This Present Darkness...Part One (American Revelation, One Shots, 9/11 Edition.)

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. 

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

It's September 11th.

And the first thing I saw when I logged on to Twitter after work this morning was this.

Let me tell you what I saw that day, Mr. Krugman. I was a college student at a small community college in Northern Michigan at the time.

Americans did not take even one damn thing on that day "pretty calmly." If they looked calm, it was because most things very quickly shut down for the day, or didn't open at all, including the college. I had to work because one of my two jobs was working in the school cafeteria and students gotta eat, and everybody was glued to the two TV's we had on and even my Mom stopped by to check on me, her own classes in Traverse City having also been canceled for the day.

 That morning I was arguing with my ex-wife on Yahoo Messenger when all the sudden she starts freaking out. Right around that time, I get a knock at the door, my neighbor Ali, an international student from Saudi Arabia, stopping by to ask if he can bum a smoke for the walk to class.

I invite him in, and grab two cigarettes from the pack sitting on top of my Dorm-sized refrigerator. Salaam, brother. Also, because my ex-wife is demanding in ALL CAPS that I turn on the TV, I do exactly that. It's set to CNN. I see a view of the World Trade Center in New York City, one of the twin towers is burning. Why this is so does not yet have time to register. My neighbor and I watch in mute horror as a Boeing 767, apparently aimed deliberately, like a missile, crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

He says something in Arabic that I don't catch, and looks me right in the face and says "Please God, brother, let it not be Muslims that did this."

My friend was part of a small group of Muslim international students, in the 2001-2002 school year they were from Egypt, a couple of the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Just kids, most of them, A few into their 20's a bit. One of the two Egyptians was older and had served two years in the Egyptian Army. They were part of a few dozen overall foreign students, others were from places as diverse as India, Latvia, Nigeria and South Korea.

A lot of those kids...and not just the Muslims either...were understandably nervous.

Some of them asked the older students, their white friends and those of us that were veterans to go with them when they went off campus or to go grocery shopping or whatever. That year, there were three veterans including me, and a currently-serving Army Reservist in the dorms. We, and those others that these kids asked went out with them when we could. Truth is, a lot of them would ask for rides and stuff anyway because many of them didn't have cars, so it kinda followed that we might accompany them. It wasn't a big deal, it was the right thing to do.

It's not just a matter of religion. Imagine being young and far from home and the country you're in gets attacked. Imagine being from one of the countries that is, or is seen as, being responsible. That can be a dangerous space to be in. For most it wasn't, but for a few it was.

The two Turkish girls in the Muslim student group asked me the following Saturday morning if I could take them to Walmart to go grocery shopping. Now, neither of these two was at the time particularly religious, they for the most part dressed the same as most Americans do, and these two were very much the shorts-and-T-shirt type anyway...much to the frustration of some of the more religious of their friends. They'd probably be Okay on their own, I thought. But I kinda needed some stuff myself, and I didn't have anything to do and didn't have to work that day. So said alright, let's go. In the car I put in one of my Michael Jackson CD's and we were off.

One of the girls kept getting dirty looks and judgmental stares at the store...all from the same basic type of white people...and it took us a second to realize why. She was wearing a red and white T-shirt that was for some Association Football team where she was from in Turkey, and it had a large Turkish flag right on the back and a fair amount of Turkish writing I didn't understand. This wasn't some kind of a statement...this was her normal clothes, stuff she wore every day being that she was a rabid Football (COUGH...I mean Soccer) fan anyway, and that was her team. If she'd been wearing MJ's number 23 jersey and a Chicago Bulls cap on backwards nobody would have so much as noticed. But here we were.

I was wearing my ratty old woodland-pattern camouflage BDU jacket, a school T-shirt and jeans. I took off my jacket and put it on her, and put my arms around her so she'd feel safe, and we just walked around the store that way, again suddenly two anonymous twenty-somethings out grocery shopping with their other buddy on a Saturday morning and no one cared. My jacket was like a tent on her small frame, she leaned into me like a long-lost lover and you can just imagine what it must have been like for her, to be far away from home and suddenly in a fairly intimate sort of space with a man she'd mostly just said "What's up" to in the hall, ordered food from in the cafeteria and traded some rap albums back and forth with or sat next to in the pit watching the Big Screen. 

Not only that, but in this space and feeling whatever she was feeling while wrapped in the military symbolism of and part of the uniform of and wearing the flag of a country that is a de facto and de jure ally, but one with which her country and her culture was often seen as being in conflict with. And all this to avoid the judgment of fools she'd never know, who'd never care about her.

She was, kind of understandably, stuck on me for awhile after that and we became very close friends...close enough that some of the Muslim dudes and a couple of our Christian friends from more traditional cultures joked...or said honestly and with varying degrees of earnestness...that we should get married. It was just her reacting to the situation, though, and me being a man even if it was with good intentions. We weren't even dating, officially, and it never "officially" rose to that level and we liked it that way.

My ex-wife, however, heard things, and angrily assumed I had a new girlfriend and took it out on me accordingly. Worse, she'd had a class with this girl the previous semester and they didn't get along.

My ex-wife was Pentecostal, and caught up in the religious craziness of the immediate aftermath to 9/11, which those people saw as part of the run-up to the End Times, because after all, what isn't?

Because that's what they do. The world is ending, why should we give a shit. Send me $20 and I'll give you the Truth!

You may, if you like, imagine how well that went for me. These are people who see demons in every shadow, behind every act outside of their narrow space of holiness, and who write books to that effect.

Yeah, Bush tried to help, I'll grant him...and Krugman...that. A vast swath of American culture and learning and media, even capitalism itself did too. The Bible Thumpers and the rednecks simply ignored it all, because it wasn't what they wanted to see.

My ex-wife, and those like her? Bush wasn't their guy. Hell, I had to damned near yell at her about it to even get her to pay attention, let alone vote. Hell, to a great extent Trump isn't even their guy, not even with Pence. They just like that he says racist shit and pisses off people they don't like. To her credit, my ex is not a Trump Supporter.

But my ex was all in for McCain/Palin in 2008, and she wanted Sarah, not Captain Queeg, and said as much many times. So she's perfectly fine with where all this crap started.

Today there is a wide stream of woo woo bullshit and various strands of hate all working their way through American life. It's beginning to be aggressively countered, finally, just as it was in the days after 9/11. But just as it was then it's completely ineffective against those who will not listen, who simply don't want to HEAR anything.

My ex, to my knowledge, never gave a fuck about one thing George W. Bush ever said.

Conservatives like George W. Bush, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or me, the ad guys like Rick Wilson, the philosophical motherfuckers like Bill Kristol or Max Boot, and the dedicated crew of the Lincoln Project...they're all based to one extent or another on facts, philosophy and reason. Sure, they might have a different view of things than liberals do...but if you peel back the layers of the onion far enough there's some kind of verifiable basis and baseline for what they'll do, or say, or how far they'll push something.

Hell, even Radical Islam can be said to be based on something greater than emotionalism and resentment.

