SPEAKER ON THE BRINK

Aquarian Weekly
9/27/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
SPEAKER ON THE BRINK
The Sad Tale of Kevin McCarthy Continues

It’s weird, right? Doesn’t it seem like Republicans are trying to not get elected ever again for anything? First, they have a criminal, who already lost an election three years ago by nearly eight-million votes coughing up former red states in the process, at the top of their presidential ticket. And they repeatedly send doomed candidates to the slaughter who mimic his “stolen election” craziness. They ban abortion, which six-out-of-ten Americans abhor. They deny climate change after five of the hottest years on record, which most Americans want addressed. They defend gun manufacturers and block sane gun regulations in the wake of dozens of mass shootings annually, which is gaining support among voters. And in all states that they run they make it more difficult for citizens to vote.

And now they’re going to shut down the government in the middle of a childish and very public inner-party spat that makes it look like their whole plan is to wreck America. Or as the current Speaker of the House, California Republican Kevin McCarthy put it this week, “They just want to burn the whole place down.”

Mind you, Republicans do not control two-thirds of the federal government, and yet, for some reason only known to six or seven MAGA Morons, they are going to do the one thing that is guaranteed to bury them in opinion polls and further motivate Independents and moderate Republicans to vote them out next fall. You would think the Speaker could wrangle enough votes to at least provide the Senate with a budget to fund the government, the most important job of congress, instead of floating strange evidence-free impeachment inquiries and trying to embarrass law enforcement on Capitol Hill for hours on end, before giving his colleagues a week off with two weeks left to the deadline.

But, nah.

No one should vote for Republicans until they right this ship.  Which sucks, because it fails to put a check on Democrats…

These appear to be the actions of someone who just wandered into the Capitol, like that guy who’s going to prison for four years for putting his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk on January 6. But McCarthy, nearly 60 years-old with a marketing degree, has been in congress for 17 years. You would think he could envision the shit storm he is orchestrating. But wait, why is he Speaker in the first place? Ah, right. He needed to persuade these MAGA Morons to get him enough votes to gain the gavel after a record-shattering 15 votes (longest such proceedings in 164 years). And what did McCarthy give up getting those votes? Oh, right. He handed the majority party the right to have any member call for a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. This was unprecedented idiocy that no Speaker has had to face in the 234 years of the U.S. House of Representatives, but what choice did he have? It was either that or go home. He wanted the damn job, and now he has it, and it comes with essentially no power. He cannot get the requisite votes for anything. He didn’t even have the votes for his sham impeachment inquiry, which means that it’s a toothless political exercise that is also wildly unpopular. Seven out of ten Americans don’t want it, so, of course, Republicans are doing it. They apparently are begging to get shellacked at the ballot box again.

Let’s review: McCarthy is fucked. His party is fucked. The country, as long as Republicans are in charge of anything, is fucked.

I am going to reiterate what I have written here since January 6, 2021, and the ensuing striking down of Roe v Wade by the corrupt Supreme Court jammed with lunatics by scheming Senate Republicans, who moved heaven and earth to rob women of their reproductive rights; the first elimination of citizen rights in my lifetime: No one should vote for Republicans until they right this ship.  Which sucks, because it fails to put a check on Democrats, who continue to have it easier because the Grand Old Party doesn’t seem to want to compete in the political arena anymore. They merely want to make Donald Trump and his 38-percent of the national vote happy. They show no desire to expand their voter block, which is shrinking by the generation, or work in a sane construct. They are fooled by conservative media that this is the way forward to govern. It is not. And if Democrats winning every special election in the last six years by an average of 11 points in a polarized atmosphere is any indication of what is coming next year, then I’m not sure what is.

When Republicans return with one week to go before the shuttering of the federal government due to their incompetence, McCarthy has one move left; work with Democrats on a bi-partisan bill that can pass a Democratic Senate and be signed by Joe Biden, a Democrat in the White House. Or watch those polls, and with it, Republican prospects for 2024 sink further. And with the end of gerrymandering in six states by next year and many of the members of congress fortunate enough to gain seats in purple districts in 2022 facing an ousting, this would be bad. For them. Good for people who don’t want American “burned down.” But to accomplish this would mean a revolt in the party and McCarthy’s eventual removal as Speaker.

It’s all so Shakespearean. But it’s what McCarthy signed on for: Fund the government or take a powder. Either way, as I see it, things go further sideways for the Republican Party; shutdown, backlash, or dump McCarthy and then who becomes Speaker? Bozo the Zealot? And can that person get enough votes from moderate Republicans, many of whom have taken to the airwaves and the D.C. press to deem this a “clown show” and “unserious” and “politically suicidal?” 

All of it is a terrible look for Republicans, who prove they are a mess and continue to entreat Americans to vote the other way.

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WHAT’S HAPPENED TO WOODY ALLEN IS BULLSHIT

Aquarian Weekly
9/20/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
WHAT’S HAPPENED TO WOODY ALLEN IS BULLSHIT

Woody Allen recently celebrated the release of his fiftieth film, Coup de Chance in Venice, Italy, which reminded me of a piece I had been working on in the spring of 2021 about the unconscionable smearing of his name and legacy by first the mentally disturbed Mia Farrow and her brainwashed kids, then a lazy press, and finally the victims of a vapid media echo-chamber. Alas, I was distracted by more pressing current events, but I think I need to get this out, and not merely because I adore Woody Allen’s work, but this entire sad episode of his having allegedly molested his then seven-year-old-daughter, Dylan, which had been intensely adjudicated 30 fucking years ago, exonerated him from all wrongdoing. And to be clear, this was not “fancy lawyering hired by famous rich guy” exoneration, but the more pressing “no evidence of any kind to substantiate dubious claims from a traumatized child” exoneration.

In the wake of HBO’s propaganda-addled Allen v Farrow that further perpetuated this egregious lie, and the reemergence of Farrow’s attack dog kids, Dylan and Ronan, to try and censor Allen’s 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, I was taken aback. But when Amazon, which had negotiated a multi-picture deal with Allen sacked him, then American theaters refused to carry his films, and many of his supposed friends and colleagues ran for cover, I could no longer abide it. I needed to state, “What’s happened to Woody Allen is bullshit.” Nearly three years later, it still is bullshit. 

To be fair, Woody, 87 years-old now, doesn’t seem to miss a step and keeps working on what he’s always called his “little films.” He is pleased to just have the money and support to keep creating his art. But it endlessly irks me that he’s lumped in with the Weinsteins, Cosbys, Spaceys, and Trumps of the world when unlike them, he co-operated with authorities, had his private life, body and possessions inspected beyond reproach, endured two long trials, invasive forensics, and was again cleared due to lack of any evidence. A psychological evaluation of Dylan exposed that the poor, exploited child had changed her story numerous times throughout and appeared to authorities to clumsily regurgitate a flimsy script conjured by her mother, and Allen’s former lover, actress, Mia Farrow.

Farrow, who has been repeatedly outed as a horrid mother figure to ten adopted children, allegedly used Dylan, one of four biological offspring, as an emotional cudgel for vengeance against Allen for his relationship with one of Farrow’s adopted daughters, the twenty-one-year-old, Soon-Yi Previn, whom Allen married in 1997 and is still with to this day; the couple have two children. One of the other nine of Farrow’s adopted kids, the now 45-year-old Moses Farrow, in his blog, “A Son Speaks Out,” much of which fills a chapter in Allen biographer, Eric Lax’s 2017 Start to Finish: Woody Allen and the Art of Moviemaking, has outed Farrow’s severe physical and mental abuse that according to his accounts led to two of her adopted children to commit suicide at ages 27 and 17. These terrifying stories have since been echoed by Soon-Yi.

Perhaps the most psychologically abused of these children is Farrow and Allen’s biological son, Ronan, first named Satchel, then changed by his mother, who made false claims that he was Frank Sinatra’s child, a man she married at 21 in 1966 when he was nearly 50 (Sinatra would have been 71 when he did this proposed fathering – something the Sinatra family calls ‘a ludicrous lie’). Many allegations of unsolicited cosmetic surgeries prompted by Farrow on her son had somehow made him more loyal to her madness. He has used his otherwise noble defense of sexual victims in adulthood to hound his father relentlessly, including leading the charge to have Allen’s memoir dropped by Hachette Books, for which Ronan worked at the time.

Don’t take my word for it. If you find this an abhorrent take, then check the facts for yourself. It’s all out there.

But no one bothered to check the legal record on all this. The one that ultimately cleared Allen of the charges by law; not newspapers, social media, or activists: “The manifestations of Dylan were not true and had been made by an emotionally vulnerable minor trapped in a disturbed family situation and who responded to stress.” Sorry, this is the hard, cold facts. Yet here we are with Woody Allen in societal wilderness. It is, I repeat, bullshit.

I do have immense sympathy for Farrow, who was an abused child and suffered from serious trauma all her life, much of it by her father and the rest in the public since she was a teenager, exploited by the Hollywood star system, which had previously done irreparable harm for many damaged souls. She was emotionally injured and understandably angered by Allen’s at best peculiar actions and worst deviant behavior with Previn, so she simply heaped this pain on her former lover, for whom she was with for 13 years with no prior signs of sexual misconduct over dozens of films in which women actors were given prime roles – Mia garnering 13 – earning them Oscars with nary a complaint or inkling of misbehavior. 

So, despite having his name dragged through the mud in the early 1990s, and a stellar career of filmmaking and writing since, in 2021 he was suddenly ostracized from Hollywood, abandoned by his production company, and disallowed to have his work appear in American theaters. I think this is a horrifying miscarriage of justice and an abuse of the First Amendment, but which, again, seems to be fine for Woody. He has stated that he still supports the #MeToo movement, despite their unfair attacks on him and his livelihood, further illustrating a complete lack of accepting the truth. And that, as we know from nearly 30 years of this column, is bullshit and cannot stand without comment to the contrary. 

Women actors have stood up over these past years to defend Allen, his longtime ingénue, Diane Keaton, his more recent collaborator, Scarlett Johansson, as well as Kate Winslet, Angelica Houston, and others, including male voices. Many articles have been written questioning the entire episode’s motives and fallout. All of them like myself understand the difference between guilty people using “cancel culture” to explain away crimes and the unfortunate circumstances of familial in-fighting, spurned lovers, and the collateral damage of children caught in the crosshairs.  

Allen never cared much for Hollywood. Didn’t show up to any Academy Awards ceremonies when he was the industry’s resident genius, despite winning a ton of them. He did appear in 2002 after the 9/11 attacks to support his beloved New York City. But otherwise, he keeps on keeping on in the shadows. And while again this seems to be enough for Woody Allen it is not for me. I had to express my issues with this whole mess, much of it a matter of ignored record in service of accepted but misplaced demonization.

Don’t take my word for it. If you find this an abhorrent take, then check the facts for yourself. It’s all out there. And when you do, you’ll agree that, if I may state once more, what’s happened to Woody Allen is bullshit.     

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LET’S TALK EDUCATION

Aquarian Weekly
9/6/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
LET’S TALK EDUCATION

In the recent Fox News showcase of candidates vying to be Donald Trump’s running mate or at the very least increase speaking engagement fees, a subject caught my ear: “A crisis in education in America.” After laughing at this irony, since for decades Republicans have waged rhetorical war on intellectualism and over the past fifteen years unleashed a legislative assault on the public school system, I thought I’d check the statistics and see if there is indeed a “crisis.” Turns out there is! And Republicans are causing it.

The most egregious of course is in Florida, conducted as a political ploy by Governor Ron DeSantis, one of Fox’s also-rans, with its banning of books, although other states have indiscriminately implemented “selected reading” for students and have levied sanctions and threatened arrests for teachers daring to cross these arbitrary lines. There has also been a steady movement on the Right to sanitize American history to protect the feelings of white people. A repeated lie perpetuated on the teaching of Critical Race Theory being offered in grade school, or even middle to high school classes, has succeeded in ginning up the great unwashed. CRT, as they like to frame it – one, they can’t deign to say it, and two because it sounds more sinister that way – is a college-level course and even that is rare. And, come on, who thinks these people even know what CRT is?

This country has seen this kind of middling crap before. I direct you to the Scopes Monkey Trial, probably our most embarrassing chapter of this pogrom against education – I am leaving out the South’s rejection of African Americans to attend schools and universities because I don’t want to further upset white people, and let’s face it that had way less to do with education than systemic racism.

Nearly a century ago in 1925, a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The argument: the Bible takes priority over all human knowledge. Crazy right? Wait, read that last sentence again and think of the current state of 51% of our American citizenry in bondage to the government thanks to more idiotic Republican/Fundamentalist claptrap. Crazier still, Scopes was found guilty! But later the goofy verdict was overturned, not because it was abjectly stupid and unconstitutional but on some technicality.

For more on this sad footnote in our complicated history that Republicans try to hide from our kids, check out H.L. Mencken’s work on the matter – some of the finest journalistic writing ever. Seriously, Mencken kicked ass.

Nine out of the ten worst educated states are run by Republicans.

But things have certainly reached a saturation point lately. Republicans want to run the federal government to strip women’s reproductive rights nationally and wipe out the Department of Education, so parents can decide curriculum. Now, as a person who feels we do need to restructure our education system, it is not to teach less or massage the public-school syllabus to match our national pride or placate superstitious zombies, it is to expand the scope of knowledge. To this end, we absolutely CANNOT leave education up to a mob of people who can’t agree on proper diet for their kids, or sleep time, or what content their offspring can consume. We had to put stickers on everything in the 1980s because parents were unable to decipher if “Fuck Like an Animal” was an appropriate listening experience for their eight-year-old daughters.

Also, please stop teaching that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America. This was a difficult feat for a man who never stepped foot on the continent, never mind that there were already people here and lots of other Europeans.

But I digress.

Did some research on the Most Educated States in America based on 2021 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Since this paper was founded and is published in New Jersey and I am writing this from my barn office on Jersey soil, I will not bury the lede: NJ is in the Top Ten. As a starting mean, let’s note that the national average is 43.8% – the share of a state population with a high school and/or bachelor’s degree. That number already makes me cringe, but judging from some of the stuff that pops up as popular on Netflix and the cable ratings for Sean Hannity, it makes sense.

I think you know where I’m going.

The Ten Worst Educated States are as follows, West Virginia: 22.40, Mississippi: 25.64, Louisiana: 27.36, Arkansas: 30.87, Alabama: 34.46, Oklahoma: 35.32, Nevada: 35.70, Kentucky: 35.70, New Mexico: 36.99, Texas: 40.14.

Firstly, can someone explain to me how in 2023 only two out of ten West Virginians have graduated from any level of schooling?

Second, you got it: Nine out of the ten worst educated states are run by Republicans. (For the record there is a Democratic governor of New Mexico, but it’s a purple state, so there could be some fucked up stuff in there already, but to be fair, the party does also run the legislature.) But that’s one out of ten.

I repeat: Nine of ten of the worst educated states are run by Republicans.

Is there a crisis in education?

To finish our research let’s peek at what the statistical ratings are for Most Education States.

Unless you’re from West Virginia, I think you know what’s coming.

The most educated states in America: Massachusetts: 83.03, Maryland: 76.73, Connecticut: 72:06, Vermont: 71.40, Colorado: 69.30, New Jersey: 68.85, Virginia: 67.33, New Hampshire: 67.20, Minnesota: 63.98, Utah: 63.31.

Come on, NJ, let’s get this to at least seven out of ten!

Eight of the ten states are distinctly NOT run by Republicans, and Virginia has just recently flipped its governorship, and is likely to flip back.

But… Massachusetts. Wow. Completely, shamelessly indoctrinated in liberalism. There is no more “woke” section of this nation. Shit, there’s a reason DeSantis sent those migrants up there. Turns out this was a boon to the migrants, at least if they wanted to learn stuff, instead of being sold that education is a progressive, elitist, radical plot to turn our kids into snowflake robots.

Look, if there is one thing I’ve learned from six decades of being a free thinker, despite Catholic school and mediocre public schools and years of reading and research and never being complacent on what new information emerges from the apparently dwindling great minds of this world: Knowledge is Good. (If I may borrow from the good people at National Lampoon).

Republicans think it’s bad, and then they stand on a stage and pander to the Fox News agenda of denying truth and pass this disease onto our kids. And those kids grow up to storm the Capitol and go to jail and then apologize for being duped by a lunatic.

But judging from the overwhelming number of Gen Z voters – many of them having endured locked downs from school shootings and are far more respectful of gender identity, race, and sexual preference, and sure as hell don’t want the government to control their bodies or choose the Bible over all human knowledge, I think we’re going to be fine.

Republicans on the other hand will be forced to keep running monosporic fascist narcissist domestic terrorists like Trump for high office or start educating their children better.

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WHAT THE HELL IS CHRIS CHRISTIE DOING?

Aquarian Weekly
8/23/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
WHAT THE HELL IS CHRIS CHRISTIE DOING?
Corpulent Kamikaze from New Jersey Explained

Good question.

Once a popular and within his party revered governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie had his time to run for president. That time was 2012. He did not run. Instead, he chose to run the year Donald Trump was in a contract dispute with the National Broadcasting Network and decided to raise his brand by ruining the Republican Party and then after that particular joke ran dry, went onto wreck the country. During Trump’s rise, Christie bailed on his goal and became the first Republican to publicly back the leading candidate, working inside the wavering campaign, debate prepping and standing weirdly behind him as Trump made a mockery of democracy.

When Trump became president he dangled many jobs in front of Christie, something the venerable politician, considering his simpering fealty, thought would be a slam dunk to get. And it would have been for normal politicians. But Trump was a game show host who spent decades using a quasi-real estate business to build his celebrity while getting other people to pay for it. Trump didn’t know what the fuck he was doing and cared even less about it. And so he was duly informed by the ad hoc fascists behind him that Christie had made one of the grandest mistakes for any Republican back in 2012 when he embraced and worked with then President Barack Obama, a Democrat, to assist in the rebuilding of his state after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

Christie was out in the cold.

But Christie was steadfast; throughout Trump’s horrid run of governance from 2017 until the insurrection of January 6, 2021, the former governor now claims he hung around in an attempt to be one of the few “adults in the room” surrounding Trump, keeping him from completely tanking America under the weight of his haphazard whims. Basically, Christie followed the actions of his Republican brethren Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Lindsay Graham; forget the terrible things Trump said about them and their families, emasculating them publicly and constantly, damaging their reputations, and just suck his ass like a pathetic bitch.

However, something happened to Chris Christie on that dark day in January of 2021. A profound sense of clarity overcame him; what many outside this space considered would be the final straw for Trump among his party. But to Christie’s dismay, his party kept defending Trump, making excuses for him, perpetuating his gambit to lie that he actually won an election he was pummeled in by nearly eight million votes – yeah, that’s the ticket, I won, not lost, and it was stolen, like the popular vote in 2016, yeah, stolen!

Christie, who had eaten more of Trump’s shit than anyone thought humanly possible, couldn’t stomach that, so he began extricating himself from his former sins, admitted he fucked up, that he now realized that Trump was evil and stupid and hated America and democracy and treated the country like all his failed private businesses. He was likely to run again in 2024 and he had to be stopped.

Christie, mostly a poser phony jackass who sucked at governor, is here to make some noise.

Some months ago, despite no ideological lane or foreseeable constituency, Christie announced his bid for the presidency. Throwing his hat in the 2024 race seemed silly. Ron DeSantis, humiliated governor of Florida, was poised for coronation should Donald Trump implode, which he most assuredly would, and there was several (turns out four) investigations that were to end up with Trump and his cronies indicted for the 2020 and 2021 shenanigans to take down the federal government and piss on the will of the voters. DeSantis was next up! What the hell was Chris Christie doing, exactly? He’s not MAGA, he’s not a culture warrior decrying “Wokism.” He wasn’t even a former cable news commentator. He’d retired back to Jersey. Out of the game.

But wait…

Ron DeSantis sucks. He is broke and has shed twenty poll points since the moment anyone outside of the sinkhole of Florida heard him utter a word. There is no more second place, just a giant hole where once stood an empty suit. So, Christie decided to do what DeSantis could not; he became Donald Trump’s troll under the bridge to the former president’s unwitting Billy Goat Bluff: Tormenting him on social media, taking to news shows and fake news shows, legitimate press and the goofy right-wing echo chamber of horrors. Trump’s a loser, he said. Trump’s a liar, he cried. He’ll sink us all – Republicans, Independents, Democrats. He must be stopped!

At first, again, this seemed silly. What’s the end game, to merely trip Trump up? Name calling and verbal fisticuffs have greatly assisted in faking the gullible unread and unwashed from believing Trump is good at debate. He is not. My fifteen-year-old-daughter would eviscerate Donald Trump in a debate. I might even feel bad for him. But Christie said he was in it to win it and suddenly he is tied with the fumbling DeSantis for second in New Hampshire and gaining in Iowa for primary positions he had no business sniffing in the spring.

And his only platform is taking Trump down. He says a few things about President Biden but considering the economy humming at a record rate and the bogeyman inflation cut from nine percent a year ago to three percent currently and all-time lows in non-wartime unemployment, and not really being into the Hunter Biden sweepstakes, that’s all Christie has got. And he does not mind playing the kamikaze. Republicans don’t want him, but that has not stopped Trump’s corpulent pit bull from gnawing at his shinbone day after day.

And now with only a week to go before Trump surrenders himself to yet another district indicting him – mugshots to come! – and a debate stage he will skip, because what’s the point? He’s forty points ahead of anyone close to him and apparently no one in this field beside Christie wants to take him on. (My daughter is busy with Minecraft). One guy said he’ll pardon him if elected to an office Trump wants, and if this idiot were within twenty points of the Donald, he would call him every racist name in the book.

And so, Christie, mostly a poser phony jackass who sucked at governor, is here to make some noise. We do that in New Jersey. And it is rarely pleasant.

Let’s see how far this noise goes.

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OHIO CALLING

Aquarian Weekly
8/16/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
OHIO CALLING
Another Fascist Republican Defeat to Democracy & the Call of Women’s Productive Rights Nationwide

We’re not going to stop until Republicanism is dead. Period. And we’re going to use the tool of women’s reproductive rights to do it, because so far, the not-so-silent majority is on an unprecedented winning streak to send the fascists a message nationwide. On August 8 a record turnout of highly motivated voters rejected a scam by a super-majority of Republicans in Ohio to make it harder for the will of the people to change their state constitution. This cheap and losing tactic was lashed together haphazardly for the fascists to stop the codifying of women’s reproductive rights that they robbed from them. And so, Ohio joins Kansas, Michigan, Kentucky, Vermont, California, and a growing number of states to stamp out the illegal virus heaped upon the U.S. after the ignominiously unconstitutional striking down of Roe v. Wade by a corrupt Supreme Court last summer. And it is not going to stop.

It was a nice try by the fascists to whip up a special election referendum to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution from a majority to sixty percent. After all, fifty-seven percent of its citizenry want legal and safe access to abortion and that issue is on the ballot this November. This is thanks to a petition that doubled the number (700K) needed to get it there. Republicans had to stop it, because these hypocrites who and claim that the striking down of Roe v Wade lets states decide. But they don’t want states to decide, because when they do their anti-woman policies go bye-bye. And so, they play games. And they lost this game, and will keep losing these games until they either give up, come to the table on a national referendum to return women the rights they’ve had for half a century, or die on that hill.

I would take either… but prefer both.

The assumption by the Republicans who cooked up the idea of taking the voter’s voice from them was that not enough of them would notice – low turnout in early summer. And so, they changed the rules (even though this same body of “legislators” banned special August elections just last year) and hoped to crush the democratic process.

But democracy went all democracy on them.

Democrats, Independents, and a surprisingly considerable number of Republicans from districts Donald Trump won by ten to fifteen points voted to strike down this “Issue 1” scam, in some cases by forty points. The ballot-box slaughter was a vehement rebuke of fascist tactics. And in the fall, they will lose again.

This November they will finish the job and notch another victory for women’s rights and put fascism on notice once again.

By the way, as a matter of record and sweet revenge, the final tally was 57-percent voting “no” on Issue 1, the exact polling number that want legal abortion codified into their constitution.

And if August 8 and red-state Ohio standing up for women’s reproductive rights is any indication, the momentum and furor over the disastrous Supreme Court Dobbs decision has not eased. If anything, it has gained fire. Just a few months ago Wisconsin, a severe 50/50 battleground state, elected a liberal judge, flipping the court for the first time in fifteen years to stop the draconian anti-women laws sanctioned by state Republicans. This all-but guarantees a lawsuit against their unconstitutional shenanigans will be successful and as a bonus will spark a long-overdue redistricting to disallow fascist Republican gerrymandering, which is one of the severest in the nation.

You see, Republicans, who are in the minority on almost every issue; gun violence, climate change, “Wokism,” LGBTQ rights, and abortion, among many others, have only been competitive because of heavy gerrymandering. They have no national voice – having lost the raw majority vote in every presidential election except one (2004) – for the past thirty-five years, and with Mr. Soon-to-be- Convicted at the top of their ballot, this will stumble closer to half a century. They must stop you from voting, otherwise they don’t exist. Most Republicans are in their 70s and 80s and the new flock of teen-to-thirty voters (Gen Z) are progressive, politically aware, and apparently voting in record numbers. The University of Ohio students had a 95-percent attendance rate in this August 8 vote.

If I was stupid enough to cling to the Republican party at this juncture, I’d cheat too.

But this latest attempt to do so was sent packing in a red state by a large margin in the middle of summer.

This November they will finish the job and notch another victory for women’s rights and put fascism on notice once again.

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JAIME ROYAL “ROBBIE” ROBERTSON – 1943 – 2023

Aquarian Weekly
8/10/23
 
Feature
 

James Campion
 
 
JAIME ROYAL “ROBBIE” ROBERTSON – 1943 – 2023

Robbie Robertson was a lightning rod in the tempest of rock’s centrifuge, a 1960s poet noir with an anachronistic streak that drove him to capture the flipside of his manic life in song. His mouthpiece, his collaborative framework, his scuffle-brothers-forever was the Band. For one summer in 1968 they imploded the entire psychedelic merry prankster tune-in-drop-out Sgt. Pet Sounds zeitgeist with ancient music from the woods. Reverberations in Big Pink – basement booze noodling during Bob Dylan’s self-banishment from hipsville, as he morphed into a country bumpkin troubadour. From that spark came his own songs that twisted a generation and struck a chord of Americana emanating from this otherwise reserved Canadian songsmith and his boys on the prayer-wing.

Robertson was a guitar player first. He played it as if it might leap from his hands and never return. A prodigy that was exploited as a teenager and blossomed as a songwriter, he never lost this obsession that bordered on dangerous. Watching the seminal rock and roll film of all time again recently, as I introduced my twenty-year-old uber-talented singer-songwriter niece, Sydney Leigh to The Last Waltz, I am/was/always will be mesmerized by his trenchant fury on the instrument shining within his band’s framework – boogie-woogie to plantation blues and twangy country to folk-rock. The Band, upon Robertson’s request, worked in service of song, all of which he composed with their able assistance. You could see it when they played – all looks and listening and eye contact and compromise.

All of it began and wrapped up in the circle of his guitar.

When you think of Robertson, darkly handsome with Jewish-Native American blood, he is withdrawn and hyper-focused, and you think of those songs, and their borderline atavistic romanticism about the deep South (“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”), the epic struggle of the nineteenth century farmer (“King Harvest [Has Surely Come]”), down-on-their luck carnies (“Life is a Carnaval”), or the Biblical wanderers of arguably his best and definitely his most known composition, “The Weight.” Character-driven morality tales of lost souls emersed in cheap temptations of the demimonde.

He learned about these vagabonds and charlatans, sad sacks and high rollers from the Band’s only American; a pistol-amped Arkansan drummer and the ensemble’s first boss, Levon Helm, who had a voice awash in moonshine molasses and lent a languid bordello backbeat to the affair. But he mastered the storytelling vehicle from Dylan when the Band first agreed to back his mercurial nether ride on the infamous mid-60s “electric tours” of Britain and the U.S., with all the booing and catcalls and death threats and the brutal fury pouring from those performances.

You want to know about Robbie Robertson musically, you listen to the most famous of all bootlegs, The Great White Wonder – released in 2017 as The Royal Albert Hall Concert and his work with Dylan in 1966 during those tours. Especially “Like a Rolling Stone,” which at once made my wife tear-up and boiled something in me that is difficult to describe as mere anger, closer to a crushing disappointment in humanity and a rare empathy for the then spiteful and speed-addled Dylan. And then go find the clip of Robertson’s dueling guitar solos in The Last Waltz with Eric Clapton, which for my money is won by Robbie on pure grit and force. It is well documented that Clapton not only dreamed of one-day joining the Band but completely restructured his musical journey and professional career on their oeuvre.

He defined the last pathway to rock and roll.

A road dog from his teen years, most infamously as part of the legendary Hawks that backed a feral lunatic named Ronnie Hawkins, who took performance to alarming levels of spastic eruptions, earned Robertson lead-guitar duties and later as the right-hand of Levon Helm, who took the name and the band and moved it out of Canada and into the heartland. And that is precisely why the Band became a touring machine, something Robertson at times barely endured and oft abhorred. Suffering from severe panic attacks – one in which a hypnotist had to be called in to get him to the stage – was well depicted in perhaps the best song written about the pangs of a traveling performer, “Stage Fright.”

The revisionist history of the Band and Robertson’s sense of entitlement as its sole songwriter and de facto leader in documentaries and his memoir has taken some of his self-aggrandized autonomy away. Of course, in that “basement” – although it was more a downstairs garage space – in Saugerties, NY, the five members, all brilliant musicians and arguably (and I argue) the best Caucasian singing rock group ever, was deep collaboration. But one thing that never changed was Robertson’s retreat from the darkness that enveloped its sheepishly lovable bass player, Rick Danko and his near-death drug-fueled car wrecks, or Helm’s descent into heroin fogs, or the gin-drenched peril of multi-instrumentalist, Richard Manuel, who’s voice sounded as achingly fragile as the man who eventually committed suicide by hanging.

No teetotaler, Robertson, an only child who understood the duality of independent solidarity, kept himself centered inside the tumult of his times and his band and remained true to his adoration of the music that moved him as a shy kid steeped in the golden age of rockabilly meets swamp-stomp, a world away from tepid suburbia. His dreams of the mystical Beale Street and its bawdy Black rebels, pool-hall hustlers, and barroom fisticuffs melded seamlessly into his story-songs. He lived vicariously through the voices of these songs, usually sung by others, except for his later solo albums, and always with a mask of truth.

Robertson broke up the Band in 1976 with the Last Waltz concert that his friend Martin Scorsese turned into a visual masterpiece and then the two worked together on several of his films and other projects, including Robertson’s scoring of the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon about the genocide of the Osage Nation in the early part of the twentieth century. Robertson told everyone the separation was mutual, but the rest of the musicians in the group disagreed and went on touring and making records without him – none of them as good, but that would have been understandable when considering the last few Band records were not as good as their time with Dylan or immediately thereafter. It’s as if they missed the outrageous turmoil of their times, the best marriage of art and chaos.

Later in life, Robertson produced Neil Diamond and played behind Ringo Starr and Carly Simone and James Taylor, and his old sparring partner, Eric Clapton. He played the part of elder statesman for bands like my friends in Counting Crows, tutoring them on recording in houses not studios, and helping to stage many of the early Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies. But his legacy was created in those rooms with those musicians.

Together they formed the final bridge between the jump-jive-swing / blue grass / downhome blues and the pop / rock / soul that sounds today as fresh as it did when it was played in that basement. They ushered in the singer-songwriter, country-rock fusion of the 1970s that still reverberates in clubs and bars in kids with mandolins and fiddles and washboards and drums and hearts filled with song.

Robbie Robertson played guitar.

He wrote songs.

He defined the last pathway to rock and roll.

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MAGA CARNAGE

Aquarian Weekly
8/9/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
MAGA CARNAGE
The Final Perp Walk of Donald J. Trump

There was only one way for the Donald J. Trump experiment in governance to end: Facing a series of felony charges for defrauding citizens and attempting to subvert democracy. He promised “American Carnage” during his inauguration speech in January of 2016 and brought it to bear four years later on January 6, 2021. And now he is charged with the crimes he very publicly and merrily committed. A businessman who knew nothing about how the government worked, who was a Democrat all his life and decided to use the Republican Party as a marketing tool and then the United States as Trump Enterprises predictably descends into an indictment on four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. 

Yeah, it had to end like this.

January 6 was the darkest day in American electoral and modern presidential history, and what the Department of Justice has unfurled in a forty-five-page document are the illegal machinations of a madman, who just could not admit he lost – against brand and fragile “daddy love me” psychology – and chose to remain in power as a dictator, above the law, above the country, above the sphere of logic and decorum.

But January 6 was merely the culmination of two of the most horridly bizarre months following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election – 63 weirdly worded and strangely filed and ultimately defeated or tossed lawsuits, five state recounts, some of which awarded Biden more votes, and press conferences by crazy lawyer types.  But it didn’t have to end like this. Or at least for functioning humans. One of those types could have walked away once the wacky theories were debunked and all the faux outrage unfounded. You give it a shot, then you take your orange tan and the Bozo coif and go home. 

But, nah, it had to end in carnage. 

Not since George Washington abdicated a power everyone in his employ thought he should maintain to walk back to Mount Vernon, Virginia in March of 1797 with the peaceful transfer of power has any American president failed to comply with the Constitution’s framework. Until Donald Trump.

Well, you put a man in office whose name is plastered over everything he owns like some kind of twisted Liberace meets Al Capone, then it has to come to this. Trump could have gone bye-bye and gotten away with dozens of egregious malfeasances to out-right crimes during his presidency, but he just could not manage to negotiate the human-function apparatus. He had to make up some story of having been bested by cheating, because he could never lose to Joe Biden fairly. And now that level of ego, hubris, and living in a hermetically sealed lie bubble has come home to roost. The reckoning of the failed experiment of Donald Trump’s American Carnage is nigh.

Whether you like him or not, it had to end like this.

Mr. Frankenstein, your monster is here.

It turns out that the conjured lawsuits and fantasies of hacked or corrupt voting machines in Philly, vote dumps in Detroit, devious deep-state minimum wage vote counters in Atlanta, have consequences. To think, strong-arming state attorneys general and governors (all of them Republican), to “find votes” and make him the winner might end in legal jeopardy. Could you fathom going to sycophantic crazies for ideas like secretly creating false electors in seven states to sneak in Trump votes over legitimate Biden votes landing you in federal court? Strange how begging the vice president to send all the legitimate electors back to their states and anoint him King of America while Mike Pence repeatedly told him the half-baked scheme was unlawful, and Trump mocking him for being “too honest,” concludes in his arrest

And finally, what are the chances inviting an angered and armed insurrectionist mob to the Capitol to fight for their country and use “force” to protect his power on the day of the ratification of an election he lost, putting his vice president on the hot seat by telling his people on the mall “We can fix this if Mike Pence has the courage to do the right thing” and when he refused (doing his constitutional duty, which is largely ceremonial), unleash the hordes on him and nearly 250 years of American law and order could possibly put him a jury-decision away from dying in prison?

Come on, let’s face it, whether you like him or not, it had to end like this. Petulant children, even 74-year-olds, do not comply to what they do not deem acceptable. Losing was never an option for Trump. Instead, he would rather wreck a system he found irritating and disenfranchise your vote and send his white-supremacist-fascist-goobers to smash up the Capitol and injure and kill officers of the law than go away quietly. It’s his thing. The Tao of Trump: Everything he touches dies.

He has to do it. 

Cows moo. Birds chirp. Dogs bark. Trump Trumps.

And so…

He’s guilty.

Fuck the trial. Let’s use the Trump method of jurisprudence like he did with the Central Park Five, when he took out a full-page ad in the NY Times calling them scum and how they should be executed before given a day in court. I agree with that particular Trump’s method to handle this version of Trump. He is scum and he is guilty. 

But no matter what Trump you use to cut it, it had to end this way.

MAGA Carnage.

Don’t worry, though, the Republicans have a sequel.

Trump 2024 – Stay of Jail on Your Money and Votes!

And that will very much end like this one.

It just has to.

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SINEAD MARIE BERNADETTE O’CONNOR (SHUHADA SADAQAT) 1966 – 2023

Aquarian Weekly
7/26/23
 
Feature
 
James Campion
 
SINEAD MARIE BERNADETTE O’CONNOR (SHUHADA SADAQAT)
1966 – 2023

Sinéad O’Connor was my hero.

Wait, I can’t leave my wife out of this. Eric D. Moore and I would not have sealed our bond, the one that has lasted twenty-six years, twenty-four in marriage with a gorgeous, strong fifteen-year-old daughter, Scarlet (who briefly could have been named Sinéad) if not for Sinéad O’Connor’s voice, her music and the miniscule freak conclave of which we were and are and will forever be proud members. Had an extra ticket to see her play at the Beacon Theater in NYC. No one gave a shit about Sinéad O’Connor in August of 1997, except, apparently my bride-to-be and yours truly. Two years later “This is to Mother You” from her wonderful 1997 EP, Gospel Oak, the album O’Connor was touring when the two of us went to see her together for what turned out to be our first time alone together and the last time I would ever be alone again, was our wedding song.

Yeah, Sinéad was our hero.

She became mine much earlier. When I needed her – like I needed Warren Zevon when Zevon stepped in – she arrived like a gale force wind, horrifically refreshing.

Haunted by demons from her earliest sentient memories, defiant and reborn with a voice that coursed through your guts, Sinéad O’Connor pushed hard against what she thought was wrong and embraced with maternal aggression what she cherished. She was a holy mess, a furious angelic punk, and when you spoke to her, as I did, you can still hear the tremors of those battles in her throat, the almost whispered Gaelic pulse of words and breath that exploded into a thousand points of light when she sang. It was in her conversation that the spastic duality which fueled her art might be glimpsed.

She put it into the songs, on those albums, and when you saw her on stage – wholly present, like watching a reed dan le déluge – trying so damn hard to be the tough Irish lass but refusing to harden her heart. She needed that tool for the art. But as many of us know, it’s a painfully arduous balancing act. I could hear it in her voice, on stage, on record, over the phone. Sadly, today, she lost her balance.

When I wrote Prince Rogers Nelson’s eulogy for this paper in 2016, I spent a good part of it explaining what his music and times meant to the twenty-something me. Well, Sinéad owned a good deal of the latter part of my twenties into my thirties, from the opening notes of “Nothing Compares 2 U” – a song I adored in 1986 when Prince strangely handed it to one of his fringe bands, the Family instead of recording it himself – flooding out of the speakers of the shitty car I was driving towards dawn. It was revelatory, a shuddering tightrope declaration of pure adrenaline and hurt. Prince, no fan of O’Connor’s, understood the song belonged to her now. He said then, “Sometimes a song doesn’t find a home until it does, and this one has.” Because when she sings, “All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the backyard / All died when you went away,” Prince knew the score.

“Nothing Compares 2 U” went on to be a massive global #1 hit with a video in the how-nuts-can-we-get age that featured only her face. It is the first track on the second side of O’Connor’s second album. I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, one of the finest statements by a woman singer-songwriter ever, and when I was working on a pitch to the editors over at the 33 1/3 series three years ago to write about the record, I pointed out how pertinent it was to the woman’s movement of 90s power pop, rock, and indie expression, from Liz Phair to Ani DiFranco, P.J. Harvey to Alanis Morrisette, and bands like Bikini Kill and Hole.

And there would not have been that album or the Prince cover if not for the death of her mother, Johanna, who had suffered all her life from mental disorder, shoved aside in a patriarchal fascist state that was 1960s Ireland – no contraception or reproductive rights, no legal recourse against “marital rape”, laws against married women working, laws against battered women leaving their husbands, women disallowed from drinking in pubs. Sinéad watched her descend into madness and endured her ghastly mental and physical abuse, forcing her to a nunnery where she found her voice, learned guitar, and escaped to London at sixteen to make her way. When Johanna died it was as if the talons of a great predatory bird had lifted from her eighteen-year-old soul and allowed her once again to breathe and to grieve.

The songs on that album are as arresting as anything that had come from a male artist. Male artists cannot be this vulnerable, as much as they might try. Prince tried, and he wrote a damn fine song, arguably his best ballad, but it took Sinéad to see it was not a torch song, but a paean to past regret and the desperate need for a wayward kid to belong. Prince later admitted it was as much about his complicated relationship with his mother and the insular emotional cocoon he’d erected to survive a peripatetic childhood than a woman he was pining for.

Watch the video again. Sinéad begins to cry when she sings that line about flowers in her mother’s garden dying. The honesty of it is terrifying. In her infinite duality, Sinéad O’Connor sang “Nothing Compares 2 U” as she sang her own sad, pure, fierce songs, tenderly but so fucking strong.

This is what you got from Sinéad O’Connor from the very beginning to the bitter end. The balance was remarkable but unsustainable.

This is the same woman who refused to allow New Jersey’s Garden State Arts Center (now PNC Center) to play the national anthem before her show. I was there that night. We did not hear about this so-called fracas until the next day. What concert have you ever been to that played the national anthem? Anthems are stringent jingoism. Her music is infinite, borderless. O’Connor took the stage, bald and thin, inflamed by the rush of that music and put on a show for the ages, and when we all awoke, she was an instant pariah. Front page news. Outraged politicians. Frank Sinatra threatened to “kick her ass.” And in the swirl of that media frenzy, she proved her point: Violence, vengeance, patriarchal lunacy comes with all the “home of the brave” stuff just like pedophilia and systemic control over women in Northern Ireland came with the Catholic Church. And so, she appeared on Saturday Night Live two years later and ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II, the one that hung on her mother’s wall when she was a child, announcing “Fight the real enemy,” and officially tanked her career.

“I never wanted to be a celebrity, I’m a fucking protest singer,”

Sinéad O’Connor

It was as if she had killed the man. The backlash was brutal, and it came from everywhere. A few days later, she stood on stage and listened to twenty thousand New Yorkers, not KKK Alabamans, boo her mercilessly as she shouted Bob Marley’s “War” – the same furious acapella performance that presaged the torn photo – with unrepentant rage before falling into Kris Kristofferson’s arms. She was to sing at some Boomer celebrity thirtieth anniversary circle-jerk for Bob Dylan, who used to get the same shit from people for singing about the murder of Emmitt Till, a young Black kid massacred for purportedly looking at a white woman. In 1963, when honored at a Bill of Rights Dinner for his contributions to the Civil Rights movement, the twenty-one-year-old Dylan took to the dais and unleashed a drunken diatribe alerting the rich liberals before him to find another “voice of a generation.” He was out of that game. Too dangerous.

Sadly, but predictably, Dylan said nothing of the incident that overshadowed his stupid shindig, much to the consternation of many of his fans, including my friend, professor Tim Riley, who dedicated a chapter in his Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary to the glaring omission and its painful irony. The next week, actor Joe Pesci hosted SNL and ripped up a picture of O’Connor and threatened to “give her such a smack.” She needn’t say anymore.

But enough about that and enough about women speaking their minds against patriarchal madness, racism, pogroms on women’s rights, all of which Sinéad stood against even after she was declared a dead pop star. “I never wanted to be a celebrity, I’m a fucking protest singer,” she told Rolling Stone, when she simultaneously won Artist of the Year and Most Hated Artist in the same issue. It was in O’Connor’s ensuing work that she spoke the loudest – her constant battle with faith, be it Catholicism or Rastafarianism or Islam. She became a priest and a shaman, then changed her name, but she could have been a sixth Marx Brother or the fifth Beatle or submerged into X for all that mattered, because her truest spirit came from that uniquely quivering, impenetrable, irrepressible bottomless throat. And from that machine emerged multitudes; lyrics and melodies bursting with love and peace and heartbreak and independence.

She often sang about her children, she had four, the first one Jake, was born when she was only twenty-one. She was allegedly asked to abort the fetus by her management as her career was about to blow up; who wants to see an unmarried pregnant pop star? This was the same management who previously suggested she wear provocative clothing and do up her hair before she showed up with a shaved head in a dirty tee shirt. She was barely twenty then. Jake is thirty-one now. She lost her third, Shane, a seventeen-year-old troubled kid, haunted like her mother, like her mother’s mother. He hung himself last January. She never recovered. Soon after, she was on suicide watch. She went missing and ended up here in New Jersey last summer. We tried to reach out to her, find her. She came back, but barely. She’d recently popped up on Twitter under a pseudonym, her last tweet to the world was of Shane, “Been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul. We were one soul in two halves. He was the only person who ever loved me unconditionally. I am lost in the bardo without him.” Nine days later she was gone.

How delicate the balance.

And so, we are left with the songs and the memories of those incredible performances, and her marching for Black lives, Women’s lives, Irish lives, Human lives. Long after the shaved head and combat boots, long after her front-page stint as punk warrior, demon bitch she kept singing – and all those records are gems – and miraculously kept up the fight. Depression. Fear. Defeat. Resurrection. None of it silenced that astonishing singing voice. To this day, whenever I hear her hit those beatific notes on her stunningly gorgeous ballad. “Three Babies,” the feathered dance of falsetto on the sultry “Jerusalem,” the building sprint of “Thank You for Hearing Me,” the naked passion of “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” the gritty harangue of “No Man’s Woman,” the whispered gauntlet in “Petit Poulet,” the lilting grace of “Jealous,” or our wedding song, the sweet, compassionate, agonizingly expressive, “This is To Mother You,” I feel, we feel, as if I am, we are, in there with her.

There is too much to say, and I am shocked I got this out, because the first draft read like a man on the edge of a complete breakdown, but I need to share the last time I spoke directly with Sinéad.

It was 2014 for an AQ Weekly cover story on her last album, I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss. Erin and I had just gotten back from Ireland to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary, as we both share Irish blood, and we spoke about a mural outside Dublin’s Hard Rock Café, which had a stunning painting of her with the inscription: “Sinéad, you were right all along, we were wrong. So sorry.” Sinéad was so moved she stopped for a moment and took a long breath. “It’s very special to me,” she said. “I’d really love to know who did it.” I told her we all did it, and she laughed. I kept that part out of the piece. It was maudlin then, but it is so apt now.

I finally asked her about her disturbing “suicide” song on the album, “8 Good Reasons” in which she sings, “Don’t know if I should quite sing this song/Don’t know if it maybe might be wrong/But then again it maybe might be right/To tell you ‘bout the bullet and the red light.”

“Can you reveal the eight good reasons that are worth sticking around for?” I asked.

Without hesitation, she whispered, “My children’s eyes.”

She lost her balance, that’s all.

She is still my hero.

Our hero.

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BIDENOMICS

Aquarian Weekly
7/12/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
BIDENOMICS
The Dangers of Owning the Wild Beast 

Economics is not a science. It is certainly not a religion. To study it, parse it, analyze it points the way to madness. But owning it is a dangerous game. The Bengal tiger in the brush. Stay in the boat, the man said. And he was right. Because the thing in the dark has fangs and a passionate hunger. Taming it is a recipe for gouging and gnawing of flesh. To think about the results of you in the jungle with God’s perfect killing machine is not for me or you or the poor bastard running the Treasury Department to fathom. Some of this nation’s best and brightest have slunk slack-jawed in defeat from its considerable shadow. Boastful yuppies in power ties end up on the wrong end of a swinging rope. Lives and reputations end in tatters. Weeping the order of the day. Yeah, it’s best to let it be.

I have written very little about economics. There is a reason. I am afraid of it. There is this hoary thought in my head that once I finish this sentence most of the money I have in the bank and whatever ghostly form it takes in the stock market will go the way of the hoola-hoop and rock music. I will be left with fond memories and a cot in the poor house. And that is after one sentence. Given the choice of finishing this paragraph or going back to writing about politics or society or even sports and art is not a choice but a redeeming factor to my existence. And yours. We’re all in this together.

But having written all the above, I will attempt to report on the current economy here, which by all indications is showing two signs – fucking gangbusters and edge of disaster. Statistics, as stated already, are less than meaningless. Ask the guy sleeping on the street as your stepping over him. But statistically, all indicators are that we have roared back from the sinkhole of 2020. Even inflation has been halved. A year ago, we and world were at nine percent. Today we are at four, the world still at nine percent. That’s fucking amazing. America currently owns the most robust post-pandemic economy of any G7 nation. And with halving inflation, unemployment is at lows that you’d only have seen if you had a gig in 1969. I was six most of that year. My gig was electric football, the Jackson 5 cartoon, and choosing peanut butter and jelly for lunch. And we’re at some kind of record number of months of payroll increases and job growth as well. Consumer confidence is at a ten-year high. They tell me the GDP is crawling but doing so in the right direction.

In the economic jungle, we’re all stupid. Or tiger chow.

Of course, this brought our president out of his hermetically sealed chamber last week to tout it. And why not? He got the Inflation-Reduction Act through Congress, along with an era-defining Chips Act. A bi-partisan infrastructure bill was also done and done. He worked with the crazies in the Republican Party to avoid dogging on our bills a few months back. If his predecessor had done half of this, he’d be doing a victory lap while eating hamburgers, but not too strenuously, because he’s dangerously obese and mightn’t have lived otherwise. But there would be band-beating tweets aplenty to be sure.

But Joe Biden, with his paltry 40-percent approval rating absolutely should be reminding people that we’re in the midst of the third verse of “Happy Days are Here Again.” But I remind him, he is playing a scary game. Owning an economy that is precarious at best is mumblety peg with a hunting knife high on meth. The same indicators that ring the bells, and Wall St. hinted at it yesterday by shedding over 500-points, also toll the bad ones. If interest rates are jacked again, even with a booming housing market, there may be no stopping a late 2023 to early 2024 recession. How hard a recession matters to who is viewing it, whether you root for the fascists or the domestic socialists. The fascists dream of the nation to be plunged into darkness so Jesus can save us from the drag queens and the Mexicans. The domestic socialists want more money for more taxes to get us more government stuff, like college debt relief or free electric cars.

A rolling economy can bring confusing signs that come from the strangest places. And what emerges from those places is someone’s business, as Patti Smith once mused, but not mine.

For kicks, Biden used the moment to shat on Ronald Reagan’s most infamous boondoggle, Trickle Down Economics. A tale of fine yacht enthusiasts tossing their crumbs to the middle class to allow their parade of malfeasance and land rape. Thus, the president’s reference to the high times now as Bidenomics. In fact, he leaned into it as a way to prove that unfettered capitalism and hoping rich people and corporations pitch favors to Johnny Lunchpail, which for the record has NEVER happened in the history of humankind, was always a pile of elitist claptrap. Ground up economics, of which Biden also noted, though, is not a thing. There is no money down there. No one has or will ever care about the worker bees deep in debt and paying the piper for our share, whatever slice that is allowed.

But, again, I don’t know fuck-all about economics, and don’t want to know, but things are so sunny these days even the bleating corpse of Larry Kudlow was singing its praises. The very man who quit a cushy TV job lying about the economy to make up numbers for Donald Trump, so he could sell whatever clusterfuck was going on before January of 2021 as “the best economy is American history” while swearing they weren’t tea-bagging the rich’s ample testicles and leaving the rest of us to suck air is left to admit this baby is cruising.

I would normally apologize for such cheap and vulgar symbolism, but I’m writing about economics. This is my point in a nutshell. I once asked an assistant for celebrated economist and former chairman of the federal reserve Allen Greenspan for his thoughts on Quantitative Easing and he went on for twenty minutes about how to remove a cock ring from your molars.

Look, I am sure things are going swimmingly now, and if this was the summer of 2024, the politics of this would be a slam dunk. But we are so far removed from that we could have seventy shifts in the economic winds by the autumn of 2024 when the country decides to hand the operation over to either a domestic terrorist or a 100-year-old man. But the whole thing is a jinx. And I shan’t be touching this subject for another decade of so. It’s safer eviscerating the stupid.

In the economic jungle, we’re all stupid.

Or tiger chow.

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MARION GORDON “PAT” ROBERTSON – 1930 – 2023

Aquarian Weekly
6/21/23
 
Reality Check
 

James Campion
 
 
MARION GORDON “PAT” ROBERTSON – 1930 – 2023

I could not let last week’s passing of Pat Robertson go by without comment. He was a monster, a gutless bigot and purveyor of dumbness. He lived on a razor’s edge of sinister clothed in the evilest of vocations, profiting off fear and delusion. This did not make him a monster per se, even though he represented the most grotesque forms of the Christian disease. No, con men and carnies are a dime a dozen. This is what makes America thrive – feeding off the weak and desperate. We have no economy without dupes and predators. Nope. Robertson is a monster because he will be remembered for being the gateway drug to anti-intellectualism under the guise of holy order, a war against reason, freedom, and individualism traded in for a cult. And not just his Christian Broadcasting Network, or the 700 Club, or the dead-eyed gaggle of the emotionally damaged sycophants that flocked to them, but the Cult of America – knee-jerk hate nurtured from an irrational intolerance against fellow humans under the auspices of God’s will. The philosophy of systemic persecution that leads courts and congress to strike down personal sovereignty by citing superstition and voodoo. Roberson was a voodoo master. One of the worst examples of the hazardous virus of humanity. And now he is dead, and that is a cause to celebrate, as if felling Hitler or smallpox.

Unfortunately, his fumes live on.

Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson was a failure long before he ever shat upon the vox populi. Like most hucksters, he sucked at everything beside being a “preacher,” which is someone who blathers about things they cannot comprehend to fill voids in people frightened by life. Their weapon is conjecture. They take opaque reverences in the text of ancient cultures and interpret them to fulfill their agenda, then sell it as dime-store salvation. Preachers create a propagandized movement from random musings and once they see what sticks, they just slather on their own bullshit to complete the con. In a nutshell, this was Robertson’s schtick. He knew he was a serial liar, but the kick is he was happy to be so. Some people like to hump the darkness, they get off on the grift. It sustains them. The dung beetle is a content creature. Robertson lived in shit, his mind was a cesspool, his clogged with sewage. He drained them nightly on television. For money. And fame. Big cars. Fist-fucks. And worship. Every time he smiled into a camera, he endeavored to topple another pillar of America’s secure construct of secular democracy and replace it with his voodoo theology. Nice work if you can get it.

Things got real for the rest of us once Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States and let the wolf into the henhouse. Reagan’s trip jived with Robertson’s. These were men most comfortable cloaked in the myths of the White Man, the old Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism afforded to the few. Reagan hoped Robertson could bring in his evangelical flock to control the national narrative by suggesting that people stop evolving, stop reading, ignore AIDS, ignore Iran Contra, police brutality, immigrant hazing, pedophile priests and worship at the Cult of America. They worked together to normalize voodoo as a national treasure, close the collective mind and smile.

It was antiquated vengeance, an attempt to stop our cultural renaissance organically derived from generations of great artists and denizens of truth. An era of quite literal white-washing – the lie of the shining city on the hill with a mansion only inhabited by Christian gun-toting, Bible-thumping ignoramuses. They were Darwin’s runts. The last puppy to the teat. Miserable mange and black organs. A B-movie Roger Corman slaughter-fest of twentieth century thought burned at the stake and tossed back into the dark ages.

In order to complete this transition to the Cult, Reagan and Robertson needed for us to thrive in stupid – squash feminism as a threat to a theocratic order, suppress art as pornography and music as delinquency, sexual freedom as smut and free speech as dangerous. These are the forebearers of what we see today in the wrecked Republican Party of cultists and MAGA drones. Do not read, do not seek truth, do not live in reality. Hide your head, call the “other” out, save the nation from the hordes. Up is down. Wrong is right. When the myth is obliterated deny it and shout from the roof that the messiah has risen and storm the capitol and murder the infidels.

Well, Pat Robertson ain’t rising. There is no messiah for the anti-Christ, just the long black veil, the hooded reaper, and the tolling bells. Ring them loudly. Because although one disease has been eradicated there are more, and they are coming. We are infected with the preacher’s Cult and it is a growing virus, seducing our worst tendencies, idiosyncratic pestilence, a marching order of the perpetually ignorant.

Keep us stupid, buy the voodoo, vote against our interests, and live the myths.

This is the legacy of the monster. He’s not under your bed. He’s on your TV, bubba, he’s running for president, he runs Florida and Texas, he has giant flags on his pick-up truck and shames single moms and trans kids, bans books, and wants your money and your nation’s soul.

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