Playing Rock and Roll Part Two with the Penn State Blue Band

Millennials are one of the most heavily surveilled and regimented generations in American history. There are precedents, but they’re aberrations: slaves, gymnasts, the inmates of orphanages and reform schools; Michael Jackson, JonBenet Ramsey. Few Americans were under the illusion that the Dixie-inflected SoCal cortisol cases herding their kindergartners onto child beauty pageant stages were normal. Nobody looked at the public screaming fits of Bela and Marta Karolyi or Joe Jackson’s sheer abusive force of will as a stage father and saw a mainstream childrearing norm. Is she really going out with him? No. Larry is staying in with her. He already has dinner in hand.

#TooSoon

What, then, explains why Millennials are so soft and spoiled? It’s always good to hear these complaints from the same Boomers who spent their own youth throwing fits that would make their children and grandchildren blanch. A rising cohort of adolescents failing to graciously adjust to adulthood in a prosperous but fractious modern nation? Oh word?

Spoiled isn’t quite it. The Millennial Lifestyle is a trip through the wringer. On the bad end of the spectrum, it’s app gigs, cursed roommate arrangements, and crushing student debt for worthless degrees from fraudulent “colleges.” On the good end, or at least the less awful end, it’s years of academic and professional hazing for an always contingent invitation to wear golden handcuffs. Parents are scared to death that their flowers will die if they’re let out of the hothouse.

Let’s look at this from a restorative justice angle. What can the system do to make life viable for those it has brutalized through this hideous socioeconomic regime? Okay. Let’s start by making student debt as uncollectable as it currently is nondischargeable and forcing the gig apps to pay their employees–that’s what their “contractors” are, for God’s sake–either minimum wage on a shift basis or double the minimum on an on-call basis, plus federal mileage.

No, I am not trying to make liberals uncomfortable. Not principally, at least. As they’re generally construed today, liberals are a constituency vocally opposed to conservative attacks on individual liberty but, for one so keen on making individuals earn their liberty from abusive employers (e.g., by staying in school) and even abusive local and state governments (by voting for Democrats), they’re awfully reluctant to demand that other, much more powerful individuals with heavy institutional backing earn their own success by acting in ways that probably won’t provoke revolts.

Think yet again, if you will–although I’ll be the last to blame you if you won’t–of the myriad ways Hillary Clinton could have flipped the 2016 presidential election in her favor. Trump’s victory was overdetermined because She overdetermined it. Indeed, we might say She was not With Herself. Sad! Hillary surrounded herself with Beltway swamp critters, bragged about working to put coal miners out of work (Much Maggie, Such Resolute; Wow), catered to rich feminist extremists in a society with a swelling population of underemployed, undersexed young men, and strung Bernie Sanders along as a spurned proxy barnstormer instead of easily winning the general election with him as her running mate.

Assertions that the dispossessed masses owe imperious, out-of-touch politicians their loyalty in exchange for promises never delivered to hold bad corporate actors accountable to the law are highly fascist. What did voters actually have to lose by giving Trump a shot? The esteem of cosmopolitan elites who had always openly mocked them and wished them ill? Assistance from a government run by a neoliberal wrecking crew constantly insisting that its viciousness was merely the realpolitik necessary to play chicken with theoretically persuadable Republican voters, that it was trying its best to serve the vulnerable but had to placate malicious compatriots who wanted them dead and disingenuous ones who needed to maintain the value of their portfolios?

They didn’t all have nothing to lose–indeed, many vulnerable poor voters thought they had more to lose under Trump than under another Clinton–but by the same token, a great many had already lost too much under “sensible” centrist governments of both partisan stripes to assume that Trump would be worse. At worst, they figured, he’d promise and not deliver.

They took notice of the horde frantically denouncing him from positions of power and privilege: spooks, feds, out-of-touch Pentagon flag officers, civilian chickenhawks who sacrificed kids from the provinces on indefensible foreign battlefields like so many pawns on a chessboard, cutthroat holier-than-thou meritocrats who expected the whole damn nation to get with the program and play their sleazy game of professional striving at all costs, racially woke moralists living in segregated neighborhoods with the thinnest of veneers flapping around over their racial and class prejudices. The sputtering hysterics of these vicious, disingenuous cosmopolitan parasites gave a critical mass of voters confidence in Trump. Sermons about how Trump is just a bigot pandering to bigots inevitably backfire. Voters who confidently know in their own hearts, from their own relationships, that they are not bigots, and who know without a doubt that the Democratic base is crawling with bigots who constantly proclaim their own enlightenment, figure they might as well vote for a candidate who shows some promise to concretely improve their lives.

Large segments of Trump’s base are bigoted. They were bigoted back when they were voting for movement conservatives out of malice. George W. Bush appealed to their basest impulses. So did Bill Clinton. Forget rehabilitation; neither of these thugs should have been habilitated in the first place.

This is unfortunate, but it isn’t germane. Bigots were not Trump’s key to victory. NPR rarely grapples with this, let alone in good faith, but it’s the easiest shit to argue. Let’s hold all else equal–control for other variables, as Nate Silver mythically does–and run a counterfactual 2016 general election in which nobody turned out for Trump in the sincere hope that their communities’ boys and girls would be brought home from our ruinous foreign wars or rescued from the throes of crippling, life-threatening drug addictions or put back to work in revitalized factories in a country with a revitalized industrial policy.

Under this scenario, Trump loses every swing state. He keeps every politically activated Facebook paranoiac and still loses the election in a Clinton blowout. This scenario doesn’t even require Clinton to gain any voters. It only needs Trump to lose a nationwide total of well under a million disaffected voters in a few key states. In every 2016 swing state, this bloc was Yuge.

The point of this exercise is that there weren’t enough deplorables in the basket to Lock Her Out of the White House. It isn’t to assuage fears that right-wing nut jobs are a potent political force. They very much are, especially in rotten boroughs. Many such cases indeed. It helps that the Confederates, a rare army of “losers” widely encouraged to fly their battle flag over their places of “defeat,” have renegotiated the Three-Fifths Compromise for a full prisoner headcount.

Trump has a rare gift for communicating to the schizoid. No other president in my lifetime, and probably in living memory, has rivaled it. Like any good CIA asset, he panders mainly to hardline reactionary conspiracy theories, although not enough for (barf warning) the “Intelligence Community,” and certainly not in ways they seem to support.

Trump has millions of Americans convinced he’s Q. If that leering, jailbait-chasing pervert is St. Michael the Archangel of Missing and Exploited Children, God help the kids before their enemies. The explanation that makes sense here is misdirection. Q-Anon keeps some goobers from looking too directly at Jeffrey Epstein and his legion of associates, including one Donald John Trump.

It is, however, only the slightest misdirection. It takes hubris for Trump, Gaetz, Boebert, and the gang to draw attention to ubiquity of perverts in and around the government. Sure, you’re right about the Podesta brothers, but speak for yourselves. They have awfully high confidence that the electorate won’t put the pieces together and realize that the whole government is rotten, confronting not just Democrats but also Republicans for their perversions.

Both sides are overdue for their punishment. If the Turkish intelligence services were blackmailing Dennis Hastert into sandbagging resolutions denouncing the Armenian Genocide, why can’t the Podesta brothers be Madeleine McCann’s kidnappers? If that sounds crazy, ask yourself: What’s up with Tony’s art collection? What’s up with the police sketches of the two suspects? Assuming the Spanish police weren’t using John and Tony Podesta as Dahmer-grade Gladio assets, they had every reason to focus on European suspects, not on a barely famous former American official and his brother. Those two were ideally poised to hide in plain sight.

Criticizing both sides upsets both sides, and I do mean both sides. The Blue No Matter Who should explain what anybody’s supposed to make of Comet Ping Pong’s owner, or “owner,” one James Alefantis. How the hell does the pizzeria that, according to opposing viewpoints (TM), either absolutely is or absolutely is not a child rape dungeon end up with an owner whose name is one letter off from an anagram of “J’aime les enfants?”

At the time, I spent hours before I went to sleep at the Harris Beach rest area typing out an essay about this extremely normal shit on a hand-me-down phone whose battery has since died, matching the letters over and over again. It still feels surreal. It feels like “James Alefantis” is a code for the initiated and a fnord for the general public.

Why would they use a Greek guy to signal pedophilia in scrambled French? Well? Why wouldn’t they? These are weird, twisted people. The Clinton e-mails demonstrated their habit of using crudely coded language. Maybe the “walnut sauce” was just drugs. What it was not was anything to do with walnuts. Please.

They’re playing with us. It’s a gaslighting op. It’s possible that these are all coincidences, but plausible it is not. The two guys who just happen to be dead ringers for the prime suspects in Europe’s most sensational child kidnapping case are also associated with a guy widely reputed to be the orchestrator of a child sex slavery dungeon who himself just happens to go by a name that’s damn near French for “I like kids?” Am I crazy to wonder about this shit? Are we all crazy? It always bears repeating that I wouldn’t be pointing about of this out if it didn’t look sinister.

It’s always fun to be badgered to ignore and forgive these creeps for their weirdness and viciousness. What are we (“we”) even defending by voting for them year after year? Bill Clinton is still the psychopath who flew home to sign Ricky Ray Rector’s death warrant, and he’s #StillWithHer. If opposition to the death penalty is negotiable enough to order the execution of the most brain-damaged retard on death row as a matter of pure realpolitik, maybe there aren’t any actual principles at stake here. The West Wing teaches us this. President Bartlet had to deny clemency to that suicidal small-time drug trafficker to build political capital with the Republicans to, uh, yeah, do this and that on policy, just like when Slick Willie secretly met with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security, then blew it all on that plump Jewess’s dress.

That one we call the “Ooh, Mo Batter! Blue!”

Again, #TooSoon, as she said.

The Big Dog became more popular with his electorate, not less, for having Westside Thicky slicken his willie. J. Denny Dundiddly had yet to expose himself (ew), and Gateside Downlow’s briefs exposure as a Page Fancier had been memory-holed years prior, but it’s impressive, given how many of these creeps keep getting exposed for their sexual power plays on minors, and at that often ones kept captive under affirmative duress, that Bill Clinton’s big scandal featured his having sex, after a fashion, with an enthusiastic grown woman. As abuses of power by American officials go, it was trivial.

It’s worth noting, too, that Monica Lewinsky quickly came (giggity) to wield exceptional power in the White House for an intern, precisely because she sucked so much. She was allowed ample, if not quite unlimited, access to the facility, one of the most restrictive on earth. This chapped the hell out of Gary Aldrich’s ass. He wrote a damn book about Bill’s horniness before the Lewinsky story broke, and also about how sore it made him to be stonewalled by people he wanted to interview about everybody’s private lives. Just as with Trump years later showing up at stream-of-consciousness rallies with no experience in government and beating a former United States Senator and Secretary of State in their race for the presidency, Lewinsky scandalized the hell out of official Washington by effectively pulling rank on staff greatly her senior as a juniormost staffer.

Swallowing: Is that like inhaling? Did she? Is she the kind of girl who gives a guy head even when he’s hung like a moose? Is this the truth? Up against the wall, signora, and tell me: If this thing could fucking talk, would its story be titillating enough for the Special Counsel?

Bill Clinton famously had procreative sex with his wife as well, and we can all see how that worked out. Many families are worth valuing; that one’s worth making wait until it at long last shows some values, and lives by them. Frankly, few Americans imagined Bill Clinton was stepping out on a good woman, or for that matter a particularly promising child. A guy everybody knew was horny as hell by the time he was first elected to the presidency cheating on the worst yuppie harridan in the land with a laidback, gracious, tasteful mistress was pretty damn sympathetic for ordinary, normal Americans.

Ken fucking Starr, of all people, went on to cover for serial rapists on a college football team. What the hell are movement conservatives or the religious right supposed to be worth to voters now? It makes sense for shitheads in business to vote for them because they’ll do their part to discipline labor, but they can barely hang on to the Job Creator vote, because the Job Creators have defected to Trump. What is the mewling and scolding of the dwindling Never Trump conservative movement supposed to accomplish in the face of his proud caterwauling? A sniveling rear guard of scolds and creeps who constantly whine for the mods to put Trump in the penalty box want us to vote for them because they pretend not to be dissolute perverts.

That dog don’t hunt no more.

Trump is a sign of many things, and some of them are hideous, but among the better ones, he’s a sign that voters want honesty in their politicians.

They’d rather have him bragging about how he’d bang Ukrainian refugee cuties in a New York minute than listen to another round of Slava Ukrainy horseshit from the same warmongers who forced the country’s armed forces into the bloodbaths of Iraq and Afghanistan. Vladimir Zelensky is a piece of shit crook who celebrates active Nazi warlords. If the Russian spelling of his name was good enough for the movies, it’s good enough for me, and it might as well be good enough for us all. It was stunning to watch him lead a standing ovation before the Canadian Parliament for a Waffen SS veteran named, swear to God, Jaroslav Hunka. More like Nazislav Hunky, eh? Canada has a famously large and politically active Ukrainian community, but did they really have to clap and cheer for that John Demjanjuk ass motherfucker?

I guess they did. I also guess Putin isn’t all that bad for pursuing a total war against the Ronald Reagan of the Pale of Settlement. We need to spend another few billion on weapons for the Judenrat-in-Fatigues guy? Says who? In the name of my late grandfather, the one whose father faked Lutheranism to get the family the hell out of White Russia, I declare that we do not. I assume they both would have been just as stunned as I am to watch this shit unfold and unfold and unfold. Putin’s primary objection to Ukraine’s militarized nationalism is probably not its infestation with skinhead Bandera apologists, but you do, in fact, gotta hand it to him for presiding over a war against the most active and deadly Nazi armed forces in the world today. This is, objectively, exactly one of the things he is doing.

The Ukraine clusterfuck on its own won’t sink Funny Uncle Joe’s campaign for reelection. As a component of inflation or austerity measures, however, it may. If America First (in which my Jewish grandfather dabbled but by gentile grandfather did not) means limiting or ending aid to a fighting force of brutal but inept Nazis, should we not put America first?

This is racism? No. The obsession with the war in Ukraine and simultaneous utter disinterest in the wars in Ethiopia and the Congo, now, THAT is some fucking racism. That’s all about White people being sad about Whitey’s Trauma, and yes, a surprising number of these White people are black.

Everything about this fixation on Ukraine is class- and caste-coded. It’s a compulsory bougie hobbyhorse. If anything in American politics is fair, Trump hammering Biden for using his coked-up footjob wastrel of a son as a conduit to Ukrainian oligarchs is fair. This is not to say that it will necessarily work, given how many Americans quietly look up to Hunter Biden as an aspirational figure vicariously living a lifestyle they seek for themselves, just that it might, and that Trump will probably try it.

The intersection of war and sex is a horror. Hunter’s girls, mercifully, seem more like Instagram call girls or spies than sex slaves. He’s yet another freak whose sexual compulsions actually aren’t all that awful. He probably doesn’t do anything Donald Trump doesn’t. He gets high as a kite on freebase and has all-night orgies with strippers. He stalls on child support for his bastard. Maybe the kid will grow up all right in spite of it all and realize a full, satisfying career as a schoolteacher, like Strom Thurmond’s daughter. Strom was a better absentee father than Hunter, but at least Hunter isn’t a schoolteacher. If Yorkville’s varsity wrestlers need not give thanks, perhaps its cheerleaders should.

WE ARE!

Hunter’s lifestyle is bad, but it’s no Boys Town.

*****

In the month that I’ve wandered away from work on this screed to do shit like work on a freight dock (your boy gets paid), Israel has managed to provoke something resembling the Third World War. The war between Israel and however many enemies decide to engage it on however many fronts (currently looking like, among others, Iran attacking Israel on all possible fronts) horrifies me in a way that the Slavic showdown in Ukraine does not. It’s probably because Israel is a country my friends, classmates, and our peers might visit, and in some cases in fact have. It makes Ukraine and Russia look like shitholes, even in peacetime.

Israel is now showing its true colors in rare form. Killing hundreds in a coordinated airstrike on a hospital during a blockade on everything down to electricity and water after days threatening exactly such a strike, then blaming it on an accidental enemy artillery discharge, requires unparalleled psychopathic arrogance. I write this, of course, as an American, whose government is Israel’s parallel. It figures our ruling class would side with Israel, a country that, unlike our own, has had as its head of government a Philadelphian. Would that Bibi were merely the Republican Milton Street.

Mainstream outlets are failing to suppress news of Israel’s utter heinousness in its war on Gaza. They’re trying, but they’re overwhelmed by what their own reporters have confirmed or personally witnessed. The whole scene calls to mind the campaign to sanitize what American police were doing to Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020. By now, all but the worst shitlib diehards can tell that Israel is committing the Siege of Leningrad on the Warsaw Ghetto in response to a guerrilla incursion.

The shitlibs, that is, and also the anti-Islamic religious right. Uh-oh. To paraphrase a certain Indonesian-speaking “Chicagoan,” we forgot some folks.

Meanwhile, the House GOP Caucus, having allowed its nuttiest members to help the entire Democratic Caucus oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, is consumed with too much infighting to nominate a replacement. The Democrats’ kingmakers would have sat down any caucus member so defiantly threatening their own party leadership for The Talk. They’re evil, and they’re bad at elections, but they’re ideologically committed and disciplined. They highlight the absolute mess that is their current opposition.

Who, then, is the closest to a favorite for McCarthy’s replacement? Think (if you can stomach it): wrestling. Yes, you’re getting a clue, too! The Republicans are just a bit too divided to elect Jim Jordan.

Steve Scalise was briefly another favorite, and he may be again. Aside from Trump being one of the least consistently and committedly evil Republicans active today, and it’s a big aside, Scalise does not have the taint of personal scandal about him. He’s evil as hell, but that’s just policy. He does not make the news for molesting wrestlers.

If we can ignore questions of wrestling’s heterosexuality as a sport, we might assume that the GOP’s kingmakers, having not so much shame as a desire to look vaguely credible, would have made Jim Jordan go away by now. There are people it is not safe to piss off, and some of them are Republicans, not Democrats. We might expect some of the Republicans behind the scenes to pull out all the stops and destroy Jordan’s political career: no more seniority, no more campaign funding, fuck his district into a shape no one recognizes, a powerfully targeted primary challenge.

They have done none of this. Nobody stepped in behind the scenes to end the party’s affiliation with a scumbag accessory to the serial molestation of college wrestlers not two decades after its Speaker Emeritus went to federal prison for bullshit white-collar lying to the FBI but really for serially molesting high school wrestlers as their coach. Nobody was like, hey, this looks like shit, we gotta stop it.

Instead, as Yaakov Smirnoff would have it, the Jordan gets to cross all over the rest of us. His being the second high-ranking Republican in very recent years to pervert a wrestling program for young men into a casting couch for horny authority figures isn’t even a talking point among dissident Republicans. Nobody in office has stood up to call Jordan the new Denny Hastert and refuse to enable his further rise in public life. Nobody has even done this for political gain.

Even Democratic officials are curiously silent about this. Surely they, many of them affiliated with Jeffrey Epstein, are not also perverts.

What even is Israel at this point? Whatever moral high ground it held is gone under its current government and won’t be back until Netanyahu is out of office (and, say, in prison on the corruption charges he still faces).

I’d say that the Christian hard right is profaning its own religion, but its versions of Christianity barely have a virtue left in them to profane.

The job market is still fucked

For me personally, it’s okay. But, if I may be so un-American, it is not just about me.

Even in my case, due on the floor in an hour, as I am, it’s half-assed. Management is splitting my overtime between pay periods so I (only sometimes, bitch) work the extra hours without the extra pay. If you or I did this with bank deposits in excess of $10,000, we’d have our accounts seized and possibly our own asses summoned to federal prison. Like any other shitty mess, it depends, but it’s hardly worth the risk.

It took me three months of searching to land this job, two of them truly in earnest. I’m a fucking cashier. My most recent job prior to this one was as a furniture builder and backup stocker at a Macy’s store. I held that job down for two and a half months, straight through the seasonal layoffs in late January. When I’ve gone back in as a customer, I’ve usually found the floor in a condition requiring days of my concerted work, or somebody’s, to look presentable. One of my colleagues told me, “Man, we need you here!”

Bug management, I guess. I won’t object. Our floor management team was excellent. District was seedy. The guy they sent to look over the furniture sales floor and complain that our GM and ASM were wasting “so much carpet” was a flagrant Family Man. I clocked him for Los Angeles mob on the spot. I may be wrong about him, but I’ve hung out with characters adjacent to the Philadelphia mob, e.g., with open invitations to call on the boss in his penthouse on Rittenhouse Square because Dad was a stand-up guy, took the fall for the organization, federal time, you’re always welcome here, Mary, you know that. Other buddies say that means she’s a wholly-owned subsidiary. They may be right.

As I said, District is pretty shit, and in our store, at least, they found a compatible interface to preside over it all. The results were oriented towards their goals, not ours. As seasonal grunts, we rarely even faced the worst of it. Our floor managers HATED the corner office crew. They were the ones who had to deal with them on a regular basis.

Americans are trying to make rent out of this shit. This is not a free country.

It’s never about education, you dumbass

Whenever Honiara’s aggrieved local kine throw a pogrom and burn Chinatown to the ground, I have the same reaction: Stop AAPI Hate. Ya don’t need to do dat, yeah? Dat wasn’t aloha, yeah? Or talofa or whatever and all dat kine. Russians and Ukrainians insist that they speak different languages, too. It wasn’t very aloha of the local color in South Central to beat Reginald Denny to the brink of death and try to murder sundry Korean corner grocers, either. A Pinkberry manager told our interview group in Marina Del Ray about the reverence Koreans show their customers as a matter of deep Korean culture when they pass ice cream orders over the counter using both hands to bludgeon beggars with tire irons for panhandling downtown.

Thomas Sowell, report to a White People Courtesy Telephone at once for an urgent message. The Roaring Forties isn’t the safest part of town for the Korean merchant caste when the cops lose it with a dust fiend on TV. It’s because merchants aren’t cops, and truckers aren’t, either. Christopher Dorner showed what happens to those who react to systemic police misconduct by targeting cops. Few are so disciplined or so bold. Nobody who’s paid to comment about or on behalf of the police has a word to say about him. It was Two Minutes Hate when they firebombed his cabin, some pro forma fuming about how he was an evil coward and then, for the years since, nothing.

It’s obvious why. They don’t want anybody scanning his manifesto for coherence and independently investigating the Tingirides Brain Trust. Phil and Emada live in Irvine, where the local cop shop doesn’t deal with crime spikes by rotating brutes in from out of town to run jumpout patrols on neighborhood teens. They basically bragged on TV about committing the collective punishment of their constituents for gang reprisals by flooding the 77th Street Division with bad cops from other divisions. Hey, boys, here’s the deal: Keep it in your waistbands and we’ll be good; outwit the LAPD’s moronic intelligence squads long enough for a cycle or two of gang reprisals and the stationhouse pickup hoops and community cookouts and all the rest of the community policing song and dance will vanish under an onslaught of Punisher decal shitheads on loan from across town who don’t know anybody in the neighborhood. Ask local Rampart heads whether this is good or bad.

It’s no coincidence that this same city elected Eric Garcetti mayor in time to close Covid-19 testing sites as reprisals for protests against police brutality. *Randy Newman Enjoying Coke Voice* We *LOVE* it!

That’s enough lore of the Tingirideses for the moment. Try to keep a reputably straight face for this next part of the story, from up north, where London Breed, formerly in support of Faauuga Moliga, is now against Faauuga Moliga. According to the newspapers, these are real people, both currently serving in elected office in San Francisco. She appointed him to the school board and now wants voters to recall him.

It’s awfully Friendship Ended With fuh, uh, uh–but her name tho. London Breed. She’s the African-American mayor of a New World city named for St. Francis of Assisi, and her legal name is London Breed. Now Imperialism Is Our Best Friend, too, Salman. The world learned about Salman, Mudasir, and Mutual in the original English. If it’s good enough for a massacre at the Lekki Tollgate, it’s good enough for me.

SARS: Don’t let it kill you, too.

Other Africans had to wait to learn of their own blackness until they could take the lessons in French. This isn’t shitposting, by the way. It’s basic history. Empire gives its subjects the tools of its own subversion, or at least critique. “Negritude” first gained currency in Paris, around the time Pol Pot was in town to study radio. Woodrow Wilson had a different Asian kid up in his face with diplomacy about self-determination and shit. Many are familiar with his later work as /Paul Harvey AM Storytime Voice/ Ho Chi Minh.

What, then, is AAPI Hate? Wilson was one we can be pretty sure was never of a mind to stop it. Indeed, by the end, he was of no mind at all. That’s why Hillary Clinton will never be the first lady president. Smears of Irish roustabouts for being the wellspring of anti-Chinese bigotry because they were uneducated have always been misdirection. Master-class scumbags like William Randolph Hearst loved to gin that style of barstool bigotry up using his hardbitten reporter proxies, but the Victorian upper crust as a class tended towards shocking coarseness about race. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the more magnanimous of them, seethed in his own diary about the righteousness of massacring dagos. He approved of the mass lynching of Italians in New Orleans. Wilson was the President of Princeton before he resegregated the District of Columbia as POTUS (and turned the State of the Union, an annual memorandum under his predecessors, into a Toastmasters evening).

The prevailing life of the mind in the American upper crust from Appomattox to Pearl Harbor was aggressively bumptious midwit. Their grandchildren today believe equally embarrassing nonsense because it was on Freakonomics Radio, but that’s the whole point. Mass-highbrow media like NPR and The Economist put on fastidiously bloodless airs. In the telegraph age, it was common for college graduates with over a decade of intensive schooling in the humanities to earnestly regard every Chinaman as a mental defective and every Malay as Fu Manchu. They’d call me scurrilous for describing them like that, but their understandings of race really were crude and stupid.

The reason they were relatively sharp for roughly half a century starting in the Great Depression was that they faced existential threats from the mob and damn well knew it. That’s why they pulled their heads out of their asses for a periodic look around. It was OODA Loop work. Then the Gipper got elected and went off on the overt unionbusting component of the yuppie project. At that point they retreated in earnest back into fantasyland. It’s arguably even dumber and more delusional this time around. The old parlance made it somewhat easier to visualize Henry Ford hiring Pinkertons to brain strikers at the factory gate than the unmitigated obfuscatory mewling that pulses these days through NPR. The old-timers were horrible bullshitters, but they had a more developed sense of direct agency in civics.

Maybe. God knows the scene isn’t any more refined in management than it was in the thirties, or in the police, most elegantly classified as the managers of Outside. There are always details about the details within the details, and I’m not here to publish footenotes, Shelby.

Some trends, however, stand out. It feels like a whole lot of Gilded Age shysters whose own prose was Dale Carnegie via G. K. Chesterton–the bombast stripped of the brilliance–have equally scummy descendants whose writing is the McGuffey Readers edited for Lamb Chop’s Play-Along. A CIA psyop makes as much sense as anything else to explain the proliferation of Wacko Jacko-level childish memes about “adulting.” If Michelle “Life School” Tandler isn’t CIA, Mocha Haole is. What the company used to do in San Francisco back before that whiny bitch was born was use whorehouses to chemically Shanghai the unwitting and vulnerable into psychological experiments. This not-so-distant history makes Tandler’s crying fits about plywood boarding in Union Square storefronts feel downright tame, just like any longitudinal study that examines what the Tenderloin was really like in the eighties. (Shitty, mostly.)

