A Thanksgiving Poem from Indigenous America

"Indian Mascot, 1959"

by Janice Gould, who was a member of the Concow tribe

Now begins the festival and rivalry of late fall,

the weird debauch and daring debacle

of frat-boy parties as students parade foggy streets in mock

processions, bearing on shoulders scrawny effigies of dead,

defeated Indians cut from trees, where,

in the twilight, they had earlier been hung.

 

"Just dummies," laughs our dad, "Red Indians hung

or burned—it's only in jest." Every fall

brings the Big Game against Stanford, where

young scholars let off steam before the debacle

they may face of failed exams. "You're dead

wrong," he says to Mom. "They don't mock

 

real, live Indians." Around UC campus, mock

lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung

the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead

from the merrymaking. On Bancroft Way, one has fallen

indecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle

that happened three generations ago in California's hills, where

 

Native peoples were strung up. (A way of having fun? Where

did they go, those Indian ghosts?) "Their kids perform mock

war dances, whooping, re-enacting scenes of a debacle

white folks let loose," chides Mom. "Meanwhile we hang

portraits of presidents on school walls and never let fall

the old red, white, and blue. My dear brother is dead

 

because he fought in a White man's war. How many dead

Indians do they need to feel okay? This whole thing wears

on my soul." In the dark car we go silent, and the fall

night gets chillier. In yards, blazing bonfires mock

the stars that glow palely somewhere above. A thin moon hangs

over the tule fogs. I've never heard the word "debacle”

 

before and wonder what it means. "What's a debacle,

Mom? " I ask. "Oh, honey, it's a terrible and deadly

collapse. Complete ruin." I've noticed how the hung

Indians have their heads slumped forward. They wear

old clothes, headbands with feathers, face paint, moc-

casins instead of boots. Little do we know, this fall,

 

living Indians at Feather Falls

leave tobacco to mark that, indeed,

we're still here, lungs full of indigenous air.

The Republican House Is Gonna Be Filled with Insanity and Fuckery

In the wake of Republicans winning the House of Representatives, even by a narrow margin, we got a preview this week of how much we're damned to hear about every detail of the business dealings and, no doubt, personal life of Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden. Conservatively, it'll be "a metric fuckton." More likely, it will be "Benghazi times Hillary's emails to the 10th degree." To the gibbering madpeople and the skeevy fucks who lie to them, Hunter Biden and his Laptop of Mystery is the goddamn Rosetta Stone of bringing down the president. Or at least making him embarrassed. It's a completely worthless, utterly bullshit subject, especially in the wake of the GOP overlooking decades of criminality by Donald Trump (who really was the president, a fact that dry humps my brain every day) and his shitty children. And it will be everywhere.

On the BBC Newshour this week, porcine drink-spiker and delinquent child support payer Jason Miller, who is also an "adviser" to Trump, was asked a reasonable question: Why doesn't Trump just say that he lost in 2020 and now he's back to win? Miller's response was, no shit, "Shouldn't Joe Biden come out and say his family had shady Chinese business dealings and maybe also that Hunter shouldn't have been on the board of Burisma?" That's not an answer to the question, which he was asked three times. You wanna compare the business ethics and financial shenanigans of Trump and Biden? Then let's go.

By the way, Republicans had control of the House of Representatives in 2017 and 2018. If you'll remember, we got zero investigations into Hunter Biden. You could argue that Joe wasn't running for president then so the country didn't have to worry about any allegedly shady shit, but you could also argue that it's odd that no one gave a damn about Hunter until Joe announced to run if he was such a nexus of corruption and depravity. Besides, the Senate did do an investigation into Hunter in 2020 and found not a goddamn thing more than "Well, he probably shouldn't have done a couple of things because they look a little hinky." That's it. A Republican-led Homeland Security Committee, chaired by fucking loon Ron Johnson, said Hunter and Joe Biden didn't do anything illegal, and they were trying to make that case. Of course, the Laptop of Mystery appeared after the report from the committee came out, so that's another secret sauce of conspiracy on top of the nutzoid sundae.

It's all Hunter, man. In a pissy little Republican press conference this week, Rep. James Comer, an election denier with his head so far up Trump's ass that he uses Trump's dick as a periscope, and Rep. Jim Jordan, who is Jim Jordan, for fuck's sake, announced that they will be probing Hunter Biden like an Ohio State wrestling coach probes the assholes of his athletes and Jim Jordan will probably ignore the truth here, too. Look at this shit: "We're going to provide you all with something you're not used with respect to congressional investigations, and that's evidence," Comer said in his slick as snakeskin Kentucky con artist voice before talking about how "experts" have "reviewed Hunter Biden's laptop" to discover how "the Biden family swindled" people of hundreds of thousands of dollars and used "influence peddling" with China and Russia to make money. In other words, money laundering. And, first off, "hundreds of thousands of dollars," motherfuckers? That's chump change. No one at Biden's level is risking everything for that pittance. But they'll keep saying, "China" because it sounds evil, and they'll keep saying, "Russia" because it makes it seem like Trump is exonerated from his money laundering.

Republicans say they're using Hunter as a way of getting to Joe.  "The president's participation in enriching his family is, in a word, abuse of the highest order," Comer asserted, and they will dig into everything Hunter to prove it. But Democrats didn't have hearings about Ivanka, Eric, or noted cocaine vlogger Don, Jr., and they fucking well worked for their father. Shit, Ivanka and her creepy wraith husband Jared worked in the fucking White House, and Jared couldn't wait to bob on sweaty Saudi knob once he was free of the mild burden of his "duties" for the federal government.

On top of this, trashcan troll doll and de facto Speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene is promising to try to use an obscure procedure to cut funding for any investigations into Trump, and I guarantee that the crazy caucus will attempt to shut down the government to stop any indictments. We've got Fauci hearings, immigrant caravan hearings, and "abuse" of January 6 terrorist hearings coming. Kevin McCarthy or whoever is cursed to be the real Speaker of the House is gonna need Democrats to get any shit done, and that's fuckin' hilarious. Meanwhile, House committees are gonna take anything said on right-wing propaganda bullshit networks as truth and use their subpoena power to fuck up lives and find absolutely fucking nothing. I look forward to the hearing on Hillary Clinton drinking baby blood. 

It's laughable that some in the media and even in Congress think that the narrowness of the GOP's margin in the House would take some of the bugfuck wind out of their lunatic sails. Fuckin' please. It's like saying that Merrick Garland appointing a special counsel to take on the investigation of Trump would show it's not political. By the time he finished that statement, Republicans were screaming about how political it is, including Trump. Haven't we fucking learned that nothing chastens Republicans? Nothing teaches them any goddamn lessons? Not winning. Not losing. Nothing. 

The only upside is that, for two elections now, Republicans have run, at least in part, on Hunter Biden, and it hasn't done shit for them. Fuckin' let people see what they do when they have power. Maybe a few more will understand that it's only a show for these shitheels. It's life and death for the rest of us.

Blaming Trump Lets Republicans Off the Hook (and Other Observations on a Pretty Good Election)

(Started writing this early in the week, but because Covid is still a thing, I've been back in Louisiana with to see a sick, hospitalized family member. Things are looking good now, but it was dicey. Get vaccinated. Wear masks. Do the shit you need to do.)

In the wake of Republicans having their raging red wave erections slapped flaccid by the firm, stinging hand of reality in the 2022 midterm elections, blame for this epic cock block has seemed to come to rest on one major cause: Donald Trump, who really was once president of the United States (something that still boggles my mind every goddamn day) and is still, to some, the de facto leader of the Republican Party. "A red wave of criticism crashes into Donald Trump after midterm losses," says the Washington Post, quoting current Republicans about how Trump's endorsements and his general Donald Trumpishness didn't help. The Guardian goes with "Republicans have someone to blame for their disappointing result: Donald Trump." And Fox Business quotes former Trump adviser Mercedes Schlapp, which is the name of a real adult human and not an SNL character or terrible branding exercise, saying that Republicans were being too hasty to blame Trump.

The problem, of course, is that blaming Trump is some cheap-ass bullshit. Oh, sure, Donald Trump always has and always will suck the hair off donkey balls if he thinks it can get him some attention and devotion (and cash).  His ego is a black hole of need, and those who venture to the event horizon are almost always remorselessly sucked in and sucked dry. But Trump didn't force any of the candidates to buff his dickhead to a bright orange sheen. They all had a chance to bail on him after the January 6 insurrection, but they didn't. They fucking went along with whatever lies he wanted to tell. They went along for the ride, like the ass remoras they are, nourishing their ambitions from his free-floating verbal detritus. Republicans are to blame for Republicans fucking up the midterms.

There are exceptions for the GOP, of course. Down in Florida, for instance, scaly sweat worm Marco Rubio easily defeated the genuinely noble Val Demings. And, yeah, completely shitty Gov. Ron DeSantis, who acts more or less like the abusive manager of a telemarketing scam company, trounced Democrat Charlie Crist, who should just stop. Some of the best advice I heard came from a pal at a Major Financial Institution who was told that it's time to give up on Florida, that people are moving there for low taxes and "freedom" to dick over others and they control the joint now. There were other GOP victories, like Sen. Ron Johnson not losing in Wisconsin when he fucking well should have. And the less said about how New York fucked up redistricting, the better.

But, holy shit, the tradeoff is that Michigan and Pennsylvania have come back from the dark side of the moon. Imagine how well John Fetterman would have done had he not had a stroke in May and been the subject of a pathetic, shameful attack on his health. And we Democrats will almost surely have won the Senate in the next couple of day when incumbent Catherine Cortez Mastro pulls ahead in Nevada, which I think will lead to an easy Warnock win in the runoff in Georgia's Senate race because why hate yourself so much that you vote for Hershel Walker if control of the Senate isn't in the balance? And, perhaps most importantly to the future of democracy in the country and, frankly, the outcome that has actually given me hope that we can pull back from the brink of fucked-beyond-fucked, all the nutzoid, election-denying, barking mad candidates up for Secretary of State in swing states, officials who could have shit on election results they didn't like, they fuckin' lost. It was like the United States said, almost as a whole, "Oh, fuck off. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Deal with it."

Sure, Republicans will almost surely end up with the House, but with a slim majority where the even semi-rational members understand that voters were saying, "Stop with your bullshit! We don't give a fuck about Hunter Biden! We support abortion rights!" Except there are the complete fucking loons who want to whole-hog impeach Joe Biden for unknown things, arrest Dr. Anthony Fauci for not being an antivaxxer, and have anal probe hearings on how the FBI has harassed poor, innocent Donald Trump. And those cockscabs will shut down the government to gut Social Security or end Obamacare or, as I've been saying, to stop any prosecution of Trump or January 6 traitors. They might even cause the collapse of the world economy if Democrats don't shitcan the debt ceiling in the lame duck session. So, truly, fuckery will likely occur. Or, perhaps, we're about to see "GOP in disarray" stories as poor bastard Kevin McCarthy tries to corral a bunch of feral, rabid weasels. Goddamn, it's gonna be fun to watch them bite his ass over and over. Gonna be even more fun when he realizes he needs to make deals with Democrats to get shit done.

There are many things you can say about the 2022 election. It didn't suck nearly as much as it could have, and there's still a chance for it not to suck much at all. Joe Biden wasn't a drag on the Democratic Party. The nation rejected crazy, but gerrymandering works wonders. Without it, Republicans wouldn't have a prayer at getting the House of Representatives. It's hilarious watching pollsters and pundits get their asses handed to them with results that defy almost all of their expectations. It's doubly hilarious to watch the tough GOP operatives and politicians scamper away from real confrontation over the election results, like the fucking cowards they always were. Mostly, though, it's like the American people just said, "Enough already," and, yeah, that did mean "Enough with Donald Trump" (although I'd caution that we thought that would happen after January 6 and it didn't), but it also meant "Enough with all of you monstrous assholes who don't give a shit about governing." As Death's double, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, said, Republicans simply didn't have any plans for anything other than owning the libs. You can't run on that. Or, really, you can run on that once, and that was 2016. After that, you gotta govern.

However, the real problem isn't that Republican politicians suck. No, the actual blame belongs with their voters, as it always has. You don't get off the hook because you supported absolute garbage candidates like Blake Masters or Lee Zeldin or Kari Lake or Dr. Oz, for fuck's sake. Fuck you for being so gullible, so simple, so hateful that you'd rather put Doug Mastriano in office than someone who actually gives a shit about your problems, like Josh Shapiro (unless your "problems" include critical race theory and drag queens, in which case, grow the fuck up, you idiot children). Fuck you for thinking that Fox "news" and other assholes tell you anything about what the world is like. Kids claiming they're cats and shitting in litter boxes? Goddamn, how do you look yourself in the mirror and not laugh at how dumb and debased you are for believing things like that. Join reality or go live on fucknut island somewhere, unvaxxed and uneducated.

Blame them all, Trump, Republicans, their media, their voters, because they form a clusterfuck of insanity and degradation, a heaving shitball heading towards a cliff.  2022 was us stepping out of the way before it dragged us with them. We're not out of danger yet, but, goddamn, it sure feels like we dodged a catastrophe.

Vote Because Fuck Them

Goddamn, I can't fucking take them anymore, any of them, any of the assorted MAGA racist freaks and moral lepers and violent morons, any of the QAnon fucknuts who are so goddamn deranged that there should be a Bedlam opened just to store them in and keep them out of the sight of decent human beings, any of the shitposting mob masturbating to bleeding over their oh-so-edgy memes, any of the gun-fellating, immigrant-hating bible-humpers, any of the cadre of corrupt cunts and cocksuckers who claim that the 2020 election was corrupt, any of the narcissist fucking billionaires who we're forced to believe have some secret understanding of the world when they are just pampered and isolated imbeciles, any of the shit-smeared liars and rube exploiters who make bank and gain power because that's better than telling the motherfucking truth, any of the scurrilous lickspittles groveling on the ground, prostrating themselves before the slothful, gluttonous, greedy, lustful, pride-engorged, envious, and wrath-driven Donald fucking Trump, as loathsome a corpulent creature to ever undulate out of the depths of crude criminality to demand obeisance and tribute from the vile and deranged and scabby and dumb crowds who would rather blow up the country than even entertain the possibility that they have been, are being, and will be conned and manipulated and mentally raped by savage purveyors of faith, of falsehoods, of fantasies, from Fox to Falwell. I cannot fucking take them anymore. 

So I'm gonna go vote on Election Day because fuck them all. Fuck them in front and then turn them over and fuck them in the back. Vote because if enough of us do, we will force them to show their asses sooner than they wanted to. We know, we fucking well know, that they are begging for an excuse for violence. They are begging for a chance to assert the power they believe they have, that they have accumulated because of the mental illness of their ideology, helped by the fucked up timing of Trumpian rhetoric and pandemic-induced paranoia. They want to show how they can overturn our votes, how they can just toss them out, how they can change them to their favor. They've teed it up: only they can win and it be legitimate, and they are mostly so rankly stupid that they don't see there is no logic in that idea. They don't fucking care. So vote because they are voting. Vote because they wanna kill us. Vote because they wanna dominate us. Vote because we can win this. Vote because our winning will drive the final nail into their empty heads, breaking their tiny brains and forcing their worst plans into the light. Then we can have that fight and not wait to see how fucking bad it gets in 2024.

And we may very well fucking lose. But they want that despair to engulf us. They wanna convince us we already lost and keep us from voting. I don't give a fuck right now about that. Fuck them. Fuck them hard and fuck them rough. If we're gonna lose, I gonna go down swinging. 

I want us to go down swinging for Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock and John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro and Val Demings and Charlie Crist and Gretchen Whitmer and Tim Ryan and so fucking many others. I want us to go down swinging for what we know is right. I want us to go down swinging because we love the country that we can be, not the country we used to be. I want us to go down swinging so that if we lose we can say that we made it fucking hurt.

But I don't wanna fucking lose. If you already voted, fuck yeah. You go, you millions of beautiful believers in reality. And if you haven't, if you're like me, with an Election Day voting fetish, then line up and, especially in places where they wanna try to stop you from voting, stand there and look tough and smug and vote like your fucking life depends on it. Like all our lives depend on it. Like you wanna finally turn, at last, and tell every single one of those disgusting motherfuckers up top there to, truly, shut the fuck up already.

Barack Obama Calls Crazy "Crazy" and We Need More of That

We needed Barack Obama to lay it all out for us: "Imagine if you hire your plumber. You've got an overflowing toilet. It's a problem," he said during a rally in Michigan. "[The plumber] comes in and, you know, you're waiting for the toilet to be fixed. He starts, 'Have you heard about the latest conspiracy of the Lizard People?' and he starts talking to you about all this stuff. 'We gotta do something about that.' You'd be like, 'No no no, I just want you to fix my toilet.' You'd find another plumber." 

What Obama has done as he crosses the country for Democratic candidates in tight races is to say that crazy motherfuckers are crazy motherfuckers and we need to say they're crazy motherfuckers and stop acting like their crazy motherfucking is in any way valid. In that Michigan speech, Obama brought up how Governor Gretchen Whitmer's opponent, Republican Tudor Dixon (which sounds like what you'd call a shitty mobile home park to make it sound fancy) said in 2020 that Democrats are trying to topple the U.S. government and control people through Covid-19 restrictions because they lost the Civil War. Obama exclaimed, "Now first of all...what?" And then he turned to the laughing crowd and gave a confused/concerned smirk, adding, "Wha...what?" The "the fuck" is implied. He continued, "I mean, I know some people go down these rabbit holes on the internet. They're up too late. But that's like a subway tunnel. That's deep. That's the darkest rabbit hole I've ever seen."

It's funny, sure. Obama has such good comic timing that he drove Donald Trump to run for president. But it's also the goddamn truth. As I've said before, we need to treat the people who spout crazy shit like they're crazy. That means anyone who believes that what's real isn't really real should be shamed for it. And I'm not just talking about the QAnon blithering madness. I'm talking about those who say, for instance, that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged or whatever. Our leaders should be mocking them more, especially the politicians who say that. Yeah, they are a threat to democracy. But they are also fucking nuts. But they say this shit shamelessly because no one of any power is shaming them.  Yes, many of them are lying just to keep Trump and the MAGA rubes happy. But their intentions in saying crazy shit have no bearing on how they should be treated.

Instead, we get CNN's new CEO pushing a policy on allowing the nutzoids on the air: "CNN won’t ban guests who have supported the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but the network will attempt to keep conversations with those people in safe zones of truth." Read another way, that says, "We'll have liars and insane people on and hope they don't lie or say something insane." You know what the best way to avoid that shit is? Don't fucking invite them on unless it's to point and laugh at how fucking mad they are. CNN had the newest Trump clone, Kari Lake, on a couple of weeks ago and just let her get away with saying that she wouldn't accept the results of the gubernatorial election in Arizona if she lost. The next question from Dana Bash should have been "Do you know how fucking deranged that sounds? I mean, that's objectively fucking nuts."

The justifications for insanity are equally insane. Take the crime against Paul Pelosi, which was meant to be an assault on his wife, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. On his show Tucker Carlson Laughs Like a Sugar-Buzzing Child Stomping Snails, the host offered about the hammer attack, "Why should the rest of us sit here and accept obvious inconsistencies in a story that has public policy implications and not say anything?" And guest Glenn Greenwald, whose primary role now seems to be jock strap for fascists, agreed and said, "Skepticism itself can never be wrong. Skepticism says there is evidentiary holes, and there is faulty reasoning in what we are being told, even if evidence does emerge later on to prove it, the skepticism itself was not just valid, but necessary."

That's all fucking nuts. No one was saying that we didn't want the whole story. But there's a vast fucking world of difference between "Some details are missing that need to be filled in" and "82 year-old Paul Pelosi was in a hammer fight with his secret gay lover." The former is acknowledging that the public should be informed. The latter is utterly idiotic and isn't "skepticism." It's the opposite of skepticism. It's saying that your extravagant speculation is valid without any proof at all. Like I could say that it's obvious to me that Tucker Carlson can only orgasm while fucking his wife if a German Shepherd is licking his asshole while he's fucking her. I don't have any proof that this is the case, but it would be irresponsible not to speculate because I'm skeptical about Tucker Carlson's ability to jizz while fucking his wife. Details are missing that need to be filled. I have a duty to assume that he needs a German Shepherd to get its snout all up in his anus, just eating him out, while he is sweatily humping the misses, and until someone shows me otherwise, that's fuckin' canon right there. 

You see what that shit does? Now it's in your head for the rest of your life. And no matter what, when you see ol' Tuckus, you're gonna think, "That dude needs canine analingus to get off." In the same way, because the "skepticism" on Paul Pelosi was treated as fact, it will never not be an article of faith among the brain-fucked MAGA cretins that David DePape and/or Pelosi just wore underwear during the attack. People who say that shit shouldn't be treated with any respect. 

One of the triumphs of conservatives starting in the 1980s isn't that their beliefs attracted followers. No, it's that they turned liberal beliefs into something that many people became embarrassed to espouse. They turned helping the impoverished and the sick into some kind of weakness while amping up the fear of crime and immigrants and the need to be tough and cruel. So people fled from liberalism, Democrats pivoted to the center and the rights, and the stain of that refusal to broadly fight for those liberal ideals has carried through to this day. Some voters won't ever go for a Democrat because they will never not believe that Democrats are communists who want to gender change your children.

What I'm saying is the same approach needs to be used for this terrifying insanity that has gripped so many millions. There are voters who are choosing Republicans who do know that Trump lost the 2020 election, but who just can't bring themselves to vote Democratic. Well, they need to be made to feel too shitty and ashamed to vote for Republicans. The way that is done is not just by saying Trump is a ludicrous, gluttonous shitpile who will wreck things worse than he did before. And not just by saying that democracy is fucked if Republicans get any power. And not even by saying that abortion rights and LGBT rights and more will be gone, too. 

The shit that the majority of the GOP candidates believe is fucking loony, befitting end-of-the-world screamers on street corners or shit-tossing maniacs in an institution. Call crazy what it is. Don't let them get away with pretending that it's normal to live in a backed up toilet full of shit. Let everyone know that the choice is to be dragged into the toilet with them. Or get a goddamned plumber.