An Open Letter To Democratic Leaders (American Revelation XVII, Six.)

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: "save the planet." What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet! We don't care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm getting tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract, they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam ... The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?"
"Plastic... asshole." ~George Carlin

...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

Dear Democrats,

My Mom came over here today, to get some groceries, have lunch with me, and run some errands. When we were out and about, I was sitting in the Jeep in the Home Depot parking lot and I saw this; Some idiot Christian Nationalist legislator from Oklahoma, mad as all hell that Harmeet Dhillon is a Sikh and calling her a "Demon Worshiper" while condemning the Republican Party for allowing her to pray at the RNC.

So, pardon me if I have absolutely zero patience for the Anti-Joe Biden Democratic circular firing squad. If you fuckers wanna quit and go be Republicans to save your place in the magical city, now's the time...but I thought you assholes should be aware of what you're getting.

And what you'll be held responsible for.

Because if Republicans win, they're going to have great fun abolishing even the concept of Freedom, they're going enslave the Working Man, they want to murder LGBT people and POC, they're going to oppress non-whatever-the-right-kind-of-Christians-is-this-week, they're going to oppress, enslave and slaughter women, and teach religion and conspiracy theories in any school not entirely attended by rich white kids. And if your kid is not a private-school kid they want to push them into the military...not to fight enemies of America like China and Russia, but so they can jerk off to the idea of invading Mexico, a US ally. They're going to try and make social change illegal while turning America into a Christian theocracy that has a King. And they plan on simply shooting anybody who resists, and don't care if it burns America to the ground, starts a bloody civil war, or does any other goddamn thing! These fucking people hate America!

You know...this is the exact type of shit that America was founded to be against and anything our country has traditionally stood for in the world.

And they'll hand world-power status over to the Russians while they preside over what will almost certainly be the violent breakup of America...not that you fuckers will notice because you'll be too busy tongue-polishing jackboots, at this rate. Come on, what the fuck is wrong with you??

I'm sorry, but if you wonder why Republicans hate you so much (Aside from Civil Rights and every other affirmative social change) it's because there's an entire class of elitist White limousine Liberals who, when push comes to shove, have all the backbone and courage of a common Garden Slug and would rather argue about policy than win the elections necessary to ever implement that policy. I mean this seriously, the common domestic Ferret has more determination.

And determination, especially bent towards shitty ends, is what defines Republicans. It burns their ass endlessly that they lose to such a dissolute majority, and that their ideas are not popular with anybody but them. So now they wanna try to force everybody to be a Republican.

All Republicans had to do was start a fake argument about replacing Joe Biden, knowing you idiots would immediately collapse into the political equivalent of arguing over how many angels one can fit on a pinhead and you morons are, all the sudden, perfectly well willing to switch horses midrace without even having the first idea who the new one might be. *And being suspiciously willing to abandon Kamala Harris, who's both the obvious choice if Biden were to step down and probably the only one who can legally keep that huge campaign war-chest, all with less than four months to go before the election.* 

And worse, you do this damned well knowing that doing it would almost certainly hand the country over to Christian Nationalism and Fascism.

Meanwhile, there's a hell of a lot of Republicans including even a lot of MAGA that are utterly disgusted with the turn their party has taken. 

It's a numbers game, we could pick those people up, and then impress upon them that yes, they can still be Christians or conservative or whatever they want in a Democratic-led country...and unlike in a Trump-ocracy, nobody will tell them how or what or who to worship. All we have to do is get them to vote against what Trump is fast becoming...which apparently isn't what they thought they were getting.

And if we want to do that, or any other damn thing, it's Joe Biden and/or Kamala Harris or We Lose.

We, the Voters, knew Joe was old when we selected him.

He was, in fact, carried over the finish line by Black voters in South Carolina in 2020. I wrote about it and it's one of my most-viewed posts over four years later.

And apparently there's Democrats who are still mad about that, that we the voters didn't go with the damn Unicorn.

Republicans were lining up and had an entire plan to spend the election season calling Bernie Sanders a Communist and Red-baiting like they thought it was 1950. Four years later, it's the Republicans who've been revealed as Putin simps, not Bernie.

And we can and should be running on shit like that. I'm goddamned serious.

For fuck's sake, lead!

And if Joe quits and hands the campaign to Kamala, she'll face a tidal wave of misogyny and open racism, and it's going to be a fight but if I didn't think Kamala Harris was tough enough to win, I wouldn't be typing this right now.

She, too, understands that this is a fight.

A fight that the media is giddy waiting to cover, by the way. They make money off the Trump crazy shit, which is half the fucking problem here.

And if it scares you that somebody like Jenna Ellis is possibly a persuadable Democratic voter at this point?? It should. I simply don't know what else to say.

I not only know a lot of Democratic voters who used to be Republicans, I'm one of them.

Sooner or later, that's gonna leave a mark.

I'm a former Christian Republican, I'm a veteran, I was a Bush 43 campaign volunteer...and 20 years ago I'd still have been repulsed by what the Republicans have become!

You have to go with the electorate you have. This ain't Fantasy Football.

And ya'll simply wouldn't even be relevant without those people. Whether that's bad or good is hard to say, and I say that as somebody who asks that question and takes a dim view of We The People having allowed our politics to get this bad in the first place. There weren't enough good people left in the Republican Party to save it. All the good Republicans are Democrats now. 

There were not, in fact, ten righteous men in Sodom.

Look, it's going to come down to a fight.

And sooner or later you're going to have to Be A Better Citizen and stand up.

When the fight comes, and it will come, I'm not talking voting to send young poor whites and men and women of color off to fight these motherfuckers.

I mean everybody is going to have to stand and deliver.

If we want to be free, we're all going to have to ante up and kick in.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Either you believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

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

Five

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