(EDIT: By some inexplicable thinko, I managed to misname the principal subject of this article - and in spite of looking at it repeatedly for some time have only just now realized. Outside of the vague resemblance between ‘k’ and ‘d’ and the fact that this article was dashed out fairly quickly, I can offer no real excuse for this; it is simply unfortunate that it fell into the beginning of a long period of personal infirmity and I didn’t notice earlier. MGC. AK)

1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Madoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Madoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues - and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US - are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews - and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel - a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism - to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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THESE United States have provided to the world, as shall doubtless pale in comparison to posterity, the very model of the geometric growth of men and wealth, & all respectable populationists assert that, should we as God made manifest close our shores to the Celestial and Slavic menace, the corrupt fecundity of to-day’s Papist and Deseretman shall be drowned as surely by our swelling numbers as the same heathens shall in good time be drowned in the Colorado & its tributaries in the coming century of good government.
But even this grand growth of the number of Christian men shall not compare to the eternal surge of white betterment by means of the rail-road. I shall withal to all men of good wisdom reveal the nature of the coming rail-transit singularity & conclusively prove that to all human misery, Marxism & Georgism & other anarchists, and alternative modes of transport (including even the grand and glorious tall-ship) the engine bears in its consist a doom as sure as the late end of Massa’s wantless provender for the Negro race. And though we shall doubtless face all manner of challenge and terror in the coming dominion of the steam engine - as those innocents quailing in the pacific Germanies at Napoleon’s relentless sponsorship of the chemin-de-fer would readily confide - it is worth it simply to stand at the boundless frontier of a promised-land free of rivers, women, and the loathsome opium tariff. Join me, your humble & obedient servant and engineer, when next ☞Dancing!!! sees fit to serialize my work.

There is a distinct area which many characterize as ‘Appalachia’ that emerges distinctly when you look at the counties that voted for McCain in 2008 by a higher margin than for Bush in 2004. The strong temptation is to write this off as ‘racism’, but I don’t think that’s technically accurate.

What must be remembered is the regional divide between what in Virginia were known as the ‘tuckahoe’ and ‘cohee’ - between the early Baptist Scots-Irish subsistence pastoralists and later primary truck-workers and the largely Anglican planter aristocracy which wound up decaying and then modernizing into what we know as the Deep South.

These areas were electrified and linked firmly to the outside world in living memory; except for the areas overlapping with the Rust Belt they’ve never had a major stake in American exports or the global economy, and - most importantly - they were never host to any serious attempts at slave-holding plantations, were subject to only extremely sporadic and occasional black migration from the Deep South, and have never seen significant immigration and only very rarely have even seen internal emigration (the large exception being the initial wave of Scots-Irish settlers moving inward as usable tidewater land became valuable for cotton production and the pre-Revolutionary strictures on westward movement disappeared - and those largely settled the westward leg of the Cohee boomerang).

As Tim Krieder suggested in The Pain - When Will It End’s America’s Scum Belt, the motto of the area could well be ‘You ain’t from around here, are you?’ - not exactly hostile, but far from friendly, and a gentle and constant reminder of the area’s fundamental resistance to outside influence. The post-Civil War mainstreaming of pro-Confederate opinion in the area spawned the secondary, ahistoric rallying cry of the secessionist and states’ rights movement - ‘We just want to be left alone’.

Clinton’s campaign, which faced after Super Tuesday a primary map which was nothing like as favorable as she would have needed to cinch the nomination before the convention, realized that there was one reliable way to get the whites of the South, who had (with few exceptions) gained little from racism and didn’t hold the oppression of blacks as near and dear as the Republicans had hoped - pointing out Obama’s exoticness.

Not in general terms, either - he was an elitist! a bold young man, in stark contrast with the region’s tradition of political lifers! Maybe possibly just could be gay, certainly not a member of their church, and by God, a black- just like they have in Richmond!

This was a sound strategy for capturing the region, but the problem is that even coming from a campaign with reasonable liberal bonafides, the entire exercise stank to outside observers of racism. Clinton won Pennsylvania but lost the Carolinas, which should have been clear evidence that she wasn’t going to smash Obama in the border South so badly that the convention would decide anything.

Of course, there’s nothing the Republicans like more than other people’s ideas, and sure enough the McCain campaign decided to plagarize this one. They started drawing contrasts between the Democrats and ‘real Americans’, started calling the tidelanders Communists, started suggesting that Obama wasn’t just black but a dangerous radical.

This didn’t exactly endear him to the High Cohee - after all, they don’t believe they have a monopoly on being Americans, they were (witness Pogo, for Chrissake) pretty indifferent to red-baiting throughout modern history, and they had less objection to blackness per se than its presence in their lives.

But the fallout was incredible. In a moment, the flailing effort to capture the south of Virginia suddenly alienated everyone outside of its panhandle - he was clearly trying to pander to a group that everyone outside of Appalachia saw as ignorant hicks, and he wasn’t even doing it convincingly. You can excuse Clinton’s seeming race-baiting away on it simply being how things work in Appalachia, but a campaign comprising an Arizonan and an Alaskan couldn’t come even close to pretending that. It won him West Virginia, but it cracked the Republican hold on the Deep South - which knew and held in contempt the cohee opinion of their big-city decadence - and it’s probably opened a suppurating wound in the Southern Strategy.

In short: we can excuse away charges of ‘racism’ against the Clinton campaign on this basis. They knew the difference, in a way it would take someone from Appalachia to be familiar with, between hating blacks and holding everything outside the near and familiar world in a sort of sweeping contempt - but that difference never occurred to anyone on McCain’s staff. Huckabee might have been able to pull it off - but McCain’s dog whistle was never even close to inaudible. Heck of a job, Johnny.

“Mister President, count back from a hundred for me,” said the fat woman. “One hundred,” said the fat man, “ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety.”

John McCain had a number of severe health problems, all aggravated by his experience as a prisoner of war for the bulk of the conflict in Vietnam. Downed after his twenty-third bombardment mission against North Vietnam, he could do little but cheer as Nixon, elected on the promise to end the war honorably, stepped up the bombardment of Vietnam, extending it quietly to Cambodia.

Some wiseass knew they could count on her when the old man went under, and it hadn’t been fifteen minutes before Belya Revolutsiya had sent out texts to all of its members. The leak, who would remain anonymous to history, honestly thought something good would come of this; that freedom would be spread and the Bear’s iron heel caught in a steel trap. Read more »

A heartbeat away from the Presidency if McCain should win is a woman who is mostly a shameless thief; her instincts are a bandit’s and her loyalties are a mobster’s.

She deliberately destroyed the world’s largest sockeye fishery for no better purpose than the profit margins of some Goddamn mining consortium; she likes to pretend that she’s a loyal Christian but she’s got that same evangelical fixation on her own petty, ridiculous issues - treating a pipeline like an object of saintly veneration, conscripting children (who Jesus of course admires more than anything, so long as they’re white) to pray with her (TV cameras rolling - Heaven forbid we not be noticed in our piety, good Philistines we are) for a fucking pipeline.

I like to say pat things about the terrible mick fuckers who squint on their million-dollar TV programs to convince the audience they’re extra special pious, but they at least have a concept of piety divorced even conceptually from their own bottom line. Palin literally believes God is smiling on her petty graft.

In the course of doing so, of course, she scammed money from the government. The gesture means more than the amount - $600 would seem pathetic to someone like her - after all, she doesn’t share the daily difficulties of the working class, and for her $600 is not a month’s rent but pocket change to be spent on a flight and a lunch; she’s stolen much larger amounts, but they all follow the same basic logic.

She has a basically fascist concept of society - it doesn’t seem at all out of place for her to requisition money to pray for a pipeline in public, nor to spend $400,000 campaigning against common sense or campaign actively against her own government on the basis of its incoherence with her private worldview. She’s been doing it since she was a small-time operative; before she became a fearless Duce for Alaska, she played the same role in Wasilla, waging a D’Annunzian war against a local librarian whose insufficient zeal for censoring moral turpitude revealed too little support for the mayor - in her own words.

Her speeches since she became nationally prominent have all been great fulminations against civil society - grand proclamations of the uselessness of community organizing, the inefficacy of private society and the transcendent beauty of the state. Small wonder she has an Objectivist fan-club devoted to scouring every black mark on her character from the public record - no human being has been as shameless about their political bankruptcy since Rand sang and danced for fascist Italy. She has no concept of power unless it be divorced from the power of life and death; no concept of good unless it be enslaved to the crusade against evil; and nothing but contempt for any people decadent enough to refuse any power to their rightful Leaders.

This is not just another rant about the inexplicable rise of the Basileus of Wasilla, however hilariously it lays bare a truth about the American right too terrible to explain directly. Her fascism - and here the word is so literal I actually feel ashamed for using it on people who simply exhibited surreal enthusiasm for power rather than openly worshipping it - is not so much a governing principle as a malignant worldview, a festering, evil rotting of the soul. Like any other aspiring autocrat, she has no power over the demoniac pull of her ink-black spiritual abyss - she simply feels its compelling claw, understands beyond understanding that eternal urge to triumph through faith.

