THAT EMOTION THING

Wall Banging, Political

So the Environmental Protection Agency won’t be sending their scientists to a conference where scientists will be gathering to discuss climate change and its effect on the environment.

Yup. Sounds like the way the Soviet Union designed the road to progress so as to keep science in line with Soviet ideology, the bedrock of their worldwide workers revolution. For the sake of workers

I suppose that EPA move makes sense in the midst of a retro-Russia craze. We should bring back the Twist and backyard fallout shelters. The workers in America’s heartland today are stoked and amply able to be the most productive, hard-working and prosperous workforce in the world today. If today is housed somewhere in the late-middle 20th Century. On American Bandstand’s dancefloor with all white kids doing the Twist.

Democrats stump on well-researched positions aimed at problems of poverty, pointless mass incarceration, wage stagnation, corporations booking out of the country leaving non-prideworthy employment for those laid off.

Righteous. Those Dems deserve great evaluations from their students. Except they’re not college professors. But they’re lecturing voters who are in torment and everyone in the room is giving the prof flunking grades in their evaluations. The voters that are not currently in torment applaud and vote for them. That’s what we do. For the sake of the workers.

Republicans run on economic and social fairytales proven wrong over and over again but the ideas sustain because they’re theology not science. They’re walking-on-water stories from the American Exceptionalism bible. Theological thinking is pretty compelling. People don’t get together once a week to sing together and go into trances over expositions of scientific studies. But those conservative gospels are just loss leaders. The real tools of Republican campaigning are fear and resentment hooks. That emotion thing. It wins every time.

Our better angels cower in a brain full of anxiety bullies. The Big Sale this weekend. If the heat is off, the delayed gratification angel – hiding your wallet for three days – is a plausible strategy when a bit low on dough. Crank up the angst burner and you'll blow up the garage to get to the wallet. NOW!

Unfortunately for the Dems and the human race, NOW! is… well, now. They, and we, are too humane to go the the lizard place. I’m not suggesting here that Democratic politicians are fundamentally not narcissistic, self-interested, donor toys like their GOP counterparts. Just a tad less so. But the tad in that less margin is skyscraperish.

In this moment of national meltdown it’s not just the parties and the politicians that are toxic. They're all working an electoral system that’s so corrupt and costly to play that their occupation’s primary task is fundraising, not legislating. If they win, they’re owned. Their mission is re-election so they can make America great but they have to legislate America’s decline in order to get the cash needed to get re-elected so they can make American great again after crapping all over it.

In the meantime we let off steam grousing, digging up the latest scapegoat, exercising our Constitutional right to free speech by writing columns and blogs.

Who doesn’t want to see DC vaporized at this point? Even if you’re not suffering (yet) you’d still like to see it under 20ft of water for a month or so.

What solution am I offering here? Solution? I don’t have a clue. I’m just screeching at the keyboard. That emotion thing.

— Polar Levine, News Goo Dissection, October 24, 2017

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