I Aten't Ded

      Kinda missed blogging yesterday.  I've been feeling physically lousy, and then there's the conceptual side of things: what's the point? 

      Old alignments have broken down and significant portions of the old blogosphere have bought into political nutjobbery of a kind that I had thought only grabbed public imagination (and the posturing of politicians) these days in the Third World and the struggling (not to mention occasionally backsliding) governments of the former Warsaw Pact.

      As near as I can figure, all it took was for the last survivors of the Holocaust and the last WW II veterans to die off, for memories of Stalin* to mellow against Russia's 20th/21st Century economic unrest and turmoil, and suddenly the idea of the Great Leader, of Caesar, was back and throbbing with blood, soil, and feel-don't-think bullshit.  People are cheering for it from Moscow to Warsaw, from France to...well, to right here.  The good old U.S. of A.  The French dealt the damnable notion a hard blow in their recent elections but the brass bands are still blaring here, and...I don't know.   When one party's leaning into the Leader Principle and the Big Lie good and hard, and the other party is milling around, rearranging their same old deck chairs and hoping the sinking will stop on its own, there's not much to look ahead to.

      Blogging as I once did about Those Clowns in Washington has become just another form of deck-chair Solitaire -- this does not mean our elected nitwits have suddenly become less clownish, just that there's less use in pointing it out; nobody's listening to anything bad about their favorite clowns.  Though some of the clowns are more evil than usual (and in a way that is structurally dangerous), the audience here under the Big Top is cheering and laughing louder than ever.

      Fates help us all when the lion-tamer shows up, pistol on his hip, cracking the whip.  A whole lot of people are gonna line up to go into the cage -- especially if they'll have a chance at the red meat of the fellow citizens they despise most.
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* In case you're thinking, "He helped win WW II!  He industrialized Russia!  How bad could he be?"  Bear (ahem) in mind he was so bad that Nikita ("We will bury you!") Khrushchev officially denounced him...once he was safely dead and embalmed, and not one second earlier.