Not a Republic, again
A quick one from the good folks at Club Metternich. Read it and remember that our paleoconservative friends howl in pain, too.
Disco Boy was asking me on the last post about my somewhat drunken vow of years ago to become not a politician, but a politician's handler. I even had a guy we were friends with in mind. It should be remembered though: in those days I was also considering how one goes about becoming a professional assassin, as well.
I pointed out that another pal of ours averrred that I had not the stomach for the ugly aspects of politickin'. DB was wise enough to come back with the real truth; I have already had, and am considering applying for some of the foulest jobs on the market. The relative distaste I may experience about hanging around with a buncha ward heelers would be minor.
Perhaps, but understand that I hate office culture, and would like to never ever do that again. Much of politicking as a business happens in offices, especially in the world of Committee Life. Committees in general can be just excruciating, and when everyone has too many years of Seminar at bad colleges under their belts like the majority of folks I know do...The bad counselling-speak would flow like a river of shit.
(I'm rambling, but that's why we write, yes? I haven't been able to get those moments together lately; y'know, when you have something to say, and the attention span to say it.)
And how about this one? I feel like I'm too old for the game. The revolution that Howard Dean's crew started with online grassroots organizing has been neatly and beautifully Taken and Run With by the far better funded GOP.
Matter of fact, go check
this out. It's a clever place where bedwetters all across these here States meet and talk about all the things they hate with one another. A dandy resource where they can hear about all the other people who agree with them. (But it's also where I found Club Metternich.) Point is, the GOP has a lot of unpaid help out there, with bloggers and evangelical churches doing nicely keeping the group mind cohesive, and the media doing a fine job of not really reporting anything anymore, but propagandizing plenty.
They've forwarded an agenda that is far-reaching and elegant in its construction. It used to look like an America First thing, but these days I swear it's more like a Anti Human thing. Capitalizing on the fact that Americans like simple answers and tend toward quick anger (and are terrified of the unfamiliar, for that matter), they've brought it back around, yet again, to a place where If You Aren't For Having No Rights, You Are A Potential Problem.
The reasoning there runs that if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind having no privacy. I suppose this seems pretty comforting to most white people of a certain economic bracket, but even they have had to deal with a bored, sadistic cop at one point or another.
Or: if you keep on saying things that other people don't want to hear (for example), it would be very easy to make it appear that you've committed a crime, and need to be locked up...After not having a fair trial, since I'm noticing that the demonization of defense lawyers continues, too...
Somewhere in there, it became a virtue to follow. I wanna say that this wasn't always the case with us Frontier Individualists, but that's probably not true, either.
The Great Game of Politics (as Nixon put it in his second inaugural speech) is a funny one. It makes tortured geeks like myself want to go pro. I think it was Hunter Thompson who pointed it out: it's addictive, and once you've obsessed on it long enough, you want to get in there...Which you can't do if you're similarly obsessed with, say, pro football.
But I do have ideas for the ontological warfare that is called for at this dark point in 'Murkan history...Do I want to comment on them here? Not really: my main point is that the Democrats need to stop trying to act like they're more mature than their opponents, but that's only the tip o' de iceberg. I also have some concrete strategies, but there are better ways of saying them, in better places.
I mean, there's no end to the mendacity out there in this stupid medium. I've been watching the travails of some guy named KEvron, lately. He has a pretty funny
blog,
and is noteworthy for just not even pretending to be a nice man. I like it: it's not gonna build any coalitions, but who said that was everybody's job?
In any case, his main error was disagreeing with some of the bedwetters here in blogville, and one of them seems to have gone ahead and tried to smear him as some sort of child molester. Said weirdo even went out of its anonymous way to pirate KEv's name, which didn't work very well because it was clear that the editorial tone had changed.
Matter of fact, the weirdo started typing as if it had a lisp (since it is an article of faith among these waterheads that molester equals queer), and in general started sounding like a seventh grader, providing insight into the private fantasies of the repressed types everywhere...They're just making fun of molestation, riiiiight...
