I FEEL LIKE THE ONLY PERSON HERE WHO GETS IT

Evening at the brewpub -- it's been so long since I indulged this particular weakness, this unhealthy splurge of time, money, and mental capacity. Anyway, while the well-groomed midtown chuckleheads chatter non-stop about ... something or other, and the NBA game on the jumbotroid teevee overlooks it all, I'm sitting here like a gearheaded retard with my laptop, streaming the Mike Malloy show. It feels like I'm the only one paying attention. To anything. It's so weird.

Unemployment is such a blast.

HAVING MY EMPLOYMENT WOES SOLVED FOR ME

A Sunday morning time-waster for everybody, not that it should actually have any actual resonance for you all out there -- wherever you are. Anyway, I was informed this past Friday that my lowly position, with the bloated trans-national corporation that shall remain nameless, is to be officially terminated. I've been "offered" a demotion and a pay cut; I intend to accept neither from these subhuman shysters, so for all intents and purposes, I'm heading into lay-off country. Frankly, it's been a long time since I've visited that drab wasteland ... I wonder if I'll even recognize it. At least they've solved my lousy job dilemma for me. How nice of them.

Anyway, now I can participate in the general strike being planned for November 6th without suffering any financial penalty. That's something, I suppose.

THE "DINO" DILEMMA -- ANOTHER HOPELESS SCREED

I haven't spent much time online lately, for a variety of personal reasons that wouldn't be of any interest to anybody, I'm sure. The web thing gets all so tiresome anyway, particularly the blogs with their constant repetition and regurgitation of doom and snark and despair. And that, of course, applies perfectly to this blog, so I know what I'm talking about here. One topic that so many bloggers spout off about -- and one I usually avoid -- is the ridiculous three-ring circus of Presidential politics, and the relative merits of candidates and all that depressing bullshit. It's especially popular among self-declared "democrats" or "liberals" or (my personal favorite, in the irony category) "progressives," desperate to establish iron-clad rhetorical edifices that prove why their choice of Presidential contender is the only one that's legitimate and/or correct, or whatever. They're all entitled to their opinions, since in this ignorant and largely disempowered age, opinion is pretty much all we have. Public opinion plays no authentic role within the political sphere of things, however. Perhaps it never has.

Well. Staking out a position over a specific candidate, pro or con, is absurd. "Debating" the qualities of Hillary Clinton or Obama, or any of the others, does nothing but create the illusion that something important is going on. Comparing them is an empty exercise; whatever real differences you might manage to glean are, at best, superficial and unimportant, and they usually revolve around minor tactical questions about how to achieve the basic goals that all members of the corporate-political class are devoted to. It's akin to trying to dig up true distinctions between the Republican and Democratic parties -- fundamentally, there aren't any, not in the areas that matter most. The same applies to individuals within the parties, particularly those running for national office.

What seems to escape most "liberals" or "progressives" is that focusing all attention on their machine-politician of choice completely -- totally, disastrously -- misses the point. Hoisting the flag for a particular Presidential candidate, hollering over each other about Hillary’s war-pimping proclivities or Obama's lack of lapel pins or Kucinich's unelectability, and all the other dreck and drivel of this sort, serves only one purpose: like most media-driven distractions in this era, it helps to obscure the fact that the United States is a democratic republic in name only.

Might as well face up to this particular truth. What do we have to lose, really, in acknowledging a little reality? Very little actually, at this late date. Most would agree that real democratic self-government has a critically important participatory component; if there is no participation, it's a fraud. Of course, this is a reference to all the anonymous chuckleheads out there, the drones and clods and gridlock jockeys -- just ordinary folk trying to live their ordinary lives in the most ordinary ways. When have they -- well, we -- ever truly participated in the ponderous process of governing ourselves? But, one might argue, this nation is organized as a republic, where we elect others to represent us within a governing body. True enough ... in theory. Problem is, we don't even have that anymore, assuming we ever really did. Unitary George and his cringing Congress of Democratic enablers pretty much proves this conclusively.

