Fallen (American Revelation V: Part Six.)

Freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty, when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner 'Freedom Now', they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. ~George W. Bush

I saw yesterday, that people in one majority-white suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, had a fifteen-minute wait to vote. While another nearby majority-black area had a line that took about five hours. Somebody that I follow on Twitter said that they waited eight and a half hours to vote.

Thanks, Republicans. Thanks to you motherfuckers, the rest of the world can now successfully argue that the Democratic Republic of the Congo...or the United Nations, for that matter...is a better-organized entity with more workable elections than the United States of America.

It's time that we, as a country, face up to something. A large minority of our people...certainly at least a third of us...simply do not believe in Democracy or rights or indeed anything that does not 100% favor them right now, on a minute-to-minute basis. 

And if you listen to them talk, these fucking people are saying they want total power, forever, such that a person should have to ask their permission to even walk down the street.

And their only consistent ethic is "FUCK YOU!"

Or perhaps the bizarre-to-the-point-of-nonsensical political counting coup of "Owning the Libs" whatever that even means.

And then they're the ones who habitually wrap themselves in the rhetoric of freedom and rights. But the only rights they seem to care about are the rights to say "Fuck you" or to kill and steal.

Just because they want to do it with laws and politics instead of guns and knives does not make it be something other than what it is.

More to the point, in a civilized society; How does that work, exactly?

How in the hell does anybody...even on their side...call such a state of affairs "Freedom?"

How in the hell do we, as a people, ever expect to remain free when one third of us does not believe in freedom on a conceptual level, except maybe for themselves, contingent on their emotional state at the time?

That kind of mentality is hugely problematic even without there being a kind of Oppositional Defiant Disorder vs. Reality in these people's minds?

How does freedom of the Press, not to mention governance on any level, work when the President is infected with a deadly virus and refuses to have any care for himself or others?

How exactly, do we expect anything of our government or society when the President's own family seems to view his position as primarily a money-making opportunity for themselves?

If this is how rich people conduct themselves, as a fucking rule, I quite frankly think we need to start setting up a lot of Guillotines and put into effect laws concerning their use, and maybe, just maybe, rethink who we look up to as a society. Why? Because it's pretty goddamned clear that these fucking people...and the donors who give them money...could give a shit about any of us.

In fact, if anything, they seem to want us to die in vast numbers.

All for the greater glory of Wall Street, and yet I'm not sure how any of these fucking fools think they can have a country, or an economy, without the people that are needed to run both. It's a classic case of the wealthy forgetting how or why they get, or have, their money in the first place. Couple that with a vast, seething contempt for everybody who isn't them, and there you have it.

We need to get these fucking people out of power if we want to keep having a country, let alone remain free within it. 

The thing that bothers me, now that all this is being exposed and laid bare before our eyes...is that there are still people rabidly following this shit, to the point where they're willing to go to rallies and risk getting COVID-19 just for some temporary feeling of power...or whatever they think they're getting out of this bullshit.

And these people's rank dishonesty and vast seething hatred now seems to extend to democracy itself.

Seems like, in a democratic nation, you're in the wrong business if you're in politics and that's what you really think.

After all, how the fuck else did you get that job?

Sure, Democracy might be flawed and messy and occasionally produce stupid results...but how else would we choose our leaders? What other method have we ever had? This is America, and the whole point of America is that this country was founded in opposition to the emperors, kings, petty satraps and warlords that were the norm of human governance in the 18th century.

What else even is there, Entreating the Gods? Gladiatorial combat? Kill your way to the top? Magic 8-Ball? Vision Quests? I'm gonna be honest here, none of that shit really works or ever did, and it seems like, flawed as it is, we already have a workable system. Maybe if you can't honestly, lawfully get elected under that system you need to change your ways, expand your voter base, or otherwise, you need to do something. Our system is not going to sacrifice itself just so you can have power, especially when your ideology literally becomes more shitty by the day.

I used to be a Republican, I'm a basic white guy, and I'm going to be honest...there's nothing for me in modern Republicanism. I don't get anything out of it, except worse living conditions. So why should I support this crap? Tell me why, show your work! Of course, these fucking people can't do that because the best answer they can come up with for why they should have power is "But they've always had it before" or "Because somebody we don't like might get it." I can't support that on any level.

Republicans are losing and people are waiting eight hours to vote against them because they're shit, because their ideals are shit, because even the religion they offer is nothing more that sycophancy toward a shitty, selfish God that is little more, even to them, than the Big Republican In The Sky. The Republican Party, as a whole, has become nothing more than an anthropomorphic, living representation of Ayn Rand's absolutely terrible novel "Atlas Shrugged" which can, in fact, be called a novel only by degrading that term.

And they're mad because people are reacting to that like real people would, not like the people in the novel that Rand wrote as cheering when their employers abandoned society. Modern Republicans not only think they have some kind of a right to take bodily autonomy away from women, or rights away from other groups of people...they think that those other people should cheer for them and vote for them while they do it, on the off chance that somebody else might end up having it worse.

It's not just that they're filled with hate of all kinds and all manner of shitty selfishness and they think they should be worshipped like gods for it, it's that they're so out of touch I have to wonder if epic level amounts of drug use are involved.

For example: What's their idea to try and bring back, for example, suburban white women? They try to cast Mike Pence as a sex symbol. You know, the dude who calls his wife "Mother" and is probably the most unsexiest motherfucker ever to fuck a mother, if there was any sex involved, which I sort of question because after all, a fly did land on his head and stay there for like three minutes.

That sort of suggests that Mike Pence would only be considered sexy if you're a Necrophiliac.

When you're so out of touch that Mayor Pete, the boring midwestern white guy who, in a normal world would probably be a Republican by dint of his moderate personality, his prior service as a US Navy intelligence officer and his religion, can be considered a "Rhetorical Assassin" against you, fundamentally for simply pointing out the obvious, it's time to pack it up and go home. Or, on a more base level...as 25-years-ago me might have opined...you got beat by a gay dude...it might just be time to pack it up and go home.

Now, personally, I like Mayor Pete, and I'd have been all in to vote for him if he'd been the nominee.

But he's exactly the type who should have been able to be a loud-and-proud gay Republican if he'd wanted to be, and had Republicans followed the trajectory of the Bushes and lots of their philosophical leaders instead of that of Conspiracy theories, FOX News, Fundamentalist religion and their baser, hateful racist elements, that might have been possible.

But it isn't, and I'm glad he's on our side.

Same with the Lincoln Project people, literally current and former Republicans who've dedicated themselves to getting Donald Trump...and in many cases their own party...out of power. Some of them want to De-Trumpify conservatism, or rebuild it along earlier lines, others have effectively switched sides. I'm glad they're on our side for now because fundamentally it's going to take all of us to get these assholes out of power.

And if you think this fight is going to be over with a Democratic election victory, or even Biden's inauguration, you have another thing coming. Just as it took generations to jack the Republican Party so far to the Right that it became anti-American, undoing the damage will likewise be the work of generations, and we will face other crises at the same time.

Climate change, and a probably right-wing insurgency, for example. Republicans have fallen a long way.

And that's why they have to be both driven from power and kept from having it ever again. If that seems like a lot of work, too bad.

But the work has to be done, and done right, and pursued vigilantly until it is complete.

Why? Because if it isn't, these fucking people will take away your vote, kill you and take your stuff, or let you die of disease while the world burns, simply because they think it's funny. This is what we're up against, period.

That spell it out for ya?

America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. ~George W. Bush

Part Five.

Also, Fuck You Lindsey Graham.

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.
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.
~Revelation 18:1-6