I am hard put to explain Ann Coulter’s race hatred as recently expressed to a Muslim woman student in Canada in which she suggested if the student could not get a cab she should take a camel. (Of course, in a recent column by her Coulter wraps herself in the issue of free speech but does not mention her own vile words — Ann as victim.) The venom in this skanky woman is volatile and vituperative and she revels in it. To grossly generalize, I’ve observed on Fox News (Views?) a steady stream of very good-looking women who are often attorneys expressing the most conservative views imaginable; it is as if they feel their personal beauty can cover up their ridiculous positions. And it works. Is this something I need to learn about women and their sense of beauty and what it does and does not allow them to get away with? Is this a kind of entitlement? Is it to assume that only ugly thoughts come from ugly-looking people? How shallow of me.
I am hard put to comprehend Bill O’Reilly; he is smug, condescending, the classic high school history teacher who is insufferable, narrow and basically rude and who feels that riding roughshod with people is to “challenge” their positions. He tried his repertoire with Congressman Anthony Weiner from New York City, and it failed. Weiner maintained his composure, kept repeating that Billy-Poo had his facts wrong and then went on to give him a corrective with hard core facts and details; O’Reilly was annoyed and continued to interrupt him until Weiner pulled a classic response. He became dead silent, turned his face at an angle as if he were looking faraway and waited until O’Reilly finished fulminating. On the next day’s show O’Reilly in response to a viewer’s question about the Weiner go-to put a spin on it in his no spin zone, as he calls it, saying that if he was any harder in his questioning he would have been taken into custody. He is a blind human being. Reality is in the eyes of the beholder and Weiner treated him as the insolent little pup he was, yet O’Reilly wraps himself up in the flag and marches on. He is very much the street bully. Proof once again that education does not deter one from being a putz. In fact, it often strengthens the very rigidity it strives to liberalize.
It sustains my belief to always question authority, and not to be impressed with wealth, things, college degrees. et al. As a therapist I have met men and women brighter than myself, wealthier, shrewder, extremely gifted and essentially fucked up. So what good is it all? At a recent meeting with fellow writers one woman introduced herself and then told us that she was a college professor and I don’t know why but in her giving that data to me I felt at some level something I can’t articulate here, but it sounded to me intuitively as if she was blowing her own horn. I said, imp that I am, “Sorry to hear that.” I associate to another instance in which a PhD asked me what college I went to and what degrees I had. I told her I would not tell and that she evaluate me on the basis of what she experiences about me — on a vacation in Spain. I never took Dale Carnegie’s course — Americana 101.
Glen Beck who runs around in sneakers on his show, using a chalkboard to present his “ideas” and “associations” to his “ideas” is a highly conditioned autodidact who lives his life between exclamation points. He is the classic example of the individual who is only as good as the last book he read or the last quotation that tickled his fancy. I associate to a high school principal I invited into my class, alas, to speak on any subject of his choosing. What was sadly startling was his observation that on his nightstand he had a compendium of famous quotations. (His practice was to read one or two before bed. Oy!) He went on to share his favorites with the class. I thought to myself about the dire emptiness of the man — how about reading a book by Twain or Voltaire who amused your sensibilities, banal as they are?. In retrospect I was dealing with a male Sarah Palin
Beck opined that he chose to be a Mormon because one of his children felt comfortable in the church. Need I write more? He is amazingly conditioned by his rearing, his emptinesses, his opinions, so utterly outer-directed that his pose to the world is that he is a deep and reflective thinker which he is not by any means. In fact he does not think. What he does is digest data, reassembles data, avoids metabolizing data into coherence and then spews it out. Perversely, outlandishly, he is the master of the half-truth. The dust has to settle before one realizes it is all televised bullshit. He is the face in the crowd, the man who nestles beneath Hilter’s outstretched Nazi salute. He portrays himself as a feeling, selfless human being, a patriot, warning his fellow Americans about socialism and how we are slowly losing our freedoms. His greatest fear, I believe, is that Darwin is right on. He cannot accept that he is the end result of evolution. I don’t blame him. Apparently if evolution gives us this, what next?
I am also hard put by the “antics” of Sean Hannity who introduces Obama as the “annointed one.” I once saw Hannity give a priest (I’ve seen more priests on his show over the months than I’ve seen in a conclave) a difficult time because the priest was advocating the denial of communion over some issue. Hannity challenged the priest. In short he was asking beneath the words that if I am a good Christian, which he most likely is, that the priest had a lot of nerve to deny him communion (see Freud’s Totem and Taboo to discover what that’s about) if he disagreed with him. Hearing this, I felt for the moment that Hannity was capable of free-thinking. I was wrong. Immensely indoctrinated and conditioned by his church, dogma and doctrine, essentially there is generally a judgmental taste to his political opinions which smack of Christian or Catholic values. Reeking of Aquinas, Paul, John, and the others, he cannot put away his theodicy and see clearly, but that is exactly what theology does — it blinds.
I once asked a friend if he believed in werewolves, vampires, ghouls, pre-destination, voodoo and all the rest. Laughingly, he dismissed all that and asked me what I was getting at. I then asked him if he believed in ghosts. He said no. Did he believe in life after death? He doubted that. I asked if he believed in resurrection and he froze. At this point there was no reasoning. It was an act of faith. To this atheistic Jew, religion is ridiculous, a monumental fairy tale told by mankind to delude mankind. Freud argued in a famous sentence or two that until a man or woman gave up this neurotic wish there was no freedom at all; that the mature human being puts away the exalted father as an illusion.
