The future crept up on us

When I waste a post on Real World Crap (TM), I generally apologize for it. This time, however, I intend to offend a certain segment of the population, specifically two-thirds of the voters in my temporary home state and probably nearly all of the non-voters.

Though The Future--the fabled Twenty-First Century--as day-dreamt of by a little boy in the 1970s (me) has not offered the space stations, Lunar colonies, Martian cities and alien invasions for which I had hoped, it has offered some "futuristic" episodes.  Do you remember Paul Verhoeven's classic film Robocop? It depicted an America gone into severe and permanent decrosion, where the Constitution and the rule of of law had been suborned by self-serving corporate interests, where power rested not with the people but with a class of political nincompoops who lived in the crotch-pockets of monied assholes, where ridiculous gas-guzzling automobiles roamed the streets as gigantic surrogate penises for their shrunken-balled, limbic-brain-driven drivers. Fiction on film in the 80s.

Then, in December of 2000, W was appointed President of the United States in a 5:4 decision by the Supreme Court. (Remember, this was well before the Terminator became governor of California) Our first court-appointed President's administration seemed, at first,  one that would pass rather inconsequentially. He had no serious agenda other than the usual GOP-type tax cutting and budget-wrecking, and seemed content to wile away his Presidency being on vacation 3 out of 7 days (not counting weekends). Then the 9/11 horror happened and the country lost its collective mind.

Fast-forward to November 2004: W is elected President (elected this time, not court-appointed). And America has become a country in severe decrosion, a land where the rule of law has been suborned by self-serving corporate interests, where all power is held and exercised by a class of crass political nincompoops, where ridiculous gas-guzzling vehicles roam the streets as gigantic surrogate penises for their shrunken-balled, reptile-brained drivers. And where we send kids to die on a daily basis in a war of choice, designed by men who want to line their pockets with its filthy spoils.

Fast forward again. In 2008, the genius of the Founders and their Constitution saw their  greatest validation in the election of a new leader who was then able to peacefully displace the old one.

Yesterday when I was listening to the highlights of President Obama's speech in Cairo, I was repeatedly struck by how the plain-spoken, common sense things he said were a lot like...well, what a smart person would say. You know, like someone who has thought about stuff for more than a minute and has maybe read some books in his life, and maybe paid attention in school a couple times. A few years ago, when I dreamed of an imaginary future President who was not a Book-of-Revelation psychopath, I imagined a man or woman who would say things about how progress toward peace on Earth will not be made by wallowing in the drooling, blithering, Texas-sized dumbassity of the past, how America and the so-called "Islamic World" need not be at war, how Hamas needs to quit being a bunch of rocket-firing suicide-bombing fuck-bags, how the Israelis need to unambiguously stop their goddamned colonization activities in the occupied territories, how Ahmadinafuck needs to quit denying the Holocaust, and so on. And that's actually what the real-life President of the United States said in Cairo in the year 2009 (albeit in slightly different language). It felt futuristic, kind of like the Bush election, but in a good way. The old hopeful kind of feeling about the future that I had as a boy.

Well, in Oklahoma, most people beam with pride over their U.S. Senators, Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe. They're both right-wing Froot Loops complete with striped novelty toucan beaks,  and they are all-around douche-bags from the heyday of the Massengil era. If there were ever a Senate vote that went 98-2, you'd know who the two were without needing to Google it. But of the two of them, it's Inhofe (prick, pictured above left) who is the real piece of Frankenstein work. Coburn at least makes a serious and principled--if nearly always factually and ideologically  erroneous--stand against wasteful government spending. That's his brand, and he is semi-credible at it. Inhofe, on the other hand, is a classic Washington fat-head with an Okie accent: he is one of the biggest pork-barrelling, pig-shit-shoveling "conservatives" in the entire Congress. I don't have all day here, so I can't list (or even summarize) all his grotesqueries, so I'll limit it to these few examples: today he carries the right-wing water by complaining about government spending all day while at the same time fighting hammer-and-tongs to preserve Okiehomie's share of Pentagon waste that even the Pentagon doesn't want anymore (think weapons to fight the Soviet Union in WWIII in 1985); in the Dark Times, when the GOP controlled Congress, he was the unlikely head of the Senate environment committee where it seemed to be his main job to deny and denounce science that has long since been conceded by everyone on Earth save for Limbaugh, Coulter and a few other extra-chromo mutant throwbacks; he routinely uses public money to go on religious junkets abroad and doesn't even bother to apologize for it (cuz it's for JuhEEzus, y'know); and now, just today, he is all over the local news calling President Obama a traitor, and wondering "whose side he's on" for telling the fucking truth.

Senator Inhofe, aside from his other excesses, opposes equal civil liberties and equal justice under the law for all Americans, and, in so doing, violates his oath as a Senator and rejects the founding principles of this nation. It is he who is un-American, is a friend to extremism, and it is he whom I flip off with a big foam novelty hand with extended middle finger and say that he can get the frak out of my country right now and go join his nutcase buddies in "the border regions of Pakistan." Yeah...that's what I mean exactly: this guy's outlook on the world--with its intolerance, social-issues stick-up-the-assedness and religious bigotry--is much more similar to that of our nation's arch enemy, Osama bin Laden, than it is to the traditional values that most Americans cherish. So suck that, wingnuts.

Which brings me, at blessed bloody last, to the bitter conclusion of this screed. The truth, of course, is that it's not merely Senator Inhofe who is a joke. He is the duly elected representative of the people of his state, and it is they, the Okie voters, who are the real problem in this whole affair.  I lack the sulfuric-acid tongue and rhetorical fire to properly address them, so I will rely, as I often do lately, on quoting Harlan Ellison, when he said of an entirely other group of people: "I do not think I malign them too much by characterizing them as eminently average...I do not think I demean them much by perceiving them as creeps, meatheads, clods, fruitcakes, nincompoops, amoeba-brains, yoyos, yipyops, kadodies and clodhoppers." [An Edge in My Voice, 126]

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