My ex-wife, her beliefs, and the people like her are so removed from the writings of St. Augustine or Martin Luther or even any scholarly interpretation of the Word...or from Plato, Hayek, or even Rand...and so hopped up on apathy or outrage in turn, and on their Rama Rama Ding Ding bullshit that they might as well be Hare Krishnas, or even Atheistic Communists, for how much or how well their beliefs relate to what is actually in the canons of Christianity or Conservatism.

So where the hell do these people get off judging anybody else, anyway?

To people like my ex-wife, George W. Bush and every last one of the Never Trumpers might as well be Latte-drinking New York City liberals, or Martians, and people like my Turkish friend from college aren't even real unless they're seen as a threat in some way.

A majority of the people I deal with every day, on either side of the political fence, haven't the slightest who Paul Krugman is, nor he them, and it shows.

Nixon, Reagan and all those other guys, they didn't pay people like Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes to be the Chucklefuck whisperers. They paid them to stir up racism so Republicans could get elected, because that was one motherfucker of a lot easier than trying to explain macroeconomics to morons.

To a solid minority of us, one that's maybe even big enough to split this country and plunge us into chaos and war, this is what's real: If Trump says we're getting along very, very well with the Taliban, then by God and sonny Jesus they'll get along with the fucking Taliban. 

Call it malice or stupidity or vicious blind tribal loyalty, but these motherfuckers will at least pretend to feel more kinship with illiterate boy-raping, Opium-smoking drug running thugs that can't even read the serial numbers on their old ass Soviet-era Kalashnikovs and RPG-7's and that took money from the fucking Russians...their other blood enemies...to kill our troops, and who are hated even by most Muslims especially the ones who have to live around them, than they'll feel for most Americans, and all because of something that Trump said.

And they will feel it on this day, in this space. The next thing I saw after Krugman's post was an article about the famous "Falling Man" photograph. Think about that for a second.

Think about what kind of head-space you gotta be in to maybe see the white guy with the limp and the old Air Force BDU jacket and the chattering foreign college students as enemies, but maybe see the people that sheltered, supported and armed Osama Motherfucking Bin Laden as your friends.

And all because, like Paul Krugman, they can't or don't want to acknowledge that there are other people, with other perceptions, other stories...they only choose, and choose with malice aforethought at that, to refuse to see from an even worse perspective.

And they'll gladly be used by the ultra-rich, who won't care if the pawns die, so long as their hedge fund is up a couple of points. Burn down the world in so doing, and they'll call it a win if they're allowed by their masters to pretend to rule the ashes.

Think about that, on this day. I have been adamant for months about where this can and will go if it's not stopped, and stopped now, with sufficient finality and numbers that nobody gets any funny ideas.

As it looks now, to simply stop it, to vote Republicans and Trump out, to drive them from power in the Constitutionally prescribed manner is not a big lift. But it's what comes after that worries me, and there will most certainly be an after. We have to do more than simply stop it, or they will just break off a piece of America, downsizing, peace with honor, yo. Declare victory and start buying weapons from the fucking Russians and learning the arts of insurgency and war from the goddamned Taliban and then it will never end, except perhaps with sun-bright flashes in the vast sea of night.

We have to get these people out of power and we have to do it now, with what we have.

Or there's gonna be a lot more memorial walls and a whole hell of a lot more dead people.

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  

Part Two.

Underwater.

At length did cross an Albatross,
And through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through!
A good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollow!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whilst all the night, through fog-smoke-white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'
God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—With my crossbow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
~From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Over the weekend, there was an incident on Lake Travis, near Austin, TX. A "Trump Boat Parade" went horribly wrong because people can't stop acting like idiots, and the rich people with the big boats that they don't know how to use started going too fast, creating wakes, actively trying to splash or swamp the smaller boats. Mind you, this was a TRUMP boat parade, aren't all these people supposed to be on the same team, united in their bellicose bellowing for their President and wanting to fight the whole rest of the world because we don't agree?

It seems tribal unity in MAGAland might not be all that it's cracked up to be. If they ever don't have the rest of us to hate anymore, they'll turn on each other.

I keep trying to tell people, there's a key division among Republicans. See, the people at the top, they want...or wanted...things a certain way.

Elites, the Professional Conservatives, the Religious Right, the Think-tankers, the wealthy...they all wanted to be Republika Srpska and saw Trump as their Radovan Karadzic, or they wanted to be something like the Estado Novo in Portugal under Antonio Oliviero Salazar, or perhaps like Spain under Francisco Franco. Sure it's ethnic cleansing and fascism, but it has a veneer of respectability and knows how to deal with major powers...and in the case of Portugal and Spain they were shrewd enough to stay out of major conflicts and to punch well above their weight politically by being, on one level or another, part of the world community, landing on the right side of the Cold War, and both having liberalizing revolutions within the same couple of years.

The base? The AR-15, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Pro-wrestling crowd, not so much. They seem to be leaning in the general direction of Gonzo Afghanistan with bigger guns and more drugs, the women treated worse and nobody even pretending to be a freedom fighter or a holy warrior. They just want to break shit and kill people, burn it all down so they can rule the ashes and as far as they're concerned they don't want no revolution, ever, because somehow they think unending malice and constantly creating enemies is a sustainable philosophy that won't eventually get them shot full of bullets, hanged from a gas station canopy and spit on.

Perhaps they can ask Il Duce how fascism worked out in the end. Oh, wait...

And it only gets worse from there because the next stop is the active Third Reich wannabes. You know, the spiritual descendants of those who invaded their own ally when Italian fascism came flying apart after the crushing defeat by the allies in North Africa and the success of Operation Husky, the US-led invasion of Sicily.

I'm not joking when I say that every so often I see somebody on Twitter for whom Trump does not go far enough. They regard him as a failure because he hasn't caused more chaos or killed more people.

As of today I'm seeing that 200,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19.

How many more dead bodies before we say "Enough."

Almost every day of the past four years there's been some bullshit scandal that would have ended any other administration that this country has ever had and led to the impeachment and removal from office...if not the being run out of Washington D.C. on a rail...of damned near any other President.

Trump commits crimes against humanity, and between a quarter and a third of Americans either literally cannot be arsed to care or they actively support this bullshit.

And over the last couple of days I've observed that there's still at least a few liberal purity-cult holdouts who just can't vote for Joe Biden. They just can't.

Listen up, pecker breath, literally the only alternative to Joe Biden is...four more years of Donald Trump.

Bernie fucking Sanders has actively supported Joe Biden. Mayor Pete is already part of his team, Not only is active Democratic support for anybody else basically zero...and I thought getting all the Democrats to agree on anything was pretty much impossible...but lots of Republicans are backing Joe too. Rick Snyder, my own state's piece of garbage Republican former governor has endorsed Biden. There were damned near as many R's speaking at the Democratic National Convention as there were actual D's. Republican political ads...if one can even find them on TV these days...are absolute flaming human shit because all the main Republican ad guys have joined the Lincoln Project and are working toward electing Joe Biden and getting rid of Trump.

They understand, you have to win first.

