Anybody here seen my old friend Kindness?

...I just looked around and he was gone.

I had started to write this:

Imagine if we had been invaded by China.

Five years ago.

Because Argentina had car-bombed the shit out of the Forbidden City

And because the United States and Argentina were in the same hemisphere.

Had similar languages.

Both technically Christian.

Argentina had a trade mission in New York, NY, USA. So, y’know, there were “linkages”.

And the Dubya Regime was obviously too dangerous to be allowed to continue to rule America. Because you just never know.

So pursuing a freshly minted "Preemption Doctrine" China whams us flat.

Disbands our military. Fires the cops. And then sits back for a year while every nut with an AK and a copy of the "Turner Diaries" goes apeshit.

And during the few minutes every day during which we are still permitted to have electricity, you tune in China Central Television to see representative from the Chinese Government saying;

1. The looting and rioting is no biggie.

2. It’s only a few Bush regime dead-enders who are doing it.

3. They’re getting help from “Argentineans”.

4. And it turns out that China’s whole plan to solve its own terrorist problem is to draw the Argentine Liberation Front into Wisconsin and then fight them there rather than having to fight them in Beijing.

5. Which would be just awesome except for part about China never bothering to ask American if we wanted to have our country staked out like a goat at a watering hole as bait to lure the ALF into the open.

Also it would seem the ALF has since started to use the Chinese Invasion as recruiting propaganda. The net result being that, rather that starving and destroying the ALF, the War has quintupled their size and support worldwide in less that three years.

Meanwhile, as you peer out your window at the three-week running gun battle taking place across the street in what used to be your kid’s elementary school, you don’t see Argentineans or Jeb Bush pulling the triggers.

And you don’t see your Chinese “liberators”.

You see that creepy, sweaty guy who you’ve never seen blink, or heard speak in anything less than a shout, and whose house always looked like an Army Surplus store had stroked out and puked on his lawn.

You see End Times Larry, who always managed to turn every innocuous conversation into a spitty, hysterical testament to The Coming Rapture whenever he cornered you at the Piggly Wiggly.

And they both look terribly…fulfilled.

Of course the street one block over is relatively safe, but that’s only because Ray-Ray – the low-rent sleaze who used to sling rock to local kids – is now a warlord with enough firepower stolen from unguarded ammo dumps to stop a tank column.

And Ray-Ray says that street is his, and no one has the muscle to say otherwise.

And now, five years later, those seem like the salad days of the Occupation.

...

Was gonna write that as parable.

As yet another attempt to try any verbal sleight of hand, any frequency, any genre, and volume as a means to do my small part to help pry open the minds of just a few – just a handful – of the ProWar Right.

And then I listened to this vlog over at Blue Gal’s place.

A lovely offering all the way through, but one that took wing for me at about the seven-minute mark and becomes something wistful and beautiful. A eulogy of a kind.

A eulogy for some of the small, dear things we have lost.

And it reminded me that when I pause and take the time to open that clench of anger and the snark that fuels a lot of what I write and look inside, there in the center I find grief.

A sadness around which I have girded cleverness and rage.

(Aside to Chautauqua: No. I don’t think an elephant knocking down the I-35 bridge is hilarious. I think it’s appalling. I think leaving a country’s infrastructure to rust because it's better that taxes should be cut for the rich is obscene. And I think a Party whose ideology commands that the country be allowed to rot because Gummit Is Evil should be forced to have that logo tattooed to their fucking heads and wear it like a mark of Cain every day they are in Minnesota.)

Because it’s absolutely no fun loathing your leaders -- Honestly don't understand how the Right can grow so fat feasting on such a thin, bilious gruel decade after decade.

It is, in fact, just terribly sad to look out at your country and see an insane asylum.

Terribly sad to see monsters and madmen smashing the finest, most precious heirlooms in your country’s treasure house to atoms. And to see their followers in their millions clap and dance in the ruins as they do it.

Terribly sad to look into the eyes of the other side and see nothing in them anymore but the fever-sick thug fury of rabid animals trapped in a nightmare.

And yet we are realists, and that is the world in which we live and with which we must contend.

And for me personally -- as a lover of words and ideas of all shapes and sizes -- that means mourning the loss of comity and respect in the way we talk to each other. It means facing a town hall that has been deliberately firebombed hollow of its amity and goodwill by thirty years of Falwell, Limbaugh, Rove, Gingrich and DeLay.

I, too, so very much miss being able to look across the political divide and see anyone on the other side who has not been bred to believe that selfishness, mercilessness and misanthropy are virtues.

And when we talk of tolerance?

We are told to fuck tolerance.

Step by unholy step, theirs has become a Party and a Movement that makes an outright sociopath like Ann Coulter their Goddess, and uses “tolerance” as a smirking, eye-rolling epithet.

Who think the only reason a person would ever be “tolerant” is:

A: You’re too big a pussy to go over and kick their ass until they’re coughing up blood, or;

B: The thought of the criminal justice system getting deeply interested in your business should your ass-kicking get reported to the authorities scares you into compliance. You big pussy.

Hey, dickhead: tolerance doesn’t mean I have to love you or agree with you. It means that my vision of democratic civilization demands that I make allowances for people I do not love, and with whom I do not agree.

It means that some of my tax dollars will go towards paving and grading the roads that allow you to drive in safety and comfort from your doublewide in Swinefuck all the way to the Pixley Bijou so you can see “The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause” in Dolby on the Big Screen.

And it means that some of your taxes will go to pay for public defenders, health insurance, and a measure of security for the elderly, the weak, the poor and whole lot of other people you despise for various reasons.

And the reason I stopped writing what I was writing is because I fear that there is no one left to talk to.

That we are now in a No Man’s Land


Facing an army of lunatics.

That theirs has become a Party and a Movement and a Media sold so far down the river by their masters that they have contempt for the very idea that there can be a reasonable middle ground over anything.

You hear it every single fucking day.

You are either a Fundamentalist Conservative Christian, or an evil, amoral Secularist.

You either love Bush, or you are Deranged.

You are either Pro-Iraq War, or you are a traitor who hates our soldiers.

You are either Pro-Nuke Iran, or are a dupe in league with the enemy.

You are either a Republican, or a Communist.

You either love America, or you are a Democrat.

You either believe in hard work, or you are a Liberal.

You either believe in "kill ‘em all", or you are an Anarchist.

You either believe in Corporate Rights Uber Alles, or you are a Socialist.

You either believe in Industry, or you are a tree-hugging fag.

You’re either one of Us 100%, or you’re a Dirty Fucking Hippy.

And the heartbreaking reality of that staring me in the face is what I mourn.

That we are no longer merely a nation divided.

We are a nation divorced.