Well, at least we know who "We the People" are...

In a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity the American public has chosen to elect a gibbering idiot who pines for the Gilded Age and dreams of Hitlerian policies towards everyone he hates - and he's a good hater - and his clutch of little Nazis who will take an axe to the 20th Century to ensure that no drag queen ever reads "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to second graders again.

To the extent they can, the GOP will root out workplace and environmental regulations and undo the already too-threadbare social "safety net". They will increase the already too-high economic inequality to ensure we become ever more an oligarchy.

Their open lunatic anti-vaxxer, anti-"Obamacare" crowd will undo public health and make us sicker and weaker.

In 1933 the German public had endured war and starvation, hyperinflation, militias fighting in the street, the punitive effects of Versailles...and STILL did not vote in the Nazis.

What's our excuse? That the cutie in the corner booth might be a transwoman in a cocktail frock?

That the roofers next door might be here illegally?

At this point all I can do is echo this comment from the election thread over at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

"The bottom line is that there are more fucking assholes in America than anyone wants to acknowledge.

More immature, misogynist, racist, greedy, myopic fucking assholes than anyone is comfortable admitting to; more really rotten, selfish human beings who choose hate over love, exclusion over inclusion and "fuck you, I got mine" over any sense of humanity.

It's time to face the facts. The fucking rot is wider and deeper than any of us want to admit, and it's growing.

It all makes me want to puke, and the worst of it is that I honestly don't know how to combat it all. All I DO know is that we must all keep fighting, because to capitulate is to descend into madness."

The madness is upon us.

We're in a Project 2025 World now.

Updated 11/6 p.m.: I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...
81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020. 
Only 67 million bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.
Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?

 Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If everyone who voted for Biden turned out yesterday...

Well..?

Put a bird on it

 

The whole "Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately pilots the bird in controlled flight into terrain" thing is remotely fascinating. 

To me, anyway.

I really don't have much of a fighting-dog on that particular flight. I don't use the app personally (I'm here, still blogging away like the refugee from the Nineties I am, or on Facebook - largely only because I still have long-distance friends that the Metaverse lets me stay in touch with...) so whether it lives or dies in a spectacular collapse is kind of a matter of indifference to me.

So the interest here at the Fire Direction Center is purely academic and out of curiosity.

But I am fascinated, in a sort of bemused way, watching a whole bunch of things very "21st Century America" slam into each other in this Twitter crash.

1. The whole tech-"genius"-worship thing.

I've never "got" the Musk-fanboi. The guy owns a company that builds...ohmigoadSpaceRockets!

Yeah, well, so did that old Nazi Werner von Braun.

But somehow this seems to have created a club that looks at this joker as some sort of culmination of The Buddha, Johnny "The Wadd" Holmes, and Croesus. Mostly because of the space rocket thing.

(There seems to be a subset of fans of his cars, but the rockets seem like the big draw).

But...c'mon. 

Einstein's Wall means that manned space flight is a nonsensical macguffin best left to science fiction, and since the end of the big NASA programs the inevitable consequence of letting plutocrats take over - space tourism - turns the whole Right Stuff legacy into WTF? Stuff. 

The fact that the USG has let this fuckstick take over the launch of communications satellites is infuriating, mind you. It's the astronautic equivalent of what we've let Republicans and greedy privatizing bastard (but I repeat myself) do to the Post Office; turn what should be a public good - communicating with each other - into a cashbox held by a greedy bastard.

Turns out that you don't really have to be that much of a "genius" to own a rocket company. You can be a greedy bastard and clueless outside your lane so long as you start by being a rich greedy bastard. Turns out that the best way to make millions is to start with millions. Who knew!?

2. Tech.

We're Americans. We're enthralled by shit that goes fast, makes noise, or beeps when you push its buttons. Twitter is just another tech gimmick, albeit a fairly useful one for talking to other people.

The notion that it's something "important" seems a fairly accurate metric of the sort of thing that the American public finds "important", and runs concurrent in my estimation with the amount of time that the recently-concluded election spent talking about "transgender".

There are such things as transgender people.

They're a tiny subset of the set "people", and they - like all people - just want to live their lives. Some happily and productively and sensibly, some madly and dramatically, some...well, just like everyone else.

In a sensible world, we, the "rest" of us, would mind our own fucking business and let them mind theirs.

Instead, because of a bunch of nitwit wingnuts, we've wasted an immense about of time, money, and intellectual throw-weight fretting about them.

It's the same with tech.

Twitter is a postcard. Facebook is a letter. TikTok is...sort of a postcard with moving cat pictures.

The platform is just another way of talking to one another. The "how" may be gee-whizzical. But the "what" is the same old-same-old that Sumerians did with clay tablets.

Which is to say, if not Twitter? Something else will be there to talk through.

Clay tablets, maybe. Whatever.

If we were willing to think of it that way, we'd realize that what's important is what we say and show and do, rather than the how.

And that brings me to...

3. "Free speech"

Supposedly the whole nonsense began because a) Musk was baked, and b) pissed off because one of his favorite right-wing assholes had been STFU by The Bird, so he c) did some dumb things that forced him into paying way more for this thing than he should have, so here we are.

Supposedly this all started because Musk (who may have been baked, remember...) wanted to "Free the Bird".

And yes, all the wingnuts have been raving for a long time about "freedom" and "their freedoms".

Those "freedoms", so far as I can tell, are largely the "freedom" to fuck around and not get kicked in the ass for it. To do rude, stupid, destructive-to-the-commons stuff and then not have to hear the non-rude, non-stupid, and/or non-destructive bystanders tell them they're being rude and stupid.

(kinda looks back at the whole "transgender" thing here...)

The "open-carry" fucknuts? The "rolling coal" d-bags? The sorts of people who want to pry into your bedroom, or your uterus? The white-is-right open racists, the "wimmens-is-stupid" misogynists?

Yeah, all those assholes.

They're cranky because they were told to sit down, shut up, and stop being rude stupid assholes.

Y'see, I grew up in the Sixties, when ALL that rude, stupid stuff was just "how Americans are". 

I remember hearing and using the expression "Jew him down" for bargaining; it wasn't "racism", it was "how Americans talked". 

I remember hearing my Chinese friend described as a "slope" and not immediately pounding the speaker senseless because that was "how Americans talked".

I remember seeing how badly the black kids in my school were treated, how girls "did this not that", how there were one set of rules for rich and powerful and another for everyone else, and that ws just "how America is".

Then, slowly, painfully, sometimes violently, incompletely, some "Americans" started pushing back against that rude, stupid shit.

It started to become unacceptable to call people playground names, because, well, that IS rude and stupid. 

It became less-acceptable (if not completely UN-acceptable) to treat people like shit because of their skin color, or their gender, or because of who they liked or loved.

And the rude and stupid people haaaaated that. So they fought back.

They found a natural ally in "conservative" groups - since most of the "conservative" groups believed, like them, that "bitches" and "faggots" were icky and that the Good Old Days when you could just call them "bitches" and "faggots" and beat them up were Good - and turned their rude stupidity into "free speech" so they could push back the pressure on them to be less-rude-and-less-stupid by slamming it as "woke" and "politically correct".

