Got to get behind the Mule...

...In the morning and blog

From Tom Waits, with some impudent edits, “Get Behind the Mule”:

“Big Jack Earl was 8-foot-1
He stood in the road and he cried
He couldn't make her love him
Couldn't make her stay
But tell the good Lord that he tried?”

Got to get behind the Mule.
In the morning and blog
Get behind the Mule.
In the morning and blog.

According to weather.com, it got up to 102 around here with a heat index of 115 or so. The wind makes the neighborhoods into pyroclastic convection ovens, and instead of 16” softball, kids are out on the sticky, lava streets, puddling copper.

For kicks, I spent the morning lobbing heat-stunned alley rats into direct sunlight and watching them burst into flames.

It’s hotter than it’s been here in six years, and heat makes me slow and dim, and while sunning myself on a flat rock, a question that one reader asked was slowly trotting around in my head.

geox said : “Good rant and all, but I dunno...it seems like you're expending an awful lot of energy shouting at people who are not listening. How many "moderate republicans" do you imagine read this blog, anyway?”

So I thought about that for awhile while the sun tried to kill me and the shadows and cool breezes all ran away to Canada for a long weekend, and here’s what I came up with.

If I thought I was personally responsible for stemming the entire tide of the irrationality in the world, I’d call in sick and hide under the covers. That’s too much to ask of anyone – Dean, Obama, Pelosi, Jebus...anyone -- but the good news is, all any of us have to do is be a voice in the chorus.

Some are big, booming basses and some can barely whisper, but all we are called on to do is our bit, the best we know how. Throw an elbow at the right moment, or be a shoulder to lean on when needed. We need to work at it, but no one of us needs to lift the whole weight of the burden alone.

We are not asked to do more, and as people of conscience, we can do no less.

So speaking only for myself, I’ll tell you some of why I do this.

1. Personal Pleasure.
I write because I’m a writer. I have a bunch of other jobs cobbled together that pay my bills and support my meager vices, but in my heart I’m a writer. As drunks drink and anglers angle, so writers write. It’s what we do. Whether well or poorly is another matter, to be judged by others, by whatever marketplace valuations are going around these days, but the doing of the thing is the thing.

Pity us.

2. Cheerleading.
Don’t knock it. Taut, fleshy pyramids of sweaty, miniskirted, women. So supple. So well-toned. So perkily eager. So...

Ok, where was I?

Oh yeah. Sorry. Sooo hot here.

Look, this is a protracted fight. The Neocons and the Fundys have been waging their Long Stupid March for thirty years and as disheartening as their victories are, WE can take heart from the fact that their example shows one thing conclusively: Politics ain’t a fucking diorama.

Things are not static. The battlefield shifts, and the tempo changes, but sometimes we all get a little tired. When I do, I head over to the likes of Wolcott or the Rude One, or Gilliard or Shakespeare's Sister for a little libation, a vigorous rubdown...and I generally learn a new word or two for “poop hole’, which is always handy.

It is a great goodness to have such oases at which to rest and ogle hot Liberal Women and stuff my face with oven-fresh adjectives, so if I can in any way return that favor to fellow travelers, then maybe I’ve paid a little something back into the pot.

3. Building a toolbox.
I live in a very Blue City, in a moderately Blue State, so I can walk out my door and hike six blocks in any direction, and not trip over a Republican.

But if I or anyone else can hand an argument or a verbal switchblade or a promising axis of attack to someone else, somewhere else, then perhaps they can use it. They can, perhaps, convince one Republican that they know and work with or whose kid they coach on the soccer team that the GOP is out of control. That we need check and balances for damned good reasons – like keeping their kid from dying in a war begun and prosecuted on the basis of lies, wishful thinking and dreams of empire. Or making sure their mom’s Social Security isn’t plundered by pin-striped thieves. And even if voting Democratic is a bridge too far for them, for the sake of their own peace of mind, maybe they just stay home next time and refuse to give their support to liars and thieves.

Right now, the Bad Guys are in a big, heavily fortified castle and we’re on the outside, and things look bad... but only if you don’t understand the huge advantages afforded to those who are fast and mobile and can stick and move and stick and move.

Think about it. The great strength of the Right is their slavish willingness to march in blind lock-step behind any tin-pot drunken idiot who happens to be at the head of their Fundy Blitzkrieg. They have no capacity to adjust and reform; to shed stupid policies and keep moving. To “Adopt, Adapt and Improve.” They’re stuck with a filthy, failed philosophy that is irrefutably fucking up everything they touch, but since Biblical and Ideological Literalists by definition cannot admit error, instead of fixing the problem, they’ve lashed themselves to the mast, nailed the tiller to the deck and tossed anyone overboard that speaks ill of this Enron-shithouse-crazy way of doing business

So, for example, John Roberts will be appointed. By a fat margin too. That ship sailed (to extend the metaphor) the day Bush won re-election. That sucks...but that’s what happens when the Bad Guys win, and we need to stop letting this sort of thing deflate us and start ask ourselves, “How can we use this?” every time something like this happens.

Offhand, it occurs to me in this case, that there are a whole lot of people who don’t vote at all, or vote GOP because they don’t see any relationship between Washington and their own lives. Now Bush has put up candidate who does not believe women have a right to control their own bodies. He has laid claim on the uteri of every woman in the country in the name of Republican Baby Jesus.

Don’t you think that there might be one or two Moderate Republicans or non-voters -- especially woman -- who might have a problem with this?

Just one or two, here and there? Why?

4. The Numbers Game.
This is not a game of millions; this is about 100,000 votes. This is about a paper-thin margin of victory that, due to its unique characteristics, I believe cannot be replicated. If this were an unwinnable fight against an irresistible tide, I’d blow the hatch and move to Ireland...but it’s not. Not by a damned site.

5. I want a fight.
I’m spoiling for a fight. I love it when a Republican gets baited out of their scripted, Potemkin-events and into an actual argument. These fucktards make the same mistake in forensics that they make in foreign policy. They think the Shock and Awe of bellowing slogans and screaming illiterate invective wins the day. They think decibels or nuclear throw-weight is an adequate substitute for being right.

A Moderate colleague of mine who I regularly verbally toss around the room when the subject turns to politics once got so mad at me that he told me the reason I won, and the reason none of my Republican acquaintances would debate me was because I was “too eloquent”.

Too smart.

So...by virtue of the fact that I know more than you, and that five minutes of conversation blows your pro-Bush drivel to flinders...in your mind that actually disqualifies me being heeded?

Talk about eloquent! That was about as perfect a distillation of why bigots cower in Bell Jars of their own propoganda and are terrified of "outside agitators" as I'd ever heard.

So after I was done laughing in his face, I said, shit man, I’ll take any one of you on with my polysyllables tied behind my back. Or all at once...and I’ll do it on one leg. In haiku. I’ll suck helium and do the whole shebang as Minnie Mouse.

As Morpheus said in “The Matrix”, “Your weakness is not your technique.”

Your weakness is simple: You. Are. Wrong.

That you are so fucking cool with your President and his Administration being so fucking wrong when you were so fucking willing to lynch the last President for much more trivial offenses, I find sickening.

And that you are so fucking cool with your President and his Administration being so fucking wrong when his lies have bankrupted the country you claim to love and killed so many people, I find tragic.

In an actual debate, these clowns blow out like Krustyland Killbots in a flurry of flashbulbs, so I say bring ‘em on.

And lastly, since I started this out on “Mule Variations”, I’ll end there with one, last reason, which is again courtesy of Mr. Tom Waits:

Well, go ahead and call the cops
You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops
She said baby, I still love you
Sometimes there's nothin left to do

Oh you got to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you got to
Just hold on.