NPR issued a stern “language warning” ahead of its most recent interview with Art Acevedo on All Things Considered, over “an ethnic slur.” I kept thinking he was going to say somebody had called him a beaner or something, but that didn’t make any sense.
The grievously offensive slur came in a short exerpt of Acevedo’s Congressional testimony about systemic police misconduct. “We call them ‘Gypsy cops.'” I could not fucking believe it. I spent fifteen minutes waiting for that segment and listening to it, all ears, and all he said was “Gypsy cops.”
The idiots who run NPR no longer do business in the real world. They can’t even see it from there. The shitcanning of Bob Edwards was an idiot wind. It blows over us to this day, more briskly by the month.
We find ourselves with ro mani problems. We try to fix them with moral window dressing. Gypsy is always a slur, never a descriptor. Language Warnings, tramps, and thieves. we’d hear it from the people of This Town, my God, Halperin; Language Warnings, tramps, and thieves, but every day they buried Tim Russert, we’d sit there in the pews, and fix to lay our money down.
Cher these findings widely; they are signs of our times. It fell on an old wifebeating Chippie to suggest that “Groundhog Day cops” might be a better descriptor, since they kept reappearing: a cheap dodge to a cheap question, but what else can we expect? None of this shit is relevant. It’s an absurd distraction.
It’s NPR.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Oftentimes I sit here, dumbfounded, trying to asbord it all and make faint sense of it. The pettiness, the moralizing, the sycophantic childishness, the sheer unreality: all of it unfolds on an unfathomable plane of thought and existence. Nothing about it intersects with my thinking, observations, or lived experiences. And I went to prep school and college. These are renowned, preeminent reporters. We entrust the news, the first draft of history, to them and their craft.
Maybe Art Acevedo was the Houston Police Chief when one of his riot cops rode his horse over a woman and trampled her, just because she had the uppity nerve to protest the brutality of her city’s police department, and just because he could. Never mind that; Acevedo spoke to Congress, shall we say, inartfully.
What the hell is wrong with them? Are they conniving? Are they just fucking stupid? I had classmates who graduated, apparently in fine academic standing, in a state of stupidity at least as profound as they enjoyed upon their matriculation. I mean, I sat through an admitted students’ roundatble with a girl who used “matrculate” in a manner proving that she believed it to be a synonym for “trickle.” Such are the characters who make the cut. Ponder who doesn’t, and shudder. Then again, I also knew classmates who were deeply amoral, or immoral or, I’m pretty sure, both at the same time.
Who the fuck even told them to warn their audience about a coming ethnic slur and pester the Chief of Police for the City of Houston for using it by way of quoting his own officers’s shorthand for the worst cops in their midst? The schoolmarmish freaks who run that joint always ask for the manager and the owner when they swoop into Fort Wayne or whatever postindusrial junkie dump most recently caught their intenton when their back-of-the-house nerds scanned a map of the Ohio Valley. There’s no way they’re liaising with the village elder of a trailer squat in the backwoods of a palisade peeking discreetly down on the flats of Secaucus for guidance on what to call his clan. Their term for these unwanted visitors would surely be rude; draw up another language warning and get it on air.
The thing about Gypsies is that they’re too busy with the usual Gypsy shit to give a rat’s ass about what a bunch of schoolmarms in Washington have to say about them on Scold Radio. Their interest in the imperial center is pragmatic: manhole covers, the superstitious and their bank accounts, public benefits, getting their fellow Bogles out of the Oregon State Penitentiary and back into the businesses that are worth a damn.
Predictably enough, these are not the sort of things one would worry about as the lavishly salaried host of a radio news show of no particular journalistic standards. So who are they trying to reach? As The Last Psychiatrist liked to say, if you’re watching it, it’s for you. Charles Osgood has yet to see me on the radio, but I’ve got enough trouble without that twee dork.
For better and worse, I’m a college boy. NPR is my cultural residue, an awful and yet irresistable pilgrim journey o fthe mind and the soul. Jesus harrowed hell for three days, which it seems we’re counting at about 25 hours from the Good Friday service to the Easter Vigil; I spend anywhere from two to six hours a day listening to that crap, because, look, I got a rechargeable pocket radio at Target and it’s useful company for laundry or guerrilla blackberry brush clearing or whatever.
Over time, the tics shine through. The cultural compulsions gaze back from the abyss. There is *NO EVIDENCE* that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself/Seth Rich was killed in anything other than a weird unsolved robbery with no leads in a heavily surveilled and videotaped city/Comet Ping Pong is tied to the weirdly, inexplicably repetitious language in the leaked Clinton e-mails, none of whose context-free words are, say, code for child pornography according to internal FBI manuals.
They’re constantly reporting on their sponsors. Google is a sponsor. Facebook is a sponsor. Amazon is an NPR sponsor. There are hours when they can’t go fifteen minutes without another of these artless disclosures. Yeah, we get it: you’re corrupt. But who the hell is “us?” Just me, I guess, the king of understanding unfortunate things in the news. Wonderful.
KQED radio broadcasts the PBS NewsHour live from Washington at 3:00 pm. BNSF is a sponsor. That’s the amalgamation of, among others, the Burlington Road, the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific. and the Frisco. This behemoth is one of Warren Buffett’s Monopoly pieces. He moves properties around on a board in his parlor across town from the Union Pacific dispatch center. Nobody in the news business has a clue that there is one. We presumably prefer trains that don’t rear-end each other at 55 to 79 miles an hour to ones that do, and maybe there’s a skilled trade of people who monitor rail traffic and control signals and switches to help keep that from happening all the time. Maybe one of them is worth more than a bunker full of Tom Brokaw-ass blowhard jagoffs playing Monopoly with 32.500 miles of trust trackage as just one portfolio holding out of hundreds. To assess the relative vocational value of these activitites, it might help to be aware of railroad dispatching as something that a number of people do for a living in Omaha.
Naw, that’s too earnest. Reagan busted PATCO and fired its air traffic controllers en masse because they worked for a living. That was what the working class wanted: the inability to successfully demand better pay and working conditions from a showboating sellout from the Screen Actors Guild. That’s why they voted for Reagan in Chicago and Hibbing and Montesano when they voted for Carter in 1980 and Mondale in 1984.
That’s the kind of shit any of us might be able to make up for a living if we moved to DC. It’s what we call work.
I’m what we call General Stroganoff. Please, to the table. The people may have a little Beef, As A Treat.
Our rulers and courtiers aren’t just broadly ignorant and incurious. They’re ignorant and incurious about their own news and analysis beats. I know exactly why they didn’t see Trump’s election to the presidency coming: they never socialize with non-Brahmins. If they’re adventurous, they branch out to socialize with #NeverTrump Optimate movement conservative dorks in Loudoun County. They spend hours in Panera lobbies in Alpharetta and emerge with no clue that they were surrounded by Trump voters, convinced that the path to a Democratic South runs through a 60% Republican exurban district full of Yankee transplants who are obviously Democrats and mostly Republicans. Conversely, they dredge up the the most crotchety, vile diner geezers to explain why Erie voted for the Donald by way of voting for Hilldawg.
They don’t even look at the fucking county victory maps. These are the Politics Understanders. Forget the crisis of legitimacy for the moment; this is a blatant crisis of confidence. They’re all morons.
Hillary is liberal, they insist. Huh? She’s a spiteful, prudish old scold who’s permapissed at her notoriously horny husband for chasing strange. Her personal morals are pretty fucking asshole-conservative, by that reckoning, at least. Her libertine husband, however, was never measurably any more liberal than her as a working politician. He threw Joycelynn Elders under the bus because Larry Craig and the gang were sore about sex education (as in, hey now, that’s our job!). He triangulated “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, as a notoriously heterosexual married man himself. He grandstanded in front of a military school yard assembly of prison inmates at Stone Mountain, blustering about law and order.
He fucking flew back to Arkansas from the campaign trail to sign a death warrant for the most retarded guy on death row. Does Ricky Ray Rector even register with these asshats? I was nine and a half when Bill had him killed. It shook me to the core. He got exactly the meal plan Randy Newman promised; it was just that he didn’t want to rush dessert.
