the defeatists!

Not so happy, maybe not so free, not so many as we used to be..

The Defeatists were Crispin Sartwell's fault. We started when a bunch of people who were reading Crispin's pieces on Creators.Com where he no longer posts them, started communicating with each other and  Crispin, renowned snake charmer and street 3 card monte dealer, at one point said we could become an important blog. He then stopped contributing. Holier than Mao wandered off to pursue some Buddhist zeitgeist lemon grass and soy alternative to antibiotics thing. Commandante, El S, Mr. Fun and I have stayed true to not being important and occasionally saying something that strikes a note, although lately we seem largely striking the attention of various robots promoting ugly sneakers and beachfront Costa Rican property. And, I'm the only one who kind of regularly posts something. My brothers do occasionally toss something up, albeit only when they're drunk and want to humor either me or the Zeitgeist. We've been doing this since 2005, and frankly, the world still sucks. They're all younger than I, and frankly, are tired of the shit and really want the pony...

An additional side venture of some of the guys and some other guys is The Guys From Area 51. This has resulted in an email kaffee klatsch that has become The Malcontents. Bunch of 20-30-40-50 somethings bitching about bosses, beer, pizza, IOZ, politics, California, tatoos and asbestos tile and loading the dropbox with music. I glanced at the todays harvest, and the material included the following...

• I need to burn down my house because some asshole covered the tile with asbestos and I always wondered if that shit burned.
• How much salt and water should I put in pizza dough? Doh? Doh?
• Why are people such dicks?
• I hate my job. I hate my co-workers. I hate my college. I hate life. Especially my sister's.
• I'm stuck in Salt Lake City with the Boulder Blues again.

Well, context is everything. Anyway, I realized as I read that we were becoming either a counterpoint to his work or in effect a Slacker-Boomer-James McMurtry Cover Band. Since his backing band is The Heartless Bastards, that seemed a fit. And, this really seemed to kind of sum it all up.

Heresy! Blasphemy! And general bullshit...Evangelicals smoke crack! Seriously...

Well, after Teddy Boy Haggard , we already knew about the crack smoking. But, Tim LeHaye of the Right, I Mean, Left Behind series is now crediting a mere human with the ability to bring on the Apocalypse. This is, of course, heresy and blasphemy. God will decide when the end times are, and if Barrack Hussein Obama is preparing for the way of the Lord, then good Evangelical Christians should be voting for him. Seriously, if you want the rapture and you think this way you should be voting Democratic while looking for your a totally pure red hefifer to send to your Ultra-Orthodox Jewish friends clustered in condos on the west bank...LaHaye went on Huckleberry's TV show to spew...

Evangelical Christian minister Tim LaHaye says that the policy initiatives put forth by the Obama administration are bringing the country "closer to the apocalypse." LaHaye issued the dire warning in an appearance this week on Mike Huckabee's talk show on Fox News."Our present president doesn't seem to get it," LaHaye explained. "He doesn't understand that some of the things he's introducing that many of us call 'raw socialism' -- it's a different name, but it's essentially government control and government domination of everything."

Well,did you know that Haggard's father was a Veterinarian and founded a charismatic movement? And now he's claiming that he was too contrite for the whole gay hooker/massage/crank thing...For people who claim to be Christian and to spout the bible and trust it verbatim, these guys really are confused.

So, since we missed the Eurovision thing, here's a bit of gratuitous Apocalyptic stuff...Happy End Times, and I hope the gal in the crab suit gets LaHaye...

Time to stop fooling ourselves...

Martin Wolf is a pillar of the conservative, economic world elite. He writes for the Financial Times, that oddball Brit document printed on pinkish sort of paper that has the intellectual clout that the Wall Street Journal pines for...he is not a firebrand pinko, nor a bullshit artist. He knows what he's talking about...and, he thinks that the situation is definitely hopeless in the world economy, because the Republicans are clueless. This is the kind of guy who cites Bruce Bartlett for a supply side conspiracy theory. That's like citing Mother Teresa for a piece about charity. Bartlett ran screaming from the Bushievick government because he couldn't take the intellectual dishonesty anymore in the middle years of the last administration.

Wolf thinks we're all doomed because the United States has lost the ability to do anything serious, due to the Reagan snake oil of supply side economics summed up best by Dick Cheney with his famous "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter..." insanity. Reagan proved that deficits do matter, just not for those of of Louis XV sensibility, Apres moi, le deluge approach. You see, from the American Right point of view, governing has nothing to do with government. Dickheads...

Wolff sums it up well in an early passage that just depresses the shit out of me. 

My reading of contemporary Republican thinking is that there is no chance of any attempt to arrest adverse long-term fiscal trends should they return to power. Moreover, since the Republicans have no interest in doing anything sensible, the Democrats will gain nothing from trying to do much either. That is the lesson Democrats have to draw from the Clinton era’s successful frugality, which merely gave George W. Bush the opportunity to make massive (irresponsible and unsustainable) tax cuts. In practice, then, nothing will be done.

Indeed, nothing may be done even if a genuine fiscal crisis were to emerge. According to my friend, Bruce Bartlett, a highly informed, if jaundiced, observer, some “conservatives” (in truth, extreme radicals) think a federal default would be an effective way to bring public spending they detest under control. It should be noted, in passing, that a federal default would surely create the biggest financial crisis in world economic history. (AXE emphasis.)

Wolf continues his explanation by pointing out supply side economics freed the Republicans from the need to be adults. They can advocate ponies and pink unicorns for all, a race to Mars and free bubbleup and rainbow stew for all, without having to say how to pay for it. The Democrats then come into office after the ball is over, the dam's burst, the woods are on fire and like the guy following the elephant in Mr. Peabody, sweep up the shit. Enough so the Republican snake oil twits can sell their crap again, and away we go.

True, the theory that cuts would pay for themselves has proved altogether wrong. That this might well be the case was evident: cutting tax rates from, say, 30 per cent to zero would unambiguously reduce revenue to zero. This is not to argue there were no incentive effects. But they were not large enough to offset the fiscal impact of the cuts (see, on this, Wikipedia and a nice chart from Paul Krugman).

Indeed, Greg Mankiw, no less, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, has responded to the view that broad-based tax cuts would pay for themselves, as follows: “I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don’t.” Indeed, he has referred to those who believe this as “charlatans and cranks”. Those are his words, not mine, though I agree. They apply, in force, to contemporary Republicans, alas.

Wolf's writing has a nice, kinda cynical understatedness to it that I really enjoy, although in this case, it's like the doctor delivering a kinda cynical, understated diagnosis of Alzheimer's early enough that you can consciously experience the death of mind and soul. However, echoing that radical Leveler-Socialist Greg "Lenin" Mankiw, appartchik to Bush 43 is a really vicious swipe. Of course the Republican ideology is total bullshit. It doesn't work. Saying it works doesn't make it work.

Wolf's prognosis -- Life is really going to suck. The idiots of the body politic will ultimately return the Republicans to power, and they will do whatever tickles their fancy while in office. The Democrats will be forced to keep bailing, until such time as the US government has to do an Argentina and default. We will no longer be the arsenal of Democracy or the sole remaining superpower. We will become the next iteration of the Ottoman Empire, and it will come through the machinations of the right. Seriously, this makes Mitch McConnel seem like Hitler, moving Armies around in his bunker even though he knows that he doesn't have a bit of truth, evidence or empirical data to back him up. Since we have dumbed down education to the point where people believe this happy horseshit, we're going to be backed up, blocked and ultimately brought down.

I have said for years that if Social Security fails, we may be screwed but we'll have bigger problems all around us long before that happens. Wolf's prognosis is on target. We're going to find ourselves run by a bunch of Nigerian swindlers as the Republicans and Democrats argue in the halls of government about which recently deceased banker's assistant we should send our bank account numbers to..."He has a nice face..." "He seems like a nice boy..." "He's a Christian, Ezra, you know we can trust him..."

Paul Krugman has an interesting piece this morning as well. He's talking about the very disappointing energy legislation that's making it's way through Congress that will probably result in us hiring Tony Hayward as goddamn Energy Czar. He's going to need a job come October. (I've been watching the convulsions of a couple of other major global corporations, and when they want to unload someone, they do so far more quickly than two months away. ) Anyway, Krugman describes the entire debacle of energy legislation, specifically carbon cap and trade in easily understood by people who don't think "refudiate" is a word, summing it all up this way...

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

Oh, and Wki has the goods on the Afghanistan kerfluffle. We're screwed. By the usual suspects.

Meanwhile, down in Boystown...

I'm soooo glad we're confronting Islamo-terrorists 12000 miles away so that we can ignore the Narco-terrorists and soon-to-be-failed state across the Rio Bravo ..."We didn't have any incidents on the American side. It's hard for people to understand who don't live here," he added. "They're not Vikings, they're not going to invade us, it doesn't work that way." Nope, just the potential for accidents. A 9mm round will probably be ineffective at a range over the border. However, since these guys are comfortable with spray and shoot weapons like AKs and M16s and the most useless weapon of all, the MAC10, it's probably a good idea to sandbag any windows facing Mexico and stay off the streets in Laredo

...I remember when the worst thing that could happen to an American in Nuevo Laredo was to get drunk, pick pocketed, get a case of the clap from a transvestite hooker named Michelina, have your car stolen and get explosive, projectile, all orifices diarrhea from some Pluma Blanca Cerveza and dogmeat Tacos. If Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers were to do this again, it would probably sound more like Combat Rock...

Why do I envision Tiffany walking through the marketplace, buying rings that they guarantee will not your fingers green, chickens and then finding Biff and riding off in his custom 57 Chevy lowrider?

Get off my lawn in whale...

Nothing to see here, move along, move along... Elect that whale Pope!

Good books, lately? Or, Elvis is not a clerk at an adult bookstore in Hattiesburg

Well, robot readers  and actual people, I've had the good fortune to read some good stuff so far this summer. There have been more, and will be more, but these are all worth the effort to toddle on over to the local book store or hit the Amazon key and order.

Let’s begin with the history. An excerpt from S.C. Gwynne Empire of the Summer Moon appeared in the June issue of Texas Monthly, chronicling the initial raid of the Fourth Cavalry under Randal MacKenzie into the Commancheria, the Illano Escondido to attempt to capture the band of Commanche lead by Quanah Paker.  After reading the chapter, I immediately ordered the book – fascinating study of the campaigns of someone we don’t hear that much about, the “Anti-Custer”, Randal Slade MacKenzie.  MacKenzie is referred to as the anti-Custer for a number of reasons – one, of course, being that he avoided last stands and vainglory, focusing with a laser like intensity on the mission. MacKenzie is a tragic figure, but he won his insurgency through a combination of annihilation and negotiation.  The book discusses the Commanche nation with a great deal of insight and sympathy.  Since most people reading this are probably John Wayne fans and have seen The Searchers several times, the story of the Commanche is largely told through the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, the most famous of the captive whites brought into the tribe and her son Quanah, who ultimately became the first and basically last Commanche chief of the entire tribe after being defeated by MacKenzie and brought to the reservation.  Quanah seems like a sort of Hamid Karzai figure at the end, while Cynthia is very much a tragic figure.  It’s worth noting that the war between Texas and the Commanche continues in some ways because of the bloody nature of that conflict. The Commanche Wars created much of the myth surrounding the Texas Rangers; in Mike Cox’s second volume of the history of the Rangers, Time of the Rangers , he describes a meeting between a Ranger and a tribal educator in the 90s, where he was introduced as a “Ranger” and the woman responded, “The Enemy.” When he said, “No, ma’am, not anymore.” She scowled and walked away. There is no peace between the Rangers and the Commanche, Walker-Texas Ranger to the contrary.

Now, Custer is a poster child for the way PR and bullshit can make a reputation. Custer was a brave man, a fantastic horseman, and a charismatic figure.  He was also a lousy officer and a not terribly effective commander. Custer made his bones at Gettysburg, taking a squadron of Michigan Volunteer Cavalry into action against Jeb Stuart’s Cavalry Division while Stuart was in column and not deployed. Why the rebel cavalry didn’t move from column to line, surround the Michiganders and save  Crazy Horse the trouble twelve years later is another of the missed opportunities during that oh so decisive battle. However, they didn’t; as more Union cavalry joined the battle, Stuart was stopped and forced to retreat, thus unable to link up with Pickett at the top of Cemetery Ridge and guaranteeing defeat for the South.  Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand details the road to Little Bighorn.  In turns philosophical, exciting, and intriguing, Philbrick puts the battle in context of the time, the leaders, the men and their histories. He says, “We interact with one another s individuals responding to a complex haze of factors:  professional responsibilities, personal likes and dislikes, ambition, jealousy, self-interest, and, in at least some instances, genuine altruism.  Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment.”

Turning now to contemporary affairs, Charles P. Pierce has an interesting cover which, in light of the Dodge Challenger commercial showing Washington charging the British line in muscle cars abreast, is kind of funny.  Idiot America features Washington riding a T-Rex, and begins with a discussion of Pierce’s visit to the Creation Museum, where visitors are greeted with a dinosaur wearing an English saddle. Hilarity should ensue, but doesn’t.  Pierce’s book is thoughtful, provocative and kind of scary for those of us with a classic liberal twist to our thinking. Pierce identifies three premises that seem to underlie Fox News, the Tea Party Movement, Sarah Palin and the National Enquirer.  They are:               

Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.              

Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.               

Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

The whole Vietnam Veteran as crazy person is a good example of this thinking. Crazy John Rambo and his bros sold a lot of books and moved a lot of units – movie tickets, posters, Rambo knives.  Everybody knows that Vietnam Vets, no, wait, all Veterans except those from WWII because they were the greatest, are PTSD-engorged psychopaths.  We all know this. The data that statistically, the average Viet Veteran is healthier, more successful , more stable and more grounded than the general population from the same era is impossible to believe, because it makes sense to blow up a Hind-D with a LAW fired from the front seat of a Huey, through the canopy, at basically point blank range. We saw it in the movie, it must be the way it is.

David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo History : The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History covers some of the same turf but focuses on the paranoid. Aaronovich draws some inspiration from the classic by Richard Hofsteader, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” but takes it deeper and makes a lot of it more relevant to today, when the John Birch Society is now seen by the Conservative Movement as kind of mainstream.  Aaronovitch points out that Hofsteader focused mainly on the right, while the conspiracy minded came from all dimensions. Back in college,  I recall listening to reasoned discussions about how the killing of buffalo – bison in North America, water buffalo in SE Asia – was a strategy to exterminate indigenous populations.  After a few seconds consideration, I figured out that these people were crazy. The author explains and documents that conspiracy theories generally fail to approach reality because they don’t apply Occam’s razor, the philosophical principle of simplicity. While stated many ways, this tool is pretty simple – given the situation and the known facts, the best explanation is the simplest in accordance to the facts. Don’t make it complicated. Unnecessary complication leads to bullshit thinking.  Dick Cheney is not an evil Cyborg from another dimension; he’s a very sick man with obvious delusions. Barak Obama was not born in Kenya but in Hawaii – why create the paper trail for a baby? Elvis is not a clerk in a 7/11 in Hattiesburg.

An oldie but goodie...from Ulster

From Howl , by Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares....

And so it goes and here it goes again...

Now personally, the wisdom of telling an IRA hardman to piss off is dubious. But that appears to have occurred, and is occurring, and I'm not sure what the end result is...

A prominent Catholic priest at the center of the main rioting area, Ardoyne in north Belfast, said he feared that the latest rioting chiefly reflects the collapse of parental responsibility in local households, not any deep-seated political agenda.

The Rev. Gary Donegan said violence that continued until 2 a.m. Wednesday in Ardoyne featured rioters aged 8 to 18 - backed by crowds of girls capturing the mayhem on their cell phones for posting on social networking Web sites.

"Recreational rioting is the term," the 46-year-old priest said. "It was like a Disney theme park for rioting. It was ludicrous."

I suspect that in a poor area in the UK, poor children see no future and have little to amuse, encourage or interest them. I threw a few rocks at cars as a pissed off teenager, and I suspect there's a lot of that in this. However, it was safer 40 years ago -- instead of fighting the police to get girls, you got a guitar...

For decades, the authority figures in the Catholic areas of Ulster were the IRA, Sein Fein and the Church. In the summer, when it gets hot, for Ulster, and boring, for 40 years the authority figures in the Catholic areas led the fight against the Protestant Marching Societies traipsing through the Catholic areas screaming racist nonsense -- which is odd, given that the Orangemen are Celts, but no odder than Bosnia or Kosovo --and playing those goddamn flutes and drums. Now, the IRA, Sein Fein and the Church are kind of down with it. Which could lead to a discussion of no peace without economic and social justice...however, I think RAM and the Stones have pretty well nailed. It's summer, and time for this...shouldn't France blow up soon? Over something...

Not boding well for the future...

I wish these two well, but between Momma Grizzly and the way of the world, I have my doubts about the whole thing. I'm amazed at the bit from the Cruella De Ville,Queen of Wasilla and her Champion, Lancelot of the Snow Machine talking about redemption. However, love is occasionally triumphant...just not normally. 

The essence of cool...bowties!

Crusader AXE's muse has been taking a vacation in Aruba lately, and writing has seemed more of a chore than not. When something seems like work, it probably is -- and when you spend leisure time working, there's something wrong with you. Still, I have things on my mind, and maybe the muse is headed back, possibly going through the duty free shop at Miami International, drinking a daiquiri and contemplating some overpriced scarves and handbags. My muse is a flighty bitch, at best.

Anyway, as I was struggling this morning to keep my eyes open while reading the news, something occurred to me. Why are world leaders just so fucked up? Why are business leaders so fucked up? Why has there been no trace of the hip, cool and smart sighted lately? It's really hard to care about things like credit default swaps, Jon Stewart keeping Nouriel Roubini locked in a closet, the Tea Party Movement and whether the proper simile with them is the No-Nothing Party or the Klan, although I'm starting to think of them as "When Boomers attack"...but, there are damn few things happening that add that touch of grace, lightness and possibility that we call "cool." There are people who try to be cool, of course -- Tucker Carlson comes to mind, as do Charles Krautheimer and Sarah Palin. On the left, they are more earnest, and generally not cool, of course. I can't think of a truly cool liberal leader since Bobby Kennedy. Certainly, Obama is not cool -- he's too controlled, too technocratic. General McChrstyal and General Petraeus could be seen as cool, I guess although fainting and whining are not cool behaviors. Steve Jobs works at being cool, and therefore is not. 

The Coolness Gap is worldwide. Putin's bizarre chopping ice with no shirt on is a fairly absurd example of how weak the whole zeitgeist thing has become. No Chinese try to be cool -- can't pull it off. Technocratic seems their best attempt; occasionally, they drift into either hedonistic or materialistic or oracular. Academics try to seem cool, with beards and funky dresses and references to Lady GaGa but they don't quite pull it off well. They work at it, and the essence of being cool is not working at it.

Now, over 40 years ago, Daddy AXE's best friend was a fellow named Bill Hennessey. Bill had no extended family, and I was kind of directed to call him Uncle Bill. Which I gladly did -- Bill was a great guy. At some point in the early 80s, Bill and my dad got into a mid-life pissing contest, and the friendship kind of shattered. When my mom died, I did call Bill's wife, Jeannie, and listened to her cry and wonder what had happened to them. That's a damn fine question -- why do human beings fall out? It's also way beyond Crusader AXE's area of expertise or interest. They just do -- someone says some little thing, like catching a sweater on a nail, and the whole relationship unravels. Anyway, I was pondering this whole coolness thing and a story Jeannie had told 45 years or so ago popped to mind.

For some reason, the two of them had gone camping up in the  Adirondacks, at either Sarinac or Cranberry Lake.  The tent was up, the generator purring away, the sun down, and Bill was starting to go to sleep as Jeannie dimmed the lantern and started to get into her sleeping bag when there was a horrendous uproar outside the tent. Yowling, hissing, growling and general animal mayhem. Jeannie immediately turned up the lantern and told Bill to go outside and see what was going on...Bill later said it sounded like a couple of cougars mating with a bear, and he wasn't at all sure this was the wisest thing to do. But, if you knew Jeannie, you knew better than to argue sense when she wanted her husband to do something husbandly like kill a spider or shoe away cougars and bears.

Jeannie told it differently. Bill got out of the sleeping bag, and pulled on his pants and shoes. He then pulled on his his shirt, and tucked the shirt in. I still recall her saying, laughing incredulously, that he "tucked the damn shirt in, and then, he combed his damn hair." He then picked up a croquet mallet, and went forth to slay the dragons, or bear on cougar threesome. (Now, that's an image that should give Palin and Rick Santorum pause!) I can picture Bill, who towered over my dad and me, combing his hair into the 40's style pompadour the two of them wore at the time, making certain to get the the damn little dip and spit curl right. He then turned on a flashlight, and with the flashlight in one hand and the croquet mallet in the other, he went forth into the night.

That was cool. The noisemakers had gone off, but he'd done what a man's supposed to do. However, that wasn't cool. What was cool was taking the time to get it right -- because, if you're going to bitchslap a couple of mating mountain lions with a flashlight and a croquet mallet, you might as well tuck your shirt in and get your hair right. You need to do it with a sense of composure, of doing it right, because that's the way you do things. Tom Cruise can never be cool; Val Kilmer is cool. John Wayne, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum were cool; Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster are not. Clapton is cool; Jeff Beck is not.

The current incarnation of Doctor Who is an interesting rif on this. This version of the Doctor played by a fellow named Matt Smith is the youngest and the most "British" seeming of the stable of Doctors. Smith wears tweeds, and a bowtie. This has created a tagline, "Bow ties are cool..." which he uses whenever his companion Amy or some more trendy type asks him why he's wearing the silly thing. Or, should he be talking to someone, usually far older and very officious, who is wearing a bow tie. Well, obviously, bow ties are not cool. They're nerdy, and twitty and uncomfortable. If you wear one that's pre-tied, you're a twit on the level with people who wear fake four in hands; if you have the time to actually tie one and do it correctly, you're either George Will or Tucker Carlson or somebody named Prescott living in Arkham waiting for you cousin Ebeneezer Lovercraft the III to come in with a postcard from Cthulhu...or, you're trying to enlist in the Nation of Islam, which is not cool.

Yet, the Doctor has a point. You can't wear a bowtie if you don't care about getting it right. You have to be willing to move to a different beat, somewhat ironic, somewhat off tempo. If you can pull it off, you're not cool. You can't be cool if you have to think about it too long or actually try to be cool. You can fail at something, and do so in a cool way, like Clapton and Winwood did with Blind Faith; you can try to be cool and still succeed at something, but who gives a fuck, like Fleetwood Mac after Rumours.

Slowly recovering from a bad case of "Goddamn Motherfuckers!!!" Overload

HL Mencken: Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke. So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated.

It's occurred to Crusader AXE that the Defeatists is sort of becoming a music blog based on whatever I'm listening to or being haunted by at the moment. This is certainly not the intention but probably inevitable with a boomer writer who has as many guitars at present as he's had cars in his lifetime. But, that's not why I post a lot of videos or music -- I do that because I'm trying to make a point in a lot of cases, unless I am in fact writing about music. While my brothers only occasionally write these days, believing Twitter, Facebook and Onanism to be more contemporary, we're still pretty pissed off at the bottomfeeders and general assholes that haunt the Republic.

Mencken talked a lot of the "boobs" who make up the mass of the people. I find this quote from Wiki really illustrative of what I consider a realistic view...

[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world – that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power – which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters – which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

Obviously, he's calling out the equivalents of the Tea Party and the Republicans but he's also calling out the Democrats; deficit hawks and socialists; environmentalists and oil well drillers.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.  ~H.L. Mencken

Which, in an odd way, leads to my joy at the list of the US presidents published by Siena University in upstate New York and rank ordering them by "best to worst," voted on by a group of historians. OK, they rank FDR first -- makes a lot of sense. He followed someone who did nothing at best and at worst made things worse, despite his being a smart, compassionate and effective guy. As a human being and a statesman, Herbert Hoover was pretty impressive; as a president, he was a victim of the inability to see beyond his own convictions. The other Roosevelt came in second, which is interesting. While most Americans have an image of TR as the Bull Moose, the Rough Rider, the big stick guy, we forget that what he was primarily was an reformer--of the police, of government by implementing the Merit System, of industry, of business and industry. Third is Lincoln, which I probably differ with -- he should be first or second, but I can understand why he's not. His willingness to let the various diva-generals hang on and say silly damn things while doing nothing prolonged the war. The rest of the list of the top 10 are probably no more controversial although there is room for some quibbles. One interesting trend is that Eisenhower is on the list in the tenth spot -- he looks a lot better in retrospect, and did a lot that people forget. He didn't back Isreal, Britain and France in Suez; he led the building of the interstates; he got things done; he was prescient about the military industrial complex; and, he was about as normal a guy as you can find on the list.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H. L. Mencken

The worst presidents are a totally different kettle of fish. They either did nothing in the face of challenges -- Harding, Tyler, Pierce setting up their successors for a life in interesting times--  or went out of their ways to make things worse --Andrew Johnson and GW Bush -- Johnson by allowing the compromise with Jim Crow while undermining Lincoln's legacy while Bush was so horrible that I find the truest and most ironic judgment on the current voices of the conservative movement and the whole eight years of Dubya to be Karl Rove's bleat that Tea Party Nation misses Bush. While PJ O'Rourke isn't Mencken, he comes close some times, and this sums up the worsts and why...

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn.  The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

At this stage, piling on Bush is being touted by the right as being an unreasonable attempt to avoid accountability, and the alliteration in that clause just happened. I personally don't think so -- as it was difficult for Bush to get a blowjob from an intern after Clinton, it's difficult to run a country when you've got two losing wars and an economy that is tits up and now starting to stink. And, for how long did the Reagan administration blame Jimmy Carter, who ranks significantly higher than Bush? Still, it does seem at times like a futile endeavor...best expressed in musically terms.