comrade simba

I got a FW: letter from a relative today and needed to put up a post here on the blog so here is my reply to him:

I’m pretty apolitical this circus cycle but I thought by now I would have seen at least one bumper sticker here in redneck land that said “I’m voting for the nigger – why not?”. How I see it is that the Republicans have trotted out somebody soooo bad that even the cracker states are going to go heavily in favor of a black guy, bwahahaha!

Just for the record here’s my take – I really thought Hillary had a lock on this deal – both her and McCain are cut from the same cloth with the same donor base and run in the same political circles on the cocktail party caucus. In other words we got offered up two sides of the same exact coin as per usual. Obama is a wild card in this game and therefore isn’t quite as trenched in to the beltway just because he hasn’t been there for the same amount of decades the others have. That means his bought and paid for loyalties are fewer.  So there is a shot in the dark (groan) that business as usual may have some of its momentum disrupted.

When everything is going to hell in a handbasket it’s probably best that you don’t keep playing with the same playbook that has you 28 points behind at halftime. McCain really is a true Bush clone – being propelled forward and served up to us as a moldy leftover by the same minority neo-con faction that has tried to get us to believe the shrub hasn’t completely fucked up everything he got within 50 yards of. The economy is suffering a finacial meltdown, the military is flat wore out with the Generals damn near in open rebellion, some new surveillance authorization is promulgated on an almost weekly basis, and McCain, the former “maverick” via voting with the Democrats 50% of the time, has said in no uncertain terms that the policies responsible for the above mentioned fiascoes are pretty much sacred cows.

I’m not a single issue votor, nor am I suffering from party loyalty. I have voted Reagan, the Libertarian, Bush Sr, Perot, Shrub and Banadarek. So I’ve voted safely conservative unless there was something different offered up outside the 2 party system when the Reps and Dems were carbon copies. I don’t feel any sense of “safety” in McCain – probably because the blue blood conservatives aren’t running the neo-con machine and are not behind a McCain presidency. So do I laugh my ass off and cast a ballot for Nadar, vote Democrat for the first time in my life or call it all a pound of sand up a rat’s ass and stay home and clean out the chicken house and turn compost heaps? I’m a “stay at home dad” anyway hehehe.

However, I’ve seen that bullshit “Change” line trotted out every 4 years. You’ve been alive long enough to have seen it and expected it this time around too. I got ten years on you – I cut my teeth in the Reagan years. So I’ve swung from conservative Republican to Anarchist to Apolitical to woo hoo bomb Saddam to a total conspiricy theory whack job all the way down to where I stand today – not giving much of a shit except for a couple of minor details. Like, on Inagueration Day McCain drops his right arm from the sky, takes his left hand off the bible and lunges with both arms outstretched for “the football”.

You know me – I’m crash proof and wouldn’t be bothered in the slightest if our happy motoring utopia shot craps, suburbia keeled over and died and the cities erupted in mass riots. Hell, for that matter I got my potassium iodide pills and can throw a couple of feet of dirt on the kitchen floor and bunker down in basement “doom room” where all our food and water is stashed and hang out in a fallout protection level of 1000 for two weeks or a month ’till the rad factor is minimal. Then I come out and get to live without all the plastic pumpkin go-go-gadget asshattery that occupies this country every waking moment. A lot of “doomers” really want to vote for McInsane just because they are dug in and want to get it over with ASAP and “Bring It On” John is the best bet. But they also say no matter how attractive that sounds no one wants to see their mother’s hair falling out and puking on the floor so they won’t be knee jerking the Republican lever -and  hoping Diebold cooperates.

So I’m not really “for” BO as much as I’m theoretically against McCain. I’m not flying a yard sign, anyway. The only excitement I have in this race is giggling about how OB is up anywhere from 7 to 10 percent in every non partisan poll and showing a mathematical electoral rout and waiting for the McCain “fix” to kick in whereby the conspiricy theorists won’t look quite as shrouded in tin foil as they do when yammering on about 9/11 long past the time anyone gives a shit about physics and Building 7.  America is in a stage of weakening power in relation to the rest of the world – I’d say we could put a Negro shuck and jive act to better use than trying to maintain our nationalist fervor at gunpoint.

Man, I was only going to quip an off color joke, instead you get this. The guy who wrote the letter that prompted the email to me is so baseball hot dogs apple pie and chevrolet I could barf. A free thinker? Hardy har har. A chimpanzee could tell it was a McCain plug from the introductory paragraph:
“   Dear Friends:

My name is Joe Porter. I live in Champaign, Illinois. I’m 46 years old, a born-again Christian, a husband, a father, a small business owner, a veteran, and a homeowner. I don’t consider myself to be either conservative or liberal, and I vote for the person, not Republican or Democrat. I don’t believe there are “two Americas” but that every person in this country can be whomever and whatever they want to be if they’ll just work to get there and nowhere else on earth can they find such opportunities. I believe our government should help those who are legitimately downtrodden, and should always put the interests of America first.”

Hahaha – dissect it…
First “Dear Friends” – how many have fallen down on the “Friends” drinking game?
Joe Plumber, anyone?
Born Again – check
Family Values – check
Member of the “Ownership” class – check and check again
Veteran. Uh huh.
And the kicker meme – “America First”.

I call bullshit on a really lame Republican PR spambot. Certainly no advanced AI going on here.

Well, so much for not voicing any real opinion about the election.  I’m mostly chapped about being forwarded a piece of propaganda and even more irked that so many fall for this shit. Man, it sure would be tough to be a Republican these days – most being either morons or racists. Balances out the whack jobs on the left I suppose.  Makes me wish Hillary was the Anointed One – at least with Martial Law enacted we wouldn’t have to put up with this agonizing farse in the future.

And no, I’m not put off by the color of Obama’s skin. If they were both regular folks I’d rather live next door to him barbecuing out by the melon patch than John puttering around in his yard with a sprayer in his hand bitching about the dandelions in mine… Getting woke up by ambulance calls to his house at 3 am for a heart attack or stroke. Middle and upper class white boomers really piss me off.

That is all. Flame away – frost got the garden so I don’t have anything better to do Not much doom here but I gotta make sure it gets posted on the survivallist under “doom”, bwahahaha!

I told a friend I’ve been picking red beans and since he’s a heirloom seed buff he asked what kind they were. “Uh… walmart beans. 89 cents a pound red beans” I said and the look I got was “does not compute”. Yeah, they grow right out of the bag and actually did better than the high dollar ones I ordered from a seed company. Sprouted some just to make sure they were viable – whether those sprouts can produce a plant that makes viable seed remains to be seen. I did the same thing with cheap feed store whole field corn and it also grew just fine. So if you wanna grow corn for chickens and pigs, black eyed peas and any kind of bean you don’t have to spend big money on seed. There you go. My contribution to the world.

Man, I got beans everywhere. Cowpeas, red beans white beans green beans purple hull peas. Idiot planted them all, too – just clawed up the dirt with a cursory tiller pass and poked them in rapid fire wherever zen said they go. Granted, we got a lot of rain and there were only two weeks of 100 degree weather – it could be said that it was kinda wet and cold for beans, too. I let them compete with the weeds for the most part, only pulling up the big ones once the plants got out of the baby stage. I’m figuring out that allowing a canopy of green – be it weeds or plants to keep the ground covered and selectively weeding is less work than obsessively making war with a hoe. Some of the beds I cleared of all weeds if I had a bunch of grass clippings to carpet bomb the bed with. Feed the worms.

We eat about three pounds of beans a week during the winter months so it looks like I grew enough to meet our needs. Add up all the time planting, picking and shelling the damn things and I could have bought them all for mowing somebody’s lawn in a half an afternoon. Ain’t that the shits? But I do it anyway just so I can feel superior to the drunk nascar lovin’ food stamp family across the road…

Reminds me of the time I was bussing tables at a Shoneys during the late night human hog trough breakfast bar. Some drunk was bitching about no eggs on the bar and asked me what came first – the chicken or the egg? I said the egg – genetic mutation occurs in the offspring of a species, so what laid the true chicken egg was not a true chicken. He gave me that one eyed drunk look and said “if you’re so smart why are you washing dishes”?

Whataya gonna do?

The sandwich board crowd is out in full force proclaiming “TSHTF” I’d be out there too, but I had to cannibalize mine for a chickens for sale sign a few months ago. So I’m in popcorn mode – just sit back and watch the show. You gotcher oh no I need six more months types, the total lock and load guys full of glee, the broker types getting all excited about soon to come buying opportunities, and guys like me – just fuckin’ wore out from the waiting, the false alarms,  head trip speculations and the physical labor of building a doomstead and extracting from the 21st century. I’m good to go, and here’s why:

No mortgage on the farm. No CC debt. No problem with jingle mailing the car keys for the wife’s newish car. So no worries in the dollar realm.  Three year’s worth of collecting tools, mason jars, fabric, and anything else that you would have found in your great grandparent’s house. I am done with OMG I need such and such. What we may not have that we may need is just the state we’ll live in. I’m doomed up like one in ten thousand or better so FEMA camps do not loom in our future. I’ve been working my digging stick for five years in the weed patch known as “the garden” and while the fare may be not too diverse, there is more than enough to feed us when I play in the dirt rather than surf the net. Power’s out? Well, I suppose I’ll put in another hundred foot row of corn or milo or beans today… just like I would have done every day since last frost.

So I can stop now. I can stop the doom watch. I can stop the tension, the mental exercises, the frantic planning and research and just relax. It’s coming on winter and I get to play with the new Pioneer Maid cookstove and putter around tinkering with a rcket stove fired water heater. Get back into my retirement mode that got tossed out the window when doom loomed out of the theoretic and into the here and now.Once again I get to quit the rat race – this time at 46.

I am not of the genus homo petroleumus. I do not require electricity to function and be happy. My wife is a good witch – her lotions and potions have fixed any ailments that have arisen. We eat like kings and stay toasty warm. The boy is growing up uncontaminated by video games. At three and a half feet tall he can plant seeds and split kindling. Our life is good and when all the clusterfuck of this modern era goes away  we’ll actually have the chance to live in the real world – not this Plasticland that everyone seems so hell bent on keeping alive. We are more fortunate than all the generations before us… the shock of transition will teach us the meaning of life.