Racist Babylon (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Sixteen)

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. ~Revelation 18:1-5

I watched Obama's Commencement speech to the class of 2020 the other night, and before that I saw clips of his college commencement speech for HBCU students, in which criticized Trump.

And then this morning I woke up and one of the first thing I saw was this; Karl Rove, of all fucking people, calling Obama's HBCU commencement speech a political drive-by shooting. No, motherfucker. No. You know what was a political drive-by shooting you racist Poindexter? What your racist ass did to John McCain in South Carolina in the 2000 Republican primaries, that's what. Fuck you! Go to hell!

Yeah, I volunteered for Bush 43's campaign but you know what? Before that, I was (along with my retired Naval Aviator grandfather) all in on supporting John McCain. (Fun fact: By 2008 neither one of us would vote for McCain.) The only reason I supported Bush was that I thought Al Gore sucked more than he did. I didn't really become an enthusiastic Bush guy until I saw him step up to the plate after 9/11 and that, unfortunately, was an effect that would not last.

I was a fairly dedicated moderate Republican, dedicated enough to certain conservative principles (but aware enough of my own self-interest) that I'd vote for somebody else if I thought they made their case better or they appealed to my values. Bush ultimately broke my Republicanism.

I was a conservative, both politically and theologically, most people are not, including lots of people who claim that label.

Now, the question is, would anybody support these motherfuckers, or have at any point, if it wasn't for 20 years of constant appeals to racism, sexism, and white male grievance in general over the last 20 years?

The (itself fairly elitist) "I'd rather have a beer with Bush than with Gore" anti-elitism of 2000 has today morphed into outright worship of a gold-plated real-estate asshole who (unlike Bush, who I could actually see having a beer with somebody) has nothing but contempt for his own followers, for his own government, and damn near everything else, and Trump doesn't even drink beer!

And I cannot help but think that the reason for it is that Trump will talk bad about brown people, when even after 9/11, Bush wouldn't.

I'm going to be honest, I don't understand how the overarching Republican contempt for literally everything at this point doesn't get these fucking people punched in the face more often.

Of course, part of the problem with that, is that all too often, these fucking people don't interact with people who do not earn the label of "These fucking people" enough for that to happen. Of course, on the other hand that's going to be a problem for them if the virus gets all that much worse and they're the ones not being safe, practicing social distancing and wearing masks. I saw yesterday that 83% of Florida's COVID-19 fatalities have been people over 65. I can't help but think that's going to have a lot of second-order effects. And before anybody thinks they or their politics or their side is going to benefit, having a hell of a lot of dead bodies to deal with creates a whole new list of problems besides the simple loss of life. Even without Coronavirus, lots of corpses around is itself a disease vector.

But don't worry, the conspiracy theorist set has an answer for that too, if this article that I saw yesterday is to be believed!

Alex Jones came right out and said, if there are food shortages due to Coronavirus, that's Okay. He'll just kill and eat his neighbors!

And people wonder why I think the white Trump Supporting conservatives are going to end up being the people dancing around the fire shouting "Bunga Bunga" while they wait for the witch doctor to come out of his hut to lead the tribe in prayer to Red Hat Man before they consume the burned corpse of some poor traveler that they've impaled on a rusted piece of Rebar just above the fire.

They''re reaching that point already and civilization hasn't even collapsed yet.

In a time when the truth is what's needed more than ever, when acting based on facts and reality is required to improve one's chances of survival, these idiots are looking at the President and shouting "Lie To Me!"

Would they have been doing the same if this thing had hit when Bush or Obama were still in power? Especially considering that both of them to one degree or another supported and in fact stressed pandemic preparedness?

The thing that I don't get is, this is a known problem that's been something Americans were talking about and conservatives were even prepared for and had solutions in mind for, for upwards of a generation.

And now because we have that incompetent Orangutan in office, they're just going to try and let it ride and see how many people they can kill or how much they can lie and how much their idiotic followers will just take it?

And of course, belief in truth (or not) itself became nothing more to these people than a culture-war virtue signal years ago. Republicans simply stopped believing in anything that didn't benefit them.


To put it another way, this could cause conservatives to forfeit the "Culture Wars" because they all died. Who wins the collapse of civilization resulting from millions of deaths?

I get that destruction is these people's goal, what I don't get is how they became so obsessed with self-destruction. A virus will kill you whether you believe in it or not.

Like I keep trying to tell people, COVID-19 is a virus, it doesn't give a fuck about you.

I'm not sure if they have simply become this evil and stupid because conservatism became like some kind of nutty Pentecostal church and these fucking people were constantly trying to one-up each other for 25 years or if the truth is that they were collectively this evil all along, but some of them had the sense not to show it.

I don't know how there isn't anybody left in the country besides Republicans who doesn't understand that whether or not we get Trump and his enablers and followers out of power is an existential issue for not only America itself but for many millions of its citizens. Racism didn't spring up out of the ground because of Donald Trump. Trump got elected because of racism. Alex Jones didn't become a person who would, according to his own words, kill and eat other human beings because of COVID-19. He was already that way.

I'm not the one telling you that Republicans are on track to become creepy, incestuous, racist cannibals.if civilization collapses. They're the ones telling you that by their actions and even their own words right now, and we still have at least a partially functioning civilization.. I'm just the guy who actually decided to write it down.

I'm just saying, anybody other than an infamous, wealthy white man like Donald Trump acting the way he is doing toward his own daughter in these pictures would almost certainly these days merit at least a call to child protective services. Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump here have more 'public displays of affection' going on than I did with quite a few girlfriends. More to the point if I had a daughter that age, and she was acting that way with boys her own age that she wasn't related to, questions would be asked, and the talk would be had, again. I'm all for people being able to do what they want, but there's still certain lines that should not be crossed, for a lot of reasons, including genetics.


There is a precedent, though, this kind of crap happened all the time in the classical era of the ancient world, Egypt and Rome were full of this kind of perversion, and in fact Egyptian royal families were pretty explicit about keeping power within the family, even if it meant that the Pharaoh's wife was also his sister. While the Greeks had (at least from a conservative Christian point of view) shall we say...other issues...an awful lot of their gods and goddesses were related. The pages of the Bible and the writings of the early Church Fathers direct a lot of energy...and for that matter a lot of neurotic hatred...at the sexual customs of the time. This is the root of modern Christian hatred for LGBT people. Bisexuality was very common, and while there's nothing wrong with that, among the upper classes, incest was pretty common too...and that is a problem, as much for morality as modern science. It was in fact just as bad if not even worse in post-Roman dark ages Christian Europe and throughout the Middle Ages. But then when you factor in that up until at least the twelfth century even the average European king or noble stood a good chance of being an illiterate dumb ass, I suppose it makes a perverse kind of sense. In the modern day, nobody cares that Nero was likely gay, our world however was in part shaped...and for the worse...by the fact that lots of European royals were crazy inbred motherfuckers. Do you see the difference?

Somehow, I don't see how these idiots believe Donald Trump, the thrice-married adulterer, is a paragon of the Christian ideal of monogamous heterosexual lifelong marriage nor of sexual morality and probity, but it seems like these people are regressing, on s certain level, and in a world as changing and complex as our own, that's a threat to everybody, not just them.

And what's worse is there's an awful lot of idiot white people out there, men in particular, who see the perversion and the wealth they imagine goes with it as their due.

Some people want to live in a world where their king has the power to fuck his daughter, and no one has the right to care. I don't want to live in that kind of world.

A lot of people don't see sex as fun, or as a matter of love or passion or even procreation, but as a means of expressing power. What kind of sex you get to have and with whom isn't a matter of who you like and your preferences, so much as it's a matter of showing how powerful you are and convincing other men to go along.

I mean, you can see the difference in how Barack and Michelle Obama acted toward each other and how Donald and Melania Trump act. Michelle is clearly a loved and valued partner in the shared enterprise that is the Obama family and that feeling is reciprocated.

Melania Trump, on the other hand, is an adornment to Donald Trump in public and I've heard they don't even associate with each other much outside of that context, and she clearly regards not only him but everything else around her as some sort of inconvenience or an object of bitchy disdain.

How the fuck do people even live like this?

Some assholes see every aspect of life as a means to try and show their power...rather than just, ya know, live. Just like some people apparently would rather hate than have food to eat. And some people don't care if the wealthy use this against them to increase their power or wealth.

People keep trying to tell me that these fools and those who support them don't know that they're evil and stupid. I disagree. I think they know exactly how evil and hypocritical and stupid they are. They just don't care.

There's a key difference between Trump Supporters and other or previous political movements in the United States. MAGA doesn't see itself as a political movement, MAGA sees itself as a tribe. Does racism factor in to this? Or into these people's behavior? Certainly, but it's not just that.

They want an America where your class, your ethnicity, your politics, your race, what your parents did and who they were all factor together to determine what you can and can't do. It's basically like segregation, or like the 19th century, or perhaps more properly like Afghanistan. Only they want it so you can't get out of the system by simply moving, running away or excelling to the point where the system has to accept you anyway. These people don't want less social change...they want to engineer it so they can have power forever and never be challenged.

That's pretty anti-American if you ask me. I was raised on the idea that if you were an American or you had the guts and grit to get here, you could do whatever you had the capability to do and should be judged accordingly. To me, there should have been no such thing as the idea that a black person or a woman couldn't be President. These fucking people are people who have trouble believing that a Native American (or any other non-white person) could be an American whether they were born here or not.

My ex-girlfriend that I wrote about at the beginning of this series was a tribal descendant and social worker for the band she was a part of. I work in a tribal casino. I had a roommate for years, a fellow casino employee that was Native...and a US Navy veteran who served eight years as a Mess Specialist aboard Arleigh Burke class Destroyers and ashore.

These people have damned well earned the right to be a part of America...and not just by having been here first...and they didn't have to do that, but they damned well did it anyway.

That's kind of fucked up when you think about the fact that even at the absolute nadir of global race relations in the 1900's, people of color could still overcome that kind of shit and make something of themselves, and here we are 120 years later, with so much of this stuff being so much easier for so many people. Yet we live in a world where there's people who not only idolize 120 years ago...but who would make things so much worse than that if they could.

Worse, they're willing to start a war in the middle of a pandemic that they're trying to use as a biological weapon to get it, and even failing to believe or heed the not-even scientific, just common sense view that it's a virus and they're just as vulnerable to it as everybody else.

American conservatism doesn't deserve to survive this mess, because if America does survive this mess even in part, or the rest of us do, the conservatives have made it pretty clear which side they're on and that we're going to have to survive not just without their help, but with them actively taking the side of the virus, or the Russians, or anything else that could possibly be arrayed against their own country and the civilization that sustains us all.

And one way or another, in this life or the next, they will face the consequences and receive the rewards commensurate with their behavior. The issue is that they see themselves as doing good.

The problem with calling Good evil, and Evil good, is that Man isn't the one who gets to decide which is which. When you read Revelation you have to understand the dynamics of the time. Rome is Babylon, meaning in the Bible, Babylon is simply a symbol of Empire, of power and wealth, and empires always fall, or their leadership incestuously fucks itself into imbecility, they get defeated and if nobody shows up to liberate them, that's that, or they run out of money, or the world changes and their power contracts and they have to adapt.

For much of America's history, Americans described their country as a shining city on a hill, a new Jerusalem, a Promised Land.

And for much of that history, they were wrong. We were Babylon. People like Trump and his followers only make that visible, on some level it has always been so in some way. We can change that and survive, or we can fall. It's our choice. Are we well enough liked in the world to be the next England or France and change from Empire to part of the world community? I'm not sure these days, but we have to find some way to get through so we can find out.

Vote, like your life depends on it, because it does.

Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

~Revelation 18:6-10

Part Fifteen.
Part Seventeen.