A Modest Proposal: Abolish Gay Marriage Immediately. *

* [Prologue:  If you have never read Jonathan Swift's excellent 1729 satire "A Modest Proposal" please understand that this missive of mine is delivered in that spirit. Onward.]

Sure, abolishing gay marriage may sound "controversial:, but hear me out.

The one thing the Centrist Big Brains and Never Trumpers with media platforms all seem to agree on is that Democrats lost because something something "culture".  They're all very careful never to explain  exactly what "culture" means, but they are all very clear that Democrats must dump the words and the people and who make "Americans" feel icky.

Example.

This is Bill Galston, nearly 80, completely out of touch reality and very hard to listen to since literally every third word out of his mouth is "y'know" on the Never Trump Beg to Differ podcast:

...the [Democratic] party is going to have to go through a hard process of dumping overboard the ballast that threatened to sink the ship.

This is Sam Harris, smug contrarian asshole who has been driven right 'round the bend by trans stuff, on the Never Trump Bulwark podcast.

The Democratic party is a... is a this very rigged, uh, Rube Goldberg device of death.  Which is just, y'know, rigged to destroy, to... to cancel the reputation of anyone who touches the wrong gear or lever.  And, uh, we have to... we have to tear it down to the studs. I mean it's just like this... is there... Actually has to be a purge of the activist class in Democratic politics. Otherwise, y'know, this... no one we put forward will be electable.

All lines on the pundit electoral map converge here:  Democrats have to go all-in on peeling off some of the cow-dumb mouthbreathers who make up the margins in these very close elections. The goofs who have no idea how anything works, what anyone stands for, who pay zero attention to the news and who broke late for Trump this year by a wide margin.  

You know, the clueless mopes Jay Leno used to interview during his "Jaywalking" bit. 

The cast of Idiocracy.   

The Kallikaks.  

America's ambulatory, unprocessed Soylent Green.

We who remember All in The Family need to stop mentally shaking our heads ruefully at the millions of Archie Bunkers who now control this country, and instead bend every oar in the service of convincing at least some of those racist dum-dums to vote Democratic.  

Because, for you Robocop fans out there, the Great Wad (as my friend, the late Harlan Ellison used to call them) does not admire the bespectacled kid working a night shift at a filling station while studying plane geometry:     

They Great Wad hates that guy.  Instead, they admire the asshole on the motorcycle who mocks the idea of being a "college boy" and takes what he wants by force.  

Those are the ones we need to somehow bamboozle into the Big Tent.  And believe me, I understand how uncomfortable this might make some of you. In fact, way back five minutes ago I wrote a lot about madness of credulous Liberals, who had been right all along, to allow themselves to be shoved into a corner (again) and control over the public conversation about what the hell had happened to the GOP ceded to the likes of recently-former Republicans like Rick Wilson and Charlie Sykes and Matthew Dowd and Joe Scarborough.  

Ceded without the slightest hint of genuine confession or repentance or atonement.  Ceded without any acknowledgment that we Liberals even existed, except as wild-eyed straw men impeding the fortunes of this new "Pro-Democracy Alliance" the Never Trumpers were somehow now in charge of.  As this tiny handful of recently-former Republicans began to completely colonize the print and teevee media, I was told, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, to sit down and shut up.

For God's Sake, driftglass, don't you realize that the Fate of American Democracy was at stake! 

[Fun Fact: Turns out that handing whatever was left of the "Liberal" media over to a bunch of recently-former Republicans accomplished nothing.  And yet there they still are.  Still useless, still wrong, and still telling us what to do.] 

So believe me when I tell you that I well understand your revulsion at the idea of pandering to meatheads for votes, but for God's Sake, don't you realize that the Fate of American Democracy is at stake! 

And keep in mind that the attitudes of the bigots and imbeciles are set in concrete, so you can forget about changing them or persuading them with "facts".  They're completely immune to that.  Instead, just like Republicans, we need to focus on a few their odious prejudices and deranged conspiracy theories and pretend like hell that, A) we agree with them, B) they are very smart for believing what they believe, and C) we promise to make whatever they're mad at go away.

