Free excerpt from Actually George Santos Rules

"But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees.”

Hola amigos, I know it’s been a while since I rapped atcha but I been up to my dick in various business wheelings and dealings that would make a lesser man leap of the grid and sackfirst into the great beyond, if you take that kinda metaphor. But enough about me. I have a question for y’all:

You know when you’re standing outside and you see a plane up high in the wild blue? Is that real? What I mean is, even if that plane is full of people you know and love, you would never know that THAT one was the plane they were on (unless you actually saw it crash, but this isn’t that kind of question) so seeing and clocking that you’ve seen it has no basis on your reality whatsoever. At best there’s a tiny facsimile of familiarity you quickly concoct in your brain before forgetting about it forever, even if you are expecting arrivals by plane that day, and even if that happens to be the plane they’re on. You’ll never think about that moment again. Because it doesn’t matter enough to consider.

So is it real? Likely your answer is “duh, dude. Of course it’s real.” But why? If it wasn’t there the entirety of your reality would not change at all. Not even a little. How is that real then?

Lemme ask you another question, if you take some of that peyote Doug sold us that one time and you see a man walk by who is made entirely of sausages, is that real? It would probably shake you to your core to see something like that, or at the very least make you opine “I’ll be damned. Doug wasn’t lying when he said this was the good shit,” or something therebouts, right? But unless you experienced some kind of profound and permanent mental break, you’d never think of that a ‘real’ guy, correct? Okay.

So, without saying anything too controversial we can conclude that the sausage guy, while not “real” in the pedantic sense, has a much larger impact on your reality than the plane, which we’re just accepting as real. Let’s continue down this path just for a moment.

If you had no eyes do colors still exist? We know that in the pure sense of objective reality vs perspective that they don’t (bro, what if what I see as blue is what you see as yellow and so on) and we use the tools that we have (corneas and lenses and other shit feeding reflected light waves into our brain that we have evolved to decode and understand as so not to walk into shit or to recognize certain waves as a lovely shade of lavender that will really liven up the rumpus room or whatever) to make sense of a reality that is, in no uncertain terms just atoms swirling in a blackness and meeting resistance only when similarly charged micro things repel one another (like when you drive your car into a wall, for example. That’s just electrons very very quickly and suddenly repelling other electrons [or something a little more complicated than that, but not by much]), and this is all happening (if you take the lens of the human eye taking stock of energy waves and relaying them to our brains as colors and shapes out of the equation), in an inky void of infinite blackness.

So in that regard, all that we know, that is everything we learn from our senses (also known as plain old everything), is just a collection of map keys to help us create order and beauty and maintain sanity (probably) out of a bunch of clumps of atoms n shit just bouncing off each other in the dark.

So the guy made of hotdogs isn’t real? Seems a little flippant, to put it mildly. I fully understand that we all have a sort of simple baseline for what reality is that we need to cling to as to not go completely bonkers, but the tiniest bit of critical thinking seems to suggest that reality is really what you want it to be, and you really don’t need a lot of it because, like that plane, it doesn’t need to be there. It’s not really there as far as every aspect of your reality is concerned anyway. You’re probably just hallucinating.

This is why so many people, myself included, find themselves feeling nuts here and there and also why there is one man out there who is totally totally in no uncertain terms nailing it….

Subscribed

If I wrote for some trash wonk adjacent pop political website or blog, I’d probably begin this by saying something like ‘Gunning for George Santos is everything that’s wrong with the Democrats,’ and the proceeding article, if begun like that, would almost entirely miss the real point, but it must be said, missing the point is almost entirely what the ‘liberal’ right centrist crew that we think of as Democrats does.

And anyway, that’s not at all what I’m doing, as you’ll discover soon enough.

I’m not here to talk politics insomuch as I’m here to talk about people that happen to be involved in politics, so don’t sweat if you are currently thinking “I don’t give a shit what this dumb ill-informed asshole thinks he knows about the machinations of establishment politics.” I assure you, I know I don’t know shit, and this ain’t that. So we cool. I just wanna talk about George Santos a little.

George Santos, for those of you that don’t know is a man that exists and holds the job of US Representative of New York’s 3rd Congressional District, a job he got this year. We literally don’t know anything else about him. And I mean that more than I think you even think I do.

We know nothing. Is his name really George Santos? Up in the air. Is he a lying grifter? Probably, but he could be lying about that shit too. I mean it. This is a guy who (and I refuse to look up a list of his supposed lies, scams etc just on principle [but probably not on the principle you think]) has purportedly stolen puppies from the Amish, said his mom died on 9-11, said his mom died on Christmas, said he was an executive producer for some Spider Man broadway musical, said he was never a drag queen in Brazil (there are pictures of him in drag in Brazil), said he was a college volleyball star at a school he didn’t attend, said he was jewish, said he worked at a bunch of places he never worked and on and on and on and on and on like this. It’s fucking insane.

Is his name really George Santos? Almost certainly not, but who cares? The thing which we are calling George Santos is an unquantifiable, unknowable entity. And it doesn’t matter at all anyway at this point. It’s like naming a distant planet that you found using a high powered space telescope and then wondering what the lifeforms on that planet ‘actually’ call it, if in fact there is life there. It makes YOU weird if you care about that at this point.

One thing I know concerning George Santos is that he pisses off his fellow legislators to a dizzying, maddening degree. Mitt Romney, the horrible, patently unlikable ghoul whose character has somehow been redeemed for doing the absolute bare minimum and saying that the former president is kind of too much of a loose cannon for his tastes, straight up apprehended Santos before the state of the union address (or some other pageant at the capitol where everyone gets together to suck off and boo each other) and said something to the effect of “you’re a disgrace. You should resign,” and for this, Mitt Romney was heartily praised.

