All over again

I was walking down the corridor of the place where I work today when I was hit with a powerful sense of the ole déjà vu. I stopped for a moment, as I always do, to see if I could muster forth a premonition of what would happen next, but I was unsuccessful, as usual. I admit that it’s a fairly childish piece of behavior on my part, a bit like crossing my fingers and making a wish whenever I see a white horse, which I still also do, despite my abysmal success record in that area as well. Although you never know. Someday I might still marry David Cassidy.

I read a really interesting explanation for déjà vu somewhere. Basically, it postulated that the feeling could be chalked up to a small, momentary brain malfunction; that a neural misfire could cause a new experience to be routed through the brain on a pathway normally reserved for memory, thus making the present “feel” like the past.

I like that explanation. Now it makes sense to me to that feelings of déjà vu never come at significant moments, but always come at the most mundane of times, e.g., when I am pulling a long string of cheese off a piece of pizza and dropping it into my mouth, or sitting at the interminable red arrow traffic light near my house, or lounging in my backyard on a summer’s eve, plotting the violent death of the Freecreditreport.com guy.

Amazingly, I don’t believe I have ever experienced an episode of déjà vu while learning that some right wing ideologue is actually a miserable lying hypocrite, which just seems like a stupendous defying of the odds, doesn’t it? I mean, I don’t know about you, but it seems like, if I were to estimate the time I spend each day learning of the real-life hypocrisies of the holier-than-thou, it would have to be about 9 waking hours, plus also about 40 minutes of sleep time a day during which I am hitting the snooze button on the clock radio whilst subconsciously absorbing news from our nation’s capital delivered by the soothing tones of Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne. So…call it 10 hours of hypocrite revelations a day, give or take.

So, no, when I hear that another one of the congressmen who stood at our nation’s seat of government and condemned President Clinton to the damnation of eternal hellfire for cheating on his wife, has in fact actually cheated on his wife, I don’t think “Wow. Déjà vu.” I maybe think, “Another brick in the wall, huh?” or “What a huge fucking surprise,” or sometimes even “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT FROM THESE PEOPLE? HONESTY? INTEGRITY? THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THOSE WORDS MEAN.”

Similarly, when I find out that the $1.9 million (she referred to it as “millions,” but we’ll let that one pass) that Sarah Palin’s office estimated the state of Alaska has spent on defending her against scandals, was comprised mainly of the salaried hours of state attorneys who would’ve had to draw a paycheck anyway, and did not, as she so emphatically assured us, divert money from state troopers or education, I do not feel a sense of déjà vu, even though it is yet another Sarah Palin convenient lie in a veritable avalanche of convenient lies from Ms. Alaska. What did divert money from education was Palin herself, as it turns out. Also, just for the record, she didn’t sell the jet on eBay, she did campaign for the “bridge to nowhere,” she and Todd actually did have health insurance during that time that she said they didn’t even though it was pointed out to her by Todd himself that they did, they were involved in the Alaska separatist group, she did fire that librarian and that police chief, she never met with Russian trade officials, her teleprompter did not break, the Branchflower Report did state unethical activity, holy fucking Christ on a cross I could go on, y’all, but I think probably the recitation of Palin’s prevarications have already caused enough of you to drift away from this post and onto less predictable fare.

The thing is, with Palin and Sanford and Ensign and loonies like Bachman and Santorum and all the others is, they know that they can sell their fucked-up agendas to a certain portion of the public. They know that there are people out there who, for reasons past all sensible understanding, think that their wages are shitty because of Mexicans, and not because of Wall Street, and that gay people are disgusting sinners who do not deserve to live like “normal” people, and that the world was a better place before blacks got all uppity, and that if the government offered them health insurance, then our health care system would be in worse shape than it is now, as if that were possible, readers. As it that were even remotely fucking possible. And they sell themselves to those people as champions of their misguided ideals, and they repeat those ideals, and they tell them that those are the only real ideals, the only truly American ideals, and they enable those people, who, by the way, know in their heart of hearts that they are bitter, and they do embrace guns and religion as a way to comfort their own powerlessness; they enable the ignorance of the people who support them, and those people continue to support them, and it all goes on and on as a part of the huge cyclone of shit that American politics ever has been and probably ever will be, amen.

No, there’s no déjà vu here, folks, because that would suggest that the exposure of right-wing hypocrites is some kind of aberration, some kind of fluke, or trick of the mind. No, there is no such luck for us – as long as politicians make their living selling lies, there will be those who eventually become exposed as liars. What frustrates me is that generally, no one yet seems willing to infer that maybe, maybe they’re all liars.

Well, let me put forth, then, that if you are selling a lie, you’re a liar. And let me suggest to CNN and MSNBC and NBC and CBS and ABC and even Fox – let me suggest that if you pretend to us that you believe that the way to present an issue is to balance every truth with a lie, and let the viewers figure it out, then you’re liars as well. Every time you bring out an Ann Coulter or a Michelle Malkin or Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity to represent “the other side,” you’re a big, fat, stinking, soul-stealing, will-to-live-crushing liar, and if there is a punishment meted out after this mortal life to those who sin against humanity, then yours will surely be colossal, but, hey, there’s nothing new about that.