Stop Me Before I Vote Again

"Now I'm a geister, meister Jaybo, it's all so much creamier, so much riper so much juice-ier..."

Yes, when he floats my way the air is now too often plump with a rotten self-satisfaction.

"I was right all along, Jayjay -- the Vegas reich will all end in a ball of flame. So now, knowing this, it's hard to be riled, to be gonzo, to be persuasively frantic. It would require... counterfeit passions. Than which theah is nothin' moah detestable, suh."

You get the idea. Amid this orotund bubble blowing, as I recall, about 3 AM, I said something in passing about "fucking the new US House Dem Majority and' the ass it rode in on," . and got this Panama planter's hat eloquence as a riposte:

"Give up on the House Majority? Why Paine, surely you jest? Never! Never! That's the express train to the Fuehrer principle you're flirtin' with theah. No no, there is no option to bug out, no option to wash the hands, to abandon the nexus...."

(Imagine flourishes here, big hammy florishes like Toscanini, as if he's inflating a bright pink bubble puff by puff to head size and beyond....)

"If salvation, if liberation is our providence, then it will spring to life right there, on the floor of the House, right there. Yes it will seem miraculous for a better future to birth itself there, where day after day, week after week, year after year, the nation's general will gets schtupped in the ass pipe by demotic gainseekers and all the the rest of the serpentine agents of narrow interest...."

Blah blah blah, the fugue state had commenced. He was contradicting his own prophecy of the fireball. And yet he was unstoppable, leaping from peak to peak like a broadly antlered elk, a great extinct Irish elk in fact. As usual, he went whereever he pleased.

"Unitary presidency be damned ... the House is our government. All the rest is squalid implementation, nothing but sadism, gunplay and theft.... Yes, my fat friend, despite its membership, faith in the blessed destiny of the House must continue to inform the hearts of all honest patriots...."

Every so often he had pauses, of course -- pregnant ones, for emphasis -- like the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. During one such, I took advantage of the lull and muttered, "Jesus, Hunter this type of shit oughta be delivered with a toga and from atop the balls of your feet!"

He was unfazed, undaunted, unashamed.

"Okay, so the Democratic caucus is in the hands of belly-crawlin' Wall Street ghouls, private lucre junkies, rabid fan dancers for foreign wars and pillage. But so what? So what if it festers like a Civil War wound? You abovegrounders need to lash up something anyway. Keep hope alive. Hold till relieved. If nothing else, create a hideous example of the terrorific capacities of the potestas popularis when keenly focused...."

I had to protest the Latin. "'Potestas popularis,' Hunter,for God's sake? Are you hanging out with A. E. Housman up there, or down there, or wherever you are?" He brushed me off like a horsefly.

"Call for a prog caucus bolt, a brutal, crashing, Dem-majority-ending splitkovich. Hell, if 40 stand up and even just talk the short walk out talk for a minute... Then when it fails to materialize, when the pusillanimous little deeer ticks cling to their seats, ruin the sleep of every last one of them, by vowing to politically destroy as many of 'em as possible, one at a time starting with..."

He interrupted himself. "I'm talking a symbolic atrocity, of course -- but very graphic and against some second-tier proggy asswipe. A ruthless 24/7 spiritual boiling in oil. 21st century voodoo shit. Turn the bastard's every immediate context into a howling confrontaion with a mob of raging online citizen avengers unwilling -- nay, I say, unable to curb their atrocious blood lust, so vivid, so nerve cutting, so deep plowing, the bugger starts hearing hallucinations from the gallery, hearing voices not there, baying for his vitals.... til the treacherous thimblefull of shit and fraud flees for his sanity, racing out of the chamber on all fours, screaming Enough enough enough!"

Then, as if he'd switched channels on his own internal cable system, we were in a quieter place ....

"By the way, Paine, did you know I've been thinking a lot lately about Citizen Marat?"

And on that enigmatic note, he vanished in a puff of brimstony smoke.