I keep noticing that some of us live in a world that has consequences. These aren’t just Monopoly pieces being moved around on a board. These are livelihoods. These are qualities of life. This is people’s basic welfare. These are lives. Bill Clinton had a man with the intellectual capacity of a three-year-old killed because his strategists told him it would win him parts of the Upper South and the Midwest. That isn’t liberalism; it’s overpowering illiberalism, because it’s also chilling psychopathy.
If you’re starting from the premise that Slick Wilie was a leading liberal light and berating me for an hour straight about what an ignorant, reckless fool I am for not voting for his hideous, bigoted wife, whom I’m convinced hates me, yo dawg, it ain’t me, chief. If you’re proceeding to lecture me about my duty, to myself and to our country, to vote for the current mush-for-brains dotard, again because he’s the liberal, I will of course be perfectly fucking blunt: Joe Biden is a handsy pervert, an authoritarian bigot, a serial liar, a man who 32 years ago dropped out of a race for the same office he’s currently seeking after he was exposed plagiarizing a British prime minister’s speeches, and by now visibly a drugged-up mush-for-brains dotard. You may want him, but that doesn’t mean I do, asshole. As it is, I’m barely, possibly in his camp, and that’s only because Donald Trump has veered into armed factional sedition and late-stage Qaddafi-Borgia mashup oratory.
Our soi-disant liberal scolds moan that they want more educated, informed voters. They can sack up and come talk to me about what it’s like to actually be one. Alternately, they can shut the fuck up. I rather enjoy the latter option.
These motherfuckers have spent my entire adolescent and adult lifetime rubbing it in our faces that this whole political spectacle is a frivolous game to them. It is, by their own slobbering accounts, a horserace. They’re degenerate enough to play the ponies, for sure. The only reason they were angry at Brett Kavanaugh was that he didn’t clean up the way they preferred, choosing instead to daydrink and snort a big line on his way to his tantrum in front of some of their faves on the Hill. That, and he raped a high-caste white girl, which is the same thing.
Excuse me, but I am not here to take these pearlclutching, sanctimonious nerds seriously. I’ve been homeless. It’s amazing to get into spats online with #Resistance deadenders about our duty to vote for Joe Biden this time and watch them completely fail to register that I’ve been homeless when I explicitly say so. They aren’t even, like, whoa, shit, are you serious? It flies straight over their heads. I had a guy call me disturbed and a bot for pushing back on his horseshit narrative about the public’s scandalously insufficient deference to the Democratic Party’s eminences grises. For real, I’ll be over on alt, using the same writing and argumentation style I use here, minus most of the shitposting, and I’ll have overpaid idiots calling me a disturbed dipshit and a bot.
One of the lessons from these unfortunate interactions is that cryptoclinically disordered ideations are much more prevalent than advertised. We’re talking paranoid, schizoid, post-traumatic. One of Donald Trump’s strokes of genius is his knack for reaching the schizoid and the paranoid on their own channels. He isn’t exactly one of them, but he vibes with that. He channels the denpa, as the Japanese call it. Normie bipartisan ratfuck politicians never allow themselves to go with a flow so subversive.
Trump uses this gift for little but deep evil. Like any other spiritual gift, it is abused with terrible ease, and the Donald is rarely any better than amoral. Our shitlibs and mostly disingenuous #NeverTrump movement conservatives are still idiots to ignore his spiritual attunement to the ideation of so many of our disturbed shut-ins, given how often they vote.
These bipartisan shitbirds are exactly the scum that rises to the top in a society whose talented tenth bully the rest of us into a political economy devoted to pure, distilled amoral rationality and purged of all spirituality. They’re here to impose hard science and drive out all humanities–all humanity, really. They aren’t actually scientific or rational, but they insist they are, and they have the resources to pay intellectual mercenaries to say so 24/7.
As it always bears repeating, they do not live in any part of our real world. They hardly even visit. When they do, they squeamishly moan about how gross it is. Techbros are trying to gentrify the Tenderloin, for some mindbogglingly fucking bizarre reason. It’s probably just because they’re used to getting their way. It’s probably just because they can. If we’re paying attention to the details of life in San Francisco we might flounder for months scrutinizing the thinking of some asshole like Jack Dorsey and contemplating why he’s also the guy who flew to Burma to sit on the floor all day and injure his ass. This isn’t a particularly foolish pursuit, but it is for naught. That motherfucker pulls that shit, all of it, because he can.
