"Whenever I go into a restaurant, I order both a chicken and an egg to see which comes first"

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

TRUMP WINS! America Therefore Is Evil, Fascist, And Racist - The Shameless Aftermath Of The Left's Decisive Loss

It's over, a win far greater and more impressive than anyone on either side expected.  The polls were wrong yet again and failed to account for the millions of Americans who, badgered, hectored, and intimidated by the Left hedged when asked, but voted their convictions. 

The almost ten years of howling, vicious, personal attacks on the President, the complicity of the media, and the reflexive knee-jerk condemnation of the political clergy kept conservatives under wraps, closeted, but never doubtful; but when it was time to vote, vote they did in record numbers to reverse the damaging, corrosive, hateful programs and policies of the Left. 

The coastal elites assumed in the failed Hillary campaign and now in the even more self-righteous, empty one of Kamala Harris, that victory was a foregone conclusion. Partisans believed their own cant and received wisdom: a) Trump is evil, a spawn of the Devil, Hitler reincarnate; and b) there is no way that a black woman can possibly lose anything.  

 

These arrogant, supercilious assumptions were a sign of political myopia at best and a deep-seated antipathy and shameless scorn, for the American working class.  Rubes, crackers, brainless gun-racked bass boat noodlers, Bible-thumping intellectual throwbacks, they were called; and fed up, riled up, and ready to act, they shouted in unison, 'BASTA!', and the rest is history. 

Will the Left finally admit defeat? Admit that they, in their political insularity, noxious dismissal of middle America, and self-righteous claims, were wrong?

Hardly. As of this writing Harris is still in hiding, not a peep, not one word of civility, respect, or modesty let alone congratulations which would be a sign of capitulation to Trump Nazi terror.  Things were not supposed to work out this way.  I was supposed to be elected.  I was supposed to be the first woman, a black one at that, to sit in the Oval Office.  There must be something I can do.  Think, Kamala, think!!!

As for those Democrats who were pulled from behind the arras to comment, nothing has changed.  America is a racist, homophobic, slanderously bigoted country and the only difference between yesterday and today is that voters admitted it.  'Our fight is just beginning', said a Harris supporter in Scranton.  'We must never let down our guard against the viral hate, the bilious spew of genocidal lust, the....' Here the woman spluttered with anger...'the Hitlerian jackbooted, brown-shirted, SS thugs who will put all black and brown people in a new, American Auschwitz...'

The reporter from MSNBC nodded and frowned with recognition.  A dark day for America, her network moaned; but half the country is still progressive in spirit, and We Shall Overcome. 

The howls and rancid commentary have just begin.  No navel-gazing among this crew.  Self-righteousness is not so easily tempered.  When one has bet one's whole being on the election, and gone to bed with smiles and a warm feeling and then awakened not just to a hair's breadth defeat but a gob-stopping blowout is an existential moment.  Everything in a progressive's mind, body, and spirit knew, simply knew that right would prevail, the Demon would once again be cast out, and sweetness and light would prevail in a Utopian age. 

The miscalculation was millennial.  They should have seen it coming, but turned away.  It cannot possibly happen, they said, never in a million years; and there he was again, smiling, joking, bantering as if the election were a round of golf at Mar A Lago and the victory speech a round of drinks.  How could he!! And not a black person in sight on the dais, all lily white people, smug, blonde, and impossibly beautiful, goddamn them!

 

Worse yet, not only did Democrats lose the Presidency, they lost both the Senate and the House of Representatives.  Now, with Republican control of all branches of legislative government and perhaps most importantly the Supreme Court, the cleansing of the Augean Stables will soon begin.  Trump will make good on his promises to roll back insidiously destructive gender-twisting, deforming policies, close the doors to the southern border and open them only to legal entries; end the war in Ukraine and stand solidly and immovably side by side with Israel against Palestinian and Iranian thugs; lower taxes, lighten regulation and stop the Stalinist oppression of the American energy industry.  

And the Senate and House will approve, ratify, and endorse every last one of President Trump's policies. The Left will lick its wounds, cavil and bitch, stand up and shout, but will be unheard - the new political supernumeraries, the new 'insignificants', time to pay up for the last four years of unbridled hatred and fantasy. 

America has spoken.  The working class, for so long disparaged and dismissed is ascendant.  Populism - not only the rule of the people but the ethos of popular rule - has returned. 

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

When Wackos Try To Go Straight - How Tarted Up January 6th 'Insurrectionists' Get Schooled

The image of the Viking-helmeted, face-painted crazies on the steps of the Capitol on January 6th went viral, a display of the hijinks of the day.  While Democrats wailed the worst, the beginning of the end of democracy and the coming of the anti-Christ, most Americans were unmoved.  The whole thing was a marvelously American show - a circus act of grand proportions, Sturm und Drang, sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing.  

It hadn't been orchestrated by any Rasputin or Kremlin plotters.  It was a bunch of halfwits rounded up from the Idaho Panhandle, Appalachia, and Humboldt County, given war paint and feathers, put on any conveyance East, and let loose in the Nation's Capital. 

No one knew they were going, any more than old-school panty raids on Hadley Hall or the gay Halloween parties that broke out of Castro walk-ups onto the streets - happy bacchanals, whose revelers were tarted up, costumed, and half-naked and bridled were marched up and down by their hostlers and Simon Legrees. 

Why didn't the Capitol Police or the Secret Service know the march was coming? Had they failed in their duty to protect the very temple of democracy?  Of course not  The revelers, all doo-dadded up,  bangles, toy store Ninja swords, and fright wigs were here to party, not insurrect.  Leave them be.  This is America, and even busloads of crazy idiots are normal in a free country. 

So this great eclectic, random cluster of wingnuts from the farthest, most remote and forgotten shitholes of the country somehow cohered, coalesced like a New Year's mob and when someone yelled, 'To the Capitol', off they went like a flooded river, going this way and that until it found its course and headed up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the iconic dome.  To do what and for what, they didn't know.  They had no idea other than camaraderie.  

When a thousand of them like catfish had been pulled and plucked out of riverbanks by noodlers, or hung over from moonshine rousted out of straw tick beds, slipped into overalls and work boots and hauled onto cattle cars only to disembark on the Mall, the shrine of America, who was to question purspose?

This was their time for once.  Every forgotten bit of America finally recognized and given their due; and so they marched to their own drummers up the Avenue, shouting, cheering, hawking and spitting. When passersby, bureaucrats who had spilled out into the winter sunshine for a break from tube lighting and cubicles, saw the parade, they waved and tossed their hats in the air.  Their dull, grey, thuddingly boring life finally had some cheer. 

The rest is history.  This group of backwoods hole-dwellers and crackers got ambition, and dumb as they were raised the ante and burst through the doors of the Capitol as crazy as ever but without a clue as to what they were doing there or what was expected of them.  They had no leadership, no marshals, generals or drill sergeants to give them orders.  They were an inchoate, ridiculous crowd of dopes suddenly realizing that they had been caught with their pants down. 

Now, this episode is only a historical prelude to the real point of the story.  While a few of these wild men were arrested, convicted, and thrown into jail, the rest of the lot went back home.  Not easily, mind you, because these numskulls had no money left after blowing it on beer and street hookers of Anacostia ('Let's get us some chocolate pussy', said one good ol' boy from Arkansas), but return they did; but once they'd seen the lights of Gay Paree, leaky shacks in the woods where it seemed to rain all the time were not exactly they way they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. 

The Humboldt gang had enough to live on - cooking meth gave them incidental change, and day labor on fishing boats or clearing brush in national forests kept them in potted beef and cornmeal - but the Washington caper had shown them another world beyond this one, and the American Dream began to take shape.  They would make something of their lives, make a difference; but just as they had not one coherent idea in their heads when they boarded the busses for the Capitol, none came to them now.  Just a kind of Barbie pastel scene of blondes and broad avenues. 

It was peripheral vision that had done it - the bureaucratic onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue, probably all with wives and children, a mistress on the side, sirloin and Cabernet at McCormick & Schmidt's, all cheering them but probably laughing at the excess, the boorishness and unkemptness. 

Despite the fact that the 'Insurrectionists' - a label pinned on them after the escapade was over which they proudly adopted - were cheered when they returned to their back woods and hollers, there was a dreary down that settled in quickly.  Ok, maybe they were just out-of-work marginalia, dumb as stones not because of lack of native intelligence, but bad circumstances, all of which could be overcome, American style.  Not exactly chuck it all for lawnmowing and house painting like the Mexican wetbacks in Southern California, but something...'ennobling', a word that one of them had heard along the way, rolled it over on his tongue enough times that it stuck. 

Wayne Fricker caught ambition on his excursion to Washington.  He looked down at his piss-stained overalls, stanky work shirt, and miserable surroundings, and said, 'I am an American'. 

Yet, as it turned out, inclusivity did not include the likes of him, a notion reserved as it was for everyone but white trash who were supposed to be as privileged as every fat-assed white prick at General Motors. Why, who knew if he was really white?  He never knew his father and his mother had led the sporting life for a while in El Paso, so he could claim something other than what he was, probably Mexican. 

When he made it out of the woods to town - a small lumber town with one sawmill, a hardware store, and a saloon - he was stymied but had enough sense to walk over to the mill; but one look at this disheveled, shambling mess of a human being and he never got past the girl at the counter; and from that moment on The Land of Opportunity became nothing more than a seedy brothel, two-bit whores and rotgut whiskey. 

He tried again down the coast, something, anything other than cheap day labor.  He wanted to be signed up, enrolled, chartered in a good place; but one look by management was enough to send him packing, out the door and back up into the woods. 

No such luck, America had passed him by and would continue to do so.  He was detritus, leavings, replaceable and insignificant, noticed by no one, recruited or addressed by no one.  Insurrectionist? If only he had been, perhaps that political cachet would have legitimized him, given him some record of having belonged.  As it was he was flotsam, trash, street dirt. 

Yet, at the very least he could say, 'I did that', and for a long time he knew he could again, would, and should. 

Monday, November 4, 2024

When Priests Go Bad - Fairies In The Vestry And The Compelling Case For Atheism

Father Aloysius F. Brophy, Jesuit, rector of St. Maurice's Church of New Brighton, loved little boys, and couldn't wait until they came of age.  He refused to admit that he was a pedophile - in the quiet of the rectory or the silence of the confessional, he was an honorable member of the Society of Jesus, devout Catholic, and man of principle and moral rectitude; but when the saw those sweet. young, innocent altar boys, his resolve and resolution weakened.  He became a sinner, if in intent only, and if the Catholic Church taught anything, it was the occasion of sin, the fountainhead of actual sin, the place to be avoided above all else. 

 

And so as far as young boys went, he kept his hands under his cassock, on the chalice, or on the host with purity and cleanliness of spirit, but when Father Peacock joined the parish, a gorgeous seminarian who had just taken his vows and turned down far more lucrative and promising churches for St. Maurice, Father Brophy was entranced.  'They' knew each other from the first, in that demure, pious chastity that suggested anything but; and before long the older priest and the newcomer joined in sexual congress. 

The act, officially condemned by the Church, was wrongly decided the young Peacock and his fellow seminarians averred - Jesus himself could not have remained celibate for long with the likes of Paul, John, and the lovely Luke as apostles.  The Last Supper was part seder, part early Christian ceremony, and part male camaraderie, the last being the most important, and God knew the most soulful; and so it was that Peacock and his Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had a marvelous time as novitiates of Christ, bound and bonded together by Holy matrimony to each other and to Christ. 

While many observers wondered how the Church would survive the counter-cultural revolution of the Sixties and the sexual apertura of the Seventies, a disastrous secularization dismissing religious orthodoxy, their concerns were premature.  The Church was the go-to place for the newly uncloseted gay men who were looking for just this opportunity.  Imagine! a sanctioned all-male institution, cloistered, protected, and cared-for by the Vatican itself, what a sanctuary and playground for a certain, privileged ordained sexuality.

Well, 'ordained' might not be the mot juste for an activity prohibited and condemned for over 2000 years, but human nature and sexual desire being what it is, it should be no surprise that the 400 graduates of St. Bartholomew Seminary dismissed the censorious opprobrium of the Church and turned it into a 'What Would Jesus Do?' moment of Christian charity and community, and off they went happily anointed, married to Christ, and free to enjoy the life of the gay Catholicism. 

When Father Lennon was caught in the vestry in delicto flagrante, using the kneeler to comfortably service the rector, he was warned but not chastised. 'Be a bit more careful, Father, where and when, etc. etc.' but nothing more.  St. Maurice's like every parish up and down the East Coast and then some was gay heaven, so who was to chastise or censor whom? The pot and the kettle were both black. 

So the 'friendship' between Frs. Peacock and Brophy not only went unreported, but was admired by clergy in the archdiocese from Hartford to Willimantic. Theirs was a love affair made in heaven, no irony intended but well appreciated.  God had created these immeasurably congenial enclaves of male bonding and affairs such as those of St. Maurice were to be limned, loved, and written about. 

Until Father Brophy got greedy and crossed the line.  He became lascivious.  Peacock was not enough, and those delectable altar boys were there for the notional picking, so why not?  They were, after all, simply adolescent versions of Peacock, young virgins ready to sacrifice themselves on the altar of God with older, more originalist fathers like him, so where was the harm, the damage?  

None and none again; and so it was that Father Brophy invited the young Peters Marshal to tea one Saturday afternoon, and amidst Easter lilies and frankincense, the priest enjoyed the boy to God's greater glory. 

However, Peters was not the complaisant young fairy that Brophy had become accustomed to.  He was as straight as an arrow, son of a pipe fitter and a nurse, good Catholics, good contributors, and good parishioners and had to be 'encouraged' in the art of pleasuring the good fathers of St. Maurice.  It all came out in the end, part of the growing scandal within the worldwide Church, and Father Brophy was reassigned to a missionary outpost in Chad where he suffered cerebral malaria and died.


Not only were these buggering priests rather unseemly in their predation of little ones, they were ordained ministers of Christ, in the unbroken line of clerics through archbishops, cardinals, the Pope and the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth.  They were priests by Holy Sacrament, not just approved applicants for a job.  Their abuse of children was not only a reprehensible social act, a crime against humanity itself, but a callous insult to Jesus Christ himself.  A sin above all sins, an unforgiveable sin. 

When Harry Gooding got word of the events at St. Maurice, he turned in his union card.  A lifelong Catholic, nurtured by the Church, faithful and devoted to Jesus, the Pope, and the legacy of saints, he reluctantly gave up his faith. What Father Brophy had done was an unconscionable, unforgiveable act. 

'Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater', his friend Rocco Palafutis counselled. 'They are only men'; but that did nothing to deter him.  Anything...anything but this, he replied. 'Those fucking, buggering....' and here he spewed an unprintable, corrosive stream of hateful sexual bile.  It was one thing to approach children, but another for a priest...a priest for Christ's sake.  Nothing but the rack and death by burning was good enough for them. 

Of course it is one thing do leave the Church, another thing altogether to go over to the dark side, the Godless side, but that was exactly what Harry Gooding did.  'Fuck 'em', he said to no one in particular. 'Fuck 'em all', and so it was that Harry became a practicing atheist, more out of anger and spite than blame of the Deity, but so be it.  The dark side can be recrossed with difficulty, so why bother.  His was a more considerate, rational, temperate side without the likes of Brophy and Peacock.