Also keep in mind, they have the memory of a mayfly, so it doesn't matter if we actually deliver on those promises.  This is a great big hammer that foolish Democrats keep leaving in the tool box.  In the New Politics, it only matters that the meatbags think you delivered on your promises.  Donald Trump built a couple of shitty miles of his stupid wall, Mexico laughed at the thought that they were going to pay for any of it, and yet the meatbags think it was a huge success.

After all, if God hadn't wanted them to be greased, fleeced and decreased, She would not have made them chumps.  Seen that way, not scamming them may even be sacrilegious.  

We'd be doing it to Save American Democracy.  And is there a nobler cause to be found in this broken old world?

But we have a lot of catching up to do, since Republicans have already picked the Hate shelves nearly clean, which is no surprise since they've been at it for so long that Hate has become the sole binding force that keeps their volatile coalition of bigots, imbeciles, gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, christopaths and grifters together.  

Consider that, with Barack Obama, Democrats offered the Right a compassionate, polymath, scandal-free constitutional law professor.  A family man with family values.  With a strong, beautiful wife and amazing kids.  A man who wanted to roll up his sleeves and help America get back on it's feet.  And who obsessively tacked to the ever-shifting Fake Center in hopes of finding partners in fixing America's real problems on the other side.

What the hell were we thinking!?  And a woman of color?  That's twice as bad!

This is not what Republicans want in a black person.  They do not want someone they have to look up to.  Who is in charge of things.  Or funny.  Or smart.  Or competent.  Or articulate.  No, no, no.  Republican want a black man who knows his fucking place.  Republicans don't want black folks gone; they want them servile and deferential.  Bowing low to white power like they did back in the good old days.  

And that's what they got in men like Michael Steele who happily groveled for Rush Limbaugh's approval because Mikey Mike knew his fucking place.  Like grinnin', clappin' Tim Scott who went so far as to marry his "Canadian girlfriend" for a shot at the highest office in the land, running in a party that never had any intention of giving it to him. And now they have Byron Donalds right out front, smiling and lying and happily eating all of Donald Trump's shit and asking for seconds, and  getting absolutely nothing in return.

No way we can match that.  

Republicans have also already stripped women of their basic civil rights, and most of the white ladies didn't care.  Didn't care that Trump was a rapist.  Didn't care that he was besties with Jeffrey Epstein.  Instead, what they know for damn sure and certain is that Obummer was a Kenyan mooslim, Hillary drinks baby's blood and had Vince Foster murdered, and Kalama Harris is tranny loving commie furriner just like her father!

So we can't compete with them for the incels, the bro-vote, or the self-loathing women.  And unless we run Tony Montana next time --

-- the male Latino voters who bailed this time -- because a woman's place is either decorative arm-candy or in the kitchen making dinner and in the bedroom making babies -- are unlikely to return. 

This election proved we can't compete with Republicans in demonizing Haitians or Puerto Ricans either.  

Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania showed they could run anti-semitic ads in one state, and anti-Muslim ads in another, and cash in on both, so they pretty much own hating both of those groups.

And no matter how frantically our Never Trumper and Centrist "allies" insist that it's not too late to get in on that slagging transexuals action, Republicans -- led by Failed Botox-and-taxidermy experiment, Nancy Mace -- own that now too.  

So who is left out there in the land of the free for us to target?  Some group that the bigots and imbeciles already hate enough for at least some of them to consider hooking up with the Dems next time?  The Irish?  Italians?  Canadians? 

Nope.  Sorry, but none of those get the blood boiling enough or fire enough berserk lightening into the amygdala to get the meatheads off their asses and to the polls for Democrats.

C'mon people, the answer is right there in front of us.  Who do the meatheads both hate and about whom (and this is the important part) do they feel they're being cruelly oppressed by the Woke Mob and prevented from blabbing their hatred in public?

It's the Gays, stupid.  

You think these assholes have evolved on that subject in the 20 years since Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove used it to help get Dubya re-elected in 2004?  Are you high?  Once again, wake the fuck up: these mopes still haven't gotten over Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865.

The New York Times, February 24, 2004

Bush Backs Ban in Constitution on Gay Marriage

 President Bush said today he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, declaring that such a measure was the only way to protect the status of marriage between man and woman, which he called "the most fundamental institution of civilization."

In an announcement fraught with social, legal and political implications, Mr. Bush urged Congress to act on the amendment quickly and send it on to the state legislatures. Quick action is essential, he said, to bring clarity to the law and protect husband-and-wife marriages from a few "activist judges."

"The voice of the people must be heard," Mr. Bush said in a brief White House speech that Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called an attempt to find "a wedge issue to divide the American people."...

Of course it was "a wedge issue to divide the American people."  In the New Politics, there are nothing but wedge issues, because the meatheads we need to win elections do not give one tiny shit about anything else.  

I tell you, out here in the Real World where I live, the meatheads are dying to go back being able to openly mock the "queers" and "fairies" and the "dykes".  Go back to telling "fag" jokes in  public without fear o censure or side-eyes from their fellow church goers, which is why Democrats must go after the Sodomites with as much zeal as we speak about climate change.  

And it'll be so easy.  Targeting gay school teachers.  Railing against Hollywood's Gay Agenda  ruining America.  And you know it's The Gays who are driving housing prices out of reach of real Americans.  And for gosh sakes, my kids can even enjoy watching Saw III without seeing commercials for gay couples doing laundry and pickout out furniture!  What about a spirited campaign to have Anita Bryant, Robert Mugabe and Phyllis Schlafly put on American postage stamps?  All the old triggers and stereotypes are still there, lurking just below the surface of oppressive Woke-enforced civility, and for once maybe we can beat the GOP at their own game.

And the first step is the abolition of gay marriage.  And we need to go all-in on this.  Some of us can get away with merely writing pseudo-scholarly contrarian articles in respected journals ala degenerate gambler Bill Bennett and high-class bigot William Buckley explaining how The Gays sap the moral strength of the nation.  This will not be a problem:  if the Times will publish Tom Cotton, they'll publish any filth as long as it draws flies.

Others will need to take a lower road: maybe going full Westboro Baptist Church -- waving the Bible and screaming about Leviticus -- if that's what it takes.  But we all need to get behind this thing and push.  

Or don't you care about Saving American Democracy?

Maybe we can even lure some of the  Log Cabin Republicans into our Big Tent -- they certainly seem self-loathing enough to go for it.

Now I am not blind to the hardship this will impose on The Gays (Note to self I: commission a focus group the find out if beating up on blind people would win us any votes in Pennsylvania.  Or hating handicapped people generally.  Note to self II: Especially people with mental disabilities -- the meatheads are nearly as thirsty to reintroduce "retard" into the MAGA out-'n-proud lexicon as they are "fag".) nor am I unsympathetic, but sacrifices must be made.  Remember, people, to impress the meatheads and get enough of 'em on our side to swing elections, purges must be done.  Ballast must be jettisoned.  

I understand that coming out loudly against gay marriage may disorient some people.  I, for one, will be saddened to see the marriages of prominent gays and lesbians like Pete Buttigieg, Tim Miller and Sara Longwell legally annulled and their children taken away, but what choice do we have?  

Personally, I enjoyed seeing Mayor Pete on Fox running rings around the hosts, and I'm sure that Miller and Longwell meant well when they insisted that the path to victory was for Dems to climb into bed with Liz Cheney, but let's look at the cold, hard facts.

Sending Mayor Pete to Fox News accomplished exactly nothing except impressing some liberals who were going to vote Democratic anyway.  And let's face it, the Never Trump "movement" has also accomplished exactly nothing except salvaging the careers and bank accounts of a handful of elite misfits who were run out of their own party gby the monster they created.

It's all very sad, but sacrifices to the bigotry of the meatheads must be made.  Tribute to the paranoia of the meatheads must be paid.  After all, in this Kobayashi Maru moment, the Salvation of American Democracy hangs in the balance.  And how selfish and self-destructive it would be to value the civil rights of the few over the Salvation of American Democracy for the many.

Look, we probably won't actually have to do most of this.  Remember the thing about the MAGA memory being Etch-a-Sketch sketchy.  We'll just need to promise to do it, then publicly emmiserate the families of a few prominent gays, then declare victory over the Gay Agenda.  Republican voter are  morons.  They'll forget.

And if it should come to pass, after years of winning elections and successfully fundraising off of this stuff, that we must actually deliver on it, well, this Supreme Court is clearly ready and willing to ignore stare decisis, eradicate decades of precedent and strip away the civil rights of certain groups of American citizens.  And if that's not enough. that same Supreme Court has granted the office of the president godlike powers and immunity from everything, so we'd have that in our back pocket too.

As I said, this would all be very sad, but surely a small price to pay to Save American Democracy.

Update:  For the record, the graphic at the top of this post is not a parody.  It's an actual relic from a Conservative ad from 2005.

The ad was produced by USA Next, a conservative group that supports creating personal accounts within Social Security and has aggressively criticized the AARP, which disagrees about the Social Security reform.

More here:

In February 2005, USA Next hired the advertising agency behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that attacked 2004 presidential candidate John F. Kerry. The group gained instant notoriety late in that month when they placed an advertisement on several conservative web sites and blogs. This advertisement depicted a large red 'x' over a picture of a soldier and a large green check mark over a picture of a just-married homosexual couple.

 

No Half Measures

Because Both Sides, Part #197,833

From Salon:

Our outrageous media created the Tea Party

How "melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration and mockery" became the dominant tone on cable and talk radio

JEFFREY M. BERRY AND SARAH SOBIERAJ 

...

Given the magnitude of the response to Limbaugh’s remarks, an unfamiliar outsider might assume his behavior to be highly out of the ordinary. In fact, what is perplexing is that the attacks on Fluke struck so many as shocking. This is, after all, the same Rush Limbaugh who coined the term “feminazi,” called Hillary Clinton a bitch, Chelsea Clinton a dog, and Nancy Pelosi a “ditz”—he who had also suggested that Anita Hill had probably had “plenty of spankings.” This is the same Limbaugh who regularly refers to the National Organization for Women as “NAGS,” and more recently responded to the multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain by suggesting: “You women, why don’t you just make it official, put on some burqas, and I’ll guaran-damn-tee you, nobody’ll touch you. You put on a burqa, and everybody’ll leave you alone.”

Rush Limbaugh’s remarks were outrageous, but such behavior is de rigueur in a political media genre where being offensive (and reliably indignant when offended) is the foundation of most content. Popular conservative radio host Michael Savage has no qualms yelling “take your religion and shove it up your behind” at Muslims on his national broadcast. And liberal radio host Mike Malloy seemed to take great enjoyment in making a mock phone call to Satan to check on conservative blogger and commentator Andrew Breibart, shortly after he passed away. In one of his many ludicrous statements, conservative Glenn Beck told viewers on Fox’s morning show that FEMA could very well be building concentration camps for those opposed to the policies of the Obama administration.

...

Although outrage has some commonality with its conceptual sibling, “incivility,” the terms are not interchangeable. Diana Mutz and Byron Reeves use incivility to denote “gratuitous asides that [suggest] a lack of respect and/or frustration with the opposition.” In a sense, outrage is incivility writ large. It is by definition uncivil but not all incivility is outrage. Rude behavior such as eye-rolling, sighing, and the like are not outrageous because they do not incorporate the elements of malfeasant inaccuracy and intent to diminish that characterize outrage.

In addition to its unique discursive style, the genre also has other recognizable attributes. First, it is generally personality centered, with a given program, column, or blog defined by a dominant charismatic voice. We can think of liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, conservative television host Bill O’Reilly, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, or liberal radio and television host Ed Schultz as examples of these distinctive personalities. While many of these programs and blogs include other voices such as those of guests, callers, and commenters, these voices take a backseat to the host, whose charm, emotional sensibilities, and worldview define the content. Unlike a conventional news program, in which the news itself is central and anchors are often replaced, there would be no Rachel Maddow Show without Rachel Maddow.

...

For those seeking to understand the genre, recognizing the various writers and speakers as part of a densely connected web is vital, as outrage is marked by internal intertextuality, with personalities from outrage venues constantly referring to one another. This is true for those on the same side of the ideological rift, but it is also difficult to imagine progressive and conservative outrage media being separated, as each plays an instrumental role in creating fodder for the other. Think back to Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke, and consider the ways in which Limbaugh himself became the subject of liberal blogs such as Daily Kos and liberal television programs such as the Ed Schultz Show. The feedback loop continued to cycle as Limbaugh, in turn, criticized progressive outlets for exaggerating the controversy and using it for political ends.

...

I love the smell of internal intertextuality in the morning.  It smells like...grad students jerking off and calling it scholarship.

Honestly, they don't even try anymore.

They don't even think about it anymore.

Now, it's just part of the Modern American Jounalism style book, right up there with when to abbreviate the names of units of government and when to spell them out.

And it is absolutely destroying our capacity for self-governance.

Weary Hooker Predicts Demand For Blowjobs To End Soon

The Professional Left Redux: "Prophecy is a Tough Buck" edition.

Almost two years, we at The Professional Left predicted that Tina Brown's next act of media-vampirism would be a magazine called "Cover", which would consist of nothing but a one-page cover (engineered to stir up fake controversy) and ads.

Two years later, judge for yourself how close we came:

Tina Brown, who edited New Yorker and Newsweek, doesn’t read magazines anymore 

Bhavya Dore, Hindustan Times  Bambolim, Goa, November 08, 2013

First Published: 21:29 IST(8/11/2013)

“The digital explosion has been so explosive,” said Brown, responding to a question on the state of journalism, during her session on Friday, “there isn’t a single place where the digital thing is a profit thing. The disruption hasn’t brought a business model.”

The British journalist who helmed among the best-known American magazines, bringing equal parts unique style and controversy to her jobs, no longer reads magazines herself.

“The habit has gone,” she said, later speaking to reporters.

And the written word is possibly, slowly going too, she told the audience during her session.

“I think you can have more satisfaction from live conversations,” she said, adding we were “going back to oral culture where the written word will be less relevant.”

...

I suppose if one has built a career on the theory that the magnificent language of Shelley and Keats and Joyce and Poe and Shakespeare and Dickenson and Faulkner and Carver was bequeathed to you merely as means for scamming people into giving you money, eventually one gets tired of it glaring back at you with such scorn and reproval.

Ever Since I Shelved the "Driftington Post" Project

("Synthesizing the Narrative of a Generation!") I have found it almost impossible to even thumb through the great, sloppy midden pile of nipple slips, diet tips, tabloid sleaze, purloined excellence, occasional articles of genuine interest and, generally, the murmur of the New Age hipster end of the Davos wading pool talking to itself that HuffPo has become.

Arianna's House of Games was, is, and ever shall be an exercise in raw capitalist scammery dressed up in the best fair-market cotton Che tee-shirt money can buy, and once I had satisfied my morbid curiosity -- once I learned exactly how the simple, mechanical aggregation magic trick worked by doing it for a couple of weeks and once I had sussed out the 25 or so words which are in constant, Batman-Splat!-Pow!-Zowie! rotation inside the headline extruding algorithm -- I lost interest.

But every now and then I drop back over just to see

Today, for example, I stopped by.

First thing I noticed was that Rupert Murdoch's trophy wife -- Wendi Deng Murdoch -- had been given a choice piece of real estate atop the front page to promote her first movie.

Oh boy!

The word "lao tong," once holding a historic meaning, now had a modern and relevant definition for me. In fact, even before we launched the production process, I found my amazing family of lao tongs rallying around me. These connections kept me feeling brave. The wonderful writer Amy Tan introduced me to Lisa See's novel. Without Amy's friendship, I would never have been inspired to start this project. My great friend Florence Sloan joined as my supportive and strong producing partner and together we found ourselves lucky enough to...

Something something Wayne Wang.
Something something impressive figures from Silicon Valley.
Something something the mayor of San Francisco.
Something something my good friend Willow Bay.
Something something actress Bing Bing Li.
Something something Lisa See.
Something something Diane von Furstenberg.
Something something Nicole Kidman.
Something something Diana Taylor.
Something something Ivanka Trump.
Something something Ben Kingsley.
Something something Deb Lee Jackman.
Something something Senator Chris Dodd.

Something something.

Or, as President Jed Bartlet once said, "It's nice when we can do something for prostitutes once in a while, isnt it?"

Because, yes, we are talking about the trophy wife of that Rupert Murdock.

Perhaps I will drop by the Huffington Post for a few seconds again.

In three months.

Or seven.

Or sixteen.

Can't Someone Else Do It?

So what does the three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at da Jewel have to do with the slow death of Wikipedia?

Funny you should ask.

From Gawker:

Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying

Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away?

Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing our ranks," he said, "it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." According to Wales a lot of the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to do with their time. Previous rumors of Wikipedias demise have focused on a lack of any new stuff to add; but this seems like a real existential threat.
...

And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags.
...

We have a cherished saying in my family: "Let's you and him fight."

Which, translated, is our way of recognizing-with-an-Ozark-laugh that the world is full of people who have lots of good ideas about how other people should spend their abundant "spare time".

What's happening with Wikipedia is not a web phenomenon: it's just the latest manifestation of same something-for-nothing shell game played by every two-bit Alexander the Great I (and probably you) have ever worked for.

It is the fantasy on which turned just about every executive staff session I was ever dragooned into attending into a meeting of all-quarterbacks and no wide-receivers where every wild, dumb idea was flung blindly down-field to no one at all -- in the passive "someone really should move the building two feet to the left!" voice -- by organizational deadwood who later tell their loved ones what heroes they had been that day.

It is the fantasy that allows elected goofs get away with promising that if gummint were just "run like a business" everything would be fine. (Which is bullshit. Most gummint -- most lousy gummint -- is run exactly like a lousy business: idiots on top who got there because or their last names or their college roommates, making far too much money than they are worth by loading up the men and women who actually till the soil and tread the grain [so to speak] with more work than they can possible accomplish [the goof on top didn't get there by telling the public "No"]...and then bitching about their general laziness and clockwatchery, or outsourcing the whole deal to some third party for a quick buck.)

It is the fantasy that has turned unpaid interns into unwitting scabs, and WalMart into an American success story instead of something foul and feudal about which we should be heartily ashamed.

It is the ancient Faustian bargain of the slaveholder – an army of uncomplaining servants created by, oh, let’s say “Providence” to provide the privileged with an endless stream of luxuries at bargain basement prices, and around which mankind has historically erected all manner of depraved theologies explaining why those who do the work should not enjoy the fruits of their labor, but should content themselves sitting on the porch, singin' spirituals.

As I wrote back in 2006:

Live Free or Buy

[Tom Friedman] also treads as lightly as a chubby mouse in a catnip bomber-jacket navigating the main floor of the Lion House just around sup-sup-sup-suppertime, because far too much of his personal well-being is staked to his main gig -- delivering ten-year-old platitudes about globalization to twenty-years-out-of-date, Conservative CEOs. Rich, white men with Republican rock-ribs, who adore George Bush and have voted straight GOP-ticket since they were old enough to golf in ugly pants.

Men who live in First Class – sometimes, to be clear and fair, through dint of long hours and hard work, which are traits to be admired – and have deluded themselves into believing that they can outsource the rivets and steel that hold the plane together, the engines that make it go and the flight crew that navigates it safely though the storm…and yet somehow they will be able to fly on in comfort forever, fueled by consultants and canny financial valuation trickery.

Friedman catches such men as the last of their employees plummet wholesale Earthward, as they sit in the skeletal airframe of their once-proud ships and the deathly cold wind of 30,000 feet is whistling though their ass-cracks and he advises that, perhaps, Steps Of Some Kind Should Be Taken.
...

We may or may not be able to educate our way out of the corner we’re in, but to even attempt to do so, we first have to come squarely to terms with who we are, what we are, and how we really got here.

To do that, consider this, which is one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Chaplin.
“The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.”

That is the dirty truth and true root of our problem; We have become the saddest thing Charlie Chaplin could imagine.

“We have become used to luxury.”

Those $.99 chicken fingers? The $12 bumper-to-bumper, inside-and-out car-wash? The three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at the Jewel?

These are, all of them, luxury items, created not by a band of rugged Libertarians hewing agricultural and technological miracles out of the living rock, but made possible by an ocean of cheap labor, federal subsidies and a continent rich beyond the dreams of Avarice in natural resources.

What we’re all about (and always have been) is manufacturing what, for most of human history, has been luxury goods, selling them cheap and living fat off the margins. There is nothing at all wrong with making a living doing this, except that in the long run, every race will go to the cleverest, and right now our problem is that we don’t believe that.

We are drowning in our own mythos of Sunshine, Freedom and Manifest Destiny.

We have take a fatal dose of our own Exceptionalism propaganda and have internalized down to our tubby little toesies the belief that God Almighty wants us to live in opulence.

That God wants gas prices to be low.
...

