Soon (Scenes From A Cold Civil War, One.)

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars

Did you wear a black armband
When they shot the man
Who said "peace could last forever"
And in my first memories
They shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all
That you can't trust freedom
When it's not in your hands
When everybody's fightin'
For their promised land

I don't need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain't that fresh
I don't need your civil war
Ow, oh no, no, no, no, no

~Guns-n-Roses, Civil War.

...

There's a man goin' 'round takin' names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reachin' down
When the man comes around
The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup
Or disappear into the potter's ground?
When the man comes around
Hear the trumpets hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singin'
Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettledrum
Voices callin', voices cryin'
Some are born and some are dyin'
It's alpha and omega's kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
~Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around.

I saw this the other day.

Some MAGA freak attacked firefighters responding to a brush fire he'd intentionally set and then after a five hour manhunt he got into a firefight with the cops and got killed.

I'm warning you, yet again, that it's not Trump that's the problem here. A hell of a lot of these Republicans simply don't see any other Americans or in point of fact any other people as people.

Not even other Republicans.

Never mind that these same fucking people basically get bored and wander off if they don't have "Liberals" to argue with or some random "Other" to pick on.

The trouble with this shit is they said it was about Conservatism, it wasn't.

They said it was about Jesus, it wasn't.

They said it was about lower taxes, it wasn't.

It's not about any of that.

It's all bullshit and hate and lies and stealing.

What this horseshit s about is 70 million goddamned cruel little narcissists, all trying to fuel their goddamned pathologies.

THIS IS NOT GOING TO END WELL, least of all for These Fucking People.

They thought Trump was going to give them whatever they thought they wanted, and of course he isn't going to share the Endless Narcissistic Slob-Job.

And what worries me is that as I've said before, at a Macro, National level America is headed for a Soviet-style collapse.

But there's places where shit will become a general melee, like The Walking Dead but with idiots. There's places where corporations will try to burn the planet down to the bedrock less in the name of profit than that of billionaire relative status or simple destruction.

It won't work.

Because these fucking people's real problem is simply that Other People Exist.

And my Mom, my partner, my partner's kid? Hell, me?We're all lives these assholes want to extinguish. But, we are under no obligation to make it easy.

Remember that.

Because it's gonna be on the test.

People will fight. Enough people? I think so.

Soon

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

Last Post

You were just babies then!" she said.
"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war— like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I — I don't know," I said.
"Well I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be portrayed in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it The Children's Crusade." She was my friend after that.

~From the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut