The Screaming Majority

By Rev. Eugene Stashtin

Destiny,
Destiny!
No escaping -
That’s for me!
- Froderick von Frankenstein

    Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, or so the saying goes. But considering the Snooki level of literacy and self-awareness in this world, I’m getting a pretty gnarly sense of deja vu from the too-interesting twentieth century, with its several world wars and millions dead.

    Global events take patterns: like wartimes giving way to pandemics, clearing into eras of prosperity, blooming into hubris and collapse, then souring to recessions and depressions, which spiral back into the conflicts that define nations and eras. A cycle of destruction and creation has defined the experience of this collection of artifice we call civilization. These alternating periods are not always so clear-cut as they were in the phantasmagoric kaleidoscope we call the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the cycles of continental wars were determined by political movements and the struggle between imperialist nations who vied for the biggest numbers of darkies they could throw into their fields and factories.

    The twentieth century just spiced everything up: with chemical weapons, genocide, the spectre of nuclear annihilation, and ideologies to exploit all of it in the name of Progress. Because while World War I was a holdover from the bad old imperialist days (spiky helmets, Dulce et Decorum Est, and all that), World War II truly became a struggle of absolute Good and Evil, of survival at all costs.

    That fundamental struggle for survival sprung out of a crippling, dehumanizing Depression spanning the globe. Evil men capitalized on the misery, by sloganeering promises at the gullible who were existentially sick of eating dirt and using wheelbarrows of currency to buy a quart of milk. They’d had enough, and even in this bastion of sensibility and stability known as the United States, the Herrenvolk got a little kooky with the KKK and socialist groups alike. The Great Depression was a valley so low the only logistical way of rejuvenating civilization was to engage in a war of extinction killing millions, forcing new industry, new technological innovations, and the natural selection of the victors to determine the New World Order. Some historians might claim the New Deal and other social policies helped spring us out of the Depression, but they’re wrong.  Pounding out thousands of Sherman tanks and destroyers and firebombs to maul Germans and incinerate Japanese is what really made us the proud superpower we’ve remained to this very day. 

    This Great Recession has reached an ebb, a plateau that seems bearable in this annus mirabilis, Two Thousand and Ten. We’ve had two years of economic doldrums so far, and the global community seems to be on the same page with trying to improve trade, bolster markets, and generally hang tough together.

    But who knows what aspiring leaders are building their political parties, planning their rise to coincide with a vanished patience – as the promise of a rebirth fails to conceive, and the only option becomes that of destruction. It’s our destiny.

Contact this author at revstashtin@screamingmajority.com

By Rev. Eugene Stashtin

    Jesse Jackson has once again discovered a molehill, taken a dump on it, then proclaimed it a mountain.

    And as always, the camera has trained its fisheye on the batshit-crazy lunacy he peddles as prophecy.

    The blustering Rev. took aim at Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert recently, saying that the owners’ emotive outburst at LeBron James was “mean, arrogant and presumptuous” – and then took the swandive off logic’s diving board and into the shallow end of 21st century race relations by claiming that Gilbert had a “slave master mentality.”

    “He sees LeBron as a runaway slave,” the Bad Rev. said.

    As a man of the cloth in equal standing to my unesteemed counterpart, it’s clear to see that the Bad Rev’s ridiculous posturing is still getting the cameras pointed his way. But probably not in the way even the old cynical snakeoil salesman would even dream of. (Though he wouldn’t give a shit the reason why, as long as they’re pointed his way).

    Jason Whitlock, of Fox Sports and a black man, nailed it best from the obvious race angle. LeBron is just being a selfish dickhead, and not worrying about racism at all – not because the problem doesn’t exist at all – but because it doesn’t exist where it doesn’t fucking exist.

    “Jackson and other African-Americans need to follow LeBron’s lead,” Whitlock wrote. “We look foolish. We look hypocritical. We come across like people who have little genuine interest in seeing racial prejudice disappear and more like people who just want it to swing in our favor.”   

    The Bad Rev, like Al Sharpton and the rest of the MLK posse who were left behind in drooling limbo after the 1968 Memphis assassination, is a complete cretin – a politician and hanger-on who saw a good thing and milked it for tee-shirt sales and publicity for disgraceful decades, and counting. Like many charismatic people and evil men of God, Jesse Jackson is a total bullshitter who gets people to believe that he knows something they don’t.

    Furthermore, the Bad Rev’s comments reveal nothing so much as a totally humorless PC cottage industry, where the only interest is self-perpetuating their own paranoid interests that have no bearing in reality.

    Or, as Whitlock, a sportswriter who’s apparently not only dangerously sane but also ethical, says:

    “We’re a nation of jock-sniffers and hypocrites. It’s not surprising so many of us fall for the crap spewed by Jesse, Rush, Al, Hannity and all the rest.”

    It’s not often another man’s words suffice for the God-fearing faithful. But in this case, Amen.

Contact this author at revstashtin@screamingmajority.com

By D.G. Lawrence

    With another World Cup in the books, we have found something that Spanish men are good at besides groping American female tourists.  Right now they are probably celebrating with a few gallons of wine or a new pair of really freaking tight blue jeans.  And we are left to ask ourselves: What has America learned about its relationship with soccer this time around?  Probably nothing we didn’t know in 2006.  Or 1994.  Or whenever. 

    Soccer stirs up a variety of reactions for Americans.  There’s the guy who roots really hard for the U.S. team until it inevitably shits the bed.  (He’s the same guy who gives a damn about medal counts during the Olympics and maybe even admits to watching curling.)  He thinks this emotional investiture makes him patriotic, or appear so, and he’s done with the Cup once the Americans are bounced.  (As if digital cable and military might weren’t enough to win the Awesome Country Contest). 

    There’s the guy who appreciates the Cup every four years, almost kinda can figure out the intricacies of the game and occasionally needs a reason to slack off at work or drink a few beers at 2 p.m.  He appreciates athletic skill.  He might be lonely.    

    There’s the doofus who can’t enjoy watching any sort of game without a rooting interest.  He puts “Go Kyrgyzstan!!!” as his Facebook status because he got a handy-dandy there once while backpacking after college.  The handy was not free.    

    There’s the guy who thinks he’s being original and clever when he drunkenly declares: “It’s not football.  It’s fucking soccer.”  He thinks soccer is “faggy” and un-American, and might even see it as part of a Euro-communist plot against Walmart, Travis Tritt and Jesus.  (He is different from the guy who simply couldn’t give a shit about soccer.  This latter person is much easier to hang out with). 

    Then there’s the rare person who actually pays attention to soccer all the time, can name the players, and knows whether they play in the English Premier League, MLS or who-knows-where-else.  You might know this guy; you probably wonder about him sometimes. 

    There’s a multitude of reasons why we don’t “get” soccer, many of which are cultural.  The shorts are – eh – maybe a little bit too short.  The players are awfully scrawny.  It’s all very European.  Could you imagine the New Orleans Saints kissing each other as they hoisted the Lombardi Trophy last February?  No.  But there was more smooching going on after yesterday’s final than occurs in a typical episode of “The Bachelor.”  And you think you would ever see Lou Piniella wearing a SCARF in the dugout?  What about Ditka?  I think I’ve made my point.    

    Then there are many of us who just don’t care for the game.  The flopping is insufferable (and enraging to anyone who knows anything about Johnny Unitas or Joe Namath).  We even complain about the officiating in soccer, as if it could be any more subjective than the perpetual hair-pulling shit that goes on in the NFL, NBA and MLB.  We moan about soccer refs who don’t have to explain their calls and arbitrarily add time to and end games.  (Sorry: it’s “matches.”)

    We almost made it out of our quadrennial soccer invasion without the excruciatingly unfunny P.J. O’Rourke offering his two cents about it all.  Almost…

    O’Rourke – who as far as I can tell fancies himself a cleverer, less banal version of Andy Rooney – made several oh-so-cute, tongue-in-cheek suggestions about how to improve soccer in a recent piece for The Wall Street Journal, including the timeless “there’s not enough scoring” argument.  He talks down to soccer as an “anyone can play it” sport. (Isn’t that one of the things we celebrate about baseball?)  He even cheekily suggests that soccer players start using their hands. 

    O’Rourke’s inane observations are innocuous as always, but he does manage to sound like a provincial moron.    As if bashing soccer somehow makes you a better American.  Like recycling or buying war bonds.  He’s really no better than the Euro-schmuck who thumbs his nose at “American Football” even though he clearly does not understand it.  Ever try to explain our beautiful game to that guy?  Yeah, he’s not listening either. 

    If you truly enjoy sports and can’t find redeeming qualities about soccer, you probably aren’t trying too hard.  If you just don’t like it, try to remember that there’s no sport at all in making fun of it.  It’s like learning to play the vuvuzela or challenging Vincent Pastore to a footrace—it’s as pointless as it is easy.

    We know soccer’s not America’s thing, but maybe some of us dig it anyway.  I see beauty in the game and enjoyed watching this past month.  Now another four-year layoff is in order.  I suspect many of my countrymen and countrywomen agree—on both counts. 

Contact this author at dglawrence@screamingmajority.com

By Rev. Eugene Stashtin

    Robert Byrd, that Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, lies in state in the U.S. Senate, after assuming his ultimate end in the unwanted-sodomy line in Hell last week.

    On this earthly plane, his dry old husk will be visited and honored by no less than the President and absolutely every whoring grabasser in the hallowed free press of this great country. (He was dear to many, by many accounts).

    Byrd was known as the “Prince of Pork” for pulling billions of dollars’ worth of bread and circuses to keep his hapless, soot-covered West Virginia constituents bringing their ignorant asses back to the polls; gleefully and greedily the evil bastard kept sucking at the tit of the American taxpayer, popularly known as Congress.

    A look over his fifty-plus years in the Senate would horrify any true liberal: bloodthirsty Vietnam hawk, lead filibusterer of the Civil Rights Act… a man who wrote, as a valiant youth, that he’d rather die a thousand deaths than serve alongside “race mongrels” that were overrunning his country.

    Oh – and that Exalted Cyclops title I mentioned before is the accurate rank he achieved with those white-robed fucktards decades ago.

    Yet no less than a black President and the rest of the sycophants with a ticket to ride in this country are harmonizing themselves breathless as to Byrd’s chameleon-like powers to camouflage to a darker shade of brown, like the rest of the politician diarrhea around him.

    Again, politics whitewashes the man (to mix more metaphors). To wit:

    A. During Stuttering George’s reign, the powers-that-be conjured up Soviet-style, days-long queues of worship for Ronald Reagan and even Gerald Fucking Ford, in a vacuum as divorced from reality as the Bedtime for Bonzo star’s drooling, inhuman end.

    B. Ted Kennedy, who would have been indicted for Chappaquiddick-something in a universe-according-to-Hoyle, was toasted as a “liberal lion” of the Senate – and not as a drunken disgrace from a criminal family who held back an actual progressive agenda for decades because he wanted votes/to stay in power/ more women/ more booze/ etc.

    C. Joe McCarthy even received the lying-in-state honor in 1957, after a fruitless search for Commies at the bottom of every whiskey bottle.

    These “statesmen” jerk each other off from caucuses unto the grave, and beyond. It crosses party lines, genders, and races. Homophobes looked the other way when Larry Craig tapped their shoes at the Senatorial urinals – until the rest of the country smelled the hypocrisy, and the other liars were forced to eat one of their own. Similarly, Bill Clinton and Obama, our “black” presidents, held the line and spoke glowingly of Byrd at services on Friday.

    Because these people are not people. They’re swine we keep sending back to the troughs of wealth and luxury because they’re intelligent, diligent and unscrupulous enough to lie without pause to us non-mutants. That’s how Robert Byrd, Gerald Fucking Ford, and even drunken Joe McCarthy were given heroes’ honors by their fellow thieves and hell-bound pigs.

    The universe does indeed have its upside, however. The Prince of Pork may have smeared his name and ill-begotten gain all over his home state. But that’s only West Virginia. And in another decade or so, they’ll start renaming all those schools and roads and libraries he left in his likeness for corporate sponsorships anyway. His Hell, like so many other demagogues, is to vanish without so much as a footnote in the annals. Ashes to ashes, crud to crud.

    Hallelujah. 

    Amen.

Contact this author at revstashtin@screamingmajority.com

By D.G. Lawrence

    Poor Wile E. 

    At least we can say he was an idea man (or coyote, I suppose).  And a man of action.  With our economy still in the shitter and unemployment still near 10 percent, it’s time we came up with an idea or two, or maybe put some of the ideas we already have to work. 

    On Hannity last night, the wonderful Newt Gingrich said Democrats “don’t understand” how jobs are created, who creates them or what incentivizes job creation.  (Newt also saw fit to note that the unemployment rate in the White House is “zero.”  Thanks, Newt.  You used to have a contract with America.  Now it’s a contract with Fox News, and I’m sure it’s quite lucrative). 

    Well, calling an entire party stupid is about as smug, unhelpful and prickish as accusing Republicans of trying to sabotage America.  What?  You say Huffington Post’s Bob Cesca just did that very thing yesterday?  And he used the Beastie Boys as a vehicle?  Don’t I feel stupid…

    But never mind Newt and Cesca being their usual condescending selves—Dems don’t have a lack of understanding on how to create jobs and help economic recovery; it’s lack of consensus that’s the issue.  Smart Democrats understand quite well their particular plan for stimulating the economy.  Conservatives understand their own plan for doing the same thing.  They’re just, um, completely and utterly different.

    In short, many Democratic econ nerds argue we need to ignore the massive federal deficit for the time being, borrow money at record-low interest rates and spend that money for job creation (by investing in clean energy manufacture, for instance).  Remember?  We talked about this not too long ago. 

    Contrary to what this Cesca guy and some other liberals think, Republicans aren’t fighting this plan just to be contrarian (well, maybe some are).  But if you want to really understand a different view, take a look at Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal column by Allen H. Meltzer, an econ professor at Carnegie Mellon.  Meltzer states that Obama and his advisers are ignoring the lessons provided by past presidents who used business tax reductions and curbed spending to encourage hiring and thus spur recovery.  (Meanwhile, two pages in front of Meltzer’s piece, weekly columnist Thomas Frank makes his own case for the “borrow now-recover soon-pay later” plan).  Not only will deficit spending fail to provide a boost, they say, but also will have detrimental long-term effects.  Shit, we’re in it for 12 zeroes already. (That’s a trillion. Put a 13 in front of it.) 

    Wile E. wouldn’t just stand there and shake his fist (or paw).  He’d call up ACME and get some badass dynamite-wired roadrunner trap or something.  We have to do something beyond calling one another idiots, communists, hitlers and whatever else.  To be honest, each view appears to have its merits, and both seem plausible to me.  Then again, I am an idiot, so someone else is gonna have to make the call on this whole economy thing. 

    At least I recognize I’m an idiot.  It’s not too late for you. 

Contact this author at dglawrence@screamingmajority.com