Missing The Point (House Of Bondage, Two.)

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

...

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

....

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

I saw this when I got up this morning.

Some idiot football player, using a Commencement speech somewhere to equate Pride Month with the Seven Deadly Sins and to demand a "More Conservative brand of Catholicism."

Bro, you play a game for a living, shut the fuck up. Your dumb ass has probably the least actually-conservative type of job on the planet, and you're paid way the fucking hell too much money to do it. This is America, nobody has to be religious, or care if you are.

Ya know, at least Tim Tebow managed to not be a complete douche canoe about politics or religion and has actually found some ways to do good in the world, whether I agree with his beliefs or his various cultural impacts or not.

And the thing is, it's funny how around the world there aren't really any countries or large people-groups who are practicing a "More Conservative" Catholicism. In fact, it's only here in America that there's people who even want to have that kind of shit.

I don't know how Traditionalist Catholicism became a fad among right-wing weirdos but I'll note that of the few people I know who've gone down this rabbit hole, none of them were regular Catholics before. This crap seems to pull in primarily insecure White dudes who think Anti-Liberalism somehow equals conservatism. 

It doesn't.

And some of these motherfuckers claim to want a King. I'm sorry, but I'm an American. This is America. The entire fucking point of this country was that it was founded to be in opposition to Monarchy...which was then the prevailing system of government throughout the world. And "In Opposition" in parliamentary terms was exactly where we were at, too. But within a few years, France had its own Revolution, and by the middle of the 20th Century most of Europe had decapitated or fired their Monarchs...or at least neutered their power, and most of the rest of the world has continued to follow suit since.

I don't know how you can live here and miss the point of America that goddamned bad.

In fact, the only place in the world where one finds Absolute Monarchies is in the Islamic world, places like Saudi Arabia, for example. Come on, bro, give it a shot. You only have to convert to Salafist Islam. I mean, seriously, what's the damned difference between that and what your ass claims to believe now.

I've been to Saudi Arabia, it sucks. This dude wouldn't be any happier there than he is here. And more to the point, a lot of the radical Islamists there aren't happy either (for different reasons) but the difference between Saudi and the USA is they don't dare say so. Over there, if you're going to openly be against the government you might as well take up arms against it...because the response is going to be the same. They'll kill you.

Funny thing, but between military service and college and living where I've lived in general, I've known quite a few people from Saudi Arabia. Most of the Saudis I've met in America didn't want to go back home. Most of the Saudis I met over there wanted to go somewhere else. I had a neighbor from Saudi Arabia downstate, he was happy to be here and that his wife could go to college and learn how to drive and even just be a person without his say-so. Hell, we were all in the same World of Warcraft guild. Trust me, those people appreciated America.

The only reason these motherfuckers want either Monarchy or "Traditionalist" Catholicism is that they think they'd be in the favored groups in such kinds of arrangements, and they've never had to live under any such system nor been anywhere, where they were a guest in such a country.

And it's the same with people who jack off to the idea of Putin's Russia. Aaron Rodgers doesn't know dick about Russia or Vladimir Putin, he just "likes" Vladimir Putin's reactionary views, and apparently also Putin's revisionist views RE: Russian history. I guess he don't realize nobody plays American Football in Russia. Or that their culture is not our culture, and their ideas of either conservative or even liberal politics are not ours either.

And here's the thing;

Those who do know or have it in their living memory what Autocracy or Communism are like, are the ones fighting against that shit.

But Evangelical preachers and rich NFL white bros are too high on the smell of Donald Trump's Big Mac farts to notice, and too stupid to listen to anybody who actually knows anything.

Around the world, "Traditionalist" Catholic sects like Opus Dei are generally sects of the poor, far more than they're fads or playthings of the powerful or the rich...and where excessively right-wing Catholics have been allowed too much power (1960's South Vietnam pre-American intervention, for example) they have very Traditionally soup sandwiched the whole deal. 

After Ngo Dinh Diem sparked the Buddhist Crisis by abusing his country's Buddhist majority, also backing up the machinations of his idiotic brothers Nhu and Thuc (Note: Thuc was a Catholic Priest and then-Archbishop of Hue) and thus threatening American power in Southeast Asia, the CIA overthrew his ass and then once they'd been captured and were in custody the agents running the operation had both Diem and Nhu assassinated by the coup plotters. Thuc only escaped death because he had been summoned to Rome for the Second Vatican Council, and when that was done he went into exile in Rome.

Meanwhile Diem's wife was in Beverly Hills talking so much shit about the Vietnamese Buddhists that it pissed off most Americans.

And, functionally, that kind of shit is what drew America into the Vietnam war. I mean for fuck's sake at least the people we're backing in Ukraine now aren't that fucking stupid, and they at least appreciate our help...which is more than can be said for the Israelis.

Ngo Dinh Thuc went on to help found the first major modern Sedevacantist movement after the Second Vatican Council, and emigrated to America to collaborate with others of similar theological leanings, although he ultimately tapped out and recanted and Pope John Paul II (who, by the way, these nuts also consider "Too liberal") let his ass back in. 

He should not have, but he did.

I use this specifically as an example because functionally, that's what these fucking people are.

Parasites who basically live by sucking off the blood and effort and good graces of others.

And they want to turn America into a House of Bondage just like the Ancient Egypt that Moses and the Israelites fled from...so that they can keep doing that...and leave the rest of us without recourse or any redress of grievances. I don't give a shit how conservative you think you are, these motherfuckers ain't your friends. They'd rather live in the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia than live in an America that's equal and free, or even just trying to be better.

The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields

And they ALL see Trump as the way.

God has not one damned thing to do with it, except that He is a convenient excuse.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press
One

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran