Republican Jews: damned depressing. and other stories.

So, i know i've been lax as all get out lately, o blog. but sometimes when the brain gets too full of reportage, it clogs, and then said reportage congeals like hardened fecal matter. i know that the scatophiles among you will like that statement. so i have fecal impaction of the mind. so be it.

anyhow, what's important is that i still have my dignity, and lately i'm in a somewhat buoyant mood, all things considered. not like the euphoria of being in Panamá, but still - knowing that i could still experience euphoria cheered me up a hell of a lot. for if i lost my cheer, then what was i? the cheer, it turned out, was self-propelled, enriched by the very fact and existence of the cheer itself, the Ding an Sich. while this may seem tautological, somehow it worked well for me. having confidence in my ability to be happy has made me happy. so i'm going to continue to run that motor, on fumes, as it were.

okay, so yeah, a lot of things happened in old panama. maybe i'll list them really fast at some point so as to leave a mental record, much in the same way that a worm leaves processed soil in smooth swirls as it feeds and shits and continues on its way. not sure why i'm so shit-fixated right now. i'm going to put on my glasses and get a little clarity. i reckon i'll spend a bit more time listing these events as they come to me, which is to say not necessarily in order. as is my wont.

tonight it's quiet and the streets are bare, slick and clean. everything is sparse here in the old (new) USA; i keep expecting indigenous women to jam their colorfully-clad bodies against me while we inhale dust until our snot turns black. hm. also, my skin and hair are freaking out, dry and oily and stringy all at the same time and generally in some sort of shock. i feel like i've been dipped in tar, and my brain is generally empty. trying to get back some power. hm.

before going into detail, i must say that lately i've had some extremely depressing and enraging encounters with Republican Jews, who i can stand even less than Republican non-Jews, for whatever reason. When in Panama, I went out to dinner and Shabbat with these Jews who had formerly taken me in and shown me around, even helping me acquire a yellow fever vaccination at a moment's notice, and then they turned out to be Republicans - Bush-voting, McCain-voting, Palin-adoring Repubs. (They were largely ex-pats living in Panama, probably for shady rich-person reasons.) Anyhow, I fell right into that trap when I made a gaffe about Sarah Palin and her vapid beaver-looking overbite and anti-feminist ways. In a moment, everything changed, and I was completely alienated. I almost choked on my food at that minute; I wanted to vomit. Needless to say, I probably will not be hanging out with them in the future. Weird that our politics would become so divisive, but this is contentious shit.

Then yesterday I had an equally unpleasant encounter with a terrible Republican Jew. Not only was he mean, old, ugly, and unwell, but he was entranced by Palin's naivete and simplistically angered by Obama's middle names. I just don't understand how anyone could be voting Republican after having lived in this country for the last decade or so. Everything has been gutted, impaled, stripped, embezzled, scrapped, and looted. Everything. And it's just going to get worse. I'd say that in some areas - like the environment, or the Middle East - the damage that the US under Bush has created has far exceeded our ability to reverse it at this point, but we need to apply some salve, some balm. What I really, really want is for there to be some kind of violent outcry from the left - especially if McCain wins. Not an assassination, but something other than docility and inward-turning. We have to be creative and brave, to follow the example of Celia Hart. Who i was lucky enough to see speak in Panama shortly before her death in a car crash. Amazing woman, loud and robust gesticulations. That'll all be in an upcoming blog post.

i know that this is painting in broad brushstrokes, but honestly, this campaign is seriously getting me down. Obama is like "a giant being trampled to death by geese" - Kierkegaard had it right when he discussed the gentle and banal ways in which modernity kills the spirit. i must say that today i was walking around in the rain, thinking about global warming and the energy crisis, the housing market and the economic crisis, the war and the global crisis, and feeling strongly that THIS IS NOT POSTMODERNITY. the postmodern - postmodernism, that is- is just an excuse, people, or a mirage, meant to make us feel the passage of time. people will eventually likely decide that the invention of postmodernity was a surrealist prank. blah. the goal is NOT to get more theoretical, but rather to be more concrete, to understand better the material conditions that give us systems that then collapse in on themselves and maroon people in hurricane-stricken lands, without proper healthcare, without government-provided safety measures, homeless, addicted to drugs, penalized, criminalized, forced out, ignored. i'm so irate about Republicans. Because if i want to get an abortion or access birth control, take a bus or a train, have services like public water and streetlights, be helped by a policeman or a fireman, have a fair trial, not be tortured, and carefully vet all possible preconditions/intelligence/justifications before launching into war with Iran, Russia, or Pakistan, well, i'm going to be sorely disappointed by the Republicans. i think it's basically a known fact that many of the constituencies voting for the Repubs will not be helped by their victory and will likely be hurt by the trickle-down economic measures and tax cuts for the very rich and all that other bullshit. Also, let me say: the weather sucks. It's because of global warming, in part, and under a Republian regime, our relentless destruction of the environment will worsen, bringing further catastrophes to Texas and other areas that are vulnerable even under relatively 'normal' weather conditions. The world created by the Republicans, the future that they would shape for Americans, is noxious. Oil-drilling, gun-shooting, fat, unhealthy, fiscally irresponsible, home-owning, suburb-living, car-driving. Blech. It's as if we're all fish swimming in a tank, and if the Republicans were to run the tank, we'd all slowly asphyxiate on the algae-slime that covers the walls of the tank, because the government would no longer pay to have periodic tank-cleanings; rather, we'd each have to hire a private contractor to do that, and the contractor would take our money and do shoddy work, cleaning maybe 50% of the slime, leaving us drowning in our own shit and waste. Then catfish like Karl Rove would come and slurp up the slime from the bottom, getting fat on the immiseration of thousands, as bloated fish corpses floated to the surface, green slime leaching from their bulging eyes and forced-open maws...ugh. apocalypse! this makes me want to eat some fish, i admit.

I wish that Europeans got to vote in US elections. Nonsensical as it is, this makes a kind of sense, as US election outcomes are an issue of global concern. In the future, once our economic clout dissolves like melting ice, there will be no one following the US into its rogue wars, not even Poland.

History brings perspective. I was perusing Harper's (excellent toilet-reading, that is), and the contributors were holding forth with their typical rhetorically-poor vituperative haranguing against Bush and everyone else. What annoys me about this is that it's stuff that we already know; I doubt that many right-wingers read Harper's. It's a self-selecting group and therefore does not need such redundancy. Anyhow, I've also been reading Harper's from 1906 lately, as I write this paper on the aesthetics and architecture of US empire in the Canal Zone, and I notice that there's the same sort of commentary, the same tone, and really amazing luminaries doing the commenting (WD Howells dominated the editorial board of Harper's during this era, it seems. and he was an excellent guy, if not the most interesting author of fiction). I'm so glad that we have archives to house our old newspapers and journals; it's comforting to dip into these things that are older than I am and see the same sort of haranguing critiques going on. Perhaps a false comfort.

Ideally, some mainstream media outlet like Newsweek would sneak in pro-Democrat content like spinach into cupcakes, so that the picky eaters (i.e., Republican voters easily wowed by the sugary symbolism of proudly waving flags and Muslim middle names) wouldn't notice that they were imperceptibly acquiring their vitamin A.

Which makes me wonder about swing voters: who are they? Are these the same people who often compose juries? What makes them undecided? Are they swing voters because they're wiser than us, or more naive? Fascinating and elusive creatures, these. The rest of the population seems basically neatly divided into their respective grandiose gestures. Nuances are not to be had; differences are stressed rather than similarities. Is this because the candidates are campaigning against each other, or is it that they really are completely different, like carrots/chocolate or black/white (pardon that last binary)?

i know that this is ideological, but these are ideological times. apathy, passivity, and hard-headed individualism have got us nowhere, people. it's time to take extreme positions and utter words that would formerly have struck us as the sayings of a demagogue. when and where exactly will this much-discussed pendulum-swing come to bring people back into the spirit of taking to the streets in favor of the maintenance and preservation of democratic goals and institutions? one thing that i'm not saying here is that the US is inherently bad; in fact, there are things that i love deeply and painfully about this country, and that's why i'm feeling so worried that the Republicans will essentially piss on the constitution and reaffirm our status as the enemy of all nations, the one to be feared. okay. love is painful, i know. unnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggghuuuuuuuuuuuuuhmm. primal jelly welling up/exploding out of pores...