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.