I dunno. None of them are going to win a Sidney Award -- certainly not the rare Sidney Doble -- but a lot of people read 'em and passed 'em around like dirty postcards, so I guess that's something...
This was the year I launched a new publication which, if I could just keep the smirk off my face and play it straight, bids fair to make me rich as Croesus:
-- while most of his Spleenwald Horde and his celebrity hangers-on (who had spent years making quite merry slagging the shit out of Landru critics like me for not being Of The Body) suddenly got reeeal quiet.
And this year Mr. David Brooks completely shook off his brief, post-2016 election flirtation with introspection and came roaring back with columns of such pure, Brooksian Pecksniffery that they will surely be studied by Historians of Tomorrow:
Tom Waits Friday Returns...with David Fucking Brooks caught on its bumper.
Because:
...it's memories that I'm stealing But you're innocent when you dream When you dream You're innocent when you dream...*
David Fucking Brooks -- the American Political Commenteriat's hand's-down winner of the "Samuel L. Jackson Sheer Ubiquity Award" -- marked his 38th appearance on the "Charlie Rose Show" by meandered his way through an hour-long "interview" this week, during which time he revealed many things, including the fact that he has enjoyed private, off-the-record access to the most powerful man on Earth "about five times" since Obama's inauguration. Which is approximately five more one-on-one meetings than I or anyone I know have ever had with any President, ever, and should serve as a sobering reminder to those of us who dismiss the Villagers and their Mouse Circus antics as the mere yapping of poll-obsessed Faux-Centrism-mongering establishmentarians, that in the politicomedia world where access and proximity to power is the genuine coin of the realm, trifling goobers like David Brooks end up wielding very real power.
A thought which becomes even more terrifying when you realize that (speculating irresponsibly on the basis on available evidence) Mr. Brooks seems to have been a blackout drunk suffering massive and debilitating episodes of memory loss over much of the last 30 years.
I mean, how else to explain his bizarre omission of the last three decades of American history during this long, tapioca spit-swap between (as I described the other day) "...two hookers who have each mistaken the other for a wealthy John."
Rose: Welcome. The last time I saw you it was 4:00 A.M. in London.
Bobo: You told me you’d never mention that!
Rose: Relax, buuuuddy; you were drunk, and in that light there was no way you could’ve known it was a dude.
And so forth.
The program was mostly a chance for Charlie Rose to let David Fucking Brooks fill an hour of air time more-or-less reading continuously aloud from his columns, while Charlie occasionally interposed "questions" to make it appear as if there were an actual conversation in progress.
Such as...
Rose: So where are we with this President?
Bobo: He has to make a fundamental decision. We’ve had this long debate between Conservatives who want to shrink government, and Liberals who want to slip me Ecstasy and make me suck stranger’s dicks.
And...
Bobo: Obama comes in with a modest technocratic kind of government -- like Larry Summers or that computer from "The Forbin Project". He is hardened by experience – Mmmm. Hardened. – but he basically wants to use gummint to do stuff. If health care fails – and I think it will – then gummint will forever have been proven to be useless, and we can all go back to getting drunk and making money exploiting proletariats. And by “all” I mean the richest 1% of Americans, and by “proletariats” I mean everyone else on the face of the Earth. And since the failure to pass health care means -- Yay! -- the end of Liberalism forever -- Boo-ya! -- what else does Obama want to be remembered for?
Rose makes a nearly inaudible farting sound which Bobo interprets as rapt attention.
Bobo: He has always had two sides to him: the filthy, bohemian Liberal side which I always found subliminally arousing and therefore frightening, and the guy who wants to fix Washington. And if he’s not going to get to preside over a second New Deal or Great Society, then he has to go back to the other side.
Rose: So running against Washington? And by “Washington” I mean the people at whose dinner parties you and I spend 70% of our lives?
Which may not be exactly what was said, but it was exactly what I heard. However as I was settling back into an amusing evening of maliciously misperceiving David Fucking Brooks' prattle about Centrism, middle America and Edmund Burke for my own depraved amusement, I suddenly heard one of those sentences that screamed "Poor David Brooks must be a blackout drunk", jumped my bullshit detector to DEFCON One , and forced me to reluctantly open my laptop and start typing:
Bobo: We’re in a great period of distrust in Washington. That’s not anti-Washington; that’s not Conservatism. Because people want Washington to work…
Really? Oh please, do continue...
Bobo: People want Washington to work, they just don’t believe that it does work. When you ask people, “Do you trust Washington not to kill your dog, sell your mommy into slavery and generally fuck you over?” between 1932 and 1964 the answer was 80%. Now we’re at 17% or 23%.
Hmmm. I wonder how Bobo is going to explain this remarkable, precipitous, toxic drop?
To be fair, Bobo did say many thing with which I did agree. Like this:
Bobo: Obama needs to do that; to try and find out a way to fix Washington.
And this...
Bobo: He’s a giant. Liberals, Conservatives…there’s nobody quite like him.
And this...
Bobo: He’s got a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness which is still unrivaled. He makes one, very good point right now about the Republicans. He was willing to take a couple of steps towards fiscal sanity. He really was willing to raise taxes. Cut Medicare. He was willing to do real stuff. Republicans, on the other hand…are a pure opposition party.
And this...
Bobo: A friend emailed me to say I’ve ... never been so pessimistic about government otherwise in my life.
And maybe this, although it could have been the voices in my head screwing with me...
Bobo: I am so completely and fraudulently unfit to occupy my position of journalistic power and privilege that I feel naked and ashamed to have been born every minute of every day.
Because when it comes to stating the obvious or reiterating the work of others, Bobo is a perfectly adequate stenographer. And in a world where genuinely crazy, lying, wingnut-cultists are now routinely considered to be acceptable camera-fodder, I suppose the calm transcription of pop culture ass-butter and second-rate Conservative apologia can look, at a distance, like journalism.
But how fucking sad is that?
And as I mused and mourned the loss of real public intellectuals in America -- and waited patiently for Bobo to offer some his signature laser-like diagnostic analysis for the reasons behind the spectacular drop in public confidence in gummint to which he had just ominously alluded -- I watched as these two, wealthy, middle-aged white elite men gradually dance each other over to the subject of the Teabaggers...
Rose: Oh! Oh! Oh! Tell me about the tea parties, Uncle Bobo
Bobo: Well, there are unspecified polls that say they’re popular, so you know it’s true! I give talks out in the country where many people stand up and cheer when the tea parties are mentioned! (Of course by “talks out in the country” I mean my inexplicably ubiquitous guest spots on every major American network, and by “many people stand up and cheer” I mean David Gregory.)
Bobo: Tea parties are more popular than half-off day at the Fox News "Me Lie Pretty One Day" Botox kiosk!
Yes, we should all pay A Lot Of Attention to the teabaggers, because, according to Bobo:
“The country hasn’t ideologically shifted. It’s not they’ve gone from Liberal of Conservative in one year; they’re still there in the middle waiting for somebody who represents their point of view.”
To which I must ask, 'What Fucking 'Point Of View' are you talking about?" Ignorant white people being tweaked by demagogues into a state of primal rage and incoherent fear isn't a "point of view"; it's the last six minutes of "The Day of the Locust":
Then came another of those many, many moments when Bobo showed exactly why he should burn in Hell.
Bobo: You had this great period of trust – from 1932 to 1964…because of Franklin Roosevelt and WWII. But for the rest of American history you have this current or distrust. It’s magnified by a lot of things…
And here we go….
Bobo: Watergate, Vietnam...
By which he means the 1960s. By which he means those dirty fucking hippies. But of course, Bobo damn well knows that "Watergate" didn't cripple America's faith in gummint, because "Watergate" is just a building. What did nearly destroy our faith in our government were the actions and attitudes of Republican President Richard Nixon, and his Republican henchmen. (Yes, Lyndon Johnson deserves a big, fat slice of the blame for the catastrophe of Vietnam, but unlike Nixon, Johnson had no larger plan for deliberately smashing and dividing the country and harvesting its organs as a part of a larger, multi-generational political strategy.)
And how did America's most ubiquitous public political and cultural analyst conclude his piercing diagnosis of exactly how we ended up in the Year of Our Lord 2010 with millions of Americans who are so utterly ignorant and smugly unhinged that they will happily follow demagogues like Sarah Palin right over a cliff, cursing the Kenyan Usurper all the way?
Bobo: Watergate, Vietnam…and all that.
And. That. Was. It.
Understand, this was was not your typical, 2.5-minute teevee cram-it-in, high-speed talking-point back alley handjob; this was a positively leisurely, amble-up-and-down-the-waterfront kind of interview where the major theme was the question of whether or not “this country is governable any longer.
And yet, for all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over our fractured politics, and what Obama could/will/should be able to do about it (Bobo was honest enough to admit that he had “talked to the Republicans” and that they’re not going to give Obama a fucking thing. That there simply is no longer any common ground), clearly Bobo's beieved his main job was to continue laboring frantically alongside fellow Conservative media co-conspirators like Andew Sullivan (while being abetted by interlocutorial jellyfish like Charlie Rose) to pushthe Big Conservative Revisionist Lie that the political and cultural roots and history of the Palinites are somehow mysterious and lost to mists of time.
That between the awful, awful 1960s and sometime between June 2004 (when Sullivan began his slow jump off the wingnut bandwagon) and Katrina (when Bobo started losing his ability to pretend that the Dubya Administration wasn't a complete and catastrophic failure) nothing much was going on over in Reaganville.
And because virtually the entire Village depends on the Big Conservative Revisionist Lie to protect their collective, complicit asses, we out here in the American Heartland end up with endless, jaw-droppingly hilarious spectacles of Soviet-level Conservative denialism, such as life-long, drooling Ronald Reagan fanboy David Fucking Brooks discussing in Serious and Frightening detail of the horrible horrors of mobs of enraged Palinite yahoos who have somehow gotten the idea that their gummint is the captive of a tiny group of elites...
...while conspicuously failing to mention that the creation of an Orc Army of Palinites was all part of the fucking plan (from me, last March)
... See, once upon a time, the Party of Lincoln got tired of losing.
Tired, tired, tired.
And their leaders sat down with many graphs and tables and Pareto charts and figured out that if they took a hard, Right turn at the corner of Loutish Bigot Avenue and Ignorant Christopath Way, they would start winning.
And it worked! So yay them!
But as the massive infusion of xenophobes, degenerate yahoos and wannabe fascists packed on Republican electoral muscle, the immutable Law of Fucktard Fluid Dynamics also meant that demagogues like Rush Limbaugh rapidly grew in Party power and influence, while anyone with an ounce of decency and self-respect was slowly cooked off and driven out of the GOP in disgust.
And that's the thing that makes "reporting" like yours so fucking laughable, Petey: the fact that Rush’s status as Party Overboss has never been exactly what you'd call a big secret.
Hell, it was on the God damned teevee!
If you'd bothered to do any checking at all you'd have found that fourteen fucking years ago -- while a popular but relatively unknown professor named Barack Obama was too busy teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago to plot out clever schemes to make it "appear" as though the GOP was Limbaugh's personal ass coachman and penis valet -- this was the actual state of the relationship between Rush and the Party of God (Spoiler Alert: video also proves yet again that no one knows "funny" like the Wall Street Journal's own shreddin' comic hellbeast, John Fund!):
The House Republican newcomers made Rush Limbaugh an honorary class member tonight, a symbol of their gratitude for conservative talk-radio hosts who championed their campaigns. Limbaugh was presented a "Majority Makers" pin, the emblem of the newcomers who have given their party majority status in the House for the first time in 40 years.
