The coronavirus and its metaphors

The baby boomer doomer (a.k.a. the baby boomer remover) is kind of pretty, isn’t it? Kind of like a Christmas tree ornament…

I remember the hysteria when HIV/AIDS first emerged in the 1980s. There were calls to quarantine gay men, even though HIV is not at all spread through casual contact — I remember the wholly unfounded hysteria that perhaps HIV was quite easily spread — and, of course, there were the innumerable pronouncements that AIDS was God’s punishment. (“AIDS kills fags dead,” one slogan put it succinctly.)

Because we gay men were — and still are — considered to be expendable, of course the Reagan regime dragged its feet on doing anything about HIV. The “right” people (if we can even call them people) were dying, after all.

So now comes along a new virus, one that curiously takes out primarily older people. According to data from China, where the new coronavirus first hit, the death rate for the virus breaks down by age group thusly:

The chart is astounding. It suggests that newborns to those aged 9 have a zero percent chance of dying from the new coronavirus, and the death rate goes up with each age group. My age group (the 50s) is 1.3 percent. Of course you don’t want to be part of the 1.3 percent, but that’s still a pretty low death rate for a plague.

As soon as you are in your 60s, however, the death rate is approaching 4 percent, and in your 70s, you’re looking at 8 percent — and approaching 15 percent for those 80 and older.

No wonder they’re calling the coronavirus the “baby boomer doomer” and the “baby boomer remover.”

Not that the herd couldn’t use some culling, and not that I would be torn up if a huge chunk of the baby boomers were offed, but the psychosocial dynamics of a plague sure are interesting.

Because this plague is killing baby boomers, we’re seeing much swifter governmental action, of course; we must save every precious baby-boomer ass, right?

But if HIV/AIDS felt like “justice” to the right wing and to other homophobes (such as the Joe Biden voters of today…), well, the coronavirus seems to me, at least in its initial stage, to perhaps offer some poetic justice.

I mean, the cruise is the bright, shining example of baby boomer over-privilege: The baby boomers’ parents passed their wealth down to their baby-boomer offspring, and today, the baby boomers are passing “their” wealth down to the likes of cruise-line companies. (To be fair, they’re also putting the nation’s wealth into McMansions, recreational vehicles, world travel, unnecessary home improvement, bright shiny new cars, time shares, golf, fine dining, expensive wines, etc.)

Boomers ostentatiously spend the nation’s wealth on cruises, on which they expect to be treated like royalty. They are to be catered to exhaustively by wage slaves who aren’t paid anything even like a living wage — and woe to those wage slaves who don’t smile the entire time of their servitude.

I listened to a recent local NPR interview of a baby-boomer-sounding woman who was on the infected Grand Princess cruise liner stopped first in the San Francisco Bay and then redirected to Oakland, and its passengers quarantined at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California.

The whiny, impossible-to-placate baby boomer acted like she was Yelping Travis Air Force Base as though it were just an extension of her fucking cruise experience. Clearly, the entire world is supposed to be designed (just like a cruise liner!) to cater to the whim and whimsy of every single fucking baby boomer; it’s their world, and the rest of us are here only to serve them.

In the baby boomers’ world, you’re either a feudal overlord (a baby boomer) or a serf (everyone else).

So: While I usually don’t wish people pain and suffering, given all that I have experienced and observed in my Generation-X lifetime, including, as a gay man, seeing how my fellow gay men were treated (and not treated) during the AIDS crisis, and including how I have been under the baby boomers’ thumbs for my entire fucking life, am I going to shed a tear for the baby boomers (and those older) felled by the coronavirus? No, not really, unless one of the vanishingly few good older people, such as Bernie Sanders, were to be taken out by the virus.

Coronavirus, as plagues go, is pretty tame. The flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 killed anywhere from 20 million to 50 million people worldwide, with a death rate of 10 percent to 20 percent, and, very much unlike the new coronavirus, most of its victims were young adults.

That said, should we read into plagues? That is, should we see “signs” in them, including which portions of the population the plagues take and the plagues’ body counts?

No, probably, we should not, and there probably is no greater meaning in pandemics — no moral meaning, anyway — but it sure is fun to interpret them, as it were.

For instance, I kind of like to think of the coronavirus as like the earth trying to shake off the parasitic baby boomers in a global act of karmic justice. But that very well might be much more my own private fantasy than anything like fact, which I recognize. (Surely those who proclaimed that “AIDS kills fags dead” didn’t doubt whether or not that stance — that gay men have deserved to die of AIDS, probably as a death sentence handed down by An Angry God Himself — has been anything like factual.)

All of that said, even though I’m not in one of the highest risk groups for death from the coronavirus, I’m still at 1.3 percent.

Ironically, just Friday morning I had a routine check-up with my doctor. I felt fine. My vital signs were normal, including my temperature, and the doctor examined my throat and ear canals and apparently found nothing out of the ordinary.

But just later Friday, I started to develop an upper respiratory infection, which I’d avoided all of this past winter until now. I’m experiencing a lot of mucous production, nasal congestion, a bit of a headache and now, a mildly sore throat and an occasional cough. It’s annoying, but not severely debilitating.

Is it the coronavirus?

I’m guessing that it’s not, that it’s one or more of a myriad of other pathogens, viral or bacterial, that cause upper respiratory infections, the vast majority of which my body will conquer on its own, but even if it is the coronavirus, a death rate of 1.3 percent isn’t high.

Besides, as a Generation X’er, I’m used to life not being like I’m on a perpetual cruise. Entirely unlike the over-privileged and overly comfortable baby boomers, I can handle some pain and suffering — and even death, if it comes to that.

Ironically, the boomers, quite unintentionally, over the course of my entire lifetime have prepared me to face the worst while they avoid — like the plague… — even the least amount of trouble, inconvenience or unpleasantness.

P.S. Seriously, though, the coronavirus exposes how incredibly fucking stupid the masses are, hoarding such bullshit like hand sanitizer, bleach, rubbing alcohol and even toilet paper.

The ignorant masses excel at seeing risk where it does not exist and at not seeing risk where it does exist. And accordingly, they take actions that they don’t need to take and fail to take actions that they do need to take.

P.P.S. The title of this blog piece, if you didn’t catch it, is a riff on the late Susan Sontag’s book AIDS and Its Metaphors. (Sometimes something just comes into my mind like that…)

Have hope; mad kings come and go

Image from Cher’s Twitter feed

I haven’t written much about “President” Pussygrabber, and that’s in no small part because I never have accepted that he legitimately is the president of the United States of America (because he isn’t a legitimate president).

That’s for many reasons, but mostly, it’s because millions more Americans voted for his opponent in November 2016 than voted for him — and that was even with the help of Russia. (If there were no “there” there, the many concurrent investigations into the very apparent collusion with Russia very probably wouldn’t be ongoing.)

Also, of course, Pussygrabber not only is an abject moron and an ultra-tacky flim-flam man, but he had lost me well before the presidential election. He had lost me with his hateful, ignorant, racist anti-Mexican comments of June 2015 during his official “presidential” campaign announcement, and with the October 2016 release of the recording of him bragging that “when you’re a star, they [(attractive) women] let you do … anything,” such as “Grab them by the pussy.”

“Trump is toast,” I declared in October 2016, as I truly had believed that no one running for high office could survive having bragged, on tape, about “grabbing” women “by the pussy,” but here we are.

(Hey, again, he did lose the popular vote — substantially, which is why he has lied repeatedly about actually having won the popular vote. The anti-democratic [and anti-Democratic] Electoral College has got to go; we tell people how important it is that they vote, and then the candidate who won the highest number of votes doesn’t even take office, but the fucking loser does.)

Aside from his illegitimacy, Pussygrabber’s abysmal behavior in office disallows me from considering him to be the real president of the United States of America. Just this past week in post-hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, for instance, “President” Pussygrabber (in no certain order):

• Of course made it all about his baby-boomer self and his fucking “ratings.” He praised the governor of Puerto Rico for having sucked up to him dutifully, saying, “this governor did not play politics, he didn’t play it all … he was giving us the highest grades.” This good gubernatorial behavior of course was in contrast to the bad behavior of the valiant female mayor of San Juan, who for very good reason does not give Pussygrabber the highest grades (and who no doubt would destroy him should he even try to grab her pussy).
• Of course let the people of Puerto Rico — who are (largely brown and black) American citizens — know how inconvenient they are. He actually told them, “Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico.” For once he apparently realized fairly immediately what a colossal fucking prick he sounded like, so he added obviously insincerely, “Which is fine.”
• Of course made the devastation wrought by hurricanes into a competitive television “reality” show. He actually told the Puerto Ricans that Hurricane Katrina, as opposed to Hurricane Maria, was “a real catastrophe,” and indicated that Puerto Rico’s “16” dead was better than Katrina’s body count of “thousands.” Yay, Puerto Rico, you win! (Actually, Puerto Rico’s body count from Maria now stands at more than 30, and Katrina’s official body count, while way higher than it ever should have been — under the other unelected and thus illegitimate Repugnican “president” — never reached 2,000, so “thousands” is incorrect, but we all know that Pussygrabber never troubles himself with facts.)
• Of course had to keep the “reality” TV show thing going by actually having thrown rolls of paper towels to Puerto Ricans:

Reuters news photo

Because when your nation has been destroyed by a natural disaster, your No. 1 need is paper towels. (And the paper towels that Mad King Pussygrabber so generously deigned to toss to the rabble of Puerto Rico weren’t even the quicker picker-upper, which you would need after a hurricane.)

Seriously, though — look at that Reuters news photo above for a long time and then tell me that I should accept this fucking imbecile as my president, even if he actually had won the fucking presidential election.

(Oh, and as if he hadn’t made a big enough of a baboon’s ass of himself when he was in Puerto Rico earlier this week, during a speech for Hispanic Heritage Month at the White House yesterday, Pussygrabber very apparently adopted a mocking Spanish accent when he repeatedly said “Puerto Rico.”*)

Alas, despite the mind-blowing image and the beyond-pathetic information above, I do have hope for the United States of America. “President” Pussygrabber isn’t the first idiot in chief whom we have weathered (even though he does make even George W. Bush look presidential). We probably will survive him.**

And no, I don’t buy the oft-repeated argument that Pussygrabber is just the logical outcome of what most Americans are. No, he isn’t representative of most Americans. (Indeed, let me say it again: Most Americans did not vote for him; in fact, Billary beat him by 2.1 percentage points, or almost 3 million more popular votes.***)

Pussygrabber certainly is representative of his narcissistic and rapacious generation, the baby boomers, but not of all Americans. Indeed, Pussygrabber probably represents the last, pathetic gasp of rule by the baby boomers and rule by stupid white males (I can’t call them “men”).

I can’t see our socially conscious young adults of today, when they become presidents in the future, acting anything like Pussygrabber routinely does. No, Pussygrabber is an anomaly, the occasional illegitimate, mad king that we’ve seen throughout history.

He will pass.

Yes, it feels like passing a fucking kidney stone, but it will pass.

And our history books (the honest ones, anyway) will record “President” Pussygrabber as just another bad blip, just another blemish on our history.

P.S. Two things: One, Pussygrabber still can’t reach an approval rating of even 40 percent in most nationwide polls. This doesn’t bode well for his “re”-election. Don’t become complacent, but take some comfort in that fact.

Two, if you want to help out the people of Puerto Rico — whom you should want to help whether they are U.S. citizens or not — you can do so by giving what you can afford to give to the Hispanic Federation, as I have, and/or to another reputable aid organization.

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*As I have noted, the anti-Latino Pussygrabber is doing to the Repugnican Party on the national level what anti-Latino former Repugnican California Gov. Pete Wilson did to the party here in California (for his own short-term personal and political gain, Wilson planted the seeds that later would decimate his party here in California).

As Latinos are the fastest-growing group of people in the United States, I encourage the Repugnican Party to continue to alienate these voters.

**As far as nukes and nuclear war go, Pussygrabber is an abject idiot, but I don’t think that he’s suicidal. No vampire wants to die, but wants to continue to suck the blood of its victims for as long as possible.

***Don’t get me wrong; as I’ve written here a million times, it was a colossal fucking mistake for the (so-called) Democrats to make Billary Clinton, (with Pussygrabber) one of the most unpopular candidates for U.S. president in history, their presidential nominee. (As I have noted, I am not a registered Democrat and will not register with the Democratic Party again until and unless it becomes the progressive party that it once was.)

With their heads planted firmly in their rectums, the “Democrats” all pretended that Billary isn’t the widely despised, corrupt harpy that she is, and we have them to thank in no tiny part for “President” Pussygrabber.

The so-called Democrats had a winning candidate in Bernie Sanders, but they decided to coronate Repugnican Lite Billary instead because it was “her turn,” you see.

We’ll see if they learned their lesson. I much doubt that they have.

Billary won’t take the hint (after all, there is more money to be made!)

Like Freddy, Billary Clinton is the stuff of nightmares and absolutely refuses to go the fuck away, but insists on inflicting poorly produced sequels on us, each one worse than the one before it.

Two wonderful headlines from Politico today: “Trump Hits New Low in Public Opinion — But He’s Still Beating Hillary Clinton” and “Democrats Dread Hillary’s Book Tour.”

Indeed, Billary projects much when she claims, as she has in her pathetic new book (horribly titled What Happened, it’s due out on Tuesday), that Bernie Sanders ran for president only “to disrupt the Democratic Party.”

Billary blasts Bernie for “disrupt[ing] the Democratic Party,” but it’s far more important to baby boomer Billary to continue to profiteer from her sad, pathetic, overlong political career than it is for her to step aside for the good of the Democratic Party that sorely needs to pick itself up off of the ground, dust itself off and learn how to walk again after what her center-right, sellout brand of “Democratic” politics did to it — including giving us “President” Pussygrabber, since it was so hard for the voters to decide in November which presidential candidate they despised less (I mean that literally and seriously).

Bernie Sanders, whose nationwide approval rating long has been in the black by double digits while Billary’s long has been in the red by double digits, is the future of the Democratic Party. That is, even if he doesn’t run for president again himself — and I hope that he does — his unabashedly progressive, anti-corporate, truly populist platform is the winning platform. If Bernie doesn’t become president with that platform, then someone else of his ilk will.

It doesn’t fucking matter that while Billary uses the label “Democrat,” Bernie doesn’t, something that Billary tried to make into an issue both when she was battling Bernie in the primary season and in her bullshit new book.*

“I am proud to be a Democrat. And I wish Bernie were, too,” she taunted in her new book like a mean girl in junior high school.

Um, I’m too fucking embarrassed to be a Democrat because of Repugnican-Lite Billary — who, as Politico notes, is despised by the American electorate even more than is “President” Pussygrabber — and because of the corrupt Democratic National Committee that fucked Bernie over to help coronate Billary as the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee, which is why I changed my voter registration from the Democratic Party to the Green Party to now, no party.**

Only when and if the Democratic Party once again becomes what it should be — a truly progressive, truly populist party — will I be able to register as a Democrat again. And that’s Billary’s fucking fault (and Barack Obama’s too, and definitely Bill Clinton’s, and probably even Jimmy Carter’s, too — the party started drifting to the right under Carter, but then that rightward drift was solidified by Billy Boy and was only perpetuated by Caretaker in Chief Obama).

Billary Clinton uses the label “Democrat” but isn’t a Democrat, while Bernie eschews the label but perversely ironically is more of a Democrat than Billary ever has been or ever will be, if we define a Democrat as a progressive instead of a center-right sellout, a Repugican-Lite asshole.

Yes, it is torture to have to continue to hear from loser-harpy Billary — like nails dragging along a chalkboard — but again, she’s a baby boomer, and among other things, boomers refuse to leave the stage even when the strong majority of the audience clearly is tired of them.

Billary’s refusal to leave the spotlight even though she is so despised might actually work some unintended good, however; her continued presence — her cluelessly and shamelessly perpetually waving her cold, dead hands of the past in our faces — might serve as a continual reminder that the Democratic Party sorely needs to continue to go left and to jettison Clintonism if it ever wants to win the White House again.

This bodes well for 2020.

—

*Whether or not Bernie, an independent who calls himself a democratic socialist, was acceptable or not as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee wasn’t fucking up to Billary, but was up to us, the people, and Bernie won 22 states in the caucuses and primaries, and he won 46 percent of the pledged delegates (those delegates democratically won).

A huge chunk of us voters didn’t find Billary to be the actual Democrat in the race. Fuck Billary.

**The Green Party had a chance at being a decent, respectable third party after Ralph Nader ran on its ticket in 2000, I think, but it pretty much blew it.

Admittedly, I voted for Jill Stein both in November 2008 and in November 2012, as I couldn’t stomach voting for Obama again or for Billary, but admittedly, if she’s the best that the Green Party can do…

Haters of free speech will get the repressive nation that they deserve

Image by Tyler Shields, YouTube

Comedienne Kathy Griffin is pictured above during a photo shoot last week in which she held up a prosthetic severed head of “President” Pussygrabber. Never mind the United States’ long history of the butchery of and the savagery against innocents that continues to this day; this act against yet another stupid white man by an uppity woman, in which no one actually was even harmed, was a bridge too far!

Living in a nation with truly free speech means that your precious sensibilities are going to be offended from time to time.

You’re going to have to get over it. (Please don’t make me have to call you a snowflake, and yes, there are snowflakes on the right as well as on the left.)

The first brouhaha this past week was when Kathy Griffin posed with a fairly realistic-looking replica of “President” Pussygrabber’s bloody severed head and posted it to the Internet on Tuesday. She held the fake head up to the camera like Perseus holding up the head of Medusa.

While the image certainly fulfilled a fantasy for millions, including me, I can’t say that it was funny. Just grisly.

And, of course, Griffin, or at least her handler(s) — assuming that she has one or more of them — should have known that depicting the violent death of the sitting “president,” especially if you are a famous or semi-famous person with an audience, would cause backlash.* It also gets you a visit from the men in black of the Secret Service.

I mean, Pussygrabber’s life is worth protecting as much as was that of our last wonderful Repugnican “president,” who also took office without actually having won the most votes and who is a complete and total baby-boomer buffoon (I know: redundant), but still, Griffin should have known.

To me, Griffin’s biggest “crime” is that she is a comedienne but that her Pussygrabber head thing wasn’t funny — just grisly. And, yes, fantasy-fulfilling. But not funny. (That said, I’ve never gravitated to Griffin, whose work I’m mostly unfamiliar with, and maybe that’s just because she overall isn’t very funny.)

But should Griffin be driven out of all paid work (if there still is a demand for her work in the so-called marketplace of ideas) for the head-of-Pussygrabber incident? No.

I’m not a fan of hers, but if we want free speech and if we want content, we’re going to have to cut our providers of content some slack when they fuck up. They’re probably not going to get it right 100 percent of the time. We expect too much of them.

On that note, on Friday night during his live politicocomedic talk show on HBO, Bill Maher remarked that he won’t work the fields of Repugnican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse’s Nebraska because he is a “house nigger,” and that, of course, has prompted calls for his show’s cancellation, and such a call is only going to backfire on the Only Black Lives Matter** set.

Don’t get me wrong; I have problems with Maher’s show. Pretty much every fucking week he has to get in a dig against those Muslims who are violent and oppressive, as though Islam had the monopoly on violence and oppression.

(I’m a gay man in the so-called land of the free, and I didn’t get the right to marry until only two fucking years ago this month, and that’s mostly because of those loving, wonderful “Christians,” who, instead of more honestly just blowing you up with a suicide vest, kill you with their “Christian” “kindness.”)

Maher’s Islamophobic comments are way beyond old and tired, and his handler or handlers should have reined him in on this long ago. Yes, he has his own show, but using his show to constantly verbalize his own personal pet peeves and prejudices, while it very apparently makes him feel better, degrades the show.

Maher on his show also frequently blasts so-called Democratic “purists,” that is, we progressives. We commoners are supposed to just shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down, and just accept a certain amount of self-serving, double-dealing, greed and corruption from so-called Democrats, you see.

It’s funny, because “Democratic” impurity doesn’t harm Maher. He’s a millionaire baby boomer (he gave a cool million dollars to Barack Obama for his re-election), and so he has plenty of buffer in money and in power, regardless of who (or what) is in the White House.

