The Almighty Kids You Not

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Thursday February 18, 2016 · 7:32 PM PST

2016/02/18 · 19:32

It was anything but a slack year for the Almighty. Civilization already teetered on the edge, and what with gravity having just been proven, the stakes were hairier than ever. Weird how humans need proof of the obvious yet reject proofs that upset their digestion.

Case in point: This endless, corpulent election cycle, staggering finally into its actual election year was in desperate need of clarity. A punctuation... some particle references to illustrate the relentless heaving and sagging waves, one after another, nauseously. (The Almighty is proudest of gravity; those other show-offy “strong” forces? Parlor tricks. Gravity’s where it’s at. Without gravity, there is no At.) So, in an omnipotent celestial nanosecond The Almighty gave each side of the teeter-totter just what they desired. The epitomized candidate on the right and on the left.

Screw polls, The Almighty knows...from the ph of your spleen and diameter of your sphincter to adored novelists, matinee crushes, unresolved daddy issues, schoolyard feuds and dreams of glory you’ve spent your life shaping your political views around—She knows. Your most secret wishes have been realized.

The candidates are spec-perfect.

And what happens? Each side can’t shed their bloke fast enough. Say they have no idea how he got there, or why. Mayhem ensues; terrible, hurtful exchanges and self-repudiations of magnificent scale and volume pierce the ether. Sober souls hurling themselves into fires of reproach, drunks, pimps and zombies ruling the night— evacuations from both ends of the digestive tract, indistinguishable, spew in wondrous libelous rainbows; the seesaw lurches in sickening gurgling arcs over the abyss.

To say the Almighty is not amused would be inaccurate, but the The Almighty kids you not, nevertheless.

Dear Phony Radicals

oftenon

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Saturday January 30, 2016 · 8:46 PM PST

2016/01/30 · 20:46

Yeah, you designer flanneled F-350-driving Trump fans with your Weimar grievances and no idea what or where Weimar is— talking to you. You’re phonies. Sandernistas too, you deluded fair and balanced wannabes. Phonies.

Your candidates are powerless, your platforms are meaningless, you’re all tools.

I’ll bet I can get you to agree on something: Ted Cruz is a douche, right? While you’re in agreement, try this on: a paper bag. Put it over your mouth and breath into it—because you’re all having the same panic attack. You think your freedoms have evaporated, and you’re right! But it ain’t the government, the immigrants or the billionaires. It’s yourselves.

You surrendered your identity. You were a person and five black-robed radicals of the rapture said screw humans—six years ago the Supreme Court made you sub-corporate tools. Any Republicans tuning out here: while you’re looking up “Weimar,” check out “Stockholm Syndrome.” WTF do you think a corporation is?—a legal machine designed to protect itself from humans. An impervious PR-spouting machine, absolved of human responsibility. Kind of a god, really—the kind Ted goes in for, anyway.

A corporation isn’t something we are, it’s something we invented and it’s now in charge. The machine is now in charge. Why else would a born tool like Ted Cruz be a contender?

You want a non-machine, non-establishment candidate? Go ahead, vote your conscience or your balls or whatever your Ouija board tells you.

But you’re canaries in a Citizens United coal mine.

If Votes Were Movie Tickets

oftenon

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Tuesday December 29, 2015 · 4:38 PM PST

2015/12/29 · 16:38

The Star Wars franchise actually became the Empire for awhile and it sucked. But good guys who never give in, never sell out and have an actual working shit detector save the day again. What a story.

President Piper Picks Apart PC Picklehead

oftenon

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Tuesday December 01, 2015 · 8:18 PM PST

2015/12/01 · 20:18

This sober repudiation of self-indulgent college kids appears on thepcgraveyard.com

This Is Not Day Care is a great soundbite! It resonates hilariously with elders who cannot believe how entitled, shallow and self-absorbed college kids are these days, demanding hugs for their poor, hurt PC feelings. College marks the peak years of youthful idealism, but what the dickens is up with youth?

Let’s see, they’ve grown up with endless wars, drones raining death, militarized police, paralyzed government, rampant bigotry, war zone schoolyards and flat-out rejection of science, facts and logic from Presidential candidates— so now that they’re old enough to presumably think a little for themselves, what do they do? Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Piper has a silly lad come up to him and tell him he’s feeling hurt by a Bible passage! President Piper takes to his pen, authoring the withering soundbite, and while he’s at it says, among other things, “An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad!” —which pretty much suggests that religion sucks at anything except as a bludgeon of systematic conformity to brutalities without limit.

The same elders who are shaking their head at these spoiled, wrong-headed kids might forget that the deck was not stacked this way when they were college age— that the vaunted “conscience” president Piper piously scolds Timmy about was actually manifest and noisy as hell in campuses across the country —and in a robust and relatively independent press; that no lesser authority than Walter Cronkite finally looked America in the eye and said we were not fighting a just war and that our leaders were lying to us.
It was also a pre-Madonna time when “materialism” was a term that distinguished acquisition from aspiration and maybe even gave a little Bible lesson on just who the Philistines were.

But this is an era of billionaires, soundbites and easy dismissals. Of mayfly news cycles and outrages du jour. Of bodice-ripping Ayn Rand acolytes and gun nut high-school dropout constitutionalists. This time is dominated by fervor masquerading as passion and demagogues devouring our precious, embattled psyches. We seek comic relief in more and more desperate satires unable to compete with actual events. We let in only so much of what’s really overtaken us and consign its solution to pithy jots on Facebook affirming our alignments. Confirming our conformity to a faith that sanity will prevail, because hasn’t it always in America?

Just maybe we should thank God some kids who’ll someday take over this mess still have the capacity to feel, no matter how fragile and silly they sound, no matter how obtuse their reasoning, in a world where reason seems to have gone to hell.

Guess the French Author

oftenon

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Sunday November 15, 2015 · 8:39 PM PST

2015/11/15 · 20:39

Diaries are not allowed with the text field empty but I have nothing to add.

RNC-Approved Debate Questions Leaked

oftenon

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Saturday October 31, 2015 · 12:55 PM PDT

2015/10/31 · 12:55

Dr. Ben’s Medicine Show Uncoded

oftenon

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Thursday October 29, 2015 · 10:52 PM PDT

2015/10/29 · 22:52

Cartoon characters who object to being drawn that way are running for President pursuant to Hype 1.0 alpha version Ronnie Reagan who conquered communism in his pajamas.

The mid 90s full release of Hype 1.0 mandated impeachment starts 48 hours after any Democrat’s Presidential inauguration; Hype 1.8 was a bug fix letting five Supreme Court votes elect Dubya and Hype 2.0 reelected him with a Diebold patch. Hype 3.0 was a quantum leap invaliding any President named Obama and black.

We now have Hype 4.0 which rewrites all forgoing bigoted code as coded non-bigotry when spoken in a soft voice by a cartoon black candidate of Republican extraction.

Hype 4.0’s reported glitches are vigorously disputed as “not very nice” by Dr. Carson, who has withdrawn from active campaigning to do a children’s morning TV show in his pajamas until the election in November 2016.

The Bull Elephant in the Room

oftenon

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Thursday September 17, 2015 · 7:18 PM PDT

2015/09/17 · 19:18

When there’s an elephant in the room it’s awkward; when there are eleven, it’s a bio-hazard. The GOP debate audience swarmed like intoxicated flies, eager for a Big One to drop. It was ten against one, but no load proved big enough to bring down the Bull. The Bull Elephant jutted and thrust and flinched but without question, he prevailed.
No mistake who the Bull in the room was, or what the “debate” was about. It wasn’t policy, or people, nor governance, equality or freedom. That’s not what they came to see. They came to see what the Bull would do.

Finally, the manifestation of GOP worship is incarnate in a candidate capable of speech, and he’s nothing like that awkwardly assembled body-part wreck that Romney was, with a mere fraction of the wealth plus all that baggage from actually governing. Here is a billionaire Bull Elephant who is defiant, resolute, rich as God and camera-ready. Here—for any Republicans capable of irony—was the actual corporate person Mitt foretold of. And he is so exciting!

All are spellbound at how actually putting money and mouth together could result in such outrageously, tyrannically, hilariously juvenile remarks— that nobody can seemingly refute! Or how that miraculous money-magnet gift also magically repels criticism and reduces opponents to meek, deferring mice. This protean herd leader commands the right to say whatever the hell he wants because he owes nobody—not donors or special interests or religious zealots—or even and especially a pair of billionaire bull elephant brothers seething in another room across the country.

A special aura attends this election season. It’s glistening with the promise of billions of dollars that will shower down on the worthy, the clever, the faithful. It also holds the prospect of spectacular failure, dismissal and disgrace.

Oh, incidentally, sometime during a commercial break a President will be elected.

Donald Trump, GOP Apogee

oftenon

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Thursday August 13, 2015 · 4:02 PM PDT

2015/08/13 · 16:02

There’s no mystery to Trump’s dominance in the Republican race.
• Never doubts.
• Never, ever apologizes.
• Speaks with outrageous candor.
• Enjoys creating and crushing enemies.
• Projects success even as he cries victim.
• Games the system like Houdini.
• Hates the underclass.
• Keeps women in their place.

And then there’s the other thing Donald has:
• Fuck You Money.

No other candidate remotely has it—but with every tortured, equivocal word they speak they’re pathetically angling for scraps of it. Alongside Trump, they’re tongue-tied, bungling losers.
If there’s anything a Republican knows, it’s the smell of weakness and the other candidates reek of it. They all owe. Donald owns.

Even after conservatives methodically crafted a world of unbridled corporate dominance, they somehow failed to apprehend its inevitable personification; the actual corporate person. Pathologically aggressive, hyperbolically PR-minded, contemptuous of weakness, sinister in deal-making, dominant in brand and legally impervious to personal responsibility.

All the other guys are running for a job. Donald has already ascended to his party’s highest aspiration. He doesn’t need a job, he’s running for sheer ego. Because he can. Suck it up, losers.