Sanity Can't Live at This Altitude

The latest sign of madness just scrolled under the talking heads on MSNBC, followed by a story about the Indiana Pacers and Detriot Pistons gangbanging with some NBA fans, indefinate suspensions and more hard-earned fine money for David Stern's favorite epicurean charity - Club Med with the Laker girls. Then came the news of an unemployeed Ohio automotive worker who was subdued earlier in the day for dropping more than a dozen bowling balls onto Interstate 71 from an overpass because, he explained to state troopers at the scene, "he was killing liberals before they could hatch."

We are living in a repulsive age, and it's likely to become a great deal dicier before we strike bottom. This could happen even sooner than even Hillary Clinton imagines. Because this is, after all, the season of the witch, and close to everyone I speak with seems to believe that we are headed for pockets of extreme bizarreness and abject insanity, of one sort or another. And some already believe we are in the midst of its death grip. Which may be true. Even the hyena cackle of jackass punditry is suggesting that evidence is pointing to strange times indeed ... but way out here in the pseudo-desert that is LA, which is an exact polar opposite of the real and present desert of Iraq, the political meteorology indicates a pressure map that is rising so fast on all fronts that nothing else matters. And now comes this sinful news out of Baghdad that insurgents are fighting it out with U.S. forces in the Iraqi capital while Condi Rice takes the reins over the State Department.

Given her track record for stonewalling, she will pollute the national atmosphere for the next three years and drive us all to haldol injections with her septic ramblings.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph - no wonder that aimless simpleton out there in Columbus went batshit and determined that bowling balls held the mystery of birth for liberals that had to be chucked, in a hurry, into oncoming traffic. He must have been a despondent political activist of some kind trying to send a message to his demented network in Washington DC.

About two days ago, on a local radio station, there were warnings about "a new plague of cat mutilations in Anaheim." The announcer sounded moved and horrified at the mention. "Two more alley cats have been isolated and they are barely holding on to life," she said, "while investigators and crime scene analysts indicate that both felines were victims of the same ferocious madman - a swarthy and hirsuite middle-aged Mexican known as 'Fuego del Gato' - who has tormented cat owners in Orange County for close to six months."

The newscast ended on a bitter note, urging listeners to quit chasing strands of yarn involuntarily until the case could be solved by authorities. "And if anyone in the audience owns a cat," the voice trailed on, "either keep them clear of Orange County or have them euthanasized for their own well-being."

But the madness has not been confined just to Baghdad and Orange Country, you see. And I am not sure that many of you can handle this kind of horror or wanton violence from your computer screens - especially with heads filled with anger, regret and depression from the last electoral sojourn, which for the rational and sane among us - and with great homage to Don McLean - was truly the day when the music died. From here on out there won't be much debate as the Which Side Are You On? polarization exercise continues; this is a technical matter now, run by and for politicians who are hiding their cards at the bottom of the deck ... which doesn't really change the business of government a whole hell of a lot, except that this time the druids are coming in waves and it's going to be so painfully obvious it will be a ballpine hammer on pulverized shins.

So, the point: my appreciation for religious right politics has never been warm, and it's getting worse by the day. Having been in the company of earnest degenerates, my impression thus far is that it has been dominated by thieves, bigots, after hours whoring, warmongers and demeneted yokels with a built in reason for rolling in decomposing sludge. There is the grand inquisitor Pat Robertson who once said that Clinton got elected because "God wanted to bring America to its knees", Jimmy Swaggart and his backstreet ministry of fiendish derelicts, the crazed and diffused Reverend Gene Scott with a satellite dish filled with moronic ramblings, and Jan and Paul Crouch ... whose addiction to shameless opulence make Jim and Tammy Faye look downright charitable.

Toward the end of the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, the spiritual backbone of this hideous fraternity fell to a white trash dingbat named Jerry Fallwell - who is still with us, in almost every crude form imaginable - and when the curtain finally drops on his Moral Majority, he will certainly go down as the biggest cannibal of them all. Fallwell was the first Baptist minister to recognize that there are just as many angry, dumb bigots beyond the comforts of the Old South as there are within it, and when he made the shrewd decision to "get political" in 1979, he built a Virginia-based commercial enterprise that has since enriched himself and a handpicked collection of cronies. For more than twenty years, Jerry Fallwell has defrauded the national press and terrorized the senior muggers in every presidential campaign.

There is no reason to consider that even the best and brightest of Baptist ministers, as it were, could repeatedly or even more than once ratchet themselves up to the level of absolute fanatical vehemence, engagement and total self-absorption it takes to live in the rushing whirlpool of a national campaign from start to finish. There is not enough baggage room on that satanic flight for anyone who wants to lay back and act human for a while. It is a rendezvous between cutthroat zealotry and adrenaline junkies ... and this was especially true of the last campaign war just waged and now settled. But this time, in the 228th year since The American Promise began, we will see organizations and institutions burnt to the ground, every waking day - on the talking heads shows and in the headlines - because of this rat's nest in which we find ourselves.

"And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"
- Jerry Fallwell, broadcast on The 700 Club, September 13, 2001

Still smarting over a final Florida margin of less than one percent and a Supreme Court dipped in rank stupidity, which was enough to put Al Gore back out there on Mean Street, where he's been trapped ever since ... and we still coming to grips with the tragic attack on the World Trade Center, when all of the sudden the viewing public was smacked right over the head with the wild-eyed, yacking hippodrome known as Jerry Fallwell. His hair was bright mongrel, his forehead was caked with make-up, and his pie-hole was moving so fast that the words could not be contained by his rattling jowls as they peaked in a sonic range that alarmed the neighborhood dogs ... "O praise Jesus, my Lord ... isn't this just brilliantly tragic? ... Why yes it is ... O come all ye faithful ... Well, it just goes to show ... "

It can't be! We can't take this vile retard again! Not right now! Here was this savage, this mortifying jacked-up deviant - laughing and delirious and fluttering his arms in the camera like he'd just been elected emperor of the damned. He looked like a pack of vultures ripping at a carcass. I jumped to my feet and backed away from the TV, but perspective didn't change a thing. It was the Real Enchilada before my eyes, and it startled everyone in the room. Even a casual observer would know it, in their soul, when harsh reality presents itself: that more people out there in Lazy-Boy World would believe Jerry Fallwell's interpretation of a heinous event before they would believe their preznut's explanation, which made the bonehead Reverend more important than the mental defective occupying the White House, and somehow Fallwell had emerged from the chaos of 9/11 with yet another return from the dead, and another serious shot of directing the cultural agenda.

Who could have foreseen that a loosely organized plot to ram jetliners into the World Trade Center would have a direct corrolation to The Commonwealth of Virginia's Anti-Sodomy Statute ... while the corporate media butchers in the backrooms of New York, Washington and Los Angeles were arguing about what it all meant. Everyone settled on gloom, pessimism, and a sort of aggressive neutrality.

The dreary task of living through this low-rent trip will fall to the rest of us. It will be a dehumanizing nightmare to be sure; and these rattling cretins will find joy and happiness in our downward spiral. Sooner or later the networks will have spiritual reporters to advise us from Down Under in Lynchburg like Jules Bergman did with the space program. Considering that such an affluent nation can't feed all its children or even conquer potholes, I for one am not holding my breath waiting for Jerry's moment of supreme enlightenment.