Republicanism, On Meth (American Revelation VI, Part Seven.)

Smoking marijuana, eating Cheetos, and masturbating do not constitute plans in my book. ~Walter White, Breaking Bad.

I'm really starting to think Republicans need to lay off on the drugs.

Or maybe things would be better if they were on drugs?

It's kind of hard to tell at this point, but I'm really fucking tired of the ongoing Caveman Ugh-lympics that is the modern Republican party. Apologies to cavemen for the analogy..

Seriously, these fucking people are fucking morons. What the hell were y'all thinking, America?

Do these idiots even realize how stupid they sound...or even what they're saying?

I'm thinking "No, they don't."

This is the direct result, ultimately, of certain Boomers convincing a lot of younger people (and a lot of their own) that the cool kids didn't care about politics.

Because that's how we ended up with this unfuckable dork brigade dominating the Republican Party and for at least the last 20 years, most of these idiots don't know anything about anything. They sure as hell believe in all their idiotic, often-racist assumptions, though...and then they continue to act as if they can make all this bullshit be true, if only they just believe in it hard enough.

Sorry, people, this isn't Planescape: Torment. Real life doesn't work like that. It's been my actual, lived experience that belief and $1.50 will get you a soda. In other words, belief is worth exactly what you put into it. 

If you happen to "believe" as guys like Tommy Tuberville do, that whatever you say should go, for no better reason than you said it...well, the best that can be said is you have shitty beliefs. Most people who think that way can expect nothing more than a life of continual disappointment because the rest of the world doesn't have to agree with your narcissistic opinion of yourself or put up with your bullshit. So then of course, these people get angry, because in a hell of a lot of cases that's not just their natural response to everything...it's the only emotion they were allowed to openly express. So, first these people fuck up everything they possibly can, because in their ideal world apparently everything is a giant soup sandwich and nobody knows much of anything...which is exactly why people like Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tommy Tuberville ended up in Congress. 

The donor class, the RNC and various other people really don't want anybody around who's smart enough to question what they're told, and of course the base is entertained by the ongoing Chucklefuck Olympics and feels emotionally attached to and sustained by an increasingly 'Bread and Circuses' onslaught of culture war bullshit. Never mind all the money they're wasting on guns and ammo they'd best not try and use, or the fact that they're not watching their own health or taking their kids to the dentist. And of course the reason for both the former and the latter and the effects thereof is that corporations and the wealthy know that the traditional Republican program of deregulation and tax cuts has been getting ever more unpopular for 40 years. So what the base hears is "Everything sucks, LOL nothing matters, burn it all down."

The only thing trickling down is these motherfuckers pissing in your ear and trying to tell you it's raining.

 Over the weekend, Ted Cruz visited the border and posed for photos on a Border Patrol small craft in the Rio Grande. I sensed very strong "Dukakis on the tank" energy here and so did a hell of a lot of other people. 

But the problem is that Ted Cruz does in fact have a base of fanatical followers that don't care how foolish he looks or how much of a toolbag he is in a general sense because they think he's being that much of a tool specifically to the people that they don't like...as opposed to, ya know, everybody including them. If there's one thing about Ted Cruz that is all about equality it's how much of an asshole he is to everybody. But Ted Cruz's voters don't care because they think it's funny. Or they did before he jetted off to Cancun in the middle of a huge blizzard hitting his state, anyway.

In another era, even as recently as 19 or 20 years ago that would have been a career-ending fuckup and he'd have been forced to resign and you'd never have heard of him again.

Except that at least some of them don't care, even when it's their own lives that are at stake.

And don't think that Congressional Republicans don't know it.

A hell of a lot of these people are basically in the process of amusing themselves to death, while an even more fanatical section of their bros is turning to outright anti-American rhetoric and beliefs that would have done the German American Bund proud.

An awful lot of these fucking people appear to be starting to think of the US government and the US military as their enemies. I'm not too worried about that. I have a strong feeling that even I, in my current condition, could pretty much reduce a lot of these idiots to tears and make them run back home to mama without even doing all that much.

But at some point, this foolishness is going to have to be addressed, because if it isn't somebody's going to get killed. Even if it's just these people who are spiraling off into this fantasy world, this shit isn't really necessary. There's been enough killing.

Hundreds of thousands of real people have died because of these idiots and their evil, stupid, wrong ideas. The problem isn't so much that these fucking people have no conscience. It's actually worse than that. There's one hell of a lot of these idiots who are basically masturbating to thoughts of even more death and destruction.

Because that's what they think righteousness is, or something. They literally think if things get bad enough, Jesus will appear and save them.

And to a hell of a lot of these fucking idiots the whole point of believing all this stuff is being Raptured and then getting a front row seat to the rest of us suffering in the Apocalypse before we ultimately get zapped into charcoal briquettes by their small, shitty, vengeful god.

And lately they aren't even bothering to pretend that their god is Jesus Christ anymore. I'm not sure how these people got this fucked in the head, but I am sure that no matter how hard you try to believe that Donald Trump is a god, that's not going to make it so. Man cannot save Man, only God can do that.

Now I'm not a born-again anything, anymore. But I'm here to tell you, if you're still believing in these shitty people and their shitty politics and their shitty, small, vengeful little "god" after all this mess, you're the one who's going to hell, not me.

In the Bible, Revelation isn't about torture porn or a supposed gilded afterlife.

It's really about justice.

No amount of circus act bullshit or fake righteousness will ever change that.

And the judge is going to be smarter than you and know all the shit you did.

No, there isn't an appeals court, either.

And that's the part these fucking people forgot.

Part Six.

Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at evening, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning, ~Mark 13:35

Lest He Break Out Like Fire In The House Of Abraham (American Revelation VI, Part Six.)

 
For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:
But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to naught.
Seek the Lord, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel. ~Amos 5:4-6

I saw this a couple days ago.

Erick Erickson was pretty much saying that how easy it is to vote should be based on how easy it is to buy a gun. It's funny how the vast majority of the world doesn't see it that way. In most developed (and even many developing) countries it's easy to vote, and difficult to get a gun.

A weapon is a tool, not some kind of be-all, end-all, or a talisman against evil. Firearms have one purpose, and that is to kill things. This is not inherently the sacred, wonderful power that Republicans collectively seem to think that it is.

Yet this is the new talking point, Republicans want to make it harder to vote...because they think then people will just give up, and they'll get to have power forever...or at least they'll stay that way right now, which seems to actually be more important.

Here's the thing, though, when Republican policies are actively harmful to most people, and those people are armed and it's hard to get the ballot but easy to get the bullets...well eventually that only ends one way. Of course, it's not like these fucking people are known for thinking through the implications of their beliefs.

Hell, I know for a fact that some of these idiots appear to think that guns somehow make a person more conservative. It's horse shit, but yet again these damn people don't think in terms of real things or causes and effects, it's all about the fantasy, the myth, the things they tell themselves to try to make their shitty beliefs more palatable even to themselves.

This isn't the Party Of Lincoln. This sure as hell isn't the party of Reagan.

The truth is, it's barely even the Party Of Trump.

And it never, ever, really was. If anything, Trump stole it. Trump provided five years of bread and circuses without the bread and a substitution of an hour of Cruelty Theater every once in awhile. More to the point, these motherfuckers can't even stop lying about that.

The Republican Party of today is the Party of Jesse Helms, the party of Lee Atwater, the party of Strom Thurmond, the party of the Dixiecrats, Jim Crow and the KKK. It's the Party of the Confederate States Of America. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are just the boob-bait for the rubes while the boys in the backroom decide the fates of others amid clouds of cigar smoke.

And they lost, again, but they hate that. So they're effectively trying to take the vote away from Black people in Georgia. If the rest of us allow this bullshit to go unanswered we deserve what we're going to get.

Which is a lot more of what we've had for the last five years.

Pretty sure they hate even more that Biden's poll ratings are way higher than Trump's ever were. Of course Biden is actually governing as President to all of us, where Republicans can't even govern their own most basic impulses. How the fuck would they expect to run a country?

More to the point, they don't care to learn, they think having to persuade or even talk to the rest of us is beneath them, and they expect to be able to insult us and treat us like children and have us love them for it. They sure as hell don't want the rest of us to have a say in our own country.

I'm tired of these motherfuckers. Vote them all out, and expose, charge and prosecute these fuckers and their donors for sedition and treason against the United States, and then treat them accordingly.

The vote Is America. An attack on one of our rights is an attack on them all. Do you really think if we let these fuckers hand-pick who votes, they won't try that shit with everything else too?

Up to and including who gets to keep and bear arms. An armed populace doesn't serve the interests of the people who don't care about the rest of our rights, because we just might decide to fight to keep those rights.

The vote IS America, our democracy and traditions are what separates us from the barbarians, or so I was taught by conservatives when that word meant one could be more than a bootlicker, a bigot or insane...or a liar.

If we want a better country, we have to be better citizens...and we have to stomp the Republican Party into the dust, sweep it up and leave it in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

To do anything else is to take a hell of a lot of risks with our own lives. These fuckers tried to weaponize a virus to kill us all...and that was what they did when they were still for the most part pretending to be civilized people.

What do you think they'll do now that they don't have to pretend anymore?

If the judgment and wrath of an angry God is not forthcoming, we need to land on these assholes like the wrath of God.

That is all.

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengthens the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. ~Amos 5:8-12

Part Five.

Whatever happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?" (American Revelation VI: Part Five.)

 

I am the way into the city of woe. I am the way to a forsaken people. I am the way into eternal sorrow. Sacred justice moved my architect. I was raised here by divine omnipotence, primordial love and ultimate intellect. Only those elements time cannot wear are beyond me, and beyond time I stand. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.' ~Sign inscribed above the gates of Hell, Dante's Inferno.

I have a confession to make.

I'm goddamned sick and tired of killing.

I'm sick and tired of guns, mass murder, and Republicans worshiping barbarities like the Death Penalty that don't do one fucking thing to deter crime, but they're good for fooling the feeble-minded into believing that "Something is being done."

I'm tired of God, I'm tired of prayers, I've had it up over my head with religion and I'm sick to death of ineffectual, vain displays of religiosity being seen as a "solution" by people who aren't one even one goddamned bit interested in an actual, real-world solution to damned near any problem.

Has prayer stopped even one person from getting shot, or from dying of the virus or any of a thousand other things we do to each other? Has it brought even one of those people back to life?

I mean, really, what's the damned point, here?

For that matter, I'm tired of our increasingly atheistic, murderous conservative politics being taught as Christianity. These motherfuckers have created a Christ-less Christianity devoid of hope, redemption or spirituality, where in truth the only thing you can hope for is that you picked the right eternal "Big Bad" because if you look at the conduct of the two the only fucking difference between God and the Devil is which side you're on. Fuck, I'm so old that I can remember when a morally relativistic religion based on the Self was what conservatives accused the liberals of trying to create!

Now it's "Praise to Him, King Trump, He who treats me like a chump."

I'm tired of these chucklefuck fascist nanny-state motherfuckers who want to tell you what you can "Like" online basically telling anybody who wants to go out and murder people in a grocery store or a massage parlor or in a church or just on the fucking street "Have at it, so long as the NRA and the weapons manufacturers get their cut and I get my campaign donations.

In the end, the only thing the godless, secularized ecclesia of the modern conservative religio-industrial-political complex is really offering anybody is the chance that they might get to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die...and after five years of Donald Trump loudly corrupting our politics, they still didn't get it.

In today's instant-gratification culture, five years is a concept well beyond Eternity.

So they mad, because they thought they were going to get to kill their imagined enemies, which is basically everybody.

Is it any wonder we've got people spiraling off into madness and murdering some motherfuckers at the grocery store?

When racism against Asian Americans was in fact openly promoted by the last President and is still being pushed by certain members of Congress, is it any wonder people get assaulted or murdered?