In 1861 the South was prosperous specifically because of the forced labor of four million brown people who were reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

In 2006, America is prosperous specifically because of the peonage-cheap, illegal labor of twelve million brown people who are reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

We tolerate with a wink-and-a-nudge a system that simultataneously criminalizes a labor force of twelve million to keep them underground and terrified, and then carefully extracts their labor for pennies.

Any social policy which doesn’t confront immigration on those terms will fail and fail badly because, in the end, we really only have two choices: Either a renegotiation of the social contract to pay working people a living wage, or an open recognition that we will forever rely more and more on cheaper and cheaper labor to remain spoiled and Holy.

So far we have chosen neither. We have chosen to burn through our collective inheritance of wealth and prestige to make foolish choices, set foolish policies, wage foolish wars, without having to feel any pain. Like crack-heads, we have stolen from our parents and mooched from our children enough fast, high-interest cash to allow us to trundle along in a state of oblivious Eloi-ness where we don’t have to make any hard decisions and our God-Given Right to Comfort and Ease keeps us from asking too many tough questions about where all this Free Lunch is actually coming from.

But Physics and Economics are brutal loan-sharks and we can’t all live forever on borrowed money, no matter how successful certain individuals like Dubya have been at doing just that.
...

I use Wikipedia for the occasional fast quote or summary here and there. I appreciate its convenience, just as I appreciate the convenience of free-of-charge services like YouTube and Blogger and gmail.

But I do not own them, and if they went away tomorrow I would find other tools with which to do my thing.

"Crowdsourcing", "cognitive surplus" and suchlike have never been anything but webslang for Homer J. Simpson's famous campaign slogan: "Can't someone else do it?"

And if you build your business, your ideology or your nation like "a foolish man who built his house on the sand" don't come crying to me when the rain comes and washes it all away.

The Fuck-Saw Junior

The Future Official Sexual Condiment of the Best Fucking Political Team on TeeVee!

From Politico:

RedState sells 'endorsement' [UPDATED]

The endorsement of Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative blog RedState and a CNN contributor is for sale as part of an advertising package, according to an email circulated by an account executive for The Human Events Group -Eagle Publishing, which recently purchased the site.

"Erick Erickson's reputation along with his rising profile, combine to make RedState the most influential conservative blog on Capitol Hill and across America," writes the account executive, Chris McIntyre, in a form email forwarded to POLITICO by two surprised conservatives. "Why not put Erick's influence to work for your organization?"
...

Why not indeed?

The Fuck-Saw Junior -- Asshole tested...

...Asshole approved!

Order now!

Still Leaning II: The Leanening

(h/t litbrit)

Breaking: Nothing New Under The Sun

Film at 11.

From Joe Klein, Time Magazine, 10/14/2010:

But Christine O'Donnell is not like that. She is attractive, to some, because she doesn't know anything. She couldn't name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with, not even Roe v. Wade. There is no way she could ever be confused with a member of the elites; there is no way she could be confused with an above average high school student. Her ignorance, therefore, makes her authentic--the holy grail of latter-day American politics: she's a real person, not like those phony politicians. In that sense, she--and the lifeboat filled with other Tea Party know-nothings--follow in the wake of our leading exemplar of ignorant authenticity, Sarah Palin (who seems every bit as unaware of public policy--she certainly never talks about it--as she was when a desperate and petulant John McCain chose her to be his running mate).

There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts. It is a society that no longer takes itself seriously.
...

From "Jubal Harshaw" in "Stranger in a Strange Land", 1961:

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was 'saved' and they were 'damned' — we were in a state of grace and the rest of the world were 'heathens' and by 'heathen' they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud.

It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance — mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day

From Samuel Johnson, "The Patriot", 1774:

A man sometimes starts up a patriot, only by disseminating discontent, and propagating reports of secret influence, of dangerous counsels, of violated rights, and encroaching usurpation.

This practice is no certain note of patriotism. To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. Few errours and few faults of government, can justify an appeal to the rabble; who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion.

More on this fast-breaking story as it develops...

And, for no extra charge, a little extra "Stranger in a Strange Land" goodness...

Jubal: "You're bitching about friendly fornication — do you know what I'm worried about?"

Ben Caxton: "What?"

Jubal: "Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead!"

One of the more hilariously odd things

to show up in my email in the last nine days.

I mean I knew someone was following me...

Celebrity Breasts, Ctd.

nIPples.

Celebrity Breasts.

But whose?