Petard

 So you might recall that over the summer we here in Portland were In Flames!!!

The antifa hordes were rampaging through our streets, the dead were rising from their graves, dogs and cats were living together, and only the Thin Blue Line of Portland Police Bureau was holding us back from being - even though we were, mind you, the President hissown self said so! - an "anarchist jurisdiction".

But...remember back in June? 

When I asked you whether we would face the brutally obvious reality that "policing" in the United States fucks with and kills poor and dark and mentally disturbed people at a ridiculously inflated rate? What we would do if no amount of "reform" had changed or would change that? What we would do now, after decades of useless wanking had left us with a Police Bureau that is a sort of Proud Boys Local #432 only all with blue clothing?

And I answered my own question with:

"I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades...I knew perfectly well (that this) was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that."

And, as surely as the sun still rises, we - we here in "anarchist jurisdiction" Portland did...

Nothing.

Instead we re-elected the empty-suit-cop-fluffing incumbent mayor instead of his lefty challenger who promised to take the fucking cops by the stacking swivel. A large part of that was because us commies, once again, managed to form up the circular firing squad - another local activist, Tessa Raiford, ran a very organized write-in campaign that siphoned off about 13 percent of the vote, all from the Left - and shot ourselves dead square in the ass because it was in a race that the OTHER lefty candidate, Iannarone, lost 40 to 46 percent.

Do the math.

Fuck. We're our own worst goddamn enemies.

So the end result of all that protesting and voting and clamor for justice is that we're stuck with the same bunch of useless bastards that sat around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses while the Portland coppers went all kinetic on the BLM protestors.

Surely as the sun rises even the hardest-core street radical can see the brutal facts in front of her, so the protests drizzled away with the autumn rains.

The summer of BLM is over and the fucking cops won.

The usual suspects - the rich white people in the West Hills and the Portland Business Alliance - voted for the empty suit in droves, terrified of the propaganda spewed by the Thin Blue Line of Bullshit and the idiot news stations. 

The same idiots are fulminating about our homeless explosion - imagine, people are losing their squats in a Plague that is killing businesses and low-wage jobs! Whoodathunkit? - and want the empty suit and his cronies to "do something"...as if anyone can "do something" without a massive infusion of tax dollars and social and actual engineering - build cheap goddamn houses, you fools! - that the richie riches and the PBA will never accept or agree to.

Which will just mean more "homeless sweeps" where the coppers kick the hoboes out of wherever they are. They will just rise and scatter like a flock of scruffy starlings to land in someone else's tree until the sweeps come through again. It's the homeless version of the whack-a-muj that worked soooo well in Southwest Asia only with fewer command-detonated mines.

Nobody is willing to think their way out of this, largely because the actual stuff that works is difficult and expensive and time-consuming and even here in Portland we're Americans, by God, and we don't do difficult and expensive and time-consuming. Fuck that noise, we're cowboys and we think with our six-shooter. 

Meanwhile we're marinating in the Plague just like the rest of you, and our wingnuts are as wingnutty as the ones all over the country, squawking and clucking about freeedummmmm!!! while the 'rona tickles their nostrils and they strut around with their festering uncovered meatfaces belching their disease all over the rest of us. The dumb fuckers have invited Mister Grenade to the party while the rest of us try to just stay in cover long enough to duck their goddamn shrapnel until the vaccines arrive.

I'm just tired.

I'm tired of the Plague. I'm tired of missing my old life; my friends and my little joys and my city, tired of being worried and afraid and nervous as a cat around crowds, wondering which one is the fucking numbnuts is that's walking around shedding the virus like rain.

And I'm really tired of this country, which has such a bright and shining promise, which has the potential to be so good and great and one but instead is dominated by the selfish, the small, the weak, the stupid, and the willfully ignorant.

I'm tired of trying to be decent and intelligent and thoughtful and careful and judicious only to look across the way at a bunch of four-year-olds squalling in a tantrum triggered by belief in utter nonsense so transparently obvious delusional foolishnessthat even  a poop-flinging monkey would sneer.

And I have no good and happy answer to how to change all that except the answer of any siege; watch and wait and keep my head down and kill the traitorous bastards trying to open the postern and try and ensure that the other sonsofbitches don't get over the wall all the while knowing that it's usually us who get blown up by our own goddamn petard.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

 Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

I am going to say this One. More. Time. and then I am going to simply lay back and await the next time one of you fucking heroes comes into my company area with "Stop the Steal" swag or I catch talking about martial law and then I am going to do to you what the wolf did to the farmer's wife when he caught her airing her unmentionables in the breeze and I promise you that you will not like it.

Look, people.

We had an election. If your people lost, I'm sorry. Too bad, so sad.

That's what fucking happens in a fucking democratic republic!

If y'all think back to when you were teeny tiny little baby soldiers, all cute and fluffy with all that facial hair like a fucking Nineteen Eighties porn star, and you raised your hand and swore to defend something against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

Remember that shit?

That thing you swore to defend was a Constitution, and it pretty much says straight out that We the People get to vote.

What it didn't say is that the people you like have to win that vote.

If it did, we would be Commieyunist Russia or Red China, and I know as the outstanding U.S. Army airborne soldiers you are that you would not want to fucking be that.

So.

Stand down, heroes. You'll get your chance in another four years, Gawdhelpus, and until then I expect you to shut up and soldier, and yes, I know that you've been hearing that shit from general officers, too, and that reminds me, what did I tell you about what happens when you cross general officers with gorillas, Sergeant Echevarria?

You get retarded gorillas, that is correct!

General officers, both as individuals and colectively, know about as much about electoral politics as a fucking cow knows about the fucking Council of Trent and no, Specialist Black, I will not explain that for you. That is what The Google is for as opposed to using it to search the phrase "Mila Kunis nude".

So do not come to me quoting general officers on electoral politics unless you wish me to consider you poorly educated and as gullible as a baby duckling. I would be morally and emotionally devastated if that were to happen.

I trust I need go on no further about this damn electoral nonsense.

Second.

I understand that there are certain elements in this formation who have had issues with the latrine facilities.

People, listen up.

We are still working under the "sequester" and yes, Specialist Black, I recommend you look that up on The Google, too.

We are issued a fixed number of rolls of DA-issue toilet paper per quarter. No more, no less.

This is based, and I have pursued this in-quiry all the way up to Division G-4, mind you, on a scientifical algorithm specially crafted at great time and expense by a civilian contractor of the Department of the Army that has calculated to the microgram how much used food you people are expected to deposit in the latrine holes per quarter.

Therefore, if you have exhausted the company's issue of toilet paper before the end of that quarter, then clearly the problem is that either, one, you have not been correctly trained in the use of DA-issue toilet paper, or, two, you are full of shit, since the nice gentleman at G-4 explained to me in excruciating fucking detail that the algorithm cannot possibly be wrong.

Therefore, I can provide this company with a block of instruction on the correct use of the DA-issue toilet paper, if you believe that will solve the problem.

Or this company will have to solve this problem for themselves.

You will note that I am not - repeat NOT - suggesting that individuals in this company might just happen find themselves in the Alpha Company area while in the possession of a capacious item of apparel such as a duffel coat capable of secreting several full rolls of toilet paper in such a way as to elide the notice of the Alpha Company CQ while exiting the billet and company area. 

That would be an underhanded suggestion and would certainly not please a certain First Sergeant whose infantry company has a reputation for being...remind me of the term, Staff Sergeant Harder?

Yes, I believe the term is "irritatingly swollen-headed little cockbites".

Until then I will continue to consult with Brigade about this issue.

Are we clear?

Good. That is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Ice cream castles in the air

Among the people I check on over the electronical internet is someone named Sexton. He's smart, he's knowledgeable, he's been "yelling at the right buildings" for a while now...but I think he gets this one very, very wrong:

"There is no both-sidesing a political landscape where a vast majority of Americans believe in reality and science and democracy and a violent minority is gnashing its teeth and demanding everyone join their sycophantic death cult."

It's the "vast majority" thing where he trips and falls.

Nope. Nopenopenope.

No.

Just no.

Assume that there are about 239 million Americans of voting age. Discount as a rounding error the disenfranchised (felons, the legally incompetent) and a total of about 152 million voted in the presidential race, about 79 million and change for Biden, 73 million and change for Trump. That's about 64 percent of the total eligible voters.

So, right off, more than a third, 87 million people, don't "believe in reality and science and democracy", at least not enough to be arsed to get off their duffs to vote in perhaps the most consequential election in more than eighty years. 

You can make all the excuses you want about voter suppression and the difficulty the US puts into voting and the pandemic and the lack of a truly inspirational choice. This was "MOAR PLAGUE!" versus "Less Plague, thanks..."; that's not exactly a tough call there. If you have to go down to the Safeway to pick up a six-pack of "vote" to keep a complete whacko from burning you alive inside your house, that's a must-make grocery run. Simple as that.

Now throw in the 73 million who actively voted for MOAR PLAGUE!

These people sure as fuck don't believe in science and reality, and given their meeching enthusiasm for the ridiculous "vote fraud!" lies they don't actually believe in "democracy", either.

So, not just no but fuck no. The vast majority of Americans aren't rational actors who love and cling to the ideals of the Constitution and equal justice under law. 

The "vast majority" - about 67 percent - of the American public is either crazier than a shithouse rat and somewhere to the right of Reinhard Heydrich on the subject of "democracy", or just could give two shits so long as they get their supersized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos over to the couch before "The Masked Singer" comes on.

The bulk of We the People are somewhere between "utterly worthless" and "shoot on sight, like a rabid weasel".

Makes you wonder where the hell we're going to go from here.

And it makes you wonder even more if you really want to find out.

But most of all it reminds me of this little Twitter vignette:

"Quote by a forest ranger at Yosemite National Park on why it is hard to design the perfect garbage bin to keep bears from breaking into it: “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and that of the dumbest tourists.”

 

Damn.

End of Time in Service in the Time of Trump

Today should be the last Veteran's Day of the Trump Era. We should be getting our exit physicals, making the rounds of the VA shop and the other ETS stations that GIs have to cycle through before hitting the street as civilians again. 

We should be the shortest of short-timers.

Instead we stand, appalled, as the gang of grifters, con-men, criminals, and wannabe fascist assholes try to steal an election like the caudillo's goons in some sort of third-rate banana republic and barely a voice is raised to tell them to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and act like citizens in a democratic republic that is also the global super power.

Four years ago on this day I was furious:

"A large minority of my fellow citizens has chosen to put over me as my nation's Chief Executive a man that I would have done my best to chapter out of my Army had he come through my training unit when I was under the hat; a compulsive liar, a man who shirked his own service then boasted that prancing around in some sort of silly military school uniform was "just like serving", a bully and a con man and a thief.

This man, and his party, will over the next four years attempt to destroy the America I grew up in. They will attempt to reverse, repeal, and destroy the liberal and progressive and egalitarian and regulatory acts that have changed the face of this nation since 1929."

If anything that man and that party have turned out to be worse than I ever imagined. They were all that AND the First World equivalent of a gang of thieves running a small-time con on some sorry dirt-road Third World shitshow of a country, and I don't know if that's more embarrassing or humiliating, or both.

But I know this; I didn't plan to spend twenty-two years as part of the Guardia Nacional for some tinpot banana dictator.

Nope.

I knew that war was a racket. I knew I was just another imperial legionary, pushing the empire's writ on those people in those places the empire wanted things.

The one thing I never pictured myself as, though, is some sort of shithole-country uniformed thug, like the gangsters in the Fuerza de Defensa I knew in Panama back in the Eighties.

And yet, here we are.

