Gates Of Paradise (American Revelation, One Shots, A Rolling Series.)

This article is a direct sequel to this one written at the end of May concerning the George Floyd protests: War Dance.

Nobushige, a soldier, came to Hakuin, and asked: "Is there really a paradise and a hell?"
"Who are you?" inquired Hakuin.
"I am a samurai," the warrior replied.
"You, a soldier!" exclaimed Hakuin. "What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? Your face looks like that of a beggar."
Nobushige became so angry that he began to draw his sword, but Hakuin continued: "So you have a sword! Your weapon is probably much too dull to cut off my head!"
As Nobushige drew his sword Hakuin remarked: "Here open the gates of hell!"
At these words the samurai, perceiving the master's discipline, sheathed his sword and bowed.
"Here open the gates of paradise," said Hakuin. ~Zen Koan 57, At The Gates Of Paradise

I had to take the car in to the shop today. I thought maybe I might need a new alternator or battery for sure yesterday, but then the damned thing started up just fine, if a little rough, this morning.

Thus telling me it's probably some stupid little thing just like it was the last time. So I took it in. Funny thing, but I noticed one of the mechanics was wearing a camouflaged Trump hat. Inside, while sitting in an office drinking coffee.

My roommate followed me to drop the car off at the mechanic, and then we went home.

He likes to take back roads. We live out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the zip code for our town. It's Trump country all the way down...or at least it was in 2016.

You know what I saw this morning?

Biden signs, and signs for local Democrats, out in the country.

There are hardly any Trump signs anywhere, I'm not talking "Less than there were at this point in '16" I'm saying there are no new ones at all.

Some of the Biden signs were at houses that had Trump signs four years ago. This is boring ass middle of nowhere central Michigan, where the normal influx of student-fed diversity has been cut by more than half this year due to COVID-19, to the point where yesterday I was able to get in and out of Walmart fairly quickly at a time when the aisles would normally be thick with students. And I'm seeing Biden signs in fairly steady numbers in probably the most white-bread part of the county.

What's any of this got to do with anything?

Two days ago, a 17-year-old white kid with a criminal record from Antioch, Illinois got his Mom to drive him to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he murdered two people with an AR-15 rifle that, so far as I know, he should not have been able to possess. He committed a felony in transporting a weapon across state lines to do this crime, and he showed up wearing gloves. And the local cops let this stand. Nothing to see here, move along, just a little First Degree Murder going on. Note: The kid was arrested in Illinois.

I'm just sayin' even at 17 if you're the kind of loser who needs your Mom to drive you places, you probably shouldn't be doing crimes.

Note that the protests to which Rifle Kid objected came about because a Black man was shot in the back seven times by a police officer, and left a paraplegic, because he tried to break up a fight.

This is not how you Law & Order.

The push-back from public opinion over these two events was...well, exactly what one might expect. The sports world, especially the NBA, has gone all in supporting Black Lives Matter. Yeah, some of it's half-ass or insincere, I'm sure, but we live in a world where the leagues now feel that they have to take that step.

Whatever happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"


As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican National Convention was a flaming tire-fire shit show.

Republicans have lost the argument, lost their minds, lost the plot, and are reduced to lying to us, screaming at us, or to tedious bullshit.

From down here at the street level it seems like it's not working. As an example Trump has pulled ads from markets in Michigan.

And, say the Republicans, That's Okay.

Because it was never about any of that.

It wasn't about Christianity, or conservatism or democracy or even religion or tax cuts, let alone getting elected on their merits. It's about power.

It's about the power to manipulate fools into throwing away their lives at your command, whether explicit or implicit.

Seriously, Tucker, what 17-year old in the whole damn world even knows what "Order" is? What even half-sane teenager is gonna go out there and Kamikaze themselves  for your racist dog-whistles?

