Skeleton Dance (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

April 11, 2011 -- Cue the xylophone.

Like the dancing skeletons of film history, here come the elected office-holders of the U.S. government cutting their capers in the graveyard of empire, giving the paying customer -- er... citizens -- a nice case of the Friday night heebie-jeebies in a mock battle over inanities. It made for a few hours of diverting theater, with an emphasis on diversion -- since the whole gruesome melodrama of the U.S. budget finally hinged on a ploy to de-fund the Planned Parenthood organization, one of the few useful endeavors left in this land of depravity, monster trucks, and microwaved cheese snacks.

I don't believe for a moment that the political right cares about the well-being of fetuses, anyway. The abortion issue is just a convenient cudgel to bash their political adversaries on the left. Karl Marx, a useful polemicist if a hinky guide in practical politics, had an apt term for what has become the ideology of the American right wing: "rural idiocy." It included all the familiar superstitions, phobias, obsessions, bugaboos, misconceptions, animosities, and sadistic impulses of simple country folk. Of course, today we'd have to update it as "suburban idiocy," because that is where the simple country folk of yesteryear have transpired to relocate, most traumatically in the Sunbelt, where today's car dealers, franchise moguls, and country clubbers, were only two generations ago digging chiggers out of their bare ankles after long days in the sharecrop furrows.

These folk believe all kinds of things that are not true, in fact lack the mental equipment for measuring the difference between what is true and not true and, having never known it, don't miss it. How else can you account for the burgeoning industry of "creation" museums all across Dixieland? These are the folks who, in the name of "liberty," want to regulate your sex life in accordance with the Southern Baptist Convention, the folks who want to start World War Three in order to promote the mythical "rapture," the folks who don't think twice about destroying the conditions that tend to support life on Planet Earth.

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[MisterP]

1. pic reminds me of

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olU40fxAXZs
(KnR)