Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Human Rights
Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives:
YESTERDAY, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
Speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York (Transcript)
Good evening.
Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices: secretaries, business men and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.
George W. Bush, 9/11 Address to the Nation
Go home; we love you.
Dumbo Gambino, 1/6/2021
Today is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Founders Day of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated (Vice President Kamala Harris is a member).
I’ve been busy since last Friday, and numb from four years of bullshit.
There’s a sizable contingent of this country – 74 million or so – that don’t think I’m a citizen. Listening to a podcast with Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehishi Coates on what happened last Wednesday, like out of a pulp fiction writer’s fever dream. The discussion between them is ostensibly titled “The Attack on the Capitol.” Their dialog led to a dark logic.
For eight years of the Obama presidency, he was illegitimated by the birther lie. He was a secret Muslim, closet homosexual, his wife a transsexual man, and the kids adopted. It would have been news to their grandmother. Every effort made to make him “other,” inclusive of Witch Doctors and hanging him in effigy.
A whole cottage industry of conspiracy theories blossomed, and right-wing operators cashed in on the racism cash cow. Violence escalated nationally against African Americans – the majority of them men, but a few women because, racism – possibly to teach us our “places” in the authoritarian hierarchy. From Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Aubrey, Breona Taylor, to George Floyd we could not catch our breaths. We were hung, struck, shot: lynched in reality.
The Former Republican Party (look up the definition of republicanism) hasn’t won both the electoral college and the popular vote in four elections: 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. The Southern Strategy obviously has a demographic shelf life, and a few in the privileged group is have the sads about it. If you “other” the first African American president, the votes of people sharing his heritage are by definition “illegitimate,” despite decisively winning elections and turning the power of the Senate. This happening despite denied voter suppression tactics of reducing drop boxes during a pandemic, cutting cables on voting machines, reducing precincts, delaying mail-in votes: they HAD to win, or so they thought.
Therefore, you can lie to your constituents, you can tell them the election was stolen without evidence. BLM protestors get teargas, water cannons, percussion bombs, and rubber bullets; armed insurrectionists get Capitol Police escorts who pose for selfies. They are fertile ground for sowing the grains of alternate facts. The ground had been prepared for over forty years. Rush Limbaugh, AM Talk Radio, Fox Propaganda, News Max, and OANN are the fruits born of this manure.
These fecal droppings also bear the fruits of violence. “Obama is coming to take your guns” raised more money than Midas for the gun industry from 2009 – 2016. They’ve lost money under Captain Crazy Pants. Without “jackbooted thug boogie men,” you don’t raise as much money for an industry so focused on a narrow clientele steeped in racism, religious extremism, sexism, xenophobia, and anxiety disorders.
So, after forty years of propaganda and bullshit, House Republicans aren’t afraid for the random QANON candidate to their far-right in a primary: they’re afraid the constituents they’ve been lying to for campaign dollars, the constituents they’ve played on their fears of the “other” and changing demographics to maintain power, will see through the wolf tickets they’ve been sold, and like the insurrectionists-seditionists cum insurgents, they will find them at their exclusive enclave residents – and kill them. The BIGGEST lie they’ve been told is that the current numerical minorities are taking their jobs. Middle-class jobs shipped overseas was a decision that happened in corporate boardrooms by people who looked like them. The rest is automation, computer science, and robotics.
Then First Lady (now Secretary) Hillary Clinton talked about a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Maybe it’s time to do what Senator Mitt Romney practically shouted in the well of the Senate post the attempted coup that threatened democrats and republicans alike. A coup that could have easily resembled how the “Son’s of Jacob” overthrew the government in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” to set up the fictional Republic of Gilead:
Tell them the truth. Teach the ones you don’t jail civics and critical thinking skills.
“His [John F. Kennedy’s] assassination was the result of the climate of hate. Only I said ‘the chickens came home to roost,’ which means the same thing. A climate of hate means that this is the result OF something, and when I say ‘chickens coming home to roost‘ I mean the same thing.” He admonishes he didn’t say he was glad the president was killed: that’s what Malcolm says the press said. YouTube
Origin: The Phrase Finder
The notion of bad deeds, specifically curses, coming back to haunt their originator is long established in the English language and was expressed in print as early as 1390, when Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Parson’s Tale:
And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.
Physics and Nano 