In the summer of 2004, I published an article in the New York Press that answered Thomas Frank’s question “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” The Bush-Kerry campaign was heating up, and it was clear to me that the American left was going to make the same mistake it’s been making for 30 years, and will continue making until it faces some unpleasant truths about the rank, farcical psychology that drives American voting habits. Why don’t they vote in their own economic interests? Why don’t voters vote rationally, the way we were taught in grade school civics classes? In a rational world, with rational voters voting in their rational economic interests, Bush—who dragged America into two lost wars before destroying the entire financial system—would’ve been forced to resign before the first primary and exiled to Saudi Arabia; rationally, rational voters would have elected anyone or anything, John Kerry or a coconut crab, over that fuck-up of fuck-ups, George W. Bush.
The answer came to me just I was just finishing my book Going Postal. Researching and writing that book was a real mind-fuck: spending all those isolated months sloshing through Middle American malice. I realized something obvious when I pulled back from all that research and looked at the Kerry-Bush race: malice and spite are as American as baseball and apple pie. But it’s never admitted into our romantic, naïve, sentimental understanding of who Americans really are, and what their lives are really like. (more…)
I asked some of my gun-enthusiast friends, and thought I’d share with you the two most interesting responses. Both asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons—this isn’t a popular time to talk honestly about the pros and cons of Glocks.
The first gun-enthusiast is a former serviceman and war veteran who owns a Glock himself, and has had extensive professional experience with a variety of weapons; the second is an old friend of mine from Texas (meaning he was born with a gun in his crib) who has always had impeccable taste in guns, more of a gun connoisseur than mere enthusiast. (more…)
Mark Ames was back on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show yesterday talking about the Tuscon assassination-rampage murder, the degeneration of America’s political class and how growing inequality makes everything and everyone shittier. To quote eXiled hero Charles Portis, “We’re weaker than our fathers, Dupree. We don’t even look like them.”
Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, Arizona, has been variously described as an “assassination” and a “shooting rampage”—but which one is it?
This may seem like a semantic quibble, but what occurred in that Safeway supermarket appears to be an entirely new type of American murder: a hybrid of political assassination, of the sort that plagued America in the 1960s and 70s, and a “going postal” rampage massacre, of the kind that first appeared in the mid- to late-1980s, with the rise of Reaganomics inequalities and the deterioration of workplace culture. (more…)
Exiled Online editor Mark Ames delivers an address to the nation on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show. The subject: A quick history lesson on why “austerity” is the worst, most insane idea imaginable to solve America’s economic woes–and how John Q. Galt III is going to force-feed every one of us a lethal dose of Dr. von Hayek’s Austerity Snake Oil, whether we like it or not: (more…)
This article was first published in the New York Press on February 8, 2005.
Thank God for the Iraqi insurgency. If it weren’t for the resistance tying us down, we would have already moved against far more serious foes like Iran or North Korea, foes we clearly can’t handle. Given the bang-up job the incompetents running our country have done in Iraq, you can bet that America versus Iran/North Korea would end with something like Bush commanding a rump American state from deep inside a Colorado bunker, cursing the American people for having let him down, as the Jihadi/People’s Army coalition troops encircle Denver…
This conclusion dawned on me while reading The Record of the Paper, a frustratingly rational, careful yet necessary critique of the New York Times‘ criminal coverage of—and collusion in—the march to war in Iraq.
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