As I keep stepping back further and further from humanity, as I keep observing it, I fear I may trip and simply fall off the ends of the earth.
Disparate Tangents
While working out at the local community gym thoughts began to coalesce about what I might write for this blog, associative threads formed and here it is. The most compelling is my dance to the death with the Arizona tax department and an audit. They are claiming, of course, I owe them money because I have not shown any profit in my writing. After five years I suppose I am to show a profit or I cannot claim on my return all the costs that come with writing. Consequently my writing is labeled more of a hobby than anything else. At first I almost caved, that is, pay them what I owed. On second thought I waited until I saw my accountant who advised that I challenge this because if I don’t they will come after me year after year for past monies and then the Feds will come in to put their grubby hands into my pockets as well. If need be, he would represent me. I had to advocate for myself, and I felt exhausted before I began.
So here I was having to defend that I am in writing to make a profit, that it was not a hobby, that I explain myself to the monolithic tax department, really a latent and manifest assault on my integrity, on my self. I am particularly peeved when I am asked to explain myself especially when I know I am innocent of the alleged lie, fault, crime, malfeasance or misdemeanor. I bit the bullet and did not become ironic nor sarcastic but simply in list form machined gunned out all the awards, 1099 Misc forms (royalties), books published, stories published to substantiate that I am an author seeking to make a profit. Of course, in this nation being an author without earning a profit or not thinking in this manner is viewed as simply ridiculous. Fuck you, America! I felt like the local Muslim who has to justify his existence, explain why other Muslims are malfeasant or not, all the rest of the McCarthy-like attributions Rep. King from New York is yapping about. Of course, he glosses smoothly over his advocacy of and connection with the Irish Republican Army years back. I almost feel like joining the Libyan rebel forces but seeing Jewish stars markered over posters of Hosni Mubarak’s face (Jew hatred to the nth degree) in the last revolt I will defer for now. (No reporter has commented on that.)
It was a quick step for me to consider how corporations rule this country, our two-percent of the population plutocrats who control congressmen (and this is not paranoia, reader), with their offshore tax shelters and teams of accountants who keep them free from taxes with financial murder year after year. I find it remarkable after all these years of living that the obvious basis for this country is still opaque to most of the masses, using that term appropriately here as they are herds. Long ago through lobbying and all the rest of the horseshit we lost this country. We do not have a Republican party, what we have is an ideological group who manifests a Social Darwinian drive. Allow me as a writer or therapist to share some felt-truths and reach some conclusions you may or may not appreciate.
Let us for a moment look at Governor Scott Walker. I don’t need to know about his family, how active he is as a church member, how he is loyal to his wife, how he never has masturbated. Let us just look at his face. Behind those eyes is death. Just his face reveals a coldness to the man, an inability to soften, to negotiate, to reflect. We have seen that face hundreds of times in all the old movies about the western cavalry and its Indian wars. Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld all have that death mask, an inability to really express empathy much less sympathy. I believe it is characterological of the American male in this country, right from our historical beginning. It was the face the black man saw, the Indian saw, women saw, unions saw, an unrelenting, blunt, cold, stone-walling mind set — callous, hard, cruel, stubborn, determinatively driven by causes and racist. Americans run from this assessment, although at one time for more than 100 years we had a caste, mind you, not a class system in this country as rigid as the untouchables in India. Read your An American Dilemma. In my fantasy Glenn beck would be an Indian agent handing out blankets saturated in small box in order to wipe out all the Progressives on the reservation.
It is also my sad contention that Anne Coulter, MIchelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Megan Kelly, all the in-house stable of Fox Views are the female versions of the American male, Gorgons all, featuring a stiletto wit, vicious bite-biting asides as crooked as Greta Von Susteren’s mouth, and just an overall toxic perfume issuing from their pretty, dolled-up faces. Very few of them give credit to the feminists who labored hard to set them free, ingrates all.
Given these tangents, I will share further thoughts I have. I recall that in the Thirties artists, writers, actors, quick-witted Jews all sensed the racist rot in Nazi Germany and emigrated to the States. I am contemplating becoming an ex-pat; I really believe we are in a dour decadent period that I want no part of it. I would not leave like a good American because it is cheaper to live in Belize, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. I would say fuck you to Medicare because in some of these countries the care is about third world as it is here in Henderson, Nevada which is a medically unsafe environment to get seriously ill in. This state is so blue-collar that they are gutting the university financially because education is really not important — that is right, it has never been important in this country. So I would leave the USA because it is no longer democratic, is controlled by a hegemonic few. The differing points of political points of view are now taking on a variation of class warfare and it is remarkably close to becoming a feudal country, with the few at the top of the pyramid and the rest pf us fighting like serfs among ourselves. Note: not one stock trader or CEO on Wall Street has had charges brought against him! Americans have the memory resource of a gnat. We get angry, we fight and quarrel but clear thinking is never an aspect of our consciousness.
Will it be better elsewhere? Of course, not. We all know that. The jolly in all this is that I will act upon a sound realization, an awakening of intelligence, if you will, that until i die I can at least choose, for the time being, to act, to opt out. I think watching America from abroad will be self-confirming as the internal tsunami of collective rot will cross the plains and mountains and cleanse both shores.
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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Politics
Tagged An American Dilemma, Bachmann, Coulter, Glenn Beck, Gov. Scott Walker, Indian wars, Ingraham, McCarthy, Rep. King, social darwinism