Call me a pussy, but honestly, I almost can’t look anymore. I keep participating, keep trying, keep watching, keep thinking about the important subjects, learn everything I possibly can. I try to keep my chin up, a stiff upper lip, a song in my heart, and all that other shit. But every time my optimism pokes its pointy little head a little ways above the gopher hole, it ends up chopped into something to stir-fry by a product made by John Deere.

Seriously, I’m ready to prostitute myself, surrender my, uh, virtue with whoever you got, if it’ll get us half a mile closer to a functional, quasi rational, remotely well-meaning society. Just point me in the general direction. I’m remarkably free of moral and emotional encumbrances to ferociously getting it on. There are no bourgeois compunctions anywhere in sight, to put it mildly. What’s another sweaty night flailing around on a squeaky bed with a mysterious stranger if it’ll improve the country?

Because, I’m going to be brutally frank here, present-day America is such a dreary, rolling monkeyfuck of needless dysfunction and heedlessly meandering brain death, roiling with unfairness, drowning in lies, boiling with bad faith, and mortally stultified by mental imbalance and moral cowardice in high places that it makes the phrase fucked up beyond all recognition seem like an assessment so cheerful your momma stitched it with crochet needles to hang on her kitchen wall.

First things first. Republicans aren’t really part of this discussion at all, since no one expects anything from them, at least nothing except prevarication on a global scale any time their mouths are open and words are coming out, or a cynicism so chillingly and so galactically awesome you can’t decide whether to damn it to hell or worship it. If nihilism is next to godliness Republicans will be fighting with the risen Savior for the chair next to the Big Kahuna’s throne.

In fairness to Republicans, somebody has to be unyieldingly solicitous toward the needs of unaccountable multinational corporations, fly-by-night businesses, penurious hard-ass bosses, empathy-deprived, irascible cranks, unreconstructed racists and antediluvian swamp things, and more than any perhaps, souls chronically ideologically florescent with Ayn Rand. If Republicans aren’t going to establish The United States of Glengarry Glen Ross, who will?

Democrats are all that stand between us and a full-blown renaissance of medievalism, a sure ‘nuff Empire of the Senseless, which is why I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in longer than I can remember. If I had a nickel for every time Democrats got the yips from a little political pressure I’d have enough to afford health insurance if the Morlocks finally manage to nullify Obamacare. Too often Democrats believe the best way to make quick work of an advancing adversary is to surrender as fast as humanly possible.

I’m as pragmatic about politics as practically anyone, and I understand the value now more than ever of a Democrat holding a House or Senate seat rather than a member of the Addams Family Party. But that said, when lives, real flesh and blood lives are genuinely in the balance, when it comes to hanging tough on protection of the Affordable Care Act for instance, apprehension about your job in Congress isn’t foremost among my concerns. I’m concerned whether food stamps provided by SNAP are restored so thousands of American families can eat. I’m concerned about whether people living on unemployment insurance retain enough to actually live. I’m sorry, but it’s not about you.

Be as cynical and jaded as you must, as ambitious as your friends and family can stand, but don’t forget that the health, well-being, safety and livelihoods of millions of actual human beings is the reason your job exists, and that the degree to which you do right by those human beings is the only measurement of your performance that has any moral meaning whatsoever.

And now for the bad news. Two words: mainstream press. The higher you ascend on the Big Media food chain, the more likely the individual is being operated by a computer chip from the Acme Journalism Career Warehouse. They’re not doggedly defoliating shoe leather snooping around for morsels of truth, but cruising in the Lexus looking for a Narrative so they can be done with it for the day and take a nap. Intellectual curiosity and commitment to objective truth are potentially limbs blown down and blocking traffic.

If you considered an idea several weeks ago and dismissed it as too reeking of banality to publically utter, a pundit will say it before the day is out. If you’re looking for original thought or perspicacity turn you head away from this crowd for your own good. And of course, the White House press corps is the most meretricious, downright addled, scenery chewing posturers of the whole lot. You end up watching a presidential press conference and praying Obama finally will do a Johnny Rotten and projectile puke on them all.

Have I missed anybody? Bloggers? Halfwits, obviously.

I do hope this post has contained plenty of useful information. I’m trying very hard not to be part of the problem, but rather part of the solution instead.