Torment (American Revelation XXII, Two.)

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?

And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow-servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casts her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

~Revelation 6, KJV.

...

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

...

"I didn't want to do it,'' he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to leave them behind.''

The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. "You had no choice.''

"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here.'' He pauses. "I didn't have to do anything,'' he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. "It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.''

"-- Evitable,'' echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F-117A hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. "Your family could still be alive, you know.''

He looks up. "They could?'' Andrea? Jason? "Alive?''

The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.'' 

~From A Colder War, a novella by Charles Stross.

The Republican-dominated Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act (again) today.

And I'll note that this month, the only reason my partner and I made it through with anything to show for it or how she's being able to tough things out at all until she can get into her new place is I got my tax refund.

And while last week, Republicans were flipping out because Virginia passed their redistricting referendum, several Southern states are again all the sudden being openly very intentional about Gerrymandering, I guess anything is Okay when Republicans do it??

A few things, though.

#1 Former Republican here and that's not what I was taught.

#2 Stripping away people's representation (because if you think this will only affect People of Color you have another thing coming) while making it either difficult or impossible for them to survive isn't a sustainable combination of things.

#3 These Fucking People, for whom Politics has basically become their religion, forget that being voted out is not the worst thing that can happen to a person who loses power.

It's still in living memory for a lot of us when they strung up the fascists at a gas station, yo. 

But there was a time...which, mind you, "Conservatives" love when they think it won't ever happen to them, when losing kings got executed and worse, when cities got pillaged and populations enslaved or massacred.

Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot of These Fucking People who would be the slaves if it would undo Civilization in a way they felt favorable to their "Beliefs" and they could go back to that Lord Of The Flies type world...if they were allowed to somehow "Identify" with whoever ended up on top.

As it is, the best their getting is Culture War consolation prizes like *Checks Notes* Russell Brand pretending to be a Christian for a few minutes. Ya know, before he became the latest in a long line of right-wing booby-prizes I barely knew who the fuck Russell Brand was. But then I never gave a shit about Katy Perry or a whole bunch of these other vapid pop culture morons either.

The entire point of American "Conservatism" and Republicanism has become an ideal of squatting in the dark clutching Bibles and Guns and shitting on your own shoes while (at best) peering suspiciously out of the firing ports of your bunker through a rifle scope while the world burns.

Just so nobody else gets any light and they can somehow claim to be identified with the people burning down the world. God and Jesus and any Truth to anything else be damned, once they figured out that the "End Times Narrative" didn't favor them exclusively either. 

Narcissism is a hell of a drug, I guess. But I also have that wonderful experience of having been an addict. Tell me, even in that context, how the fuck does this make any sense?? Sooner or later everybody knows they have a problem.

You take a drug, right? The chemicals, they rush through your body, rush through your brain. And the sensations, you want the sensations again and again and again, but let me tell you, you can also get addicted to grief, to guilt, to hate. Because when you feel dead inside, even bad sensations make you feel like you're alive! ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E5 "The Straight Life."

I mean, I get it, more than you know. These monsters are mad as fuck that the world didn't turn out their way, and they're even more mad that their efforts to beat it back into the shape they desire have continually failed (nor do they want to face that this is because of their own incompetence.)

Look, among other things until Religion in general (and Christianity in particular) calls out Narcissism as Sin, problems are going to continue. I'm sorry, but some people won't get it any other way. Some people do not think and require a bunch of Unga Bunga bullshit from some dude in a funny hat to tell them...whatever.

And goddamn, if you think politics is overrun with people of bad character you should fuckin' see religion. (And, Increasingly also the secular right-wing belief system that claims to be derived from religion.) Funny how every few generations people like to forget basic morality, then institute a bunch of character and other tests and then eventually forget the tests and lather-rinse-repeat here we go again.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

You'd think people would be tired of this bullshit by now.

I fucking know I am.

But as long as they get to behave like beasts, I guarantee you there's a large subset of American White Men that will never get tired of or stop this shit.

I have seen it.

[Mon Mothma addresses the Senate chambers again]

Mon Mothma: Fellow Senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart. I've spent my life in this chamber. I came here as a child, and as I look around me now, I realize I have almost no memories that predate my arrival, and few bonds of affection that cleave so tightly. Through these many years, I believe I have served my constituents honorably and upheld our code of conduct. This chamber is a cauldron of opinions, and we've certainly all had our patience and tempers tested in pursuit of our ideals. Disagree as we might, I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come.

I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil! When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber's hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza! What took place yesterday, what happened yesterday on Ghorman, was unprovoked genocide! Yes, genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine!

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S2.E9 "Welcome To The Rebellion."

And they don't even care if it wrecks the social bonds that have defined their lives for 20 years. Bigotry and selfish hedonism are more important I guess? Like I said, narcissism is a hell of a drug.

Maybe at this point it's better if we let our system fall on its ass and the country fall apart and maybe people in places like Alabama or Florida would figure it out? But, then again, a lot of them very likely wouldn't. Florida seems to be the capital of that kind of hedonism and all the right-wing horseshit just makes it worse and more unlivable.

I mean, I'm old enough to remember when a person walking around blaming everybody else for their own shit would get mocked by the whole rest of the neighborhood, but now that kind of crap is just normal and people aren't figuring it out and in the name of ideology, profits, religion or generalized sociopathy, half the populace just shrugs. They might say so-and-so is an idiot, but they're not willing to do anything about it or even limit that person's ability to inflict their bullshit on others.

Why??

We're gonna have to bring back the alpha predators or some shit, at the rate this is going.

And the worst part is These Fucking People know, they KNOW their bullshit is going to be undone, very likely quite forcibly, by an angry people who have had enough, and soon.

But they want to get their kicks in and try to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die anyway. Consequences be damned, they'd rather go to Hell than share with anybody else. 

I remember when even conservatives were all about small L, small D liberal democracy and Compassionate Conservatism when half of America had pretty much had it up to *Here* with Bill Clinton's bullshit and our first national run of Donkey Show Politics so those very things were thus about to hand them the keys despite their own part in the mess *Cough* Newt Gingrich *Cough.*

And Democrats? LOL, well, they aren't that much different than they were in 2000, at least. I guess as a conservative Democrat myself I'll have to live with that. At least something is consistent.

Now that those things like the idea of liberal democracy and most people are against them, and for the literal same goddamn reason, all these idiots wanna do is politically and otherwise fortify their positions, building literal and metaphorical bunkers rather than admit they fucked it up. They got their asses handed to them in 2020 over the second edition of Donkey Show bullshit, and somehow think a third shot is a hat trick.

Fuck that.

I wonder if I somehow missed some sort of teaching that Hell has a hierarchy and Heaven doesn't and going to Hell is somehow preferable.

Cuz that's sure what it feels like is going on with these idiots at this point.

And they'd rather inflict all the Torments of Revelation on the world than admit they were wrong or give up whatever "Power" they think they have.

All things change, all things die, time marches on. If you try to deny this it only gets worse.

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

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from the D&D video game Planescape Torment