In less than one lifetime...

This is will be all that remains of the Mainstream Media...

One of the sublime pleasures of being an upright-walking child of the Enlightenment instead of a knuckle-scraping, fear-injected, Christalopithecus is that we get to contemplate the Really Big Universe.

We get to sit back and think about Deep Space and Deep Time (a term possibly coined by Greg Benford, but I could be wrong about that) with out being awash in fear that God will kick in the door like Raging Drunk Dad, catch us shamelessly playing a fast game of “Accelerate the Particle” with the neighbor girl, and smite the flesh off the bones of every living thing in a five mile radius.

We get to celebrate and cerebrate the fact that we don’t have to spend our lives cowering in squealing, reptilian terror inside a cramped, mingy, 6,000 years-old, geocentric God-hovel but get to run barefoot and nekkid through the spectacular complexity that a 13-and-a-half-gigayear-old, 20-billion-light-year-wide Universe affords.

In our big sandbox, we are free to cogitate over phenomena like singularities and superstrings and dark matter. We feel no need to force such grandeur into cobbled up tissue-box-diorama-sized religious explanations for what can only be explained by the actions of a nearly infinite amount of matter and energy dirty dancing over the span of a nearly infinite amount of time. We see what we see, and we marvel and clamor for more, and feel no need to try to scuff away at such things as event horizons by demanding that physics classes in public school refer to them as “The Almighty’s Holy Taint”.

And because of our freedom of thought, and its range of motion, we can appreciate the phenomenon of evolution…even its failures. Predators with teeth grown so long they slit their own jugular, or butterflies that only breed on continents that are slowly receding from their summer homes.

So behold one such evolutionary dead end – the Modern Gay Republican. Motivated by some kind of single-minded self-loathing that is startling to behold, he wholeheartedly embraces the political companionship of people who openly want to annihilate him, and will hold himself willfully and astonishingly ignorant of the true nature of the enemies in whose beards he nests.

So when I read Andrew Sullivan’s jeremiad entitled “Getting Their Wives” – about how his shock in learning the precise level of barbarity to which his good, good friends and Republican Overlords have descended – it was grimly interesting in a “Nature Channel” kind of way. I mean who besides the self-lobotomized can claim to actually be surprised that this government is now openly behaving in ways that are morally indistinguishable from the tyrants we used to claim we opposed...for doing the very things...that we are now doing? The hard-core GOP portion of the country is delighted that we’re finally getting around to torturing innocent brown women and children. These blood-drunk creatures live for this shit, and I suppose we should all consider ourselves lucky that they don’t demand that Rummy put it up on pay-per-view.

The rest of us are, of course, horrified, but hardly surprised – only a straddling, self-blinding evolutionary failure like Sully would have the nerve to pretend astonishment that same thugs who publicly sneer at the ideas of Law and Constitutional safeguards – and who he so volubly supported – would now turn around and behave like…thugs…who have no regard for the rule of Law.

I looked on his electronic lamentation as one might look upon a particularly death-wish-intensive mollusk, Lindy Hopping its merry way along the shallow bottom of a primordial sea full of huge mollusk-eaters, but in this case, Sully the Mollusk has chosen to voluntarily cohabitate with the predators in their smelly Republican tide pool.

And then, out of the grimy depths, a huge shape swarms into view.

All teeth and torture and talking points…and Sully the Mollusk frantically one-foot’s it toward the shore. Towards the safety of the dry land, where he can lie panting on the sand, under the blazing sun, and pen this little diary entry:

Getting Their Wives

27 Jan 2006 08:39 pm

You may have heard of the tactic. As a way to leverage information or capture an enemy, terrorists sometimes kidnap innocent women and children in order to put pressure on their husbands or relatives. It's called kidnapping and blackmail. Except that in Rumsfeld's military, the United States now uses the tactic. Sure, it's against the Geneva Conventions. Sure, those Conventions are supposed to apply in Iraq. But this is the Bush administration. King George doesn't have to obey the law; and his military can do anything they want. The Pentagon has gotten used to denying hard evidence of abuse - and no one, of course, has been disciplined for following the instructions given ultimately in Washington. "It's very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happened," says the Pentagon spokesman. No, it isn't. And so we slowly descend toward the level of the enemy. Because King George can.

Fascinating, isn’t it? That Sullivan has so succinctly described the danger to himself and his country? And that he could, if he chose, presumably extend his scrutiny to any number of anatomical details of the monsters that own his Party, and the closer he looked the more horrified he would become.

What is surprising is that, in peak moments like this, he demonstrates that he really does very clearly understand the nature of the Enemy Within, and the lethal threat they pose to him, to his country and to everything he claims to value.

What is equally surprising is that after a day or two on the relative safely of beach, after his fury cools and his sense of danger and integrity fades, he will dutifully slide right back onto the filthy GOP tide pool, still teeming with the same maneaters that drove him to shore.

He will write jaunty articles defending them, and make the rounds of the Tide Pool talk shows taking their side and doing his little bit to bait other Mollusks into the killbox.

He will swim out among the Roves and the Bushes and the Rummys and beg them to let him frolic and play with them.

And then one day they will eat him.

And that will be the story of Sully the Mollusk.