I hope everyone else who wore the tree suit or the crackerjacks or the flightsuit is as furious about this as I am. Like I said; I don't give a shit how much you love your God or your guns or your tax cuts. Some things transcend our petty preferences, and the Great Promise of the United States - equal justice under law - is one and the most important one of them.

What's going on now in this country makes a mockery and a hollow sham of every citizen's vote and every serviceperson's oath. It is a slap in the face of our promise to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

If stealing - or trying to steal - an election is not being an enemy of the Constitution, I don't know what is.

So spare me today the homilies about veterans and service, and instead go spend some time shouting at Republicans to STFU and be actual small-r republicans instead of fucking banana republicans.

Because there is nothing I can say or do today suits the times better than what I wrote the year after my 2016 rant. 

The current state of the nation makes a joke of the idea that it is currently capable of "honoring" anything or anyone. The best we can do is stand ashamed of what we are doing to the work of those who have served in - and especially out - of uniform to preserve the promise of this nation, so I will conclude now as I did then:

"For those of you who have come here seeking grave words hymning this day, weighted with honor and glory of the service I and mine have done and do, I have none."

 

220 Million Used-car Salesmen

 I have no idea what to say after yesterday. Confronted between the choice of a bland corporate technocrat who would put in place the sort of commonsense public health measures that have tamped down a pandemic disease in places as far apart as Germany and South Korea, and a raging, thieving, lying dumpster fire of a hominid whose insane incompetence has helped kill a quarter of a million of their fellow citizens, nearly half of the U.S. public screamed "FUCK YES!!! I WANT MORE PLAGUE!!!"

I don't care how much you love your guns, or your God, or your tax cuts.

It's the fucking Plague!

Half the goddamn US public can't vote to escape the fucking 14th Century.

Jesus wept.

Actually...I do have this to say; look at this, from last night's Oregonian:

 

This is "Jo Rae Perkins":

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not sunk ass-deep in the wingnut fever swamp, so you won't recognize the little sticker she's holding. 

It's a QAnon thing; "Where we go one, we go all".

Yep. Perkins is a QANut. A drooling, gibbering looney who has no business being let off Monkey Island, much less into the U.S.Senate. And yet...

Oregon is listed by Teh Google as containing about 4.2 million people.

As of this morning a total of 2,125,047 had voted in this race.

That 's about 50.6% of the people in Oregon.  Let's assume that about a quarter are underage, or otherwise unable to vote legally. That brings the total up to about two-thirds, 67%. Repectable, but, still...in the most consequential election in our generation a third of the supposed "citizens" couldn't be arsed to request, or complete, a paper ballot.

And of the group that did, about 835,000 voted for this loon. That's roughly 26% of the vote.

And - as we've discussed here before - that's the Crazification Modulus. That was the "approval" percentage Dick Cheney was riding in 2008, after eight years of nonstop lies, bullshit, and fuckery.

That's what this loon got twelve years later.

 I don't care how much you love your guns, or your God, or your tax cuts.

This nitwit has no more business in the U.S. Senate that she does being the Dragon Queen of Bhutan. And if you think she does, YOU have no business being allowed to handle firearms, operate a motor vehicle, or vote in a democratic republic. 

You're demonstrably completely fucking unfit to associate with actual humans.

And these hominids are a quarter of the U.S. public and half the nutbag of hammers who voted for MOAR PLAGUE!

As we used to say back in the dark days of the Iraq War, back at the old Intel Dump:

We are so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, SO, SO FUCKED!!!

Blood Red Dawn

 

The dawn of Election Day, 2020, was appropriately colored.

I can think of only two elections in U.S. history as consequential as this one; 1860 and 1932.

In both of the earlier elections the public had stark choices.

In 1860 it was slavery or war. A vote for Breckenridge, or a vote for Lincoln, were equally votes for the war that even then many, if not most, Americans must have known would come of those votes. As Lincoln himself put it; "Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

In 1932 it was plutocracy or...something else. A vote for Hoover was a vote for the Gilded Age status quo that had impoverished the nation. A vote for FDR was a vote for some new thing, the "New Deal", that promised to change that. The background to that election were the dire warnings from Europe; the communist and fascist revolutions of the Twenties, and the growing power of Naziism of the Thirties.

