Depraved and Indifferent

I hauled this one out of the vault from September 2005, which is starting to be a long time ago.

Sadly, the premise still remains completely and horribly topical:

Depraved

and indifferent.

As Iraq began stripped down to the studs any Republican pretense for caring for this country if it was going to actually cost them anything (Shared sacrifice? Oh fuck that! “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.” is, as it turns out, only for the Little People. For “those people”. Whereas the melanin-poor-but-resource-rich feel it is their God Given right to wipe their asses with the Army ‘cause “they volunteered”.) so now has Katrina finished the job. What may go down in the books as the greatest natural disaster in our history completely sandblasted away the Compassionate Mardi Gras mask of the Party of God with 145 m.p.h. winds and has shown them to be what everyone who has not has been replaced by a pod has always known them to be.

Assholes.

Creepy, hateful assholes.

Wired up like a Doomsday Defense system long after the human operators have died, the GOP rank-and-file are on brain-dead automatic – a corpse face down on the accelerator – habitually and mechanically seeking in every tragedy to blame the weak, despise the dispossessed, defend their Dear Leader, and go after anyone who tries to interposed themselves between the truth and their inbred hick delusions like a pack of rabid jackals.

Who squirm and sizzle like the Devil himself up to his chin in a six-feet-and-rising tide of Holy Water when it looks like they may have to reap a little of whirlwind they have so assiduously sown for the last 30 years.

They have been more genteel about the loathsome baselines of their souls lately, piling up preachers and think tanks like sandbags around their position. Sending Kenny-boy Mehlman out to bat his horsey eyes, and flutter his dainty fan and truckle gigglingly on, “Oh, my. Ah do declare, suh, that once upon a time, looong ago, we wuh the Party of Racist Bahstads, but a you can plainly see, suh, not any more. No suh; no bigots ‘round heah’.”

A tough trick to pull off with the American Swastika snapping proudly in the breeze above the Republican Party and Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond still using Trent Lott’s nose as a bung-candle, but I would argue that racism – while still alive, loud and proud that the rotten heart of the Party of God -- is just one of a series of fellow-traveling ideologies that make common cause against our nation, each for it’s own despicable agenda.

The broader, more descriptive and inclusive ideology that sums up the whole of the GOP – from the NeoCon fascists, to Christopath theocrats to the millions of just plain dumbfuck racists for whose throbbing electoral love the Republican Party gladly lubes itself up spreads ‘em – comes down to four, simple words.

Fuck Everyone But Me.

That’s what being a Republican comes down to in the end.

Those four, little words that mean so much.

The pillars of the Republican Party.

The basic “forward”, “forward”, “side”, “close” that make the formal steps of the Neocon Foxtrot identical to the Christopath Waltz.

Decade after decade, the GOP has burrowed away like the clever, eyeless rodents that they are, weakening the very bulwark that makes our nation possible. Gnawing away with their blood-stained razor-teeth at the very concept of the commonweal – the common good – itself. They have worked carefully, deliberately, patiently to rip the belly out of our Republic and breach the levee of our civilization...and now the filthy, mutagenic sludge roils through the streets, staining an polluting everything it touches.

We have lived to see “Fuck Everyone But Me” enshrined as a virtuous sentiment. And not just any virtue, but the Primum Mobile. The First Cause behind all other virtues -- by men who claim the mantle of God’s Favored -- while “Love Thy Neighbor” floats face-down in the noxious hellbrew they have worked so hard to unleash.

Fuck Everyone But Me.

The Guanine, Adanine, Cytosine, and Thamine that make up the base-pairs of the Modern GOP, interlacing themselves into ever more complex patterns and Rovian huckster patter, spiraling outwards into policy shops and pulpits, fractalling into think-tank White Papers and PNAC lucid dreams.

But unspool the complex helix of Republican thinking, map the GOP Genome backwards from any direction – theological, philosophical, economic, “scientific” – and it always comes down to the same, straightforward building blocks: Fuck Everyone But Me.

And see, this is where every Republican I know trips right over their own dicks every single fucking time.

Because there is no getting around the fact that Fuck Everyone But Me is a depraved and morally bankrupt philosophy.

And when you’re basic moral precept is Fuck Everyone But Me, you back yourself into a corner where you look absolutely ridiculous trying to judge or mock anyone else’s moral choices. What do you care who adults sleep with or marry? What do you care if terrorists kill Americans, as long as they’re not you. From what high moral ground do you get off prattling on about the various sins of Bill Clinton or anyone else?

