A new age of spite and entitlement is dawning in the West, as the haves, confronted by a yawning abyss of their own manufacture, struggle to find a way to so demonize their opposite numbers at the bottom that they need no justification to remain at the top.

It is observed, including by my own perennial favorite Adam Cadre, that a powerful motivator for this sort of behavior is simple spite – that after a certain amount of privilege accrues, one of the main ways of enjoying it is finding ways to wave it under the noses of those without it. We observe this on a daily basis with money – the whole category of Veblen goods could not exist otherwise.

A trans-Atlantic culture of fat snobbery has emerged on similar terms, with people – blessed by the mix of economic and physical privilege such that they do not, by their normal day-to-day- routine, gain or retain large amounts of weight – basically heaping abuse on the disgusting, morally incontinent fat-asses who inexplicably now form a majority in the US and a plurality in the UK. While the temptation, as always within the framework of choice-based liberalism, is to view obesity as a simple consequence of personal choice, a more coherent view emerges if you construct it in the same manner at least some liberals are willing to qualifiedly accept class or wealth.

(Certainly much more coherent than Jamie Oliver flogging up-market delicacies as a substitute for prolefeed with similar caloric content, and treating the choice as one not just of diet but of morality – as though money were no object.)

But these are not subjects I am touching on in detail today. With the 2011 autumn of rage still sputtering along and still making the odd headline,  I would only be adding to a vast stream of noise about money to discuss it; and I have already done too much futile speaking for too long on my left approach to obesity, and a man gets discouraged after a while.

What I am interested in now is a new push against the discipline of mental health.

Read more »

Michael Lind is at it again. Everyone’s favorite incomplete Republican convert is of course haranguing the Occupy protests, insisting that for a variety of reasons only a certain species of racist shit-eater can be truly populist and the Democrat Party is dominated by latte-sipping elites blah blah blah blah blah.

The thing is, this is something that passes for analysis so often in the media that seeing it trotted out here shouldn’t surprise me. I suppose folderol of that specific character going up on Salon is what’s doing it (although the fact that they recently published a non-paid advertisement for a group of pickup artists should have blunted that concern a little).

The thing is, I’m sure I’ve made my background a matter of the public record, but if not, here it is: around 1992, when I was five years old, my parents began working together to get my dad, sick and tired of an unfulfilling career as an electrical engineer, qualified as a medical doctor. He started out wanting to do anesthesia, and has settled into dealing with trauma.

The point is, at around the same time my father started having to take out large amounts of student debt and my mother had to stop working her usual service-industry jobs permanently instead of temporarily to deal with a string of babies being born. The decision knocked us out of the lower middle class and into the student poor.

Lind, of course, doesn’t see any of this as work. Electrical engineering takes a degree and involved mostly freelancing, so it’s the vocation of a decadent sit’n'thinker, and my mom’s eight-hour shifts selling decorative arrangements, flowers, and home furnishings (a trade that required a significant amount of on-the-job training, as the service industry had yet to completely suck the marrow from their workers’ bones) were unanswerable to unionization and besides only sold things that other people made. Besides which, to be wholly blunt, to a man that idealizes “horny-handed sons of toil”, anything my scrawny high-school-only mom could do could hardly qualify, could it?

It’s a species of knock-on to laborism shared by Orwell at his worst – an obsession with sweaty, hard men doing sweaty, hard things and an overriding contempt for anyone who deliberately spurns a life of honest muscular toil, even people who work themselves to the bone doing things outside of the canon of manly labor.

The crucial thing is that it’s an elitist view. Lind is a lifelong political operative and Orwell was a scholarship-educated belle-lettrist; the idea of the honest poor doing honest work for an honest day’s wage is unsustainable by the realities on the factory floor, where compensation has always had more to do with custom and demand than skill or work. In fact, the cruelly arbitrary reality of a system in which some menial workers make enough to buy a car and some make too little to rent a flop is one of the original motive forces of the socialist movement – partially from the bottom, but partially as well from decadent elites, the children of ‘honest toilers’ who made good but never forgot the shit they were born into.

At least in Orwell’s day, though, there was a ‘working man’ to be fetishized in this manner. The industrial product of the first world generally and America especially, through both honest movement of capital to countries with lower productivity (and thus lower wages) and rent-seeking currency, wage, and labor manipulation by ‘tiger’ economies under the approving gaze of financier-dominated US governments , has more or less been shattered. (It doesn’t help that the bipartisan soft-Reaganite movement of mergers, acquisitors, and tech-jobbers deliberately smashed the industrial state for their own profit and were cheered on by the crowned heads of the economic academy.) At every turn, labor has been cut off at the fucking knees by an organized, right-wing political movement and has been encouraged to blame the Dirty Fucking Hippies for every moment of it. It’s bait Lind has eagerly swallowed – not because of his experience with unionized labor, because I’m not sure what if any he actually has. No, he swallowed it because he spent the 80s and 90s being a Reaganaut activist, and can’t bring himself to admit that the people he was dutifully following orders to villify were blameless.

The destruction of the American labor union came from within – it came from bosses servile to a Carterite consensus that political change through electoral politics was a failed model, that Washington was intrinsically instead of sectionally rotten; it came from writers and speakers and publishers willing to buy a bill of goods to strike out at a culture the country hated and feared; and more than anything it came from the pension funds, a little Trojan Horse of managerialist cash-above-all hypercapitalism in the breast of the labor movement.

In short, there’s a reason that the private unions have been largely gutted, and there’s no reasonable way to make that reason the kids in the street in New York and other cities around the country. Like me, most of them were born to parents who stopped getting promotions and raises regularly when they were children, and have never had a stable or useful job. Lind has no fucking idea what it’s like to mature into a country where double-digit joblessness is the new normal. He wouldn’t know what work now means if it jumped up and bit him. And if he were jost an elitist shit, that would be one thing; but no, he’s sure he knows what labor is and wants.

~

The main line of Lind’s articles has generally been that there is a decadent academic latte-sipping creative class that dominates the Democrat party with its identity politics (which all decent white people despise natch) and its ideas about ‘nudging’. (The fact that Lind’s reflexive ‘bipartisanship’ has contributed to an environment in which no one on any side of the political spectrum believes in electoral politics as an engine for change is irrelevant; when Bloomberg and his pals try to ‘transcend’ politics by throwing money at bloodless capitalist automatons and by undermining faith in partisan elections, it’s innovative and hopeful and good; when professional antagonists of public-sector unions suck the blood from their charges with ‘incentives’ transparently intended only to screw people out of promised pay and work, it’s innovative and potentially Messianic; when progressives occasionally take power and use small amounts of taxpayer money to subsidize the adoption of expensive but long-term beneficial changes in consumption patterns, it’s patronizing and elitist.)

But more than that, he’s sure that these people, these gross horrible disgusting mongrels and race-traitors and layabouts, are committing a grave offense against the Working Man by – let’s be honest – not getting their solids via Hungry Man, not getting their clothes via K-Mart, and not getting their news via a Fox affiliate.

This is a view of the poor – that they are desperately loyal to their beloved Walton chain warehouse and horrible big-city elitists are looking to take it away, oh noes – that can only be sustained by someone who has never been poor or even seen poverty up close. This is the view of someone who has gone to the supermarket for cheap bourbon and admired the toily honesty of the sturdy, beat-down men and their fat, prematurely aged wives pushing carts of frozen vegetables and meat.

I might not have come by a childhood of hunger and want the honest way, by my dad’s union bowing to Whip Inflation Now and letting the bosses throw him out on his ass, but I can tell you that nobody who lives through that likes or wants it. Target’s entire business model is substantiated by exactly that – by being a big-box shop with prices and merchandise accessible to people on a budget which doesn’t wipe your nose in the fucking destitution of America’s post-industrial hellscape. If you give those beat-down men or those run-down women a million dollars, they will never darken Wal-Mart’s door again.

I don’t know if they’d shop at Whole Foods. I sure wouldn’t, but never mind that – I think running into a leftist who wasn’t obsessively loyal to what Lind imagines is our core culture of fancy consumption would give him hives – they’d just avoid Lind’s beloved big-box shitholes like the plague.

Here’s a man who believes that the working poor go out and raise credit to buy SUVs because big man like big car hnnngh. Makes sense, if you’re a patronizing shit, but when you only have one car you need to fit your entire family into it and drive them anywhere, and the SUV is a cheap, horrible way of achieving that. The idea that the Common Man is in love with low fuel efficiency or constant fucking engine problems is impossible to believe if you’ve ever met one. If you live in the imaginarium of talk radio, sure, it’s all culture, and that’s Lind’s gimmick.

“The working man loves the owning class fucking him up the ass,” says Lind, “and how dare you get in the way, you horrible decadent faggots”. The idea that when we get money we spend the rest of our lives sleeping on our backs is surely neither here nor there.

(N.B.: I wrote this whenever ‘a recent post’ was recent. The film itself is no longer even remotely relevant, but Alec told me [probably a year ago, christ] that the review was worth posting. So: here.)

After I saw Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, I spent some time trying to concentrate my thoughts on the film enough for a post here. I was never able to do so to my satisfaction, and eventually the film stopped being timely. Luckily, a recent post at Alicublog brought up Anthony Lane’s review of the film. Instead of making an overlong and off-topic comment there, I’ll make you all suffer. (Here be spoilers for both film and comic.) Lane pans the film as an inhumane celebration of thuggery, and he repeatedly states that the comic and the movie are philosophically similar. I mostly agree with Lane’s assessment of Watchmen the film, but couldn’t agree less with his association of Snyder’s love of thuggery with Alan Moore himself. The film is an eviscerated parody of the comic I read. On its own, the superhero story is not particularly notable –it’s the kind of “dark” inverted hero story that Frank Miller might have written. What I find appealing about Watchmen that both Snyder and Lane missed are simple human stories, cut short by Veidt’s scheme.

The emotional peak of the comic is the execution of Veidt’s plan. A half-dozen small plots with decidedly non-superheroic characters – a cabbie’s fight with her girlfriend, a newspaper vendor talking to an uninterested youth reading a pirate comic, the paranoia- and drug-fueled murder of Hollis Mason, the eventual disgrace of the cop who captures Rorschach,  and Rorschach’s psychiatrist spiralling into despair and alienating his wife — begin to be drawn together. At that moment, Veidt’s plan to murder half of New York takes effect, and all of these lives are obliterated in a series of panels which still makes me tear up even after dozens of readings.

Watchmen does briefly reference the iconic scene with the newspaper vendor and youth in silhouette before everything goes white. You’d just about miss it. And it symbolized exactly what was wrong with the film — I had no emotional response, because I had no reason to care about these characters.

Quite a lot of the film is spent slavishly recreating the hero arc of the comic, to the expense of just about everything else. The resulting plot arc, with the characters as written, would have been pretty strongly biased in favor of Veidt. Moore’s Adrian Veidt is a fascinating character, one of the best villains ever written — because he is strong, and handsome, and charming, and makes a fairly convincing argument that he had to murder millions of people to save the world. Furthermore, Moore never explicitly rebukes Veidt’s actions. The comic’s protagonists come around at the end, agree to stay quiet, and return to their lives — except one, the psychotic (and ultimately suicidal) serial killer Rorschach. Beyond that, the only person really questioning Veidt at the end is Veidt himself.

Snyder realized this, although he didn’t seem to recognize the value of the excised plots (the part he’s restoring in his director’s cut, apparently, is the well-done but marginal Black Freighter story). So he turns Veidt into a weaselly, snivelling Eurofag (with a directory labelled BOYS on his computer, natch), makes Dan and Laurie stronger and more appealing, and does everything he can to make a psycho killer like Rorschach an antihero.

This is what Lane saw in the film. I agree with him on that. The dehumanized script of the film had to increase the severity of Veidt’s crime by a tremendous magnitude, replacing “half of New York” with the complete obliteration of a handful of the world’s biggest cities. The comic’s Dan Dreiberg is shocked and appalled at Veidt’s murders at first, but ultimately agrees to go along with Veidt’s plan. In the movie, the same scene ends with an absurd sequence where Dreiberg beats the shit out of Veidt and accuses him of “deforming humanity.” It’s fitting that a film directed by the guy who did 300 replaced half the plot with a burly man repeatedly punching a homosexual in the face.

(An aside — I’m aware Snyder didn’t write the script, and I’m being lazy in attributing all of these decisions to him. I apologize. However, I suspect that Snyder was satisfied with the script he filmed, and his previous work on 300 as well as his obvious love of filming scenes of merciless violence reinforce this. Oh, and before I forget: the comic depicts the pre-Keene Act rioters as middle-aged, pudgy working people. The film depicts them as bomb-throwing hippies. It all adds up.)

In general, the film’s script slashes out any scene that doesn’t feature a superhero but dedicates minutes on end to loving expansions of sex and fight scenes (Dan & Laurie on the airship, the Comedian’s death, the thugs in the alley) which were dispensed with fairly quickly in the comic. I know the entire book comic would have been impossible to film, but when you expand a scene just so you can show more of Malin Akerman getting a deep dicking you open yourself up to questions about priorities.

Life on Titan? A liberal NASA plot. They say there’s life on Titan, then Obambi and the Democrat congress declare it a wildlife refuge and we can’t drill it for oil!

huh huh hhuuuh

I don’t know how many arms these Titanians have, but I know that each one of them is going to end up holding a Democrat welfare check!!

hhhuuh huuuuuh huh

Maybe they know where Obama’s birth certificate is located!!

hhh hhhuhh [choking sound, heavy clump of body striking floor]

(with a blanket exception for YouTube)

A regular troll at Krugman’s, quoting same:

“…in the top half of the income distribution, but only 1.3 years in the bottom half.”

Income DISTRIBUTION?

Call them what you may…progressives, socialists, statists, modern day liberals, Krugmanites…they cannot or will not grasp the fact that that income is EARNED, not distributed.

OK, so I was reading a thread over at Sadly and someone linked to Eric Cantor’s YouCut website. This is a campaign doodad Cantor came up with where ‘the people’ (read: GOP online activists) vote on ‘wasteful’ spending items, and then the Republicans get to issue Drudge Sirens that the Democrats refused to vote to cut spending even when THE PEOPLE demanded it. Considering that our new noble GOP majority is unwilling to make any specific statements about what they’re going to do to stop all the spendin’, this is probably the best place to find out some specifics.

A quick overview here: non-military, discretionary spending is a fucking trifle compared to the big four: military spending, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. There’s also a conditional fifth item: unemployment benefits. The reason we’re running a fat deficit right now has little to nothing to do with TARP (“the bank bailout”) or ARRA (“the stimulus”). It’s a result of the confluence of two major trends of spending and revenue: the recession, which has reduced tax receipts and put millions of people on the dole, and George W. Bush and the Republican congress, who reduced revenue through hefty tax cuts and increased spending by entering two wars (also: Medicare Part D), which meant that Obama entered office in the early months of a recession with the budget already at a serious deficit. (Remember: Keynesians think that recession deficit spending should be balanced out by prudent spending and tax policy in fat years.)

The vast bulk of federal spending is basically obligatory in the short term, because there’s no way the voting public will endorse cutting Medicare, Social Security, or the military. I don’t think there’s sufficient stomach for cutting Medicaid, and the most hawkish the Republicans can realistically get on unemployment benefits is to block extensions past 99 weeks. That won’t be enough. The only way to balance the budget (and please understand: I consider budget-balancing to be madness, especially during a recession or recovery) would be to slash entitlement spending (thus pissing off the armies of olds who came out for the GOP last week) and military spending (which is the meat and potatoes of the Republican coalition) as well as raising taxes. The GOP is going to do none of that, because they’ve already insisted that the deficit can be fixed by cutting non-military, non-entitlement spending (“waste”, “fraud”).

Some of the YouCut stuff isn’t even cuts. Collecting outstanding taxes from federal employees and selling federal property is revenue generation, not spending reduction. The deficit is revenue – spending, yes, but it’s still kind of cheap to call revenue ‘savings’ when the Republicans have just spent two years pretending that every dollar of the “Obama deficit” is due to spending.

The numbers cited all seem to be over 10 years, although they’re not consistently labeled as such. Sometimes I’m not even sure that’s the case — “Reforming Fannie and Freddie” is labeled as saving $30 billion, but no time frame is given.Being generous and granting a 10-year timeframe for everything listed, all of the programs listed come down to $15 billion a year. This isn’t even a dent in the deficit.

The items listed are basically a hot mess. There’s a few of the classic examples of unnecessary spending cited and slashed during periods of austeria — for example, the terrifying ~$9 million a year spent on an indifferently-managed grants program for Alaskan natives.The description on that one mentions that the President has singled it out. That’s another point — most of these cheap sacrificial programs have bipartisan support to be cut. It won’t do much to the deficit and a small number of unimportant people might get fucked, but it makes good press releases.The huge bulk of the ‘cuts’ on YouCut came in the early weeks, which gives you an idea of how quickly one runs out of big non-defense non-entitlement programs to single out.

The total amount cut is $160 billion over 10 years. But almost all of the major chunks of this total are either deceptive or just generically evil.

$25 billion is just a straight-up welfare cut, whining about how these able-bodied adults should GET A JOB, etc.

$30 billion is a tricky fucking lie — it’s a “savings” generated by freezing federal employee wages at the current level. That’s $30 billion less in spending over 10 years, but it’s not going to cut at all into the current deficit. Beyond that, although reasonable people might suggest that federal wages shouldn’t rise if the cost of living hasn’t, it’s fucking ludicrous to suggest freezing federal wages for 10 years. Depending on inflation, that could be a very significant pay cut, and Cantor isn’t honest about this.

$30 billion is the nebulous Fannie and Freddy reform. I’m not an expert on this. My gut feeling is that this is a handful of reasonable proposals mixed with the standard wingnut obscenities, and the $30 billion is the bluest of blue-sky forecasts. But sure, I’ll give them this one. That’s 2% of the deficit for just this year, and one tenth of one percent of the federal debt.

$15 billion is revenue from selling federal property. Again, I don’t think there’s a huge opposition to this, but it’s a tiny fraction of the deficit.

Another $15 billion is a typical RW hobby-horse — not giving the IRS the budget they need to handle the tax changes from the Affordable Care Act. What’s particularly interesting about this one is that it’s listed at $15 billion but the item itself says “5 to 10 billion”. I’m honestly wondering if some very clever idiot just added the numbers together to reach 15.The final item that makes up the bulk of that tiny $16 bn/yr is “reducing federal employment to 2008 levels.” That’s rated at $35 bn over ten years, implementing an attrition program to only replace every other departing federal employee. This is the kind of program that sounds like hot shit on TV but doesn’t really work in reality. The feds can’t control where they lose employees, and if they’re unable to hire acceptable replacements you end up with waste and crappy service — which is what the Republicans claim to oppose. This is the policy equivalent of pasting agency names to a dartboard and making blind throws. If the Republicans really had the bozack required to cut federal employment, they’d actually target specific programs to eliminate or cut.

Apres Levitt et Dubner, et à cher frère Cadre.

When America had industry we were in the unique position of being so big that you could feasibly dump a thousand miles away without creating an international incident. This is why we invented the biggest smokestacks, pumping waste into the air to fall dozens, hundreds, a thousand miles away. Our foundries poured poison into the heartland, and for a time as the Europeans looked at their own pollution problems and extrapolated to our scale, there was a real catastrophe on our hands.

Technology saved us, as it always does. The official history gives credit for smaller stacks and scrubber rims to the market, but the state and its scientist pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. And in time, as Reagan and the finance industry broke the industrial heartland and auctioned it off piece by piece, the need to throw poison into the air slacked off and the Yellow Sea took the acrid burden from Lake Erie. We could at last throw away Silent Spring, which sympathized with mosquitos; everything was all right again.

But Pandora’s box was stuck open wide, and three generations of growth and stagnation made China and ourselves coke and gas junkies. No matter how clean we cleaned our act, our looms and drive-trains were as ominous in their silence as unattended infants. The carbon flowed as the carbon must flow.

The Europeans again looked at their own pollution problems, the summer storm and winter drought and the rising of the sea, and they looked with alarm to us and to China, to Russia and to the second world, and we realized there was a catastrophe on our hands. We had stopped the destruction of the ozone long before we stopped the poisonous haze of sulfur, but the carbon was different, we were told: an integral part of who we were, and if that was to change we would need to gather electricity different ways. The wind, the sea, the sun, the atom – some source of free energy other than the earth’s ancient biomass would be needed.

But the people who survived the American economy had bottom lines to protect, and they saw denial as a better investment than cooptation. For a time there was a crisis as the bearded men who knew why we had seen the hurricanes from Hell were denied by billionaires in baseball caps. Wind farms are an eyesore, said they, and solar power is for fags. What we need is a way to keep on burning ancient carbon forever (for God will always furnish us with more).

Economists saved us, as they always do. To save our cities from the rising sea and the buffeting sky would require India and China to have nice things; what we needed instead was a pump, a giant pump, a big old hose as long as the biggest skygouging smoke stacks ever planned, so big you could pump poison into the air and it’d never come back. But what magical poison would save us from the carbon dioxide? How could we undo the greenhouse flux that had been a part of the Earth’s climate since life began to metabolize oxygen?

Sulfur dioxide, said they. We remembered the name but we couldn’t recall where from; the oil and coal men assured us it was from their pitiable complaints that they had to spend all this money throwing it away – when it could save us from ourselves! The market had finally come through for us, and the economists and their corporate pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. We could at last throw away Michael Moore and Al Gore, who were fat and had beards and sympathized with ecoterrorists. Everything was all right again.

The hose was delivered by the lowest bidder, not really a hose but a massive spire of a fine modern resin. They did a serviceable job, but they didn’t overbuild it; it wasn’t that expensive and we would just build more when this one started to degrade. A mainframe, for now inert, would work out how much sulfur needed to be in the air to maintain a permanent volcanic-style haze, to cool the Earth back down a degree and a half.

At the appointed date the sulfur levels were off by no less than ten percent, but that would be solved in time. There was concern in areas outside the thirty-mile circle in a near-abandoned rez no one could enter without permission that the hose was leaking; the contractors given the job of maintaining it affirmed that emissions were within parameters. The gas we had lost in the sky, said they, must have undergone a chemical change or floated into the sky. More plausible, surely, than some kind of conspiracy to cover up the poor construction of the pump.

Whatever its problems, the sulfur plan had given us back our freedoms – our lives, our liberty, our pursuit of carbon dioxide. We had not silenced the beardos but they no longer mattered; the plan had worked, and if it stopped working we could just build another plant.

Some time later they explained that the pump facility was old, and because of alarmists and nimby-pimbies it was hard to site them where we would have liked; because the sites we got weren’t ideal, didn’t have the access to refineries and strong security we had in Arizona, they were smaller and weaker. It was a sign of the concept’s strength, we understood, that what would work with one twenty-mile hose would work with five or ten. We had a site in Turkey; we had a site in Hawaii; we had a site in Tibet, in Rhodesia and Patagonia, two in the Northern Territory and one in Finnish waters north of the Arctic Circle. They weren’t as efficient as the older site, but they got the job done.

Our greatest fear, that terrorists or Russians or some other monsters would destroy our last hope because they resented the carbon scam being over, never came to pass, and even though dropping Earth’s temperature below its prior levels took until the 60s, the worst of the crisis was over.

The beardos would never be happy about our clever plan, and in their resentful anger they made the inefficient coral and plankton species dying out to be the sulfur-plan’s fault. A well-known blogger with a Harvard bachelor’s told a TV host that the ocean being more acrid than lakes was a big deal, and we laughed and laughed, because it always has been.

When the Arizona stack fell it hadn’t been our primary pump for decades, but that didn’t stop a lot of misguided concern about the carbon production of the Sinobanana’s trucks or new paracoal plants in unihabited Congolese desert. And there were calls for pump regulation by statists, and there were ignorant claims that no living thing had inhabited the Sea of Cortes since before the disaster. But we ignored their foolishness, and when the carbon dioxide production that buoyed our economy rebounded, we replaced the old Arizona pump with cheaper, less heavy stacks in Belarus, Saudi Iraq, and the islands the US had given Cuba in the 30s.

