Book List

Today in radio The Fat Drug-Addled Liar pined for the old days, like when Kennedy threatened to glass the entire USSR if Cuba "tested" a missle.

Later on Air America, Dr. Justin A. Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, discussed the cowardice of Bush, which is so extensive that Secret Security agents set up exit routes through the White House so that Bush need not inadvertantly run into visiting dignitaries in and about our imperial palace. Bush does not like to face people eye-to-eye. It stresses him out.

Bush ridicules people. I heard him say "Nice suit" to a press person recently, forcing the questioner to take a humbled position even before asking. Bush is mean like that. He likes to put people down, because they threaten him.

He doesn't like to think. "I don't do nuance," he has proclaimed. In his traumatized school-boy mindset, thinking causes great discomfort by unsettling his black-and-white notions of infantile simplicity. "You're either with us or against us," he proclaims, but how can you be with a person who only considers himself and has no regard for the lives of others?

Impossible.

So we have a president who is damaged goods, a 7-year-old psychopath in an adult body. With a government full of appointed fellow monsters. On the verge of taking over the entire world, what is it that these soulless theocrats have planned next?

Why, raising more soulless theocrats to continue the good work, of course. Like the young zealots portrayed in Righteous, Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement.

The book kinda reminds me of the movie The Boys from Brazil, in the sense that breeding and unbringing are fostering a whole new class of people tasked to exert political power. And not in a really good way.

The basic premise of the book, as I understand it, is that younger people are more propagandized and beholden to religious rightwing ideology than even their immediate forebears.

That's scary.

About as scary as a team of mutant Hitlers bent on world dominion, yet there they are, not on the silver screen but right there in front of us all, plain to see; indeed, shouting to be heard and seen. Tattooed young people, outwardly displaying common cultural insignia but inwardly tied up in knots of conservative religious ideology, without support, except from those very same people as would have them instead be left behind when their lord comes down from the sky to retrieve them.

If there was a god these people would change, really change.