Democracy in name only. This is where the choreographed fiction of a Presidential election "campaign" rears its ugly, and very empty, head -- in fact, it's the very epitome of the "DINO" dilemma in which we"re all such unsuspecting captives. All candidates for public office, wherever it might be, say certain things during a campaign, tailored to the particular audience to which they're delivered. They pander, in other words. Meanwhile, they solicit and accumulate massive gobs of corporate cash to fund their various drives for power, in return for an encyclopedic collection of quid pro quos. It's a highly-evolved racket, predicated on age-old American traditions of greed and larceny, that has no real connection to the theories or conceptual underpinnings of true representative government, much less participatory democracy. How the hell can anybody who claims to understand the basic problems and dysfunction of US electoral politics -- self-styled "progressives" and "liberals" seem to believe they do -- have any measure of faith in any fully-owned product of such a comprehensively corrupt system, as all the major Presidential candidates clearly are? It's quite a puzzler, to say the least.

Well, long-winded screeds that go nowhere are certainly no answer to anything ... you might think, after all this time, I would've figured that out. Sigh. In any event, to all those Obama mamas and Hillary hipsters out there, as well as any other frothing partisan of some hack machine politician: Give it up already. No single individual, particularly a well-heeled shill crippled by corporate dollars and overwrought ambitions, is likely to have your interests in mind. Slavish devotion to these quasi-personality cults masquerading as Presidential campaigns -- it doesn’t really matter which one -- merely accelerates the process through which the warped neo-con vision of a privatized authoritarian state on the North American continent is being inexorably realized. It hastens the final dissolution of constitutional government, as we understand the term, and its ultimate replacement by a lawless corporate kleptocracy under the ham-fisted rule of telegenic demagogues and charismatic whack-jobs ...

... I wish I knew what the answer was, beyond just spewing such poisonously depressing bile right in the middle of a pleasant Saturday morning. Maybe there isn't an answer; maybe I should just order a beer and say, fuck it already. Maybe I should stop inflicting this incomprehensible brain-dribble on everybody ...

COMMENTS ARE ALWAYS GREATLY APPRECIATED ...

GORE SHOULD RUN AS AN INDEPENDENT -- PLAIN AND SIMPLE

"Pin your ear to the wisdom post ..." So sings Tom Waits, in the tune that best explicates the confounding, infuriating insanity in which our so-called individual consciousnesses are imprisoned, Get Behind The Mule. This is, naturally, a matter of opinion. And that's fine. Really, where would we be if we didn't have the foul brute of opinion out there, fucking everything up beyond all hope?

There's no need to even attempt to answer such a stupid question.

***

So here we are, stumbling and staggering amid our flummoxed flounderings, hopelessly searching for even a glimpse of the wisdom post, which will probably never happen. Not in the deathly arid intellectual environment we've allowed to be imposed on ourselves, at any rate. Anyway, for what little it's worth, here's my latest foray behind the mule, a hope-deprived toss of a few pennies into the putrid wishing-well of despair we've been tap-dancing around for the past seven (very long) years. And it is this: now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize, he should immediately announce his candidacy for President -- as an independent. No party machine, no DLC, no corporate compromises, just Al. What a dramatic, seismic upheaval that would cause; a gonad-tightening, sphincter-clenching paradigm shift of epic proportions. It'd almost be enough for me to actually give a shit about the debased electoral system in this sad, ridiculous country of ours.

Ah, but the discomfiting panic that would overwhelm the feeble corporate hacks at the helm of the shabbily leaking garbage scow that is the Democratic Party, in the audacious face of an independent Gore run, would surely be a sight to see. The highly entertaining turmoil that would ensue among this crime gang, these closeted neo-cons desperate to inherit Bush’s "unitary executive" mantle -- what an utterly priceless spectacle that'd be. To see Hillary's towering ambition to wield the unconstitutional powers that have been so deliberately crafted for chucklehead George go up in a puff of smoke, like the existential ass gas that it is, at least would give us something to laugh about when we're finally all transported to the nearest Halliburton-approved concentration camp. Hardy har.

