Thunder in the Distance (spastic sputtering from the right)

The first time you inhale the stench of death it changes you. There is a profanity to that experience that transcends singular sensory perception. As an odor the reaction pulls at your lungs in a way that tugs the other organs convulsively along and leaves you with an earned understanding of foulness that you will forever recognize at the slightest whiff. It is odor beyond odor that wrecks your emotion with primal instinct. This stench is in the air.

Of late – this nastiness seems to be slathered about any and all right wing sycophantic talking heads like they are bathing in vats of it as cologne. This can’t be good. The fervor seems to be moving towards manic and their eyes are darting back and forth like rats in boiling fishbowls, but with less natural grace. I don’t need to name names here because you instinctively know the ones I am talking about. They are a shameless breed of opportunistic hucksters who have built an industry on the mystic art of stirring up and identifying with the discontent in a population that is seething but does not know why and is starved for validation.

The bureaucratic imperative is a simple law that says that the first rule of any bureaucracy is to survive; to perpetuate its own necessity. So then it is the first rule of our modern breed of political hack to perpetuate their own relevance. They have made their way for years with shrill, mean spirited and over simplistic pandering to the basest instincts of an audience in whom they have worked with singular focus to fan embers of bitterness into flames of inchoate rage and who are shamefully quick to jump onto the simplest, most convenient and least personally accountable answers. An ever growing sense of alienation is a hallmark of job security for them – and therefore must be nourished carefully and attentively. They depend on these masses for meaning and have come to a space in a place where oxygen is scarce and a foaming fervor is their last desperate lifeline.

Their time has passed but they will rage against the dying of their dingy yellow spotlight like werewolf Quixotes on a mutated caffeine strain. The show promises to be dangerous and is moving like a hammer-throw windup through an antique shop. My advice is don’t stand too close and cover your tender parts in protective clothing. The death rattle here will be kaleidoscopically messy and projectile in nature. They will grasp desperately with piercing volume at the lowest hanging fruit no matter how rotten or festering the logic is. The newest version of the red scare is well underway and if the early returns are any indication it promises to make McCarthy seem cautious, measured and reasonable by comparison. They will promise doom and disease, they will diagnose certain death and absolute Armageddon with a tin hollow booming conviction whose volume belies its own credibility.

Listen to these desperate, anachronistic brutes at your own risk. This is a stench that rubs off on you and seeps in to the marrow and I would think twice before letting these sickly wounded screeching vultures start to let that foulness loose in my dreams.