Zombie Jesus (Land Of Confusion, Three.)

Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance caused the Zombie War. Imagine if we had known then what we know now. Imagine if the undead virus had been as understood as, say, tuberculosis was. Imagine if the world’s citizens, or at least those charged with protecting those citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons. ~From the novel World War Z, by Max Brooks.

...

When the last broadcast came from Buenos Aires, when that famous Latin singer played that Spanish lullaby, it was too much for one of our operators. He wasn’t from Buenos Aires, he wasn’t even from South America. He was just an eighteen-year-old Russian sailor who blew his brains out all over his instruments. He was the first, and since the end of the war, the rest of the IR operators have followed suit. Not one of them is alive today. The last was my Belgian friend. “You carry those voices with you,” he told me one morning. We were standing on the deck, looking into that brown haze, waiting for a sunrise we knew we’d never see. “Those cries will be with me the rest of my life, never resting, never fading, never ceasing their call to join them. ~From the novel World War Z, by Max Brooks.

I saw this a few days ago.

Some idiot Pastor saying the parents of Transgender kids should be "shot in the back of the head, and their bodies strung up on a bridge."

"Thou Shalt Not Kill" could not be reached for comment. 

Then I saw this Tweet from Rick Wilson, QT in response to Jesse Kelly demanding an American dictator just now.

I have a confession to make.

I've read "1984" like five times.

Partly because I was a Security Policeman assigned to a Bomb Wing when I was in the Air Force, I've always had a morbid fascination with apocalyptic nuclear novels. I used to actively collect them. 

I have a copy of Trinity's Child by William Prochnau (the book on which the film "By Dawn's Early Light" is based) around here somewhere that originated in the base library at KI Sawyer. 

One day back in 2007 I was randomly flipping through "World War Z" at Borders Books in Traverse City, Michigan...and that shit went home with me that damn day.

Since I first heard of it, I was a fan of The Walking Dead, both the comic and the later TV show.

I mean, shit, I was a member of the End Times Prophecy Movement for like five years.

But all that shit falls flat with me now.

COVID-19 pretty much killed all that stuff for me.

Until they make a Zombie Apocalypse series where some idiot is running up to the Zombies, shouting back at the cops or the soldiers or at other survivors "You can't tell ME what to do!" And gets eaten, yet others still have to be physically restrained from following and call out to people they think they know who turned, who in spite of a world of obvious evidence think something's still left...

Until they make a post-nuclear apocalypse novel where some Grunt is deliberately drinking irradiated water in defiance of orders and even basic CBRN protocols because he thinks it'll turn him into Doom Guy or Spider Man or the dude from Bioshock or some shit...

Until they make an Christian End Times novel where the high-tech forces of the Beast's One-World Government are trapped in some Texas hellhole, fighting heavily-armed Christian extremists who blow shit up with car bombs and suicide bombers and string people up from bridges like the Radical Islamists in Fallujah did in a continuous string of month-long battles over the course of a whole year...

Until somebody writes a story where the Antichrist is cut down with some ancient grand master's sword by some Templar-wannabe screaming "Deus Hoc Vult!" who's then cut down in a hail of gunfire on global TV and then Old Scratch resurrects only to get blown up by some stoned Assassin who shouted "Allah Akbar" before he flipped that dead man's switch, and then hacked by some North Korean saboteur in the name of Kim Jong Il or Lenin or Mao when he tries to upload into a cyborg or some shit...

I mean what could a literal goddamned Antichrist think up that Antivaxxers and Evangelicals haven't already?

But the difference is that the Antivaxxers and the religious nuts got to call their shit "Righteous."

Unless you can write a thing that reflects all these different strains of base stupidity, internet contrarianism and religious dumbfuckery and have a plausible way to deal with it, what's the point?

It just doesn't reflect enough of the truth of this fucked-up world we live in to even hold my interest.

These chucklefucks have ruined apocalyptic fiction for me. It's just not any fun anymore, not even as a guilty pleasure.

What's the point, when no matter how screwed up of a story you can come up with some idiot will one-up you by literally not acting like a believable goddamned human being for the dumbest possible fucking reasons imaginable!

I mean, fucking seriously?!?!

Seriously, I literally got my first vaccination for COVID-19 over two years ago. I'm still obviously here, I'm alive. And these Antivax morons can still say this shit without being dragged out back and beaten with golf clubs?

You could drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with this horseshit. I damned near did.

Yeah, there's Zombies out there alright, and it's these fucking people.

What else can you even call somebody who just keeps going on this right-wing shit and will not learn anything? I'll wait. 

Addicts keep going this hard, this long they drink and drive, they get arrested or they overdose. Addicts can hit rock bottom and stop, can end up in jail and be cut off from their supply, or can be persuaded to pursue Sobriety.

I've looked at this from an addiction standpoint for awhile, and that no longer seems sufficient.

So...Zombies?

And it seems like more of them than are otherwise are simple-ass screaming fanatics that aren't even interested in anything else. The cruelty, the stupidity and some grievance against the world, real or imagined, is the goddamned point.

I mean how the fuck does anybody look at somebody like Lauren Blowbert and think that's who they want helping to run the country?