In 2020 it's just as binary. A vote for a Republican - any Republican - is a vote to end the promises written into the Constitution by the amendments of 1868 and a return to the original of 1789, an end to the pretense of "equal justice under law". It's a vote for Making America A White Oligarchy Again, a return to Gilded Age economics and pre-Twentieth Century social rules.

A vote for a Democrat - and let's not kid ourselves about silly emo "protest" votes (or NOT voting); the First-Past-The-Post U.S. electoral system means that there's always going to be two large parties. Your only choices are which party, and what you can make that party into - is a vote to try and continue to move away from those things towards a country that tries to make good its promises to all its people.

Here's the thing.

A Republican win today will mean absolutely nothing harmful to me, personally.

I'm an old fairly well-off cis/het white guy. By my demographic I should be a raging red MAGAt. I'll be dead long before the bill for the idiocy the GOP is locked into regarding climate change comes due. I might lose a slug or so in the tax-hate the "no-new-taxes" morons have for blue Oregon's recognition that without the damn taxes you don't have roads or schools outside the gated communities. I'm not going to miss a meal or a buck because my country is governed by a pack of nitwits who want to repeal the entire 20th Century.

The Plague might kill me - they're going to completely screw the pooch on that - but otherwise?

I'm MAGAt-proof.

No, the fury I feel is purely for the fact that the GOP enthusiasm for returning us to 1822 is over such petty, worthless, insignificant, idiotic "causes".

Seriously, people?

Abortion? Drag Queen Story Hour? Owing fifteen Armalite knock-offs? Paying taxes? Having to not call people childish names, sit down, shut up, and listen to people who actually know what they're talking about?

The reality is that the GOP's primary objective is fluffing rich people. You'll note that the actual "accomplishments" of Trump's administration have been a massive tax cut for the wealthy and a fanatic drive to eliminate any and all restriction on wealthy people's businesses to dump their shit in the public air and water, fuck up perfectly good land, and screw over customers without risk of punishment.

Everything else has just been pure assholeism; punching down on poor people, immigrants, anyone duskier than printer paper, lefties, and anyone to the left of Pinochet or religiously less fundie than Falwell.

It's not that I'm angry about losing. I'm angry about who I'm losing to; these fucking nitwits who vote Republican for these worthless things that the GOP tosses them so they can get the plutocracy that's their real endstate.

It's like being run over by a truckload of fatheads because they're desperate to snare cheap plastic Happy Meal toys.

It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world.

But for Wales?

I'll meet you again on the other side.

This Slave Country

 

One hundred and sixty-one years ago tomorrow a condemned man rose to address the courtroom in Charles Town, Virginia. He had been convicted of insurrection, treason - against the Commonwealth of Virginia, mind, not the U.S. government; this was a state, not a federal, court - and murder.

In his short speech, which included a surprisingly large amount of whining about the unfairness of the verdict and the amount of injustice done him, he included this:

"I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done"

 And with that he was taken from there to the place from whence he came where, after a month-long hiatus required by Virginia law, he was taken to the place of execution where the Commonwealth hung John Brown by the neck until he was dead. Whether the God he claimed was on his side has mercy on his soul, only he and he alone knows.

My understanding is that Brown was a symptom rather than a cause of the war that came soon thereafter. The country had been long divided on the question of chattel slavery. What Brown's aborted rebellion, trial, and execution did was simply push Americans further down the road towards war over that question.

What Brown did  was to help focus people's minds on the problem of a nation "conceived in liberty" that treated people that were born, lived, and died within that nation as property at worst and three-fifths of a human being at best.

Before Brown it was much more possible to compromise and prevaricate and elide that problem.

After Brown?

Not so much.

