For Want Of A Nail (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Three.)

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America,"white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. 

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.

When I lived in the Dorms at North Central Michigan College, it was the first time I'd ever been in the kind of environment, technology-wise, that most of us take for granted, today, just plug the serial cable into the blue slot on the wall and there you have it. I had a number of friends who were part of the small group of Muslim international students at the school, which was a necessary thing for me, a struggling religious man in a place that had relatively few other people who I could talk to about that kind of stuff. I was on a few online forums, but I found it too hard to sit through things like church services. Most of the few Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christian dorm students knew both me and my ex (She'd done a semester to finish up her degree) and had taken her side. All in all, I'd gained a fairly diverse group of friends, many of whom I'd probably not have been that close to a year or two before, and had a number of one-night stands and short-term relationships with girls that lived in the dorm while I was at it. Those girls included an Atheist (my friend Persephone) and a Witch (Danny, who had boy-short hair to go with a boy's name) and that second one pissed my ex off something fierce. Hell, the Residence hall director, Greg, was gay. Bruce, my boss in the cafeteria was part Native American and an active member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands, the local Native American tribe.

In 2001, 2002 and 2003, it felt like a time of massive change. 9/11 had just happened, the war in Afghanistan was ongoing, opposition to the possibility of war in Iraq had spawned an actual peace movement. I was a part of that not despite, but actually because of my background. There was a lot of stuff happening, and to be honest, a lot of stuff to worry about. But the difference, I think, between now and then is that I do not remember fear and hate being encouraged so much in society. In the months after 9/11 and over most of the decade following, I saw far more of an effort by Americans to understand things like Islam, and the cultures and societies we were...like it or not, right or wrong, engaging as things progressed. Books like The Kite Runner were best-sellers. My friends from other countries got asked questions about what things were like over there, etc. There wasn't a day went by that one of the Muslims I knew didn't get asked some sort of question...in good faith...about their religion. This didn't come from just the liberal students either, but from the more conservative ones also. Americans in general, and American conservatives in particular, had yet to sink into the kind of surly intellectual incurious funk that defines so many of us today, and yet to perfect the art of shitting their pants on command from Fox News.

And not only had the far-right nuts of the previous decade suddenly been nowhere to be found when a real crisis happened, but after a couple weeks the religious craziness after 9/11 had faded into the background as well, aside from my ex-wife, who I'd mostly just ignore. Hell, open racism was a rare enough thing that it tended to be a pretty big deal when it happened.

But...

There were a couple of local incidents in the late summer and fall of 2001, homophobia-based incidents, one in my town, the other in Traverse City. Neither one made much more than the local papers, both of the perpetrators were arrested, one charged with simple misdemeanor assault, the other...a more serious case, with a felony. The second case sparked a small protest, which made the local news and evidently percolated up to the national level somewhere, because Fred Phelps, the infamous pastor of Westboro Baptist Church, found out about it, and announced his intent to stage a protest. This predictably caused a substantial boost in support for the local LGBT community in northwest Michigan. Full disclosure, I'd paid the $2.00 for one of the Rainbow Flag "We Are Traverse City" stickers myself, and put it on my car. By the time Fred Phelps and a small group showed up one cold, gray day in the early spring of 2002 to protest the local gay bar in Traverse City, the popular outrage had been tempered a bit and the Westboro Baptist idiots were studiously ignored by, well, everybody. That said, their protest made the national news, which led to a recap of events, which held national attention for all of five seconds.

There's two important things I should note here. One, Not too long before this my Mom came out to me as bisexual. Second, remember how I said I was able to be online all the time?

I was part of a number of online forums, the social media of the day, including a few Christian forums...more than one of which catered specifically to Evangelicals. You wouldn't think so, but looking back that was a pretty dark and wild corner of the internet. I had nothing much to hide, had private messages forwarded to my E-mail, etc.

My profile pic on a number of these forums was a picture of me, the ex-girlfriend and her girlfriend standing by the back of my parked car with the Mackinaw Bridge and the Straits of Mackinac in the background. Like an idiot, I just thought it was a good picture. My Mom had taken it with my new digital camera when we all decided we were gonna hang out in Mackinaw City one day.

Well, one day on this site "ChristianBBS" this one Calvinist dude starts popping off with a profanity-laced rant about literally burning "homosexuals" at the stake and threatening anybody who tried to stop him.

Also note that this guy was apparently a meat-space neighbor to one of the staff members. They both lived in Sacramento, California. Given the context of this guy, that seems kind of problematic.

ChristianBBS had both its conservative and liberal groups, its various non-Christians, and its Fundamentalists. It was, basically, a community like any other at the start. The website sold some stuff, and had some kind of stream of ad revenue or something as well, basically just enough to pay a part-time staff minimum wage and maintain the site itself. Mostly they were tech people working second jobs, or people who were married or retired. I should also note this site had a below-board war going on between two camps of its staff. One side strictly enforced the Terms of Service which were quite typical in forbidding advocating for violence and in typical Christian form, banning profanity and trying to maintain a general ethic of tolerance. The other side was a clique of mostly-Southern, very political, conservative Fundamentalists that enforced the ToS very selectively...if at all...and mostly just banned anybody who criticized them if they could. The two sides would tend to counteract each other if you hung on long enough.

The Calvinist dude, AKA "Sola Gratia" was beloved by the conservative Fundamentalist camp. His neighbor was one of the people just trying to do a relatively low-wage part-time tech job while maintaining some degree of sanity. Anyway, I noted the Calvinist dude's thread one evening and looked at it. It was titled, "I DEFY YOU..." [to prove him theologically wrong on his premise.]

To their credit, a very solid majority of people reacted to this whole thing with horror. To their credit, almost nobody tried to engage this asshole on his own terms, most people simply pointed out that it was wrong to kill people, they'd get dog-piled by the Fundamentalists, then the other camp would fight back. I got into it on the second day, mostly trying to talk some sense into the "These Fucking People" camp while trying to support moderation and ya know, following the rules while pointing out that I had multiple LGBT people in my family and couldn't ethically support this crap. It devolved into a decidedly Jesus-themed flame war between the homophobic assholes and everybody else. The thread was reported hundreds, if not thousands of times. It was locked, then unlocked, then locked again, then finally "Conditionally." reopened.

This went on for a week or so, and over that time, the staff...or at least those who had any pretense of doing their actual jobs...just sort of gave up and tried to do their jobs as best they could everywhere else. I seriously do not know what, if anything, this Sola Gratia dude did for a living or with his time but he basically kept this stream of homophobic vitriol up for this whole time without stopping. People did their level best, argued passionately against this shit, or simply declared opposition, or staked out whatever ideological or theological positions, a few even came out. For all the good it did. The Fundamentalists remained in resolute lockstep behind this asshole, and more of them joined. Lots of other people started quitting. So the tide started to turn the other way. A couple of staff members...including that guy's neighbor...also quit. A lot of people defected to other message boards. It turned out that not just that particular situation, but the dynamics of that website had caused pain to a lot of people.

As for those of us who tried to hold on...

Well, somebody took my profile pic, blew it up, saw that sticker and then accused me directly of supporting gay rights in the thread. Yep, guilty as charged, I said. That got me dog-piled, not just on that post but elsewhere on the site as well. When I stopped responding after a week of watching this shit sandwich (mostly because, ya know, life) I started getting hate mail. My inbox started dripping glowing green acidic drool and finally I just went and changed my message preferences, and changed my profile pic to the 410th Bomb Wing shoulder patch, too.

I started posting mostly on the other message boards and more or less ignoring that one, except that references to that shit-show thread were popping up on other boards as well. Several other forum refugees messaged me on other sites, including that dude's neighbor who wanted to apologize to me. She'd had a shot at a much better-paying regular job and took it, because the aggravation wasn't worth it. Finally, about a month after the whole mess started, I went back to ChristianBBS just to see what was going on. I had 300+ private messages, all the exact kind of violent misspelled hate mail you'd expect. It appeared most of the staff accounts were inactive or had been replaced by others, and the shit-show had spread from that one thread to the whole site, homophobia, racism, sexism...with a thin coat of "Jesus" paint...had become the rule rather than being against the rules. There were tons of new accounts, and the previous diversity of beliefs and opinions was mostly gone, in favor of the fundamentalists. I locked my account and left.

Tellingly, the site's owner popped up in a couple of other places in the next couple months to try and defend the change with "But my bank account..." He basically sounded exactly like he didn't think he'd done anything wrong by letting things go to shit. A year or so later, it came out that he'd sold his website to another website for a decent amount of money and that was that. Nobody I knew of ever heard anything about it, or him, ever again.

Thinking back, down through the years, that's just a small microcosm of how we got here.

The moral of the story, is all this bullshit that we're stuck dealing with right now is the same old bullshit that's always been there. The scenery changes, the variables change some, the words used, that's all. If there's one thing I've learned from dealing with a wide range of people it's that people are people, wherever you go. When they can get away with it, people will be angry, fearful, hateful idiots and there's always going to be some slime-bucket looking to monetize whatever they can. To those kind of fucking people, hate works as well as anything, I guess.

The difference between then and now, is that some people have nothing but endless exposure to crazy bullshit and violent rhetoric wrapped in a paper thin sheet of conservatism and Jesus. And then you take and add seventeen years more of that shit and imagine what that does to a person's psyche.

Not to mention, most especially among the "conservatives" a kind of fearful idiocy combined with ability to abandon previous beliefs and become outraged at the drop of a hat seems to be being preached as a virtue.

But it's not just that there's nothing else left. For at least some of these fucking people, that's all that was ever there in the first place. Fear, Anger, Hate, and Suffering. It seems to me like Orwell's "Big Brother" could not have asked for a better population to rule than American conservatives...and media-wise, 1984 was chillingly prophetic in quite a few ways.

We've just reached the point where the mad swirl of hate has combined with a natural event to rise up and consume the profits of many of those who've profited off of this mess...and neither they, nor the army of rage-monkeys they've ginned up over the course of the past generation or so can handle the fact that the gig is up and it's all going to come crashing down soon.

This mess we're in gets worse by the day, and I think it's going to come down to armed conflict and the country fragmenting. It's not that I don't think the Democrats or Joe Biden will win. In fact, I think they will. I just think we're starting to reach the point where that's irrelevant.

I had long thought that this would be a conflict over ideology, politics, religion or even sectional identity. But the truth is, I think it's going to come down, on a different level, to a conflict between those who believe in life and truth vs. those who believe only in power, and in keeping that power by any means necessary. Larry Hogan, you'll note, is a Republican.

That matters less than the fact that he's not trying to keep power even if it means trying to weaponize a goddamned virus that could kill us all in the hope that it takes down his political enemies first. At the end of the day, these people don't even care about their own lives. At least Larry Hogan isn't that kind of Republican, and right now, that's enough for me.

The truth is, trying to keep his own people alive could quite literally lead to a firefight between the US Army and Federal Agents. I can tell you how that's going to turn out, both in the immediate term and in the long term. Doesn't work out well for the Feds right away, doesn't work out for the rest of us much past that. Just like the Maryland Army National Guard will have to, everybody, military or civilian, is gonna have to pick a side. Most will go with where ever they live or they're stationed, or who their bros join, and too many will follow the paycheck without concern for much else.

But the ability to ignore politics is itself a privilege, not a right. In America, the Constitution and the ideals of the founders were set up with the intent that you be an active citizen.

If the numbers I keep seeing are accurate, well more than half of the troops don't support the current soup sandwich. But that also means that close to half still do.

And if that ain't a sobering thought I don't know what the hell is.

These Fucking People don't care about anything more than trying to gain the absolute power that they crave over all the rest of us. Basically what they want is for all of us to turn into redcaps, willing to strap on a bomb vest because Orange Man Say So. I mean, these fucking people have thrown out everything else they ever claimed to believe in, why not their own lives, too? That's basically what these "protests" or somebody driving halfway across the country with a car full of knives like some kind of modern day Assassin wannabe, even are.

Now imagine that lady if she'd had the sense to even browse Wikipedia to know what a US Navy hospital ship, vs. an aircraft carrier turned into a museum, looked like.

There's no rationality, just emotion. All the "Pro-Life" bullshit was just another way to break people's brains. That's what the "Mark of the Beast" means, accepting a false system because you lack wisdom.

Yeah, that's the level of stupid we're talking about here, can't identify a big white-painted ship with a red cross on the side that was all over the news a month ago...but she can get mad enough to drive a thousand miles to the wrong city to try to stab somebody.

Get enough of that, and you don't have civilization. All of those evils from the past coming back and fusing into something worse because people never bothered to know anything.

For the common Redcap, or Republican (or, god forbid, Libertarian) every last one of these motherfuckers thinks they're going to come out of this as the king in the castle, the lord in the manor or at least the warlord with the drugs and the money like in some kind of Gonzo version of Afghanistan under the Taliban. Nobody's thinking they're gonna end up dead in a ditch somewhere, or a serf in the fields, or the catamite lashed to the back of the truck.

As for the amoral sociopaths higher up in the food chain, they see that they were able to get people to turn in their brains for some kind of sense of belonging to a tribe, and then turn in their feeling of belonging to a greater humanity on top of that, and they want more.

It's not really about ideology, or religion, these people would preach that the moon is made of green moldy cheese if they thought it would get them what they want. It's not even really about money, that's mostly just a means to an end. They hate and fear equality because it detracts from their power.

That's what we're up against. That's all they care about.

We're going to have to vote these kind of bastards out and we're going to have to fight.

If you're not willing to stand up one way or the other, at this point, take the word freedom out of your mouth.

Our culture has forgotten what the founders knew;
The American experiment is a moral, not just political exercise.
~Chuck Colson

Part Two.
Part Four.

Hurt Not The Oil And The Wine (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Two.)

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.~Revelation 6:1-4

The first couple years of the Millennium were eventful ones for me. My girlfriend and I broke up over the course of late May and early June of 2000, she was having some issues she didn't really want to discuss, but we broke it off on fairly amicable terms and remained friends (It would be nearly a year before I found out that she'd been questioning her sexuality and I'd been on the losing side of the argument. She'd been afraid to tell me) So my suddenly single-again life went a little nuts for a while a few months later when I met my now ex-wife...who not only Rose but a lot of other people in my life at that point genuinely did not like. But still, because she cared about me, Rose came to my wedding that September, along with one of my Bros, Ron, who'd introduced us. Rose got into an argument with my wife that escalated to shouting and came within a polished-fingernail-length of mutual physical violence at the wedding reception, as well as my ex getting a pitcher of extremely cold ice water thrown in her face before half a dozen people broke it up.

Thankfully several of us had some level of deescalation training...and nobody who saw the whole thing blamed Rose, not even my ex's family members. My ex had taken Rose's empathy and kindness as a sign of weakness, and pounced. Oops. She had, as I found out later that evening, rubbed Rose's nose in what she thought of as 'winning' and my ex had made a rather nasty remark about Rose's sexuality. Like the rest of us, she had no idea, but she had malice without having the slightest idea of what was really going on. My ex and I spent the first couple days of being married giving each other the cold shoulder and the silent treatment.

Talk about a bad omen...

It came as a shock to her, seven months or so later when I had to call Rose and admit that yes, she had told me so, she was right. Rose, who rarely ever swore, responded with a very sweet "I fuckin' told you." Then she admitted to me that she had a girlfriend...and when I laughed, told her I thought that was great and all the sudden a lot of things made so much more sense...I could feel her relief over the phone. In the intervening time I'd quit the restaurant job I had, worked at Walmart for a year in two different stores, had a couple of second and side jobs and my college grades had suffered thanks to a shitty home life. Grades were something both my Mom and Rose had always been relentlessly 'on' me to keep up. My ex-wife had descended into a Pentecostal religious mania that, twenty years and a couple months later, has yet to abate, but at that time it was genuinely annoying and harmful to my own spiritual well-being, seeing as we still had to deal with each other.

I was on to a rebuilding phase, working at the college in Petoskey, getting my GPA back up and the divorce would as of that time be another messy ten months or so in the making. Rose and I (and her new girlfriend) hung out a few times and she and I were both in Ron's wedding...another instant relationship that would turn out badly.

My Mom had gotten her BSW degree in May of 2000, but promptly dove into getting her Masters, doing her internship and working, maintaining a six or seven day a week schedule for months at a time. School for me got out, but I was working at the college, so it didn't really. Life found somewhat of a normal ebb and flow as the school year neared, then started.

Until...

On September 11th, I had just woke up and was arguing with my ex-wife via Yahoo Messenger (a multiple-times-daily occurrence) when my neighbor Ali (a Saudi international student) stopped by to bum a smoke and I came back to a dozen weird messages on my computer, all of them demanding that I turn on the TV. I'd turned on the TV with one hand and was handing my buddy a couple of cigarettes as we both watched, horrified, as the second jet hit the World Trade Center.

Classes were canceled within the hour, though work wasn't, but since it wasn't much more than staff and dorm students (and my Mom stopping by to check on me) we mostly just turned all the cafeteria TV's on the different news channels and kept one eye on our work and the other on the world. Bruce (the big boss of my department) and I stood outside for ten minutes after putting the cardboard in the recycling dumpster. We smoked as I pointed out to him that the solitary set of contrails in that infamously clear blue sky was a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, and I got a pair of binoculars out of my car and showed him. I'd known from the TV showing airliners filling up the ramp at K.I. Sawyer that nuclear-war air defense orders had been issued, and from stuff we'd trained for but never had to do, what that meant. My Mom had a class that morning in a building not too far from the airport in Traverse City, and had noted Army Reserve troopers, Coast Guardsmen and cops at its entrances.

And nobody knew if there'd be more attacks, or where. You do the math. It's hard to explain the fear to those who weren't born yet or old enough to really feel it. It's harder to explain the certainty and the dread felt by those of us who knew, on some level, what was coming.

It would be later that night...that other implications of events came to light for me. Lots of churches had opened their doors to serve a deeply distressed public, many with genuinely pure motives, but others not so much. While the Episcopal and Seventh Day Adventist churches that shared the end of Howard street with the college were open...and indeed each sent somebody to the Dorms to ask if there were any students who needed anything...my ex-wife's church in Cheboygan was going full Ecstatic Revival service in anticipation of the oncoming Apocalypse and dozens of people had gotten "Saved" and/or manifested "Spiritual Gifts."

Now, I'm not sure if any of that is true, and I don't really care, to be honest.

But that's where it began, I think.

The profound disconnect between what was really going on out there in the world and what was going on in these people's heads.

My ex-wife was exactly one of those Apocalypse Goalpost Movers who I'd been so disgusted by the year before. She was so righteously sure that the End Times narrative was about to unfold right before our eyes, live on CNN. She told me so. I've been getting the same kind of garbage from her since this virus stuff started...except that the narrative has, well, changed....to the point of being unrecognizable by this guy right here who can quote the Left Behind novels and assorted End Times Prophecy books from memory. Funny thing is, the only evidence for anything she's been able to produce is assorted YouTube videos by various internet randos that mostly seem to have a lot less understanding of science than I do...and I'm just an average guy who pays attention.

I remember a photo my cousin, who then was a Marine Corps Reservist, sent me by E-mail when he was deployed in 2002. It was a shot of a handmade sign from a dusty Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan. It read "America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war. America is at the Mall."

America is not Social Distancing, people who give a shit, who want to stay alive, are Social Distancing. Republicans, religious nuts and the wealthy are demanding the right to put everybody else at risk so they can get their hair done or get waited on in a restaurant, like they forgot how to cook in their own damn house and don't know the meaning of "Get it your own damn self." Or they're going to church just as if they're not risking meeting their Maker that much sooner by doing so. Never mind that thousands upon thousands of Catholic, mainstream Protestant and even Pentecostal or Southern Baptist churches have moved their services online or found other ways to do what they do safely while social distancing. The same crop of Evangelicals, Fundamentalists and Goddamned fools that seem most convinced that the Apocalypse is upon us appear to be equally convinced that they should be among the earlier casualties.

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. ~Revelation 6:5-6

Except of course, that's not it. They simply believe that they live in some kind of metaphorical gated community, and it shouldn't inconvenience them and it won't happen to them. They won't get sick...they're special. Until they do, and until they aren't, anyway.

When the rest of us exist at all, to these fools, we're seen as leeches, takers, and various ambulatory appliances, that it, when we're seen as possessing or worthy of life at all.

Gee, can't you feel God's love and a thrilling sense of "Let's Roll!" as these motherfuckers consign our parents and grandparents and immune-system compromised neighbors to the grave and every working person not protected by a conscientious state government that they can reach to as-unsafe-as-they-can-make-them working conditions?

It really does seem like, since I left it, Conservatism has morphed into a cult of cruelty and death...but cruelty and death is for other people, of course. The slightest consequences for their bullshit couldn't possibly be a real-life example of Action = Consequence, it's the End Times, or some vast Left-wing conspiracy against them, or something something Gazpacho BUT I CAN'T GET MY HAIR DONE!

How the hell was I ever one of these fucking people?!

I got my Unemployment today, and I had to go to the store and get groceries and stuff. Well, when I came back out there was this red GMC Canyon pickup truck parked nose-to-nose with my car, adorned with all manner of stickers proclaiming how much of an armed, car-racing, chicken-loving (don't ask, and you don't want to know my theory) Deplorable racist redneck Trump Supporter the owner was. After I'd loaded up my groceries I had to check a couple things on my phone and while I was doing that, the truck's owner came out of the store and it turned out he was just a short, fat, gray-bearded little old White Man in a MAGA hat and knockoff Tree-bark camouflage jacket. The kind of guy who with a Craftsman or Snap-On cap instead, might look like a substitute Shop teacher.

We have, laid out right before us, a fairly obvious path to getting Trump and Republicans out of power and beginning the long process of digging out of this mess and getting things headed back in the direction of progress. We have the obvious means to drive what remains of these little fascist fucks underground again.

All people gotta do is vote for Joe Biden, and there's more people lining up to do that, by far, than are open Trump supporters or voters. Indeed, even the nature of such people has changed since 2016. As I've said before, it's overwhelmingly the nebbish-looking old people.

Instead, I had to deal with a bunch of "Progressive" women nattering away in the comment section of a friend's post about how they just couldn't vote for Joe. I can't stress this hard enough, Joe inherited the Obama coalition like twelve seconds after he declared, just by showing up. Joe has the kind of track record for not putting up with bullshit that's exactly what we need right now. Joe is damned well running on a progressive platform that's basically the mutant love child of Obama/Biden 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016, and that's not good enough?

Yes, there's a sexual assault allegation from some time in the 1990's making the rounds. But also yes, it's mostly pushed by bitter Bernie Bros and obvious Russian bots, and how in the fuck did this not come up in 2008, or even, ya know, like a decade before that? I'm willing to give the lady the benefit of the doubt, and it should be investigated, but at the same time I find the whole thing suspicious, especially considering that Republicans have been flailing about for months trying to find something, anything, to take a swipe at Uncle Joe since they can/t run on the economy or against Comrade Bernie like they were hoping.

And again, Republicans will not just tolerate far worse, they'll embrace it. Look at Trump for fuck's sake!

It sounds dubious on the face of it, and instead of dealing with this rationally or considering just how hard it might be to assemble a winning political movement and beat Trump in about six months time, these fucking people are grasping at whatever straw they can to sabotage themselves, reelect Trump and make their own lives far worse.

Listen, if you want a progressive government, better social services or sexual assault taken seriously, we are going to have to stop electing Republicans in this country. We have to WIN first. We have to start somewhere, and likely will still spend years digging out from under this fucking Trump mess. I did not start out in favor of Joe either, but he's the best we're going to get.

Broken government and the collapse of the United States might get you some little progressive republic in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic states, Minnesota or on the West Coast and maybe in Hawaii.

Don't ask what'll happen to kids, people of color, and women in places like Alabama or Idaho, though. Don't be surprised when there's wars of ethnic cleansing in Florida and Texas, or if somebody tries to nuke Chicago. And don't ask what conflict will do to the virus curve. Republicans don't care, we're supposed to.

Sure, ya'll might get some kind of woke socialist republic out of it, but it'll be a lot more likely to be an equivalent to Colombia or Zimbabwe than say, Denmark. In other words, you'll spend fifty years getting back to what we had in 2015 instead of slogging through four or eight years of hard shit to come out in a better position in 2024 or 2028. MEDICARE FOR ALL IN 2070 doesn't sound like much of a plan especially when Republicans are preaching Medicare For Nobody in 2021 and actively trying to use a global pandemic to kill as many people as they can in 2020.

It's not actually that hard to preserve civilization, here. All you gotta do is show up and vote for the party that's trying to keep our people alive.

Instead of doing the responsible thing, even if it might be distasteful, even if it might save the world, a lot of fucking people seem perfectly content to join Republicans in burning the world down around our ears. I mean come on, people, what the fuck?

Instead, Jesse Ventura and Justin Amash...two dudes who are each in their way both pretty damned smart, who should both goddamn well know exactly what's at stake here, are "exploring" Third-Party runs for President.

Literally everybody's life is at stake here, and we've got people who are still obsessed with the finer points of political theory or making whatever moral stand makes them feel good.

We need to stop that shit, because if we don't I am here to tell you the people picking all these hills to die on in assorted political infighting today run the risk of creating a situation where people are literally having to die on actual hills named for their height in meters in actual armed conflict in the near future, in the middle of a pandemic, when food and supply chains are already stressed now.

That's not just the future Republicans want, it's the future they're actively trying to create because they think they'll win or at least that when they're dead, the rich old white guys will still be rich old white guys and you and I will be dead right along with them. The MAGA base is essentially being offered no more of a reward than having their boot on somebody else's throat before they die. But for too many, that's enough.

Everything else is expendable. It was never about Christ, it was never about conservative policy or social morals. It was ever and always about power, for the very few. That is what "And hurt not the oil and the wine" means.

That's what we're up against. Your move, Greens, Libertarians and Progressives, your move.

And we live in a country where what's in a holy book shouldn't matter to anybody who doesn't want it to.

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? ~Revelation 6:7-10

Part One.
Part Three

The First Day (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part One.)

Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay

There's always some reason
To feel not good enough
And it's hard at the end of the day

I need some distraction
Oh, beautiful release
Memories seep from my veins

Let me be empty
Oh, and weightless, and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight

In the arms of the angel
Fly away from here
From this dark, cold, hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of the angelMay you find some comfort here. 

~Sarah McLachlan, In the arms of an Angel.

The day was dawning, bright, clear and cold. I found myself wide awake, awakened by some dream or other, ethereal and fading from my mind even as I awoke, nothing moving in the "guest cottage" where I slept. My girlfriend, Rose, slept soundly at my right side, between the two of us, George, one of my two Schnauzers, snored like a little freight train, the only visible evidence of him his little gray-furred butt and nub of a tail sticking out from the blanket. A warm, furry weight by my feet told me that his older sister Gracie was still in the spot she'd burrowed her way into maybe...four hours before. Sandy, Rose's Yellow Lab, was still snoring loudly at the foot of the bed. Without sitting up, I could see that the lights were on in the kitchen, on the opposite side of the back porch.

My liberal college-student Mom, up from Saginaw, was likely already making breakfast. Not a couple minutes later, a cacophony of small barks and yips split the morning air...my Mom had let her dogs out. George was up like a shot, growling, standing on-point with his paws on my pillow, his muscles all but vibrating with anticipation and pent up energy. Damn it, now he wants to go out. Lurching up to a sitting position I fumbled for my slippers, the dog bounded off the bed and bounced to the door, practically crackling with energy. As soon as I opened it he was off like a shot to join the rest of the pack in sniffing the cold morning air and making yellow snow out of a light dusting from clouds come and gone during the night. Gracie, for her part, growled a little bit but otherwise didn't move except into the warm spot my feet had previously occupied. Welcome to the first day of the new millennium.

And so it began, like any other, no Y2K computer virus, no Middle-Eastern wars, no Antichrist. All the "End Times" craziness of the past two years or so...basically for nothing. I tried and failed to get the other dogs up and out, Gracie actually growled at me. I threw on a faded Air Force sweatshirt and the blue sweat pants that went with it, and went in the house to find that my Mom already had breakfast made, breakfast burritos with some kind of spicy sausage and fruity salsa, and a chicken-and-spinach salad with grated cheese and raspberry dressing. I ate, making sure to throw a few bits of chicken to begging dogs, and then made Rose a plate and went back out to wake her up and roust the other two dogs out of bed. Rose was quite hungry, as she'd smoked before bed. She wolfed down the burritos and salad before putting her shoulder-length red hair up in a ponytail, throwing on her fuzzy pink robe over the lacy red slip she was wearing, stepping into her slippers that were on the other side of the bed and going in the house to get more food and talk about the finer points of social work papers with my Mom.

Rose already had the bachelors degree my Mom was in her last semester of getting, and ran some kind of food program for a small Native American tribe down by Grand Rapids...a job that required cooking and health and welfare checks as much as paperwork and going to meetings.

After all the usual morning routines we spent most of the day with my grandparents...who lived next door. I had to work at four P.M. and so threw on my chef's coat and black pants and...given the state of the roads...drove Rose's Subaru station wagon in to work. Things were rather calmer than New Years Eve had been. I actually spent most of the day working with my boss, an older Italian dude with a very thick accent, who seemed to me to be very liberal but insisted that in his country he was considered a conservative. We did most of the cleaning we'd been unable to do over the previous few days, and we finished off our shift on time with me bumming one of those Indonesian clove cigarettes he smoked and him laughing that it made me cough. He'd smoked a pack-and-a-half of those things a day forever. I don't know how he'd lived long enough to have gray hair or retire to my little corner of the world.

I had not managed to get online the day before, so after midnight when I got home, I did just that. Y2K had turned out not to be much of a thing, but I very quickly noticed an air of quiet desperation, the search for the apocalyptic "next big thing" had already begun. I went to bed rather disgusted by it all. Rose and I got up the next morning and went to church, driving the thirteen miles into town and stopping for gas before we went to what was at the time a little store-front church two blocks past the grocery store called Victory Baptist church. (Victory Baptist was actually a small mini-denomination, four of what most would call independent Fundamentalist Baptist churches. My ex-wife and I would later attend and get married in Victory Baptist of Black River.)

Brother Larry...the Pastor at Victory Baptist of Onaway...preached on Amos chapter five, his theme...to seek after the Lord, not the opinions or works of Man. He'd seen a lot of the same stuff I had, both before and after that Friday, and the Sunday before he'd counseled against taking it too seriously. That particular Sunday, I got the vibe that he was just as disgusted as I was, and he went full fire and brimstone when he got to verses eighteen through twenty-four;

"Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord. To what end is it for you? That day of the Lord is the darkness, and not the light. It is as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, or went into his house and leaned on the wall and a serpent bit him. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light, even very dark, with no brightness in it? I hate, I despise your feast days, and will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me burnt offerings, and meat offerings, I will not accept them, nor will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts! Take thou away from me the noises of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. BUT LET JUDGMENT RAIN DOWN LIKE MANY WATERS, AND RIGHTEOUSNESS LIKE A MIGHTY STREAM!" His voice, in the small church, was thunderous.

"Now" he said, holding up his opened Bible, opened to the first page of Revelation. Brother Larry always preached without notes "You tell me right here in this book, where it talks about this or that specific date or computers or micro-chips or some Ayatollah Cockamamie or something. Go right on ahead, we got all day." After a moment of silence...and no takers...he continued "The Bible speaks of specific things that must be present, yes, but Man is sinful and those conditions are always present somewhere in our world. Thus, the Word gives us no specific dates or times, saying only that God knows and we don't. But when that day is come, the Lord says that it will be obvious and able seen by all, as the lightning that strikes in the east is seen even in the west. Therefore keep watch, for ye know not when the master of the house comes. Peace be with you, and good day."

I've never forgotten that particular lesson, nor ever trusted the date-setters and apocalypse crazies ever again. Nor have I ever forgotten something else that dude used to say all the time. "The truth is simple, Man makes it complicated because he does not want to obey."

How many of these Q-Anon types or "Reopen" protesters are preaching anything like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy might." How many? You tell me. I've got all day.

As you can probably tell I did not get my End Times eschatology or my knowledge of Christian theology out of a cereal box, but I had good teachers. I needed them. I needed them so that I did not become one of these fools. People divorced their spouses, or sold everything they had, for douchebag liars like Harold Camping. People are selling their souls out to Donald Trump or some dipshit Youtube person whose real name they might not even know.

I'll ask again, how is any of that stuff Christian?

And if there can be said to be anything like a "Global elite" how is big-city-Fat-Cat Donald Trump who spent most of his life being one of the faces of New York City Democratic nominal-liberalism not a part of said "Global Elite?" Oh, wait, the assorted elites of New York City never accepted him, so he ran for President to try to one-up them into having to do so. If anything, trying that hard to be a "Global Elite" and failing somehow seems even more pathetic.

There was a time you could be a Christian and a conservative without believing all type of woo woo bullshit or being a partisan fanatic or some kind of strange prude who was yet Okay with the sexual perversions of assorted authority figures. I know, I was there.

I can remember when conservatives and liberals alike thought that lying was wrong, and if there were any proponents of moral relativism or situational ethics, I could at least at that point with some degree of plausibility believe that more of them were on the other side than my own.

When I couldn't do that anymore, I had to stop being a Christian, I had to stop being a conservative. Hate, moral relativism, racism, open mocking of God, and every kind of immoral perfidy have become part of the brand for white American Christianity...and too damned few people in the pews even notice, much less care. The vast majority of those who formed and shaped my conservatism and Christianity are either irreligious and at least comparatively liberal...or dead...now.

There was a time when you could be a conservative without literally worshiping at the altar of Donald Fucking Trump.

How is it, that people will ignore what the Bible says about loving your neighbor or about how all people are created by God, but they'll cheerfully listen when Donald Trump tells them to put bleach inside their bodies or when Diamond and Silk tell them that 5G Cell Phone service causes Coronavirus? But they won't listen to a fucking doctor either?

Given Mike Pence's refusal to mask up, this may be relevant too.

It's like what Rose used to jokingly say about men, that God gave us all a brain and a penis but only enough blood to run one or the other was actually true...and Donald Trump and all the woo woo motherfuckers give all these idiots a big damned hard-on.

I don't know what the real answer is, but I do know that it's extremely dangerous that so many people appear to have simply switched off their brains in response to all this garbage, whether to believe in it or to ignore it. Part of writing this article is getting to the bottom of this mess.

I should say I think it's worse than that, to be honest.

Some dude in Kansas "chugged cleaning products" because of Trump. Now, I don't know who this idiot is or how old he is but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that whatever cleaning products he consumed have had a label on them that said "Harmful or Fatal if swallowed" for all or at least most of his life. Why? Because such has been the case for my life. I wouldn't chug no cleaning products. It says right there on the packaging not to.

So, what, these fucking people think that the Clorox company or Proctor and Gamble have just been holding out on them for all this time? If Trump told these fools that a NATO standard 5.56mm bullet through the chest clears up breathing difficulties, would they shoot themselves? I'm serious, here. At least as long as I've been alive there's been a big damn label on most cleaning products that says "Don't eat me." Certainly, as long as I've been aware of them the rules of firearms safety have always been pretty ironclad, doesn't seem to stop idiots from negligently shooting themselves all too often.

Do these fucking idiots just want to believe this stuff?!

Somehow, that makes it worse. It's not that somebody is fooling these motherfuckers, they know what the labels say, they're just going in eyes wide open because Donald Trump said something and they want to believe it. They wanna believe in this motherfucker more than they want to believe in God. The men, at least, seem to love Donald Trump and/or this fascist bullshit more than they love pussy. (And in case any of you think I'm joking go right ahead and look it up. I've researched and written some about how much gay stuff there is going on among these hard-right lunatics. Go ahead. And no, I don't mean normal gay stuff which is fine, I mean they basically thought they were going to intimidate Congress by showing off their peckers. Although for the record, if the MAGA nudist Blue Oyster flash mob rally ever happened, I never heard about it.)

It gets worse, these fucking people also have an alarming tendency to sexualize violence, and for that matter to fantasize about homosexual sexual violence while they're at it. As I've said before, I'm starting to think these people are just lizard brain idiots ruled by base urges and brain chemicals who think Donald Trump is giving them permission to act like lizard-brain idiots who are ruled by nothing more than their baser urges and imbalanced brain chemicals.

I mean, seriously, what is the point of waving the flag and wearing the colors or adorning your stuff with them if you don't believe in the things that flag stands for? What is the point of even saying you're a conservative if you don't care about any of the things that go with that, and why thump the Bible if you believe in Donald Trump more than you believe in Jesus Christ?!

It's actually worse than that, day by day, hour by hour, Trumpism seems to be causing a fusion of various conspiracy theories with his cult of personality and various elements of religious fanaticism, including End Times Prophecy stuff, but somehow, without any belief in Jesus Christ.

It's like those people, 20 years ago, who still desperately wanted to believe that the End Was Near even though their years-long apocalyptic binge had been foiled simply by the rising of the sun and the turning of the calendar. I think, ultimately, this will be the same...but I also think we're going to get a new and rather malevolent religious movement out of this if we're not real damned careful, and if we do it's not going to go away for a very long time.

But it's like my old Pastor said.

Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at evening, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning, ~Mark 13:35

Christian influences aside, I am an Agnostic. I do not know for certain if all that stuff is true anymore. Certainly, the Believers themselves are not much of evidence of the truth of it. But I do know there are demons, and devils, and they are here...and very often, all too human in nature.

As for the rest, I'm pretty sure a Succubus could give Donald Trump a blowjob right in the Oval Office, on camera, and all Jerry Falwell Jr. and Mike Pence would do was criticize her technique.

And those who seek to claim Trump is some kind of super macho masculine dude would howl with glee, seeing themselves as having been proven right. Fear of demons is for cucks and liberals.

And far too many of the Christians are lining up to follow these demons in human form, because the devils tickle their ears.

Don't be those fucking people.

It occurs to me, that what I'm writing here probably would loosely fall into the realm of Christian Apologetics. If it is that, I don't care. Somebody's gotta speak up and I can only use the tools I've been given.

Against a lie, the truth is the only weapon.

Prequel

Part Two.

Pillars Of Creation (Left Behind Is A Lie, Prequel.)

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.~Revelation 13:15-18

As I have said many times before, I spent part of the later 1990's as a member of the Christian End Times Prophecy movement. But I didn't start out that way. I was raised as, and began my political and religious life as an adult being, a politically-conservative mainstream Christian. I started out as a Baptist, but in turn had points in my education where I attended Lutheran and later Catholic schools. I had of course read Revelation, and in a vague sort of way I knew the basics of the popular "End Times Prophecy" narrative at least as it existed in the 1980's and early 1990's.

But like a lot of people with my particular background I was by turns both ignorant and skeptical of the finer points of what drove the pop-Christian Evangelicals and the people who watched the TV preachers, or the political cult that lay yet unformed but, like stars forming within a nebula, unmistakable all the same.

As a young person who had managed to hear both sides of the Catholic-Protestant argument, I had no use for Calvinism, nor its bastard children, the Prosperity Gospel and Reformed Theology. It seemed to me that these heretical belief systems basically existed to justify the greed of TV preachers like Bob Tilton, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, or the brooding evil of fringe cranks like Rousas John Rushdoony. To me, well into my 20's, hell, my 30's...the idea that a Christian or conservative person might say that somebody else's life was less important than their liberty would have been seen as completely ridiculous. I mean, let's get real here, it's kinda hard to enjoy having freedom when you're dead, and if you're a decent person on any level, people dying when such can be prevented was, in my experience at the time, something generally seen as a bad thing.

In fact, I'll be honest. I was 19 years old before I even knew what the hell the Rapture was, given that it's neither mentioned as such in the Bible nor described in any mainstream Christian doctrines. My first exposure to the concept was when I happened to be trying to watch TV in a barracks basement rec room and a couple of other Airmen sitting at one of the other tables were talking about it. Needless to say, I was annoyed and more interested in trying to watch NYPD Blue (then the hot new show) than in joining their conversation. In that time of still a solid couple of years before the Internet and AOL bothering me with junk-mail CD-ROM's, I couldn't just look it up right then.

I was, in point of fact, a complete stranger to the baroque world of Evangelical conspiracy theories that in some cases then and now operate from assumptions and theories that mainstream science-fiction has not yet to my knowledge made, but I digress.

In fact, I was taught that if you were a Christian, things like spirits and technology couldn't have a hold over you unless you allowed it. Nothing of the sort could be forced upon you. There was no airtight conspiracy theory narrative construction because, well, my people were't so fucking stupid or scientifically or theologically illiterate that they'd bought into stuff like that.

Oh, I'd seen a few chain letters and such about computer chips being implanted into people in places like Sweden, but then you'd look for any mention of it anywhere else and...nothing, ever.

Well, a few years, a car accident, and learning to live with being disabled later I was often  still dealing with medical stuff, which entailed lots of waiting, and this older couple, Lloyd and Mira, that I knew gave me a bag of books to read. The bag had in it both Atlas Shrugged and Left Behind, in addition to a lot of middling science fiction and some other Christian woo woo stuff, including some books on morality and politics that warned of exactly the kind of problems that conservatism has today...but they thought such would come from the liberal side of the spectrum. I read most of those books, found Atlas Shrugged to be so deadly boring that I couldn't finished reading it, and moved on. I read Left Behind which wasn't the least bit interesting, but I did remember that one incident, and something clicked. I was like "Oh, Okay, that's what that means." I thought the book sucked, though. I'm not going to lie.

The short version is, it's literally an entire book where almost nothing of consequence happens, except for the Rapture. You can read the synopsis at the start of the next book and not miss a thing.

The people who gave me this selection of crap were older, not-quite retired yet, part of the same loose circle of mostly older or retired local Republicans that I had drank and golfed and hunted and shot guns at the rifle range with some of them off and on for some years. They attended one of the (at the time) two local Baptist churches. Lloyd was a Vietnam-era Marine Corps veteran...he'd been an F-4 Phantom maintainer...and high school math teacher who I'd known, but never had a class with since I wasn't one of the smart kids that way. Mira...a Cuban from Florida who had fled Castro with her family as a kid...worked at the grocery store in town before she'd upgraded to working at Walmart in Cheboygan when that went in. Their son was my age...a devoutly religious kid with a hardcore interest in music who came out as gay a few years later. Anyway, we had occasion to discuss some of the books (...and the phrase "Where did you find this crap" was mentioned...) but anyway, it generated discussion. Also, any competent Evangelist will tell you...that's how they get you. She'd just read Tribulation Force, the next book in the Left Behind series, and offered it to me next. I found it somewhat of a better book, and as it turned out a couple other friends of mine had also started reading it. Anyway, since I wasn't particularly happy with the church I was attending occasionally at the time, I switched to the one they went to around this time as well.

The ship was cheered, 
The harbor cleared
Merrily did we drop 
Below the Kirk, below the hill
Below the lighthouse top.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

I feel like it's important to note that the End Times eschatology and movement I was stepping into, at least where I was at, had not yet become insane. These people followed things like the budding of the European Union and the ongoing Middle East peace process intently, they were aware of and concerned about things like Climate Change (especially concern about Pacific Ocean warming called El Nino) before almost anybody else I knew was...if only because such things are described in Revelation...and they were aware, in a global sense, of how good they had it and sensitive to the fact that other Christians around the world were actually being persecuted.

All of those things were, and are, germane to the End Times as they are depicted in the Bible, there are a number of things that have to happen, according to what I was taught. As of this writing they have mostly not, yet.

Half the people I knew barely shopped at Walmart, let alone accused it of being part of the New World Order.

There was no freaking out about the fact that George H.W. Bush had once uttered the words "New World Order" nor belief that such things as the "Mark of the Beast" were about to be thrust upon us. In point of fact, one of the reasons these people did things like follow the Middle East peace process and what was going on in Indonesia or South Sudan was because it was well understood at the time that certain things had to take place, and that previous parts of the "narrative" i.e. a whole slew of stuff involving the Soviet Union had been undone by the ebb and flow of world events.

The constant goal-post moving that would characterize End Times people just a few years later as the turn of the century drew near...and especially after Y2K passed without incident...was off to a rocky start, just as often met with "Okay, show me in the Bible where it says that" as anything else.

Granted, a lot of us were starting to get online and work our way around the internet, but that phenomenon had yet to reshape how nuts put their stuff out there. There were some cranks and crazies, but at that time their stuff tended to still percolate more through certain churches, face to face meetings and occasionally gun shows...mostly places and things respectable people like we thought we were all tried to avoid...than websites and whatnot. This was when computers were still typically more expensive...several hundred to a couple thousand dollars...and Dial-up internet service was all that was available. The only place around that was 'networked' in anything close to the modern sense was the computer lab at the local community college.

Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of nuts out there. Just north of the area where I lived and worked and went to church was a hotbed of Michigan Militia activity, and there had even been articles about this in the Detroit Free Press. Then, as now, we knew there was a problem. The difference was that Republicans were just as afraid of the far-right and the militia nuts as Democrats were...the Oklahoma City bombing still at the time was the biggest terrorist attack the US had ever had...in fact, we were probably more worried because we were also concerned about government overreach in dealing with these threats and more than a few of us personally knew people who'd come after us first if Black Helicopter hysteria or the RaHoWa or whatever broke out.

When there are people in your family or social circle who don't "fit in" in some way despite the fact that they too may be conservative as all get-out you tend to be aware of such things, and possibly keep weapons relatively handy. In fact, then as now, lots of Those Fucking People considered plenty of conservatives suspect. Then, as now, it didn't matter how Evangelical or Republican you were.

But more of us were damned well aware of that fact. Nobody thought their privilege or their wealth would protect them if things went sideways.

In fact, if you'd walked into Victory Baptist and said "YOUR HEALTH IS NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY LIBERTIES" it would have probably been about as well received as if you'd walked in and shouted "I like big butts and I can not lie!" In either case, I suspect you'd have been marched back out the door fairly quickly.

And perhaps the biggest difference between the later 1990's and now was that, though you could see some issues, the conservative movement itself was not obviously composed of morons. Newt Gingrich was yet to be exposed as an adulterous cheat, the fault lines now coming to a head, would only begin to show during the Clinton impeachment, itself a couple years away. Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan had yet to be eclipsed by Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan and the idea that somebody like Donald Trump...then a Democrat and thought of as a disgraced loser, if at all...would ever be considered a conservative or a Republican was beyond the pale.

Sometimes, I really miss those days.

In these days where there's a constant barrage of "COVID-19 VACCINE AND 5G ARE THE MARK OF THE BEAST" I mean, fuck, if they think the plan has been that comprehensively thought out, what exactly do they propose to do about it?

I mean, if they really think some functionary in Brussels or wherever can just flip your life-switch, what's the point? All those guns sure aren't going to do you any good if that's the case.

I feel like it's necessary to take a look at just how we got here, so I'm going to try over the next week or two to do exactly that, to understand the problem, to get to the root of it, you have to start from the beginning. I intend to take a look at conservatism, social issues and the End Times Prophecy movement over the last 20 years to see if a forensic analysis will help determine just where things went wrong and if there's anything we can do about this bullshit.

Peace.

Broad is the road that leads to destruction.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction, and many there be which go in there at:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leads unto life, and few there be that find it. ~Matthew 7:13-14

I had to go to the grocery store today. That, in and of itself is pretty boring, but after I left the store I happened to see an SUV driving down the highway that had "DEFY THE GOVERNMENT" written on the back window, all caps, in large letters. When I passed it by I looked over and saw that the driver was a fairly milquetoast looking old guy, basically exactly the kind of person you'd think would be taking the COVID-19 crisis and social distancing seriously if only for the sake of his own life.

