Hillary V The Donald

I don’t usually write about national politics because the USA seems like a lost cause to me, and following the machinations of the federal government makes my head hurt, but this current presidential campaign has gotten too ridiculous to ignore. It’s almost too ridiculous to make fun of. I still expect Trump to rip off his mask, revealing Andy Kaufman underneath. That’s how unbelievable I find Trump, but no matter who gets elected this November, it’s all downhill from here.

We’ve already gotten used to choosing a lesser of two evils, but this year, the evil runs pretty deep on both sides. On one side we have clever, cunning, and connected evil, vs stupid, rogue, egotistical evil, on the other. Intelligence in the service of evil is formidable. Stupidity defeats itself, and egotism always has a blind side. Do you prefer the deliberate, calculated evil of a team with a proven track record, or do you want reckless, wanton, spontaneous evil? How does one make such a choice? It’s a matter of perspective, I suppose.

Strange things happen when the world falls apart. As the US Empire progresses from decline to collapse, only the denial and bad habits of the American people animate the rotting corpse of democracy. We go through the motions of having an election because it allows us to believe that we have some control over the government, and that it serves us, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As push comes to shove in the New World Order, the question becomes, “Who can manufacture consent?” Increasingly, it looks like the answer to that question is “no one.”

Dissatisfaction with the US government is high right now. Everyone is fed up with the federal government, but instead of abandoning it, and looking for an alternative, too many people want some knight in shining armor to ride in and rescue the princess from the evil dragon. A lot of people thought Bernie Sanders was their knight. Other people see Trump that way, I guess, but pretty much everyone knows that Hillary is there to feed the dragon.

In fact, they’re all there to feed the dragon. Presidential politics is a contest to see who can feed the most people to the evil dragon. Bernie convinced us that he could tame the dragon. Hillary wants to ride the dragon, and Trump wants to be the dragon. It’s still the same evil empire, and the people serve the empire, not vice versa. That’s how empires work, including this one, regardless of what they taught you in school.

For Hillary, it’s like this: Do you want to vote for the Wall St. candidate?  Do you want to vote for the banker’s candidate? Do you want to vote for the medical industry and health insurance industry candidate? Do you want to vote for the candidate supported by the people who have been dissecting you and eating you alive for the last few decades? Fuck no!

Think about it. Sure, Hillary Clinton is, far and away, the most qualified candidate for the job, but the job is bending humanity to the will of our Wall St. overlords.

Maybe we don’t want the best, most qualified person in that position. Maybe we want an incompetent buffoon in the White House, just to give humanity a fighting chance. Maybe we can use Trump’s ego to our advantage. Since all he cares about is his own popularity, he may actually respond to public pressure, Then again, we may not like how he responds.

Trump really took the Republican Party by storm, and it shows. The GOP looks like New Orleans after Katrina. They’re up to their eyeballs in filth. Everything they’ve worked for for the last 160 years, is now smothered in raw sewage, putrefied garbage, and toxic pollution. The fact that he’s surging in the polls is like that hot Louisiana sun, cooking it all up into some scary-ass gumbo. The Republican leadership is afraid to touch it, let alone taste it, but now they’re stranded in it, sitting on the roof of what’s left of their house, trying to decide whether they can get along with those pretentious New York liberals, or get behind that wacko outsider who doesn’t know what “Aleppo” is, rather than hold their nose and dive in to swim with the slime.

On the bright side, for Republicans, I think a Trump presidency could do a lot for the image of previous Republican administrations. For instance: Donald Trump makes George W Bush sound intelligent.

Donald Trump makes Dick Cheney appear reasonable and compassionate.

Next to Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan comes across as deep, and not at all vain,  and Richard M Nixon seems like a nice guy.

Proud Republicans everywhere can thank Trump for that.

 

So, it seems like a toss-up to me. We can have more of the same,

…or we can have cheeze-doodles in Cool Whip.

I think we should take it as an indication of how fed-up people are with what they are being fed, that cheeze-doodles in Cool Whip looks good to them.

 

You Call That Cooking! Herr’s New Hi-Tech Cheese Doodles

You Call That Cooking;

How to Make Not Quite a Meal From Stuff That is Not Quite Food

Herr’s New Hi-Tech Cheese Doodles

 

These things have saved my life on these long blog days. Usually, on the days we come to town, we have breakfast between 9-10am. Then I usually spend 3-4 hours looking up photos to go with the essays I have written, and putting together each weekly blog post here at http://www.lygsbtd.wordpress.com. We then have at least a half a dozen other chores to do before we head home.

 

Of course, the last place we stop, before we head for the hills, is the grocery store. By this time, it’s 5 or 6 in the evening. I haven’t eaten anything since 10 am, and my brain is fried. I’m tired of being in town, too hungry to think straight, and we have to decide on our weeks menu, before we can go home and eat. This is a recipe for disaster.

 

Lately however, Shop Smart in Redway has put out sample bowls of these new high-tech cheese doodles with a sign saying “Take Some”. The ingredient list looks about as long as facebook’s user agreement, and was written in print too fine for me to read without a microscope. I’m sure I don’t want to know what’s in them, but the free samples of these new cheese doodles have pulled me out of some very dark places, and may have prevented several grisly crimes.

 

By now, cheese doodles have been around for a long time, and I’ve never had any complaints about them. In fact, I’ve never met a cheese doodle I didn’t like. Cheese doodles and I go way back, and although I eat them less often, the older I get, I’m always happy to see them. Baked or fried, name brand or generic, cheese doodles have always been there for me, and never let me down. It would have never occurred to me that they needed improvement, but these new high-tech cheese doodles represent a major leap forward in doodle technology.

 

The first thing you notice is that these new cheese doodles come in a myriad of new flavors, like pizza, jalapeno poppers, or bacon cheddar flavor. They look different too. These new doodles resemble conventional cheese doodles as much as Doritos resemble tortilla chips, or a McRib resembles a rack of spare ribs.

 

Superficially, they look similar, but one looks like it came out of a kitchen and the other looks like it was developed by NASA. Besides the other-worldly texture and the blast of space-age MSG based flavor engineering, these new cheese doodles are larger and straighter than their conventional counterparts, further emphasizing their snack potency. They taste good, dangerously good.

 

I have hurt myself in the past, binging on conventional cheese doodles. Once, in the middle of the night, on a long road trip, I found a great deal on 3 lb of cheese doodles in a 24 hour Safeway store. Individually, cheese doodles do not weigh much, and 3 lb of them takes up a surprising amount of space, but I was traveling alone, so I strapped my newly purchased golden booty into the passenger seat, and got back on the highway.

 

About an hour later I saw flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. I stopped, and the cop told me that he pulled me over because he thought I was molesting the fat lady in the orange dress sitting next to me. When he saw my lips, hands and steering wheel deeply encrusted with florescent orange doodle-funk, sitting next to a half-eaten garbage bag of cheese doodles, the cop told me I was even more disgusting than he first imagined.

 

Ultimately, he let me go with just a beating, but that was the first time I ever saw cheese doodles tinted red, with my own blood. I still ate them. Years later, however, when I discovered Frito-Lay’s “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos” they gave me a bone-chilling flashback, as well as ass-searing diarrhea.

 

Yes, I have suffered as a result of my weakness for cheese doodles, but I never blamed the doodles. They always seem so innocent. So light and airy, with that sunny orange color. They couldn’t hurt anyone, could they? Even so, as I age, more and more, I learn to keep my distance.

 

In a bowl, in a public place, like at the grocery store, I can control myself. I’ll take a few, maybe a handful or two, just enough to take the edge off. That is, just enough to get past “Wow, these taste unbelievably good!” to “Whoa, there’s something just a little nauseating about these.” Once I get there, I’m ready to face the reality of grocery shopping.

 

The problem is, I want real food to taste like these new high-tech bacon cheddar cheese doodles, and to require no more preparation than opening the bag. The fact that real food still requires effort and time to prepare, and that it yields less than junk-food-sensational flavor, attests to the ultimate failure of our technological society. There’s nothing like feeling slightly nauseous on junk food to remind you of the emptiness of the modern high-tech lifestyle.

 

As far as I’m concerned, for all of our global cooking traditions, our haute, and nouveau cuisines, and the modern world of high-tech prepared foods, cooking comes down to knowing which plants are good to eat, and knowing how to hold a dead animal over a fire without burning yourself.

 

Science and technology have completely failed to change this equation. For all of the resources we devote to science and technology, the best it can do for us is cheese doodles, emptiness made irresistible. Just a few of these new high-tech cheese doodles, not only revive me when I’m tired and hungry, they remind me of these facts of life about food.