Six GOP women in the class added their own special thanks, presenting Limbaugh with a plaque that said: "Rush was right." And Rep.-elect Barbara Cubin (R-Wyo.) added: "There's not a femiNazi among us."
...while conspicuously failing to mention what horrors the GOP unleashed when they made the conscious decision to invite a whole nest of hateful, divisive Christopath thugs like these
into the Party of Lincoln 30 years ago.
...while conspicuously failing to mention the guy who built his entire political career out of telling Americans that they could not trust their gummint -- that "Gummint Is The Problem" -- because it was controlled by a "little, intellectual elite"
in a "far distant capitol".
Because "every bit as much as any Birther flake or Death Panel stooge -- every bit as much as Sarah Palin -- " Conservative apostates like David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan are conspiring to perpetrate their own massive, self-serving, fraudulent rewrite of American history.
And the thing it, while the Beck/Palin lies will probably burst at the seams sooner or later, the Brooks/Sullivan lies shom every sign of becoming quickly and eagerly adopted as Holy Writ.
And why?
Because there are dozens of other members of the Villager Media Clubhouse who are every bit as culpable as clowns like Brooks and Sullivan in permitting the Conservative wingnut infection run wild and unchecked though the American body politic year after year after year. And the malignant mythology that is being built by Brooks and Sullivan right before our eyes fulfills those same Villagers's dearest wishes: to find the Perfect Lie; one that allows them to simultaneously smirk and mock and cluck their tongues at the car-wreck that is the Palinite Movement, while conspicuously ignoring the fact that they were the ones who helped cut the brake cables that caused the wreck in the first place.
The Villagers want more than anything else to be innocent.
And after decades of covering up for Conservative lies and treason and betraying their profession into the hands of monsters, the only way they can be innocent anymore is when they dream.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"
Since Andrew Sullivan went out of his way to challenge me to be an asshole:
If the journalist looks like an asshole, get over it. It is our job to look like assholes. We are professional assholes. We get paid to be rude. In order to expose the truth.
...
And by relentlessly, I mean - if they fail to answer, or offer vague generalizations, ask again. And again. And again. And again. On air. Refuse to move on. Put them on the spot.
...
I feel I should oblige him by continuing to ask him the same question I have been asking for years: Andrew, why do you continue to lie about Conservatism?
For those of you that don't know, Mr. Sullivan runs a massive blog-appendage of "The Atlantic" magazine where he does roughly 200 times the traffic of a lil' guy like yours truly:
Last January, the Dish amassed 6.2 million page-views; this January 11 million. Thanks.
Mr. Sullivan posts many cool videos and many opinions with which I agree -- with which, in fact, I agreed long, long, looooooooooong before Mr. Sullivan reluctantly abandoned the fiery wreck of his own failed ideology and jumped resentfully onto my bandwagon. But woven deeply into virtually every one of his critiques of the "Christianists" and Palinites whom he feels have polluted His Awesome Movement to the point where he had to leave, you will find a massive dose of exactly the same brand of poison he slams them for pushing: that sweet, fatal narcotic of revisionism and forgetfulness.
And in the aggregate, the work of Mr. Sullivan has become such a remarkable, public and continuous display of unalloyed hypocrisy and willful blindness that I thought it deserved special attention.
Attention Mr. Sullivan's friends
and
colleagues
in the
Big Dollar Media
would
never
ever
be rude enough
to inflict
on him.
Attention his fellow mega-bloggers will not visit upon his pernicious twaddle
because he is one of them, and you don't fuck up a fellow hustler while he's working his game.
Mr. Sullivan's critique of the horrors of the "contemporary" Conservative movement comes in three, distinct parts.
First, that it relies entirely on aggressively and continuously lying about their own immediate past (In the interest of brevity, I believe this from Mr. Sullivan's assay of "Going Rogue" fairly summarizes his opinions of the entire Teabagger/Conservative/Beckian/Cult of Palin mob that yours truly simply refers to as The Pig People:
... The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious puree of such ghastly prose that, in the end, the book can only really be read as a some kind of chapter in a cheap nineteenth century edition of "Lives of the Saints." But as autobiography.
It is a religious book, full of myths and parables. And yet it is also crafted politically, with every single "detail" of the narrative honed carefully for specific constituencies. It is also some kind of manifesto - but not in the usual sense of a collection of policy proposals. It is a manifesto for the imagined life of an imagined Sarah Palin as a leader for all those who identify with the image and background she relentlessly claims to represent.
In this, the book is emblematic of late degenerate Republicanism, which is based not on actual policies, but on slogans now so exhausted by over-use they retain no real meaning: free enterprise is great, God loves us all, America is fabulous, foreigners are suspect, we need to be tough, we can't dither, we must always cut taxes, government is bad, liberals are socialists, the media hates you, etc etc.
Second, that this aggressive and continuous lying is, y'know, a bad thing:
Let me try to explain: it matters who caused the problem and why because if we do not understand the causes we cannot fix the problem and it matters because any adult judgment of a politician's first year that does not take into account the inheritance he was bequeathed is impossible.
... What you begin to realize is that on a whole host of issues, the GOP is going backward in areas of social tolerance, as they marinate in their own paranoia and purge every non-ideologue from their ranks. And as they go backward and feel, yes, left behind, their virulence and resentment intensify. It's a classic fundamentalist response to modernity.
And third, that this act of destroying the diagnostic equipment of democracy -- namely, our collective capacity to have honest and reasoned argument -- is coldly premeditated, representing as it does the Right's only hope of saving itself from the righteous and brutal judgment of history, and clawing its way back to power:
... Removing that context, as the GOP has largely done, and Crook now endorses, is to rig the entire debate so that Obama cannot win. It is a function of the kind of punditry that is, in fact, far more of a problem for the country than anything Obama has done - because it bases political judgment on unreality, and distorts the body politic's capacity for reasoned argument. ...
So far, so good, and if Mr. Sullivan's critique had the good sense to end on that note, I would not feel the need to write this.
But Mr. Sullivan does not stop there, because he cannot stop there.
Because, to be blunt, Mr. Sullivan has spent most of his adult life making a living not merely as a pundit and public intellectual, but as the Gay Conservative pundit and public intellectual.
As the staunch Gay Defender of the Party of Homophobes, bigots, Christopaths, gun nuts and plutocrats.
By being the Party of God's own, pet Gay Conservative Clayton Bigsby (video no longer exists) doing yeoman's work providing the boards and nails to lay the foundation of the fascist movement that he only started decrying:
... If you are not alarmed by this development - a new, proto-fascist political party being recreated on television in front of our very eyes - then you have not read much history.
once the entire Conservative Ponzi Scheme began collapsing on his head under the sheer weight of Conservative clusterfuckery at the hands of the Cheney Administration.
And how does he accomplish this?
Would it surprise you to learn that he accomplishes this by aggressively and continuously lying about his own immediate past (emphasis added)?
... But what I find odd is how relatively few people seem to have evolved or shifted their political alliances or views over the past ten years I've been blogging. Obviously, I had a severe case of whiplash as the Bush and Cheney administration exploded the debt, jacked up entitlements, embraced torture, bungled two wars, and demonized gays. But the events of recent times, one might imagine, would have affected worldviews all over. ...
Got that?
For the Palinites, the lie is that history began on January 20, 2009, when the Black Guy became president; for the Sullivanites, the lie is that history began in 2003, when George W. Bush apparently snuck into Ronald Reagan's crypt and peed on the Great Man's mortal remains.
Because every bit as much as any Birther flake or Death Panel stooge -- every bit as much as Sarah Palin -- Andrew " Reagan-Thatcher pragmatic Christian Tory" Sullivan hangs onto his position and paycheck only by tirelessly hawking his own brand of discredited, self-absolving, self-deluding revisionist bullshit ("Bush Betrayed 'Real' Conservatism"). Mr. Sullivan dresses his crackpottery up by nudging the time-line back a little bit, but the object is the same: to exempt himself from the same, harsh judgment he wants to lavish on the Palinites by excusing himself from the much larger and more destructive crime of helping to create the environment in which moral monsters like the Palinites could flourish.
And because Mr. Sullivan builds his critique of the Palinites on fundamentally corrupt ground, his observations of them not only come across as deeply dishonest, but also loudly and unintentionally hilarious.
...anyone with eyes open and mind ungunked-up with Right Wing hoo-ha could see this clearly:
From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:
…
What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.
We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct.
…
“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”
In conjunction with the civil rights movement, Johnson overcame southern resistance and convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed most forms of racial segregation. Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. Legend has it that, as he put down his pen, Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation," anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
-- and has been sliding deeper into the septic tank ever since.
And according to Wikipedia, Andrew Sullivan was born in 1963.
Which means that Andrew Sullivan has been wrong, about everything, his entire life.
His. Entire. Life.
What we saw during the Bush/Cheney administration was not a fluke or an anomaly, but the murderous crest of an authoritarian/plutocrat movement that was born in sin and began its aggressive descent into ignorance, bigotry and willful blindness not five months or five years ago...but was well underway 40 years ago, was radically amplified by a man named Ronald Reagan, and had been gaining barbaric force and momentum ever since.
It was, after all, none other than Ronald Reagan -- the very Fountainhead of all Conservative Good Things -- who first blew up the deficit. Wheee!
It was Ronald Reagan who rode to power over the bodies of civil rights workers, in the back of the imaginary Cadillac of a fictional welfare queen, to the thunderous applause of Klansmen, Birchers and theocrats.
It was Reagan who kicked the door open and invited the crazies onto the dance floor. Reagan, who opened the floodgates to the GOP lining its electoral pockets by demonizing gays. And uppity women. And minorities. And imaginary hippies.
It was Reagan who crushed residential mental health programs, programs to provide legal help to poor people, food programs, unions, you name it.
It was Reagan who unleashed Total Class Warfare aimed squarely at those citizens who were poorest, weakest and least-able-to-defend themselves.
It was Reagan who began the Republican War on the Middle Class that is now approaching its Gettysburg.
It was Conservative icon Saint Ronald Reagan who supercharged the efforts to methodically transform the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis begun under Conservative Richard Nixon. Who oversaw the cynical escalation of the cultural war from Conventional to Nuclear.
It was Reagan who conducted a flatly illegal war and told his critics to fuck off when his crimes were discovered. It was Reagan who dallied with terrorists and laundered their money to pay for that illegal war. And it was Reagan's vice president who 20 fucking years ago turned the despicable Lee Atwater loose
to run one of the most nakedly racist campaigns in modern presidential history, and who then went on to make sure that all of Reagan's criminal co-conspirators got pardons.
All of which and so very much more has been whisked down the memory hole by Mr. Sullivan, because his particular shell game only works as long as everyone agrees to pretend that the Palinites, the Bushies, the Cheneyites and all the other slavering, wingnut zombie hordes from which Mr. Sullivan now cringes in horror are some random freaks of recent vintage
... It's also a function of Fox News creating a national ideology through a national propaganda arm of the RNC. Well, they will reap what they sow. At least I hope so if real conservatism is going to one day find a comeback in American political discourse. ...
and not a generation of stunted, smug, pig-ignorant Conservatives who were deliberately spawned and suckled by the Republican Party in the radioactive wasteland created by Mr. Sullivan's beloved Reagan Revolution.
Because any Acknowledgment of Paternity which establishes Ronald Reagan's as the political father of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin would completely fuck up Mr. Sullivan's lucrative scam.
It all happened centuries ago, and while Rand’s economic and philosophical offerings are pure, self-serving, laissez-faire gangsterism, if you don’t understand the powerful allure of it’s meritorcratic siren’s song, you will always miss the point.
Looking back over my professional life -- from delivering papers in the pre-dawn cold to today, writing this -- I see a landscape littered with lessons. I see the remnants of lost jobs and aborted careers; some small or predictable (say, working for a company that went out of business), but a disturbing number times the end came when dimwits with power let hucksters con then into playing with the lives and fortunes of the people who worked for them like Gomez Addams
playing with toy trains.
Most of my adult life I have been playing dime-store Cassandra at one organization or another, arguing for intelligent solutions based on realistic expectations and built on a boring, methodical, data-tested implementation strategy that pays close attention to the negative feedback loop.
Hideously unsexy stuff, but it works.
In virtually every fucking case, I found myself completely outgunned by people who were more connected, more ruthless, completely unfettered by conscience and more willing to promise a credulous, frightened, inept boss magical, transformative, quantum-leapy results, packed deep inside sleek, focus-group-tested adjectives.
Then came the next recession or funding cut or management fad, some functionary hands me my walking papers, and I find myself back on the road -- broke, screwed, angry, scared, forced to start all over again, and watching as the party boat sails on over the horizon without me.
Then in 3…2…1…
Boom.
Organizational shrapnel flying into the sky. Distant screams. The smell of burning PowerPoints and flipcharts. A flood of emails from friends still aboard the doomed vessel hinting at new, unspeakably Caligulan outrages. Having bet the farm on the Latest Crackpot Idiocy and having driven out of the monkey house everyone who tried to warn them that the Latest Crackpot Idiocy wouldn’t work, management can no longer back out of its Faustian bargain without a fatal loss of face.
So they go all-in and give the douchbags the keys to the kingdom; the weasels can have anything they want – they can eat the organization alive and dance in its skin – as long they promise to save the necks of the goofs who steered the ship into disaster in the first place.
And they do: the great, smothering arms of the Confederacy of Dunces reach out to enfold and protect another one of their own.
And it all begins again.
And you know what? Some morning I get up, looking in the mirror and my first coherent thought is that I am fucking tired of it.
Politically and professionally, I am heartily tired of being right, and losing, over and over and over again.
I’m tired of warning people not to give the keys to the shitwhistles, then watching them do it, then watching my nightmares come true, then watching them lie about it.
I am tired of drowning in a flood of other people’s self-absolving bullshit.
Tired of being a head smarter than primates who tell me to shut up and sit down while they fuck things up beyond repair.
Tired going broke while I watch people who have been wrong forever about everything prosper.
Tired of finding out – always too late – that there was another, secret rule book. Another, secret, organization chart. Another, secret list of the Clout Protected. Another, secret clique of insiders or brothers-in-law or made-media-men or A-lister’s who had already held their own Yalta Conference behind closed doors and have already divvied up the Brave New World I thought I was fighting for long before the battle was over.
Tired of finding out that while I was sweating my ass off, the game had been rigged against me by people who I thought were on my team.
Tired of finding out that the two ironclad rules of Illinois politics (Rule One: There is a club. Rule Two: You are not in it.) also apply to virtually every other institution.
Tired of finding out, yet again, that in the Valley of the Blind, the One-eyed Man gets fired.
And in that exhausted, angry moment when I can see so clearly how the world could be if it weren’t being driven to ruin by thieves and hacks and aldermen, I understand the appeal of Going Galt.
The attraction of once and for all turning my back, stepping aside and letting it burn.
In that moment I once again understand the adolescent allure of Ayn Rand.
