State of the Union

As this post more or less coincides with President Obama’s first State of the Union Address delivered last night, I guess I should give at least give an idea of what I thought of the speech.

It’s this: Nice speech, fat lot of good it will do.

Obama does give good speech. What worries me is that I also have every reason to believe Civil War general and military paperweight George McClellan was a better public speaker than the much less charismatic but far more kick-ass Ulysses S. Grant. See, the people back then who needed to be pounded into submission so that what’s right could flourish, the  ass-backwards slave-owning secessionists, not only wouldn’t have cared who could talk better, they would have encouraged doing nothing but talk. Grant could have been mute and scratching “charge” on a slate hung around his neck — as he did later in life — for all giving speeches mattered.

For all the wingnutty talk of taking up arms every time things don’t go their way, it’s appalling that Democrats still can’t bring themselves to put up a good legislative scuffle over things that really, really matter.  Like health care, like Iraq, like other things in which people dying allow for a little in-congress rudeness. The few Democrats that consistently do fight, such as Alan Grayson and Al Franken, should not just be copied, they should be cloned. You’d think that after Joe Lieberman screwed them five or six times, cracking a grin with a mouth like a sheep’s labia, Democrats as a whole would get the hint.

Unfortunately, Obama has had a good year to demonstrate that talking about fighting and actually pulling the trigger are two completely unrelated things. Now, many reasonable explanations have been given for President Obama’s endless, open-invitation to the Republican party to join the human race and get things done. It may be political calculation, designed to show how unreasonable and unmoving the Republicans are, but for the life of me I can’t imagine how this is intended to impress the unreasonable and unmoving people who will just vote Republican anyway. If he keeps it up, and doesn’t realize that the right-wing is sand-bagged into their bunkers until he just fucking goes away, already, and he starts lobbing tear-gas in after them in preparation for mowing them down when they come running out, then he looks clueless, naive or some other iteration of just plain dumb. Not because of anything he says, but because he’s attempting to raise the mentally and spiritually dead.

What Obama doesn’t seem to understand is that the Republicans have rendered themselves profoundly, willfully irrelevant. Whatever happens, whatever will happen, whatever can happen, it will have to happen without the Republican party and in spite of it.

Whatever the ideas behind Obama’s State of the Union, its content was overshadowed by not a portent of things to come, but a portent of more of the same: The sorry spectacle of the Republicans, surly as pimply know-it-all teenagers in after-school detention, not only failing to applaud  anything Obama said, but also yawning, smirking, slouching over their Blackberries and generally looking bored with the whole governing thing. These are exactly the attention deficit types that stand in front of teabagger rallies and conflate the Declaration of Independence with The Constitution. Not because they are trying to pull one over, but because a command of American history, and either document, is pretty irrelevant to what they are in office to do:  Which is nothing more than what they are told by the people giving them money and setting them up for cushy jobs when they leave.

They have their marching orders, they know what they are going to do, regardless, and there’s simply nothing that President Obama can say to change that. The Republican Party isn’t a political entity that can be persuaded by rational argument, or even their own self interest or that of their supposed constituency. Unfortunately, people like Obama, and much of the Democratic Party, make the mistake of seeing people in opposition to them as mirror images, equals on different poles, rather than a whole breed apart. Just as the Republicans ceased to be “The Party of Lincoln” during the civil rights era when they absorbed the Dixiecrats and went from being the party of emancipation to the party of segregation, the Republican party ceased to be a group one could agree to disagree with once it was coopted by corporatism, neocons and the more ravenously vacuous elements of fundamental Christianity.

You’re certainly welcome to disagree with them, and you can argue with them, but, and this is the key point, you’re not going to talk them into being decent human beings, part of a civil society, that gives a shit about anything. These days Christians couldn’t be convinced to act Christian if Jesus did the haranguing himself while pacing around in their bath tub.

What may have been an actual political party once, the Republicans are now little more than a front group (or people who determine to ride into office by paying lip-service) for the corporations who fund them and the Religious Right and various fringe groups who they pander to just enough to get that little extra bump that lands them in office. That sounds pretty conspiratorial, but conspiracy actually takes some effort, and these people are hardly trying to conceal it. Aside from that, they are answerable to no one, least of all whatever atrophied conscience they may have left. Remember, these wingnuts are the people who have screamed endlessly that the greatest threat to America, besides Al Qaeda and the “Death Tax”, is ACORN, a group whose main purpose is to register poor, black and otherwise disenfranchised groups to vote. Republicans, as you know, hold voting in such high regard that they like to ensure only the sort of people who meet their approval actually get to do it.

