Media Fasting

I’ve been media fasting lately, which accounts for my silence on the blogs. The weather is nice and I’ve been busy with important, real-life stuff. I can’t get worked up over the cretins in the House, immigration reform, George Zimmerman, Egyptian revolutions, climate catastrophe, or the demise of human civilization. Fuck it. I’m going to the beach.

Life is too short to obsess over what are, in the last analysis, the most unappetizing life forms on earth. No, not flesh eating bacteria or tapeworms. They serve a functional purpose in our ecosystem. I’m talking about politicians, specifically American politicians circa 2013, the beginning of what may be the last century of humanity’s existence.

If you want to understand what is wrong with us, you don’t need to read history, sociology, political science, economics, psychology, literature, the New York Times, David Brooks, or any of the other flash in the pan “intellectuals” who pose as Serious Thinkers in our debased and provincial discourse. No, all you need to do is watch C-Span for a day. I was laid up with brown bottle flu a couple of weeks back and I did precisely that. Oy vey! There, all of your questions will be answered. All of your worst fears will be confirmed, all cynicism justified, all hope destroyed. There, you will see all of our most salient character defects on full display, naked and unashamed before a candid world.

There are exceptions, of course, but an alarming number of reps in the People’s House appear to be bumbling, ineffectual boobs, Kiwanians and soccer moms straining to do good or worse. Some are outright reptiles. Eric Cantor literally makes your skin crawl. As soon as he speaks the skies darken, as if a dragon has swallowed the sun. The animals have spontaneous abortions and swarms of insects emerge from fissures in the earth. You finally understand what the word oleaginous means. Louie Gohmert, on the other hand, is pure comedy. He would look quite at home sitting in a high chair eating paste and fondling Play-Doh.

Which brings us to Texas. You could blindfold me and lock me in a closet and I’d still be able to tell when one of the right honorable gentleman from Texas mounted the podium. The same twanging right wing dogma comes burbling out with brain smashing tedium, on and on and on in a monotonous, never-ending flow, like when you puncture a tube of Shoe Goo, glop, glop, glop. It is intensely boring. They don’t  even speak with any real verve or vigor. They just sound like a bunch of dull insurance salesmen lifelessly going through another day at the office. Any Democrat with one testicle and the gift of speech should be able to lay waste to these donkeys, but they don’t, ever (why is that?)

By all means, watch C-SPAN. Skip the middleman and go straight to the source. It will give you one of those rare, luminous moments of clarity, like the penultimate second before vomiting. You will realize that the House of Representatives is exactly what it was designed to be.  

The problem isn’t them. They were all elected by a majority of their constituents. The problem is us.  It is me. It is you. It is the guy sitting next to you. It is everyone who casts a vote and everyone who doesn’t. It is the moron with tattoos and baggy pants that sag below his ass crack. It is the sad couple who sit together in a restaurant and talk to other people on their cell phones the whole time. It’s the shallow marketing type who uses terms like “customer base” and refers to other human beings as “resources.”  It is anyone whose job title is “consultant.” It is the person who laughs at the E-Trade commercials with the talking baby. It is  his best friend who seriously uses the word “App” in a sentence and doesn’t realize that it makes him sound like a trendy adolescent asshole. Everyone, whether it is the liberal suburbanite who wears fanny packs, recycles plastic, and donates to PBS, or the sports addled Viagra muncher who waves the flag on command and devours more calories in a single day than a Guatemalan does in an entire week. In short, it is the fault of America.

So I media fast.