The Nazi Belch-Tide Reaches Palm Beach

This has been a terrible week for the Amerikkkan Nation, and next week will be even worse as the beginnings of the first fundamentalist onslaught on Christmas begins. The fair and balanced cadre over at FOX is happily promoting the end of secular holiday displays that don't show the scene of a manger, and by next week the Mel Gibson version should transform it into a bloody sadomasochistic ritual of punditry approaching the final climactic scenes of Rosemary's Baby, not that many among the mainstream media have really noticed, or cared. Led by hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity - two pillars of acute decadence and bottomless debasement, no less - FOX News anchors have clearly gotten the Murdoch memo on reporting stories whose theme is the purported marginalization or persecution of christians during the holiday season.

The weekly review show, Inside the NFL, was barely over when I discovered to my horror that "Easy" Rush Limbaugh began chiming in with his own savage opinions from everything to thug-life in the NBA and Democrats wishing for more US deaths in Iraq. Limbaugh's entire broadcasting career - and in fact his very existence - is a crepuscular magnum opus to the notion that not even rabid schizophrenia or impregnable psychosis could prevent a demented retard from climbing to the top of the dung heap in this bizarre culture we have erected within this tiny, disturbed part of the world in the name of "entitlement" and "victim society" and "free trade." For the entire stretch of his demented life, the bottomless pit of Rush Limbaugh's regret and revisionist logic seems to arrive from a deep and perverted self-awareness that he was born stupid and at precisely the wrong time in American history - visions of ripe plantations, barnyard debauchery at the end of garden tools and a stable of under-age mulatto housegirls to ravage in the name of backwoods white supremacy should have been his moral summit. If "Easy" Rush had been born Hispanic, instead of white trash, he would probably have been a low-rent drug dealer instead of a talk show host, not just because many of his past stomping grounds would never have listened to a Hispanic host back in the 1980s, but simply because running a tiny street-based crowd of dope fiends and twenty-dollar suck and spin princesses would have been enough to fuel his maniacal need to be followed and absolutely adored no matter the demographic, political affiliation or reason ... which almost every talk show host craves - from Jerry Springer all the way down to Montel and Opie and Anthony.

On any given day, both the talk show host and the dope dealer come to the reality that by nightfall the trappings of their calling will force them to do inexplicable things that are better left unsaid, and the shadows are something into which the weak should never stare. The window dressing may be different, but the baseline instinct never changes for an instant. Both the talk show host and the dope dealer are condemned to live on like insane junkies looking for the next fix - sometimes crossing the line for ever-more - hooked on that heteroclite energy of their own unfathomable addictions.

With a heavy sense of regret, only because I find the collected works humorous, it is easy to agree with P.J. O'Rourke, a conservative who writes in The Atlantic that he tunes out "Easy" Rush because there's almost no room for debate: "Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives." And when I read O'Rourke's piece several months ago I recall feeling angry that a former National Lampoon contributor made the conscious decision to retreat into the dark forays of gothic right-wing hurly-burly, making it okay for a generation of avid readers - of such monumental pieces like How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink - to vote Rethug and, specifically, elect Dubya to anything beyond the office of Town Crank.

It's an ugly prospect these days. How could a once-proud nation have changed so much in the last four years, so drastically that it doesn't look familiar anymore? In what feels like the time it takes to speed through a small West Texas town, Dubya has delivered us from a successful and prosperous nation at peace with the world to a savage nation of freaks and degenerates that are broke or suffocating with debt. And why - exactly - did we go halfway across the world to kill Iraqis with smart bombs and napalm and depleted uranium that is creating a generation of Lon Cheney look-alikes?

Indeed, there is something not right going on here, sports fans, and it's beginning to look like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind - plastic, in bad taste, fraudulent, paranoid, filled with down-low schlock, hallucinogenic, duplicitous and littered with cheap prizes for the terminally offensive. Insane asylums are filled with people who think they're Jesus or Satan. Very few have grand delusions of being a talk show host or dealing dope to crazed addicts and fiends.