Operation American Idiot (American Revelation XIX, Ten.)

 And war broke out in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. ~Revelation 12:7-9

...

So, what have we learned? What's the lesson for today, for all the never-ending days and restless nights in Oz? That morality is transient? That virtue cannot exist without violence? That to be honest is to be flawed? That the giving and taking of love both debases and elevates us? That God or Allah or Yahweh has answers to questions we dare not even ask? The story is simple. A man lives in prison and dies. How he dies that's easy. The who and the why is the complex part the human part the only part worth knowing. Peace. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series "Oz."

...

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.

So I keep seeing this shit.

"Conservatives" are acting like there's not going to be any resistance to...whatever they think they're going to do, either here or abroad (and both Canada and Mexico have already rolled Trump. Canadians are boycotting American products in general and Red State products in particular. I'm sure the list goes on, but that's what I can think of at the moment.)

I'm a veteran who had friends who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of my closest friends were wounded in combat...one quite severely thanks to an IED in Iraq, he had to be medically retired. The other is no longer with us because his mental problems, which started in Afghanistan and were made worse by a bad marriage, eventually got the better of him.

In the Global War On Terror, we functionally got our asses kicked by two relatively small, poor ass countries with no rule of law (or the insurgents therein) that make a place like Canada or even the roughest parts of Mexico seem like heaven on Earth by comparison. My bros went through shit especially in Iraq that made my own Southern Watch deployment at PSAB in Saudi in the 1990's (a formative experience RE: my definition of "This Sucks!") or even Bosnian Peacekeeping seem like an easy walk in the park by comparison.

Meanwhile, it's been like two weeks, these fucking people are basically ripping apart government agencies like crackheads stripping copper pipe and wiring out of an abandoned house, and the full faith and credit of our country is effectively destroyed even on a domestic level.

Operation American Idiot is going to faceplant rather spectacularly.

My read on the situation is, as of last weekend, that there were 771 days between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, just a shade over two years.

We'll be gone in 20% of the time, with Trump left as the shouty, bombastic Russian-backed Caudillo of a Banana Republic in Florida at best. The rest of the world will go on without us, except for helping "Liberal" areas reintegrate themselves into the World, and very likely trying to safely dispose of our nuclear arsenal. China and the EU will gradually pick up replacing our foreign aid, Chinese soft power will win over Africa to their cause (Pro Tip: This is already happening) and within a decade, there'll be at least one US Successor State that uses the Norinco QBZ-97 bullpup assault rifle as its standard service weapon.

The Red States?? It ain't gonna be long after The Fall that those places make Afghanistan, Iraq and the worst places you can imagine in Africa...except for maybe the Russian-dominated Central African Republic...seem like heaven on Earth by comparison.

There's a story my Civil War history teacher in college told about a captured Confederate soldier, clad in rags, half-frozen, long ratty beard, starving, being given a medical checkup by Union doctors before they shipped him off to a POW camp and somebody asked the guy "Look at you and the state you're in, why do you keep fighting?" The Confederate's answer was simply "Because y'all here."

 

I rather expect situations and answers like that...not to mention the shit done (including to their own former countrymen) by formerly-American people who give said answers...will traumatize Chicom, European Union and United Nations peacekeepers for decades.

The fall of America will kill millions, and Trump and his enablers and followers are directly attacking the threads that bind us together.

Want to know why I say that??

Because Trump is talking about the US taking over the Gaza strip like it's some kind of flimflam New York City real-estate deal and using the US military to do it.

Like that's not going to supercharge Radical Islam and create another terrorist threat for a couple more decades??

Couple things here: #1 If I was the Israelis I would far rather have a land border with two million heavily armed radical Islamists than I would with these motherfuckers. The likelihood of shots fired between the IDF and some dumbass redneck troop who learned Antisemitism in a Southern Baptist church are very, very fuckin' high.

#2 We're not supposed to mess with that land. According to what I was taught in church, God gets a vote there. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on, to one extent or another, since literal Biblical times. The Philistines of the Old Testament? The Arabic word for Palestinian is Philistin.

We mess with lands not our own, with peoples and powers and principalities beyond our understanding or even wish to understand?? That only ends one way.

These fucking people would know that if they read books.

It's OK, I suppose, to support one side or the other. But much of the rest of the world has avoided direct engagement in that mess for a damn reason. We stick ourselves in there? Especially for Trump and some bullshit occupation he treats like a real-estate deal?? 

Well, America, you just slammed your dick in the car door, even by entertaining this horseshit. Congratulations.

And you cannot tell me these idiots won't fuck it up, because I know this type of person.

They will fuck it up. They'll think fucking it up is funny. These assholes don't care about anything, all they want to do is kill and steal.

Worse, they'll treat America itself the same way and think they will profit and that some kind of bullshit "god" will protect them. God doesn't work that way. Capitalism is not Divine Right.

They all think they're going to be the lord in his castle and that the rest of us will be the serfs in the fields, and that they can somehow bring back and keep systems that started dying when the Magna Carta was forced on the British Crown, that were mortally wounded by the Renaissance and the Reformation and finally swept away by the American and French Revolutions.

And they think they're gonna do that shit here. Like I said, they'll fuck it up.

These fucking people are against everything that America stands for.

As for you? You either believe in freedom or you don't.

This is gonna blow up.

Soon.

So, what are you going to do about it??

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

Nine

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.