Triangle Trade

I had a conversation with a co-worker the other night, while I was at work.

He's a black dude, about my age, maybe a little older. We mostly talk about basketball since that was something we both played, or cars, since he works on them as a hobby. The other day I asked him what he thought of our current political mess, and how it seems like Republicans have lost the plot on damned near everything they've ever claimed to stand for and set on fire every value they've ever had for an unholy trinity of racism, tax cuts, and Donald Trump.

I've been saying this for awhile, obviously.

His response? "Slavery. That's what they want, that's the only value they care about. They want to go back to the slavery days."

Now, my dude is a custodian, not a political scientist. He doesn't write position papers, he mops the floor for a living. But he is, of course, African American. So he is of course conscious of and more sensitive to certain things.

I suppose, if my ancestors had come over here with three or four people stuffed into a space that's smaller than one of my ferret cages, I'd be on alert at the slightest hint of racist bullshit too.

It seems like a bad idea for Republicans and these various fascists to arouse similar feelings among women in a general sense, or to antagonize other groups of people of color, but that appears to be what they're doing. After all, it wasn't so long ago that Republicans themselves were opining that they weren't creating angry old white guys fast enough.

Often, in the last 25 years or so, Republicans have relied on a trifecta of homophobia, racism, and misogyny to accomplish their political goals.

It's like the old Triangle Trade, from the slavery days, as my co-worker put it. The Triangle Trade, for those who don't know, was taking people from Africa to be slaves in the Americas, then cotton, sugar and tobacco from the Americas to Europe...and finished goods, guns, and rum to Africa to buy more slaves.

You can plug all manner of things into this, in threes, using Republicans own words...and it still works.

Of course, at the level of my core sample, it's starting to break down. Homophobia is getting to be less of a thing, hell (not that it's much of an improvement) there are gay alt-right Nazis now. Most younger people are less racist, leaving said Nazis marching in ever-smaller groups and often fighting among themselves, and people who are old enough to remember the days of Jim Crow are mostly old, retired and dying off. Misogyny of course, seems to be getting worse...but I wonder if it's just that it's maybe more exposed, now.

As people keep pointing out...and as Trump aide Jason Miller's spiking of a stripper's smoothie with an abortion pill shows...it's not actually abortion that these fucking people don't like, it's women having control over their own bodies that's the real problem as far as most right-wingers are concerned.

I followed the Brett Kavanaugh hearing yesterday, and on social media last night...and honestly, to me it looks like this might be the battle that costs them the war. A Supreme Court justice nominee, ranting like a drunk on the Senate floor?

Multiple rape or attempted rape allegations, as well as at least one of these having happened in a state that has no statute of limitations on that crime? The dude's own friends coming out and saying he was an aggressive drunk? 

To me, it kind of looks like even if Republicans win this one, they lose. It seems like a bad idea to do something that shines a light on how right-wingers get made, from prep-school to college level. It seems like an even worse idea to put somebody up who seems to think it's an entitlement, his due somehow, to sexually assault women, or to be a Supreme Court Justice.

It's a little bit over a month to election day, and honestly all this seems a high cost to pay for one more Republican ideologue on the Supreme Court, when Roberts is still present as a swing vote...and this will likely both leave a cloud hanging over the Court that will diminish it, as well as drive up Democratic voter turnout and with just over a month until the midterms elections, there's no time to forget.

In point of fact, there will likely be a dozen ridiculous outrages between now and then.

The whole thing seems like a bad idea, honestly, another poorly-thought-out Trump scam that's going to implode somehow, with unexpected consequences.

It seems like the new Republican trifecta literally has become Male Entitlement, Rape, and Resentment.

Women, or at least the ones who aren't programmed Republican Stepford-Bots, also seem none too amused by this garbage, and appear to be driving both increased voter registration and changes to the Democratic Party platform. 

Meanwhile, as Jim Wright put it, Republicans seem intent on fiddling while the world literally burns.

Remember that no social problem exists in America that some rich white jerk-off somewhere doesn't profit from. Perhaps the modern Triangle Trade could better be described as:

Economic, moral or social problem ---> Manipulate or prevent backlash to it ----> PROFIT!

Listen, these fucking people have basically turned into the kind of villains one sees in bad science fiction, cartoons, and maybe the kind of movies that used to be on CineMax after 1 A.M. that have horrible plot lines and worse script-writers but lots of action and some actress who lets her boobs hang out a lot.

