Yesterday in the wake of Scott Carrier being back in the saddle, my three other favorite podcasts dropped episodes that are helping me refine my ideas about what this world is and where I stand in it.

I already told you about the Useful Idiots one. Number 2 on the list was from TrueAnon.

Episode 81: SCROTUS

Brace and Liz talked with two lawyers about the courts and the Court. Best I can tell, it was recorded before the news of RBG’s death broke. Which left them free, in the course of discussing her, to refer to her as that “450-year old lich Queen”. This was enough to help me laugh about it in the wake of the disappointment surrounding her death, and the preternatural reverence her name has been invoking for some time now, due to the fact that any thinking person wanted her to last forever, or at least until some hapless corporate Dem like Biden could get themselves into a position to replace her.

As for that: water under the bridge over the river Styx.

The real usefulness of the episode was really only tangentially related to the supreme disasters.

Back around that four years ago mark I mentioned, I found myself explaining to a good but hopelessly liberal (in the mundane sense) friend, about why I wasn’t too hyped to vote for Hillary. I said something like … look, Friend … I get how you as a woman might well urge me to vote for the Senator. Court nominations, Roe v. Wade, all of that. I might feel the same, if I were that femme. I might feel the same, if I were trans and couldn’t go to the bathroom in public. There are plenty of reasons of the identity-politics kind to prefer the DNC’s alleged solutions to any Republican, and especially the orange one.

But as you and your woke friends are always telling me, I’m not female by your metrics. For reasons that would take a long time to explain, I am not and have never been in a position to personally fret about the abortion question. I can’t get pregnant, and I can’t make anyone pregnant, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. I’m not a gay man who wants to join the Air Force …

In short the identitarian rationales for voting DNC don’t move me on that personal level.

On the questions that DO move my gut … income inequality, mass surveillance, an empire at endless war with the world, health care, border policy, corporate regulatory capture, the oligarchs of Goldman-Sachs sitting in cabinet-level positions (on and on) … your gal Hill hasn’t given me one damn reason to prefer her, much less vote for her. Sorry but no sale.

Four years later, I’m in quite the same position, only worse.

Biden gets excited talking about how he’ll never ban fracking. He gets excited, talking about how he’d veto a Medicare for All bill. There’s a better chance that Trump would pardon Snowden and Assange (no doubt for cynical reasons) than that Biden ever would.

Eight years of Obama got us absolutely nowhere on the questions of black lives mattering, on wealth inequality, on (and on and on). Guantanamo Bay is still a thing. The planet is still burning and flooding. The streets are still full of ugliness and broken hearts. In Obama’s financial crisis, the rich got bailed out and the poor were evicted en masse. The Patriot Act sailed through renewal again and again. The war criminals who brought you Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria didn’t get pardoned, but they might as well–no Cheney ever paid for it. No banker ever went to jail. The people that you play Despacito to, Joe, nicknamed your boss the Deporter in Chief, and the validity of that name was proven by hard numbers, and the first kids in cages.

Clintonism got us NAFTA and deregulation of the financial elites, defunct chatter about ‘superpredators’ that filled our jails and then fueled a huge private prison industry, ‘welfare reform’ that meant the dismantling of the Great Society from LBJ’s day. Payday lenders and intern blowjobs. Why did Bill never pay, the way Harvey Weinstein rightfully paid? What was Bill doing on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, and why does no one want to ask that question?

Obama writ large was no better, give or take a blue semen-stained dress or two. I see no reason to believe that Biden would be either.

The reasons I would never vote for Trump differ from the reasons I couldn’t vote for HRC, and the reasons I’m having such a hard time imagining a vote for Joe. But the revulsion is the same anyway.

What the TrueAnon interview said, in essence, was: abortion isn’t about women’s rights any more.

It’s an endless game of legal whack-a-mole that keeps lawyers and lobbyists employed, and more importantly, it’s a carefully choreographed snake dance that is specifically designed to keep you caring about things that don’t matter to you anymore, even if they might have mattered once.

It’s opium for the masses on the nominal left and the deplorable right too.

So break your addiction and wake the hell up.

I’ve said before that I follow politics the way real men are supposed to follow football. Every four years there’s a Super Bowl. I’ve stopped caring about who makes the playoffs in the NFL. I am rapidly getting to the same point with my replacement political distraction.

It’s easy to see why football doesn’t matter and changes nothing. It’s harder to see the same thing about a match between team blue and team red, but … tell me I’m wrong. This might have been a democracy once, at least for the white male landowners. It’s an oligarchy now, and “Citizen’s United”, that product of an already dying Court, just rubber-stamped democracy’s death and the new imperial regime.

Left and right mean less and less.

The authoritarians are always winning, and if there’s any fight still worth having, it’s between the corrupt and toxic Authority and the forces of Liberation that lives on quietly in the souls of those who are not yet Borged. Bidened. Trumped. Brainfucked.

The next time I’m tempted to rail on like this at nauseating length about politics, I will do my best to go back and just listen to TrueAnon 81 instead. I know I keep promising something like it. Please forgive me for failing. I have an addictive personality and a raging hereditary paranoia in me.

***

The last of the golden eps was Rumble 120 from Michael Moore. It’s very short and very sweet and it’s good for one thing. If my cynicism bores you, if my snark bullshit about lich-Queens was offensive, Michael will not only grieve with you–he’s clearly moved by the death–but he’ll give you some thin cause for hoping again. It’s an emotional hope, not a rational one, but any port in a storm. I believe in the sincerity of his heart this time.

A late add–it appears that mmoore’s rationale rationale comes along 24 hours later in 121–haven’t listened to that one yet.