Why Republicans Love Russians

After more than a half-century of listening to Republicans’ timid anti-Russian freakouts, it’s interesting to see them suddenly cozy up to Putin and the remains of the Soviet Union. Honestly, I’ve never understood their hostility in the first place. Way back in the 70’s, I argued that if the USSR ever managed to take over the USA they’d leave the Nixon Administration in charge. They were and are the same people, with the same beliefs (including fake religions: communism or Christianity), the same authoritarian attitudes, the same disinterest in civil rights, the same misogyny, and the same total lack of moral values. Let me list their similarities:

• Above all Republicans and Soviets are anti-democratic. Their half-hearted nod to “elections” is almost comical, so you’d wonder why they bother at all. I suspect that maintaining the pretense of being elected allows the less-informed public to pretend they still have a stake and it pumps up the egos of the nutjobs who want to create a society with as little going for it as the world Putin and Trump would love to make."They voted for this mess. They must have wanted it."
• Like the conservatives in Russia, Republicans haven’t originated a progressive reform since Teddy Roosevelt. Their opposition to President Obama was a classic Soviet Russian conservative knee-jerk. Look at how the one Russian reformer in the last 100 years, Gorbachev, was treated.What passes for "reform" from the Russian/Republican Party is always less tax on the already untaxed 1% and less security for the 99%.
• Republicans and Russians love military solutions to political problems. It will not surprise me to see Trump use the military to overwhelm the opposition to the various oil pipelines he and his Russian allies want to build across this country to get US and Canadian oil to everywhere but the US market. The only answer Republicans/Russians have to any economic disaster is to "build more bombs and bombers." It would never occur to them to improve the education system, for example, the only possible solution to most of today's US problems.
• Russians and Republicans not only represent the ogliarchy but desperately want to become members. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/how-did-members-of-congress-get-so-wealthy/379848/) There is a reason congresscritters are allowed to bet on their own legislation, it's called "insider trading" and from the White House to the Extreme Court, insider trading is status quo. 
• The police are always Republican/Russians because they can exercise unlimited power under authoritarian administrations without having to worry about nasty issues like being prosecuted for murder, robbery, or other crimes against the citizens the pretend to “serve and protect.”
• At the individual level, Russians/Republicans always look for solutions from rulers, not leaders. There is no personal responsibility in either the country’s success or failure when a ruler fails to live up to his promises. Ruled citizens can bitch and moan about their sorry lives, but they don’t have to take any responsibility in creating change. Leaders need citizens to carry the load locally to create reforms and change. Free societies are obligated to work to maintain their freedom and democracy and that takes time away from watching football or Faux Views. Russians and Republicans hate work, especially when that work might benefit someone other than themselves.
• Republicans/Russians prefer muscle over thought. While some theoretical free market promoters believe that capitalism is a system of ideas and change, the people represented at both ends of Republican/Russian politics are obviously more fond of power than ideas and change. Scientists are rarely either conservative or Republican, which should be the ultimate proof that thinking isn’t a Russian or Republican value. In fact, the opposition to public education proves that they believe in a world where only the wealthy can afford any education at all.
• Russian/Republicans stand for mythical “freedoms” while making sure only the oligarchy are free. The freedom of the 1%, or the "nomenklatura" as the Russians call their elites, is the ultimate freedom, because no laws apply to them. That’s the world Republican/Russians are saluting when they eliminate “regulations” (laws for corporations and the ultra-rich): freedom for them and a train wreak for the rest of us.

• When you look at the societies Russians and Republicans create, you can’t tell which one Orwell was describing in 1984. Is it an authoritarian faux-socialist society or a libertarian dream world? No one knows because you can't tell them apart without proper labels. Hell, I can't even tell if A Handmaid's Tale is Russian or Republican. All we really know is that either group stands for repression, violence, corruption, greed, and everything the ideals of the United States of America is suppose to oppose.

Learning to Love the Apocolypse

It took me a while to adjust to appreciating global climate change. For a couple of decades, I talked the good talk about wanting to do my part to stop the 6th Extension; to try to create a world my kids and grandkids could enjoy as much as I’d enjoyed the world handed off to me. Tonight, while I lay sleepless in my bed three days after Donald Trump was elected Last President of Democratic United States of America, I came to grips with loving what comes next.

I have two daughters; both are college-educated, intelligent, compassionate, decent people. One of my two sons-in-law is also a decent, hard-working man. I have three grandkids who I love more than my own life. That’s a reproduction rate of slightly less than two-per-couple for my wife and I. Among my wife’s Kansas family there must be close to two hundred zombies spawned from just one of her four aunt’s two marriages. One of my wife’s Kansas cousins churned out eleven nitwits from five marriages and one high school kid who got her pregnant when she was a school councilor (No kidding, it’s Kansas, remember?). Those eleven uneducated, unwanted coneheads have already churned out at least four dozen equally moronic dropouts, misfits, and massively dependent offspring. Their annual Xmas family photo looks like a special Olympics graduating class of hundreds.

So, while I hate the idea that my three beautiful grandchildren and two brilliant, compassionate, and loving daughters are going to watch the world collapse into chaos and see the world they love destroyed out of greed, apathy, laziness, superstition, and stupidity, I’ve come to terms with the math.

Let’s face it, we’re a nation that constantly justifies “collateral damage.” We’re willing to blow up one hundred people in a wedding ceremony in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Mexico, Columbia, or any where else and because some contractor’s Puerto Rican drone operator spotted one or two characters who have been randomly selected for our “terrorist watch list.” Compared to that, sacrificing my five off-spring to let the coal industry take out a hundred or so brain-dead Kansas relatives is an efficiency bargain. Add the 60M Trump voters and the rest of the world’s uneducated, lazy, moronic basket cases to that list and the world would be far better off without humans on it. So, bring on the Trump apocalypse. No, children, you’re not going to be levitated into the Big Rock Candy Mountain before the shit hits the fan. You’re going to suffer, possibly for years, before it all comes to a smoking, dying end and then you’re just going to be dead. No Gods will be coming to rescue you, no economic miracles from a clown who couldn’t manage a meat counter or who was too lazy to even show up for his fake “university’s” events will pull your useless asses out of the fires, and the odds that another Barak Obama will put his life and family at risk to save you from yourselves have been dramatically and vanishingly reduced. And I’m good with that. We have earned our part in the Sixth Extinction and we deserve every miserable moment.

Un-Fixable

The angry white voters who claimed Democrats and liberals have abandoned them are probably right. The only thing that could save the jobs these people imagine they are entitled to have would be education and education is the one bit of reality that poor, pseudo-conservative white people resent the most. Back in 2008 Barak Obama made his infamous statement about the disenfranchised white voters, "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." He wasn’t wrong and he is just as right today, except that you’ll have to add meth and oxy to the things they are clinging to. Those three hallmarks of the unemployable are still going strong and Donald Trump is reaping the rewards of stoking those brain-dead fires.

The real problem liberals and progressives have yet to face is that the core problems of the welfare states are un-fixable. Here are some facts that prove my point, “32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.” Those statistics have not changed, for the better, in a decade and we can count on them getting much worse over the next four to eight years. Over the last ten years, at least 25% of the US population did not read a book in part or whole in the previous year. Trump and Republicans may “love the uneducated,” but society and our democracy can not afford them. The purpose in creating a public education system was to prevent idiotic catastrophes like Donald Trump and the “modern” Republican Party from destroying the nation.

And that’s where the problem lies today. Substantial portions of the nation are never going to change, except for the worse. Places like most of the Southeast and Midwest have chased out the smart kids and encouraged the dumb ones to stay and reproduce and, culturally, the places and people have become intolerant, uneducated, unemployable, and proud of all of those “qualities.” When I was young, alcohol was the primary self-medication drug of choice for the losers who couldn’t escape. Today, there are far more effective drugs for that purpose. I came from one of those parts of the country and, like most of my high school graduating class who went on to obtain an education and some sort of career, I got the “hell out of Dodge” as soon as possible and stayed away. There is nothing that would ever induce me to move back to Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, or any of the states similar or worse than where I came from. Minnesota is as red a state as I can tolerate and away from the Twin Cities it’s a good bit redder (and dumber) than I like.

And I’m not alone. Reams of newspaper and books have been written about the exodus of talent and creativity from “the heartland.” Lots of people have wrung their hands over the fact that those desperate and depressed Trump voters are stuck in an endless cycle of poverty, ignorance, and drug addiction. Unless some miracle of disease and death suddenly purges those places of their populations, it’s only going to get worse.

Growing up in western Kansas, a high school teacher’s son and surrounded by “educators,” I was consistently unimpressed by what passed for education in my 1950’s K-12 experience. I, immediately, enrolled in the local community college where that experience only got worse. After losing my college savings to a scam Texas for-profit “computer school,” I stumbled on to a downtown Dallas community college and discovered that there are actually people who have a talent for teaching who are attracted to institutions that are committed to education. After a few years of suffering the more familiar uninspired “higher education” in western Texas and Nebraska, I moved to southern California. I was lucky to be in California in the 1980’s, before Reagan’s Prop 13 damage began to wreak that state’s once-great education system and make it unavailable to working class people. Even more, I was lucky to be there while California was enjoying the only economic stability in the country so that I had the luxury of being the sole support of my family and going to school part-to-full time for 8 years. The point to take away for this essay is that out of 130 credit hours from three different California state institutions, I endured no more than 6 hours of mediocre classroom experience. California attracted high quality instructors and there was enough competition for positions and institutions that kept instruction quality at a level I’d never seen before or since.

The reverse is true for the red states. No one with skill, experience, or credentials wants to live in those depressed and depressing areas. The chances of attracting instructors of quality to the Southeast, the Midwest, or much of the Northeast are slim-to-none. Even if the nation were to apply Peace Corps tactics to enticing teachers to work in the depressed areas as a way to pay off college debt, the end result will be that those few quality teachers will identify the few quality students and encourage them to get out before their hometown destroys their life. Clearly, plenty of that is going on now in most of these places, based on the fact that small towns are losing population and skills and can’t find any way to attract new blood. The brain-drain exodus from those places might actually accelerate if outside education resources were applied.

While it’s not true that intelligent people are no longer having children, it’s true that damn few smart people are staying “on the farm” or in small towns when opportunity, tolerance, entertainment, security, and quality of life are available just a short plane ride away. The Trump disaster is just an indication of elections to come, as impoverished states cling to their political power through a rigged system designed to protect the rich from democracy. Now, that system is protecting the rich and the stupid from reality and democracy. Either the Electoral College has to die or the nation will die from the damage done to democracy by that idiotic institution.

I’m With Garrison

Garrison Keillor went further out on a limb than most writers this election. He warned Trump that he’d have “nothing he wants” after the election, win or lose. He wrote a lot about how the Trumpers were so clueless, vicious, and out-of-touch with not just the country and the world but reality. It didn’t matter. In the end, enough (although a minority) Americans voted for the end. I’m not a big Garrison Keillor fan. I think he hung on too long, took himself too seriously as a musician, and became the old face of liberal NPR that deluded too many public radio fans into believing that the new NPR resembled the old NPR. However, I am totally on board with his last statement to the Trumpers: “Done, Over. He’s Here. Goodbye.”

Garrison wrote, “Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure."

"Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones and they will not like what happens next."

"America is still the land where the waitress' kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren't plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids."

"Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids and we Democrats can go for a long brisk walk and smell the roses."

The responses to this article were informative. A gutless dirtbag “deplorable” who, typically, hid his identify with the fake name, “RandomCitizen” said, "Suck it up libs, the world is going to change. Femisinsts [sic] will learn how to become women and will be put back into their correct role. Jobs will be brought back to hardworking men. Foreign and domestic enemies will be destroyed. Enjoy the show, libs. You lost and now you're toast."

Oh you clueless moron, the world is going to change, but you are going to be ground under that change-vehicle. Most likely, RandomCitizen is one of the red state’s unemployable, lazy deadbeats sucking off of the federal welfare tit while pretending to be one of the master race.  Trump could not care less about the fate of people like RandomCitizen. He won’t lift a finger to relieve their drug addictions, economic dysfunction, ignorance, unemployability, or even do more than Tweet to encourage their delusions of genetic superiority. The face Donald Trump sees in the mirror is the only person on this planet he has ever cared about and a whole bunch of RandomCitizens are going to discover how much worse their lives can get.