Amerikastan (Last Christmas In Trump Land, Part Two.)

We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar
Field and fountain, moor and mountain
Following yonder star
We three kings, we three kings

Born a king on Bethlehem's plain
Gold I bring to crown Him again
King forever, ceasing never
Over us all to reign

Oh, star of wonder, star of night
Star with royal beauty bright
Westward leading, still proceeding
Guide us to thy perfect light
We three kings, we three kings

~We Three Kings, Traditional Christmas Hymn.

On September 16th, 2007 several military contractors of Erik Prince's 'Blackwater' company opened fire on crowds and traffic in Nisour Square, Baghdad, Iraq. They killed 17 people and wounded 20 more. This severely strained Iraq-US relations for a time, and both the FBI and Iraqi law enforcement carried out investigations. After several years of investigations, trials, appeals and legal wrangling several of the contractors involved were tried and convicted of crimes.

Trump pardoned four of the men involved last night. 

Last night at work I read a Twitter thread about a kid named Ali Kinani who was shot in the head during the Nisour Square massacre and how when Ali's father...who was himself a doctor...opened the passenger door of his SUV to try to save his son's life and tend to any wounds suffered by his two sisters, Ali's brain fell out of his shattered head and landed in the street.

And Trump just pardoned the motherfuckers who did this crime. 

This was a kid, he wasn't hurting anybody. Had those men held their fire Ali would be a young man now, college age, maybe over there working and raising a family of his own, perhaps serving in the Army...or maybe given his family's status, even attending a university in a Western country like France, the UK or the USA, contributing to the economy there, growing, learning, thence to perhaps take a Western idea or two back to Iraq with him and help to make his country better and more free in ways that Operation Iraqi Freedom never could.

That right there, that lost potential and snuffed out innocent life, is the true cost of war.

The people who start wars in our modern world, these pasty old soft-handed white-bread butterball turkey-looking motherfuckers like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove...and do not for one damn minute forget that Osama Bin Laden was of the same sort of social class. These people...they don't have to bear that cost, not in any recognizable way, and some of these people are still actively making trouble for people in our society and the world. 

Yet it's worth noting that even Karl Rove considers Trump's post-election conduct to be a bridge too far.

But it's under the watch of people like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and Karl Rove that organizations like Blackwater came to be, although the mercenary profession is as old as war itself, that is not our way. People like Erik Prince think in terms of aristocrats and mercenaries like the Carthaginians or the old feudal German states. But the American way of war is...and always has been...citizen soldiers raised theoretically in defense of a common and generally secular ideal like democracy rather than a profit margin or politics or religion.

America is not Carthage or Sparta or East Prussia or even Hesse-Kessal and Hesse-Hanau, no matter how much conservatives may thirst after an aristocratic, militarized society mostly lacks an army and hires mercenaries for defense, and that practices war for profit on an official basis, nor one of order and uniformed sameness like Nazi Germany or North Korea, nor are we a modern Sparta where war is what we do, even though we're pretty damned good at it. More to the point, America never will be one of those kind of societies no matter how much Republicans may wish it was. 

And America is not Iraq. either. Most of us don't shout Allah Akbar (God is Great) or any such thing when our party wins an election or the local favorite Association Football club wins a match.

And there's a reason for that, historically. It's not because we're a bunch of godless fucks, though some may think that. It starts with the Constitution and our founding ideals. Even American religion ran more with the utopian vision the Pilgrims had than with their harsh, strict Calvinist doctrines, to the eternal frustration of people like the DeVos family.

Much of America is far more about the "Protestant Work Ethic" than it ever is or was about the actual Word of God, and quite honestly nowadays even, and perhaps especially, conservatives have stripped Christ right out of the equation, often for all intents and purposes right along with any concept of ethics or real work. For far too many, America has become a country where you get rich by being rich.

I get that being is easier than becoming, and it's easier to tear down than it is to build up, but these dueling desires within conservatism for chaos and death, or order and stasis, or order and stasis for me but disease and death for you over there...none of this shit is compatible with either a free society or a competently-run not-free one, either. These people can't go five minutes without contradicting themselves and in that contradiction lies the death of our civilization.

This bullshit has to stop. Rights come with responsibilities too, or it's not freedom. This constant desire and ideology built around trying to be constantly counting coup on largely-imagined opponents has to go.

Think about that, as we count down the days until the day we celebrate the Birth of the Prince of Peace.

And perhaps spare a thought or two for Ali Kinani, and those like him throughout the world, and give a thought to what might have been. How many George Washington Carvers or Thomas Edisons or Marie Curies or Jonas Salks has America left dead on the battlefield before their time, or stuck in low-wage jobs instead of living out their potential. Think about that before you back some political assault on the internet and technology or some stupid rich man's war or start bellowing about Chinese "Communists" or calling your Democratic-voting neighbors Communists. If we don't start maximizing our potential and working together in the face of threats like climate change and COVID-19, and yes, living and thinking more communally...a lot more people are going to die. Don't think you won't be one of them.

How many people who could have cured cancer or invented a longer-lasting lightbulb or something have died of the virus?

And conservatives, please for the love of God stop calling everybody who disagrees with you a socialist or a communist, it's fucking puerile and stupid.

Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989, people, I was there. The fall of Communism wasn't some kind of clever disinformation, it really happened. As a teenager I saw normal people just like me smash down the Berlin Wall.

Sure, I'll grant you that everyone from American G.I.'s to Afghan Jihadis had a part in making that possible, but even Ronald Reagan aspired to peace, not war. When I was a kid there used to be a barn in Brighton, Michigan that had "Paying for nuclear weapons is a crime against humanity."

I was surprised, years later, to find out that the people who owned that farm were conservatives, who my aunt and uncle who lived nearby actually knew...and often disagreed with, but in an amicable way.

And there were people who prosecuted German and Japanese war criminals, who would almost certainly fit in with the Trump administration, but they did their duty anyway.

There was a time when conservatism was at least...more than this garbage, more than one small angry Orange man. It's everyone's loss that it's not that way anymore. It's everyone's loss that too many of these people would happily make America or some part of it be like Afghanistan, and then call that "Great."

But America will not truly be great until it respects the life of a small child and reveres the peacemaker more than its leaders fear the social media posts of a bullying con-man.

It might be easy to make a nativity scene featuring the baby Jesus, but it's a lot harder to follow the ways of the adult Jesus, and isn't that what these people will try and tell you it's all about?

Part One.