Revolting

I really don't enjoy this.

What I want to do is publish the post I already had scheduled for today. Old fart meets credit-card reader, and hilarity ensues. I want to explain why spider bites are usually on your fanny because spiders object to being sat on. I'd like to tell you that my new shampoo smells like Pine-Sol and now I get out of the shower wondering if I've been scrubbing the toilet bowl with my head.

But I can't, because we can't go three days in this country without a lunacy grenade going off. We're all collateral damage, and the shrapnel is by now lodged in all of our hearts, and half of us are trying to pluck it out and half are happy to let it fester.

 

Nearly half cannot comprehend losing an election, because everyone they knew voted the same way they did. They cannot visualize their opposition, even though they've been mocking us for four years. Did they, too, believe we were fictional bots?

 

And some of them answered the call, when the call came. They were standing by, an army ready for their leader to deploy. Still, it was shocking. At first it almost looked like men were gaining the Capitol by scaling its walls, but surely that can't be--walls keep people out. Don't they?

 

But no, there they were, a faction of fat fascist fucks playing dress-up, and no, I'm not fat-shaming; I'm merely describing; they are shaming themselves. Just look at those fat white fucks. Where is Lorena Bobbitt? Get her on the phone.

These are described as "mostly white males," although that is a nod to their tattoos: this group is all about white power, and meanwhile, while we fantasize about where they can jam their rebel flags, Black power is alive and well a few states to the south, extracting the monkey wrench from the gears of the Senate with grace and peace. This is a day for the books.

But no sooner do we all bear witness than the Mostly-White-Males' operating system begins planting new seeds of deceit and broadcasting them into the soft spongy soil of the brainwashed: Antifa did this awful thing. That we totally approve of.

 

Sure. Those are definitely anti-fascists dolled up in raccoon underpants and traitor's flags. But it has come to this, that if I read a headline about vandals leaving a severed pig's head at Nancy Pelosi's house, I do not immediately know what group is responsible. Because the radicalized left and right occupy much of the same territory, where the politics of confrontation erases civility, and defense of freedom erodes freedom, and war is proclaimed the path to peace.

 

I do not equate the two. Neither by extent, or intent. I understand that the left musters in the cause of justice, and the right in the cause of a toddler's notion of liberty. But I have seen both sides attack an assault-weapon ban for the same reason: the need to fight our own government. I'm horrified to hear it from the right. It breaks my heart to hear it from the left.

 

After a while, the soldiers at the fringes start to look the same. Rage is its own fuel. Fury is all-consuming, and obliterates reason and dissent. Can it be quarantined? Set up a tournament, a jousting match. Duels: penises at ten paces. Make it ten inches, they still won't touch each other. Make it pay-per-view, and we can buy ourselves some nice health care, reparations, solar panels for all.

As for the shameless architect of our ruin, I do not want to see him harmed. I do not want to see him hanging upside-down in the town square. I wish to see him escorted into a court of law and delivered without ceremony to a secure location, wearing horizontal stripes and as long a necktie as he wants.