Trump Death Clock is way too low

A few months ago, The Trump Death Clock came on line (tracking avoidable deaths due to Covid). It tracked the total number of Covid deaths in the U.S. vs. the number that could have been avoided had Trump recognized the problem and taken appropriate steps a single week before the shutdown. It’s currently at 96,000+ — and that’s way too low.

A better metric would have been set at two weeks prior to the shutdown, when with appropriate public health measures the number of deaths would have been 90% below what it is now. Three weeks before, approximately 99% — almost exactly what could have been expected had the U.S. taken South Korea’s approach.  That would work out to about 1,600 deaths — about 1% of current U.S. deaths. The other 99% are due to Trump’s incompetence.

The U.S. and South Korea (a country of 50,000,000 people) had their first cases on the same day, in January. To date, the number of deaths in the U.S. is approaching 162,000 (officially — likely real total deaths might be twice that). In South Korea — which did everything right (massive testing, near-immediate results, and assiduous contact tracing)? Three hundred Covid deaths. In a democratic country with about 15% of the U.S. population, way under 1% of the fatalities here. Under one percent.

Trump insists that he’s had a “perfect” response to the pandemic.

The only way that could be “perfect” is if Trump was a white nationalist who didn’t care if a lot of poor white people died, but was pleased that a good majority of the fatalities are among poor black, hispanic, and native peoples, who have borne the brunt of his incompetent response to the pandemic.

I despise Joe Biden (and Hillary Clinton), but I’d crawl naked across broken glass to vote against the sociopathic monster in the White House — and his arrogant, theo-fascist, racist, goose-stepping acolytes — who don’t give a damn about our fellow Americans.

Listening to Trump and his endlessly outraged, self-pitying butt kissers on Fox “News,” my response is that of Arnold J. Rimmer: “Stop your foul whining, you filthy pieces of distended rectum.”

Those pieces of filth, and Trump, are trying to excuse what’s essentially mass murder.

A few years ago there was a documentary titled “Hitler’s Willing Accomplices.”

The same can be said of Trump’s current tools.

Quote of the Day 8-7-20 (Steven Weinberg)

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

–Steven Weinberg (winner 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics), address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference on Cosmic Design, Washington, D.C., April 1999

Christianity’s Sick Obsession with Sex

The following is the bare-bones version of Chapter 10 in 24 Reasons to Abandon Christianity, which will be out in a little over year. I’ll add to it considerably over the next few months, but this’ll give you a good idea of where I’m going with it — I’ll basically be adding more documentation and illustrative passages and quotes.

For now, here ’tis:

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10. Christianity’s morbid preoccupation with sex

Since its inception, Christianity has had an exceptionally unhealthy fixation on sex, to the exclusion of almost everything else (except power, money, and the infliction of cruelty). This stems from the numerous “thou shalt nots” relating to sex, and the calumnies heaped upon it, in the Bible. To quote only a few of the many passages maligning sex and warning against it:

“”Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.” — I Peter 2:11

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanliness, lasciviousness.” –Galatians 5:19

“For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” — Romans 8:6

The church fathers echoed these views:

“We Christians regard a stain upon our chastity as more dreadful than any punishment, or even death itself.” –Tertullian, Apologeticus

“The children of the flesh can never be compared to the glory of holy virginity.” — St. Augustine, On Holy Virginity

“Nothing so much casts down the mind of man from its citadel as do the blandishments of women, and that physical contact without which a wife cannot be possessed.” — St. Augustine, Soliloquies

“Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.” –St. Augustine, Soliloquies

And lest we forget:

“It is time to cut down the forest of marriage with the ax of virginity.” –St. Jerome, Epistle 123

All of this prudishness and calumny stems from Christianity’s most basic scriptures, especially the Ten Commandments.

That the Ten Commandments (enumerated in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5) command keeping the sabbath, forbid taking the Lord’s name, and forbid coveting one’s neighbor’s wife, but do not even mention, let alone forbid, slavery, rape, incest, torture, or cruelty—all of which were abundantly common in the time the Commandments were written. This speaks volumes about their writers’ preoccupation with sex (and women as property), as well as the pettiness of the Judeo-Christian deity.

Over the centuries, Christian religious leaders have echoed and amplified the perverted morality espoused in the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Bible. To cite but two examples from relatively recent popes:

“When Christianity is rejected, marriage inevitably sinks into the slavery of man’s vile passions.” –Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum divinae sapientiae (1880)

“You cannot belong to Christ unless you crucify all self-indulgent passions and desires.” –Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prior to ascending to the papacy), Pastoral Letter on the Care of Homosexual Persons (1986)

Today, judging from the pronouncements of many Christian leaders, one would think that morality consists solely of what one does (more precisely, doesn’t) in one’s bedroom. For a completely bonkers example of this, let’s turn to a prominent televangelist and former GOP presidential candidate who has posited that tolerance of homosexuality is the cause of hurricanes:

“If you wanted to get America destroyed, if you were a malevolent, evil force and you said, “How can I turn God against America? What can I do to get God mad at the people of America to cause this great land to vomit out the people?” Well, I’d pick five things. I’d begin to have incest. I’d begin to commit adultery wherever possible, all over the country, and sexuality. I’d begin to have them offering up and killing their babies. I’d get them having homosexual relations, and then I’d have them having sex with animals.”

–Pat Robertson, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, September 7, 1986

The Catholic Church, though less flamboyant than Robertson, is the prime example of sex negativity, with its moral pronouncements rarely going beyond the matters of birth control and abortion, and with its moral emphasis seemingly entirely on those matters.

Also note that the official Catholic view of sex—that it’s for the purpose of procreation only—reduces human sexual relations to those of brood animals. Many of the Church fathers (and later popes) were quite explicit about this, with Augustine, in his work Conjugal Adultery, stating: “Intercourse with even a lawful wife is unlawful and wicked if the conception of offspring be prevented.”

Thus it’s no surprise that for centuries the Catholic Church has been the driving force behind efforts to prohibit access to birth control devices and information—to everyone, not just Catholics.

The Catholic Church, however, is far from alone in its sick obsession with sex. The evangelical hate campaign against gay people is probably the most prominent current manifestation of this perverse preoccupation. Even at this writing, condemnation of “sodomites” from church pulpits is still very common—with Christian clergymen wringing their hands as they piously proclaim that their words of hate have nothing to do with gay bashings and the murder of gays.

Christianity produces sexual misery

“[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism — everything that the Bible condemns.” –Pat Robertson (12)

In addition to the misery produced by Christian intrusions into the sex lives of non-Christians, Christianity produces great misery among its own adherents through its insistence that sex, except the very narrow variety it sanctions, is evil, against God’s law. Christianity proscribes sex between unmarried people, sex outside of marriage, homosexual relations, bestiality, and even “impure” thoughts. Indulging in such things can and will, in the conventional Christian view, lead straight to hell.

(One indication of the Christian obsession with sex is the repeated mention of bestiality in medieval ecclesiastical writings. One 8th-century penitential [list of sins and punishments] quoted in A.A. Hadden’s Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents states: “If a cleric has fornicated with a quadruped let him do penance for, if he is a simple cleric, two years, if a deacon, three years, if a priest, seven years, if a bishop, ten years.” All this leads one to wonder just exactly how common this practice was in the medieval church.)

Given that human beings are by nature highly sexual beings, and that their urges very often do not fit into the only officially sanctioned Christian form of sexual relations (monogamous, heterosexual marriage), it’s inevitable that those who attempt to follow Christian “morals” in this area are often miserable, as their strongest urges run smack dab into the wall of religious belief. This is inevitable in Christian adolescents and unmarried young people in that the only “pure” way for them to behave is celibately—in the strict Christian view, even masturbation is prohibited. (Philip Roth well described the dilemma of the religiously/sexually repressed young in Portnoy’s Complaint as “being torn between desires that are repugnant to my conscience and a conscience repugnant to my desires.”) Thus the years of adolescence and young adulthood for many Christians are poisoned by “sinful” urges, unfulfilled longings, and intense guilt (after the urges become too much to bear and are acted upon).

Even after Christian young people receive a license from church and state to have sex, they often discover that the sexual release promised by marriage is not all that it’s cracked up to be. One gathers that in marriages between those who have followed Christian rules up until marriage—that is, no sex (and often no sex education) at all—sexual ineptitude and lack of fulfillment are all too common. Even when Christian married people do have good sexual relations, the problems do not end. Sexual attractions ebb and flow, and new attractions inevitably arise. In conventional Christian relationships, one is not allowed to act on these new attractions. One is often not even permitted to admit that such attractions exist. As Sten Linnander put it, “with traditional [Christian] morality, you have to choose between being unfaithful to yourself or to another.”

The dilemma is even worse for gay teens and young people in that Christianity never offers them release from their unrequited urges. They are simply condemned to lifelong celibacy. If they indulge their natural desires, they become “sodomites” subject not only to earthly persecution under religion-inspired laws, but to being roasted alive forever in the pit. Given the internalized homophobia Christian teachings inspire, not to mention the very real discrimination gay people face, it’s not surprising that a great many homosexually oriented Christians choose to live a lie and feign heterosexual marriage. In most cases, this leads to lifelong personal torture and gross unfairness to their spouses, who deserve someone who desires them sexually. But such internalized homophobia can have even more tragic results.

A prime example is Marshall Applewhite, “John Do,” the guru of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, whose members committed mass suicide in 1997. Applewhite grew up in the South in a repressive Christian fundamentalist family. Horrified by his homosexual urges, he began to think of sexuality itself as evil, and eventually underwent castration to curb his sexual urges. Several of his followers took his anti-sexual teachings to heart and likewise underwent castration before, at Applewhite’s direction, killing themselves.

One strongly suspects that Applewhite, given his fundamentalist upbringing, was aware of and took to heart Christ’s words in Matthew 19:12: “For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be some eunuchs which have made themselves for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

Finally, the astounding level of sexual hypocrisy displayed by Christian clergymen and politicians is mute testimony to Christianity’s impossible-to-meet “moral” demands and the misery they produce. It’s also of note that the sexual behavior of repressed Christians often leaks out in incredibly unhealthy ways. The Catholic Church’s ongoing pedophilia scandal is exhibit A. A church that preaches abstinence for the unmarried, celibacy for clergy, and sex within marriage only for procreative purposes, has harbored myriad pedophiles, has shielded them from prosecution, and has made it a routine practice to shuffle them from parish to parish – thus providing them with one fresh set of victims after another.

Protestants have nothing to brag about regarding sexual hypocrisy, either. Exemplary Protestant hypocrites include the Rev. Ted Haggerd, whose meth-and-male-hooker scandal occurred while he was spiritual advisor to George W. Bush; Rev. Jimmy “I have sinned!” Swaggart, whose involvement with female hookers led to his defrocking by the Assemblies of God; homophobic Republican senator Larry “Wide Stance” Crane, who was arrested for soliciting sex in an airport bathroom; Rev. Jim Bakker, who was involved in orgies with members of both sexes – though he went to jail for financial fraud involving his Heritage USA Christian theme park; and family-values Republican senator David “Diaper Man” Vitter, who was re-elected after his hooker scandal came to light.

All of this hypocritical, sordid behavior points to one thing: Christian sexual “morality” produces so much misery that even its most ardent advocates often find Christian “morals” impossible to follow.

Separated at Birth?

Quote of the Decade (Charles Barkley) — please read this, it’s important

“POOR LIVES MATTER”

My favorite athlete, Charles Barkley, nailed it. Yes, black, brown, and red people get screwed, often far worse than white people, but poor people regardless of race get screwed the worst.

Thank god Sir Charles recognizes this and has the guts to say it. Identity politics — fueled by industrial strength white guilt among those who didn’t grow up poor — points down a blind alley, an alley that pits all of us against each other based on race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Charles Barkley got it exactly right: it’s the 99% vs. the 1%. “Solutions” that accept the status quo and artificial scarcity (e.g., “reparations” based on race, while fundamental economic inequities go unchallenged), pit working people of different races and genders against each other, to the benefit of the 1%.

Think about past identity-politics disasters: busing (rather than equalizing school funding), and “affirmative action,” which did next to nothing to redress inequities, but played into the artificial-scarcity myth and the hands of the 1% — setting peoples of different races against each other, for decades, clawing each other over crumbs.

All of the social welfare measures that are universally popular (social security and medicare) are universal — everyone benefits from them. Why on earth don’t you, and everyone else, see that? Why not insist on benefits that will equalize economic well-being for everyone? Medicare for all, free higher education for those who want it, universal basic income regardless of race? Why not, in the “richest country on earth”?

Insisting on race and gender based “solutions,” without challenging fundamental economic disparities, in a manner that will benefit all, guarantees that the 1%’s divide-and-conquer tactics will continue to block real change and will continue to screw us — all of us.

Please don’t play into their hands.

A musical/psychological distraction from the ongoing horror

I fixed dinner tonight and had the GF over (a joy to be around, nicest woman in the world), with several blues CDs in the background (Robert Cray, Willie Edwards, Junior Parker, et al.) as we ate and drank.

Eventually, the talk turned to singing. After decades playing in bar bands, where I let my “fingers do the walking,” (and if you recognize that reference, you’re dating yourself), last winter I decided to try my hand at vocals after our new band’s vocalist ghosted when we had three-and-a-half sets of material down and I was ready to start booking us. (No obvious problems musically or with anybody in the band, no warning — he just disappeared. I’m still slightly pissed at the lack of courtesy, but mostly disappointed and mystified, as we sounded good and were almost ready to go.)

So, we were high and dry. To keep things from crashing, I decided to try my hand at singing, and I sucked. Bad. I’m not quite as bad now, but still not good. I do a decent job on about 10 songs (embarrassingly badly on maybe another 20), but am obviously in the “Our guitar player will sing one for you now” category when we have a better vocalist. (Any good, local (Tucson), left-of-center vocalists reading this, please leave a comment.)

Anyway, the GF has a great sense of rhythm (good dancer) and seems to have an instinctive understanding of the blues (she’s lived a hard enough life for it–which, frankly, is important if you’re gonna get it right), but when I suggested that I haul out the acoustic in a “judgment-free zone” and play a few tunes with her doing vocals, she recoiled in horror, and said she “can’t” even try it — which meant “won’t.”

I’ve run into this over and over, including with myself. I’ve been playing in bands for decades, but it’s only over the last half-year or so that I’ve even tried singing. With the blues band (great players one and all), none of them would even do shouting (no singing, no being on pitch necessary) in call-and-response tunes. I’d go, “C’mon! you don’t even need to sing! Just bounce off me!” And they wouldn’t do it. No way, no how. They were petrified. They’ve all spent thousands of hours playing their instruments, and are all great players, but vocals? No way, no how. The horror! The horror!

This caused me to look at my own previous reluctance to even try singing, and to remember what I was telling my self-sabotaging self when I chickened out:

• “I sound like shit! I’ll be humiliated!”
• “I can’t stand it if that’d happen!”
• “It’d be awful! Absolutely awful!”
• “I’m such a good player, I shouldn’t need to sing!”

I still sound like shit (mostly–pretty decent on a few tunes), and am still embarrassed by my vocals, but here’s what I tell myself to keep the anxiety under control:

• If I sound like shit, it ain’t the end of the world;
• What’s the worst thing that could happen?
• Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan both thought they sounded awful–were they? (In other words my self-criticality isn’t necessarily accurate.)
• Again, if I make a fool of yourself vocally, what’s the worst that can happen? Will I die? Go bankrupt? Will my honey walk away from me in disgust because of bad vocals? (No)
• Would I be better off if I sing, even badly? (Yes)
• Most people are so self-absorbed they’ll barely register whether I’m good, bad, or indifferent. So, why not?
• The critical jerks are mostly a bunch of insecure, incompetent assholes, too — so why not?
• What real harm can nasty comments do to me?

And that’s the key: what you tell yourself.

With singing, get over the initial embarrassment and you might have a hell of a lot of fun. Maybe not, but why not try? You have nothing to lose except your embarrassment.

 

Reparations don’t go nearly far enough

We’re about to elect Joe Biden, objectively a horrible choice (Jeffrey Dahmer, if we could resurrect him. would be better — “Dahmer: Waste Not Want Not”). Biden will undoubtedly do whatever he can to forestall major change — change that would benefit the vast majority of people.

But he might get pressured into it. It’d be in line with his entire career-trajectory, where he bends with the wind; but he’s not an idiot.