Same as today’s boohoo cracker moral panics about “crime” in San Francisco, where “crime” is burglars calmly carrying fully insured deluxe merchandise out of department stores in neighborhoods long seasoned by the al fresco mental health crises of cold homeless who are too far gone to properly dress themselves, the moralistic carryings-on of the Gilded Age were ordered to the externalization and suppression social problems arising directly from the bad policies demanded by the very same elite moralists. In ye olden steamtime days, the problems arose from industrial capitalism. In San Francisco and other hip cities today, the problems arise from land speculation.

The Bay Area would be sociologically unrecognizable if its real estate prices passed for normal. Anybody with real estate equity anywhere from Mountain View north to the Marina District literally has millions of dollars at stake. A modest market correction–the housing market becoming slightly less insane–would wipe out six figures’ worth of current or anticipated home equity per household. Jenny Luke made it sound like one half of Over-the-Rhine was constantly murdering the other half for a piece of crack rock. “It’s classic.” One might describe the neighborhood as “Over the Germans.” There’s an exchange rate to take into account between the very Anglo but very non-Saxon James “Mack the Pipe” Mack and white people who are Bay Area homeowners because they’re White People, but the spread isn’t a million to one. Everybody who’s anybody on the Peninsula owns a motive for murder.

This is why so many Californians today overtly dehumanize the homeless. Pets are people; the homeless are a threat to property values. This is how they end up living around abusive, chronically trucker-tweaked techbros and becoming only more entrenched as the years go by in their conviction that the homeless suffer from alcohol, hard drug, and consequent behavioral problems unique to the homeless. There’s little to admire or emulate in the lifestyles of low-functioning destitute addicts, but in many times and places they have mostly had stable housing. When they’re living on the streets, one of their obvious major problems, fully separable from any addictions afflicting them (in incidences grossly exaggerated by their propertied neighbors), is that they’re homeless. What the fuck is the problem with addressing this first–getting them into proper apartments–and then dealing with their being lushes or junkies or whatever else they supposedly all are?

Well no shit, the problem is that this approach, a robust housing-first campaign, would depress sale prices and rents, and we can’t have that.

That isn’t the full extent of it, either. Flooding the market with affordable housing would deprive the servant class of that salutary hunger. Most gig app customers must realize on some level that the hustlers driving their entitled asses all over hell and dropping all the shit they order at their doorsteps are of lower strata than themselves. That is, they are not delivering for DoorDash or driving around in their own cars for well less than the cost of a ride in a licensed cab because they’re looking to make a little walking-around money. They realize, if only subconsciously and uncomfortably, that these servants are full-time members of a permanent servant underclass, and that the company line about “side hustles” for people with outside sources of income (From what? How much?) is a crock of shit.

They consider this exploitation indispensable to the elegance of the California lifestyle (get your whiny ass on Muni, bitch; I’ll see you on the bus), but they hate to admit that California is a class-based, classist society. Wanna hear a secret? California is practically Brazil. Maybe it’s India, too. We have more Indians than Brazilians, but we also have more of a residual foundation of broad prosperity and stability to erode than either India or Brazil has ever had. Since this is much more than just a Californian problem, we’re surely integrating our heavily Brahmin Indians into American society in ways that harm the lower strata of the native stock. Look around any shitty part of the Bay Area waterfront if you don’t believe me.

Faauga Moliga is a high-profile representative of the low-rent Asians who keep the Bay Area’s physical plant running while the high-rent Asians do whatever the hell they do for a much better living. If anybody’s a low-rent Asian, it’s a Pacific Islander. The Philippines are islands in the Pacific. So is Japan. Nah, we all know the Japs had their minute of hardship back when they blackened the Western Addition, because they also had the gumption to get over it, except for the ones deputized to ceremoniously celebrate it on NPR, unlike the local color. He isn’t black; he’s OJ! Lance Allan Ito was named for two white guys. We love LA!

The ironic thing about Moliga is that he’s so fucking conservative. He promotes the premise that education is the key to upward mobility. The core of his complaint about the current state of public education in San Francisco is that it disparately advantages affluent children north of Duboce Avenue–little Chinamen, if I may, and if I may not I will regardless–to the detrimental exclusion of poor kids in the deep south, heavily Pacific Islander like himself. He’s dissatisfied that the children of needy Samoan and Tongan families in the Ingleside and the Excelsior are forced to compete on a field slanted in favor of Chinese kids who put the rich into the Richmond. It’s the well-to-do, cutthroat parents of these latter kids who are up in arms with Moliga for trying to keep their precious, precocious, eminently meritorious brats out of Lowell High by weakening the admissions criteria to admit more of the lower sorts of AAPI, whom they hate.

They’re so bent out of shape about this, and they’re so loud, that nobody of any clout is pointing out Moliga’s assumption that his own fellow Pacific Islanders should strive to rise above their parents’ lowly stations in life through educational attainment. His agenda is to help them stay in school and get into “better” schools than they otherwise would (as if this means anything) by leveling the playing field to make them competitive with the chronically hazed, mentally sickened children of high-caste Chinese diaspora nutjobs out in the Avenues.

He’s playing their game. He’s promoting upward mobility for the children of low-caste Pacific Islanders, Filipinos, and the likes, in ways that clash with the same ambitions on the part of low-caste Chinese strivers, in contrast to the ambitions of high-caste Chinese parents for their own besieged children to hold the line and not crash into poverty and disgrace, but they’re all jockeying for position at the head of the class.

A radical critique would call foul on the entire project. It would propose wildcat strikes every week until the stranglehold of the dream hoarders is broken and formal education is moot as channel of socioeconomic advancement. Moliga won’t even encourage his own constituents to use the powerful leverage they have as blue- and pink-collar workers with the sheer numbers in critical positions to shut San Francisco down, along with the northern end of San Mateo County. Instead he wants them to exert their weak leverage as disadvantaged students with low GPA’s against ruthless classmates across town whose parents pull out all the stops to get them into the Ivy League.

Moliga objects to Pacific Islander students being denied the unfair advantages Chinese parents give their own children by getting them into selective high schools and private tutoring services like Mathnasium. What I want to know, as an overeducated, underemployed classmate of dream hoarders who sometimes catches the bus in front of the Mathnasium on Lombard, is when somebody will run for the school board on the platform that Mathnasium is bullshit. You know, the hell’s math got to do with any of this shit? Fuck Mathnasium. Classical Romans had Greek slave tutors teach their children math, among other subjects, in curricula approximating the genuine liberal arts, although not so liberal for the tutors.

The math a prosperous workforce needs is arithmetic sufficient to recognize the price point that makes management cry uncle during a strike. Coding doesn’t pay well because old-line Americans are retarded about math where Asians are brilliant at it. It’s a supply-and-demand thing, pure and simple. Hectoring schoolchildren to study STEM plays directly into management’s campaign to flood the job market with surplus technical whizzes.

The point isn’t to build up a workforce large and skilled enough to keep society running; it’s to depress wages. I would never have heard about that shit on the NBC local news out of Albany if the campaign to improve STEM education and make good minds GRRREAT! were coherently oriented in an understanding of what it takes to run a civilization. You still won’t know much about a science book if you try to keep up with Carisi.

Television: #TheMoreYouKnow about it, the less you trust it.

Radio, too.

We’re heightening the inherent contradictions of capitalism again. Whatever Alison Collins said about uppity Ching-Chong a decade ago is a sideshow. I had reasons for alluding to Thomas Sowell’s work on middleman minorities above. Grafting ethnic grievances onto class tensions thick enough to cut with a knife is never good, but it’s not like the Chinese would be in deep and abiding harmony among their own people back home in the middle of the kingdom. Dawg I’ve been on the 30-Stockton. That ridership base is nothing like the Chinese in the Richmond. All Asians look alike? Bullshit. We’re talking about prosperous homeowners in the early trolley suburbs versus indigent peasants living in SRO’s and spending the rest of their ablebodied lives working for restaurateurs whose families moved out to Fremont in 1975. They’re a breed apart, London.

I assume I’d have an even more cynical assessment of this mess if I could understand more than ten words of spoken Mandarin or read more than ten characters. Or maybe twenty. With numbers like those, there’s no reason to learn the math.

The horny-for-rules process-oriented institutionalism of this whole shit show is kind of sad. I have a fairly spotty familiarity with Chinese history, but I can tell that the party line is nonsense when bullying entire generations of children into cramming for years of exam hell is presented as fundamentally Chinese but Maoism is not. It’s past time to confront the worst sorts of Chinese parents for driving their own children to suicide. Palo Alto, now a very Chinese city, keeps losing its own teenagers to Caltrain pedestrian strikes. It’s hard to say how different the college rat race would be in the absence of China’s best and brightest from the American college application pool, but it’s clear that their cultural influence and sheer numbers have some bad effects on the whole country. Why the hell should other Americans have to compete against these unbalanced freaks?

I’m referring to other Chinese-Americans, too. In case sensitivity to Chinese culture is an actual goal here, I’ll note the perky interest I take when I read about the classical Chinese civil service exam apparatus inspiring rampant cheating and cultivating generations of failsons. If we’re looking to learn from the Chinese, that’s some shit worth studying.

Nah, we didn’t learn shit from the initial Japanese edition of the hikikomori, either. The normie twerps who run this show kept assuming we had to take cultural learnings of Inscrutable Oriental about the work ethic or some shit like that. They refused to consider the implications of a generation of Type A white-collar alcoholics begetting a generation of adrift, marginally employable dropouts with no career prospects in a major trading partner with extensive commercial and social ties to the United States.

Captain Ho Lee Fuk are we retarded.

What happens if the Samoans start studying, too? Maybe they can drive for Uber or work dead-end retail jobs with college degrees just like various races of White People. This is most likely not a question that has occurred to Faauga Moliga, just as it has not too much of anybody else in American government. Our man reveres institutions and processes. So do his Chinese haters, who so revere institutions and processes that they need a new school board right now.

An interesting thing I learned about AAPI culture on NPR recently is that Jollibee, which has a restaurant in Daly City, uses wheat noodles, not rice. The Philippines is the most American country on earth. The CIA does what it can to keep it that way, so our hospitals and nursing homes don’t have to figure out how to make payroll for American aides. Tonga is even more American, depending on one’s feelings about Mormons. By Doctrines and Covenants it would be a goshdarned shame if Utah’s honkies were all too busy working the ramp for Delta to run MLM scams on one another.

As I said, this country is retarded. Why would we study useful parts of Chinese history? I’ve read enough about American labor history to know we don’t even study our own.

Another trip on the white privilege bus, with a different kind of ass-backwards Kentucky shithead

Covington Catholic is case number I have no earthly fucking idea of, yes, Virginia, rich kids can be racist assholes, too. Come out and don’t make me wait, baby, if you’re done praying over it. I sometimes see this Chicana cradle Catholic chick who likes to tweak my nipples, and I could do without that better than she could, but she’s WAY more respectful than the Cov Cath boys would be about it, and I have no doubt that there are some Lt. Tittytorque types in that crowd. This chick mostly listens to me when I’m like, uh, yeah, let’s not do too much of that, so, no I am not here to make you let me TELL you about my trauma. Why that’s what gets her off is beyond me, but whatever, and I’m proud, if discomfited, to occasionally mortify my own flesh to satisfy m’lady.

What gets the Cov Cath boys off is straight-up public sadism. The scandal that took them national was an impromptu harassment campaign that a group of them launched from the periphery of the March for Life against a Native American Vietnam War veteran who was performing a drum ceremony. These boys had their freight paid to go to the National Mall and grandstand about abortion, and they couldn’t even keep their eyes on that ball when they spotted an opportunity to harass an Indian with MAGA talking points. Sure enough, these guys showed up in Washington in full prep douche field uniform, ballcap and all, as one does when one’s great moral interest is the sanctity of life. However their school and diocese are funded, that stupid field trip got its line item disbursed, and now they’ve all got a national scandal to show for it. Great work, chaps.

Hammer of the Blogs has an excellent drive-by ethnography up about this clusterfuck and its sociological context. It’s painfully, obnoxiously obvious even from the still photos of this incident of flash-mob harassment that the boys involved didn’t have a moral or philosophical point to make. They were clearly just out to humiliate someone and exhibit their own supremacy. HotB is right: these are smug little shits who never face the least consequence for their shitty behavior, South Park-level assholes, minus the rude charm, who will for the foreseeable future always have a staff of fixers on retainer to swoop in and clean up the messes they make whenever they inevitably piss someone off by being absolute pieces of shit. They’ve already got diocesan functionaries apologizing for their Indian enclosure stunt, a development that took a few hours of concerted outside pressure on social media. They treat their bishop like their private butler. A diocese is lucky if the worst its bishop is bothered for is a charity golf appearance. Can you blame this one for yielding to the temptation and lining up what goodies he can from these boys’ parents? I really can’t.

It turns out that Cov Cath has been locally notorious for this kind of shit for years. It figures; a group of high school boys most likely does not decide out of nowhere to spend a major out-of-town field trip going AWOL from the assigned protest to gang up on an Indian doing ceremonial drumming in full regalia and yell about the border wall. This doesn’t just happen without prior conditioning that such aggression is admired and, crucially, safe for the aggressors. They aren’t about to roll into Over-the-Rhine yelling racial slurs at the local gangbangers. They aren’t game to go to Cut Bank and rumble with their fellow drunks on the Rez. They picked on a peaceable man from an outgroup because he was a peaceable outsider.

The diocese covers for this evil because it’s bought and paid for. There’s no snapping fingers to materialize an alternate funding stream on command. These assholes’ parents have the clergy of the entire diocese and the entire faculty and administration of their school by the balls, even, we might say, by the tits. It’s a case of play ball or we seize both of yours. What else can be said? It sucks, but them’s the damn breaks. Cults make for great fundraising. Cov Cath is a cult harboring a youth gang, funded by parents who find it easier to bribe their way out of their kids’ problems than to morally form their shitty wayward sons. There have to be some really fucked up, depraved parents in the mix, too; this doesn’t look like the fruit of a wholesome tree. Somewhere along the line the parents must discover that they’ve enrolled their boys in a real shitshow and that there are more edifying schools where they could be transferred for their own good. The sick truth of the matter is that they don’t care about the Lord of the Flies wilding, the hazing, the outbursts of bigotry, or any of the other things that make Covington Catholic toxic–or, worse, that they actively approve of and support this toxic environment.

It’s the same moral abdication that has some of the wealthiest parents in Montgomery County enrolling their tween and teen daughters in Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s after-school basketball ministry. For the love of God there are other basketball coaches in town. It isn’t fucking Battle Mountain or some shit. Seriously, what the fuck is up with them? The guy’s a known blackout drunk, a certain cokehead, a publicly accused serial rapist, and a shrieking maniac; he sits on a federal bench that can’t begin to cope with the petitions it receives for review and lives in an area swarming with every sort of coach offering every sort of sport. How in all hell is he even tolerable in a position of close-contact authority over minor girls? I’d take out a fucking restraining order if I found him coaching children under my supervision. I’d call 911 and preemptively report him for grooming children for sexual abuse.

These are rhetorical questions. It’s disgusting but true. If our cokey boi Brett Michael weren’t a pillar of the right-wing legal establishment or some other such happy horseshit, child protective services would be interviewing his players and their parents and assembling a dossier. Hell, he’d be hiding out in Belize like John McAfee right now if he’d crossed the wrong old-school mobster by getting funny around his daughter. This isn’t about how he’s lace curtain Irish and they’re Italian; does Whitey Bulger sound like he’d feel bad for having a fellow mick whacked for being a pervert?

Genuine family values would have taken care of that motherfucker decades ago. Interpret it as you wish. Maybe he’d be six feet under. Maybe he’d be in Costa Rica for the lower cost of living and the nonextradition. Maybe he’d be doing wills and trusts under an alias in Grand Junction. The gutter’s the limit. What he would not be is a sitting judge on any federal court and a girls’ basketball coach within bike-commute distance of his high school alma mater and his childhood home.

The fundamental problem at play here is a crude one, but it’s all too real. Guys like these never get punished. They never have people in authority over them tell them no. They never get fired or demoted or suspended or expelled. They never even get humiliated with ceaseless ridicule or rebuke until they stop being sadistic assholes. They piss all over others, but no one turns the rude stream back on them. They remain unbaptized.

By all means, dox them if the spirit so moves you. It might be the same one we worship and call upon in church. It’s a spiritual act of mercy to make these shitheads feel like shitheads for being shitheads. To paraphrase Tom Wolfe, who knew these slimy fuckers, they could do to be infected with a bad case of PMS. May the Lord have his Mersey upon the lot of them, and his servant Benjamin Montgomery Robinson upon their roads.

Impeaching that motherfucker: a burn upon a rich white boy by that other Sherman

First off, Brad Sherman is flubbing it by using the Russia bullshit as the basis for articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. The Russia dealings are crooked, but so, as the President is so keen to say, is Hillary. It’s true. Is it bad for a president to be compromised by a foreign power that is at the very least friendly enough to promptly contact the FBI about current intelligence indicating that US permanent residents are associating with violent extremists but kosher for the House of Saud to have pretty much the entire US government by the balls? Is THAT thugs’ gallery what we’re calling savory? I don’t fucking think so. And Christopher Steele, of the Steele Dossier: Are we talking about a real dude here, or is that nigga made up? A Christopher Steele claims to have, but never produces, proof that Russian ladies of the night went pee-pee on the pre-POTUS in a Moscow hotel room, and that these ladies were honeypot assets of the State-Patriotic Mother Russian Intelligence. There are movies about such stories. There are movies about dragons and wizards, trolls, Bigfoot, kawaii waifus who will marry your fat pimply unemployed ass.

As Dril said, I fucking hate it when I come at the king and miss, especially when I best not do that. The Russia stuff is a red herring. Heh. “Red.” Also, “herring.” They eat that in that part of the world. It’s disgusting. There are, however, a number of compelling reasons to bring articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, if we’re over the stupid idea that impeachment is for when Capitol Hill’s Brokeback Mountain closet cases are jealous of the plump Jewess for having the Alpha Arkie all to herself. In this spirit, and with the stipulation that the list may be expanded after I’ve gotten some damn sleep, I’d like to thank you all for–coming out today to read an assortment of these reasons:

–The Borgia Pope deal 

That freak wants to fuck his own daughter. It isn’t just a fleeting demon that he imperfectly fails to exorcise. He revels in it. He brags about his incestuous interest in a daughter who serves in his administration. It’s like the Denny Dundiddly deal, but documented on Howard Stern.

