Breaking Wrong

For years friends have been urging me towards the TV show Breaking Bad. They tell me about how the writing is so good, and the drama so engaging. The problem I have is that it stars, not just a meth dealer, but a meth maker. For me that’s a deal breaker that no writing is good enough to overcome. Nothing is worth inviting a meth maker into my life on a regular basis.

I see a parallel in how people accept Trump even when they do see him for the idiot and creep that he is. In this case, it’s certainly not good writing (or good governing) they seek, it’s getting their way that makes them support an ignorant, incompetent, greedy, narcissistic racist.

I gotta ask: Have we gotten too willing to embrace human failure?

I see two aspects to this:

Firstly, have we gone too far in accepting that people, all people, are basically shit, so we might as well just learn to live down in that muck? Have we given up on the ideals of human comportment?

Secondly, do we — at least sometimes — go too far in accepting something without regard to its full context? Do we drink the wine even if it’s a bit polluted?

And (thirdly), juxtapose that second question with the hair-trigger response that blew away Al Franken or Megyn Kelly. We’re all over the map on whether a bit of sewage ruins the wine. At least sometimes, the mere speck is enough.

One of my earliest blog posts was about how a teaspoon of sewage ruins a barrel of wine, yet a whole bottle of wine can’t “ruin” sewage. Shit always wins.

(FWIW, I think it’s better to look at life in terms of wine and stew. It’s still true that adding a bit of stew to a fine wine ruins the wine — perfection is easily spoiled. But adding some wine to the stew just improves it. Life isn’t sewage, it’s stew, and the occasional bit of perfection (wine) just makes it tastier.)

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Anyway, my point is that I continue to be astonished at how much raw sewage Republicans can stomach in order to get their way. A lot of it clearly is because they know they’re in the minority, that they’re a dying point of view.

Some of it, though, seems to be because we’ve just learned to live with a lot of shit in life. We don’t blink an eye at the idea of inviting a meth maker into our homes — into our minds — for five seasons.

It would be, at least for me, different if we were talking about a movie. I can stomach a lot for 90 minutes or two hours (or whatever). And even these days, when evil does sometimes triumph in our stories, as a “one and done” that’s fine. That’s even art!

Getting together weekly, for five years, is a whole other deal.

Likewise, Trump was fine, even kind of amusing, in small doses when his antics really didn’t matter and we could just ignore him. He was “one and done” — only the tabloids (and their readers) cared.

But the Republicans invited the vampire in the door!

Vampires can’t enter your home unless you invite them in, but if you do, they’re really hard to get rid of. Evil is hard to combat.

And now all Republicans have a legacy of evil that will stick to them forever. History will record and will not treat them well. People like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will be remembered much as Hitler’s closest aids are today.

This is the legacy of the Republican Party:

• Ugly, indecent, divisive politics.
• Cruel and inhuman policies.
• Lies and propaganda.
• Dangerous and incompetent foreign policy.
• Backsliding of social policy in the USA.

We need to burn the GOP to the ground. Then salt that ground.

There needs to arise a new conservative party; one that upholds true conservative values in the context of a whole United States of America.

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That’s what ought to happen, if there’s any justice.

Will we remember? Or will we just shrug, accept the shit in our wine, and move on to the next big thing?

Has a diet of ugly entertainment (Breaking Bad, Scandal, House of Cards, et many al) inured us to evil in the real world?

Or are these “entertainments” reflective of our own acceptance of evil in the real world? (Or, more likely, do both feed off each other in a positive feedback loop?)

One lesson the barrel of wine metaphor teaches is that fine things are easily ruined. Perfection is the tip of a mountain. Climbing that mountain is the point — the idea is to get as high as you can, to stay as high as possible.

Being lazy in the valley is easy. Shit runs downhill. And collects there — another reason to try to achieve the greatest heights you can.

It’s hard to ruin shit. I mean, how could you? What makes shit worse?

That’s exactly why Trump is so hard to defeat. It’s hard to make shit seem shittier.

And if his fans have swallowed all his shit — all of that enormous river of foul diarrhea he produces — they’re obviously okay with it, and there isn’t much one can do to make is less palatable.

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Probably the best weapon is mockery and ignoring him as much as possible.

And stop obsessing over every verbal misstep. Learn that it’s just shit that comes from his mouth, and it can mostly be ignored. Pay attention to what he actually does, that’s what matters. His words are just farts going the wrong way.

And please, please, please vote!

Pretty much this time you just have to vote Democratic ticket and not risk splitting the vote. The vote here is to repudiate Trumpism and all his Trumpets.

We need a very clear mandate!

We need to end this madness!