There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. ~George Carlin
...
In Natal, apartheid is a deadly cancer in our midst, setting house against house, and eating away at the precious ties that bound us together. This strife among ourselves wastes our energy and destroys our unity. My message to those of you involved in this battle of brother against brother is this: take your guns, your knives, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea! Close down the death factories. End this war now! ~Nelson Mandela, speech at a peace rally, February 25th, 1990
...
Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.
That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions.
In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. ~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.I didn't watch the Superbowl this year, or even follow along on social media like I usually do. Mostly, I had to work Sunday night and I was just tired to start with.
But it turned out to be a slow night, and as breaks and time allowed I was laughing my ass off about "Conservatives" collectively popping their cork over, like, anything connected to the Super Bowl, and no one cared. I guess even Trump made his usual half-baked big deal about storming off in a huff, and of course he got booed at least twice that I heard about. (Apparently, so did Taylor Swift, but I don't really give a fuck.)
Like I've been saying, Republicans have decided they don't like America.
Not any America that they have to share with anybody else at all, anyway.
And here's the thing, stuff like the Super Bowl shows that...as a People, we're bigger than these motherfuckers. We collectively asserted our right not to care and gave them a giant goddamned foam-rubber middle finger for the night.
And they
mad about it, of course.
The thing is, in the end that'll kill the United States of America as dead as Muskrat and Trump wrecking the Federal government, but at least if that vibe holds there won't be much of a civil war. It'll just be a gradual or rapid Soviet-style disintegration beset by Oligarch-raids. This may or may not effect me very much in the short term (though I fully expect the disintegration of my veteran's benefits and of Social Security, but my Mom has a house and I can help her keep it) but that's because I live in one of the better places, more or less. I'm acutely conscious of the fact that I know those who don't.
Places like Michigan and Minnesota and Wisconsin will be the Baltic States of our Soviet collapse, Texas will be more like Kazakhstan.
But there's more (and worse) than that going on here.
Republicans (with Trump taking the role of their Id) have clearly set their sights on fucking off to somewhere else and leaving the US to (they think, hopefully) bloody civil war and disintegration. I thought this was the whole unspoken point of the Greenland thing...which has apparently been forgotten now? I don't know, but apparently, led by Trump they've set their sights on Gaza. Which Trump seems to think he, personally, is going to own. Why the Israelis would be stupid enough to volunteer to share a land-border with these rapacious motherfuckers, I have no idea.
MAGA's thought Trump was going to enslave or kick out or kill or re-segregate all of the many, many people that they don't like and somehow leave them being the Planters of a new and nation-wide Antebellum South. They also thought Mr. "Art of the Deal" would somehow just bullshit all the rest of us into peacefully accepting that.
Of course that couldn't and didn't happen. There simply was no possibility of it coming to pass. Nobody but them wants to go back.
Now, all too many of the MAGA's see that Elon and Trump are stealing from them and loudly wrecking the Federal government for them too. I've noticed aside from among the MAGA "Influencers" and politicians the gloating and shit has stopped, not that it went on for very long in any case. Now, the common CHUD...especially old CHUD's are not any happier than the rest of us.
They still think other people will get hurt worse, though, so they're not too mad, yet. They will be, because these idiots will always find something to be mad about. Doubly so when (like Russian pensioners in 1996) their Social Security-equivalent is only worth like $10.
And here's the thing, Old MAGA's,
unless you're somebody like Chuck Grassley,
YOU won't get to go to the Trump Sultanate Of Gaza either.
(But they sure as hell want to use American firepower and resources and your tax money to get it.)
And like I literally said as soon as I found out about this damn foolishness, I still have enough of the End Times believer in me to think that guess what?? America is very likely to go down simply because somebody here thought up this stupidity and was not immediately slapped down.
Israel will almost certainly pay a price as well, because this bullshit is both Bibi and Trump stepping on God's toes with the Golf Cleats in terms of the End Times Prophecy narratives that I was taught.
I'm just going to assume Elon Musk putting a computer chip in your head is part of the price of admission to this place, which will otherwise basically be an attempt at creating a landbound version of the space station from Elysium, just with more drugs and prostitution.
And less freedom, don't forget that part.
No, the Trump Sultanate of Gaza will not be a new Crusader Kingdom nor some kind of Fundamentalist Christian Shangri-La. It won't be Christian (or any other religion, save for the Cult of Mammon) in the least.
I mean, they'll try and sell it as that to attract angry young White CHUD's into indentured service in whatever for-profit mercenary army they think they'll defend that shit with, but it's that daily ration of white powder that'll keep the troops hooked, not the wannabe-Crusaderism.
And they'll no sooner have some kind of functional military formation than they'll betray Netanyahu and take some kind of a shot at Israel itself if they get this thing. I mean, fuck, you guys thought Hamas was a problem??
Have you seen what the Fundamentalist Christians and the radical Catholics say when they know there aren't any Jewish people around...or think that there's any liberals or anybody else who'll tell them??
(And it's always been like that. It is their nature to hate those who have gone before, and to hate actual faith or Tradition, simply Because. They. Think. They. Know. Better.)
The
stupidest thing one could
possibly do for global stability is give either American Evangelicalism or even the most allegedly-secular pushers of American "Conservative" Manifest Destiny horseshit even the
tiniest toehold in the Middle East, not least because both groups are so far in over their heads with the End Of Days fanaticism. (Remember that the Mormons tried to say that the Garden of Eden was actually in America, and that the New Jerusalem
would be.) The truth is These Fucking People know what's where and what the Word actually says (and have spent forever resenting the hell out of it) and would look at getting even a
small chunk of Gaza for their own use and think
They Have Arrived.
Because all that Left Behind shit was a lie, but it's a lie they want to live some parts of; Not least "Heaven isn't Heaven if anybody else gets to go."
Remember that part, they want to watch...and get off on...other people suffering.
All the more so if These Fucking People get their glittering gilded beachfront towers and leave even
part of America in a war of AK-47's and Technical Trucks and poverty and suffering. Why? because then I
guarantee you somebody (hell, maybe even
Trump himself) will preach fire and brimstone about the fallen, Sinful nature of their former home. they
will blame America's fall not on their own bigotry, conspiracy theories, divisiveness, hubris and improper education but on "Blackness" and "Sexual Immorality" and on the fact that people got Welfare and that even in collapse and that even in the course America reformatting itself without them, there
will be those of us who do what we can to care for our fellow citizens in need.
And yeah, the truth is as long as they think there's enough money involved, these fuckers absolutely would trade America for a worthless chunk of desert coastline in the Middle East, because they think they'll just buy whatever they'll need, get somebody else to do the actual physical labor of putting it up, and then they can just bullshit and flimflam their way into creating some kind of bullshit Mecca for the people and things that serve their real interests; Worship at the Temple of Dis Pater by day, then hit the Cocaine Bars and the glory holes at night.
And if they get it, they'll set a land speed record to
build that shit, too.
(Because places like Dubai or Moscow are already owned by other people, and Republicans hate other people.)
They figure they'll sleep when they're dead.
Well, that and Republicans want a land where they don't ever have to look at anybody else. If they can have it in a part of the world that captures the imagination of the chuckle-fucks who follow them and then use it to [continue to] scam the shit out of said morons, so much the better.
These assholes want their own (Un-)Holy Land. They're figuring out America ain't that.
So, like they do with cars or women, they're going to try to trade up to a younger, prettier model or something.
They don't really care what happens to the rest of us.
As for the rest of us, though?
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
One
The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields
