Catching up 2: White House White Trash

I'm not sure what more I can say about the astounding descent into howling madness that is Trump 47 than what I've already said over and over and over again.

 
Except that the scum in the GriftSkyBlue Reflecting Pool is the least-toxic scum currently associated with this Administration.

It's difficult for me, who lived through Nixon criming and Reagan selling missiles to the mullahs and Dubya getting GIs waxed in Southwest Asia and Felony Fats 45 helping kill millions with a preventable pandemic disease, to really get my mind around how utterly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously awful the Second Coming of Tubby has been and will be.

Except this evening it's all going to be there. As Jim Wright sums it up:

"Jumping dirt bikes. UFC cage fights. Roaring 4-wheelers. Gratuitous military displays. Way too loud redneck music. Port-O-Potties and overflowing trashcans full of Taco Bell and McDonalds. All it needs is a Donut Burger stand and a 4-H cowbarn."

Words alone don't begin to describe the white trash tackiness of the Orange Fuhrer's Führergeburtstag. Here's the visual:

 

I...I...fuck. Words fail me.

All this lacks is a sagging couch on the West Portico and a rusted-out Oldsmobile up on blocks where the Rose Garden used to be.

Why is this a problem?

Because, frankly, I know that the world is full of people who love this grubby low-rent shit. The point is that the people who are supposed to be "leaders", the people We the People elect to do the hard work of governance, are supposed to be better than that.

I don't want to have some redneck goober in the Oval Office. In the Senate. Fuck, I don't want to have them in my local county commission.

Yet here we are.

And Trump being Trump - which is to say, a liar and thief - of course there's a grift:

"The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday."

Sweet Baby Jesus. If you wrote this as part of a crime novel not even the most credulous reader would buy it.

There's no bottom to this cesspit. And no visible realistic way to fight free of it, because 1) somewhere between 25% and 40% of the U.S. public love and want it, and 2) the Constitutional framework we have now makes it entirely too easy for that toxic minority to tear the country down to the level of this ignorant crap and difficult to shove it back down into the shithole where it belongs.

I have no idea what comes After Trump.

But I don't think it's going to be good.

 
The brightest promise of this nation, the lofty aspiration of Liberty and Justice For All, of Equal Justice Under Law, of true republican equity, has always been more of a hope and ideal than a real thing.

Founded by wealthy white men, many of whom were slaveowners, it's hardly surprising that in the history of this nation the wealthy have always taken more than their share. 

The Rest of Us have had to fight over the scraps, and those of us even further on the margins, whether from birth or gender or color or belief or...well, all the other "other" things that have set us apart from the rich, the well-born, and the able...have been driven even further down and out, harassed and punished for the crime of not being rich or white or male or "Christian" and every other thing the wingnut horde hates. 

That those plutocrats have managed to convince a critical minority of the "rest of us" that, as one of the characters in the awful musical 1776 says, “...most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” 

Or of being on top for being male, or het, or "conservative" or every other damn thing this Administration represents. 

The United States has had two immense upheavals where the original white plutocracy was challenged.

 
One was a civil war.

In theory it was "won" by the foundation of a Second Republic that pulled the people the First Republic had locked into slavery into the body politic.

The "Civil Rights Era" of the late Fifties and Sixties tried to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction (and the social revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties tried to continue that, to do the same for other pushed-down minorities such as women and people who didn't match the conventional stereotypes of gender, sexuality...).

 
The other was a depression that so threatened the nation with the specter of popular revolution that it forced the wealthy to cede a portion of their wealth and power to the masses.

The original thrones and dominations of 1789 haaaated both of these, and have worked tirelessly to reverse and destroy them. 

Much of the Second Republic was undone by the end of the 19th Century. We're now in the process of undoing the New Deal as well as whatever remains of the Civil Rights acts and the individual liberties won between then and 2016.

Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning.

And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)

Intermission II: Weird Ass Boogaloo

 To follow up on the political part of my last post...

The Lawyers, Guns, & Money gang are having a good laugh over the latest Trump weirdness story:

"My take here, not that it matters, is that Trump is now in some sort of twilight mental world in which his lifetime habit of bullshitting — saying stuff that he doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether it’s true or not — is blending with his age-related cognitive deterioration, to generate stories like this, that Trump more or less believes are true at the moment he’s confabulating them, to the extent he believes literally anything, which to be fair is not much."

In the post they dredge up an old something I remembered about Tubby because it ran head-on into my military history fetish. 

This:

This weird fake "monument" supposedly dates back to the Oughts when Tubby bought the Northern Virginia golf club within which he set up this goofball thing.

IIRC when the story broke during his 2016 campaign Tubby's apologists tried to spin this as commemorating the 1861 "Battle of Ball's Bluff", one of the many early-war Union debacles. See, the narrative ran, that's what he means! Take him seriously but not literally!

One teensy little problem with that.

The two places - the battle site and the golf course - are nowhere even close. The red rectangle in the upper left is Ball's Bluff, the smaller square in the right center is this goofy plaque:

Ball's Bluff is over ten miles upriver from the golf course.

The essence of a good lie is that it has just enough proximity to some hard truth(s) as to be at least remotely plausible. You have to squint hard to see the lie.

The essence of good bullshit is similar; it can't be completely ridiculous. It has to have at least some elements of what sound like possibilities. If it's just flying donkeys? No, that's not effective bullshitting.

That's what I don't get about the MAGAt cult.

I have a certain wry appreciation for a clever liar, or an accomplished bullshitter, or a cunning grifter.

It takes a certain amount of wit, inventiveness, and brass to be one or all of them.

This stuff? The lies and bullshit that Tubby spews?

It's not even trying.

It's lazy. It's idiotic. It's childish.

History (and literature) is full of people who led others through a mixture of wit, nerve, inspiration, and brass...mixed in with genuine ideals and goals as well as some inspirational bullshit and even some outright lies. 

It's the old "Saint Elizabeth of Hungary" thing - you start with a lie and then make it true.

History is also full of ignorant liars and bad bullshitters.

The outcomes of following the leads of people like that are usually...very, very bad. Children's Crusade bad.

I get that there's a bunch of angry people who want an angry person to lead them against the people they're angry at.

But this joker?

Seriously?

THIS guy?

He can't even fucking lie right.

 

And if they give him to us again in November, we're gonna find out just precisely how wrong that will be.

King of Spades and King of Fools

I'm sure I don't need to go into depth about my opinion of the idiot who claims credit for this.

Even so, this nitwit screed is a morass of ignorance and ignorant foolishness profound even for Tubby.

But it points up something that I'd like to briefly revisit that we discussed here way back in 2008, the myth of "Good Ol' Marse Robert".

The second link above points out the many examples of Lee as no better than his treasonous peers as a citizen, as well as no better as a man than many other Americans of his time about race.

But it's the myth of Lee the Military Genius that obsesses Tubby here, and just reminds us that the Artist of the Deal was always a conman and a grifter that knew and knows nothing about anything.

Lee was an excellent tactical commander, and generally decent up to the operational level (although his bizarre obsession with dividing his forces bit him in the ass both in 1862 and 1863 and led to his defeats in Maryland and Pennsylvania).

But above that?

His strategic assessment of the Southern means and ends helped doom the Confederacy. Yeah, he was that bad.

Granted, he had a lot of help from that military nimrod Jeff Davis, but as the rebel equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff it was his job to advise his political masters of the best way to win independence. 

His advice helped Davis & Co. choose battlefield victory as the means even though those means were always doomed - due to the Union economic and demographic strength, due to the naval mismatch, and due to the political freight of chattel slavery - and had Lee been the strategic genius of Tubby's worm-eaten brain he'd have recognized that.

Fortunately for this nation, he didn't.

Again, I expect little more from Trump. He's simply a bullying fool, a racist, a conman, and an ignoramus.

But this little screed, as misinformed, incoherent, and bizarre as it is, reminds us that Tubby's only real political genius, his dark magisterium, such as it is, is to find the bully, the fool, the racist, the conman, and the ignoramus lurking in us and usher them, blinking and stretching out into the light.

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.

Fort Loser

This is me in 1984, a perky young SP-4 waiting patiently for someone to auger into Sicily Drop Zone at Fort Braxton Bragg, North Carolina.

At the time I couldn't have picked Braxton Bragg out of a police lineup or told you what the hell he'd done to get a ginormous Army post named after him. But, then I was young and stupid, as young men often are.

Know I know better.

And now ol' Braxton is in the middle of a ginormous shitstorm revolving around the way my country spent a long time treating - and in a lot of ways still treats - those of Us the People a whole bunch of the rest of We figured were more useful as property than actual people.

And, of course, if there's a shitstorm there's a Trump stepping in (and stirring up) the shit:

I'm not going to even bother making an argument about this. The nonsensical notion of naming places where American soldiers live and train for people who fought against and killed American soldiers would be so far beyond ridiculously stupid that it would create an entire dimension of "ridiculously stupid".

These names are a living monument to the racism that has poisoned the nation for so long that they simply need to be cornered as quickly as possible and beaten to death with the dispatch you'd club a cannibal plague rat.

Plus there's a whole bunch of GIs who have already made the argument and more eloquently than I ever could.

So, nope, my point here today is just to recall that not only were these sonsofbitches traitors, not only were they murderous traitors, not only were they murderous traitors for one of the worst possible fucking causes in human history but that, as officers and commanders of traitorous troops they were massive fucking losers, and that there was no bigger loser in the bunch than Braxton Fucking Bragg.

Let me give you a quick taste (and a nasty flavor it is) of the man, from his Wikipedia article:

"In June 1862, Bragg was elevated to command the Army of Mississippi (later known as the Army of Tennessee). He and Edmund Kirby Smith attempted an invasion of Kentucky in 1862, but Bragg retreated following the inconclusive Battle of Perryville in October.

In December, he fought another inconclusive battle at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Battle of Stones River, against the Army of the Cumberland under Major General William Rosecrans. After months without significant fighting, Bragg was outmaneuvered by Rosecrans in the Tullahoma Campaign in June 1863, causing him to surrender Middle Tennessee to the Union. Bragg retreated to Chattanooga but evacuated it in September as Rosecrans' troops entered Georgia.

Later that month, with the assistance of Confederate forces from the Eastern Theater under James Longstreet, Bragg was able to defeat Rosecrans at the Battle of Chickamauga, the bloodiest battle in the Western Theater, and the only major Confederate victory therein. Bragg forced Rosecrans back to Tennessee, but was criticized for not mounting an effective pursuit. In November, Bragg's army was routed by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the Battles for Chattanooga and pushed back to Georgia. Confederate President Jefferson Davis subsequently relieved Bragg of command, recalling him to Richmond to serve as his chief military advisor. Bragg briefly returned to the field as a corps commander near the end of the war during the Campaign of the Carolinas.

Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War. Most of the battles in which he engaged ended in defeats. Bragg was extremely unpopular with both the men and the officers of his command, who criticized him for numerous perceived faults, including poor battlefield strategy, a quick temper, and overzealous discipline. Bragg has a generally poor reputation with historians, while some point towards the failures of Bragg's subordinates, especially Leonidas Polk, a close ally of Davis and known enemy of Bragg, as more significant factors in the many Confederate defeats at which Bragg commanded. The losses which Bragg suffered are cited as principal factors in the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy."

So, in the course of about two years, this idiot:

1. Tried to invade Kentucky, couldn't whip Don Carlos Buell (who was a pretty conclusive nitwit himself), and ran away like a whipped dog,
2. Couldn't beat fucking Bill Rosecrans, who as a commander couldn't beat a carpet if you spotted him the bat and the carpet,
3. Then got outmaneuvered by Rosecrans, which is like winning some sort of Nobel Prize for "crap generaling",
4. Finally whipped Rosecrans in a bloody brawl but needed Longstreet, one of the best rebel officers to do it,
5. And when the U.S. finally 86ed Rosecrans and replaced him with a competent commander Bragg managed to get his ass comprehensively whipped despite fighting defensively in one of the strongest defensive positions ever held by an armed force in the history of combat (look up the "Battle of Missionary Ridge" sometime...).

Finally even Jeff Davis - not exactly a military genius - had enough of Bragg's incompetent ass and got him out of the chain of command.

This guy was a complete and utter military moron.

Taking his name off the Home of the Airborne wouldn't just be a recognition that We the People shouldn't "honor" people who betrayed our country for the notion that other people could and should be owned like a box of Cap'n Crunch.

It's be a recognition that this particular traitor was not just a traitor but a spectacularly incompetent one, at that.

Then rename the place for George Thomas, who said this:

"[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed.

This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them."

Now that would be a perfect, chef's kiss, sort way of correcting the history books. Fort George Thomas.

Do it.

Now.

O tempora, o mores!

Bearing arms against the Republic, 1864:

The U.S. government's response, 1864:

Bearing arms against the Republic, 2020:

The U.S. government's response, 2020:

We live in sadly diminished times.

Down Among the Dead Men

So on Memorial Day I ended up in the old Civil War cemetery at Poplar Grove.

It's peaceful and pretty and very manicured, very much in the tradition of the more modern military cemeteries, a sort of pocket-Arlington.

Until you look at the rows of stones, and realize that way more than half of them aren't "headstones" at all but simply stone blocks with a number carved on them.

These were the remnants of soldiers that lacked any sort of identity; nothing marked their original grave - or, it it had, was gone by the time the graves registration parties reached it - and nothing was left, if there had been anything, of a tag or scrap of paper with a name on it.

There was just some bone, and scraps of cloth, and probably some less savory remnants, to be gathered up and put back in a hole with a stone with a number on it for the following hundred-plus years. An empty chair at a table, an empty peg on a wall where no coat was hung, an empty house to which the scraps of bone and cloth never returned.

Perhaps even more grim were the separate files where the men of the U.S. Colored Troops were buried, still put apart from the white soldiers, still separate and unequal in death as in life.

All in all a very unsettling sort of day, one that raised more spectres than laid them.