Live Free or Die

Well, there you have it.

All I can say at this point is that if all those idiots who bayed about "Second Amendment Solutions" aren't storming Capitol Hill right now then they can just STFU forever after.

In a true democracy this would result in pitchforks and torches and the Swiss Guard dead at the gates of the Tuileries.

Which is another way of saying that we must destroy the GOP or bow before our New Plutocratic Masters.

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

We have not.

A tax measure that provides a road map to increased inequality in one of the already-most-unequal industrial democracies and shreds the social safety net woven in the depth of the Depression to prevent a hard turn to fascist or communist revolution, and that is "supported" by, at most, a quarter of the citizens of the affected polity (and that in the midst of a relentless, unashamedly vicious barrage of lies from the ruling party that suggests that at least a portion of that 25% would fall away if they understood how nakedly plutocratic this legislation is) is as close to the definition of "taxation without representation" as I can think of short of a genuine occupation government.

If our political system has devolved to the point where a coterie of neo-Gilded Age fantasists can impose their Sharia Law on three-quarters of the populace, then we have put a wrap on the American Experiment.

In a truly republican nation this would decorate Pennsylvania Avenue with a festive holiday display of heads on pikes.

It has not and will not.

And, as such, we have no one to blame for our failure to keep our own republic but ourselves.

Welcome to our new Tangerine-hued Overlord!

Well...at least we won't have to worry about all that obstructionism!

Still...here's what worries me most about yesterday.

The GOP has much the same priorities today as it did in 2001; taxcuttery, deregulation, privatization, in essence to destruction of what remains of the environmental, labor, and safety regulations, the welfare state, and the New Deal left by eight years of Reagan and eight years of Bush (and eight years of a pretty damn centerist Clinton...) - a return to the pristine unmoderated vulture capitalism of the Gilded Age.

Ironically we were spared that in 2001 only by Osama and Bush having to spend the next seven years chasing muj in the desert instead of running down granny's Social Security or kicking the apartment doors of gay adopters.

Today Trump and his supporters have no such distractions. Trump himself has shown very little enthusiasm for wars other than the usual war-on-terror bullstuff that's carried on thru Obama's tenure. Osama can't come to our rescue now, he sleeps wit' da fishes.

Nope. Donnie's got a TON of time and inclination to use it to endorse Paul Ryan's Randite boner and Joni Ernst's kill-the-fags butthurt. He's got nothing to do but grab us by the pussy and return us to the Republican paradise of 1899; when men were men, women were life support systems for a vagina, and when you could dump your coal tar and your fly ash in the crick without some prissy bureaucrat whinin' about "drinking water" or some such faggy shit.

Since now I think we get to live in an Dickensian cosplay only with real hunger and sickness here's the thing, Red America:

You voted for this. You own it. It's all yours. Now you get to Make America Great Again.

And...

When your poor neighbor's Medicare voucher runs out and she curls on her front steps in pain unable to afford her medication just remember; you voted for this.

When the guy at the taqueria who used to make those great churros is gone Friday just remember; you voted for this.

When the fence wire goes up across what used to be your favorite wilderness trail just remember; you voted for this.

When the DA refuses to indict the three men who roughed up your daughter's gay friend just remember; you voted for this.

You've been whining for years that political correctness and liberal prejudices kept you from making America great again. Those are now gone, swept away; in six months you will control all three branches of the federal government. Your dreams have come true.

And when those dreams become your fellow Americans' nightmares, just remember;

You voted for this. You own it. I cannot stop you. I tried. I failed.

What happens now will be on your heads, for good...or ill.

As for me..?

You will be unsurprised to know that I despise the President-elect and all he stands for. While I cannot do much I will do everything I can to fight him and his party's agenda. I will work, to the extent I can, here in Oregon, every minute for the next four years to mitigate the damage he and his minions will do to my friends, my state, my country, and the world. If I cannot do that I will work, at least, here in Oregon to build a great, big, beautiful wall to keep Trumpism away from my friends that he would pursue; my gay and lesbian friends who fear the loss of their legal marriage, my immigrant and Muslim friends who simply fear, period. My daughter, who is afraid that when he gins up a trade - or a hot - war with China that she will suffer the fate of the Japanese in WW2.

He IS the President. The laws under which our nation is governed have rewarded him and his supporters with the right TO govern. I'm not going to imitate the Republicans under Obama, I'm not going to be a whiny little titty-baby and spend the next four years refusing to accept that and trying to dirty-trick my way into undermine his legitimacy.

Fight his agenda? Sure. Refuse to accept his victory, #NotMyPresident? No. He is my President, and yours, much as it hurts me to say that.

And I swear, I will not rest for the next four years until I can no longer say that.

I don't get it

I'm still working down in southern Oregon, living out of a hotel - this time the less-swanky Ramada up the street from the nice Hampton Inn where I spent the first two weeks and where as I type this on the other side of the gimcrack-cheap paper thin hotel walls someone's infant is screaming as though it is being vigorously lashed with a length of coaxial cable - and pretty much just waking up, going to work, coming back to the hotel, eating, reading (or watching some television) and going to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's about as much fun and exciting as you'd think.

Plus we're back on standard time, so darkness falls in fucking mid-afternoon and there's no daylight left after work hours to even go exploring the southern Oregon scenery. And that's about as much fun as you'd think, too.

The one thing that's hard to avoid here in Oregon's Dixie is the politics. This isn't the blue part of Oregon. This isn't even the relatively purpleishly-liberal outpost of Eugene and the University of Oregon. This is hard Red Oregon, home of the Dope-smoking Rednecks. This is Trump territory, or, at best, in fealty to the Paul clan. God, guns, and taxation - even WITH representation - as the ultimate Evil.

It's in places like this that I really despair for my country.

Because you look around here, and then look at the Red talking heads on the electronical teevee and you wonder...what the fuck would make me want what these people are telling me to want, if I was one of the people here in Medford?

I mean, the bog-standard GOP talking points are exactly what "conservatives" wanted a century ago. Low taxes on their wealth. The freedom to do, well, whatever they damn well pleased. Dump their chemicals in the rivers and their shit into the air and fuck the upstairs maid when they got to feeling frisky. Keep the nigras on the plantation and the women on their backs. Work the hunkies and the polacks and the other white trash for chump change, kill them if it made a buck of extra profit, and throw them on the trash heap when they weren't good for ten minutes work anymore. Back then it was called the Gilded Age and for everyone but the Carnegies and the Mellons it was like an electric fan; if you looked at it one way it sucked, but if you looked at it the other way, it blew.

I mean, in the Reagan and early Bush years the GOP grifters used to at least try and pretend this stuff was something else. Freedom or prosperity or, well, whatever would convince the public marks to vote for them. But now they aren't even trying. Have you heard Trump? Christ, that idiot couldn't have won a junior high school class election with his nonsense forty years ago. Tax cuts for the Kochs and Medicare for white people and wars for the towelheads and a balanced budget? It's enough to make a cat laugh and yet these freaking southern Oregon C.H.U.D.s are out there lapping it up and baying for more. It''d be ridiculous if it wasn't so tragic.

I think that some of these people - Trump, for sure, and I suspect guys like Bush and Rubio and that loathsome harpy Fiorina - are just flat-out grifters. They know that the snake oil they're peddling is nothing but wood alcohol and turpentine, and that it's poison for the rubes. They're grifting because they'll profit from the grift, and they need the rubes to buy it, and don't care that their toxins will poison the rubes by stealing their jobs, blighting their lives, and crushing them under debt and imprisonment and unemployment and hopelessness.

But some of these people can't be grifters. Some of them must truly believe this stuff. Carson, maybe. Cruz? The Pauls?

But...it's such a grossly fucking obvious grift. It's not like we haven't seen the America it will reduce us to; an America where people die in dangerous jobs and their orphans starve, an America where the rich do what they can and the poor suffer what they must, an America of filthy toxic slums huddling below shining mansions, an America where if you aren't born to the purple your life is nasty, brutish, and short.

It was that America that the reformers, the muckrakers, the socialists, the labor unions, the New Dealers beat back into its gated communities and boardrooms and forced to give up its oligarchy, creating the Middle Class America of the Fifties and Sixties, the America I grew up in. That America isn't what these Republican policies will produce.

That America is the America these Republican policies, from the "right-to-work" to the end of Social Security to the fight against minimum wages and workplace safety and health regulations and progressive taxes, will destroy and replace with the old, dark, dirty, oligarchic America, the America of the Gilded Age.

How can these people, the ones not in on the grift, how can they not see that? How can they want that, that Gilded Age America, back?

I honestly have no idea, and the rank, feral stupidity of that wanting just makes me violently ill.