RNC Part II - Jesus Make It Stop

[The Editor wishes to acknowledge that several references to “Human Turdbag Ted Cruz” have been truncated for the sake of brevity before publication. When asked about this adjustment the author grimaced, and then calmly laid down face first on the floor. This was interpreted as agreement.]

I’ll give the Human Turdbag this much, that speech was a goddamned spectacle to behold. It’d have been a real barnburner if it wasn’t apparent that the whole barn has already been on fire for three days before he got up there, and if I hadn't watched it live I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the ashes of Cruz's burned bridges from those of the GOP...but I'll be damned if it didn't make for the best episode of Death of a Political Party yet.

It started out with the usual trappings of a Cruz speech, how the slaying of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge are somehow proof that the country needs more Conservative values (read: even more unchecked assault weapons flooding into the streets, enough divisive rhetoric to justify anything, and an even blinder eye to oppression in America).

There was a twist to this though, and at first it seemed strange to me until I remembered who I was listening to and what kind of a person he is and why I call him a living sack of shit. He warned against the kind of reckless hate that leads to incidents like the Orlando shooting and it took me a second to remember that Orlando was the one at the gay nightclub, whose victims he has tirelessly fought to deny rights to, and who hid in the bathrooms he had made a particular focus of his absurd primary campaign.

“The Bill of Rights lets us live according to our conscience” he had the audacity to say, having previously described same sex marriage as a threat to Liberty, and transgender citizens as child raping perverts. “Cast aside hate for love” was a particularly great line for a man who called for the creation of ghettos for American Muslims just a few months earlier.

But then the whole thing became something else, a real Cruz missile aimed squarely at the Trump campaign. Not so much in what he said, but what he didn't. Anyone with a working brain who was even remotely familiar with the primary campaign could not have expected a particularly strong Trump endorsement during that speech, as anything over the top would have been obviously disingenuous after the months of sniping between the two of them. But his complete aversion to using the Trump name and telling Republicans to vote their conscience was magnificent, and the boos that rose from the crowd were shocking and glorious.

It was like a viking suicide. There he was, stabbing himself in the gut and slowly pulling out whatever he could find inside for all to see, with that smug shit-eating grin on his face. Newt Gingrich had to be immediately pushed on stage to retcon Cruz's statement, suggesting he'd actually endorsed Trump even if no one had actually heard one and Cruz had never actually given one. Newt is an experienced and eager liar when the situation calls for it, so I guess we should just be lucky nobody had to be diagnosed with cancer before he started fucking us around.

The convention was incredulous at the whole affair. "If you get invited to a dinner party you don't show up just to piss on the rug" the Republican commentariat suggested afterwards. Fair enough I suppose, but if you call a man's wife ugly, convince your tabloid publishing friend to accuse him of philandering, and then imply that his father killed John F. Kennedy, how goddamned stupid do you have to be to invite him to dinner in the first place?

Still, the Cruz ordeal was better to my mind - or at least, tickled me far better - than Little Marco, who gave a reasonably decent endorsement of Donald Trump via pre-recorded video so he could say he didn't attend the convention but still weasel his way into the Trump camp. For a few minutes I thought he was trying to call for a coalition government with the Bloc Quebecois and needed a fresh splash of gin to get past it.

Jesus, at least Kasich had the good sense to just keep his head down and stay out of Cleveland altogether this week, with his balls intact.

I swear, inviting Cruz to speak and then not being prepared for the aftermath is just the latest in a long long list of catastrophic blunders this convention has committed, ruining their best prime-time exposure for the third night in a row. If we can't trust them to adequately organize their own circle jerk we're all going to be screwed if they manage to win some real power.

It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise, but still I'm struck by it. With no real policy ideas to run and a candidate who seems to be deathly allergic to positivity, the whole convention has been a Clinton-bashing event from start to finish. The daily themes, "Make America Work Again", "Make America First Again" have really all been variations of the first night, "Make America Safe Again BENGHAZI! EMAILS!" with no attempt to stick to a plan.

Everything is so completely bizarre. I can't recall another party convention where so many speakers have been on stage and yet gone to such lengths to completely avoiding using the nominee's name. Nobody seems to want to actually endorse Trump, the whole show is about how awful the Obama administration has been, how Hillary Clinton is a traitor, and how Conservatives are worth voting for even if they lead to a Donald Trump Presidency and an early end to Western Civilization. "Please!" Paul Ryan is screaming with his teary eyes any time he's on stage, "Please keep my congressional majority!".