That said, I fear that the corporate Democrats will make the same horrible (perhaps deliberate) mistake they did back in the ’70s, with busing: How the hell did they think people wouldn’t be pissed about that? Their kids going over an hour on a bus one way to go to a shitty school, where they’d likely be bullied? (Of course this happened with black kids the other way round, but to a better school.) Rather than demand what was obviously needed — equal funding per student regardless of district or school — they tried to put it all in terms of race, to take everything out of the hide of the white working class, rather than out of the hide of the rich, and portray the busing atrocity as racists.

If you want to set racially diverse people against each other, this is it: divide and conquer, set it up as as an artificial-scarcity economy, and set it up in racial rather than economic terms.

The “take it out of the hide of the white working class” mindset stems directly from the father of neo-liberalism, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who came up with it: as regards schooling, portray those who didn’t want their kids busing an hour to shitty schools as “racists.” In no way push for equal funding for schools: just posit it in terms of artificial scarcity, where “privileged” whites are fucking over black kids.

Never mind that all kids are being fucked over under the present economic arrangement.

It worked. A lot of white working class people hate black folks as a result (don’t deny it), and consider them a threat. A lot of them voted for Trump.

Now, I hear a jargon term, lot of crap that doesn’t inform and will alienate white working class folks: “white privilege” — as if being a month from losing your home, losing your job, not having health insurance, and not even having $500 to pay for an emergency is “privilege.”

This is simply grotesque. White upper-middle-class guilt. (And, hey, fuck y’all, you PC assholes!)

What’s coming up next, on the part of the economic elite, is an attempt to install “reparations” — god knows how they’d be calculated or how they’d be taken out of us (guaranteed — Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, white working class, out of our hides).

If you really want to look at “reparations,” paying back for people who’ve been fucked over, the inexorable conclusion is that we all deserve “reparations.” We all created the wealth monopolized by the top 1%. (Tell me that my illiterate granddad, who died from silicosis after working in a foundry for 40 years, was “white privileged,” and I’ll tell you how far up your ass to stick it.)

“Reparations” don’t go nearly far enough. Hundreds of generations created our collective wealth.

We deserve to share it equally.

 

 

 

 

Trump’s 4th of July Vision

Definition of the Day 7-3-20 — Mt. Rushmore

MOUNT RUSHMORE, n. An aesthetic disaster in South Dakota. A desecrated mountain bearing the likenesses of four dead politicians chiseled into its flanks–in other words, graffiti tagging taken to its logical extreme. Every year, this unnatural wonder is reverently viewed by hundreds of thousands of camera-toting, polyester-clad Americans, a people who cherish kitsch ugliness as they do the infliction of pain.

(As regards Mr. Tangerine Man’s personality cult, the mass of plague enthusiasts who’ll shortly befoul that formerly beautiful mountain with an orgy of chest-beating and butt-kissing, H.L. Mencken had their number a century ago: “The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.”)

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–from the revised and expanded edition of The American Heretic’s Dictionary, the 21st-century successor to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

Star Party Image of the Day (south of Tucson)

An awe-struck professor at ASU looking up at the Sagittarius star cloud rising above the Santa Ritas in June 2020. (Check out “The Teapot” asterism  in the exact center of this image, with Scorpius a middle-right.) This is only 45 miles south of my house in central Tucson, and less than an hour away. We took our eyes, binocs, and an 8″ and a 10″ telescope, and were blown away for several hours. For those who the following has meaning, we looked at double stars (Nu Scorpii, Albireo), open clusters (M6, M7, M11, M 25, Coma Berenices), Galaxies (M51, M65, M66, M95, M96, M101, the Sombrero), globular clusters (M4, M10, M13, M22, Omega Centauri), nebulae (the Lagoon, the Triffid, the Eagle), and planets (Jupiter, Saturn). The Milky Way was so bright when it rose that several people thought it was a cloud. The high point was that at high magnification using averted vision we could see the spiral arms in M51, the nearest spiral galaxy where that’s (barely) possible with a 10″ scope.

There’s still a lot of beauty out there, folks. Enjoy! (Photo by Elaine Jones of elainjonespr.com)

And as the song says, “What’s so funny about peace love and understanding?” And appreciation of the beautiful universe we all share?

Final Day E-book Sale

Since June 1, over half of our e-books have been on sale at all of the usual e-book vendors (Kobo, Apple, Amazon, etc.). Most are priced at $.99, and none of the sale titles are above $2.99. The sale ends on Tuesday, June 30. So, if you want to get some cheap, worthwhile e-books, now’s the time. The sale titles are as follows. The sale ends at midnight.

Science Fiction

• Sleep State Interrupt, by T.C. Weber
• The Wrath of Leviathan, by T.C. Weber
• Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia, by Zeke Teflon
• The Watcher, by Nicholas T. Oakley

Classic Fiction

• The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, by Upton Sinclair

Anarchism/Politics

• Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, by Rafael Uzcátegui
• Venezuelan Anarchism: The History of a Movement, by Rodolfo Montes de Oca
• The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations, Chaz Bufe, ed.
• The Best of Social Anarchism, Howard Ehrlich and a.h.s. boy, eds.

Science

• Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science, by John Grant

Humor

• The American Heretic’s Dictionary, by Chaz Bufe
• Bible Tales for Ages 18 and Up, by G. Richard Bozarth

Atheism

• Disbelief 101: A Young Person’s Guide to Atheism, by S.C. Hitchcock
• Spiritual Snake Oil: Fads & Fallacies in Pop Culture, by Chris Edwards

Performing Arts

• Stage Fright: 40 Stars Tell You How They Beat America’s #1 Fear, by Mick Berry and Michael Edelstein
• An Understandable Guide to Music Theory: The Most Useful Aspects of Theory for Rock, Jazz, and Blues Musicians

Silver Linings to the Ongoing Crises (yes, there are a few) — first up, Donald Trump

It’s hard to believe, but there are a few good things coming out of the Coronavirus, economic, and systemic racism crises. The personal and societal tragedies far outweigh these bright spots, but they’re worth mentioning nonetheless. It’s always good to remind oneself that things aren’t quite as bad as they seem.

Here are some of the silver linings. Let’s take the darkest, foulest of “silver linings” — a “silver lining” akin to that you’d get by dropping a scratched-up, stamped-metal spoon into a septic tank, hauling it out two years later, holding it up to the sun, and regarding its glowing, rusty edge alight with filigreed fecal matter: that glowing, tangerine-colored fecal matter being Donald Trump. Here are the relatively good things about him:

• Donald Trump is a moron, too stupid to understand his own best interests. Yes, Trump’s incompetence, his complete failure to lead during a deadly pandemic, has already cost well over 100,000 lives, and will likely lead to at least twice that. But when he came into office, Trump had a chance to completely destroy what passes for American democracy — that chance supplied by both the outright racist, authoritarian Republican Party and the screw-the-poor, authoritarian, corporate-servant Democrats, such as the Clintons, Obama, Holder, Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi, who all pursued Republican economic and social policies that resulted in an ever-expanding wealth gap, grossly inadequate and unequal healthcare and education, mass incarceration, and the police as uniformed, above-the-law terrorists.

If the Republicans had placed in power a capable fascist, who handled the Coronavirus pandemic competently, it’d likely be game over: he’d be immensely popular — and he’d have ushered in outright totalitarianism, which Trump obviously yearns for. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Republicans installed Donald Trump, an outright idiot, too stupid to understand even the most basic of his own best interests. (We’re talking about a man so stupid he managed to bankrupt several casinos — otherwise known as licenses to print money — who began receiving a $200,000-a-year allowance at age three, who received over $400 million from his dad, and who was so incompetent he’d be much better off today if he’d just put his money into an index fund.) Trump’s self-sabotaging stupidity has given us vitally necessary breathing room.

• Trump is a bullying sadist who brags about sexually assaulting women and his anti-LGBT Bigotry. Trump’s boasting about his sexual assaults, with over 20 credible accusers, including three who’ve accused him of rape; his utterly creepy comments about how “hot” his daughter is and how he’d like to date her; his condescending and dismissive attitude toward women; and his assaults on women’s reproductive rights have left him massively unpopular with women, and hence headed for defeat. (I’m a guy, and reading about Trump’s assaults on women leaves me wanting to take a shower; I’m sure the reaction is even more visceral for most women.)

Trump has also been pandering to his theo-fascist evangelical base by attacking gay human rights. This is already backfiring, furthering isolating the Republicans from the American mainstream.

