Alt-Ridiculous (Election 2022, Eight.)

Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on a race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength of the world. That is the American way. ~Ronald Reagan

For much of the time when I was serving in the Air Force, I had the same LT. Several years older than I was, bright, energetic, smart, female. I have no idea what her political leanings were, it was inappropriate to ask. She sure as hell wasn't religious. But she was from somewhere in New York, City or just 'State' I'm not sure. Ethnically at least, she counts as one of the few Jewish people I've ever really gotten to know. 

She was a USAFA graduate, a mathematics major whose eyesight had worsened slightly, which had prevented her from qualifying as a pilot. She could figure out shit in her head and with nothing more than a pencil and a piece of paper that I couldn't have solved with a mainframe at the time...and still can't. More, she could do it in a tenth of the time it'd take me to try. 

Since Math is, by hook or by crook, the foundation for study of most of the other physical sciences, that's a pretty damn useful set of skills to have. 

And when I made Sergeant that meant I was interacting with the LT a lot, on a professional basis. This is how I found out being a leader is actually a hard job.

Same with all the other NCO's, and with other officers. Functionally a military command team is not that much different than management in a lot of other places, except for all the weapons.

Yes, Right up to and including sexual harassment training, safety training for this or that, and any other thing you can think of that hard-charging young people will fundamentally view as a complete waste of time...just like in every other workplace on the planet, I'm sure.

It was the same when I worked at the casino.

Then, as now, it's usually nothing to do with being "Woke" or "Anti-Woke" it's generally more along the lines of "I just got off a ten hour shift and I want to go home and get some rack time so I can do it all over again tomorrow."

Joe, One of our other Sergeants was from Louisiana, Cajun, Conservative, and at the time very religious. This guy is one of the people responsible for the fact that I know what the Rapture even is.

Although, to be honest, I'm pretty sure he thought Newt Gingrich was the Second Coming of Christ, now that I think about it. Dude was and probably still is a huge fan of Rush Limbaugh.

And one day after we got out of some training or other, when it was just me and him and he didn't think anybody would care or notice, he described our mutual commanding officer as "Not smart enough to pack sand in a rat hole."

I looked at him and I laughed, at him, not because it was funny. I told him to go fuck himself. Not so much to defend somebody I thought was a demanding boss myself. No, I just thought it was a ridiculous thing to even say and I told him so. It was about right and wrong. Not to mention, such a comment could well have ended his career if proven.

He never said anything like that around me again.

Why would I bring this up? 

That guy fell down the Alt-Right Nazi rabbit hole in 2016. This, and a bunch of crazy posts about Trump by a very small minority, pretty much caused the meltdown of our Facebook veterans group. It's still there. but I don't think anybody posts in it anymore. The fall of our little "Someplace Special" FB group was both a microcosm and a harbinger of things to come.

Around that time, This former Air Force Security Forces troop turned electrical engineer also became enchanted by the fascist-wonk ramblings of Scott Adams...and this by the way is how I learned the Dilbert Guy was a fucking fascist nut. Anyway, because of that dude, I knew about all the Alt-Right Nazi shit before most people did.

Joe was a regular fount of information, he was.

Again, what's the point?

Over the weekend, I saw that various places around Jacksonville, Florida, were bombarded with Antisemitic messages including: "Kanye was right about the Jews." And then some guy got thrown out of some club in Soho for dressing in a goddamned Nazi uniform.

I've been thinking about this, and about some of the other people I ran into as a teenager, and as a younger man. No, Nazi shit was not cool then, but the basis for it? That part was just fine.

Remember, I came up in the era of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert. You know, the Contract On America, the Gingrich Revolution. Making America work, one government shutdown at a time. I was a 1990's Republican. The only thing worse than Bill Clinton...was our own leadership.

When These Fucking People say somebody is smart or somebody is stupid, it has absolutely not one damn thing to do with if they are or not. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

It's "Do they accept the bigotry, the greed, the hate and the manipulation that we believe are the really important things in life?"

It's "Do you want to live under a caste system or some other Unga Bunga shit that we just made up?"

It's "Do you accept the infallibility of our bullshit political system?"

It's the mentality of "Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed."

As if that hasn't left a trail of enough broken bodies and broken souls across history that they'll still be cleaning it up in a thousand years...

And increasingly it's "If you don't, if you won't believe the world is on fire so as to suit our shitty political purposes, we'll just pretend really hard that it is until something breaks or we can simply will some calamity into existence" because chaos and destruction is profitable, or something.

Because over the weekend an 82-year-old man got assaulted, and all these assholes can be bothered to do about it is think it's funny.

Also over the weekend, Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection in Brazil. If I had to guess, being a massively homophobic dickbag in a country with a lot of LGBT people, and bungling a COVID-19 response in a very hard-hit nation didn't help on top of the fact that Bolsonaro was just as fucking corrupt as any of the people who held the office before him. Basically the only reason he got in, in the first place, was that a lot of upper middle-class Brazilians are selfish assholes. It's the same everywhere, I guess.

But, it's unconscionable to Republicans that a guy like Bolsonaro lost. They simply can't imagine that the overacting performative right-wing asshole could lose without fire raining from the sky, riots in the streets and every other damn thing their overactive amygdala and lurid imaginations can invent.

Because the only values these fucking people have left anymore are their fucking cruelty and the grasping, pathetic need for some kind of well-defined hierarchy in which they can kiss up and kick down, on a for-profit basis.

And if they can't get people to agree to that, they'll wreck shit again and again and again, until the world itself does not function, if needs be...until they get to a small enough circle that everyone does agree to their terms and is willing to hand absolute power to one of their "own."

Because none of the other things they've ever claimed they stood for has been the point for at least a generation. Pretty much about as long as it's been since these motherfuckers started thinking that Newt Gingrich was the Second Coming of Jesus and telling people "Listen to Rush."

Used to be they'd claim all these high-and-mighty philosophical justifications, but in reality they'd just draw dicks on the wall of Plato's Cave.

Now they don't even bother with that. Why? Now they just wipe their own shit on the walls of the Capitol building in real life knowing that not enough of them will go to jail for it.

And it's funny how that works, isn't it? They want to tell you how to live, but they still get to enjoy themselves and fuck around and do stupid shit all they want.

Well, they've been doing a lot of fucking around, it's getting to the point where they need to find out.

I'm tired of this endless season of Rumspringa For Assholes.

If you vote for these sons of bitches, least of all for any of the problems they endlessly complain about but have neither desire nor plan to fix...you deserve exactly what you're going to get.

But the rest of us fucking don't deserve this fucking ridiculous bullshit, and I'm getting tired of it. I'm even more tired of the media and wealthy idiots trying to create more of it for their own profits.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen, and this ain't it.

To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste. ~Deuteronomy 32:35

Seven

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

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