Promises Made, Promises Kept

I don't know if Charlottesville will turn out to be the Fort Sumter of the current "cold civil war," as all the kids are calling it, but things seem to be heating up, slowly, surely, inexorably. The joke has been that maybe Clownstick ran over an old gypsy woman, and she cursed him to live out all his peanut-gallery tweets at Obama. The truth is that Yeats was a prophet, and we are all living out his warning. Clownstick may be Orangemandias, faded glory that never was in the first place, but the Pepe-the-Frog Jew-baiting douchebags are the falcon to his falconer.

These racist assholes and their racist bullshit are being normalized right in front of us. They are not bothering to conceal it at all, you have to give them that. David Duke is a loathsome tool, but when he's right, he's right:

“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

Yes indeedy. They got their panties all up in a wad every time the Black Lives Matter folks blocked traffic, but in the meantime, these small racist rallies have been going on all over the south, and you know what you have not heard of? Some random BLM activist pulling a Mr. Mercedes and running these losers down.

You can't say you weren't warned.

If they haven't already, some relatively "mainstream" asshole, some Sebastian Gorka or Laura Ingraham virus that has long been loosed in the bloodstream of "acceptable" discourse, will excuse this violence -- keep in mind, we have one dead and nineteen injured so far -- as the result of being "provoked" by some Antifa type pepper-spraying or throwing rocks or trying to up the ante somehow. Which is stupid, because all reports indicated that the nazis were outnumbered considerably, even though license plates from Texas and Michigan and other states were spotted among the marchers. If true, it was unnecessary.

This escalation of violence is also foreseeable, and the Antifa folks should be aware of what they're getting themselves into, what they're confronting -- the real-deal white-trash supremacist guys really do not give a shit. Push comes to shove, they don't even give a shit about Clownstick or Duke or any of the talking heads or defenders. They'll find another, better, more convenient avatar when one comes along. They are not there to discuss ideas or propagate dialogue, or find a way to get along.

David Duke concisely explains their overall outlook on things with the "take our country back" cliché, and so the question begs to be asked not only to what passes for the left in this country, but to all people who repudiate this crap:  are you going to take your country back from these people? Is it even worth it anymore, if this mindset is so prevalent? If so, there's a number of ways to act that do not involve risk of personal injury.

Make sure you are registered to vote; if you have any reason to wonder, go to your local elections office and double-check. If it takes a voter ID card, then for fuck's sake, scrounge up twenty bucks and get the goddamned card already. I don't want to hear about how full your diaper is; life isn't fair, and if we don't start taking these assholes seriously and shut them down, it's going to get a lot more unfair.

Keep an eye on any politician or company that winks at these bozos instead of shoving them away, and write them, email them, call them, let them know that you will boycott their products, vote against them when they run for office, etc. It may sound like bullshit, but these people understand the bottom line, and if it costs them money, they'll listen.

Most of all, don't back down. I've read and heard too many anecdotes of Democratic voters just avoiding their Clownstick-voting relatives and friends. That's understandable, but some of these assholes are getting to the point where they initiate a verbal confrontation about their zero hero. And that's where we all just need to speak up and respond: you don't necessarily have to get nasty and raise your voice, but if your dipshit aunt is still forwarding you nonsense, tell her to stop and tell her why; if your elderly parent is regurgitating whatever horseshit they just half-heard Hannity pull out of his pendulous ass, tell them it's all lies, and Sean Hannity is selling out his country for a dishonest buck for a fucking lowlife who's lied to and stolen from people his entire life.

Stop telling yourself that life is easier if you just ignore the fucktards. Look around you. How's that working out?

Assholes, by and large, get that way because decent people understandably find it easier to just move on with their day and avoid them, rather than confront them. They count on that lack of response, you know. It emboldens them, gives them a sense of purpose. They are unhappy, aimless, useless as human beings, so they need to create drama to feel alive. They are dead inside, especially above the shoulders.

That doesn't mean we have to put up with their bullshit. We have an insane clown in charge because there weren't enough people who thought it was important enough to tell the assholes to shut the fuck up already, that their fucking coal jobs are not coming back, and are a drop in the employment bucket anyway, that their "cultural grievances" might be alleviated if they traveled outside the country or even just read a goddamned book once a year or so.

They've marinated in their ignorant grievances for decades, and we've all just been content to leave them at it, because it wasn't worth the trouble; they're not going to listen anyway. Fair enough. But now the ante has been raised, and people like these are emboldened by non-responses as much as they are by responses. There's certainly no perfect solution to all this, but hopefully some sort of livable compromise can be found before things get too much further out of hand.

Remember, today's events started because a city councilman proposed removing a statue of a man who took up arms against his own country, whose army crossed into Pennsylvania and kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery, who never repented or accounted for his actions.

Lincoln and Sherman were far too magnanimous in victory, because they were decent human beings who grievously underestimated the inhuman indecency that was necessary to keep the "institution" of slavery running. Turns out that, despite what you hear current Lost Cause defenders pulling out of their asses, most people are not happy to live under a system that forces them to work, plunders the fruits of their labor, and breaks up their families. It took a lot of force and sheer brutality on the part of everyone in the chain, from overseers on up to Jeff Davis his besainted self, the kind of brutality that can only be obtained by dehumanizing your target, by literally regarding them as subhuman, or not human at all.

And after the extended brutality of the war, Lincoln wanted to reconcile the warring factions, again forgetting in his magnanimity that this was evil -- real, visceral, cut your guts and wrap them around your neck while you're still breathing evil -- the Union was up against. Lee, Davis, Stephens, John Tyler, and the rest of them should have been lined up against a wall and shot, and hung from trees until the birds came for their eyes and the softer bits. After all, that's what they did with slaves that attempted to achieve the freedom everyone else took for granted.

Instead, they have statues and schools and streets named after them, commemorating their vile deeds and words and thoughts. And they have a miserable faction of losers trying to retrench around the lost dream of a traitor slaver nation, of all things. I don't think we're quite yet at the point where people have to start psyching themselves into hero mode and grabbing weapons, but we can't just ignore them anymore.

[Update 10:03 PDT:  Holy fucking shit. Look, we can dance around the whole "not all Clownstickers are racist, but all racists are Clownstickers" thing all we want, but the photo in the link does not lie. And it's up to the rest of the Clownstickers whether or not they wish to vocally repudiate this ugly nonsense, but we'll know accordingly which side of the ultimate fence they're on. Remaining silent is one thing, but if they choose to start yapping, they should choose their words with some care. Either way, we'll know where they stand, and none of their weasel words will change that.]