Solidarity

"Socially, culturally, morally, America has taken on the aspect of a decadent society and a declining nation."-- Patrick J. Buchanan, preface to Suicide of a Superpower

It is rather disconcerting to respond to a GQ image of the stadium exodus in Paris just prior to heating up your fish and chips and then find yourself quoted live on France 24 three hours later, rushing to telephone the dying aunt now holed up with dying brother and my immediate progenitor, my father, exhausted with tales of his dying wife, as fed to you by a sister you listen to, mouthing support you do not mean. Louise is dying, the fleeting nurse and more evincing invalid with her rheumatoid arthritis. "Her rectum is falling out of her ass," says besieged sister, and this makes you, as a cripple who wants to kill her apartment manager on any given Sunday, feel curiously more lucid than the rest of my clan: I am now evidently in charge, hanging by a thread while being quoted by France 24, watching the civilized world simply descend, trying to curb my hyperbole, but truly believing that Caucasian moral decency is imperiled, aware that this is a draconian throwback even to the 19th century. I could tell you too, how I took on Trudy Richardson and Debra Horne and the new one, Gail Sims, last week, losing my temper, standing up to Debra, calling her incompetent, a lout, realizing my contempt for these mocha women isn't worth my soul.

Louise has Sundowning Syndrome, to hear my sister tell it, while I continue to accrue a better, diminished, picture of Ben Carson, my mild interest in the black boy who did good in Detroit waning. He fooled Nightline, evidently, those many years ago, the carefully groomed and educated minority now revealing levels of bombast which alarm the establishment, reminding yourself you have little idea who the establishment is. But the generalized anxiety among the fractious conservative class seems to convey "What if Trump or Carson gets the nomination, or worse, becomes president if the edifice of ossified Clinton centrism cracks?"

My response to this is cynicism: So what? Neither the smirking monkey with his evangelical definition nor the mogul-shyster would have the actual power to do much damage, not immediately, in this facade of a democratic republic where a wastrel of a reactionary like me gets quoted on live international television looking for social media filler about the latest attack on Europe which has broken many congruent hearts.

If I in turn had the power to generate hawkish policy, I'd say its time for the third world war. Assassinate Assan Rouhani of Iran, dissolve Syria, expose the Russian armed forces for their ineptitude, and so forth, as withering in rhetorical sentiment as papier-mache, while I was quoted on France 24, trivialized spastic on the margins, preferring to die in battle. Ludicrous, my family decimated by chemotherapy, innocent Western blood flowing in the age of a troubled new century molded by the fanaticism of a nefarious Saudi named Osama. The disintegration of Airbus 321 was tactically effective. It caused a united retrenchment. The attack on Paris, in contrast, will backfire, in expected ways and otherwise. All I can do is regret benighted choices, observe the web of familial disease, crack ghoulish jokes. Consider the hospice industry with disgust. People need to know when it is time to make peace with death, and my stepmother, and my father's sister Marie, and her brother, need to stop receiving extraordinary medical intervention. They will not do it of course, but it would free up resources to ease the stringency of the welfare state we all hate. The brutality of a cause, the brutality of centralized institutional paradigms, these are flip sides of the same coin.

Synergenic Oxymorons

Both technology and religion are found to have transcendence as a common motivation. -- Susan George, Religion and Technology in the 21st Century, introduction.

I remain diffident about following Justina Hadnott's account. Oh, the grooming and poise take work, and she wouldn't be caught dead in my static bubble guts environment, but I am too familiar with the smooth moving love joy routine of her less dazzling lard hindered sisters. My disposition is far too acerbic to love each day like it's my last. I've fought every day as my last, from calcified fecal matter buffering my hip spike cast on the ward (destroy them!) to my most recent calamities with having parked the Jazzy too far back to extend my bad arm to sit up on my concave stained mattress, and instead of giving in, calling 911, then getting a memo from Trudy Richardson asking why I did not contact the office. Well, because Lanishea the receptionist barely bothered to make a note to ask maintenance to bring up my new phone, and so I was left without the 5s until late Saturday, then the guard on duty did not respond to my pull cord signal for over six hours. This is minority competence in the inner city, hardly the pop corn comfort of Terrence Howard's scheming in prison issue orange.

The problem is temporarily solved, driving in so close to my milk crate bed stand that I endanger my pivot onto the toxic bedding, not that days cannot be numbered unexpectedly. Dave Goldberg's rather amusing treadmill demise is actually a perfect argument against mercy killing, since we never know, in the assurances we use to go on with our day, whether or not our propulsion driven tin cans will turn us into victuals for Elijah's ravens.

Airplanes are marvels of physics, and have been used in warfare since their manufacture became practical, and of course a passenger jet is still safer than most motor vehicles, but the post 9/11 environment has seen a dramatic change. We do not stop to think. Not necessarily that Airbus 321 may have been destroyed as an act of vengeance for MH17, (and if it was Putin is hardly chastened by conscience), but that we're rapidly losing control of the complex environment we've created. Cold War disinformation, the worry of my generation, is an outmoded tactic in the age of Goggle's amoral, if playful efficiency, and Obama's occasionally daring foreign policy insights ineffectual. Democracy is a shell game, and Communist central planning leads to the Orwellian cruelty of black children.

What does freedom mean in this context? We all have to game the system. We could mitigate it, on our own terms, but who does that anymore?