Today In Both Sides Do It: American Gods

Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. But there is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter:

When belief in a god dies, the god dies.

When the last acolyte renounces his faith and turns to another deity, the god ceases to be.

They know the terrible simplicity of that truth, the mightiest and the mingiest of gods. They have seen their fellow gods go down to obscurity and banishment for lack of believers...

As the time passes for men and women, so does it pass for gods, for they are made viable and substantial only through the massed beliefs of masses of men and women. And when puny mortals no longer worship at their altars, the gods die.

To be replaced by newer, more relevant gods...

-- From Harlan Ellison's forward to
Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (1975)

With "American Gods" set to drop at the end of this month --

-- I thought it would be helpful to step out of the whipsaw torrent of minute-to-minute Republican fuckery and take look at a wider picture though a different lens.

Because we're not in a conventional political fight.  We're in the middle of a Holy War.

And to quote Mr. Wednesday, we're losing.

Of course, we can still win if we choose to -- if we marshal and deploy our energies wisely and effectively -- but we will never win if we refuse to understand the basic nature of the war itself.

So consider the Right.  The Conservatives.  The Republicans.  The "whateverthefuck they're calling themselves this week".

Ignore their talking points and their spin and focus on what they do and how they act.

Depraved.  Mindless.  Gibbering nonsense.  Sure, a lot of money has been spent tarted their lunacy up for public consumption with pious indignation and Gish Galloped lies pitched by men and women in expensive threads, but underneath...nothing.  Hollow.  Anti-life.

Which means there is no defeating them in any conventional political or cultural sense because it is a mania, not a movement.  It is a folie à plusieurs wedded to a blood-drunk, primeval will-to-power, not an ideology.  It can't be defeated because it does not recognize the concept of "losing".  And it does not recognize the concept of "losing" because it no longer recognizes the concept of "being wrong".

If an election doesn't go their way, it must have been rigged.  If the consensus of every reputable scientist on Earth flies in the face of one on their idiotic dogmas, it must be a vast and sinister conspiracy.  If their own history -- their very own lies from yesterday -- contradicts the lies they're trying to peddle today...well the past doesn't count.  It never happened.  It does not exist.

And if the mainstream media will not run daily, screaming headlines on those "rigged" elections, or phantom Obama wiretaps, or secret Benghaaaazi stand-down orders, or the secret Planned Parenthood baby-murdering-for-profit syndicate that your tax dollars are paying for or any of the hundreds of other, utterly batshit lies these scuttlefish take as gospel?

Well obviously the media is part of that vast and sinister conspiracy.

The GOP -- after decades of diligent effort and billions of dollars spent to build their base a detailed and immersive fake "reality" that they never have to leave -- has harnessed the collective horsepower of virtually every bigot, imbecile and lunatic in America to serve their despicable agenda and has used the scum of the Earth to elect the lying DayGlo fascist madman of their dreams.

It is not that they have well-worked-out policies for, well, anything or even a coherent governing philosophy, because they are not a governing party.  They are a cult. with a head-full of crazy that has been shit into their skulls decade after decade by Fox News and Hate Radio .  They are a cult that worships an entire pantheon of wild, bloodthirsty gods.  Gods of Guns and Gods of Lies. A God of White Supremacy.  A God of Hate.  A God of Liberals are The Devil.  And slipped into the mix. a God of Tax Cuts Uber Alles, because they need plutocrats to foot the bill for the maintenance and upkeep of the temple.

Which is more or less what we on the Left have been saying all along.  That there is no salvation for these people.  No cure for what ails them. The best we can hope for is to identify them for who and what they are and work together to contain them before they break the world beyond repair.  As their numbers shrink, their fanaticism will grow, but eventually their gods will not have enough acolytes to sustain themselves and they will collapse.

But there is another, equally toxic but more presentable and profitable cult that we could actually destroy with a little effort.  A parasite-cult that empowers the Right by deflecting and diffusing its opponents. and without which the demise of the Right would be greatly accelerated.

I am speaking, of course, of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism.

The God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism has ruled the American political media for most of our lives, and its deacons and cardinals and popes have made themselves wealthy and influential by spreading it doctrine everywhere.  It has smothered every honest attempt at healing what is broken in our culture, and provided the Right with a permanent alibi for every atrocity they commit. Like the Matrix, it is everywhere,  all around us. You can see it when you turn on your television.  You can hear it on the radio and read it in the paper. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.

It is the comforting, asphyxiating fairy tale that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us to the truth.

Unlike the Gods of the Right which demand absolute fealty to a thick catechism of warped and wicked beliefs, the God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism only asks its adherents to believe nothing.  To render no judgement of any kind on any act of Conservative barbarism...because out there somewhere there is probably some Dirty Hippie doing something equally terrible.   To affix "No Label" to anything, because the worst profanity against the God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism is the partisan wish to distinguish between apple juice and battery acid.  Between Liberals and Conservatives.

The God of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism demands only that its acolytes sit on the sidelines and bitch incessantly about everyone equally -- to face the Beltway and whine five times a day about how equally awful and equally partisan and equally steeped in sin Both Sides are.

It is a God of the lazy and the cowardly and meretricious, all of which suits the depraved, anti-life agenda of the Right just fine, because every single time they burn down another democratic institution, they can rely on the deacons of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism to be first on the scene. blaming the arsonists and the fire department equally.

But unlike the pantheon of the Gods of the Right, The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism has a fatal flaw, because The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism cannot exist on it' own.  It can only exist as a mathematical function -- a point midway between two extremes, one of which is wholly fictional and one of which is lethally real.

As I wrote all the way back in 2005, for the administrators of The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism, the political cosmos must always remain fixed, constant and...

...carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happen to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong...

And this is the Thermal Exhaust Port in their Death Star.  Because while the Gods of the Right believe simple dogmas anchored in the deranged Id of the Right itself, The High and Holy Church of Both Siderism is a parasite-cult which can only exist as long as it continues to straddle the (Imaginary) Left and the (Actual) Right.  Which means that while Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity need never interact with Reality at any level,  David Brooks and Matthew Dowd and Ron Fourier and the rest of the Beltway's pernicious Both Siderist peddlers must do their filthy business within sight of some recognizable version of Reality.

They do not have the luxury to pretending that the Trump Administration is not rotten to the core with traitors and mountebanks and imbeciles and demagogues.  To appease their god and and keep their jobs they must instead resort to tossing out more and more ludicrously false equivalents.

Which brings us, at last, the Mr. Ron Fournier -- America's Sad Clown of Centrism -- who told a mighty lie on Twitter...

On @MSNBC, Susan Rice is asking us to believe her. That ship has sailed.

Investigate.

Same for Trump WH. Word is no good

Investigate

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) April 4, 2017

...and then immediately made an even bigger public laughingstock of himself by showing what an utterly clueless hack he really is:

Deflection is the last resort of the weak and irresolute https://t.co/3mVkIrbxHm

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) April 5, 2017

At this point I am so tired of these people and my respect for the American political media is already so bottomed-out that I can't really work up a big mad at Fournier being Fournier.  

Honestly, all I see when I look at a clown like Fournier is another political eunuch, making empty, ritual sacrifices and keeping the lamps lit in the crumbling temple of a dying god.

A temple we really can knock down and a grubby little god we really can depose if we put our backs into it.  

(FYI, I'm still fundraising, so if you can I'd appreciate it.  Also I'm way backed up on "Thank You" notes, but they are coming.  Really.  Would I lie to you? :-)

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