By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
So how come our government has just passed a big tax reform bill that most of us don't like?
How come we've got a president whose approval rating is totally meh?
A president who is not only the biggest asshole of all presidents ever, but also the biggest asshole among all current world leaders, the biggest asshole among all current business leaders, the biggest asshole among all rich New Yorkers, the biggest asshole among all assholes from Queens, the biggest asshole sitting on any gold toilet, and maybe the biggest asshole among all contemporary members of the human race extant, with the possible exception of Ted Cruz?
How come our government is filled with assholes of immense assholicity — the president, his staff (how about John Kelly?), his cabinet (how about Jeff Sessions?), Congress (how about Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan?), the Supreme Court (how about Clarence Thomas?), etcetera into an infinite totality of utter assholicity?
Aren't we as a nation supposed to be better than these assholes?
Maybe not.
ASSHOLES BY THE TRUCKLOAD, SUCKERS BY THE BUCKET
If our government truly represents us, there can be only one conclusion.
We are a nation of assholes.
Or, if we are not a nation of assholes, we are a nation of suckers, which may be worse.
How come?
Well, we're ignorant and under-educated. Only a third of us grownups have any college. Many of us don't finish high school, and our high schools are not that great anyway. We're basically a nation of dumb fucks. Witness the ratings of Fox News, a dumbfuck media outfit that sets new standards for galactic assholicity (how about Tucker Carlson?).
Number two, we're overly religious. 70% of us believe that an actual devil exists, complete with scaly horns and a forked tail. All our evangelicals believe that the world will end in The Rapture, when they will ascend naked to heaven as their clothes fall from their bodies, while the vast majority of humanity will catch fire and burn up in immense howling pain and excruciating torment.
That's what they wish for us non-evangelicals. Not all that compassionate — or even quite Christian, eh? (How about Pat Robinson?)
Number three, we're racist.
Number four, we're sexist (look at the King Kong dung Everest of excremental crap that Hillary had to negotiate).
Number five, many of us are southerners, which include perhaps the worst Americans — Texans (how about Ted Cruz?) — those famed bigots of big hats and no cattle.
Number six, we're not compassionate. We are a very cruel nation. We like killing foreigners: the last time, as many as half a million innocent Iraqi women and kids for no good reason (how about Dick Cheney?). We treat animals incredibly cruelly on factory farms because we like to eat them.
And number seven, perhaps the worst thing of all, we're terribly classist. We are great believers in inequality. We have the biggest income inequality of all developed nations. We have the most selfish, greedy, entitled, privileged elite that ever lived (how about Robert Rubin?).
At Harvard and Yale, they turn out kids who believe they're better than everyone else. Not only better than all other Americans, but better than all other humans. Our elite are bigger snobs than British royalty.
THE SHITTY GOP
Number eight, one of our two political parties has turned into a deranged cult, who just the other day was all for electing a known pedophile from Alabama to the Senate just because he'd vote along with them. (In jail, guys like Roy Moore are immediately whacked by their fellow-prisoners because they can't stand being around pedophiles, which makes the GOP Senators less morally sensitive than our goddam jailbirds.)
The GOP leaders, after being reasonably thoughtful Burkean conservatives who were all for personal freedom, less government, and an unregulated free market (positions not completely disreputable), have now ended up with only a single philosophical position: tax cuts for the rich.
What a fall from intellectual grace.
These are assholes who don't believe in basic science, like climate change caused by humans — or even evolution.
And these same asshole GOP leaders (how about Ted Cruz?) have bamboozled their followers by playing the Southern strategy card — appealing to our nation's enduring racism. (Best line about Ted Cruz: why are people so quick to hate Ted Cruz? because it saves time.)
The GOP's single-minded message to their followers has been this: trust us not to give your hard-earned tax dollars to poor people, and especially not to poor black people. Big government is bad because it gives your money to poor blacks. Taxes are bad because they go to poor black people.
This has been the Republican Party's appeal since Nixon.
And boy, does it work for them: better than gooseberries make elephants shit fast.
Naturally, our nation of un-educated, religious, racist, sexist, southern, cruel, Republican assholes, with our terrible elite of classist snobs, has ended up with a government that the rest of us now suffer under: government of the assholes, for the assholes and by the assholes.
Assholes so stinky, it's no wonder that the whole world turns their noses up at us. (The world used to admire us. Remember? No more. Now we smell bad.)
H.L. MENCKEN PREDICTED US
It was all foreseen by H.L. Mencken (who died in 1956, and whom I personally miss as much as I do Molly Ivins). Perhaps the sanest American who ever lived, Mencken wrote this back in 1920:
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."