I mean, how am I supposed to process the fact that a major pull at the convention is screenings of a "documentary" that
exposes the Occupy movement, revealing the “sinister, organized, and highly orchestrated nature of its leaders and their number-one goal: not just to change government, but to destroy it.”What? I thought the Tea party wanted to destroy government. I thought that was, like, their entire thing, other than saying it's really unfair to call them racists just because 49% of them are and the other 51% don't seem to care about that fact at all. If Occupy really was about the destruction of government - as oppose to destroying people's willingness to engage with government, which is its own problem - then wouldn't the "Taxed Enough Already!" people be happy to join forces with them? Or is the real problem that once both groups had torn down DC some of the Occupy people would want to be gay in amongst the ruins?
One thing that all this swirling childish resentment has achieved is to clarify exactly why I despise Mitt Romney as a person, as oppose to just as a man determined to make his fellow citizens lives worse whilst lying to them about it. It's all this "No apology" bullshit. Romney won't apologise to other countries for killing their civilians. He won't apologise to the working class for making a fuckton of money by sensibly timing the exact moment he could fuck them over and make the biggest profit. Nor will he apologise for taking the money he extracted from vulnerable companies and stashing it in the Cayman Islands so that the government he claims to want to lead couldn't slice off its share in order to keep the country he claims to want to run actually, you know, fucking running.
In terms of personality defects (as oppose to actions), there is nothing, absolutely nothing, than I despise more than the idea that refusing to apologise represents strength of character. George W Bush was exactly the same way, of course; when asked about the worst moment of his presidency the rubber-faced mass-murderer had the neck to bitch about Kayne West being mean to him. Gods forbid he choose anything that might be interpreted as something approaching regret.
Apologising is hard. Not apologising is monumentally fucking easy. Blaming other people is monumentally fucking easy. Deciding you don't need to say "sorry" because the other guy is a dick anyway or because you've had a bad day or because other people do way worse stuff has been hardwired into our brains ever since the first homo erectus stole the mammoth meat from the second homo erectus on the basis of seniority. "Stop apologising so much!" "Sorry!" is an easy joke in feeble sitcoms, but out here in the real world 99.9% of the population could stand to apologise more often and more sincerely than they do, and God I know I'm one, as the song goes.
Of course, this is all part of what, despite it's exist origins and associated difficulty of use, I genuinely can't think of a better name for than the Cult of Cuntiness. The celebration of never apologising. Of never showing gratitude. Of giggling whilst the bombs are going off in central Baghdad. The confusion of pathologies for virtue, and the idea that the worst angels of a nature are the ones that should be listened to above all others, and somehow that we should be impressed by those who do so. This is by no means the exclusive province of the right, but it is the right that has institutionalised it. It's in Thatcherism, root and branch. It's in Osborne's "there is no Plan B" posturing. And across the stormy Atlantic, in rain-streaked Tampa buildings, it suffuses the air like mustard gas, with no dissimilar promises of suffering.
In 67 days, we'll see just how far the cloud has spread.
Also, since it's Friday:
