Join the new world

Hey everybody. What a great-looking crowd! Welcome, one and all, new friends and old, long-timers, new arrivals, and visitors, to a new kind of tension all across the alien nation.

Yeah, OK.

First I'd like to invite you to take a visit with me, when it's convenient, to Ham's Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky.

Our wrinkle-resistant, stain-released kids can sit on English saddles atop plastic dinosaurs while we ponder the physics of how Noah managed to coax a loving pair of titanosaur Argentinosaurus huinculensis onto his 300x30x50-cubit boat. Personally, I'd think Western saddles would be more historically accurate. But then Ham is from Oz. So. Who knows what they do down there.

Anyhoo. Weighing in at up to 97 tons and stretching out to 40 meters long, each, Mr. and Ms. Titanosaur'd make sauroposeidon proteles (60 tons, 34 meters) seem svelte by comparison.





Leaving aside the other humungo dinos, what about all the other big bloated creatures that must have still existed 5,000 years ago when Noah floated his boat? You know, the hippos, the glyptodons and the giant ground sloths? Wouldn't the ship have capsized?

Also, this:




These are curiosities that Murkin religio-science education will no doubt one day resolve to our complete satisfaction.






Murka proudly marches backwards. We were born late into the family of nations and so are just now nostalgically reaching back to invent some medievalist roots: preemptive, never-ending war; secret prisons and torture; unbridled executive power; hating all the icky foreigners; religious exclusions; fearing knowledge.

In Ali-Bama, which is kind of like Murka's petri dish for cultivating poverty and fascism, an illiterate legislator put forward a bill to ban all works by gay writers and artists. Somebody, probably a Yankee schoolteacher, pointed out to him that this would mean banning Walt Whitman, Tennesee Williams, Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Michel Foucault, T.S. Eliot, Michelangelo, E.M. Forster, Langston Hughes, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Federico Garica Lorca, John Milton, Henry David Thoreau, Chuck Palahniuk and Plato, among others, not to mention being a violation of the US Constitution.

Once he realized that kids in Bama would be prevented from viewing "Fight Club", he withdrew his bill.





There is a strain of "thinkers" in Murka who see themselves, as one half-wit preacher put it: "Under attack by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture".



Murka has always been a happy place for believers in silly things. Medicine wagons and tent revivals. Juke joints and gambling dens. Ghost dances and hippie communes.

The calcification of idiocy-for-profit, that determined, studied deployment of asininity in pursuit of power, emerges when there is an ascendancy of the notion that we should trust the least people who actually know what they are talking about.




Singing along in the age of paranoia is how Idiot Murka amuses itself, deciding on the basis of two millions clicks and keystrokes that there really are two sides to every question, and that both are right. That the thunderous ravings of a turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christmastime Parking Structures in DeSneezus, Arkanas knows as much about biology or geo-science as an actual biologist or geologist. In fact, the scientist is a "so-called expert" and an "elitist" who, yuck, "writes books" and doesn't even have his own show on cable or YouTube. Eeeew.



We're well into that phase of the long national hangover where the light feels less like daggers in your eyes, and regret and guilt start flooding in to replace the receding hammers inside your head. Your keys are in the freezer. The cat is in the sink. You are beginning to realize that late last night you tried to make stew out of bunch of wadded-up paper towels.

Things are mixed up.

Religion is in the box where science used to be. You go looking for science on the shelf and find a bunch of wind-up, bobble-head politics dolls instead. Somebody has spilled so much entertainment all over everything you can't even find the daily news.







What is especially sad in all this is that we've misplaced our cranks, which, mark my words, will have dire consequences. The Murkin crank is one of the greatest by-products of the whole she-bang. The country was founded on untested, radical ideas. It was supposed to be an ongoing and evolving experiment.

The Murkin crank is not necessarily a nerd or a geek. Although some cranks are, that particular road to Cranksville tends to get reified, these days, into yet another recipe for selling us shit we don't need as a substitute for having to actually be challenged by anything. Which is what we are told is modernity.

A crank is not an iconoclast, a slogan-shouting demagogue, a lying, cheating charlatan who will do anything to advance his personal agenda. That's just an asshole. That's merely what some cranks do for a living.

At the end of the day, when all is said and done, in the long run, sooner or later, when the fat lady sings, as the sun sets in the west, ultimately, finally and somewhere over the rainbow, a crank's greatest contribution is to provide the nation with its living imagination.





All the greatest cranks do that. The sidewalk preachers. The sellers of quack cures. The truly populist politicians of both the right and the left. The old men singing the blues on their porch as the sun falls hotly on the Delta.

Murkin cranks do they best work in the realm of the national imagination. They take risks in creating a vision of the country. They believe in moonshine. They do not insist upon the praise of the people living in the comfortable center. They do not yearn for book deals, prizes, being chairman of the department or having the corner office.

Cranks are valuable only when they are not assimilated. That's how intellectual horizons broaden. Crankiness is devalued when cranky ideas are accepted untested and unchallenged.





Nothing is more worthless than a persistently wrong idea that succeeds despite itself.


The failure of Idiot Murka is a failure of the imagination and more specifically, the failure to recognize the utility of imagination. An indolent tolerance of driftwood-level bad ideas causes true crankiness to lose its charm. That's how the country loses its mind.

A crank should stand apart from a country gone mad. Today they have book deals, TV shows, thousands of couch-potato "followers" and "likers". As Henry Gondorff said in The Sting: "There's no point in being a grifter if it's the same as being a citizen."





Television and the Internet have killed good ol' Murkin crankhood by making it obsolete. Banal media has become the engine for validation of ideas within the culture. Appearance of "success" there eliminates your value as a crank, destroyed by an unearned respectability.

On these media, you are speaking to a potato, a moron, to a roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. It knows what it knows because it has feels. It reviles intellect and celebrates cleverness, which it has no problem transmuting into the sly and the diabolical.

The potato Know What Everybody Knows. It cuts everything down to fit the procrustean bed of commercial salesmanship. Potatos mainstream crankiness without allowing it to effect any change. The crank simply becomes another product within the unimaginative parameters of the marketplace.





When anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough and often enough, then notions can be sold like potions. Promoting commercial, political and religious idiocy used to take some work. It was an up-by-your-bootstraps activity. Now any kind of mush-brained "idea" can be put "out there" and therefore become "real".







The point of all this? It's party election time again!! ...