So all these rude, stupid wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Musk turning his new Twitter toy into a place where everyone can be rude and stupid to the people that wingnuts hate.

And that seems to be happening.

And if that's not "America 2022" I don't know what is.

A rich, greedy rude (and, it now seems, pretty stupid) "genius" makes a dumb move while baked because his rude and stupid fanbois are fapping to him making the dumb move, and in the process takes something that other non-rude, non-stupid people find useful to communicate and makes it ruder, stupider, and worse.

The fucking Post Office?

Medical care?

Politics?

It seems like there's nothing that 21st Century America can't find a way to let - or encourage - rich, greedy, stupid douchenozzles to make ruder, stupider, and worse.

So.

I'm hopeful that the good (not-rude, not-stupid) people I visit on Twitter (hi, Arielle Dror! Hi, Mark Hertling! Hi, Scamperbeasts!) don't go away if (when?) the Bird hits the window.

Perhaps that's the most irritating part about all this, and what makes me less "fascinated" and more "irked with the antics of greedy rich bastard"; that all these good people (and cats...) are going to take it in the shorts because some baked knucklehead has a bunch of rude stupid asshole fanbois.

But people, eh?

As one of my old platoon sergeants summed it up:

"Some fuckin' people could fuck up a wet dream."

Probably as pithy an epigram for the damned human race as was ever coined, and so, since I can't add anything, here's another cat picture.

I gotta go gas up the Prius. But I'll be back later with more less-rude less-stupidity.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

Frankly, I can't say it better than Jim Wright did, so instead of wasting your time blathering on about this, my forty-second Veteran's Day, I'm just going to hand you over to him.

I do want to emphasize Wright's point about the politically dangerous business of "heroing" soldiers in a notional democracy.

To lionize the military as we do, to exempt soldiers - because that's what "hero" does; it takes the object of that veneration out of the sordid business of daily living and makes them a shining object of veneration - from criticism and scrutiny is to make them the idols of your society. 

That's not "democracy". It is "militarism", the heart of totalitarian doctrines like fascism and soviet-style-communism.

Like Wright, I'm not vauntingly proud of what I did in the Army.

I did my time, and did it well. I had some good times, some bad time - though not as bad as the troops who had to fight real wars had - had a good laugh and came home sound.

Which is a damn "good war" all things considered.

I'm good with my past.

But I'm concerned for my and my children's future. So I want you to think - just as it made me think - about what Wright says about this day.

For as he has said elsewhere; if you want a better country, you have to be better citizens.

Talking to the hand

 One thing that has come up repeatedly in discussion of the current state of the Second Civil War - in the "cold war" phase, but, still... - is "how do you back the public away from the abyss" or, as Ael likes to put it, how do "...you start (really) talking to them."

I'll say upfront - I'm all in on jaw-jaw as better than war-war.

My point, and our problem, is that I don't see how there's a "jaw-jaw" that works with the 30% of the US public that's currently stroking their Trump flag and dreaming of revanche.

Back in 2016, when Trump was the frontrunner for the GOP, I characterized it's and his "platform" (as much as there was anything there other than Trump's million lies about criminal Mexicans and his beautiful health care and Infrastructure Week "plans") as fluffing plutocracy and tossing red meat on social issues to the Base.

I think we've seen that proven beyond a scintilla of doubt over the past four years. 

Trump's approval level and the 2020 popular vote suggests that about a third of the US public is hardcore Republican. That tracks with the base-level "crazification factor" of 2008 - about 27% of the public still "liked" Dick Cheney by that point. 

If you're all in for Darth Cheney after eight years of the Dubya Shitshow? You're a hardcore Republican.

So, now that we've seen how many of us they are, and what they are and what they want, what can we do to "really talk to them"? How many will talk back?

Let's take them as the groups in which they present themselves.

The Plutocrats.

The keystone of the GOP Archway to the Gilded Age are the fatcats. The 1%. The plutocrats and wanna-be oligarchs of business and finance. The people that the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" of 2017 were written for.

These folks were the ones that were shaved by FDR back in the Thirties and had to bend the knee because an infuriated public had the examples of the Soviet and Italian revolutions to look to, and were at least potentially likely to go to communist or fascist revolution if the US government hadn't done something to ease the brutality of the Dickensian/Randian crony capitalist society of 1929.

They hated that haircut, and have worked tirelessly and successfully to largely reverse it.

The Left has nothing to offer these people except safety from the popular mob. And the current lack of danger from the Left - there's nothing remotely resembling the weird coalition of muckraking journalists, militant (typically socialist or even communist) labor, and political strength ranging from Huey Long every-man-a-king "populist" to noblesse oblige aristos like FDR - means that the "danger" there is nonexistent and the need for "safety" is, as well.

The Rich have neutered "populism" by monkeywrenching the delusions and racism of white people. And since they have nothing to fear from the pop mob they have no real reason to compromise or even talk to the Left. They've succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the aristos that wrote the Constitution, so why give ground now?

The way arrant nonsense like "trickle-down economics" and "tax cuts create jobs" have succeeded with the public just confirm their wisdom. They're not going to fold unless they lose the bulk of their coalition, of which the next segment we'll talk about are

The Idealogues.

I'm not sure to what extent "true believers" make up any significantly large group within the Republican Party or the US Right in general. To the extent they do I'd have to say that they're living embodiment of Chief's Third Law of Republican Politics: "Any sufficiently ridiculous Republican idea is indistinguishable from magic."

(The other two are "Nobody went broke betting on the stupidity of the Republican voter" and "Never give a Republican the benefit of the doubt.")

I mean...you can't really believe ludicrous stuff like the contents of Atlas Shrugged or the Laffer Curve or the Ledeen Doctrine. Well, I suppose you can, but you'd be such a complete wanker so as to be unable to appear in public because you'd be too stupid to figure out how to unlock your front door.

But to the extent there are people who pretend enough to get the cosplay close to real, well...if you do believe this stuff I can't see a way to wrangle you out of that cult by talking sense to you. 

That sort of belief depends on utter disregard for actual practice and life experience, factual evidence, and common sense. You believe it because you WANT to believe it. It's like a religion or, more precisely, like a cult, and like both of those it's not about "talking" it's about belief.

Which brings us to two related groups,

The Bible-bangers and The QANuts.

I'm sorry, but to me there's no true distinction between "talking" to these two groups of fanatics. They both believe impossibilities so they can both be convinced to do atrocities and they can't be talked down out of their trees.

I'm not talking about nice suburban Presbyterians or douce Catholic church ladies. I'm talking the reeeeeal red-meat foursquare megachurch fanatics and the QANut-Pizzagate-conspiracy-threory-wingnut hordes.

Ever tried to discuss how unrealistic the basic tenets of monotheistic religion are with a real hardcore fundamentalist believer of any faith? The responses are either to simply shut off the conversation, or to respond by saying that faith is belief beyond reason.

I'm not saying "religion is bad"; religious faith has been the engine behind some of the great works of art, music, literature, and even politics in human history. It's also been behind some of the most appalling atrocities and horrors, which simply points up that it's 1) not "religion" per se but the tenets of the religion and 2) not religion but the people who are involved. 

One person creates a transcendent work of art, another slaughters other people for their "sins".

But regardless of the person involved, "talk" is a another term for "debate", and faith isn't debatable, it's based on emotion, not reason.

There's a rather sad little story in a recent NYT about some sort of QANut "meme queen" (paywall, so no point in linking) but the author sums up the whole futility of "talking" to these people pretty well:

“These people aren’t drooling, mind-controlled cultists,” Mr. Rothschild said. “People who are in Q like it. They like being part of it. You can’t debunk and fact-check your way out of this, because these people don’t want to leave.”

There's a sort of bizarre subset of these groups, or a parallel to them;

The Trumpkins.

MAGAts. Trump Cultists. People who either genuinely or performatively believe that Trump is like a living God.

I have NO fucking idea how to "talk" to these people. If you're literally in thrall to this mook after his four year reign of terror? I can't possibly have anything to say to you that you'll listen to, or whether you can get through to them with anything short of those "deprogramming" things they use on other culties

So, "talking" to any these cultists? Not really helpful.

 

The Racists.

Yeah, well.

The only real disconcerting part is how the sheer number of these sonsofbitches seems not to have dwindled since the Civil Rights Era and how, despite all the talking we're already done since the 1950s (and before), how they're still the same goddamn ignorant shithead racist sonsofbitches they were then.

Good luck with trying to talk to them about being less racist sonsofbitches. I'll go get some coffee and wait for you here.

The Gun Nuts.

I'd like to think that there's a reachable discussion here, simply because I'm a gun owner and enjoy both hunting and target shooting.

I think the problem is that there's a couple of subgroups within the larger assemblage of "gun owners" whose obsessions drive them into wildly and irretrievably into Right Wing politics; the "Second Amendment" cultists who have managed to completely blank out the "well-regulated militia" portion of the amendment as well as the documented reasons that it was added, the "Fallujah-cosplayers" who want the military hardware without the nuisance of actually having to join a service.

The bottom line is that there's no demonstrable reason to assume that the Founder and Framers wanted to reserve the "right" of Joe and Molly to overthrow the US government. 

(Hint - That's why we have fucking voting..!) 

But these people - and I think this includes the weird sub-subgroups like the "open carry" loons and sovereign citizens - believe they did, and seem to have gone way too far into the weeds to be talked back; they're the American equivalent of those post-WW2 Japanese troopers who hid out in the jungle.

And the thing is that I've been involved in "talking" to the real hardccore gun cultists and there's always something. You mention background checks and there's always a hardcore that tells you it's a slippery slope to confiscation. It's all paranoia about "confiscation" all the way down, no matter how reasonable you start. The notion that any and every jamoke can tote a semiautomatic assault rifle knockoff isn't really a good idea can't even get through the door because if so, confiscation is next.

I'm not sure these people are gettable. I'd like to think so and I think it makes sense to try and have a sensible discussion of "what is a reasonable well-regulated firearms policy". But given my experience when I've tried? 

I'm not super hopeful.

The Social Conservatives.

I'm calling these the "gays-are-icky" group. They're not the American Taliban-type religious nuts from above that think anything but penis-in-vagina sex is a Sin and that God Hates Fags, but the "I-think-we-should-all-dress-and-act-normal-like-me" people who have been convinced that electing "liberals" mean every kindergartner will be forced to have Drag Queen Story Hour every friday after naptime.

 Here's the thing about them.

They can't have what they want.

They can force the trans kid into a certain potty. They can force the gays or lesbians back into the closet, and by that I mean in any way. They need to accept that other people's behavior (that doesn't involve physical or political danger to others) is neither their business nor their problem.

If they can be willing to buy into that? Fine.

But if "talking" to them includes throwing all those non-cis-het-"normie" people under the bus?

No. That's not okay.

So there's "talking"...but the "talk" has bounds, and if they're not willing to accept those, the talk probably won't convince them of much.

The Rest.

This is where I lump the generic "conservative"; not a wannabe Roeckfeller, not fanatically religious, not a conspiracy theorist, not a crazed Trumpkin, not a lunatic gun-humper. These people are as close to what used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans" as 2021 can come. The groups above probably call these people "RINOs". They accept the fundamental tenets of the New Deal - that unrestrained "capitalism" is dangerously punitive and you need to balance it with intelligent regulations and some sort of "safety net" to help the people run over by corporate power.

It's pretty much what the Master Chief was until Newt Gingrich's Contract on America drove him out of the GOP because he could see through the transparent bullshit.

Can we talk to these folks? Sure. They're not going to agree on everything - they'll want more guns and less butter, for one thing - but they'll agree on enough of the basics that we can at least agree to disagree.

But...how much of the GOP is left for them?

It's pretty obvious that the real nutjobs - the cultists of whatever sort - are by far the dominant force in the GOP right now. I'd say that something like half of the GOP are MAGAts, QANuts, Christopaths, or some version of the gun-nut/sovereign citizen/Klansman type. Another half of the remaining half are plutocrats. 

That leaves only about a quarter - so something like 7-8% of the US public - as the sane conservatives we can talk to.

Which is why I keep coming back to how utterly fucked we are.

If a third of the public doesn't care even though they've lived through the GOP's malfeasance killing hundreds of thousands during a pandemic disease.

And three-quarters of the remaining third are too far gone to even get to the table, much less to some sort of accomodation.

How the hell do you have a "We, the People" left out of the remaining third-and-change?

I truly, honestly, frustratingly don't know.

I know you have to for a functional democratic republic.

But if you don't...if you can't?

That's what really worries me.

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.

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.

On their behalf

One thing that used to kind of drive me nuts when I was a GI was listening to other GIs complain about "American society".

First, because half the time what they were complaining about was utter bullshit, the same sort of bullshit that GIs talk about money, alcohol, sex, and politics. It was based on stuff they'd seen on Fox News or Entertainment Tonight or heard on Rush or from some other bomb-throwing moron. It had about as much to do with "American society" as a picture from some girlie magazine has to do with a real woman.

Second, because it was almost uniformly complaining about how "American society" was soft and squishy, coddling criminals and giving money to poor people, worrying about sensitivity and kindness instead of being the sort of tough, hard-assed, "realistic" place that had hacked this country out of the howling wilderness with a jug of 'shine and a coonskin cap, goddamn it. The real problem with "American society" was that Americans weren't enough like Spartans, and I've already noted how I feel about that bullshit.

Anyway, this came up because one of the blogs I follow occasionally is written by a former USAF type. It's usually one of those "change from the inside" sorts of things, with the author trying to highlight things that he'd like to see change about the USAF. This week, though, he passed on some sort of screed from another wing-wiper that has supposedly gone viral. The blog's author says:

"His message struck a chord. At last count, it had been shared more the 23,000 times on Facebook and was popping up in news feeds prolifically. I had Grogan’s message sent to me privately by no less than a two dozen airmen in the last day or so, all encouraging me to share and comment on it."

