BLOOD MERIDIAN

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My friend Bryan Castañeda sends me this quote from Cormac McCarthy’s celebrated novel Blood Meridian:

The horse screamed and reared and the Apache struggled to keep his seat and drew his sword and found himself staring into the black lemniscate that was the paired bores of Glanton’s doublerifle . . .  The Apache wrenched his pony’s head around and when Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with the savages, they and their arms wired into a construction taut and fragile as those puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other and they in turn so that none can move for bringing down the structure entire . . .

He steadied the animal’s head to show it but it jerked loose and slung the broken ear about so that blood sprayed the riders. Horseblood or any blood a tremor ran that perilous architecture and the ponies stood rigid and quivering in the reddened sunrise and the desert under them hummed like a snaredrum. The tensile properties of this unratified truce were abused to the utmost of their enduring when the judge stood slightly in the saddle and raised his arm and spoke out a greeting beyond them.

If you are too stupid to recognize this as abject crap, then I feel sorry for you, as I feel sorry for the literary culture which celebrates such abject crap as art.

. . . those puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other . . .

You mean, like every fucking puzzle ever created?  Are there puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is not predicated upon every other?  Go home and think about this for two seconds, Mr. McCarthy, and then get back to us — you fucking pretentious bloviating idiot.

THE END OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

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The principled Republican right has always been a minority. It has always had to make alliances with unprincipled hairpins in order to gain national power — typically with Southern segregationists, or Christian theocrats.

It has always been an uneasy and tenuous collaboration. It is so uneasy and tenuous now that “rational” Republicans have had to abandon all their principles in order to keep the hairpins on board. If this capitulation fails in 2012, the strategy may have reached the end of its practical usefulness.

If the capitulation succeeds, what will it gain for Republicans?  Power without even the vestige of principle — a moral vacuum that will itself lead inevitably and in short order to the end of The Republican Party.

CHRISTIAN MINGLE AT IMPASSE

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The contract between Christian Mingle and God is set to expire next February and an inside source at the online dating service says negotiations for a renewal are not going well. The source explained that the crux of the problem was the complexity of dealing with a tripartite God. “We’re close to an agreement with God the Father and God the Son but God the Holy Ghost is holding out for conditions we simply can’t accept.”  These apparently include a larger share of merchandizing revenues.

The site has reportedly registered the domain name Buddhist-Mingle.com in case the deal with the Christian Trinity goes south. The source in the company says, “If we need to hook people up with those they partnered with successfully in a past life, we can do that.”