Who the fuck looks at some Nazi ramming the White House fence and immediately thinks "False Flag!" and not "Oh, shit?"

As far as I'm concerned, if that's you, then "What the fuck is wrong with you?" doesn't even begin to cover it and I'm not particularly interested in phrasing that as a question. Fuck you, get off my lawn.

Shit, in the middle of the night last night some nut with a U-haul truck and a Nazi flag ran into the White House fence and by morning it wasn't even news.

Where does this bullshit stop?

When's enough, enough?

I think the only answer to this garbage is a complete lack of social tolerance, and a zero-tolerance policy enforced with at least the occasional visible knuckle sandwich. Embarrass people who say dumb shit in public, fire people publicly instead of taking them back in the office first. Peel the warning labels off everything, let stupidity be painful for the stupid again!

And if somebody's got some short in the wiring like a broken computer that spits out -1 or "Me, Me, Me" as the answer to every fucking thing you goddamned sure don't let them run for President. If somebody has a ravening hatred for Black people or LGBT folks or is obsessed with the genitals of transgender folk...you don't let that person run shit. You hand them a fudge-sickle and direct them to the couch so they can watch Spongebob or Televangelist sermons or whatever.

Stop giving idiots a platform!

And you goddamned sure don't give them a fucking weapon.

Let alone let them try to reshape America into some totalitarian gulag, like North Korea but with Republicans because of what amounts to lame-ass bullshit excuses.

We've got people, right here in America, who are so eager to prostrate themselves before the Hammer And Sickle and Vladimir Putin that they'd gladly sell out the United States and all of its power to a fourth-rate 18th Century shithole that's literally trying to commit genocide against people who didn't even do anything to it. 

A country so backwards that right now the Russians cannot even contain or stop some cheap ass bunch of rebels in what looks like the modern equivalent of the Bay Of Pigs in Belogrod Oblast...except that it's working, at least for the moment. Depending on who you ask, These guys appear to either have fallen back across the border in good order, claiming few casualties and having captured some Russian heavy equipment including a T-90 tank...or they're still at it, I suspect it's one element is still on the attack and the other had to fall back. Depends on how well-led the Orcs were.

Thing is, at least one of the two factions of these raiders is far-right and could well cause more problems than they solve, should they happen to win.

But nobody's thinking that far ahead.

And I'm a tell you what.

We got here by lionizing "Beliefs" and "Feelings" and letting "Conservative" White People do whatever they wanted...so long as some rich person got to take advantage of it at some point. It's like a bit over a decade ago it just became accepted that it was Republicans' societal role to just fuck shit up and so long as they didn't go over some arbitrary line somewhere, everybody just shrugs and lets these pig-fuckers do whatever the fuck they feel like.

Literally anything, other than "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..."

And as a result, they and their belief systems and even their topics of conversation have become utterly unrecognizable to me...me being a former one of these fucking people!

Meanwhile Zombie "Conservatism" just shuffles along through the land of confusion, moaning occasionally and eating anything that won't run away fast enough while decomposing and spreading its contagions all over, literally. And those who could put a bullet between its eyes just yawn and shrug, and keep eating Cheetos and masturbating instead of doing their civic goddamn duty.

You don't crucify the Zombie Jesus, that's not a kill. You have to shoot it in the head.

When do we stop putting up with this horseshit?

When do We, The People, pull together and say "No?"

We are the front line, and the last line of defense.

We are America, and don't you forget it.

Two

Слава Україна!

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

...

 [The Mandalorian brings together the entire Mandalorian covert after Carson Teva makes a surprise visit and asks him to help Greef Karga's situation on Nevarro when the New Republic won't lift a finger]

Mando: Now, many of you don't know Greef Karga. And those that do fought against him when you rescued me from his ambush many cycles ago on the streets of Nevarro. Since then, he's had a change of heart and has risked his life to save mine as well as the Foundling in my charge. [Grogu coos] I stand before you to petition an intervention. To help rescue Nevarro before it's too late. I am in no position to ask any more of you. However... However, the enemy that decimated this very covert were Imperials, not Greef Karga's bounty hunters. Greef Karga is now a High Magistrate and has offered me a tract of land on his independent world. Perhaps it is time for us to live in the light once again on a planet where we are welcome. So our culture may flourish and our children can feel what it is to play in the sunlight.

Armorer: Does anyone else wish to speak?

Mando: It's up to them now.

Paz Vizsla: I do. I was there on Nevarro that night. I fought against Greef Karga and his hunters. I saw my brothers and sisters fall at the hands of the Imperial butchers that hunted us in the sewers. I saw many die to save the life of [gestures to Grogu] this one, tiny Foundling. And now we are asked to sacrifice yet again. The question we should be asking ourselves is, "Why? Why should we lay our lives down yet again?" Because we are Mandalorians! I have had my disagreements with this man, but he risked his life to save my son. And Bo-Katan Kryze did not give up on my child's life even when the rest of us did. These two are asking us to take up arms in the name of a brighter future, and I for one will take up arms to fight by their side. [Mandalorians agree] This is the Way!

Mandalorians: This is the Way.

Armorer: This is the Way.