PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT (I cuss. A lot.)
Life’s a hard fucker, sometimes. Worlds we build for ourselves can go topsy-turvy pretty rapidly without warning. Foundations shift. Purposes become muddled. I was stuck in that place for months, in a sort of reckless limbo, so disenchanted with the internal and the external, that I had to step back from blogging for a while. Maybe my absence was notable. Probably not. I missed the writing and the caring, but it just got too draining to give a shit for the most part.
I think the not giving a shit is what they’re counting on. And I guess it worked for a while, on me at least. The 2010 race for U.S. Senate was both mind-boggling and unsurprising. The Dreamboat went all Mongiardo-ish and tried to Blue Dog the Teacracker. This failed, in part because the actual “conservative” dipshit will win out over the pretend one every time. Over trolls‘ insistence that it was the economy, stupid, anyone with a modicum of common sense could see right through that claim. They wanted a culture war from the get-go.
So I’m saying, “Bring it.” Loudly. Repeatedly. Publicly. It’s not just elections they’re after. They’re out for blood. And they want it indelibly.
Kentucky, of course, has played no small role in this wingnut awakening. Emboldened by a so-called mandate to stop government spending and decrease the deficit, Sen. Rand Paul’s first actual move as U.S. Senator was to proudly cosponsor anti-choice legislation that is wholly unenforceable, defies any sort of medical education he claims to have had, and would be prohibitively expensive to actually enforce. (Straight from the fetus fetishism playbook, natch.) The junior Senator recently took up with the popular pay-per-rapist, Sen. David Vitter, to co-sponsor a bill meant to codify the second-class status of babies born to the “wrong” (i.e., brown) parents. The growing frustration with these transparent culture warriors is as palpable as it is familiar.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just our federal office-holders who are showing their hands for upcoming campaign strategies. Gubernatorial candidate David Williams – whose running mate is former Mr. Basketball (seriously) and current Ag. Commissioner Richie Farmer – introduced a “papers please” bill of his very own. Not to be outdone, Gov. Steve Beshear is also courting the “conservative” vote that every Blue Dog both loves and fears by supporting state tax incentives for a Noah’s Ark theme park. (FYI: No rides, proving my point yet again that godbags are able to suck the fun out of practically everything.
What am I getting at? Quite simply, the personal is political. And when bigoted, science-denying patriarchs set up shop in my beloved state and fleece money from good people, I ain’t gonna shut up and just watch it happen. And I am sure as hell not going to let Kentucky’s rich history of progressive activism go unnoticed, just because we’ve been written off as “red.”
