mésalliance with corrosion

According to the prediction, for which yours truly is going way out on an extend limb, the book's author will comply with the following tabloid injunction. . . . "If it bleeds, it leads!" . . . Even now, so I am now speculating, some hot-shot aspirant for a doctorate in political science is gathering the viscera for a Nietzschean lion. Time honored and well financed concepts will, in a future all too near, be mauled to shreds.

The above text in technicolor is how I hoped to start this essay. And then, it happened, that dreaded writer's block. Okay, here was the plan.

Right after that opening paragraph, my deathless prose would dive into a meditation on the Oklahoma City bombing. Nowadays, that bombing is blamed on a few lunatics, who had glutted their imagination with perfervid rightwing swill. Here's the dirty little secret that's intrinsic to that swill.

That swill did not come from nowhere. It came as an abstration from bombast that was incessantly broadcast by perfervid Republican partisans. For the two generations prior to that bombing, those partisans assailed their country's government as rapacious and burdensome and inexcusably clumsy. During that time, the government was very much in the hands of the rival Democratic Party.

All that bombast was meant to sway the voters to replace the then dominant Democratic Party with the then subordinate Republican Party. During his second campaign to unseat an incumbent president, candidate Ronald Reagan, in one way or other, availed himself of that particular trinity. To ameliorate financial predation by rapacious government, he promised tax cuts. To relieve burdens imposed by government that was also inexcusably clumsy, he promised to "get the government off your back".

In swaying the majority of American voters over to his side, Reagan owed his success to the power of that trinity of adjectives, a power cultivated by nearly 50 years of incessant Republican bombast. Good for the Republican Party, one might suppose.

Funny thing about people, they tend to simplify concepts. Often, they combine two concepts into one. It took a while, but eventually two components in that trinity were combined into one concept. In truth, it becomes easy to regard a government that is burdensome and rapacious as tyrannical. Somehow, the supposed inexcusable clumsiness of government gets exaggerated little by little. And fine day, government is more than just clumsy, it is ineffectual.

. . . "you have to answer for Santio" . . . .

Bypassing the expected rhetorical question, let's slash to the cheese. In the eyes of a tiny minority, government has become irredeemably tyrannical and ineffectual.


It took that second pair of adjectives to enable the mindset to contemplate the Oklahoma City bombing . . . the thought precedes the deed. If government is tyrannical, then it's perfectly morally permissible to destroy it with whatever means that are expedient. If a government is impervious to destruction by peaceable democratic measures, then surely violence by a moral minority is permissible. If a government is ineffectual, getting away with that violence is eminently possible.

My five doughnuts to somebody's three. I never read "THE TURNER DIARIES", which certainly encouraged the gorpes, who undertook the above mentioned bombing. And yet, I believe that book has its protagonist going about ever so merrily bombing government buildings.

And that person perpetrates bombing after bombing, without getting caught by the authorities, until romance rears its lovely head. The bomber falls in love with a hottie, who happens to be working secretly for the government. Shortly thereafter, betrayal with consequent capture ensues.

Funny, how a jigger of romance enables some dupe to chug a pitcher of blather.

Here's a comment with a cosmically comic aspect. For more than five decades, the powers that be at the top of this capitalist society have financed, and heavily so, a campaign to disparage both government and governance. Funny thing came to pass. Those powers that be came to believe the very blather they were financing. The final consequence being, the Oval Office is now occupied by a jesus-up-the-heart nincompoop with cotton candy for brains.

And the resulting damage is mind-boggling.

And here's something that just might be considered comic. Somehow, the entire right wing is suffering from amnesia. Time and time again, some rightwing stalwart avouches eternal love and devotion for "small government", somehow implying there's something untoward about "big government". Here's the thing.

Well, within living memory, victory over fascism came about through the instrumentality of "big government". It was "big government" that got all the ships and planes built and manned, got all the military recruited and trained to take on and defeat the Axis powers, successfully pursued victory in a struggle taking place in two oceans, and not least, recruited the scientists and built the facilities, necessary to assemble the atomic bombs that compelled imperial Japan to accept unconditional surrender.

ya'know, one should hope that, for this country's sake, the right wing shall replace the mantra of "small government" with "small government, where appropriate . . . large government, when necessary".

If anybody out there wants to bend their brain around some gut-wrenching speculation, I got just the thing . . . let's suppose that, instead of disparaging governance in general, congressional Republicans in Congress had boasted of curbing the excesses of a Congress, dominated by the opposition party . . . those Republicans might've considered avouching they had kept the opposition party from rapaciously increasing taxes, thereby allowing goernment to work in a way that benefits the country

. . . by so doing, those congressional Republicans would have implicitly championed the proposition that government can be made to work . . . And in that way, they might've attentuated the atmospherics that led to the Oklahoma City bombing . . .

oh, well, here's a flash . . . maybe, instead of "mésalliance with corrosion", the title of this predicted book will be something like, say, "THE GOD THAT SUCKED" . . . well, ye'know, whyz.ache.err, that title is bound to get a lot more media mention that the other, more scholarly one . . .


from the bottom right-hand corner, two up and two over




oh, yeah, I just flashed on something most visitors will consider arcane. Supposedly, the philosopher Immanuel Kant opened the way for faith by showing reason its constraints. In so doing, he transmuted the very essentiality of faith. Some of our cognoscenti may contend the consequences will likely prove rather lurid. Well, maybe they'll be proven right.

Given my adiaphoristic temperament, I regard Kant's achievement with the deepest gratitude. So far as I'm concerned, he extricated faith from a requirement. Over the centuries, that requirement has proven disasterous. Over the centuries, the theologians in power have insisted that it is their right to impose the religion they espouse. In as much as that religion, which is necessarily based on faith, is manifestly true, those theologians are performing a service, by saving the ignorant from error.

Thanks to Kant, that requirement of being true has been obviated. The man expunged from the essentiality of faith the concept of true and false.

For forever after in this our pedestrian life, in which we must meet the requirements of our physiology, both the concept of "true religion" and that of "false religion" fall into the category of claptrap. For forever after, talking about "true religion" versus "false religion" makes about as much sense as talking about "illiterate rocks" versus "literate rocks".

Certainly, we may, sensibly, talk about "beautiful religion" versus 'drab religion", or "energetic religion" versus "placid religion" . . . c'mon, whyz.ache.err, that concession has got to be made, otherwise all those collegiate departments of comparative religion will have to be shuttered, throwing, god.knows, how many professors out of a job . . .