The Morning After

To the extent that Obama sought to divert America's dumb dumb nationalist and exceptionalist impulses from war making to education and infrastructure investment, I suppose that his State of the Union was a comparatively good thing -- not that everybody didn't give endless blow jobs to the military in any case last night.

Come what may, I personally think we should all be hoping for the Chinese to become a better educated and more prosperous and more responsible planetary partner rather than getting into a delusive lather over "outcompeting them," rah rah blah blah blah, especially to the extent that this sort of competition can so easily just end up becoming a rationale for still more self-sacrifice and austerity, which is never about anything but more welfare for the already rich at the endless expense of precarious majorities to the ruin of all.

Obama's speech was okay, certainly not inspiring for me nor intended for the likes of me. It was rather reassuring to hear a President pretending both parties have reasonable people in them capable of responding sensibly to real problems so long as you didn't think about how that isn't, you know, even remotely true.

The Republican responses were full of the usual lies and errors and confusions, but managed to surprise only in their shared choice of a tone of catastrophism over optimism. Don't Republicans understand any more that Americans like to accentuate the positive as we eat our children? Don't they remember why they love smiley-face Saint Ronnie's corporate-militarism so much more than frowny-face Sinner Nixon's corporate-militarism?

In his "official" wingnut response, fitness guru and roseate puppet-head Paul Ryan (anagrammatically, that's "Ayn R" to you) alluded to European crises not all of which actually exist, he warned about seniors losing benefits while proposing literally to take those benefits away as a matter of principle, he reassured us all that Republicans see a role for government facilitating enterprise and order but just not involving any investment or interference or anything else.

In other words, he was pretty hard to distinguish in his lunacy from Michelle Bachmann, although apparently all one need do to be treated as "articulate" and "serious," again, comparatively speaking, is manage to look at the right camera as one peddles the Randroid fraud and Founderological revisionisms.