The Serpent In The Garden (American Revelation IV, Part Ten)

There's a man workin' in a field
See's the rain and it's burning
He's saying this can't be real
As he sees the color of the fields turning
Far away the men too busy getting rich to care
Close their eyes and let it all out into the air
Hoping nobody else would care

Look out any window
Look out any open door
Look out any window
See what's going on in the world around you. 

~Look out any window, Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

Serious question, people.

Without looking it up, can anybody here tell me who Juan De Onate was?

It's a historical question.

No? Well, Okay. We'll come back to that later.

Likewise, can anybody here tell me what the schools of Constitutional law called Originalism and Textualism are, and what they mean, or what they stand for? Doctrines and principles and words matter. What is the "Correct" outcome for some ideological fanatic is not usually the [morally] right outcome for everybody else.

Also, can you tell me where the Galwan valley and the region of Ladakh are located, and why they are suddenly important? Or why a sudden reigniting of the Korean War would be a bad thing?

These seem like small things, but they're not, not really.

I'm serious. History has a purpose or we wouldn't record it, knowledge is power, and if you don't think that even in some roundabout way Republicans know...or at least still know this you have another thing coming. They're just trying to bamboozle you into believing in nothing at all and doing what you're told without thinking about it.

Of course, the sad fact of the matter is that many Republicans these days are themselves extremely ignorant of history, or they still believe the glossed-over version of it that they got in elementary school, or the "Lost Cause" narrative of the US Civil War, that seeks to glorify the Confederacy and minimize slavery, all in support of racism. This effect naturally extends far beyond Civil War history itself.

And while we're at it, we need to consider the role of religion in all this, and the bastardization thereof. I have a church background, but over the last 30 years or so I've seen American conservative Christianity gradually ground down to just three major rules:

#1 Don't have an Abortion.
#2 Don't be an LGBT person, unless you're in porn and it's there for me to get off on.
#3 Support the rich, and most of all Vote Republican.

None of that shit is in the Bible, Frank. In point of fact even the admonitions against homosexuality are more complicated than simple homophobia if you actually consider the context and the history and the kinds of things the contemporaries of the Jews did to people that they defeated in battle.


The simple, sad fact is that none of this stuff matters to these people...the ones bitching about Gorsuch, or complaining about the protests or ranting about the riots or refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic.

Oh, don't get me wrong, it started out being important, but over time, it became simple camouflage...along with Ronald Reagan, either President Bush, and Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney. Why else do you think the MAGA cult hates those people so much?

Anyway, somebody got shot at some point yesterday, at a protest in New Mexico.

Just some random right-wing nut, from the look of things, shooting an innocent person because they were at a fucking protest, exercising their God-given rights per the Constitution.

The shooter was immediately mobbed by the crowd, beat down with a skateboard, and arrested by the cops while street medics jumped in to assist the victim until the paramedics showed up.


And here we have the victim, being carried to the ambulance by SWAT team members who are virtually indistinguishable from soldiers, as if this were happening in Al Anbar rather than Albuqueque.

It really seems like there should be a less heavily armed way to do this.

And here's the thing. What was this protest about? The protesters were trying to remove a statue of Juan De Onate, New Mexico's Mexican-born Spanish Conquistador. Remember the question above?

How many white people who've never lived in the American Southwest actually would know who Juan De Onate was without having to Google it?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and tell you that I'd guess the answer is, probably not very many of them. It's understandable, a bit of state history trivia that the average person who doesn't live in a given area could be forgiven for not knowing.

Except that there's people out there...all too many of them ignorant of the history itself...who are willing to kill people over it.

You want to know who Juan De Onate was? He was a Mexican-born 16th century Spanish explorer and military officer, born in 1550, who explored and claimed for New Spain (as Mexico was then known) much of the American Southwest, as well as leading expeditions as far north as the Great Plains, who eventually became governor of Nueva Mexico, and would go on to lead several more expeditions. He was recalled to Mexico City, forced from power, tried and convicted and exiled from both New Mexico (for life) and from Mexico City (for five years) and incarcerated for a few years because of his cruelty to the Pueblo peoples and his use of excessive force against Native Americans in general. After he was released from prison he went to Spain where the King appointed him a mining inspector. He died in Spain in 1626 and outside of the United States there are no statues of him that I know of.

Did you know all that? As it happens, I did. I'm not one to put much stock in statues, but this is sure as fuck one I'd help to pull down.

This guy was a piece of shit, who so far as I'm concerned doesn't deserve to have a statue anywhere, much less in the United States.

The reason that I know who he is and the reason that my antennae went up when I heard the name was because I am familiar with the history of the American Southwest, having been all over that part of the country when I was a kid, including to a place called El Morro National Monument...effectively a giant rock jutting out of the plains of western New Mexico that has a pool of water at its base, and as such was inscribed and painted on by travelers from prehistoric Native Americans all the way to later Anglo-American pioneers. Juan De Onate was one of the people who made such an inscription. El Morro became a National Monument in 1906. I went there in 1985.

The chance that some random Q-Nut knows all this stuff or has ever been to that place or studied that history seems to me to be rather small. But "This is only the beginning..." Ooh, scary.

(Not really.)

Some Q-Nut posted about the New Mexico shooting basically threatening Civil War or at least mass right-wing terrorism...because people were pulling down the statue of a racist Mexican conqueror? What? Excuse me? Hello? is this thing even on?

These people want to start a war, over racism, and they want this very badly, indeed. They literally do not care about anything else, nor care to know anything else.

In fact, to them, not having to know shit seems to be a mark of privilege.

Why?

Because if you don't know anything, you can believe whatever you want. Let me give you an example of how perpetually triggered and reactionary these fucking people are.