For the most part, folks is nice to me. Unity, over at The Love Rhombus, has pointed out to her readers that she's in a boring mood, and folks should come over here and look at the funny bachelor. I appreciate yer throwin' an old person a bone, lady: s'nice. But see here: you must stop with this World of Warcraft bullshit immediately. It kills, as all video games do, everything that is nice.
There are so many other things to talk about...Well, I'm just gonna have to start doing this on a regular basis again, and see here Disco Boy ('see here' is what people of good social standing on "Perry Mason" say when they're gettin' pissed off): you raised a damn good question, which I still have no good answer for (that can be put into words, anyway), and haven't considered for a long time. I made my peace with never being an evil svengali a while ago, at least somewhat because there's so many other things I'd rather do...But I was, at one time, a pretty mean lothario...Ah, let's go get a drink.
Disco Boy was asking me on the last post about my somewhat drunken vow of years ago to become not a politician, but a politician's handler. I even had a guy we were friends with in mind. It should be remembered though: in those days I was also considering how one goes about becoming a professional assassin, as well.
I pointed out that another pal of ours averrred that I had not the stomach for the ugly aspects of politickin'. DB was wise enough to come back with the real truth; I have already had, and am considering applying for some of the foulest jobs on the market. The relative distaste I may experience about hanging around with a buncha ward heelers would be minor.
Perhaps, but understand that I hate office culture, and would like to never ever do that again. Much of politicking as a business happens in offices, especially in the world of Committee Life. Committees in general can be just excruciating, and when everyone has too many years of Seminar at bad colleges under their belts like the majority of folks I know do...The bad counselling-speak would flow like a river of shit.
(I'm rambling, but that's why we write, yes? I haven't been able to get those moments together lately; y'know, when you have something to say, and the attention span to say it.)
And how about this one? I feel like I'm too old for the game. The revolution that Howard Dean's crew started with online grassroots organizing has been neatly and beautifully Taken and Run With by the far better funded GOP.
Matter of fact, go check
this out. It's a clever place where bedwetters all across these here States meet and talk about all the things they hate with one another. A dandy resource where they can hear about all the other people who agree with them. (But it's also where I found Club Metternich.) Point is, the GOP has a lot of unpaid help out there, with bloggers and evangelical churches doing nicely keeping the group mind cohesive, and the media doing a fine job of not really reporting anything anymore, but propagandizing plenty.
They've forwarded an agenda that is far-reaching and elegant in its construction. It used to look like an America First thing, but these days I swear it's more like a Anti Human thing. Capitalizing on the fact that Americans like simple answers and tend toward quick anger (and are terrified of the unfamiliar, for that matter), they've brought it back around, yet again, to a place where If You Aren't For Having No Rights, You Are A Potential Problem.
The reasoning there runs that if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind having no privacy. I suppose this seems pretty comforting to most white people of a certain economic bracket, but even they have had to deal with a bored, sadistic cop at one point or another.
Or: if you keep on saying things that other people don't want to hear (for example), it would be very easy to make it appear that you've committed a crime, and need to be locked up...After not having a fair trial, since I'm noticing that the demonization of defense lawyers continues, too...
Somewhere in there, it became a virtue to follow. I wanna say that this wasn't always the case with us Frontier Individualists, but that's probably not true, either.
The Great Game of Politics (as Nixon put it in his second inaugural speech) is a funny one. It makes tortured geeks like myself want to go pro. I think it was Hunter Thompson who pointed it out: it's addictive, and once you've obsessed on it long enough, you want to get in there...Which you can't do if you're similarly obsessed with, say, pro football.
But I do have ideas for the ontological warfare that is called for at this dark point in 'Murkan history...Do I want to comment on them here? Not really: my main point is that the Democrats need to stop trying to act like they're more mature than their opponents, but that's only the tip o' de iceberg. I also have some concrete strategies, but there are better ways of saying them, in better places.
I mean, there's no end to the mendacity out there in this stupid medium. I've been watching the travails of some guy named KEvron, lately. He has a pretty funny
blog,
and is noteworthy for just not even pretending to be a nice man. I like it: it's not gonna build any coalitions, but who said that was everybody's job?
In any case, his main error was disagreeing with some of the bedwetters here in blogville, and one of them seems to have gone ahead and tried to smear him as some sort of child molester. Said weirdo even went out of its anonymous way to pirate KEv's name, which didn't work very well because it was clear that the editorial tone had changed.
Matter of fact, the weirdo started typing as if it had a lisp (since it is an article of faith among these waterheads that molester equals queer), and in general started sounding like a seventh grader, providing insight into the private fantasies of the repressed types everywhere...They're just making fun of molestation, riiiiight...
For the most part, folks is nice to me. Unity, over at The Love Rhombus, has pointed out to her readers that she's in a boring mood, and folks should come over here and look at the funny bachelor. I appreciate yer throwin' an old person a bone, lady: s'nice. But see here: you must stop with this World of Warcraft bullshit immediately. It kills, as all video games do, everything that is nice.
There are so many other things to talk about...Well, I'm just gonna have to start doing this on a regular basis again, and see here Disco Boy ('see here' is what people of good social standing on "Perry Mason" say when they're gettin' pissed off): you raised a damn good question, which I still have no good answer for (that can be put into words, anyway), and haven't considered for a long time. I made my peace with never being an evil svengali a while ago, at least somewhat because there's so many other things I'd rather do...But I was, at one time, a pretty mean lothario...Ah, let's go get a drink.
Labels: pol'tics
posted by rich bachelor | 6:00 PM
19 Comments:
John Wooden, the longtime men's basketball coach at UCLA used to tell his players that if everyone was thinking alike then no one was thinking.
That is a good thing for playing the game of basketball. In sports...and music...having each member of the team/band on the same page is a key for success.
In politics group thinking tends to leave open the possibility of domination by a small fraction of the group. When this happens it is better to sacrifice the whole group than to turn it over to those who would abuse it.
The Democratic party has been torn apart and now needs to cheat neat if it is to suture itself back together. If that doesn't happen we will find ourselves irrevocably beneath the bootheel of those that don't give a rat's ass about our views.
I find myself wonderin' if it isn't a whole lot bigger than pol'tics. I mean, ok, liberals are a thoughtful bunch. Not always smart but certainly thoughtful, and something about the saturation bombing of media stimulus makes it harder and harder for folks to be thoughtful. And this seems to me to be why liberalism is falling apart slowly over the last 20 years. It wasn't so long ago that a well timed, well done book could make a difference in how things work, now it seems that the only thing that can effect real change is a slick marketing package - something that is by definition not thoughtful. I worry that in order to "win" democrats might have to abandon thoughtfulness altogether. That would be a bad thing, I think. Liberalism can go feral just as fast as conservatism, and past a certain level of nastiness the pot ain't worth winning. So if the probelm is something along these lines where do we direct our efforts? Frankly, I'm scared like I have never been before. I've been plenty disgusted before, but shit, this is not looking good. Americans are soooo deep in this "it can't happen here" fantasy... Well, you know all this. The point: do we give up on speakin' the truth with a shaky voice and start manipulating the fantasy with slick patter and quick cut imagery in hopes of keeping the mesmerized stimulus tweekers docile?
The cons are content to leave it rotting on a trash heap, but we can never abandon the truth. Repackage it, make it more appealing for embrace.
Because of those things George talks about it isn't enough anymore to only hope that the truth of the message will stand on it's own.
It isn't. It hasn't been.
And I just keep on noting, as always, that what I really meant to say here got lost in my own swirl of anger and free association, as always.
It was something else, something more in between...There is actually another way out of this ugly mess, and occasionally I see the outlines of it...And fail to write it down...