Don't look away, answer the fucking question.

Hell, I'm pretty sure at this point that the only reason the cops aren't trying to cover for the Boulder gun nut or act like his psychologist or say he had a bad day is that he killed a cop.

That, and he happened to have an Arabic name. He looked white as fuck to me, but I'm pretty sure just his name had FOX News starting with the usual Ooga Booga Booga routine, I mean, multiculturalism and pluralism and the world refusing to conform to right-wing racial stereotypes means anybody could be one of "Them" right?

Whoever "Them" happens to be right now. Endless paranoia is endless.

Let's not forget that hate, racism and xenophobia are components in why all this is so, too.

I'm tired of the fear, the hate, the racism, and all the rest of it too. I'm sick of the gutless, ravening fear of change, be it cultural, social, or whatever...

...Often by people who should, dead to rights based on their own life histories, not be afraid of much of anything.

I know people who's literal job it was 30 years ago, to potentially face down twenty-to-one odds in the Fulda Gap, part of an Armored Cavalry Regiment whose literal mission was to take on a Soviet Guards Army and kick its ass back into the next time zone who have been reduced to cowardly, pants-pissing fear of their own fellow Americans (most of whom don't care about them or want to do them any harm) by endless right-wing propaganda to the point where they think they have to take a gun in Walmart. Not only that, but then action movies and fake machismo and toxic masculinity make them think they have to act like they have something to prove by doing it?

(And do I really need to tell you how many of these fucking people are religious?)

If that's what they've come to, it's probably a good thing in real terms that the Cold War ended relatively peacefully. It's probably a good thing that most of these fools never had to face a crisis and a test of their convictions or morals until relatively recently.

Because to be honest, fully a third of this country's population is not only failing that test, but actively trying to drag the rest of us down into the gutter with it.

It's honestly a wonder that we don't have more shootings.

Speaking as a United States Air Force Security Forces veteran here, speaking as a person who's dealt with multiple crises, the majority of them self-inflicted, I have never felt the need to take a weapon in the store with me. I have nothing to prove, and long before those days I was taught the value of things like consistency and courage. I was taught that being a conservative meant a lot more than following whatever the party line of the moment was, or opposing whatever the liberals were doing.

In that regard it's probably no surprise that I ended up on the other side.

You cannot be afraid all the time and then flip a switch to be brave, all based on what some politician or political party wants at the time. One of these things is not like the other one.

I know somebody else, too. A lady who once endlessly waxed eloquent about dying bravely and righteously for Christ in the End Times she believed were coming who, now that we're facing a few genuine global crises, has the uninspiring life-goal of joining some Fundamentalist Christian commune in a remote part of Idaho.

Because it never was about Christ, it never was about Truth.

It was about the ego and fooling the feeble-minded so that she, and people like her, could get money and power and stuff.

I'm an Agnostic, yes.

But if you want to know why I believe in American Revelation, that's why.

Because these fucking people have taken the Lord's Word and turned it into nothing but a circus act and raised up their own Golden Image fake god to justify it all.

And anybody who's actually read the Book knows how that ends.

Peace.

Hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation, O house of Israel.

The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up.

For thus saith the Lord God; The city that went out by a thousand shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall leave ten, to the house of Israel.

For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:

But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to naught.

Seek the Lord, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel.

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

~Amos 5:1-8

Part Four-Bravo

Atlas Whacked (American Revelation VI, Part Four-Bravo.)

Auntie Entity: And what did you do before all this?

Max: I was a cop, a driver.

Auntie Entity: Well, how the world turns. One day cock of the walk, next a feather-duster.

~From Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome

There's something I see going on that bothers me. There's a certain percentage of the (mostly white) media that keeps bumping Trumpist, thinly veiled white nationalist talking points about the border in a supposed effort to find fault with President Biden.

Why? Because they miss Trump. They miss the constant chaos, the constant drama, the scandal-a-day ethic, they miss the money and the props for being seen as "fighting" Trump. And yeah, for a lot of them it was just cosplay, or personal dislike, or they bet correctly on the direction things would go.

It sure wasn't belief in life and freedom, or the Constitution.

Never mind that Trump basically wanted to arrest and/or kill any journalist that didn't kiss his ass. Never mind that his supporters developed and still have a bloody-minded hatred of the media, which has even expanded to Fox News for a lot of them.

Because of course, they think it could never happen to them. That's how a privileged mentality works. They thought all the bad shit was going to happen to somebody else.

Never mind that the numbers concerning support for Biden and his policies thus far are almost unheard of in recent memory, as regards his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, well it's damn near impossible in my experience to get 70% of Americans to agree on anything, but here we are.

And of course, good government and smooth functioning of things isn't good for business, it isn't good for the infotainment media complex in particular.

Good, fuck those people. I'm sick of this horse shit, and these motherfuckers want to start it back up again? Yeah, fuck all that.

It needs to be said that in a lot of cases this crisis is far from over.

A Q-Anon nut recently tried to storm an Army Reserve Center with a paintball gun to try to "test the loyalty" of the military, and basically preached nonsensical Q-drivel while doing so, and while a couple of Army reservists tackled him and sat on him and waited for the cops to show up. This guy had been arrested and put in mental hospitals before over this bullshit.

So when these fucking people start shooting at the rest of us, will it be the big-time media personalities like Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough who are out there embedded with the troops? Will it be Ross "Chunky Reese Witherspoon Fancier" Douthat or any of these other Very Serious People?

No, it won't. And to be quite honest I'll bet you can guess the color and the gender and the orientations or religions of the reporters they stick downrange of the enemy as well as I can. It's sure as hell not going to be the older rich white assholes who are the ones making these decisions, let alone the CEO's and the owners who made bank off of the media's performative opposition to Trump that they're now effectively doubling back on and hoping we won't notice.

But what happens when we end up stuck with a violent right-wing insurgency because these assholes are against democracy and anything else that stands in the way of their power? Now that they know amassing political power instead of persuading people didn't work, "owning the libs" didn't work, ideological masturbation isn't working and it's quite likely trying to suppress the vote won't work either (and what happens to their own voters who are so rabidly against protecting themselves from or getting vaccinated for the virus?) they're going to make up their minds that violence is their only option, and they will use it. I'm serious, I've been saying this all along for a reason.

When that happens these same assholes who miss the political drama of the Trump years will fill the 24-hour news cycle with footage of firefights in the French Quarter of New Orleans and airstrikes against rebel positions in Appalachia and pictures of BUFF's orbiting at high altitude over the Great Plains waiting for a strike order to be put up, and likewise, the atrocities, the massacred civilians, the soldiers in the streets, and all the uncivilized fuckery that always goes with any war.

And they'll shed plenty of crocodile tears in the process, and some fucking idiot will opine that this would never have happened if Republicans were in power.

Never realizing that it's the unending Republican lust for power and the willingness of too many people to whitewash that crap that's pushing us in this direction to start with.

And people will die because of it. Who will be the ones held to account?

Never mind that Trump himself is far from gone, though he certainly does seem to have faded quite a bit and to be honest, there's probably not much of a story there either.

It's not that all these media people or Republicans really miss Trump. They just liked the sensationalism, or the idea of authority or whatever, and the lies and myths they told themselves to feel important and justify it all.

And they resent the fact that the rest of the country is not playing along with their bullshit.

So you get stuff like Trump plotting to start a new social media network. As if that worked out so well for Gab or Parler. Let me tell you what's going to happen, if it gets off the ground and goes live at all it won't last very long, and Trump will steal a whole bunch of somebody else's money while somebody else tries to protect him from the consequences of his actions and from prosecution, and likely sets their own life and career on fire in the process. That's the part that mystifies me, nobody in all of this mess ever really came out ahead but Trump, yet all sorts of gullible idiots are perfectly willing to light they own ass on fire for this asshole. And for what? That's the part that I don't get.

And there's people who will follow along with this garbage. 

There's people who believe in Trump more than they ever believed in Christ, and they'll be happy to extend their "faith" to anybody affiliated with Trump and they literally don't give a damn about what their own claimed religion says about people who do that kind of thing.

Because it never was about that. It never was about making America "Great Again." It was sure never about having good leadership. It was never about making the world a better place. It was about bread and circuses and entertainment and seeing what they could get out of it and titillation for the roaring mob so that it wasn't coming at them with the pitchforks and torches and these fucking assholes were hoping they could keep this scam going on literally forever at the rest of our expense.

Of course, something would have broken, something would have lit the whole mess on fire. You can see that even more clearly now that Trump is gone. He was never anything more than a symptom of the main problems. He was never more than a figurehead for the Republicans, a fake-as-hell populist label slapped on the same old crony capitalism, a new gold-plated asshole to advance the same old racist agendas.

And it didn't work.

But along the way they became addicted to the bullshit, they started believing their own propaganda.

And in their minds Trump will go down as a great liberator, because he freed them from having to act like decent, civilized people, because he was the cool dad who let them do whatever they damned well pleased...and for all his bluster he lacked the force of personality to bend damn near anything his way, even the Republicans, who were all but bending over and waiting for him to do exactly that.

Yet for all that, they took a lot more of him into their souls than even they thought they did and only now is it really coming out. It wasn't Trump that did this, it was them. They made him their god, with malice aforethought toward the rest of us. If extremism and racism look indistinguishable from modern conservatism, well, conservatives have nobody to blame for that but themselves. Trump didn't do that. Trump didn't call out to them to be their god. They did that, and they were the ones thirsting for a dictator with a cult of personality, or a king to bow down to, or whatever.

They threw the previous right-wing Jesus, Ayn Rand, down from her pedestal because functionally she wasn't shitty enough.

And they thought they'd get away with it, forever.

So now they're more or less left with the ideological and political equivalent of E-mailing dick pics around and trying to impress people that way, and there's those in the media perfectly well willing to pretend to be impressed by this shit.

A good leader, by contrast, knows that respect is earned and takes a stand on some things. A good leader knows he or his country is going to have some enemies and doesn't waste time trying to appease them.

A good leader is willing to draw a line in the sand and will stand and deliver when somebody tries to cross it. Good leaders understand that if you want to have a better nation, you have to be better citizens, because they sure as hell can't do it all. They don't want to make all of your decisions for you...because they get that you have to be responsible enough to make said choices on your own.

Look around you, look at who wants to run away from the responsibilities of adulthood and life, from the choices that make us free...and look at who is willing to embrace those things for better and worse.

And throw your lot in with those of us who are willing to do the work of citizenship and life, and who aren't hankering after bread and circuses in the service of would-be emperors, because it's the only way.

Part Four-Alfa.

#Top20

 

Atlas Tugged (American Revelation VI, Part Four-Alfa)

And a democracy can't exist without free speech and the right to assemble. And that's what Americans tend to forget. And they're born into a culture where they take all of their freedoms for granted. ~Larry Flynt.

I saw this the other day, John Cooper, of the Christian rock band Skillet, comparing the Grammy's to Nazi propaganda because of the performance of ""WAP" at the awards.

For the love of God, what?

Listen, asshole, the same First Amendment that protects your freedom of religion and ability to make money off of being a mediocre artist with "Jesus" slapped on the label also protects Cardi B's right to perform and write music as she damn well pleases, and you don't get to have one without the other.

Not if you want to remain free, at any rate.

This has been a conservative viewpoint, indeed, was the conservative viewpoint for most of my life and was put in place, among other things, by a Supreme Court that tended Republican, and towards free speech absolutism, for a very long time.

That said, the same people also believed that freedom of speech did not protect one from the consequences of that speech, and until very recently this was the default conservative viewpoint as well.

In other words, when I was coming up back in the 1970's and 1980's if somebody, especially a Republican, had said they supported Russia over the United States, they would have almost certainly ended up picking their teeth up off the ground immediately after that. Hell, I can remember when "If you don't like this country, move to Russia and see how you like it" was an insult that people would use.

For the vast majority of my life, until Trump, in fact...America as a whole in general and the Republican Party in particular often defined itself in opposition to Russia. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and to a lesser extent the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this was because of Communism. After that, and particularly in the 1990's it was because of corruption and nationalism, leavened with a "We won" attitude on the part of American conservatives in particular. 

That seemed to change when Trump ran for President, did change after he won, and now after he lost, FOX News and Trumpist Republicans like Matt Gaetz are openly kissing Vladimir Putin's ass. In this clip Matt Gaetz is busy saying that "If Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin debated, it would not go like Rocky IV." As a fan of the series I think Matt Gaetz doesn't know dick about the Rocky movies and the zeitgeist of the time in which they were made. There was a reason that in that same series Apollo Creed always wore those American flag shorts. Hell, in the 1980's there was not to my knowledge any actor considered to be more pro-America than proudly Republican Sly Stallone.

And here this smarmy little fuck is trying to use that against Joe Biden?

Yeah, Fuck you, Matt. Fuck you and the horse you drunk-rode in on. Now, all Republicans care about is continual ideological masturbation and not facing consequences when they get caught with their dicks in their hands.

Again, these fucking people have either forgotten these once rock-solid mythos of their own movement, or it was all bullshit in the first place.

For a lot of the current Republicans, it absolutely always was bullshit. Anybody who really believed it all is old, out of power, voting for the Democrats or possibly all of the above.

And speaking as somebody whose values when I was a Republican were formed by the Reagan era, it's not like these motherfuckers haven't spent the last five years doing everything but digging Ronald Reagan up and ritually desecrating his corpse. They certainly have shit all over his Cold War victory, his efforts to end the threat of nuclear war and the comparative pragmatism of Republican governance at the time. In fact, the only things modern Republicans seem to care about from that legacy are the culture war narratives and trickle-down economics. And in point of fact, their central argument regarding such matters is that Republicans in the past (indeed all Republicans prior to Trump...and since his fall, even Trump himself) did not go far enough. In point of fact it seems like the extremism of the Republican Party doubles down almost daily now. They thought they were going to end up owning everything, and since that didn't work, since even this divided house that is our country managed to stand against their wannabe dictator, and since they got caught with their dicks hanging out when they were supposed to be the serious party of very serious people...now all they want to do is burn the house down as if that will somehow save their bullshit mental image of themselves.

These days Republicans are hankering for everything from having a king to having a military coup, as if either one would automatically break in their favor, but certainly they desire to have someone with unaccountable power in charge in the hope that whoever that is will be on their side. These idiots don't just want to be the Pashtuns of an American tribal society, but quite unlike those actual people in the real-world Afghanistan...they almost seem to want to be invaded by the Russians.

These fucking people are so desperate to have somebody to bow down to, to make all their adult decisions for them and shield them from the rigors of modern life in their own country, that the person doesn't even have to be an American.

I can't help but think that even Ayn Rand, who'd had to live under and lived her whole life in fear of people just like Vladimir Putin, would be shocked by the Republicans pro-KGB Agent turn.

"America First" my ass.

And if you don't think avoidance of responsibility and of having to care about other people is exactly what it's about, last night the city of Miami Beach declared an emergency and a curfew because the spring break crowds got out of control.

I watched the video, the party in the streets seemed, to me, to be functionally indistinguishable from a low-grade riot. How in the hell, after fully a year of this mess and over half a million dead, do we have so many people not taking the virus seriously?!

I'm all for people being able to assemble and party it up, under normal circumstances, but for fuck's sake mask up and keep your distance from each other until everybody gets vaccinated and we have the virus under control!

I realize that Trump and Republicans propagated these attitudes because they hoped to use the virus as a weapon against their political opposition, but if I had to guess I'd say most of the people partying it up in the streets are their own voters. I quite wonder how they think that's going to work out in their favor.

But the truth is that Republicans don't actually care. American conservatism, like the Pentecostal revival shows and Prosperity Gospel bullshit that infests it has become experiential and all about getting from one emotional orgasm to the next, like addicts.

And they've managed to drag a lot of the country along with them.

Well, we better get clean, we better put it back in our pants, and we better do it real quick.

Or a lot more people are going to die.

Part Four.

Atlas Masturbated (American Revelation VI, Part Four)

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord Of The Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." ~John Rogers

There's something that's been bugging me for awhile now. I'm sick of these fucking Republicans, you know...the people who've spent the last five years trying to retroactively lose the Cold War and hand a belated victory to Vladimir Putin and reinstate the threat of global nuclear war, trying to cover themselves in the glory of Ronald Reagan...who they'd likely not let in the door were he around today...and George H.W. Bush, who they've already explicitly othered. You know, the guys who won the Cold War.

And, among other things, Reagan was not dealing with a global pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 and, although the AIDS crisis was in full effect, in the US its effects were more limited population-wise. Still, if anything Reagan's response to the AIDS crisis shows a lot of disturbing similarities to how Trump bungled the COVID-19 response.

As Jordan's quote shows, he's more about the mythology of Reagan than paying attention to anything the Gipper actually did. Reagan often governed quite pragmatically, and of course the GOP of that era was a whole different animal...although certainly a lot of the trends that have become major problems in America got their start during his time. Reagan opened the floodgates and let both the Evangelicals and the Objectivists into our government and political mainstream, for one...and both for the same reason; political advantage.

But then, in the eyes of Tea Party nuts like Gym Jordan, I'm pretty sure that Reagan's one and only worthy accomplishment was nominating Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan to be the chair of the Federal Reserve.

But I suppose that Ayn Rand, a shitty writer who came to believe her own bullshit, and Jim Jordan, a shitty politician who also believes in his own bullshit, have much in common, don't they?

But then, I think believing your own bullshit must be a requirement for Republicans these days.

These fucking people sure do love their out of context Robert Heinlein quotes.