No: the one thing Palin can understand, the one emotion she can be counted on to exhibit, is contempt for things outside of her domain. Like the nearly erotic terror the idea of art and culture divorced from tradition aroused in the Nazis and their sympathizers, anything that she cannot clump into her own stilted, corrupt experience - the Pinochetian cosmos of greed, grasping Nietzchian wills and impossibly complicit victims - is an impossible beast, something to be set alight and trampled underfoot. Anything that is not part of the rat-race must become fuel for that which is.

This is the common theme we see in what she does where there is no clearly understandable profit motive. We can exercise the benefit of the doubt and suppose that her militant contempt for ANWR might just be the hand of big oil up her ass, and we could similarly paint her willingness to rip her own state’s future as a tourist haven to shreds as the impossible desperation of a miner’s whore in an incipient ghost-town.

But we cannot by these means explain the wolves.

Like that filthy monster Reagan - dead before the public ever knew his name and shambling about even now these four years after his mouldering body at last followed his conscience and memory in giving up the ghost - she hates the world in a way functioning human beings find impossible to understand. Reagan insisted that the redwoods and other precious parts of our nation’s most populous, diverse, and essentially American state were interchangeable logging stock; even that had some surreal, warped basis in economic impulse. But Palin goes beyond this.

She offers men who think of themselves as hunters, responsible men of the world, a hundred and fifty dollars each to destroy wolves. She has been warned by people who understand ecology, even those - like the Republicans for Environmental Protection mentioned by Dolan - who share her culture’s insistence that the place of nature is under the dominion of man. Unlike any other hunters in the first world, the methods she favors - methods that shameless thief’s thief spent $400,000 of the state’s money to encourage at the polls - are mechanically efficient. We are not dealing with boar-stickers or deer-slayers; these women and men are intimate with the idea of death and share a kind of spiritual concern for the animals they destroy. They are often not the most ecologically-minded of people, but they are united by a vague idea of sport.

Palin, aiming to correct their ludicrous inefficiency, suggested they machine-gun the wolves by Cessna. To her, not only is the idea of the wolf repellant but so is the idea of the wolf meeting a human end. She can understand humans preying on big game - even if she does not understand, as ecologists now do and as sport hunters always have, that their fellow predators play a vital role in weeding out the weak and sick and keeping the big game strong - but the idea of something hunting out of hunger is alien to her, and so is the idea of competition with mercy. Wolves must be destroyed; the strong must destroy the weak even when forebearance serves them just as well.

Here, thus, we can record the only principle Palin has ever exhibited in any of her forty-four years: that God put us on Earth to strafe the wolves. I am no Christian, but I’m not sure what Christ would say about this.

The Stanford-Yale Oreo, or the Texas Graduate: Dubya and Condi: fuckin’. They know they’ll never get caught because there’s a media and political smokescreen around their private lives, and nobody really goes snooping for Republican sexual antics (case in point - you think a senior Dem senator being picked up for toilet sex would have stayed off the news for three or four months?), but it appeals perfectly to them both, and in both cases it might just be a sort of Pareto-optimal peccadillo.
Bush is the kind of right-wing evangelical jackass for whom the only esctasy is the self-destructive esctasy of a lapsed puritan, the only thrill the thrill of pushing one’s personal debasement to the limit; he had the pleasure and shame wires crossed a long time ago, and between cheating on his wife and sleeping with a black subordinate, it’s difficult to imagine the good-ol’-boy finding any more shame-driven eroticism without being gay or into crack whores. For Condi’s part, we find a reasonably intelligent and attractive woman with an extremely scant sexual history, but the documented partners are all big, strong guys, and fairly socially powerful as well - NFL players, suits, that kind of thing. The impression I get is an extremely powerful, dominant personality who is primarily submissive when it comes to sex - and besides Dick Cheney (who despises her), the President is the only man in America who could dominate her.

If they aren’t fucking now they have in the past, and if they haven’t it’s probably been from conscious effort and for the worse. And the Condi-Georgie-Laura triangle it forms is a perfect example of the relatively tame but personally horrifying sex lives the Republicans are famous for - the Democratic frontrunners in this race, after all, are respectively a couple with more genuine chemistry and mutual respect than have ever been in the Oval Office and a couple who, while by all indications sexually estranged, value each other enough as thinkers and as people that the idea of ending their personal partnership is unthinkable. (Rather like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, although roughly reversed in relative intelligence, family influence, and convictions.) By contrast, Palin and her husband both think of her as a baby factory and the less said about McCain’s horrifying relationship history the better.

The Big State Pepperpot, or The Yellow Rose of Alaska: Sarah Palin: Ron Paul in a clever disguise. You might think the children would be a dead giveaway, but he is an obstetrician.

Cee Bee Yoosta Bee or Spitball, Snowball - Same Difference: The Republican Party grooms strategic Yoostabees from the ranks of Blue Dogs for political gain and has been doing so regularly since at least 1994. It’s Lieberman now, and while it wound up being Zell Miller in 2004 I strongly suspect that it was supposed to be James Traficant.

Mighty Morphine Bowery Dangers or Why Cindy, What Big Eyes You Have: The main purpose of the war on drugs is to criminalize any kind of relief from the grind of everyday life, ignoring as it does any drugs readily available to people outside of that grind. Wackily far-out, I know, but it’s so crazy it just might work.

This one actually isn’t too big, but it is something I’d like to comment on.

Going after McCain on Czechoslovakia is kind of uncharitable, considering that as the would-be oldest President in American history he imprinted pretty heavily on a world that no longer exists.

Things have changed a great deal since he was a young man; for instance, not only does Czechoslovakia no longer exist, but if it did it would not be ruled indirectly by Adolf Hitler.
Also newly defunct: the Comintern, the Anti-Comintern, the Anti-Anti Comintern (we call those last two the Axis and Allies nowadays, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves), the Grange Party, the Cominform, the League of Nations, Tannu Tuva, most notable Kennedies, the Empire of India, political machines, Upper Volta, the Japanese Imperial Navy, effective laws against or controversy over sodomy and interracial marriage, Step’n'Fetchit, the Gold Standard, the Portuguese Empire, dogsledding, mercantilism, caesaropapism, an innumerable number of living species, nuclear recoilless rifles, any reasonable use for a battleship, the political respectability of the Ku Klux Klan, pneumatic post, the nuclear stockpile of South Africa, German invasion thrillers, Amos ‘n’ Andy, the smoldering ruins of Hiroshima, prop fighters, Latin mass, the Irish Free State, the Philippines’ legal and later semilegal colonial subordination to the United States, chicken-heated nuclear landmines, powder toothpaste, widespread use of either kind of LSD, homeownership, the territories of Hawaii and Alaska and the very Canal Zone on which he was born, the innocence of mankind, Orson Welles, radioactive patent medicine and for the most part patent medicine in general, New Criticism, torpedo bombers, the Big Bopper, Josef Stalin, Flash Gordon serials, rent control, South Yemen, musical cinema, the Transcontinental Railroad, Levittowns, Herbert Hoover, East Germany, the lethality of syphillis, an alarmingly large number of black men wantlessly left infected by a government body with the same, the Communist Party USA, Jim Crow, widespread belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life within the Solar System, Eurocommunism, the Marshall Plan, mainstream anti-Semitism, belief in the healthfulness of tobacco, French Indochina, the Empire of Vietnam, South Vietnam, light and heavy tanks, military ballooning, most of Europe’s Jews, soda jerks, blackface, the Comecon, racial quotas, automobile starter cranks, hundreds and hundreds of fashions, Social Credit, the Hughes fortune, potable groundwater in southern Nevada and Utah, vaudeville, Manchukuo, Elvis, HUAC, American industry, habeas corpus, ODESSA holdouts, the Russo-BerwickuponTweedian war, the USSR, Leon Trotsky, nuclear non-proliferation, apartheid, Church Slavonic, Noel Coward, the German aristocracy, the State of France, doggerel verse, widespread legal and social acceptability of almost every hard drug, Red spies, the Chongyalate of Sikkim, the American left, pan-Arabism, Charles Lindbergh, fidelity-exclusive divorce, most buildings in Dresden and Tokyo older than himself, the independence of the judicary, sock hops, hippies, smallpox, penny seignorage, anti-Hibernism, Cuba’s political dependence on the US, the American frontier, Ian Fleming, the widespread use of breadbaskets, flooding on the Colorado and Columbia river systems, marital spanking, bootblacks, Francoism, Burma, Burma Shave, the Sino-Soviet split, old money, the sound barrier, efforts at English spelling reform, the Cold War, the Shahanshah, the Australian pound, the eight-hour workday, most racist dog-whistles aimed at the hard left, rabbit and organ meat in the First World diet, several hundred languages, shotgun marriage, Yugoslavia (monarchist, fascist, and communist), newsreels, Charles Atlas, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, plausible deniability for J. Edgar Hoover, and spats.

On the plus side, at least Zsa Zsa Gabor is still around.

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