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An Atheist Looks at the Right Wing and Laughs

Even Putin thinks the fright wing is all idiots, but to him they are useful idiots

I rarely find common ground with the worlds biggest autocrat, but I couldn’t resist that picture of Putin after I started this post. Even he has to be laughing at his useful idiots, the ones that can’t tell shit from shinola or … anything else based in reality. The problem I have is that they are so stupid that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. At least for the moment, the laughing works better.

What triggered this post was reading “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Samuel Clements, a.k.a. Mark Twain. The things he made fun of in that book are still with us today - worthless, self-centered, idiotic royalty, and a church with no morals except collecting money and power. Those two things were bad back in the late eighteenth century, and they are just as bad today. Even worse, the regular folks still worship and make themselves slaves to them in spite of their worthlessness. Americans haven’t learned anything in the intervening 130+ years.

Now Clements was a smart atheist and knew his game. He couldn’t have gotten away with putting his atheism in the book or it would never have been published. Instead, he substituted a Presbyterian cult for his atheism. The Catholics were just as incensed at that as they would have been at his atheism. They couldn’t say much, though, a point that Clements I am sure enjoyed. Even today, the antagonism continues, even as the entire point of “church” - so-called religion - sinks into oblivion. The Protestants and Catholics still hate each other, and both of them still hate the Jews, just like they did when Clements wrote his book.

Of course everything is not the same now. When Clements was writing, the industrial revolution was in full stride, and the mechanical technologies used in it were the stars of the show. New ideas could literally change the world when made into metal. Even simple changes (by today’s standards) made huge differences. Cars were rearranging the country, and airplanes were on the horizon.

We are well into the post-industrial era now. Bright ideas can make a few individuals rich, but there are too many giants around that buy and kill them. If someone invented a car that ran on water, the first peep of it getting around to the oil and car companies would be the end of it. The inventor would be very dead, very shortly. The giants have no scruples and no humanity, just profits.

What they can’t kill with money and guns, they kill with lies. COVID vaccines found themselves on the wrong end of a soviet-style and -scale дезинформация campaign. Even members of Congress, people who should have been smart enough to know better, went along with and spread the lies. Today we have the fright -wing lunatic fringe represented in Congress in numbers that FAR outpace real-life idiots in the general population. Ever since Nixon and Ronnie Raygun, the right and their fascist billionaire owners have been working to take over the U. S. government, and the orange (un)reality-show host and the insane DeSadist are their best chances to close the deal.

This is where the bit in Connecticut Yankee about the masses being willing slaves hit me the hardest. Today’s worst slaves are the ones that talk about freedom while destroying it every chance they get - in service of their masters. The loons talk about patriotism while destroying every piece of the United States they can. Hitler wasn’t there in Clements’ world, but the racism and all the rest that made him possible was building, and the newspaperman in Clements couldn’t miss it. Clements made several subtle digs in his career at the racist culture of America, but there was little he could say about it that wouldn’t get him fired and destroyed by his publishers. There was no alternative outlet for him like blogs and other internet media are today.

Comedians have always poked fun at power, especially undeserved power. They are the ones that are smart enough to see the stupidity, and smart enough to know how to make it seem funny. But it kills them, some slowly, some suddenly. Just ask Robin Williams next time you see him.

Now there’s some sad things known to man
But ain’t too much sadder than
The tears of a clown
When there’s no one around
– “The Tears of a Clown” by Hank Cosby, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder