Twilight's Last Gleaming, Part One.

Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? ~The Star-spangled Banner, first stanza.

There;s something going on these days, that really bothers me.

Yet at the same time, I recognize that it has to happen.

I just hope it doesn't turn out the way I think it will.

Since the President and the Federal government have utterly failed to rise to the occasion, others, state governors mostly, are stepping in to fill the gap. Conglomerates of states are setting common policies, sharing resources, and working together. I mean, at the end of the day, somebody has to do it. At least 20 states have grouped together in four or five different pacts now, doing what the Federal government should be doing, even as the credibility of the feds takes a hit every time Donald Trump opens his mouth.

It has to be done, yet if the divisiveness from the President does not stop, if the utter lack of care about it from too many Republicans continues, this only ends one way. The problem with a country like ours...is that its government has to be worthy of being followed. I don't know how Republicans forgot this, but it is to everyone's detriment that they did.

I could very well end up dying as a citizen of a different country than the one I started out in, and I haven't moved on a permanent basis from the state I was born in, despite having traveled around the world at a couple of different points in this life. That bothers me, because I've put some time in for this country...only to see Republicans and Trump spit in the face of that service far too many times in recent years and especially in the last couple of months.

Note that I wasn't surprised, so much as angry at the scale of the betrayal.

Yet it's not just the Captain and crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, or their own mostly-older voters that "Conservatives" and Republicans are betraying, day in and day out, it's all of us, the Constitution, democracy, and the very ideas that the United States of America was founded upon. Only a Republican, at this point, could see voting my mail as "Trying to destroy democracy" especially in the middle of a pandemic where we all have to keep each other at arm's length, at least.

Only a Republican, it seems, could think up the idea that social distancing somehow involves keeping factory workers "at their machinery" by closing the break room.

Seriously, asshole, the 20th century called and would like to have some words with you, mostly a lot of profanity, and the ghosts of millions of union workers seem to be lining up with intent to punch you right in the mouth.

Left to their own devices, there are those among these fucking people who would use ideas and principles that are intended to keep people free and safe and use them to enslave all of us.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, fascism is Republicanism, and so on. Listen, I've been a union worker. I worked in a grocery store for a year and was a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers. The truth, however, is that I'd been educated about the importance of organized labor, labor laws and safety regulations well before any of that, because I had grandparents and parents and teachers and college professors who gave a shit. Did I mention that I still damned well understood the need for this stuff when I was a Republican?

We used to be the anti-slavery party, ya know.

That said, there seems to be something deeply offensive to Republicans about the fact that the vast majority of the actual heroes in this mess are not military officers like Captain Crozier, or politicians like Gretchen Whitmer or Mike DeWine (and especially not most Republican politicians, at that) but common fucking workers like the old lady that rang up my groceries at Walmart today, or the truck drivers who delivered the stuff, or all the workers scurrying around with carts and tubs to fill all the curb-side service orders....or the doctors, nurses and other educated experts whose job it is to tend to the sick and try to keep the rest of us alive through this awful crisis.

The educated and the workers are only useful to Republicans when they support shitty Republican agendas, I guess.

It seems to offend Republicans on a very deep level that we, as a people, might realize that some 27-year old Latina cashier that works in an NYC Bodega is a valuable member of society, who is to those in her immediate community probably one hell of a lot more useful than Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or Lindsey Gaham might be.

And it scares the fuck out of them, that there are those of us who think she should be paid a livable wage, or have the option of an education, or that there's those of us who think the point of America is that you are not what you were born as, but what you have it in yourself to be.

I suppose it really bothers modern Republicans that some of us were taught this stuff back when we were Republicans ourselves, before the conservative movement lost its mind and became nothing more than a vehicle for those people that we'd never have heard of if it wasn't for their disdain for the rest of us and their shitty politics.

When I woke up this morning, I saw that Dr. Phil had joined the coterie of fake doctors who are shilling for this idea of "reopening" the country when we don't have anything near the kind of comprehensive Coronavirus testing that would be needed to prevent such a program from turning into mass slaughter.

So you know, this dude isn't even a real psychologist, and licensing aside he wasn't before either. He was the kind of douchebag who helped corporations facing lawsuits try to get favorable jurors seated on juries when they got sued.

How in the hell is the fact that a job like that even exists not a cause for pitchforks and torches all by itself?

I didn't like Dr. Phil before I found that out. I've always thought he was a fake. Now we know just how fake he is.

If there's one good thing that might come out of this whole Trump mess, it's that the common person has an excellent chance of seeing that the wealthy are absolutely not worth the regard that they spent a century and a half purchasing or lying their way into having. Donald Trump did not start out as somebody who got laughed at. He earned that position.

And that, right there, is what terrifies them most of all.

Being exposed as nothing more than a bunch of corrupt buffoons in a democratic nation and a pluralistic society most likely means that the people will react accordingly and the State will have to step in and constrain their behavior, and most likely, raise their taxes.

Here's the thing, that right there is exactly what the dimwitted goons in the red hats, the Confederate flags, and the guns are for...to try to intimidate the rest of us into going along with this shit. Those people in Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and now Virginia, were their hedge against when they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar or their dick in the pool boy. It used to be, if somebody caught them at something and stood up against it they could call the cops, or the Army, but those days are mostly gone as those in professions of arms have become more accountable to the people and constrained by the law.

When the military, national governments and various emergency services, or for that matter capitalism, education, and religion or even technology, ceased to be organs solely of class and racial power in the face of changing realities on the ground and expanding requirements, they ceased to be useful to these goddamn motherfuckers and in fact became a threat to their power and wealth. You can draw direct lines between others being able to access any of that stuff and the erosion of the static power that white conservatives crave.

Do you think these fucking people spent the last couple of decades making education harder to get or promoting the glorification of selfishness through "reality" TV shows like Survivor or pushing dumb redneck shit on the rest of us a la Duck Dynasty because they like stupid people?! No, it's because these assholes need somebody else to jump on the grenade of social change...and dumb ass racist white people have always been only too happy to volunteer before.

Smart people won't do that.

And don't think that rich people don't know goddamned well what that Confederate flag stands for, either. They were willing players in the social rehabilitation of the South, which throughout the early 20th century was regarded as a brutal backwater, because Northern elites wanted it to be socially acceptable for them to hang out with Southern elites again. Why in the fuck else, really, would Woodrow Wilson have screened D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation at the White House, and why else were films like Gone With The Wind promoted so heavily? Racism is the drug they try to sell us in exchange for the wealth of lower classes, and the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism.

There are people in this country who revere Arlington National Cemetery not for the honored dead who have not died in vain who are buried there, but because it was once Robert E. Lee's slave plantation.

And they take themselves very seriously, indeed.

I don't think laughter, upraised middle fingers, and worries about the effects on public health were quite the reaction they had in mind, or what they thought that they were going to get when it really mattered.

But that's what they're getting.

And it fucking terrifies them.

So they're left with pushing harder to try to get the economy rolling again, in the hope that people will continue to buy into 40 years of Trickle-Down-Economics bullshit and vote for them in spite of everything.

Because a very sub-par virus response means that enough of us would die...including their own voters but also those they see as a threat...and they're betting on being able to squeak out some kind of demographic win on that. But even that seems like a long shot. Still, it's all they have.

And yet our Constitution and Federal system itself denies them that power, and enough people still know that for it to actually matter. And if you don't think they haven't noticed that this is their real problem, you have another thing coming. They'd rather burn America down around their ears and die in the middle of an armed anarchy than have to share with anybody.

If we want to stop this, we're going to have to step up. We're going to have to keep doing what we've been doing, social distancing, keeping on our government to do the right thing, stand up and keep standing up and we don't have the option of going back to sleep when this particular crisis is over.

The other side has made plain that they want to kill not just us, but anybody they can, not for some kind of reason but because they don't need a reason, because the cruelty is the point. If we want a better country, or even one we can all live in, we have to be better citizens and it really is that simple.

You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over a goddamn percentage. ~Ellen Ripley, Aliens

Part Two.