Where do I sign up?

“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”

– Groucho Marx, probably others.

I agree with that. Totally and whole-heartedly.

I was never a boy scout (on so many levels), a frat-boy, or a Young anything. I will never belong to a country club, or serve on a board, or become a Mason (although I know a few and I am a legacy).

Joining is not for me.

I work with joiners, people who belong to organizations. They go to meetings, sit on committees, network – you know, club stuff. They get off on being in the know, of having that Wizard of Oz behind the curtain view of things. They like ‘belonging’.

I don’t.

In the wake of the debates, I’ve spent a week down the rabbit hole, surfing the Republican and Democratic blogs. Not the mainstream blogs, but the personal blogs by outsiders and bystanders and people with axes to grind. The guys who post crazy, unsubstantiated, inflammatory shit. Conspiratorial nonsense that makes flat earthers and apocalyptic cultists look like rational fucking guys. I once heard a guy on the train in St. Louis talking about how Aristotle Onassis had JFK killed because Bobby was poking into his mobbed up shipping business, then went and married Jackie to ice the cake. I thought that guy was nuts at the time. Now, after a week of blog-slogging, I appreciate him for his logic. A beautiful logic that made you think ‘You know, that makes sense. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Masons killed Kennedy to put lodge brother Johnson into office, I could get behind that.’

Yeah, these guys make that guy seem stand up.

The Republic is fucked.

The problem, as I see it, is that where they once sat in their basements or garages and pumped out mimeographed flyers to be handed out on street corners, the mushpates now have the internet to bring them together. There was a time, a glorious time, when these pinheads were ostracized for being ‘off’ and rightly so. They added nothing but anger to the civil discourse and, quite frankly, were completely  un-fucking-necessary. They were the skulky kids at school with no friends and a list of enemies who sat in the corner and filled notebooks with hate and rage. They got lousy jobs, crushed on the secretaries who wouldn’t give them the time of day and never got promotions.  In time, they grew up to be crotchety old men who kept you ball when it went over the fence, filled with so much more vinegar than piss.

Now, they can come together. One more reason to hate MySpace and Facebook. And once found, they bond. Bond in a sick parasitic/symbiotic kind of way. They encourage and feed off one another. It’s like a sick double dare. ‘You hate him…well I hate him more….top that!’ And so they do. They treat rumors as gospel, and the truth as an inconvenience. And all this truth that you never hear about in the ‘mainstream media’ is, well, that’s because the mainstream media is silencing itself, because if we knew all about it, there would be an outcry in the media for the media’s head for not reporting it.

Yeah, I know it’s circular, but these aren’t deep thinkers.

These are the people for whom the word ‘schadenfreude’ was intended. They delight in personal destruction. They pray for a fall from grace. I’ve wished bad things on people, but not like this. I hope my foes don’t get a job, or get dumped by a girlfriend that is way too hot for a loser like that soccer fag Brent, even if he does have really cool hair.

That might be too much personal information.

But you get the point. Right now, I’m hearing every wackjob anti- McCain/Obama/Palin/Biden half-truth there is at work, and getting even more via e-mail from my dad, who thinks this shit is funny. But combine those stories with a pliable (stupid) audience, such as the one that can be found online, and the next thing you know John McCain is having to tell a crowd of his supporters that Obama isn’t an Arab…and getting booed for the effort.

Did I mention that the Republic is fucked?

Maybe there’s a support group or a club I could join to make me feel better.