Rejecting the Status Quo Is the Only Way to Survive

June 10, 2024 by J.B. Shurk

Can men give birth?  Do cow farts cause tornadoes?  Must “disinformation” tsars censor words to protect free speech?  Should Democrats jail opponents in order to save “democracy”?  If you listen to the propaganda press, these are some of the most important queries of our time.  It feels as if we’ve fallen down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole or entered the absurdist plot of a Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut novel.  How can we make sense of our increasingly senseless world?

America’s dean of word wizardry, Mark Twain, once quipped, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”  Boy, was he right!  For years we’ve been bouncing around in a pinball universe designed by Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury.  When the government isn’t policing our language or arresting little old grandmothers for engaging in wrongthink, it’s busy helping Mexican drug-smugglers hook Americans on Chinese fentanyl and encouraging young boys to chop off their willies.  The Gestapo FBI spends most of its time hunting patriots as “domestic terrorists” and orchestrating elaborate entrapment schemes to justify bloated budgets.  The Josef Mengeles at the CDC work to create new diseases that will require experimental “cures.”  The Department of (in)Justice can’t stop locking up Americans for their political beliefs while lecturing the country about the importance of thwarting tyranny.  So much insanity now grips the United States that the great dystopian novels of the last century appear downright tame by comparison! 

The easiest way to navigate this Kafkaesque environment is to follow a simple rule: whatever the government says, believe the opposite.  Obama promised that socialized medicine would lower health care costs without benefiting illegal aliens; a decade and a half later, the only people who can afford Obamacare are the illegal aliens who get it for free!  Homeland (in)Security doofus Mayorkas still claims the U.S. border is secure, even as foreign terrorists and Chinese nationals flash middle fingers at television cameras documenting America’s invasion.  Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer passed an “Inflation Reduction Act” that has done nothing but exacerbate inflation.  Obama doesn’t care; the border has disappeared; and rampant inflation is the goal!  When everything our political leaders say is a lie and every policy betrays its purpose, Americans live in a Bizarro World where words mean nothing.  

At the same time, whomever the political Establishment admires most, regular people should admire least.  Mitt Romney, the morally sanctimonious charlatan with a squishy backbone, reacted to the Democrats’ successful conviction of President Trump for imaginary crimes in New York by calling it “political malpractice.”  By that, he meant that the lawfare prosecutions would likely boost Trump’s polling support.  You see, if putting Trump behind bars would effectively prevent his re-election in November, Romney would be all for it!  Pierre Delecto doesn’t mind that Democrats are abusing the criminal justice system to imprison Trump and his supporters; he just regrets that all these judicial exercises in election interference are failing.  Only in Bizarro World could a monumental fraud as repugnant as Romney have become the Republicans’ presidential nominee!

With RINO cowards such as Romney always looking to shiv them in the back, Republican voters have been forced to remake the party into something that vaguely represents their interests.  “Shouldn’t the party have always represented their interests?” a reasonable person might ask.  Not in Bizarro World!  Here the Republican Party has long worked for a small number of financial heavyweights who believe that Republican voters exist to serve them.  The more salt-of-the-earth Republicans advance their own political objectives, the faster Romney-like RINOs denounce them as a “threat to democracy.”  In this dystopia, the best form of “democracy” is the one where an insular cabal of privileged and wealthy “elites” decide everything for everyone else.  Real self-government is entirely too insurrection-y.  News flash: Democrats and RINOs share the same beliefs!

How do we know?  Because Republican voters have spent decades demanding smaller government, less illegal immigration, balanced budgets, and renewed deference to constitutional constraints and the Bill of Rights.  Republican leaders have promised to get right on that — just as soon as they build the Department of Homeland Security, provide sixty million illegal aliens with amnesty, add trillions to the debt in war spending, and expand the PATRIOT Act so that the federal government can spy on every citizen of the United States!  Don’t worry, though.  Every Republican voter unhappy with the party will still receive a free t-shirt that says, “I’m with Karl Rove!”  It will most likely come from a Chinese merchant using a Vietnamese manufacturer, but the tri-blend fabric will feel super-soft!  Who needs to make things in America when we can all depend upon the benevolent generosity of Chinese communists?

Didn’t you know that the Republican Establishment is, as Romney has called himself, “severely conservative”?  It is in the business of conserving institutional power — even when it despises what it fights to preserve!  It’s not Republicans’ fault that Democrats keep expanding the federal government; they might not like Liz Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, National Public Radio, or socialized medicine, but by golly, any good Republican will fight doggedly to conserve whatever new monstrosity the Democrats construct!  Severely conservative people must protect and preserve severely progressive things!  Honor demands it!  

Perhaps if hoity-toity RINOs could have found the will to conserve Americans’ liberties, MAGA voters would have been more amenable to the idea of conserving the Republican Party.  Alas, a party in the hands of invertebrates requires stronger leaders to accomplish anything.

Americans want the government out of their lives.  They want a stable monetary currency free from central bank manipulation.  They want to speak freely without being censored online.  They want to build local businesses without forking over profits to regulatory agencies that specialize in producing red tape.  They want to parent their children without worrying that public schools are warping their young minds with indoctrination from the State.  They want the FBI and NSA to stop spying on their communications and financial transactions without warrants or probable cause.  They want Biden to stop issuing “green” executive orders that make everything more expensive.  They want Disney and other child-grooming corporations to stop abusing young kids with their perverse sexual agendas.  They want prosecutors to punish violent criminals and to stop targeting political rivals.  They want the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum to shut up about most things.  They want a free press committed to challenging government and corporate orthodoxies every day — not a bunch of pretend journalists and progressive poodles who do their masters’ bidding.  They want elected officials to end their cancerous addiction to dividing Americans against each other by race.

What do RINOs want?  If you listen to Romney, McConnell, Graham, Thune, and other Decepticons, they’re most interested in starting WWIII with Russia over Ukraine.  Twenty years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan was apparently insufficient to line the pockets of politicians whose retirement portfolios depend upon hefty defense industry profits.  We must tiptoe toward nuclear annihilation so that the rich and powerful can keep getting paid.

Maybe we’ll call this chapter in American history “Dr. Strangelove or: How the Military-Industrial Complex Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”  The best thing about nuclear war for RINOs is that nobody will be around to vote them out of office.  What a splendid “democracy”!

Corporate news talking heads and politicians are flabbergasted that they can’t seem to get the American people to stop supporting President Trump’s re-election.  It’s simple, really: in an insane world hurtling toward economic collapse and nuclear Armageddon, rejecting the status quo is the only way to survive.