The Wheels Come Off...

OK people, one more time...

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

-- Sinclair Lewis

We no longer live in a free country. The fruitloops, wingnuts, cornpone nazis, Bible-thumping demagogues, race-warrior rednecks, fat-cat plutocrats and sundry ruling elite have the levers of governmental power firmly in their greasy hands and they aren't even being subtle about using them to maintain power over the rabble. The cops at the GOP convention in St. Paul were just a flicker of this ugly statism. The NYPD acting like Gestapo or the NKVD on behalf of our GOP overlords four years ago were another mere flicker. The Secret Service is keeping the press away from the crowds at Palin rallies and publicly denying that cries of "Kill Him" and "Off with his head" are happening at them, even though video evidence is widely available to the contrary. Taking a cue from Moose-a-lini's declaration that we have pro-American and anti-American parts of, urm, AMERICA, we now are treated to the sight of elected public officials denouncing other elected public officials in Congress as un-American:

(why is there never a damned HUAC around when you need one!)

We have the GOP actively trying to create their own Sturmabteilung in Wisconsin. In California, the R's are not even trying to hide their racism with "Obama Bucks" nor their moral degeneracy in advocating the torture of their opponent. The wingnut Rightie hate-radio bloviators are so determined to make their paranoid listeners join them in seeing a conspiracy under every rock that one of them accuses Obama of creating his own Obama-ized version of the American flag when he saw pictures of Obama in front of flags with a big "O" on them, even though Ohioans would be surprised to learn that he'd adopted their fine state flag for his dawning dictatorship of one during a speech in Toledo, Ohio. Speaking of conspiracies, the attorney scandal (remember the why's and wherefore's of Alberto Gonzales' departure from public life?) is an actual conspiracy ongoing, as we now learn that not only is the FBI investigating ACORN for vote-fraud, just weeks before the election but several US Attorney's offices are proceeding with their own investigations in the wake of McCain's hyperbolic screech in the last debate that ACORN is a threat to the very fabric of democracy. In the wake of that accusation, the GOP brownshirt brigades in Seattle and Boston vandalized ACORN offices, while ACORN officials in Cleveland and Providence, RI received death threats. I'm certain that it's all a coincidence.

This is no longer just the whimpering of a few disaffected ex-hippies and assorted leftist student groups. The country is disintegrating after 40 years of Rethuglican "leadership" and the foot-soldiers who enabled and reinforced the Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II regime are reverting to type as the failure of all their most-cherished tropes and assorted other lies bespeaks their own personal failure and it makes them angry and prone to seek a scapegoat. Like Germany in the 1920's & 1930's. McSneer and Moose-a-lini are doing everything they can to solidify the racist, persecution-complexed middle of American society. Note that I didn't characterize it as "underbelly" or some such. It isn't. This putrescent hatred is interwoven in the very fabric our national character. It is the legacy of a nation built on genocide and human chattel slavery.

I'm not sure what they think will come of it, but the way I see it, McCain is a rich, grumpy, entitled old man who doesn't understand why the world won't just give him what he wants by dint of his gender, skin color, pedigree and resume and if he has to dip his widdle-footsie into the stinking, sulphurous, seething pool of evil that bubbles in the heart of the political right, then so be it, it can't possibly stain him because so doing furthers his ambitions and thus must be for the greater good; not the greater god of all Americans, mind you, but the greater good of the good Americans, the pro-Americans, his friends & family & business partners. His denials of the actual ugliness of his campaign's behavior stem, I think, from his pathological inability to see the wrongness of the underlying worldview that drives the behavior. In other words, the rabble who advocate violence are only doing so in the name of defending John McCain's America. As another senator from Arizona said at the beginning of the Right's nightmarish march to political hegemony (just before going down in defeat to the last Democrat to preside over a national consensus):

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

Which, in light of how utterly without principle or scruple they've conducted their political affairs since reads now like marching orders for a movement. Rethuglicans have seen every action through that lens and John McCain is no different, which is why the souring tone of his rallies doesn't phase him and the preposterousness of his distortions of fact and outright lies simply don't compute for him. His moral compass is broken, his internal ethical radar calibrated to different priorities.

Sarah Palin lies on the other side of McCain's cynical political calculations. She is a dimwit and a demagogue, but she is not a leader, good or bad. She is just another slack-jawed, Kool-Aid drinking rabble who got herself fast-tracked up the ranks through sheer pluck, luck and a total absence of core principle. If she were smarter, she'd be like Karl Rove - a collaborating member of the proletariat who knows his place on the food chain and instead assists the plantation masters in keeping the other slaves in line to earn favors, priviledges and access. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is too stupid to know that she isn't one of them, but rather is the type of manipulative social-climber who takes any apparent lack of social status as merely a failure of perception to be remedied by MILF-y charm, will to power or a well-timed shivving. She is the shiny new face of the same old blood-thirsty, Dixie-anchored rump of an electoral coalition McCain's approaching defeat will reveal.

By "Dixie-anchored" however, I don't mean geographically, although that will be true as well. The Solid South will remain so, even if the city-fied transplants from DC and other dins of iniquity further up the Eastern Seaboard make Virginia and North Carolina swing back and forth over the next few election cycles. No, I mean the mindset and values of The South, the mythical south of the redneck NASCAR "Lost Cause" Sunbelt sprawling cookie-cutter suburb & mega-church popular imagination. THAT South, the one that gets weepy when Lee Greenwood sings "Proud to be an American," is nationwide. And the policies of the ruling class over the last 40 years - enacted through the vigorous machinations of their pet political party, the GOP - have made their lives immeasureably worse through regressive taxation, crony capitalism, a self-justifying military-industrial war-making complex , industrial sell-off, rigging of the financial system and a relentless culture war. These are the ways that a greedy, pernicious ruling class maintains its power not just in America, kiddies, but everywhere in the world. They create a politics, through violence or bribery or both, that will eventually come to resemble the political Right in any country anywhere at any time in history for they are all the same in their fundmental desire to protect power & priviledge and supress the masses for fun & profit. Sometimes this is called monarchy, sometimes a dictatorship or a banana republic or a fascist state, sometimes it is "The People's Republic of..." and the plutocrats mouth communal doctrines of the "for thee not for me" variety, but the desire to constrict, restrict and suppress is an impulse of the political right.

Billmon, who vanished for a few years before re-surfacing recently back over at Daily Kos, wrote about the American variety of this eternal theme on his now-defunct blog (hence - no link):

If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology), libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government. . . .

Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. Post Civil War industrialization and financial colonization produced the Populists -- both good (Mother Jones) and bad (Tom Watson and Pitchfork Ben Tilman). The waves of 19th and early 20th century immigration spurred the rise of the Know Nothings and the modern Klu Klux Klan. The New Deal and the civil rights era incited the John Birch Society and Goldwater conservatism. And now the blowback effects of globalization (what conservative ideologues sneeringly deride as "multiculturalism") coupled with the patriotic and xenophobic passions unleashed by the war against Al Qaeda, have turbocharged the traditionalists into declaring something close to all-out war on the modernists -- as symbolized, at the moment, by the traitorous New York Times. . . .

The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.

A running topic on his blog was the Spanish Civil War, which he persuasively argued was a strong analog to the type of war we're going to have when our Civil War 2 breaks out. The Spanish Civil War was a brutal affair that pitted neighbor against neighbor, neighborhood against neighborhood. It was not a matter of armies blue and gray (or is it blue and red?) ranging against each other across open fields. It was fought with meat cleavers and clubs in alleyways and in the streets. The Nazis helped out with planes and guns, which gave us "Guernica", but that conventional 20th Century-style warfare was the exception. The rest of the war was vicious and rife with atrocities.

Touching on that idea, I wrote about it over at my old LiveJournal site:

I think this time in our history is comparable to the years leading up to our previous civil war in the hostile balkanization of the political camps. Back then, it was about slavery. BTW, never let anyone argue that our Civil War was ever about anything else but whether or not we would be a nation that allowed the ownership of human beings. Anyone who does argue thusly is a southern apologist merely muddying the waters to dilute their own reflected regional culpability.

So, I think we are barreling toward a civil war, something like the Spanish Civil War, a war lacking in front lines, where neighborhoods fielded partisan gang armies against the gang armies other neighborhoods, where neighbors hacked their next-door neighbors to death, where not even churches could offer safe harbor against murderous mobs. I fear for this country because predominant regional political differences as expressed by congressional representation belie deeper cultural differences that have more to do with religious affiliation, level of education and line of work and union affiliation and exist everywhere all at once apart from larger political culture. I am thinking, for instance, of true-blue Austin, an island of education and cultural sophistication in deep-red Texas, a sea of menacingly willful ignorance, hostility to cultural diversity and easy violence. I am also thinking of the fact that the police force in this bright blue city (to say nothing of the firefighters, or even blue-collar union members in general - the number of IATSE stagehands who LOVE George W. Bush is both sickening and shocking - and the entire Borough of Staten Island) are a bright shade of scarlet because red-ness & blue-ness is not an expression of regional difference, but rather of deep-seated cultural impulse. Police in general, NYPD in particular, are always on the side of authoritarianism. As metaphive once pointed out to me - for the police the whole civilian population is divided into two groups: perps and sheep. For police it is not about "protecting and serving" but rather maintaining order first and protecting property second, and serving people only insofar as it reinforces the first two items.

When the shit hits the fan, in Austin I would fear for the safety of the community that has grown up around the University at the hands of an armed and culturally resentful wider population with a collective chip on its shoulder - the animosity between Texas A&M and UT-Austin is only good-natured to a point. In New York, the police are also armed and deeply sympathetic to the racist, violent, and culturally resentful impulses normally attributed to the dark side of Jeff Foxworthy's America. Up to this point, NYPD and their blue-collar fellow-travellers have reached a kind of truce with the liberal forces that dominate this city, but unleashed by widespread social unrest, who knows what kinds of ugliness could ensue.

That is why I argue that the next Civil War, as murky as the lines of our previous war of brother against brother were, won't be even as well-defined as that one.

And, sadly, the fascists won in Spain. They were never defeated and Franco died in his bed of Parkinson's on November 20, 1975. If Obama wins this one, I fear an epic outbreak along all the traditional social and cultural and class lines in this country that could escalate, spurred on by rhetoric from the hate-spewers on talk radio, into a gradually-escalating civil conflict. Their side doesn't view any Democratic administration as a legitimate governing body. Add to that the racial component brought on by Obama's skin color, intensified by the cultural bigotry of his odd-sounding name, amid an economic crisis and a deeply unpopular war abroad, and you have the Ruling Class' Frankenstein's monster going off the rails in a likely violent national social upheaval.

I fear for the health of the candidate and that of our nation.

More on this topic later.

Conservatism's creed, simplified

From driftglass:

1. “The common good” is an evil delusion
2. Looking out for "the least of these" is a Socialist plot.
3. Looking out for Number One is next to Godliness.
4. And therefore the rules of courtesy, reciprocity, tolerance and prudence are strictly for suckers.

Something Political

OK, so I have to say something about this. First, Broadway Carl has a wonderful post up right now that pretty neatly echoes my feelings about Obama's emergence as a viable candidate and what that has meant to me, so go read it and - may I say across the deafening roar of the inter-web "conversation" - hear, hear!

No, really, go read his post before continuing here. Go ahead. I'll wait.

OK, so now that you've read it, I have feelings about this:


What I see in his eyes is defeat. I see a man who has been not been sober in while, drunk on ambition and rage or doped up on Ambien (who knows?), finally seeing with his own eyes the horror he has wrought and knowing that he can do nothing about it.

Maybe he understands now and feels bad. Right now, I don't think so because I think he's got ambition and part of me even hangs this on his Barbie wife. Her money has paid for his political career and I have no doubt that they have had more than one conversation that went something like "What the fuck have I been paying for all these years!? I have underwritten all your crappy campaigns for all these years and godammit I want me a president!"

Or words to that effect.

I don't mean to deflect blame from Mavericky McMaximum-Maverick-ossity. He's a douche. Not as big a douche as The Quisling from Connecticut, but close. Barbie-doll McCain and how she got to be Ms. McMaverick is proof enough of that, but I think he does have shreds of decency in him, they've just been swamped by his Macbethian ambition to the point of irrelevance.

After the election, though...

When Congress is out of session and he is at one of his houses with a pissed-off Cindy and no one is calling him and he has hours and days to putter around the house and review his life, thinking back on flight school and Hanoi and the Keating Five and the South Carolina GOP primary in 2000 and all those ugly rallies he whipped up to solidify his base as some kind of revenge for what happened to him there... so many thoughts... so many regrets...

Especially if something should now happen to Obama. How could such an outcome not be blamed directly on the toxic sewer of the rhetoric of the last few weeks of his campaign, a stretch that has begun to resemble nothing so much as a political rally in Bavaria circa 1924 or 25?

How else to describe it? John McCain sold his soul. We know it. We've all known it for quite a while. His friends and loved ones know it, too, but I think they are too in love with his status and how it reflects on them to tell him, if any of them have even admitted it to themselves. He definitely hasn't admitted to himself yet.

But he will.

And that will be a dark, dark day in a lifetime of dark days for John Sidney McCain, who has so proudly held his honor as his greatest treasure to know that he sold even that. Maybe such a day will come, but then maybe he will simply slide into senility without ever having admitted to himself how very, terribly wrong he has been.

The man in that video will someday be able to admit it, perhaps even out loud and to other people if not just to himself, but such a man is having an ever harder time swimming out of the mental sewer of drugs, senility and bad advice in which he is now adrift.

It is a scary time in America and The Maverick is to blame if things get any scarier. If he were a true man of principle, wouldn't be here.

I leave the last word to a very eloquent post over at Bob Cesca's place (h/t Broadway Carl)

In recklessly stoking the fires of bigotry and hatred to near-maelstrom temperatures and then refusing to carry the torch himself, John McCain has surrendered legitimate political responsibility for their anger and yielded the floor to those whose rage now has no champion. In goading them on, planting seeds of doubt and sewing acres of hate while bravely promising to take the good fight to Obama’s door, McCain played to a Base -- and baseless -- fear for which he himself was the conquering Hero, a role he has no trouble imagining for himself. But this gutless little man, finding his own house burning after feckless arsonists in his employ set the Obama barn ablaze, has found he cannot stand the heat; with no lawful political means to control the burn, this is a fire that may spread without sense or sensibility, feeding on its own hot futility.

If those cowardly masses that saw a strong and righteous John McCain as the sole arbiter of their rage now find him a paper tiger frightened by his own swaggering shadow, they may appoint themselves Heroes in this contrived battle between Right and Wrong, Blue and Red, Black and White. A vigilante, after all, acts out of the perception that The System has failed, its leaders too cowardly or corrupt to take up the sword. They say politics abhors a vacuum. But this may be a fire that burns hottest when starved of McCain’s hot, fetid air.

One final, monstrous smash-and-grab

What else to say?

How else to characterize it?

The bailout, which is SOOOO last week I know, is (as Mr. Sideshow wrote a couple of weeks ago), long before Hank "The Donald Rumsfeld of Economics" Paulson's "Give-Me-All-The-Money-And-Don't-Fucking-Ask-Me-Any-Questions-Or-The-Economy-Gets-It" three-page plan was scuttled in The House - the People's Chamber - by the "Tru-Believers" in the Rethugli-bot coalition (before being rescued by The Senate - The Plutocrat's Chamber) because - weaned on the poison milk of the Reagan Revolution as they are - they never understood that all that free-market rhetoric was just so much malarky spread by the Ruling Class to get their signature pet policies package-dealt with all those the Culture War rostrums that get the shrieking wingnut brigades nice and agitated for the end result of election victories that translate via Abramoff and Delay and the like into more money in the pockets of the Monied Class. The poor dears, those useful tools, willing pawns in a game they are too stupid or stubborn to understand (h/t to Lance Mannion):

One final, monstrous smash-and-grab raid on the treasury before they leave office

That about sums up the entire Bush Administration, don't it? W has been the very culmination of that vaunted "Reagan Revolution." He is the distilled essence of all that is ugly, greedy, simplistic, violent and mendacious in the entire intellectual (if that's even an appropriate word for this willfully ignorant bunch of hate-spewing know-nothings) underpinnings of the modern GOP.

We can all see that now as Grandpa McSimpson gets snarling and ugly at the uppity n*gger who dares challenge his white priviledge, as he sics Ms. Spunky McBeauty-Queen on him like some racist Alabama cop in a black & white newsreel from 1965 would sic a German Shephard on a black man who didn't know his place, but this time with lipstick. Sarah Palin is a racist. And the crowds who attend her speeches are, too.

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Because McCain was never radical enough for the fruitloops who run the GOP, he has been kept away from the heavy machinery. Only now, after the entire Rethugli-goon ascendancy of the last 30 years has been revealed to be the massive power and money grab that it was way back when Nixon Went A-Courtin' the racists in Old Dixieland, when the press let Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun's senile brain just make shit up and they smiled and called it cute, when all our Defenders of the First Amendment marched lockstep into the panty-sniffing abyss to tsk-tsk about dalliances as the cackling wingnut gremlins of the rightwing impeached a lawfully elected and popular president of the opposing party just for spite and then pivoted 180º to poo-poo the so-called howling moonbat liberals and other assorted Dirty Fucking Hippies who didn't think that maybe launcing headlong into a land war in the Heart of Arabia for the sake of cheap oil - while lead by a shifltless moron the shitkickers in fly-over country wanted to have a beer with - was necessarily the wisest and (as that shiftless moron's corrupt daddy would sputter) "prudent" action to take in the wake of an attack by men who had arisen from the educated middle class of a different country who was ostensibly one of our allies and whose iron-fisted ruling family is a well-known and well-documented friend to the entire clan of that aforementioned shiftless moron who would lead that kamikaze charge.

Only now, after Junior has wrecked the whole machine, run it aground, burned up the pistons and ripped out the radio (in case he can hock it on his way back to Crawford), have they let McSnarl have the keys.

Do what you can with it, Grumpy. Vroom, vroom.

Call Your Representatives

Call your congress-critter and tell them to vote against the bail-out.

Here's the number to the main switchboard. Call it and ask for your representative's office:
(202) 224-3121

If you don't know who your representative is, here's a webpage to help you find him/her:
https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml

Don't let Nancy Pelosi and the Wilting-Violets in the Democratic Caucus in Congress obediently scrape and bow to the "wise" old crooks in pinstripe suits (GOP-ers, to a man) who will frown and scowl and in patient "I have special knowledge that you must respect so don't fucking question me" tones tell them that this no-strings-attached $700 Billion bail-out is The. Only. Way. To save. Our economy.

I would like to note that the proposal conveniently has the following Wall-Street-Masters-of-the-Universe approved Fact Cat-protection clause:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Ahh, checks and balances. Give us your fucking money but don't ever question anything we say or do, peon. What's mine is mine and whats yours is mine, too. Welcome to AmeriKKKa. As thers writes today over at Eschaton:

"[R]ight now the choice is, Bush's Plan, or Something Else. Kill Bush's Plan now, worry about Something Else later."

Fuck 'em. Let 'em swing. Our petroleum-dependent economy is going to go down the tubes whether we actually enact this bailout or not, so why not just let it happen now? Sort of like ripping off the band-aid instead of pulling slowly.

And, just for spite, I reiterate my point from my previous post that we throw the entire lot of them in prison and make their families buy them out. We'll see how attached their families are to those yachts and private jets and multiple homes when they would have to give them up, and I mean give them all up - in toto - to get their respective patriarchs out of the clink. Besides, why do we have to bail these assholes out when they get to keep all their stuff?

Once again, I leave it to digby (full disclosure - I once was an avid follower of Ayn Rand, then I realized she was full of shit and a crappy writer, to boot. It was college. I was young and foolish and taking lots of drugs):

(SEC Chairman Chris) Cox is just a natural symptom of the illness of modern conservatism's Randian philosophy, which, at its core, really does hold that the Big Money Boyz should be allowed unfettered freedom to make money without restrictions or rules. And when they gamble on the wrong thing, they believe that it is the right thing for the rubes to bail them out. Their basic philosophy holds that the taxpayers are parasites who benefit when the John Galts of the world make money so they should shoulder the burden when they fail. Indeed, they believe the serfs should be grateful for what they got out of it

Know your place, serf.

Pauper's Prisons

Now, granted, I am a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak, but if the bailout for all these financial firms is going to total in the trillions, why not get the bulk of that money from the people who were so well compensated for being at the helm when the place failed? I like the idea of a bailout being predicated on the people who got rich(er) running a company into the ground giving back all the money. And I do mean all the money. Or the government gets to seize and auction off their assets until the bill is covered, just like we get to do to the drug lords and mafia goons who are their moral and ethical fellow-travellers.

I know most of that money is sunk into yachts and seaside homes in the French Riviera, or hidden in numbered accounts from Switzerland to the Caymans, but if we told them that if they don't pay it back we'll throw them in prison, I'm pretty sure they'd find a way to cough up some of the dough. Pauper's prisons for the plutocratic class. A little global class war to usher in the new century.

I know our overlords will never allow that to happen and we the average taxpayer will be required to cover the bills these fucking self-designed Master of the Universe have racked up. I hate them and think the iron bars of their precious gated communities should be overrun and their silk drapes burned, a'la Russia circa 1917.

Fight the Power!

Coming up for air...

So much has happened. Sorry for the long, looooong pause between posts. Work has started to overwhelm my schedule. No relief in sight, at least for another month+, but I wanted to take the time to make the following observations:

Regarding New Orleans and Hurricane Gustav:

New Orleans is in a geological bowl. Recall that after Karina the water needed to be pumped out because it will never, ever drain on its own. New Orleans is several feet below sea level and that will never get any better since it doesn't rest on "land" as we in the rest of the country understand it. The whole city essentially sits on water-saturated river mud of varying densities and a building will slowly sink under its own weight on that kind of surface, so it only gets worse over time.

Making things worse still is that the Gulf of Mexico is also a gigantic geologic bowl into which the Mississippi River has been pouring sediment for millions of years and thus is itself sinking into the Earth's crust, pulling down the edges of the Gulf with it. Texas has slip faults as far inland as Austin as a result. So the bedrock on which the mud NOLA is sinking into is also itself sinking.

And, third, the Army Corps of Engineers has, since WW2, diked and dammed and leveed the shit out of the river to control flooding, which has had two major negative results: 1.) the protective fresh-water swamps around the city, which soak up storm energy and act as a natural buffer between the salt-water Gulf and the fresh-water inland lakes and streams, are not being replenished with the silt from the Mississippi's once annual floods and thus are eroding at an ever accelerating rate as salt-water from the Gulf kills the fresh-water ecology that maintains the swamp and 2.) the River is dumping silt and sediment farther out into the Gulf than it has ever in geologic history which means it is not replenishing the deep-sea mud "shelf" that shores up the Louisiana coast-line, which also accelerates the erosion process.

As bad as this scenario seems, all of the above assumes everything will simply continue as it always has. If you also factor in Global Climate Change and the accompanying rise in sea level plus the increasing intensity of storms as a result of a warmer ocean, New Orleans doesn't have a prayer. Katrina wasn't The Big One. Katrina was the shot across the bow. It is not a matter of if New Orleans will ever get a direct hit from a Category 5, it is simply a matter of when.

Sadly, I think this jewel of our civic firmament should be abandoned. It was always more of a frontier outpost akin to something on the banks of the Congo or the Amazon than to a proper city anyway - a commercial enterprise that once served a specific economic purpose and now survives simply because it has survived up to now.

Regarding McCain, Gustav & Palin:

I think, as much as it pains me to say it, that McCain and the Rethuglicans are in the right to modify their convention plans. Their reasons for doing it, however, are suspect and deplorable. One, they are doing to it neutralize the baggage the entire GOP establishment carries from the aftermath of Katrina - no "Heckuva job, Brownie" moments this time around. Two, we all know that W will once again allow McSame to step in, act all bossy (like he did a few weeks ago during the Russia/Georgia dust-up) and more or less appear to rubes and nitwits who constitute the bulk of the GOP voting bloc to already be running things as part of that appear-to-be-winning-by-acting-like-a-winner strategy. Also, this is akin in their minds to the idea from any dictatorship (and we know W and the Rethugli-goons do love them some dictatorishness) where the party and the government are seperate, but nevertheless function as one. Think of the Communists in Soviet Russia or the Nazis in WW2 Germany. The government in both cases (and anywhere a country suffers under one-party rule) was kept separate from the party for appearances sake, but was still completely subservient to the dictates of the party.

We're not fully a dictatorship yet in this country, but the police state tactics currently underway in Minnesota (h/t Mr. the Broadway Carl) are in keeping with our slide into fascism. I was in NYC in 2004 for the GOP convention and I remember how much the NYPD, already something of a violent occupying force in this city on a good day, turned into full-riot-gear and machine-guns-and-dogs enforcement mode. This devolution will only accelerate as the actual mechanisms of government and law enforcement are increasingly populated by like-minded people who gleefully and proudly cleave ever tighter to an ever more authoritarian political party. The US Attorney scandal is part of this same seizing of the reigns of power, a politicization of the actual structures of law-enforcement, wherein political opponents are jailed simply for dissent in the name of law & order (Siegelman anyone?), just like a third-world banana republic (which I think they want to turn this country into anyway). This is the country we've become thanks to the thugs, goons, know-nothings and nitwits who constitute America's modern Republican Party

We should henceforce call them Banana Republicans.

In that way, McCain isn't so much a "maverick" really. On the contrary, he's a natural to now take the helm at the GOP. The GOP has been on a relentless march to authoritarian power since the racist Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic party for friendlier territory in Nixonland. One of the weapons in their arsenal during this march has been our collective national memory of the Vietnam War, which they have labored hard to re-shape in the intervening decades, building up a Dolchstoßlegende mythology around it - we could have won, "if only...".

Finally, after all this time, they get a Vietnam vet at the head of their ticket. Not only that, but in fact they get one of the ones who actually believes we could have won that immoral imperial occupation were it not for all the pointy-headed liberals and bleeding-heart war doves and dirty fucking hippies and Jane Fonda, just as the polarizing power of "the Vietnam experience" - when used as a red, white & blue code word to condemn all the purported excesses of the 1960's in the cultural battles of the last four decades - has finally started to fade. Sad, really, and sad that Vietnam vets are getting too old to even seek the job anymore. Just got one in under the wire, I suppose.

Whatever.

Vietnam has been the GOP's cudgel to beat the Democrats into meek submission for 40 fucking years. In so doing, they have successfully shifted the center of gravity in American politics oh-so-slowly to the right, ever more militaristic, authoritarian and plutocratic, to the point that even though our military budget is larger than all the other nations on the planet combined, nobody deemed "serious" in either party would even consider raising the slightest objection to that kind of spending on the machinery of death - if only on fiscal grounds, much less moral. The Dems have let it happen, sure, but the cultural turmoil of the 1960's that so upset the Establishment and the good (white) people of Main Street America and sent the whole herd flailing and fainting into the greasy hands of Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun in the 1980's simply don't matter anymore. The Boomers are dying off and the college campus battles they carried from their youth all the way into retirement are finally dying off with them. It is a new century and the GOP's bullying and beating of anyone to the left of Pinochet stops right here, right now, laid at Johm McSame's mangled feet with a toe-tag marked "I was a POW."

If anyone had any doubt about this dawning of a new age, Obama's speech last week should have sufficed to awaken them. More on that in a moment.

In the meantime, I will make the following prediction: Sarah Palin will drop out before the election. She will get him through the convention, shore up his Dominionist credentials with the drooling Jesus freaks, score him a few free points with the PUMA's on the other side of the aisle, then she will cite family concerns, drop out and go away. The Man Called Petraeus will retire from the Army and join the ticket with McCain sometime in early October. That will be the October Surprise, 2008-style.

Regarding The Speech, Barack Obama and What It All Means:

What can I say that hasn't already been said? Electric. Intergalactic. Dazzling. Wish I'd been there.

It is the most amazing political speech I have ever seen and will likely ever see, even if I live to be 103 (a lady in my building died this weekend at the age of 103, so that number sorta jumped out at me). The tone of the speech generally conveyed the idea that this Democrat is not going to take it from those guys anymore.

I loved it.

I dearly wish he could become our next president, but I don't think the plutocrats will let him have it. America has a way of robbing us of those who really give us sincere hope and no one has lifted our hopes like this since the men cut down by assassin's bullets during those hated 1960's. Remember, Stalin once said that it is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes. This one will be "close" in "key" districts in "key" states, but will ultimately, somehow, magically break for McCain. If it starts to look like Florida 2000 again, Obama will be persuaded (like I'm certain Kerry was in 2004) to bow out gracefully or else. Obama seems tough enough to test the "or else" which I fear will not be pretty.

I hope I'm wrong, but eight years of this criminal enterprise known as the "Bush Administration" has kept a lid on so many putrid kettles of K-Street fish that a government run by an opposition party intent on shining a light on every cockroach in Washington can simply never be allowed to happen. Ever. Too much money at stake, to say nothing of jail time.

But even if all that doesn't happen and the McCain/Petraeus ticket is somehow allowed to lose, the Cheney Administration will likely launch a war with Iran sometime in December or early January, just to make sure that either the Obama Administration is hamstrung by a national emergency from its first day in office or to construct a pretext for suspending the results of the election until the emergency has passed - sort of like those guys in Gitmo held until the war is over, except that we've declared war on an idea "terrorism" and not a state or government who can surrender, ergo: endless war. Sorry, Abdulluh.

Hell, even if they do manage to steal it for McCain/Petraeus, Cheney will still probably launch a war with Iran to keep McCain toeing the party line (for there is nothing like a fresh, shiny new war to keep the press jingoistic and the public stoked, dude), McCain will cite age-related health reasons early in 2009 and resign and we'll have General Petraeus as our Commander in Chief before next summer. I expect him to deliver his first address as C-in-C in full general's regalia so that we can finally end this charade that we are a free country and the Pentagon can assume it's regularly scheduled take-over of our government.

Regarding that Big Picture:

Which brings me to where I think we are now. We are at the end of history, or at least so many over-lapping sine waves of historical ontology all converging down into one huge conclusion that it will seem like the end of history. The battles of the 1960's are ended, yes, and the wave that crested with the Reagan Revolution and broke on shore with the Bush EPIC FAIL has mercifully receded to reveal the form of that skinny kid from Chicago. But what kind of country is Obama going to lead (if he is allowed to take office)? A country so exhausted that it cannot revive one of it's major cities nor extricate itself from an intractable resource war half a planet away. We have the smell of death about us, like the British did when the Zulus kicked their ass 100 years ago. When Roosevelt took office, despite the Depression, he took the reigns of a nation still rich in natural and intellectual and human and economic resources that only needed to be nudged into motion again. Granted, it took a war (and the widespread implementation of an oil-based economy) to fully revive the American economy, but there was something there to be revived. What about now? We are saturated with pollution and exhausted of spirit with crashing natural stocks of fish and game, forests that are dying of thirst and burning up due to climate change, a crumbling national infrastructure starved of funding for decades due to an ideological fetish for privatization. Where would a President Obama find the means to rejuvenate a country so bereft of resources on a dying planet?

But yet another subsiding wave of history is what driftglass recently called "The Negrological Constant." Our struggle with racism is far from over - to wit, a clearly qualified, energetic, charismatic young man like Barack Obama is nevertheless neck-in-neck with a gaffe-prone fuddy-duddy who can't even keep his own opinions straight from week to week, much less actual facts and still the pundits are positively mystified that Obama can't close the deal. Whatever could it be, I wonder? What could possibly make some people think twice about voting for someone like Barack Hussein Obama? You know, someone smart and funny and, uh, smart? What is it? What IS it? I dunno. It's a mystery. Must be Obama's fault, somehow. I'm just not sure what it could be.

At any rate, the fact that a black man has finally risen to the candidacy of a major political party says a lot about the continuing power of the racist meme as it wends its way through our collective national consciousness because it took so damned long to actually happen. Were it not for the fucking Electoral College, lo these many years, I don't think politicians would have been as able or as prone or as eager to play the race card to appeal to the rubes and crackers and redneck fuckwits in the third-world shit-hole known as the American South and we could have possibly seen a black man at the top of a ticket sooner than a century and a half after we fought a war to free his ancestors.

Possibly. But maybe not.

We have been amid the last gasp of that way of politicking since the Dixiecrats stampeded to the Party of Nixon. Viewed as the lancing of a boil, we have lived the expulsion of the puss and disease in the form of forty years of coded hate speech that has kept a dying GOP in power as they collapse into a minor regional party centered in the South. Well, you gotta dance with them's what brung ya. The fact that the best the GOP could do this time is Candidate John McCain (and the twittering chorus of disbelief in the ranks at his ascension) says a lot about how shallow their bench is these days. As a party, they represent the end of an era of history that began when the Virginia colonists traded with a Dutch ship for the first African slaves in America in 1619 and ought to have ended when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but in fact can only be said to have ended once "right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." A President Obama could one day be seen as just such an historical marker.

Another wave of history is the End of Oil, which drove America's post-WW2 prosperity. But I have argued before that the End of Oil also represents the end of the western dominance of the world. That era began when the first explorers left Europe 600 years ago and began to colonize the world, and specifically the New World, in the name of Christian civilization - which was always and without exception merely an ecumenical pretext for robbing the locals blind. European prosperity - the glamour of Paris, the industrial might of Britain, the soaring beauty of Spanish cathedrals, the refined culture of the Dutch and the Italians and the Germans, et al, was financed by and can be traced directly to the literally tens of thousands of shiploads of gold stolen from the Americas. All those sailing ships shooting at each other in the pirate movies the kids are all watching these days were fighting over stolen gold. America paid for the Europe we so admire today.

So much of our history is embroiled in that Grand Crime. America itself was founded in the genocidal middle of it, which I think blinds us to our place in it. We began as a commercial proposition - the fancy words and high-falutin' philosophy got added later. From the legacy of slavery to rampant corporatism to the echoes of Manifest Destiny we hear in the rhetoric of America as Global Policeman, we are the product of our national DNA. We were born in a whirl of racism, violence and abject greed (with a facade of brittle piety to make it all the more cloying), have never really stopped, and every time we've tried to be honest and come to grips with our origins in some kind of nationwide reckoning, we've usually erupted into a violent cultural spasm that has on more than one occasion devolved into an open shooting war.

In his own way, for better or worse, Obama represents the end of that longer era as well, at least some manner of sea change. Whatever's on the other side, I hope we can get there in one piece.

I'll be on again, off again for a while but I hope I've given you something to talk and think about. Please feel free to comment. In fact, I'm not proud - I'm begging you to comment.

Unicorn Farts

izzy o'rainey asks a very good question in response to my post about walkable cities:

What's your timetable for the Star Trek world where I don't have to work for money and can live in a dense-but-totally-biodegradable neighborhood with recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts?

