my blog fell down

well, clearly one does get busy and then more than a week goes by.... I've got no time for ranting about politics "up there," but it is nice to see the shithouse truly on fire, at least for now.

I will say this, with sincere appreciation for the Unapologetic Mexican, and for Springs and Wells, (who I am glad to see writing a little again), you are both right about cynicism. It is clever being cynical, and cynical being clever. If I think about the opposite and what we try to do instead of being clever and cynical I ended up using flat words like honesty and earnestness that get me very much of nowhere. I would go so far as to say that I think cynicism and cleverness are usually foils attempting to mask what is inexperienced, what is the posture of enlightenment, but I don't know. What do the cynical pretend their wisdom postures in front of ? A real, raw view of human nature ? Perhaps they don't pretend to be Jackson Pollack all alone on Long Island, in his stupor, summoning the voices of Austrian analysts.

Listen to David Brooks as quoted by Digby:

DAVID BROOKS: I know a lot of very socially conservative people who want Rudy Giuliani. They know where he stands on abortion and gay marriage. They know all that stuff. But they like him because they think he's a fighter.

It should be clear to anyone who reads such sentences that this guy Brooks is just a bald-faced liar. He doesn't know anyone. He doesn't even talk to anyone. It is just the sort of thing you make up when you are talking and you have a 22-year-old brain that pretends all the time to know everything. This idiot has been pretending to understand something about some broad swath of "society" for as long as anyone can remember. Sometimes, when I go to McDonalds, I read the stuff they print on the paper tray-liner. It's about how their freaking salad is nutritious, so if you don't eat the Big Mac, you can get like so much sodium and some other crap and you won't feel sick when you leave. It's cynical. The people writing the piece of paper underneath your McDonald's piece of shit lunch are cynical. I only eat there when I feel emotionally needy for some cynical garbage (which does happen to me surprisingly often.) It's all cynical.

So is the idea that people are stupid and slow. So is the idea that the people who inherit money have a right to run the government because they are good at business. It's that age old "democracy can't work" because the riff-raff can't be trusted with it. Oh wait, that was the 19th century !?!

It's that age old "Art can't work because people without degrees from Yale can't understand it." Oh wait, what century did that shit start? The 80s ? I can't remember now, but people who "appreciate" "art" from the eighties and nineties love to confuse what I am saying, now, with cynicism. I beg to differ. On the contrary, it is not difficult to have faith in art and democracy if one has faith in people. But it is also really something to see how easy it is for the cynical to destroy a democracy. Ask David Brooks.