That Mitt Romney, human corporation that he is, lost his composure publicly (whether scripted or not) says volumes about the amount of hatred heading George Santos’s direction in the capitol, because Mitt’s whole thing is a highly focus grouped affable fake smile and eyes that lack any semblance of discernible emotion.

In a world where you can’t even open your favorite news website and trust something that looks like an article to actually be a legit article and not a fast food concern’s native ad for waffle fries disguised as an op ed column espousing a political agenda that feeds the coffers of said fast food concern’s shareholders more than their admittedly delicious waffle fry sales already do (an avaricious misdirect that wouldn’t bother Mitt Romney in the slightest, btw) finally someone has broken through the clutter, pissed off the most robotic mormon in the room (whose unhinged reaction is, in my esteem, the canary in the coal mine for the limits of what polite beltway automatons will tolerate) and “hold my beer’d” the entire mechanism of truth in this regrettable but fun post irony late stage capitalist internet age. That man is George Santos.

And frankly, he fucking rules.

You know who’s a disgrace and should resign? Mitt ‘roof rack’ Romney. He’s a sad sack cowardly little lord Fontleroy piece of shit grifter private equity dream destroying Brooks Brothers toilet paper using goon and the very notion that he represents anything but his most base treasure hoarding interests is laughable enough. When he said “corporations are people, my friend” at that fundraiser when he was running for president, he said it without a trace of guile. He is such a disgusting cardboard cutout of a man leaned up against a bank deposit box that he literally anthropomorphizes loose confederations of schemes and loopholes as being something deserving of human rights, which is interesting, since he is a real bummer on, you know, real human rights for real human people he ostensibly represents who just want to get married and be able to see their loved ones in the hospital and stuff. But I’m getting into politics and I said I wouldn't do that. TL;DR: Mitt Romney is a bag of shit and a disgrace.

And so are all of those people. And I hate the political rhetoric of the lazy, which is “who gives a fuck, they’re all the same anyway” (because it’s just a quick reflex mechanism employed to eschew feelings of guilt or personal responsibility for not ever doing anything or learning about anything), but the thing about positions of power in a capitalist society is that you have to raise money to acquire that power and in order to shamelessly go around asking people for money so you can tell them what to do, with very rare exceptions, you have to be a really fucked up self absorbed maniac to be good at it. And that’s a very different skill than taking care of people and making important policy decisions thoughtfully with everyone’s best interests at heart.

When that one guy became president (you know the one. He’s got a son that somehow looks exactly like both beavis AND butthead at the same time), the thing you heard over and over from people is that he tells it like it is, which, that’s admittedly kind of true.

Capitol Hill is a place where, well intentioned or not, everyone, to the last, is a self important windbag full of lies and clandestinely compromised and financially baised objectives. Every single one of em, and that’s not laziness (though I’m aware that I just said it was), it’s situational, based on shared community. Here’s what I mean:

If you hang out in a room full of convicted pedophile birthday clowns who want nothing more than to find your dirtiest secrets and lord them over you in order to make you do what they want every day for years, you don’t have to be one yourself, but you DO have to interact with them, and every once in a while do them favors and do what they say.

No matter what you tell yourself or your friends, you’re still that guy that hangs out with convicted pedophile birthday clowns, and by necessity, you adjust your thing, no matter what your thing is, to act like them when you need to or you leave, one way or the other. That’s just survival. To function in their society, you live and die by their rules.

To put it another way, swimming through the sewer doesn’t make you a piece of shit but it sure makes you smell and move a lot like one.

‘Telling it like it is,’ then, was really just finally being so brazen about objectives and petty desires and basking in the egomania that’s so endemic in halls of power and doing it without shame.

In that way, our beloved former president did tell it like it is. He would say “I’m gonna deal with China, and it’s gonna be the best deal” and that has no basis whatsoever in fact, intent or indeed any sort of understanding of policy, the machinations of US Chinese relations or even what the ‘deal’ being mentioned could possibly be about in a general sense.

And that’s the ‘it like it is’ part. ‘It’ is a group of people just saying things, not knowing what they’re saying, not caring what the words even mean, only registering when there is applause and then repeating blindly grasping their way towards whatever it is that just spiked that rush their dopamine-craving circulatory system. That’s it.

In that way, Trump straight up laid it bare. He talked for applause. His moods were visibly dictated by how happy people around him were with him. His talk was big and his big stick was not even in his hand or even his stick so much as it was a stick that he was able to make swing by saying the words that the people holding the stick wanted him to say. He had no control over where the stick swung, and he didn’t care because he doesn’t care about anything but feeling like he’s part of something. He just liked that he had a part in making it swing. That’s all. That’s Trump’s entire policy agenda across the board.

He was the id of our diseased backroom political operatives laid bare, and in a way it was interesting to behold. He’s like a Pinnochio made of cubic zirconia, McRibs and veneers. Which has its charm, as we’ve seen.

But he ain’t got SHIT on George Santos.

George Santos is so magnificent that he doesn’t even have to make sense on paper: if anything is to be believed (and I can’t stress this enough, there is absolutely NO reason to believe anything at all about him including that he’s a man, from earth, named George Santos, anything at all, and that’s the true beauty here), he’s a bit of a small time grifter who lied his way into an unassuming republican state rep job as a young gay presenting man who’s not afraid to bend the truth to get his way….

that’s all folks. To get the real stuff, hit that button. Thanks for reading. Love ya.