Republican Disaggregated Reality

Independent observation suggests that in the case of many, many members the United States' Republican Party, and particularly among those who self-identify as members of the "Tea Party," the generally accepted rules of what encompasses reality have been disaggregated.

While they can't fight physics, it seems that pretty much everything else is subject to their whims. In the world of graphic facilitation, only M. C. Escher could visually represent their logic. From economics to biology and geology, the sciences seem to be in play as far as these folks are concerned.

Elsewhere in this blog, there is a post about Humpty Dumpty logic. Nevertheless, the abuses of the historic and noble art of rhetoric have become so egregious that one might well fear for the structural integrity of the very constructs which enable us, as a species, to function effectively.

Howling at the moon, or, in the case of a frightening large swath of the populace, picking and choosing which  parts of the scientific canon to accept, is pointless and to some degree dangerous. Famously, it is believedby many that the Earth is in the neighborhood of 6,000 years old. Nevertheless, millions of these ignoramuses (our would it be ignorami?) fuel their vehicles, heat their homes, and cook their food with fossil fuels that took significantly longer than that to convert from dead animals to oil and gas. Disaggregation at work. What do they think? That their god injected the oil and gas into the crust of the earth like jelly into a donut?

Denial of Inconvenient Truths is one thing, but when the deliberate and defiant ignorance of facts goes to work on economics, things become positively dangerous both to the body politic and global financial stability. Money is a shared illusion, but there are principles that make it work. Further, in order for the social contract under which a society ostensibly functions to accomplish its purpose, it must be funded, typically with taxes, and to hope otherwise is more folly.

When Ronald Reagan sought to bring his peculiar brand of political thinking to Washington, the man who became his Vice President decried it as "voodoo economics." Nevertheless, his foma comforted enough people long enough to metastasize and become dogma. The practical result as been that taxes, the ante for civilization, have come to be regarded as parasitical. And yet there remains unwavering support for any expenditures related to what might well be called The Fear Business (NSA, DHS, DoD, DoJ, etc.) and any other spending is anathema.

The result of these economic foma has been astonishing debt which must be repaid. The nation ran up the tab and should repay it. Indeed, it was well on the way to being repaid when the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush as President, who immediately began dismantling the structure that had put the US on a path to repaying its debts and having a fiscally responsible government. An opportunity to take the military out and show the world Who's Boss (while simultaneously enriching a large contingent of politically connected people with borrowed money AND cutting taxes below levels needed to continue paying for existing expenditures, not counting the military adventures) came along and, not wishing to miss the opportunity, they made the most of it, nearly bankrupting the country along the way, as well as encouraging widespread fraud and outright theft in the housing and banking sectors that pretty much broke the economy.

Then they cashed in their chips and walked away.

Here are a couple of comics that sum up that lost decade.

 

and 

Those are the best summations of how we find ourselves, 13 years later, in such a state. The fantasists who live in a disaggregated reality have these and their ideological forbears to thank. Reality is non-negotiable. I'm just hoping for a meteor.