For awhile, my handle on Twitter was "Hurones Mexicanos" which simply means "Mexican Ferrets." I change it every so often and this was simply one such case but more than once while that was the name on my account I got jumped by one of these triggered racist morons and told to go back to Mexico...a place that white, American-born former-conservative me has only in fact been to several times as a fucking tourist. Nothing that I am, or ever was, actually matters to these people. Nothing that Neil Gorsuch or even Antonin Scalia is or was matters either. They are only looking for an opportunity to kill and steal. They would rather hate, than eat.

These fucking people could give a goddamn about Juan De Onate, they're just looking for a rationalization to kill people, and literally anything will do, because killing people with their guns is all they actually believe in.

And the point of conspiracy theory bullshit like Q-Anon is simply to strip people of any fixed or foundational morality so that they will do what whoever is pulling the strings wants them to, and I've long theorized that Q is nothing more than a Russian intelligence operation, information warfare aimed at making Americans dumber and more reactionary and more willing to shoot their own neighbors because something something Gazpacho. If you think the Russians give a shit about whatever dumb shit they have to feed these motherfucking idiots, you have another thing coming. They will keep stirring the pot until these fools boil over and kill people for their dumb-shit conspiracy theories.

Don't take my word for it, look at what they say.


And did you notice how quickly the conspiracy theorists jumped to the defense of white racism, or of something peripherally having to do with it? This, even though they would almost certainly harass a person with a Spanish name if they got the chance? Again, the context of the statue doesn't matter. The context of the words doesn't matter.

The primary value here is racism, all else is camouflage.

Last night some idiot pastor said publicly that he preferred the term "White Blessing" to "White Privilege.

No, motherfucker, it's privilege, conferred by Man, not some blessing given by God. Cut that shit the fuck out before you embarrass yourself.

Seriously, I say that as a white dude.

Whiteness isn't a blessing, it's a social construct created by Man to justify his hate and shitty behaviors.

Trying to claim that evil and hate and racism is a blessing or holy doesn't make it Okay any more than a terrorist shouting Allah Akbar as they shoot people would make it right for them to do that. God is not stupid, and either you believe that He is the Creator of all...or you don't. There's no middle ground here.

It wasn't Woke Liberals that taught me this stuff, it was Christian schools that set me on that path.

Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, Red, Brown, Yellow, Black and White they are precious in His sight...didn't y'all have to learn any of this stuff or sing those songs, the same as I did? Like I've said before, the truth is simple, Man makes it complicated because he does not want to obey.

If there's anything we should know from history it's that religious fanaticism and right-wing authoritarianism always turn out badly.

Why is this hard?

Why does us falling flat on our face right now, with all this stupid shit, matter?

It matters because, China and India are engaging in armed clashes that could easily escalate into a full-scale war over a remote Himalayan river valley called the Galwan valley in a sub-region of Jammu and Kashmir known as Ladakh.

If you don't see the potential threat to everybody posed by a possible war between two superpowers that each have huge armed forces, nuclear weapons and populations well in excess of a billion people, it's not just that I can't help you. It's that I don't want to try.

As I understand it, Chinese and Indian troops have slugged it out with everything from bare fists, clubs and rocks on up to full on firefights between infantry platoons with rifles and machine guns and there's been sporadic use of heavy weapons, and casualties on both sides for the first time in 45 years.

And at the same time, North Korea has blown up one of its own diplomatic facilities in South Korea as tensions between those two countries continue to escalate.

Ordinarily, were this administration the least bit effective or sane, this crisis would have American diplomats, possibly all the way up to Mike Pompeo himself shuttling back and forth between Beijing and New Delhi and burning up considerable bandwidth via secure communications to try to resolve this crisis. The US Navy should be putting Carrier Battle Groups off both the Chinese and Indian coasts right now, but it almost certainly isn't. We as a country, should be stepping up to deal with a potentially global crisis here.

But we're not.

In point of fact, given his own views, shitty as they are, if he was who he says he is Donald Trump could be the dude, due to his claimed affinity for Chinese President Xi and similarity of views with Indian Prime Minister Mohdi, to go in there and make a deal and resolve this thing...and whatever happened with the election or our own multiple domestic crises he'd probably finally get himself that Nobel Prize on the merits of having defused a war between two nuclear powers.

But he isn't and we're not and instead of being the world leader we have been for 75 years and should still be being right now we're navel-gazing and falling down the same old rabbit hole of shitty bullshit that, in a sane world, we'd have resolved 150 years ago.

Racism is America's Original Sin, the Serpent that pollutes our Eden. It's the central evil from which most of our other evils and national neuroses springs. The fact that we have not dealt with it is slowly killing us, much as my own addictions nearly killed me more than once. We have to love our country and love our lives more than we love that sin, if we want to survive, much less be the country we could be...or should be.

And right now racism is exactly what is causing us to fall from our place in the world, just as the world most needs us.

If we cannot conquer this evil in our own hearts and set ourselves on the path to healing and do it real damn fast, maybe we never deserved the things we had or were given in the first place. Trump came to power because of the twin evils of apathy and racism. It's really that fucking simple. We cannot allow this to keep happening, because the gun nuts and the Republicans and the Q-Nuts will gladly shatter America and turn it into a nuclear Bosnia just to keep their own personal perks and power if we don't show up as a people and tell them No.

The Democrats have to defeat Trump and the Republicans have to be removed from power, the protesters have to win, the statues have to be pulled down, if we want a better country we have to be better citizens and we have to fix our shit.

Or we'd better get used to a world that's on fire.

Does that spell it out for you?!

Part Nine.
Part Eleven.