Statue of Limitations

Here's an idea for all the confederate crybabies who are seething as their racist totems get toppled, one by one by miserable one:  what if -- and I'm just spitballing here, mind you -- but what if we just erected monuments to people who did great things, who accomplished deeds that inspired people, made the world or even just their community a better place? How about that?

And what if we stuck to naming our military bases after people who actually fought for this country, rather than against it? What might that be like? I've been wondering this since I was in like sixth grade -- why on earth would you name your military bases after a bunch of losers and traitors? Seriously, is there another country on the planet that does this, trains and quarters their soldiers in places literally named after people who fought against them? What the hell is that?

It's not like Braxton Bragg was Hannibal fighting Rome or anything. He did fine as an officer during the "manifest destiny" wars, stealing land from natives and from Mexico, then became a slave-owner and turned on his country, and was disastrous as a confederate field commander. And so on. None of these people are worth remembering, much less commemorating or enshrining.

This is all happening very quickly, but it's generations overdue, and it's wonderful to see. The confederate flag is the American swastika and always has been, no matter what its fans try to tell themselves. It's time the lost cause was truly disposed of.

Do your duty, America -- flush twice.

[Update 6/11/20 9:10 PM PDT:  Apparently this handy cheat sheet was given to the press as part of a briefing yesterday. I wish I was making that up. I'm honestly surprised there aren't any misspellings or stray apostrophes. Regardless, Trump is a dangerous moron and should be treated as such. The rules for using upper-case letters are really not that difficult to master.]

Clarity

If you find yourself in opposition to the ridonkulously regressive anti-choice bills being shoveled forth throughout Real 'murka, you owe them a huge thanks:  they are clarifying things wonderfully, removing any possible doubts from the well, the establishment Republicons won't let the extra-chromosome crowd kill Roe hack argument. They will. They are. Wishful interpretations of their supposed intentions aren't going to help anyone.

This should not be framed as the typical "pro-life/pro-choice" dilemma. The argument is simple:  either you think women and teenaged girls should be thrown in prison for decades at a time for making their own health care decisions, or you don't. Some inbred, doddering creep who has no clue how women's bodies work, or how basic reproduction and gestation take place, decided that miscarriages should be investigated and treated as homicides. Either you trust those imbeciles, or you don't. There is no longer any middle ground to pretend to defend.

It's interesting how none of these bills address the male's role at all in any of these pregnancies or precious heartbeats. It's even more interesting how so many of the bills have been "crafted" by individuals with literally no idea how women's bodies work, or how medical science works, or how pregnancies work. You can't re-implant an ectopic pregnancy. Women do not know they're pregnant the instant after the male ejaculates in them, nor can they test at that point. And so on. These people aren't just fanatics, they appear to be borderline retarded as well.

And while it's true that this all predates Trump by decades, this is still his baby (so to speak). He's the one who put a couple of middle-aged conservative Roman Catholics on the Supreme Court to decide Roe's eventual fate, when it makes it back there for the overturn in a year or so. He's the one who's been prancing around the country with his fanciful stories about newborns being "executed" because they had the bad luck to be born to murderous parents with serial-killer doctors working out of butcher-shop hospitals. He's stoked the nonsense with pure lies, and these bills are the natural results.

So everyone who is horrified by this, but just couldn't get "enthused" enough to vote for Butter Emails, you own this. It's yours. You did this with your purity-pony bullshit, or because you're too lazy to vote in the midterms, or for state legislature candidates, allowing them to be gummed up with these batshit god-bothering squids. How do you like it?

Runnin' With the Devil

So this is fun. Mo Brooks is a slimy sack of crap; it is truly a shame he didn't take a header down those marble steps and land on his face. These people would literally rather vote for a creep who sexually assaulted teenagers when he was in his thirties, and was literally banned from a mall, than for someone who sent murderous domestic terrorists to prison.

Alabama can get its collective back up and whinge about "Yankees" tellin' 'em whut ta do, but the fact is that this is a test for that state. They need to step up and decide what they're about. It's too late for Roy Moore (and the mediots need to stop referring to him as "judge" -- he's been forcibly removed from that position twice) to be removed from the ballot, so the choice is between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. Period.

So no nudging, Alabama, but what are you about as a state? Forget all the "dummycrats is sociamalists" mumbo-jumbo excuses -- you either support a skeevy pederast, or you don't. Either you stick with the Cletus the cousin-fucker stereotypes or you reject them. You're either the state of Bob Ewell or of Atticus Finch. You cannot have it both ways anymore.

Same goes for the Republican Party, which is still fundraising and canvassing for Moore, despite their public plaints; same goes for the GOP voters. Sometimes a moment comes along where you have to decide how you want to define your team, and this is one of those times.

The Goopers are really stuck on this one, and they know it. There are a couple of longshot scenarios to consider here, but they're not completely out of the realm of possibility:

1. Jeff Flake's seat in AZ is up for grabs, as is Bob Corker's in TN, and "Everybody Hates" Ted Cruz has to run for his seat next year as well. Things are not rolling the Goopers' way lately, and these are all gettable for the Dems.
2. Moore loses or is pre-emptively disqualified per the actions of the leaders of his own party, and he rallies the same breed of deplorable who are chomping at the bit to kill and/or die in the service of Fuckface Von Clownstick. A schism is created in the Republican party, and a breakaway "populist" party takes on the "establishment" party. Popcorn companies do record business, and the Dems sweep the midterms hard. Clownstick goes into full Downfall bunker mode, watching his idiot MAGA fantasy go up like a tire fire.

The second one is admittedly a very long shot, because no matter what these weasels say, politics is really more about the money than the ideology, and it's hard to imagine the sort of genuinely wealthy person who wants to invest in a Howdy Doody-looking asshole like Roy Moore, with his totally-not-a-closet-case leather vest and the pew-pew pea-shooter he needs in order to feel safe buying his Starbucks. But there's always some douchebag Robert Mercer / Foster Friess type out there who didn't work hard enough for his money to have any respect for it.

Either way, what a difference a year makes, especially when your enemies are so consistently ridiculous. It is truly a joy watching these assholes screw the pooch and turn on each other. May the aneurysm fairy start making the rounds, and they all ride the escalator to hell sooner rather than later.

Strange Magic

As everyone predicted, oversized machine hack Luther Strange lost his primary in 'murka's Taint to Christofascist Roy, I say, Roy Moore. What's funny -- but like everything else, not at all surprising -- is that HRH Emperor Snowflake has backtracked through his tweet-machine to drop his inconvenient truths down the digital poop-chute.

Make no mistake:  Roy Moore is as whackjob as they come, a true embarrassment to the notion of an impartial judicial bench beholden to the law of the land, as opposed to his interpretations of the verses of his book. He's a Christian Sharia judge, pure and simple.

Over the next year, we'll be hearing any number of things about money raised and spent, various modes of voter suppression, etc. It will be presented in the context of fatalistic inevitability, as if it is merely a matter of sheer determinism that people will always vote for the best-funded candidate, or that they are powerless to take steps to ensure that they are not unduly franchised.

So that's what needs to be pummeled into the brain stems of Alabamans who might find themselves repulsed at the idea of this peacocking little shithead representing their state in the US Senate -- you don't have to vote for the guy with the most commercials, or the last commercial you hear before the election. You are still allowed to go to the public liberry; you are still allowed to turn away from this week's Two Minutes of Hate for uppity black athaletes, and read a book or an article about anything, anything at all.

Also, too:  you have more than thirteen months before the election. That's a lot of time to double-check with your county elections office and make sure you are correctly registered to vote. It might take a fifteen-minute phone call to do that. It might take slightly longer to register to vote by mail, which I promise you will be the best move you ever made. If your state requires voter ID, you have time to acquire that ID. Maybe it costs twenty bucks. That's not fair, but even poor people are usually able to look around them and find twenty bucks worth of things they can get by without for a couple weeks -- smokes, snacks, cable, etc.

We can debate the fairness of things like voter IDs, but the point really is that all of these simple steps described in the above paragraph, for someone who might be uncertain about their ability to exercise their right as a citizen of this country, can be done well before next year's election. Hell, it can be done before this Christmas, probably before Halloween.

So how badly do you want it, how urgent is it to you to stand against the fuckery of the world right now, and the agents of that fuckery, such as Roy Moore? Either it's important enough to step up and take care of your business -- here, now, while the election's still a mile off -- or it isn't. Either you have skin in this game, and something to lose -- your health care, your right to get married or adopt, your basic right to walk down the street and live your life and mind your fucking business without being treated like a subhuman -- or you don't.

Personally, I don't have any skin in any of these games. Being a straight, married, middle-aged, gainfully employed white guy with insurance, I'm in the fucking wheelhouse. But I still care about what kind of country this is going to be, and we all have to understand that it takes constant effort. It does not end with the election, it begins with the election -- if your candidate wins, then you work to support their efforts and platform; if a Roy Moore type wins, you do what you can to dump him the next time around. That's it. That's all there is to this.

I don't live anywhere near Alabama, I don't know anyone there, and I doubt I'll ever set foot within a thousand miles of there. (A southern man don't need me around anyhow.) So there's nothing I can do about whether Alabama sends Roy Moore to the Senate next year or not. That's up to the residents of that state. No one wants to hear about how someone's diaper is full -- either you can vote or you can't, and either you pay attention and take care of business or you don't.

The Lives of Others

The murder of Emmett Till was perhaps the most public of the countless blemishes on the American southern postwar apartheid regime. Some "good" did come from the atrocity -- for starters, Till's murder and the subsequent acquittal of his killers catalyzed the civil rights movement, and inspired To Kill a Mockingbird. It helped begin the dismantling of said apartheid regime, at least in the official sense. Southerners could drawl their "proud" plaints all they wanted, but nothing could undo the contempt they saw in the eyes of the rest of the country and the world.

The "revelation" that the woman at the center of the murder, whom Till made the fatal mistake of flirting with, was lying the whole time, should surprise no one. But in small additional twist of karmic fate, it turns out that Carolyn Bryant Donham's life was, according to writer Timothy Tyson, "ruined" as well.

I'll confess to being just small enough of a person to be gratified, heartened by that fact. Till's murder, it turns out, ruined the lives of his killers, Roy Bryant (Carolyn's husband) and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, the latter of whom was quite open about his glee in putting Till "in his place." Bryant and Milam had their shops boycotted until they had to close, and were basically run out of town, moved to Texas, their notoriety following them, and had difficulty finding gainful employment for the rest of their miserable lives. Both men died in their early sixties of cancer, hopefully in unspeakable pain.

Ordinarily I'd have wished that fate on Carolyn Bryant Donham as well, but it is just as gratifying to know that she's had to live with it all these years. It's still not enough, and one would like to see something more closely resembling actual remorse, rather than mere regret. (Incidentally, Tyson is something of a chump for waiting ten fucking years to drop this bit of information in the first place.)

Donham's lies had impact on the lives of countless others:  her initial lie got a kid murdered, beaten so hard one of his eyes popped out his head; her subsequent lie in court got Emmett Till's murderers off the hook. That willful evasion of justice triggered a massive, painful national upheaval, one which got countless other people beaten and killed. All for the institutionalized refusal to recognize that, as our esteemed founding fathers once wrote, tongues perhaps in their cheeks, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

It's amazing to think of how recent that murder was, a mere three generations ago, most of the principals now rotting in hell, but still relatively fresh in the collective psyche, which turns its soil more slowly, patiently. The people who insist that their stupid confederate flag has a "different" meaning should be forced to read the detailed account of Emmett Till's murder, and others like it that were commonplace throughout the south for a full century after the war supposedly ended. Countless other scumbags got away clean with evil deeds, just as awful as Till's murder.

The Union was way too nice to the traitorous insurrectionist slave states after the war -- every plantation owner should have been shot immediately, and the property redistributed among the people who had been forced under pain of death and torture to work it for free. It would have saved a hundred years of misery for millions of people.

I hope the last sixty years have held nothing but pain and sorrow for Carolyn Donham. I hope she has had regular nightmares featuring Emmett Till's face, pulped beyond recognition just a few weeks after his fifteenth birthday, because of her lies. I hope she lives to be 120, of sound mind, cognizant right up to her final breath of what she did, unable to escape its full weight. But as with most people who are capable of such actions in the first place, it's much more likely that she forgave herself long ago, feels that she paid the price, even though it was she all along who chose to pay it.

Bloc Heads

One of the most tedious features of political horse-race coverage is how inept it tends to be. Even the Monday-morning-quarterback hindsight assessments tend to be off, because they tend to be based on assumptions going in.

Last night's South Carolina primary is a good example of that. Conventional wisdom had it that "evangelicals" would go for Cruz, and instead they went for Trump. The media don't really know what to make of evangelicals, and when they ask them questions, of course the evangelicals spout a bunch of god-bothering jabber about their morals and values.

I saw a commenter somewhere -- a conservative Trump supporter, mind you -- recently say something to the effect that most of the southern evangelicals he knew had been divorced several times, used meth, oxy, and or alcohol, and usually could be found at a casino. He was not saying this disparagingly or admiringly, just in a matter-of-fact way.

Dreams of Waco and Ruby Ridge

The essence of the true insurrectionist is to fantasize constantly that either the majority of his fellow citizens or god (usually both) are on his side, that they see what he sees. The fanatic's sincerity of mere belief does not magically render the beliefs as empirically accurate and provable, anymore than the insistence that you can fly will help you when you take a header off the Empire State Building.

Sincerity of belief simply morphs into rote, tautological affirmations. Think about the average Faux News viewer (but not for too long). They are not tuning in to get informed, but to be affirmed, to have their prejudices and incorrect assumptions spoon-fed back to them, preferably by some interchangeable bottle-blonde who probably gives spectacular head to someone with power and/or money.

As much as I loathe and disagree with those folks, I can't say as I completely blame them. The world is changing more quickly than many of us can keep up with it; indeed, it changes so constantly on so many fronts that it's difficult to imagine someone who can be in the game 100% of the time. Such a total consciousness would be mentally and physically crippling.

Flag Hags

It's been a minute since America's Favorite Shitbird, walking ham sandwich George Zimmerman, has done something stupid, but like the sun being forced to rise in the east to watch us collectively abuse the planet one more blessed day, it was inevitable that Zimmerman and stupid would be paired up again.

Since one would assume that Zimmerman is virtually unemployable at this point -- I mean, it's not like any of his mouth-breathing supporters have stepped up to, you know, offer him a fucking job -- it makes sense that he'd try something like this. Joining up with some other Florida doofus, this one a gun shop owner who has bravely (and illegally) declared his bidness a moooooslim-free zone, seems almost made-to-order.

When it comes to judging art, I am pretty much aligned (believe it or not) with Rush Limbaugh, of all people. Limbaugh, in a Playboy interview many years ago, once said (more or less verbatim):  "Look. If I can do it, it's not art. Okay?" As someone whose artistic output is strictly limited to musical instruments, and only then after thousands of hours of hard work and practice, I am not fond of the notion that just because someone puts a frame around a turd, that it suddenly won't stink.

And near as I can tell, Zimmerman's magnum excrementum looks like he spent about an hour slapping paint on a slab of OSB with a used Ace Hardware pig-bristle brush. He might as well have been painting a chicken coop. The stenciled letters are a nice touch, though his free-hand needs some work. I mean, there are guys in every small town across this great land of ours who do shit like this with much better lettering, for about a hundred-fifty bucks a sign. This fucking maroon thinks he's going to split high-five/low-six G's with Maynard for this thing. And knowing this country, he's got even odds on that. Nothing surprises me anymore.

But Zimmerman's yard-sale sigil is useful in plumbing the continued teleology of southern apologists and unrepentant rednecks. Why does Zimmerman choose that particular symbol, what heuristic purpose does it serve? Or, working in reverse, what does the traitor loser battle flag have to do with the pudgy killer who painted it, or the islamophobic business owner the painter has allied himself with? The answer there, of course, is absolutely nothing, except that it will piss off Those People. Which naturally answers the first question as well, its heuristic purpose in the first place.

This has been one of those summers where random internets keyboard warriors have bravely declaimed the "offense" that others have taken against their traitor loser flag. This is purely anecdotal, but everything I've seen has indicated the opposite:  countless Facebook memes whinging about how a good ol' boy jest cain't have his flag anymores without someone complainin' 'bout it, and more variations on that theme than anyone in their right mind would care to contemplate.

Maybe the best part about all of this is just how hilarious the history of the traitors' various flags really is. They kept having to change the design, first because the original flag was too close to that of the nation they were betraying, and then because there was so much white it looked like a surrender flag. I think this bespeaks the utter ineptitude around which the entire concept of this vile slave-holding traitor despotism took hold.

The biggest problem is that the south never had a true reckoning, not one that meant anything. Sure, Sherman went scorched-earth en route to Atlanta, but that was about it. The southern states spent the subsequent 100 years persecuting the people they had enslaved, kidnapped, raped, tortured, murdered, and plundered for the previous 200 years. They were unrepentant of all crimes in both eras. They have never apologized because they are not sorry.

Once again, let's simplify the entire dynamic for the cousin-fuckers out there: 

• Nobody cares about you flying your confederate flag on your truck or your house or your wall. Nobody is offended by it, they just assume that it's a signifier to like-minded halfwits, that meth and/or pit bulls can be found within fifty feet of the bespangled bumwipe.
• The Dukes of Hazzard -- a silly teevee show that no one in their right mind had even thought about in at least thirty years -- was taken off of TV Land ten days after its syndication run began, not because of some imaginary outcry by bien pensant libruls, but because Warner Brothers, which owns the rights to the show, had suspended sales of all of its confederate flag merch in the wake of the Charleston shootings. As with the Dork Density mishegas, this was not political correctness, this was pure business.
• The most outspoken supporters of your piece-of-shit flag are the worst fucking examples of humanity this country has to offer. They are straight from central casting for "someone who looks like they just got done fucking a farm animal". You are fighting a losing battle -- worse yet, for no goddamned reason at all. The biggest adherents to your lost cause are also the biggest arguments against it.

Frankly, I don't put too much stock in delving into the "mindset" of these cretins, anymore than I get the idea of trying to "understand" child rapists or animal torturers. It's a waste of time, as far as I'm concerned. But some folks of a more scientific bent like to tilt at such windmills, as if it will help in the fields of psychology or penology or what-have-you.

Once again, I'll take the liberty of repeating one of my many mantras, as they are central to understanding people and life, and we should repeat them often, to remind us of what should be obvious:  It is a waste of time trying to deal rationally with irrational people. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't try to figure out what their deal is, if only to deal predictively with their behavior, if nothing else.

But converting them, talking sense into them, showing them the light -- it ain't gonna happen. They find out on their own, when life breaks one too many off in their ass, or they never figure it out at all, dying angry and embittered at their imaginary demons. These traitor-loser-flag folks have been voting against themselves for going on three generations now. Your facts mean nothing to them.

Old Times There Are Selectively Remembered

I'm trying to figure out what sort of person would want to tour a preserved plantation. Having lived all my life in California, with its historically preserved Spanish missions, one could argue that there is something of a corollary, if separated by an order of magnitude. And certainly the mission tours tend to gloss over the worst abuses of the natives by the invading Spanish.

But I suppose one anecdotal difference is that in touring at least half of the missions in this state, it seems to be universally understood just what went on there, that abuse and indentured servitude were the norms. Only children would ask something like "were the priests kind to the Indians" or "were the Indians loyal to their keepers". Even then, most children (I visited at least four of the missions on school field trips over the years) had a balanced understanding of things, that while the Spanish may have brought medicine and order, they also brought disease and violence and plunder.

While common sense at least implies that the vocal contingent one usually hears defending the Traitor Loser Flag is the typical loudmouth minority, it's still clearly a substantial one that carries up to the state and federal legislative representatives of those states. And they refuse to brook any compromise on the subject, fail to consider the cognitive dissonance of slavishly supporting the emblem of a failed, awful cause.

The Continuing Adventures of Fucking Yokels

Maybe there is such a thing as karma. Nah, there isn't. But for a sweet second there, you could almost believe it.

Ipse Dixie

It's somewhat heartening to see how quickly The Market Has Spoken on retailing items emblazoned with the 'murkin swastika. If I were of more cynical mind and heart (I know, I know), I'd probably come up with some catchy bullshit slogan about the noble resistance to political correctness and move some "collectible" swag on CafePress or such like. Git 'em now before they take yer guns!

Do rednecks really think anyone buys their bullshit rationalizations about what that flag "means" to them, that it somehow no longer means what it has always meant? Since when do symbols of genocide and brutality and institutionalized cruelty get to magically shuck off their history and start over again? More importantly, why would you want to do that?

The idea that the Traitor Loser flag now just stands for "courage, family, and good times" is just ludicrous. It cannot escape its history so easily, or indeed at all. It is the emblem of the eternally butthurt, of people who take some perverse pride in being descended from people who fought against their own country for the right to own and brutalize other human beings. It is not a point of pride, it is a point of shame.

Slavery and its vile structure is a stain on this nation's soul, one that the Founding Fathers saw and understood, and regrettably did not move to correct quickly enough. But once they finally did move to correct it, the southern states felt more obligated to their disgusting institution than to their country.
They lost, and paid a more than fair price; if anything, in retrospect, the Union clearly didn't finish the job and beat the stupid out of 'em.

Now, while it can no longer stand that public places show open support for this, I really couldn't care less if people choose to fly the rag as individuals. Freedom of speech and all; if people want to tell the world that they're assholes, I encourage them to speak loud and remove all doubt. But by the same token, they should expect their self-serving nonsense to be repudiated by people who have actually watched Selma and 12 Years a Slave, and read the Corner Stone speech, and understand exactly what "states rights" and "heritage" they are referring to.

Ordinarily I root for losers and underdogs, I like rebels and people who tell The Man "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me". But this is just plain pig-headed obstinacy for its own sake. The default excuse for the rapists and killers and vicious oppressors of the good ol' days is that they were people of a different time. They certainly were, and it certainly was a different time, and the best way to ensure that the mores and rationales of that misbegotten era stay in the past is to stop memorializing the schtick and totems of that era. They need to either let go and get rid of the damned rag, or get used to the rest of the world calling them on their bullshit.

Lazy Train

When Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are the voices of reason on your side, maybe it's time to reconsider your basic premises. This is about to be the next entrant in the Tedious Summer Fake Debate sweepstakes, now that the required shark attacks and Trump announcements are already out of the way. At least one half-assed "tradition" will be "scrutinized" and Both Sides Will Be Heard.

The tradition of flying a flag that celebrates systemic racism and plunder will be said to come down to the noble voters of South Carolina, who will get their backs up in righteous indignation, drawl some obvious untruths, and tell everyone to go fuck themselves. Short of a tourism boycott, you're not going to talk these rubes out of their stupid tree. They're fine with lying to themselves and everyone else about the nature of that hateful rag and what it represents.

Ordinarily you'd just say, well, let morons be morons and leave it at that. And perhaps that's where we'll end up. But nine people got slaughtered in a church a few days ago because some deranged dipshit decided that he'd had enough of something. The same mindset that defends that damned flag is precisely the same mindset that composed said dipshit's actions.

Another tradition is that of giving South Carolina -- a state notable for exactly two things:  being the first state to attempt to secede, and having about 1.5% of the US population -- a prominent role in selecting the next president. To the extent that the electoral process for picking imperial custodian even matters, with its perpetual campaign machine and roster of mostly worthless choices, the insistence on giving tiny states where no one lives first choice on legitimizing candidates undermines the validity of that process. Larger, more populous states such as California and New York -- and yes, Texas and Florida as well -- don't have a voice until Iowa and South Carolina and New Hampshire have had their say.

It's bad enough that a depopulated ghost state like Wyoming has exactly the same number of US Senators as California, a state with about 66 times as many people, and at least four cities each with more people than all of Wyoming. It's ridiculous that preliminary choices are entirely ceded to small states that are not representative of anything but themselves.

I've felt increasingly that the post-Westphalian nation-state paradigm is increasingly outmoded, that what worked to preserve order in 1648 has perhaps run its course nearly four centuries later. Maybe the fifty states would work better as a loose confederation of regional entities that regulate trade, and leave each other to their picayune bullshit.

Maybe the taker states, adding nothing of value in the first place and no longer having their nonsense supported by the maker states, would be forced to get honest with themselves, and join the 21st century. Or not. With that sort of setup, what goes on in the backwaters would have as much relevance as news from Pakistan or Gambia.

Carthago Delenda Est

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
"Y'all are raping our women and taking over our country. This must be done." -- Dylann Storm Roof

There is some sort of twisted irony that bowl-haircutted domestic terrorist Dylann Stormfront Roof, who shot up a church full of Christiansblack people, is about to find out what the racial demographic is in gen-pop. Good luck, shitbird. I don't make jokes about dropping the soap, because this nation's penitentiary system is a nasty disgrace of privatized enslavement and institutionalized sadism. But there are some people whom you just can't muster sympathy for, and this is one of them.

More interesting is how this is yet another of those inane pretend "national discussions" that are supposed to cut 'murka's perceptions about race in sharp relief, yet do anything but in practice. It does provide small respite from the endless jabber about Rachel Dolezal, a woman who clearly has some issues about identity but is essentially a harmless goofball.