When I was that age I effectively measured time in "How long until I get my next blowjob?" You know, like any other sane young man in America (or any other country in the world) especially a young rural white conservative who played Basketball, listened to Rap music and did stuff like write papers on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas for my government class. Even then, I gave a shit, but my priorities were (as they damn well ought to have been) mostly worked around more basic stuff. You know, like not killing people because I didn't want to go to prison.

I mean, seriously, I could be pretty inventive when it came to doing dumb shit but if I'd asked my Mom to drive me anywhere while I was carrying a weapon, it's a safe bet that she would have broke her foot off in my ass.

Among other things, one did not handle weapons at 17 in my family without an adult in the immediate vicinity being informed, whether it was my Grandpa, my Mom, or one of my uncles if they were up north. One did not go anywhere with a weapon without informing said adult of where they were going and how long they would be gone, either. Likewise, we were conservatives, if I'd have ever suggested a plan to go out and do crimes, calling the police wouldn't have been the first thing to occur to any of those I normally answered to...but beating my ass probably would have.

And no one would have cared, let alone saw anything for it, and I would certainly have been seen as the one seen as being in the wrong. Why? Because way back in the barbaric and crude 1990's we weren't this fucking stupid as a society.

But it's not about any of that. What good is firearms safety, parental authority or the simple basic job of keeping tabs on your kid when...well, to be honest you abandoned all that stuff years ago in a mad quest to promote right-wing politics?

Even at the expense of conservatism itself. Even at the expense of religion itself.
All must fall before the shitty agenda.

I'm serious, when was the last time you saw a conservative, much less a Trump supporter, talk about Jesus?

Why do the actual work at the micro-level and ya know, give people actual reasons to want to follow this stuff when it's so much easier [Eyeroll] to just get the "right" President into office and then he'll do all the work...and yeah go ahead and tell me how well that strategy has worked out, you fucking assholes.

And they know it's not working out. Oh yes, they do. That's what the kid with the rifle is for.

Saving Western Civilization, one child soldier at a time.

We're gonna party like it's Sierra Leone under Corporal Alfred Foday Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front in the late 1990's and this is saving "Western Civilization?"

And there are people and organizations literally preparing to spend money to defend this asshole wannabe terrorist in court. He has a Go Fund Me set up for his legal expenses.

And he killed two people, live on video. One of them was just an innocent bystander. Like I said these shitty little losers think you should have to ask them for permission just to walk down the street.

Fuck you. This is supposed to be America. We are supposed to be a free people. All of us.

These fools don't give a damn about civilization. They want you to be afraid, and feel that you have to ask them permission to walk down the street with grocery bags...and if they can, write that into law. They want it to be required of you to cower in the face of authority...and then make it so the only authority is theirs. And it doesn't matter how, or if they have to degrade America to the merest shadow of its former self to do it, because again, it never was about America.

It's about weak little white men who want to pretend to be the burly cigar-chomping Alpha Males of previous generations (or so they think) who look to people like John Wayne for inspiration. Somehow they never understood that even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne. Not to mention a lot of these dudes are closer to Nathan Lane doing his John Wayne impression in The Birdcage.

And note that I consider comparing these dudes to homosexuals a grave insult...to the homosexuals. I just saw a video not too long ago of Jacob Wohl getting punched in the face. At long last, consequences.

Jacob Wohl didn't stand and fight, he ran away, and as we would say back when I was a young dude his age, he runs like an interior decorator. That being a reference to a profession that was associated with gay dudes at the time.

I'm sorry, guys, but some things just gotta be said and in my generation sometimes they got said that way.

I'm gonna be honest here, I'm tired of homophobic and misogynist assholes who in their personal conduct act much more like the people they say they don't like than like the Man's-man types they say they aspire to be.

That should be Okay, they should have been able to be who they really are and not hold themselves up to some ridiculous standard. They should also have been able to get the mental health support they needed to figure out who they were in the first place.

But instead, we stigmatize mental health stuff and promote a reactionary view of manliness that creates vast amounts of cognitive dissonance.

As a result of that cognitive dissonance, these fools think they want to be the drug- and juju- addled soldiers of some thug like Charles Taylor, who believe their heady mix of being fucked up on drugs and absolutely certain of the power of Witchcraft will rush into battle naked with their AK-47's and think that they're bulletproof and invisible.

It's like when somebody tried too hard explaining Armor Class to the dumb ass Bard in The Order Of The Stick...only this is real life, not Dungeons & Dragons.

Instead, they're a lot more like an asshole version of Rave Night at the Ramrod and because they don't like what they are...because they've been programmed with all this silly bullshit...they demand the rest of us adopt their ideas of forced uniformed sameness, harsh religion and white supremacy just so they can feel good about themselves and learn to be what they think men are supposed to be like. Never mind that damned few of those guys back in the day were really like that. Never mind that their 1950's archetype hardly existed outside of the movies.

It's the 21st century, they can be whatever they want...but because there's a loud, vocal, and politically powerful sector of our society that fetishizes the 1950's and shit, that's what they want to be like. Of course, for a good percentage of that time conservatism was dominated by men like Roy Cohn...oh, wait.

And remember, ladies and gentlemen, that's who taught Donald Trump, and who the Orange One is still trying to emulate all these years later. Roy Cohn was a hard-right gay dude.

Donald Trump's idea of manhood...didn't measure up to Donald Trump's idea of manhood. When Roy Cohn was dying of AIDS, Donald Trump abandoned him.

And it only becomes more of a self-destructive circle-jerk from there.

I'm not gonna lie, and I'll say this specifically looking through that 1990's conservative lens of vague homophobia. Rave Night at the Ramrod would be a fucking huge improvement over all this silly bullshit.

We live in a world where American culture and capitalism and society have decided, in the majority, that LGBT people, people of Color, people of other religions (or no religion) etc. should be able to do what they want. We live in a world where, were he still here and dealing with it today, Roy Cohn's biggest challenge would be maintaining health care coverage.

And it's the "Conservatives" who have a problem with that.

This is the kind of crazy stupid shit that pre-modern societies occasionally do, and that we're working up toward post-modern societies doing a lot more often. This is basically like the Taliban preaching their hard-core Salafi Islamist party line...but then going out and getting fucked up on drugs and then sodomizing the youngest of their fighters.

Conservatives used to hate and fear this sort of thing, now they're virtually the only ones advocating for it. This is the direct result of 40 years of conspiracy theories and creationism. I grew up laughing at Jim Bakker and his gaudy stupidity. 40 years later nobody's laughing anymore.

And this kind of crap only ends one way, every single time. War, death and destruction. That's how this ends if we don't stop it, and stop these fucking people.

This is the kind of cognitive dissonance that destroys societies.

Take careful note, that this teenage murderer is what these fucking people want.

We can stop this shit, but you have to show up, and do so in enough numbers that these fucking people know better than to try anything funny.

If we don't, they're going to split the country.

For however long theirs lasts, it will be horrifying.

 It doesn't actually matter that much who wins in November in that regard. These people seem to feel like they're losing the culture wars, or some shit like that, or they didn't get a blowjob from the Prom Queen in high school or their delusions flattered enough in life...so now they want to make it so you have to ask their permission to walk down the street and go get groceries or whatever.

No, they don't care if they'll be consumed by their own system. Hell, that's the only thing they think the system should be for. These fucking people have decided what they want to be, and it's Gonzo Afghanistan with more drugs. Or right-wing North Korea, with more killings.

They think government, or the police, or the State should only be a malevolent presence in people's lives, and that you should only be able to succeed in spite of society...not because of it...unless you're a white man who's rich enough or has the exact right political views, or both.

And they think that they should get a free ride from life, just for being whatever they think they are or aspire to be.

Right now, as a society we face a choice. We can keep indulging these assholes and destroy ourselves, or we can start giving a shit about one another, stand up and put an end to this crap and tell these people to go fuck themselves.

Thus open the gates of hell.

Unless we choose differently, and keep doing that.

Series IV.

Series III.

Series II.

Series I.

This Web Of Life.