The Three Christs of Washington D.C.

A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. ~Winston Churchill

Let me tell you a story, once upon a time back in the oh-so-righteous early 1960's, there were three guys, all Paranoid Schizophrenics confined to the same mental institution, who each believed they were Jesus Christ. This situation became well enough known that a psychologist came to that institution and put all three men, who had previously not interacted, into the same support group. I suppose the objective was to see if being confronted with others who believed the same would cause each man to change their beliefs, or improve their condition. They did not, and in fact each doubled down and their delusions became more lurid and sexualized. The study "The Three Christs Of Yipsilanti" eventually became a book, and the story is still analyzed and talked about in psychology classes today. There's no happy ending, all three of these guys lived out the remainder of their lives in the mental hospital and would likewise die there, and be buried in some potter's field owned by the State.

Why do I bring this up?

Oh, no particular reason. Just that after the anti-choice shit-show of the last week or so, now Trump is saying the US will veto a United Nations resolution aimed at stopping the use of rape as a weapon of war because the resolution contains language about abortion and access to reproductive health care.

As if such a resolution could be passed, or would even make any sense, without such? Rape when used as a weapon in conflict is typically an instrument of genocide, of population disruption. It's specifically aimed at creating a class of women no one wants to marry, and a class of children who will always be viewed as out-caste by the society that has been so violated. Without confidential access to abortion and women's health care, those aims will tend to succeed, UN Resolution or no UN Resolution. In other words, this is nothing but more Cruelty Theater, this time aimed at pleasing the anti-abortion nuts. Come on, it's not like a child begotten of rape in some Third World ethnic conflict has any chance of growing up loved and safe and well-cared-for...unless they are lucky enough to be put up for adoption. This is American religious nuts, yet again, proving their "purity" by inflicting pain on people they will never meet or ever give a shit about.

And this is supposed to be "Christian?"

As I've said before The. Cruelty. Is. The. Point. These fucking people get off on this shit.

It's not like America doesn't already have a serious history of exporting its cruelty elsewhere or anything, right?

Trump is reportedly planning on pardoning a war criminal who is on trial for multiple murders, including the killing of a prisoner in direct violation of the Geneva Convention, the laws of war, and US military regulations, a man whose own teammates turned him in, and who in turn threatened to kill his own comrades in arms for not enabling his crimes, and that is indeed what they were. Had I done what this man did, I'd expect to spend the rest of my life in the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, and I'd deserve it.

And again, the question is "Why are they doing this?" Because it was never about conservative views, it was never about Christ, it was never about anything that they said it was about and the second they didn't have to keep up their holy talk, they left all that crap to burn on the side of the road like they'd never ever need it again, and these fucking people are positively enraged that there is any resistance at all to what they want to do, either here or abroad. They're enraged that they lost the House last November...and they're pissed off at most of the rest of the world now, including most of their fellow Americans, because the rest of us have not joined them in ecstatic worship of their new god.

Read the article, the reporter to whom Rick Wiles is replying writes for Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, kind of a center-right equivalent to the New York Times or the Washington Post. This entire outburst was because this Jewish reporter criticized the Alabama abortion law (Israel, mind you, is a very pro-choice country that puts a hell of a lot of the money they save on their military--because of US M.I.C. funding--right into their national health care system.) Yep, one of God's chosen people, from God's chosen country, called bullshit on their bullshit. So what was the response? Of course, it was an anti-Semitic screed blaming Jews for abortion. Trust me, if God told them He wasn't down with their agenda...they'd turn on Him, too. Because these people's real "god" is their political agenda, and everything else is just to try to bullshit the feeble-minded into following along or to provide rationalizations to those who actually believe this shit.

And people don't believe me when I tell them that these motherfuckers will turn against Israel and want to attack that country, and someday consider it an enemy as much as they consider Iran one now. Hell, the Israelis don't even have to do anything for that to happen, all that has to happen is for Jesus to not show up...or to show up and not do exactly what they want.

Because that's what this is about, fanatics, small petty men who have made deities of themselves in their own minds, who regard their own shitty beliefs as Holy Writ.

And because they can't persuade rational (or even somewhat irrational) people of good conscience to go along...they rile up a mob of the hateful and the prejudiced and the stupid and the venal, and take money from the endlessly greedy and sociopathic to promote this shit, while promising them endless riches in return, all for an agenda that very few people would agree with on its merits. Go along, IT'LL BE GREAT! They say, like some young shitposting idiot trying to get people to post moronic memes...only this crap has painful, real-life consequences for the vast majority of people, and only those with enough power or status that they're not actually affected by much of anything get to benefit from any of it in the slightest. These people are literally a mob of drooling morons, and it's a failure of education systems, morality and for that matter parenting on a massive scale that things have even gotten this way.

But to do something about that...and despite the fact that a majority of these people are probably unreachable it has to be done, or this will keep happening...the rest of us have to win, period.

I spent a good chunk of my morning arguing with a Bernie Bro on Facebook over the fact that I said Democrats had to win before we could start talking policies or expect any such to be enacted. His issue with Joe Biden was that Biden has not said much about policy, which isn't true, though I'm not following the Democratic race that closely yet this early in the cycle...and whoever wins that aspect has my support, even if it's Bernie...the self-defeating fanaticism on the Democratic side of the fence has to stop...it only enables the fanaticism on the other side. I don't know how these people can't see that. Democrats need to stop chasing Unicorns. The Republicans have already found theirs, and they'll burn everything to the ground, even their own lives, even their own families, Republicanism itself, to keep that feeling.

To stop it, we have to...not be fanatics.
...But then, I distrust fanatics of all types, and I always have.

And let me tell you why I see that distrust validated every damn day.

America's social compact is starting to break down. Or perhaps, it's more accurate to say that the breaking-down which was begun deliberately by Republicans 50 years ago and ramped up by Newt Gingrich 25 years ago has become visible, and obvious to the point that one doesn't have to be looking for it to see it. Yeah, right now it's Right vs. Left, and to a lesser extent urban vs. rural, or maybe to a greater extent non-racist vs. racist. How long before that translates into geographic divides on a more major scale as well? What happens if the Midwest and South turn into dueling factions of Center-Right/Center Left vs. Nationalists and Racists? And how long before East Coast and West Coast develop dueling factions of Progressive thought, besides? (And what happens when one faction decides to get sporty and decides it wants something that another has? Hmm?)

What happens, when things don't go his way and Trump gets impeached or loses in 2020? This is a thing even many conservatives that I know consider quite likely, especially seeing as many have said they won't vote for him again.

See, I think on some level Trump knows he doesn't have the level of public support he needs to be a dictator.

I think deep down most Republicans know that their shitty agenda is shitty and unpopular. So, what you do in that sort of a case is pull back, until you have a group, or an area, that's relatively unified and on your side and then you build your power base back up from there...because there certainly are places where these shitty beliefs are popular. Alabama, most of Georgia outside of major cities and the coast, some chunks of the Florida panhandle...vast areas of the rural South in general...

Let me put it another way. What do you think is more important to the anti-Choice fanatics? Preserving this country as a whole...or protecting their anti-choice bullshit? Do they protect America or do they protect "Conservatism?" Spoiler: A lot of these fucking people have already decided that they've lost and they just want to make the rest of us pay.

And while I'm at it, when did Republicans decide that RAPE was some kind of a good thing, let alone the atrocity that is the idea of forcing a rape victim to have her rapist's baby.

That is the wages of fanaticism.

Look, I don't have a solution here, I don't have any ideas, but if we as a people don't find a solution and find one that doesn't result in people losing their basic rights or control over their own bodies, I can tell you exactly how this is going to end...and I can already tell you from long experience that that's exactly what the other side wants.

And the only way to prevent that is Impeachment, investigation, revealing all the facts and letting that shit air out in broad daylight for all to see. There will still be some who refuse, but we have to at least try to reach everybody that can be reached...and defeating this crap has to be Bipartisan, at least on the level of getting the #NeverTrump Republicans.

The "Nationalists" and the Nazis are unreachable, except to punch them.

Conservatives...what actual conservatives are left, anyway, have to have something they can hang on to, and people like Bill Kristol and Justin Amash and Tea Party Joe Walsh and Rick Wilson give them something to hang on to, some way to feel that they're represented, like it or not that's life.

Because if they aren't...if no one is prevented by facts or by the truth outing from doing what they naturally want to do anyway...then no matter what happens it's already too late.
If that's what happens and the Democrats win by the ballot in 2020 the Republicans will try to undo it by the bullet (and depending on how bad things get if Trump wins, the same is just as possible by the Democrats.)

Justin Amash is giving us an out, here.

If, as my Bernie-bro former Facebook-friend suggested, the Democrats just keep ramping up the base plays, and yes, most of the Republicans will do the same, no matter what happens. If no one tries to talk to anybody on the other side or get people to come together in a fair way to negotiate...I'm not saying it will work, but we have to try. If not, I think we might as well just expect that every night we're going to go to bed every night seeing the two sides of our political divide shelling each other across a moonscape of craters and free fire zones and rubble littered with un-exploded ordinance that used to be South Florida or Northern Iowa or Western Maryland. If it comes to that CNN and FOX News respectively tallying the body counts as if war is some awful video game. I think we have to face the fact that the next major conflict could be here...and that some Americans would gleefully commit atrocities against other ones.

Hell, some already do. Just ask any Black person about the cops these days, or any school kid about guns.

And the only way to stop it, is to stop glorifying being a fanatic for its own sake. We have to stop glorifying conflict, killing, and war. We have to reign in our national obsession with guns. We have to try to get along without one side having to bend over or knuckle under for the other one to do it. We have to stop being fanatics.

That's hard...but we're Americans and we used to do hard stuff just to see if we could do it.

What the hell happened? When did we, as a nation, become those three schizophrenic men?

And how do we save ourselves?