If you aren't pissed off enough to vote against that shit, you're part of the problem.

If you need to be "inspired" to vote against drunks raging in the Senate because their Supreme Court nomination got questioned at the last minute, then fuck you.

If we, as a people, don't stand up and fucking well do something about these sick elitist rapist fucks...and mind you the means to do this are provided to us every two years by our own Constitution...then we goddamned well deserve what we get.

Increasingly, I have a feeling this will end in blood and fire. Certainly they will go for their guns if they are defeated politically, regardless of whether or not conservatives (not that they're conservative in any meaningful way anymore, but that's the word) did it to themselves by their own incompetence, regardless of whether they have the judges or not. As Trump himself often demonstrates, even total subservience often isn't good enough. 

It's human nature to resist, and not only that but one gets the vibe that even Republicans know their version of America sucks. But of course, they don't seem to know what else to do. As far as I'm concerned, the failure of imagination alone...not to mention the hell that they imagine as their ideal world...is unforgivable.

If they get voted out...as looks likely, but you still have to show up to make it so...that may only be the beginning of what decent people have to do to stand up for what's right.

But we still have to do it.

Vote. Be prepared to do whatever else has to be done. All the guns, rum and shiny glass beads in the world that you get for selling your fellow man out to the rich guys isn't gonna do you one damn bit of good if the land you live on gets burnt up by climate change, and what happens when they come after you?

You don't have to find out. You could vote against them on November 6th and make sure they start the next round worse off. Democrats won a hell of a lot of special elections in 2017. You can make a difference if you just show up.

It's easier on everybody if we deal with these fucking people by the ballot instead of the bullet this time.

So just fucking do it. 

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.

~Bob Marley, Redemption Song.

Rape-publicans

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. ~Maya Angelou.

I've been following the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation saga over the last week or so, and I'm not going to lie, I've been doing so with an increasing sense of revulsion.

Listen up. This isn't about law, this isn't about policy, hell it's only peripherally about abortion or civil rights...given that even a Kavanaugh confirmation will basically punt the Republican swing-vote on the court back to Roberts. After Anthony Kennedy's performance in recent years, and especially in the course of his retirement, I've grown more and more inclined to view him as just another shitty Republican.

No, this isn't about the law, or a more conservative approach to the law or somehow getting revenge for Watergate by nominating some asshole who thinks Nixon shouldn't have been run out of office. (That's basically most Republicans at this point, anyway.)

No. This is, as with so much about this bullshit ass garbage administration, about using-whatever-to stick up a giant middle finger at the world. Yeah, Republicans will say it's about abortion, and conservatism and law and policy, but what this is really about is throwing up a giant fuck you at the rest of us, even in the face of an angry reality.

They know they're massively unpopular, they know they're going down, if not in this cycle certainly in the next and they know that the last person who's actually going to help them with this mess is Donald Fucking Trump. They know the election is right around the fucking corner, and they've not only decided to broadcast their assholery, they're joyously shouting it in the streets.

The Trump era, if not Trump himself, finally liberates them from the laws of decent behavior political correctness having to act like a fucking human being.

What this is about, at heart, is shitty power games. This isn't about law books, this is about thinking with the dick.

I'm serious. These assholes already know they're unpopular as fuck, facing a motivated, hostile electorate that for once (if not actually Democrat-leaning) is certainly hostile to Republicans and Trump. Like any rapist, facing the possibility that their victim will go to the cops, they don't care. All that's on their mind is right now and the power they can exert in the moment.

I'm using that analogy for a fucking reason.

The basic Republican response to the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, with some honorable exceptions like David French or Rick Wilson, has so far been "What? You've never raped anybody?"

As if rape is some kind of thing that people routinely do to each other, or somehow not a thing at all.

As if women are not actually people, or something.

I'm sorry, but I started out as a conservative and I missed where in the manual it said that rape is acceptable so long as you're a Republican.

This basically takes the whole "could be found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy" thing to the next level on an updraft of pure Republican shitty behavior. Dead girl or live boy no longer matters, because the core Trump Supporters (and some, if not all, opportunistic Republicans) will at this point simply assume that the dead girl or live boy or both were Democratic operatives liberals nuts put there personally by Satan to something something Gazpacho mess with Donald Trump ooga booga.

Yes, our political discourse at least on the Republican side of things really is that fucking stupid. They know...they know...it will be the death of them in the end. They just don't care right now because it feels good and they're making money and they got their tax cut so fuck you, everybody else.

I'd like to say that I have more to add here, but the truth is that I don't.

This kind of stupid cannot be reasoned with.

This kind of stupid can only be outvoted and then told to go fuck itself in the ear once it's voted out.

It's not going to get any better, and they keep telling is that they're craven, and greedy, and stupid, and that they don't give a fuck about anybody who makes less than seven figures.

We can't appeal to their better nature, they simply don't have one.

We can only vote them out, and then keep voting to make sure they never get power back in the first place.

We can't say "What about the future?" Because, since these assholes know they don't have much of one, they think none of the rest of us do either.

The same applies to the soul. These rape-publicans simply don't have one left.

We have to vote them out, period.

So get on it.

Show up.

Make it happen.

If we want a better country we all have to be better citizens.

Crab Bucket

Crab mentality or crabs in a bucket (also barrel, basket or pot), is a way of thinking best described by the phrase "if I can't have it, neither can you." The metaphor refers to a pattern of behavior noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its effort will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise


So, I think over the last couple of days I've actually managed to discover that Republicans in general (mostly excepting #NeverTrump Republicans) and Trump Supporters in particular are actually dumber and more selfish than I thought.


Case in point, I guess Willie Nelson is supposedly losing fans over his decision to play at a Beto O'Rourke rally.


Full disclosure, I've been a Willie Nelson fan since cross-country trips in my grandparents motor home (or later, pickup truck and fifth-wheel camper) as a kid. My Grandpa Thompson especially would play the shit out of Willie's "On the road again." It had a way of livening things up while driving south through Indiana on the way to Florida, or across Nebraska on the way from California to Michigan. Just sayin.'


That set of grandparents was basically conservative union Democrats, in particular back in the 1980's when we went on a lot of those trips they would've been considered Reagan Democrats. When I registered to vote in 1991 as an 18-year-old young adult I decided after thinking about it, to register as a Republican, although I'd generally vote a split ticket for a lot of years.


We all knew Willie was a Democrat, as in the not-conservative kind and we didn't care.


See, according to what I was taught things like music are supposed to transcend temporal things like politics.


It's also worth noting that my Grandpa's branch of the family got help from Farm Aid back in the 1980's that kept my great-grandparents family farm in the family for a couple more years, Even though my Grandpa had left Minnesota farm life behind decades before when he went to college in 1941...and ultimately joined the Navy in 1943...to his generation, the last in which such an upbringing could be considered a default American start in life, such things were still important.


And Willie did his damnedest to raise money for Farm Aid.


I saw a post on Twitter in which a Trump Supporter called Willie Nelson "A bitter, angry old man like John McCain."


Now, weed or no weed, Willie always struck me as more mellow than bitter, and given that he was one of the guys who originated and popularized the term "Outlaw country" I rather doubt, as John Scalzi points out above, that Willie Nelson, being an 85 year old man with that kind of reputation, and being somebody who's gone to jail over his use of Marijuana and belief that it should be legalized, gives one trifling SHIT what some conservative moron on Twitter thinks about him.


These people are fans of Donald Trump, not Willie Nelson. Hell I doubt these fucking people ever bothered to care or pay attention to the things Willie stands for, and has stood for forever, openly, loudly, and without care or worry for the consequences.

Yesterday, Rick Scott publicly stood by the various estimates that place the death toll from last year's hurricanes on Puerto Rico at almost 3,000 people. Republican voters...sounding for once almost like Unicorn-hunting far-Left Bernie nuts...said they wouldn't vote for him as a result, and called him "Just another liberal."


Rick Scott is a Republican, and as shady and shitty as the rest of the lot and he's never made any bones about it.


But no, he disagreed with Cheeto Jesus ONE time and all the sudden he's "Just another liberal?"


Help me here.


It seems like conservatism now has been redefined around two things: Support of Donald Trump at all times and in all cases, and more generally a sort of transactional support for Republicans.


Not a word about free markets, global engagement, human dignity, individual liberty, muscular foreign policy or even (and oddly enough) the traditional American exceptionalism. How exactly are these fucking people blood-and-soil American nationalists without believing in American exceptionalism?


