It’s likely that if I were 30 years older, I would have voted, er, auld lang Republican at that time. It’s just that in my lifetime the GOP seemed more intent on polarizing the nation’s voters to play demographic/mass media games and on handing various theocrats the Constitution. The Republicans’ interference in people’s private lives and Constitutional rights was bad enough in my lifetime; the Democrats then followed suit.

Obama is just a creation of mass mind engineers of the advertising, PR, marketing, and “communications” industries that showed the two parties, and their uber-rich handlers, how to create and manipulate demographic and opinion blocs, so they may be manipulated to bring the republic’s functioning to a screeching halt. It is a staggering revolution–bloodless, total, and so ingeniously installed in each and every psyche that we now have multiple generations who literally cannot think for themselves. To put it another way, the Skinner Box is in their own heads: they have been trained to push buttons for pellets of neural pleasure, and anything that causes the least psychological dissonance or distress, they flee, and try to impose these simplistic mind models, so they can get back to thumbing for iPellets.

On the cupcakes, I laughed my ass off at this satire. Having lived in Berkeley, and hated every minute of it spent outside my own home, I thought the Berkeley young Republicans did an awesome job of making an important point–something that should lead to more thoughtful discussion–and doing it in a way that woke up enough idiots so intelligent people can then have those discussions. Affirmative Action may have been “a good idea at the time,” though I personally refused it when it was extended to me; I preferred not to be insulted like that. In any case, it’s time to consider those scores equalized and insist that people succeed, or fail, through their own merits and efforts. I know I detest it when people think I got where I’m at because of skin color or gender or whatever, because it’s clear that two colleagues of mine in fact got their positions that way, rather than working for them. And that strikes me as the worst racism of all: the nice white privileged liberals who let me and others know that we cannot possibly succeed without the bounty of their pity. It reifies their positions, and their power.

In closing, I tend not to fling labels around like “communist,” “socialist,” “conservative,” etc. I don’t see that PBS is any more communist than the pinstriped Stalinists of Wall Street, who crush productive work in favor of speculation, whose profits are then shared out among anyone who marches into the camps of consumerism. “Conservative” used to describe a position that would rather stick to what is proven, than kick shit apart just because one can. But the Baby Boomers were demographically and psychologically engineered (for profit) to reject anything they could, since rebellion for its own sake was the biggest marketing meme of that era…and is with us still. OWS is ample evidence of that.

Moving away from theocratic thinking–the One Big Idea/Meme/Construct whose utterance of existence is supposed to trump all rational/reasoned thought–is still this nation’s gift, and challenge. I’m not sure how it’s going. Some days I’m optimistic; other days I crawl into the pantry and hide. But in a nation where “liberals” and “progressives” think Sharia law is OK, and not theocratic, because to think otherwise a) could be dangerous and b) is “racist”…most days just seem like some psychogenic mess Grace Slick vomited out.