I had actually been looking forward to Make America Work Again on Tuesday night and - anticipating a slew of anti-Mexican, anti-Chinese economic fear mongering - had spent the evening eating Tex-Mex and drinking cheap asian beer. Alas, Make America Work Again turned out to just be more of the same. The hits were constant and baffling: from Chris Christie's mob witch trial (it turns out if you fill an arena full of jabbering neurotics you can make call-and-answer work really well), to Ben Carson claiming that Clinton consorts with Satan worshipers.

Literally, Hillary Clinton is in league with Lucifer and his minions. This was delivered as a major presentation at a political convention in the United States of America, to rancorous applause, and yet they will wonder why nobody takes them seriously anymore.

I've disliked the Clintons in general for some time and I could still be convinced that Hillary Clinton's candidacy is secretly a PR stunt by Robin wright to promote Clair Underwood and House of Cards. Yet after three days of this mess not only is it clear that she's staggeringly more qualified to be President but I'm actually starting to look forward to the prospect.

Oh well, if I don't wrap this up I'll just end up foaming at the mouth until I choke to death: The Republicans have an official nominee, after a tedious but relatively drama-free state-by-state roll call. Thousands of delegates cast their votes loudly and enthusiastically. They talked up the things they love about their state and their pride in how firmly the GOP control their legislatures and state offices, even if data will bear out that these rank among the most garbage places on the continent.

At any rate, the serious business of the convention finished on Tuesday afternoon and freed us to relax and enjoy the decline into dementia. It was the closest thing to "an exercise in democracy" we're likely to see in the convention, and it felt exactly like having all of the blood drained slowly from your body.

I've been husked before, but never as part of a group. We now live in a reality where a racist misogynist like Donald Trump can bloviate and hate his way into being the Presidential nominee for an American political party. We will never again know a universe where that isn’t true. Such an existence hardly seems worth sustaining: after President Trump triggers World War Three and the nuclear warheads come, I don’t think I have the heart left in me to try and escape into the forest anymore; I’d rather just be vaporized.

RNC Part I - Send Tinfoil Hats And Extra Beer

My God we're finally here, the Republican National Convention: a week long debacle that promises to bring us gloriously color-corrected HD images of complete bedlam and catastrophe. And unlike most other Reality TV series, Death of a Political Party is being beamed directly into my amygdala live.

If I'm honest I'm not sure if I'm fully prepared for the ordeal. Closely following a US political convention with an eye towards blogging it is serious business, and if it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. Like an expedition climb, it's taken weeks of preparation - quiet meditation with Tibetan monks, stocking up on vitamins, and multiple supply runs to build up a base camp of liquor and cigarettes - to get ready, and by the end I'll be just as exhausted and high on oxygen deprivation as any conqueror of Everest. On Sunday night I took a 15km run and then resolved to drink a bottle of wine; this week is going to be one with few luxuries, and it's wise to start these things with a base alcohol level to thin the blood and train the body.

The whole thing has been surreal right from the start, when Reince Priebus opened the convention with a moment of silence to honor the police officers recently shot and killed in Baton Rouge, while a few blocks away Trump-endorser and Infowars lunatic Alex Jones (whose nonsense views on the New World Order and the 2nd amendment are pretty compatible with cop-killings) hosted a massive rally for delegates to throw of the shackles of the 'globalists' and their chemtrails with a Donald Trump Presidency. Then word came that the Trump motorcade had been involved in a car accident, because there's no such thing as too much symbolism for a week dedicated to binging on American jingoism.

After that was a good old fashioned floor fight over the convention rules, between the Trump team and supporters of Human Turdbag Ted Cruz, though supporters of the failed coup have quickly distanced themselves from the Texas Senator for his own protection (he is, as far as we know, still scheduled to speak on Wednesday and totally isn't being kept in a burlap sack in the cargo hold of the Trump plane).

Last night was cleverly titled Make America Safe Again and featured a number of frantic speakers screaming "Benghazi!" into the microphone, interspersed with guest appearances from other Reality shows like Duck Dynasty and Confessions of a Teen Idol.

True to type, quite a few speakers seemed convinced that it was cowardly weakness of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that's responsible for Americas allies feeling abandoned. Nevermind the war mongering of Bush-43, Freedom Fries, and "Old Europe". Nevermind the unprecedented increase in drone strikes conducted by the Obama administration (which is still operating the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, for those of you keeping score at home), or the fact that it was Clinton who had to convince Joe Biden that the US government should shoot Osama bin Laden and dump his body in the ocean. Mewling kittens, all of them.

Somewhat to my surprise, Rudy Giuliani's remarks were remarkably inoffensive. It's great to see that even a man of his age can enjoy a good trip on speed without being thrown off message, I'd have been a jabbering mess after that much Benzedrine. I've never been Mayor of New York, though, so I defer to his obvious experience at trying to maintain.

More than a few speakers talked about how Hillary Clinton had abandoned her duty, how the Democrats had failed to honor the service of veterans, and how much better Donald Trump and the Republicans would be at both of those. I predict this should all work fine as long as nobody tells them that Donald Trump was a draft dodger who only likes veterans that aren't captured or tortured, and they don't see McConnell wrestle a crippled firefighter backstage to recoup 9/11 responder cash. Every second I watch I regret not camping out in Cleveland more and more, this must be an amazing party scene.

Melania Trump was the star attraction for the first night (how she beat Antonio Sabato Jr. for top billing, I'll never know) and delivered her speech with considerable poise, although I couldn't help but notice that the loudest applause seemed to come when she sounded most like a Democrat. Republicans are weird like that - give them a speech about getting everyone to school and protecting the elderly and preventing murderous violence and they'll go nuts over it, foaming at the mouth and howling for more. Actually try to do any of those things and they'll tear your throat out like rabid animals.

As it turns out she lifted the thing from Michelle Obama anyway, an embarrassing bungle the Trump campaign will no doubt try to blame on President Obama's refusal to say "Radical Islamic Terrorism", so I guess that's a wash. So much for her weeks of writing and preparation, next time she should just call Peggy Wente at the Globe and Mail, who I'm sure could turn it around on a tighter deadline.

The show business largely dispensed with, tonight's speakers promise to be even more entertaining for a sauced-up politico like me: Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will be up to offer the final surrender of the elected Republican Establishment, Ben Carson will put everyone to sleep, and Chris Christie will offer proof that no matter how eagerly you whore yourself out some people are still just going to stuff you under the basement stairs instead of putting you on the ticket. At this rate he'll be lucky if Manafort doesn't harness him up to a gold plated ricksaw and horsewhip him as he pulls Trump and Pence on stage. We all have to lie in the dungpile we've made for ourselves, Chris, at least it's good exercise.

I suspect, however, that the peak for me personally may yet come when Human Turdbag Ted Cruz takes the stage on Wednesday, though, and we finally see just what it looks like to nail shit to a wall. Who knows though? The way this thing is playing out is a fun exercise in chaos. Horrifying, nerve wracking, abuse inducing, and utterly entertaining.

Torn Asunder

[The Publisher wishes to commend the actions of our office intern Alfonso, who secured this column after a two-day chase through the woods. Despite the author having stripped naked and smeared himself in mud in an attempt to hide from contact with human life, Alfonso was commendably able to track him down, pry it from his hands, and transcribe the following handwritten pages, though they are incomplete. We wish him a full and speedy recovery.]

I am writing to you from a secret, undisclosed location somewhere in South-Central Ontario. I'm at a lake retreat, surrounded by forest. It's the sort of place a militia survivalist would seek out to await the ending of the world with a massive supply of beer and cigarettes, and so suits my purposes perfectly after the events of the last few days and my burning need to channel some dark energy.

Still, the situation here is admittedly precarious. The door to my cabin has no lock and can be blown open with little more force than a heavy cough, so the only thing that seems to be keeping the bears out is their own lack of opposable thumbs. It's folly to rely on that of course, but at least I'm armed to the teeth.

Perhaps more accurately, I'm as armed as I dare trust myself to be in these ghastly new circumstances: a Super Soaker Barrage 9800 is my primary line of defense. It may sound like a children's toy but anyone who says that hasn't taken a blast full force in the genitals - it packs enough pressure to shatter a human femur and is complimented by the 200 rounds of water balloons I have at my disposal which, with a little luck, will distract a large predator large enough for it to accidentally choke on the latex.

But I'm not here for the hunting or all of the convenient ways to be gruesomely killed. I'm here to escape - escape my work, escape the news, escape the internet, escape the city and people. If I am to have any hope of surviving the upcoming Republican National Convention I was always going to need some downtime to lower the blood pressure and detox the liver, but it's been a wretched and destructive week and now I want just the opposite; with any luck I can drink and smoke and sun my way to a massive stroke before I am forced to return to what we may now only generously call "civilization" and that infernal convention.