Not that you couldn't if you tried. And lot of people did; people are like that. We're good at doing everything we can to avoid looking straight at any really difficult, troubling, expensive, and (possibly or even probably) insoluble problem. Many, perhaps most, of us prefer the comfortable, happy lie to the unpleasant truth.

But Brown, like the harsh light on an aging actor's face, made that truth a lot harder to evade.

Donald Trump is the John Brown of our generation.

Personally he is as unlike Brown as a man could be; uninvolved, dispassionate, carnal, greedy, and foolish instead of driven, tempestuous, prophetic, and - perhaps - nearly mad.

But he exists in the same position in our lives as Brown did in the lives of his contemporaries. Trump is the balefire that throws an unforgiving light on the Great Issue of our time; the Conservative Question.

As slavery was in 1859, the current "problem" - American "conservatism" - is not a new one. It is rooted in the troubles of the Great Depression, grew to maturity through the Taft years of Republican exile, was watered by the Birchers and Goldwater and Wallace campaigns, bore the poison fruit of Watergate and Iran-contra, and burst into full flower with the rise of Limbaugh and Hate Radio, FOX, and the Wingnut Newsosphere that allowed the sort of people who were terrified and loathed Brown to be terrified of fictitious BLM terrorists and ANTIFA and Mexican rapists. To have not just their own opinions but their own facts.

Until Trump it was possible to pretend that these people were still "Americans", that they still had at least a tenuous link to the promise of this nation, that great promise of "equal justice under law". A promise, mind you, that had been ignored when not openly rejected many times over the history of this country, but still remained on the papers that founded it, in the amendments enacted after the great Treason to try and reform it, in the Civil Rights laws that attempted to force those traitors and their lineal descendants to accept it.

They didn't, not in any real sense, but until Trump we could at least sit next to them and try and ignore the Dixie Swastika patch on their camo jacket while we talked about sports.

But not now.

Trump has liberated them from the need to pretend. From public shame, and the need to hide their open contempt and hatred for "everyone else"; the liberals, the queers, the darkies, the women, the "experts" and eggheads and everyone else who isn't "us" conservatives, "us" Real Americans.

This coming Tuesday some 60 million of these people are going to vote for Trump. I have no idea whether it will be enough to re-elect him, and, frankly, don't really care. A re-elected Trump will likely be the quietus of a true popular democracy in this country. Four more years of Republican rule will do as much as humanly possible to lock in a "conservative" minority rule. 

But that's not the REAL problem

Because even if Trump loses the election - and by "loses" I mean by such an enormous margin that not even the most insane legal and illegal means of overthrowing that popular result will be possible, because you and I know that if it's even close to close the "conservatives" will just go full-on gleichschaltung to seize the nation they believe that they and only they deserve - we're still left where we were after Brown was cut down from the gallows that December. 

The problem will remain. Then, slavery. Now...that there will still be a hard, vicious, irreconcilable, indigestible knot of somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of the U.S. public who will burn the statehouse down and sow the ruins with salt before they accept that somewhere, some time, in some library commons room, Bubbles LaRue is hosting Drag Queen Story Hour.

We are a house divided against itself. 

The Right realizes that and plays our politics as if it's true.

Now, regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's election, the choice is on the rest of us; do we continue to pretend otherwise, or do we respond as if those people are, as they say they are, committed to not just our defeat but our destruction? Not just to their triumph but their tyranny? Not just to the advancement of their own causes but the utter ruin of any and all of ours?

To "bind the wounds" of the first Civil War first required four years of hard, bloody, unrelenting war that forced the unconditional surrender of the first "conservative" traitors.

We know that even if their current leaders are defeated at the polls the modern "conservatives" will not surrender. If anything, their fanaticism and lunacy are likely to redouble.

Trump's only accomplishment is to lay that bare, to force the choice upon us as it did on the Americans of Brown's time. 

We cannot remain undecided; we must become all one thing or all the other; we must become as close to the promised nation of equal justice under law as we can, or go back to the Constitution of 1789, to the Three-Fifths Compromise, to the Gilded Age, to the nation of White is Right and the nation of Corporations are People, my friend.

