Barbarians In The Shining City (American Revelation IV, Postscript.)

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come. ~Caesar, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene II, William Shakespeare.

I saw this over the weekend. A video of a bunch of white morons dancing at the Trump rally in Tulsa. The feed? Some dipshit group called "The Deplorable Choir" that basically sings home-made pro-Trump propaganda songs that are every bit as awful and dumb as that sounds like it is. The caption: "This is the side of Trump rallies that the media doesn't want you to see."

My friend tagged me in this same picture on Facebook, Caption: "If I had to see this, so do you." My response; I saw it dozens more times than I wanted to over the weekend.

Seriously if you need the "media" to know that most white people can't dance worth a shit and look like fools trying, you aren't paying attention to, ya know, life.

But these idiots act like this is somehow some kind of a big reveal, that the "Liberal" Media somehow doesn't want you to see? And then they act like posting in a public forum like Twitter somehow isn't going to cause everybody to see it?

Fun fact. The Deplorable Choir actually posted the video this image is taken from twice. They deleted the first one because too many comments making fun of this shit popped up on the feed.

And that right there should tell you anything you'd like to know about these fucking people.

And here we have Rudy Giuliani ranting about Black Lives Matter on FOX News, basically saying that if police officers aren't allowed to gun down Black people in the streets for no reason that hordes of Black people will come and take your stuff.

Rudy Giuliani, once "America's Mayor" with a better than average shot at the Presidency himself, once the very face of in-most-things moderate Republicanism (unless you were, rather infamously, a ferret owner or his cousin/first wife, and I'm not joking.) talking like a damn Segregationist Dixiecrat right out of 1850...and it's 2020.

Will the real Rudy G please stand up...
Please stand up...
Please stand up...

No, seriously, who the fuck is this guy? When my roommate told me about this, this morning, I was like "What the fuck?" Then I sat down and logged into Twitter and there it fucking was.

America's Mayor, everybody.

Unless you're black and you have the temerity to think you shouldn't get killed for no reason.

I can remember when talking like this got you ran out of politics and respectable society, period.

First, they came for Police brutality, then they came for the Confederate statues...and now the fucking right-wing conservative Christians are basically shitting themselves in fear that somebody's going to come and take their Jesus away.

In all seriousness right-wing idiots here and there have been saying "Statues of Jesus are next" for a few days and yesterday Shaun King said some dumb shit that every Black person, liberal or other person of color that commented on it basically just laughed off. Shaun King may be Black, but he is not taken seriously by the vast majority of Black people, or really, anybody other than the Bernie Bros last I knew. At least one of the comments I saw was pretty much "Shaun King is mad because Jesus is not white, but he is." Yet every pants-shitting comment I saw by "Conservatives" took his stupid comment about how statues of a "White Jesus" should be taken down both seriously and extremely literally.

What an awful thing it must be to live in this kind of a demon-haunted world. I'm serious.

In any conflict where they face any kind of direct threat to themselves, it's not that these privileged white conservatives will lose. It's basically that they've already lost. They're so filled with fear, with their wills so pre-broken by Fox News and right-wing talk radio and constant racist bullshit that they would shatter like glass. You cannot be constantly trained to utter pants-shitting fear and then suddenly become courageous. It doesn't work that way. War is not about destroying the other side, first and foremost, it's about breaking the will to fight in the first place.

Any fighting these people tried to do, would be lashing out, trying to force submission...but they would find themselves incapable of much of a strategy, likely run themselves afoul of the law and a host of other things, face all the more public backlash for it, and then try to bluster their way out and probably fail in most cases.

Ya know, like the cops finally overreacting against a determined public in the George Floyd protests and getting smacked around by public opinion and exposure as being a bunch of bullying cowardly shits themselves, and it's funny how just like that, public support for the police and even most of the right-wing "Thin Blue Line" bullshit just sort of disappeared in a matter of a few weeks.

All the guns and political power and legal immunity in the world won't save you if you're a fucking coward who melts down the second some other person actually says what they think of you.

And if I had to guess, when something other than right-wing conservatism or fascism comes along and shows itself to be the stronger tribe, one hell of a lot of these fucking people will switch sides, simply because boot leather is boot leather and to a bootlicker it tastes all the same.

Don't get me wrong, that's not likely to be an improvement. Apparently, yesterday a United States Army Private was arraigned on terrorism charges for sending sensitive information to White Supremacists in an attempt to facilitate an attack on his own unit.

He was ready and willing to throw his own bros under the bus, for white supremacy. First off, this is treason, straight up, and while terrorism charges are fitting I think he ought to be charged with treason, too. Second, speaking as a veteran here, I wanna knock this dude into next week. What in the fuck kind of lowdown filthy son of a bitch do you gotta be not just to betray your country, but your own brothers and sisters in arms? In the military, everybody lives in everybody else's space, everybody depends on everybody else, and in something as simple as an FTX (Field Training Exercise) everybody's life depends on everybody else doing their duty and doing their jobs to the best of their ability at all times. Anybody who doesn't understand that shouldn't be there in the fist place.

But it's worse than that. If you can look at those people who you live and serve and sweat and may die with, and say that the Knights Of The Flabby White Ass have more value?

Fuck you.

You are not just my enemy, but the enemy of every Airman, Coast Guardsman, Marine, Sailor or Soldier that has ever honorably served the United States of America and more to the point, the enemy of every citizen from the Jail House to the White House who has ever, with good intentions, exercised or stood up and demanded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution those people all swore an oath to.

You are, perhaps even more so, the enemy of the immigrant, or America's allies, and of every person around the world who ever saw America as the Shining City On A Hill.

You are the enemy not only of America's history and traditions, but, if you claim to be a conservative, even your own.

This is what Conservatism has become. This is the Truth of American Revelation, as revealed by Donald Trump whether he intended for it to be so or not. This is what these fucking people are, racist monsters who would just as soon throw their own people under the bus if it would earn them a dime or a moment of cheap internet-fame.

But, God forbid they be criticized or called out or shown to their faces to be anything other than what they claim they are...even though they know that what they're claiming to be is complete and total horse shit even as they say it. Not a thing these people say is trustworthy, not a goddamned word that comes out of their mouths at this point should be accepted in good faith, because the chances are pretty fucking slim those words were said in good faith.

These fucking people are desperate to be seen as good white Christian people, trying to live orderly, prosperous and simple lives while being persecuted by some nebulous and shifting "Other."

But when you try and set it up not just so that your order, prosperity, religion or simplicity comes at the expense of or on the backs of or from the blood of other people...but so that this is the only way by which it comes...you're not the good people.

YOU are the hordes of Barbarians at the fucking gates, and don't you forget it.

Being too cowardly to admit the truth to yourself does not make it go away.

Part Twelve.