Primal Scream

This is not a normal issue; it’s more of a rant. Sorry, couldn’t help it. Probably won’t happen again.

I’m angry. Sad as well, and I might add appalled, offended, and betrayed. Most of all, though I’m just plain angry. I’m angry that people that get elected to leadership positions in this excuse for a country so often behave so badly. They act in ways that you’d immediately correct and teach if you found your children doing. They do whatever they…I don’t even know, do they want some of the asinine, counterproductive, nonsensical things they espouse, or do they think they must do those things because they think their supporters would abandon them otherwise? And then they justify, justify, justify after the fact. And so many of them are lawyers, and evidently law school is primarily a set of classes in how to lie in a way that lets you deny it, how to cheat and get away with it, and how to hide your real motives behind words you can say with great conviction and yet betray with your actions as soon as your rhetoric has gotten you into a position of power.

And the crap they seem to believe — and not only them. Where the bloody hell did the hateful, pinheaded notion of race come from, let alone the idea that one “race” is better in some way than another? And religions too; most of them I know of talk a lot about love and care and hardly at all about hate and rancor and fighting and killing. Then there’s history; people will claim to believe whatever they think they need to in order to justify whatever short-sighted, selfish, or pathetically brainless issue they’ve adopted as “important.”

In the halls of law and power there’s alway a bunch of tripe about the “founding fathers” and what they supposedly believed. Which almost always, if you go look at what they actually wrote and was written about them, is just made-up crap, from the religions they supposedly held to the ideas that did and didn’t get written in the “constitution” that’s so important. And yet when some aging, political hack of a lawyer who’s stuck in the 1940s and managed to dissemble and cheat his way into a lifetime job wants to base an opinion on this “constitution” thing, he gets to completely make up what’s in it, what it means, and where it came from.

Who are these people? And some of the people who helped them get elected and appointed; what is wrong with them? These are not the kind of people you look up to or respect. McConnell invents whatever excuse he thinks he needs to misuse the power he’s managed to amass (and you can just guess the kinds of things he was willing to do to get that power). Not to mention the millions of people who voted a con man into the presidency, I guess on the basis of him once having a TV show. By all reports he’s spent his whole life cheating, losing, making bad decisions, and thinking about nobody but himself. And those reports are all over the place; it’s not like anybody would have trouble finding out that this guy has failed at more businesses than anybody, but has managed to stay afloat because of his dad’s bequest. I mean, come on, how do you fail at running a licensed casino?

I’m angry. Angry at the old men who evidently think of women as chattel, and have spent decades working on putting them there. Angry at the racists who evidently think there are “races” and (of course) whatever one they think they themselves are must be better than the others. Angry at the white men in this country (I’m speaking as one of them) who have for their whole lives gotten by with mediocrity being good enough, and now they’re afraid of a situation where they might have to compete with people who look slightly different (and just might assume that mediocrity is not good enough). Angry at the jingoistic nationalists who insist in the face of all the evidence that this excuse for a country is better than any other, either generally or in specific ways like “the best health care in the world” or things like that. It’s always things that you can find out in minutes are just not true, and yet they either don’t care or just ignore the facts. I’m angry at the people we elect to congress who seem to be some combination of psychopath, borderline stupid, just confused, or so habituated to lying (in that deniable, lawyerly way) that they keep it up even when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to. I’m angry at the people we’ve elected for decades, and the people they’ve chosen for key roles, who have made it manifestly clear that the only thing this excuse for a country really is the best at is killing and manipulation. Nobody even knows for sure how many military bases we have around the world, for crying out loud.

I’m angry that I’m not the only one who’s angry about these things, and that’s been true for most of my adult life, and yet here we are. And so I have to ask, about a lot of the rest of the population of this excuse for a country: who are these people?

This place is home for me, and has been for my family for 4 centuries (although I’m also angry that they helped steal it from the people who were here first), and I don’t see why I should leave. I feel like I belong here, and living in the northeast corner of the country I find plenty of folks I agree with and fit in with. But I look at what’s going on in some other states and parts of the country and I don’t think that would be the case. I don’t know what to do about that. When I and people like me get things established around here that make sense to us, are others going to be just as angry as I am now? If so, maybe we need a new idea. Texas republicans reportedly want to secede. Maybe we just say “good riddance” and stop subsidizing them the way we always do. Sure, Texas was its own country once, very briefly. That didn’t work out so well for them, but I’m sure they’ll ignore the facts about that. That “Alamo” thing they love to remember? They lost. Just like the Confederacy lost. So why the attitudes about those things nowadays? I mean, come on…who are these people?

The end part

So do I feel better now? No.

Illustration is The Scream by Edvard Munch. He was Norwegian, and painted The Scream in 1893. His inspiration came during an early evening walk when he “heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.” Munch was pretty successful, but evidently was not very happy. He once wrote “I live with the dead—my mother, my sister, my grandfather, my father…Kill yourself and then it's over. Why live?” Nevertheless he did live, from 1863 to 1944.