• Trump is an outright racist. Race-baiting has always been Trump’s stock in trade. Starting with the Obama birth certificate bullshit, and followed up by separating families seeking asylum (literally tearing babies out of their mothers’ arms), locking immigrant kids up in cages, and attempting to deport kids who were brought here without documentation and have spent their entire lives here, Trump has made it very plain that one of the most important Republican playing cards, perhaps the most important, is outright racism. Since the supposedly decent Republicans have seen fit to in no wise oppose Trump’s vicious actions, they’ve made it plain that racism is the Republican calling card — as it’s been since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the consequent Republican Southern Strategy, replete with race baiting and voter suppression. Now, that Republican racism is out in the open (no more need for dog whistles), the Republicans have to own it, and they’re on a demographic suicide course. Trump has accelerated this day of reckoning.
• Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. For this, we should thank Trump. Clinton was the ultimate, entitled, neo-liberal Washington insider. During the 2016 primary campaign, she rained down fire on Bernie Sanders’ mild, common-sense reforms within capitalism (reforms which he inexplicably labeled a “revolution” — bad branding if there ever was bad branding). Clinton was the ultimate status quo candidate. Had she won, the underlying, festering problems — a grossly unequal distribution of wealth and income, an ever-expanding surveillance state, grossly inadequate healthcare, stagnating wages, staggering student debt, an accelerating climate-change crisis — would have gone unaddressed (especially wealth and income distribution), or barely addressed, the Republicans could have run against her without having any real solutions to anything (as has become obvious), they could well have kept control of both the Senate and the House, and in 2020 they could have run an intelligent fascist who could have completely destroyed our sad farce of a democracy en route to an environmental apocalypse. Clinton, her husband, Biden, Obama, et al., paved the way for a Republican fascist. Thank god the Republicans chose one who’s uniquely loathsome and utterly incompetent.

Trump, with his bargain-basement Mussolini act, has alerted a great many people to the looming threat of fascism, and has provoked a huge progressive backlash. Where it will lead, no one knows, but the backlash against Trump, racism, economic disparity, and Trump’s callous, deliberately cruel policies provides at least some hope. One of those hopes is that the Republican Party will become a rump party influential in only the most religiously, socially, and culturally vicious and benighted parts of the country.

There’s one more related, relatively bright spot:

• Joe Biden is an unprincipled opportunist who’s been in thrall to corporate interests his entire career. He’s made a career of catering to corporate interests (e.g., the bankruptcy bill that made it almost impossible to discharge student debt), advocating mass incarceration (his 1994 crime bill), and supporting Obama’s persecution of patriotic whistle blowers such as Ed Snowden. The good news here is that Biden is an unprincipled opportunist — but a smart one, at least smarter than Trump. He knows which way the wind is blowing, and he’ll probably bend accordingly. He might try to institute at least a few of the desperately needed reforms because he’ll think it’s to his political advantage to do so. I certainly hope so.

We’ll shortly deal with the silver linings of the Coronavirus pandemic and the economic collapse. (And, yes, there are some silver linings there, too.)

 

 

Definitions of the Day: Assaulting an Officer, Perjury

ASSAULTING AN OFFICER, phr. The usual legal charge after your face assaults a nightstick.

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also

PERJURY, n. A common leisure-time activity of policemen.

(from The American Heretic’s Dictionary — I wrote these definitions, and my pal J.R. did the illustration, in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, in which I participated. More on this later today or Thursday.)

Huge E-book Sale

Over half of our e-books will be on sale starting today, and will be available at all of the usual e-book vendors (Kobo, Apple, Amazon, etc.). Most are priced at $.99, and none of the sale titles are above $2.99. Here are the temporarily reduced e-books:

Science Fiction

• Sleep State Interrupt, by T.C. Weber
• The Wrath of Leviathan, by T.C. Weber
• Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia, by Zeke Teflon
• The Watcher, by Nicholas T. Oakley

Classic Fiction

• The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, by Upton Sinclair

Anarchism/Politics

• Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, by Rafael Uzcátegui
• Venezuelan Anarchism: The History of a Movement, by Rodolfo Montes de Oca
• The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations, Chaz Bufe, ed.
• The Best of Social Anarchism, Howard Ehrlich and a.h.s. boy, eds.