Trump's campaign has spent a billion dollars and the numbers have barely budged. He's converted a lot of Republican donor money into his personal funds, if I were some people I'd be demanding my money back, and sending in battalions of lawyers to make sure I got it.

This should not be that hard.

Biden is fairly consistently polling at least ten points ahead these days, and has generally had a more than respectable lead, over a period of time that is record-setting by itself. And he's running like he's behind, which is what you're supposed to do. So why isn't he up by twenty points, or thirty?

A narrow Biden win means Republicans try to split the country and start a civil war. Lots of people see the danger here, but too many on both sides think it won't affect them. I find it amusing that the people who couldn't handle COVID shutdowns think they'll be able to hack the deprivation, supply disruptions and requirements for thrift that a wartime economy demands.

And far too many more are excited by the idea of firefights in the streets, tanks shooting it out in Iowa corn fields and watching F-16's duel Su-27's...or F-35's for that matter...in the sky overhead.

Trump is underwater, but there's lots of people, even some on the other team, seem to be looking to throw him a lifeline.

Cut that shit out.

Nothing is going to get better until Republicans are out of power. Period. Read this again until you internalize it.

And this:

We all have to be prepared to vote these fuckers out...and then be ready to fight them off.

Allah Q Akbar! (American Revelation, Are You Fucking Kidding Me, Part Two.)

Akeem: Ohar, it is my 21st birthday. Do you think perhaps just this once I might use the bathroom by myself?
Ohar: Most amusing, Sir. *Claps Hands* WIPERS!
~From Coming To America.

Yesterday, I flew off the handle over Noor Bin Laden's endorsement of Trump, and Trump's disrespect (yet again) of American war dead, POW's and veterans.

I said that, before this Trump bullshit is over, the old white turkey-neck establishment Republicans would be forced to lick the runny burger shit out of Trump's ass crack for a campaign ad.

Today, I find out that Noor Bin Laden is a Q-Nut. (Hat Tip to my friend Jay for this one.)

I'd like to apologize and say I was wrong. There is no "Before this is over." These fucking people will collectively be licking Trump's ass by the end of next week.

The same people who demanded we turn the Middle East into a giant glowing parking lot after 9/11 and who crowed about it for weeks when the Navy SEAL's whacked Osama (while refusing to credit Obama for the op or even making the call to do it, which had to have been his decision) and who still say they advocate violence against all Muslims (or at least the ones who actually give a shit about democracy, human rights, other people or their own religion) will now wholeheartedly embrace Noor Bin Laden. Allah Q Akbar! Where We Go One, We Go All!

Or some such bullshit, anyway.

It's almost like all these fucking freaks at home and abroad will do or say anything at all to undermine the rest of us and try to flimflam their way into a position of power so they can take our freedom and human rights, while showering gifts upon themselves at our expense.

No, wait, it IS that. It is exactly that, and don't you forget it.

This kind of horse shit is the fruit of 50 years of Creationism and conspiracy theories. This is the end result of 70 years of "It's All About Me" from the Boomer generation.

This is the end result of generations of secretive Republican connections to...and through them, US government involvement with...various shady religious fanatics and woo woo cult motherfuckers from Sun Myung Moon to the Saudi Royal Family to various Evangelical Dominionist Christians.
But it's worse than that, when Sun Myung Moon crowned himself "King of Kings" with Bush 43 administration dignitaries present, Evangelicals didn't say shit.

And they never do.

It's almost like all this extremism is nothing more than a giant circle-jerk and none of these fucking people believe a word of what they're saying.

But their malice toward literally everyone else is real enough,

Believe in that. The time is going to come when these fucking people with these dumb-shit beliefs are going to rise up and try to kill other people. Q-Anon is mostly centered in the United States, but there are small nodes of this crap...some of them significant...around the world.

And yes, they are absolutely preparing for the QHOWA, this is an idea we'd best get used to and be prepared to defend ourselves against.

And too many people in government and the media, not to mention the general population...even people who are against it...will see this mess not as a potentially existential threat but as some kind of big adventure or opportunity for profit. They see conflicts and wars as opportunities for profit. The idea of Abrams tanks and old Soviet-era T-55's shooting it out in the Kentucky horse country or swarms of jets launching clouds of missiles at each other in the skies over Baltimore and Washington D.C. or of Boghammer boats shooting it out with Arleigh Burke destroyers in the Gulf Of Mexico fills them with excitement rather than dread, until they start getting shot at personally, that is.

They don't see the threat of this one massive lie. They don't see that all they have to do is attract the notice of the conspiracy theorists and they might just get denounced as part of some "Deep State" cabal or something, based on no good reason, and have no recourse against it but having to travel everywhere with bodyguards or carry a weapon for self-defense for the rest of their life.

No thought is being given to the fact that lots of us don't want to live like that.

Instead, you can imagine how many people, from governments and corporations on down to individual bad actors, are scheming to use these fools for their own personal profits.

We got ourselves into this mess. We'd best figure a way out of it, and fast.

Part One.

2020 What The Fuck. (American Revelation, Are You Fucking Kidding Me, Part One.)

Akeem: Sir, I was wondering, did you catch the professional football contest on television last night?
Mr. McDowell: No, I didn't.
Akeem: Oh, it was a most amazing game. The Giants of New York took on the Packers of Green Bay. The Giants triumphed by kicking a pigskin ball through a big "H" It was a most ripping victory.
Mr. McDowell: Son... I'm just going to tell you this one time. If you want to keep working here, stay off the drugs.

~From Coming To America.
Seriously?

Donald Trump has now secured the coveted Bin Laden endorsement.

Just tell me one thing, Burke...

Who in the ever-living FUCK thought this was a good idea?

I'm now officially working off of the assumption that Trump and his campaign are basically seeing how far they can get so-called "Conservatives" to debase themselves. No, not to "Own The Libs" or whatever you want to call it...but simply to show their alleged power and to see just how far they can push things and still keep the fealty of the howling mob.

At this point, don't be surprised if there's a campaign ad before this is over that simply features Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell each having to lick the runny fast-food shits out of Trump's orange ass crack.

I mean, what's next? Are they going to dig up a coterie of moldy old Red Army Generals, complete with their moth-eaten Soviet-era uniforms, and have them seated at a table and all endorsing Trump in subtitled Russian in some kind of odd reflection of that one cabinet meeting from 2017 where Trump forced everyone to praise him?

I'm fucking serious, what is even the purpose of this silly bullshit?! I mean for fuck's sake who in their right mind gives a damn what Noor Bin Laden thinks?

As of now she's one of dozens of other people I'd never have heard of without Donald Trump.

Who's going to go for the coveted "Family Members Of Radovan Karadzic" endorsement? Hangers on of the House of Habsburg? Robert Mugabe? Descendants Of Saddam Hussein? Sirhan Sirhan? That crazy dude who shot Ronald Reagan? Mehmet Ali Agca? Members of the Gaddafi family? Raul Castro? Come on, Who's next? I mean, I'm fairly sure Timothy McVeigh has surviving relatives. Why not just go all-out with the Anti-American bullshit or the offensive stomping all over the alleged beliefs of your own followers if you're gonna do it, Trump?

Of course these are the same fucking people who now seem to think it's a good idea to run campaign ads that are explicit threats towards their fellow Americans, toward likely future colleagues, and aimed at people whose literal job it's supposed to be to get along with...or at least put aside petty bullshit now and again...for the good of the country.

It's not that Trump wants those people for his base, for his followers that bothers me...it's that he doesn't seem to want anybody else...and now, when his political fortunes are already in doubt he's basically throwing down the gauntlet and demanding that Republicans abandon whatever remaining beliefs, principles or self-respect they had left and lick his dirty asshole.

And the scary part is, a good percentage of remaining Republicans...especially elected officials...will express concern and disappointment, furrow their brows, make disapproving noises...and then turn around and do exactly that, for no better reason than Trump is allegedly a Republican and (by job title at least) supposed to be the President.

And more to the point, what Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and all these idiots calling Kyle Rittenhouse a hero are trying to tell you is...in their idea of America, YOU TOO must have that level of "loyalty." Lick Trump's dirty asshole, and we must all join hands against the scary Brown and Foreign hordes...or you might get shot.

This last week or so has literally been the master class in Republican Asshole Virtue Signaling and trying to demand that those Republicans endorsing or supporting Biden return to the fold...and that they do so as supplicants rather than applicants, as probationary faction members rather than equal members of the sect.

...Or they might get shot.

Because anything that is not hard-right Republican asshole-ism is "Socialism" or something something Gazpacho. Meanwhile, even Radical Islam...even Radical Islamic Terrorism...is acceptable if the people who are part of it support Trump.

And Socialists get shot.

Say the people beholden to one Lt. Colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, KGB, yes, late of the "Sword And Shield Of The Party." That is, of course, the Communist Party.

There's stupid, there's evil, and then there's these motherfuckers.

They can't even go five minutes without contradicting themselves.

Mind you, this drops a couple days after it came out that Trump disrespected American war dead and veterans and said an American military cemetery was "Full of Losers" back in 2018.

Not just any American military cemetery either, but the one at Belleau Wood, the site of a major battle between the Imperial German Army and the United States Marine Corps during World War I. According to legend, this is the very place where the term "Devil Dog" originated, that being the nickname given to the Marines by the German Army troops they were fighting.

Imagine if you will, being a young Marine, first time away from home much less first time out of the country and you're low-down ass-in-the-grass with bullets zipping over your head. The Botches have turned that forest into a fortress, they've got machine guns in the trees, for fuck's sake. All you want to do in that moment is not die. And the Sgt. Major stands up, he's a big dude, he's risking his life by doing this, and he shouts right in the faces of his platoon members "Come on you sons of bitches, you want to live forever?!" the challenge hangs there for a second before he turns and charges toward the enemy, and you follow, because it's your duty, because you don't want to face your bros having not followed, and because at the end of the day, you have to control your fear so that you can face yourself in the mirror when you shave in the morning.

The Marines charged across that field and they took that position, and many of them died. The living and the dead became literal heroes in a way that too many of those who throw around such terms these days will never...can never understand.

America in those days was no major power, no sure thing.

Our most-watched conflict on a global scale had been against ourselves and the last of those who had fought in that war were just then dying off. We were seen far more as a nation of industrialists and a place to make money than as a nation of citizen soldiers who would defend democracy. In point of fact, democracy in America was then far from as universal as it is now, especially for people of Color, or women...for whom the vote itself was still a couple of years away and we ourselves were still mired in the absolute nadir of race-relations. In point of fact, World War I was where that began to turn around, when the Harlem Hellfighters and other Black troops saw that they were treated better serving under French command than under White Americans.

Belleau Wood was one of the places that defined what it even is to be a Marine, or to be an American on the world stage. That French forest...and more broadly other major battles of World War I...is one of those places where we, as a people, paid the entrance fee for our Great Power status and we paid that fee in blood because right or wrong, that's the only currency that the Universe accepts for such things.

Like it or not, one doesn't really get to be a hero, that guy, or earn any sort of moral authority by bankrupting casinos, doing shitty real estate deals, getting on TV a lot and publicly failing at marriage. Despite centuries of trying, the wealthy have never managed to get most people to believe that wealth can or should replace courage or morality as a thing we humans revere.

There's a reason for that.

Respect. Is. Earned. It's earned by every action, every day. It's earned by being that guy that when you shout at your men "Come on, you want to live forever?!" The answer is "No" because your people don't want to debase themselves in front of That Guy.

Not just that. You don't want to live being the guy who didn't stand up.

You don't have to have served in the military to understand that. I'm serious. That's where I got this understanding of life but it's far from the only way to pick it up. You just have to have faced some kind of adversity or challenge in your life, or maybe even just had a leader or two that was worth following. Ask a cancer patient, a domestic violence survivor, an immigrant or refugee who crossed deserts or seas to get here, or an old person that doesn't have a fuck-ton of money.

But one thing is certain, if you don't understand it, I can't explain it to you.

You want to live in a better country? Do you really want to "Make America Great?" Be a better citizen. Maybe we can make America be a country where nobody gets left behind, and where people don't turn to hating their neighbors and to shitty ideology to find comfort.

Make America a country where nobody seeks the political endorsements of our enemies, Again.

Otherwise, what the fuck are we even doing here?

Part Two.

Welcome To The Revolution?

Hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation, O house of Israel.
The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up.
For thus saith the Lord God; The city that went out by a thousand shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall leave ten, to the house of Israel.
For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live: But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to naught. ~Amos 5:1-5

There's something I keep seeing that's a fucking problem.

There is apparently a substantial percentage of conservatives, supposed Christians, theoretically Evangelicals and shit, who either have forgotten or somehow never heard the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

Every day now since the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings happened, I've been seeing at least several Republicans or assorted other right-wingers crawling out of the woodwork to defend that little son of a bitch, many, if not most, framing his actions not as those of some troubled kid...you know, the usual school shooting stuff...but in nothing less than glowing, if not heroic or even revolutionary terms.

No, dude, just no.

Kyle Rittenhouse shooting two people for basically no damn reason is not the start of some "Second American Revolution" and in fact, what these fucking people want to do isn't actually one bit revolutionary in any way.

I mean, sure, they fetishize the idea of civil war and killing their political opponents. They never think we'll shoot back. They never consider in the least that there would be disruptions to food and water and power supplies and transportation networks, not to mention hoarding and shortages that would make the holes in the supply chain from COVID-19 and three months of no toilet paper at any stores whatever look like absolutely nothing.

Food, fuel, strategic metals? Hello? Ammunition, building materials, electronics, medications?? HELLO?! Is this thing even on? During World War II the national speed limit was reduced to 35 miles an hour, every bit of useful scrap got recycled and people grew their own vegetables in Victory Gardens.

Now? We live in a society where people can't...or far more often won't...give up the two seconds it takes to put a mask on. 

But then they'll literally argue for, or even fiercely advocate for, destroying, giving up or severely limiting every freedom, right or societal benefit that we have all the way back to the Franchise itself, personal freedom and sovereignty over your own body...the very right to be treated as a person or to vote and have a say in things, the very essences of our society...the very purposes America even has for being here...because something something gazpacho. 

If you think I'm joking, go ahead and ask one of these fucking idiots why they support Donald Trump. I fucking dare you. I've not yet met one of these fools who can or will actually tell me why they support Donald Trump.

I mean, I suspect I know. It's because he says racist shit and aggravates or harms people they don't like. But, Mr. White Man, how is that a reason to burn civilization down around your head?

And what happens when one of these goddamned idiots "jokes" about pimping out your wife, or your daughter? Let alone actually does it, and don't think somebody won't try.

The essence of Trumpism is disrespect, and don't think they won't get around to violating your personal beliefs or your personal boundaries or morals or space because they will, and they'll do it just because it's there. Because it might get them a tiny bump in polling, or because they damn well feel like it. 

And remember, if you disagree with this flaming shit-show even one time, you're out. You might as well go join the Bernie Bros, or Boko Haram, or the Communists, for all they care. In point of fact, they literally don't know or recognize any difference between those widely differing groups, with these people it's literally "Us vs. Them."

Trumpers vs. The World.

Hey guys, how's that working out?! 

Trump and the Republicans don't give a goddamn if they're basically financially-controlled bond slaves of the Russian mafia and Putin, taking orders from the guy who god his ass lit on fire in Boondock Saints, or RFID-chipped gay-married one-world-religion-worshiping servants of the "New World Order" so long as they get to keep power over you and me.

I'm pretty sure these fucking people would publicly bow down and worship the damn devil if that's what it took.

Is that the America that you want to live in? It's sure not my idea of a good place to live.

One way or another, we gotta get these motherfuckers out of power and that's all there is to it. We cannot afford to fail if we want to have any kind of life whatever. Vote them out, and then be prepared to fight them off.

After this last few days, you should not think I'm joking, because I'm dead serious.

They want a "Revolution" so they can cosplay at being "heroes" while in truth being anything but that. Their idea of revolution is not to stand up against tyranny, but to create one.

The rest of us need to consider that a real revolution might be necessary if we want to survive.

Be careful what you wish for, Republicans, and I'd suggest you start picking better heroes than teenage murderers.

Welcome to the Revolution.

Be careful what you wish for, for you may get it. 

Killing America (American Revelation, One Shots, A Rolling Series.)

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
~Linji

This is not normal.

This is not normal?

How is this not normal?

I used to be a conservative.

All my life, there's been at least a few nuts who were determined, against all odds, to believe that the entire world was against them and all they could do was amass an arsenal and hope to go out in a blaze of glory.

It's a hell of a shitty set of life choices to make, but this is America and there's no shortage of paranoid stupidity.

Oh sure, there might be other variables, but one constant was always the same. They wanted to shoot people.

I swear, it's like a bad bit of code in some people's mental programming. Plug in any variables you like, but the result it spits back out is always going to be -1.

They were going to shoot people when The Commies Took Over nope The Ravening Black Mobs from the cities turned up nope The Soviets invaded nope The New World Order (TM) took over nope THE END TIMES! JESUS IS COMING double nope and if He was you'd want to shoot Him, too OMG Terrorists! nope OBAMA!! *Frothy Spittle-flecked Rage* nope When Trump tells us we can kill all the people we don't like.

And when that doesn't...on multiple counts actually can't...happen, these goddamned fools...of whom there are more now than there were when I was growing up, by at least an order of magnitude, will simply move on to some other reason to constantly entertain and regularly beat off to fantasies about murdering their neighbors. Most of whom are white, not many of whom are the promiscuous hippies they imagine, and most of whom have guns too, and a good number of us actually know how to use the damn things.

But every few months or so, one of these goddamned fools goes out and kills somebody anyway.

And the reason Trump can't tell them what they want to hear isn't some legal or moral reason, it's because Trump is a simpering coward. These fucking people have assigned a godlike status to somebody who simply, on all counts, does not fucking deserve such a thing.

The right-wing Jesus is, on all counts, a complete and utter fraud.

But at the end of the day these fucking people don't care.

This is America, there is no problem these fucking fools think they can't shoot their way out of.

Somehow, the fact that people might resist or shoot back never occurs to them.

And they're always surprised when it happens.

No, don't ask me why. I'm not flexible enough to stick my head up my own ass to possibly discern these people's "logic."

In Buddhism, there's a story about how a Monk came back to the temple, babbling excitedly about having met the Buddha on the road. The Master, upon seeing this replies "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" Why? Because the person the monk met on the road was not the Buddha, but merely a reflection of the monk's own desires.

And flawed human reasoning filled in the rest.

Trump might not be a very good Right Wing Jesus.

But he's an excellent false Buddha for the Monk to find on the road.

Donald Trump is nothing more than a meme into which these people have poured their desires, hopes and insecure fears.

He doesn't really believe much more than that anyone who is against him is bad, he should have money and power, and that somehow, deep down, everybody else is a total bastard just like he is.

Of course, in that way he's not too much different from what a lot of these people are really like. Come on, you don't think Marco Rubio Tweets out random Bible verses because he really believes this stuff, do you?

Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people, one of whom was just walking down the street, because people tried to disarm him and he panicked.

His mother drove him so that he could go and do this. Apparently the words "accessory to murder" for her and "Life Without Parole" for her son, likely under hellish conditions, never entered her thought process.

I'm so old I can remember when conservatives thought that killing people (at any stage of life) was wrong.

Evangelical Christians are raising money for Kyle's legal defense, and Trump personally defended him when asked about the subject this evening. Kyle is well on his way to that trajectory of "Make a rap album when he gets out of jail" and if he gets hit with a standard life sentence, he'll be out in 20 years, maybe a little less...and make a soft landing right into whatever's left of the wingnut welfare system.

It's pretty much an insult to the people that are, ya know, dead because of his dumb ass.

In Portland, Oregon, after months of attacks and terroristic threats from these fucking people, one of them finally got shot, and these motherfuckers spent all weekend making it sound like it was the worst thing ever.

I'm serious, these fucking people are fucking weak.

We can beat this shit, all we have to do is show up, and not back down. They'll fold. The entire basis of their paradigm is that they need to have political power and the power of the State behind them just to feel like men.

Just like, far from having faith as the basis of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, modern Evangelicals demand the entire Universe exist for their own gratification and shout their claimed beliefs back in their face at all times.

Nothing is ever about what they say it's about. It's stupid.

All we gotta do is show up, hang on, and not back the fuck down.

And we'd better, because if we don't things will only get worse.

Stupidity is killing America.

Gates Of Paradise (American Revelation, One Shots, A Rolling Series.)

This article is a direct sequel to this one written at the end of May concerning the George Floyd protests: War Dance.

Nobushige, a soldier, came to Hakuin, and asked: "Is there really a paradise and a hell?"
"Who are you?" inquired Hakuin.
"I am a samurai," the warrior replied.
"You, a soldier!" exclaimed Hakuin. "What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? Your face looks like that of a beggar."
Nobushige became so angry that he began to draw his sword, but Hakuin continued: "So you have a sword! Your weapon is probably much too dull to cut off my head!"
As Nobushige drew his sword Hakuin remarked: "Here open the gates of hell!"
At these words the samurai, perceiving the master's discipline, sheathed his sword and bowed.
"Here open the gates of paradise," said Hakuin. ~Zen Koan 57, At The Gates Of Paradise

I had to take the car in to the shop today. I thought maybe I might need a new alternator or battery for sure yesterday, but then the damned thing started up just fine, if a little rough, this morning.

Thus telling me it's probably some stupid little thing just like it was the last time. So I took it in. Funny thing, but I noticed one of the mechanics was wearing a camouflaged Trump hat. Inside, while sitting in an office drinking coffee.

My roommate followed me to drop the car off at the mechanic, and then we went home.

He likes to take back roads. We live out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the zip code for our town. It's Trump country all the way down...or at least it was in 2016.

You know what I saw this morning?

Biden signs, and signs for local Democrats, out in the country.

There are hardly any Trump signs anywhere, I'm not talking "Less than there were at this point in '16" I'm saying there are no new ones at all.

Some of the Biden signs were at houses that had Trump signs four years ago. This is boring ass middle of nowhere central Michigan, where the normal influx of student-fed diversity has been cut by more than half this year due to COVID-19, to the point where yesterday I was able to get in and out of Walmart fairly quickly at a time when the aisles would normally be thick with students. And I'm seeing Biden signs in fairly steady numbers in probably the most white-bread part of the county.

What's any of this got to do with anything?

Two days ago, a 17-year-old white kid with a criminal record from Antioch, Illinois got his Mom to drive him to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he murdered two people with an AR-15 rifle that, so far as I know, he should not have been able to possess. He committed a felony in transporting a weapon across state lines to do this crime, and he showed up wearing gloves. And the local cops let this stand. Nothing to see here, move along, just a little First Degree Murder going on. Note: The kid was arrested in Illinois.

I'm just sayin' even at 17 if you're the kind of loser who needs your Mom to drive you places, you probably shouldn't be doing crimes.

Note that the protests to which Rifle Kid objected came about because a Black man was shot in the back seven times by a police officer, and left a paraplegic, because he tried to break up a fight.

This is not how you Law & Order.

The push-back from public opinion over these two events was...well, exactly what one might expect. The sports world, especially the NBA, has gone all in supporting Black Lives Matter. Yeah, some of it's half-ass or insincere, I'm sure, but we live in a world where the leagues now feel that they have to take that step.

Whatever happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"


As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican National Convention was a flaming tire-fire shit show.

Republicans have lost the argument, lost their minds, lost the plot, and are reduced to lying to us, screaming at us, or to tedious bullshit.

From down here at the street level it seems like it's not working. As an example Trump has pulled ads from markets in Michigan.

And, say the Republicans, That's Okay.

Because it was never about any of that.

It wasn't about Christianity, or conservatism or democracy or even religion or tax cuts, let alone getting elected on their merits. It's about power.

It's about the power to manipulate fools into throwing away their lives at your command, whether explicit or implicit.

Seriously, Tucker, what 17-year old in the whole damn world even knows what "Order" is? What even half-sane teenager is gonna go out there and Kamikaze themselves  for your racist dog-whistles?

When I was that age I effectively measured time in "How long until I get my next blowjob?" You know, like any other sane young man in America (or any other country in the world) especially a young rural white conservative who played Basketball, listened to Rap music and did stuff like write papers on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas for my government class. Even then, I gave a shit, but my priorities were (as they damn well ought to have been) mostly worked around more basic stuff. You know, like not killing people because I didn't want to go to prison.

I mean, seriously, I could be pretty inventive when it came to doing dumb shit but if I'd asked my Mom to drive me anywhere while I was carrying a weapon, it's a safe bet that she would have broke her foot off in my ass.

Among other things, one did not handle weapons at 17 in my family without an adult in the immediate vicinity being informed, whether it was my Grandpa, my Mom, or one of my uncles if they were up north. One did not go anywhere with a weapon without informing said adult of where they were going and how long they would be gone, either. Likewise, we were conservatives, if I'd have ever suggested a plan to go out and do crimes, calling the police wouldn't have been the first thing to occur to any of those I normally answered to...but beating my ass probably would have.

And no one would have cared, let alone saw anything for it, and I would certainly have been seen as the one seen as being in the wrong. Why? Because way back in the barbaric and crude 1990's we weren't this fucking stupid as a society.

But it's not about any of that. What good is firearms safety, parental authority or the simple basic job of keeping tabs on your kid when...well, to be honest you abandoned all that stuff years ago in a mad quest to promote right-wing politics?

Even at the expense of conservatism itself. Even at the expense of religion itself.
All must fall before the shitty agenda.

I'm serious, when was the last time you saw a conservative, much less a Trump supporter, talk about Jesus?

Why do the actual work at the micro-level and ya know, give people actual reasons to want to follow this stuff when it's so much easier [Eyeroll] to just get the "right" President into office and then he'll do all the work...and yeah go ahead and tell me how well that strategy has worked out, you fucking assholes.

And they know it's not working out. Oh yes, they do. That's what the kid with the rifle is for.

Saving Western Civilization, one child soldier at a time.

We're gonna party like it's Sierra Leone under Corporal Alfred Foday Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front in the late 1990's and this is saving "Western Civilization?"

And there are people and organizations literally preparing to spend money to defend this asshole wannabe terrorist in court. He has a Go Fund Me set up for his legal expenses.

And he killed two people, live on video. One of them was just an innocent bystander. Like I said these shitty little losers think you should have to ask them for permission just to walk down the street.

Fuck you. This is supposed to be America. We are supposed to be a free people. All of us.

These fools don't give a damn about civilization. They want you to be afraid, and feel that you have to ask them permission to walk down the street with grocery bags...and if they can, write that into law. They want it to be required of you to cower in the face of authority...and then make it so the only authority is theirs. And it doesn't matter how, or if they have to degrade America to the merest shadow of its former self to do it, because again, it never was about America.

It's about weak little white men who want to pretend to be the burly cigar-chomping Alpha Males of previous generations (or so they think) who look to people like John Wayne for inspiration. Somehow they never understood that even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne. Not to mention a lot of these dudes are closer to Nathan Lane doing his John Wayne impression in The Birdcage.

And note that I consider comparing these dudes to homosexuals a grave insult...to the homosexuals. I just saw a video not too long ago of Jacob Wohl getting punched in the face. At long last, consequences.

Jacob Wohl didn't stand and fight, he ran away, and as we would say back when I was a young dude his age, he runs like an interior decorator. That being a reference to a profession that was associated with gay dudes at the time.

I'm sorry, guys, but some things just gotta be said and in my generation sometimes they got said that way.

I'm gonna be honest here, I'm tired of homophobic and misogynist assholes who in their personal conduct act much more like the people they say they don't like than like the Man's-man types they say they aspire to be.

