Blaze Of Glory (American Revelation IX, Five.)

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred. 

Flashed all their sabers bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabering the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

~Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade

"Democrats are trying to take everything from us, but they can never take our FAITH!"

Bitch, do you know what, and who it was that made me lose my belief in organized religion?

Want to take a guess?

It was right-wing political religion and people like yourself. Democrats didn't have one damned thing to do with it.

But of course, this guy knows that. He just doesn't care. 

His faith is in right-wing politics, which is fast being boiled down to nothing but White Supremacy...they are leaving themselves nothing else, this isn't something I said but it's demonstrable by their actions...and he calls this "Faith?" They are taking something else and calling it faith and religion. I'll admit I don't study the Word much these days but I seem to recall that it has a thing or two to say about that kind of stuff.

I used to be part of a big clique of people at my old job, the religious crew, basically. Christians of various sorts, Native American traditional practitioners, others came and went through the years. 

You know what? Almost none of the Christians in that group are still identifying as Christians these days. Broadly speaking, it was the hate, the hypocrisy, and the politics that wrecked it for every last one of them. 

It was the constant, ginned-up feeling of being under attack by basically everything, when in reality nothing and no one was coming at almost all of them.

For most people, at least those of us who aren't conflict-driven assholes, drama-mama psycho-bitches and foaming-at-the-mouth religious fanatics, the constant culture war drama is simply not sustainable. We burn out, we get tired, we shut off the goddamn TV and go the fuck outside.

We can see with our own eyes that we're not under attack, and sooner or later it sets in that nothing of the sort is happening. Sooner or later, we all have to interact with Other People.

But the Admiral here? He knows that too.

Motherfucker just hopes that you don't.

He hasn't been recalled to duty to patch up wounded grunts in some existential fight to the death. Hell, his ass got elected to Congress! He's more of a goddamned fat cat living large than most of us will ever be, and he knows it!

Again, he just hopes you, don't. 

No one has more contempt for the Republican base than Republicans do, and that is not a joke.

And the world is changing, sorry, not sorry.

I saw this in the paper last weekend. Front page of the Detroit Free Press, article about some New Age woo woo 'Academy' in Detroit.

OK, whatever. I could care less if somebody wants to eat psychedelic mushrooms, lick poisonous toads or smoke weed in search of enlightenment...and I could've cared less 20 years ago when I was a conservative Christian with a pocket-size Bible in my back pocket. I've done my share of that stuff since. Hell, I had then.

Sometimes those people actually have a point, and as a younger man I worked with enough Rastafari to know...if you're going to talk Bible with them and debate theology, you better bring your A-game, facts, and snacks. They know their stuff, and so do the Toad Poison people, more often than not, simply because such people are by nature seekers and they've likely been through some sort of a Bible-thumper phase already. 

Hell a lot of Voudoun and other afro-Caribbean faiths already incorporate heavy elements of Christianity because they were syncretic faiths created by enslaved Africans so those people could preserve some elements of their culture and traditional faiths.

Fuck, while I'm at it, good old-fashioned American Pentecostalism is a syncretic faith incorporating many elements of such traditional religions...particularly African and Afro-Caribbean ones, albeit with the serial numbers filed off...and nobody has more rock-star passion for Jesus than some dude in Zambia who might well have an appointment with the local medicine man after church.

I'm serious.

But you can't explain that to these fucking people.

Well, not the American ones, anyway.

They simply won't hear you.

I'm sure some asshole somewhere is freaking out about Witchcraft being on the front page of the Detroit Free Press. You know, that supposed icon of liberalism that spent much of the mid-1990's breaking a strike by its unionized workers.

The simple fact is, these fucking people simply see difference as an attack. The existence of the Other and the fact that even a relatively (small-c) conservative newspaper sees a need to acknowledge such is exactly what Ronny Jackson is saying he "Will never surrender" to.

Winston Churchill, he fuckin' ain't.

These fucking people long to be embattled, persecuted, stuck in a fight to the death against all type of crazy shit that exists only in their own whacked-out imaginations.

More to the point, they long to claim for themselves the historical mantle of righteousness they think goes with all that.

And they want to inflict real pain and trauma on real people, on the scale of generations, because of it. 

