Only a God can Save Obamacare

It is time to take a closer look at why the voice of the Republican party, and its incoherent objections to Obamacare, is still being taken seriously in Washington and in the media. Because, really, how can you pretend that someone who is screaming and foaming at the mouth at your dinner table is attempting to be a part of the discussion? The problem is this. The faction of the Republican party that is left is not merely a set of wacko extremists disaffected by the course of national events (and the course of modern times), although they are that, too. What this screaming and bloodthirsty irrationalism represents is something far more sinister and profound than a set of isolated and disenfranchised joe six-packers. This splinter is not on the fringes, but at the very center of the American soul. It is because of the centrality of that soul, and the spirits that torture, haunt, and console it, that we are still dealing with, and taking seriously, those voices that are dissenting for the sake of dissension.

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Down Nineteenth

The numbered streets and the named streets are straight this one is number nineteen. People stay, here on the nineteen and here on the numbered and the named, stay as if sheer inertia would transform the gas fumes, the murder rate, the bottlenecked libidos, the very trap that is this swamp between two rivers, as if the cells greased with tasty cakes and lager, scrapple and pretzel dough would eventually learn some arcane legend of industrial biochemistry, the code of how to break cancer’s own genesis, as if by living and dying on these broken pavements over oil slicks, between tumbling plastic bags, beneath rotting hi tops hanging from the power lines one day humanity would acquire the secret alchemical insight denied the pharmaceutical pharaohs mining this same cholesterolic ore, their towers gleaming in center city, grinning stupidly in their seasonal neons, a changing tribute to the static repetitions of easter Christmas valentines memorial labor Halloween president’s fourth of july thanksgiving windows of these lost unhappy Italian peasants.

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Metamorphosis Digitalis

A man wakes up as his cell phone.

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Spiritual Atavism

The ancestors are clung to in the modern West by those disaffected by progress and disappointed by the visible contours of Enlightenment. Neo-primitive spiritualities are political protests, at least when they are not fatuous intellectual games played by the elites. The worship of ancestral spirits and of chthonic daimons is more a political than a religious heresy. It is a profound protest against the constitution of subjectivity by culture and civilization.

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Starbucks, Broad & Wolf

So far from these brutal and brutalized faces
So far from these neighbors
These squishy hoods
Squashed boxy heads
Bad haircuts
Clipped speech, no adjectives
No time for those

Here everything goes horizontal

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