morning glow

1.

You wake up in a cold sweat face down in a crumpled sweatshirt on your bedroom floor. Your throat is dry and hoarse and before you have time to get a drink of water you are seized by a dry-heaving cough that is debilitating and somehow cathartic.

After regaining control you slam down the button on top of your digital alarm clock that has been obnoxiously trying to rouse you since 9:30.

Your headache implausibly eases ever so slightly. Enough that completely opening your eyes becomes possible.

Your eyes adjust to the southerly glow of morning streaming through the half-drawn shades and you take in the orderly blankness of your room’s empty walls.

Your nose is running and it itches fiercely.

Last night’s shirt serves as a tissue and in addition to some unholy phlegm your nostrils are coated in dried blood that your memory seems to have excluded from its reportage.

The hardwood floor of the hellway causes you to momentarily recoil before skipping into the bathroom where the chilled tiles are even less welcoming to bare feet.

A look in the mirror gives little indication of the cause or injury. You look ghastly but unharmed. The dark rings around your eyes indicate the months of fitful sleep that has passed for rest. An uneven and prickly beard coming unbidden.

The digital clock underneath the mirror reads 9:43 and you are somewhat surprised to be up so early on day you deliberately try to sleep through every week.

Again you are seized up by a violent coughing fit. You collapse over the toilet and retch up nothing in particular in an attempt to expel whatever evil has your lungs and throat in its icy, poisonous grasp. Needles in your throat flare and the sense of lightheadedness dulls the seerign headache enough for you to fill a plastic cup up with tap water and gulp it greedily down without choking.

You sit down heavily against the bathtub on top of the small rectangular shag carpet that you inherited from your older brother’s first SOHO apartment. It is dirty and not particularly comfortable but compared to the tile it suits your modest needs, never more so than right now.

On the wall in the hallway is a black and white portrait of a scowling owl that you found in a thrift store in Southeast Ohio.

Its dark eyes burnished with anger and untold resentment, no matter where you stand the owl always seems to be staring directly at you in stark judgment. For a year it was above your small television in the living room but multiple complaints provoked the change of venue to a slightly less antagonistic location. The belligerence evinced by the owl’s severely furrowed brow and wide, all-seeing eyes had become a reasonable approximation of your own mood as of late so that when a young woman whose name you could not recall came out of the bathroom at 8 AM she was unsettled enough to leave that much quicker and sooner. Morning conversation became less feasible after this inevitable confrontation and you were satisfied to once more be alone, as if the previous evening was yet another eight hour block of time that neither didn’t occur or occur. Like a wisp of undependable, patchy text, if existed only in the corners of your eyes where its presence was felt without ever truly being seen. And anything unseen can remain comfortably unacknowledged.

In the living room a a few half-empty cans of inexpensive beer sit on the Ikea coffee table amid two empty whiskey bottles. The tv is on with the volume muted and the morning news drones inaudibly on.

You turn off the tv and sit down on the couch. A half-empty pack of Parliaments stares at you from the table next to an open jar of uneaten pickles. You look around the room for a lighter and find a matchbook from the dingy bar in the basement of your building.

The cigarettes tastes dry and your throat rebels as if to warn you of another imminent coughing fit but as you take long, deep drags your resolve holds and the coughs never materialize. You ash into a Diet Coke can that has been cut in half and when you are finished you douse the smoking butt with stale beer whose smell reminds you of college parties that you never quite enjoyed as much as everyone else.

Outside, on the fire escape, three pigeons are sleeping peacefully through what appears to be an unseasonably warm March morning.

The headache returns, in earnest, poised behind your left ear tickling your skull like a plastic knife. You close your eyes tightly, grab a pillow, lean back, and cover your face.

Chapter 2:

You come to when the hip-hop song clip ringtone is on its third circuit through the chorus.

The living room is dark and greying. Your eyes slowly adjust to the dim late-afternoon light and follow the sound. Across the room, on a bookshelf that houses your broken-spined Norton Anthologies, is your vibrating phone.

You shuffle across the floor to pick it up. You step in something wet and look down to notice that you are wearing one sock and standing in beer. On the phone is your mother, whom you haven’t spoken to in several weeks. Not since you asked her for the check that promptly arrived a few days later. Your shame prevents you from answering. So instead you stand there staring at the screen until the voicemail icon pops up. You touch the icon and your mother’s familiar voice begins, “Hi Reed, Its your mother…I’m just checking in since I haven’t heard from you…Call me. Mom.”

You put the phone down as nausea surges up from your stomach through your ravaged esophagus and dry throat to occupy your nostrils, eyes and sinuses. You stumble back the couch and have just barely laid down when more violent shutters seize your shoulders, back and abdomen. You involuntarily shake like a doll for a handful of long seconds that are as interminable as they are painful. You become dimly aware of a high-pitched shrieking that may or may not be coming from your throat and as quickly as it begun it ends.

You breathe deep, haggard breathes and stare up at the ceiling as if its going to collapse on you. Long moments pass in silence and the thin slivers of daylight evaporate into the ether and, finally, you are enveloped by heavy, unapologetic darkness.

Your thoughts return to last night’s half-memories.

Stefan spilling bourbon on the couch and then burning a hole in the fabric with a dangling cigarette.

Wes doing sixty pushups and then throwing up on the living room floor and laughing at his reflection in the mirror as he flexed like a body builder.

The journey down to Grandpa’s Tavern. Splitting cigarettes as you walked. The whistle of the wind between buildings and the echo of car horns and voices between letterless glass and steel crossword puzzles that rise up like mountains around you. How the emptiness and silence opened up as the four of you trudged across the park and the vastness of everything felt imminent and real and tangible and you were, in a way, frightened at your own yawning insignificance among so much gross and unfathomable largesse. So much experience that it cannot, reasonably, be comprehended or contained.

The moment of philosophical thought escaped into the brisk night and disappeared among spindly, naked trees that seem ghoulish and sinister, if a bit malnourished. They lord over parks and streets everywhere in winter like silent guardians.

Cassidy puts her hand through yours and pushes against your arm and shoulder as you walk.

“I love you,” she whispers through the knit scarf wrapped around her face.

You’re heart lurches and it takes an act of heroic willpower not to shudder physically in surprise and embarrassment at your own predictability.

“I love you too,” you croak after what feels like too long.

She leans on your shoulder reassuringly and you relax because you know she believed you and for now you won’t have to lie to yourself again because the truth is that you do lover her and that you always have and that you have waited years for this moment and even after years of waiting it caught you offguard and now you are afraid because you feel unprepared for how significant this moment has now become and you fear you may ruin it or permanently scar your relationship with someone whom you have adored since you laid eyes on her and now you have her but fear you will lose her and the thought of losing her floods you with horror and anxiety and sadness and that sadness washes over the happiness you felt ever so briefly and now you are grim and angry and hate her for the power she wields even while you love her for her brilliance and frankness and freckles and lips and the way her hands smell like ink and peaches at the same time while her breath reminds you of almonds except when she drinks whiskey or smokes a cigarette and then you feel nostalgic for when you first met her and she was dating other guys and you were just friends and she would confide in you things that seemed so meaningful and now that you have her and she loves you you wonder how it could get better and worry it can only get worse and if so what is the point of any of this if it all just eventually goes away?

This rushes through your mind in a matter of seconds as three or four memories and images compressed like individual frames of a film that altogether create only three seconds of a movie but your thoughts are deep and pregnant and wide and when Cassidy kisses your cheek you come back to the park and smell Stefan’s Marlboro and here Wes laugh and Caroline is skipping and you laugh for no reason and Cassidy laughs because you laughed and you snuggle into her and put your arm around her and you can see the bar down the block and you are glad to almost be there with your friends and Cassidy and glad you have her right now in your arms and glad that you’ll have tonight and if you are lucky tomorrow and the day after and you resolve to stop worrying and become happier and work harder to smile more and give Cassidy the love she deserves and has never had and to tell her every day that you adore her and remind her that you have loved her for years without wavering and that this was meant to be the way it is until it isn’t but you can’t worry about that yet and so you don’t.

On Poverty

You wake up every morning at 8:15 to the same melody droning out of your phone. You kick off your covers and sit at the end of your bed staring at the faded yellow paint that someone years ago decided was a nice color for a bedroom. You walk across the room, stepping over laundry, loose change and shoes and grab your towel. You open your door and listen for the sound of the shower and/or the radio to make sure the bathroom is unoccupied. You stroll down the staircase and turn past the living room. You do not, for the fifteenth time, consider how strange it is that the primary bathroom is downstairs. You close the door behind you.

You stare at yourself in the mirror. You probe and prod at parts of your body. As if your fingers will discover whether you are flabbier than you were a month earlier. You are, but you cannot be sure if it is obvious. You do twenty five, no, fifteen pushups. You collapse against the tile and breath deep breathes while staring at the wall for a moment. You stand up. You breathe again.

You let the shower run for a minute until the water is hot enough.You shower quickly under almost scalding hot water that momentarily lessens the pain of your stiff neck and lingering sciatica. You stretch. You touch your toes and try to loosen the fists in your lower back that feel like boulders every morning. You use three different types of facial cleanser to try to lessen the effects of the ingrown hairs that keep you from shaving regularly. Your face stings as Africa gets it revenge on your ravaged skin by curling up hairs like springs underneath your skin. This is the only time you wish you were whiter, mostly. That your dad’s straight, dull whiteboy brown hair had beaten back the press of your mother’s blackness. But when it comes to genetics, black beats white on points. It is one of the world’s more puzzling or perverse cosmic jokes.

There is a truism that fuels your rage: white fathers always fuck up their black sons. The details are immaterial. He is as present in your skin as he is absent from your memory. He endures as long as you do, dug in like a tick.

You dress quickly in wrinkled pants. Either a pair of khaki chinos that make your ass look good or a dinged up pair of grey slacks that have seen better days but you like showing your boss how small of a fuck you give. You wear boat shoes. You always wear boat shoes. You didn’t go to Andover but you like looking it. If it’s colder than 50 degrees you wear socks that may or may not be clean and may or may not match. You wear cardigans to hide the fact that you almost never iron your shirts. Then you grab a granola bar from the kitchen pantry and walk out the front door, down the steep concrete steps and avoid any fresh dog shit that some kind neighbor has neglected to pick up that morning.

You turn the corner and walk the one Avenue over to your office on a busy commercial thoroughfare. Your office is above a convenience store that sells everything from dime store paperbacks to Mother Jones and National Review to cigarettes, zippo lighters, beanie babies and, of course, Peanut M&M’s. You grab weak ass coffee loaded with cream and sugar the greasy spoon diner across the street from your office and wonder if you or you boss will be first today. If it’s your boss you know you’ll have to take a quick lunch since you’re 15 minutes late and no amount of late nights working unpaid overtime will let him forget you showed up at 9:12 AM. He won’t say anything but you know by the way he glances up at the clock in his office that he’s judging the fuck out of you.

You sit at your desk with your back to him and for the umpteenth time feel like you’re working in some crazy ass Jeremy Bentham meets Milton Friedman wet dream. You write “articles” for the newsletter written at a 8^th grade level for the dumb fucks your boss think read it. You argue with him over grammar and the definitions of words and whether or not he can use pickup as a verb. A few hundred years of common English usage isn’t enough to convince him otherwise since more than anything else he resents that you have an advanced degree and he does not.

In spare moments you write misery-tarnished poetry on your anonymous, unread blog. It’s all vague adverbs and ellipses mixed in with bullshit five dollar words and random imagery culled from memories of long drives across the Midwest and Southern New Jersey, but it helps you limp through the day and at 5:30 PM you exit like a bank robber and walk home to your yellow room that looks like a hurricane blasted it every day for a week.
Some nights you sprawl out on your bed and stare at the ceiling like it’s anything other than what it is. You perfect the art of a blank mind, and subdue the shaking wails and roiling turmoil that boils up in your gut and threaten to send you into hysterics that would make your roommates seriously consider evicting you.

One night you call your mom as you sob uncontrollably, gasping for air and considering the end. In even, measured tones she essentially tells you to man the fuck up followed by “I Love You.” Never one to indulge in self-pity, she is a therapist and a damned good one and she is determined not to let you turn into one of the real, genuine fuckups she works with. You smoke a cigarette and drink Carlo Rossi to calm down and play video games on your computer until 3 am, which has been your therapy of choice since you started getting sad as shit as a 12 year old.

The night is your ally, you think to yourself. At nighttime your solitude feels like armor and you exist in a depopulated, quiet place where the frenzy of day and activity drives you into the blackest of moods where your hate and insanity explodes in every direction like a nova. Through sheer willpower and fear you keep it below the skin until you can curl up in your room and scream or punch your pillow or watch porn until you feel nothing but gloriously hollow.
Disaffection is a constant goal. The complete erasure of emotion feels like a tide of bliss that swallows the same rotten knots that consume every ounce of energy for days at a time until you collapse from exhaustion or drink yourself into a blind stupor. The hangover tamps down on actual feelings and as long you feel too ill to move, you are too ill to think about anything other than your immediate desire to feel like a human being again.

In Chicago you spent days at a time in bed. You would work from Thursday through Saturday at bar in the financial district where your customers are traders and bondsmen who come to celebrate good days and bad days. You stay in bed from Sunday through Wednesday. Your roommate would check on you after a few days and find you in bed surrounded by laundry you had never bothered to put away.

You budgeted 60 dollars a week for whiskey, 30 dollars a week for cigarettes, and 30 dollars a week for food. You lived on rice and beans, Camel Lights and Makers Mark for four months and barely made rent. You called your mother and a check for three or four hundred dollars might arrive. You considered climbing to the roof of your building and stepping off the top, but that always, when you got down to things, felt like the most cowardly thing you might ever do, and cowardice, your vice, is also your greatest fear.

Sometimes after work you would duck into a dive bar on your walk home and see what happened. When you’re drinking alone one of two things happens: nothing, or some intrigued girl will walk over and start to chat you up. The night’s no one walks over you go home after an hour and sit in front of the TV with your roommate drinking four fingers of whiskey until you’re ready to hit your bed like a toppling tree. When someone does come over you spit game like only bartenders can and usually they come home with you.

You pour them a whiskey you know they wont drink and suck yours down before coaxing them into your dark cave of a room to have mind-numbing, forgettable sex they’ll regret as soon as they wake up. They think you are deep and soulful; sad but redeemable. They mistake misery for gravitas and you will let them fool themselves for as long as it takes until they realize you are poisonous.

Now you maintain appearances. If anything work forces you to do something everyday and you have to speak with people and participate in human activities. Your sense of outrage and unfairness are inflamed by your proximity to others, but you bear it with no small sense of martyrdom.

On weekends — especially on weekends — a squall of black gloom descends like a blizzard. Work offers a respite for five days. Distraction from the machinations of unhappiness that twist up in your gut on long aimless days spent wandering the streets of Jersey City, a place that has no patience for self-pity.

The fetid squalor of working poverty is everywhere. You are in it, but not of it. Though your father was a high school dropout, his lack of ambition and cowardice was experienced secondhand. Your mother worked. Always. You recall years of babysitters. Of strange houses with strange families and strange children with strange habits. A Princeton physics professors whose daughter would make you undress in the attic of their four story Victorian. A white woman whose adopted son would open the bathroom door and stare at you as you peed. A Puerto Rican family whose kids yelled constantly. Eventually you just went home alone and spent hours with books and only books.

You remember Trenton, when you played with other black boys whose poverty made you feel wealthy. One long summer day, one of the older boys in the neighborhood tied a milk crate to the back of his bicycle with a rope. You climbed inside of the orange crate and crouched down. Someone placed a bicycle helmet on your head and the older boy started riding.