Any party with a functioning pair of balls would be eager to correctly tarnish its opposition as the incest apologists. That shit is not normal. Plus we’ve got the blackmail angle. Daddy’s little girl has this leverage on him and is said to use it to get her way. She’s positioned to play him like a bull fiddle. *Uncomfortable Tommy Douglas Voice* Mercy, MacMaster, but yes, I suppose a lady could use it to play an ugly tune as well.

–The Radio Mille Collines shit 

The President keeps trying to stir up violent communal tensions. His stirring of this pot has already gotten people killed; Heather Heyer comes notably to mind. There were good people on many sides, including the sides that ran their opponents down with cars and those that did not attempt premeditated vehicular mass murder as their idea of Clausewitzian diplomacy by other means.

Congress has the prerogative to say, listen up, bucko, you’re using the presidency to abet deadly race riots, and we don’t hold with that. That’s a misdemeanor because we say so. We’re flipping that dumbass script on you this time. You’re fired.

–The government shutdown 

Does the President have a basic fiduciary duty to his constituents to reasonably cooperate with the government’s efforts to maintain a working civilization within the borders of the United States, or doesn’t he? Congress may be too derelict to ask, but I’m not. This asshole is throwing the day-to-day public services of the federal government into paralytic dysfunction and chaos because the latter-day Rasputins he follows on Fox News advise him that sabotaging services ordinary Americans rely on everyday will help him coerce Congress into funding his batshit crazy scheme to wall off the southern border at extreme expense, party by duplicating sections of fortified border fence that are already in place and closely monitored, partly by extending these fortifications into stretches of desert that are practically inimical to human life for half the year.

It’s surprising that the coyote cartels haven’t gone into the camel business. Then again, maybe Chapo took one look and cried out, Mother of God, that’s a nasty beast. I once rode one, and I thought it an unnecessarily smelly and foultempered bastard. Mark Twain, I think it was, described it as an animal designed by committee. The point is, it’ll keep your foolish ape ass alive when you go where you never had any business.

Congress can put its foot down and refuse to tolerate a president who shuts down the federal government over crazy nonsense he was told by a chorus of television frauds. Americans will be killed by this toddler tantrum bullshit, if they haven’t already. It’s the adults’ hour. The only thing missing is the adults.

–Sundown in Mar-a-Lago 

The geezer is fucking losing it. We’re having visions of a sunset two or three times a day with this demented oaf. He does such a piss-poor job tracking basic matters pertinent to his duties that it’s questionable how he can manage his own activities of daily living. The claims that he lacks object permanence are all too credible. We’re talking about significant mental deficits combined with malignant narcissism, impatience, and impulsivity.

Congress is under no obligation to tolerate this reckless unfitness for office in the sitting chief of a coequal branch of government. There is no civil right to collect a federal salary when one is out to lunch half the time. It’s been tolerated in the past, but that wasn’t a good idea, either. Reagan had publicly misplaced his entire bag of marbles by 1984. Congress and the press were derelict not to declare that the White House was observing Lunchtime in the Land of Make-Believe all the live-long day and demand that the Gipper resign under threat of impeachment in favor of someone consistently lucid. There were times when that fucker was barely employable to shell peanuts, let alone to be a head of government and state.

What about Pence? 

Impeach his sleazy ass, too. He’s the one who grabbed Trump’s coattails for political advantage and a public salary despite recognizing the guy’s moral turpitude. He’s the one who assented to most of Trump’s bad acts in the apparent hope that he would be next in line when the Donald finally crossed the Rubicon, ready to pursue an agenda that he would never have been elected to pursue in his own right in 2016. The point is, hey, buddy, you signed up for this; you grafted yourself onto that poisonous vine, and into the righteous slash pit you go.

 

We call this shit “temporalities” for a reason

They had a second collection of sorts after mass tonight, a pledge drive to fund the local Catholic radio operation. I chipped in a little, and I do mean little, something, out of Catholic guilt, I assume. $6.00 was my gift, Pahrump a thumpa me bum, me drumma. I flat-out told the radio station development guy that money was tight, which wasn’t exactly a truth but wasn’t exactly a lie, either. I needed $5.98 for a sourdough round and a container of lemon capellini salad more than the network needed Abe and George plus any contact information I felt like offering to keep doing its thing. I tune in to Catholic radio from time to time, mostly when there’s absolutely nothing else within range but a thousand hills, so to speak, and some of it is better than it might be. And as the development guy pointed out to me when I gave him my poor drummer boy shtick, that pays for fifteen minutes, all in, since the station’s entire operations cost $25 an hour.

This was more accurate than his other math. I’ll be Richard Feynman if he helped us put the $15,000 matching pledge, good only on contributions pledged or deposited into his blue plastic buckets by the end of chitchat hour after mass, into the context of $1.5m. I did some quick math and figured out that the whole amount he was trying to finagle out of us and his generous donation danglers worked out to less than a week’s worth of operating costs. Dude must really have to ride the circuit for this shit. Then again, that’s why he makes the big bucks and I make the small bucks. That’s half an hour’s gross that I gave, bare minimum, for the work of human hands on the fruit of the vine.

You’re all most welcome.

The development guy talked a bit too much like his counterpart my senior year at Lancaster Country Day School. It must have been inevitable. The whole fucking business is a strange attractor for sleazeballs who are just far enough on the decent side of Joel Osteen to make their average mark uncomfortable saying, hey, you’re a sleazeball. Of course this guy is in marketing; it’s either that or a car lot. These guys have their shtick. In this guy’s case, it included, “The Lord works it all out.”

Yeah, but you asked us for the money, not Him. Funny how this providence works, Cianci or no Cianci.

I decided to provide my name and address for one reason and one reason alone: to see how much shit these cats mail me.

Another transrachel overproduction of elites

Dolezal is in the doodoo again, this time for welfare fraud. Is this how she’s trying to prove that she’s black?

I looked her up, and sure enough I correctly remembered her new nom de guerre as Nkechi Diallo. Sometimes I wonder whether trivia such as this objectively useless and distracting tidbit will displace useful knowledge about something crucial. I already keep extra hard drive space available by knowing relatively little about movies and sports, except for what I hear from Chicago Senpai and friends on Saturday mornings pursuant to #SPORTS (for which it’s always time), and I have a hella good memory in general, but still I wonder. Is this how Rome fell? Is this how Rome falls?

Today is a gift; that’s why we call it the present. Rachel Dolezal’s initial exposure as a lying white bitch stirred up such a moral panic about bogus black people that assholes online were flaming Wesley Lowery with accusations that he was lying about being black. It’s reasonable to think that he’s racially ambiguous, but he was making a name for himself by doing timely and compellingly important on-the-ground reporting in Ferguson, among other troubled and misgoverned parts of our country. He wasn’t posting photos of fried chicken dinner with the fam online to demonstrate his own blackness, like Shaun King, or, as Firehat called him, noted white boy Shaun King. Everybody in my family back in Kansas ate fried chicken for Sunday dinner, too. Was it because WE were black? I don’t fucking think so. But this is America, and that’s how we think.

I could listen to the Dinner Party Download on my way to go dining for miles and still make Dolezal look white. She’s just an attention whore with a John Boehner tan and a perm. This is probably an episode best left ignored, and so I chronicle it through my most grievous fault, etc. You might as well store up these takes in your cabin, for wintertime heat. On the other hand, our national relationship to race is fucked up in ways that go beyond merely being racist. Racism per se isn’t nearly weird enough. The Morials, a more or less white-passing high yellow family, did business as whites under segregation, then increasingly as blacks under integration. Who dat! I’m not convinced that this is objectively any more reputable than the transrachel bullshit up north. I am entirely convinced that New Orleans is a worse-run city than Spokane. The latter has had its own troubles with public corruption, but Lawdy, Fogerty, down on the fuckin’ bayou, where we was Bonn, ain’t all good what they rollin’ on the Riva.

Asking what the hell gives to allow a bunch of guys from El Cerrito and Phoenix to play Cajun good old boys for fifty years without incident, other than the fucking Heidi Ho lawsuit, is as pertinent as any of this shit. They’re in it for the money, too; it isn’t just the Diallo who didn’t have the adverse reaction with the NYPD.

And since this is a mercenary business, it’s worth asking whether maybe, if we may, blacklisting the likes of Rachel Dolezal for being race frauds doesn’t just encourage more of their bullshit and more imitators who are hungry for the upsides. After all, those who don’t succeed as oppressed white black people can troll for sympathy in the Oppression Olympics as ones who got fired and publicly humiliated for trying to ensure that–the colors are close enough for government benefits–orange is the new black. There’s always wingnut welfare more or less within reach for such cases. Surely it’s good press for one’s GoFundMe.

The crux of this mess is that successfully honky-larping public negritude has the potential to pay better than most trades and professions, and even clumsily doing so and getting into hot water for one’s sheer gall pays better than picking fruit. Hell, I nearly went u-picking Bing cherries today on my day off from commercially picking blueberries, then decided to hell with it when I discovered that it would be cheaper to buy Rainiers already washed and bagged at Fred Meyer. If Sam Sanders did that, he, too, would become blindingly White, but it’s been a damn minute since I did anything that embarrassing with my plants. I have standards. Maybe not particularly high ones, but good God, y’all. $4.50 a pound to replace a Mexican for an hour.

We’ve got too many fucking people living on their reputations around here. Michael O. Church is spot on about this. Colby Cosh, too. If Gerry Rundel were still plying a trade, he could look at me and say, uh, you’re some douche with a blog, what’re you gonna do, publish a bunch of crappy “songs” about me and call me Midlife Crisis Surf-n-Turf? Duh. What the fuck else would I do? Instead he’s got even worse Mounties calling him a coward, like a fireman who’s afraid of fire. I’m sure that will warm all hearts in the fire services and not at all inspire fond memories of General Sherman heading to the coast to, uh, grill seafood. Don’t forget the Pole!

As much as I enjoy shitposting about Fish Friend, he sounds like a good cop, and because he came away traumatized from personal involvement in a homicide he’s got asshat superiors acting like he’s the missing chickenshit character from Backdraft. The point here is that the reputation management buzzsaw chews up and spits out decent people, too, not just dipshits with perjury convictions and “storytelling” businesses who make it look normal to get trashed and kill motorcyclists with one’s Jeep. One can do that by killing a guy and then going into public health vegetarianism, too. But at least Raw Ginger and the Royal Canadian Manslaughter Project are easily racially categorized, every one of them.

So is Rachel Dolezal. She’s white, so, so very White.

Strokes of the Kaine

Let’s start with the TL;DR: Bernie would have won. It’s been whine o’clock in Chappaqua for years, and in the midst of the endless, insufferable, and deeply shameful carrying on by America’s most shameless about the advanced Transatlantic Russian electronic mind control that obviously determined the outcome in 2016, it’s easy to forget about the baggage that Hillary lost along the way, notably including her running mate.

We must not do Occam’s Razor these days. Interpret that as a description or a prescription, however you fucking please, but it’s true. America is a nation of Americans, and Russia is a nation of Russians. Russians aren’t particularly good English speakers, and in general small-c cultural terms, I don’t care for them. They’d be better off, and so would we, if they were more like Poles or Czechs than the frigid mess that they so long have been. Either way, they aren’t a whole lot like us, and this truth regularly seeps through in interactions with them. I’ve known acculturated immigrants from Mother Fatherland and its near satellites who slip into recognizable Slavic authoritarian patterns without warning. These are people who speak unaccented or barely accented English and have lived here for years.

The Kremlin didn’t have hundreds of crack operatives capable of catfishing as old-stock birthright Americans holed up in a goddamn cube farm to conduct remote internet warfare. That did not fucking happen. I guarantee it. The level of idiomatic fluency assumed in this delusion is rare in Russia, and the Russian government would not waste the career of anyone possessing it on intensive pen pal bullshit with a handful of mentally ill swing voters in the United States. Realize, since the mainstream media are too fucking retarded to say so, that this mass delusion of persecution by coldwater catfish assumes entire office blocks chock full of underpaid junior operatives who make Sergei Lavrov sound like an eighth-grade dropout. If that’s the case, I’m General Stroganoff; please, to the table, for Beef.

Sure, the targets of whatever electoral campaign the Kremlin pursued weren’t the savviest, but if we’re worried about their susceptibility to mind control, maybe we should fucking think critically about the acceptability of the domestic Bernaysian aggression that pervades our mainstream media and has for just about an entire century. Or maybe we should think about actually teaching critical thinking in our schools or on our public broadcasting platforms. We don’t get to blame a random foreign government for an occasional campaign of the same shit that we allow our own elites to do with complete impunity all the fucking time. I am not exactly Charlotte Simmons, but I do not hold with that. Go berate someone else for being Putin’s useful idiot.

Let’s assume that a few socially isolated voters were persuaded by people they assumed were Americans because they claimed to be Americans. This isn’t good, but neither is plenty else about American politics, such as our habit of spending not just hundreds of millions but billions of dollars per cycle on presidential campaign advertising. If we’ve got gullible dipshits in our electorate, it’s up to us to try to reach them and win them over, and it’s on us if we, as their relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, and fellow citizens, abandon them and let someone else reach out to them instead.

Then again, 2016 wasn’t the first time absolute wackjobs turned out to vote in an American election. We have entire political movements and partisan factions devoted to them. Any competent left-of-center politician accounts for the baseline of these freaks and comes up with a strategy to overwhelm their votes with those of a silent majority of those not completely off their rockers.

This is nothing new. The internet is quasi-new, but candidates have been navigating a landscape littered with voters and activists deranged by febrile campaigns using state-of-the-art communications media for as long as there have been media and electoral campaigns. Again, the winning strategy is to recognize that such people exist and to outmaneuver them by appealing to other voters who aren’t batshit insane.

This isn’t difficult for competent politicians. Bernie Sanders did not have any such difficulty. Hillary Clinton did. Duh. He was a strong communicator with a compelling message; she was a piss-poor communicator with a message that freaked voters out and pissed them off, as well as an aura of scandal going back decades.

She could have chosen Bernie as her running mate to shore up her weaknesses, so who did she choose? #TIMMEH! Who else? It must all be Russia’s fault, not that she had the atrocious judgment to bring that simpering ball of smarm on board to double down on Acelaland, but that ordinary Americans didn’t respond enthusiastically. Our swing voters obviously got punked by Boris and Natasha running Our Hearts Go Out to the Bismarck Family, Sad Day for Otto Von game. There’s no way that anyone looked at Tim Kaine and thought, good God, what a putz.

Tim Kaine was great for Hillary’s three-coast strategy: East Coast, West Coast, and Gold Coast. Granted, no one in the national party meant to win much of the other third coast, namely the Gulf; the Song, Song of the South, Millington for Sheriff and I shut my mouth is a Republican tune in our time. Mercy, Mr. Secessions! That doesn’t explain all that interior flyover country, though. Oops. Someone fucked up, and it wasn’t the someone inveighing against the billionaire class.

Tim Kaine, to his credit, has been pretty quiet since his fifteen minutes of fame as a national subaltern failure. Hillary, meanwhile, has been all too loud, but not about what the fuck she was ever doing bringing that fey-looking twerp on board. It’s hard to think of another presidential candidate who insisted on such a ridiculous strategy in choosing a running mate. Bill Clinton choosing Al Gore was close, but doubling down on the solid South made sense for a campaign that was so strong in the North. Eisenhower and Nixon were two middle-class guys from the old Union West, but they were a career military officer and a lawyer from states thousands of miles apart, and temperamentally complementary enough. Otherwise, we’ve had Obama and Biden, Bush and Cheney, Kerry and Edwards, McCain and Palin, Romney and Ryan, Kennedy and Johnson, FDR and Truman, Reagan and Poppy Bush, Bush and Quayle, etc. These guys didn’t all love the shit out of those they chose, but they bit the bullet, if there was one to bite, because they valued their own electoral success.

Why the fuck should Hillz be judged differently? LBJ was hands down more obnoxious before Bobby and Broad-Bangin’ Jack than Bernie has ever been before anyone in his public life. If His Vigga had the patience to suffer Lyndon Baines Jumbo for the Southwestern balance that he brought to his otherwise High New English ticket, why the fuck shouldn’t anyone have expected Hillary to tolerate the most popular politician in her party as a running mate for his electoral strength in a big swath of Appalachian and Midwestern swing states? And why should we think that her bringing that smarmy NoVa Peace Corps Spanish dork onto her ticket to lock down Virginia and Maryland, reliable Democratic states both, was meant as anything but a fuck-you to the losers elsewhere whose votes she needed so much more? Not all of us signed up for the neoliberal operant conditioning and compliance testing. Some of us noticed space on the Trump Train, or the Stein Steamer. Quite a bit of space on the latter, as it turned out, but bitch we got 5.5% in Humboldt County.

Don’t come whining now; the other #Her, #With whom one was expected to be, crushed Trump in Humboldt in spite of that. The granolas weren’t able to fuck up a single county in California for Hillary, but we’re still hearing about what rat bastards we were for not voting for her, and I hate brown rice. I’m one of the ones who nearly voted for Trump, lesser of two evils and all.

I probably would have voted for Bernie as the second in succession, but I wasn’t offered that option, and I didn’t feel like scribbling anything onto my ballot. I’m not the only one. Sanders would have crushed Pence in the general election. Pence was a sensible running mate for Trump to choose, by the way; he brought the risk of alienating moderates but the promise of winning over our highly organized religious extremists. If you’re gonna run a smarmy dork, you might as well run one who actually has a base of support. The Republicans understand this; the Democrats blame anyone who points this out.

No, I don’t feel like doing the math of how Bernie would have won the election for Hillary if she hadn’t kept ratfucking him and his voters after securing his endorsement. It would have been more overdetermined than Trump’s electoral win ultimately was. 538 minus less than 268 is more than 270. QED, cracka.

