They Say Weather Can Affect Your Mood

That was the name of a punk band that played at Sigma Nu during my freshman year at U of O, way back in 1982, and at the time I didn’t yet see that America was becoming that; I was still a Republican, after all.  We went from the Great Society to the Punitive Society in the years hence, and despite the warnings of Eugene punkers back then, here we are.

Today on the floor of the House, Pete Sessions patiently explained that women deserved to pay more for health care, because, like smokers, they had higher costs, so there.  If you’re a broad, evidently you should go abroad, and stay there.  Speaking of smokers, writing about the landmark case against the tobacco industry’s cynical marketing of “light” cigarettes, our local righty Oregonian associate editor, the long gone and unmissed David Reinhard blamed the plaintiff’s dead husband for being so dissolute and perverse as to smoke 3 packs a day, “Sixty times a day, he could have made the right decision,” or some such claptrap.  Since God seemed short of lightning bolts, and the miscreant was already dead, perhaps some corporation could step in and further smite the sinner who had supported his killers so lavishly all those years.  Maybe he could have been posthumously disinterred so Pete Sessions could join Reinhard in slapping his decaying remains around a bit more, or perhaps drag him from a truck, (he was black, after all…) for the greater glory of God’s own enforcer, Philip Morris.  When struck by the terrible swift sword, the only right thing to do is expire, and shut up about it.

In the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, those vauntedly legitimate news anchors at Fox declared that perhaps it was “political correctness” that let an obvious terrorist like Hasan run around loose in the first place; heaven knows that those people are only any good when they’re in a dungeon with a broken bottle up their ass.  That’s how you prevent violence, you know.  And did you hear that the Orlando shooter was named Rodriguez?  Draw your own conclusions.

It’s unsurprising, really.  We’re saddled with a deeply unpopular but nevertheless extravagantly funded political movement that is set against doing any good for us, so they drive us to this craziness by pointing out the bad in us all.  Few dictatorships could hold a candle to our incarceration rates, military aggression, or ruthless legal system, and yet we still feel that somehow, we’re endangered by not being allowed to “take the gloves off.”  What, exactly would that mean?  We already torture people, spy on them and invade their homes, kill them (often ineptly and brutally) whether or not they’re guilty of any crime, and scoldingly denounce such chickenhearted notions as rehabilitation and due process as hopelessly naive and patchouli-scented artifacts of a misguidedly namby-pamby era now gone and unlamented.

No deed; good, bad, or indifferent, should ever go unpunished, here in Punishment Farm.  Women so uppity and whorish as to have sex of course ought to be forced to bear children against their will, and dykes and fags doing the same thing are even worse.  Artists who dare to criticize the government of course should be banned, shunned, and boycotted; countries who question the American Imperium had better stock up their bomb shelters, because the Hammer is going to come down, even if we still haven’t figured out a way to pay for it, without unduly burdening our long-suffering rich.

One wonders, in the end, where all this leads….  Is there really enough punishment to go around for the burgeoning ranks of those who, in the immortal words of Matthew Shepard’s killer, “need” it?  Is there ever a case in which suffering isn’t deserved, and therefore a good and cleansing thing?  What would we do then?  Forgive and forget?

I ask rhetorically, of course, because we’ve gotten to a point where we’ve simply bet the farm on punishing our way out of every problem, and that is the new normal, as long as you’re not a Republican politician or donor.  Then, forgiveness reigns, and God calls us to turn the other cheek.  Please make a note of it.