Beast Of War (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Four)

Two days past eighteen
He was waiting for the bus in his Army greens
Sat down in a booth in a cafe there
Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair
He's a little shy so she give him a smile
So he said would you mind sittin' down for a while
And talking to me, I'm feeling a little low
She said I'm off in an hour and I know where we can go
So they went down and they sat on the pier
He said I bet you got a boyfriend but I don't care
I got no one to send a letter to
Would you mind if I sent one back here to you
~Travelin' Soldier, The Dixie Chicks.

I sit here, day by day, watching things get worse, I feel like it's impossible for me to articulate how I feel or what's going on in my head to anybody who doesn't share some of my life experience, but I swear, I will try.

Yesterday I watched far-right thugs scream at Michigan State Police Troopers and menace my State's senators from the senate gallery. As the virus ravages the entire country, I know, state by state, this keeps happening as some on the far-right, and wealthy conservatives in particular are violently opposed to the social distancing measures and partial economic shutdowns that have been vital to saving so many people's lives. They know they can't reopen the economy, they know there's no fucking way mass death would not destroy things even more than the virus has if they did. They know this.

It's not that they don't care, they care very much.

Not that people will die, mind you, these fucking sociopaths consider that part of the cost of doing business. They count on it, truth be told. Death and misery used to drive their profit margins in the days before a workplace accident could get you sued into oblivion. It's for that same reason that we had sixty years of labor struggles before economic collapse and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal encoded into custom, law and the social contract a whole shit-ton of things that every single American of all political stripes and every color and creed takes for granted today. Like the Unemployment Insurance that's enabling me to go on living much as I always have, and maybe even a little better truth be told, so I can contribute to the economy and do my part to keep something going, at least.

But they want the deaths.

And while I'm at it, throw in a hundred years of Civil Rights struggles, following the Civil War. American Capitalism as it has existed for my whole life couldn't make it without People of Color, or women, or LGBT folks being given more of a stake. These fucking people hate that. Hell, Pot Heads are a pretty big driver of the active parts of my state's economy right now! And oh yes, these fucking people care very much about that. Not the guy who's screaming at the cop while wearing a pot-leaf shirt...but the people who put him there.

It is utterly impossible to overstate how much Republicans in general, and wealthy hard-right social conservatives like the DeVos family in particular, hate and resent the idea that Americans, and people of all colors and creeds especially are sitting at home safely social distancing, happy and well-fed and able to eat whatever they want, have sex, practice their own religions by social distancing, smoke weed, etc. etc.

They want you to die, if possible, they want to profit from your death, and lots of these fucking people hate that capitalism itself requires for its own survival that other people get a share. Capitalism as they see it, should be for them. Non-wealthy white conservatives can be the people who get a little share, who get to be the government officials and the middle management and the cops and the soldiers and stuff, everybody else...including not-sufficiently-conservative-enough Whites gets serfdom or sharecropping at best, and "Eat shit and die" at worst.

Hell, Scott Walker came right out and said it. To These Fucking People, "Social Distancing" means shutting down the break room and making you stay at your work station. I bet if they could, they'd chain you there, and give you a bucket to piss in. The way people like Betsy DeVos and Scott Walker see it; All the ideologically-wrong people, and people who (whatever their politics) worked their way up within living memory are the people who are making money off of the pandemic. Or the people who will bow to public pressure, or give customers what they want instead of putting a gun to their heads and telling them they'll eat their moldy bread and thin gruel and like it.

And there's people in my state that are like "HELL YEAH! Sign me up!" and I'm sitting here like "What the fuck?"

And there is a non-zero chance that I know at least one motherfucker who's been to one of these stupid "protests."

You'll notice that for all the noise they're making, these "Protests" are only in general attracting a few hundred to a couple thousand people at a time. And that's exactly why these fucking people are so freaked out. The last thing they want is for people to see Democratic or Progressive policies work and make their lives better. The Republican narrative of Sol Que Put (Save himself who can) and the authority that they feel it gives them is suddenly in jeopardy because guess what? New Deal democratic policy is probably the only thing right now that's keeping the bottom from totally dropping out of the economy, among other things.

When people are hungry, or stressed, or things are going badly, they don't vote Republican.

There are no hordes in the streets and mass protests of people demanding we reopen the economy. It's a few hundred idiots blocking access to a hospital and some idiot screaming at a cop who doesn't even care. I have a family friend who's a retired State Troop. Bob at some point did a tour as a State Police Academy drill instructor, and after that he was always the guy who's job it was to break in the 'Cubs', the new Troopers. His mother once got pulled over and tried to drop his name to get out of it. It turned out the Troop, who'd been one of Bob's students, took particular glee in writing that ticket. I have some idea from what kind of person he was what kind of training those guys get. If Cannabis Shirt there knew what he was potentially screwing with he'd not have acted like that. More to the point, social distancing is pretty damned popular with those of us who don't wanna die, right now. I quite suspect that  Cannabis Shirt guy set himself up for a lifetime of free knuckle sandwiches from random people, getting pulled over by the cops, and public mockery.

Funny thing, but these fucking people don't seem to even notice the rest of us, much less care what we might do. And I'm serious as a heart attack when I say this, but these fucking people collectively have a paste-up stereotyped image of the rest of us, liberals. moderates, never-Trump conservatives, non-Christians and People Of Color alike that hasn't got one fucking thing to do with reality.

They basically think they're going to kill us, and we're just going to roll over and take it. In their fantasies, they're the protagonists of reality and everybody else shoots like the Imperial Storm troopers in the original Star Wars trilogy, or begs for mercy, or tries to run away. Granted, they also have a whole bunch of beliefs about themselves that have nothing to do with reality. They think they're some kind of righteous Christian Warriors, manly, virile, somehow anything but some fat middle-aged guy screaming at a cop who in damn near any other circumstance would've fucked him up. More to the point, these fucking people see decency, politeness, restraint and hell, obedience to lawful orders and rules of engagement as weakness. Why else do you think they lionize murderers like Eddie Gallagher or lying shitheads like Mike Flynn?

And they're so snowed under by the constant barrage of Trump bullshit, that that's all they can see. I'm fucking serious, none of the Trump Supporters I know anymore can give you an actual reason why they like him. Many will just say that they do and that's that.

There's no way to argue with that. You have to let it run smack into reality and let them take the consequences and see for themselves...and be aware it may take multiple times of this.

The smartest thing anybody could have fucking done here was send in an Army National Guard rifle company and watch these fuckers piss themselves when facing down armed soldiers, disarm every last one of these assholes and then send them the fuck home wearing big fucking signs that say "I am a moron." Send them their weapons back via FedEx or UPS since they don't like the postal service. And send them cash on delivery and disassembled. I'll bet you ten bucks 90% of these goddamn fools who could come up with the cash to pay the FedEx guy wouldn't know how to reassemble them. More to the point, it'd be a lesson on living in what the kind of world they think they want is really like. Of course "Do this now or we shoot you" is what they imagine themselves saying.

They simply cannot imagine that authority and force go both ways, because they're stupid, and because stupid people on the other side tend to let these motherfuckers commit crimes and violence before responding appropriately.

If you let people do stupid shit, they're going to keep doing stupid shit. Well guess what? In the case of this COVID-19 shit, that could kill us all by itself.

But complete idiocy never stopped people from doing dumb shit before. And that's what the rich assholes are counting on. These fucking people want to bring about an apocalypse on the off chance that they can come out the other side having erased the gains others have made for the past 170 years and manage to preserve their own power.

So the letters came from an army camp in California, then Vietnam
And he told her of his heart
It might be love and all of the things he was so scared of
He said when it's getting kinda rough over here
I think of that day sittin' down at the pier and I close my eyes and see your pretty smile
Don't worry but I won't be able to write for a while

I cried
Never gonna hold the hand of another guy, too young for him they told her
Waitin' for the love of a travelin' soldier. Our love will never end
Waitin' for the soldier to come back again
Never more to be alone when the letter says, a soldier's coming home. ~Travelin' Soldier, The Dixie Chicks.

 In this series, I've written about my own certainty of what would happen and my nagging sense of dread that I felt after 9/11. I knew...I knew from personal experience and what I'd seen with my own eyes what would happen.

