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.