Science

• Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science, by John Grant

Humor

• The American Heretic’s Dictionary, by Chaz Bufe
• Bible Tales for Ages 18 and Up, by G. Richard Bozarth

Atheism

• Disbelief 101: A Young Person’s Guide to Atheism, by S.C. Hitchcock
• Spiritual Snake Oil: Fads & Fallacies in Pop Culture, by Chris Edwards

Performing Arts

• Stage Fright: 40 Stars Tell You How They Beat America’s #1 Fear, by Mick Berry and Michael Edelstein
• An Understandable Guide to Music Theory: The Most Useful Aspects of Theory for Rock, Jazz, and Blues Musicians

Review: Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature (Pamela Bedore)

Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature, Pamela Bedore, PhD, presenter, Great Courses, 2019.

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

This is a mixed bag. There are 24 half-hour episodes covering many of the major utopian and dystopian works of the last half millennium, and Bedore does a good job of analyzing those running through the 1970s, at which point things go off the rails.

Just before that point, she rightly and insightfully devotes an episode to Ursula LeGuin (“The Dispossessed” and “The Left Hand of Darkness”), but then heads into the thicket of postmodernism and feminist/LGBTQ fiction to the exclusion of almost everything else except YA books (“Great Works of Literature”?) over the last 40 years. (Ironically, in an earlier episode dealing with Orwell, she approvingly quotes his famous essay, “Politics and English Language,” which posits that political writing should be as clear as “a pane of glass” — and then approvingly quotes postmodernist obscurantists such as Lyotard and Foucault in later episodes.)

In the latter episodes, Bedore skews things so badly that she devotes three full episodes to Octavia Butler — a quite good writer, but hardly deserving of a plurality of the post-1970s episodes — and completely ignores the deeply reactionary and thoroughly debunked assumption underlying what’s probably Butler’s most famous work, the Xenogenesis trilogy, treating those books as a flawed utopia. In fact, Bedore seems entirely oblivious to the entirely dystopic political and social associations and implications of Butler’s underlying assumption.

That assumption is that humans are basically competitive rather than cooperative, and hence are doomed to destroy themselves and the earth. This is merely the flip side of the Social Darwinist coin, and it’s no more progressive than that rationale for sociopathic behavior. (Butler doesn’t even provide a plausible way out of this artificial problem, leaving it up to more enlightened aliens to genetically alter humans to make them cooperative. To treat the Xenogenesis trilogy as a utopia is grotesque; it’s more akin to the disgusting, discredited “Lord of the Flies.”)

At any rate, Bedore wastes a lot of time on Butler, while ignoring or giving short shrift to more important writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Iain M. Banks, and (arguably) Ken Macleod, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Charles Stross, Rudy Rucker, and Kim Stanley Robinson. She devotes only a woefully superficial half-episode to Atwood’s masterful, extremely complex Maddaddam trilogy. And she totally ignores the premier utopian novels of the last four decades, Banks’ “Culture” novels.

As well, Bedore gives very short shrift to the important eco-catastrophe works of the last several decades. She doesn’t even mention the first, and probably best, climate-change-disaster novel, George Turner’s “Drowning Towers” (1987), which is a literary masterpiece, nor Norman Spinrad’s underrated, nearly ignored master work, “He Walked Among Us” (likely his best book but for, perhaps, “The Iron Dream”) and the only such novel she deals with at any length is Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” whose premise is so absurd (all life on earth extinguished except for humans) that the book should be dismissed out of hand. (Of course, McCarthy is an acclaimed “literary” author, so, at least in academic eyes, he deserves to be taken seriously — as should the postmodernist b.s. artists.)

All in all, Bedore does a good job with the pre-1980 period, but after that, not so much. Of course, the farther back you go the easier it is to make accurate critical judgments, but even so she did a poor job with the post-1970s material.

Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature isn’t terrible. But it could have been so much better.

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Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia (large pdf sample here). His latest book is the compilation Godless: 150 Years of Disbelief, published by PM Press, and when the insomnia let’s up and he’s relatively coherent, Zeke is working on the sequel to Free Radicals, an unrelated sci-fi novel, a nonfiction book on the seamier sides of Christianity, and an anarchist compilation for PM.