The crate skidded across the pavement and picked up speed. For two blocks the boy pedaled harder and harder and for a moment you thought you were flying.

The boy look a wide looping turn at the end of the road but the crate kept skidding forward. When the crate hit the curb, it shattered and your momentum carried you up and out of it, over the grass and onto sidewalk.

You remember hearing your shoulder hit with a crunch and your skin drag and flay as you rolled into a yard.

It was quiet. And the sky was big and impossibly blue, with a handful of whispy clouds drifting lazily. Your view is ringed by the old, towering trees that seem as old as time itself. As if the world grew up around them anchored to the universe by their deep, limitless roots whose whispers you can hear if you are quiet and put your head to the ground.

You star at one cloud in particular as it slowly morphs and takes on a new image and you wonder how long a single cloud will drift across the world before it grows, or dies or disappears.

When the wide eyes of your neighbor looked down at you they glanced at your arm and then at your face and back and forth as if they expected you to say something.

Their mouths move with genuine alarm but you hear nothing.

“You were smiling”, they will say later. “You were smiling.”

“A suffering face, strong as a door.”

An exerpt from Salter’s “Via Negativa”, found while perusing The Paris Review’s astounding archives:

There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. His index finger is the color of tea, his smile filled with bad teeth. He knows literature, however. His sad bones are made of it. He knows what was written and where writers died. His opinions are cold but accurate. They are pure, at least there is that.

He’s unknown, though not without a few admirers. They are really like marriage, uninteresting, but what else is there? His life is his journals. In them somewhere is a line from the astrologer: your natural companions are women. Occasionally, perhaps. No more than that. His hair is thin. His clothes are a little out of style. He is aware, however, that there is a great, a final glory which falls on certain figures barely noticed in their time, touches them in obscurity and recreates their lives. His heroes are Musil and, of course, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bunin.

Wealth is Not A Sign of Merit

Trevor Burrus writing at the CATO institute blog:

Wealth is not a sign of merit, and poverty is not a sign of failure. As I’veargued before, we should champion the free market as a system where productivity allows people to be artists, record store clerks, or even bums. We can personally praise or chastise anyone for their life-choices and values, but we should not argue that the market is there to do it for us.

The Party of Dispassionate Conservatism, or why the Republican Party Doesn’t Care About New Jersey

From a New York Times piece on the Republican response to Chris Christie’s Sandy-related performance:

In New Jersey, Mr. Christie’s politics-be-damned approach to the storm seemed to represent a moment of high-minded crisis management for a governor frequently defined by his public diatribes and tantrums. Mr. Christie locked arms with Mr. Obama, flew with him on Marine One, talked with him daily and went out of his way to praise him publicly as “outstanding,” “incredibly supportive” and worthy of “great credit.”

But in the days after the storm, Mr. Christie and his advisers were startled to hear from out-of-state donors to Mr. Romney, who had little interest in the hurricane and viewed him solely as a campaign surrogate, demanding to know why he had stood so close to the president on a tarmac. One of them questioned why he had boarded Mr. Obama’s helicopter, according to people briefed on the conversations. (italics mine)

Fuck you very much, Republican elites. In case you didn’t realize it, the Republican Party is undoubtedly the party of dirtbag cynicism. Bobby Jindal rejects Big Government on one hand but loves FEMA money post-oil spill. Now, these assholes are mad at our Governor for doing his job after the worst disaster to ever hit our state and they are pissed at him because he ceased being appropriately partisan. Fuck these guys (because they are, invariably, guys). The quicker these scumbag, rent-seeking, neo-white supremacist leeches are condemned to the trash bin of historical nothingness the better.

May New Jersey stay Blue forever and may Republican elites die a slow money grubbing, cancerous death surrounded by all the opulent splendor their soulless pursuit of wealth, power, lower tax rates and a gutted welfare state.

Mitt Romney was the truest articulation in recent memory of what the Republican Party is all about; extracting wealth, not creating it. Ted  Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio might represent a “new face” but at its heart the party is owned by America’s millionaires and billionaires and doing their bidding. The cultural issues are tactical cover for the economic war waged against the legacy of the New Deal as a desire to return America to the Gilded Age of trusts, monopolies and oligarchy.

I’m not letting Christie off the hook for his throaty participation in this war, but I am crediting him for putting his ideological loyalties aside during and after Sandy, and the fact that conservative overlords were displeased with him shows how much they really don’t give a shit about anything other than enriching themselves and their cohort by owning government.

Big Deadline for NJ on Provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act

“New Jersey has approximately 1.3 million residents without health insurance, most of whom work full-time jobs. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the state struggle to provide insurance for their employees, and those that do have no choice but to accept rising rates year after year. Our individual market is hemorrhaging consumers by the day due to a lack of affordable options.” – Renee Steinhagen in today’s Star Ledger

The Southern Strategy Nears Its End

The Obama campaign won the 2012 presidential election largely by furiously and successfully courting new voters, especially in swing states, and in the process introduced a potentially new and deadly (to the Republican Party) group of people into the equation of presidential elections: non-voters. The Romney campaign lost by relying on catcalls, coded language on “food stamps” and “welfare”, and the assumption that the same political strategy focused on mobilizing the white vote that got Nixon elected would work for Romney 45 years later. They were wrong, and their utter surprise and shock at how wrong they were shows how much the Republican party (after forty years of the Southern Strategy) just doesn’t understand the 21st century United States of America.

The Romney campaigns sharp focus on so-called independent voters, at the expense of serious new voter registration efforts, meant that even as they built up a lead among independents, the Obama campaign was cancelling those gains out by getting people to the polls who rarely vote or had never voted before. The Obama campaign targeted young people, minorities, and poor folks and others who while not active voters were people they suspected of being sympathetic to Democratic politics and they got to work. In addition to matching the Romney campaign’s advertisement war, they blew the Romney campaign out of the water with their grassroots ground game.

As the old saying goes, all politics is local, and the Obama campaign turned this presidential election into a local election by combining digital information technology and behavioral psychology with the the oldest tools in politics: canvassing and word of mouth. Romney instead relief on messaging, money, and the type of intellectual laziness that is now endemic across the entire conservative movement. New Ideas? What for? 

At this point, its tempting to say the Obama campaign won simply by being smarter than the Romney campaign, and that would make this three straight races where Barack Obama’s team has simply out-thought the opposition (the 2008 Democratic Primary, the 2008 General Election, and the 2012 General Election), but it also comes down to the fundamental gap between the Republican braintrust’s concept of politics on a theoretical level and the place the United States of America is in 2012.

Looking at the stunningly off-base predictions of right wing and Republican election prognosticators (some of whom I think are very sharp despite our disagreements) and considering the assumptions that the Romney campaign made throughout the election suggests that the same wistful nostalgia for a conservatism that never existed is slowly sapping the American conservatism of any relevancy it may have once had.

The same columnists whose gut feelings told them that the polls must be wrong and that Romney would win in a landslide are the great minds behind the modern conservative movement. Political mandarin Charles Krauthammer thinks that the only change the Republican Party needed to make was to court Latinos better since Latinos are evidently “socially conservative”. Never mind that this confuses Cuban grandparents with their 19 year old grandchildren and fails to acknowledge how evolving social values occur in all communities, but it also completely avoids the question how just why the Republican Party’s message of extreme fiscal conservatism, gutted social programs, and warmongering neocon foreign policy just doesn’t connect with a generation of people raised during a time when public schools budgets have been gutted, when their friends, brothers, sisters and parents have fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq, and while mostly everyone they know is struggling to make ends meet.

Self-reliance sounds good when you’ve got a decent savings account, a house or two and and something resembling financial security, but at a time like this, it sounds like the vacuous sound byte it is. The abstract (and wrong) notion that deregulation and flat taxes will be the nation’s economic miracle cure and magically create more money and more jobs might sound good within Republican echo chambers but in the lives of many Americans its not something based in their reality.

As Rich Yeselson of the Washington Monthly points out:

In the US, any possibility of the GOP appealing to the economic interests of most white men, as opposed to massaging their beleaguered sense of identity, must be subsumed to the antithetical economic priorities of the GOP’s plutocratic donor class. In short, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brother are ardent rent seekers from the federal government, union haters and tax avoiders, while promoting the demolition of social insurance for the 99.9%. They do not share most of the same economic goals as the guy wearing the “Put The White Back in the White House” t-shirt at a Romney rally. Yet rage and paranoia paradoxically bind these billionaires and white male small business owners and contractors: see, for example the Adelson owned newspaper in Israel’s headline after Obama’s victory, “Socialism Comes To America.”

Comedian Dennis Miller, on the O’Reilly Factor after the election said, “I liked it the way it was [...] from [when he was] 18-58″.  Miller also spoke of all the “unfair attacks” levied against Mitt Romney, “who is a good man”. The subtext here, of course, is that Romney’s opponent is not a good man and was wholly deserving of the slander for the past four years. Moreover, for those Americans who for obvious reasons don’t look too fondly back at the Mad Men era and its predecessors, Miller’s nostalgia is wholly alien and any political messaging that evokes it is likely to come up empty.

These talking points and policies are made all the more obscene by the knowledge that the Republican coalition of geriatrics and white men has benefited more than any other population from systematic and widespread sinecure and the inherited wealth and privilege of a system was for years picked the winners and losers based on the color of their skin and the country of their parents birth. That Republicans reject that narrative of American history doesn’t make it any less true.

In the past year I’ve been told time and time again that its unconstitutional for my taxes to pay for my own health care by people whose healthcare is being paid for by my taxes. The fundamental hypocrisy necessitated by the Right Wing’s ideological and electoral imperatives reek of the self-serving rent seeking antithetical to groups of people who are in the ascendancy: women, immigrants, young people and the working poor whose consumer dollars truly drive the economy (just ask Walmart).  To win elections the Republican Party must protect demographics of incumbency (their electoral coalition) by preserving their entitlements (carried interest, capital gains, low taxes on inherited wealth) while those very same voters want to cut the red haired stepchildren out of the inheritance (social programs) because, essentially, they don’t like them very much.

The Republican Party has convinced itself that its current brand of “conservative” is not only correct but is what the country needs in ever stronger doses. Any deviation from that orthodoxy of God and Markets means you are either a heathen, a socialist, or both, and you are most certainly bound for hell. Even as neoliberalism has become the economic gospel of the left and the right, Republicans scream socialism, while Democrats move further from their social-democratic and populist impulses, while capitalist excess is even more unrestrained and regulated. ! As the Democratic party’s leftist impulses die out, the Right Wing screams communism and tyranny. There is something perverse about the level of disinformation and willful ignorance.

If Barry Goldwater laid the first brick in the intellectual foundation of the modern Conservative movement and Ronald Reagan installed the roof and the air conditioning, the movement has been constructed in a way that necessitates the coalition of big business and disillusioned white Americans that has  been the Republican Party’s base since the 1960s. Nixon’s Southern Strategy has been the unspoken, unacknowledged rule of the Republican Party for decades but its cynical effectiveness is fundamentally incompatible with the the new United States of America. It was always going to have an expiration date but Republicans began to believe that a strategically viable strategy was also ideologically and politically sound, and not in fact a political and social cancer rotting out the state of modern conservatism. It’s amazing that the Southern strategy has lasted for this long until you consider how effective it has been, but we’ve reached the moment where the Republican Party will have to reinvent itself or perish. To reinvent itself it was must disavow the very beliefs that they hold dearest and will have now to recruit people who at this point are almost allergic to their particular concoction of reactionary bullshit.

Standing athwart history yelling,  ”Stop!” just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Republican voters will continue to die off and the female, poor, foreign or otherwise different people who have permanently altered the face of the American politics aren’t going anywhere. Not now, not ever.