God, it was only two years ago that elaborate stories of Russian mind control were considered fit for the al fresco mental health community, but we have more important considerations than our dignity now. If we can’t blame Putin, we might have to recall that Tim Kaine sucked ass, and I guess that wouldn’t be as much fun. Puti-Poo has his disrepute, to be sure, but damned if he doesn’t keep the worthiest enemies. We should all be proud to be, so to speak, Marching Together against such liberal scum, and since I was expected to suck on Tim’s Kaine, I see no reason not to expect any of America’s horrified and scandalized pseudoliberal bourgeoisie to suck on that. After all, they’re too busy pretending that Donald Trump is our first Vulgarian-American president to remember that Lyndon might have encouraged them to do likewise on his Johnson.

An overproduction of Canadian elites featuring Scott Greenfield, a mildly canucksploitative JD-level Anglo-American elite

Let’s cast stones to our north, as usual, but not at our usual naughty friends, buddies, and guys. That would be too much fun, and we’re here, and here, to have too much serious.

Greenfield’s point, less depressive than usual, is that a bunch of overeducated but underaccomplished twits who have been coddled by an educational system overly solicitous to their needs have gotten too big for their britches and taken to petulantly trying to bring their intellectual and professional betters down in a spirit of schadenfreude and projection instead of trying to accomplish something worthwhile themselves. It sounds like a wretched way to live and work, so I’m basically with him, in spirit if not in tone. If I focused with such exclusive discipline on all the shit that’s wrong with some deeply troubled field like the law, I’d probably sound and, worse, feel like a chronically misanthropic depressive myself, and I’d rather not. Nor does the blawgosphere generally attract me to the law in any professional capacity, although I am amazed when a blawgger is able to, as in Ken White’s example, find time for childrearing, the practice of law, blawgging, bipolar disorder, Twitter, and videogaming. As my age peers are supposed to say, I can’t even, in any sense that one might be able to can.

The second link, which I’ll admit I’ve only skimmed, is a lengthier examination of how and why the Canadian academy is an ethical, intellectual, and spiritual clusterfuck. It’s probably just as well that I’m operating on Starbucks time tonight and have a train to catch; I’d waste too much time on this shit if I didn’t, and sometimes it really is about the journey away from Canada’s crappiest, not the destination, which might be better, might be worse, and will definitely be Klamath Falls. It’s definitely just as well that I don’t fundamentally give a shit about my reputation on here, in that I have scruples and points that I’m trying to make but don’t get worried much about who will unreasonably take this shit the wrong way and make fun of me for it as long as I’m doing what I can to reach an audience that’s interested in what I have to say and might be able to make some use of it. Our second link is definitely about Canucks taking themselves too seriously, as one does when one notes one’s PhD on a flyer falsely insinuating that one will be debating Margaret Atwood, i.e., fuming about her in an auditorium in her absence. Hence Greenfield’s and Jonathan Kay’s point about the coddled, obscure, and talentless impotently raging at the accomplished in a futile bid for attention and relevance.

I did notice in Kay’s piece some comments about faculty-on-student sexual harassment in creative writing programs. When male corporals in the RCMP do that to female probies, they’re dressed better. Or at least I can pretend that they are, and yes, I’m familiar with the field uniform, that bitchin’ blue. Shit, we’re talking about the fun Canucks after all. That’s better than the extracurricular Canadian university standard, which seems to be Create to Communicate Diseases. We’ve already got more active voice than Canada’s favorite–pardon, favourite–storytelling friend had about the unfortunate Vancouver thing that happened to the unfortunate Pole. Even so, Northside Juice is a welcome distraction from these other losers. He’s just an ex-Mountie dipshit who got fired for being the Taser buddy in a night-watch squad of rough riders and tried his hand on the motivational speaking and gym coaching circuits; the others are part of a serious structural problem affecting Anglo North American higher education. We’ve got the same bumptious, thin-skinned, combative idiots down here, although probably in different proportions, and probably with less opportunity for the fuckheads to be puffed-up fish in a small, stagnant pond.

There’s a whole fucking lot I could say about this stuff, and if I had the time right now I’d surely say too much. I believe this is the premise of Saved by the Bell, which didn’t sound like it did a thing to inspire confidence in secondary education itself. Homeschool your kids. What I will say, and what is probably a bit more cogent than any of the other disorganized shit I’d think up, is that there’s something wrong with people who need a fucking graduate writing program to convince themselves that they know how to write. I didn’t learn how to write in college or high school, and no, I am not humblebragging. I learned on the internet. That should explain some things. I’m serious, though. This isn’t just native talent; if I read the same insipid mainstream shit that most of my peers seem to read, my writing wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is. It sure as hell isn’t education in the normal institutional sense; most of what I was assigned to read sucked ass as art.

Creative writing programs seem to go to the other extreme, eschewing the bland, workmanlike, regularly unreadable garbage of textbooks and scholarly research in the sciences and the more rigorous humanities for endless overwrought nonsense. Greenfield and Kay are bothered that MFA writer types graduate expecting a market to be in place for whatever they churn out and eager to blame society and better thinkers when there is not, but the MFA’s aren’t entirely wrong: one of the best-read and best-spoken people I’ve ever known finds Karl Ove Knausgaard compelling. Some of them fail commercially due to bad luck, inadequate networks, or not enough industry baksheesh. It isn’t just that the market for MFA house voice bullshit is already saturated; we need something else to explain Jonathan Franzen’s sheer volume, which should have flooded that zone every time he published.

The fundamental problem is dipshits expecting formal praise from formal academics as the determination of their work’s literary worth. This is the same folly and dysfunction that propped up Jian Ghomeshi in his extended time of perv at the CBC. Every socially climbing fuckhead hoped that he’d be the meal ticket they needed to be accepted as serious artists. Not enough Canadians think that fish farming is a respectable occupation that should allow a person to make a decent living and maybe permit enough free time for the focused to make a living and for the love of God Rundel don’t put down that net. As I said about Kevin Vickers years ago, Canada needs more New Brunswick farm kids and fewer Toronto arts scene wankers. And shit, if you’re in it for the easy ass, the pay is better for an RCMP corporal than for yet another surplus MFA adjunct, and the long-term disability benefits for the harassed are great.

Steamertown USA

All the little kids growing up on the skids say, hey, what’s wrong with him? My sleep patterns, mainly. On alternating nights I’ve been jarred awake by a Next-Gen 737 with surprisingly bad pressurization at 0500 Central and a conductor telling me that we were coming into Cleveland at 0525 Eastern. In the intervening night I slept, no joke, from about four in the afternoon until nine the next morning, with an eleven o’clock snack break for the remainder of a bag of chili lime cashews and some coffee. This is not normal, so what the hell do any of you expect of me?

Cleveland isn’t quite as fucked up as it should be, but it isn’t in great shape, either. It manufactured more stuff back when the fire department had to put out the river, so that much is a mixed blessing, but it’s since fallen into quite a bit of neoliberal marketeering horseshit: a casino in Terminal Tower, the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, a bus called the HealthLine. Meanwhile I couldn’t find a ticket vending machine in the light rail station by the Amtrak depot, which is out by not much more than a dumbass science museum and a wind turbine even though I was on the only train that comes through after, like, three in the morning (surely one must be lonely!). I ended up entering the station backwards and walking out through a gate that had been left open all night. What is this, a Prince number from “Twilight Zone: The Musical?” I’ve been on a shitload of mass transit systems, and I don’t think that would have been normal had I been normally awake.

The Amtrak schedules can’t help, and neither can the condition of the Amtrak depot, but the state of Ohio never seems interested in subsidizing additional service at less fucked up hours of the day. I don’t entirely get the state-level politics behind these decisions, e.g., why Michigan has kept up its Amtrak subsidies, but there’s probably a strong class, racial, and political fuckery angle here. As a body politic, the suburbanites really have it in for Cleveland and Cincinnati, where there be Negroes. Other sorts of po’ folk, too, and Democrats. I believe it was Parma that was for a time the largest city in the United States without a mass transit system. Cleveland and Cincinnati have really neat urban cores, definitely neater than Columbus, but the political and business interest in investing in them is spotty and flaky. Hence light rail stations that look like they were abandoned by a late-stage Polish politburo that didn’t think to turn off the lights. Hence, also, all the tourist trap gimcrackery.

This bullshit was a long time coming. The most exquisite description I’ve heard of Cleveland in the sixties, from my mom, was that the blacks on the East Side and the Slavs on the West Side periodically squared off in race riots while the Italians and the Jews looked on. I can’t help but admire the diaspora Joel/Fischer/Buttafuoco crowd for treating that as a spectator sport. My uncle really should have married an Italian girl. What’s wrong with the Italians complements what’s wrong with the Jews, which complements what’s wrong with the Italians in return, while the Jews and the Poles are too busy with their semi-Semitic bum fight to compliment one another. *Very Temple Clinger Suburban Pollack Voice* Whoop Whoop Compliment. Nah, I shouldn’t be so harsh on that spergy mofo: I’ve never gotten any indication that he understands Jews as a concept, and he’s unfiltered enough that if he did he’d surely have something ridiculous to say about them on Facebook.

Or about us, since I’m Jewish enough for Hitler, and my self-loathing Jew of an uncle with the Polish/Shanty Mick wife doubly so. She’s the one I’ve sometimes been tempted to tell that I’d seen her possible paternal relatives from Staten Island at Hersheypark, but I think they were Black Irish.

#RaceTogether, bitch. The Dirty Dog will be here to pick me up soon enough and I’m already Too Very Online, so until we convene again, full steam abreast!