Fighting The Monster (Immanentizing The Eschaton, Part Four.)

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. ~Nelson Mandela

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

I personally find it interesting that "Conservatives" these days have inverted the quote, and basically decided that justice anywhere is a threat to injustice...and thus their power and profits...everywhere.

Here we have an armed, armored and gas-masked police officer pointing a shotgun right at the throat of a peaceful protester armed with nothing more than a yoga mat. This picture was taken recently in South Carolina.

At that range, damned near anything is a kill shot.

Yet here's the thing, the young lady with the yoga mat seems unafraid. Certainly, if she feels fear she is controlling it well.

And the guy with the shotgun hardly seems to be the one in control of the situation. As I've said before, if you are not by nature a courageous person, if you do not have an internal morality that is something you can speak about, if you don't have the courage of your convictions...or for that matter believe in something worth believing in...all the guns and money and political power in the world will not help you. If your beliefs are shit, sooner or later people will figure it out and they will get tired of it. Sooner or later, they're going to get tired enough of it that they're not afraid of your gun, and then what do you have?

Nothing.

You're an empty son of a bitch with a uniform and a weapon who forgot that authority without morality or power without responsibility is meaningless, and all the sudden there's more people on the street than you and your buddies have shells in your shotguns. Then if things go the way you're trying to push them to go, all the sudden it doesn't end in your favor.

Oops.

Sooner or later, you end up like this fucking guy, Donald Trump, mouthing a bunch of stupid slogans even as you gotta know that fewer and fewer people give a shit about what you say.

Leave it to the scam artist to accuse everybody else of being a scam. Leave it to a man who has spent five years sowing anarchy and violence to accuse others of doing the same, but then hide in his bunker or go golfing when the bill comes due and it's time to pay up, or step up and lead, or do...well, anything other than make accusations about it and talk shit on Twitter.

And there are people who think Donald Trump is some kind of great leader? Seriously?

By definition, a leader isn't...cannot be...somebody who just repeatedly tells you what you want to hear. Sometimes inconvenient or uncomfortable truths have to be dealt with. Doubling down, responding to protests against police brutality and racism with more police brutality and racism isn't a strategy that's going to work.

But maybe that, right there, is the key.

Republicans don't want it to work. They want to burn it all down so they can squat in their bunkers with their Bibles and their guns and shit on their own shoes in the dark, and so that their idea of government can justify giving away the store to weapons manufacturers for a bunch of crap that doesn't work, and then they'll call that mess "righteous."

Yesterday Tom Cotton, a Republican, defended slavery as a "necessary evil." That's quite a fall for a Party that when it was founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, was specifically the anti-slavery party. Slavery was a blight on American civilization, but I guarantee you that the wealthy, the people who fund assholes like Tom Cotton, have never forgotten that they could once own other human beings, and profit from their free labor, and they resent that the world took that away, civilization be damned.

And people like Tom Cotton will happily sign on to these kind of shitty beliefs in return for a little piece of the money and power, again, civilization be damned. These fools don't care that civilization is what enables them to have their power in the first place, they want more.

The reason Republicans are against civilization is because they think without it, they'll be the Lord in his castle or the Planter in the manor house or the warlord with his army, rather than the beggars in the gutter, the slaves in the fields, or the catamite strapped to the back of the truck until the local warlord gets fucked up smoking opium and decides he wants a piece.

Republicans don't want to live in America anymore, they want to be the Bosnian Serbs, but running Gonzo Afghanistan with bigger, more expensive guns, more violent ethnic cleansing and a lot more drugs. They just think they're going to be the warlords doing the drugs, not the victims of somebody who turned out to be meaner and more ruthless than they are.

And they don't care if all the Christians, pregnant mothers and veterans and everybody else they've ever claimed to support starve to death or die of disease in the process of them getting this nightmare world, either.

Because fuck you, that's why.

That's their entire program, really.

And they'll say whatever goofy bullshit they have to, to get some dumb ass people behind them to serve as cannon fodder and meat shields so that they're not the ones getting shot in the head or fucked up the ass or chained to a drill press or whose only consolation in their miserable life is a vial of white powder cut with god only knows what, although they'll gladly sign up for the idea that they want to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die. They don't want to live in America, they want the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with a golf resort and a Mall.

And that's what Q-Anon and stirring up all this racism and Trump trying to spark a civil war really is. It's an exit strategy. They know, or at least strongly suspect they're going to lose the election. They know if they stay in place consequences will come. That's why they're trying to set it up so they can break off a piece of America for themselves or at least get us all fighting each other so they can sneak out the back door to a comfortable exile in Russia or Saudi Arabia and steal a bunch of money as they slip out the back door.

These people are so hooked on their fear and hate, so hung up on the idea that somebody else might do something they somehow disapprove of or don't understand...which is basically almost everything at this point...that they'd rather burn down the country, if not the world, than let somebody else have a piece. They don't care if this ends in fire, or with them lined up against a bloodstained, pitted wall posing for rifle shots. It doesn't matter if all they end up with is on a better level of hell or a nicer spot in the Underworld than somebody they don't like. The Fuck You Is The Point.


These fucking people see themselves as the only holders of Truth in a world that they consider fallen and sinful....mostly because it doesn't conform to their shitty ideas and give them the kind of power and recognition that they think they should have, or because it includes people they don't like as something other than automatons who are forced to obey their every whim.

Don't ask what these fucking people would consider an ideal world...you don't want to know.

Or, if you do, just look at the worst parts of human history and see if you can figure it out. There really are people in the world who think the Crusades were a good idea, or who think genocide against Native Americans, or slavery, or the Holocaust, or the Iraq War or a host of other wrongs were somehow justifiable.

And the reason for that, is that they'd rather burn the world than look in the mirror and realize what cowardly, shitty people they are, or face that they are not the protagonist of reality like in their bullshit imaginings.

They are overwhelmed by their fear, yes, but the truth is that most of these people learn this stuff from some nasty dualistic theology and they fear nothing more than having to face their fears and come out the other side and change in so doing. Sure, they might still be shitty people, but even the thought of having to be shitty in a different way fills them with existential dread. The thought that "It's not all about me?" fills them with a horror deeper than the pits of hell.

And these fucking people think they have some kind of a right to inflict their chthonic longings, emotional issues, existential fears, racial insecurities and shitty social beliefs on the rest of us.

That is the essence of the conservative Eschaton, right there.

If we want to continue to live in this world, in any way even close to what came before, we are going to have to stand up and show these people that they are not gods, but men.

Part Three.
Part Five.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil