Culture War Crimes (American Revelation XiX, Three.)

There's this brother on death row somewhere, he checked in when he was 16. He sat there another 16 years while the courts and lawyers argued about this and that. While he waited he painted a mural on his wall. For all those years he painted, not letting a soul see what he was up to. Finally, when he was 32 and had spent more life on death row than in his mama's house, all his appeals were exhausted. He was about to die. As he was about to be let out for the final time, he finally unveiled his masterpiece. All there was were six words. "Death is certain, life is not". The next day the hacks painted over it. Peace out. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series "Oz" S1, E4 "Capital P."

...

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this last night.

Republicans are trying to ban "Chemtrails."

Only problem is, there's no such thing. Contrails are water vapor. 

They're the same as any other cloud, except that they're long and thin, created by water vapor in aircraft-engine exhaust and the combination of heat, humidity and low temperatures at higher altitudes.

Weather manipulation isn't really much of a thing. Seriously, people have been trying all this stuff for awhile, and it seems not to work very much. It's almost like Nature is more powerful than we are, or something. Pretty much anybody who doesn't have Trump's childish understanding of things knows this already, but for some reason the nuts want to humor this fucking idiot with all this garbage.

Republican "Governance" (such as it is) is already spiraling out into conspiracy theories, dumb shit and unreality even as these fucks belligerently bray about firing the government, installing their totalitarian horseshit ideology (which will, apparently, be enforced by the Underpants Gnomes, minus a functional Federal government) and going out and trying to fight the whole rest of the damn world like they think they're Knights on Crusade or some bullshit. 

As if they're not already soup-sandwiching the military.

Among other things, everything from funding to procurement to training pipelines simply cannot handle fighting a war against the rest of the world and half of America on top of that. Shit, we struggled to supply Ukraine until we started overhauling our own production.

Canada, the EU, Mexico, let alone China or Russia...these fuckers start shit with somebody else, they're gonna lose, and the reasons why run very deep in the minds of people like Pete Hegseth. Character flows from the top down in military units, among other things.

And yes, I'm very serious about that.

I've written multiple times about going to a Black History month event where a few Tuskegee Airmen were going to be speaking, in dress uniform, this wasn't "DEI" it was called respect. The Redtails of the 332nd Fighter Group never lost an escorted bomber to enemy air action. Things like that matter to bomber pilots and since that's who made the decisions in the 410th Bomb Wing, a whole bunch of us attended the event. Sure, it was "voluntary." My LT said "You're going."

But the point was, so that we would know what we were. Our history is part of what makes us. Many Tuskegee Airmen became USAF leaders later!

And at a time when we were, certifiably, the biggest badasses on the planet, no less.

But MAGA, with their eternal Year Zero mentality, doesn't give a fuck about about any of that. They think all they need to know is Trump, because all they want to know is Trump. Trump doesn't get shit right...he wings it, on everything. You cannot do that if you're flying an aircraft, or protecting one, along with all the people that turn it into an effective fighting machine. 

History is about people. The thing is, one of the lessons I learned as an Airman was that if you don't care enough to get the small things right, or understand what makes things what they are...you won't get the big, important stuff right either.

Seriously, if these motherfuckers tried to invade Greenland, they'd be defeated by the weather. Worse, there's nothing there that it wouldn't take 15-20 years to be able to actually exploit because you have to build things like pipelines and ports and roads first, at the least. That's before you get to the issue that much of the island is covered by an ice sheet.

"For want of a nail, the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost..." only scales up.

For example: These fucking people have already declared "Antifa" to be a terrorist group. Trouble is, all
"Antifa" was, was an internet thing for most of us. It was never much more than an internet meme outside of Portland and maybe Seattle, and honestly whatever actual groups existed seem to have pretty much disappeared fairly early in 2021. Portland's political street-brawlers come in both Leftist and Rightist colors, but not much that either side does could legally be considered terrorism.

We already have laws for all this shit. Assault is already illegal. It ain't illegal to be a Democrat or otherwise not be a Republican, and that's a First Amendment thing.

If Republicans are trying to make opposition to fascism or Trump illegal, they've thus far made an effort that a half-baked jailhouse lawyer could poke big holes in.

But ya know, these same people are calling Empathy a Sin. 

Excuse me, What?

There's a few problems with all that, not least that this is America, Trump is already back to his previous shitty approval ratings, and its preexisting culture and society will only take so much. People can only take so much before they get mad. 

Everything from governance to public health to warfare requires a certain level of rational decision-making based on actual conditions and facts and what's really happening...or things simply stop working.

And in any case, it's early yet, but organized resistance to this crap at this point seems to mainly be forming up around churches.

Oh, don't worry, they're coming for Christianity too. Fascists have a long tradition of that. Consider for example the Salvadoran Civil War.

In 1980, Archbishop (now Saint) Oscar Romero, of San Salvador, was assassinated by a right-wing death squad while celebrating Mass. He wasn't some liberal, he was a no-shit Opus Dei bishop, a conservative's conservative or he would not have been the local leader of Catholicism in a right-wing country. But you see, outside of the USA where they recruit celebrities and Republican judges and politicians, Opus Dei is a sect of the poor. Naturally, Archbishop Romero stood up for the poor people because that was his literal vocation from God. So the fascists within the Salvadoran government (who themselves were at odds with the military junta at the time) had Romero murdered.

He was killed on the orders of a guy named  Roberto D'Aubuisson (pronounced De-Ob-Wee-Son) who was a literal self-proclaimed Neo-Fascist and an open admirer of Hitler and the Nazis. He was called "Blowtorch Bob" because he liked to use a blowtorch to torture people, and he was trained in part by the US Army and had ties to the Moral Majority and Republicans and shit. 

Hell, the "Moral Majority" and such groups as Young Americans For Freedom gave this dude awards. When dude got shitcanned from the Salvadoran Army over his death-squad activities, he went into politics. ARENA (AKA the Nationalist Republican Alliance) one of El Salvador's main political parties (along with the leftist FMLN, AKA the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front) before Nayib Bukele's Nuevas Ideas stole [both of] their lunch money and took over the country, was founded by him. And Republican Senator Jesse Helms was one of his patrons. The FMLN and other Leftist forces gained ground anyway. Old Blowtorch Bob died of cancer in 1992, just after the signing of the Chapultepec peace accords ended the Salvadoran Civil War.

A fair number of the people and various groups that supported this bullshit are not only still around, but big backers of Project 2025 and Trump.

Just in case you're wondering what we can expect from These Fucking People when the shit hits the fan here.

And it's going to.

Soon.

I consider this whole thing to go in roughly two week cycles because, per my observations during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the initial stages of the invasion of Ukraine, that's about how long it takes before these fucking idiots get bored. We're halfway through the first one.

Meanwhile Republicans have lit all type of various fires and are pouring gas on them because they think it's funny, or something. Bird Flu is a rising pandemic, there's a big Tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas right now. Incompetent Republicans will only make all that shit worse, and they're literally governing like they think they've permanently outfoxed reality or some shit.

When it snaps back, a lot of shit is going to snap right along with it.

I am, in fact, preparing as best I can for what I think is coming.

Unlike some other people.

Meghan McCain for example.

She's not worried, she thinks Republicans are "Cool" now. (As if the Democratic Party was ever "Cool" or even tried to be.) So she thinks it's some kind of Brave New World out there. Not brave enough, though, that she didn't block me, Stonekettle and about a thousand other people on Threads yesterday when her stupid comment got (justifiably) dragged.

These people aren't going to be able to handle fighting a war, Civil or otherwise, or any other long-term...anything.

The thing is, it only takes a couple days or weeks to wreck shit that took a hundred or a thousand years to build.

But hey, Meghan McCain got to feel like a cultural trendsetter for five minutes so...Worth It!!

(Full Sarcasm Warning.)

We're down to committing Culture War Crimes.

Feel proud of yourselves yet, Republicans??

If Republicans manage to atomize the Federal government, which I think the most likely scenario; America then starts over as 50 little countries, the Federal budget vanishes into the ether and various Billionaires and politicians pockets, and the military mostly just gets left to rot except for whatever formations land in polities that can afford to support them. Everybody else starts over.

That number will, of course, start going down fairly quickly as different states ally and form co-ops and new nations, and there will of course be conflicts. That and Republican unreasonableness and craving for political monoculture is where we get our civil war.

One of the main causes of the downfall of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed was that the Serbian political elite attempted to create an ethnic and political monoculture in 1989-1991 and shut everybody else out.

And Republicans will say or think whatever they have to, to try the same shit here, knowing that it won't work.

But they think they can get a good result from Bad Faith. 

It don't work that way, but that's what they think.

Do you see where I'm coming from now??

And I don't think it'll take anywhere near that long for that shit to go sideways here. Too many people ain't going back.

The question then becomes, what do we fight for?

You either 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

Two

Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism.
Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty. ~Saint Oscar Romero.