The referenced "message" is an open letter to...someone - other servicepeople? The U.S. public? - as the writer ETS's from the USAF.

I won't give you the full text; you can follow the link if you want. But the TL:DR version is "You people are petty and soft. You're not worth my service." The message-writer complains that he barely makes $15 an hour and has deployed repeatedly whilst his fellow citizens "...give more attention and respect to stars and animals then we do to those who continue to give their lives for this country." He bitches about Caitlyn Jenner and Cecil the Lion, and that nobody remembers the names of the five guys blown away in Tennessee by "a terrorist".

You all know this guy. He's the guy at your VFW, or down at the local newsstand, or the bus stop, who will rant about "decadence" and "the homosexual agenda" and "political correctness." Tell me you haven't heard this from one of these guys before:

"If we as a society don’t toughen up and grow thick skin then we will definitely lose the battle to those who wish ill will upon us. Perception is reality, and right now we are more scared of speaking our mind and hurting someones feelings versus doing the right thing."

So. Yeah. This guy ETSed...because his fellow citizens are more obsessed with "Dancing With The Stars" than their troops lost in imperial cabinet wars most of them barely understand...or are barely understandable, period? Because "society" isn't tough enough? This guy's problem with taking Sammy's paycheck is that the society he serves isn't a stern, hard, ruthless society, hard as Krupp steel.

Let's remember that this guy was serving in the most powerful military on the planet, one capable of putting a "warhead on the forehead" (as he himself describes his work for the USAF) of an individual mook a gajillion miles away from the shores of North America. That seems plenty "tough" to me. If the public that funds that armed force could give a rat's ass about it because they want to know more about the Kardashians or Cecil the Lion that seems more like a testimonial to the civil peace that armed force has brought rather than a warning that the society needs to become more spartan.

Do we need soldiers? Sure. "Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf", Orwell said. But one of the things that sometimes drives me fucking nuts is that those violent men sometimes forget that their violence is not an obligation on the peaceful sleepers to be as violent as they are. We've seen those sorts of societies, and they are very unpleasant places indeed.

So that's basically what this comes down to; a guy who haz sadz because his country is frivolous and nonviolent. Who is ready to stop taking a government check because of all the fluffy bunny sensitivity around him, who longs for Sparta. His country can afford guns, butter, and "sensitivity" and driver training, that pays him a decent wage to serve all the above - and between pay and allowances he was doing a hell of a lot better than someone working the downstairs at Jiffy Lube part-time - and this dude don't like that?

Wow, sorry, guy.

Cry me a river.

I guess there's always Jiffy Lube.

This is why we can't have nice things. This. Is fucking why.

And, surprisingly, it's not "Short Time" Sam Alito's Himalayan-massif-like mountain of stupid that is the Hobby Lobby v. Burwell decision.

And, yet, it is, but not for the reason that most of my friends are furious about it.

Yes, it privileges one sect of Christianity over others, including other non-fundie Christian sects, thus violating the Establishment Clause. Yes, it's a remarkable dick-slap in the face of women and especially women not born to the two-yacht family. Yes, it's hypocritical, given the business' owners support of other contraceptive manufacturers. Yes, yes, yes...

But you know what the REALLY insidious thing about this gelatinous mass of fucktardry is?

That it equates ignorant credulity with intelligent reason.

Here's the deal. One of the main points that the Jesus-pesterers who own this outfit objected to was that several of the forms of birth control purchaseable under the ACA were, in their opinion, "abortifacients" - they popped little blastocyst-Americans out of their proto-mommy's womb like teensy pry-bars and thus made Baby Jesus cry or something.

The facts were completely in opposition. These things - including the "Plan B" pill and a couple of IUD's - prevented implantation rather than "aborted" an actual fertilized zygote. Doctors and researchers from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists noted "...there is a scientific distinction between a contraceptive and an abortifacient and the scientific record demonstrates that none of the FDA-approved contraceptives covered by the Mandate are abortifacients."

Pretty straightforward, right? You can get to fight this because you don't want to pay for your employee's birth control (and good luck with that, given both the case law and popular opinion...) but not because you don't like the idea of funding her post-hootchie time abortion...because what you're paying for is NOT abortion. You just BELIEVE it is.

Now Sam Alito comes along and makes his bid for the imperial crown of Emperor-for-Life of the Stupids:

"It is not for the Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable."

Got that? Your "belief" may be completely in opposition to cold, hard, established fact. You may believe that dogs are ducks. You may believe that the Sun is a giant heat-lamp in God's bathroom. You may believe that women are life-support systems for a womb. And...if you really, really, really believe that, then Sam Alito's Supreme Court, the highest seat of legal opinion in our nation, isn't going to tell you you're as full of shit as a three-day-old-diaper and to knock it the hell off and grow another brain cell.

Now. What's interesting to me about this is that on the comment thread about this on my Facebook page, one of the wingtards opined: "Labeling the people who disagree with you "stupid" is as bad as labeling the people who disagree with you "immoral"." Which is basically what Short-Time Sam is saying. You want to believe something impossible? Something ridiculous? And, more importantly, you want to make people who are dependent on you, who may not believe in that stupid ridiculous belief act in line with your stupid belief? Fine. We, the highest court in the land, are not going to tell you that you are a fucking idiot and that you need to smarten up, stop doing stupid things, and stop trying to make smarter people around you do those stupid fucking things.

No. We're going to tell you to go ahead and go Full On Stupid, because Jesus tells you to.

I have NO problem labeling that "stupid". It IS stupid. When my ignorant opinion is accorded the same weight as your fact? That's stupid.

That's one reason we can't have nice things; because a pantsload of our fellow citizens are doing Full Stupid because they believe Jesus (or whatever the heck they worship; God, Allah, Zoroaster, Mammon, Ayn Rand, who the hell knows...) tells them so.

As Ruth Ginsberg said in her dissent: "Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations..?"

Based on Emperor Sam of the Stupids, yes, apparently.

So that's all very idiotic and depressing but, no. Here's the thing that really depresses me. Here's the real reason that the rest of us can't have good things:

Okay, this is the last point: What are the costs? What are the consequences of this, other than just that it’s an oppressive system and it sucks to live in a small town where Wal-Mart is the only retailer, and it sucks to be a farmer who’s having your livelihood crushed. What are the costs?

The costs are the end of democracy, the costs are the end of liberty. The real issue with Wal-Mart is not that it sucks to live in a small town, it’s that the Walton family now controls as much wealth as 41.5 percent of all Americans. One family with as much wealth as 130 million Americans. Now, who’s gonna get listened to when they show up on Capitol Hill? Or in the State House? Or the Town Hall? Is it Mrs. Smith? Or is it going to be the Walton family?

Of course.

And all this accumulation continues still. This accumulation of wealth and power is getting worse and worse and worse. So, the cost is the loss of our democracy and the loss of our liberties.