Funny thing is, Heinlein never claimed his beliefs, or his stories, were anything more than that. Heinlein, a former US Navy officer, rather explicitly did not believe that "an armed society is a polite society" and the quote is from a novel about a futuristic society that resolves all disputes by dueling. I don't see anybody actually advocating for such a thing.

Jim Jordan and Kevin Sorbo on the other hand, are rather explicit in stating that they think society should be organized around their shitty beliefs. Apparently, they forget, or never realized in the first place that one hell of a lot of their beliefs are rooted in science fiction.

But then, and note that I say this as a former Christian, a lot of the rest of their beliefs are also rooted in religious interpretations that have about as much to do with the Bible or Christianity as Atlas Shrugged does. As it turns out, I was right. The killer in the Atlanta shooting spree from a couple days ago was a racist and religious fanatic who had some real issues and hated himself for even a normal thing like masturbating, and he apparently was so religious that he thought he didn't have a right to swear, but he did have a right to commit murder.

Whatever happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"

When you value your self-proclaimed religious purity more than somebody else's life, you're doing it wrong.

It's funny how all you have to do anymore, to get away with doing a bunch of evil shit is claim to be religious, especially conservative Christian. It's funny how none of these people even try to live up to their own bullshit, but if you (intentionally or otherwise) show their mythos to be a lie, they want to kill you.

Again, because these motherfuckers don't really believe in God...except as a rationalization for the shit they already wanted to do anyway.

And it doesn't help that the cops apparently, publicly, all but acted as his psychological counselors...and then of course the guy doing most of the talking there was himself outed as a racist who sold shirts that blamed Asian people for the COVID-19 pandemic.

And then, the Congressional Republican pivots right from anti-Asian racism to anti-Communism without missing a beat.

Because yes, the racism was ever and always the point. "Conservatives" 60-70 years ago thought racial integration was a communist plot, and I'll remind you that that's also when Ayn Rand was at her most active and she was just fine with that shit.

The billions of dollars that motherfuckers like Chip Roy and Republicans like him and their wealthy Republican donors make off of cheap goods that are manufactured in China could not be reached for comment. Likewise, the claimed anti-Communism of Ayn Rand and her acolytes is also missing from the chat. Apparently, not one word of that shit matters when there's money on the table.

But somehow that's Okay.

Or is it?

There really is a problem with all this. I'll also remind you that Republicans spent much of my younger years railing against moral relativism.

But the Republican Party of today wants people to be conservative, or courageous, or religious only as actions dictate and only when it suits their purposes, which change from day to day. The people bitching about the WAP song being performed at the Grammys complete with two female artists twerking on each other in a rather racy stage show were just fine with it when it came out that Kimberly Guilfoyle repeatedly sexually harassed and tried to seduce other women.

And of course, to them that's fine because modern "Conservative" morality is entirely situationally relative. Everything is OK when we do it. Nothing is OK when anybody else does it. And after awhile, they get addicted to this kind of thinking, and the party of "Personal Responsibility" ends up thinking everything is everybody else's fault.

But my own life lessons call out to me that respect is earned, by every action, every day, all the time.

And sooner or later the buck has to stop somewhere and the bill is going to come due.

You cannot be brave one minute and a coward the next and have both things be true. One of these things is going to be a lie, every time. You cannot be so religious that you won't even use profanity one day, and turn into a killer the next, and have both descriptions apply in good faith. That dude was always a killer who masqueraded as a religious fanatic. His "purity" was never anything more than a rationalization.

Light has no fellowship with darkness.

One of these things is not like the other one.

Remember that.

Part Three.

 

Temptation (American Revelation VI: Part Three.)

Thou Shalt Not Kill. ~Exodus 20:13

Eight people, including six Asian women, got murdered in Atlanta, Georgia yesterday, by some pasty white religious nut who was mad because of the "temptation" posed by massage parlors?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not murder a more grievous sin than getting your dick jacked off? I'm fucking serious, here. Answer the question.

And perhaps more to the point, can anybody tell me why, during the press conference, the cops rather strangely brought up that this creepy uncooked pizza-dough looking motherfucker "had a bad day."

I've had lots of bad days and I've never wanted to kill a bunch of people because of them.

This guy killed eight people for no damn reason, I don't give a shit what he thinks and I'm not afraid to say so. Plus, he's probably going to have a lot more bad days now.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's going to come out that this dude was a far-right nut of some sort, a fundamentalist Christian, and likely a misogynist, a racist, and a Trump supporter as well. Certainly, if he was anything else, that would have been all over the media to the point of ridiculous by now. But he "had a bad day" and "Police still aren't sure it's a hate crime." What the fuck else could it have been?

Daily there are new reports of racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who people with a certain mob mentality unjustly blame for COVID-19. This ridiculous bullshit was egged on with malice aforethought by conservatives in general and people like Donald Trump in particular for much of the last year and it's still going on, if on a smaller and less national scale, even now.

Eight people got murdered yesterday, and the cops are actively trying to soft-pedal the fucking killer?

And then they have the balls to wonder why people are demanding police reform? Or why people say "Fuck The Police." Gee, I wonder why they do that. Well, among other things, when the media and the police keep being publicly seen trying to find ways to empathize with every white criminal that comes along, maybe we should goddamned well name the roots of the problems here?

Racism, for one.

Easy access to weapons for another.

And perhaps more to the point, one half of our political culture specifically and with malice aforethought enables both for their political and financial profits and for a certain set of religious and theological beliefs.

If you wonder why my last blog post series was "America is not so exceptional" and why I'm up to six main and a couple of secondary series with the tag "American Revelation" look no further than this.

America is a country where some people seem to have the right to have the cops try and make you look good when you do a mass murder, and where some people's right to be alive is contingent upon not crossing the path of said murderers.

If you wonder why, among countries with an actual reputation for religiosity or religious fanaticism (either real, like in much of the Middle East, or astroturfed by the government like in Russia) America is called godless, well this kind of shit is why. True enough, a lot of those countries do plenty of bad things. Part of the difference is, most of them make no bones about it (or even cite religion as the reason) and they don't demand that the rest of the world see them as actually moral in both religious and secular terms like America in general, and American conservatives in particular, do.

But when American police agencies and others effectively, publicly, imply that some damned white fool's fear of temptation, imagined "purity," squicky sexual issues or simply what kind of a day the son of a bitch was having are more important than the lives of eight other human beings, we don't need them to call us immoral. We're telling on ourselves.

Americans are not a moral people, even those of us who have morals are tolerating far too much immorality in the name of convenience.

America is not a moral nation, and all one needs to do to see that is look at how we treat the least of us, or the stranger among us, and compare that to what the Word of God (in whatever persuasion you want, really) actually says.

No nation will ever be judged by how it treats its in-groups, its religious nuts, or its wealthy.

And if we want to not be judged, or to be judged on a favorable basis, we're going to have to become a better people.

Sin and temptation are not monsters under the bed or things unto themselves. What they mean is that we miss the mark set by God. Similarly, without conviction, without repentance...without actual sincere efforts to change and make amends, these terms are just empty, meaningless words most useful for fooling the feeble-minded.

If you actually are a person who's read the Bible, you know that the alternative to conviction and repentance...the alternative to picking up that mark and working to do better...is destruction.

If you're more worried about wanting to get your dick jerked off than you are about killing people you're doing it wrong.

All temptation is, is the dark side of the universe and your own thoughts and rationalizations trying to convince you to do what you already want to do anyway.

That guy wanted to do wrong, there's nothing actually wrong with sex. He wanted to hate, he wanted to act on that hate. The sexual stuff was just a rationalization.

Humans will always rationalize stupid bullshit, given the chance. According to Christianity that's because of our own fallen, sinful nature.

If you want to overcome that, you have to love your own life and the lives of others more than you love your sin.

If we want to have a better country, we have to be better citizens. We are going to have to be better people.

And we're going to have to, or a lot more people are going to die. Call it God's judgement, call it our own godless stupidity, either way the result is the same, and fixing that, preventing more bloodshed? That part is on us.
 

Part Two.

Fakeservatism (American Revelation VI, Part Two.)

“‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen." ~Ezekiel 16:49-50

Yesterday, Marjorie Taylor Greene called Guam (A US territory since the Spanish American War, whose people have been citizens since 1898) a "foreign land." 

I'm quite sure the Chamorro, the native people of Guam, who historically are s very patriotic people and who are thus overrepresented in the United States Armed Forces (most especially in the Air Force and the Navy) are thrilled to hear that.

Oh, wait, Guam's Congressional representative showed up at Marge's office with a platoon of Guam Army National Guardsmen deployed to D.C. to show exactly how people felt about this. Guess what? Marge hid in her office and didn't have the guts to face the people she'd been otherizing and talking shit about for no damned good reason. Like most bullies, Marge is a coward.

That's typical of Republicans these days, all things considered. Refuse to act like civilized or decent people, say a bunch of dumb racist shit, and then try and hide from the consequences.

Again, I'm going to remind y'all that it's not so much that Marjorie Taylor Greene and those like her are jingoistic racist xenophobic assholes who hate their fellow Americans even as they'd gladly kiss the asses of foreign dictators...it's that, to them, the rest of us don't really exist except as an inconvenience. It's not so much that Marjorie Taylor Greene is an adulterous, conspiratorial, lying piece of human garbage who's spent her life obsessively seeking attention as it's that she literally thinks she should be able to do whatever she wants, to whomever she wants, just because she thinks she's special.

Or rather, it's that these fucking people are all that, and more, and a hell of a lot of the voters they have left are the same way, just on a smaller scale.

And not a damned one of them has the guts to face what they actually are when called on the carpet by the rest of us. Republicans' moralizing is as fake as their social conservatism, and the only thing in all these years that has ever trickled down to their common voters is their contempt for literally the entire rest of the world.

And when those that they deem their servants, i.e. the military in this case, clap back at them when one of theirs (Frozen fish heir Tucker Carlson, who has served precisely zero days in uniform) says a bunch of dumb shit, then they claim the mantles of peace and persecution, like they think we're too fucking dumb to notice what they've been up to all these years.

This is America, the military doesn't start wars, politicians do. Increasingly, though, the politicians don't have the guts to own up to their own actions. There's a certain segment of the Republican Party that's been trying to start a war with the Iranians since the 1980's, for example. Rand Paul very much supports that, but here he is trying to claim peace and isolationism because the troops called out Tucker Carlson for saying a bunch of misogynistic dumb shit.

Speaking as a veteran here, I can tell you from personal experience that these fucking people only think we're "heroes" when they can imagine that we've had our boots on someone else's throat on their behalf. 

Yes, there's a lot of Republicans who sincerely believed in things like collective security, international alliances and a strong defense. You know what? Most of those people are dead by now, and the rest are either out of power or voting Democratic. There's a reason for that.

The modern Republican Party is composed of nothing but clout-seeking bullies who need an ass whuppin.' Rand Paul got one, but it doesn't seem to have helped.

I'm beginning to think the only thing these motherfuckers WILL ever understand is if they are removed from power and it is kept away from them on a permanent basis, and they get to watch everything they've done crumble...and then they'll go to their graves resenting that and never consider that they didn't deserve to have that power in the first place. Rand Paul's sudden belief in peace is as fake as his social conservatism.

Why, again, do we give these people power?

And it's an indictment of our country that they ever had it. Think about that for a second. And Mitch McConnell is threatening to make trouble for the Democrats if they change the Filibuster and otherwise stand up to him?

These people need to be kicked from power and never allowed to have it again.

American conservatives no longer understand what's even the point of America, if they ever did.

When they dance around the notion that this country which was founded in opposition to the very idea of kings and hereditary nobility should have them, that's what they're saying: "We don't fucking get it, and we never did."

More to the point, each and every one of these absolute motherfuckers believes that they should be the king in his castle or the lord in the manor...and the rest of us should be the serfs in the fields. Fuck Republicans, and I say that as somebody who used to be one.

Conservatism is supposed to be about belief in revealed truth and the wisdom of our ancestors. God created all people equal in His sight and our ancestors decided, sometimes only because we as a people forced them to, that all the people who are born in our country should be citizens and are legally entitled to equal rights. There's maybe a dozen Republicans in office who've shown by their actions that they actually believe this.

When I say "These are the sins of your sister Sodom" this is what I'm talking about. Under these people's influence America IS Sodom as surely as the Biblical one ever was...but not because of gay people or trans people...it's because of the conservatives, and the Republicans. And if we keep tolerating this shit we'll meet the same fate. They're explicit about it these days, the destruction of America is the future conservatives want.

You want to stop that? Get these fucking people out.

You want to have a better country? A stronger country? Be a better citizen, and hold things like the corporations, the government and the media to account and pay attention rather than just taking people's word for it...not outsourcing it to somebody else, not passing the buck, You do it. The only reason these fucking people act like this is the rest of us let them.

A hell of a lot of Americans seem to think bad behavior is funny.

We need to stop putting up with this shit.

Part One.

 

The Sins Of Your Sister Sodom (American Revelation VI, Part One.)

Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
Behold, I have told you before.
Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not.
For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:23-27

Last night at work, I saw this.

I very much got a "Behold, he is in the desert!" vibe from it. "Behold, he is in the secret chambers!" and naturally, I didn't believe it. But then, I never did.

In fact, I got a vibe of a profound sense of satisfaction on the part of the people who posted the snipped Tweets. Trump might not be the President anymore, but that just means they don't have to share. As if any of the rest of us would want the motherfucker.

Trump still gets the adulation, although perhaps a little less of it. He still gets to golf, and he apparently has conservative influencers and Republican elected officials or those aspiring to run for office coming to see him all the time. He still gets to be the powerbroker, without any of the responsibility.

Pardon me for thinking he's not ever going to run for President again. He doesn't have to.

Why be President when you can be the Big Man, God-Emperor, Potentate Of All Republicans and any future Republican President while you're still alive is going to have to de facto answer to you, lest they face the wrath of the mob?

And any Republicans who stand up to this horse shit, and increasingly stand up to the purveyors of it within Congress, will find themselves on the wrong side of the personality cult.

And this is life in America now. We have our own national Anti-President, or perhaps more appropriately, Antichrist.

These fucking people were thirsting so badly for someone to bow down to that they selected... *Checks Notes* Donald Trump?

Sounds about right.

Except it's not, really.

Like the label of "Conservatism" itself, it's misleading. Such a label is completely outdated, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were conservatives, but there's nothing there if you look in that particular spot.

Just like [modern] conservatism isn't about conserving anything anymore and hasn't been so for over a generation now, Trumpism itself is nothing but a hologram. It's basically Newt Gingrich wearing a bad wig and an orange face mask.

Trumpism is a hologram, it's the same old shitty bullshit that Newt Gingrich made seem like a new thing in 1994, or that Barry Goldwater first put into a cohesive national platform in 1964 only to back away from later, or that numerous far-right Republicans and segregationist Democrats said for basically forever before that.

"Fuck you, I've got mine, but I want yours too." and we'll call that "Freedom" and "Liberty." The freedom to do what I want, my liberty to have power over you, what you want doesn't actually matter. That's modern conservatism and Republicanism in a nutshell. Everything else is just noise, or made-up bullshit to distract the masses from that truth.

When somebody tells you who they are, believe them the first time.

What Sarah Huckabee Sanders calls freedom and rule of law sounds to me like classism, homophobia, misogyny, racism and transphobia. Republican politics is no longer about limited government and lower taxes, it's become about creating a fascist nanny-state to forcibly advance the interests of only one specific type of person.

If people like Josh Hawley and Sarah Huckabee Sanders had their way, the government would indeed make all of your decisions for you, but those decisions would look suspiciously like those of rural white Christian Fundamentalist nuts from Arkansas or Missouri. Doesn't matter one damn bit to them if that's not you, what you're like, who you are as a person is irrelevant to these fucking people because they have their own mythos they desire to uphold to paper over the holes in their own egos and satisfy their own endless hate and racism. They don't need a life, they have a narrative!

They want to have a transcendent State to worship, meaning a government that they control to try to force their dominance over our culture, and for no better reason than they do not really believe in God, except as a rationalization.

And it's not working, in no small part because all they can do is react. They could face reality, and the world as it is and be proactive, or think ahead but that would require that they adapt and change and have a little foresight and maybe accept some more people and more kinds of people. But to do that, in and of itself, is apostasy to them.

Now here's the kicker, if bearded men in desert robes who shouted "Allah Akbar" were doing the same exact thing, these same Republicans would be demanding war and claiming they wanted to defend oppressed peoples, and hoping you ignore the Lockheed Martin stock options and that the fighter jets don't actually work.

And the day will come when they will try to break off a piece of this country, to declare war against modern multicultural, pluralistic life and social change. I think they've recognized...I think they recognized a long time ago that they would not ever control the government or our culture enough to do that and they were hoping that the virus would even their odds a bit. I've written about this before, too.

But that's not working either, yet within their own ranks nearly half of them are doubling down on it, to their ultimate peril. I'll be damned if I understand the logic of it. Personally, I think it's a death cult and a lot of these fucking people simply have a death wish...and they hope to take as many of them down with us as they can.

Because that's what power is, to them.

Those who do not believe in eternal life always think that the taking of earthly life is the greatest expression of power.

And that's what the Mark Of The Beast truly represents, the acceptance of the false worldly system over He whose kingdom is not of this world.

Welcome to Revelation.

“‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen." ~Ezekiel 16:49-50

Prequel.

American Revelation I

American Revelation II

American Revelation III

American Revelation IV (War Dance)

American Revelation V