While Eric had planned to do a surrealistic RINO carnival based on the rhinocerotic art of Dali (the world's first surrealistic RINO Carnival), it seems that something went awry in the channeling department. Eric was trying to channel Dali, but Dali is instead channeling Eric.

To illustrate:

Of course, Dali does not believe in politics, but he does believe in RINOs as an essential art form. On the other hand, RINOs are endangered because of politics. They are destructive of the forces of political conformity, so these forces in turn conspire to destroy them. Eric wants to channel Dali, but Dali is peering into the eyes of the RINO! But what if the RINO is Eric and is peering into the eyes of Dali? There is no way to win.

It's not as if the Republican Party doesn't need RINOs. Far from it. With things getting ever more surreal by the day, the RINOs are starting to look positively normal! And that is a contradiction. On top of that the RINOs are so demoralized that very few posts were received. While Eric the pessimist might call this a form of disintegration, Dali the optimist believes that the Creation and Destruction elements are all at work, and thus even the disintegration of the RINOs means the creation of new atomic and subatomic rinocerotic subparticulate matter -- the stuff of which all change, all metamorphosis, even all creation, is based!

To illustrate, here is a disintegrating RINO.

Notice the angels; even they are concerned. Is it too arrogant to suggest that this means God cares about the fate of RINOs? Eric would never say such a thing, but if Dali says that on his behalf, then who is to say that a dead man cannot put words into a living man's mouth? And if he can do that, then why can't he also put words into a living man's blog? The answer is that it happens all the time!

Considering Dali's hatred of politics, why drag him into the RINO carnival? For several reasons, the first of which is that Republican politics have become so surreal, and what could be more surreal than dissenters from surrealism? As a dissenter from surrealism (expelled from the Surrealist movement for being too surreal) Dali is the perfect symbol. Moreover, there's Dali's paranoiac obsession with all things rhino -- which this essay sums up pretty well:

Artists, all through history, have been tormenting themselves to grasp form and to reduce it to elementary geometrical volumes. Leonardo always tended to produce eggs ... Ingres preferred spheres, and Cézanne cubes and cylinders. But only Dalí... has found truth. All curved surfaces of the human body have the same geometric spot in common, the one found in this cone with the rounded tip curved toward heaven or toward the earth ... the rhinoceros horn!

After this initial discovery, Dalí surveyed his images and realised that all of them could be deconstructed to rhinoceros horns.

We go to the irreducible essence of politics.

So, with that, it's on to the posts, along with some illustrations which I hope are appropriate.

BEAUTY AND GRACE UNDER EXTREME DURESS

Here's a Dalinian sculpture of a RINO whose legs are so delicately long and sweet that I'm reminded of beautiful hookers:

ALL WE NEED IS DUST

Beginning in the early 1950s, Dali became obsessed with atomic particles -- and depicted them in the form of RINO horns. A good example is the Dust of Souls:

LOYALTY

THE JOKE'S ON WHO?

Here's a joker who seems to be annoying the RINO in the background:

ALIEN INVASION

From the early 1960s, a study for Dali's "Battle of Tetuan":

BORDERS IN SPACE

Particles floating around in the cosmos, anyone?

NEVER TOO PROUD TO SUBMIT?

While that concludes the submissions I received, isn't it true that not all "submissions" are voluntary?

As I see it, the people who actually submitted posts to this anarchic and surreal carnival were behaving in an orderly manner. This means that the RINOs who submitted no submissions were more in need of submission than those who submitted, and thus I feel that as the host I have a duty to submit their submissions on their behalf. And even if I don't have a duty, I nonetheless have a right, don't I? I mean, isn't this a blog post as well as a carnival? And, being a blog post, I can link to anyone I want, regardless of whether any formal "submission" is involved.

So, the involuntary submissions (selected by me from favorite fellow RINOs) follow.

RINO submits to angel (who seems to like the RINO):

Dali, a grand master of bullshit if ever there was one, said the following in Conquest of the Irrational:

we Surrealists, as you will realize by paying us some slight attention, are not quite artists, nor are we really scientists; we are caviar, and believe me, caviar is the extravagance and the very intelligence of taste, especially in concrete times like the present in which the above mentioned hungering for the irrational, albeit an incommensurable, impatient, and imperialist hungering, is so exasperated by the salivary expectations of waiting, that in order to arrive progressively at its glorious conquests close by, it must first swallow the fine, heady, and dialectical grape of caviar, without which the heavy and stifling food of the next ideologies would threaten immediately to paralyze the vital and philosophical rage of the belly of history.

For caviar is the life experience not only of the sturgeon, but of the Surrealists as well, because, like the sturgeon, we are carnivorous fish, who, as I have already hinted, swim between two bodies of water, the cold water of art and the warm water of science; and it is precisely due to that temperature and to our swimming against the current that the experience of our lives and our fecundation reaches that turbid depth, that irrational and moral hyperlucidity possible only in the climate of Neronian osmosis that results from the living and continuous fusion of the sole's thickness and its crowned heat, the satisfaction and the circumcision of the sole and the corrugated iron, territorial ambition and agricultural patience, keen collectivism and vizors propped up by letters of white on the old billiard cushions and letters of white on the old millyard Russians, all sorts of warm and dermatological elements, which, in short, are the coexisting and characteristic elements presiding over the notion of the "imponderable," a sham notion unanimously recognized as functioning as an epithet for the elusive taste of caviar and hiding the timid and gustatory germs of concrete irrationality, which, being merely the apotheosis and the paroxysm of the objective imponderable, constitutes the divisionist exactness and precision of the very caviar of imagination and will constitute, exclusively and philosophically, the terribly demoralizing and terribly complicated result of my experiences and inventions in painting.

For one thing is certain: I hate any form of simplicity whatsoever.

LOGIC BEATS SUBMISSION

Or does submission beat logic? I don't know, but Dean Esmay (whose unsubmitted submission is titled "The Standing Male Response To Female Complaints That Has Annoyed Every Woman Since Eve") may have discovered an infallible way to piss off all women without exception. No; I will not say what it is, for I might get sued.

However, Dean's post invites a little Dalinian relativism.

Here is Dali's traditional depiction of Vermeer's Lacemaker:

To fully understand the deconstructive/reconstructive power of the RINO horns, here's Dali's RINOCEROTIC version -- titled the "The Paranoiac-Critical Study of Vermeer's Lacemaker":

And if that doesn't manage to annoy every woman since Eve, Dali took this a step further with "Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized By the Horns of Her Own Chastity":

Commented Dali,

The rhino horn is indeed the legendary unicorn horn, symbol of chastity. The young lady may choose to lie on it or to morally play with it; as it was usual in courtesan love epochs.

FEAR

This Dalinian RINO depiction illustrated a 1950s essay about fear:

Global Warming

Hot climate anyone?

DOOM

At the risk of sounding apocalyptic, here's an image from Dali's Apocalypse of St. John:

With that in mind, a couple of very "final" posts.

FINAL PRAYER

At this point I don't know who is channeling whom, but it seems fair to allow Dali to conclude this post with a prayer for the RINOs:

UPDATE: Digger, by the way, has announced a new site -- The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration:

From the educational costs of illegal aliens to traffic congestion to gangs to solutions to the immigration problem, the website is packed full of facts, links to reports and detailed analysis.

UPDATE: As Jennifer linked this post and had some very kind words, it seemed fair to her and the Dali theme to find a late but fitting entry from Jennifer.

My surrealism button was pushed by her "TV Pretend" post:

Decompress time. Unwind from pretend nuclear explosion. TV pretend. I don't think I spoke for about 27 minutes after watching Dr. Strangelove, I am easily impressionable I know, but I like me that way.

So what better way to forget about TV pretend?

From the TV Guide cover of June 8-14, 1968, (titled "Today, Tonight and Tomorrow"):

That's TV Pretend.

And thank you Jennifer!