Into the Bray

No I'll stand my ground

Won't be turned around

And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down

Gonna stand my ground

--I Won't Back Down,

Tom Petty

He goes out at night with his big boots on

None of his friends know right from wrong

--Rehumanize Yourself,

The Police

You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain

Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon

--Sugar Mountain,

Neil Young 

_____________________

Subtitle: What We Have Lost.


An unsung casualty of the 2016 election season is humor, that great American salve. R.I.P.

In its place, we have gained a robust factory system of bilge and bile production, delivered by rough performers who dance like marionette puppets to a Democratic laugh track.

When did the take-down of American humor happen? Probably, it was not a discrete event, but a slow and inexorable disappearance. One might look to humorist Jon Stewart, for a start.

In a 2009 Time poll, 44% of Americans said Stewart was their most trusted "newsman". Then Stewart admitted his piker status after his chummy interview and later socializing with Paula Broadwell failed to suggest to him her improper relationship with later disgraced General David Petraeus.

In his blind arrogance, Stewart said of his oversight, "I am the worst journalist in the world." Actually, Mr. Stewart is no journalist at all. At his best, he was amusing, and he left the stage last year before things turned ugly for the fake newsters.

And so we now have entertainers-cum-newsmen like Stephen Colbert getting his props for offering dreck that even a site like "Stormfront" would not proffer. Can you imagine him aiming this grotesque twaddle at President Obama or Mrs. Clinton? (Didn't think so.)

Our airwaves are filled with carnival barkers. Like emcees at a Cafe Risque midnight show, they grow increasingly outrageous in an attempt to keep us awake, tuned in and Twitter-fed.

Humor, satire, civility, and even sanity have left the stage. Many of my associates go snow-blind when they simply hear the name "Trump". Fury, anger, disgust ... I am not sure what overtakes them. The voices rise and, predictably comes the response, "I am so TIRED of hearing about Trump!"

And so they are, for they have been blasted from every one of their media outlets with the unfitness of the man and the supposed unreality and illegality of the election results since last year. At the mention of his name they recoil, for they know the drill -- the inevitable onslaught to follow.

Pain is anticipated, so woe be it to the person who attempts any dialog about the new President outside of a Ft. Bragg bunker playing Lili Marlene, for you are now persona non grata amongst your Democratic fellows. Perhaps they think such a person a troublemaker, callow, or naive?

Ire aimed at this President has become a self-licking ice cream cone.This is operant conditioning, and we have been brainwashed, en masse.

Someone who might buy simplistic slogans like "HOPE" and "CHANGE", or "Make America Great Again?" Pshaw! Perish the thought that anyone could be such a rube, eh? That's the domain of folks like, um, factory workers (do they still exist here?)

Yet the Democrats howl on command as the cant grow ever more tragedic, in the face of little or no facts. Meanwhile, in this fetid environment, the insinuations grow ever larger.

When the pattern of media lies was emerging, Lisa thought to take notes. However, it quickly reached pandemic proportions, and keeping track would have been a fool's errand. Bowing out is the only sane move.

However, before leaving, here are three idiosyncratic examples of why:


1.) When a member of peaceful group of Trump supporters was pepper-sprayed in Huntington Beach (CA) late March, the head was, "Riot Breaks Out at Trump Rally". Now, an ingenue might envision a David Duke sort of fervor, and some gentle liberals -- the sort who used to put daisies in National Guard rifle barrels --being bullied for their non-violent witness.

But it was the other way 'round, and the press identified the attacker of the woman at the peaceful gathering as a "counter-protester". But one must have a "protest" in order to have it's opposite, and the celebrants were NOT protesters.

So the press lied, in order to sow confusion in the reader's mind.

How would the press have covered a pepper spray attack upon a jubilant celebration of President Obama's election? Would the press call them, "racist"? Perhaps, "jack-booted Aryan thugs?" Certainly, they would be "protesters", and not "anti-protesters".

In a final filip, as if to justify their slanted coverage, the article's coda mentions that the protester's numbers are legion nationwide, compared to those who support the President. How is this conjecture relevant to the news piece?


2.) In a recent NYT Magazine piece about Facebook's effect upon the election, even Farhood Manjoo has been forced to sacrifice his reporter's impartiality in service of The Story.

In the piece, Facebook is indicted for the rise of right-wing fanaticism, which is blamed for electing Trump. The election of Trump was the main offense: how Zuck's "news feed" algorithm might have aided conservatives ... that's all.

The story brushed aside the angry democrats who remain so because they are trapped in the bubble of the vanity "news feed".


3.) Michael Moore, erstwhile spokesman for the Little Guy, asks "What Would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Say About Trump?" He posits that he might cry -- which is laughable, were it not so blind. Moore gives us the horsehair shirt his followers want.

But I suggest Rev. King would say, "Let's reach out to our next President. He is our brother."

He would probably form a wonderful relationship with the new President, and appeal to the nation to cease its hatred and riven-ness; to stop the tomfoolery of an "Us vs. Him" mentality. (Mr. Trump has never shown any racial animus.)

He would forefront the plight of the American black which became inadvertently highlighted by violence in President Obama's term. In his own words, he would say let us stop pretending that it was all skittles and beer under Mr. Obama, or that it would have been so under Mrs. Clinton.

She lost the election. Now get on with it. We have work to do.

THAT'S what he'd say.


Democrats --- historical protectors of those who have been trammeled -- have now become the jackals and hyenas doing the trammeling. They are turning us on each other, so we do not ask, "What is really going on here?"

We are allowed neither solidarity nor peace. We have become Sunnis and Shiites (with the occasional Kurd), because that is all the news will allow for us.

Ironically, the Democratic base which has been animated to expulse the daily rot regarding their President is predominately the low- to center middle class, the very people who have been sold down the river by the glutted and disingenuous Democratic Party, a party which has not spoken for them for many years now.

They feel that mutant freaks like Charles Pierce speak for them as they crank up the band of their not very merry pranksters day by day, running their hamster wheel as fast as they can.

Disunited States of America

--Aesop's Scorpion and Froggy

Oh, I used to be disgusted
And now I try to be amused
--Red Shoes, 
Elvis Costello

Change your heart
Look around you
--Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime,
Beck

Tell me about your despair, yours,
and I will tell you mine
--"Wild Geese",
Mary Oliver

____________________________

[A caveat: when I write about the 2016 election, I am usually indicted as being pro-Trump. I did not campaign for any candidate. I have only sought to highlight the willful blindness and the anger and sorrows now rending our nation. The loss of a viable Democratic Party saddens me.

I continue in that vein ...]

Something new and ugly entered our national dialog in 2016 when The Atlantic (an otherwise respectable magazine) began running Charles Pierce's malignant invective masquerading as political commentary.

Pierce became an early organ grinder revving up the anti-Trump bloc, his bottomless black soul fueling his seemingly endless hate-filled diatribes to ever more grotesque lows. Licking his bloody claws, he became an early pied piper of no-holds-barred "false news" set, emboldening the loutish Left to take up residence in that dark Neverland.

As the Republican's Stable of Sixteen began dropping off, a paranoid fear possessed the intelligentsia of the Left. Though they professed a sure knowledge of Hillary Clinton's win (lukewarmly tapped heir-apparent by outgoing President Obama), concomitantly Trump became their sole focus, not of an intellectually rigorous debate, but of a very personal character assassination.

Inverted Willy Horton-esque ads were run by the DNC, one featuring a black girl alone in a room, terrified before an image of Trump. Hillary was re-cast as a stand-by-your-man kind of woman (the Other Hillary was so 1992), beaming at her milquetoast man, Tim Kaine.

Her campaign signs showed the candidate's names in pale blue small font on a mat of navy blue, so innocuous that one need almost squint to make them out. By any means necessary, as Clinton traded in her feminist bona fides in her stoop to conquer.

Of course it didn't work out for her, but the detritus in her wake is punting every which way to slake their fury over their sense of entitlement, derailed. In truth they have nothing to beat their drums about, as the election was an orderly and legal affair (unlike the Supreme Court decision in Gore vs. Bush, 2000.)

But they are so stoked up, they cannot come down. White entitlement rears its ugly head again as the liberal partisans fight on, rending their country in the process. Unlike the righteous anger (if one allows that) of the blacks in a Ferguson, MO scenario, the liberal whites have no cause for their anger against Mr. Trump and their fellow Americans who voted him into office.