But, I can hear the Kosmaniac dead-enders bleat in a horrified ejaculation of dismay, an independent run by Gore would disastrously split the Democratic vote, thereby ensuring a Republican electoral victory next year! To which I answer: so the fuck what? The Democratic "leadership" in Congress has already shown, well beyond a reasonable doubt, that they're fully on-board with the wider neo-con project -- their adamant refusal, in the face of public discontent and an enormous mountain of rather obvious criminal activity, to remove the most thoroughly corrupt administration in US history, pretty much proves this to be the case. They want all this extra-constitutional power for themselves, to replace their Republican cohorts as corporate-sponsored arbiters of the privatized death-wheel profit machine, the primary motivating engine propelling this whole catastrophic neo-con experiment. Would a President Hillary, as completely and enthusiastically in the corporate bag as any American politician has ever been, seriously consider curtailing or rolling back the abusive policies and precedents set by the present administration? You don't really believe that, do you? Come on, already.

Logic would seem to indicate that Gore doesn't owe much in the way of loyalty to the Democratic Party; after all, it was the party that foisted Lieberman on him in 2000, and has been at the forefront of the Vichyite appeasement of the neo-cons ever since. He's more than proven that he hardly needs the debilitating albatross of a compromised political apparatus strung around his neck, dragging him back down into the filth and puke -- you know, the natural habitat of the political animal. Gore has achieved heaps more than he ever could have, or did, as a captive member of a completely wasted political system. That's why he would be the perfect anti-party candidate, in a manner of speaking: he's redeemed himself about as well as any major politician ever has, is involved with issues of critical importance to the very survival of the planet and its monumentally misguided human inhabitants, and has reached a plateau of personal stature that no machine politician can hope to match. He's the one person who might be able to yank this corrupted pustule of a nation back from the brink of extinction ... so long as he doesn't run as an "official" Democrat. If he runs as a Democrat, he's owned, again. It's just that simple.

Well, you can all relax, you supercilious sniffers of Hillary's bloomers, or you moronic miscreants who actually believe that Barack Obama or John Edwards or any of the other nitwits have something important to say: Gore won't run, under apparently any circumstances. More's the pity. Instead of the one individual who might possibly save this "democratic republic" from itself -- Gore would at least try to -- we’ll probably be afflicted with Unitary Hillary and her superficially modulated version of neo-con fucktardery. So will end the buffoon epoch, the Bush period of the neo-con make-over of America, to be replaced by perhaps the far more dangerous, much less intellectually-challenged Hillary edition. Al, shorn of the useless baggage of party affiliation, is -- or would be -- the only thing standing in her way ...

Oh hell -- so much for the wisdom post. Run Al, run. You're our only hope ...

WHATEVER

Front page headline of today's Sacramento Bee: DEMS TO YIELD ON WIRETAP POWERS. The article hardly requires reading; I don't even touch corporate trash newspapers if I can avoid it. Why would I want to read about another vicious betrayal, another "off the table" rat-fucking, courtesy of the Democrats we put in control of Congress to put an end to such neo-con nonsense? How's it feel, all you Democratic partisans out there? Had enough yet? Ready to jettison your desperate, death-grip-like identification with pathetic authoritarian co-dependents like Reid and Pelosi? Are you convinced, finally, of the sheer folly of hanging your much-abused faith on a political apparatus that is thoroughly rotten to the core? How many times can you be so blatantly screwed by your Democratic saviors, and not withdraw your bizarre allegiance to them?

Yeah, I know: more rhetorical questions that serve no useful purpose. Whatever.

"Whatever" just about sums it up. Another sell-out, another nasty dry-humping by the diseased three-legged pit bull of incipient fascism ... I can already hear the wheels spinning inside the paper-thin skulls of Skinner and Kos and other Democratic Party diehards of their ilk, practicing their special brand of bandwidth-sucking monkey motion by telling us, yet again, why we MUST continue to unconditionally support the Democratic machine and elect more Democrats next year and why Hillary is better than Obama and Obama is better than Hillary and blither blather blah blah blah fucking blah ... Meanwhile, representative government in the United States continues with its spot-on and rather unearthly impersonation of the Weimar Republic, even as it ignores the brick wall that always appears at the end of such routines. The public issues a gaping yawn, the DLC laughs uproariously, and the neo-con fanatics ready the cruise missiles for launch against, oh, pick a country ...

Whatever.