LukeofNazareth's Open Salon Blog

Rick Perry Doesn't Really Like Gays.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:12:12 -0500

Newt Gettin' Nasty

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:12:42 -0500

Newt Gettin' Nasty

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:12:39 -0500

Tastes Like Fear & Promise

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 22:10:35 -0400

" I never said Muskie was on Ibogaine. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he was. And I started the rumor in Milwaukee."

-Hunter S. Thompson

I thought the year had been soaked in mediocrity --surely the politics, the pop culture fit this mold. And yet an electric feeling swept me up, swept us all up like an eighth of mushrooms. Only this wasn't a trip. Not a roll. A high? Maybe. Yeah, a high on anger, on indignation, on that palpable sense that everything is oh so wrong and rigged.

My initial reaction to Occupy Wall Street reeked of disdain, not surprisingly; it stunk of such an enfeebling cynicism it hurt to realize I was wrong. This was righteous, I admitted. This was right. This was fucking it! FINALLY!

Millions of former Reaganites in foreclosure. Millions of would-be liberals in humiliating, enervating debt. To say we're echoing the 1960s' counter-culture is to miss the whole "nut" of the scene, as Hunter Thompson might have said. And yet it is anti-war. It is anti-Johnson still. It's anti-American history writ large. Fuck everybody, anybody in power, and everyone once in possession of that perverted responsibility. To debauch a once good and once just polity and convince her people it really was never good, never really right takes years of egomaniacal, smug and carelessly careless governance that we're STILL! protesting the 1960s as much as we're protesting the present malaise. (Kind of a run on but it felt right.)

For once our national lethargy begins to ebb, and a much needed participation and empathy begins to flow. Thankfully. Now on my way home from my $15 an hour job, I'm almost knocked over on West 42nd Street by a big blue police bus completely foreign to my eyes (and I've been here 8 years) hurtling toward Time Square at an untoward speed, hurrying to corral my seemingly peerless peers. And goddamn does the onset of confrontation taste so sweet and promising. For now I need another beer, another toke or another bump. Hell I'll have all three...Or maybe it's a meeting I need. Hahaha! Kidding, of course.

More jeremiads to come, I promise...

Written under the influence and while listening to "Psycho Killer,"

by Luke A. Egan aka Hoot Peters

Union City, NJ

10/15/2o11

The Obama Apologists

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 04:08:18 -0400

I voted for Barack Obama three years ago and save for a few fleeting moments, I've basically regretted it ever since. Moreover these last three years I've been mocked, chastised and insulted because I actually have convictions and I don't give them up just because Barack Obama has a nice a smile. And I'd like to add it's not my responsibility to "give him a break" or "blame the Tea party," for Obama's panoply of poor policies, errors and shortcomings. In fact it's the opposite: citizens are meant to challenge elected leaders when they lie, distort the truth and promote awful public policy. It's in a textbook somewhere, I swear.

The problem with the Obama Apologists, then, is that Obama's gotten his"core" supporters to abandon so many of their convictions or at least issues they once pretended to care about that they channel their frustration by insulting those of us to Obama's left when we criticize him for capitulating time and again to the right wing/business elite and label him a corporate shill.

Now I'm not going to convince the Obama Apologists, I merely say...

If you don't care to support single payer health care, that's fine, I do.

If you don't care to support withdrawing the troops from Iraq & Afghanistan, that's fine, I do.

If you don't care to support raising taxes on the affluent, that's fine, I do.

If you don't care to support divorcing commercial & investment banking and restoring New Deal-era regulations for Wall Street, that's fine, I do.

If you don't care to support making it easier for labor unions to organize, that's fine, I do.

If you don't care to support the government renegotiating mortgages to keep people in their homes, that's fine, I do.

But frankly, if you don't care to support these progressive measures, that's fine, they have a political party for you. They're called Republicans.