Mint Hotel Illness

from T.S. deHaviland, Special Correspondent

“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile–and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.”

–Hunter S. Thompson

The Culture Wars are literally making me ill–my stomach turns when I hear words like “values” and “moral authority” and “the American way of life” said by politicians and pundits and the criminally insane who are carefully screened to appear on call-in shows.

Probably because this is because I’m a liberal and we lost, but it’s also because the more dualistic and partisan we become the more we look and act like a third-world country. Pretty soon each party will hire its own death squads to eliminate opposition outright instead of just killing their characters and careers on the evening news. When the side you’re on becomes more important than the ideology you espouse, this tends to be the result.

It’s sort of sad, though, to see that the vestiges of actual civilization have pretty much retreated to the European Union, having been abandoned by the rest of the world for a lawless brand of command Capitalism. And, yes, I’ve seriously considered moving there. But I can’t seem to get my gun collection through customs.

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