Baby-boomer millionaire and limousine liberal Maher isn’t affected by what we commoners are affected by. He has the best health care that money can buy, I’m sure, and if he had kids he’d have no problem putting them though the best universities. I rather doubt that he lives paycheck to paycheck or worries about ever being homeless.

So instead of bashing “purists” who have a lot more skin in the game than he does, Maher should check his rich, white, baby-boomer, limousine-liberal privilege.

Very much related to that, Maher’s throwaway use of the term “house nigger” demonstrated his privilege. It is easy for a rich, white baby boomer, whose life is quite comfortable, to make a casual, unfunny joke about the brutal system of U.S. slavery in which some black slaves had less arduous forced tasks than others.

Again, Maher’s “house nigger” “joke” wasn’t even funny. It was stupid and throwaway. (I watched Maher make the remark on HBO’s streaming service, and “the ‘n’-word” was edited out by muting it; it is the first word that I recall ever having been edited from his show, which is profuse with profanity, which I’m OK with.)

Like Kathy Griffin, Bill Maher is supposed to be a comedian, and one might argue that the only real wrong a comedian or comedienne can commit is to fail to be funny.

That said, Maher has apologized for his “house nigger” comment, and coming from him, I think that his apology most likely is sincere.

Should his show be cancelled because of it? No.

Is Maher a racist? Sure, to those black supremacists and race hustlers who believe that every white person is racist (even though, ironically, the race-hustling black supremacists are incredibly racist themselves), of course Maher is a racist, but I don’t know too many white racists who gave Barack Obama a million dollars and who have dated black women, and I have been watching Maher’s show for some time now, and he regularly has black guests, very probably at a proportion that significantly exceeds blacks’ percentage of the U.S. population (which is 13 percent).

One of Maher’s many frequent black guests is Cornel West, of whom I’m a huge fan.***

Maher gives West and other black Americans a voice that they often don’t get in widely broadcast television shows that are watched by a lot of white Americans, so it’s perversely ironic that any black Americans would call for his show’s cancellation.

(Black Americans’ No. 1 pastime, it seems, is shooting themselves in the fucking foot, such as how they supported Billary Clinton over the much more popular Bernie Sanders by a margin of about three to one [which has reeked of anti-white racism (and perhaps also of anti-Semitism) to me], helping to ensure that the widely despised Repugnican-Lite Billary lost the White House to Donald Fucking Trump in November.)

All of that said, yes, Maher needs to check his privilege, not only his white privilege, but also his class and generational privilege.

But his having uttered “the ‘n’-word” in a lame and tone-deaf apparent attempt to be funny doesn’t in one fell swoop wipe out all of the overall good that Maher’s show still has. (If his show didn’t have more good than bad, I wouldn’t still be watching it regularly.)

Maher needs to be further educated and further enlightened, not utterly destroyed, and the Only Black Lives Matter set apparently still needs to learn that mercilessly calling for the complete, total and utter destruction of offending/“offending” whites (which, ironically, is just part and parcel of their own racial supremacism) — instead of calling for the education and enlightenment of whites (where such education and enlightenment is possible) — only is going to drive more whites away from their cause/“cause” than toward it. (Which, ironically, at least on a subconscious level probably is their intent, given that actual interracial reconciliation very apparently actually is the last thing that they want.)

I, for one, don’t want to live in a United States of America in which all of the Bill Mahers are driven out of the marketplace of ideas, leaving us only the white supremacists (the vast majority of whom vote Repugnican) and the black supremacists (many if not most of whom only use the Democratic Party to further their selfish, racist agenda of black supremacism, and so who aren’t at all actually progressive themselves) to churn out their hateful speech.

If those of us who are sane and progressive don’t protect First-Amendment rights — which includes protecting those whose hearts are mostly in the right place from being the victims of incredibly hypocritical political-correctness lynch mobs when and if they ever cross the political-correctness line — then that is the kind of nation that we’ll live in.

—

*Yes, awful, racist, inexcusable things routinely were said of Barack Obama and of his family members, but I don’t recall any celebrity, major or minor, ever having posed with a prosthetic severed head of President Obama. Just sayin’.

**Anyone who has read me regularly knows that I support the political push for greater racial equality, including stopping cops from routinely shooting (and otherwise harming and killing) unarmed black men (and other historically oppressed minorities), ending the insane incarceration rate of non-whites, and tackling our insane rate of income inequality, which harms people of all races.

Of course black lives matter, but Black Lives Matter needs to rein in the black supremacists among its ranks, and I refer only to those black supremacists as the “Only Black Lives Matter” set — because that is their mindset, their worldview: they care only about black people, and for anyone of any race to care only about people of his or her own race is some incredibly fucked-up, and racist, shit.

***Cornel West is a true progressive who doesn’t kiss the center-right Democratic Party establishment’s ass. He courageously consistently has been appropriately critical of Barack Obama and of Billary Clinton and, being an actual progressive, he supported Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

And in a wonderful move consistent with acting according to his conscience, although West was on the committee that wrote the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, he nonetheless ended up endorsing Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein instead of Billary, and I voted for Stein in November just as I voted for her in 2012, as I don’t vote for DINOs, but for actual progressives.

‘Rogue One’ gives me a new hope

Updated below (on Thursday, January 5, 2017)

Right about now we all could use a new “Star Wars” movie that doesn’t suck. “Rogue One’s” diverse cast of heroic characters (see the movie’s publicity image below) has the white supremacists in a frothy lather, which is yet another good reason to see it.

With Darth Donald furiously filling his administration with hell’s best and brightest — and our only hope rebel electors who halt the construction of the Death Star and thus save the republic when they meet in the state capitals on Monday — it’s great that we have a new “Star Wars” movie to look to.

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the first live-action “Star Wars” film that isn’t part of the ongoing nine-film series (which has hits and misses), opens on Friday, and it looks like it’s going to be a worthy “Star Wars” movie, unlike last year’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

I like that “Force Awakens” features a heroine instead of a hero (British actress Daisy Ridley as Rey did a great job), and that it is somewhat diverse, with black British actor John Boyega as rebel stormtrooper Finn and Latino Oscar Isaac as rebel pilot Poe Dameron. (Boyega and Isaac also did a great job, and, like many, many others, I’ve always had something for Isaac…)

But “Force Awakens,” although acted well enough and technically sound, of course, given its big budget, suffers significantly from being a brazen rehash of the “Star Wars” movies that came before it, replete with a third Death Star (well, OK, it’s a weaponized planet, but in essence it’s a third Death Star), another climactic light-saber duel, and, of course, the climactic destruction of that third Death Star.

“Force Awakens” also features a geriatric Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford as a geriatric Princess Leia and Han Solo, which didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy sense of nostalgia as much as it gave me the sense that the fucking baby boomers just won’t get off of the stage, no matter how long it has been since they wore out their welcome. (At least Han Solo dies in the movie…)

Perhaps most sinfully, “Force Awakens'” “villain,” Darth Vader descendant Kylo Ren (the son of Han Solo and Leia, he is played by Adam Driver), isn’t actually bad-ass at all, but is a whiny little bitch (much like Darth Donald). And that Kylo Ren is just a bad Darth Vader knock-off only emphasizes the fact that “Force Awakens” is just a bad “Star Wars” knock-off…

Oh, sure, it’s great to watch Rey kick Kylo Ren’s ass, but the whole fucking premise that Leia and Han Solo had a son who grew up to try to emulate Granddad Vader is just stupid. As is that third Death Star.

“Rogue One,” though, looks promising. It’s a more immediate prequel to 1977’s “Star Wars: A New Hope”* than was 2005’s “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” which is the best of the first-three-numbered “Star Wars” episodes of 1999, 2002 and 2005 that were made after the first three released “Star Wars” episodes of 1977, 1980 and 1983. (Indeed, “Sith” is the only of those three proactive episodes worth watching, really.)

We already pretty much know the plot of “Rogue One”: Rebels to the Empire manage to steal the (first) Death Star plans so that the rebels then can destroy it. But while that back story was mentioned** in “A New Hope,” it never was fleshed out (recall that “A New Hope” begins with Princess Leia safeguarding the Death Star plans with the [an]droid R2-D2, who/which then jettisons in an escape pod with sidekick C-3PO), and very apparently “Rogue One” fleshes out that back story.

That “Rogue One” takes on fresher (albeit pre-established) material rather than simply rehashing old material, as “Force Awakens” did, is a big draw to me, as is the fact that I was a “Star Wars” fan at nine or 10 years old, replete with action figures and plastic toy replicas of the vehicles. (The fact that my mother cavalierly bought me a regular TIE fighter instead of the Darth Vader TIE fighter that I’d very specifically and repeatedly requested for one Christmas [a true story, unfortunately] probably contributed to the person that I am today [including my being fairly used to deep disappointment].)

While I grew up as a “Star Wars” fan — not only was finally seeing the very first “Star Wars” film a major event for me (I was taken to see it by an uncle who felt pity for my brother and me that our lazy, selfish, baby-boomer parents had yet to take us to it [another unfortunately true story]), but “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” also were big events for me, even though “Jedi,” with its second Death Star (and its inevitable destruction), largely is a rehash of “New Hope,” just with a bigger budget and on a larger scale — I still expect a new “Star Wars” movie to bring fresh elements to the table, and “Rogue One” appears to do that.

And I didn’t need another reason to see “Rogue One,” but the fact that the Trump-loving white supremacists/neo-Nazis are boycotting “Rogue One” because it’s just too damned diverse (and thus apparently is anti-white, you see) is yet another significant reason for me to see it.

You would think that these “alt-right” losers would have boycotted “Force Awakens,” because in it, the heroine Rey kicks the ass of the bad-ass wannabe Kylo Ren, who reminds me a lot of the neo-Nazis: He very much wants to be a bad-ass, and is trying to mimic an actual bad-ass who came before him, but he’s just a pathetic, petty terrorist; oh, sure, he can cause plenty of harm to others, but at heart, he’s a weak fucking coward — who gets his sorry ass kicked by a girl.