I'll be back, though.
Sorry. Sometimes it is difficult to filet the proper chunk of meat from your posts as you do tend to cover a lot of ground.
And so you do think there is someone out to get kevron. I was beginning to think it was just another personality sitting down at the same computer. An alter ego of sorts.
shee-zus, i clicked on every link but my own, and damn if i wasn't ground down by all the rhetoric and gum-flappin' anger and hot hot air. and then it made sense to me: that's just the kind of silly, stupid, mindless waste of breath you not only want to avoid hearing, but avoid redirecting, controlling and meticulously clipping and primping as well. i sure as shit can't blame you for that.
all in all, take it as a compliment, i still see you as the steeley-eyed sort of guy who's quick wit and sharp insight deflates all the stupid arguments, and now, more than ever, we need someone fighting for the right (i mean the correct) side with that sort of natural and effortless ability to trim the fat off the bone, and hopefully make this world the type of place i might wanna let kids loose in.
of course with that metaphor, maybe you would do really well as a meat-dresser.
i spent a while talking to my pa this weekend about the focus group, the marketing meeting, the abstract christian message, the backroom negotiation handshake, and the shit and the shovel.
during that conversation, we speculated that the next presidential election could very likely be held between hillary and jeb, which would imply that if either was elected, the highest seat in our land would recieve the ass of one of only two families that spanned back from 1988. and, if you consider the first bush adminisration a continuance of the reagan years, well then you are looking at a two family switcho-chango that dates back 28 years. two party system indeed! that considered, why bother getting into politics? you have a better chance of success starting a global automobile production facility out of your apartment.
george raises a hell of a point, it goes beyond the us and them, it's now us (the pleebs) vs. them (the packaging and slick sell) no matter the ideological slant, and it just seems like we can't win, which is scary. did the 60's do something to us that we can't come back from? is there a unspoken futility that we all share and understand? what do we have to do to get back to a sense of control over our own community and lives, move onto our own island? if so, i vote for australia, it seems to be canada in the south pacific. they also seem to be pretty much ignored by the northern hemisphere.
i'm sorry mom and dad, i love you but i'm never having kids and i'm thinking of taking up smoking and maybe heroin.
I've been waiting until I had something newly profound to say before commenting here. As that doesn't seem to be happening I'll go ahead anyway. I don't think we need to worry about the two family dynasty continuing its stranglehold on the Whitehouse. Hillary will never win that office. She is a woman. That one obvious fact cuts her chances down to about a 38% success rate. Even though women make up more than half the of the population of registered voters, they don't seem to be able to get together as a block. Too many of those female voters are conservative Christian soccer mom types. She is a liberal and is perceived to be a New Yorker. That will not go over in the Midwest or deep South. Worst of all she is related to that dastardly bastard, Bill Clinton.'Nuff said on ol' Hil.
Jeb Bush is perceived to be even more stupid and awkward than his brother, the appointed King of AmeriKa. With the downward spiral that W is taking, I think Jester Jeb has little chance of being a true heir to the throne.
Here is who we need to worry about - Rudy Guilianni and John McCain. Rudy has a built-in support even from liberal New Yorkers. The South and Midwest love him because of his strong leadership after 9/11. Liberals kinda like him for those same reasons plus he sometimes is seen as a moderate. John McCain was pretty popular amongst Republicans in 2000. If it wasn't for the giant Karlrovian smear machine, he probably would have taken not only the pub nomination, but the presidency as well. After 8 years of King W The Insane, McCain will seem like a veritable breath of fresh air. As with Rudy, McCain is seen as a moderate. I have to admit that given the right circumstances I might vote for him. The worst possible scenario I foresee is a McCain/Guilianni Republican ticket.
But remember, Sprintime (of the 21st century) is almost here. Goddess bless that Wiccan High Priestess who fought to lead the morning prayer at the Cleveland city council meetings. She lost her fight, but the very fact that she tried is a sure sign of Spring. And people are becoming aware of the folly of the last two elections, finally. There is a hope for a massive backlash against the status quo. Look to the midterm elections to see if the Dem's gain a seat or dozen. It could be a look into the future.
Ya' know I think I'd vote for McCain. Yes, we lose on some cherished social issues, but it looks like we're loosing those anyway. IF and it is a might big if, McCain could 1. _*Really*_ reform campaigne finance and 2. regain some semblance of regulatory control over multi-national mega corporations, we might be able to eventually get beyond simple damage control and get those (social issues) things back.
I never thought I'd be in a position where I thought I was going to have to give up on free legal abortion or freedom of the press in a desperate gambit to wrestle national sovereignty back from unnamed financial interests. If I'm not overreacting then this really does change our strategic situation.
More than any candidate the cons serve up, I think the greatest obstacle to a Democrat winning the Oval office is the possible revocation of the 16th amendment.
Sure the president has to run another election, but by hook or crook he managed to wrangle enough votes the first two times.
Four more...no wait, eight more...ah what the hell, let's just anoint him king. Or savior.
Oh Canada.
with love and respect to everyone reading... excuse a moment of specific attention: george and rb, please email me... i don't have either of your personal email addresses. i have just adjusted my profile so you can hit me with the direct email message.
oh, and yeah, i agree. if he's not sure how to keep it in the family, he'll try and find a way to keep the crown on his head.
fuggum. AUSTRALIA!
"....noteworthy for just not even pretending to be a nice man."
ack! hey, i'm a warm, gracious, gregarious, caring man. and i'm proud, and filled with indignation (you've read some of the stuff being said out there). so i've given up on discussion with unreasonable people; they express their opinions in their own way, and i do the same.
KEvron
"....and past a certain level of nastiness the pot ain't worth winning."
i certainly don't want my party to stoop to the same tactics as their opposition. it would only fuel the partisan division we now endure. the idea of the conservatives as an ineffective minority is just as troubling to me as the position the dems currently occupy. okay, fine., nearly as troubling....
i'm willing to play rough, but i won't play dirty.
KEvron
"An alter ego of sorts."
"ack!" again!
mind games aren't my style.
KEvron
So sorry KEvron, it is that I've been so utterly confused trying to follow along.
Well, and sorries from me over here, too. The 'not even pretending...' thing was both a compliment and a joke.
I continue to think that a lot of things that need saying never really get said because we're all a little too afraid of being insensitive,or something along those lines.
In response to what you said over at your place: if calling you a child molester isn't libel, then what is?
And-is your antagonist fifteen fucking years old, or what?
"so utterly confused trying to follow along."
well, i've removed the older blogger comments (using haloscan now), but the cofussion can be easily resolved; check the user profiles. the personal information can be copied/faked, but the membership date and the number of viewings cannot. my start date is nov, 2005, with 804 viewings currently. on the haloscan, the imposure has been incomplete, as they haven't been using my email address (which is a bogus one anyway), nor my blog url, as their own. if and when they start doing this too, i'll delete the two addies from their post. in this way, the reader should be able to differentiate between the imposter(s) and the genuine me.
KEvron
"if calling you a child molester isn't libel, then what is?"
as i've suffered no loss of income nor any damage to my reputation, no libel has been committed. an insult isn't libel.
"And-is your antagonist fifteen fucking years old, or what?"
who can say? i'm 99.999% certain that it's a fellow who calls himself "republican vet" (i and others refer to him as "fuckboy"). i'll provide links if you'd like, but he's just an exercise in futility.
KEvron
ps
you may, in the interest of order on your blog, delete this comment with my approval. wouldn't want him spamming your blog to the point that it won't function properly.
BTY, by 16th amendment I meant 22nd amendment. Taxes we gotta pay.
I'm always bitching about things being unconstitutional. You know, some day I'm gonna sit down and actually read that bastard.
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