When Gods Die (We Are Spirits, Not Animals, Two.)

The moment stretched into eternity as both men brought their weapons to bear. He saw the man's eyes. It was a young face there, immediately below the emergency light, but the eyes . . . the rage there, the hatred, nearly stopped the Colonel's heart. But Bondarenko was a soldier before all things. The Afghan's first shot missed. His did not.

The Archer felt shock, but not pain in his chest as he fell. His brain sent a message to his hands to bring the weapon to the left, but they ignored the command and dropped it. He fell in stages, first to his knees, then on his back, and at last he was staring up at a ceiling. It was finally over. Then the man stood by his side. It was not a cruel face, the Archer thought. It was the enemy, and it was an infidel, but he was a man, too, wasn't he? There was curiosity there. He wants to know who I am, the Archer told him with his last breath. "Allah Akbar!" God is great 

Yes, I suppose He is, Bondarenko told the corpse. He knew the phrase well enough. Is that why you came? He saw that the man had a radio. It started to make noise, and the Colonel bent down to grab it. "Are you there?" the radio asked a moment later. The question was in Pashto, but the answer was delivered in Russian. "It is all finished here," 

~Closing moments of the battle of the Soviet laser installation, From the novel Cardinal Of The Kremlin, by Tom Clancy.

 I just saw a little bit ago, that Matt Schlapp...the CPAC dude...said in an interview on Steve Bannon's "War Room" show that "We're no longer conservatives."

I mean...and I say this with all due disrespect...No shit, Sherlock.

I was a conservative. You fuckers haven't been conservative in a way that I could identify as such in over a decade.

It's supposed to be sad when a god dies. In this case it's...maybe...anticlimactic.

For my part of it, I look at this bullshit, at basically the end of everything, from an ideological perspective...and think of things like even the books that defined my younger years and the authors I read and the fact that I really believed this stuff...and I feel nothing.

I can't even work it up to be disappointed. Just disgusted, I knew they'd hit this point eventually. In fact, what I wrote yesterday seems vaguely prophetic now.

It's like the plotline in the second season of the Walking Dead where Daryl and Rick and Shane spend almost the whole time looking for the lost little girl, only for us to find out in the last five minutes of the last episode that the kid got bit and has been shambling around as a Zombie almost the whole time.

Then in the post-credits show you find out that the young actress cast in the role had a growth spurt and literally grew out of the role, thus altering the entire story.

Except that these fucking people didn't drift away from conservatism, they didn't philosophically grow out of it. No. That's not what happened here. To continue with the Zombie analogy...they pushed it off the roof and watched it fall into the ravening horde of Ghouls below and be torn apart and eaten alive for no better reason than it became inconvenient and they wanted to steal the contents of its backpack.

In a day, Republicans have rhetorically gone from not knowing the first thing about what they stand for to....not standing for anything at all. It's like the second coming of Michael Dukakis...and what should be political death by embarrassing stupidity on a daily basis...but he's a Republican this time, and it's George Bush who was posthumously excommunicated.

Republicanism itself has become nothing but that infamous Willie Horton ad, and nothing more. Hate, racism and resentment is all these fucking people even have.

Democrats are acting like these fuckers are ten feet tall, but they're less the Trojan Horse filled with invincible warriors ready to take down democracy than the wooden rabbit from Monty Python and the Quest For The Holy Grail that the idiot knights forgot to get into before the French guys wheeled it inside their castle.

Internally, philosophically, there's just no there, there. You could beat the ass off these fucking people simply by having any message at all...because they sure don't.

And it's not even just that they don't. It's they don't even want to. They think having a message or trying to persuade people is simply beneath them.

And so, I'll ask again, how does the late Party Of Ronald Reagan think its going to compete with Vladimir Putin if it can't out-message Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi? And can't do it with vast chunks of America's media apparatus effectively shilling for Republicans because they want Trump back...not on any ideological basis but simply because the Trump years brought in a lot of easy money...

(As if what's coming won't exceed that by an order of magnitude in a small fraction of the time. Real history, be it good or bad, being made tends to attract more attention than a years-long grift.)

I mean, sure, the rabid Trump Supporters will keep you going for a little while...they literally don't care what you say, but all Trump has to do is die off, not run, or run as an independent and you're completely fucked. Funny enough, he has threatened to do exactly that, because the Party Of Slavish Loyalty was not slavish enough, or something.

It's actually worse than that. Republicans themselves debased conservatism until the word itself meant nothing. In the video I snipped the picture from, Schlapp claims his is an "American" movement.

Thus he gives away the game. Like I always say about these people, he can't wait to tell on himself.

These fucking people have already debased Christianity and conservatism to the point where those words don't mean shit and hold no appeal at all for most people, and now they're going to do the same with the concept of America itself. And they know that a foreign war, mixed with internal conflict, just might tear America apart. Republicans would like to see America turned into exactly what Ukraine has been for the last 8 years, just so they can have their own little Donetsk People's Republic.

And that's a feature, not a bug, in their plans.

Like a radioactive blob...or some kind of Lovecraftian horror...these fuckers know they're radioactive and they know they can burn their way through anything, given enough time.

Meanwhile, while half of America's political system bleeds out on the floor, dying of blood loss and zombie plague...and no one can even be bothered enough to care...while America's political system is in an existential struggle against apathy on one side and utter debasement on the other...this is how the global other half lives.

Guy goes into a restaurant, the waitress asks him if he's leaving the country. She says she'd like to, her husband thinks they should, but she's afraid to leave the cats.

So while American right-wingers are whacking off 'til they're raw over Putin and Trump at least some Ukrainians, no matter their politics. are...and justifiably so...worried sick about what will happen to their country and not wanting to leave their pets alone in its path.

I get that.

Trust me, I get that. You have no idea.

But it's more than that, and it's much worse than that, too.

There was a time when even if you were the enemy, you could reasonably well expect that a conservative person would have respect for your life, liberty and property. 

Now these fuckers don't even seem to care about themselves, past how much power or wealth they might accumulate and then use to debase or pleasure themselves. But for some goddamned reason, these fucking people sure as hell care about Vladimir Putin. 

I'll never fucking get that.

I wouldn't want to leave my ferret in the way of these fucking people or their schemes, either.

And not least because the Russian Army very often fails to feed, much less pay, it's conscripted troops properly nor restrain them so that they behave correctly, let alone professionally...and their military justice system is a joke, generally built not on the concept of maintaining discipline, order in the ranks or rule of law...but on simply shooting anybody who steps out of line. 

This goes all the way back to Czarist times, and has been a severe problem in most of their more recent wars as well, especially Afghanistan. Russian troops billeted in various places in Belarus are already proving to be destructive to environment and infrastructure, stealing alcohol and food and shitting wherever they damn well please and even domestic animals and pets have gone missing. Hell, COVID-19 is ripping its way through their encampments and they're not even bothering to do anything about that. 

My own background spits in the dirt and walks away in disgust even talking about this garbage. And these fucking people thought they were going to take on the United States Army in the Fulda Gap? 

Give me a fucking break. The hardest part of that shit would have been keeping the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment supplied, so they could kill the fuckers fast enough.

If they cannot maintain discipline or even sobriety in the face of boredom, cold and mud, how in the fuck are they going to maintain discipline in the face of a determined Ukrainian defense backed by external allies, with the equipment and training to fight an absolutely ruthless insurgent war if they have to?

But that's the kicker, isn't it? 

Their leaders absolutely don't give a shit, and they never really have either. Putin is just more of the fucking same.

Whether it was the Romanovs fucking each other's brains out while whole battalions marched into battle against the Germans without rifles at Tannenberg at the start of World War I, the Communist elite going to the ballet while their soldiers froze to death fighting against the Finns in the Winter War of 1939 or the Soviet civilians living under Glasnost and the beginnings of openness to Western capitalism while their soldiers got hacked to death or shot by the Dushman...which means "Enemy"... the American-armed Mujahids who were at once everywhere and nowhere...these people make America's chronic detachment from our own war in Afghanistan seem like an ideal of civic and governmental engagement.

And this is the future that Republicans want for our world.

And just like the Russians, they have no problem with letting hundreds of thousands of people die for their bullshit political theories.

Think about that, take all the time you need.

Part One

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan