Jumping the Shark with Clint Eastwood

At what point did Republicans officially jump the shark? The question is hard to answer, because jumping the shark – a “Happy Days” reference, I believe, involving the Fonz, his motorcycle, and a shark tank – no longer seems like an apt metaphor. If you jump the shark, you’ve lost the plot and need to be redirected. Inherent in this is an attachment to reality, or at least the potential for a re-attachment. Republicans are past this. They’re jumping the Loch Ness Monster on a unicorn.

The thing that continues to astound me is that people are still listening, still taking seriously the insanity Republicans vomit day after day. There’s a new frontrunner for the presidential nomination every 6 hours, and each and every one of them is explicitly promising to turn our presently dysfunctional society into a veritable dystopia. They scoff at the idea that we should create jobs through investment in the nation’s infrastructure, an infrastructure so astoundingly awful that it has received a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers; simply put, they say, we don’t have that kind of money, so our roads, bridges, public transportation, and all the rest will just have to crumble. What we DO have money for is the construction of a massive wall along the US-Mexican border, patrolled 24 hours a day by minimum-wage private contractors with assault rifles. Lovely.

While I am opposed on principle to dividing countries by a wall – Do we fear an invasion by the Visigoths? What is wrong with us? – I wouldn’t be quite so scathing if Republicans had a plan in place to finance such a project. They don’t, of course, because the right wing is waging war on revenue. Not corporate revenue, which should of course should be maximized. Greed is good. No, the real problem is government revenue, because that has to come from taxes, which are evil. How Republicans are convincing people of this, I couldn’t say. It seems like such a no-brainer. People who are much, much richer than you should pay a little bit more so that you, working class retiree, can afford your Lipitor. The old folks who make up the Republican base are either suicidally gullible or just plain suicidal. Or genuinely fearful of the Visigoths.

Lest you label me a partisan, I submit that the Democrats are not much better. Both parties seem to have missed the memo on how trickle-down economics doesn’t work; both parties are dragging their feet on campaign finance reform, because both parties are accepting wildly generous donations from Wall Street baddies; neither party has demanded a single-payer healthcare option; neither party has made real headway on environmental issues. Basically, the political system as a whole is rocketing away from reason, but the Democrats seem at least vaguely aware of this fact. This makes them the good guys, kind of like Clint Eastwood is the titular Good in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” He’s a murdering, money-hungry sociopath, but next to the wicked deeds and visages of the Bad and the Ugly, he’s Gandhi.

I guess that’s what it all boils down to: American politics is a spaghetti western, and should be treated accordingly. Let’s stop waiting on a hero and just appoint Clint Eastwood Supreme Dear Leader of the Universe. Stupider things have happened.

The Great (Wo)Man Theory

Three 20th century figures still ruining our lives today:

Ronald Reagan
Holy mother of god, if one more person says “Well he may not have been perfect, but he did win the Cold War,” I’m going to shit myself. Presiding over the end of a war is different than winning it. Soviet-style communism had had one foot in the grave since 1917. Political systems in which extravagantly-mustachioed despots are able to intentionally and unnecessarily starve millions of their own citizens don’t last forever. When Ukrainians started eating each other, that was the beginning of the end. Perestroika was more about bread than missiles.

So if we cross off “Won the Cold War” from our list of pros, what are we left with? I’m having trouble coming up with one. On the con side, I have “Once said that ‘Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,’ thereby bequeathing upon the American people a pernicious legacy of small-government fundamentalism that continues to destroy us from the inside out.”

Margaret Thatcher
The UK’s answer to Ronald Reagan. We can thank her for lots of the austerity bullshit currently preventing Europe from appropriately handling its sovereign debt crisis.

Ayn Rand
L. Ron Hubbard wrote (science) fiction that transmogrified into holy scripture. While I think we can all agree that Scientologists are crazy, their influence is mercifully limited to bad actors.

Ayn Rand on the other hand wrote fiction that transmogrified into holy scripture, and that holy scripture influenced people like Alan Greenspan. From what I’ve been able to piece together, Ayn Rand’s argument was that poor people should be left to die because they’re not as good as rich people. This argument gels nicely with libertarianism – perhaps the most puerile political theory to ever receive serious mainstream consideration – and now forms the basis of the modern Republican Party. The fact that they’ve latched on to social Darwinism while rejecting real Darwinism tells you pretty much all you need to know about the GOP’s intellectual rigor.