I am sick to death of useless knowledge.

“I’d be more apathetic if I wasn’t so lethargic.”

I’ve felt so… lost today. Powerless. Hopeless. My New Orleans is drowning along with all my idealism… which sounds so tritely poetic that it says nothing at all.

I’ve decided that being intelligent and informed blows. The more I read, the more I watch the news, the more hopeless I feel. I am in the middle of a book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? [How the Conversatives won the Heart of America]. And it’s a great book, it really is, but it makes me feel more utterly at a loss to deal with the problems of the world than ever.

How do I combat the “backlash myth”? This very myth takes people under incredible economic strain and deceives them into voting for the very people and policies that create such circumstances. These demagogues peddle their “culture war” bullshit to Middle America and sell them this sense of self-righteous victimization. “You too can have all the outspoken indignation of racial minorities [i.e. Black People or The-Word-You-Can’t-Say]! Just tune into FOX News and we’ll tell you how!” This lie of oppression and coercion and liberal media is all-consuming. And for me to even fight against it just feeds in to exactly what they already believe. So I sit here vituperating against it and the “great beating heart of America” gets infuriated because I just used a word they don’t know, thus solidifying their opinions that I am just trying to look down my nose at them. Reading books is no a crime – something you do at those “fancy east coast liberal homosexual training camps” that were formerly known as colleges.

Yes, I am a blue-blood, blue-stater, born and fucking raised. But I don’t take my Volvo-driving, latte-drinking hippie commie bullshit and try to legislate it. (And for your fucking information, David Brooks and all you anti-American bastards at the Atlantic, I drive a fucking Toyota and I hate coffee.) I don’t remember when this was a free country, G.Gordon Liddy [you murderous felon], and neither do you. Being able to chop down trees and cart about a gun isn’t freedom. Freedom is not having a government that ignores the interests of its own people and sells them down the river to corporations. Freedom is being able to not say “under god” in school. And let me make it fucking clear, Rush Limbaugh, that so long as there are pop quizzes there will always be prayer in schools. But it should not be legislated. Pray all you want – just don’t force me to.

But every word I am saying is just making this backlash bullshit worse. This myth that “liberals lie because they are liberals”, that “liberals are out to destroy the country… because they are liberals”… this faceless, pointless, directionless double-think ideology that just pollutes our society never mind the facts. The Republicans control EVERY FACET of our government yet things are getting worse every day on all sides. They don’t WANT gay rights to be abolished; they don’t WANT abortion to become illegal. The money is not in the cure, it’s in the prevention – so to speak. These fascist bastards pick issues of great sociological import that they and their followers admit are issues that will never be changed…

But the Neo-cons weren’t even prepared for their own success, oh no. Now we’re installing an anti-abortion con man onto the Supreme Court. What will you do when your millstone of cultural dissent and electoral passion becomes… oh fuck it, we all know that they will still keep voting for you bastards. And there is nothing any of our intellectual class can do. We’re not the ruling class – if that particular backlash myth were true all you useless pundit bastards would be fanning me on a beach somewhere and feeding me grapes. Technically, I am in the same class as most of the people who are voting right-right-righteous-right. Class is an ECONOMIC DISTINCTION! George W is not in your ‘class’ because Karl Rove advised him to wear flannel and drink beers. He is from one of America’s wealthiest, most-landed, most-politically and financially well-to-do families.

But I’ve strayed from what I was getting at – I can’t just march on down to Kansas or wherever and strike up a conversation in a bar about how laissez-faire economic policies and a ridiculous and unfounded faith in the inherent goodness and godliness of the Free Market have devastated the “Red” states. I can’t discuss the rise of the Neo-cons as a faction disillusioned Ex-Stalinist Commies who became Capitalist cheerleaders and pig-dogs, running rampant through the Republican party. I can’t explain how the Right has systematically campaigned on a platform of “for the little guy” while they systematically fucked them over and sold them out to the corporate machine over and over and over and over and…

It’s not that I can’t. I can. I can expound on this subject ad naseum.

But you won’t let me because I use sentences like “I can expound on this subject ad naseum.”

So back to my original bitch, which was my feeling of utter despair and powerlessness. How do I (and we) bring our nation back together? Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not un-American or anti-Red State. I love this nation with all my heart (part of which is bleeding for the Gulf Coast right now and the rest is bleeding for us all). I love every bit of it, down to the trailer parks and ghettos. My love of my country has caused me to study the words of our forefathers, to volunteer at charitable events… ah, fuck it, I could self-aggrandize here, but I won’t. I’m not better than anyone and that is not at all what I am trying to say.

What I am trying to say is the rampant xenophobia and hatred that we show not only the world but our fellow countrymen outright scares me. Yes, people have a right to protect their children from ‘subversive’ influences – be it music, television, or what-have-you. But that is your role as a parent. I have a right to demand my MTV and watch my movies about boys kissing just as you have your right to prevent your kids from seeing it. No one is holding a gun to their head, please don’t hold one to mine.

I look around and I see a war we can’t win, gas prices soaring ever higher, a housing bubble that is going to burst, a national disaster, an ideological civil-war, growing intolerance and ignorance… and I don’t know what to do to help my country anymore. I just don’t know what to do.

This is what keeps me up at night – not fears about terrorism or my job or monsters in my closet. What keeps me up at night is this desperate, heart-wrenching pain… this focusless longing for peace and unity within my country. I never wanted to live through a war. I never wanted people I didn’t know to die for me. I never wanted people to feel like I was trying to force any way of life on them. I just want my freedom to live my life my way and you to live yours. The only time the government should interfere is when those ideas are harmful to one-another. (Hear the anarchist in me coming out, yes? I should join the neo-cons… they are trying to abolish government altogether. You think I’m kidding. Check out the Project for the New American Centuries website sometime.)

All this knowledge hurts because it is impotent. I can know every single detail about the culture wars and the history of the Middle Eastern Crisis and the 9/11 commission reports and it doesn’t change a goddamn thing about the misery that is palpable in my country to this very day. It just make me feel like it is getting worse, that this worsening is inevitable. And I know that is the seeping, creeping whoredom of the backlash culture but I CAN’T HELP IT!

I don’t know what to do anymore, I just don’t and I can’t take it. I can’t watch CNN, I can’t read books, I can’t rant out my thoughts and get anything coherent anymore. It just all hurts.

Every second of every day. And it is every one of us.

What the fuck can we do?

This was not the rant I intended but it is the rant that I got.