Facing It (Death God Rising, Two.)

My black face fades,

hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. 

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke. 

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

The Texas GOP officially no longer recognizes the United States government, according to the platform they passed at their convention last weekend, where a sitting US Congressman and his staff were assaulted.

Think about this for a second.

How any of this would work for one of the states most dependent on Federal dollars, and which has a large chunk of the United States Armed Forces garrisoned within its borders...not to mention millions of people who are just fine with being Americans...or who desire to be...I have no idea.

But the truth is that the Right has become so dominated by fabulists, fascists, religious fanatics and various barking mad lunatics that there's nothing much else left at this point...and soon, there won't be anything else at all. 

Like, these fucking people are so high on this "Own the Libs" horse shit that I don't even know what they think they're trying to do...and neither do they. Right, Marge?

Left on its own and cut loose from the Union...with III Corps, all those Air Force wings and Navy training wings, NASA and all those federal employees gone...not to mention all the money they spend and all the straight-up Federal funding, what's left? Then you've got the brain drain from people leaving. Texas would very shortly become a Banana Republic, but with no Bananas. 

Basically, Putin's Russia, but presided over by drug lords and oil companies...and locked in a state of constant conflict because so many of these fucking people just want to shoot somebody. There's only one problem with that; Nobody else who lived in Texas besides the corporate overlords and the drug lords would be able to afford to buy even a box of 5.56mm shells before long, if there were any to be had.

But the truth is, it doesn't matter. Lunatic dreams are a nightmare reality for the sane.

The truth is, these fucking people are trying to immanentize some kind of shitty right-wing eschaton. You want to see how that works out in real life, look at what's become of Russia.

Putin is literally blending Soviet iconography with Christian imagery, this image is from the Wikipedia page for the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces...as I've said so many times, he's trying to have both the Cross of Christ and the Hammer And Sickle...and that only ends one way:

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. ~Matthew 6:24

I didn't say it, the Word did. Is that this "Reality has a liberal bias" stuff I keep hearing about?

And no, they didn't think it through. At least they didn't think it through past "I'll get to shoot some Mexicans and then everything will be fine" level of thought process. Change out "Mexicans" for "Ukrainians" and you have what's going on in Russia.

And people wonder why I say that the world these sons of bitches want is basically the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia but with an Applebee's and a mall. I say that, because that's exactly what some of them have been telling us, for years.

If you believe in democracy and freedom or having the right to do anything without these fucking people or some Transcendent Fascist State that they create, or hostile fascist neighbors, crawling up your ass about it...these fuckers think you should have to fight for that right, simply to be left alone! Again, how the fuck is this "Conservative?"

And how's it even working out, given that the Ukrainians are still hanging on, and things are still not going well for the Russians....and what the New Soviet Men have accomplished has been at the expense of vast amount of casualties.

And think about it, each of those self-propelled howitzers costs around 17 million Euros. The Ukrainians just had to buy a dozen of them, to help defend their country. If there was no war, how many children could have been educated, or refugees resettled, or poor people given a better shot at life, or sick people made well...with that 204 million Euros?

But it's either that, spend the money and do the fighting and the dying...or somebody else from another country gets to determine where those Ukrainian children live, what they learn, etc. etc. In case anybody's forgotten what Communism or Totalitarianism means. 

That's the kind of world these monomaniacal sons of bitches want to live in, and to make you live in it as well.

And not only that, then they think you should be "Grateful" for having to lick some wealthy person's boot. Hannity basically came right out and said this yesterday. "Be grateful the wealthy buy yachts?

Fuck you, dude.

Then they have the nerve to call this "Freedom?"

These people fucking hate the rest of us, including their own supporters.

If they hate their own supporters and want them to die of a perfectly well preventable illness, what the hell do you think they want for you or me?

Certainly, if you believe in Democracy more than these fucking people's chosen figurehead-of-the-moment, they'll hound you relentlessly.

But the truth is, Trump himself is nothing more than exactly that, a fat gilded pig on a leash at the head of their line, he's an opportunist, an appropriated symbol of these fucking people's fascism.

They'll find somebody worse, and it's going to start, soon.

These fucking people's blood religion, their death god, demands no less.

We need to face the facts here, and do something about this shit.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

Слава Україна!

Part One

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan