There’s really no excuse to dither about your vote, now that one party is pro-life and the other is the party of murder. Everyone agrees on that much.
The murder party is consistent in its embrace of death and destruction from the top down. If we’re all in a bus speeding toward climate catastrophe, their solution is to pipe in Christian music and tie a boulder to the gas pedal. If we’re running out of clean water, their solution is to use what’s left to blast methane out of rocks and bottle the remainder for profit.
Basically, one of our major parties is serving up a vegan casserole that many will find disappointing and mockable, and the other party is offering a bile loaf with arsenic dressing.
The murder party gives Putin a pass, winks at authoritarian tyrants, and plots to achieve their power. The party of death does not care who dies at all, as long as billionaires get to keep all their treasure without being subjected to work requirements. They don’t care who gets mowed down in the streets and schools as long as citizens, preferably the white ones, have the freedom to own weapons of war. It’s all about freedom, for them. Children retain the freedom to cower under their desks and grown women have the freedom to let the state decide if they must bear children. From the think tanks to the State House to the Capitol, the murder party is convening Death Panels to decide who will be sacrificed to enrich the rich.
Yes, the imminent dismantling of our livable environment is the worst of all this. It’s beyond criminal. It’s God’s Trump Card, as it were: even Hitler wasn’t in a position to murder everyone on the planet. But it’s in the littler things that the murder party really gets personal.
Many on the left wing liked to speculate, not that long ago, that the recent violent outbursts against blacks, and Jews, and Muslims, and your browner immigrants, and queers—all that was a sign of weakness, the death-rattle of a heretofore dominant race losing its perceived position of power. It was, in other words, going to pass.
But it won’t, if the murder party keeps its knee on our necks. Because the murder party needs enemies and it can fabricate as many as it wants. It can paint desperate asylum seekers as violent criminals, and Blacks as shiftless and malevolent, and Muslims as terrorists, and Jews as the evil power behind the scene, and queers as predators, and Democrats—what is more harmless, more feckless than a Democrat!—as pedophiles, and with enough hysterical demagoguery and a few video clips out of context, they can find willing consumers of their hatred and cruelty. Hatred is energizing. Hatred erases thoughtfulness and ambivalence. Hatred is pure.
And if you can somehow get people to believe drag queens and grade-school teachers are a threat to their children, you can do anything. You can empower citizens to be bounty hunters. You can recruit vigilantes. You can murder.
Murder is what they’re all about. Do not be deceived: all the queers, and those who look like they might be queer; the Blacks portrayed as violent, by violent people; the immigrants, or people who look like them; the Jews, of course, plenty of precedent there; the occasional spouse of a prominent Democrat, or the Democrat herself; the faithful precinct worker in a swing state; all those who will be killed will have been murdered by the murder party. The murder party holds the gun, they aim the gun, and they have all the bullets they need, among the aggrieved, the ignorant, and the armed. The murder party grew that ammunition themselves, from a damp smudge to a thriving colony, like virulent bacteria.
But if they are not all holding the gun, there isn’t a one of them willing to stop it. If the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with the gun, they don’t know any. I don’t know how every member of the murder party has become so compromised. But they’re all willing to open up their property for the shooters. The most horrifying slanders against whole groups of people continue to go unchallenged by the murder party.
Give them your vote if you want. Just remember they don’t care if you die, unless you’re 34 weeks from being born yet, and no one yet knows you’re queer. They will tell you a blastocyst is fully human and a grown woman isn’t. They will tell you what they want you to know and burn the books they don’t want you to read. They will let you starve. They don’t care if you die.
If their own kids are queer, they don’t even care if they die.
There IS Evil in the world. I’m an atheist, so this isn’t driven by religion. Just observation. I was watching pundits this morning talking about how the republicans are willing to crash the world’s economy. And of course, they aren’t doing a thing about climate change (I personally think it’s too late to do anything about it anyway.) And THEY are the ones trying to tear down our democracy by chipping away at our institutions… yet are whining that the government is broken. If it’s broken, it’s because you guys fucked with it!
For some reason, I thought about Star Wars, and how it pales in comparison to out present day world for sheer terror. Trump is Darth Vader, and the Imperial Forces are the republican party. And they are out to destroy a planet, but it’s not Alderan… it’s our own. And we don’t have an escape pod to live somewhere else. What kind of crazy person do you have to be to knowingly destroy the very planet you live on?!
There most certainly is! (“Evil” has no religious significance for me either.) Before I quit FaceBook I was using the word when others kept talking about “ignorance,” “insecurity,” “fear” etc. ESPECIALLY “ignorance.” I got so tired of commenting “We confuse evil with ignorance at our peril”! I have a couple of definitions of “evil,” and I’m sure there can be more: 1. Addicted to the feeling of power some get by hurting those not in a position to fight back, and 2. Willingness to do unlimited harm to get what they don’t need.
I wish I knew. It’s all so evil and criminal I can’t even get my head around it. I get why there are so many people voting for them because they are good at propaganda but I don’t get THEM at all.
The only bright spot in this madness (and this is REALLY a stretch!) is that the Earth will continue… but without us and, sadly, a LOT of other species. I’ve heard that this will be The Sixth Extinction, and i know the last one was the dinosaurs (which wasn’t their fault, so they were a helluva lot smarter than WE are!) I am curious as to what the other 4 extinctions consisted of. But we are a cancer on this planet. It would be better off without us. And SOMETHING will evolve to populate it. (Maybe this microbe I’ve heard of that can eat plastic? Bon appetit, microbe! You’ve got a friggin’ buffet!)
Generally, they’ve involved climate changes, including cooling, from various causes. The asteroid was the quickest of course and might have wiped out nearly everything in a few hours, but also led to global cooling.
I was thinking yesterday about how we liberals repeatedly ask if the Boeberts and Gaetzes and Greenes BELIEVE what they claim to. I’ve decided the question is irrelevant. They are knowingly and deliberately acting out a specialized role in the takeover of the most prosperous country in the world. They are the court jesters, the devil’s advocates, the clowns of outrage. Their job is to accelerate our fracture. And not because they are believers, but because they expect to be compensated for their performances. They can destroy faster than we can investigate, and they know it. I would love to believe that voting can save us, but we all know countries that “vote” at regular intervals for their own subjugation by tyrants and dictators. Likely we are the only country today that thinks we can survive this. My eyes are scorched by the headlines. I try to focus on the birds on my feeders, the plants in my garden, the people I care for. Poor, silly America.
A few of them are probably popping a boner for God and Louis Gohmert is dumber than lint but you’re right about the rest of them. I too have cut WAY down on my news consumption.
You nailed that one, Nance. I quit asking that question some time ago. They don’t CARE if the nonsense they repeat is true or not. It’s all cheers they can holler to egg each other and themselves on to violent rage — exactly like shouts of “Sieg heil!”
And they will all be led to Oblivion by King I’m Your Retribution. the End.
But I don’t wanna go.
me neither
Wow, that is harsh. And it feels extreme.
And yet your words are nowhere near as violent as their actions.
I so want to believe in the inherent goodness of humans.
So must I believe that so many of us are inhuman?
I fear so, though I really don’t want to.
In my charitable moments I think they’re either born sociopaths or damaged.
Long, long ago, through a combination of poor judgement, bad luck, and, I daresay, low self-esteem, I lived with a sociopath for several years. (Or maybe psychopath — those two terms have become so confused that the DSM doesn’t even use them as personality-disorder categories any more.) Anyway, I learned quite a bit more than I ever wanted to know about such people, and recent years’ observations have made it clear to me that the behavior of socio/psychopaths and fascisti is pretty much indistinguishable. The horrors of MAGA were recognizable instantly, and, sad to say, they looked quite familiar.
And to think most of this latest wave of bile and hysteria was basically launched by the election of the erudite, intelligent and well-liked by leaders of democracies the world over, Barack Hussein Obama. But a Black man in the White House caused a lot of terrified white men to ask themselves, “If they get power over us, will they treat us the way we have treated them?” Sadly, all ‘the others’ in America have ever wanted was simple equality. And the Murder Party have cunningly twisted that song of hope for equality into a nuclear-powered threat to the existence of the White *race*. They’ve gone insane, cases in point DJT and MTG, unhinged, pitiful people families used to keep at home or quietly drive to a private institution in the wee hours for treatment. The Murder Party now consists of a few psychotics and a few reasonable cowards leading the pig-ignorant, who make a great deal of noise. The whole damn country is heading like lemmings toward a cliff, dragging the world behind it. So so glad to be an ex-pat, but what happens in the USA spills out across the world. You all have my deepest sympathy, and I’m not being facetious. I have to stay away from the news and I don’t live in the US. Hugs to the lot of ya.
I very much enjoyed “pitiful people families used to keep at home,” and thank you for that.
“Many on the left wing liked to speculate, not that long ago, that the recent violent outbursts against blacks, and Jews, and Muslims, and your browner immigrants, and queers—all that was a sign of weakness, the death-rattle of a heretofore dominant race losing its perceived position of power. It was, in other words, going to pass.”
I still believe this is the reason for their behavior, because people who feel secure don’t act the way they are acting. Religious belief is waning, churches are closing, and the atrocities of the past are being brought into the light to show that the “good old days” were only good if you were the correct gender, or sexual orientation, or race, or religion. That’s bound to elicit a strong reaction.
But is it going to pass? Maybe not in time to save us. Actually, probably not. I’ve all but stopped watching the news. And as much as I sometimes lament that there’s a whole lot more of my life in the rearview than ahead, there’s a growing part of me that’s relieved about that. I’m glad I never had children, because I wouldn’t want them to have to deal with what comes next.
What comes next on nearly every level. Yes. Glad not to have had my own kids. It’s a nightmare for them. I worry for the kids in my ken.
I believe that the reason for their behavior is that bigotry is heritable, contagious and addictive, so it will never go away. Insecurity is a sufficient but not necessary condition for a trigger.
Excellent piece, Murr, with no punches pulled!
I expect a civil war, not on the American model but the Rwandan, not geographical but with people murdering their neighbors. From the viewpoint of the firearms industry, that is the best of all possible worlds, because it represents the maximum of sales, with the only limit to the chaos being the need for maintaining a stable currency.
I’m grateful to Naomi Klein whose book “The Shock Doctrine” really elucidated the deliberate efforts of right-wing and/or authoritarian players to manufacture as much chaos as possible, and profit from it–or be ready to take advantage of natural chaos, such as smoothly replacing public schools with private in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
That was a terrific book. Stephen King’s comment about “The Hot Zone” — “The first chapter … is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read in my whole life … and then it gets worse” exactly describes what I felt reading The Shock Doctrine.
I’ve often thought about the Shock Doctrine Triad (which I mis-remembered as the Shock Doctrine Trifecta): Austerity, Privatization, De-regulation.
Those Old White Men may think they are whiter than white, but their souls are as black as coal.
And it don’t get worse than coal.
I’ve had conversations with my adult children about the State of Our World lately. My ‘solution’ for them was for them to get out, as fast as possible.
It turns out it’s not as easy as it once was to emigrate to many countries. Canada has always been fairly difficult, sans considerable wealth. Japan and many Asian countries are very difficult to get anything but a residence visa. Europe has become more difficult with the last decade’s economic and social unrest.
I’ve pretty much given up on the US. I’ve seen the skirts of social change go up and down, and inevitably the froth or scum rises to the top of our pond. Witness trump and de santis, and too many others to count.
The brunt of my anger at the country is based now on our ability to not only bring ourselves down, but much of the rest of the world with us. We lack the grace to face our decline with any dignity.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that the US is willing to bring down the rest of the world and the world economy. After all, it’s responsible for most of climate change. Then they try to make us feel that WE, as citizens, (oops… that’s right! We’re not CALLED citizens anymore. We’re CONSUMERS.) that WE can make a big difference by carrying cloth bags to the store instead of getting plastic. Or recycling, when most of the plastic we use is NOT recyclable, or just ISN’T for various reasons. Or taking a bus instead of driving, when there are places with piss-poor mass transit. They are like David Copperfield, trying to create a diversion: “Look at THIS hand… not THAT one!”
And when it gets bad enough — IIRC, there is a treaty by which Canada will not accept refugees from the US, under any circumstances.