If you haven't been to my blog before, WELCOME!
If you have, you'll no doubt notice that not only are previous entries few and far between, but they are also not very political. I suppose there is a good reason for that, but I cannot think of it right now.
Suffice it to say, I used to blog quite frequently in the past. I had at least four or five blogs going on about 15 years ago. One was very political and critical of George W. Nixon (as I used to call him) and the rest had the occasional news-related item.
Then I discovered social media. First it was Friendster; then My Space, which was mostly about posting music on my page; and then I came across Facebook, and kinda stayed there. I have a Twitter account but I never use it, and the reason is evident when you read how long my old blog posts can get.
So Facebook has been where I posted EVERYTHING for the past decade or so. No need for extraneous blogs-- or, more importantly, no time for them. Marriage and raising a son and moving to the Midwest really took up all my free moments. I could link you to those but they have been neglected and many of the links are long gone and the relevancy has passed. Better to just start a whole new thing.
This new political climate is also a factor. President Trump is something completely new, and yet we've seen him before. I'm not gonna go the Hitler route; I'm thinking more like Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. I won't link to that; you're just gonna have to do the leg work yourself. But most likely I will end up writing about Jarry in the near future anyway, so just be patient and I will eventually get to it.
At this moment I feel the need to explain why I have returned to the haven of the political blog. It's because of what I call 'cultural gaslighting'. I define that as the process of being talked down to or lectured by political and religious neophytes and poseurs, to varying degrees.
I resist the urge to call the religious zealots poseurs because some of them have really turned their lives around thanks to religion; it just annoys me that I've been going to church and reading the Bible since I was a kid but now all of a sudden someone who prefers Christ to jail now has the cojones to tell me that I'm living foul.
With the political zealots, however, I have less pity. I have no tolerance for people whom I clearly remember complaining about people like me who talk political shop, who are now spouting endless ill-informed bullshit about current events and wagging their finger at me with NO AWARENESS of their own complicity in this stinky cluster of fuck we call the news.
It's not all bullshit, though. Some of it is common sense, whether it be liberal or conservative in its viewpoint. But the sancti-fucking-nomious way in which it is expressed riles me to no end. I know, I know... I wrote the book on sanctimony in political discourse... which is why it gets me upset: I've been doing it for years. How dare some newbie upstart tell me how to blather on pointlessly about political minutiae!
I guess I feel guilty because in at least one instance my political boorishness actually converted someone over to my way of thinking... and then I changed my way of thinking! Which is ironic, given that I am railing against people who change horses midstream... but in this case, I stopped entertaining certain conspiracy theories while inadvertently turning a friend onto them. This resulted in many painful exchanges where we butted heads and I ultimately had to block him from my Facebook page because he was annoying the shit out of me by posting onto my Timeline after I told him not to do that.
I would check up on his page from time to time; by then he'd become a full-on Ron Paul Libertarian... a "Paulbot", if you will. I guess there are worse things... no, wait, there aren't! At least not many. But at any rate, we didn't ever talk again. And it's too bad because he passed away on Halloween night of this year, a week before an election that may have conceivably killed him anyway had he somehow survived the heart attack he suffered.
I vowed I wouldn't let politics ruin a friendship again, but in the wake of Trump's victory this seems almost impossible. So I am taking extra measures to keep my social media life and my Political-with-a-capital-P side apart. Sort of like the separation of church and state. Or like the McDLT. Anyone remember the McDLT? I won't link it; you're just going to have to find out on your own.
I will end this blog entry with a newfound reason for why my previous posts on this blog were not political: I was actually trying to do the opposite of what I'm doing now. This blog was going to be the respite from current news, and my Facebook page was going to be where I was going to wage the wars and debate the critics. But a funny thing has happened: I no longer have the stomach for it. I now get sick when I think of having to bicker online with people. I don't like that feeling; I used to live for it, but now I detest it. And yet a part of me still has the jones to argue with people over issues that, truthfully, might not directly affect me or anyone I know that much. So how to reconcile that? I guess moving the political BS over to the blog is a better tactic. It keeps my social media friendly and it takes the war somewhere off the beaten track. Blogs have less currency these days (at least that's how it seems to me) so it's sort of a No Man's Land for battling among opinions.
So anyway, this is the place. This is the Terrordome. This is where you can find me if you want to talk about the President or world leaders or inane domestic policies or ISIS. This is where we can freely bash Mike Pence or discuss why Bernie Sanders is theoretically a good politician. As for my Facebook page, that's gonna be devoted to pics of my son, You Tube shares, and movie reviews. That's how I like it, and that's how I'm gonna keep it.
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