So: this is how the great populist period of the 20th Century ends; not with a bang. Not even with a whimper, but with the sound of a cash drawer closing on the nation we grew up in.

What's infuriating to me is that this isn't a surprise, this isn't a black swan. We've been here before, been under the boot of the plutocrats and the malefactors of great wealth. We know that that's bad, for us, anyway, and we know how to change that, and we're choosing not to, we're choosing instead to slide restively but quitely into the New Feudalism, the New Gilded Age, rather than to fight...because there IS nowhere to fight. The popular press is owned by the same people who own everything else, and there is no other path to public attention; the failure of Occupy proved that. If you cannot gain the licking of the lickspittle press you will be drowned out, turned away, ridiculed, and emasculated. You cannot hope to gain the attention, let alone the furor, of the huge unmoving slorg that is the American Public.

The gates are high, and the gatekeepers are all paid to keep us out.

And the alternative is what the People gave the Bourbons and the Romanovs. And we know how those ended; with Men on Horseback, ruin, and merciless hatred.

It's late, and I'm tired, and unhappy, and dispirited. I wish I could see another end to this story, a happy, sunshiny ending full of rainbows and sparkle ponies. But I can't and I don't. All I can do is rail at the blind stupidity of people like the Walton clan and Short-Time Sam Alito, Emperor-for-Life of the Stupid People, and the owners of the Hobby Lobby and the Teabaggers who love them. They are dragging us down to a damnation of their own making in the name of Freedom! and salvation and though I will be safely in my dirt bed by the time their promises are fullfilled all I can see is the yawning Pit and the fire and the hell that await my children.

Decoration Day 2014

My daughter is up early, as usual. She's just a natural morning person, and she loves to watch the "My Little Pony" reruns the kid channel shows before 9:00am.

I've been trained into getting up early ever since my first week in Reception Station, so I get up with her, and we cuddle, and then I go make coffee and check my e-mail and my Facebook feed.

Today, as always, there are all sorts of "inspirational" stories about soldiers and "tributes" to the recent veterans of our land wars in Asia, because, frankly, most civilians haven't the slightest fucking idea of the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day but they do feel a sort of vague sense of wanting to do the "right thing".

And I'm sitting here reading my friends Facebook posts and I can't help but think this as I read all the Memorial Day stuff.

I'm glad you're thinking about your soldiers today. At least for one day. I'm glad you are concerned about them and wish them well.

But, frankly, if you really care for and want to do something for American soldiers, you might want to be paying more attention to what your "leaders" are doing in your name. You might want to take a hard, hard look at those people who want to send your soldiers into harm's way to accomplish impossible missions like "fighting terrorism". You might want to work against electing morons who have a penchant for doing moronic things like starting land wars in Asia. You might want to think about what happens to those who don't die in wars, and that only those dead have seen an end to war. That the VA "scandal" is really that a coterie of grifters and sonsofbitches lied to you that war could be painless and cheap, waved a flag and frightened you with the idea of dusky terrorists under your bed and you bought it, or, at least, you did nothing to stop it, and now there are thousands of young men and women who will take the mental and physical wounds of those lies to their graves.

You might consider that the best way to honor our war dead is to make damn sure that our "leaders" have damn good reasons for making more of them.

I know most of you here already know that.

But you might take a moment to remind your friends who don't that they might take a moment to consider all that before they return to their regularly scheduled barbeque.

And, as always on Memorial Day, this.

Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?

Remember Sammy the Whiny Seal we talked about back in February?

Well, turns out that that Dark Nexus of infomercials, CNN, has brewed a tempest in...I don't know, something smaller and less significant than a teacup. A shotglass? (Probably appropriate, since the whole damn nonsense makes me want to drink heavily).

I won't bother you with the sissy-fight, something about which sailor put two rounds in Osama's ten-ring. Go read the article at the link, if you care.

But here's what bugs me. Back in the day we fought dangerous people. Seriously dangerous guys, people who controlled entire armies, fleets, scads of big ol' bombers loaded with torpedoes and five-hundred pound blobs of high explosive. Guys who could command the actions of millions of hard-core, well-trained, dangerous sons-of-bitches.

Well, it took millions of us, but we fought them, and won. And then went back to work, making cars, building houses, watching television, electing rubes and gomers, stealthily gettin' busy after the kids went to bed. Y'know, being regular civilians in a nation at peace.

We got over ourselves, is what I'm saying. We seem to have gotten over getting over ourselves, if this ridiculous nonsense over who actually put bullets in the World's Tallest Saudi is any indication. Faced with the saddest lot of raggedy-ass fundamentalist wannabees we have let ourselves become some sort of quasi-Star Wars Empire, farkling about all over the world, torturing and disappearing people, and letting folks who shouldn't be allowed to run a raffle directing our politics and military operations that most of us don't know - or, much care - about. We're at perpetual war, and yet, who gives a shit?

The guy who shot down the aircraft carrying ADM Isoroku Yamamoto, who could have wreaked more havoc in his sleep than Osama could have on his Best Day Ever,

"...joined the 449th Fighter Squadron in China, still flying P-38s. He claimed three further Japanese planes probably destroyed and damaged, but he was shot down on his 139th mission, bailing out near Kiukiang on April 29. He was rescued by Chinese civilians, who treated his injuries and escorted him to safety five weeks later. At the end of the war, Barber attained the rank of major and commanded one of America's first jet squadrons. He retired as a colonel in 1961."

Guy didn't get out with four years to run until retirement. He didn't get into a public pissing contest with CPT Lanphier, the other guy involved in the shootdown.

It was just another day at war. And when the war was over - which We the People WANTED it to be - we got on with the business of getting back to business.

Now, this. It's perfect; the entire business of this ridiculous "War on Terror" in a shotglass. Neverending. Inconclusive. Utterly meaningless. But chock-full of noisy, furious bullshit.

Who gives a shit who "killed bin Laden"? We soldiers were once taught that we were a team; that every one of us was important to completing the mission, from the chancre-mechanic that gave us our plague shot to the guy who drove the truck that took our Class V down to the port of embarkation, to the cooks who mermited our hot chow up to the firebase to the guy who pulled security while we slept.

And, yet, here we are; sitting at home listening to a couple of knuckleheads pissing down each others' legs about who shot some scruffy wog in a dirty house in butt-rump Pakistan. And CNN, which should have a pantsload of better things to talk about (How did Osama manage to sit around Abbotabad - described as location of "...the regimental headquarters for the Frontier Force Regiment, the Baloch Regiment and Pakistan Army Medical Corps and Kakul Military Academy..." - for years without our old pal Pakistan giving us the heads-up..?), that managed to pass the tenth anniversary of the Iraq Debacle without so much as a whimper of discontent that the montebanks, grifters, thugs, and stooges that lied us into that Mess-o-potamia (and comprehensively screwed what was going on in Afghanistan in the process) are still with us, nattering on Morning Joe and Meet the Press as if they weren't as complicit as Bob MacNamara in getting a bunch of Americans killed in somebody else's goddamn civil war.

If that doesn't say something about us, and something not very complimentary, I don't know what the hell it does.

We petty men

Tomorrow is the Tin Anniversary of the Third Gulf War.



I wish I had something to post better than Charlie Pierce, but I don't. So I will merely direct you to his scathing reminder that we petty men will - now and forever - creep between the broken legs of the statue in Firdos Square and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

The war may have killed thousands but completely spared the lives and even the public careers of the wretched, greedy, cowardly liars that summoned it from the depths of the Eblis of national fear, violence, and hubris. And we have chosen to accept that without demur. That is our shame. That is our crime; not that we committed the wrong but that we did not punish it when we saw that it was wrong.

The persistence of these Tin Gods in the public life of our nation is, and should be, a great enduring unbearable shame to us, all of us, us the We the People who were entrusted with the honor and truth of this nation. We have chosen to be a nation of Men rather than a nation of Law, chosen comfortable dishonor above painful rectitude, chosen the deaths of others rather than to sacrifice ourselves.

When our generation is remembered it should be for that, and for that above all. Whatever good we have done, whatever kindnesses we may do, the crimes for which we hung the defeated leaders of Nazi Germany, the crime of making aggressive war, the "crimes against peace" of Nuremberg; the crimes of others that by our acceptance and indifference we have made our own, will remain with us always. Like the unquiet ghosts of the dead of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Basra, like the mournful fragments of the GIs flown home inside plastic sacks, and like the cries of the headscarved women, weeping for sons and fathers and lovers vanished in the morning mists that rise above the Tigris as the merciless dawn floods the watermeadows with light as red as blood.

Labor Nunc Nihil Vincit

Remember yesterday, how I mentioned that just looking at the news is difficult for me?

Well, here's a great example; from today's "Lawyers, Guns & Money" roundup of labor news. A neat little package of despair in six inches of tidy 11-point Arial type.

This is exactly the sort of thing I mean; this is what's so damn deadly depressing. A functioning republic depends on, well, small-r republicans. It depends on a citizenry that is engaged in the business of self-government, has the information to conduct that business intelligently and in their own best interests (and to know what those interests are), and has the confidence, means, and opportunity enough to speak up and act.

And that, in turn, depends on those citizens being well-enough-off and secure enough in their livelihoods to be all the above.

A servile wage-slave that may be canned for any excuse or no excuse at all, who is one paycheck away from genuine poverty, who has to cling to his or her boss' favor or face penury and disaster is not really a "citizen" in any real sense. While they may not be a literal slave they have little more power than one. While they may be "free" in technical terms that "freedom" means nothing more than the freedom to starve if they run afoul of the powerful people who really matter in an oligarchic United States.

So if I was an oligarch I would be all in favor of making American's jobs' less lucrative, more insecure, more difficult and dangerous, and more scarce.

The real question I can't answer is; why would anyone else be in favor of this?

And yet, that has been the great arc of our nation over the past forty years, nearly the whole of my life.

Why? Why the hell would anyone who genuinely believed in the Republic, who truly believed in We the People AS the sovereign of the Republic, sit idly by and let that happen? Are foolish and petty fulminations over silly bits of trivia like firearms, abortion, gays, burning flags, and pointless foreign wars, is the craving for cheap imported plastic crap, so fucking crucial to people's lives as to make these people - who are not likely to benefit from the destruction of the free citizenry - embrace this destruction?

I cannot come to any other conclusion, and yet that conclusion is profoundly grim.

Sailor Slighted

Came across this article in the on-line Esquire mag yesterday.

The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden...Is Screwed is written by someone named Phil Bronstein and advertises itself as

"...the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tells his story — speaking not just about the raid and the three shots that changed history, but about the personal aftermath for himself and his family."

It is, as advertised, largely about the raid on Abbottabad on 6 MAY 2011.

That part's just your basic war story, a story about what might be the most famous night raid in recent history, but, still...just another no-knock entry in the thousands the U.S. Army, Marine, and Navy infantry have been doing since 2002. Read it, if you will. It's your bread-and-butter light infantry operation that at least partially accomplished the mission (Just me, but it would have been nice to have hauled ol' Osama back for a Nuremberg-style tribunal, but, whatev'; First Rule of War - Shit Happens).

Hooah, raid team. AAMs for everyone!

Sorry. Army joke.

But, kidding aside, that wasn't really what I got out of it. I've done my share of MOUT, just not with the live rounds and the angry Arabs. Didn't really need the lyrics to know how that song goes.

I did have a strong reaction to the piece, but probably not what the author wanted. What he wanted is pretty clear; to get the reader angry about "...the startling failure of the United States government to help its most experienced and skilled warriors carry on with their lives" Between the raid story the article centers around a long litany of complaints that this guy and his fellow Seal team members are getting screwed.

"But when he officially separates from the Navy three months later, where do his sixteen years of training and preparedness go on his résumé? Who in the outside world understands the executive skills and keen psychological fortitude he and his First Tier colleagues have absorbed into their DNA? Who is even allowed to know? And where can he go to get any of these questions answered? There is a Transition Assistance Program in the military, but it's largely remedial level, rote advice of marginal value: Wear a tie to interviews, not your Corfam (black shiny service) shoes. Try not to sneeze in anyone's coffee. There is also a program at MacDill Air Force Base designed to help Special Ops vets navigate various bureaucracies. And the VA does offer five years of benefits for specific service-related claims — but it’s not comprehensive and it offers nothing for the Shooter's family.

"It's criminal to me that these guys walk out the door naked," says retired Marine major general Mike Myatt. "They're the greatest of their generation; they know how to get things done. If I were a Fortune 500 company, I'd try to get my hands on any one of them." General Myatt believes "the U.S. military is the best in the world at transitioning from civilian to military life and the worst in the world at transitioning back." The Special Operations men are special beyond their operations. "These guys are self-actualizers," says a retired rear admiral and former SEAL I spoke with. "Top of the pyramid. If they wanted to build companies, they could. They can do anything they put their minds to. That's how smart they are."

But what's available to these superskilled retiring public servants? "Pretty much nothing," says the admiral. "It's 'Thank you for your service, good luck.'"

I hate to be this way, but...guys? Lemme sing you a little song I know:

"In time of danger or in war
God and the soldier we adore.
Danger past and all things righted
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted."

Some British grunt wrote that song in fucking 1645.

Ain't no different three hundred and fifty years later. If nobody told you that in Reception Station?

They should have.

I mean, yeah; it sucks to be this guy. I get that. It sucks to be an imperial grunt in a country that is fiercely pretending NOT to be fighting colonial wars, so much so that it that is practically jamming its fists into its collective ears and shrieking "ICAN'THEARYOUlalalalalala!" rather than accept what it is doing to the legionaries it is sending out to do the dirty deeds it doesn't want to hear about or is pretending are the military equal of storming ashore on the Normandy beaches instead of the vile, ugly business of suppressing foreign rebellions in shitty parts of the world.

That's the reality. You can hate it. But you can't pretend you didn't know that going in, especially now after ten goddamn years of it.

A couple of other things;

1. The article is full of sad about how the poor dude is getting screwed over because he's getting out with jack shit; "Anyone who leaves early also gets no pension, so he is without income. Even if he had stayed in for the full twenty, his pension would have been half his base pay: $2,197 a month. The same as a member of the Navy choir."

Ummm.

I know they told you that shit in Repo. You don't do your twenty, I don't care if you're Audie Fucking Murphy; you get squat. Always have, always will. You sing in the choir for 20 years, you get the brass ring. 19.9 years of hard fighting? Bupkis. Them's the rules. You may not like that, but you can't complain you didn't know that.

The article keeps talking about the Shooter "retiring". Dude; this guy ain't "retiring". He's ETSing short of retirement. Get your military terminology straight, Phil. And if you ETS short of your 20-year letter, you get...? C'mon, say it with me now..."jack"...and what else?

"Shit?"

Sorry, man. That's how it works. If the author didn't get that somebody he talked to should have squared him away. It makes the guys in ST6 sound like whiners, and I'm sure they wouldn't want that.

And this guy is described as all jacked up physically (which I believe; 16 years as a grunt would have crocked me up. Hell, they DID, in a way.). Why isn't he getting out on a medical? You CAN retire medically short of twenty. Why no discussion about that?

Next?

2. Here's the thing that completely baffled me; there's a ton of talk in this article about how special these special operators are, how any CEO and Wall Street firm and school district should be killing themselves to get them, how they're the best of the best of the best?

So where the hell was the Navy re-up guy?

The Shooter says he doesn't want to be a shooter any more. OK, fine. I'm not a squid but I'll bet there's tons of jobs in the USN that don't require a guy to bust a cap in Abu's ass. PAC clerk? Third shop? Stores? Chief of the Boat?

Plus, if these guys really were all self-actualizing and entrepreneurial as the article implies, wouldn't you think that the USN would be begging them to stay in and provide all this special leadership as senior NCOs.

Over at MilPub Al just talked about the importance of those salty old Navy chiefs; why isn't this guy moving on from the hard-core hooah infantry fun to a cushy job the regular Navy? Beer and skittles aboard a carrier? Why isn't he heading up the path towards CPO? Why doesn't anyone in this article talk about these guys as future Master Chief Petty Officers of the Navy, as the future Kings of the Goat Locker?

Could it be...that for all the stuff in the article about how special these guys are, when you come down to it - with 16 years in the Navy this Shooter has about the same experience with troop leadership and organizational management as an infantry squad leader, an E-6 on his second or even the end of his first enlistment?

And that the sort of senior leadership you need to have to be a good Chief Petty Officer for a big organization - running a division or being Chief of the Boat - or even be a good teacher, or a stockbroker...requires more, and very different, skills than just "a fist to the helmet"?

And that these guys have, in essence, been frozen in place as infantry squaddies for more than a decade?

There's always been tension between the special operations organizations and the line dogs, but one of the reasons for that is this; these guys ARE good. They're among the best light infantrymen in the world. As a former grunt medic, I gotta respect that.

But.

That's ALL they are.

The Regular Army's problem with senior SF NCOs has always been that - short of the supposed-wartime mission of creating indig armies - an E-7 in SF is a nothing more than a super squad leader. He doesn't even get the experience of leading a platoon of grunts, let alone the experience with combined arms and the logistic and operational business of troop-leading in a combined arms battle.

So could it be that the reason the Navy re-up NCO wasn't chasing this guy is that even with 16 years in he's not really considered all that terrific as a potential line Navy chief?

I don't know, but it makes me wonder; is the Navy and, by inference, the other services doing these guys any favors allowing them to, or making them, make a home in these special operations units? If they really don't have any civilian skills, shouldn't we be making it easy for them to do their thirty years in the Navy (or Army, or Marines) and retire full of years, honors, and a fat pension?

Makes me wonder, anyway.

And finally...

3. There's the obligatory hat-tip to the Crazy Mad National Defending Skilz that these wars are supposed to have been All About; "The Shooter himself, an essential part of the team helping keep us safe since 9/11, is now on his own."

Don't get me wrong. This guy and his teammates have been fighting hard. They've been doing everything they've been asked to do, and more.

But a lot of that fighting has had nothing to do with "keeping us safe."

Everything they did in Iraq?

Not.

A hell of a lot that went down in Afghanistan, that involved chasing angry tribesmen around and around the mountains?

Not.

And the other stuff? The secret wars in places like Yemen and Somalia?

Who the hell knows? But probably some yesses, some noes.

Look. I was a soldier for years. In a lot of ways I'm still stuck inside the Green Machine. I want my soldier brothers - and that includes this guy, who for all that he wore blue, has fought as a grunt for more than a decade - to get the best life they can out of the nation and the People who employ them.

But I think that a big part of that means that the People should get the whole story about our guys; good, bad, and indifferent. And told straight out, without the attempt to "sell" the guys to the Public. I think that the Public might, just might, for one thing, start wondering why these guys have been doing this for twelve years, and whether it is really "keeping us safe", and whether there might be better ways to do this both for us and for them.

And I don't think that a big part of this article really helps with that instead of just turning it into another war story.

So; question - what do you think? Am I reading too much into this? Is this sort of article part of the problem, part of the solution, both, or neither?

Where would you start..?

You all probably know that I am not sanguine about the prospects for my country in the long term. Even in the medium term, for that matter. The forces of entropy combined with the forces of oligarchy are simply too strong.

The resurgent power of the myopic rich, for example, who have like their predecessors the Bourbons learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the last time they shat the national bed back in 1929. The decayed public press that seems every day more and more supine and fawning towards the purveyors of power (both in government and in "business", to whatever degree those institutions may be distinguished from one another these days...), wealth, and celebrity while both ignorant and contemptuous of those of us not wealthy, powerful, or a guest on this week's Oprah.

The utter lack of power, and influence on the levers of power, of those individuals or institutions that DO lean towards fighting for those of us not in the two-yacht family; the labor unions, the muckraking journalists, the iconoclastic politicians.

No. I do not see this nation being anything but colder, leaner, viler, and less welcoming for those of us not born to the purple in the coming years.

But that is merely the "big picture" sense I have of the current arc of the United States. There's no genuine frisson of immediate fear there, no bright flash of sudden fury; just a slow, smouldering groundfire of anger at the coterie of inelegant fucktards whose gibbering idiocy pushes my country back to the future of the Gilded Age at home and constant inchoate farkling about overseas.

Rather, it is when I am forcibly confronted with the immense magnitude of the sort of short-term, immediate dumbfuckery my nation is engaged in both at home and abroad that I really despair.

And the real reason is; let's assume for the sake of argument that a critical mass of both the public, the press, and our government officials - 54%, let's say, of every one of those groups - woke up tomorrow slapping their collective and individual foreheads and groaning "What the fuck have we done?", resolving immediately to take action to address the issues currently rending our body politic

...massive unemployment, deepening financial inequality, the continuing desuetude of a large dienfranchised portion of the citizenry, the trifecta of poverty-ignorance-want that have that portion a subtraction on our collective polity rather than an addition to it, and a ridiculously misapplied "defense" policy that drenches our military with largesse while the only active foe is a band of raggedy-assed jihadi wannabes and the only even-close-to-peer-foe is too busy poisoning itself to even come close to taking a whack at us while refusing to even attempt to take a clearheaded view of where all that money and time is going...

my thought would be...what the hell could they do about it?

About a quarter to a third of the public is completely lost. Drowned in tinfoil hat fears of islamic enemies and drenched in idiotic obsessions with trivia utterly disconnected with the welfare of the commons - things like abortion, prayer in schools, vote fraud, and whatever-the-hell-other bizarre shit Fox News has shoved through their ear- and eyeholes into their tiny little brains, they will not ever consent to rational government. Charlie Pierce neatly sums up the approach that this toxic minority, this confederacy of dunces, brings to the Republic;

"All the politicians and all the people down there covering them, and all the people who are now expressing such utter disbelief that poo-flinging monkeys fling poo. We have had at least two years — I would argue at least two decades — of organized denial of what the Republican party actually has made of itself. We have had at least two years — I would argue at least three decades — of tolerating barely disguised nihilism as legitimate conservative thought. Now, chickens are back on the roost, the inmates are running the asylum, and crows do sit upon the capitol, and compromise never has been rendered more of a curse than it was today."

There's just no there there. No sanity, no proportionality, no civic duty, just the filthy raw greed of feral children who see no need for the game to continue if they don't get everything exactly as they want it.

And because the lunatic that doesn't just threaten but is really willing to blow up the orphanage will always have the advantage over the sane people who don't want the orphans to die these fucktards will always have the ability to knock over the milk carton.

And that's just the proles. Amongst the nobility, in and among our governing classes there is the block-like stupidity and persistence of fucktardry that comes with the complete lack of accountability or even fear of accountability, of anyone anywhere within the structures of political power for such fucktardry.

Think of something fucked up that has happened since September 11, 2001. Invading sovereign nations based on lies. Warrentless spying. Secret prisons. Torture. The utterly insane and dysfunctional metastasizing of the national security state. Foreign entanglements conducted without the slightest shred of evidence of national interests and, in fact, often the strong evidence of the likelihood of harmful blowback.

And who has paid for these, whether in terms of public shame or private suffering?

Where are the prosecutions, the convictions, the imprisonment of the torturers? Of the people who ginned up "aggressive war" that sent those nasty evil Nazis to the gallows? The people who murdered helpless captives during "enhanced interrogation" AND those who authorized those interrogations AND those whose literally-tortured legalese paved the wide path to Hell for those interrogations? Who spied on people without warrants or without any real reason other than "suspicion"? Who are part of the Obama Administration's Star Chamber, where death warrants are signed and delivered without a shred of speedy and public trial or any evidence at all, for all we know?

So it appears to me that we have lost any hope of gaining the attention of the our rulers, even assuming that there was not an indigestible bloc among the citizenry that would fight any such attention-demanding AND that there was a genuinely decent press to amplify and clarify such a demand.

The well we have dug ourselves (not the vast well of inequality and undemocracy we are delving in the future but the immediate malfosse of stupidity, greed, anger, sloth, and all the other Vices we have let ourselves indulge so freely in) is, therefore, so deep and so dark that we do not seem able to even see into it, much less pull ourselves away from it.

The voices crying out that the danger is not just ahead but upon us are few, scattered, and too weak to penetrate the fog of indolence and stupidity that lies so thickly over the U.S. public.

This notional sovereign is asleep, or distracted, or mad, and the ship of state seems destined for some unknown iceberg somewhere ahead that I cannot see and do not conceive of but cannot imagine is not waiting for us. And given that we cannot seem to agree, much less address, these immediate and obvious fooleries I have no hope, none, that the prospect for a safe landfall for my children or their children is toward.

I simply can't imagine; if you were to spark such a hope, where the hell would you start?

Down Among the Dead Men

The past couple of weeks I've been working on a project just inside one of the Olympic National Park areas. It's located on the southeastern edge of the great wilderness, just at the toes of the mountains and close to the inland waterway of Hood Canal.

It's a terrible project, really; the contractor was chosen (as usual) based on their willingness to low-bid the job, and (as usual) this means that everything is cheap and on the down-low.

The work I'm involved in requires this contractor to perform a rather difficult technical task and because said contractor was chosen not on their ability to perform said task speedily and well but (as usual) because they were the cheapest fucker willing to actually bid on the work - several people in their line of work looked at the job and walked away saying that they did not think it was technically possible.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to write this wasn't because of that.

Or because the place we're working is of a monumental and almost frightening beauty, a bit of the old wild lands that has only been superficially tamed; domiciled, not domesticated.

The fierce unwelcomingness of the untamed land is not far from the edge of the works of Man, not far beyond the edge of the trail or outside the light-circle of the camp cabins. The woods are dark, and deep, and they seem to remember the times before the firstcomers ventured up from the strand line eyes wide with the fear of the forests; panic fear, the terror of the gods of the twilight under the boughs.

But this is an illusion.

The land was settled, and logged, generations ago. All along the road north from the central valley, in the little hollows along the great water to the east are the remnants of the little logging towns still lingering on after the great days of the caulks and the timber fellers have passed away.

I have been staying in the little town of Hoodsport, which was so small as to never have even had such days. But not far south is the seat of Mason County, Shelton, which is one of many such here in Washington and Oregon.

If you stay on Railroad Avenue you might mistake the place for a solid little rural community. But venture too far off the main street and you come across the sad remains of what once was; the shuttered shops and sagging little houses long past the day they should have been painted and roofed. The plain brick woodworker's union hall is empty and stares out on the broken street with its glass eyes hollow and haunted at the way of life that has passed away in the last of its lifetime.

The people, too, look a little lost and a little sad; tough men with the slightly dazed look of a defeated fighter who cannot hear the bell, women wary and tired, looking faded and slightly irked as though they have half-heard something that has displeased them mightily.

The pickups are getting old and haven't been replaced with newer models. The clothes are looking slightly dingy and frayed. The only things shiny and new are, viciously, the "Mitt Romney" campaign signs, as if the plutocratic candidate would be caught dead in the dying mill town except to drum up votes and hoo-raw the rubes for pocket change. The locals don't seem to get the irony; they are sincere and rough-edged in their belief that the man with the overseas bank account will be their champion.

Here is unemployment, and disability, social security and Medicare and Medicaid, aid to families with dependent children and food stamps; here is the 47% and they are all voting, it seems, for the man who would ensure that their lives will continue to be pinched by the reality that a man can fell and dismember trees far faster than they can grow tall enough to log.

The nights are growing colder now, and the days clear with the hard crispness of late autumn. Yesterday the first rains of winter fell, and soon the fogs of November will creep up from the cold waters of the Sound and wrap up the dead leaves of October and the summer will have ended, dead as the leaves, faded and brown as the raveled edges of the little towns dying dreaming of a yesterday that never was and a tomorrow that will never return.