I REALLY WISH I KNEW WHAT THE HELL I WAS TALKING ABOUT

It seems to have reached the point where I can’t keep the mad parade of Bushworld corruption straight in my briny, messed-up brain-pan anymore -- not without some sort of scorecard or a fucking road map. Who’s really screwing who; what’s the real story, and what are the calculated diversions and misdirections that prevent us from understanding it; where does the truth reside, and just what the hell is the truth, anyway ...? It’s quite an impressive mass of confusion and bewilderment, a well-orchestrated campaign of controlled chaos, a cynical and hugely manipulative circle-jerk of thievery and deception that the amoral corporatists and barely-closeted Nazis in the current regime have foisted upon us. What’s the blueprint for survival in this milieu of maniacal, money-grubbing malfeasance? I don’t even know where to begin, what with my head being tied up by a clabbered and contorted assemblage of labyrinthine flapdoodle, mystifying minutia, and an anarchy of perplexing and stupefying misinformation. I am, for all practical purposes, mentally immobilized and intellectually unable to blaze a trail out of the Neo-Con darkness in which we’re slowly being asphyxiated. A common problem for most people nowadays, I should think.

Honestly, the accelerating nature of the present state of things has seriously outstripped my capacity for reason. If I really wished to understand what’s going on -- and I do, obviously -- on what am I supposed to focus my ever-shrinking attention span? Every member of the “progressive” community, whether they be bloggers or democratic activists or just loud-mouthed opinion-mongers, all seem to know the precise answer to such an impossible question. To some (and I include myself in this camp), the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Bush and his obscene horde of con-artists and blood-swillers is of the highest priority; others are of the opinion that installing a Democratically-controlled Congress next November is the magic panacea for all our various national ills; certain quarters seem to believe that we should get our bowels in a righteous uproar over NSA spying, or the Iraq war; or perhaps the non-issue of immigration, or election fraud, or even gay marriage or the looming aggression against Iran. Every blithering mouth-breather has their own pet issue, and each of these issues holds a certain degree of importance in its own right. However, the multiplicity of critical issues obscures the fact that the fundamental questions (whatever they may be), which need to be confronted first, can’t be addressed at all so long as we’re all acting like a clutch of pinheaded reactionaries. The latest outrage crashes over our heads, and well-meaning groups and individuals immediately froth and fume and spew out fiery blasts of indignation and anger -- but it rarely touches on the root causes of why the outrages occur in the first place, thereby setting the stage for the next outrage. And the one after that, and so on.

Oh hell, this isn’t anything we don’t already know. I’m certainly no paragon of ... well, anything really. I indulge in the same instinctive, adrenalin-fueled, fury-soaked reactionary behavior I so rudely poke others in the gonads over -- as in my previous post, where I was (and remain) practically catatonic in disgusted outrage over those Iraq photos at After Downing Street, or in the queasy panic I’m struggling to contain at the prospect of an Air Force general, the very same bald-headed bottom-feeding fuck who cobbled together the illegal NSA spy program, being installed in the top position at the Central Intelligence Agency. I guess the point is that, as vital as these individual issues are -- as well as the myriad of others clamoring for attention -- obsessive fixation on any one of them in particular is a hollow exercise in self-defeating futility. All of these actions and questions, these low-lifes suddenly thrust into prominence, these criminal acts of larceny and destruction and mass death, are merely manifestations of far more deep and fundamental phenomena: they’re only means to a nefarious end, in simplest terms. You can expose and attack and dissect and eviscerate and ridicule and (occasionally) force to a halt any one of these manifestations, which tends to puff-up one’s ego with a lot of uselessly hot air, but it doesn’t really change anything. The cancerous zombie of the Neo-Con Death Machine will continue its disastrous, lurching rampage over what’s left of the prone and pliant American body politic, regardless of how many tiny bits and pieces of its diseased and foully bloated carcass the righteous and well-meaning manage to knock off, here and there. We need to kill the damn thing, not just annoy or inconvenience it.

Yeah well, blah blah blah. I wish I knew what the hell I was talking about.