Monday, February 06, 2017

Here, Have Some Housepox

     When it comes to politics, many people -- maybe most -- disgust me.  Rationality goes out the window and whatever is wrong, it's always the other party's fault.  Elaborate justification for whatever might look hinky on one's own side of the aisle complete with no-true-Scotsman in full regalia, sporran, skean dhu, bagpipes and all, but those bloody-handed bastards on the other side are a single, solid mass, skilfully manipulated by their puppetmasters: Soros!  Koch! Bloomberg! Bannon!

     You know what the reality is?  Every one of those guys -- even the sneakiest, cleverest, richest of the lot, pick your choice, is floundering.  Oh, they may stumble a little less than we do, and get a little more light shed in one corner or another, but they, like you or me, are doing good to keep up.  It's 2017 and a goatherd barely out of the Stone Age armed with a can of gasoline can, for a short while, speak just as loudly and influentially as the greasiest éminence grise.  Those fellows who look so confident, generals and zillionaires, Congressthings and shady wheeler-dealers?  It's a front; they've got their refuges and boltholes and they hope their ride will wait, but they have no better handle on the future than you do and their only real plan is to see the next sunrise with their skin intact.  They rely on custom and habit and the dull goodwill of their fellow humans every bit as much as you do.

     If you can't get that through your head, I'm done with ya.  If you'd rather live in Superman comic books -- and not even the good ones -- than the real world, then git.  We're not pals.  Not because you're a bad person but because you can't tell imaginary icebergs from real ice cubes or a real polar bear from a fake bearskin rug

     In January, we saw one of the great civil miracles of modern civilization: the peaceful transfer of power of a major nation going off without a hitch in a ceremony that's been performed every four years since the end of April, 1789, and you know what people did?  They went after trivia.  After speculative nonsense.  And it has only become worse every day since.

     Serious discussion has become impossible and I haven't got time to wrassle ants.