Never mind who, historically, just who it is that's often the one doing the persecuting of the Other...

And these same fucking people, who are terrified of interracial couples or LGBT people...are perfectly fine with children having children. I'm sorry, I can't make that shit make any sense. 

But then if you'd have told me 20 years ago that Republicans would run a vapid Instagram star named "Tudor" for governor of my state, I'd have laughed at you, because that shit doesn't make any sense either, and I'd have told you so when I was a Republican, too.

But the internal logic of American conservatism has fallen apart, and they kept going anyway.

Other people's aspirations, dreams, futures, and lives simply don't matter to them. Contempt not only for the Other, but even for those like themselves is a driving force for these fucking people. 

What? You don't think Trump having 300+ classified documents in his possession without authorization, with no chain of custody, and likely selling secrets to foreign powers puts White Conservatives in danger, too? 

We're all Americans, ain't we? The blast effects of a Russian nuclear weapon don't stop to ask one's political affiliation before they burn one to ash, you know.

These motherfuckers will keep this up until images of Black medics patching up White grunts, Soldiers of different Colors dying in each others arms while trying to shield each other from concussion and shrapnel, and the image of a violently severed arm and the remains of a Corps tattoo, with a strangely undamaged Pride bracelet on the wrist are seared into all of our minds. It's hard to keep being angry, hateful or racist towards the people who might've saved your life or the lives of people you love.

It's hard to keep hating people, when they're the rough men (and women) standing ready so that you can sleep safe at night. Sooner or later, somebody's going to pin the Congressional Medal of Honor on a transgender person.

That's not "Wokeness" it's simple statistical probability.

Whether they realize it or not, that's the direction "Conservatives" are pushing things in. We're all going to have to stand up against this shit sooner or later.

And if these assholes keep this shit up, they may well get their wish of being embattled and persecuted, except it's more properly labeled "Consequences" and nobody but 'Conservatives' ever felt sympathy for the fucking Nazis.

I'm going to be honest, that's a thing that's starting to worry me. I think the Republican Party is going to violently self-destruct, if not during this election cycle, certainly after it. But I think it's looking to go out in a blaze of glory like some radical Islamic suicide bomber and take other people with it rather than overdose like some coked out rich kid.

And considering just how many Republicans I've seen complaining about aid to Ukraine lately, I'm starting to wonder if they're being paid to destroy themselves...and if something infinitely worse will rise from the wreckage.

As it is these fuckers can't make a dig against Dr. Fauci without also working in classist and racist comments, apparently. (Never mind that there's plenty of advanced countries that don't extradite people to the US.)

These are people who love the idea of fighting some kind of war like the French Revolution...or the October Revolution...against liberalism, science and, well, basically reality at this point.

But here's the thing, who wins the war is to a great extent determined by...science. Sure, it's not as hard as it used to be where some Centurion had to eyeball the terrain and do the math in his head real quick about where to site the catapults...but how bullets, explosives, missiles and all that kind of stuff works is still something that comes down to math and science, and that was as true in our Civil War as it would be in the right-wing insurgency these fucking people think they want to fight. Nowadays somebody just punches a few commands into a computer, the solution downloads to the warfighters, whose fingers pull the triggers, and there you have it. 

The people who see the existence of Black people as an attack? They're not going to have all that.

And for months now, we've had the ongoing example of the Ukrainian Army...which fights according to reality...kicking the shit out of the Russian Army, which is all hopped up on ideology.

It's not going well for the people who thought they were fighting some glorious war against reality's apparent liberal bias, now is it?

But you can't tell these fucking people any of that.

They simply won't hear you. 

They think the bad shit will only happen to other people. They get that people die in war, they just don't imagine it could ever be them. And they won't like how any of this is going to turn out. But when it doesn't they'll double down and keep fighting anyway, because the cruelty is the point.

When the murder of a Black man by a police officer seared the conscience of our nation a couple years ago, they got mad that other people had consciences.

Actions have consequences, and we're in such a time again. We need to do something about this shit before these fucking people and their privileged stupidity kill us all.

They only want to go out in a blaze of glory because they think it'll somehow hurt other people more.

And there's plenty of more-rational bad actors looking to take advantage of it.

Four

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

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