I love it that as with “Force Awakens,” “Rogue One’s” main hero is a heroine, Jyn Erso (played by British actress Felicity Jones), a rebel who apparently is aided in her cause against the Empire by fellow rebels played by Mexican actor Diego Luna, black American actor Forest Whitaker, Chinese actor Donnie Yen, and Riz Ahmed, who is a Brit of Pakistani heritage.

I’ve enjoyed the work of Luna, Whitaker, Yen and the adorable, doe-eyed Ahmed, and I’m happy to be able to see all of them in one movie.

And that ass-kicking droid in “Rogue One” (named K-2SO, apparently an Imperial droid that/who is droidnapped and reprogrammed to work for the rebels) strikes me as pretty fucking cool — like a C-3PO who/that finally grew a pair.

Movies do a lot of things. They are escapism, for sure, and right about now we Americans — and those who live in nations that are affected by what we Americans allow our government actors to do (and what we don’t allow them to do) — sure could use some escapism.

But movies also are a deep part of American and global culture, and it’s not a one-way street; movies not only reflect the culture at large, but they help to shape the culture.

Even the dimwitted, cowardly members of the “alt-right” and other neo-Nazis know this, and that’s why they hate to see images of racial and gender equality in our mainstream movies; they want only straight, white, conservative men to be the sole heroes in our movies in perpetuity.

But “Star Wars” has been, at least in its own way, subversive from Day One. Even in 1977’s retroactively titled “A New Hope,” it’s clear that the evil Empire, with its legions of stormtroopers and military hierarchy and massive weaponry, is much like the short-lived Nazi German empire.

And “Star Wars'” heroes have not been its villains (although no doubt many have fetishized its villains to the point of not really even viewing them as villains); “Star Wars'” heroes always have been the little guys and gals who have stood up to the big, fascist bullies against all odds.

“Star Wars” has been anti-neo-Nazi since its birth in 1977; the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, neo-Nazi mega-losers of today boycott it way too late.

And I’m incredibly fine, when I go to see “Rogue One” — taking a break from the news of the stunningly awful team that is being assembled in Washington, D.C., to “make America great again” by bringing it to the brink of its destruction — knowing that at least there shouldn’t be any neo-Nazis in the theater with me because of their pissy little boycott.

Update (Thursday, January 5, 2017): I finally saw “Rogue One” in IMAX on Monday.

While not a perfect movie, it probably is the best “Star Wars” movie to be released since “The Empire Strikes Back.” It certainly has the look and the feel of the 1977 “Star Wars.”

Like every “Star Wars” movie, “Rogue One” has some characters (humans and non-humans) that are rather dumb, to be frank, but in “Rogue One” the strong characters thankfully cancel out the others. Droid K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) steals the show as a C-3PO with balls, and Felicity Jones as reluctant Rebel Jyn Erso and Diego Luna as Rebel leader Cassian Andor are a strong heroine and hero team.

Riz Ahmed seems underused as Imperial turncoat Bodhi Rook, a character that is rather undeveloped, as are the characters of blind warrior Chirrut Imwe (who is reduced to babbling a mantra about the Force, which many viewers are going to find more tiresome and annoying than anything else), played by Donnie Yen, and radical Rebel offshoot Saw Gerrera, played by Forest Whitaker, whose importance seems diminished by a deficient back story.

The CGI of the long-dead Peter Cushing as Governor Tarkin is rather obviously CGI, and it’s surprising how much of the CGI Peter Cushing is in “Rogue One.” I’ll leave aside the discussion as to whether or not we even should be resurrecting dead actors via CGI, and just say that the CGI in “Rogue One” is lacking. We’ve come a long way from the creepy CGI of “The Polar Express,” but in “Rogue One,” it’s not far enough.

For all of it flaws, again, “Rogue One” succeeds in bringing back the look and feel and spirit of the 1977 “Star Wars” without entirely rehashing old story lines, as “Return of the Jedi” and “The Force Awakens” did.

Yes, like “Revenge of the Sith,” “Rogue One” fleshes out events that already were alluded to in the earlier films, but still, it’s a masterful fleshing out.

And it’s rather exhilarating, in fact, if you are an old “Star Wars” fan like I am, to watch “Rogue One” take you right to where the 1977 “Star Wars” begins.

I give “Rogue One” at least an “A-“. It misses primarily in some lacking character development. And I still don’t know about that CGI.

“Rogue One” must be given points for its diverse cast — it’s so refreshing when the hero isn’t yet another straight white guy — and for its rather bold ending, which I’d talk about except that it would be a major spoiler to tell you the fate of the main characters.

—

*I was nine years old when that movie came out, and it wasn’t subtitled “A New Hope” until 1981, when the movie was re-released.

**The iconic opening crawl of “A New Hope” reads:

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.

Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy…

I briefly break my hibernation in this presidential election season snoozefest

I knew that after Bernie Sanders was out of the presidential race, this thing would be a fucking snoozefest.

We witness Billary Clinton and Donald Trump, the most disliked presidential candidates in U.S. history, duke it out when it’s most likely that Billary will emerge as president in November. Fivethirtyeight.com right now puts Der Fuhrer Trump’s chances of winning the White House at 19.1 percent and Queen Billary’s at 80.9 percent.

Billary leads that much not because anyone actually fucking likes her, but because The Donald is that fucking bad. 

This is what the wonderful baby boomers, whose cohort includes Billary and Trump, have brought us to: the two most hated presidential candidates in our nation’s history in what probably is our most utterly uninspiring presidential race in our nation’s history.

Leave it to the fucking baby boomers to fuck up pretty much everything that came before them.

Anyway, Trump’s record level of despicability aside, as I’ve noted before, in my lifetime of almost five decades, no U.S. president had not first been vice president, a U.S. senator or a governor of a state (or some combination of these) before being elected president. The likes of Donald Trump always highly unlikely was to going to break that streak of presidential prequisites.

One recent tangle between boomer Billary and boomer Donald is representative of the evil and the lesser evil that they represent.

Der Fuhrer Donald uber-ludicrously recently told black Americans and Latinos (even though there were precious few of them in his mostly white audience) that they should vote for him. His fuller-than-usually-reported remarks were:

“Our government has totally failed our African-American friends, our Hispanic friends and the people of our country. Period.

“The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities. For those hurting the most who have been failed and failed by their politician — year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers.

“Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.

“And I ask you this, I ask you this — crime, all of the problems — to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out. I’ll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?

“And you know, I say it, and I’m going to keep saying it. And some people say: ‘Wow, that makes sense.’ And then some people say: ‘Well, that wasn’t very nice.’ Look, it is a disaster the way African Americans are living, in many cases, and, in many cases the way Hispanics are living, and I say it with such a deep-felt feeling: What do you have to lose?

“I will straighten it out. I’ll bring jobs back. We’ll bring spirit back. We’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot. Look at the statistics.

“We’ll straighten it out. If you keep voting for the same failed politicians, you will keep getting the same results. They don’t care about you. They just like you once every four years — get your vote and then they say: ‘Bye, bye!'”

Now, a white billionaire running on the Repugnican Tea Party ticket claiming to care so much about the impoverished (of any race) when impoverishment is what keeps the billionaires billionaires is, of course, incredibly fucking ludicrous, but what can make a ball of lies dangerous is when that ball contains some degree of truth.

I agree with Donald Trump that most Democratic politicians, especially the high-level ones like President Hopey-Changey and Queen Billary, don’t truly give a shit about African Americans, Latinos (we call them Latinos, Senor Donaldo, not “Hispanics”), the poor, and other historically beleaguered minority groups, including my own (gay men).

The Democrats cynically, slimily pander to historically oppressed minority groups in order to get our money and our votes. But once in office, they don’t do anything for us until and unless public opinion fucking forces them to, such as on same-sex marriage (which Billary didn’t publicly support until March 2013, for fuck’s sake).

I probably wouldn’t go so far as to call Billary a “bigot,” as uber-bigot Trump uber-hypocritically has done, but I would call her a big-time panderer, and I have to at-least-mostly agree with Trump’s recent assertion that Billary “sees people of color only as votes.” As a gay man, I fully sense that she values me and my group only or at least primarily for our money and for our votes.

That said, of course Trump is no less such a panderer than is Billary, and it’s not at all believable that billionaire Donald Trump cares about any of us commoners any more than millionaire Billary Clinton does.

Yes, the Repugnican Tea Party is worse than is the Democratic Party, but the Democrats (at least the ones in D.C.) don’t lead. They follow. They love the status quo, because it’s great for their bank accounts, and, again, any progress that actually comes under them comes only after it’s unavoidable because of public opinion and activism (public pressure).

Queen Billary even brazenly, shamelessly openly promotes her center-right brand of incrementalism — progress moving along at a pre-global-warming glacial pace — which, again, is great for her and her cronies but which is not so wonderful for the rest of us.

And how have black Americans done under our first black president?

The record is mixed, but one indisputable statistic is that under President Hopey-Changey, income inequality between white Americans and black Americans is at its worst point in the past 25 years. And that’s because the Obama administration has done little to nothing to substantively tackle the problem of income inequality. Indeed, Obama has been, at best, a caretaker president, no progressive champion.

The Democrats, of course, don’t want to talk about any of this. We members of the rabble are supposed to buy the myth that poor people, non-whites, women, gay men, lesbians, et. al. are better off under Democrats by definition.

Of course Donald Trump isn’t the solution. That goes without saying, but in this debased day and age it must be said. Trump is the solution to our problems like like Colonel Sanders is the solution to the chickens’ problems.

But our commoners’ “choice” on November 8 remains slower death and destruction under Repugnican Lite Queen Billary or faster death and destruction under Der Fuhrer Trump.

There is a part of me, methinks, that almost would rather get it all over with more quickly under Trump.

Not that I would vote for him — of course I wouldn’t.

But nor would I vote for Billary.

The lesser of two evils is still an evil.

I’m going back into hibernation from the presidential race now.

Marco Rubio, the real Repugnican frontrunner, is the one to take down

Marco Rubio, Repugnican Tea Party U.S. senator for Florida, warns in his very first TV ad that “What happened in Paris could happen here.” He was excluding, of course, the slaughter perpetrated by white, right-wing “Christian” terrorists, such as the one who just shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. (After all, such terrorists are the Repugnican Tea Party’s base.) Rubio also assures American senior citizens that in return for their support, he’ll ensure that they get their entitlements (and ours) while those of us who follow them will be fucked royally out of ours.