They all do. Every time one of these pricks shows up for another round of gentrification, he’s just throwing his weight around, because he feels like it, and because he can. Occam’s Razor always puts a crude cut on that bitch. It goes full SEPTA 61-Ridge Badlands on a motherfucker, not Dennis Geyer knife time.
It’s so easy to overthink these ghouls. Here’s the dumb but powerful thing: Many members of the upper middle class, scions and arrivistes alike, are not members of the cognitive elite, but a great many of the cognitive elite are members of the upper middle class. It’s subtle but important.
This is a skeleton key to how and why Rex Tillerson very perceptively called Donald Trump a fucking moron. Rex is an engineer who spent a career spanning roughly two generations in the oil industry, delegating the vast majority of the operational work as he rose into the executive ranks but still keeping a keen eye on operations and providing extensive guidance to operational chiefs. The Donald inherited the proceeds of an outer-borough slumlord empire from his sleazy father and wormed his way over the bridge into Manhattan, and you can betcha that meant the part below 95th Street. He plastered his name on a series of showboat businesses that he promptly ran into the ground. Then he went on television and played a shitbag simulacrum of Lee Iacocca.
None of this military school bone spur malingerer’s shtick had anything to do with competence. He’s just an actor. As Doug Casey says, acting is like prostitution: an honorable profession, but one that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Casey lures bitcoin dipshits to his bugout spread in Argentina, or maybe it’s his buddy’s spread, to violate Argentinian labor laws by working for free in the vineyard, but he’s right about both professions. Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan are entertainers. A healthy, livable society always has its buskers, its orchestra musicians, its stage actors, its Wesley Willis multimedia visionaries, its muralists, its interior designers, and its whores. This is the good shit.
The problem is that we take the more prominent of these entertainers,, who are not coincidentally often some of the more mediocre, as real-life leaders. This is a key driver of our epistemic closure as a nation. As John Regan, my favorite monarchist blogger, says, societies always end up with a hereditary elite, so they might as well collect and curate one for official adoration. I don’t care for this idea, but I have a hard time refuting it. All I can do is enthuse about Nicola Sturgeon, England’s low-key smallholders and craftsmen, and the National Fruit Collection. No, I’m not talking about Elton John; if you look it up you’ll see.
It’s not like I’m necessarily against getting a piece of Caterbury tail. Regan has openly admired Kim’s more demure nudes: not my idea of taste, but if you look at the other stuff I’ve published here you’ll know that I have no business commenting on taste, which I never promise to have from minute to minute. The hilarious thing is that Regan and Kardashian are colleagues; I recall hearing that she’s in law school, and if anyone has ghostwritten law review articles, it’s Kim. A bitch has to balance her personal branding and her intellectual interests.
We do that out on the streets, too, for our own welfare and survival. The idea that Chuck and Nancy or any of the Trump family, maybe excepting Tiffany, have any capacity or interest to relate to ordinary Americans, let alone to the poor of them, is absurd. They live in a different, unreal, surreal world. The homeless psychotic guy at the Metro 40 bus stop at Inglewood and Century, catty corner from the Yoshinoya and the laundromat, who told me about how he was “pretty much traveling between universes right now,” happily and graciously conceded the validity of my only perceptible universe. Is that A340 actually on final approach to 24L, or is it on short final to a wormhole? We can’t see it, can we? Sure, you just landed on 25L without incident this afternoon, but what’s its turbulence?
I’m absolutely serious that Turbulence Dude was more attuned to the lives of the sane, functional people around him than Fancy Nancy and her crew have been in years, if ever. He probably had other bums telling him that he was batshit fucking nuts, and hey, we aren’t all traveling between the same universes at the same time. There’s all kinds of angles for astral projections, shit, a lot of universes, and maybe you’ll encounter a few more on the 40 by the time you hit Western, or maybe you won’t, yeah, that’s probably it.
Nobody tells Nancy that she’s totally full of shit and totally out of touch. She pays for layers of security and sycophancy to cosset herself against this insolence. That’s why I usually show her no manners whatsoever when I call her Washington office and demand the constituent services we’re all due as Americans. She’d catch worse in the Tenderloin. She is domiciled right about two miles from the SFPD Tenderloin Station, the official Heart of the Shitty. I’ve been looking for her home address, which has to be a matter of public record for her to represent the Twelfth District, but I guess they try to memory-hole that shit even though it’s a constitutional requirement to verify it for public office. It’s not like she stays there on any given night away from Washington, as opposed to any of her other opulent properties; I mean, we all know she lives on Zinfandel Lane; but she governs us, so it’s obviously relevant.
Our politicians are ever less our servants, ever more our masters. Lincoln rode around Washington alone on his horse. He walked across the street, alone if nobody wished to accompany him, to the same church whose perimeter Trump ordered goons from his palace guard to violently clear so he could pose with what he called “a Bible.” Harry and Bess Truman retired to their old unassuing house in the Independence town platt. Fancy Nancy would never settle for a single bungalow when she can own at least three castles for her personal use. The third is her pied-a-terre in Washington; that’s a ridiculous term of art for anywhere she lives or works, but the French, bruh.
We’ve had high elected officials, even presidents, who lived in the real world. The Roosevelts were ungodly rich but still had a keen finger on the ordinary American’s pulse. Trump does, too, after a weird fashion, but mainly by way of setting narrow factions against outgroups they already hate and activating segments of the mentally ill.
It’s a good bet that a sneering, mobbed-up centimillionaire Baltimore mayoral daughter who’s been in Washinton forever and represents the next thing to a rotten borough ain’t it, and in Pelosi’s case it’s the correct bet.
Prior to the techbro invasion, San Francisco was a socioeconomically diverse city where people of ordinary means could afford to live, not on Nob Hill but at least somewhere in the Richmond, the Sunset, the Excelsior, or whatever. Tech purged the city of the middle class: the old-timers cashed out and moved out, and the newcomers and local kids found themselves unable to get by anywhere closer than Hayward or Petaluma.
What this exodus left behind was the usual Tenderloin losers, with their 5-10% turnout or whatever the fuck they achieve at the polls (it’s a free country; take your own guess); thousands of non-Anglophone noncitizens cooped up in SRO’s in Chinatown, counted in the census but not on the voter rolls; and the rich. I’m only half eliding this shit. A whole lot of ordinary working people fled or got run out of town. San Francisco’s black population hasn’t been cratering by coincidence.
Members of my native upper middle class ask me, incredulously, how I can possibly believe that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton hate the poor. Epistemic closure, like every other vice, causes less chaos and damage for the rich, so that’s nice, but let’s look at her with clear eyes and clear minds. Her net worth is mathematically impossible on a Congressional salary. She’s easily worth an order of magnitude more than a six-sigma miser would be able to amass on a Congressional salary. Yeah yeah, she’s got family money–as I note from time to time, her father was a huge mob crook–but she also owns a constellation of successful investment properties and an ample stock portfolio, blind trust my fat white ass, and Congress is crawling with habitual insider traders. Congresscritters don’t just kind of end up in positions to buy into the Napa Valley landed gentry. That takes some combination of marrying well and juice.
/Annoying little Mexican girl meme/ Why Not Both? How could the modal asshole in that joint not work every available angle? It was, what, six or eight percent of the Senate that got exposed insider-trading on information from the Covid-19 briefing over the winter? Plus they’re all positioned to place their kin and cronies in sinecures and get paid for it. There’s an old Anglo-Saxonism for a five- or six-figure speaking fee for spending half an hour at an all-expenses-paid junket regurgitating gobbledygook: we call that a bribe.
The last bus any of these assholes is riding is the Straight Talk Express. The Democrats among them are permanently furious with Bernie Sanders, a rare colleague who for the most part thinks and speaks like a normal adult of ordinary means. Obfuscation is the coin of their realm, and yet they wonder why some of us distrust them. Yeah, asshole, it doesn’t take a proctological exam to determine that a serial liar and fraud is full of shit.
The reason I don’t trust Fancy Nancy, Hillz, the Big Dog, or any of the rest of their ilk to do a damn thing for the poor is that I have every reason to distrust them. That’s a circular argument for my distrust of the circle jerkers, but I’ve been over the particulars more times than I can count. Homelessness, emotional abuse (in my case, consistently at the hands of overt or tacit socioeconomic superiors), and hard downward mobility have resulted, inter alia, in my acquiring a worldview divergent from that of the Brahmins I left behind up there. Their worldview and interests are not mine.
This is a suprisingly hard teaching for them. As I keep having to ask, who the hell are “we?” It ain’t me, governor.
There was, of course, a mass delusional break among establishment Democratic officials and their voters in 2016. A guy they really disliked caught them off guard and won the presidency. All of a sudden, everything was the Kremlin’s fault. This is an overt delusion of persecution. We often see such ideation in the clinically psychotic.
This is not, however, a case of denpa, but rather a flareup of mass hysteria with an indefinite half-life. This shit is extremely fashionable among the fashionable. It is not a low-class hobby for schizoid shut-ins; it’s much, much worse. Change any of the characters in this play and see how it sounds. “John Cox would have won the California gubernatorial election, but Angela Merkel had German junior intelligence analysts under her direct command catfish as American chat buddies and brainwash entire communities of conservative Chicanos.”
Out on the streets, that’s what we call nuts. We’re walking the 5150 block on that journey. Some of us have reasons for being sick of that shit. For one thing, it isn’t even fun. Most psychotics aren’t just trying to deflect blame for shitting the bed, the way the Democrats have been doing for the past four years. It’s always someone else’s fault. In my case alone, it’s my fault for taking negatively to Hillary, for having positive reactions AT ALL to Donny Fingers, for having an affirmative enthusiasm for Jill Stein. It’s a batshit insane binary: #WithHer or Against Her, and Against Her means with HIM. This is nonsense: one of the reasons I voted for Stein was that Trump put me off, too. I got sick of that fucker by the time I got my ballot.
These dipshits construe the entire 2016 election as a humiliating, scandalous breach of deference. Why America’s yacht dealers and dentists wanted to defer to the pussyhatters in the first place is beyond them, too, because Trump’s Optimate base does not exist to them. This is why I’m one of their scapegoats for not taking their orders in the completion of my legally secret ballot.
Fuck that, of course. What’s crazy is that these delusions of persecution are a high-class phenomenon. This is political astuteness, too Them. That guy from Inglewood needs to catch the bus and run some universe checks on these freaks. Listening to millionaires, some of them bigtime multmillionaires, whine about the breach of their aesthetics and their norms, and now pivot to the frantic assertion that the election of a different rapist and flagrant sex pest is feminism, doesn’t impress me in a good way.
Besides, if the plan is to convince me that Biden or the Clintons or some such trash love the poor like Jesus and Trump hates the poor, it might be a good idea to demonstrate either some personal familiarity with what it’s like to be poor or else some working observations. They never show up with this. It’s hopeless for me to explain how and why I have to observe and understand them more accurately than they have to observe and understand me. It’s the stuff of a basic human education, which they so proudly completed, In School.
Add this to the treasury of things not understood about Christian teaching and practice in this, Our Christian Country. The average Hindu seeker who’s looking in bashfully and wondering what possesses us to lay it all on a single god-guru and the two other gods who are part of him understands Christianity better than our biblethumping leaders ever do, just by not being hardhearted and idiotic.
Ever since Constantine we’ve been discovering anew how pigheaded and disastrous it is to try to mold Christianity into an official imperial religion. Christian discipleship, which, to lightly paraphrase Gandhi, sounds like a marvelous idea, is, leaving aside questions of strict divinity, a lifelong pilgrimage in the path of a humble mystic, healer, and almsgiver who was put to death for defying the Roman imperial authorities and one of their Levantine satrapies. Even if we’re convinced that he’s a god, not the God, or what have we, reading from Eccleasiastes to clap back at a political opponent for holding “a Bible” up as a crude talisman who’s power didn’t even interest him and then proceeding to do nothing for the poor and vulnerable among one’s legislative constituents plainly ain’t it. Remember, “as you do to the least of these, you do to me.” This sure seems like it applies to civil officials who wield great power to provide for the needs of the poor, or to refuse them all aid.
The confusion over this discord between word and deed starts to lift as we consider that American governments are formed mainly from incarnations of the Antichrist. Hypocrisy doesn’t always sound quite right as an explanation; it’s at least a significant component, but we’re talking about people with serious delusional disorders, the loudest of them having to do with Russian spook sabotage and chat bot mind control. They’re evil, but they aren’t JUST evil. There’s a whole lot going on here.
In any event, we do have a leadership class of Structural Antichrist. Casual but sincere students of Christian scripture and tradition know more than well enough what’s wrong with this shit and why it’s a huge fraud. Countless outsiders who have studied Christianity look at what passes for Christianity in the United States and think, correctly, what the fuck.
The synthesis here is gross but compelling. We’re all about epistemic closure, we’re all about in-your-face Christian piety, and so, QED, epistemic closure in the name of Christ Jesus is extremely our shit. Reading some decontextualized bollocks about seasons of life from Ecclesiastes for the sole purpose of one-upping a political opponent for being proudly ignorant of the whole book of books is what we call Christianity, instead of suspecting that the Tenderloin is exactly Jesus’s beat and he wants us to at least try to do something about it.
As I said, Fancy Nancy is in a position to really do something. I show up in the confessional guilty that I was curt with some bums and knew I could spare them a few bucks. Most of us fail here more than we succeed and fall down more readily than we get back up, and it’s a good reason to seek maybe not so much absolution as guidance, but I’d say we could use some fucking help from that bitch on this job. We could certainly do worse than to rebuke her and her kind as rudely as seems useful.
Our rulers need to be dragged, kicking and screaming if they insist on being so graceless, back into the real world, to do the jobs they owe us. All they’ve been doing lately is making messes and contemptuously leaving them for us to clean up. The quality of lawmaking and administration they offer us is abysmal.
This is why we had to have the police brutality protests. Our lawmakers would feel differently about cops kneeling on people’s necks if cops barged into their living rooms and knelt on their necks. These atrocities are always for the little people. The high theory holds that with great power comes great responsibility; the low practice ensures that with great power comes great power. Power asserts itself for its own sake. Our rulers have the same morals and appetites as a cancer.
One difference, of course, is that cancer doesn’t stage a Kente Cloth Kneeling Ceremony for the purpose of exorcising the centuries-old racial sins of a nation founded on chattel slavery. There’s no making this shit up. Nancy got down on her knee, like, a week and a half after reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes. It feels like it could have been months. It should have taken decades, because she should never, ever have been involved in anything of the sort. Still in Kente shawls, Chuck and Nancy glared down at the press pool from behind their masks like two exceedingly hostile and condescending birds of prey. In fairness, though, they look only marginally less contemptuous from the dais when they’re unmasked and not dressed like Kwanzaa show-and-tell fools.
It’s all inconceivably absurd. They have a job to do, and that ain’t it. Even by P. J. O’Rourke’s reckoning, their branch of the government is money, not television. Nothing about kneeling on the floor for over eight minutes in a doofus waka waka hey hey vestment is a reasonable or bona fide way to respond to a police misconduct scandal in which a cop knelt on a man’s neck until he was dead. We’ve living in the twilight zone of elected assholes who will always resent us, their constituents, for demanding their representation. God help us if we deserve the grandparenting of Chuck and Nancy.
The Kente Cloth Kneeling Ceremony is an exceptionally flagrant example of our epistemic closure. In a single outrageously self-absorbed stunt the Congressional Democratic leadership provocatively recapitulated the murder of George Floyd in a gesture that was at the same time bathetically meaningless, elevated vacuous style over crucial substance, dicked around in ethnic garb like a Nigerian federal cabinet with Swiss bank accounts full of embezzled oil royalties and bribes, clumsily tried to stand back up, preened about their racial magnanimity at a time when blue-on-black killings had their nation at the flashpoint, and declined all around to do their fucking jobs. They’re shitheads, but they aren’t JUST shitheads. They expected this provocation to bear political benefits. They of course arrogantly assumed that the serfs they didn’t want reacting peevishly to their contempt would miss the show, or at least would hold their peace (fuck off lol), but they were pandering to a core constituency every bit as performatively vapid as themselves. Nancy know her neighbors. No, not the ones hard up in the Tenderloin, a mere two miles down the hill, but the ones who matter, the ones like herself. Duh.
This horseshit is never about Africa. An interest in West Africa might inspire astute observations of the culture that Congress shares with its counterparts in Nigeria, specifically, their common love of being huge crooks who live to take bribes. Instead, the usual suspects, Inner Party and Outer Party alike, are again walking around with their thumbs up their asses, proud that they are at last getting justice for Kunta Kinte. It’s an odd way to react to protests over a guy from Houston getting murdered by a cop in Minneapolis. That sounds pretty American and not very Ghanaian. It doesn’t seem like a national evil we can purge by holding a seance with Kwame Nkrumah.
Then again, Africa has had blameshifting no-account incompetents in high elected office, too, and Jerry Rawlings is white. Kente Cloth didn’t have anything to do with OJ, either, until the Dream Team decided it did and got Lance Ito to compliment them on their ties. Still, I’m down here, thinking that if I traded places with Fancy Nancy I’d be working on telling the police what to do, such as immediately arresting their colleagues upon establishing probable cause for murder if they want federal appropriations to continue, and not making a huge ass of myself by doing Motherland cosplay on the boob tube.
This cosplay was much more crudely and divisively racialized than anything about the Black Lives Matter movement. The point of BLM is to demand that the police stop murdering black people. The police have been murdering African-Americans ever since there have been Africans in the Americas. They aren’t reachable like black street gangs or lone hotheads, either. They go around murdering people at will.
Sometimes those people are white. The “All Lives Matter” countermovement doesn’t actually give a shit about life. Provocateurs like Matt Walsh pop up out of the woodwork to scold BLM protesters for not demanding justice for Daniel Shaver or whoever, reasonable points that might be well taken if they’d had anything to say about these cases in the years prior to the murder of George Floyd. The emblematic All Lives Matter demonstration was the attempted point-blank bow-and-arrow attack in Salt Lake City. Protesters nearby agreed with him sufficiently to bumrush him and stop him from fully acting on his violent disdain for life.
The “Black Lives Matter” framing is divisive, but only incidentally so. Exceedingly few people who are horrified by Floyd George’s murder would say that Daniel Shaver had it coming as a honky or that Brailsford is a good cop. There is no natural antagonism between those who want justice for Floyd and those who want justice for Shaver. Any distrust can be assuaged.
BLM is not a movement of racists who want Whitey to be murdered by cops. It’s an interracial movement of people demanding an end to police brutality. Its emphasis is on black lives, as opposed to all lives, because African-Americans bear the brunt of police violence. Cops preferentially harass, menace, assault, and murder black people. Where black targets are scarce, however, or for that matter whenver a non-black person pisses them off, they’ll gladly take it out on Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, American Indians, or whoever else is in the vicinity, especially if they’re poor.
This is a profession whose members have been given carte blanche authority to batter, strangle, rape, and murder people under color of law and force of arms. Support for these thugs and their enablers correlates with affluence and wealth: the moneyed know that the police, the managers of Outside, are their de facto mercenaries; the poor know that cops are as shitty and abusive as they feel like being. The downwardly mobile feel the injustice acutely as a looming threat to their own welfare and survival.
We can guess, with perfect ease and accuracy, which side Fancy Nancy takes in this war. That’s right: not ours. She hates poor people and demands servants; cops are overpaid servants who hate the poor.
By NPR’s reckoning all of this has to do with Gypsies. “Gypsy cops” is a slur on the Romani, not on lemon dance thugs. The United States has very little communal tension between Gypsies and the rest of us, so NPR is there to inadvertently foment it through its sheer woke ineptitude. But Chief, why do your officers them “Gypsy cops?” Jesus tapdancing Christ, you fucking nerd, why the hell do you think? How much of an asskissing dork do you have to be to ask that in the first place?
Mary Louise Kelly is here to distract Art Acevedo from police reform. I need to take up drinking again.
Murica Derp 