What Happened? (American Revelation XXII, Nine.)

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

...

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft....When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. ~Baba, from The Kite Runner.

I saw this earlier.

Tea Party Joe Walsh, asking "What happened to Bill Maher?"

My answer was "Nothing, he was always That Guy."

And I have receipts on why that is.

See, back in the day, like 15-20 years ago when I worked Third Shift in a casino kitchen, I was a fan. Hell, a lot of us who worked there in that time and place were.

In fact, 20 years ago it was little things like that, that drove my current partner nuts, well, except that she liked to argue about stuff like that, so I don't know if she really minded all that much.

Her and I, we'd have arguments about stuff that'd go on for days at a time, I'm serious.

The thing was, we also loved each other, although we were also very competitive with each other and, like I said, constantly arguing and bickering back and forth. It's just every once in awhile we'd end up doing stuff...and for a few months out of that first year, we were quietly a couple.

Now, a hell of a lot of the crew we worked with was a bunch of dude-bros for whom Bill Maher fandom as it was at the time just...fit. Likewise Howard Stern, WWE, and a whole bunch of other Bro-coded shit. My partner was infamously regarded as a bitch at work. (She wasn't, really, but they thought she was.)

We didn't broadcast our relationship status, she's never been big on public affection, we worked with a bunch of dumb guys and they never figured it out until a couple years later.

Then we broke up, she got with the next guy a few months later, moved out, got married, then moved out west, that didn't last for very long. She landed in Tennessee with her parents, and by early the next spring we were talking a lot again, and flirting quite a bit, too.

Now, in the summer of 2008 I transferred over to being a line cook, but since I was almost always on the employee buffet line or the grill I was still always working around the same people and I tried to take my breaks at the same time as them.

Anyway, one of those nights, on my lunch break I was talking to her while I was sitting at the table with my crew, nothing racy, nothing even special so far as I can recall. Just normal stuff a couple of very close friends talk about at four in the morning, part of the conversation on speaker, too.

But anyway, I got up, signed off with her and went back to work. I had to go to the employee dish area and wash a rack of knives and utensils, so I got after it. Run the stuff through the dish machine...

And walk straight into a wall of bros, literally pressing flesh, physically blocking my way out of the dish area, four of them. So I'm like "What?!"

"You F****d her, didn't you?"

"Who?"

"Don't give us that shit, we figured it out. Werewolf Lady that you was just on the phone with. (It's still a running joke between her and I that she's a Werewolf.) Out with it, or we're seizing the Man Card."

"Okay yeah, we did, so? What's it matter to you??" I paused for effect "I'm trained to kill, yo, rack of knives and I gotta get back out there but ya'll in the way" They let me pass, but grudgingly. I think they thought I was gonna argue. Surprisingly they didn't give me too much shit until we formally started dating in the winter months of 2009. At that point it was generally assumed that she was the Man in the relationship.

(The joke was on them, she was, we didn't care.)

The four guys in question were my late best friend, my other best friend that I had to shit-can last summer, my Roman-obsessed coworker and a current friend of mine who was then going through his Libertarian Bro phase. We were all deep into video games like BioShock and God Of War, too, at the time.

It never really occurred to me until last summer that they had heard us talking, heard the love in our voices, and then with malice aforethought treated her like a goal for dude-bros to score on, not like a person.

What happened, he says?

In a temporal sense? One of those guys died, a couple of 'em drifted Leftwards like I did, and the other one? 

Well, I wrote about what happened with him.

Spiritually? Nothing much at all happened.

Only thing I can figure is that MAGA or the Manosphere crap got to that guy in particular, or he let all the gaming bullshit go to his head. He didn't talk like that 20 years ago. 

Oh well, nothing of value was lost. 

But at that point in time, back in 2008, we were all That Guy. Some of us, apparently more than others.

Fuck, I look at pictures of myself from back then and I'm amazed at how angry I looked all the time.

Some of us grew out of it, some people stayed that way.

What happened to Bill Maher? 

What happened to my surviving best friend? What didn't happen to me??

Some of us made, and kept to, the choice to give a damn about other people.

Some of us made the choice to be small and mean and selfishly hedonistic, and to not give a shit about other people. Some of us very likely were that way all along, but chose not to broadcast it because they thought their peers would give them shit about it or that it would hurt them to show their true selves.

You can call it Christian Nationalism, Narcissism, Patriarchy, Privilege or Relative Status or whatever psychological, religious, social or Unga Bunga shit you want, but it basically comes down to selfishness, to literally not giving a shit about the hearts and minds of other people.

Seems like women in particular are catching a lot of that kind of crap right now, but *Who* those other people are doesn't really end up mattering, it's just that a lot of These Fucking People think they gotta discriminate against somebody or treat somebody like crap...or they'll die or something...and especially somebody they are required to be Close To in some way. And all of these idiots are terrified that they're next because they can't imagine a society where somebody isn't being abused, or where love itself isn't treated like some kind of sport-ball bullshit.

That love outlasts death never occurs to these motherfuckers.

And until we reckon with that, as a society, and figure a way to stop doing it, problems are gonna continue.

Again, you either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

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

Eight

And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.

And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.

And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. 

~Matthew 24:10-13

...

[Caprica-Cavil and Galactica-Cavil are in an airlock, about to be executed]

Caprica-Cavil: Is there a Resurrection Ship within range?

Galactica-Cavil: Yes, brother. But first we're gonna die in a vacuum.

Caprica-Cavil: There's a 170 foot long launch tube in front of us. We might die of our injuries before we get to the vacuum.

Galactica-Cavil: I don't like you.

Caprica-Cavil: I understand that.

Galactica-Cavil: Do you really believe it was a mistake to attack the humans?

Caprica-Cavil: Rather intensely, yes.

Galactica-Cavil: You know that when we download amongst the others your strange ideas will be shouted down.

Caprica-Cavil: Ideas always seem strange until you try them on, brother. We had a temper-tantrum in the form of a cataclysm because we wanted them to treasure us, the Ones, more than humanity. More than their own history and blood.

Galactica-Cavil: We didn't want to be loved. We wanted to be treated fairly.

Caprica-Cavil: We wanted to be held to a bosom. To be petted and perfumed and told we were the princes of the universe.

Galactica-Cavil: Yes, well if the humans were gone-

Caprica-Cavil: Our parents would mourn them. They'd love them more anyway.

Galactica-Cavil: I'm going to see to it that you get boxed. And then I'm going to prepare to wipe out humanity once and for all.

Caprica-Cavil: The anticipation is very unpleasant.

Galactica-Cavil: Yes.

[Caprica-Cavil offers his hand, Galactica-Cavil looks at it and accepts it. Galactica-Cavil closes his eyes while Caprica-Cavil keeps looking. They are then airlocked.]

~From Battlestar Galactica: The Plan