A Nation of Koch Suckers?

Happy 240th Birthday Beethoven!

At this point in the narrative, with the embers glowing merrily in the Yuletide hearth, the storyteller pauses, marking his place in the Book of Time with a callused thumb, and lifting his glasses/rubbing his eyes with a practiced hand.

Then, heaving a great, raling sigh, he asks his listeners a question:

How, he asks: How did the strongest, fastest, smartest generation, the generation blessed with the longest period of peace and prosperity (minus a couple of show wars) since the old Pax Romana, the generation with technologies and marvels and educational opportunities never before seen in all the Ages of Mankind, a generation freed of the great killers, tuburculosis and polio, malaria, cholera and typhus: How did that generation turn out so stupid, vicious and mean?

It’s more than a fair question. It’s THE question.

That’s not mere hyperbole: I was feeding my cat and contemplating the nearly overripe avocado on my counter that had been inadvertently shielded by a box of Bisquick® for a couple of days, and I thought: what the hell has happened to our country that Barry Goldwater was too “liberal” for the GOP by the time he died, when Barry never moved? And how is it that BOB DOLE’s alternate health care plan from 1993 is now the Socialist End of All Human Freedom, Dignity and have you READ Atlas Shrugged?

It can’t be fluoridated water. I grew up on it in my tooth-formative years, and, as advertised, it produced tough, cavity-resistant teeth that I still have. But it didn’t demonstrably make me stoopid.

And it can’t the Salk Vaccine for the same reasons.

But SOMETHING happened, and now we are stupid, vicious and mean.

• Stupid: “Yeah: Billionaires use tax breaks to create ‘trickle down’ jobs!”
• Vicious: Holding the vast army of unemployed hostage to tax cuts and estate cuts for fewer than 500 (ultra-wealthy) families out of 300 million Americans. (Not to mention holding the entire GOVERNMENT hostage, and, by extension, the entire nation.)
• Mean: Sneering at the President’s use of similar, precisely descriptive language in explaining his tax “compromise” with the Visigoths of the RepubliKKKan party.

Then again: both Obama and I are, demonstrably, writers, and they seem not to be. (Not at ALL to be.)

What kind of moron allows his “presidential” memoirs  released under the title of Decision Points? Even in the extremely liberal and forgiving syntax of titular composition, it is barely literate. In a phrase that cannot stand alone grammatically, it is still very NEARLY ungrammatical, and automatically invites unwanted (and yet entirely justifyable) comparisons between the phrase of the title and the crown of the miscreant’s skull.

Sorry: “Miscreant” (capital “M”).

• Stupid: Evolution is controversial (again)
• Vicious: The National Park Service was forced to sell a ‘creationist’ book at the Grand Canyon; the government of Kentucky is investing in ANOTHER “Creationism” theme park, using the Kentucky taxpayers’ money, all the while claiming it’s NOT an establishment of religion and it’s OK because the State will make its money back.*
• Mean: Blocking stem cell research because people who believe that because some goat herders in the Middle East wrote down a creation myth four thousand years ago, all of modern science must stand in awe to their syntactical analysis of the translated Aramaic texts.

[* If that last is true, then the State OUGHT to invest in Tennessee's highly lucrative pot industry, (Number 2 in the Nation!) saving their family farms and probably actually turning a HUGE profit. They'd need an Ark the size of the one they're building to hold all the cash, assuming that anything is OK, as long as it turns a profit. Have you ever considered the Enormous Profits that POPPIES can bring?]

The American public has no clue as to how our government works — and even if you do, that ain’t the way it works in practice. As noted in the link I sent you to yesterday, the loss of beat reporting, of knowledge in reporters, has done incalculable damage to the “public’s right to know.”

Let me quote the opening section of David Cay Johnston’s essay, because it’s a good anecdote and ought be remembered as metaphor for the whole stinking mess we find ourselves up to the neck in, vainly trying to pinch together our collective nostrils to minimize the stench:

It’s Scary Out There in Reporting Land

‘Beats are fundamental to journalism, but our foundation is crumbling.’

By David Cay Johnston

To understand how badly we’re doing the most basic work of journalism in covering the law enforcement beat, try sitting in a barbershop. When I was getting my last haircut, the noon news on the television—positioned to be impossible to avoid watching—began with a grisly murder. The well-educated man in the chair next to me started ranting about how crime is out of control.

But it isn’t. I told Frank, a regular, that crime isn’t running wild and his chance of being burglarized today is less than one quarter what it was in 1980. The shop turned so quiet you could have heard a hair fall to the floor had the scissors not stopped. The barbers and clients listened intently as I next told them about how the number of murders in America peaked back in the early 1990’s at a bit south of 25,000 and fell to fewer than 16,000 in 2009. When we take population growth into account, this means your chance of being murdered has almost been cut in half.

“So why is there so much crime on the news every day?” Diane, who was cutting Frank’s hair, asked.

“Because it’s cheap,” I replied. “And with crime news you only have to get the cops’ side of the story. There is no ethical duty to ask the arrested for their side of the story.” [...]

AUTHOR’S NOTE
Upon further checking, I learned that the chance of getting burglarized today is actually 42.5 percent of what it was in 1980.

Just like the old Dust Bowl, we wear metaphorical bandanas soaked in water to filter out the constant drift of fine-grained shit. The Shit Bowl started, like the Dust Bowl, in the Midwest and then spread at an alarming rate over farm country. And, of course, like the Dust Bowl Days, giant Shitstorms blow up with alarming frequency. (Blowing legitimate news stories off the front pages in minutes.)

click for full size

And then you have the drama queens. (They win.)

I used to know a child who acted like that. He was four or five, and was dying of some incurable disease, his mother doted on him, and he was the subject of endless puppy-dog pity by all adults. We had to take care of him one time, as in “Hart, take little [shitball] out to the sandbox and play.”

This kid knew all the tricks. What HE wanted, he got. I cannot help picturing him in a Little Lord Fauntleroy or “Blue Boy” outfit, even though I know that wasn’t what he wore. But the psychic impression of his sheer existential greed is so powerful that it has transformed my actual memory of him to a symbolic dream image substitute.

THAT is how evil and greedy the dying child was. He knew every angle, and he knew that he could have his way and as he imperiously ordered me about I inadvertently took on that attitude that is described in the old TIME/LIFE Western series ad (paraphrasing):

It was not uncommon for European aristocracy to purchase large ranches in Western territories. One day, in Wyoming, an English lord was attempting to visit the ranch of his childhood friend, the Earl of Dipsticks, when he became lost. He located a cowboy mending the barbed-wire fences that ringed the ranch and asked, “I say, my good fellow. Do you know where I might find your master?”

To which the cowboy replied: “The s’um bitch ain’t yet been born.”

Unfakequote.

Finally, I hit upon a way of paralyzing this enfant terrible, this child-king: Like all three-year-olds (which he had got to and stuck) he was obsessed with HIS  property–which was everything, including YOUR things. I learned the hard way that if he took something of yours and screamed MOMMY! loud enough, his mother and your mother would arrive and AWARD him your thing, because the little shit was dying of some incurable disease and what a shit you are not to bow and scrape to his endless Make A Wish® demands.

This is how I disciplined the little rat, and I pass it on to the Democrats, free of charge, unless they do not take to it, in which case, it is for SALE to them for a mere $949,995.00.

(Make grant cheques payable to “Hart Williams,” please. No C.O.D.s.)

He had, from his complete devotion to acquisition, more toys than you could shake a stick at. And if you TOUCHED one, he squealed (as do all Republicans):

MINE! MINE!

I remember hearing that same cry once from Bill O’Reilly at the infamous confrontation at the Los Angeles Book Fair with Al Franken, explaining why he shouldn’t have to pay any taxes. And, except for its lower register, it was Little Lord Dying’s squeal exactly. It actually brought it BACK to me when I heard Mr. O’Reilly.

And a plan formed in my mind. A devious plan that used his own greed against him. I smiled. He smiled back.

I consciously touched his blackboard.

MINE! MINE!

And he scooped it up and held it close to him, to protect it.

I reached for his bear.

MINE! MINE!

He scooped that up. He scooted into the corner.

And, as I touched each of his toys, he walled himself up in that corner, Fortunato crossed with Tom Sawyer, not only walled in alive from the promise of a cask of Amontillado, but DOING THE BRICKWORK himself.

For the rest of that afternoon, that kid sat in the corner, in a self-imposed “time-out” (although no one used the term at the time), walled in by his own greed.

Which got him the hell out of my hair.

It isn’t often that you feel that a fatal disease is not some terrible Judgement from above.

But that “fact” had perverted and twisted that kid and his mother into something abominable.

And when I see Jim DeMint of South Carolina on the floor of the United States Senate — “The Greatest Deliberative Body on Eartth™” — threatening to have every page of the budget bill read aloud, just to waste time, I cannot help but think of that little monster of a dying child.

MINE! MINE!

(And remembering that 150 years ago, on Christmas Eve, South Carolina seceded from the Union, starting the Civil War. Or, perhaps, the first “War on Christmas”?)

And, yes, perhaps I too have turned stupid, vicious and mean, but I hope the little bastard died as soon as possible thereafter. But I have lived in the Real World long enough to know that it’s equally likely that he lived, inherited millions of dollars and amuses himself by flying to Waco, Texas or Michigan, where he and Ted Nugent kill things together, because killing animals with high-speed rifles is so DAMN much fun.

I wish I had a goddamn punchline, but I don’t.

Oh, wait. I do.

The Party Of God® evidently sends you Christmas greetings.

Courage.

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Note: “Tennessee” corrected to “Kentucky.” Links added. And if you need some good, hard-nosed Koch investigative reporting that you can really sink your teeth into,  and/or want to play “Constitutional Jeopardy” don’t miss Tuesday’s “Because “Cudgel For Growth” Wouldn’t Sound as Warm and Fuzzy.”