How will we now choose? 

Because there is only one way past the gallows where the body now hangs.

And that way is narrow and steep, and promises nothing but the same hard and bitter choices we faced one hundred and sixty-one years ago.

Because on that morning Brown wrote:

"I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

And he was not wrong. It was, and is, only through that way, only by making those hard choices, purging this land of "conservatism", fighting that fight to the bitter, bloody end, can we hope to see the dawn of that new nation.

A guy's got to have some line he just won't cross.

So I keep hearing from Republicans that the problem is that Joe Biden is a socialist and will completely destroy the wholesomely juicy capitalist goodness of the United States if elected.

Y'know what?

If Joe Biden WAS a socialist and ran on a platform to the left of Leon Trotsky I'd vote for him before I'd vote for Donald Trump. 

 If the Democratic nominee was the ghost of Leon Trotsky who promised to massacre all the wealthy I'd vote for him before I'd vote for Donald Trump.

If the Democratic nominee was a drag queen named Twinkles LaBarr who promised that if elected she would outlaw God, make every American share a single bathroom, and crown herself Dragon Queen I'd vote for her in a heartbeat before I'd fucking vote for Donald Fucking Trump.

Because I believe that a man just has to have some moral standards below which he will not sink.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

 Until now Ael and I have been largely disagreeing in the comments. But our disagreement is so fundamental to the issues we're looking at now - and, particularly, looking at in the light of the coming U.S. election - that I think it's worth taking a post to discuss them.

Portrait of the Artist Losing His Dainty Freshness, John Day, Oregon, 8/18/20

 

Ael summed up his salient point well in this comment on the "Election Eve" thread:

"...a return to Obama style "Hope and Change rhetoric and fuck all else" won't cut it.
There is rising anti-elitist anti-corporate sentiment in the land.
If a populist insurgency fails in the Democratic party, I am afraid of what it might become in the GOP."

 So, first; let me say that I couldn't agree more with his fundamental premise; that the social, economic, and political "playing field" in the current United States is viciously, irremediably skewed against anyone not in a two-yacht family.

The brutal fact is that we are effectively an oligarchy, or a plutocracy, if you will. The "people" - the mass of the citizens - do not, in fact, rule either in and by themselves, or through their elected representatives.

Things that the vast majority of the citizens of this nation like and want to be the things that shape their lives; equal opportunity, freedom from the terror of sudden illness or unemployment rendering them helpless, homeless, and hopeless...a more equitable society, in short...are always put aside in favor of the things that the wealthy citizens of the nation want and like.

The problem is that, right now, there's no way past or through or around that.

First, because the first-past-the-post electoral system always produces two large parties. Unless one of them is dying, as the Whigs did before the Civil War, a third (or more) parties simply splits the vote of that side of the political spectrum and allows the "other side" to win.

Second. because our electoral system is drowned, drenched, soaked in money. You cannot get elected in the U.S. without insanely huge amounts of money.

Which means that either you have to be insanely rich, or you have to court the insanely rich...or you have to mobilize literally millions of un-rich people to pay you and keep paying you.

The result?

The rich have access to political power in a way that everyone else does not.

That's why American politics never bothers to debate the value of tax cuts but has a conniption at the thought of using taxes to reduce inequity.

And that's baked in to the American political system.

Remember these guys?

None of them were poor. None of them were landless. None of them were Black or Asian or Latino or born to the tribes that had lived here before the Vikings (and, obviously, none were women).

They set the system up to over-represent rich white guys. And it's worked well that way ever since.

The story of this nation, the promise of the nation, was that although when they wrote that "all men are created equal" they didn't expect those other men - and women - to take them at their words. And that American history has been a long, hard, fight to make those lofty words reality for those "others".

For much of it's history, though, the United States has been what it is now; an open oligarchy.

Three periods were largely responsible to making some changes in that - the "Progressive" era, from roughly the turn of the 20th Century until the First World War, the New Deal era, from 1932 until the Second World War, and the Civil Rights era, from the 1950s to about 1980.

Right now we're embedded in a Second Gilded Age. The first one was disrupted - not ended, exactly, but broken up and forced to admit some of those "other" people - by the Progressives and the New Dealers. Those left outside by those movements - that is, non-white Americans - had to fight again in the second half of the Twentieth Century to try and gain some of that admission.

But the Empire struck back with the election of Reagan, and the country has been sliding back into economic and political feudalism ever since.

The coalition that frustrated the plutocrats in the first two eras - muckraking journalists, true Leftists - socialists and communists - and labor unions, and noblesse oblige aristos like the Roosevelts - is as gone as the Gibson Girl and the I.W.W.

Instead we're left with a dire dichotomy

The result of the hard graft of the wealthy to own one of the two parties has resulted in a GOP that is, frankly, irredeemable. Just lost. Gone. Entirely given over to everything from embryonic fascism to crony capitalism to really lunatic gabba-gooberosity, stuff like QAnon.

But the other big party is still largely in thrall to it's wealthy donors, and to the fear that if they move to hard to the left they will face the wrath of the now-massively-overpowered financial businesses, big banks, and corporate power.

And, frankly, the problem is that to dismantle the resurrected Gilded Age would, indeed, require what amounts to a revolution.

And that's not a metaphor. It would be, in fact, an economic and social (and political) overturn of the status quo.

Wealth would have to be massively taxed. Capital flight - the ability of large corporate organizations to move their wealth out of the U.S. - would have to first be viciously crushed and then policed with a savage intensity. Financial crimes would have to be investigated and punished with the dispatch and ruthlessness we now use on selling weed or sticking up gas stations. Prisons would have to bulge with banksters and grifters and other financial fraudsters.

In other words, the American public would have to start seeing the wealthy and "business" the way they now see government; as a large, unaccountable, dangerous threat.

And this would have to be done by a million tiny uprisings, tens of thousands of pamphlates, YouTube video after YouTube video, in classrooms and townhalls and community groups. The danger, frankly, is that a "populist" uprising is a fantastic risk of becoming either a dictatorship of the proletariat or a Man on Horseback. There's a reason that the French Revolution produced Napoleon and the Russian, Lenin.

The optimist in me wants to believe that there's a way this can be done. That there's a genuine way for the American people to reclaim those high-flown words written back at the close of the 18th Century.

The realist in me looks around and sees nothing but ignorant armies clashing by night. I don't see the American public as capable of that sort of patient, remorseless, brutally focused action, or as willing to make the sort of sacrifices that action would demand.

And, thus, I'm reminded again why I don't want to write about American politics. The way to political hell is already before us, broad and smooth; a descent into madness on the Right, a timidity and fear of violent revolt on the Left.

The way up is hard and narrow, and requires not simply one person but millions to be willing to walk it, to be willing to work and fight and suffer and, yes, perhaps, die, in that journey.

That's an immense ask.

And I'm not sure - not just if the American people are willing to answer, but - whether I even want to ask if of them for my dread that my worst fears will be horribly confirmed.

For me?

I'll fight.

That's what as a citizen I have to do.

But I fight without much hope.

And speaking of election eve...

 ...here's the latest lunatic GOP goober who will soon be in position to inflict her looney gooberosity on the rest of us to the extent she can.

This isn't an accident or coincidence or happenstance. This IS the Republican Party. This is where these lunatics have been going since Reagan - as Charlie Pierce likes to say - fed them the monkey brains full of trickle-down and welfare queens and government is the problem prion disease. Trump is not the disease. He's the symptom.

And the nation is FULL of these goobers. And they vote. And they are convinced that tomorrow belongs to them and are perfectly happy to dynamite the entire foundations of liberal democracy to get it.

I do not know how you run a popular republic with this much crazy in it. But I think we're finding out during this Plague Year, and the answer is not a happy one.