That should be Okay, they should have been able to be who they really are and not hold themselves up to some ridiculous standard. They should also have been able to get the mental health support they needed to figure out who they were in the first place.

But instead, we stigmatize mental health stuff and promote a reactionary view of manliness that creates vast amounts of cognitive dissonance.

As a result of that cognitive dissonance, these fools think they want to be the drug- and juju- addled soldiers of some thug like Charles Taylor, who believe their heady mix of being fucked up on drugs and absolutely certain of the power of Witchcraft will rush into battle naked with their AK-47's and think that they're bulletproof and invisible.

It's like when somebody tried too hard explaining Armor Class to the dumb ass Bard in The Order Of The Stick...only this is real life, not Dungeons & Dragons.

Instead, they're a lot more like an asshole version of Rave Night at the Ramrod and because they don't like what they are...because they've been programmed with all this silly bullshit...they demand the rest of us adopt their ideas of forced uniformed sameness, harsh religion and white supremacy just so they can feel good about themselves and learn to be what they think men are supposed to be like. Never mind that damned few of those guys back in the day were really like that. Never mind that their 1950's archetype hardly existed outside of the movies.

It's the 21st century, they can be whatever they want...but because there's a loud, vocal, and politically powerful sector of our society that fetishizes the 1950's and shit, that's what they want to be like. Of course, for a good percentage of that time conservatism was dominated by men like Roy Cohn...oh, wait.

And remember, ladies and gentlemen, that's who taught Donald Trump, and who the Orange One is still trying to emulate all these years later. Roy Cohn was a hard-right gay dude.

Donald Trump's idea of manhood...didn't measure up to Donald Trump's idea of manhood. When Roy Cohn was dying of AIDS, Donald Trump abandoned him.

And it only becomes more of a self-destructive circle-jerk from there.

I'm not gonna lie, and I'll say this specifically looking through that 1990's conservative lens of vague homophobia. Rave Night at the Ramrod would be a fucking huge improvement over all this silly bullshit.

We live in a world where American culture and capitalism and society have decided, in the majority, that LGBT people, people of Color, people of other religions (or no religion) etc. should be able to do what they want. We live in a world where, were he still here and dealing with it today, Roy Cohn's biggest challenge would be maintaining health care coverage.

And it's the "Conservatives" who have a problem with that.

This is the kind of crazy stupid shit that pre-modern societies occasionally do, and that we're working up toward post-modern societies doing a lot more often. This is basically like the Taliban preaching their hard-core Salafi Islamist party line...but then going out and getting fucked up on drugs and then sodomizing the youngest of their fighters.

Conservatives used to hate and fear this sort of thing, now they're virtually the only ones advocating for it. This is the direct result of 40 years of conspiracy theories and creationism. I grew up laughing at Jim Bakker and his gaudy stupidity. 40 years later nobody's laughing anymore.

And this kind of crap only ends one way, every single time. War, death and destruction. That's how this ends if we don't stop it, and stop these fucking people.

This is the kind of cognitive dissonance that destroys societies.

Take careful note, that this teenage murderer is what these fucking people want.

We can stop this shit, but you have to show up, and do so in enough numbers that these fucking people know better than to try anything funny.

If we don't, they're going to split the country.

For however long theirs lasts, it will be horrifying.

 It doesn't actually matter that much who wins in November in that regard. These people seem to feel like they're losing the culture wars, or some shit like that, or they didn't get a blowjob from the Prom Queen in high school or their delusions flattered enough in life...so now they want to make it so you have to ask their permission to walk down the street and go get groceries or whatever.

No, they don't care if they'll be consumed by their own system. Hell, that's the only thing they think the system should be for. These fucking people have decided what they want to be, and it's Gonzo Afghanistan with more drugs. Or right-wing North Korea, with more killings.

They think government, or the police, or the State should only be a malevolent presence in people's lives, and that you should only be able to succeed in spite of society...not because of it...unless you're a white man who's rich enough or has the exact right political views, or both.

And they think that they should get a free ride from life, just for being whatever they think they are or aspire to be.

Right now, as a society we face a choice. We can keep indulging these assholes and destroy ourselves, or we can start giving a shit about one another, stand up and put an end to this crap and tell these people to go fuck themselves.

Thus open the gates of hell.

Unless we choose differently, and keep doing that.

Series IV.

Series III.

Series II.

Series I.

This Web Of Life.

Hell Is Empty... (Death Spiral, Part Two.)

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorcery, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9:20-21
...Because all the demons are here.

And making that connection is probably insulting to demons.

Seriously, watching the flaming goddamned train wreck that is the 2020 Republican National Convention, it's hard to shake the feeling that Republicans have lost the argument. It doesn't really matter what argument, or how you frame the thing.

When somebody like Kimberly Guilfoyle just abandons all argument or even pretext of having one, and just starts shrieking at people...and keeps it up for seven minutes...this isn't a political nomination convention anymore, it's an abusive relationship in which one of the partners is in dire need of mental health care. I mean, come on, if Hillary Clinton had done something like that, Republicans would still be smugly bringing it up 20 years from now.

When Donald Trump Junior goes from merely being Beardo Von Fail-son to looking like he spent all day snorting cocaine at Benny's House of Blow, y'all got issues and you shouldn't need somebody like me to tell you that.

When one of your speakers is the kid who literally made a name for himself standing there sneering at an old Native American dude...you ain't got a damn thing to say that's worth saying, come on now. When somehow what the Republican Party is now manages to make Ted Cruz look less punchable it's time to take a good hard look in the mirror.

When the calmest-sounding people in the room...virtual or otherwise...are the St. Louis gun couple, whose banal white-bread stupidity is exceeded only by their incompetence at weapons-handling, even the most hard-bitten, jaded Republican pundit should be able to see there's a fucking problem.

And somebody should have...should have long ago had...the guts to step up and clean house.

That no one did simply confirms my belief...backed by personal experience...that the Republican Party has been rotting out for at least a generation.

People think Trump talking about maiming migrants is shocking, yes, and rightly so.

But, as I've written previously, Evangelicals were ranting about burning gay people at the stake in 2002.

The Republican Party has been losing its base for at least a generation, probably longer.

Ivory Tower, Shining City On A Hill, it doesn't really matter all that much what you call it if the floodwaters of evil and unreason have been slicing through the limestone and washing away the sand beneath, often encouraged...at least tacitly...by the Republicans themselves in their eternal desire to screw for political advantage and their unceasing drive to try to make everything political in a balls-out effort to try and squeeze more votes out of the diminishing returns from an increasingly aging and monochromatic...and shrinking...base.

As I've said before I greatly prefer Reagan's Biblical ideal of the Shining City on a hill to the daily tire-fire bullshit-fest of the Trump administration, but when you factor in that by the time Reagan spoke those famous words, Newt Gingrich had been in Congress for a decade stirring up trouble on Capitol Hill and perfecting the tactics that would turn the Republican Party into the compromise- and facts-proof information- and ideological-silo that it is today...and those were the very scorched earth ideological tactics that would lead us to Trump and every bit of the current mess! Reagan's shining city on a hill was being undermined before he even rhetorically built the thing. Trumpism is nothing but a hologram. This mess is Newt Gingrich and his tactics of political warfare carried out all the way to the end.

It's no wonder these fucking people can't even hold a convention without insulting your intelligence, lying to you or screaming at you.

There's a lot of strands of Republicanism that have always been shit and note I say this as a former Republican who was aware of them at the time. And as I've written before I was a mid-stage casualty of those fucking people's efforts to kick everybody else out.

Today's Republicans are the damned devils.

And they are, in point of fact, here.

They don't deserve to have the power that they do have, and if the rest of us don't step up and take it away from them, and protect our own freedom...well that's on us.

If we want a better country we have to be better citizens, We The People have got to be better people.

Part One.

The Dark And Rolling Sea, Again (Death Spiral, Part One.)

Oh you set your course for the furthest shores
And you never once looked back
And the flag you flew was a pirate cross
On a field of velvet black
And those landsmen who you but lately knew
Were left stranded on the lea
Don't call on them when the storm clouds rise
On the dark and rolling sea.

~Al Stewart

The Republican National Convention, or what of it there's gonna be, anyway, started in Charlotte, NC, this morning. I'm just saying, I've watched old people suffer through the lingering decline and slow death of diseases like Parkinson's and Dementia before, and sooner or later the pace always accelerates, there comes a tipping point where the end is no longer in doubt.

Half of our political system is dying, and it would dearly love to take the other half down with it, not to mention the rest of the country. That's exactly what Immanentizing the "Conservative" Eschaton means.

We don't want to have anything, but we don't want you to have anything, either. They would rather hate than eat, at this point.

The Republican Party at this point is that wrinkled gray, mean old bag from White Pines, running around naked in the woods while the cops and the nursing home staff are trying desperately to chase her down before she freezes to death in the cold winter night.

Or perhaps its that shitty middle-aged domestic abuser, all flabby arms and beer gut, yelling "I'm gonna kill you, bitch" as he's hauled away in handcuffs by the cops.

Except it's worse than that, so much indescribably worse.

This is the same "We're out of ideas and attempting to land this thing on popularity" vibe that afflicted the Republicans in 1992 and then the Democrats in 2000. This is the same mentality that led people to vote for Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, the whole idea that "We should have power, Why? Well, because we've always had it before."

I've read my history, that kind of thinking only ends one way, if it goes on long enough.

It ends in Guillotines and Terrors, It ends in mass evacuations, firefights in the streets even as the regime and its army disintegrate, and tanks crashing through the gates of the Independence Palace. It ends in ethnic cleansing and wars and peace imposed from without, and United Nations tribunals.

It ends with Saddam on the gallows, defiant to the end, convinced that if he only yells loud enough, all will bow to his will.

Right up until the trapdoor opens beneath his feet.

That mentality tended to make a younger, more conservative me want to kick over the card table and tell these sons of bitches they had to go get real jobs. I personally liked Bush 41, but I voted for Clinton because I thought he'd done a crap job as President. By the same token, I liked Bush 43, but I more strongly felt that the Clinton years had not worked out all that well.

Now? It's the same old bullshit, again.

Except this time it's in the middle of the bed in an expensive hotel room, naked, with the pool boy snorting powder cocaine off its boobs and Jerry Falwell Jr. tied to a chair, watching eagerly.

Oh, wait, did I say that out loud? Too damned bad.

The other mental image I had was much worse, and involved a gaudier, shabbier hotel room in a Trump property, Donald Trump, Ivanka, no clothing, a glass tube, K-Y, and a magically-shrunken Ronna Romney-McDaniel, with Jared tied up in the corner watching the whole procedure and Lindsey Graham in a dominatrix outfit, a gimp mask, and high heels.

Oh I have no need of a chart or creed
You told your waiting crew
For the winds of chance, they will bear us straight
And you spoke as though you knew
So you paid no mind to the warning signs
As you gave your words so free
Don't change your tack when the timbers crack
On the dark and rolling sea.
~Al Stewart

Actually, it gets even worse. These fucking people are so out of ideas that they're attempting to revive fear of a political system 30 years gone, that no one who ever lived under it wants to fully go back to, and that most Americans now living cannot even define without looking it up. And then they want to pin that on the opposition party.

Even though they're the only ones bringing it up.

I'm here to tell you, with these fucking people Everything is about the shitty agenda, and everything else is somehow a repository for their own endless wellspring of insecure fears.

There are no American Communists to speak of. Unless you consider my longstanding argument that, behavior-wise, Republicans are Communists now.

Never mind that these idiotic conspiracy theory-addled dumb ass motherfuckers are the ones in thrall to Kremlin paymasters and one former KGB Lt. Colonel in particular, namely Vladimir Putin. So, much if not all of what Beardo Von Fail-Son here is even saying could likely be chalked up to projection. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, there are a hell of a lot of things about the modern Republican Party that come off as creepily Soviet.

Yet they're so afraid of everything, that they desperately would bring back even the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war, mass death in 30 minutes and eye-searing flashes in the cold night as the Air Force Base an hour from your house and the city a few hours away in which a bunch of your family members live are reduced to a light dusting of wind-borne ash...simply to create a rationale for their own existence.

Except that they want to deploy that fear, and create that New Cold War not against some foreign power...but against a majority of the citizens of their own country, because they need something, anything, to cover their own shitty hypocrisy and because a majority of the American body politic would rather be citizens than subjects.

Oh, don't worry, they'll throw China and Russia and the rest of them under that bus later, too. All Republicanism is transactional.

Sometimes, when you see the entire rest of the whole damn world as enemies, maybe the problem just might be you.

The Party's motto might as well be "What have you done for me lately?"

The only better Trump is the one that wrote that book and ratted out the rest of them.

And the only better Republicans are the ones who've thrown in with the other team and are supporting Joe Biden.

This is what those who remain part of the True Faith Cult are.

This is what they always have been.

The only difference is, in these last five years or so, they've finally found a "leader" who will sink to their level. They will never abandon him. These people cannot be reasoned with. You cannot appeal to the better nature of somebody who simply doesn't have one.

We have to vote them out, and then after that, unless the numbers against them are so overwhelming as to make the outcome a foregone conclusion, we're going to have to fight them off.

You have been warned.

If this was a mob in the streets of a dusty desert country shouting "Allah Akbar" or "Death To America" in response to the harangues of some bumptious mustached fool in a beret and Soviet-style uniform, while firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, millions of Americans would be screaming for blood.

But since it's the Republican Party, at the Republican National Convention, conflict, murder, treason and the dismantling of America are somehow Okay.

Or celebrated, or implicitly or explicitly agreed with.

How the fuck do you not see the problem here? Why the fuck does only one side see the double standard?

We have to stop this shit. Now.

Now the thunder rails in the great main-sails
And the stars desert the skies
And the rigging strains as the hands of rain
Reach down to wash your eyes
And your oarsmen stands with his knife in hand
And his eyes spell mutiny
Don't call my name when your ship goes down
On the dark and rolling sea.
~Al Stewart, On The Dark And Rolling Sea.

Part Two.