Live Free Or Die (American Revelation XV, Dixville Notch Primary Edition.)

Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils. ~General John Stark, New Hampshire Revolutionary War hero.
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We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. ~Malcolm X.

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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

I said it, going on two years ago now, Nobody Cares About Dixville Notch.

I said it while I was on my lunch break at the Slot Palace, on a dead-ass slow night made all the more slow by the fact that it was snowing outside. COVID-19 and our knowledge of it was just beginning to be a thing, and it seriously irritated the hell out of me that all these idiot reporters couldn't shut up about some dinky-ass little hole-in-the-wall village (If you can call it that?) called Dixville Notch, NH, population six. It was on all the work TV's in the Slot Palace, and after I went and cleaned the bar (and changed the channel on the TV's because that's where the controls for the network were, only to find that BS was on all the news channels, so I put on Animal Planet and called it even) I'd had just about enough of that bullshit.

I started writing a post on my lunch break, and I finished it after I got home from work. Likewise, I pretty much spend most of last night working on this one in my head, because unlike at my last job, I can't just leave my laptop set up all night in the big empty room on the other side of the building.

Mind you, the news elsewhere wasn't all that great, most of the shit you saw coming out of the People's Republic of China looked like something out of the early stages of The Walking Dead or World War Z or some shit like that.

That's what like a billion and a half people were facing in that moment, and all our media idiots and half of Twitter kept talking about for like the first half of my shift was how Mike Bloomberg won half the votes in this tiny ass town with a population that could fit in my car.

And they acted like it was some kind of coronation. 

OK, whatever, dudes. When you get your head out of your ass, call me.

So tonight I get to work and when I sit down to take my break and check my social media, what's the first damn thing I see but "Nikki Haley wins the Dixville Notch primary." LOL, Okay, whatever. At least most of the people on Blue Sky seem to be treating it as the joke that it is.

At least most of the news these days is a little bit better.

I was thinking about that shit last night. Like, the media hasn't learned one damn thing since 2020, even as the possible existential stakes for them (along with most of the rest of us, here in America) have only grown. Trump and his base are basically talking like if he wins, they're going to either enslave or kill anybody who they don't like, that they can reach, and the media's at or near the top of that list, seemingly as a general rule.

Yeah, okay, I get it. A lot of people are really fuckin' stupid.

And a lot of people are just plain malicious, and think Trump is going to corn-hole their "Enemies" for them, or that they'll "get" something from him. Just sayin' none of that should outweigh the fact that this asshole and his followers, by definition, are (whether he wins or loses the next election) going to try to burn down the civilization that keeps us all alive, fed, and so on.

Including, again, You.

And they're shockingly open about wanting to do exactly that.

Seriously?

Come on, my Ferrets have survival instincts, what's wrong with people??

It's almost like trying to make money off all this crazy bullshit is more important to a lot of America than being free is. And what good is making a shitload of money off of some set of circumstances, if the money is no good when you're done??

I did peacekeeping in Bosnia, nobody with a brain in their head wants that kind of shit here.

Like, these fucking people's express goal is that if they can't turn America into some kind of Fascist theocracy with Trump as its Orange Jesus, they want to turn America into a Failed State with themselves as a Christianized Taliban, or start a civil war and break America into pieces, thinking they'll get at least one.

Insurrection, Revolution, hell, these motherfuckers are cheering everything from Putinist Communism to Radical Islam judging from what I've seen online since about October 7th of last year when Hamas attacked Israel, and that's aside from the fact that we're coming up on two years of war in Ukraine now. 

I mean, at this point it's literally anything but America and the system we have. Joe Biden isn't "Entertaining" enough, or some stupid horseshit. The "logic" seems to go; Something something "Own The Libs" = Profit! or something like that.

Bitch, the purpose of government is not to "entertain" anybody, least of all so you can profit off of it.

All these motherfuckers see Trump as the key to getting whatever bullshit they think they want. And no, they don't care if it fucks their shit up too. Remember, These Fucking People believed so much in using COVID-19 as a bioweapon against civilization that they were willing to die from it. You do the math how that kind of thinking applies to anything else.

And "What They Want" is everything from a racist Ethnocracy where you can't participate in society if you have the wrong hairstyle...not to mention the "Wrong" skin color...To laws regulating sexual behavior that make Radical Islamic Purdah seem free by comparison, if not both. There's apparently, basically people out there who'd throw your ass in jail for flirting with anybody but your wife (or flirting with your wife in public) or even sending a Selfie, let alone consuming pornography or having sex outside of marriage.

To follow the "logic" flow-chart they developed for the virus, functionally that means yes, these assholes would be slaves themselves if that's what it took to keep the idea of Slavery going, and they'd make up how "In The Next Life" things might be better...especially if there's some people that end up being a worse class of slave than they are. 

Yes, these fucking assholes already idolize the idea of being sexless drones spending eternity praising their small, angry egomaniac of a god...and there's always some dumbass freak of a preacher or some other nut trying to force that shit on the real world somehow. And they get mad if anybody asks the question "But what if there is no 'next' life??"

And no, none of this bullshit is even close to Constitutional (or even humane) per our current system as any of this stuff has been defined anywhere in, or even close to, living memory...and the truth is, the times these fucking ass-clowns think they want to "Go back to" were just as perverse as any other, and for the most part did not hide it.

If they know, these idiots don't care. 

Jesus Christ only wishes he had the influence over Christianity's formation after His Death that Plato and Saul of Tarsus did...but these jackoffs are too stupid to know all that.

Lunatic dreams create a nightmare reality for the sane.

And I'm here to tell you, these fucking people's bullshit tautologies and proof-texted idiocies are a hell of a lot more cruel and malicious than anything an actual lunatic is going to think of on their own.

But sure, instead of facing that we have a lot of fascists and wannabe religious murderers among us and dealing with that, let's spend an inordinate amount of time on media airheads filling the airwaves of our 24 hour news cycle speculating what the primary votes of *Checks Notes* Six People In New Hampshire mean is really going on in the Republican Party. 

I get it, the mail-in Democratic primaries won't even get counted up until Super Tuesday, blah blah blah, so what?

You know what it means?? Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for President. Anybody with a brain in their head can tell you that. The Republican base has gone too far down the rabbit hole. Anybody who wouldn't go along has been chased out.

It sucks, I know, I was there...in 2008.

But you know what else it means??

Of the six voters in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, five of them voted in the 2020 general election.

I checked.

And all five of them voted for Joe Biden.

I guess "Live Free Or Die" really does mean something to somebody.

But you? You better show up, too. This Time.

Freedom ain't free. Sometimes, you have to fight for it.

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

I can't put it any more simply than that.

Слава Україна!

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press.

Four

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. 

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran