Lindsay Graham is a Detestable, Stinking Sphincter

Lindsay Graham’s giddy playfulness right after the hurried 11-10 vote to send the Kavanaugh nomination to the full Senate told everything one might want to know about Kavanaugh and the Republicans and their plans to ram him through, unrepentant rapist style.   

No concessions were made by the men with the solid one vote majority, outside of one of them saying he might could … you know, vote against the nominee if they don’t do a quick FBI investigation before the vote.   He could do that, might could.   If Mitch McConnell suddenly grows a moral self, if Donald J. Trump decides to do the fair thing (right after my brother-in-law the hunchback straightens up)  (remember who these two moral black holes are)– then … ha, just kidding.   Vote Monday!

Graham, a prissy single white southern man if there ever was one, went from screaming and hissing in fury about the unfairness of investigating a man credibly accused of very bad behavior, to outright playfulness with members of the lying media, smiling, happy, excited puppy dog — all in less than a day.  All it took was an 11-10 party line vote to send Kavanaugh’s name to the body that will actually confirm him, his God willing, 51-49.

As for emotional Lindsay, he stinks a mile, as my grandmother would say. 

What the Jesuits say about Brett Kavanaugh

Amy Goodman reports today on Democracy Now!

All Christine Blasey Ford really claimed at the hearing was this old news, that, according to Republicans, Kavanaugh completely demolished with his forceful denials:

“Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time because he was very inebriated and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath my clothing. I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This was what terrified me the most and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”

Now, we honestly don’t know what Jesus Christ would say about this, but we know what the Jesuits of the United States say, and the ABA.  Today America, as embodied in its ruling elites, wears the tiniest fig leaf of decency.  Actually, no fig leaf– it’s just naked aggression against the vicious, coordinated, well-funded Left Wing Conspiracy that demands a credible investigation into charges of attempted rape.   You’d expect Kavanaugh to angrily demand exactly that if his daughter was the victim of a sexual assault like the one Christine Blasey Ford describes.   Hence, the insane rush to get this man confirmed for his place on the Supreme court.

The vote today went, as expected, 11-10 in the Judiciary Committee.   Jeff Flake proposed a mealy mouthed, completely non-binding call for short vote delay and a quick FBI investigation, before voting with the other ten Republicans to send the nominee out for a 51-49 vote of the full Senate (with pallid homophobe Mike Pence as the tie-breaker).  Trump celebrated by tweeting his call for an immediate up and down vote in the Senate on this historically well-qualified, truthful man of the highest principles, and sterling character and breeding.  

Straight party line vote, same as any lynch mob, the guys with the rope and the guns having the final say.  You can also think of the 11 Republicans as guys waiting (younger versions of themselves, to be sure) their turn in a “train”, outside the room where a future partisan colleague is having his way with a drugged high school girl. Same high moral principles, half the calories!

 

Rape Culture

I remind everyone, and myself, that in spite of living in a rape culture where the denials of powerful, privileged men still work just fine in cases of doubt, where the indiscretions of the inebriated privileged are weighed on a different scale, there are two rounds of voting before even the elite partisan Brett Kavanaugh can get on to the Supreme Court.   The Republicans should really kill this one in committee, rather than brazening it out in the full Senate for a confirmation vote.   Not likely because Republicans are now ideologically against abortion in all cases, even in the case of an extreme monstrosity.

The first vote will apparently be tomorrow morning, in the Judiciary Committee composed of 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats, expected to be a straight 11-10 vote to put Kavanaugh’s name up for a vote by the full Senate where Republicans appear to be doubling down in hopes of brazening out a robust 51-49 confirmation.   If Jeff Flake, or perhaps the high-minded Ben Sasse, has a moment of conscience over night, Kavanaugh goes down in the committee, crying, by that same 11-10 margin.  It’s anybody’s guess right now, though one presumes Grassley made sure he had the 11 votes before committing to the full committee vote tomorrow at 9:30 a.m..

If it gets to the full Senate it will be fascinating to watch those six female Republicans, (though most come from locked down right wing Republican strongholds) and picture their moral dilemmas as the 51-49 majority is being whipped into shape by the Whip.  The Whip says even if Kavanaugh is less than 100% truthful, even if he is, as said by his Yale roommate, a mean, aggressive drunk, even if he did once, but only once, when he was really, really fucked up.., never mind… nobody can prove that.  

It didn’t happen, it never happened, nothing happened, but if it did happen it was nothing, really, really nothing, even if it did happen to happen that one time, decades ago, a time I have no recollection of because I used to get that drunk when I was really happy back in the Jesuit school.  As I had them print on my yearbook page, I don’t recall who won that Orioles game or who the other team was.  Who cares?

Christine Blasey Ford testified, credibly, sympathetically and without any doubt, about a sexual assault and the identity of the man who tried to rape her one long ago summer evening in high school.   Dr. Ford even quickly explained the science of how photographic memories of traumatic moments are indelibly frozen in the hippocampus.   The most traumatic single thing she can’t get out of her head from that evening was the uproarious laughter of Kavanaugh and football teammate and fellow Renate Alumnius [sic], toxic buddy Mark Judge as they stumbled back downstairs after Kavanaugh’s ballsy rape attempt gone awry.   No reason to hear from Judge, the other guy in the room during the attempted rape, he’s already sworn that Blasey Ford is a liar.

The man she’d identified as one of the two drunken boys, President Trump’s nominee for Associate Supreme Court Justice, came into the hearing angry, defiant, prissy, insisting that he was the victim, he was the one under attack, that it was his good name being destroyed, his dreams they were trying to crush, his life being ruined, and the lives of his family, and the lives of every American who believes in democracy.    He put on a tour de force of judicial character, lashing out at everybody, imagining vicious partisan conspiracies like the ones he’s taken part in, acting like a drunk prep school asshole for the international TV audience.

Judicial character, yo.   He bullied everyone in the room who suggested he didn’t want the fair process he’d called for, tried to stare them down, with that smug, supremely punchable face.   He looked, whenever he felt cornered, every bit the entitled, intemperate, belligerent handsy drunk he’s been depicted as.  The kind of stupid drunk who would hold his hand over a squirming girl’s mouth and drunkenly struggle to get her one piece bathing suit off.   Looking at his poorly restrained anger, it was easy to picture him saying “no means yes and yes means anal,” and laughing mirthlessly about it with the macho little turds he got drunk with in prep school.  It’s what the football team at an elite all-boys school does, perform rituals of toxic masculinity for each other.

He was very sorry about the woman, Dr. Blasey Ford, he said, and held nothing against her, it was the evil Democrats sneakily and viciously trying to get revenge against him for things like his zeal in the Clinton sex impeachment, his role in stopping the Florida recount in 2000, his advising Bush and Cheney on the legality of the torture program, and extrajudicial killing by drone, the classification of 90% of his writings, the whole sick well-funded Democrat partisan attack machine, but he had never tried to rape her, not even one time, or anyone else, even after he’d had several beers.  He liked beer, still does, beer, just beer, nothing stronger than a good old American beer, like everybody in America likes to drink.

She might think that she was 100% sure it is his leering face indelibly implanted in her hippocampus, but she was wrong.  It 100% was not him, 100%.  He might have had a lot of beer on some of those high school nights (too drunk to remember scores of several sporting events he attended while at Georgetown Prep, as he fondly recalled on his yearbook page), but it wasn’t him, no way, no fucking way you goddamned godless fucking fucks!   He was 100% sure that it could not possibly have been him who tried to rape this woman, and would subject himself to absolutely any investigation Republican committee chairman Chuck Grassely would call for.  

He didn’t blame Blasey Ford, a well-meaning but sadly mistaken tool of bitter, lying partisans, maliciously lying in wait until the very last minute, their hearts filled with hatred, thirsting for injustice, intent on a personal vendetta against him, upon decency itself.

“These are last-minute smears, pure and simple. They debase our public discourse. And the consequences extend beyond any one nomination. Such grotesque and obvious character assassination — if allowed to succeed — will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country.”

That’s Trump fucking nominee there all right.  No doubt.  The president is very proud of the angry, brazenly lying bitch, can see a lot of himself in the boy.   You can practically see Trump nodding along as his nominee indignantly expresses how personally aggrieved he is by the unbearable unfairness that is being perpetrated against him.   Then he defiantly stated that he will not back down, never, will fight to the end to protect our great democracy by taking his place on the Supreme Court, the job he was born and bred to have for the rest of his lifetime.

I texted my sister “the partisan doth protest too much, methinks,” and then he started crying.   He was literally crying, that frustrated, entitled boy being so unfairly, and so falsely, challenged by such a compelling witness, and so close to the lifelong prize he’d been groomed for since before his prep school days!   Frustrating!    In front of this nation he loves, in front of his wife and his parents (present live in the room as he defended his good name), the emotion of the moment overcame him and he began to sob as he told a story about his Christlike ten year-old daughter.   He had to pause while he cried, gather himself.  

I thought the tears were a nice touch, especially considering that Christine Blasey Ford, the actual victim of his drunken piggishness, had put on such a brave yet meek face and held it together so admirably, spoke with such humility as she faced a hostile committee of ossified white men too intimidated by the optics of the situation to ask her anything, but pressing on with a female prosecutor.

That Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was completely credible is beyond dispute.   Kavanaugh’s crying didn’t make his bullying, self-pitying act any easier to watch, I have to say.   He lied some more, very indignantly.   He blurted a false claim during his opening rant, trying to discredit Dr. Ford by claiming that her friend had said she was wrong, that there never was a gathering like the one she remembers:

…Kavanaugh claimed that Christine Blasey Ford’s friend, Leland Keyser, “refuted” her account of the party she was assaulted at by Brett Kavanaugh. In fact, Keyser has only said that she does not recall the event but believes Ford’s allegation.    source

He said, she said, now it’s time to vote.  

The Republican men of the Judicial Committee are cowards, hiding behind the skirts of a woman they brought in to speak for them, for the optics, the optics, we must do the opposite of Biden with Anita Hill.   We don’t talk at all, we get a female mouthpiece, for the optics, the optics.   The female prosecutor in the end was hard-pressed to impeach the credibility of an extremely candid witness.   Blasey Ford was an extremely sympathetic witness, by the end of her testimony every fair minded person in the world believed her story, including, it seemed, the sympathetic sex crimes prosecutor herself.

 To state the obvious once more — Christine Blasey Ford had nothing to gain and has already lost a good deal by coming forward.   The Republican men of the committee apparently gathered during the long recess to coordinate their hissy fit for the afternoon session when the nominee would deny all this uncorroborated testimony and they would rally around him like the fucking blindly partisan pussies they are. The Republican men exploded in indignation after Kavanaugh went into brainlock when Dick Durbin pressed him about sitting for an FBI investigation.   Kavanaugh was literally slack-jawed when challenged about why he won’t ask for an FBI investigation.   Angry Republican men began snarling on his behalf.  The female prosecutor, their mouthpiece, didn’t utter another word the rest of the way.

The Democrats aren’t much better than the Republicans, of course, though not quite as vicious, organized or implacable when it comes to how they wage war.   Republicans will do anything, they’re not concerned with grace, or looking bad, not afraid to look clumsy, desperate, tone deaf, immoral, they will pay any short term price (usually make others, the Takers, pay the price) for the final victory.  Individually they may be fine people, very fine people, the finest people and some very classy people, very classy ladies and gentlemen.   As a pack, the extreme right, our current Republican party, tend to run in lockstep, disciplined, following their leader without condition, unconstrained by ethics, conscience, moral qualms, the appearance of fairness, decency and many other things most good people take for granted.   Soldiers of their cause, power to the people, that small sliver of the very best people who deserve it most, the best of the best.   People like Brett Kavanaugh.

A friend told me the other day he thinks radical Republicans (the only kind we have at the moment) are mentally ill.   I didn’t have any good arguments against this proposition.   The best we can say is that they care only about themselves and that their elected representatives are acutely self-interested and not ashamed to march in a parade of powerfully stinking, bullying clowns, as long as they retain power.   

The stench of this confirmation farce to get the most extreme partisan hack yet quickly put up, for life, on the nation’s highest court, is powerful.   It’s not like anyone is accusing the man of smoking pot!   That guy, Douglas Ginsberg, Ronald Reagan’s nominee, stepped down when it came out he’d smoked marijuana. Nothing that serious has been alleged against good Christian Brett Kavanaugh.  Therefore, it was up to the eleven angry men to speak up for what is right, and true, and fuck you!  Lindsay Graham, a hissy douche-bag who finally couldn’t contain himself, after being so fair and listening so fairly to everything, finally had heard enough, eventually went berserk.

Lindsay Graham 2018-09-28 at 12.48.55 AM

These middle aged and old white guys are the victims, always, and they are so fucking sick of being nice guys about it.  Goddamn it!  Jesus Christ himself wouldn’t sit still for this kind of fucking bullshit!

The 11-10 Republican Committee plans to vote first thing tomorrow, brazen it out full stink, shoot the moon, fuck the bitches and their credible sympathetic fucking testimony.  A fair process, now, a fair process, immediately!   Before any more of these lying jezebels come forward, claiming more lies against this most excellent, most deserving man. 

Will be interesting to see, assuming he makes it out of the committee, and then somehow makes it to a full vote, if any of the 51 Republicans will find a spine, or a modicum of shame, if the women in the Senate, the six Republicans, between them will find a pair of ovaries.  

If this asshole gets an up and down vote next week,and somehow gets to 51 votes, it will be quite a triumph for rape culture.  Hopefully its last triumph before a united front of decent people sweep these scumbags out of power.    Either way, this jerk-off will have a lot of time, in his old age, to cry over the fate his pathetic behavior has already ensured for the little girl, now ten, who made him cry today, for love of her gentle little soul, in that moment of human frailty in front of a live audience of many millions.

 

Ode to an angry, rapey mean drunk

The nominee wants an immediate fair hearing
by his peers, zealots,
no evidence against him,
only one witness’s
uncorroborated word against his
but a fair process
he wants a fair process, a fair process 
 
Goes on their channel to make his case
says this over and over, and:
Dignity and respect, nothing but dignity
and respect for girls of every age
and fuck those lying teenaged bitches
How dare they?!!  My good name!  The fucking whores.
 
FBI, no thanks, I would, of course,
but you know… the committee
 
“False Acquisitions!” snarls a dotard. 

Dignity and Respect

“Dignity and respect,” said the outraged, unfairly attacked entitled man to the friendly interviewers on the president’s favorite fake news channel.  His good Christian wife sat dutifully next to him, one hundred percent on his side. “I have nothing but dignity and respect for women, never would even think about committing a sexual assault against one, never!  Even while stinking drunk, especially while stinking drunk.   How dare they?!!  I regard all women with dignity and respect, dignity and respect, always have, even for the drunken, horny, unattainable sluts I encountered as a hard-drinking prep school virgin and an equally soused freshman virgin at Yale.  All I want is a fair process, a fair chance to not be persecuted like our Lord and Savior was, a fair process to show that these bitches from hell are lying, partisan, fetus slaughtering whores.”

Thus the Supreme Court nominee made his case to American partisans, via Fox News.   The interview was set up by a disgraced former Fox executive, one Mr. Bill Shine [1], who made his bones defending a series of sexual predator Fox executives who all subsequently had to step down, as, in the end, did Shine.   Not that Shine didn’t do his best to protect his powerful white male friends, it’s just that these bitches are fucking determined and women now, suddenly, are the fucking victims of everything, don’t you know?   And their high priced lawyers were good, demonically so.   Now Shine works directly for Trump, in Scaramucci’s old job.   “Let’s put Brett on Fox, Bill, let him speak directly to the base,” the President must have said.   The president is a genius, he says so himself.  

All Kavanaugh is asking for is, as he stated over and over to the fawning interviewer at Fox, is  “a fair process”, a fair process, a fair process where no evidence against me is admissible if it is prejudicial in any way.   The same standard of evidence I require in my court, except nothing detrimental to the life-long dream of an entitled, powerful white man who loves his family and is poised to become among the nine most elite and powerful people in the nation, if not the world.  

Dignity and respect, he said again and again, suggesting that he too is entitled to those things.  You could see, behind his beady, lying eyes, the wheels turning in his brilliant, high-achieving, lawyerly brain, “…since birth, my mother, a late in life lawyer and then a judge, was an inspiration to me, and I also hated her, as you might expect, which is why I got so drunk so often and though I always, always behaved with absolute regard for their dignity and respect, even though no female ever reciprocated my sexual interest– what did I have to do, playfully brush my dick across their fucking faces?—  I was always respectful, even when my shows of affection did not result in my penis penetrating their vagina, which is the only true definition of sexual assault.  Never got so much as the goddamned tip in.   Case closed.  How many more questions?  Is it time to say it again?”

“All I am asking for is a fair process that allows an immediate up or down 51-49 vote to confirm me without undue delay for a gathering coven of lying, godless partisan women to prepare any sort of real case against me.  Fair process means no FBI, no witnesses called to assassinate my good name, no evidence produced to impeach my testimony, or me, or my high minded Jesus inspired family values purity.  Look, I produced a fucking 1982 calendar to prove I was never once at a party of any kind the year I am accused of the heinous things made up against me.  Proof that the whores are lying! All of them!

“Fair process means we fairly (51-49, bitches) violate the rules of the Senate and allow the optically unsympathetic white men on the Judiciary Committee who unconditionally support me to interrogate the witness against me using a powerful woman’s voice.  The voice of a single witness, the lying, or mistaken, or mixed up, or partisan academic bitch who claims that when she was fifteen I did the unthinkable to her against the voice of a strong woman.  I was a fucking virgin, OK– so, by definition I couldn’t have raped her.  And as any choir boy knows, if there is no penetration, no rape.  Case closed.  Shut your hole, lady.”  

So the old white Republican men on the Judiciary Committee, to avoid the sickening gang rape optics of the Anita Hill sessions (and the many lost confirmation votes that followed) lawyer up, find a suitable mouthpiece, a staunch Republican female pitbull from Maricopa County, Arizona, home of pardoned contemnor Joe Arpaio’s infamous desert concentration camp penal colonies,  to confront this lying professor Blasey Ford.  

A partisan woman prosecutor attacking a woman testifying about an attempted rape– you have to admit, the optics are much, much better than stern, horsefaced Chuck Grassley, or the equally fair-minded feminist member Orrin Hatch, hoarsely insisting: “isn’t it true, missy, that you are a lying fucking whore?”  The optics of Anita Hill’s ordeal were horrible, and these two conservative pricks were part of it (Democratic Judiciary Committee member Patrick Leahy was also there during the Hill testimony– though he called for a postponement to have a full hearing– SAD!) , so better for everybody if we have an impartial yet aggressive female lawyer take this lying professor apart.

A fair process is all I ask for, insists the shameless Kavanaugh.   One day of hurried testimony to brazen my way through and a straight up or down 51-49 vote for confirmation the next morning.   Keep the pressure on those two Republican swing votes, those two female senators, at least one of whom has indicated if they are convinced a younger Kavanaugh attacked an even younger woman and is now lying about it– before he can do a more complete job attacking all young women as the fifth vote against the murder of innocent fetuses– they would vote against him.  

Got to have the vote now.  NOW!   A fair process demands no less!  A fair process!!! Quick, before Mueller can complete his anti-Christ witch hunt.  I am the only one who can protect our president against his legions of ruthless enemies.  Vote now, confirm me NOW!  A fair process, dignity and respect, dignity and respect, a fair process!!!  For the love of God and His Only Son, in the name of all that is good and holy.  I am the only one who is committed to fully protecting our leader!  Beside Stephen Miller, a great man who reminds me very much of my younger self.

As fifth generation American George Lopez might say;  “fuck those putos”.

 

[1] top Google blurb, from the Grey Skank:   

Bill Shine, the former Fox News executive who was pushed out over his handling of sexual harassment scandals at the network, was named …

Note:   Shine was named four or five days before well-bred shit-don’t-stink dignity respecter Brett Kavanaugh was nominated, as the Pussygrabber-in-chief’s guy to handle the spin for the confirmation, the Mueller probe/witch hunt and everything else.  

And God bless these United Shayssssh.

False Acquisitions.png

The Stories We Tell Each Other

My mother used to complain to me about a certain person’s conversational style, said that it eventually drove her almost insane.   The talk was always rapid fire, the meandering stories long, involved, usually about friends or acquaintances of people this person knew, who my mother didn’t know, had never met or heard of.  There would always be many twists to the endless, meandering tales, and a large, shifting cast of characters, and, not knowing any of them, my mother was hard-pressed to follow most of the drama, let alone care about it.  

My mother would be at a loss for how to respond, she’d venture a polite, inane comment once in a while, just to prop up her end of the monologue.    Her friend understood this non-engagement as a sign of my mother’s dementia and looked at her with a mixture of concern and impatience.   My mother didn’t have dementia.  She had strong opinions, and she spoke them to the end.   She also tuned out when she was bored, like many of us do, but she was not demented.   It was rare for my mother to have nothing to say and when she honestly had nothing she was at a loss, stumped, reminding herself that there was really nothing in the conversation for her.  Trying to remember not to make another lunch date with this high pressure talking hose.

To the other party in these chats, it was easy to make the case that her old friend was demented.   “First, she can’t really follow a simple story.   I had told her all about these people already, only last week.   Memory is another issue, she has no short or medium term memory, none!  She stares at me blankly, her mouth partly open, like she’s in a daze.”

“It’s true, I go into a daze, like an alpha state, just to try to keep myself from screaming.   I’m pretty sure if I ever started yelling it would hurt her feelings, there’d be some kind of trouble afterwards.   But every week, these endless tales of interlocking, uninteresting strangers she barely describes, over generic food I can hardly eat.  I hate that place, but it’s the only restaurant she likes to go to, it’s cheap.  

“If she was a good story-teller, at least, but she’s not, she doesn’t set anything up right, there’s no through-line to anything, no dramatic shape or pay off,  it’s all just:  ‘So X and Y go over to Z’s house, and everybody knows what Z’s house is like, I must have told you about that shithole.  Now, if you recall from three weeks or so ago, there is a couple named G and H, they were friends of U and V, the ones from college that they sort of aren’t really close friends with anymore, though they all claim to love each other and their kids, and those goddamned kids are another long, terrible tale, but anyway, as you may recall, G recently lost her hot shot job, a big blow to the ego and also to the family checkbook, and so H says…”

“It’s sad, the dementia.  I still try to tell her stories, keep her engaged, interested in life, but it seems she’s sunken into her own dour thoughts, whatever they may be.   It’s impossible to arouse her interest or engage her at all.  She doesn’t even seem to care about eating anymore.  It’s so sad, she was such a bright interactive person and now she’s just… like this.'”   The eyes half close, the mouth falls half open, under the dropped eyelids the eyes move around slowly, without plan or hope of a plan.  

“I become a zombie, I really do.   After ten minutes of her endless narration I just want to sink my teeth into somebody’s arm and go ‘ahhhhnnnnngggggghhhhh….’ the way zombies do.  I just want the noise to stop, that’s all it is, nervous, chattering white noise.   ‘So H has the temerity to say, and when I say temerity, I mean, you can’t compare H to even Z in that regard.  How people get so brazen and oblivious I will never understand.   Anyway….’  

“Last time she called I told her I’m sick and she said she’d come over, bring me that prepared overly salty chicken soup from Publix.  I told her she’s very kind but that the doctor told me I’m very contagious.  I almost told her I might bite her face, hard, if she didn’t let me hang up the phone right then, but thought better of it.  I’m lonely enough and at least she calls, you know?”

I understood my mother’s loneliness better than most things.  I urged her to write, but she never did.   There was a world in there that was too painful to relax in, let alone explore, better to keep the mind busy with books, murder mysteries, and murder mysteries on television.  It was uncanny how quickly she would tell you who the murderer would turn out to be, she pounced on plot points with the lightning quickness of a terrier grabbing a rat by the neck.  She’d give it a quick shake and leave it twitching when the commercial hit.  In the end, she was never wrong about the killer.

The United States of Brazenness

The trait that has surged out of control in recent years, the one, above the rest, that makes people angry enough to punch each other now in the land of the free and the home of the brave, is brazenness.   You say I’m disrespectful?  How about I stare you down and punch you in the fucking face, is that disrespectful enough for you, ass wipe?

You see it on TV all the time in our violent, brazen culture.  Years ago a football player who did an in-your-fucking-face victory dance in the end zone would be carried out on a stretcher the next time he came on to the field.   The players would all be stone-faced about the accident that dislocated his leg, but the message would be delivered.  Don’t be a fucking hotdog.

Now we are Hotdog Nation.  If you don’t boast, brag, celebrate every small triumph, it is taken as a sign of weakness.   Humility is now widely regarded as a vice of the timid and a badge of inferiority here in Hotdog Nation.   If there are two widely hated political rivals vying for an important post, the one who rubs the other one’s nose in their excrement, not the one who takes what used to be called the moral high road, will most often be elected.  Brazenness pays.  Ask President Brazen.

And so it is with all of the unfairly maligned men in the president’s orbit.  If some bitch accuses you of doing, whatever, say it’s only something as innocent as good-naturedly lying on top of somebody, while both of you are drunk, and trying to cop a few innocent feels, you do what needs to be done.  You attack.  Go for the fucking face, punch, kick– if you can get your foot up in their face, that’s the best.  Why dirty your hands on a lying bitch if you can Bruce Lee her in the face a few times?   She won’t be talking shit so easily after a few good socks in the face, will she?   Death threats are good, if you’re really out there, there are risks, you know, but the threat of a lawsuit is often just as good as a death threat.   Most people will fold like a flimsy origami bird when the process server hands them the legal papers.

Of course, a long time rabid Republican operative, active during the Newt Gingrich revolution against that liar about a blow-job Bill Clinton, who ran into battle screaming, writing furious, secret memos to his boss Kenneth Starr, and later for Bush and Cheney, after being at the legal front of the mob of right wing lawyers who ensured that Mr. Bush’s chance to be president would not be harmed by a full recount of contested votes, well, a man with those credentials needs no lessons in brazenness.  Still, Mr. Kavanaugh is an impressive specimen of brazenness, as he must be to do what he does.

What he does is stand there and stink.

We don’t know if the now two women who have reluctantly come forward with allegations of long ago sexual assault, amid death threats for the first and blanket denials from most people contacted in the case of the second,  are 100% credible.   That is why the accusers themselves are calling for an FBI investigation, since otherwise partisan witnesses tend not to lie to the FBI the way they might when asked to sign a letter, or are questioned by a journalist who irrationally hates the president.   We do know that, while impressively brazen, the barrage of denials from the White House and the nominee are mostly a fine spray of aerosolized pig feces, mixed with urine and blood.   There is a reason for this.  

When we create bacon, ham, pork chops and all those delicious things made from pigs, it takes a certain amount of time to get the little suckers good and fat.   Nothing hard to understand about that, right?  While we are growing them big and delicious, they have to make.  They make every day, a few times a day.   There might be a hundred thousand pigs, or more, at any given time, in a decent sized pork facility.   What do you do with all that disgusting stuff they make when they’re alive– and with the inedible bi-products they leave behind when they are turned into delicious cuts of meat?   You make a lake, and dig it deep, if you have any plans to be in business for a while.  No matter how deep you dig it, if you are successful, you will need to start getting rid of some of that mixture of urine, excrement, blood and pus from infections.   Otherwise, it will overflow, obviously, and cause disgusting problems.   A problem: an opportunity to be creative.

So here’s what you do: you stick a pump into the bottom of this stinking muck, connected to a hose with a spray nozzle.   I don’t know the science, exactly, but you get the pump going, raise the hose high into the air and turn the nozzle of that hose on.  A very fine spray, the finest spray, of whatever you want to call that stuff, can be sprayed high into the air, lowering the level in the lake.  That’s what we do anywhere there is a lake of pig waste.  

The mist falls on the poor, the only people who would be stupid enough to live near an industrial pig farm.   The stink of those farms is unforgettable, if you’ve ever driven past them with the windows up, trying to hold your breath, you will never forget the stench.   Poor people have to get used to it.  As soon as they see that plume of spray going up into the air over their homes, the smart ones stay inside and make sure all the windows are shut tight.  There are always some, of course, who walk outside and get soaked with the stuff.  That’s because there are winners and losers.

Winners gloat, and losers suck it.  Call it brazen if you like, the attitude of entitlement on the faces of those of us who will never be stupid enough to walk in a misty rain of pig waste, but would you rather be blinking away a mist of pig waste, or doing a victory dance, in a beautiful, tastefully furnished bathroom, every time you succeed in moving your bowels?  Doesn’t sound like much of a choice, does it?

 

 

How Do We Learn About Life?

I will grant you at the start, learning real lessons in this difficult life is hard work and many people do it only haphazardly, when some crippling tragedy knocks them back and forces them to take stock.   In fact, if you’re like most people, you might want to skip this entry entirely, because I am pretty much talking to myself, and for myself.

I find I learn some of the most valuable things I know by studying the lives of people I know well who do not learn the lessons of their own lives.   My father was one I knew very well, watched very closely for decades, and there are many others.   This makes me sound judgmental, I know, but I don’t stand by, like a scientist with a gigantic pair of tweezers, observing my lab rat friends.   I was once accused of that, actually, by one of the cheekier lab rats, he actually said to me “I get it now– you’re the scientist and we’re all your lab rats!”   I smiled, because he was right, in a way, but I said nothing, because, you know, I don’t talk to lab rats, as a rule.  I try to help the people I know as I hope they will help me if the need arises.   It is sometimes subtle, but I like to think my good will is always apparent.  I am willing to listen and keep talking until the story breaks apart into incoherence.

Humans need a story to grasp anything.  I’ll tell you an old one, featuring the brilliant, troubled lab rat above.   He was the youngest of three brothers, always felt he got the short end of everything, that life was a zero sum game he was always losing.   He learned to negotiate, wheedle, demand, pout, glower.   These things served him well in business, I suppose, I believe he eventually made a shitload of money by nickel and diming everyone involved.  It did not make him successful in friendship or love, sad to say.   But here’s the thing:  over the years I watched him stage and brilliantly perform an identical three act play maybe a hundred times.    There is a lesson in this.

Act one: meet a new person and view this new person in glowingly idealized terms.  If the person is funny, he’s the funniest person ever.  This goes for coolness and every other perceived quality.  Act one is animated by playfulness, infinite promise and  the protagonist’s belief that he has finally found a great person, not just another neurotic asshole like all the ones who have previously let him down.    You will always be compared, unfavorably, to the new person, just so you have a personal stake in the rest of the play.  Audience participation, you dig.

In Act Two: complications arise, as in any good drama, or any good comedy, for that matter.  The person is still very funny, sure, but there’s a snide edge creeping in sometimes.   Yes, the person is very charismatic, but also, careless, not very thoughtful, kind of dumb, in a weird way.   The promises made in the first act are being strangely revisited in act two and everything is suddenly coming into question.  Reality itself is starting to come into doubt.  Drastic corrective action is called for and eventually taken by the protagonist.

Act Three reveals that this is no tragicomedy we are watching, it’s a rather stark tragedy.   In Act Three the inevitable betrayal comes, sometimes in a terrible form.  One time it’s an anti-Semitic outburst and threatened punch in the fucking face.  Another time it’s the trashing of your commercial kitchen.   People break into your house, almost certainly people you know, steal a bunch of your things, including every valuable in the house, take a shit on the piano bench, for good measure.    Or you’re invited to the wedding of illegal immigrant, underpaid workers of yours and are then served food stolen from your own kitchen.  Or the new best friend is fucking your now ex and the two of them are laughing about it when you confront them.  Or, paint your own betrayal picture here, the possibilities are truly endless.

Classic repetition compulsion, one of the defining neurotic behaviors of our time, maybe of any time.  I could not have learned about it more thoroughly from even the best psychology course as I did from watching a close friend tirelessly at work for many years.   It’s a simple process, keep repeating the same painful thing the same way until, well, just keep repeating it.  

If at first the play seems a tragedy rather than an enlightened comedy, recast the play and play it again.  You dig how this works, right?  You get a new star to play opposite you, you stage the thing with a genius director, or better, direct it yourself, who knows your vision better than you yourself?   No need to change the script, because this time– THIS TIME– everything is perfect for the desired result.   The play cannot fail to entertain and enlighten because– look at the incandescence of the new star I have cast!

But back in the dressing room, it’s always the same.  Opening night and the incandescent new star is loudly having sex with your mother, who is loving the sex and shockingly uninhibited about expressing it, not even looking away when you walk into the dressing room shocked.   Another fucking putz!   Un fucking believable… Another shocking betrayal, is it not?  IS IT FUCKING NOT?!!!

You look at this lab rat, after he tells you story number one hundred identical in every detail to the ninety-nine that came before: idealized new person, disillusionment, betrayal.    Every story exactly the same dramatic arc, exhausting.   You think to yourself: how can you not see this, my dear lab rat?   Hard for the scientist in me to truly understand.   When they hook me up to the machines that deliver that awful shock, I try to figure out how not to get the electricity full blast, there is always some way to get less pain from the sadists who designed the experiment.  That’s just me, OK, I get that, and maybe I haven’t come up against a sadistic enough experimenter, but still.   I’m left holding my clipboard and scratching my head when I see a rat rushing constantly, inexorably toward the button that delivers electrocution.

Now I have told you a simple story, about a rather extreme case, yes, but true in every detail, I assure you (except for mom and the star in the dressing room).  Most people conduct their repetition compulsion business on a much more subtle level.   We are, virtually all of us, geniuses of justification.    We can give a rationale that makes insane behavior seem more or less rational.   Why did you march all those indigenous people to their deaths when you could have made an arrangement that would have served everybody, preserved peace, honored wisdom and honor itself?   Manifest Destiny.  Social Darwinism.   Freedom on the march.   Done.  What is your fucking point, asshole?  Get off my land.

I am trying, as I believe I sometimes demonstrate in these pages, to understand the sources of pain in my life, in the lives of my friends and loved ones, and behave in ways that seem productive, healing rather than harming.    It is better to be gentle than to be harsh, better to help than to hurt.  I may not always be up to that challenge, but it seems better to struggle with remaining gentle than not to.  For me.

Not everyone welcomes this kind of struggle, it’s a matter of temperament.  I understand that, even as it sometimes makes me sad.  It is, to my way of thinking, cheating yourself out of the full richness of this life, not being open to looking deeply into these highly educational situations that shed what little light there is to be had here in a world of darkness.  

If I manage to reel myself in from anger over and over, while provoked without mercy by someone who believes I am stronger than them and therefor able to take multiple punches and kicks, it is a good day for me– not giving in to rage, remaining calm enough to remain open and almost cordial.   It is not as good a day, of course, as a day when I don’t have to prove my ability to take multiple punches and kicks, but there is something worthwhile in it for me– proving to myself again that constantly giving in to righteous rage is not my fate.   If the person I finally have to walk away from is sobbing piteously, or cursing me angrily, convinced that I am a heartless bastard, it is something I just have to live with.   

All this is well worth thinking about, I think.  And if not– well, there’s always the weather, good books, politics, culture (and lack of same), our well-stocked catalogues of frustrations and the relative fascism of various nations to discuss. The vexing smugness of powerful lying fucking hypocrites who make decisions the rest of us must live by is always easy enough to bat around (see previous several posts, and the next few, no doubt).

There is also philosophy, of course, observations about life made in a general sort of way that don’t need to  touch on tangible details that are personal or difficult, don’t force us to take sides in moral pissing contests.   No need, in a philosophical chat, to go into the well-known intimate examples of the thing we are talking about– why go there?   There’s always all that to kick around.   But that shit is really not the beating heart of a human life, or why it sometimes grabs us by the throat, this flickering miracle of being alive.