I guess not. I quite wonder if there's anybody who cares for him, more than he cares for his own life.

I spent much of my life as a conservative Republican, and it fills me with anger and shame to see that in the midst of a global crisis there are three basic responses to this fact.

#1 Self-pitying denial, as evidenced by Donald Trump today. It's his wife's birthday and he's spending it rage-tweeting about the media and his ratings on the Internet. What a sad life to live, eh? With all the money Trump supposedly has, you'd think he could buy something that would keep him happy for a few minutes. Also, the "Fox News Babe" approach of "People are dying, but I can't get my nails done."

#2 The "Kill 'em all/What can we get out of this" approach. See also The Federalist, the Georgia and Texas state governments and of course, Trump, again. Sure, 50,000 Americans are dead, but there must be some way they can make money off of this, right? Seriously if that's your approach to mass death you need to find some way to go outside and rethink your life.

#3 The Magical Woo Woo theory. See Also the conspiracy theorists and the Evangelical "COVID-19 vaccination is the Mark of the Beast" crowd. While I was at the grocery store, I was texting back and forth with my Evangelical ex-partner who seems determined to believe that we are literally living through the Biblical End Times despite any evidence other than this being the first global crisis of our lifetimes that we couldn't shoot our way out of. She seems to have hit on some idea that she's going to be some kind of a big deal in the End Times because she's part of some internet chat group that thinks it's going to "help" people by debating if their "needs" are valid and deciding what kind of chump change or prayer or sympathy to dole out and ya know, I'm just not buying it. I'll stick with getting online and doing my Unemployment stuff in the morning like I'm scheduled for.

When I got home, there was a firestorm of argument on Twitter over the fact that Land O' Lakes has apparently changed their packaging by removing the picture of the Native American woman from the label. I don't buy that brand anyway, but seriously, who knew that butter labels were such a big deal to people? Oh, and because I was bored and have no sense of mental self-preservation I looked at some of the profiles of people responding to this garbage. The vast majority of them were white, Christian Trump Supporters who'll stop buying butter because the company changed the packaging, but when you bring up actual issues confronting actual Native people their eyes just glaze over and they ignore you, or they get mad and don't want to talk about it, because when they are confronted with the fact that buying a brand of butter with a person of color on the label isn't the same as supporting human rights for those people, it's either a) confront their own blinkered selfishness or b) get mad.

Hardly anybody seemed to acknowledge the actual Native person who posted about the subject to bring up something that was important to them, which given the tenor of a lot of the other comments, was probably a good thing, to be honest. I'm sure the last thing this lady would have wanted to deal with was some Karen crying about "But, but, but...they changed the package!"

God, are people really this fucking dumb?!

Never mind, don't answer that.

If there's one thing my friends, especially my younger more web-crawling friends have taught me, it's that there are certain questions that I really do not want to ask, simply because I don't want to know what the answer is.

But still...really?

It is my profound regret to inform you that not only is the answer "Yes, they fucking are that motherfucking dumb" but that it actually somehow manages to get worse from there.

Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator, may be dead or may have suffered severe brain damage, and the general consensus of people is that his younger sister Kim Yo Jong will likely replace him. The general consensus also is that she's as bad as he is or worse...likely worse because she showed at the Olympics that she at least has enough social grace to charm people like Mike Pence, which is frankly an asset that the North Koreans have not had before.

What's the internet's response? Dude bros, many of them the obvious, performative right-wing kind, all  talking about how much they'd like to tap that. Worse, one of these guys turned her into a

cute Anime character, as if this woman is anything but (very likely) a murderous psychopath. Actually, the thing that scares me is, if she is found to be a killer like the rest of her family, is that going to make the Waifu Pillow crowd like her more? I know enough Anime nerds to know that I don't really want to know the answer to my own question.

And not only do these fools turn to idolizing the woman whose finger might soon be on the launch button for a bunch of nuclear weapons pointed at United States Forces Korea and the South Korean people, but likely lots of these same fools turn around and demonize the women whose job it might soon be to save their own lives if they get sick!

We're in the middle of a major medical crisis here, and people are throwing hate at doctors and especially nurses and public health specialists, because they don't like social distancing and argle bargle something something Gazpacho is closed?!

First off, as far as I'm concerned if you're a grown ass adult and not inventive enough to find a way to get what you want or something like it, or strong-willed enough to delay gratification until such time as this crisis is over, you're the one with the problem and I'm all out of sympathy for you. It's that easy. Convenience is a really stupid thing to worship.

Second, If you're a social person and you haven't figured out a way to communicate with people by now, you're not a very smart one, and everybody is probably better off for the lack of your presence and whatever dumb-shit opinions you may want to share. With a little creativity and effort, well basically the only thing I'd normally be doing that I'm not doing now is going to work. I might just go and find a job in an essential business in a few months if my work hasn't opened back up, but right now it doesn't serve me to do that, and I can read a balance sheet as well as the next guy.

Third, it's not the nurse's or the public health expert's or even the governors (or for that matter, technically) the President's fault or that of some other country that this crisis happened and everything is shut down. Yeah, Trump has fucked a lot of shit up and made the crisis a lot worse, and you can argue about what might be better or worse if he'd acted a couple months or a couple weeks earlier or what the Chinese government or the World Health Organization did all day, but at the end of the day, it's a virus. It is a natural occurrence for which we, at this time, happened to not be well prepared on a global scale.

If you're going to be mad, be mad at the virus. Shit happens, as we used to say back in my day. The idea is to be prepared when it happens. Pretending the problem doesn't exist won't make it go away.

And blaming it on Obama (especially by means of using numerology, which the Bible considers to be sorcery and thus forbidden on pain of death) sure won't do a single damn thing to help anybody, especially if you can't do basic math because you are a fucking dumb ass. I mean, come on, among other things. Come on, Obama has been out of office and a private citizen since January of 2017. Unless you're a racist and you hate him because he's Black, there's no reason to bring him up as regards the current crisis which is going on in 2020 over three years after he left office. This crisis is the responsibility of the current President and government officials to deal with. It's just that simple.

And it's your responsibility, and mine, because we're here in this time and God or some magical woo woo is not going to save us, and there's no volcano god to throw virgins into the lake of lava to appease.

I was raised conservative. I was taught there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, a right thing and a wrong thing to believe. Broad is the road that leads to destruction. Narrow is the gate that leads to salvation.

It's to everybody's detriment that the people who used to preach that stuff forgot it, and now adorn their cars with loud demands that you defy the state government that's trying to keep you alive.

I really do hope that the Bible and all the other holy books are correct, if only because I want these fucking people to face consequences for their shit. What they are doing is wrong, and if you can't see that you're a danger to yourself and others.

I can't put it any more simply than that.