I have trouble finding an opinion about a seemingly misguided white person pretending to be black, it's about as pressing an issue as the countless suburban cracker mooks trying to up their puny game. They grow out of it when they either have to get a job, or get tired of people laughing at them instead of with them. Sooner or later Dolezal would have encountered an actual black person who, rather than giving her funny, inquisitive looks, asked her point-blank what the fuck she thought she was pulling. Still and all, as I said, dopey and harmless. But you would have thought by the verbal kerfuffle that it Meant Something.

This is how we pretend to talk to each other about race, primarily because the southern states understand the issue differently, as they have never and perhaps will never get over having their asses sorely kicked in the Woah of Nawthun Aggresshun. So they pretend that their worthless, traitorous rag is a profound statement of "heritage" rather than hate or racism. On that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wisely points out, we agree -- but it's a heritage of plunder, torture, mayhem, rape, murder, cruelty.

So fuck Huckleberry Closetcase and the horse he rode in on, and the heritage of institutionalized theft and misery he takes such pride in. It's not that much of a wonder that assholes like Roof germinate and take root in the polluted soil of the south, with its monuments and highways and cities dedicated to the people who fought and died for the right to enslave and terrorize other human beings, to treat them literally as pieces of property, to be divided, sold, or discarded at will.

It's the most cowardly, chickenshit thing to pretend that Roof set out to murder Christians, when Roof himself said he set out to murder black people. He made no bones about it. But we live in a society where a bunch of biker gangs can shoot up Waco, kill close to a dozen people, and people just go, "huh, that sucks," but when people in Baltimore riot because they have no other recourse, and burn down a drugstore and torch a few cars -- but kill no one -- it's an endless litany about what "thugs" those people are.

(And, as a parallel side note, the Waco shootout may turn out to be a serious over-reaction by our paramilitarized law enforcement. But the fact is, as the known facts lay immediately after the incident last month, the chatter revolved largely around romanticizing the "outlaw" mentality of the bikers, who are rugged individualists in comparison to the "thug" outlaws in the inner cities. It's as if they're never heard of or read Hunter S. Thompson.)

Already Roof is being characterized as mentally ill, or a drug addict, or both. And perhaps he is. (In which case maybe Roof's father ought to be charged as an accessory, seeing as how he saw fit to give the little prick a fucking .45 handgun for his birthday in April, just weeks after getting busted for drugs and trespassing.) But maybe he really just hates black people, because he's been raised and steeped in a bullshit "culture" that still goes out of its way to find ways to relegate non-whites, to reframe an epic struggle that sundered a nation, whose combatants were abundantly clear about what precisely they were fighting to preserve.

I have completely run out of fucks to give about these people. Fuck them, fuck their stupid two-ply flag, fuck their bullshit rationalizations for systemic theft and brutality, fuck their heritage. There are like ten backwater welfare states that continue to resist common sense. It is time for the rest of the country and the world to stop coddling them. We need to find the graves of everyone from Jefferson Davis to Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Lester Maddox, take a collective dump on them, burn a traitor flag on the shit, and piss out the embers.

A boycott would definitely get through to them, something along the lines of "take your flag down or we stop coming to Myrtle Beach". The games of shitholes like Missuhsippuh refusing to ratify the 13th Amendment need to be done with. Playtime is over.

Plus Ça Change

Fifty years after officers sworn to uphold the law attacked peaceful protesters on a bridge named after a human turd, things have changed some, but not enough. You still live in a country where Darren Wilson could have been caught on video walking right up to a prone Michael Brown, unprovoked, and plugged his ass for no goddamned reason, and someone would have defended or rationalized it.

Handicapping the Horse Race

What Steve said. It's bad enough that the primaries are nine months away, and the general election twenty months away, and the usual mediots are already weighing in with their empty picks. What's so much worse is the way media outlets in general tend to dismiss fringe Democratic candidates, while giving time to every knuckle-dragging shithead the Republicans churn up.

Matt Bai's smarmy line about Elizabeth Warren making Howard Dean look like Barry Goldwater perfectly encapsulates the problem with the political analysis that emanates from the sphincter of the corporate media. "Liberal" candidates who might pursue actual change, like Warren or Bernie Sanders, are summarily dismissed as political quacks. "Conservatives" who show up at the annual CPAC crapfest are duly graded and rated, however ineptly.

Scott Walker, who does not have a college degree, is being talked about as a serious contender for the most important job on the planet. (Outside of the finance and arms industries, anyway.) But according to the Serious Observers, despite Walker's refusal to address anything substantive, he still gets an "A" grade, apparently because he has the balls to confidently believe his own bullshit.

The difference between a country with a free press and a country with a state-owned puppet press is that the latter at least has a valid excuse for its craven behavior.

Because They're Dicks

Without even looking, I knew which states prefer to celebrate an insurrectionist traitor instead of a civil rights icon. Because these are states (let's just call them 48, 49, and 50, since they take turns licking the bottom of the barrel in just about every quality-of-life category) that have nothing better to do but stomp their wittle feet in the supermarket, thinking they're showing Mommy a thing or two, unaware that the rest of the store is looking at them, quietly thinking, "If that was my kid, I'd grab a box of his favorite cereal, beat the shit out of him with it, and then box up all his toys for a couple weeks the second we get back home."

I don't really have anything against Lee in particular; in fact, he is supposedly a distant relative. Lee was a product of his time, fighting more or less honorably for a thoroughly dishonorable cause. This is really about the knuckle-dragging mossbacks that cling to this stupid shit, because they have nothing else to offer, because their states have nothing else to offer. People come from around the world to California, to see Yosemite or Hollywood or the Golden Gate Bridge, or hell to start a new career in the tech industry, write an app and gentrify what's left of the poorz outta there. They're not flocking to Pigfucker's Holler to see the Twine Museum.

No Surprises

There can't possibly be anyone out there surprised by the Ferguson grand jury's finding. All the usual ofay assholes, the Giulianis of the teevee jabber industry, will flood the zone tomorrow and pontificate about how if those people just stopped acting up, white cops wouldn't have to put 'em down.

Yes, maybe Michael Brown should have been a little smarter about cops. Same goes for Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot by a Cleveland cop over the weekend. We were all young once, but some of us have forgotten that part of the deal with being a dumb kid is that you haven't yet learned that the world is at best indifferent to your fate, at worst out to get you, or just waiting for you to fuck up so it can pounce on you.

Children are made aware of sex at about the age they hit puberty, just so that they hopefully understand the potential consequences of irresponsibility and recklessness. What would be an ideal age to teach them that if they screw around with the law, a cop can shoot them like a dog in the street and not lose a wink of sleep over any of it?

I'm old enough to recall a simpler time, a time when shooting even known perps was considered a last resort for cops, or nearly so, a time when cops didn't just gun down a sixth-grader in a playground swing as the go-to option. I think that if Michael Brown or Tamir Rice or John Crawford or Akai Gurley or Eric Garner had been white, they'd all still be alive. I know that there are still parts of this country where thieving racists hold positions of some authority, and they get away with it until they're caught on camera, until there's no choice but to hold them at least a little bit accountable.

Then they get fired, maybe, sometimes. But the dead are still dead, and paranoid white people still side with overeager shooters, until it's their turn or their screw-up kid gets a visit from Johnny Law. Riot all you want, kiddies, it won't do you a goddamned bit of good. You get to hear yet another round of full-throated song from the proverbial rednecked peckerwood, that most pernicious and tiresome of the political aviary. That's about it.

For now, this is racial, but it's really socioeconomic at heart; only poor people get the full iron fist treatment. And because 'murka is full of gullible maroons who assure themselves that poor people are lazy idiots while they themselves are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, the crackers assume that the police are always right, as long as it's someone else they're picking on.

Fortunately, in our post-scarcity utopia, when no one has a job because robots are flipping our burgers, delivering our goods, and yes, patrolling our streets, and what jobs are left are for (perhaps literally) peanuts, everyone will be fair game.

It's Not Even Past

Let's not put too fine a point on it -- if the events and actions and social dynamics in the south over the past 150 have taught us anything, it's that Billy the Torch didn't go nearly far enough. The fact that there are still no shortage of fools in that region who persist in mythologizing what was nothing more (or less) than a brutal, racist, genocidal machine, a society built on nothing but the extracted blood and unpaid toil and pain of others, only reinforces that fact.

People like Jack Bridwell suppress and avoid those truths because they are inconvenient, difficult to accept. Republican politics since 1964 has taken advantage of that revolting, absurdist mentality, and owned the entire region since then. That is not a coincidence.

Nationally, that strategy has translated into soft-focus gimmickry, mostly revolving around mythologizing an America that never was. The verb that pops up most consistently in their marketing materials is "restore"; they continuously promise to "restore" "America," whether that's "values," "greatness," whatever. I think the word they're really looking for is "instauration," which is very similar but not precisely the same.