Obama could give the most rousing, carefully constructed, reasonable bi-partisan speech delivered so eloquently that he makes Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King seem like sputtering crack heads with a mouth full of cock and the next day the lot of the Republicans will be right back to business as usual claiming he’s a Marxist bone-in-the-nose witchdoctor with a bogus birth certificate sent as a Manchurian Candidate from Kenya to destroy our freedoms™. In that sense, as with religious nut jobs and conspiracy theorists, you have to give the Right Wing credit: They are completely cynical and bat-shit crazy, but their discipline in unwavering adherence to a completely fictional narrative is admirable.

Then again, no matter how recalcitrant and stupid the right-wing is, those attributes wouldn’t make any difference at all if there weren’t a significant percentage of the population as mean, rude, compromised and bat-shit crazy as they are, who keeps putting them back into office. In fact, what worries the Republicans these days is not whether they are mean, stupid and crazy, but whether whether they are mean, stupid and crazy enough to make significant gains with the American voting public in time for the upcoming mid-term election.

As I attempt to reboot this sad, Mary Celeste of a web site, I wish to affirm that, through the years, through divorce, and recovery, illness and despair one thing has not changed: And that is my complete contempt for the  fatuous, mean-spirited bags of fucking stupid that makes up a deciding majority of Americans.

Yes, the people in elected office are tools, but the real rat-fuckers are the ones who keep putting them there, mostly to prevent fictional welfare queens from stealing stuff they don’t even have.

Things were bad during the Bush years. So bad that if future historians don’t see that period at a complete derailing of our Constitutional Republic, at the very least the wheels on one side of the train hovered over the rails by at least a couple of feet. The election of Barack Obama had a feeling of the same sense of relief a passenger on that train would experience with the jolt of those wheels slamming back down in place. So we can now say that the train is securely back on track.

Which would be reassuring, except we are firmly back on a track where the route goes over a chasm, and the bridge is out.

The real would-be-comic-if-it-wasn’t-tragic thing about the right-wing ciphers and cardboard cut-outs in office is to look at the poor sacks who keep voting for them. They aren’t the elites. There aren’t enough fabulously wealthy people to win elections on their own and corporations — as of this moment, but subject to change without notice under the Roberts Supreme Court — can’t vote. The people who keep putting the wingnut elite back into office are the masses of aging, marginally middle-class, undereducated, just-about-trailer trash, fat-assed, burger-eating douche-bags who could really use a comprehensive universal health care plan, but can be cajoled by a few Facebook comments by Sarah Palin and some cheap propagandistic ads into taking the streets screaming bloody murder how they don’t want what’s good for them. These are exactly the same sort of people who get all worked up over the idea that if their daughter is taught Evolution in the public schools then, as a logical necessity, she’ll get knocked up as of fifteen minutes ago. In the past the sort of issue that riled up this sort was communism, fluoridation, and being denied their God-given right to shit where they slept.

Forget the economy. Forget the two wars we’re mired in in the Middle East, one of which serves absolutely no sane purpose, even forget health care and think of this: That whether or not we can teach the Theory of Evolution in American public schools — a theory first described by Charles Darwin in 1859 and supported by every advance in genetics, biochemistry, developmental biology, comparative anatomy, immunology, geology, and paleontology since — is still an iffy proposition. That should serve as a rough measure of just how close-minded, anti-intellectual, agenda-drive and, in a hyphenated phrase, bat-shit crazy we are as a country. Before one can solve problems one has to face facts, and from Iraq to Wall Street that’s something we’ve show time and time again we just can’t do.

I’ve spend most of my intellectual adulthood arguing with religious fundamentalists, spiritualists, conspiracy theorists and believers in all manner of unlikely woo. You just can’t convince them that the nonsense they believe in isn’t true. Creationists will continue to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old. Conspiracy theorists will continue to believe that JFK was shot with a “frangible bullet” fired from the Grassy Knoll by Badgeman under the direction of Carlos Tropicante , as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton, and there’s very little you can do about it. It’s not because they are incapable of comprehending reality, they tend to hold down jobs and can fill out complicated tax forms in other circumstances, but when it comes to some specific subjects they are just mental. The Republicans tools in office will keep shilling and the teagaggers, birthers, racists, paranoids and generally stupid will continue voting for them.

I feel for Obama. I really do. Because as a reasonable man he’s not just trying to teach pigs to sing. Instead, he’s put himself in the unenviable, untenable position of being choirmaster to the all-pig chorus.