Communism’s corrosive effects linger on, as we all know, and the new plants had a few minor incidents – but those piled up, and before anyone (the beardos’ babbling aside) knew what was happening, we had random tides of dead fish and crop failures. Those failures got bad enough that instigators in Africa readily started riots, producing a real scare as the sulfur production slacked off. In the time it took us to build reserve facilities, the haze dropped badly enough that air passengers reportedly saw the ground at night and the Earth’s temperature had risen again.

Automation had saved us, as it always does. We threw away the local laborers and building inspectors and kept them out with drones and lasers, and we were at last free of their sympathizing with food-moochers and wobblies. The pumps would last a hundred years.

Mammals and bridges lasted fifty, and the Hoover Dam two hundred and twenty. Whether anything else from what we called Earth would write its names on the cosmos before the Sun erased Nixon’s and Gandhi’s I couldn’t tell you.

Behold this classy ad for some kind of fascist rally or something being held by Michelle Bachmann:

1) Couldn’t you have found something less lynchy than a lasso, what with race being in the news ex. Jackson Jive, a Georgia peckerwood making and promoting a veiled death threat to a representative from another state, and that entire classy NewsMax coup thing? It’s not like you really ever want to ask your constituents to fantasize about lynching the government, but now is a particularly bad time. Oh, who am I talking to.

2) It took me a few minutes to realize this next thing, and I find that depressing. I hate living in Nevada.

3) Madame Sturmtruppefuhrerin, I know you’re really enthusiastic about Real America stringing the coloreds up high, but if I may: in what conceivable way could you take back reins with a fucking lasso?

1) It was a dark and stormy night, and Pat Boone was depressed about the poor fortunes of his close personal and professional friend Bob Dole. As he prepared to cross the Canadian border and leave this undeserving nation forever, around the corner appeared the surviving Sex Pistols, each erect.

2) 1965: low Earth orbit. Edward White, doomed son of Texas, stepped out of his capsule, his tether carefully spooling him out into the void. While he knew that he could see less this way than he had in the capsule, and that in the grand scheme of things he was still just a high-flying sky-man, his eyes were filled with glory and a hope we know to be forlorn. Today would not be as planned, though: in the corner of his restrained, space-drunk vision he could make out a flash of the different, more beige gray his superiors had warned him of. He mentally reminded himself of his space revolver. He was ready for Leonov. He was ready to kill in orbit, or die in it. What he was not ready for was love.

3)Retirement had been good to President Bush. Nobody made him hang around horses any more, and he got to hang around in Kennebunkport as his station in life demanded instead of slumming it with those lazy-eyed Texan fuckers. He didn’t even have to sit down and shut up when Cheney had something foul to say any more. It had been a good day even before his manservant Sowadjec announced the arrival of today’s guest. Cybernetic boy-jockey in tow, Crown Prince Abdul-Aziz entered the room with a warm greeting, still gloriously toned beneath his assless robes after these long seven years. “Tonight you are the House of Saud’s camel,” continued the conservative heir, offering his hand and a greased velvet glove to his New England colleague.

4) Once again, Lee and John were eager with anticipation, sporting a boner and bonah respectively as the limo streamed into view of the warehouse. But today John’s wife and her Greek lover knew how to keep the safe-word unsaid. Little did either know that they had already begun their last tango in Dallas.

[5] “And thanks to my guests, Ollie North and Bay Buchanan. America salutes you. God bless all of you at home.” Another day, another Hannity’s America, another hundred thousand dollars. But as the swarthy hive took down the set for the night, Sean noticed Colonel North wasn’t leaving — and, as Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch swaggered in with a gleam in their old, wet eyes, Sean realized his endless fidelity was about to be repaid, his love for the GOP consummated. Tonight the Republican Party would make an honest woman of him.

(6) In a sinister dacha in the Crimea, a man in a particularly cruisy wheelchair snickered openly at his own perfidy with his friends Alger Hiss – codename ALES – and Josef Stalin. “Oy,” said Rosenfeldt, “always with the betraying of America’s doughty Aryan allies.” He squealed with girlish delight as he noticed that Stalin’s balls also had tiny, angry moustaches, and then took out his big queer cigarette holder in order to slosh them around in his stupid mouth.

This is one of the more lucid things I’ve read in a while. I have an adjunct I’m working on: originally a short observation on women in the workplace, but this brings it into finer focus.