Where Will YOU Stand? (American Revelation VII: Part One.)

• Some people who are enjoying our prosperity have forgotten what it's for. But they diminish our triumph when they act as if wealth is an end in itself.

And there are those who have dropped their standards along the way, as if ethics were too heavy and slowed their rise to the top. ~George H.W. Bush

The Tiananmen Square massacre in China happened 32 years ago today.

It's hard not to think about that, when Republicans are trying, with malice aforethought, to make it harder for people to vote and easier to disregard the will of the people when there is an election. They do this as if they think not only that people will tolerate this forever, but that they themselves will live forever as long as they have power. Like, seriously, do you even America, bro?

 The truth is, authoritarianism can only be maintained by force, and force is best exercised over an at least mostly disarmed, politically apathetic population in cultures that have less concern for individual rights. None of that is how America works...although it's clear that this is what certain Republicans like Josh Hawley seem to be edging towards trying to create. In so doing they're eventually going to trip over the gun people and their own Party's longstanding obsession with individual rights and libertarianism, just like they've already tripped over their previous corporatism and accidentally proven that everything they ever said was ever and always bullshit.

The truth is, Republicans want an activist and authoritarian government just like the Chinese Communist Party, as long as it's far-right-enough Republican...and they drool, right now, over what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to Hong Kong.

The only problem...and this is exactly what I keep trying to warn people about...is that nothing will ever be enough for these assholes, not even when the Thin Blue Line, Sword and Shield Of The Party can basically reach up your ass and tell you what your talking points are.

Literally nothing will ever be enough for these people or turn the trick to get them to leave you alone, even utter destruction of X will only cause them to crave destruction of Y and start working toward that end.

And the only way to stop this shit is have a population that believes in freedom, that has a say in its own country and holds its government to account.

Needless to say that is exactly what Republicans are eager to try and defang, and I'm here to tell you that Donald Trump is just the excuse (and not a very good one, at that.)

Meanwhile, because they lost, certain Republicans are trying to talk like they intend to 'Get tough' on China and Russia as if they didn't spend the last five years loudly and publicly abasing themselves before those countries and kissing the asses of their leaders at every available opportunity, to the point that we're still wondering just what the hell happened in certain cases. 

Modern Republicans, farther than they've ever been from the rhetoric of Reagan or either President Bush, have never failed to schmooze up to any dictator who turned up on their radar, and just as "The Chicago Boys" advised Pinochet 40+ years ago and inflicted American style crony capitalism on Chile, there are even now fascist advisors connected to people like Peter Theil and Steve Bannon giving the CCP advice on how to handle Hong Kong and run their ostensibly Communist country. Somehow it seems like this is a combination of things that's going to lead to a bad end.

The truth is, a lot of these motherfuckers, while talking about freedom out of one side of their mouth were always all too happy to turn around and do business with dictators and chat them up with the other side of their mouth, because they saw that sort of leadership as beneficial to their commercial profits. In plenty of cases, too, they also (though far less openly in the past than today) they liked that kind of government and that style of "leadership" on ideological and personal levels. But of course the admiration only seems to go one way. Republicans like the taste of boot leather, then wonder why they get taken advantage of, ignored, and then seen as tacitly supporting some military adventure or other. (See Also: Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and Kim Jong Un's missile program.) Then, it goes sideways and only then, do Republicans get mad.

It's a lot easier for corporations and tin-pot political operatives to pay off one guy than in it for them to have to pay their fair share in taxes, and when it all goes south they just blame that one guy and start a war for freedom and democracy.

Throughout the 1980's Republicans (and also, Evangelicals) were very busy giving aid and comfort to people like Efrain Rios-Montt of Guatemala, Jonas Savimbi (the Angolan leader of UNITA) and of course, Saddam Hussein. All of the above were seen as Anti-Communist (and in Hussein's case, Anti-Islamist as well.) And for the record, people like Paul Manafort were balls deep in this bullshit then, too. Kind of puts Evangelical and Republican support for Israel and Bibi Netanyahu in a less-favorable light, too, doesn't it? 

Have to wonder how that's going to go now that the Israelis are forming a new coalition government and he's going to be replaced this week.

With that in mind, and especially considering that Democracy just handed Republican fascist aspirations a stinging defeat...and that their attempts to overthrown democracy as a result were a ham-fisted, transparent failure in all respects...it is inevitable that movement "Conservatives" will turn their penchant for anti-democratic fuckery on their own country. 

While some of this is going to be expressed in laws like in Georgia, or like the effort Democrats stymied in Texas...well, they're not always going to be that way. 

More to the point as they are and continue to be frustrated in their efforts...or when people simply show up and vote them out anyway...I am here to tell you that these motherfuckers will eventually resort to violence. Whether it just ends up some bullshit insurgency that borderlines into criminal activity or they try and break off a piece of America for their own use it's as simple as that, and they will try it eventually. In the past, even within the Republican Party there were a lot of checks on these fucking people and their ambitions. Well, now they've ran everybody else out and I know this because one of those people over the last decade-and-a-half was me. 

So far we're lucky that the people they've found to be their users-of-force are incompetents, fakes or morons who were known for their "dedication" or whatever...and that their entire movement seems to be shot through on a grand-scale level with a mind-boggling amount of mental illness.

But we cannot always count on that and the Darwinian exactitudes of reality dictate that eventually, they'll get smart people who aren't so snookered by their own ideological stupidity that they can't act coherently or make intelligent decisions.

Sooner or later, we're all going to have to stand up. Sooner or later, we're going to have to be the Tank Man if we want to keep the system and the civilization we have. because conservatives themselves have abandoned every thing they ever said they believed in the hope that they can save themselves by the raw accumulation of power.

Well, I've been a few places and seen some shit and I'm here to tell you that never works out in the end, but that end is usually war, genocide, mass graves and a bereaved diaspora and you end up with stuff like local banks in places like Iowa having Bosnian or Somali language options on their phone systems.

And the war criminals who burned it all down end up wanted international fugitives selling homeopathic woo woo bullshit until they get caught.

But they don't care about that. They have no shame, no standards, and frankly no survival instinct, desiring only to keep their perks and shit for a little longer and wring a few more monetary units of whatever kind out of the grift. They're not thinking any further ahead than that. Trump just exposed it. That's all.

Functionally, they don't give a shit if they get put up against a wall and made to pose for rifle shots or what they had to burn down to get to that point, as long as they had a good time first...at your expense and that of the rest of the world. 

It is ever and always going to be that way with morons, with people who measure themselves by relative status. and with various and assorted bad actors.

But what about you? Where do you stand? In front of the tank or off to the side letting it all happen because you want desperately to go back to sleep?

When the choice comes, you'll have but a moment to make it.

In the face of American Revelation, the answer is always going to be the same.

If you want a better country, be a better citizen. If you want a better world, be a better person.

Be the Tank Man.

Be the better citizen.

But be prepared to fight for your own freedom and that of others.

The fact is: Prosperity has a purpose. It's to allow us to pursue "the better angels," to give us time to think and grow. Prosperity with a purpose means taking your idealism and making it concrete by certain acts of goodness. It means helping a child from an unhappy home learn how to read, and I thank my wife, Barbara, for all her work in helping people to read, in all her work for literacy in this country. It means teaching troubled children through your presence that there is such a thing as reliable love. Some would say it's soft and insufficiently tough to care about these things. But where is it written that we must act if we do not care, as if we are not moved? Well, I am moved. I want a kinder and gentler nation.

~George H.W. Bush

Prequel.