Ira Hayes
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the marine that went to war
Gather 'round me people
There's a story I would tell
'Bout a brave young Indian
You should remember well
From the land of the Pima Indian
A proud and noble band
Who farmed the Phoenix Valley
In Arizona land
Down the ditches a thousand years
The waters grew Ira's peoples' crops
'Til the white man stole their water rights
And the sparkling water stopped
Now, Ira's folks were hungry
And their land grew crops of weeds
When war came, Ira volunteered
And forgot the white man's greed
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the marine that went to war.
~The Ballad of Ira Hayes, by Johnny Cash.
I saw this earlier today.
I'm a veteran. Fuck that.
I'd literally be dead if it wasn't for my health care, that I only get because I'm a veteran. In 2021-2022 I had a mental health crisis, depression, you do the math. More to the point, I know I'm far from the only person like that. Most of us seem to hit rock bottom at some point. I mean...most people do, but for those of us who've put on the uniform at some point it sure seems like the odds are higher. Military service, even in peacetime, is demanding and dangerous and it leaves a mark on most of us who've done it.
And, like I said in Lakota Man's thread, I served with Native Americans. By then, most that I knew had a life not that different from mine, if perhaps a little rougher around the edges. But, There was a time...more recent than for most...that the only way a Native American person could get a fair shot at life was to enlist in the military.
As I've said on here before, I had a Native roommate for several years. He was a Navy veteran (He'd been a Mess Specialist serving on Arleigh Burke-class Destroyers in the 1990's) and was a member of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe's Ogitchedaw Warrior Society...their veteran's group. His parents were Navy, his upbringing had thus been pretty well-off, even if parts of it were spent in Navy housing. Now, for obvious reasons I was tight with a lot of the Ogitchedaws both before and after this.
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived
To walk back down again
And when the fight was over
And Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the marine that went to war
Ira Hayes returned a hero
Celebrated through the land
He was wined and speeched and honored
Everybody shook his hand
But he was just a Pima Indian
No water, no home, no chance
At home nobody cared what Ira'd done
And when did the Indians dance?
~The Ballad of Ira Hayes, by Johnny Cash.
Another buddy of mine, though, is who I thought of reading Lakota Man's post. One of the older guys, Dave, a Vietnam veteran who'd fought with the 7th Cavalry in the Ia Drang valley. He'd enlisted in the US Army because, as he put it, in the time and place where he grew up he had three options, the Army, the bean field, or the slammer. Serving his country, even though it literally was no longer his country was his only even possible ticket to a real job. And I'm serious, in Mount Pleasant, Michigan before 1964 if you were Native American there were certain parts of that city where you were not allowed to go without the possibility of being arrested. The Civil Rights Act wasn't just for Black people, yo.
Native Americans had, at that time, been Citizens for 40 years (Having earned that citizenship on the battlefields of World War I.) But they still needed the Federal government to step in and say that they had to be treated as equal citizens under the Law, as people.
What Project 2025 does is rescind all that and more...and all for one man's ego.
But I want to state emphatically and for the record that I spent a generation hearing the stories of Native people in general...and because of a shared life experience...I heard the stories of their Veterans in particular.
If somebody has an Anishnaabe name, let alone it's both first and last...chances are real good they were born after about 1993. Chances are, they also lived through their family being lifted out of poverty by casino gambling and per-capita shares.
So, From 1990 to about 1995 also correlates handily to when the Tribe started to have money because of gambling. Whypipo could give a shit about your rights...or theirs...unless there's money involved, pretty much.
Think about that, for a second.
And the entire Republican platform, at this point, is a giant middle finger to anybody who isn't a rich white man who has nothing but success in life. Their whole damned point of view is, if you have a health crisis (Mental or otherwise) or anything whatever goes wrong in your life, or if you're not born in the "Right" group, or if you need anything, fuck you, you deserve it, go wander off and die somewhere. And how dare any person outside of their select chosen few demand fair treatment or equality in any way. America is for Americans Rich Christian White People Republican Men.
And these assholes think the rest of us will just sit there and take this crap?? No. Wrong. Fuck You!
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the marine that went to war
Then Ira started drinking hard
Jail was often his home
They let him raise the flag and lower it
Like you'd throw a dog a bone
He died drunk early one morning
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water and a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the marine that went to war
Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lying thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died
~The Ballad of Ira Hayes, by Johnny Cash.
Still think these fucking assholes won't get around to banning the Bible eventually?? Can't have the Proles learning about how they're supposed to treat foreigners in their lands, or Jubilee, or "Love Thy Neighbor" or the Sermon On The Mount, or how a rich man getting into Heaven is like trying to stuff a Camel though the eye of a needle...or any of that crap...without it becoming inconvenient for Power and Wealth eventually. And their next target will almost certainly be literacy. I think "Conservative" elites tell on themselves by the popularity of medieval Catholic Fundamentalism among their ranks.
They don't care if they go to Hell, but they actively think the rest of us should.
They both crave the Power of the medieval Catholic Church, and don't actually think there's a God that might not be bound by their decrees.
And if you think it'd end with "Project 2025" you have another thing coming. These assholes already wanna keep going until they've Canceled the Magna Carta...but only as long as they get to control the King. If they don't, they still wanna use the Law to shield themselves.
This isn't "Party before Country." This isn't even "The Party, and fuck everything else" anymore. This is Republicans demanding that they get nothing but endless hand-jobs for their narcissism and everybody else gets nothing but shit.
Republicans want America to be turned into Elon Musk's Twitter...and they all think they're gonna get to be Muskrat.
And all that matters to Trump is getting back his place in the magical city, which is exactly why he gave away the store to the Focus On The Family crowd...because they sucked up to him and told him they'd protect his Power. Only then, he found out even he didn't like what they really wanted to do.
And if these motherfuckers can't get their Christian Nationalist Theocratic Dictatorship and outlaw Freedom in the name of Jesus and Tax Cuts, they want America to beat itself into illiterate feudal savagery in for-profit conflicts, so they can break a piece of it off for themselves.
Almighty God be damned, they want to sacrifice America to the Almighty Dollar, and somehow never put two and two together on where the worth of that money even comes from.
And they sure as shit never stopped to think about the blood and sacrifices...by veterans and others...it took for things to even get that way. And this kind of blind, willful ignorance and selfishness is killing us...deliberately and literally. What the fuck do you think Trump's bungled COVID-19 responses were?
These assholes wanna Steal America, they want to take us for everything we have, and they can't even be bothered to distract us with cheap liquor or some shit. We're just supposed to take it, and accept racism and religiosity and whatever stupid privileges they accord small groups of us (Which will be a setup that benefits them, not us) instead of our God-given Constitutional Rights because these motherfuckers think that's some kind of natural order in the Universe.
And they believe in this shit so much that they're willing to become the bad guys in their own alleged End Times Narrative, if they have to.
Oh, Hell No.
These idiots have forgotten about Guillotines, among other things.
Either you believe in freedom or you don't.
You're either willing to stand up for yourself and your own rights, or you ain't.
Sooner or later, we're gonna have to fight for it.
This shouldn't be that hard of a choice, people.
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
Two
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
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