"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war— like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I — I don't know," I said.
"Well I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be portrayed in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it The Children's Crusade." She was my friend after that.
~From the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
(In deference to the seriousness of the issue I'm not going to head this off with a cute picture of a ferret and tell you this is serious, read on or not. Just read. Full content warning is in effect across the board, though.)
Right or wrong, Kyle Rittenhouse was found Not Guilty today. I've already written pretty extensively about what I think of him, let alone his actions. I'm not going to repeat myself. If you didn't get it the first time, YOU figure it out.
The entire basis for this whole damned farce was decades of National Rifle Association propaganda and hordes of (overwhelmingly white, right-wing) men who jack off to the idea of shooting down their neighbors for any or no reason whatever.
And shit like that, not to mention the American Right's bottomless anti-liberalism, absolutely has its basis in racism. Whether they'll admit it or not there's one motherfucker of a lot of white dudes who are mad at the Democrats for nominating a black man as a presidential candidate...and they're even more endlessly angry at the rest of us for electing him President twice.
The fact that liberals, moderates, and even many conservatives are perfectly fine with judging people as individuals rather than condemning them based on some arbitrary, immutable categorization really pisses these fucking people off.
Some people have been trying to say that race wasn't an issue in this trial.
Just going to put this out there that certain people, namely the White Supremacists at VDare, disagree with that assessment. When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time.
For the record I feel like it needs to be pointed out that VDare, allegedly an anti-immigration (which is actually code for "White Supremacist") outfit, was founded by Peter Brimelow, who is himself a British-born immigrant and a naturalized US citizen. Why he's here isn't hard to understand. Odds are pretty good even today that he would be arrested, charged and tried for doing what he does if he tried it over there.
And giving aid and comfort to the enemies of America and the enemies of (small-L) liberal (small-D) democracy is exactly what American movement conservatism has become all about, because they'd rather burn America down than see Black people (not to mention ordinary working people like me, white or otherwise...or most of my readers) get a slice.. Capitalism always needs ever more people to pay in, and participate, and that long ago expanded to include people of color. Thus they've turned against it. Empire invariably means cultural and population exchanges. Thus, these fucking people's desire to wall America off from the rest of the world and never interact with anybody else again except over the barrel of a gun.
Never mind how many of these motherfuckers and their political avatars and rich benefactors will happily, repeatedly, hop into bed with former-Communist, KGB-trained enemies of America be they business oligarchs, crime lords or politicians. Internationalism for me, but not for thee? Eh?
The whole idea here is that they want to steal America from the rest of us, break it up and sell it for parts. I might be coining a term here but that's the point of all this non-state atavistic fascism we've been seeing.
Never mind that fascism is at it's core a statist ideology and thus antithetical to both the New Deal democracy and libertarian-ish Reaganite conservatism I was raised with. Hell, bad as she was even Ayn Rand despised the idea. When these fucking people tell you they want to bow down to, and reach out and touch some transcendent State, they're not talking about drugs or meditation. They're talking about monstrous bonfires full of books, legions of goose-stepping soldiers and the persecution of people they don't like.
And these people, with malice aforethought, see Kyle Rittenhouse and any copycats that may follow as the first members of a new Freikorps Amerika. Nobody tell these fuckers what happened to most of the Freikorps leaders on the Night Of The Long Knives, or later on when Hitler consolidated power. Let it be a surprise. (They all think they'll be the one holding the knife.)
Ernst Rohm was a gay man who thought being a Nazi would save him from being murdered in a fucking basement. It didn't. Erich Ludendorff was Pagan, he thought his military record and shitty right-wing social Darwinism would save him, or maybe make him the Chancellor of a new German Empire. Instead he did time and was persona non grata until Der Fuhrer could bask in second-hand glory by granting him a state funeral against his own express wishes.
There's one hell of a lot of these people that fascism, particularly its close cousin Nazism, has covertly been their only true religion for a long goddamned time. The conservative side of American gun culture has always been a little nuts. It's getting worse. It no longer cares who gets shot, who gets shit on, it has its narrative and it's sticking to it.
And since Trump didn't deliver enough and they were unable to twist COVID-19 fully to their ends (or get the rest of us to just catch it and die like they wanted) they'll see this gun-fueled chaos as their next big ticket to Galt's Gulch or whatever they call it now. Civil War is a big ticket item in "Conservative" circles right now. If they can't have totalitarian control of America, they want to burn the shit down.
And if you're not some oligarch with a horde of courtiers in a fortress guarded by a private army, well fuck you.
And no, they absolutely won't give a good goddamn what you did before. "You're not being useful to me right now, so you can die in hell for all I care" is exactly what the fuck they learned from Donald Fucking Trump.
I'm going to say this right now, hypocrisy and the evil that invariably goes with it are the fuels that all this bullshit runs off of, the resulting reaction may burn down the country, and anybody who tells you anything different is a fool or a liar.
And this shit will likely find a way to get worse if it isn't stopped right the fuck now.
Thing is, you can't find a Republican in good standing who has the guts...or likely even the capability...to stop it at this point, and they're running anybody who has stood up or even might try to out of the Party on a rail.
Trouble is, any emergency or forcible methods to stop this bullshit would #1 themselves mollify at least some of the fascists and #2 get the rest scheming to retake control of the State so they could use that shit themselves as soon as possible, constitutional order of things or term-of-office mandated timetables be damned.
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