Game Theory (Election 2022, One.)

 Little Boy, in a baseball hat

Stands in the field with his ball and bat
Says I am the greatest player of them all
Puts his bat on his shoulder and he tosses up his ball

And the ball goes up and the ball comes down
Swings his bat all the way around
The world's so still you can hear the sound
The baseball falls to the ground 

~Kenny Rogers, The Greatest

I worked last night, half the night with this song stuck in my head.

And for some reason, I thought about when I first heard it. Me and my Grandpa were sitting on the front deck, him drinking a beer, me smoking a cigarette. We were half-listening to some special on CMT that my grandma had on in the living room. It featured Kenny Rogers, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and some other country artists of that generation who were still active. 

It was a warm May day in 2000, which I'd happened to have off somehow. The grass in my grandparents' front yard was a radiant green, my Schnauzer (My other one had, in recent days become my suddenly-ex-girlfriend's dog, long story) and my Mom's older Schnauzer had a couple of squirrels treed, and my Mom's geriatric Yorkshire Terrier was digging around in the garden, trying to find just the right rock to get somebody to throw.

My Mom had just gotten a new computer, and I'd just rebuilt my own (again) we'd decided to hook my grandparents up with my Mom's old one. I'd fixed up and upgraded her old system. My Grandpa and I had spent the afternoon setting up their "new" PC (Remember, this was in the days when downloading AOL and MSN Messenger via Dial-up could take ALL DAY!) and I'd showed my grandparents how to log on to dial-up internet, set up and showed them how to use their E-mail, and all the other basic shit. We were taking a break.

We'd spent the last couple hours looking up all the ships my Grandpa served on in the Navy, and finding pictures of them mostly via the Dictionary Of American Naval Fighting Ships website and the Navy's own website. Considering my Grandpa was a retired Naval Aviator who'd served 25 years either active duty and reserve...and flown missions in World War II, Korea, and the early parts of Vietnam...in those pre-Google times this was a bit of an undertaking.

And hardly anything but a few dedicated online people catered to stuff like that. My Grandpa and I were both veterans, and at that time the national observance of veteran's day was "FUCK! What do you mean the bank is closed?!?!"

Still, We'd found pictures, a few of which were digitized versions of...or taken near the same time as...some of the ones in his personal collection. The next holiday season, I built a set of interlocking frames to put them all in, in order, and had my uncle Bill (then still living) mill out some nameplates, one for each ship.

This was just for fun, for a project, no GoFundMe type shit, I paid my uncle to do that work out of my own pocket after we'd put in the work to find and eventually print out all the stuff. Because we wanted to. It wasn't some big deal.

And you know, I can't help but think that I was a conservative and a Republican at that time and goddamn if we didn't live in a much more optimistic world back in those days.

And, honestly, even 9/11, then almost a year and a half in the future, wasn't enough to change that on its own.

There was a small, but intensely dedicated group of Republicans actively working to end that world.

Now the little boy doesn't say a word
Picks up his ball, he is undeterred
Says I am the greatest there has ever been
And he grits his teeth and he tries it again

And the ball goes up and the ball comes down
Swings his bat all the way around
The world's so still you can hear the sound
The baseball falls to the ground.

~Kenny Rogers, The Greatest

I mean, yeah, there was some rather fucked up shit going on at the time. Just a few months before George W. Bush had decisively beaten John McCain in the primary in South Carolina. His campaign pulled this off by running a smear campaign against McCain that claimed his adopted daughter (of Bengali descent) was actually mixed-race and the result of an affair with a black woman. I mean, this whole thing was seemingly directed by the ghost of Lee Atwater.

My Grandpa, a conservative Democrat who (despite having been a Clinton guy all that time) didn't like Al Gore very much, had been all in for McCain. (Although he had known Captain Queeg and didn't much like him personally, the Navy was enough of a connection at the time. Funny enough in '08 my Grandpa voted for Obama mostly for the reason of that personal dislike, with a large side of "Sarah Palin is an idiot.") 

I was the Republican, and I'd voted for Clinton because I'd been angry about George H.W. Bush raising taxes.

It legit was a different world.

And even back then, the South Carolina Republican Primary had been enough to make both of us wonder why any black person would vote Republican, if they were going to pull that kind of stuff.

And you know, back then, conservatism both had and withstood that kind of internal criticism and we as a faction at least made some efforts to try and police our own.

Of course, all this was still a bit before the insanity of the 2000 Florida recounts, the Brooks Brothers Riot, SCOTUS getting involved, and you know, I can't help but think now that some of the same Republican Ghouls like Matt Schlapp and Roger Stone who've gone all-in for Trump were a part of that mess, too.

But If you'd have told me 22 years ago what our political situation would be at this time, I'd probably have punched you in the face. Just the fact that you, Time Traveler, said that "Donald Trump is going to be President" would have caused me to laugh at you.

But the more I think about this mess, I think that's where it began, in that time.

There's always been that underbelly of "Because fuck you, that's why" to conservatism. There have always been some people like that. But under the radar of people like me...those sons of bitches were busy figuring out how to turn things their way even then.

I saw George W. Bush and his idea of Compassionate Conservatism as, honestly, the best available option at the time. Bush certainly seemed to believe in it, and that seemed like a better bet than the scorched-Earth partisan warfare of Newt Gingrich, whose rise and fall had left me pretty disgusted even then.

Little boy, in a baseball hat
Picks up his ball, stares at his bat
Says I am the greatest the game is on the line
And he gives his all one last time

And the ball goes up like the moon so bright
Swings his bat with all his might
And the world's so still as still can be
And the baseball falls, and that's strike three

Now it's supper time and his mama calls
Little boy starts home with his bat and ball
Says I am the greatest that is a fact
But even I didn't know I could pitch like that. ~Kenny Rogers, The Greatest.

The thing that leaves me utterly disgusted with Republicans now isn't Donald Trump, not exactly. It's Gingrich, Schlapp, and Stone...and more than that it's JD Vance and Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz.

Might as well just say Dumbest Motherfucker On Earth (R) and see if people will still vote for that shit. 

And it's the bad faith, the same people endlessly banging on about inflation, who've voted against all the efforts to combat it, who bitch endlessly about a supposed fentanyl epidemic (that doesn't really seem to exist) but who were all in to help the drug companies get a shitload of Americans...many of them "Conservatives" in rural areas...absolutely hooked on Opioids, for profit.

This wasn't some failure by the other team, Republicans, you did this shit.

It's not just American Republicans or British Tories that have me disgusted, it's the wider global Right in general, and the Russians in particular. Their leaders have so much contempt for their own people that they can't even be bothered to send their soldiers into battle with proper battle rattle, body armor and weapons.

These fucking people have nothing but contempt and hatred for their own followers. In the case of Republicans and a lot of these other woo woo sons of bitches that became abundantly clear because of COVID-19. These fucking people want their own followers and voters to die...and die by horrible means at that.

These fuckers don't want America, or the rest of our modern world. They want the Killing Fields, but with a mall.

It seems to me like, if you actually want a better country, or a better world, endless authoritarianism, fascism cruelty, murder and theft probably isn't going to get you that. None of that shit makes anything better.

To quote the great Stonekettle, if you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

And so much of what's going on these days...ain't that.

And Republicans aren't even trying to hide that it's all bullshit.

Or that the cruelty is the goddamn point. 

Ideology and religion seem not to mean anything to these fuckers unless they can be used to hurt somebody.

And burning down civilization itself seems to be treated as a laudable goal.

I mean, the fuck??

It seems like being an angry, miserable bastard is the goddamned point.

And worse, whether it's the media or Republicans...it seems like it's all a game to These Fucking People. The moral relativism that I so detested during the Clinton years has fully taken over the majority of the Republican Party to the point where "LOL, Nothing Matters. Fuck You, Pay Me" is pretty much their stock answer to anything.

And the part I don't get is, so many of their voters seem not to care.

I know what I was taught, and this ain't it.

I don't know about you, but being openly used and abused by people who could absolutely give a fuck about me or anybody that I know was not on my personal bucket list.

Being ultimately serfs and toys for our self-proclaimed betters is not the purpose for We The People.

If it was on yours, maybe you might want to rethink your life.

America is straight up not supposed to be that kind of country. I don't know how the hell Republicans, of all people, are the ones who forgot that shit. Reagan Fucking Wept.

Seems like we've got a good opportunity coming up, to remind them of this.

You fuckers want to be cruel, out-of-touch rich assholes? See how far that gets you in the private sector.

You want a better world? You have to go out and make it better.

They sure won't.

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If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan