And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth.
And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.
~Revelation 17:1-6
Last night at work, I saw that Ronna Romney-McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, has basically been reduced to threatening people on Twitter. So hey, uh, Ronna? I can call you Ronna, right? How's that whole #MAGA thing working out? I'm guessing not well, if you're having to try to threaten people (and sucking at it that badly) and assuming you know that most of the people who'll read it are probably Republicans. I think that says a lot of things about your party that you might just not want to admit in public right now, what with an election coming up and all. But whatever. I do have to admit I've been pretty impressed with the fact that a lot of the conservatives I follow on Twitter, people like Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Sarah Rumpf and Steve Schmidt, have dog-piled on you in much more epic fashion than I ever could.
Let's just get one thing outta the way right now; You're pathetic.
I've said it before and I'll say it again as many times as I need to. Political control does not equal leadership, Trump has no leadership skills, I'm guessing you don't either, and ya'll are surprised things are going the way they are? Fuck you.
Then, a few minutes after I saw your Tweet, I saw this:
Here we have US President Donald J. Trump, Mr. #MAGA himself, America First-ranter extraordinaire, God-Emperor, the Hero of Hill 69 who did not get the clap, Holder of Hitler's hat while he takes a leak, Ravisher of Porn Stars, Swamp-Drainius Maximus, The Colossus of Mar-A-Lago and Patient Zero for Bangkok Fire-Dick, saluting a North Korean Army General?!?!
Have you people lost your God-Damned minds?
Leaving aside that the President is a civilian and should not be saluting any military member, foreign or domestic, I'm curious, why in the hell does the President, the ultimate representative of America, keep feeling compelled to suck up to dictators like he's some kind of two-bit toady to the playground bully of Andrew Jackson Elementary School?
Go ahead and think about your answer. Take all the time you need, I'll wait.
So then, I got to thinking. How in the hell did this happen?
Well, on the one hand if you go far enough back there's McCarthyism, Racism, the Red Scare, the Southern Strategy, and all that, like it or not that's baked into the DNA of certain elements of the Right and there's nothing ya'll can really do about it except educate yourself and try to fight against those tendencies and your own biases just like the rest of us.
But, more medium-term and falling within my own adult lifespan, I think there's both more and less to it than that.
There are of course, conspiracy theories, those modern mystery cults which claim all sorts of secret knowledge for the greater glory of their believers, and of course Alex Jones. For those who don't know, Greek/Roman mythology (and most of the rest of the ancient world) postulated a cosmological world-view in which only the truly wicked went to hell, but also only the truly virtuous went to heaven. Most people, when they died, were understood to go to the Underworld, which while not terrible, was not greatly desirable either.
Needless to say, the Roman Empire especially in the First Century was rife with mystery-cults, each claiming to know this formula or that secret that would enable the holders of the super-secret knowledge to transcend the Underworld and spend eternity getting turned into a goat and repeatedly corn-holed by Zeus or caught up in the manipulations of Hera or most definitely not getting Athenian Fire-Dick from Aphrodite, or what the fuck ever. I don't know. The point is, these cults were a theological shortcut for those who didn't want to do the work of living a virtuous life Instead they'd feel all important with their rituals and their secret decoder rings and their super-secret knowledge...what happened after death, who knows. I suspect the various and assorted deities of their time and place (which varied considerably throughout the Empire) probably were not stupid enough to fall for that crap.
It's much the same with conspiracy theories. For the record, it's a rare Evangelical or Fundamentalist these days who doesn't buy into conspiracy garbage on some level.
Then of course, there's the reality TV shows, I blame stuff like Jackass and Survivor for normalizing dumb shit and selfishness, and it just went downhill from there. (Throw in years of talk of Obama being the Antichrist and now you've got Republicans who seem to think Trump is The Savior. I don't think this is gonna work out the way they think it will.
I was a conservative (non-Fundamentalist) Christian at the time and I remember seeing my first episode of Survivor and thinking, my God, what in the hell kind of ridiculous nastiness is this?
My Pentecostal ex-wife however, was hooked. Being the Man, I simply forbade anyone from watching that kind of ungodly ridiculous shit in my house...and so far as I can tell, technically it stuck.
How do I know this? My wife would go over to her sister's house on Tuesday nights and watch Survivor. She always denied it, but I knew.
A year or so after we split up my ex's sister confirmed to me that I was, in point of fact, right.
A lot of things about my ex-wife got worse because of that show.
Of course, Donald Trump came out of the reality show genre with a dumb-ass side-trip into professional wrestling.
...And never forget that it's generally a good idea to look at anything Trump does in terms of professional wrestling. None of it is real, it's all crap, but idiots think it's entertaining.
The fact that the voters forgot this pisses me off. The fact that leadership and senior figures like Ronna McDaniel forgot it is inexcusable.
When the shit hits the fan, Republicans are going to pay the consequences.
Never forget what the Whore of Babylon actually represents, nor what happens to her in the end.
The "Whore" was always, at least when I followed and studied this stuff, taken to mean Rome.
America is the Rome of our current age.
I've been saying this for 15 years.
Something is coming, and soon. Democrats are primed for a Blue Wave, Republicans are ranting about civil war and unspecified retribution. Historically, the more fact-based and persistent side will win, because war and other conflicts are generally all about the willpower.
Ronna, I hate to break it to you, but you're going to lose. To a great extent you've lost already.
Conservatives can't even control themselves or keep their own followers in line without threats. How do they expect to run the country?
Justice or Karma or whatever you want to call it is in the process of swinging back around.
Don't say you weren't warned.
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