De gustibus non est disputandum (well, maybe this once)

From Lotus flowah, floating on a Floridean lake (do they have lakes in Florida?).......

If, like me, you've long believed that a sense of self-humor forms the borderline of sanity, there's a fellow in Atlanta you should meet.

His name is Neal Horsley, and his schtick is running for governor under the banner of The Creator's Rights Party. Here he is at campaign headquarters with the only known other TCRP-member, his schnauzer, I mean Director of Security (click to enlarge photo):


As you can see either at a glance of his campaign signage or by clicking on the links above, Horsley's devotion to theocracy actually out-Palins Sarah Palin. Heck, his promised violence is even too much for Alan Keyes.

Virulently anti-abortion and anti-gay, he (serially) runs for governor on a platform of "nullification." That is, he believes Georgia, or any state, has the legal right to declare null-and-void any federal law the state deems unconstitutional. TCRP's motto is "We Will Outlaw Abortion In One State, Or the United States of America Will Be Destroyed."

If elected, he says, he plans to declare the second secession of the State of Georgia from the Union. In fact, he recently told a reporter that's the only way to overturn Roe v. Wade:

The candidate for Governor for the Creator's Rights Party says, people have to be willing to die. The idea is to take over a state, then hole up and wait for the United States army to come for a kind of Alamo last stand. ...

"I have a son who was a Sergeant in the Army," he says.

We ask him if you won the election, and you seceded, what would you do if the United States government sent your son to stop you? Would you be willing to kill your own son? Because that's what we're talking about if you start another Civil War -- brother against brother. That's when he relates the following story.

One day, he's in his room arguing with his son (his family tries to talk him out of his extreme positions), and finally loses it. "He literally attacked me," Horsley says. "He weighs 220 lbs like a Bulldog and said 'Don’t say another word!'"

The second time his son slammed him down, when Horsley got up, he had a pocket knife out. "My son looks at me and says, 'So, it’s life or death, huh?' and I said, 'Yeah, life or death son. Don’t come back until you’re ready to apologize to me.' The point is, I was one foot from killing my own son, or hurting him really, really bad. If he would have attacked me again, I would have stuck him. Or cut him or sliced him or done something to stop him. That's the point, [your] hypothetical has literally already been worked out with me, and that’s what makes me different from the other candidates for Governor. They understand I’m not like no politician they have looked at, ever. I am prepared to do a John Brown. I’m not prepared to do an Abe Lincoln and talk out both sides of my mouth and try to get a majority together. I’m looking for the people who are prepared to go with me and take over the foundry, then set up shop and prepare to fight to the death. I’ll do it."

Now I could go on and on with what I've found out about Neal Horsley -- check out the impressive dossier the Southern Poverty Law Center compiled on him -- but here's the surprise (or set of them): unless the BNP has some hidden wags, he's the only Far Right nut you'll ever run across who's intentionally funny.

Let's listen in on Miami Examiner reporter Dylan Otto Krider's recent interview with him:

When you're a reporter, you occasionally have to ask uncomfortable questions of someone. ... During the course of my research, I stumbled upon the fact that Horsley had screwed a mule. (Horsely [sic, and heh] originally fessed up in an Esquire article, which was picked up by Alan Colmes.) At that point, the campaign, the crusade, everything else kind of takes a backseat to the fact that he screwed a mule.

... Here's a snippet of his confession on Alan Colmes:

NH: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."

AC: "I'm not so sure that that is so."

NH: "You didn't grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?"

AC: "Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?"

NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality... Welcome to domestic life on the farm..."

Colmes said he thought there were a lot of people in the audience who grew up on farms, are living on farms now, raising kids on farms and "and I don't think they are dating Elsie right now. You know what I'm saying?"

Horsley said, "You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. You're naive. You know better than that... If it's warm and it's damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it."

Krider pursues the topic . . .

"A small mule?" I ask.

"No, a full grown mule," he says. "She loved me, though."

We both laugh, but I'm still trying to figure out the logistics. How big is this thing? The size of a horse, he says.

"All I had to do was give her an ear of corn." He laughs again. "She was a [prostitute] mule."

"How did you reach?"

"I don't know... I stood on something. The kicker is, as soon as I was done she pissed all over me. It was embarrassing. I never told anyone that before." ...

Not only that, but Horsley has had sex with men. He was in the Air Force, it was a cold night, yadda, yadda, yadda, he had sex with him, ahem, the way he did the mule. "It was gross," he says.

Really? He hadn't described the mule that way.

"I've [screwed] a watermelon," he says. And that's just for starters. He's had sex with just about everything it's physically possible to have sex with, and some that isn't. "How many times have I masturbated in my life?" he asks. Now he's 65 and orgasm-free for two years (his wife finally divorced him -- too much "drama", she said). "The bottom line is, I never treated it as if it were not a sin."

Good to know.

Ya think?


UPDATE: Now of course Horsley ain't the only nutter in his neighborhood. As a matter of fact, for Daily Kos, Research 2000 just polled Georgia residents on the questions

Do you think Georgia would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America?

and

Would you approve or disapprove of Georgia leaving the United States?

Among respondents self-identifying as Republicans (polling margin-of-error: 4%), 43% think Georgia would be better off as an independent nation; 32% approve the idea of seceding. (Just in case you doubt GOPers' reputation as sore losers . . . ) No word from the mules or watermelons.

For J.G.

 Walker surveyed the burning white plain, featureless in the glare of creation.
The leather of his flying helmet was cracked black where he had cut strips with his swiss army knife. Chewed, they provided the only moisture he had taken in 72 hours. He swivelled slowly on his car tyre sandals. Sometimes the skeleton of the charred BlackHawk appeared, comfortingly close by. Sometimes, a black dot would form, an anti-intense negation of its blinding surroundings. It would multiply, firing tracer like across his inner vision. He would stumble then, eyes focusing down onto his gravular treadmill, onto each shard of exhausted limestone. He believed himself to be a giant, the stones foothills, a rare black ant some monstrous machine of war created by the dust mote inhabitants of this rejected ecology.
Rocking and stumbling backwards, he came to visualise the abrupt return from reverie to reality as a bucket of water, thrown in his face. It sustained him.
The GPS twanged and nudged his breastbone. The bright l.e.d. braille read 11.17. He believed that this may be the time, or laterly, a cryptic readout of his existential status, compiled by smart software. Sometimes he embraced an enervating synthesis of the two and sang of his joy at a fleeting glimpse of Oneness. On one occasion, he attempted to stand on his head and sing "Bird on a Wire" after decoding 16.22.

"The White Nile has already come 2000 miles when it unites with the Blue at Khartoum. For six months of the year the combined stream rushes down from the Ethiopian mountains with the effect of a tidal wave, carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of discoloring grit and soil to Egypt."

Walker left Khartoum the day the last animal had been killed. It was a dormouse, hoarded for a family gathering, but discovered by a neighbour. In the ensuing riots, Walker and Rocco, a very black man from Tisissat, had no problem leaving the city, because to leave the city was suicide, to remain not life affirming, only life extending.
They went their separate ways, or so Walker thought, at the site of the first mass grave. Increasingly frequent individual skeletons, laid to rest with arms crossed over the chest, big toes together, led across a baking depression to the Clock of Death, twelve skeletons arranged radially. The violent argument that ensued over the time of the last death made it easy to accept the splitting of their ways and resources (ten litres of recycled water and a pound of grain) and the brief wave as Rocco set out for the Red Sea coast. Walker had decided to go up the baked Nile bed in search of water and its attendant life, hopefully retained in the hidden shaded gorges beyond the third cataract.
Suddenly, he finds himself face down, breathing the dusty halitosis of the death rattle air. A dull silicate thorn feebly attempts to puncture his palm. It sticks like a cheap bindi, then falls back, uncatchable.


Rocco roared at the lion and it let him pass. The spark in his black eyes told of his joy at the discovery of his new powers. The wadi had sprung many surprises on Rocco and the lions, which attacked after stalking him for two days, had been defeated as easily as the huge python which had descended from the branches of a dead tree and locked him in its eternal grip. As his ribs groaned at breaking point, he had felt a surge of energy course through his body, seemingly emanating from his solar plexus. His arms and shoulders bristled with unnatural muscle. The huge snake had been ripped into flying shreds, its coils exploding like a cheap tire in a 70 mph blowout. However, he could not remember gathering and eating the ensuing unexpected meal, which, in moments of self doubt, made him question the reality of the experience. He soon derived little pleasure from questioning any experience in this world of blank flashcards. For now he was pumped full of adrenaline, leaping from boulder to scorching boulder on feet that had never been shod. Rocco had no GPS or headgear, but wore a pale grey european suit with his mother's birthing shawl draped around his shoulders. He carried a black metal stave which he would periodically thrust into the baked dust whenever he found water smoothed rocks. It came up dry.
His father had told Rocco and his eleven sisters the story of the Great Beast which, eons ago, had laid its eggs deep below the earth's crust. These had now hatched, the monstrous offspring emptying the world's oceans and rivers of water to fuel their journey back to their ancestor's solar system. The family had watched the worldwide fires, riots and wars that followed on the internet, but had never left the Nile basin. Father had encountered six europeans in his 73 years as a lowland farmer. Two tried to kill him, one to capture his daughters for slavery and the other three to convert him to some form of Christianity, with bibles written in a language that neither he nor the missionaries could understand.
Father had died the day Kuwait spontaneously combusted. He was spared the fate of his daughters, their murderers too weak to rape them before drinking their blood and cooking the emaciated bodies on the black rocks. This wasn't a localised famine, those had been suffered and survived for as long as life itself. This was everywhere, blanketing the globe in heat, death and dislocation. Rocco's brain registered that his eyes had perceived movement, but he refused to believe it. No more lions now, please. His tears were so salt, they dried on his eyelashes.

The hallucination was intense. He was instantaneously locked into a Roman bath house existence, the marble cool against his naked body as he lay in dappled sunlight next to the pool, its central fountain misting the air with rosewater. The beautiful woman offered the black grapes, reverently, as if she were handling God's piles. Her bright untroubled face disappeared behind her cool, manicured small hand as she reached to stroke his brow, a perfect cleavage forming, the valley to Heaven.
Walker stared across the courtyard, sipping sweet wine from a bronze goblet. He frowned. Rocco was here again.

CIDER

'Let every tree in every garden own
The Red-streak as supreme, whose pulpous fruit
With gold irradiate, and vermilion shines
Tempting, not fatal, as the birth of that
Primeval interdicted plant that won
Fond Eve in hapless hour to taste, and die.
This, of more bounteous influence, inspires
Poetic raptures, and the lowly
Muse Kindles to loftier strains; even I perceive
Her sacred virtue. See! the numbers flow
Easy, whilst, cheer'd with her nectareous juice,
Hers and my country's praises I exalt.
Hail Herefordian plant, that dost disdain
All other fields! Heaven's sweetest blessing, hail!
Be thou the copious matter of my song,
And thy choice nectar; on which always waits
Laughter, and sport, and care-beguiling wit,
And friendship, chief delight of human life.
What should we wish for more? or why, in quest
Of foreign vintage, insincere, and mixt,
Traverse th' extremest world? why tempt the rage
Of the rough ocean? when our native glebe
Imparts, from bounteous womb, annual recruits
Of wine delectable, that far surmounts
Gallic, or Latin grapes, or those that see
The setting sun near Calpes' towering height.
Nor let the Rhodian, nor the Lesbian vines
Vaunt their rich Must, nor let Tokay contend
For sovereignty; Phanaeus self must bow
To th' Ariconian vales.'

Honos erit huic quoque pomo

John Phillips 1676-1709

I am hungry to be interrupted
Forever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.

Stevie Smith

Doubt

Kay Ryan

A chick has just so much time
to chip its way out, just so much
egg energy to apply to the weakest spot
or whatever spot it started at.
It can't afford doubt. Who can?
Doubt uses albumen
at twice the rate of work.
One backward look by any of us
can cost what it cost Orpheus.
Neither may you answer
the stranger's knock;
you know it is the Person from Porlock
who eats dreams for dinner,
his napkin stained the most delicate colors.

Drugged Doggerel

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding  sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I'm glad I turned up and saved the world from any more of this crap.