Fail

I find the current political mood to be highly amusing. We want the smell of change but actual change? Not so much. We loved Obama because he whispered sweet nothings while beating us back into the hospital. When we really got mad he gave us his card so we could shop at Nordstroms. Jimmy Choo’s on overweight drag queens. You are welcome.

It is a national obsession we indulge in every election. We want hope and change but we don’t want hope and change that would constrain our behavior. We want freedom but we don’t want freedom at the price of safety. We want to end poverty, end hunger, end war, end racism, end haters, and do it in a way that doesn’t interfere with our ability to follow our bliss. We want a spiritual life but we are deeply suspicious of the Christians. We want cardinals and popes that won’t be too difficult. Islam seems to be copacetic with our gut feeling that legalism is probably a good thing. How very boomer of us. Then there is them snowflakes. The ones who filled the streets after the inauguration and did some rioting because they were afraid that Dumpf would take away all their rights. The ones that rioted in Berkeley, CA because Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to appear at the University.

So, this has become the narrative regarding Cheeto Satan: he is an evil fascist sado-masochist, male chauvinist pig who is going to create an authoritarian state worse than the worst evil genocidal dictator ever. We are so screwed. The answer is to fight him with everything we have. Lies, damned lies and the weapon of socialism: the bureaucracy. It’s going to be a tough 4 years.

A century of socialist democracy, more debt in 8 years than the combined spending of every presidency, the largest, wealthiest empire in history, one of the most massive governments in history and we want hope and change without doing anything that would seriously change anything.

Every election we hear some flavor of—the new pimp daddy is going to give us more money than the last pimp daddy and beat us less. On the other side we hear what sounds like our nightmare stentorian father who is going to make us do rehab again.

The litany repeats, that there is too much waste, fraud and abuse in the government and if we elect the re-pub-lick-cans they’ll fix it. We keep electing the demo-krats because we don’t want to give up our check. Yeah, they are crooked but here in the ghetto everybody is a crook so that’s not a thing.

I never did rehab. My particular hurts, habits and hangups are not so severe as to require checking myself in. Plus, as a confirmed member of the party my privilege lets me hide my unique kink fairly well. I have first-world, white people privilege and problems. There was therapy for a while. Yeah, wife beater, sure. That was years ago so it’s resonance in my life has faded to dusty and sentimental reasons why I’m not just another ugly WASP.

I did jail, a half-way house, homeless shelters, and such. I came away with a bitter taste in my mouth for the help we offer those who fucked up or are fucked up. Don’t be crazy in America, please. Don’t be crazy and reach out for help. Worse, be a criminal and crazy and need help. What is the secret of most of these social justice programs? They don’t work. Getting better means you have to pull yourself together and bootstrap the endeavor to get healthy.

So . . . I don’t worry about what Dumpf will do. I see that it is destructive to the establishment as we have known it. Being 57 and living 38 years beyond my walk on to a bus and into self-reliance and looking back at those who did help me get here I am not afraid of Cheeto Satan. I am happy he is my president.

You probably know this one, that we are not likely to change until the pain of changing is less than the pain of staying the same. We have been seduced into believing that re-electing another Pimp Daddy will give us the signaled change without actually changing anything for over a century. Now that a voting majority has decided that staying the same will hurt more than changing we are in for a rough ride.

This is going to hurt bad America. This is going to hurt opiate cold turkey bad. I never did rehab but I did wake up in a shelter every morning for six months with a sequence of cubicle mates who snored, farted, and beat off within arms reach of me. It sucked.

I am the failure my family feared. I know I am repeating but my Dad expected me to level up from his white-collar union job with RCA. He was middle class and I, after college, was supposed to graduate with a degree into an upper-middle-class life. I became a cab driver. I got married and became a wife beater. I graduated from college with a degree that assured I’d never have that upper-middle-class life he hoped I’d have. I failed. I failed a lot.

It is because of so many failures that I have the success that I have. It is because of thousands of cab customers that I have an instinct about people that is hard to replicate another way. Failure drove me to sign up for Aiki-Jujitsu and have that battle with my shit that I needed to have. Failure is how I ended up succeeding.

This socialist experiment we started a century ago was headed for collapse. This is what has happened to every other attempt at using the ugly hand of government to enforce a vision of a perfect, secular society with all the believed benefits of Christian doctrine and none of the difficulties given to us by Jesus of Nazareth.

Caesar was an unfortunate necessity until the martyrdom of Christ. It took us over 300 years to inveigle our way into the Emperor’s spiritual life. But we were like malignant cancer on the soul of the Roman Empire. All efforts to suppress us just caused an explosion of evangelism. Once Constantine converted the Empire could never be the same. The resurrected kingdom won not by the sword, but by beating swords into plowshares and following the way of a no-account Nazarene carpenter.

As a nation, we are a crack-head whore who just left her pimp and is in the first week of rehab. Everything hurts. We are angry. We sort of know that being in rehab is a better long term plan. But even though our head knows this our heart is still in love with our pimp and those Jimmy Choos. There is still a piece of us that wants our personal shopping appointments and, y’know, some of the Johns were kind of nice. It’s still debatable whether the pain of change is worse than the pain of staying with our pimp.

This is not a fight that will end soon. Dumpf may have been necessary to break us out of the death spiral we were in. But Dumpf still seems like a rich John who in a stoned moment was less awful than our pimp. He’s an idiot who won. It is still an open question as to whether he’ll get his shit together and be a president.

What to do? Do you. WWJD. As a Christian, my obligation is to Christ, to the resurrected kingdom and only to Caesar as is necessary to render unto Caesar that which is his. Christians won over the centuries. We became the establishment. It was not always so. The way we will win again, be great again, is by remembering and being the light and salt we were called to be.