Don’t get me wrong; it is at least an honest philosophy, and if Republicans were ever honest for five consecutive minutes they’d just own up to the fact that the loathe their fellow man and women on a sliding scale that reaches its zenith when the people on the business end of the shotgun are Poor and/or Black.

Republicans don’t give a shit if “those people” live or die as long as they don’t live or die near them.

As long as their taxes don’t go to them in any way shape or form. As long as they stay in their place, and pump prices stay low. But if brown people have to be killed in their millions to keep Republican’s tanks full of cheap gas, fuck ‘em. If Republican’s have to choose between their poorer, browner fellow citizens living in abject poverty and despair, and a $600 tax cut, fuck ‘em.

It's not even close.

So it’s an honest ideology, in the same way that offering human sacrifices to summon Satan would be a sincere expression of belief.

So what?

No faith or philosophy of any kind with which I am familiar has ever held that Fuck Everyone But Me is anything but bestial and depraved, so how did it become the watermark on Party of God’s stationary?

Well, they had to make it up from scratch, and it took a lot of time and money.

A moral philosophy – whether it wears the God-pants of not – has, for the most part, one purpose. To uplift. To spell out an ideal ethical stance for a Good Man or a Reasonable Man or a Godly Man to take, and then the threaten or cajole or persuade we poor creatures, stranded, as Twain said, “...between he angels and the French” to strive towards that standard.

I have no idea how many of the Nine Billion Names of God are Sacred and True, but I do know this for God Damned Sure: if your –ism demands that you do make yourself occasionally uncomfortable in the service of your fellow man, it’s on the right track. If it demands that you love more and hate less, act with empathy and fucking well feel bad when you act like a shit...you’re on the right bus.

If your faith says you damned well are your brother’s keeper and slaps you cold and wet across the face when you try to shirk your duty, sign me up.

Nature, Kate Hepburn reminds us in The African Queen, is “what we are put on this Earth to overcome."

Not the oceans or the they skies, but ourselves. Our own killer ape instinct to fuck everything that moves, and kill everything that doesn’t smell like us.

And as true as it is that when your faith demands that you work hard to be better than your most rapacious instincts call you to be, you know you’re headed in the right direction, so it is equally true that if your faith tells you to indulge your worst impulses – to positively revel in them -- then you know you are serving a very dark master indeed.

When your –ism informs you that there are two kinds of people – Us and Them – and “they” are inherently your moral or spiritual inferior, and encourages you to believe that “those people” (whoever “those people” are this week) aren’t fully human and don't deserve your help and respect, then your –ism is evil.

Period.

And what does every instrument in the GOP orchestra do but harmonize to try to provide moral cover for the core idea of Fuck Everyone But Me. Unlike the other Great Beliefs, the GOP –ism wasn’t built forward from insight and wisdom, but has been built backwards to justify their pre-existing bigotries. It is an invented-ideology, specifically constructed to spec to relieve Republican swine of the guilt that any human being should feel when they do Bad Things.

In quick strokes...

GOP “ Science”

Attacking settled science like evolution, and yet touting bad pseduoscience drivel like the “The Bell Curve” that boils down to “Genetics has made the White Man superior to the Black Man.” It seeks to put across their debased dogma by tarting it up with fake science: to tell their thralls that they are not obligated to feel for those people or throw your tax dollars in their direction because they are Darwin’s Losers.

Science, it holds, gives it blessings to Fuck Everyone But Me.

GOP “Religion”

Nothing less than Preachers of Hate. Of us versus them. Of fags are ruining my country, and feminists and the ACLU are our digging the grave. Knee-jerk anti-Christians who are the direct, lineal spiritual descendents of the Bible pounders who defended slavery, and then took to the same pulpits in the same places to defend lynching and Jim Crow.

Conservative Christian Fundanmentalism is just Jebus for vicious, small-minded Dummies. A religion tailored for hateful, creeps who always need someone to loathe and feel superior to and blame for Every Bad Thing that happens.

The GOP Religion exists for the same reason the Taliban had an Office of Virtue and Vice, and is run by exactly the same kind of men...plus it comes with a final act – The Rapture –- which is all about “those people” finally being given the Almighty fucking over that the preachers of hate say they deserve, and all of “us” get to float away to an eternity of rhubarb pie and holy jug bands.

And the Republican God said; "Thou shalt Fuck Everyone But Thyself. In Jesus’ Name.”

GOP Economics.

I’m rich and getting insanely richer every day. They’re poor and stagnating. They fail because they are bad people. They are lost because they are bad people. They drowned because they were bad people, and bad people only understand pain. They don’t need help; they ust need to be punished, and then punished some more.

The economic beatings will continue until morale improves.

GOP plain, old, down-home American racism

This is the mutant 70-foot gator the Republicans keep trying to pretend isn’t in slithering around the room. The core of racism is the distilled, cancerous essence of Fuck Everyone But Me. From before the day when the we imbedded a 3/5th clause in our Constitution and hard-coded our racism for all the world to see, it has been the flatfooted belief of a large number of our fellow citizens that blacks are simply less than human. They went to war to protect their barbaric institution and customs that ALL were founded on the institution of Slavery.

They went to war again in the form of a carefully organized program of domestic terrorism to keep blacks from exercising their basic rights as humans, for the simple reason that millions of Americans were and still are fucking racists douchebags.

And now they have their own political party, and all the pig-lipstick in the Universe will never cover up the fact that the Dixicrats fled to the Republican Party in their millions precisely because the Party of Lincoln was willing and eager to whore itself for the scum of the Earth. Because for no other reason that raw political gain – for EXACTLY the same political reason that George Wallace said “no one will ever out-nigger me again” after he lost in his first run for Governor -- the GOP hung out a shingle that said, “Klansmen Welcome: We Hate Coons Too!.”

But I would argue that their default position isn’t hatred: their default position is Fuck Everyone But Me, that ramps right up into burning hatred at blinding speed whenever The Government tries to force them – through shame or taxes or busing or civil rights or the abolition of slavery or the overturning of Loving v. Virginia or whatever – into giving a shit about people they despise.

The Republican Party is the ugly consequence of Democracy itself. The unembraceable shadow. It is the moral rot that is left behind when we believe that we are Exceptional by virtue of genetics or economics or God. When we stop requiring an informed electorate, and begin breeding idiots who take their sustenance at the diseased teats of Hate Radio and Old Time Gospel Hour.

It is the sharp, bright line that separates an often foolish and weak fixer-upper Democratic Party from an unambiguously depraved Republican Party.

Democrats believe that racism, hateful hillbilly superstition fobbing itself of as theology and simple, down-home pig-ignorance are, y’know, BAD things that should be educated into extinction.

Republicans, on the other hand, cultivate that barbaric sewage as if it were prize-winning teacup roses. They coddle and cuddle and actively encourage it because without a steady stream of bigoted morons and self-righteous inbreds, lets face it, there would be no Republican Party.

When Moderates react with horror at what they saw in NOLA, and then whiplash themselves catatonic looking suddenly around in every direction at the bile that comes fountaining from the mouths of talk radio hosts, teevee commentators and former-First-Ladies-and-Mother-of-the-current-President, they are looking for safe harbor. Some bit of dry land from which they can express their outrage, and yet still pretend that despite decades of warning that their Party is run by these very monsters, they can somehow remain Republican and keep their souls.

That the thugs who run their Party aren’t really there, or maybe they’ll just magically dry up and blow away.

Sorry, that ship has long since sailed, and you fucking well know it and the roaring sound you hear are flocks of chickens darkening the sky as the come home to roost.

Moderates thought worshipping at the church of Fuck Everyone But Me was a pretty sweet deal: they got tax cuts, but more importantly they got soothing men in pastoral garb and $1,000 suits telling them that it was absolutely OK to behave like a selfish prick. That letting people rot was a far lesser sin that the Evil Government confiscating their hard-earned ducats to use for reason that do not benefit them directly.

After all, since they were little shits they’ve been taught that they know how to spend their money better than some Washington Bee-Euro-Crat.

The problem being, this is the attitude of a cranky stupid child and not a grown up who lives in the real world, and the election of 2004 can now be seen in retrospect for what it really was: a tantrum thrown by idiots.

It was the screaming of 59 million 5-year-old spoiled brats bellowing, “You can’t make me clean up after myself. You can’t make me pay for the war I ordered. You can’t make me look at the truth.”

And the answer is, tragically, we don’t have to. We never did.

Being warned to stop putting a loaded gun in you mouth isn’t a way for us to score debating points. It was a way for your fellow citizens to say, “Hey, dumbass; if that thing ever goes off you’re gonna be in a world of shit.”

And then it went Bang!

The consequences of Fuck Everyone But Me aren’t about politics. They’re about physics and causality. They’re about actions having inevitable consequences.

It doesn’t matter if you run you car off a cliff in Drive -- looking at the ground rushing up at you -- or in Reverse – looking at the clouds and pretty blue sky, gravity is going to have her merciless way with you either way.

And that is what we have been trying to tell you.