It's hard to describe the phenomenon that seems to be casting a shadow across the United States these days. For a few hours the other night I thought the country was literally going to rip itself apart and we were all going to watch it happen live on Twitter. That place as it exists now bears little resemblance to their great national mythos; it's hard to say Home of the Free and Land of the Brave about a society where an entire race of people effectively remain second class citizens, peaceful protests become ambushes and bloodbaths, and it's all still basically business as usual.

I would like to write about Black Lives Matters, and admit that every time I'm out late for a run in my hoodie, or whenever been pulled over for gratuitous speeding, I've always secretly been thankful that I'm not Black (or Trans, Muslim, or Camp, for that matter). There's a stark contrast between the reality I get to live in and the one African Americans are forced into every day, increasingly captured in horrifying videos of unarmed and innocent men being shot to death by police officers so irrationally terrified as to be rabid.

I would also like to write about the Dallas police force, and lament that it was members one of the most progressive and positively reformed police organization in the country who became victims, while they were standing amicably side-by-side with peaceful BLM protesters, tweeting pictures together until the shots began.

All of those thoughts are valid and worthy of their own piece but somehow I feel like this is the chill of something even bleaker than the systemic racism that haunts us. This Thing seems to go beyond Black Lives Matters or the Police, beyond Democrats or the GOP, beyond religious extremism. Beyond all of that. This is like entropy made manifest; it is a force of nature. As if the Republic has reached some critical mass and is now flying apart into chaos at the atomic level. What bonds of fellowship that have held it together so far are fraying, and whatever is left of the American Dream is distorted into something twisted, like the kind of American Dream you imagine springs from the imagination of the National Rifle Association.

Jesus, how big of a hard on do you think Wayne Lapierre was sporting, watching Dallas explode as if it was a new and particularly aggressive form of pornography? It was like his own personal fuck dungeon - Texas' open carry law meant many bystanders were carrying rifles out in public when the ambush started, which just added to the confusion and put even more lives at risk. So much for the "what if everyone just had a gun?" line of thinking, no? In fact the potential for a situation like this to become a complete mess is exactly why Texas police forces have always had problems with the open carry laws pushed by the NRA and their subby-gimps in the legislature.

Buy when you're bankrolled by the companies that make these things, suddenly every problem looks like something to be fired with a hair-trigger. Guns become your solution to every problem, even the ones caused by too many guns. Throw another SMG on the grill, dear. There's plenty more where that came from. So let's be honest with each other Wayne, Dallas was your little paradise isn't it? Guns (especially the insidiously vicious assault variety) for everyone! Except maybe blacks, of course - your silence after "he was openly carrying a gun" was the justification for the execution of Alton Sterling was just fucking deafening all the way out here in the forest.

There was a time not all that long ago when, like most men of a certain age, I loved guns. The noise, the action, the power, the precision. No more. It is now impossible for me to separate my personal affinity for the things from the gun lobby, which profits directly from sales and thinks the next justice on the Supreme Court should have "maximize proliferation of death and fear" added right into the oath of office.

The blood of the dead in Dallas and Baton Rouge and dozens of other places are on your hands, Wayne, and your hypocrisy over Alton Sterling makes your racist undertone plain. A massacre every now and then is just what the NRA wants: it stokes white fear and black suppression, furthers the discord on all fronts to drive everyone to the local hunting supply store to save them from having to confront the reality that is the United States today, and convinces cops that it's always better to shoot first and get acquitted later.

We are truly becoming a post-fact world where Boris Johnson can destroy Europe, Donald Trump can destroy the Presidency, and the combination of cheaply acquired weapons of mass destruction with a refusal to reconcile the American myth with the American reality can destroy countless lives on all sides, all because of feelings, and the prioritization of fear over information and compassion for fellow human beings.

Forget evidence and body cameras which show an overwhelming problem with the relationship between police and their communities, forget experts and studies which show non-violent and inclusive community policing and gun control make everyone safer, forget the golden rule and the fundamental tenet that we all deserve the same dignities...pass the ammunition and let's stomp someone who looks different than us or makes us feel strange or bad - we're scared, Goddammit.

[At this point the pages Alfonso was able to recover become illegible and smeared in mud, we apologize for the abrupt ending and promise normal service will resume shortly.]