(keep in mind that part of my job is pulling your leg)

Well, it seems to me when I think about Star Trek that whatever else may be said about the lack of conflict in the storylines or the relative androgyny of their creepily-sterile world, my biggest complaint would be that their world seems to take a staggeringly vast amount of energy to run. Which is why the geeks who dream up the technology for the show had to invent a virtually bottomless type of fantasy energy called dilithium to run all the warp drives and "Shh" doors and tri-corders and such. That world isn't running on black gold, that's for sure. And soon enough, neither will ours.

As I look into my crystal ball, I see oil only getting more extravagantly expensive in the coming years. I don't just mean gasoline for our cars. Expensive, depleting oil will drive up the cost of everything since petroleum is used to make, process, transport, heat, cool and otherwise store pretty much everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell throughout our days. Since so much of our national infrastructure is invested in an oil-based economy, from shopping malls to corner gas stations, our cities will shrink by necessity and what remains on the perimeter (the current-day suburbs) will remain a fairly rich source of partially processed materials to be scavenged for the retooling of the older center cities for decades into the next phase of human history - the post-petroleum future we once thought would look like 2001 (until we actually got there, when it started to look more like Road Warrior).

My guess, and this is only a guess, is that in ten years the scope of the catastrophe will be obvious to even the most obtuse, pro-Reagan, Limbaugh-loving nitwit - who will naturally blame it on Al Gore and the dirty fucking hippies anyway and who will also naturally deny ever having thought Global Warming and Peak Oil were hoaxes - but none of that will change the fact that only the wealthy will continue to own and operate motor vehicles and the very wealthy will actually be able to fly anywhere.

The very wealthy, that is, and the United States military - who will likely use up the very last drops of oil on earth to drive a tank into a ramshackle village somewhere in Iowa to put down a rebellion on behalf of the wealthy overlords who will be nervous about the threat of food riots by the serfs on their land. Although I think that scenario is several decades away, we are nevetheless in Iraq to secure an oil supply for the Pentagon, not for the average American car owner. Fighter jets gotta fly and tanks gotta make tracks and neither can run on re-used french fry grease or unicorn farts.

So, what I was saying in my earlier post was, more or less, that we will have these changes forced upon us. Some places are better positioned to weather the changes than others. If a place was fairly prosperous in the pre-car era, chances are that it may have enough legacy architecture and infrastructure to re-tool and adapt. 19th-Century cities have "good bones" upon which oil-free prosperity can be built. If not, then not. Phoenix, for example, will be unlivable in the post-petroleum future because they can't grow enough food locally to feed themselves, nor have enough electricity without oil to run the air-conditioners and water-pumps needed to keep the place habitable.

In other words, I don't think we're going to find a better, more eco-friendly way to run the world we live in now. Why would we want to? This world needs to change and we had a chance to get ahead of the curve three decades ago, but it was more profitable for the plutocratic class to double-down and stick future generations with the bill and it was more fun for the trogs to make fun of Jimmy Carter to the sound of a revving big-bore engine than to, you know, pitch-in and make a better future by conserving. Conserving is for suckers, nerds and wimps and who wants to be one of those?

Maybe if we'd invested in research when we had a chance, by now we'd have those recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts.

Or maybe dilithium.

Putrification of the American Spirit

Jimmy Carter called is a national "malaise" in the 1970's and has been ridiculed about it ever since, but I think we are again in such a rut at the dawn of the new century. I think any number of factors have contributed to this paucity of spirit - including but not limited to a three decade long assault by the joint Reich-wing and Rethugli-goon forces of bigotry, hatred of diversity and a proud and willful anti-intellectualism on anything soft, pretty or vaguely feminine, which has in turn reinforced a steeply pro-corporate (read "private") so-called public policy that has demanded an ever-expanding private realm at the expense of the public which invariably leaves many if not most people behind and those who aren't nevertheless distrustful, jealous and viciously protective of their ever-jeopardized status which in turn erodes the spirit of community and civic commitment that once bound people together, a crack into which corporate America can in turn pour it's cheap electronics, junk-food, crappy TV and environmentally corrosive products as a substitute for real connection, which weakens the mind and turns people into Rethugli-bots which renews and reinforces the downward spiral and so on. It's the end of America, really. And my Bill of Indictment on this putrification of the American Spirit has included:

1. The gaping hole at the south end of Manhattan Island which still has not been filled. The Empire State Building was erected in less time.
2. The always troubled but still vital American city that was washed away and is now being replaced by a Disney-esque - and very white - amusement park version of the dark and funky original.
3. The eroding national infrastructure that has already begun outstrip our ability to replace and repair it's deteriorating components - as symbolized by a collapsed bridge in the same town the Rethugligoons will hold their Nuremberg Rally. And all without a hint of irony.
4. The downward spiral of personal health of the average citizen, without hope of aid from a bloated, inefficient and imploding national health "care" system.
5. The collapsing dollar.

I can add the following item. The CDC doesn't have enough money to properly build containment doors for the horrifying diseases it is supposed to contain and control. They have to use duct tape. And it leaks.

As hilzoy sez about this issue: This is no way to run a country.


dva