The Bottomless Pit

Then the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from heaven which had fallen to the earth and the key of the bottomless pit was given to him. He opened the bottomless pit, and smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit. ~Revelation 9:1-2

It's Martin Luther King day, and this was the first thing I saw when I got up this morning and logged into my social media accounts. Before we go any further, I want anybody and everybody who reads this to let that sink in. Think about it long and hard. I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. Think about how fucked up that is, do it now, take as long as you need.

Here we have a productive member of society, a man with a family, a home and a job, who has probably paid his fair share in US taxes being deported for reasons that, fundamentally, are not his fault.

Then there's this fucking guy, right here. "LA Werewolf" who I guess is some kind of internet Nazi or Youtube something-or-other who has to quit the far-right internet sausage fest because his parents are forcing him to get a job. I think it's kind of hilarious that he refers to this as "resigning" to "civilian life." As if the closest this guy ever got to either the military or a professional job wasn't renting "American Sniper" from a shady video store late at night one time when he got bored with beating off while watching Anime and they were out of pornos.

I suspect working at the local Jack-In-The-Box is probably going to be an educational experience for this dude, especially when he realizes that both the staff and the customer bases of such places are largely people of color, and an awful lot of the asshole managers are the white ones.

I would, in fact, like to point out yet again that in my own life experience as a former conservative, having a job, paying your bills and being a productive member of society (regardless of color, creed or station in life) was fundamentally what the entire damned deal was based upon. Living in your parents basement, not paying your bills, and spending your time surfing the internet instead of being productive? That doesn't qualify, and if I'd have told any of the older people who educated me on this stuff that one could get paid for such a thing, the very least I could or would expect is to get laughed at.

I can imagine my Grandma pointing out "Well if he can get paid for it he can have his own place, can't he?" You know, logic.

But then, it occurs to me that the absolute last thing modern conservatism is about is being a productive citizen. The rich assholes at the top basically want to colonize the rest of us and sit back and collect the checks, and this has spread downward to the masses of idiots that follow the political party they control. There's another word for that: Parasite.

Then of course, there's this ridiculous shit. You remember what I wrote about Steve King last year, right? The notoriously racist Iowa Republican Tweeted this earlier today, and has put up several similar posts since: 

Don't ask what I think about that. You don't want to know and I'd rather that this essay didn't devolve into an unending stream of profanity. This son of a bitch, who has openly said that more Americans should read the racist French novel "Camp of the Saints" is posting MLK pictures and civil-rights quotes? What's next? Pol Pot and Josef Stalin take turns reading from the Bible? I mean, come on, fucking seriously? You know what? I'm actually not sure what this does more, generally offend me or simply insult my intelligence. I know these people like their whitewashed, inoffensive mythology about the Civil Rights movement, but damn. The simple fact is that 50 years ago, Steve King would have sided with the Southern racists and there's no doubt in my mind about that subject. Why? Because that's how the motherfucker acts today, in this day and age, publicly. After all, this is the guy who publicly said that Mexican immigrants had "Calves the size of Cantaloupes" from smuggling drugs across the deserts of the US Southwest.

Yeah, fuck that guy, I don't give a damn what he has to say about anything.

If I said something like that, I would expect nothing more and nothing less than an ass whuppin.' 

Go ahead and try to tell me that not only all this Trump bullshit, but most of the current Republican party and the far-right more generally isn't all about the damned racism. Go ahead, I'll wait.

There's only one way to fix this, and that is that white America needs to get its head out of its ass. This racist, path-of-least-resistance, no-one-takes-responsibility bullshit is going to do nothing more than enable the worst elements of our society...and yes I'm talking to you, Republicans who are choosing to retire rather than stand up. We have a real problem, and that is that a small, but still statistically significant portion of American idiots get their dicks hard at the thought of ranks of goose-stepping soldiers...and if you think those people won't eventually come for the other conservative white folks, you have another thing coming.

It's like, the only future some people can imagine is destruction.

Funny, but it's often people of color who are the first to articulate a different vision of the future that works better for everybody.

Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look? Ooh
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the Book.

~Bob Marley, Redemption Song.