Well, I guess you could argue that they make pretty damned good Russian nationalists, but I digress.


As I've said, I know from personal experience you can be a conservative without being a Republican. Hell there used to be liberal Republicans too. Even today, a lot of the younger Democratic-voting people that I know consider me a conservative, though I've voted with them around 90% of the time for a decade now.


At this point, I'm having trouble even figuring out what conservatism stands for, unless it's misogyny and racism specifically, or maybe corporate greed. Even the latter has...almost...fallen by the wayside and even Trump Supporters don't seem to care about Trump's shitty tax cut.


But they sure care about hating on people of color, and talking real stupid about women, don't they?


This is what happens when you divorce politics and religion from compassion, humanity and morality.


Give these people (most of whom identify as Christian) the option...or even a simple lack of leadership that says not to do it...and the first thing they will do with the Cross of Christ is take it and set it on fire.


If you don't think these damn morons have it on their minds to burn people, you have another thing coming. Fair warning: They'll probably start with their fellow conservatives.


Just remember, Republicans: In the Crab-bucket moral universe of Donald Trump, no one gets out alive. Remember that these are the people who think everybody else must secretly be as shitty as they are...because they lack the imagination to understand that anybody else might think differently.


All the little crabs couldn't get along or work together, so they all pulled each other down and ended up as crab cakes. If you don't believe me, go look for yourself. Go on Twitter and check out all the Republican butt-hurt, even (especially) from people like David French (and especially over the adverse reactions to Brett Kavanaugh by everybody who isn't a Republican) who normally knows better.


Go check it out, and vote, vote these fuckers out. We need to stop rewarding partisan assholery and stupidity.


Just empty the damn crab bucket, make these fuckers at least catch new crabs.

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
T'was blind but now I see

T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace, my fears relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come.
T'was grace that brought us safe thus far
And grace will lead us home,~Traditional Christian Hymn, by John Newton

I watched John McCain's D.C. memorial service yesterday morning.

To be quite honest, I found the entire thing to be very emotionally draining. I was moved to tears more than one time, and I didn't vote for the guy. I was deeply impressed by Meghan McCain, powering through her pain for what had to have been an agonizing moment on the world stage, to deliver a stinging rebuke of Trump and Trumpism, which she did, to thunderous applause.

We gather to mourn the passing of American greatness, the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice, those that live lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served. He was a great fire who burned bright. In the past few days, my family and I have heard from so many of those Americans who stood in the warmth and light of his fire and found it illuminated what's best about them. We are grateful to them because they're grateful to him. A few have resented that fire for the light it cast upon them for the truth it revealed about their character, but my father never cared what they thought and even that small number still have the opportunity as long as they draw breath to live up to the example of John McCain.

The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.

It was more than that, though. George W. Bush spoke eloquently, and reminded me all too much of what conservatism once was, and how much it has lost. Hell, even Henry Kissenger came off more as an amusing old man than as some kind of foreign policy titan, kind of like a Vietnam-era version of the old guy from "Up."

I find myself missing these old Republicans. All of them, even the ones I hated, or voted against.

Barack Obama of course, was Barack Obama and god damn but I miss that guy.

We need these people, all of them, even if we don't always or even really like them...because we need examples of class and decency and grace and people with the capability to say things that can uplift us all, because despite...or perhaps even because of...our very often anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical nature as a people, it's better if the best of us, or at least people who can speak properly, who do not harbor endless insecure fears and who understand the world rise to the top. I don't give a damn if what I'm about to say sounds elitist or snobbish, but there are a lot of people out there...grown ass adults...who in their minds are like little children. They will follow the examples that they see. Fundamentally, these people often don't have much of an internal moral code or sense of right and wrong...they will do what they are permitted to do.

I started out as a conservative, and I quite honestly think that to a degree our society has become too permissive. Now I'm not talking about feminism, LGBT rights, or sexual liberation, or people of color or any of the traditional things conservatives bitch about.

I'm talking about the fact that any old stupid idea people get in their heads is at least given the benefit of the doubt, even if it's a very old idea like racism, that's never benefited anybody but rich people. It's that "Free exchange of ideas" that often makes social media such an abusive shit-hole for so many people. It's the kind of bullshit that leads somebody like Jack Dorsey to refuse to kick Alex Jones off his platform, or to drag his feet in eliminating outright Nazis from the discourse.

It's the fact that personal freedom, at least in a limited sense, has been being used as a club by the Right to beat on the collective freedoms of our society. The right wing basically says [as long as you meet certain implicit conditions i.e. you're a conservative white man] you can do whatever you want. It's kind of like how "State's Rights" is really code for "Hate" and "Laws against brown people." These idiots fundamentally can't concieve of the idea that government can or should be a force for good in the lives of people who make less than seven figures. Therefore, when they talk about their "rights" what they're really talking about is the unwritten conservative-American "right" to be an asshole.

Do you see yet, why these fucking people love Trump so much?

This was a reply to one of my comments on a post by Joe Walsh, as in former Tea Party Congressman Joe Walsh, who was very much the face of the movement for a time and who I really couldn't stand for like, years, but in the era of Trump he's...reasonable and sane, and I can respect him even if he still says something that's nuts now and again. I still often disagree with him, but I can see where he's coming from. Again, this guy was the face of These Fucking People for a few years, and now he damned well makes sense and has firm moral boundaries that have been exceeded by Trump. And this is the kind of stuff people post on his timeline because of it. If there is one thing that I think describes Trumpism over and above everything else, it's the profound lack of gratitude to anyone who's gone before...especially anyone with morals or some line that they were unable to cross somewhere along the way. People like me, for example.

Perhaps that's why I've reached the point where I can tolerate Joe. I remember when I was where he is now, I was that guy roughly about 2007 or so, and well into 2008 before the lines firmed up and I realized that I wasn't...that I couldn't be...on the side I'd spent all of my political life before that moment on. Fundamentally, people like Joe Walsh...or Bill Kristol, or Rick Wilson or even yes, John McCain...are and were fighting to try to save conservatism.

The problem with that, is you gotta want to be saved, and I no longer think these people do.

For one thing, if you've read the Bible, Jesus did not have a funeral, simple or otherwise.

An awful lot of what Christianity has turned into in the last 20 years has been simply a nihilistic veneration of the idea of the end of the world.

I think they want that apocalyptic destruction of American conservatism...of their own side, if not of America or the Earth itself. Why? Because they convinced themselves years ago that it was going to happen.

They've forgotten why. Old men like Chuck Woolery, like Donald Trump, like that old guy at work who talks about how great life was in 1973...they know they're old and they know they're going to die and they can't understand the world as it is...having made no real effort to understand it as it was either. So if they're going to die, why not everybody else, too? I mean, obviously not everybody else is 60+ years old...but when people look at life only through their own eyes and never try to understand anybody else or expand their own perception that's what we have to deal with.

John McCain never mattered to these fucking people. Hell, once he's out of power or has been overcome by dementia or died of old age, Donald Trump won't matter to most of them either, because all the majority of these fucking people care about is right now, and what makes them feel good about themselves, right now.

They don't like Trump for Trump, they like Trump because he's given them permission to act on their shitty impulses. They think...hope, perhaps...that because we have a president who was the public face of self-promoting rich assholes for 40 years...that maybe they'll get rich. If they don't, well then they'll be mad about that too.

They like Trump because people who know how things work worry about this guy causing the end of America, if not the end of the Earth itself.

This is why we need people with some form of higher values, with some sense of class, to be the public face of our country. Sure, the drunk racist uncle types will bitch about that, but they bitch about everything else too...and since roughly 70% of Americans don't like their overstuffed gilded orange god, well they don't like 70% of their fellow Americans.

That's always who these fucking people have really had a problem with, Americans who weren't like themselves...and the things they really, deep down have shown that they believed in are often the very opposite of what many of their own leaders stood for.

We need higher values because the alternative is apparently robocalls with jungle noises making fun of Black candidates.

I think, as much as John McCain himself often failed to live up to the ideals enunciated by those who eulogized him, in this message he left us, in these last words of this American hero, in the class, dignity, grace and merciless subtle condemnation of those currently in power that he obviously had a hand in assiduously planning...I think we have the key for how to deal with this crap.

At the end of the day, I think it mostly comes down to two words. Two words...that people like Donald Trump will never understand.

Be. Real.

Be real, and vote for something better, because this ain't working.