As I’ve noted many times, never in my lifetime of more than four decades has a U.S. president not first been a U.S. senator or the governor of a state before he* ascended to the White House.

While perhaps anything could happen, especially in the American empire’s apparent waning days, I don’t see either billionaire fascist Donald Trump or “Christo”fascist nut job Ben Carson breaking that pattern.

In the polls right behind Trump and Carson, neither of whom is likely to get the Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination — electability will become crystal clear to them when voters and caucus-goers actually vote and caucus (as was said of the Democratic Party’s 2004 contest for the presidential nomination, the electorate dated [Howard] Dean but married [John] Kerry) — are Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

Nationally right now, per Real Clear Politics’ polling averages, Trump leads with about 29 percent; then Carson, with about 20 percent; then Rubio, with about 13 percent; and then Cruz, with 12 percent. (At fifth place, with only about 5 percent, is Jeb! Bush.)

In RCP’s polling averages for Iowa, that order is almost the same but the percentages are different; it’s Trump, 27 percent; Carson, 20 percent; Cruz, 18 percent; Rubio, 12 percent; and Bush, not even a full 5 percent.

In New Hampshire, the order is shaken up; RCP’s polling averages for New Hampshire are Trump, 26 percent; Rubio, 12.5 percent; Carson, 10.5 percent; Cruz, 9.5 percent; and at fifth place is not Jeb!, but John Kasich, at almost 8 percent (Jeb! is in sixth place, with 7.5 percent; it became safe to write off Jeb! a way back).

Trump remains the frontrunner in the polls, but his numbers (at not even 30 percent) aren’t nearly high enough to prevent him from cratering at any time now. And the polls cited above don’t reflect his latest campaign fuckups, not only falsely claiming that thousands of American Muslims cheered on 9/11 even as the World Trade Center collapsed and burned, but also his having made fun of a New York Times reporter with a congenital physical disability (and then, as Trump always does, brazenly lying that he didn’t say and do what he’d just said and done).

As others have noted, Trump & Co. largely politically can get away with their Islamophobic rhetoric; only about 1 percent of Americans are Muslim, compared to the more than 75 percent who claim Christianity. Just as the Nazi Germans bullied the Jews because the Jews didn’t have nearly the numbers to fight back, the American right wing, the neo-Nazis, now bully Muslims in the United States because the Muslims don’t have nearly the numbers to fight back.

(If you think that my continued Nazi references are over the top, there is the fact that Donald Trump, if he didn’t outright endorse a national database/registry of Muslims in the United States — like the Nazi Germans kept their registries of Jews in Germany [and then in the other regions that they occupied] — he definitely didn’t reject the idea, either. Yeah.)

But while “good” “Christian” Americans (especially those who vote for Repugnican Tea Party candidates) are perfectly OK with persecuting Muslims, just like Jesus would do, I still maintain that when Trump mocked a physically disabled man during one of his KKK rallies, he finally sealed his fate. He’s finished, most likely. It’s that the incident is too recent to be reflected in the polls yet. I expect Trump to be polling consistently below 20 percent soon. (If he wages an independent presidential campaign, Ross Perot style, if it’s not too late for him to do so, he will ensure a Democratic presidential victory in November 2016, so I encourage him to scoop up his marbles in a huff and run as an independent.)

Carson’s polling isn’t as good as Trump’s, and Trump’s polling isn’t strong enough for him to be a shue-in, and Carson’s many lies about his biography, as well as his creepiness and his being an abject nut job (as well as a theofascist), doom him. He won’t be the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nominee.

This leaves us with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

Cruz, the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, is too widely despised, even by those within his own party, to win the party’s presidential nomination. He’s doing well in Iowa (just behind Trump and Carson), but Iowans are even more wingnutty that is your typical Repugnican. I mean, fuck: Prick Santorum won Iowa in 2012 and Mike Fuckabee won Iowa in 2008. Iowan Repugnicans aren’t exactly mainstream. In terms of who the eventual Repugnican Tea Party presidential nominee actually will be, Iowa, for the past two cycles, has meant nothing, and I expect that trend to continue in 2016.

New Hampshire’s recent track record, however, has been spot-on. Mittens Romney won New Hampshire in 2012 and went on to win his party’s nomination. Ditto for John McCainosaurus in 2008.

Rubio polls second in New Hampshire right now, behind only Trump, giving him a shot at emerging at first place in the polls for New Hampshire in the near future.

Truth be told, I’d much rather that Ted Cruz win the party’s presidential nomination than Marco Rubio.

Why? Because Cruz is so despicable and creepy that there’s no way in hell that he’d win the White House in 2016, no matter whether he’s up against Billary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Marco Rubio, however, is just as mean-spirited and insane as the rest of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabes — recall that Rubio rode the “tea party” wave into office in 2010 — but he is able to come off to the unthinking/uncritical and the unperceptive (a majority of Americans) as a saner individual.

Old fucks love Marco Rubio. As Reuters recently reported (emphases in bold are mine):

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, 44, frequently plugs his youth on the campaign trail but his promise to restore the American Dream for a new generation seems to appeal more to older age groups.

As the U.S. senator from Florida rises in opinion polls of Republicans, his gains are coming from voters over the age of 50, and most from those older than 65, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.

Although Rubio is running third overall behind Donald Trump and Ben Carson, he is tied with Carson with 12 percent among those older than 65, up from only 7 percent in late October.

Yet his support in the online survey is flat among voters his own age and younger. He registers at just six to seven percent among Republicans younger than 49.

In interviews with two dozen of the poll respondents over 50, 14 preferred Rubio after watching Republican debates this fall because they believed he was best able to stand up to his opponents while projecting a positive tone rather than acidity.

Two-thirds of those interviewed also mentioned being attracted to the Cuban-American senator’s personal history, which he has worked into key moments in each debate as Republicans fight to win their party’s nomination for the November 2016 election.

“Rubio’s initial bump in the polls is due to older voters really liking his story,” said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray, whose surveys also found increases for Rubio among older voters in early voting states like New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Evoking the American Dream [which long has since become the American Nightmare], Rubio [whom I have nicknamed “Bootstraps”] often talks about his parents who fled Cuba for the United States, where they worked as a bartender and maid. He talks about being raised from paycheck to paycheck and working to put himself through college. …

Sixteen of the 24 older voters Reuters spoke to this week also cited Rubio’s relative youth compared with many of the other leading candidates as a positive attribute. …

Four of those voters even compared Rubio to John F. Kennedy, a Democrat elected president in 1960 aged 43. [I just vomited in my mouth.]

“I think he would be like Kennedy,” said Rhoda Pelliccia, a 76-year-old Republican New Yorker living in Florida. “Kennedy was young and look what he did.” [I vomited again.]

Reliable older voters

Rubio’s advisers say they are not surprised or worried by the disparity and point out that older Americans are a crucial group because they reliably go to the polls.

While pollsters say he must broaden his appeal and attract younger voters to secure the nomination, Rubio’s aides say the candidate has no plans to change his message and they believe younger voters eventually will come his way.

“Our message is entirely about the future, but a part of that is creating an America where parents can pass on a better country than the one they inherited,” Rubio’s chief strategist, Todd Harris, said. “Older voters understand that because they’ve lived it and it’s what their parents did for them.” …

All the same, Rubio is taking great care to address entitlement programs and the concerns of senior citizens, who often make up the bulk of audiences at his campaign events.

“I’m from Florida. You may not know this, but there are a lot of people in Florida on Medicare and Social Security,” he says, barely pausing for his crowds to laugh, as they realize how many older voters retire in the southern state. “One of them happens to be my mother. And I can say this to you right now unequivocally: I am against anything that is bad for my mother,” he said in Bedford, New Hampshire last month. [Awww! How sweet! How charming!]

Rubio vows not to change those programs for the already retired or for those nearing retirement age. But he acknowledges that they must change for future generations.

Ah, Reuters saved the best for last. Rubio, being a U.S. senator for Florida, sure knows how to lick senior-citizen ass, and he assures these senior citizens that while they’ll get their entitlements, those of us who follow them (such as this member of Generation X) will get screwed royally, even though we’ve been paying into and will continue to pay into these entitlement systems our entire work lives. (By “entitlement” I mean the dictionary definition of term [“a right to benefits specified especially by law or contract”], not the term as it dismissively has come to be used by the right wing, which wants to take everything from us commoners, even the entitlements that we already have paid for.)

According to the Pew Research Center, “By many measures, Florida — which has long attracted snowbirds and retirees — is one of the nation’s grayest states. Overall, 19.1 percent of the Sunshine State’s population is 65 and older, the highest percentage in the nation.”

So Marco Rubio, a Gen X’er himself (I don’t claim him as one of my own), is perfectly willing to sell his own generation, and the generations that follow his/ours, down the river for his own short-term political gain. (After all, he will get cushy retirement benefits for having been a U.S. senator; he’ll be just fine, so don’t worry about him!)

What’s good for Marco Rubio’s political career is not good for the nation as a whole. The state of Florida is not representative of the entire United States of America, and this idea that it’s perfectly fine to fuck over future generations is an idea that needs to be fought against vehemently. It already largely is viewed not only as acceptable, but even as “common sensical.”

And leadership is supposed to be visionary and future-oriented. Marco Rubio is anything but these things. He’s perfectly willing to sell out his own and future generations for his own personal political gain today.

Marco Rubio also is perfectly willing to join the other bullies of the “Christo”fascist right wing in bashing American Muslims, since, again, without the numbers they can’t fight back. His very first television ad, released earlier this month, ominously warns us that “What happened in Paris could happen here.”

Why, yes, it could, but, as has been established, if you are a typical American, you are about twice as likely to be killed by a white, American, “Christo”fascist terrorist than you are by an “Islamofascist” terrorist.

But Islamophobia sells quite well among the xenophobic Repugnican Tea Party traitors who are deathly allergic to truth, reality and facts, so Marco Rubio gladly will use fear tactics, as will every Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe, for personal political gain. (Hey, it got George W. Bush “re”-elected!)

Marco Rubio is not the nice guy so many believe he is, which is why I consider him to be even more dangerous than is Ted Cruz, who can’t pull off the nice-guy facade.

Rubio’s strategy of cornering the old-fuck vote certainly isn’t a winning long-term strategy, but for the time being, old fucks do vote in much higher percentages than do younger Americans. And Rubio has made it clear, from his campaign rhetoric, that he isn’t concerned about the long term, but only wants to assure the old fucks (in return for their campaign donations and their votes) that they’ll get “theirs” (which is his own plan, too — to get “his” and then get out; I use quotation marks there because Rubio and his ilk don’t want what’s just theirs; they want what’s ours, too, of course, and they don’t care whatsofuckingever that they’ll leave us with nothing — or even less than nothing, in terms of great debt).

We’ll see how long the pandering to the over-inflated fear of “Islamofascist” “terrorists” will last for Rubio and his ilk. I have no doubt that they’d love a terrorist attack (or even more than one attack) on American soil by a Muslim or Muslims any time from right now to November 8, 2016. Paris was great for their brand of politics, but xenophobic, nationalist Americans only care so much about what happens in other nations. And here in the United States of Amnesia, things like the Paris attacks have a fairly short political shelf life.

If you think that I’m overstating how strongly Marco Rubio is positioned politically, know that Real Clear Politics’ averages of general presidential election polling match-ups have Rubio beating both Billary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Yup. RCP right now has Rubio beating Billary by an average of 1.4 percent and Bernie Sanders by 1 percent. He barely beats them, but it’s scary that he even should tie them.

(The only other Repugnican Tea Party candidate who also beats Billary and Sanders in the general-election match-ups is Ben Carson, who inexplicably does even better against them than does Rubio, but, again, Carson won’t be the nominee.)

Bluntly, Marco Rubio is the one to take down. The Repugnican Tea Party set ultimately will front him as their Latino Barack Obama — youth appeals in this youth-obsessed, adolescent-minded nation; Rubio assures the old fucks that he’ll cater to them, no matter the long-term damage to the nation; and the Repugnican Tea Party needs to try to regain critical ground lost to Latinos by El Trumpo — and while Rubio has Obama’s youth and smoothness, his agenda is dangerous: He’s perfectly willing to sell most of us down the river for his own political gain right now.

And he’s doing so with a youthful, perhaps even JFK-esque, smile.

—

*Yes, I’m more than ready for our first female president, but voting for Billary Clinton is like voting for a Repugnican. I don’t vote Repugnican.

Had U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren run instead of Bernie Sanders, I’d be supporting her right now.

 

More post-debate thoughts: We all lose when Billary Clinton ‘wins by not losing’

Photo from The Washington Post

Billary Clinton has become Rudy Guiliani in drag. Billary walks, talks and acts like a Repugnican, which means that should she become the “Democratic” presidential candidate in November 2016, a majority of voters probably will just go ahead and vote for the real Repugnican presidential candidate (perhaps especially if that candidate is Marco “Bootstraps” Rubio).

In its post-Democratic-debate analysis, Vox.com (typical of the conventional “wisdom” of the mass media) proclaims of Billary Clinton, “To some degree, Clinton wins by not losing,” adding, “And while she hardly had a perfect night, she definitely didn’t lose.” Vox.com proclaims of Bernie Sanders:

To be somewhat tautological about it, Sanders lost by not winning. The one, narrow path he has to the nomination comes through a surprise win or close loss in Iowa, followed by a big win in New Hampshire — trusting that the momentum from winning early will carry him, much as it did for John Kerry in 2004. Given that Sanders is losing Iowa quite badly at the moment, and he has less than three months to go before the caucuses, he needed something big to happen to get his Iowa numbers rising again.

But while he didn’t do a bad job in the debate, per se, he didn’t have any real marquee moments that would make Iowa caucus-goers stand up and take notice. …

Despite acknowledging that Billary’s “most serious error of the night was implying that she received support from Wall Street, and took Wall Street-friendly policies as senator from New York, because the financial industry was targeted in the September 11 attacks,” adding, “It was a bizarre moment,” Vox.com nonetheless proclaims Billary the “winner.”

(Actually, Vox.com was quite generous in its report of what Billary actually said. This is what she actually said, from CBS’ own transcript:

Oh, wait a minute, senator. (LAUGH) You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small, I am very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60 percent. (APPLAUSE) So I — I represented New York. And I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked.

Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy. And it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country. (APPLAUSE)

Again, note Billary’s knee-jerk reversion to playing the feminist/“sexism”/“misogyny” card when she is under attack, even quite legitimately, in this case for her history of taking loads of campaign cash from the weasels of Wall Street.* But claiming that her self-serving, obedient support of Wall Street — which harmed almost all Americans when the economy resultantly cratered in 2007 and 2008 — “was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country” is incredibly craven, even for someone of Billary’s character.

No, it’s not that Billary is just another corrupt politician who’s on the take; no, by giving the Wall Street weasels everything that they wanted, she wanted to “rebuke the terrorists”! [As Joe Biden once put it: A noun, a verb and 9/11!])

This bias — to the point of proclaiming that Billary “won” the debate last night even though she uttered the most cringe-worthy lines (including, yes, her refusal to support more than a $12/hour federal minimum wage while everyone else is calling for a $15/hour federal minimum wage) — demonstrates what Bernie Sanders has been up against.

Bernie has been laboring in D.C. even longer than Billary has — he became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1990, while Billary didn’t become first lady until a couple of years later — but he hasn’t had the fame (or, luckily, the notoriety) that Billary has.

As I’ve stated, Billary has been running for president at least since her 2000 run for the U.S. Senate, and since she ran for the White House in 2008 but lost, she widely is considered by the limousine-liberal intelligentsia (such as the folks at Vox.com) as “having earned it,” as “it’s her turn.”

Therefore, all that Billary has to do to “win” a debate is not have an emotional breakdown or an episode of Tourette’s on stage, apparently. (And even then, were you to dare to say anything about it, it would be cast by the Billarybots that you hate women!)

Martin O’Malley during the debate last night referred to Billary and/or one of her policy prescriptions as “weak tea.” Yup. As I wrote last night as I live-blogged the debate, she would prescribe only a lukewarm glass of water for a raging house fire. On almost every issue, be it raising the minimum wage to a living wage, reining in the gross abuses of the Wall Street weasels, the legalization of marijuana, and even “her” “signature” issue of health-care reform, she proposes doing as little as is humanly possible.

When you start off asking for/demanding so little, in the negotiating process in D.C. you’ll end up with even less.

During last night’s debate Billary surreally praised Barack Obama’s “record” of “accomplishment” (my words, not hers), which is telling, since the hopey-changey President Obama has done little to nothing. I, for one, can’t say that I’m much better off in year seven of Obama’s presidency than I was when George W. Bush was still president, and that’s because Obama has barely touched the status quo; he’s been barely a caretaker president, much more a leader. If he’s Billary’s role model, we know that with President Billary we’d get four more years of the same.

Despite Billary’s staunch refusal to stand up for the common American instead of for her millionaire and billionaire campaign contributors — and for the older, more right-wing voters to whom she appeals — she does, alas, lead in the polls.

Vox.com is correct: Bernie lags by double digits in Iowa, the state that goes first when it caucuses on February 1. On February 9 it’s the New Hampshire primary, where, according to Real Clear Politics’ polling average, Billary is ahead of Bernie by three percentage points, but where, according to Huffington Post’s polling average, Bernie is ahead of Billary by eight percentage points.

I agree with Vox.com’s analysis that if Bernie loses Iowa, it needs to be close; he needs to come in at a close No. 2 if he can’t pull out a first-place win. (And then, he really needs to win New Hampshire; he can’t afford even a close second there, I believe. If he doesn’t come in at No. 1 at least in Iowa or in New Hampshire, I don’t see him recovering from that.)

All of that said, before we write Bernie Sanders off it’s important to remember that John Kerry came back from the dead to beat Howard Dean in Iowa in January 2004. Wikipedia notes of the 2004 Iowa caucuses:

The Iowa caucuses revived the once moribund campaign of Kerry, who proceeded to the New Hampshire primary as one of the front runners, and [he] ultimately captured the Democratic nomination. …

The results were a blow to Dean, who had for weeks been expected to win the caucuses. He planned afterward to quickly move to New Hampshire, where he expected to do well and regain momentum. At the time, he had far more money than any other candidate and did not spend much of it in Iowa. Dean’s aggressive post-caucus speech to his supporters, culminating with a hoarse scream that came to be known as the “Dean Scream,” was widely shown and mocked on television, although the effect on his campaign was unclear. …

What do John Kerry and Bernie Sanders have in common? Tad Devine as a senior adviser.

Could Bernie Sanders pull a John Kerry in Iowa?

Yes, I think so, which is why I refuse to write Bernie Sanders’ political obituary, even though, as Vox.com points out, Sanders has not even three full months before Iowa.

I wouldn’t call Sanders’ campaign thus far to be “moribund,” either. It’s true that in nationwide polls he lags by double digits — 33.5 percent to Billary’s 54.5 percent, per RCP, and 33.2 percent to Billary’s 56.5 percent, per HuffPo — but put into perspective, Bernie’s not doing badly for a relative unknown, a dark horse, who fairly came from nowhere to challenge the “inevitable” coronation of Billary Clinton.

And, as I’ve noted before, the entire nation isn’t voting on the same day, but over the course of several months (even though the race is likely to be wrapped up over the course of several weeks [I don’t expect the race to go past the end of March, by which time more than 30 states will have weighed in).

Therefore, if Bernie scores early wins, it could give him the momentum that it gave the once-“moribund” Kerry campaign. (The once-“moribund” Kerry went on to win all but a handful of states.) This snowball effect makes the nationwide polling a poor predictor of the final outcome of a presidential primary race — because, again, the entire nation doesn’t vote on one day.

I’ve never supported Bernie Sanders merely to push Billary Clinton to the left. This line of thought presumes that Billary was going to be coronated from the get-go, and that any opponent to her would be only for show.

I recognize, of course, that Bernie Sanders might not win the primary race; it remains an uphill battle. (As Bernie tells us repeatedly, unlike Billary Clinton and the other Repugnican presidential candidates [yes, to me Billary might as well be running as a Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate, as a “moderate” Repugnican], he’s not funded by the billionaires). But once it was clear that Elizabeth Warren was sitting this one out, I’ve always seen Sanders as the candidate best suited to be president.

Nor do I have any confidence — none whatsofuckingever — that merely pushing Billary’s campaign rhetoric to the left during the primary race actually would result in any actual progressive action on her part should she actually become president.

Billary’s history is one of lying, of switching her political positions like a human weather vane on crack. We can’t trust any of her promises. Barack Obama, at least, was an unknown; when he relentlessly promised “hope” and “change” in advance of November 2008, I thought that he might actually at least try to deliver on these campaign promises. With Billary, I know that she won’t.

Billary also clearly wants to be president only for her rapacious baby-boomer cohort. It’s clear that she wants to keep things just as they are, until after the baby boomers all finally die off, and leave us Gen X’ers, Millennials and those who follow us X’ers and Millennials holding the bag, with not even the short end of the stick, but no stick left at all. (Clintonista Paul Begala once called the baby boomers “a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland.” Yup.)

Leadership is about vision and having an eye to the future. Bernie Sanders has shown that vision, that far-sighted wisdom. Billary, like her Wall Street buddies, views only what she can get in this quarter.

As I’ve stated before, Bernie Sanders might be like Barry Goldwater was in 1964: Goldwater didn’t become president, but he is credited with having started the “Reagan revolution” that came after him.

Similarly, probably especially if Billary Clinton wins the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination but then loses in November 2016 to, say, Marco Rubio (since she’s using his and other Repugnican Tea Party talking points, why wouldn’t the voters go ahead and vote for him or for another Repugnican Tea Party candidate?) — and Billary’s losing in November 2016 easily could happen, given that the majority of Americans do not like her — perhaps the Democratic Party finally will wake the fuck up and rid itself of the virulent center-right stain that the self-serving Clintons put on it in the 1990s. (I just now thought of that infamously stained blue dress, but that wasn’t actually meant as a pun…)

Even if Bernie doesn’t win, at the minimum he is breaking ground for another actually progressive candidate, such as Elizabeth Warren, to not only win the White House but to finally take back the Democratic Party, to return it to its rightful progressive roots.

And that would be a huge win.

In that event, you might even say that Bernie won even while “losing.”

—

*Rolling Stone notes:

Over the course of her career, four of [Clinton’s] top five donors have been Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. Someone has to be the moron, and if it’s not the rich guys whose jobs are buying things that advance their self-interest, then it’s the people at home buying a new regulatory zeal from someone who’s never much evinced an inclination toward it before.

It gets better. Much like I have noted, Rolling Stone’s Jeb Lund continues:

Clinton’s response took the form of a vaporous appeal to identity politics, followed by an invocation of September 11 crass enough to make Rudy Giuliani’s cheeks redden in either shame or envy. Addressing Sanders’ comments above, as well as the number of small donors to his campaign, Clinton said:

“You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small, and I’m very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60 percent… I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”

This rancid bucket of word scrofula does a lot of coldly profitable hand-waving and at best only creates more questions than it answers. Clinton’s disclosure forms reveal reams of high-dollar Wall Street contributors, so what does a majority of women donors signify that obviates the former in any material way? Would significant Wall Street backing disappear as an issue for a gay candidate who said, “60 percent of my donors are gay”? Does all of Cory Booker’s “love money” from hedge fund ghouls get less problematic if he hits a threshold of black donors?

And, after 14 years of every opportunist creep in a blue suit and red tie exhuming the corpses of the World Trade Center dead to festoon themselves with sanctified victimhood, it’s amazing that there are still new ways to be forced to ask the question What the fuck does September 11 have to do with any of this shit, asshole? Would Hillary Clinton become a card-carrying Communist if the CPUSA headquarters had been hit by a plane? Would her donor lists be full of members of Supertramp, Fairport Convention and Oingo Boingo if Al Qaeda had attacked the A&M Records building? What possible causal relationship exists here? And how does attending to Wall Street’s fortunes rebuke the terrorists? …

Lund does proclaim that “despite flogging the nation’s honored dead for the billionth beshitted time this century, Hillary Clinton won the debate handily,” by which I take it that he means, from that link (which is his, not mine) that most Democrats think that Clinton won the debate handily.

Sure; I buy that. As I’ve recently noted, most self-proclaimed Democrats seem poised to go right over that cliff with Billary on November 8, 2016. That doesn’t mean that Billary actually “won” the debate — not if we define winning a debate as actually being truthful in the debate and not resorting to such sleazy, slimy, weaselly tactics as exploiting identity politics and using a noun + a verb + 9/11.

Donald Trump is a hypocritical dick, but John McCain indeed is no war hero

Associated Press photo

An ambitious John “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain shakes the hand of President Richard Nixon in 1973, not too long after his having been held as a POW in Vietnam. The warhawk McCain shamelessly has used his POW status for political and personal gain ever since, and there probably isn’t a nation on the globe he thinks the U.S. military shouldn’t bomb.

Repugnican U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona indeed is no war hero, but not for the reason that Repugnican presidential aspirant Donald “The Mouth” Trump infamously recently cited.

At an event in Iowa yesterday, Trump declared of McCain: “”He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

The left-leaning Margaret Cho similarly quipped in 2008, when McCain was running for the White House: “I am not voting for McCain. I hope that is obvious. I am sick of everyone saying, ‘He was a good soldier. He was a good soldier.’ Um, yeah. He was captured. So he was not that good!”

(I don’t recall Cho’s comment as having created a shit storm then. Of course, she wasn’t running for president…)

To me, if the war was unjust, as the Vietnam War was, it’s difficult to call anyone who participated in it on the American side a “war hero.” How does something just and heroic emerge from something that was inherently unjust and unheroic?

Only perhaps if someone was drafted — forced into — fighting in an unjust war that he or she had recognized as unjust (which was not the case with McCain in the Vietnam War) might we be able to call his or her brave actions during that war “heroic,” but the war itself still remains unjust.

But with John McCain, it goes further than that. I lived in Arizona from my birth in 1968 to my overdue departure from the state in 1998, and I recall McCain’s television ads for his U.S. Senate bids. It was POW, POW, POW, POW, POW, POW. It was POW 24/7, all POW, all the time. (McCain, whose U.S. Navy plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1967, was captured and kept as a POW for five years.)

Clearly, the message was that you were to vote for McCain — or you hate POWs. (You hate freedom! You love Commies!)

I was shocked that McCain didn’t exploit the POW thing much, much more than he did when he ran for the White House in 2008. Maybe he wanted to and his advisers advised him to cool it, since it is unseemly to exploit one’s POW status for political and personal gain.

Those who are rushing to defend McCain against Trump right now are simply sheeple who can’t worship the U.S. military enough, despite the fact that the bloated-bey0nd-belief military-corporate complex has sucked up our national resources and is killing us like stage-four cancer and has caused untold suffering to millions and millions of innocent people abroad.

(Um, yeah, the U.S. military exists primarily to enforce the existing global socioeconomic status quo, in which Americans continue to enjoy a quality of life that is crazy-better than the quality of life of the planet’s average human inhabitant, and that comes at the average human inhabitants’ expense. “Spreading democracy” — riiiiggghhhht!)

That said, of course baby boomer Trump, who, like his fellow Repugnican baby-boomer chickenhawks George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (and many others of that demographic), avoided the Vietnam War, so for him to be criticizing McCain’s performance in the Vietnam War is beyond hypocritical.

But I still say that McCain is no war hero, as not only was the war he voluntarily fought in unjust — Vietnam never had posed a real threat to the United States, and estimates of the number of people who died because of the war (the vast majority of them Vietnamese, of course) range from 1.5 million to 3.6 million, of which the hundreds of Vietnamese civilians slaughtered by mass-murderous U.S. troops in the My Lai Massacre of 1968 were only a tiny fraction — but also as that true war heroes don’t boast about their (supposed) war heroism for personal and political gain.

John McCain, whose almost-30-year Senate record has been unremarkable, for years has benefited from the fact that it’s taboo to openly disagree with or to show anything other than worshipfulness for a former POW. Had McCain never been a POW (which obviously was no accomplishment) and then shamelessly exploited it, I seriously doubt that he’d be where he is now. That’s some sick shit.

Still, it’s great to watch the infighting within the Repugnican Tea Party. “Clown car” is overused but it’s quite an apt description.

(50 million to) 80 million Americans vanish without a trace!

An August 2000 editorial cartoon by progressive Gen Xer Ted Rall. (Another, even earlier ’toon by Rall on this topic is here.)

When I saw a little while ago that the new book The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, which I (probably stupidly) since bought via amazon.com (I just opened the package today), very apparently pretends that those of us of Generation X don’t even fucking exist, I thought of my fellow progressive Gen Xer Ted Rall and his quite correct labeling of us Xers as victims of “generational leapfrog.”

Prompted by what I had read of The Next America on amazon.com, I was going to blog on my thoughts on my generation’s exclusion from the national discussion as though Winston Smith, working at the Ministry of Truth, had simply erased all mention of us, but now, I see, Rall (thankfully) has written a column on the topic, so, at the risk of violating copyright law, I am posting Rall’s column in full at the end of this post (I don’t think that he would mind), because he echoes my thoughts and feelings.

Not only does the title of this latest book about generations of Americans, which sits at No. 239 on amazon.com as I compose this sentence, exclude my generation entirely, but in the preface of the book — in which the author (shockingly!) identifies himself as a baby boomer — my generation is ignored. In the preface, the baby-boomer author, one Paul Taylor, proclaims:

… This book … pays particular attention to our two outsize generations — the Baby Boomers, fifty- and sixty-somethings having trouble coming to terms with getting old, and the Millennials, twenty-somethings having trouble finding the road map to adulthood. It looks at their competing interests in the big showdown over entitlement reform that our politicians, much as they might try, won’t be able to put off for much longer. …

So why has baby boomer (yeah, I don’t capitalize the term, since that might imply respect, which in this case is undeserved) Taylor disappeared (as Ted Rall accurately put it in his latest column) my entire generation?

And let me first interrupt myself to tell you that my generation actually isn’t all that tiny, with an estimated more than 80 million Americans being Xers, for fuck’s sake, while the figure for the number of baby boomers who were born apparently is around 76 million, and it is estimated that about 80 million Americans are members of Generation Y (a.k.a. Millennials).

Yes, there was a baby boom when the boomers were belched from the bowels of hell and into the world from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s (yes, Barack Obama is a [late] baby boomer; we’ve yet to have a Gen-X president [and we very well might not ever have one]), but American population (despite advances in birth control) has climbed steadily since the boomers made their unfortunate entrance, which, I surmise, would explain why all three generations actually have been roughly the same in size, despite Taylor’s assertion that only his generation and the Millennials are worth discussing because they are “outsize.”

(The cover of the book says that it is authored by “Paul Taylor and the Pew Research Center.” Wow. You’d think the folks at the Pew Research Center would have caught the mistake or even the lie that we Gen Xers are so tiny a cohort that we’re not worth discussing. Seriously — this “oversight” has harmed Pew Research Center’s reputation, in my mind.)

Back to what I was saying: So why would baby boomer Paul Taylor exclude my generation almost entirely from his book that is supposed to be a part of the national discussion?

Well, of course it’s easier to discuss only two generations instead of three. So yes, some laziness definitely might have been involved.

But the larger part of it, I believe, is that the baby boomers in general — and we very apparently cannot exclude Taylor from that cohort, based not only upon his age but also based upon his brand of inter-generational politics — long have treated us Xers as though we didn’t exist.

Indeed, one of Ted Rall’s most successful books is his 1998 Revenge of the Latchkey Kids, one of the first, if not the first, Gen-X manifesto.

I was born to boomers and I certainly was a latchkey kid. I won’t go into detail that only will make others (especially boomers) accuse me of being a whiner who blames everything on his parents (for the record, I blame much on them, but not everything on them), but yeah, while the boomers were the cherished children of the American men who had survived World War II and come home to inseminate their wives and while the Millennials were the cherished children (largely if not mostly of boomers) replete with “Baby on Board” signs, we X’ers were, to put it mildly, not cherished. There were no “Baby on Board” signs, no car seats for us. Our parents were not, for the very most part, “helicopter parents.” No, they were more like invisible parents. As Rall stated correctly many years ago, we Xers, overall, were latchkey kids. We were largely left to raise ourselves.

I suspect that this is why we are ignored by the dominant generation, the boomers (almost all seats of power in the U.S. still are filled by boomers, who hold on to their seats of power with death grips, like U.S. Supreme Court justices): they always have ignored us, so why begin to acknowledge our inconvenient existence now?

Also, if any of the boomers are actually even capable of feeling anything remotely like guilt, maybe they have at least a dim awareness that they failed us Xers, their children, miserably, that they are the first generation in the history of the United States to have had it better themselves than their children have had it, and therefore, in order to avoid feeling guilty — because boomers were raised by the so-called “greatest generation” to believe that they are entitled to feel only great about themselves all of the fucking time (a “value” that the boomers seemed to have imparted to many if not most of the Millennials) — they do their best not to think about us Xers at all.

All of my legitimate generational grievances aside, there is no way that you can write a responsibly comprehensive book about the problems that loom over the United States of America without discussing an entire generation of Americans. (OK, to be fair, there are some entries for “Generation X” in the index of The Next America, which I have not read because I just opened the package today, but very apparently the book glosses over Gen X for a much more detailed discussion about the boomers and the Millennials.)

We Xers care about, we are affected by and we affect Social Security, Medicare, retirement security, income inequality, climate change, human rights, social justice, politics, overpopulation, etc., etc., and while millions want to simply ignore us (and so do simply ignore us) because to do so fits their own selfish political agendas, we Gen Xers are right fucking here, tens of millions of us — whether the generation that precedes us and the generation that follows us (and, tragically, they have so many characteristics in common) wish to see us or not.

Now: Here is Rall’s column, with my comments inserted in [brackets]:

I’ve been disappeared.

Erased from history.

Dropped down the memory hole.

(bye)

If you were born between 1961 and 1976, you no longer exist. [Exact definitions of Gen X vary. In my book, Gen X begins around 1962 to 1964. 1961 is a bit early, in my book. And I would extend Gen X at least to those born in 1980.]

Generation X has been disappeared.

The Soviets altered photos to excise the images of leaders who had fallen out of favor, but communist censors went after individuals.

America’s corporate media is more ambitious. They’re turning 50 million people into unpersons. [Again, I see figures that put Gen X at least at 80 million, but even only 50 million people, if Rall’s figure indeed is closer to the actual figure, still is a large chunk of the national population of more than 317 million.]

The disappearing of Gen X began about a year ago, when major news outlets began reducing living Americans to two generations: the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1960) and their children, the Millennials (born approximately 1977-2004).

[I would include 1945, and perhaps also 1944, for the boomers, and I probably wouldn’t start the Millennials earlier than 1980. Again, these generational demarcations vary from person to person. To me, personal characteristics and worldview are important, too, not strictly the year in which one was born, perhaps especially in those generationally cuspy situations. (My husband, for instance, born in 1962, while on the cusp of the boomers and the Xers, has more Xer characteristics than boomer characteristics; otherwise, he wouldn’t be my husband…)]

(Generational birth years are controversial. Many classify the Boom years between 1946 and 1964, but I agree with the demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe’s assessment — and the novelist Douglas Coupland, who defined the term “Generation X” — that people like me, born from ’61 to ’64, called “the most dysfunctional cohort of the century,” identify with the culture and economic fortunes of Xers, not the Boom.)

The unpersoning of X takes full bloom in “Wooing a New Generation of Museum Patrons,” a March 19, 2014, piece in The New York Times about how museums like the Guggenheim are soliciting money from “a select group of young donors already contributing at a high level.”

Take your gum/joint/food out of your mouth before reading further, lest you gag: “Several hundred Millennials mingled under the soaring atrium of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue one recent frigid February night. Weaving around them were black-clad servers bearing silver trays piled high with doughnuts, while a pixieish D.J. spun Daft Punk remixes.”

According to the Times’ David Gelles (playing the role of Winston Smith): “Across the country, museums large and small are preparing for the eventual passing of the baton from the Baby Boom generation, which for decades has been the lifeblood not only of individual giving but of boardroom leadership. Yet it is far from clear whether the children of Baby Boomers are prepared to replicate the efforts of their parents.”

Gelles’ piece doesn’t contain any reference to Generation X.

Really? Museums don’t give a crap about would-be philanthropists among the millionaires born between 1961 and 1976?

By the way, Xers were into Daft Punk before Millennials were even done being born.

Boomer/Millennial articles that ignore the existence of Xers have become commonplace. Again in The New York Times, Emily Esfahani Smith and Jennifer L. Aaker perform the neat trick of disappearing one-sixth of the country. Their November 30, 2013, op/ed about “Millennial Searchers” for the meaning of life asks about Millennials: “Do we have a lost generation on our hands?”

Substitute “1991” for “2008” and everything Smith and Aaker write could be, and was written about Gen X: “Yet since the Great Recession of 2008, they have been having a hard time. They are facing one of the worst job markets in decades. They are in debt. Many of them are unemployed. The income gap between old and young Americans is widening.”

Even in an essay about humanity’s search for meaning — and about the downward mobility that defines Gen X — there is only room for Boomers and Millennials.

It’s like our crappy economy and low wages and student loan debt never even happened. [Infuckingdeed. As I’ve noted here before, it’s incredibly interesting that our Gen Xers’ crippling student-loan debt and lack of decent jobs never were considered to be newsworthy at all, but that those problems sure the fuck are today, now that they are affecting the precious “Baby-on-Board” crowd.]

“No one’s talkin’ ’bout my generation,” notes columnist M.J. Fine, a Generation Xer. “It’s hard to think of an era in which people ages 34-49 had less social currency.”

Remember the great coming clash over Social Security between Boomers and Xers? We’ve vanished from that narrative too, not just in a thousand words but over the course of a full-length book: The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown.

It’s not just the Times. In Sonya Stinson’s frivolous “What Gen Y Can Teach Boomers About Financial Planning” in Forbes, Gen X neither learns nor teaches. Gen X doesn’t exist.

Poof!

I saved the worst for last. Courtesy of a sharp-eyed reader, check out PBS’ Judy Woodruff, defining the generations for a NewsHour interview with the author of The Next America:

“I just want to remind everybody what those age groups are, the Millennials, 18 to 33 years old today, Gen X, 34 to 39 [years old] today, the Boomers, 50 — the big group — 50 to 68 [years old], and the Silent [Generation], 69 to 86 [years old].”

In PBS World, Gen X has shrunk. If you’re in your forties, you no longer have a generational home.

Life begins at 40?

[To be fair, I listened to the PBS clip, and in it Woodruff clearly says “Gen X, 34 to 49″ years old. The transcript, however, reads “34 to 39” years old, an apparent typo.]

More like the empty void of generational purgatory, as far as the Boomer-controlled media is concerned.

Indeed, the No. 1 reason that we Gen Xers have been so successfully disappeared is that the boomers have controlled the media, and thus the national discussion, for most of our lives. The powers that be want us to be non-existent, and the powers that be mostly still are boomers and they still mostly control the media, and thus they still mostly monopolize the national discussion.

But actually, as much as I have complained about the unfairness and the insanity of it, I think that I would take my “generational purgatory” (an apt description of Gen X) over the unearned and undeserved attention and rewards that the boomers and the Millennials have received.

Having been left to raise ourselves to such a degree and having been systematically and even institutionally ignored and passed over — and, indeed, having been shit and pissed upon — our entire fucking lives, we Gen Xers have, out of necessity, developed strength, resilience and self-reliance that most members of the pretty fucking awful, overprivileged generations that immediately precede us and immediately follow us never will possess.*

And who wants to be a member of a generation whose collective personality is like that of Nellie Olesen? (OK, the boomers and the Millennials do, but that was a rhetorical question.)

Gen X still rules — not literally, not sociopolitically, but where it really counts — which is why we’re so widely ignored by the two generations that don’t hold a candle to us.

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*That said, while the boomers have been a lost fucking cause for a long, long time, and will take their generational assholery with them to their graves and urns, I suppose that the Millennials still have enough time to not become just like their baby-boomer examples.