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It's Charles P. Pierce's World ... We just live in it.
We can't have what our parents and grandparents had — limitless cheap gas, the space to build anything anywhere, the right to dump whatever we want wherever we please. The old ideas of American affluence seem a distant joke.
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Last December, an uprising in Virginia derailed a local plan to prepare for a possible rise in the sea levels due to global warming. The community responded by losing its mind.
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Almost every issue of the angry modern American right was engaged. A project to save the region's endangered oyster beds was attacked as adding to the national debt. But Agenda 21 provides a coherent narrative for inchoate anger and fear. People want someone to blame. Agenda 21 gives them a simple answer. It gives them a They, and life is always simpler with a They. It is a unified field of resistance to what seems to be the irresistible.
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While one can idly dismiss the Birchers, one dismisses the power of this issue at one's peril. It is an attack on government at its most basic level. It is a clever play in the long game being played by modern conservatism — and the corporate money behind it — against the very notion of environmental protection. It is being fought out on those levels of our self-government that don't get covered by cable news and don't get talked about on the Sunday shows, until, one day, the whole thing explodes in all directions all at once.
Money is a flatterer. It tells you what you want to hear about how well you're doing. It reassures you that every plan is a good plan because every plan is an expensive plan.
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Last year. The more I think about it, the more I believe that we, as a society, gave up on the pillory too soon. And $158.3 million is tip money for CitiGroup.
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This is what happens when real punishment for real crimes is considered to be too inconvenient, or too difficult, or too traumatic for the nation, which is made up completely of candyglass children incapable of existing with the knowledge that their financial lords of the universe are really no different from stick-up kids in a bodega. This is what happens when nobody goes to jail. This is what happens today.
Plainly, the people in the administration [were] handed an economic catastrophe that was much worse than they'd been told it was, and loud disgreement erupted over how to deal with it. And, running through the entire dialogue, from the president on down, was the utterly zany notion that the way to get things done was to deal rationally with a political opposition dedicated to destroying him. After botching the best chance they had to get their way on what needed to be done, the administration responded to the 2010 midterms by actively debating whether or not to sell out the signature achievements of the Democratic party over the past 50 years....
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[I]f I accomplish the big achievement of driving a busload of nuns off a cliff and into the fiery heart of Moana Loa, I have successfully written the first line of my obituary and entered history. But I've still driven nuns into a volcano. ... Big Stupid usually trumps Little Smart. (C.f. — George Walker Bush, 43rd president of these United States.) I am hoping that the events of the past couple of years — the Occupy folks, the increasing political dementia of the Republicans, the political revival of labor in the midwest — have managed to knock this poisonous thinking out of the Obama White House
Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri is a dolt who currently should be learning to run the Slurpee machine at a convenience store on a logging road outside of Branson, and not fouling the atmosphere of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body.
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Legislatamalism is so confusing.
Given enough column inches, and even when he's occasionally describing things accurately, Master could make Little Richard sound as joyless and leaden as Nietzsche with a bad case of the piles. Master lived with the horror that somebody, somewhere, was having fun in their lives without his permission.
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(Brooks seems to have joined Opus Dei when we weren't looking. And it is passing odd that, whenever anybody points out that, because of the way "this ethos shaped our modern life," a bunch of Wall Street sharpers stole all the money, and when the Occupy folks pointed out loudly that maybe this "ethos" was little more than a license to steal, Brooks ridiculed them and started talking again about how the real problem was poor people fucking in their trailer parks.)
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( ... [O]ur best teacher on the subject is actually Bob Knight, who reportedly once said to an Indiana player who attributed a loss by the Hoosiers to God's will: "Son, some day you'll grow up and understand that God doesn't give a fuck about Indiana basketball.")
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( ... And "most of the anger that arises when religion mixes with sports or with politics" is based on the people who use it promote ignorant policies, based on ancient prejudices and viciously retrograde attitudes toward women and gay people and poor people, by gussying them up with the Gospels. ... )
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