Survivor: Republican Politics (Reagan Wept, Revisited, Three.)

When day comes we ask ourselves, ‘where can we find light in this never-ending shade,’ the loss we carry, a sea we must wade? We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always just-ice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. ~Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb.

Somebody sent me this, early this morning (Or at least, before I was up, which was pretty late because work fucking sucked last night.)

The Mom who got Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb" shit-canned from a Florida school was at some point promoting the fake "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" antisemitic bullshit.

Tell me, something, "Conservatives;" Why does your alleged "Movement" these days, always come down to shit like this??

Like, fucking always, there is literally no point nor purpose to any of it but cruelty and hate.

And when you get called out on it, the general response these days is increasingly a shrug and "Yeah, so?"

And at this point even other people generally just accept that hate is what Republicans do.

Like it's not even an issue, it's just assumed. The hatefulness is implied. (And given the increasingly hateful, nihilistic and outright anti-American beliefs of "Conservatives" these days, I can see why people just figure all Republicans are ever going to do is crap all over everything.)

Seriously, Reagan Wept.

It's funny that the people who, early on in my life, instilled in me the idea of having a moral compass and a solid moral compass rather than a relativistic and situational one simply...lack that same thing themselves? 

Make it make fucking sense.

Or is it simply that having a "Moral Compass" or moralism as an idea was simply being used to cover for the fact that some Republicans were always hateful shitty people who could give a fuck about the Lord, His Word or anything else...so long as they got to disapprove of, hate and judge other people and feel "religious about it."

I knew people like that, and if you were a Christian or a Republican in past iterations of those things so did you, but generally speaking we always believed they were not the majority.

This is Meatball Ron's press secretary being heckled by some teenage Republican idiot, right here. I'm glad there doesn't seem to be very many "GOP Josh" types out there anymore.

I mean, I get that the DeSantis campaign "Launch" was in all respects a soup sandwich (I mean, look at it. Given that Elon was involved I'm not sure how anybody expected anything the fuck else.) But that's not what this CHUD kid is making an issue of.

And all it currently takes to instantly get "Voted Off The Island" these days is...running against Trump??

Yes, I will forever blame garbage like the Survivor reality show for the current state of the "Conservative" mentality and its obsessive selfishness.

I know this, this is my lived experience, it doesn't have to make sense to you.

But, I see your confusion, so I'll explain. Ever get a bad vibe off of something?

In 2000 when I got with my ex-wife, Survivor was then in its first US season. Mind you, my ex was even more outspokenly conservative than I was, and she was allegedly a devout Pentecostal Christian. (NOTE: She is not a Trump Supporter, so far as I know.)

When that show was on, my ex became completely enraptured by it. I'm not even talking like "ADHD kid staring zombie-eyed at the TV." No. That wouldn't have bothered me as much. She would watch that shit with an absolute expression of joy on her face. It was fucking creepy.

And it repulsed me, I literally got a bad vibe off that TV show. I can't explain it. It was just gross to me. Something in my soul just said "Ick." 

It just felt wrong. I can't explain it in rational terms or make it make sense beyond that. Watching all these people do all this stupid shit, and then voting to decide who to kick out based on some bullshit idea of "Performance" and shitty political ratfucking?

(In retrospect, it hits right at the very heart of what a lot of stupid people think "Conservatism" and "Meritocracy" even is.)

This was a source of tension, and once we got engaged and moved in together, I literally forbade her from watching it because...and I actually said this...I thought it was ungodly and I didn't want that bullshit on the TV in my house.

So she would go over to her (considerably less religious) sister's house and they'd watch it, since her sister was also a fan. At least her sister didn't watch it like it was some kind of ecstatic sacrament, though.

All these years later I note that this was all part of Mark Burnett's reality TV empire and that was a huge part of what gave us Donald Trump as a former President and still-extant political force and that's why I think the bad vibe was the correct reaction. 

And I'll note, all these years later, just how many alleged conservatives and Christians have bowed down before this godless altar...to the exclusion of almost all else except hate. And they've not only left everything else to the rest of us...but actively strove to impede the rest of us from maintaining a functioning society since then.

And more to the point, these fuckers have decided a functioning society is not what they want.

It's more fun to "Vote people off the island" or something.

Maybe it's just me, and maybe because I'm a veteran and I have a little more real life experience at an environment where things have to be done a certain way, the right way, every time or somebody doesn't survive (and I also lived through the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic in which a third of our society simply refused to do what it took to not get sick, thus suggesting all this "Prepper" and pro-life shit has just been a LARP) I'm considerably less enthusiastic about living in that kind of world.

But I don't think that's the only reason:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

~Matthew 25:31-46

I guess I was just taught to see following Christ as a burden and a restraint upon the Self, as an anchor for the soul rather than as a source of worldly power or privilege or a thing to beat other people over the head with.

Consider this Catholic nut calling the "Sisters of perpetual indulgence" which is a gay men's protest group and charity an "Anti-Catholic hate group."

I'll believe that when I see gay men in campy outfits assaulting and killing Catholics and trying to make laws against them, bro, and not before. And plenty of "Christians" do shit like that to gay people all the fucking time.

More to the point, I don't see all that many Catholic priests trying to get their followers to stop abusing LGBT people...which seems like kind of a problem if you ask me.

And it's the same with People of Color. Most Black folks or Latinos are Christians, in point of fact many Latinos are specifically Catholic and yet too much of the American Church simply won't stand up for them, because the Cruelty Is The Point.

Now, we can either all keep playing Survivor: Republican Politics or we can act like a civilized goddamned society.

We cannot do both, and it's that simple.

Two

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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