Can you sucker yourself? Maybe, if you’re an incurable optimist. For a few days I actually had convinced myself that this country would redeem itself, and yesterday evening I was bursting with such confidence that I posted this almost giddy secular Te Deum. I’m now cured, almost certainly for good (or evil).
NEWS FLASH: Kerry has just conceded* (Didn’t he repeatedly say something about making sure all the votes are counted this time?)
Right now I’ll only add a few words to the piles accumulating everywhere in reaction to yesterday’s debacle.
Americans have destroyed their own country out of ignorance, superstition, bigotry and fear.
And we have absolutely no excuse. Unlike other nations which have resorted to autocracy, fascism, dictatorship (by party, cabal or leader) our majority decision to endorse this regime was done with eyes wide open, without threat of invasion, not prostrate in defeat, and even absent economic depression or civil war. In fact the U.S. stood on top of the world, the most admired, the richest and most powerful state of all time, and that’s when we blew it, big time:
For four years the gang we have now installed legitimately (although by only a narrow majority), in full view of the rest of the world, has shown that it really believes in our balloting system of “winner-take-all.” Since the beginning of 2000 the Republicans have operated as if there were no interests other than their own; Never before in American history have the welfare or the concerns of the “losers” been so totally eliminated from the agenda of the party in power, and it’s now going to get worse.
From today we will be living in a nation whose Republican executive will have no restraints, whose Congressional Republican majorities will soon be larger and therefore more alarming than ever and whose courts, above all the Supreme Court, will be in the posession of a radical Republican Party for decades, regardless of the longevity of its dominance elsewhere.
And it gets still worse. The more alarming consequence of this election will be the real evil its winners do here and abroad, and attract, here and abroad. But the most depressing thought of all is that things will absolutely have to get much worst before they could get better, and there’s no guarantee of that.
Although the blue sky I included in yesterday’s post is still there (I cannot strike a line through it, like I did everything I wrote), and it is still above New York this afternoon, the heavens never did care what was happening down here. We’re on our own.
Listening to: Gustav Mahler, Adagietto (Sehr Langsam), Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor (Haitink, Berlin Philharmonic)
*They used us, the Republicans did, to swing their cultists to the polls. So Bush’s victory is ultimately my fault and the fault of every other faggot for choosing our “lifestyle,” even if only some of us were bent on shredding into pieces the other 50 percent of the precious marriages they hadn’t already destroyed themselves.
Category: Cults
fascism, but it’s all-American
file photograph
Fascism, it’s so US. Are there still any doubters out there?
The Bush campaign is now asking followers to swear allegiance to Bush, right hands extended. The pledge:
“I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.”
The principle established, the words can easily be rearranged in the future as needed.
[image from Chemtrails]
fucknewyork
Ahhh. The Underground Railroad has the dope on the wonderful little video I posted one month ago. This is from the director, Matt Lenski:
We’re both native New Yorkers – I was born in Manhattan and lived on Eldridge and Houston when I was little – and of course we were all outraged that Republicans were coming here to use the 911 incident and twist it in their favor. They’re coming to our home town and we felt like we did when we were sixteen years old and some bully was steppin to you on your block, talking shit. These Republicans are the ultimate punks. I’m a director and Sam Marks is a writer and a playwright so we said let’s come up with something.
[thanks to bloggy]
but can we survive even a Kerry victory?
Tweedledumdee
That’s it! I’m not voting for Kerry. The man wants to be remembered as a hero, and with good reason, but he wants to hide the one part of his history which finally distinguished him as a truly great hero, his noble efforts to end the Viet Nam War. And the reason is that he’s desperate to establish credentials as the same kind of warrior who thirty and more years ago ran the insane conflict from which he was fortunate to escape with his life. On war, including apparently even the War in Southeast Asia, and on just about every other subject he has addressed during his candidacy his position is almost indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush.
I have to admit that it’s only because New York State has absolutely no chance of awarding its electoral votes to Kerry’s Commander-in-Chief that once again I will not have to contribute to the end of the American experiment by voting for either of the Right-wing candidates held up by our two Right-wing parties.
Of course if I were unfortunate enough to find myself registered in one of those confused realms whose voters four years ago didn’t seem to understand what was happening to them, I would probably find myself holding my nose tightly with one hand while I flipped the lever or touched the screen for the Democratic Party’s candidate on November 2, hoping it might help my state swing toward Mr. Anything.
Kerry and the Democratic Party offer little more than somewhat inferior copies of what Bush and the Republican Party already represent very well. Most progressives would like to ignore this, operating on the now-familiar and almost universal, desperate principle of “Anything But Bush.” Alexander Cockburn writes in The Nation this month,
Can someone win the presidency entirely on the basis of a negative asset? I wouldn’t have thought so, but here’s John Kerry, just about 90 days shy of election day, promoting himself as a man of presidential caliber entirely on the basis that he’s the Anyone in “Anyone But Bush”. Aside from the flag wagging , that’s what it comes down to, unless you take the probably realistic view that when it comes to war-fighting in the service of Empire he’s far more bloodthirsty. Come next January the Anyone behind the desk in the Oval Office may be a bit taller. There’ll be medals on the book shelf showing he killed Vietnamese in the service of his country. Most everything else will stay the same. Kerry’s been pretty clear about that, letting his core constituencies know that as President Anyone he’s not going to cut them any favors.
One more, very prococative thought, and I’ll close down for the night. In the same article Cockburn reports the real concern which Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, expressed to the Washington Post‘s David Broder on the floor of the Democratic Convention. Cockburn describes Stern as saying, “another four years of Bush might be less damaging than the stifling of needed reform within the party and the labor movement that would occur if Kerry becomes president.”
Stern later recanted, but I don’t think I’m the only one who wonders about the wisdom of his conversion.
Ralph Nader was there first, and he hasn’t left, bless him.
[image from MSNBC]
Moon furnished N. Korea missile with subs a threat to U.S.
Yowza! That’s showing some really faith-based initiative!
It would seem that, a few years ago, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon purchased a small fleet of Russian ballistic missile submarines with the missile-launching hardware intact, then handed the subs over to North Korea. Now, according to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the North Koreans have used that hardware to develop missiles that can threaten the United States.
Your tax-free cult’s dollars at work.
Thanks to The American Prospect, linked above, Atrios and Jane’s Defense Weekly.
crush the Church before it crushes all reason
it’s a slippery slope
But it’s 2004! Why do we still have to deal with this accursed thing? I’ve absolutely had it with the abominations of the Catholic Church, and don’t get me started on all the other monstrously evil cults which compete with it in advancing fear and superstition in this benighted land and around the world.
Bloggy discovered last night that my home state of Michigan is about to institutionalize unreason, bigotry and hate.
Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.
The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.
The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.
If these idiots want religious war, I think we should let them have it. I’m in.
I know the Catholic Church like few others do. My family has practiced its magic for almost two thousand years and most of them continue to do so. I was educated in a Catholic elementary school staffed entirely by nuns, an Augustinian Prep School manned by black-robed priests and brothers, and a Jesuit not-so-liberal-arts university.
In that time I learned just about everything they wanted me to learn about “The Church,” and I never questioned the system, but within a few weeks of my arrival at the University of Wisconsin Madison the entire structure of intellectual restraints collapsed and I learned how to breathe freely for the first time.
Years later I find even more darkness all around me, and I am its enemy.
In spite of cries of alarm coming from those who carry its torches, religion is not persecuted in this country. Reason is persecuted in this country. Religion is winning.
[image from a French Charles Taze Russell site, where it is captioned, “Fratricide Autodafé à Paris”]