fear & loathing at the end of an age in life stuff and misc.

The immediate logical aftermath of the 2000 American presidential election, the most reasonable outcome as we all woke up to the hideous realization that a born-again cokehead man-child was being handed the reigns to The Republic would’ve been that all sane women and men would’ve gotten together at dawn the next morning and had Ralph Nader shot.

No, not shot with a gun as an execution, of course not.

A firing squad would have both been too cruel a punishment and too lenient a punishment at once for the sins of ego and naivety the bastard had committed. Both too cruel and too lenient at once for the trajectory his slim loud and ugly vanity campaign was setting the entire world into. No, Ralph Nader should not have been shot by a firing squad or psychotic assassin that grim morning.

Ralph Nader should’ve been shot out of a cannon into the heart of the goddamned sun.

To suffocate and burn alive for the hell his arrogant false-shining-knightery was about to send us all into, a place even hotter and more damning than the belching plasma light-bulb in the sky itself. Back then, of course, merely for putting the nation in the hands of a man who couldn’t make money off a sport franchise that’s part of a legal monopoly or even off of fucking Texas oil, for Christ’s sake. A parrot trained for the words “buy” and “sell” could make money off fucking Texas oil with enough of someone else’s capital behind it.

But no.

And no, not even punishment for the future horrors inflicted on America, on Iraq, on Afghanistan, Pakistan, not even the destabilization of the entire Middle East of the world at the hands of that Jesus-freak Alfred E Neuman homunculus.

No, not even for that.

The worst sin of Ralph Nader’s grand empty gesture of patting himself on the back was setting into motion the cycle of Permanent Grievance, of Infinite Political Dead-Ending, of endless exploitation of anything electoral as long as the outcome was even somewhat close.

This is the legacy that brought forth a world where “close enough” could be exploited to the extent that a failed real estate shyster with a game show and distinct Nazi sympathies could be hoisted like a New Year’s Babe that just shit its diaper with a grin to match into the White House by Vlad Putin’s assassin-spies to declare pogroms of Hispanics and Muslims, rip up tens of millions of people’s health care with a pen stroke and play golf on the tax payers’ dime.

Ralph Nader’s sins are two fold and for the Christ of me, I don’t know which is worse, which one fucked us over more, only to say that they were both vast and savage, only to say that without both, either one would not have been able to do so much damage. But the first is simpler to put so we’ll start with that. Or maybe the two points will blend together, because they have to, conjoined twins of sick bastardty as they are.

He founded this bullshit ideal on the fringes of the left that “not picking the lesser of two evils” was this glorious badge to wear over your heart as a person, no matter how much you fucked up by doing it, no matter how many people with less privilege than your preening abstention from choice are ruined or oppressed by your inaction.

You get to be smug every single election, pulling the lever for Jill Stein or Mickey Mouse or some other confection of fictive ramblings and you get to believe yourself “honourable” no matter what horse shit falls out after you scribble in Max Headroom, sealing the deal for a Real Bastard to get in within enough of a margin of doubt for them to exploit.

You get to say “I didn’t vote for the lesser of the two evils” and feel all golly-gosh pure and fucking hip and smart, even as the world burns down around you because you didn’t want to sully yourself with performing your civic duty and making a choice between Imperfect-But-Livable and Goddamned Monstrous to some degree.

Because that’s what Gore vs Bush was, sane people who haven’t broken their arms patting themselves on the back knew it then as well as they knew it now. That’s what Secretary Clinton vs that fucking rotten pumpkin you leave out on the backporch in the middle of November was as well. Anyone not utterly lost in self-obsession knew that score and they damned well better know it now.

Gore, Clinton, Obama himself as well, these people as presidential candidates, these presidential candidates as people, they weren’t “evils” and they weren’t “lesser evils” either. Not in the mind of anyone who doesn’t feel the need to use their president vote as a performative act of thinking they’re smarter than everyone else, goddamn the consequences to the huddled masses yearning to be free. None of these candidates were evil at all.

What they were was Imperfect-But-Livable. What they promised were sane approaches to governance with slow, admitted frustratingly slow at times, paths to real progress that would work. Yes, they had their toes dipped in the moral grays that anyone must to rise to the prominence to get to the stage where you can actually run for president. Some smoky-room horse-trading, a few pictures with faked grins to get the donations, calculated centrist votes in the past because they saw how that particular change was not possible yet.

None of that is evil, nor is it even lesser evil.

All of those things that made them Imperfect-But-Livable were the things that also made them effective at governance. The ability to build coalitions, the ability to strike hard compromise, the ability to go out there and schmooze to get their hands on the levers of power to do good things.

I’ll readily admit, I would never have the stomach to walk into a room and pretend that the head of an Exxon isn’t a particular kind of bastard swine deserving of the most hideous hell but that’s why we elect people. Because sadly sometimes that must be done.

We elect representatives to do the things we don’t have the pull or the stomach to do, you know. That’s what the actual deal of a republic or a democracy or a two-headed mutant hellbeast fusion of democracy and republic must do.

The fact they got a little dirty in the machinery of power does not make them an evil necessarily. It means they got inside that grimy golem of organizing the public goods for the public good and they found the fucking levers. They know what to pull and for how long.

That moral gray on them, Gore, Clinton, Obama, any of them, was proof they could do the things we could never do so as to get the needed things done.

When such a thing is in opposition to some born-rich draft-dodging wackjob with aspirations of being either Christ’s messenger on Earth or Hitler’s cabana boy, that’s not the lesser of two evils. That is Imperfect Versus Monster and to abstain in all of your smugness is to take the side of the monsters. And I mean, here we are, March 2017, myself typing in my brother’s house in-between fits of explosive diarrhea and this nation illegitimately led by Little Lord Fauntleroy surrounded by fringe AM radio conspiracy fascists.

And here we are now but that’s only half the story because…

The other half of the 2000 election’s blow-back is that you have to do is find some hanging chads, suppress the black vote in enough Southern states, have Russia spies pepper the internet with stolen documents spun wildly out of context and that’s all that matters. Everyone has to accept that as just how elections go nowadays.

If you lose but you don’t lose by whatever is decided to be “enough” there is always either a crooked Supreme Court or a Russia Today funded Wikileaks file-dump to step in for you and, if not, a cult of dead-enders who will take pretending you didn’t actually lose and think they can overturn it somehow still.

This is also the horror that Ralph Nader helped to create.

This Permanent Grievance, this cult of unending doubt, this Schrodinger’s Box of politics leaving everything even a little close hazy so that you can hold onto your sense of righteousness forever if you lost on real terms, your sense of righteousness forever if you won by cheating in plain sight but no one was ballsy enough to concretely call the Emperor’s Nudity fast enough.

When Nader left the Grand Bastards just enough room to cheat their way in then, they knew forever, as long as they kept it even kind of close, they could win forever. As it is now.

Because of the hanging chads, because of Ralph Nader’s self-righteous torpedoing of the democratic process, there is always Huge Doubt in anything even a little bit close. Now the press is gun-shy to cry foul because everyone can point back to that 2000 haziness of meaning.

Now everyone has a narrative they can hide within, a conspiracy theory to hang onto like an ideological life raft, a petard of doubt and fringe thinking they can hang themselves and their nation upon. Everyone has their Grievance that they never have to let go of, that they can pretend was a wrong so heinous that the principle of that wrong is more important than any of the prevention of madness and horror that would come out of compromising, of not being a dead-ender, of coming together against a greater evil.

Senator Sanders, a mostly good man without any of the experience or connections to actually gain a major party’s nomination, of course The Bastards watched us collapse into dead-ending doubt over the fact that Secretary Clinton just knew how to run for the Democratic nomination better than him. The Bastards licked their chops over our internal schisms and the smug fucks who’d sacrifice further generations of America just to feel like they made a stand with Sanders, long after he’d lost.

Long after of course Sanders lost because despite the best of intentions, he’d never gotten his hand even a little bit dirty in the gears of wielding power. He’d spent his whole career out at the edges yelling nice ideas but never getting into the back-rooms and the wheel-deals that actually making any of them happen. He stayed “pure” as The Children of Nader loved, so that they could pretend they were that kind of pure too, and because of it of course he stayed unelectable.

But in the times of post-Nader doubt, The Bastards knew exactly how to pick that scab, how to get the “never the lesser of two evils” ideologues riled up and voting for joke candidates like Jill Stein, just enough to create a cloud of dust at the finish and claim victory while a gun-shy press hemmed and hawed and shrugged and accepted the proclamation.

The Bastards knew this was the time of Permanent Doubt and Endless Grievance so Putin’s spies stole a bunch of documents, twisting them wildly out of context to make Usual Back-Room Politics look like Satanic Evil then fed them to Wikileaks. Their head Julie Assange was hiding from the ramifications of sexual assault in an embassy closet and had picked up some money in the past on Putin’s propaganda channel Russia Today so he knew what to do, how to rile up the dead-enders in the day of grievance and doubt.

Julie knew how to peel off just enough ideologues and egotists to vote for Jill Stein who, coincidentally, had been feted in Moscow by Russia Today in the recent past. Coincidentally, as well, I own this wonderful bridge that goes from Vinegar Hill in Kings County to the lower east side of Manhattan and baby it is priced to sell. “Coincidentally.” Just the kind of word to carve into our collective tombstone. Anyway.

So in this time of Endless Dead-ender Grievance and Unreasonable Reasonable Doubt for anything even close, these legacies Ralph Nader left us nearly twenty years ago, The Bastards knew that they could get the fix in. And they did. All the ego-cases and suck-weasels and sex offenders on the run from their crimes and failed real-estate moguls running from their Russian debts, they all played their parts and now here we are.

The Fog of Election doubts so engrained into us now that even as the Russian ties are clear and even though Secretary Clinton won by two percent of the vote even with that, despite what Bernie’s Endless Dead-enders say about her non-electability, The Bastard still had their hanging chad and The King of False Grief was illegitimately carried into D.C. in a litter by a passel of oil-enriched Cossacks. The irony isn’t lost, of course, a man who could be born into insane wealth and who stole from the poor anything he couldn’t get from Daddy while all the while complaining that everything is against him, of course that kind of shit-bird inherits the throne abdicated by the Children of Nader.

Using that Doubt on us twice, once to split off the fringe-left dead-enders to vanity candidates and then again afterwards, to say that anyone who sees that Empirical Nudity is just a conspiracy theorist wrapped up in that Doubt again. While the press hems and haws and worries about coming off too strong after getting the whole 2000 election belatedly “wrong”.

The fascists are marching now, in the streets everywhere. Burning down Jewish temples. Turning away Muslims at airports. Killing and/or bankrupting millions by stealing their health care. Rescinding the naturally-born rights of the trans and the gay once again. Forbidding women the control of their own bodies. All of it. All of it just to start.

This isn’t to say, of course, that up until Vlad Putin the murderer of journalists, Vlad Putin who could stop the siege of Aleppo with a cough but does nothing, Vlad Putin annexor of Crimea and so much more in the future… look, until that bastard stepped in, it wasn’t even a conspiracy. All these pieces of doubt and grievance, of fear and loathing, were all falling into place after the domino of Ralph Nader’s ego and arrogance fell back in 2000.

Fell damning us to a domino rally that would move toward the de-legitimized but somehow still enforced 2016 election at a breakneck pace that could only be called, well of course, unsafe at any speed.

Here we are now. Wishing we’d shoved him in a Pinto inside a cannon and set the controls for the heart of the sun. But we didn’t.

Christ, I don’t know what writing this down changes. The fascists march in the streets wearing crosses or ICE jackets and laying out this truth now won’t change that. Hell, it probably won’t even wake up any of those fringe-left dead-enders who still think they were right to be Bernie-Or-Bust even now, even as Nero sits in the Mar-A-Lago Beach Club, paying some migrant worker to play fiddle for him while he drowns his steak in blood-red ketchup.

But even this land, maybe this maybe forever now land of fear of loathing, deserves the story to be told and correctly, saved somewhere to be extant but ignored as it all burns down. And hell, I’m up all night with the squirts anyway. Might as well do it myself.

Last updated March 13, 2017