It is a sad and pathetic show to witness the whites co-opting black anguish. They haven't a clue as to what real pain is, though they experience their thwarted proxy ambitions thusly.

The liberals are behaving so typically liberal. For the previous eight years of President Obama's administration they have seen black pain and anger ride the front pages. They have seen people upload shootings onto their Facebook, up close and personal. They want in on that, and think to do it in concert with their marginalized fellows.

Perhaps they feel their anger is in the service of some amorphous larger good, maybe something like, "We can't believe our candidate didn't win, because she's all over that human rights thing. (Except, of course, when the brown people might be deemed "bad men" from other countries. Different story there.)

A small analogy: Lisa recently volunteered in a program aimed at helping first-time juvenile offenders avoid a record by attending a "non-violent communications" program. While the program has merit, it is led by by non-'hood white people. The leader broke down in tears one day so flummoxed was she by her high attrition rate and general "lack of presence" (her term).

After an uncomfortable silence during which many left the room, one of the participants said, "My 14 year-old brother in court today tryin' to get custody of his kid; I jes' got slapped with more charges for things I didn't do ..."

What he was saying was, "You live in a different world, lady. You got nothing to cry about."

Much like today's cliquish liberal whiners: You have NO idea, so get over this sullenness and show some dignity for your nation.

Your whines and rants are pathetic, elitist and out of touch. You show solidarity with none so much as your own privileged fellows. As Fargo's fictional Police Chief Marge Gunderson said, "And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it."

Why do the liberals want to tear their country down? Because they can? Because they are guilty they didn't protest when it mattered, when the Phony Wars on Terror were busting out all over?

Because these pasty East- and West-Coasters feel their entitled hatred will gain them an aura of solidarity with their protesting inner-city brothers and sisters? Not likely.

All they can think to do is protest, protest, cry tears in their beer, be pugilistic and alienate friends because they're mad the election didn't go their way. For too many, the behavior has become habitual and psychopathic.

The elegant move for liberals six months nigh would be to strike a conciliatory pose with their fellows. Perhaps, to take some Abilify to amp up their anti-depressant regime. To take a stance to nation-build their own country.

But they behave so demoralized, gutted and enervated, they see no other way than to fight on.

Even notoriously ALT Left writer Tom Englehardt suggests the liberals have been "demobbed" of their will to protest anything that actually matters, like America's unjust wars.

"Why, with the sole exception of President Trump ... is no one ... going after the national security state, even as its wars threaten to create a vast arc of failed states and a hell of terror movements and unmoored populations?" 

Why? Because it's so much easier to stay ensconced amongst one's fellow naysayers, taking the morning cup o' Joe with a side of cyanide. Comfortable ... predictable.

Tap out the characters on your Facebook feed and it feels like you have done something. (And you have, virtually-speaking, on the order of watching your Zippo app -- which amounts to not a hill of beans.)

Our President ran on a platform of correcting some ills in the nation, so why not run with that and exploit that stated intention?

Trump ran for the Office on a platform of letting other nations take care of themselves, of not being President of the world. The sane among us should be pleased that there is an inert thing called United Nations led by men with names like Bhutros-Bhutros Ghali and U Thant whose job it is to convene a committee, to convene another committee, to mete out moral censure (=to wrist-slap) its more murderous members.

That is how Realpolitik is played, for there are lots of "bad men" out there. Some of them even sit on "Security Counsels," in a bit of high irony.

Instead the liberal mouthpiece, The New York Times shamed Mr. Trump for "moral cowardice" in the face of his non-action after some apres-inauguration Syrian attacks, goading this neophyte President into the very non-liberal action of dropping the largest bomb to date, The MOAB, on Afghanistan.

For busting a cap, Trump earned his first praise from that now thoroughly discredited "news" outlet. Pity, and foolish, for you can't gain favor by kow-towing to your brutalizers.

It's Aesop's "Scorpion and the Frog". That's pretty simple.

But it wouldn't do in Neverland for Mr. Trump to prove more liberal and pacifist than Democrats like Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton.


(Wait, there's more ... in a couple of days. Then back to your beloved Ranger fare.)