I saw photos and videos of BUFFS flying lazy orbits in a clear blue sky over Afghanistan, just waiting for somebody to call in a strike. Somewhere there'd be a tactical control party with Air Force security forces troops, Marines or Special Operations...or fuck, maybe some of Massoud's Northern Alliance guys protecting it that was gonna call in a strike on some bunch of illiterate goons with AK-47's. RPG-7's and the odd mortar here and there and within a few minutes a couple of A-10 Thunderbolt II's would come screaming in, fire off a couple of Mavericks from about ten clicks away and maybe dart in low and strafe the position with their GAU-8 30mm Cannons for good measure. Or maybe a couple of sticks of Mark 117 bombs would just fall out the sky and blow these bearded, drug-addled goat-fuckers and their position straight into Allah's arms and wouldn't that be an awkward conversation you'd like to be a fly on the wall for? 

For all the goddamned good it ever did anybody.

This has been life for some people for...what...going on nineteen years now and we're still there and they're still fighting and the standard of living for all too many Afghans has improved only incrementally...yet that's still a hell of an improvement over what life under the Taliban was. These wars have created so many veterans...and modern medical science and casualty evacuation made sure so many of the wounded survived...that the Department of Veterans Affairs and its medical system (underfunded by the Republicans who got us into the wars) can't handle it. You know how many free meals that I've gotten that I wanted to throw back in the face of whoever decided I should get them? All of them. Don't call us heroes, give us decent health care. Don't tell us how great we are, get better diplomats and politicians so nobody gotta go to war in the first goddamn place. I never saw combat, but I saw what it did to my friends who went over there.

War. Sucks. 

Anybody who'll ever tell you anything else is a fool, a liar or a sociopath

Those fuckers up there menacing my state's Senators, they ain't no heroes, they're the goddamned Taliban, only without anything I can recognize as religion. Fuck, to be honest I'd take the Taliban over these guys. At least if you got captured by the Taliban you'd get a fucking toothbrush.

And I've known Muslim people for most of my life. Hell, I've met people from Afghanistan. Comparing these motherfuckers to the Taliban is insulting. For the fucking Taliban.

And no, I don't believe their claims of religiosity either. People who follow the Old Ways don't act like this. I'm not joking when I say that I'd take the word of the most hardened member of the Haqqani Network or the Taliban over "Phil Odinson" and let me tell you why.

I was against the Iraq War. Not least because I felt like it wasn't necessary and we should probably finish what we'd started in Afghanistan first. I more or less by default ended up in the rather short-term peace movement that came about because of opposition to that war. I was far from the only conservative who was one of those people at the time, too. It made for some strange bedfellows. One of the people who I'd managed to drag along on my opposition to the war was my conservative Evangelical partner for whom I'd later move down here. But anyway, I was taking a class on nonviolence that semester, and so were a couple of the Muslim students that I was friends with. One of the other students was a Marine Corps veteran who had also been a boxer at some point. We all made an interesting contrast to the more typical hippie type student who had this kind of class...or this particular professor. Jim Norgaard taught a slew of history classes, ranging from fairly straight world history to kind of out there crunchy stuff like "Celts and Nature" or this nonviolence class I was in. Because of that course I went to several peace protests, and briefly met Michael Moore once. Anybody wonders why I don't like the guy, there you go. 

Anyway, when major combat operations began over the 19th-20th of March, the mood was pretty bleak and some people took it really hard, even though there wasn't much hope of cooler heads prevailing anyway. A couple people got really mad.

One of them, though...

There was this kid, Ikram, who was from some of the wilder northern parts of Pakistan, Computer nerd working on that kind of degree, quiet, one of the more devout of the small group of Muslim students. He didn't really socialize much, but he was more or less attached to somebody who did. Her name was Sondra, a cute little black girl from the Detroit area who was the only American in the little Muslim student group. She was one of the people in my nonviolence class.

He didn't take the whole situation well, and was angry enough to want to fight about it, though he looked like the type who'd never been in a fight in his life. He got into a shoving match with this other kid, simply because the kid had a brother that was in the Army who was deployed over there. Me and Sondra broke it up, talked the other kid out of turning him in and then spent the rest of the night talking Ikram down and trying to get him to calm down and ultimately extracting a promise from him that he'd talk to Cliff, the school's mental health guy, and not get into any fights.. I'll be honest, I'd seen some people pretty damn mad, but I'd never seen somebody that damned angry before. Somehow, the story did get out, nothing came of it, except a brief "holy shit" moment the next week from the rest of the class directed at me and Sondra. They were proud of us I think, but didn't make a big deal of it.

Ikram pretty much went back to his quiet self after that, and for the rest of the semester at least he didn't cause any trouble. He told me later, in one of our few conversations, that honor demanded he keep the promise that he made to us even though sometimes he didn't want to. After the school year was over he went back to Pakistan, and from what I heard later via Yahoo messenger from some of the students who talked to him he'd decided to continue his studies somewhere else. I don't know how that turned out.

But I do know that we could reach that kid, and he kept his word.

I'm sorry to say this, but I don't have much faith that a lot of Americans could do that, especially racist assholes like Phil Odinson.

They are determined to go out and fight somebody, or more likely just shoot some unsuspecting innocent person in the back and call it a great victory, or blow up a police car with an I.E.D. or try to kill somebody in an ambush. I've spent fucking years, deliberately going after this shit from a conservative viewpoint, because I know that's the only way some of these people will hear it, and it's getting to the point where I don't want to try anymore. I'm tired, tired and angry, because no matter what, if you talk to these stupid rage monkeys, five minutes after you leave they're right back at it. 

I'm angry because these fucking people are being egged on by once fairly typical conservative talking heads like Laura Ingraham. I mean come on, Retweeting VDARE? What the fuck? 

Here's the thing about those Burmese workers, notice the "faith based organization" bit? Those people are Burmese Christians or Rohingya Muslims, basically exactly the kind of people that you'd think Betsy DeVos, Jerry Falwell Jr Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson would be all about bringing over here. Christians and conservative non-Christians, and they'll do nasty low-wage work that white Americans won't do? Seems like that is exactly the kind of "Transformation" that conservatives would want...if they believed in any of the things they said they did. I mean, seriously, I'M not a conservative or a Christian anymore and I'd be fine with it. I'll talk Bible stuff or Islamic theology with these people all day. Somebody just might learn something! Good chance it would be me. Yeah, I'll admit it, I care about knowledge for a selfish reason, I like to learn new things, interact with people who don't necessarily agree with me...so long as there's a good-faith effort on both sides...and encounter different cultures. That makes us all stronger. Republicans used to get that! Those were the people who taught me this stuff! America is a melting pot! In a different era, the Iowa Republican Party and, say, either Bush GOP would have damned well made sure to send people to speak at their churches or Mosque, get them to start the process to get their citizenship and do its level best to turn both groups into loyal Republican voters while actively using the Muslim ones as a stick with which to beat Daesh and the Taliban, and it would almost certainly have worked. 

But that's not who they are anymore, and the world is probably worse off for it.

It's like I once told one of the cleaning contractors at work...you're a Republican, right? If whether or not Michigan went blue or red in a Presidential election or your choice of Senator got elected or what have you might come down to a few hundred Syrian refugees who just got their citizenship in Detroit, or a couple hundred Lebanese folks in Grand Rapids who've been there forever...well, you'd want to cultivate those people as your voters, wouldn't you?

And cultivating Republicans of Color is important, because that's how you get more of them, new ideas, stronger. I told him, and this was in 2018, that Republicans like John James were important, because hey, the "Left" would have a harder time calling ya'll racist if you'd run a Republican rainbow nation ticket, wouldn't they? I told him about how African Christians tended to be...well, to be honest, more conservative in a lot of ways than even really exists in the United States. 

We've been having these discussions for years.

He's not stupid, he's from the next town over from the one my Mom lives in, and we know a lot of the same people all over the state because his company also contracts for a lot of the same restaurants that I've worked in at different times. He's not dumb, he knows right from wrong, and he's never come off as being particularly racist.

That said, he'd definitely kind of sheltered in a very-rural America sort of way.

Because this guy is a fairly serious politically-conservative mainstream Christian (Reformed theology and serious enough that he was just as mad about Sarah Palin as I was in 2008) I put it like this. "Make it so that anybody who accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior can join the Republican Party regardless of race or anything, same with any non-Christian religious person who can accept being around that, and treat them all the same, and have a consistent morality. Don't pull this racist crap they're throwing at Obama. Do the opposite. This guy talks like he's a Republican some of the time. Use that. Hell, use Shrub there as an example, but cut out the dumb mistakes and get us out of Iraq, and you'll hardly ever lose an election again. Run on, not against the health care stuff and ya'll could be the next FDR and there ain't shit the Democrats could do about it."

He got it, when I put it that way.

Politics is supposed to be a game of addition, not subtraction. 

The GOP used to understand that, and used to do this this whenever they thought they'd have a shot at cultivating a constituency, Arab Christians in Michigan and Ohio, Cubans in Florida, Koreans and Vietnamese in California...and it often worked. Where in the fuck do you think they got Darrell Issa, or for that matter, Justin Amash?

Oh, wait...

But it hasn't been about any of that for at least a decade, and for all too many Republicans that were below the radar in my time, far longer, or it never was about Christ, or conservatism as a philosophy at all. Like I said, that's not who they are anymore.

One Friday night at a football game
The Lord's Prayer said and the anthem sang
A man said folks would you bow your head
For the list of local Vietnam dead
Crying all alone under the stands
Was the piccolo player in the marching band
And one name read and nobody really cared
But a pretty little girl with a bow in her hair 

~Travelin' Soldier, The Dixie Chicks.

Now they'd rather kill you because they've bought into the ideas of far-right rich people who think everything is a zero sum game, and if they simply kill you, there will be more for them.

And for reasons I can't fathom, there are people supposedly on the other side who are willing to help them with this.

And for what? So that you can be further back in line when the questions get to "Who will be eaten first?"

I'll never fucking get it. I'll never get how so many Americans became so...anti-American, I guess. I have no other way to say it. Is your own freedom...or ours...really worth so little? Is it just that much more important to be "right" or feel good about yourself than it is to live in a functioning country with a functioning government or even to have your own life and freedom?

I don't know when or how this is going to go down, but I can give you an idea or two of where it might start, and who's going to start it. The thing that actually scares me is that the Anti-vaccine bullshit, MAGA, and an End Times narrative completely emptied of any reference to or reverence for God or Jesus appear to be slowly melding into a new religion, with Trump as its presumptive god, racism as its redemptive son, and whiteness as its holy spirit. Then they'll want to have a holy war in the middle of a pandemic, just like the fucking Taliban started a Jihad in the middle of a civil war. 

And it'll be a war of 20 years or more just to contain it, because teaching people to have a brain in their heads or that peace is preferable to war or to love thy neighbor instead of wanting to shoot them is just too goddamned hard. It'll be Afghanistan in Appalachia and Najaf in Nevada if we ain't real damned careful. Arc Light strikes on the Blue Ridge, Wart Hogs rolling in with Mavericks and 30mm cannon shells on the deserts of western Washington, HC-130 Hercules and P-3 Orions backing up Coast Guard cutters hunting for pirates on the Great Lakes and all..

And I fucking guarantee you they'll kill and persecute Christians right along with everybody else. And the innocent will die with the rest of us. Like I said, war sucks.

And there's people, supposed "Progressives" and cowed Republicans, that are just going to stand there and let this happen?

The cruelty, death, and evil are the fucking point. But when the real shit happens, lots of Republicans and most of their donors are probably going to start looking for non-extradition countries to go to.

Something is coming, I think Republicans are going to try to bring about the destruction of the United States either actively or passively, so that they can break off a piece for themselves, in the middle of a pandemic. There's too many Americans against them for them to succeed at taking the whole country. Though like I said the real architects and beneficiaries of this will do their best to be as far away as possible when they might be at risk. Whether this happens after the election, or even before it, I cannot say because I do not know. It's just this feeling I have.

These people would rather face the apocalypse than equality and rather burn the world than pay higher taxes or see Brown people get a fair share. Chances are excellent that they're going to lose the election, and they'd rather all die than face the consequences of that...just so they take us with them. The thing is, all they have to do is say "Follow me" and at least a few million people certainly will.

If we've learned anything in the last 20 years it's that a few hundred guys with AK-47's and I.E.D.'s can tie the United States Armed Forces in knots for damned near 20 years. Now instead of the Haqqani Network, the Mahdi Army or the Taliban, imagine it's the Boogaloo Brigade or the Trump Apocalypse Army.

Conservatism is far more now the Turner Diaries than Atlas Shrugged, let alone the Bible.

War. Sucks.

That's where this is headed if things don't change. Yeah, most of these idiots won't last five minutes, but the ones that do will learn fast, combat is about as Darwinian of a learning environment as it's possible to have.

Because an Apocalypse is what these people want, and they're going to get it if we don't ALL stand up and stop them first.

And if we want to even try to prevent that apocalypse it's going to come down to a fight eventually.

I wish I could tell you something different or better than that.

But I can't.

Part Three.
Part Five.