"A Rose for Bobo" -- Part 3 of 4

“Call Me Pish Male.”

In 1982, in an essay entitled “The Spawn of Annenberg, Part 1”, Harlan Ellison wrote about his visit to San Quentin and the chilling experience of listening to the convicted murderer of a 5-year-old child explain why he couldn’t have done what he obviously had done.

The convict had stomped the boy to death, but explained that he could not have done it because he wears sneakers.

And sneakers are soft.

This from a summary of that essay:

“…when a man who was on Death Row for beating a 5-year-old boy to death responded to a simple question with an answer that seemed absurd or beside the point but did relate to it in an approximate way.

This illustrates a rare condition known as Ganser’s Syndrome, also termed paralogia…”

Paralogia.

Bobo’s runty, privileged, gated-community self-image could not bear up for one second if he were ever obliged to lock eyes in the clear, noon light with the vast, greasy army of bigots and madmen to whom he offers pastel-toned cover-fire from the good, gray pages of the New York Times.

And yet all around him he sees the Conservative Revolution evaporating not from external threats or Dirty Hippy sappers inside his perimeter, but in a toxic cloud of wholly internal corruption, incompetence, delusion, fascism, demagoguery, racism, homophobia and a slimy and hateful perversion of genuine Christianity.

There is, in the end, no one to blame for the ruin and failure that Conservatives have left in their wake but that army of bigots and lunatics who have always been at the core of the Modern Conservative movement.

And they won’t even go decently into hiding so that men like Bobo can plausibly pretend they don’t exist!

In fact, quite the opposite has always been the case: Falwell and Roberston, Limbaugh and Coulter, DeLay and Gingrich, Atwater and Rove and all the rest of that sick, sadistic litany of degenerates and frauds have always been the leering, drooling, outspoken, very public and unapologetic soul of the GOP.

And Bobo has finally reached that place where reality and delusion can no longer be coaxed into coexisting.

Because while Bobo has always been a pastel-fig-leaf-wearing ally and wheelman of the scum who run his Movement, here we see Actual!Footage! of what would happen to Our Mr. Brooks were he ever forced to look in the mirror

and admit that he always been the willing ally and wheelman of the scum who run his Movement.

(High ick-content makes this probably not work safe)

So like Ishmael and Queequeg in “Moby Dick”, to save himself from going under forever, Bobo clings to Reagan’s coffin; to that last soggy relic of those Glorious Wingnut Days of Yore That Never Were which has not yet been entirely smashed to matchsticks and sent to the bottom of the sea by the deranged leaders of his doomed tribe.

Bobo couldn't be the tool of the scum of the nation...because Reagan was his Hero.

And because Reagan was a Hero

he could not have possibly said and meant and done all of the vile, hateful and bigot-pandering things that he deliberately and indisputably did say...and did mean...and did do.

(graphic via the very talented darkblack)

Paralogia: The last refuge if the politically insane.

End Part 3 of 4


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