Animals, Not Spirits (Trailer Park Rome, Nine.)

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

I just saw this.

Video from the January 6th insurrection of some woman in a MAGA hat shaking a tambourine and screaming "I AM AN ANIMAL!" At the height of the mobocracy's moment, this bitch pretty much illustrates what I've been saying.

Modern Republicanism, yo.

Reagan Fucking Wept.

These fucking people completely invert the meaning and intent of the words spoken by Churchill and later quoted by Reagan. And worse, the people who put these fucking fools up to it really do believe that the destiny of Man is measured by material computation. Everything is zero-sum. These fucking people have no concept of eternity or infinity. If they did, they'd feel diminished by that, too.

All else flows from that. You want to know what's wrong with modern conservatism? Start there.

And because of these fucking people's searing contempt for...everybody else, in addition to their contempt for civil society, democracy and rule of law is that the Republican Party as it is now is something worse than an Idiocracy, because it's become that on purpose, with malice aforethought. It's come to naught but desiring to be the Senate of an Empire Of Meth, a Trailer Park Rome, under a particularly dumbass Caesar.

And what's worse, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who always prominently feature the word "Christian" in their Twitter bio, who go through the motions of religiosity pretty much just to jack off the mob, seem to have no concept of what any of that Christianity stuff is even for.

Marge doesn't want to participate in the Divine Conversation. If faith is the evidence of things unseen, she wants none of it. She wants fame and money and worldly power and that's it.

It's all she wants or understands, and she sees things like performative conservatism and religiosity as ways to get it.

Doesn't even have the goddamned decency or common sense to look on a map and see where Ukraine is. This is exactly how much respect Marge has for people who are fighting to the death for their own freedom right now.

Go ahead and think about that, for a second.

And if anything, it gets worse. Here's Congressman (former Naval officer and former white house physician) Ronny Jackson spewing about defunding NPR and PBS.

Ya know, for starters, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Oscar The Grouch and all that Sesame Street stuff helped me learn how to fucking read. 

Do you, by any chance, want to give it some thought what it was like to have been an elementary school kid with ADHD in the 1970's when most people had never even heard of the whole concept?

Sesame Street, and reading and writing and drawing and this, that and the other thing at home helped me to overcome those deficits, so by the time I was actually diagnosed with that shit everybody was just like "Okay" and I already was dealing with it pretty well, no medication needed.

You have to make learning catchy and interesting to get kids to want to do it, and sometimes even with that, it doesn't always take.

And guess what? Because I also watched stuff like the MacLaughlin Group on PBS, when the 1992 presidential primaries were a thing...I knew who Pat Buchanan was. Not only that, but one of the reasons I watched it was the verbal sparring between him and everybody else.

NPR, PBS, etc. are nonpartisan by design.

But that ain't the world Dr. Adderall wants to live in.

What Republicans are saying out loud here is that our diverse civil society and not only free access to information...but free access to tools that can give people the capability to understand that information and apply it with purpose that it can be turned into knowledge...isn't producing enough angry, emotionalist reactionaries that are easy for them to manipulate.

Raw information being dropped into the wild is no good if people don't have the capability to understand it. Republicans know that, this is why when they talk about "Transparency" they want to just dump all this shit on people without the people having any way to know what it means.

It's like when somebody walks into a dark room and asks "Where's the switch?" You start explaining the physics of the Speed of Light and how a lightbulb works using precise mathematical and scientific terminology. The intent is to confuse and mislead, to not answer the question and ultimately to prevent the person from simply turning on a light.

And the reason Republicans want these fucking people living in darkness...even their own people...is because they think somebody acting out like a maniac as part of a mob storming the government serves the ends of their Cult Of Dis Pater more than informed conservatives working within the system and trying to persuade others does. 

The demiurges of death and wealth were not sated enough by the Reaganite consensus, apparently.

And, in the end, they'll want to collapse even their Trailer Park Rome in all its redneck glory, in favor of a new Dark Age, because they think they'll get to be dukes and earls in their castles and not the serfs getting raided by the goddamned Vikings, or something.

Maybe it's just me, but I know reactionaries and religious fanatics don't build starships, and I don't think any of us have a thousand years for civilization to reassert itself while Republicans, Russian Nationalists and Saudi Arabian oil sheiks play hide the sausage and pass money around while jerking each other off with one hand and trying to fuck each other over with the other hand.

And what's even worse, in convincing their insane followers that they are animals, not spirits, they rob those people of even the illusion of Eternal Life as the Christian tradition teaches it. They offer nothing but a dark world with the hope of having one's boot on somebody else's throat before one dies.

And yeah, I'm an old guy with a church background, but I honestly fail to see why so many people think this is such a fucking great idea.

It's like these fucking people want to go to hell.

Eight

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There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Generation Of Swine.