Bread and circuses.

You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Anyplace is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we'll make something
But me myself I got nothing to prove

You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us out of here
been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
We won't have to drive too far
Just 'cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living
~Tracy Chapman, Fast Car

See this little guy? This is Little Dook, my oldest Albino ferret, when I got him back in 2015. I wasn't planning on getting another ferret when I decided to get him, but I'd walked into the pet store (having asked if they could order me a white ferret a couple of weeks before) only to find that they'd gotten a little tribe of four Albino kits. Little Dook was the smallest of the baby ferrets. He fell asleep contentedly in my hands and I stood there holding him in my hands, swaying to the music, as Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" was playing on the radio at the time. I couldn't leave the little guy there.

Fast Car is a song about deep generational poverty, written from the perspective of an African-American woman. I was just an eighth-grader in a small-town almost-all-white Northern Michigan school when I first heard it, and it always stayed with me. Having experienced poverty a little bit after my Dad died, for a while until my Mom got on her feet, I guess it always served as an audible reminder of how the other half lives. If you ask me, that's something more of us need.

A legit solution to generational or minority poverty is something that would take all of our efforts. I believe it still needs to be done, though.

As for Little Dook? This is him today, and you'd never know he was the runt of his litter.

Why do I bring this up? Oh, no particular reason, sort of a Zen moment I guess, to focus myself before I rip into somebody...

Look, I'm only gonna say this one time:

What in the actual fuck is even going on here?

Here we have Kaya Jones, former Pussycat Doll and current sagging-breasted has-been, currently of the 'Boobs hanging out" school of conservative thought, "Triggering the snowflakes" by presumably exciting the dicks of a bunch of Trump-supporting guys that she would never give the time of day to in real life. 

I mean, come on, seriously. What the fuck? Was this supposed to do anything but run down my supply of brain-bleach?

How in the hell is this supposed to even look like anything more than attention-grubbing performative moronism for "Likes" on social media?

That's exactly what it is. That's all it is. Unfortunately it illustrates a larger problem. that I've seen as getting worse lately, and I feel like I gotta say something.

I'll start here. In her quest to "Own the Libs" by posting a poor-quality cheesecake photo, Kaya apparently forgot what she was doing and who her intended audience was and walked straight into a buzz saw of Evangelical indigration. Listen, lady, I hardly know who your one-hit-wonder ass is and I could care less but you should know that as a two-bit, has-been celebrity that's all they can usually get...THEY care. The pinch-faced angry Evangelical crowd hangs on your every word, because you're all they have. You should have known, pinch faced Evangelicals are gonna pinch faced Evangelical.

Oops.

I barely scanned the comments, mostly because they all looked the same as they always look any time anybody...whether in the oddball-politically-correct forms of the current "Conservative" nut house climate or not...has the urge to act a little bit human for five minutes.

Now, from my point of view, these people...both Kaya Cheesecake and her mob of  super-uptight high-religiosity followers...are about as "Christian" as I am a Twelver Shiite Muslim. That is to say, they're not. It's at once more complicated than that and far less so.

Both Christianity and conservatism as I was taught them are a set of beliefs and philosophies that start first of all with the Self. You accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and believe in the Bible *Or You Don't.* You believe in things like free trade, global engagement, human worth, limited state power and personal responsibility *Or You Don't.* 

There are no half-measures, in each case one of these things is not like the other. Christianity and conservatism each contain a fair number of contradictory impulses, combine them and there's even more. So, everybody has to pick and choose a little bit, but the whole point is none of this is meant to be easy.

Easy, on the other hand, is exactly what people like Kaya...and Trump...want to make this stuff. They want to pick and choose based on convenience and feelings even as they try to hold everybody else to the full extent of everything in order to make it easier for them to take advantage.

Don't forget that a lot of these pinch-faced Evangelicals, though, lead lives in which their daily and nightly doings would shame a goat. They're desperately trying to push the entirety of their beliefs off on Kaya to make themselves feel righteous. It's the same reason they convince themselves that Trump is a Believer...it's not true but they desperately want it to be so. They want this because their beliefs (and their brittle egos) demand constant outside reinforcement.

But see, here's the catch. When you die you don't get to take any of that outside shit with you. It's just your soul, and God, and at the end of life if your faith is nothing because you depended on all this outside reinforcement, He is going to see it, and react accordingly.

Spirituality is a constant, ongoing relationship between ourselves and forces that we humans can barely understand and could never find all the answers to. The universe is filled with terror and wonder, God or Allah or Yahweh or the Gods or whatever you want to call it has the answers to questions we dare not even ask...for all too often even the most enlightened of us do not truly want to know the answers. In the face of this, organized religions and political philosophies like conservatism or liberalism try to provide a framework to the human experience, a guidebook for our sojourn here, upon our planet floor.

The truth is that all this is infinitely complex, but it can be equally infinitely simple. 

That said, if you wanna ham it up and shove your boobs in front of a camera I don't have a problem with that. I just don't see anything terribly conservative about it and I remember very distinctly just what Christian and conservative sexual morals entail. As far as I'm concerned you can't be a conservative in your politics and a liberal with your boobs and expect me to take you seriously. You can do it, but I'm a laugh at you. Don't get me wrong, I've seen plenty of boob shots, hell I've seen some extremely Christian and conservative boob shots, but you know what? They weren't public boob shots intended to tittilate the general public. They were for me, and they came with an admonition not to make them public knowledge. Conservatism as I was taught it views sexual matters as a private thing, between two people. Gay or straight, religious or not, as long as all involved are consenting adults and nobody makes it my business...it's none of my business.

Older, more liberal me feels much the same way. What you do is your business. If I'm not involved don't make it mine. If anything, I have even less tolerance for busybody Evangelicals now than I had before...and I've never had much.

How do all these people square all this crap with the Bible, much less basic human morality? Trump lies and lies and lies, abuses people, says racist shit and scams people and all this is supposed to be OK? No, no, no, it doesn't work like that.

"Has Mom been tested for STD's?" I read that last night, it was a quoted text from one of Paul Manafort's daughters to somebody. Evidently, Paul Manafort would force his wife to have sex with groups of men while he filmed it.

How is that conservative? How is that Christian? Your political goals are not worth what this permissiveness is doing to your politics or your religion.

You wanna know what it looks like to me? It was ALL a lie, a lie meant to keep money flowing into the pockets of those who already have too much, a lie to preserve hate and racism and white privilege for just a few more years and maybe get another war, some gratuitous cruelty, right wing judges and a tax cut.

I don't have to ask God what He thinks of that, I can read it in the Bible that sits on my desk. But that's why Betsy DeVos & so many of these fucking people hate education isn't it? It's a threat to those people and their power that I can read it & make my own conclusions.

Boob-bait, guns, all these carnal pleasures, aren't a threat to these fucking people. It's bread and circuses. Empathy for others, knowledge, morals...and voting...those are a threat. Always remember that Caesar Augustus was a social conservative. THEY haven't forgotten.

If you think modern society being swept away and being replaced by an illiterate mob that's kept entertained with blood sports, free bread and sexual debauchery wouldn't be just fine with the rich, think again. Platonic idealism existed side by side with this stuff before. Jesus Christ wishes he had the influence over Christianity & Western Civilization that Julius Caesar & Plato had.
But even Rome had a lot of bulwarks and firebreaks against despotism and excess. Not least, the People. They couldn't vote you out, so somebody would kill you. Listen, if you don't want to be the next one getting thrown to the lions (real or figurative) in front of a roaring crowd, conservatives, now might be a good time to develop some backbone and ideological consistency.

This is why consistency, a moral compass, rule of law, sometimes strict moral codes and THE VOTE are required for people and society to function. It's not all about who has the most money. The richest man who ever lived was a Roman gladiator. Do you even know his name?

I thought not. That should tell you how important fame, money & power in our temporal world are. No one cares that many Romans were religious, nobody worships their gods anymore. It's the things that can't be bought with money or taken by power that are the most important.

How much money did Jesus have? How many kingdoms did He rule? How many cool pics did He post? Aside from working as a carpenter, how many especially masculine things is Jesus recorded as having done? Not a one. His Kingdom is not of this world. Yet even Trump has to lie & claim following Him to please the mob. That's the value of Truth. Even a liar has to pretend to follow it, even if only to try to please other liars. We mortals are but shadows and dust.

But let's try to make things better while we're here instead of screwing things up worse.