I fear thy skinny hand! And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown.'
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! This body dropped not down.
Alone, alone, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on my soul in agony. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
Last night, Trump held a rally at the local municipal airport in Omaha, Nebraska. After it was over, he left, and left thousands of people in freezing temperatures with inadequate transport to get back to where their cars were parked. A number of people suffered medical issues, and several were hospitalized with hypothermia. I spent most of last night at work thinking "What the fuck?"
People left waiting in the cold, while he flies away in glory, having basked in their adulation and wasted their time, honestly about the only thing that might make this whole set of circumstances better for this asshole is if he were allowed to charge these chumps admission to hear him talk stupid.
But as for me, I've had frostbite and hypothermia, such things are a risk for people who hunt or participate in various winter sports in a place like Northern Michigan and bust through a weak point in the ice on a frozen lake while ice fishing like I did as a teenager and then have to get both to shore and up to the house while soaked to the bone in freezing cold. That whole ordeal sucked. Or for those of us who live close to their workplace and have a broke-down truck, but still have to work on a shockingly cold late December night, and when it happened to me, I was a still-relatively strong person in my mid-20's. Sure, I'd been disabled by an accident, but I could tough out the chill in my bones. The frostbite on the part of my face not covered by my scarf, not so much. In the end, it was a quick trip to urgent care in Alpena the next morning that my work actually paid for. All I could think about half of last night was how miserable of experiences those things were.
In northern Michigan, throughout the Northern Tier states, and across the Great Plains this stuff is a real, legit risk, not an idle threat by any means. People who live in these places know that...or they should, and those organizing public events certainly should...or they should be held responsible when they do not.
And this of course extends to claimed boilerplate beliefs and the actual pillars that hold up our society, too. The Constitution, corporate sovereignty, personal freedom, property rights, all must fall before that actual arbiter of what modern "Conservatism" is about:
But of course, as ever, Republicans simply do not give a shit.
"How do I feel right now?"
Seriously, these fucking people want the government to effectively take ownership of corporations and tell them what they can and can't do...
...And what's that called, again?
Communism.
And it's worse that this isn't over any actual public good, but simply how these fucking people feel right now, about their fear that they might just lose their ass in this election, for real and maybe for good this time.
Because they've disgraced themselves, and they know it. They just think they're entitled to have power anyway. For no better reason than they've had it before.
Functionally, these right-wing, wealthy assholes are mad because society, social media and the internet doesn't coddle them enough.
And do you know what the funny part is, here?
The Internet, even more than the Wild West of which places like Nebraska were once a part, has as a whole been the Great Libertarian Frontier.
The business model under which the internet tends to operate has long since been predominately a conservative and Republican wet dream. Regulation? Hell, the damned internet in its modern form has been around for a generation now and corporations and governments are still trying to figure out how to regulate the goddamned thing in the first place, as not only the technology but internet culture and social interaction itself mutates faster than most people can keep up.
Maybe we ought not to have a government run primarily by aged wealthy white men who have neither the capability nor the incentive nor any inclination to even try to keep up?
But they're sure as hell mad about their imagined "censorship" of conservative opinions, aren't they?
Here's the thing, assholes.
You know what your real problems are?
Algorithms. These filter everything on social media for the sole purpose of providing content that users "like" so as to keep them engaged for longer and drive up ad revenue.
Ya know, Capitalism.
But again, these fucking people think Capitalism itself, and the mighty Invisible Hand of the Free Market ought to tremble before "Conservative" Butt-hurt and pants-shitting fear of, well, everything.
Bullshit.
The answer here, that word too many people are too adverse to using these days is "No."
Fuck these motherfuckers.
Here's a pro tip. No matter what anybody does...it doesn't matter if Twitter comps self-identified far-right conservatives 1000 "Likes" per post and 10,000 imaginary followers and puts their bullshit at the top of every feed. These Fucking People will never be happy. They will never be satisfied. Hell, that's their entire business model.
And if they ever get it? They'll still happily leave you alone in the dark and the cold with dangerously inadequate transport once you've cheered for them and boosted their endlessly shitty egos.
As often as not, simply as an expression of their endless contempt for everybody else, and because they think it's funny.
It's past time we, as a society, tell these assholes to go fuck themselves.
Vote them out. ALL of them.
I've had some long nights in stir. Alone in the dark, with nothing but your thoughts, time can draw out like a blade. That was the longest night of my life. ~Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding, The Shawshank Redemption.
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