Assholes and liars

I am becoming convinced that we are, and, to some degree, every generation always will be, a species of unrepentant assholes and liars. At least for awhile. Until we face up.

And I don't mean that in a "Humanity is irredeemable and doomed," kind of way.

What I mean is that we are all so obsessed with our uglier impulses, that we can't even admit we have them or that they are behind much of our uglier rationalizations for how we live life.

We keep using the excuse that the world is full of assholes to rationalize what assholes we are.

But here's the secret on that one: when you do that, you're still an asshole, asshole.

And the person you should be worried about being an asshole is you.

Most of the assholes we need to worry about today are us. They are not found in some boogeyman notion of humanity we have. It is numero uno. Moi. Me, myself, and I. Not some asshole lurking in another political party or under the darkness of night.

The asshole we should all be concerned with, as my man Jesus used to say, is the one in our own beds. The one who sleeps on our pillows. The one whose words keep being used to justify what fuckin' assholes we are.

You know the one, right? I'll give you a clue. It ain't George Bush. It isn't even Osama Bin Laden. Although I will grant you that both of these guys are grade A asswipes, the second more than the first, obviously.

It's you. It's me. It's all of us. Until we face up.

And no amount of lying makes up for the truth on that one, no matter how you spin it.

You don't want people to think you're an asshole?

Stop being a fuckin' asshole, asshole.

That goes for all of us. Me too.

You doubt that I'm an asshole. Ask my kids.

I've got work to do. To be a better man, that is.

You reap what you sow

It's a pretty simple fact of life. And it is a fact of life in politics as much as in the rest of life.

Rod Dreher offers some really poignant observations on this fact of life, today, in his column, And It Was Written, Our Blame.

"Complex financial instruments come and go, but the hearts of men remain the same. Greed, vanity and hubris we always have with us, as well as a weakness for the soft sophisticated lie over the hard plain truth. About human nature, tradition – the accumulated wisdom of mankind – is never wrong. True conservatives – as opposed to those who confuse mammon-worship with moral and intellectual principle – know that a tolerable order can only exist when most people live by the moral laws articulated in time-worn banalities.

So, send the tumbrels into the streets to carry off the heads of sophisticates who believed that we had repealed the laws of economics and human nature by our cleverness. The Gods of the Copybook Headings demand propitiation. We shall offer them scapegoats and try to forget our own complicity in the coming catastrophe.

After all, these scoundrels did not elect themselves, nor was there an outcry heard in the land against Wall Street rapacity and recklessness when our 401(k)s were rising, and all but the lowliest plebeian was moving into his very own McMansion.

Along those lines, there's one proverb that we will all become painfully acquainted with in the years to come: You reap what you sow."

I try to take a lighter view on things that Ron does here. But I have to say that I'm a little disgusted, today, watching Wall Street folks who fucked up getting a handout while the average folks who lost in this most recent round of the the hot-then-cold housing market get to eat their mistakes themselves.

It's kind of bullshit, really. Whole fuckin' political world is kind of bullshit, really. And then they all go pat themselves on the back on avoiding the Depression that was sure to come one quarter following 3.3% growth. And while liberals are scaring us all with Depression talk, conservatives are out scaring us with talk about how Hitler is around every corner.

It's all so bullshit and dishonest I can hardly stand it. I'm sure these morons honestly believe their bullshit. But they do so avoiding debates with one another and with those who could distinguish Depressions and Hitlers from stuff that they don't even closely resemble.

And then they tell themselves, "See. Those smarty-pants professors didn't know what they were talking about. You don't have to be a genius to make a fortune or build a power base. You just need to believe in your own bullshit enough that you never have to even question it, you're so goddamn sure of how right you are."

The only solace I have watching this load of shit unfold is exactly what Rod Dreher concludes with:

We reap what we sow.

There is no law that human beings always follow. But there are some facts of life that always show up.

And this is one of them.

It will not be the last. No matter how much we try to bullshit ourselves otherwise.