The False Resurrection (American Revelation III, Part Twelve.)

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. ~Matthew 6:24

It's the day after Easter.

Already, Conservatives are focused all the more obsessively on the Resurrection of their Lord.

That is, money and Wall Street. Seriously, you didn't think I was talking about Jesus, did you?!

Don't worry, their false resurrection doesn't just mean your death, although that may well come first. It has a good chance of being their deaths, too. The goddamned fools still don't get that COVID-19 is a virus and doesn't give a fuck, and that everybody is at risk.

Somebody went out and dug up Bill Bennett, Reagan Administration Secretary of Education and infamous 1990's moral scold...oh, and loser of somewhere around EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS gambling in Las Vegas in the early 1990's. I mean, unless you're an addict, how the fuck do you lose that much money at gambling and not quit?

Seriously, because one of the more socially conservative of the old ass, old-school Republicans that I used to know thought this joker was the best thing since sliced bread I've unfortunately read several of his books. To be honest, I've always thought Bill Bennett was a pompous jackass, and to be honest, I wouldn't trust his dumb son of a bitch for tips on how to play penny slots or Texas Hold 'Em much less for medical advice.

But of course he's an old Crypt-keeper looking ass white man in a suit, so to the mindset of Fox News and their viewers, he must be authoritative, right?

No, it's no longer difficult to imagine these fucking people dressed in rags and improvised loincloths dancing around a fire shouting "Bunga Bunga" and hashtags that they think are words while they wait for some decrepit Witch Doctor in a ragged suit and a red hat to come out of his cave and say a few magic words. I mean, what do you think Bill Bennett is at this point, really?

I'm honestly surprised this old fossil is still alive, much less that anybody thinks his ass is authoritative about anything. I never did, and I used to be a conservative. I never thought much of him before, and when I found out about his gambling habit, that was pretty much it for me.

Again, this is a Pandemic and it's much worse than the Flu and if you can't be arsed to care about or even notice 22,000 dead bodies, then fuck you, you literally should not be allowed to have a forum in public at all, you selfish bastard.

It should be noted, that since Trump didn't make any of the decisions regarding stay-at-home orders and social distancing, he can't unmake them, either. It's not his decision, Constitutionally he doesn't have that authority. Federalism was instituted as a firebreak against tyranny. It really is that simple.

We need comprehensive, readily available testing, contact tracing, and a ready supply of PPE before we can lift these restrictions, or a hell of a lot more people are going to die.

And if you don't think a lot of dead people will tank the economy even worse, you have another thing coming.

But of course, stuff like that doesn't matter to simple-minded far-right dipshits the world over. They just want to poke a finger in the eyes of the experts, the media, and people whose job it is to keep them from dying. Then they can gloat about being "right" and then watch as a few million more people die, because so long as it's not them dying, then they get to think they're somehow superior...until they're not and then they're just as dead as the rest of us along with a whole bunch more of their own people, and as they die they'll curse God and wonder why nobody told them they were going to die.

You were told that you would die, dumb ass, you just chose...willfully...not to listen.

I mean, seriously, does somebody have to put guns to these people's heads to get them to stop being stupid, selfish jerks?

The answer, of course, is yes. And it's exactly what they want, too. Freedom is fundamentally anathema to authoritarian dickbags and just so long as everybody else is getting stomped on by the same jackboot they'll feel validated in their shitty political and social beliefs just so they get to see somebody else get shot, or die of some perfectly well preventable condition, because the cruelty is the fucking point.

And then on top of that, there's people like Bill Bennett, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich who just can't wait to exploit fools like them. And the fools are perfectly happy to be exploited, so long as they get their biases confirmed and their ears tickled, and get to know that somebody they don't like might have it a little bit worse than they do.

I used to think the only way these people would ever get it, is if the rest of us let them have some little corner of the world, let the bodies pile up and let them hear from those who crashed garbage trucks through the gates or crawled through kilometers-deep defense zones while avoiding border guards...but then I look at the fact that there are still people who are nostalgic for East Germany or the Soviet Union for that matter. Or that we have people in this world who still revere Hitler and Nazi Germany despite their being literal symbols of human evil. When you consider that guys like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn lost because they were relying on discredited century-old Marxist theories in their electoral strategies...well, I just wonder what the fuck is wrong with people.

I guess the difference between now and when I was growing up is that at least where I was at, ignorance, prejudice, stupidity and superstition tended to be actively stigmatized, and people would point to jobs like working at McDonald's as something you didn't want to end up doing.

Of course I don't think conservatives back in the 1980's imagined that fast food or retail would ever be such large sectors of our economy, either, capital mobility literally allowed corporations to run away with the shop in the 1980's and 1990's while people like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich were pontificating about morality...and gambling or cheating on their wives when they thought nobody was looking.

And now the same fucking people are back at it again, judging what other people are doing with their time during the pandemic

You know, I'm not quite sure if these fucking people have always been shit or if it started with the apotheosis of Newt Gingrich in 1994. But I do know that this whole Trump mess is the apex of the philosophy that Newt and all those Very Serious People that wrote all those books about morality back in the 1990's espoused.

Morality for thee, Stock Dividends and Tax Cuts for me. That's Republicanism in a nutshell.

And the resurrection they espouse, trying to bring back the economy, at the hoped-for cost of your death rather than their own, is as false as their morality was 25 years ago and has been all along. People like me, who were conservatives that actually had morals just feel stupid and used all these years later.

People like Bill Bennett talk stupid, and are happy to be used to fool the feeble-minded, just so they get their money and a little bit of shitty power from the tribe.

I guess I just wasn't taught that way.

If you want to live in a better world, you have to be better people than this. Eternal life comes from compassion, not selfishness. It's just that simple. These people's false resurrection and false morality lead to death.

Yours, and theirs. You get to go first, though.

But there's a few simple ways to solve this problem.

Don't fall for this crap! Look at what people do, not what they say!

Show the fuck up, and pay attention!

and...

VOTE!

If it sounds simple, it's because it usually is. The Truth, whether literal or spiritual, is often simple. Man makes it complicated, because he does not want to obey.

But, in the Christian tradition that I was taught, Man cannot save Man, only God can do that.

If you see Trump as your Salvation, you're going to hell. If you see these people and their false resurrection of Mammon as the Truth, I can't help you and I've no longer any wish to try.

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. ~Revelation 9:1

Part Eleven.