Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989 (Repeat this until you understand it, Part One.)

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenberg's, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it. 

~Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire.

At the Republican state convention in Utah yesterday, Mitt Romney was booed and called a Communist.

Mitt Romney.

Mitt Motherfucking Romney.

Mr. Car Elevator Out Of Touch Vulture Capitalist Himself, Elitist Asshole Por Favor, Former Republican Governor and son of another, and sitting Republican Senator who is lulled to sleep every night by (un)live readings from the novel Atlas Shrugged, performed by the ghost of Ayn Rand herself, whose kitchens are certified by RedState as containing no spicy foods whatever. He of the 47% remark that destroyed his Presidential ambitions and directly led to the reelection of Barack Obama, whose Vice Presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, was rhetorically disassembled and put back together in embarrassing positions by one Joseph Robinette Biden (who is now your President, bitches) in the Vice-Presidential debate in 2012. Long story short, you cannot physically get more Republican than this guy.

Or at least you couldn't before 2015 when conservatism in any traditional sense of that word got voted right off the fucking island and Republicanism began its transition to being a cult of personality, and then just a cult, and finally a cult in search of a personality to lead it.

Communist.

I have a full confession to make here. I'm 47 years old. My formative years included such wonders as the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the brushfire conflict in Lebanon, and various and sundry Cold War conflicts in the 1970's and 1980's. I'm not going to lie, I expected to die in a nuclear war and my family generally lived in locations that made such a thing a real possibility, if not right away, certainly within hours or days of the event.

And everybody knew this was a fact. No one really batted an eye at the fact that there were countless anti-nuclear protests at the time. It was pretty much expected.

I never expected the Berlin Wall, and then the East Bloc, and ultimately the Soviet Union and world Communism as an organized force to come crashing down, much less as rapidly as it all did. As I've written before I came home from school and a counseling appointment one evening, then a 15-year old kid whose 16th birthday was just a few weeks away to find that the world as I knew it had ended, and a brave new world brimming with possibility had sprang into being in its place, all in less than one day.

And my Mom and I sat in the living room eating a pizza and watched Germans ring in the New World by taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall.

Fuck you, Karl Marx, Fuck you, Vladimir Lenin, Fuck you, Joseph Motherfucking Stalin!

I sure as hell didn't expect the final verdict on East Bloc vs. US and NATO military power that was rendered by the Gulf War in 1991 when deeply experienced Iraqi troops using Soviet tactics, who'd been fighting the Iranians for a fucking decade got their collective ass blasted right into Allah's arms by the tens of thousands in exchange for a paltry few Allied casualties. 

The general consensus over the next few years was that, had those Soviet Guards Armies come pouring through the Fulda Gap, the Black Horse Cav and other US Army Armored Cavalry Regiments stationed there they'd have kicked Ivan's ass up between his shoulder blades and the hardest part of it all would've been keeping up with logistics.

Then the world got that Merry Christmas from Moscow later that year as the Hammer and Sickle was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolor.

And as a young conservative, my ass was on the winning side. I want you to think about that, for a second. It was, for all intents and purposes, an absolutely amazing time to be a young man...even a young conservative in a country that, then as now, seemed awash in currents of cultural and social change. Diversity, Rap music, the beginnings of the rise of the Information Age.

Hell, it was fucking great. In the summer of 1992 I worked my first "real" job (as in, not working for my Grandpa or my Mom or somebody connected to either of them, and being just a hair above minimum wage) as a prep cook on Mackinaw Island, and I got to work with a bunch of Jamaicans and experience people of different cultures from a more adult perspective.

And you know, that fall I was so disenchanted with George H.W. Bush and all the Republican tax increases of the last decade plus a couple of years, that in the first election I could vote in, I voted for Slick Willie and called it the fuck even.

Yeah, true enough, I spent a lot of the next eight years hating myself for it, and you can absolutely draw a line from too much of what happened during that time to right now.

But by the time I got sick of seasonal food service and stupid factory jobs and enlisted in the United States Air Force, the world had changed from what I'd grown up in...and you know, I was just fine with that.

For fuck's sake, even the Chinese aren't even really Communists anymore.

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it. ~Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire.

Flash forward almost 30 years, and too many Americans see most other Americans as the enemy.

But you know, there's some of them that damned well deserve it, because they're trying to either impose their authoritarianism on the country, or resurrect the Cold War (with the idea of eventually turning things hot) not against Soviet hordes but against the rest of us, their fellow Americans.

And literally everything that conservatives ever believed historically has been thrown in the trash by these people, gleefully, and with malice aforethought.

And pretty much all the recent inventions they claimed in terms of beliefs have been exposed as a lie.

Yet the media...which these fuckwads would gladly murder en masse given the chance, keeps trying to gin up sympathy for this idiocy.

Meanwhile, people who saved the world from nuclear WAR, like George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan...and people who were on the pointy end of the stick and suffered for serving their country like John McCain...have been saved from the ash heap of history only because at least some liberals and moderate Democrats (and, you know, those of us who are glad we didn't get incinerated in nuclear fire) have chosen to remember them, if not fondly, at least with a little respect.

Hell, here's Greg Kelly of Newsmax demanding the name of the Capitol Police officer that shot Ashlii Babbitt, thus to summon the flying monkeys and internet trolls and violent Q-Nuts to make that person's life worse than death. "Thin Blue Line" my ass.

By contrast, had we not learned the name of Derek Chauvin straight away, especially if there had been no video, this asshole would have been all for trying to keep that information secret for as long as possible.

They don't care about the killing of a Black man though. Hell, they don't even care about an actual attack on the seat of the US government.

It's because they believe in racism more than they believe in America, and they're not even trying to hide it. For fuck's sake, Q-Anon is not much more than Nazism with the serial numbers filed off.

I'm sure you can imagine what they think of Ronald Reagan granting amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants. 

Fucking Tucker Carlson has railed against the Immigration Act of 1965, a measure then overwhelmingly supported by Republicans.

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it. ~Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire.

But of course, the actual truth is it was never about any of that.

Back in the day there were a few people, not very many and they tended not to say anything in mixed company, but they were there...who lamented the passing of the Cold War, or thought the world changing on them was some kind of a trick. The rest of us mostly just wondered what the hell was wrong with those people...if we were even aware they existed, and most people outside of conservatism or even in it, but who didn't live where there were militia nuts and religious fanatics aplenty, weren't.

A world where we don't all have to live with the constant threat of horrible death (and where they lack the ability to use the threat of such a thing to force compliance) is anathema to these fucking people..

Modern conservatives have become the very strangest of things, violent zealots for whom nothing matters, including the Cause.

Sure, their politics/religion briefly claimed Donald Trump as its god, but since his Social Media-less Floridian exile, indeed since their failed 1/6 insurrection, it seems as if Trump has faded back into pathetic obscurity and now they're casting about looking for a new demagogue.

And it's only ever one infotainment "news" broadcast away from being changed completely. We have always been at war with East Asia.

And in the meantime, everything else they ever said they believed in doesn't matter, except insofar as they can use it to claim they are better or more righteous than somebody else, or use it to beat them over the head with.

It's a strange reverse-Gnosticism cravenly looking for a Demiurge to worship.

They have always been trying to immanentize the Eschaton.

And in the meantime, Communism is still dead, and has been so effectively for at least 30 years.

Repeat this until you understand it.