God forgive me.

 God forgive me, he ranted.    

                     Back in February, explaining that I didn’t have the guts for it, I turned the “political side” of my vast media empire (two blogs and facebook page) over to my friend Tom Nashe. I didn’t “enjoy my anger enough,” I wrote, “it turns too easily to gall.” Tom wasn’t so bothered by his anger, because – or so he claimed – his politics were non-existent: he belonged to no party, he said, “but the anti-hypocrisy party.” Since Nashe had no web presence, I did (and do) continue to publish Go Around Back, and it was I that prevailed this October upon our mutual (much younger) friend Melchior Ball to join Tom as “drawer,” as he (m ball) calls it. 
     
This is probably not a good time to get back into political commentary; and it’s probably never a good idea to post something written in the middle of a sleepless night, awake in part because I was so damned mad at what Tom had written on Carson, Trump, and Cruz, taking their xenophobia to its logical extremes. Not Tom's intention: he seems to have some patience with these jackasses, but I found I had none. I hated their hate-filled-ness. Worse – here’s what I wrote, only a bit cleaned up for prime time.

Worse, I think I am beginning to hate my country. I haven’t liked “us” in a long time, but I do hate American exceptionalism and American capitalism. The first allows us to be our own moral compass; whatever we say or do must be right, because we say so, we do it. The second has become our form of government. We are no longer a republic but a plutocracy. We are also a hypocrisy, because we have always to pretend we are what we are not; whatever the rest of the world may think, we are never rude, never crude, never unthinking, never a nation of xenophobic jerks.

    But our xenophobia is not only jerky; it has become complete. We hate not only all aliens but anyone remotely alien. It’s not only Syrians we hate – or the Lebanese, or Libyans, or Algerians, or the French for that matter. We hate each other. American men hate American women; American women hate American men. American whites hate American blacks; American blacks hate American whites. American Christians hate American Jews and Muslims and vice versa and versa vice in every permutation. Atheists hate the religious; the religious hate atheists and agnostics; indeed, we have come to loathe anyone that has sinned even once and failed not only to confess but proclaim it, so God could be gracious and we can be the one that said he was.

    Cowboys hate Indians, and Indians hate Cowboys. Everybody hates Hispanics, and they hate one another: the Mexicans hate the Dominicans, the Dominicans hate the Guatemalans, the Guatemalans hate the Ecuadorans and round and round it goes: Cuban Americans despise them all. Everybody including every kind of Hispanic hates Arab-Americans; in fact, they think that is a contradiction in terms; no Arab can be American, never mind that his family has been here 150 years.

    The rich hate the poor, and the poor hate the rich. Democrats hate Republicans – they lie when they say they don’t. And Republicans hate Democrats and are not afraid to say so.

    Gays hate straights almost as much as straights hate gays – perhaps more. Lesbians hate gay men. The transgendered and bisexuals hate everybody; fair enough: everybody hates them.

    We all hate God – not just the atheists among us. (Their hate is actually less than that of the religious.) We hate God the way the most conservative, fundamentalist, macho, narrow-minded father hates his gay son: We say we love him but we wish he were different; he isn’t right, so we put him into re-programming. There are centers, several, in every city, town, and village: there are rural reprogramming centers. Wherever there is a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, there we are reprogramming the God we claim to worship and adore, because frankly God isn't right; God is strange and needs our help. But lest God be dismayed, let God know this: hate-filled Americans of all religious stripes want to help.

    Our most popular entertainers embrace and espouse hate, wanting to help: rappers and Rush Limbaugh; hip-hoppers and Sean Hannity. They pretend they don’t really hate, but those clucks of sympathy you hear in their throats with regard to anyone else: it’s actually gagging.

    We’re all gagging on the antics of the alien. How can he fail so miserably to be us?

That’s where I stopped and got back into bed. But it doesn’t stop there. That’s the problem: once started, it just doesn’t stop – at all.

11.21.15