Empire Of Self (American Revelation XII, Nine.)

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

...

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

I saw this earlier today.

Fox News is evidently bitching about Democrats "Demanding" that kids should have breakfast, lunch, dinner and the option of a snack at school.

Yeah, kids need to eat too, you dumbasses.

And yes, a lot of this mentality actually does come down to the Right wanting to punish anybody other than rich private-school kids for daring to get an education.

Consider time spent. Kids are already there six or seven hours out the day, often starting from early morning (very early in the case of rural kids riding a school bus, trust me.) Then quite likely, if they're in sports or some other after-school activities they might be there into the evening hours...more if there's a game or some event. It can add up to a nine, maybe ten-hour day. Routinely did for me when I was in Basketball and Football. Sometimes more when I was in various other stuff with my girl. We were neighbors and basically shared a car (Most often, mine) because she (despite her much more suburban affect) couldn't afford one. Her dad was a medically-retired cop who was on disability and the alternative was the school bus or his truck. She got some money from her mom and worked part time, but didn't make that much. Thus our respective jobs and school activities had to be more-or-less coordinated.

I'm here to tell you a crappy lunch and vending machine food doesn't cut it. We'd be pretty hungry by the time we got home (Or to work, since she was a hostess and I washed dishes in the same place.) So yes, healthy food, multiple meals at school? Yes, please.

But the thing is, none of that matters to those fucking people who think things like kids getting to eat, labor organizing, and worker solidarity are the rest of us stealing from the rich...and I'm here to tell you lots of poor "Conservative" chucklefucks view themselves as temporarily-down-on-their-luck rich people...and yes, they absolutely view literally owning their neighbors as a cure to what ails them. 

These fucking people literally view basic human rights...much less LGBT rights and racial equality...as the "Proles" stealing from them. They want a system of privileges and tradition that only they get to have and which they'll get thrills out of denying to others...even if it leads to their kids having to marry cousins and worse to keep power, status, wealth etc. in families.

None of that shit matters to people whose idea of the apex of human politics is submission to a dictator or a king and that political participation by us commoners (let alone ethnic and racial minorities) is somehow wrong.

And it never stops, the goalposts must always be moved, the level of insanity must be increased, just so a few people can feel "Special" and they need stronger drugs to keep the dopamine hits coming.

These fucking people don't want to live in America.

And that's absolutely what these motherfuckers are saying when they talk about raising the voting age, administering bullshit tests, or instituting service (or land-ownership) requirements for voting. His ideas violate at least 3 Constitutional Amendments and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts along with large swaths of existing Federal laws.

That's what they're talking about when the mob turns on Elon Musk because random something something Gazpacho. That's what these right-wing elites don't realize they're fucking with.

The whole reason these fucking people are willing to depend on some bullshit social contract with the wealthy for their existence (which they expect the wealthy to violate) is that they themselves fully expect to enforce mob rule whenever the "elites" don't do what they want.

Fuck privilege and tradition, what these idiots want is a system based on hate, which validates their petty grievances and hatreds.

How's that worked out, historically??

The reasons that 18 year old young people can vote, or for why there are not poll taxes or "literacy tests" anymore were written in blood, earned in combat in Vietnam or blood spilled on a bridge in Selma, Alabama. Vivek doesn't care about that. It wasn't his ass getting shot at or beaten. 

Fuck him. 

Vivek has precisely no chance at the Presidency because of the very same mentalities he's attempting to appeal to.

How fucked up is that??

Elon, likewise...as shitty as he is...is very likely soon going to get swallowed by the same beast he's been trying to feed for fun and profit...simply because he cannot be shitty enough and function in the modern society he literally depends on. The fact that he'd like to deny us that modern society because he thinks it's funny will boomerang on him. Republicanism has swung so far to the Right that it demands global submission to the Hammer And Sickle. 

Or maybe it's just all about the shitty authoritarianism and actual ideologies, policies, and principles haven't mattered since at least 1994. I'll note Republicanism has pretty much excommunicated all its former Presidents...except Trump.

Plenty of these fucking people openly support Vladimir Putin...and how's that working out, since the Red Army 2.0 has basically leveled down to a Reverse Stalingrad in Bakhmut.

Note: This is the nation that "Conservatives" have emphatically said should rule the world and which the EU, our NATO allies and the Ukrainians should all be thrown under the bus to appease.

And they cannot even defeat the Ukrainians.

And we're going to have to spend generations (again) specifically attacking this tendency towards crankery and conspiracy bullshit and edge-case reactionary overacting. 

It only took us 50 years after the downfall of McCarthyism and the exile into the political wilderness of the John Birch Society to make that horseshit go away the first time. 

And then that shit came right back, because a Black man ran for US President on a major-party ticket.

And thus these fucking people decided that they had to burn civilization and society to the ground, reject modernity in all its forms, and that "Every Man For Himself" libertarianism straight out of Ayn Rand's atheistic "Atlas Shrugged (with a side of white supremacist "thought" if you dare call it that) should be their guiding philosophy.

And they literally are not smart enough to see that their "movement" is the exact post-modern horror that conservative and Christian writers of 30 and 40 years ago were warning us about...except that those people all thought it would be the "Left" foisting this shit on the world.

Wrong. Metrically Wrong. A Singularity Of Wrongness. 

Thing is...that sol que put bullshit only really works for rich people. Just in the last ten years or so this shit has migrated from "Who Is John Galt?" to "Who is George Santos?"

All of this reactionary, religious and various other crap is literally being marketed to people. Motherfuckers did not independently decide to reject America and 250 years of the Enlightenment and political thought...if not every constraint on Power going all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

This garbage is being literally marketed to people with an undertone of snide assumption that these fucking people will be the Lords and Ladies of a new neo-feudal aristocracy by people whose ideal "Society" is a mutant love-child of Idiocracy and The Empire from Star Wars.

Basically, they all think they're going to be Tucker Carlson if he really decided that he was Baron Von Fishsticks or something. And they don't realize that Tucker was selling them out the whole time, gossiping with the very people they hate, and hating Trump just as much as the rest of us do.

Hell, more than half of these fucking idiots' assorted "Leaders" don't believe a word they say, they're only pushing this shit for fun and profit. Both sides talk about "Culling the herd" and "Population Control." The elite fascists think it's funny that the mob buys it all. The mob fascists think they're going to kill the rest of us and then the elites.

Every last one of these selfish pricks basically wants to be God.

And again, all these assholes think this shit is funny. Cruelty really is the point.

Until the mob comes for them, and then for the rest of us. It's gonna be a big "Oh shit" for a lot of people like Elon Musk, too. Trust me, both sides will find out that it's on like Donkey Kong. But it's gonna go a lot worse for the mob. You don't really think the United States has a bigger defense budget than God because we're somehow afraid of Afghan goat herders and mustached Iraqi tin pot warlords, do you??

I mean, we're all watching Russia...our "Big Bad" throughout 50 years of the Cold War...implode yet again in real time despite bellicose threats to all and sundry. All this force and rage is gonna have to go somewhere. And that's ALL a lot of these sons of bitches actually believe in.

Preserving civilization against those who think dancing around a fire and shouting "Unga Bunga" is something to aspire to won't be any fun, it's going to be a lot of work. It already has been.

If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen.

And this ain't it.

This Empire of Self is going to fall hard and fast.

Nine

Слава Україна!

Son, come on son
Let me squeeze them titties
I been fiending for this freedom
I been begging for the beat
I been jonesing for the jump over the wall
But all I keep coming back to is them titties
Round and firm, for the vein burn
I keep bugging over the reasons
For this shit I yearn
Years in this piece got me
Wanting the shit that I unlearned
Got me wanting to block it out
Forget about
Erase it from my think.

~Arnold "Poet" Jackson, From the HBO series "Oz" S1, E6 "To Your Health." Subject: Addiction, Drugs