Eater Of Souls (Salvation, Part Three.)

"I didn't want to do it,'' he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to leave them behind.''

The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. "You had no choice.''

"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here.'' He pauses. "I didn't have to do anything,'' he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. "It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.''

"-- Evitable,'' echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F-117A hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. "Your family could still be alive, you know.''

He looks up. "They could?'' Andrea? Jason? "Alive?''

The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.'' 

~From A Colder War, a novella by Charles Stross.

Want to return to normal? Get Vaccinated.

Seems like a fairly anodyne statement put out by any given public health agency in the world in the days of COVID-19, doesn't it?

Nope, Communism, according to some tin-pot state legislator in Arizona.

Again, for you motherfuckers sitting in the back, Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989.

Didn't we just go over this?

Yes, we did, didn't we?

I'm serious. There is something wrong with these people.

Call it basic insanity, mass delusion, slavering Lovecraftian thralldom to powers and principalities we'll never understand, I don't know...but there's something wrong with these fucking people.

Normal people do not look at a normal public service announcement and scream "COMMUNISM!"

I don't give a damn. 

I used to be a Republican. I was born during the political firestorm that was the Watergate scandal. I was too young to remember Ford, or much of Carter, Reagan's two terms took up much of my formative years and that time and the late Cold War very much did shape my ideas of morality. The balance of my teenage years fell during George H.W. Bush's term, I turned 18 in 1991, and registered to vote as a Republican. The Clinton years were eventful for me, military service, car accident, disability, getting back on my feet both financially and literally, addiction, the beginning of recovery. By the time George, Son Of George was in office, I was married...though I would not be for much longer. That time was its own set of crises about which I've written extensively. In all that time, even after I stopped being a Republican I can't say I recall people randomly shouting "Communist!" at public health announcements, even when John McCain crashed and burned and Obama got elected and Republicanism began to be eaten alive by conspiracy theories, racism and weird shit, it never quite reached the level of normal Moral Panic...at least outside of a certain percentage of Republicans, anyway...much less Pocket Red Scare.

Nobody gave much of a fuck about Communism.

In fact, I can't really say as I heard or saw anybody say much about Communism until Trump got into politics, and the first example I can think of was me. Trump said "Build The Wall!" I said "So, Republicans are basically Communists now?" Because naturally, the very first thing I thought of was the Berlin Wall, the Inner German Border, and East Germany.

But now that Trump is gone, it seems like everyone and everything is Communist, and them Dirty Commies seem to include everybody but select Republicans...including most other Republicans. For fuck's sake they called Mitt Romney a Communist!

In the smoking wreckage of MAGAland, it seems, there is only one true way (and nobody seems to know what it is on any kind of a consistent basis) but there are endless paths to treason. Everything not Far-Right-enough is Communist.

And with Trump seeming to fade, determining what IS Far-Right enough appears to have reverted to Fox News again, with special emphasis on Tucker Carlson...and the Tiki Torch lit by Trump appears to be being carried forward by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, and I can't escape the creeping feeling that one of those two motherfuckers is going to be running for President in 2024.

Nothing matters, not even the Cause.

Republicanism, such as it is, isn't even about any of the stuff it ever was before or that I can even relate to as an idea, much less an ideal.

Trump's big lie that he somehow won the election has gone beyond even him and...without him on social media to egg it all on, the shit's taken on a life of its own, even to the point where it's sucked in old standard wooden Republicans who might as well have came with the building...and who were at least once considered not-insane...like Chuck Grassley. 

Yep, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who is just oh-so-fake-piously asking questions and stanning for a skeevy op like "Cyber Ninjas" only to be put in his place by Republican former-Virginia Rep. Denver Riggleman, who I'd never heard of before he was summarily excommunicated from Republicanism for officiating at the wedding of two gay men who worked for him. He stood firm that he did nothing wrong, and all things considered to me he at least seems recognizably conservative and Republican, and consistent with the core values he learned as an Airman and then an Officer in the US Air Force. I mean, really, the most out-there thing about this guy is he believes in Bigfoot. These days? Fuck, I can live with that.

Chuck Grassley...or what's become of him, anyway? Not so much.

And the truth is...there is absolutely a stinking red tide of much worse rising up from the bottom as shrieking Lovecraftian madness overtakes the Republican base. You think I'm kidding?

Now former Trump election lawyer Lin Wood is going after arch-Trump Toady Lindsey Graham and calling for civil war. 

Lin Wood, who appears to have had some kind of psychotic break and apparently thinks he's God (but he's still apparently a lawyer) is actively in the running to become South Carolina Republican Party chairman (What was that about South Carolina being too small to be a republic, yet too big to be an insane asylum?) 

The Republican Party as I knew it is dead, it died when even those with strong enough personalities and leadership skills or enough connections to stabilizing influences were about to be out of office, and it was buried under a wave of conspiracy theories and racism and eulogized in the corresponding wave of idiotic religious sentimentality that rose and fell with Sarah Palin. I can still see the wreckage from my house.

The thing is, even the Tea Party that rose to power on her shoulders is dead, what members of it remain have gone one of two ways...either they turned out to be part of a valuable corps of unlikely and often unlikeable but useful allies in the struggle against Trump and Trumpism...or they became the most glassy-eyed of glassy-eyed Stepford Trump Robots and that was that. There seems to be no middle of the road there.

Now? Even the gone-nutty, Nationalistic but still all too recognizably American in all the worst ways Republican Party of 2016 and 2017 is utterly dead, and it's conspiracy-addled, mush-brained children are already dying right by its side. 

Even the Republican Party as it existed on January 5th of this year is deader than Richard Nixon.

Thing is, as it collapses to ash like a Vampire shot with blessed bullets the Republican Party is literally reconstituting and self-replacing with something much worse, like a T-1000 of wrong, a monster far less redeemable or even relatable because it lacks the humanity even a vampire has to remember having...and it's doing it because too many leaders like Chuck Grassley are "Just asking questions" out of alleged political convenience instead of trying to right the ship.

Of course even trying to right the ship would sink the ship at this point, but because lives are at stake, if you have the least bit of moral courage you do it anyway. See also, Cheney, Liz. Yes, that hurt to type. Fuck you, I don't give a damn.

This is happening in no small part because too many of these fucking people don't give a damn, or they're gibbering insane, just downright evil or some combination of all of the above and/or worse things.

They feel like they're owed something.

They think they're somehow getting one over on somebody they don't like see also all this stupid "Own the Libs" bullshit that's been going around for six years or so.

Or they want their worst impulses, like their hate and racism, protected from social change somehow.

They don't care about anything else.

The country could be reduced to ash and them to abject poverty, the world could burn, and they could be living in a refugee camp but as long as they've got a right to hate and a couple more packets of UN-distributed relief supplies than Those People in the Quonset hut next door to their tent, they're good with that...and they would still absolutely try to exploit those refugees worse off than themselves, especially if those refugees are black or brown.

Because it never stops, there is no bottom. It's been over a generation now since Newt Gingrich set the tone for the modern Republican Party when he became Speaker of the House in 1995, and in that time this bullshit has eaten at least some people's souls.

Now the question I'm asking is, is that the kind of world that you want to live in? 

I sure don't.

But only we can stop this shit.

You get what you tolerate.

If you want a better country, be a better citizen.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan
 

Part Two.

Part One.