What do Facebook, National Geographic, Malala Yousafzai, Marco Rubio, Lady Gaga, Fox News, Robert Reich, and the Word "Jigaboo" all have in common?
Well, this article for one. And GOPFUBAR, for two.
I am fully aware that my Facebook and Twitter activism, which at times approaches “Rant” on the reasonability meter, probably accounts for why I don’t have many social media “Friends.”
Part of our national problem, as I see it, is that many of us remain disengaged from the political process, a form of real power which happens to be the way that most of what gets done in the world gets done.
Trying to make a difference can sometimes be frustrating. For instance, a friend texted me this past Tuesday, which happened to be election day. His name is Patrick and he is such a good guy that it would be hard not to love Patrick. But when I asked him if he was heading out to vote his immediate response was, “fuck that!!!” Then he sent me three smiley faces.
When confronted by apathy, complacency, or worse, partisan attacks, it is easy to ask, “why bother?” And so at one point about a year ago I closed my Facebook account. I was tired of right-wing thugs ganging up on my posts and I finally just gave up. But after some time had passed, I felt that I was shirking some kind of duty and so I recently opened another account.
I am proud of the stand I take on issues, such as the need for more effective gun regulation, the overreach of the security state, getting money out of politics, or the false promise of trickle-down economics, but still I sometimes grow concerned that I may look like a pointless reactionary to others on Facebook because my posts are so consistently political.
I recently learned that I‘m not the only politically interested person who wonders if they’ve gone bonkers, turned into a kind of Jon Stewart wannabe (gosh, I miss that guy), devolved into a needy, attention-grabbing Chicken Little or, God forbid, a "Libtard!" (something I’ve been called often, mostly by right-wing pro-gun conspiracy theorists).
So I welled with gratitude when I discovered that there are others who also experience self-dissonance when battered by senseless, almost Kafkaesque accusations and attacks. Of all the people I admire, former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich ranks high on the list. And it was he himself who confessed just the other day that he sometimes second-guesses his own strong aversion to what we all witness currently going on in the Republican Party.
GOP infighting, when coupled to the anachronistic moral positions they insist on clinging to even as the world whips past them at ever increasing speeds presents a troubling phenomenon—that is, a political party whose constituent processes outwardly manifest as an admixture of absolute absurdity and complete chaos.
Yes, that’s right, even Dr. Reich sometimes has to stop and wonder when he sees or hears the latest Republican contentless diatribe, “Am I really hearing what I think I’m hearing, or have I finally gone crazy?”
In a recent Facebook post, Professor Reich describes a telephone call he made to a friend and former colleague. Here’s his account:
“The other night I phoned a former Republican member of Congress with whom I'd worked in the 1990s on various pieces of legislation. I consider him a friend. I wanted his take on the Republican candidates because I felt I needed a reality check. Was I becoming excessively crotchety and partisan, or are these people really as weird as they seem?”
The answer that the good professor received from his republican colleague was simultaneously reassuring and unsettling:
“There's no party any more,” he was informed. “It's chaos. Anybody can just decide they want to be the Republican nominee, and make a run for it. Carson? Trump? They're in the lead, and they're both out of their f*cking minds."
Remember, that’s coming from a former republican congressman.
So, maybe it’s not me after all. Maybe Facebook salad sprouts and Facebook dogs and Facebook Jesuses really do pale in comparison with the political crises played out every evening on the nightly news . . . news programs like, well, Fox News for example.
Yes, the same Fox News owned by the same Rupert Murdoch who recently bought a controlling stake in National Geographic. And suddenly I’m back to, “why bother?” We’re doomed.
* * * * *
Earlier this evening I read that republican contender, Marco Rubio, said he’d like to have a beer with Ms. Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for wanting to pursue an education, which in fundamentalist Islam is the sole province of boys and men.
Now, whether it was Jesus or Allah or Malala’s fighting optimism that kept her alive after the attempt on her young life, I do not care—I love them all. I love them all because Malala, against all odds, survived. But Marco, a beer? Really? Why not a nice big ham sandwich, to go along with it?
And while I’m certain Marco Rubio’s esteem for Malala is sincere, he must know that in addition to Islamic religious prohibitions, Malala is not old enough to have a beer.
Thinking on this—especially in light of a certain fiscal controversy currently darkening Rubio’s doorstep—I do find myself wondering, if Marco were able to pull of his dream of ingesting some suds-n-dogs a la Malala ‘n sans Allah too, might he charge the two beers and the two ham sandwiches to a governmental account of some opaque origin?
I feel a “rant” beginning to swell like a mighty ocean wave—a salty rant!
But . . . “no, John,” I think to myself. “Don’t get carried away in anger. Perhaps Rubio was taken out of context by the notorious ‘liberal media’ or something. It happens you know. Rubio himself was talking about the bane of the liberal media only a week or two ago.”
But then, even as I draw on deeply on reserved stores of humility, suddenly the political levy of stupidity breaks when I click open yet another email and read the following Adweek summary:
“FOX AFFILIATE’S WJW Anchor Uses Racial Slur [Jigaboo] On Air: Says she, ‘I Didn’t Know the Meaning of Jigaboo’:
“An anchor at Cleveland Fox station WJW is apologizing after using a racial slur on-air during a chat about Sunday night’s Academy Awards. Kristi Capel was attempting to compliment Lady Gaga’s performance at the awards show, saying that “she has a gorgeous voice. I never knew,” thereby attempting to suggest that the performer’s voice is harder to appreciate in her more popular songs. . . . ”It’s really hard to hear her voice with all the Jigaboo music that she . . . whatever you want to call it—Jigaboo.”
You can find a recording of this Fox News debutante jigabooing all over herself on youtube.
On a positive note however, I do think the well-coiffed, young Negro fellow with whom Capel was conversing handled the whole thing quite well. I’m sure you’ll agree. After all, he must listen to some of that jigaboo boogie-woogie down-home knee-slapping rap-to-hip-hop shit himself, no?
Oh boy. The rant monster is beginning to raise his puny head inside of me once more. So, before I get up and begin to break-dance, I’ll stop.
Back to reality.
* * * *
If you are still reading this piece, which yes, rambles a bit, then you mightn’t know that I am a believer in positive outcomes. And while I do not think that I believe in miracles in the same way I once did—as a suspension of the natural order (aka magic)—I do still tend to believe in what you might call Grace.
Malala, and the fact that she not only survived the savage attack on her life, but that she also now continues to answer her Taliban attackers with a forceful will to educate girls and women around the world, evidences to me the power of Good, the power of an indomitable spirit, and even more than that.
Nevertheless, while I can’t express the fathomless gratitude I experience whenever I confront the fact that dear Malala survived the assassination attempt, I’m not so optimistic as to think that the National Geographic, with Fox’s Rupert Murdoch now at the helm, will survive it’s own wounds.
Does anyone else see any irony in the fact that Murdoch’s organization fired the magazine’s fact-checkers in the very first round of layoffs? (It’s too perfectly Murdochean.)
And neither am I sure, should Marco Rubio attain the White House, that America will survive. Of course, I could say the same of any of the other republican court jesters all currently vying to occupy that oligarchic drone-throne which will soon be abdicated by good King Obama.
So, as for my political posts and occasional rants on social media I wish I could say I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry so I can’t.
I am afraid that social-media friends who, like me, love fresh sprouts, or who own lazy dogs, or controlling dogs, or happy dogs, or who have a favorite Jesus or two of their own, yes, I’m afraid they will have to endure my activist posts, or else join the legions who have already, alas, “defriended” me.
Why? Well, to draw on a quote a former republican congressman with not a little license, here’s why. As I see it:
The entire GOP—from Marco Rubio to Rupert Murdoch, from Paul Ryan to Roger Ailes, from Charles and David Koch to Ann Coulter and Wayne LaPierre, along with all the potentially fascist elements rumbling beneath the thin veil of their out-of-touch and increasingly irrelevant Right-Wing, desperate conservatism—yes, the entire factious party has itself gone completely and irrevocably—“out of their f*cking minds.”
I think this is in some way important to point out.
Finally, I also suspect the United States is in the middle of a political identity crisis. If we fail to confront and curtail the extremist desperation currently feeding the flames of that crisis with open-carry madness and deep, festering resentment over the loosening grip of White moneyed interests, the crisis may grow hotter and, I’m afraid, woefully dangerous, even fascist.
Only the political will that undertakes structural changes to our current two-party system, a system which is sinking daily ever deeper in the quicksands of its own buffoonery, can at this hour offer middle-class Americans any hope at all.
Yet, even knowing all this, I admit that I still wake in the middle of the night, sweating, groggy, imagining an other-worldly and unyielding Ted Cruz filibuster—Little-Nero fiddling his pudgy little fingers off while repeating the Pledge of Allegiance ten thousand thousand times. And even as he fiddles, Washington D.C. burns on the fossilized fuel of republican anger, and I run aimlessly, frantically seeking refuge somewhere, a closet, a cellar, anywhere. But I can’t find any refuge and finally drop to the ground exhausted, unable to stop my ears against Cruz’s tremulous keening, Cruz at the congressional podium, Cruz decrying all jigaboo music, high and loud in his inimitable and torturously intensive nasal drone.
What’s a little social media rant in the face of that, I ask you?