Twilight's Last Gleaming, Part Three.

Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way. 
~Ronald Reagan.

I saw this yesterday. A sign held up by a pro-virus protester in Ohio, saying that Jews are the real plague with a visual depicting them as rats.

We fought a war about this, and the Nazis fucking lost. You ever notice that whether it's Confederate flags or Swastikas, the only flags of defeated regimes that people keep flying are the racist ones? 

I've never seen anybody still flying an Imperial German or South Vietnamese flag, the only times I've seen a Soviet flag being flown since 1991 was in a video of a march by veterans of the Red Army who fought in their Afghanistan war.

Yet American racists fly the Confederate flag all the time, the far-right uses the Swastika as a symbol and before he went and shot those people in that church in Charleston, Dylan Roof was using the Rhodesian flag as a symbol.

And of course, in the last few years these motherfuckers have dusted off the Nazi playbook from the 1930's. I used to be a conservative, to me, signs like this, damned near straight out of Nazi Germany, are a synonym for human evil, And I'm sure they would deny it, but in the end their goals are the same.

And then you can throw in the accelerationists, the preppers, the religious fanatics and the rich people who all think they're going to get something out of a potential collapse of civilization. Too bad if Grandpa can't get his blood pressure medication, there's ideological fantasies to be masturbated to and profits to be made. Fuck you if you just want to survive long enough to go back to work or plant a nice new flower bed, though.

If you ever wonder why the "Kill all normies" internet nihilism of the last 20 years was a bad idea, well here you go. Functionally, these are the internet fanatics, and now they see their chance to kill the rest of us.

Never again, as they say, is now.

I wasn't kidding the other day, when I said "Imagine the logistics of trying not to get the virus when you've been shot." 

As we all learned from the situation aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, it is impossible to socially distance in the military, in any situation like that, it just works out that people are basically living in each other's pockets the whole time because no matter how you try and hack it you've got hundreds or maybe even thousands of people living and working in very close quarters in very small areas, not to mention fighting and bleeding on each other.

Hell, while I'm at it many civilian workplaces are the same. I work in a kitchen. If one person gets the flu, chances are we'll all get it.

Now do you want to tell me what we're all going to end up doing for a living if these fucking idiots decide they're going to keep at this stupid bullshit and have their own little redneck idiot wannabe-fascist revolution?

The only people who profit will be the coffin makers and weapons manufacturers.

Best case scenario, those of us too old to fight and not needed in some other essential job but still capable of working? We'll all be standing six feet apart making bandages and bullets and basic stuff that people need on an assembly line or digging graves or growing food in the hot sun somewhere.

Worst case, we'll be sneezing on each other's shoulders. 

Why? Because most likely nobody will have enough space, given these fanatics lack of basic humanity, do not be surprised if they leave large areas of land simply uninhabitable just to use refugees and the virus as a weapon to grind down the other factions.

It's not just that, though. As the military, law enforcement agencies and hell, even corporations and other groups of people come apart as each element thereof decides which side it's on or if they want to just go along with the people wherever they're located or with whatever new government or company will pay them, and what about personnel transfers and prisoner exchanges, or refugees from areas controlled by "Pro-Virus" forces? 

There will be a new wave of viral infections every time new people show up.

And do you want to take a guess what the effects on the health care providers themselves, much less medical research and stuff like that will be? 

Medical professionals and various other experts are already having a bad time of it, and civilization is still for the most part intact despite right-wing efforts to make it otherwise. And what happens to the health of people, much less our institutions and society if these goddamned fools start actively targeting those people with more than conspiracy theories and harsh language.

Don't think it won't happen. I'm serious. If you don't think there's people who'd kill doctors and nurses because Jesus or because something something Communism, you ain't been paying attention.

And that's before you consider racial and religious animus, and how those social cancers tend to thrive among the willfully ignorant. 

Want to take a stab at what the breakdown of civilization will do to education levels? Trust me, I've met people from Afghanistan and some of the wilder regions of Pakistan. Imagine wanting to get an education, and living somewhere, where you have to go to another country to get one, or having to join the military to get the education and technical training to even have a shot at doing that successfully?

Now imagine knowing that you're intelligent, and being of the wrong gender or group or whatever to have a shot at getting out. Think about that. Let this bullshit go on long enough and a lot of people are going to learn the hard way how the other [global] half lives.

Consider the rates of drug abuse and suicide when people find out that living in a cave with your gun and your Bible, eating survival taco meat and shitting on their own shoes isn't nearly as grand as they thought it would be.

There are people who hunger for the fall of civilization. They see this as their chance, either because of nihilism, hate, homicidal desires or tribalism, and lots of these people see the rest of us as just getting in the way. Look at all the Republicans who came out of the woodwork last month basically advocating for a genocide of old people, just to get the economy restarted. Yeah, think about that for a second.

Rich people like Betsy DeVos or Donald Trump think they're going to exploit this murderous, ridiculous bullshit for fun and politics and profit. Not just the virus itself, but the sheer number of guns in the hands of idiots means this situation will very quickly get away from them. It's hard to be rich, when all the sudden money isn't worth anything.

Consider Trump's strange daily meltdowns, as this situation day in and day out fails to morph into something that's favorable to him. There's some of these people who, when it doesn't turn out some way that they like, are gonna do more than have a childish tantrum and yell at reporters. Sooner or later, this mess is going to get down to somebody who will do something more destructive than just be an incompetent dumbass, and that has been destructive enough.

Now imagine what these people might do with a competent sociopath or somebody who had actual leadership qualities...

So far, these fucking people, their idiocy, insanity, misspelled signs, toxic racism and weapons fetish are, for the most part, being met with upraised middle fingers, laughter, and worries about the spread of the virus.

But these people were made this dumb and fanatical and fearful on purpose, because selfish rich people who believe in a selfish shitty god that represents little more than their own wealth and power.

If these bleating fucking sheep have come unglued this fast, are they going to be protesting that democracy and elections themselves, not to mention education and public health, are tools of the "New world order" by November?!

There are too many people who simply will do what it takes to survive, or who care about their own lives and self-interest now that they face a real threat, for Republicans to successfully stage some kind of a takeover. If Wisconsin is any kind of an indicator, there's enough people who are willing to stand up to stop this mess, at least in a lot of places. But in some, there simply aren't. 

It's a safe bet that places where social distancing and stuff are not being taken seriously are going to be devastated by the virus. Whatever demographic advantage people like Trump think they're going to get out of letting this thing run hog-wild is likely going to prove as illusory as their own beliefs about their personal power and safety are.

But I'll caution against letting that go to your head, because the size of this country and distribution of people and belief systems means these assholes will almost certainly get power somewhere...and a pro-virus section of the country works about as well for the rest of us as a smoking section in a restaurant does. 

Just the existence of normal secular anti-vaccine people and conspiracy theorists makes this situation incredibly more dangerous. The fact that there are religious fanatics and white supremacists with violent fantasies who have incorporated that kind of shit into their belief systems about a very real crisis that doesn't have a lot of room for fake bullshit and fantasy makes it even worse, and, as it always has been before, I'm afraid that racism will be the fuel that causes a conflagration from even the smallest spark, and the privileged assholes really do not care if they burn along with the rest of us.

I'm not sure what we're going to do, but the rest of us better think of something, and fast.

Part Two.

We really need to stop doing this to ourselves.


Part Four.