Allah Akbar (American Revelation IV, Part Seven.)

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
He had three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.
He sailed by night; he sailed by day;
He used the stars to find his way.
A compass also helped him know
How to find the way to go.
Ninety sailors were on board;
Some men worked while others snored.
Then the workers went to sleep;
And others watched the ocean deep.
Day after day they looked for land;
They dreamed of trees and rocks and sand.
October 12 their dream came true,
You never saw a happier crew!
"Indians!  Indians!"  Columbus cried;
His heart was filled with joyful pride.
But "India" the land was not;
It was the Bahamas, and it was hot.
The Arawak natives were very nice;
They gave the sailors food and spice.
Columbus sailed on to find some gold
To bring back home, as he'd been told.
He made the trip again and again,
Trading gold to bring to Spain.
The first American?  No, not quite.
But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.
~American grade-school nursery rhyme.

Seriously?

At some point yesterday, Ted Cruz referred to protesters toppling Confederate statues and a statue of Christopher Columbus as "American Taliban."

First of all...What?!

Second...Allah Akbar, motherfucker, Allah Akbar.

All things considered, it's to their peril at this point, that conservatives and Evangelical Christians seem to have forgotten that there is a greater power than Donald Trump in the universe.

The ironic thing here is that in regard to his political, religious, and social views Senator Rafael Eduardo Cruz demonstrably has far more in common with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan...yes, the actual Taliban...than he does with most Americans. You just have to scratch the serial numbers off and replace Allah with Jesus and AK-47's with AR-15's and there you go.

Ted Cruz is the fucking front man for the actual American Taliban.

And Christopher Columbus is the person those motherfuckers wish they could be...not the supposedly-righteous, supposedly Christian explorer, not really...more the gold-hungry pillaging genocidal rapist who kept screwing his own crew out of their share of the profits.

I've been spending the last couple of weeks watching conservatives lose their shit over the fact that the George Floyd protests included people of all creeds and colors, not just Black people, that 'Black Lives Matter' has gone from an activist group and a right-wing snarl-phrase to just...something that most people seemed to suddenly get, and even corporations had to pick up on, and of course now that we're having long-overdue conversations about the nature of American policing and institutionalized racism, all these people wanna talk about is America, until somebody brings up the actual history of our country and then they're all "But not like that."

Just as Heather Heyer's murder ended the alt-right's dreams of Nazi glory and Donald Trump appears to be blowing up generations of Republican grifting, so the killing of George Floyd appears to have pricked our collective conscience.

And police brutality and violence didn't work to stop it, and in fact only inflamed the situation more, and not in their favor and created thousands more individually memorable instances of horror.

A million little girls shot in the face is procedure, one, on camera, is a career-ending clusterfuck for some idiot with a badge.

As Stalin, of all fucking people, once said; "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic."

But somehow, the individual stories stuck more in people's minds than the statistics did. That's what did it.

In the last few days we've seen more Confederate statues taken down, a statue of a 17th century slaver toppled ignominiously into the bay where it belonged, and most recently statues of Christopher Columbus decapitated or pulled down.

Conservatives are basically shitting themselves.

Good.

And I say that as somebody who took a class on Indigenous People's History as a conservative back in the 1990's. Christopher Columbus was such a dishonest piece of shit that his own crews hated him and mutinied more than once, he was so cruel and evil to Native Americans in the Caribbean that his own countrymen...then engaged in a brutal genocide against Andalusian Muslims back home...put him in chains and sent him back to Spain to be put on trial. Fuck that guy, with a Spanish treasure galleon at full sail, sideways, and fire all the cannons after you jam it up his ass.

So of course, naturally Yertle The Turtle And Other Stories here *Cough* I mean Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is demanding a "Free and Open Society."

Free and open for whom, asshole?

Police officers shooting reporters is not indicative of a free and open society.

Gassing and shooting at clergy and peaceful protesters is not indicative of a free and open society. Authoritarian goons like Bill Barr have no place in a free and open society. Nuremburg-like political rallies are not an event that happens in a healthy, free society either.

Statues glorifying racist conquerors and slavers and traitors are not indicative of a free and open society. Who does Moscow Mitch want a free and open society for? I'll give you a hint, it's not you or me, or my Black roommate, or...well, anybody really.

He doesn't want a free and open society for John and Jane Q Public, he wants a free and open society for Mr. and Mrs. Dollar Bill and by extension only for those in possession of said cash.

By way of a participation trophy, all the rest of you suckers get is a little racism doled out by their favorite drug dealer and wannabe mob boss, Mr. Trump.

And the sad part is, lots of white conservatives think that's a hell of a deal, they always have.

And now that the self-congratulatory circle-jerk of Whiteness-informed bullshit is rather publicly starting to collapse, now that enough people know the real history that it's something the public is aware of and actually cares about and you don't have to be taking a class with an underpaid adjunct professor who works two other jobs to make sure all the ends meet to actually know the real history or that Columbus was hardly some great bringer of the light of civilization and Robert E. Lee and Thomas John "Stonewall" Jackson and all the rest were not some kind of honorable paragons of Christianity and soldierly virtue but actual savage racist traitors to the American experiment, these fucking people are terrified.

And let me tell you why.

They're terrified because they know the "old teachings" are nothing but complete and total bullshit.

They're terrified because average Americans...including some conservatives...are talking about stuff like poverty and race in terms that even somebody like me, with a decent education, associated with the farthest of far-left academics 15 years ago.

They're terrified because they keep continually betting on the wrong thing, and they know that as a result, as goes our understanding of Christopher Columbus and the Mayflower and the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, so goes their narrative and they've seen that without that, force won't work, their financial power rests atop a collapsing house of cards and pure unadulterated racism won't net them enough people to intimidate, much less overpower the rest of us.

It's all bullshit, and they know it. Oh yes, they do.

They're just terrified that you might find out.

If you're not a wealthy white conservative, the American story isn't so much "Land of the free, home of the brave" as it is a constant struggle to claim and reclaim your basic constitutional and human rights and force your own country to pay up on the promises it made to you while you were still learning bullshit nursery rhymes in elementary school and people like Laura Ingraham hoped you weren't paying attention in class.

If we want a better country, we're going to have to keep being better citizens.

Part Six.
Part Eight.

In a sense we've come to our nation's Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. ~Martin Luther King Jr.