Categories
Coronavirus Politics

Preamble to a New Declaration: Freedom from Self-Destruction

You could argue that a picture of a bombed out Washington, D.C. during the Martin Luther King riots of ’68 would make for a more fitting backdrop considering not only the topic of this piece but also the state of America at this millionth racial flashpoint over the past blah-blah-blah decade(s). However, if you’ve been reading this little blog of mine, you’ll know my affinity for (in my view correctly) comparing America of today to a perilously close version of 1940’s Nazi Germany: that is, a former democratic republic-turned fascist caricature that ultimately cannibalized itself, slaughtered its own people, and collapsed under the weight of its own oppression.

Hence why I feel that photo of a sacked 1945 Berlin is sadly more apropos.


The immunity is here!

I have a full course of the Pfizer vaccine pfacillitating the pfucking power of pfull immunity from this motherpfucking pfuckpface of a pfuckhole virus.

That’s the best news I’ve had in a year, and I’ll be happier when I’m not so tired and my arm stops feeling like a giant bee stung the shit out of it.

Of course, it’s going to work itself out. What WON’T work itself out is the country we’ve all been simultaneously lucky to have been birthed into…so long as we have a lack of melanin and a shit load of money.

Sadly, I’m not one of those lucky pfew.

We need to change before we die a painful and pitiful death.

Next week, we’ll be gearing up for the conclusion to the most public murder trial arguably since OJ Simpson, and likely the most important policing-related trial since the miscarriage of justice that was the 1992 Rodney King fiasco.

Because an all-white jury in one of the wealthiest counties in L.A. (along with being the home turf of most LAPD officers at the time) acquitted four officers of the savage beating of a Black man in the middle of a freeway, the country witnessed the most destructive racial riot in its history, one that still reverberates on our streets with every acquittal, grand jury dismissal, non-action and faux mea culpa issued by the most corrupt criminal gang in America: the police.

We’re seeing the fruits of the gutless defense of one of those four defendants whom despite ganging up on a LONE MAN in the middle of a busy fucking interstate highway, uttered the universal get-out-jail-free applause line for every cop facing prison time for murdering innocent BIPOC.

“I was completely in fear for my life,” Laurence Powell, the man who struck Rodney King 56 times on video camera, told his sympathetic allies, the jury, in Simi Valley all those years ago. True, he later was found guilty in a federal case, along with the leader of that merry gang of psychopaths Stacey Koon, of civil rights violations and served 30 months in prison.

Sadly, that line of defense has acquitted more murderers in the eyes of too many juries at the expense of the families of the many dead who’ve suffered for our nation’s refusal to reconcile with the inherently unequal system of society we’ve hardwired into every facet of American life.

Michael Brown’s killer Darren Wilson used similar wording in an interview with Stephanopoulos eight years ago, so similar in fact that this article’s headline paraphrased his comments into an almost carbon copy of Powell’s mewlings more than a decade before. Not to mention a dash of good ol’ fashioned “he was like a big burly man”:

“I just felt the immense power that he had. And then the way I’ve described it is it was like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big this man was […]”.

Michael Brown was 18 at the time of his untimely murder at the hands of this whiny pissant.

He was a normal young man, no more remarkable, made of flesh and bone as opposed to the wrought iron and hatred Wilson’s teary-eyed sob story would have you believe.

Of course, this same defense was employed by the yellow-bellied fat puddle of pork shit George Zimmerman – not even an ACTUAL cop – for justifying murdering a 17-year-old boy he stalked in the middle of the night. Trayvon Martin rightly defended himself against this wannabe Klansman, but died anyway. The fucked up part about this situation was that racist Pillsbury Doughboy didn’t even need to say the words “I was in fear for my life” because the jury said it for him (emphasis mine):

“He had a right to defend himself,” [the juror] said. “If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him, or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right.”

But notice something else in these stories: the only person who actually said he feared for his life was Laurence Powell.

Instead of saying that phrase in direct quotes, each of the acquitted murderers or their advocates merely echoed that sentiment. It’s the headlines of ABC and CNN that repeat Powell’s now hallowed defense, the words stained in the memories of these agencies that covered that explosive 1992 trial and thus broadcast its devastating impact on a national, even global level.

No doubt had he testified and not taken the coward’s way out, Derek Chauvin would have echoed that sentiment to his jury. Kim Potter will likely use a similar justification despite having 26 years of experience with I would assume more than a 20-year-old kid ducking a missed court date for smoking fucking grass.

I’m sure even Eric Stillman, the Chicago Police’s newest high-profile child killer, will say it too, if not have the media simply say it for him as they replay his hurried and terrified gasps of fear over the body of Adam Toledo, knowing full well what he did was inhuman and worthy of the flames of hellfire if such place does exist.

Will this matter? Who knows and frankly, will a single one of us be shocked if nothing befalls this cadre of badged wannabe Steve Rogerses?

I’m expecting this country’s violent objection of progress to kick in, even in the middle of a global pandemic that’s left us all burned into withered husks of our former selves.

And as the justice system will likely fail us once more, we can ALWAYS depend on the forces of ineptitude and ego-devouring fame fucking to condemn us to our continued existence in this by-the-rich, for-the-soulless society governed by hedge funds and lobbyists at the detriment to regular human beings.

I’m speaking of course of the human Pet Rock Joe Manchin: an ancient relic of days gone by that never did anything other than look really unique in a world of far fewer choices for entertainment and self-distraction. Last night, MSDNC’s very own Lawrence O’Donnell had guest LA Times columnist and fellow mountain person Virginia Heffernan and her dear mother Nancy to explain why it is Joe Manchin just won’t fall in line with the Democratic agenda of securing voting rights for all and fixing a crumbling infrastructure. The younger Heffernan’s defense of West Virginia’s senior senator amounted to him essentially having fun being such a wittle outswider from West Virginny! She more or less said he likes to keep people “on their toes”, not wanting to be pegged down as any sort of predictable politician with his past support of Planned Parenthood and his sterling endorsement from the fundamentalist terrorist organization that is the NRA.

Oh, how lovely! And here I thought he was merely defending the filibuster simply to uphold the legacy of the virulent segregationist that once used Appalachian Joe’s seat to obstruct the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A move by the way that the man himself later fucking regretted.

Now, it should be noted that in that above article I linked, John Lewis (yes that John Lewis) defended the legacy of the late Robert C. Byrd, the man whom Manchin wishes to honor by keeping the filibuster alive.

You know, that same filibuster that Byrd later was sorry for using to try to obstruct Black Americans from receiving human rights codified in the law.

So………ya know………take that and read into it exactly what you should.

That sentient Sam Eagle would be so goddamn moronic as to justify his obnoxious stubbornness by defending the act of a racist who later disavowed said act of defiance should be the true only thing you should remember about Senator Pet Rock.

He and Curtsy McFucksuckle of Arizona have only one answer for those of you wishing for a government with some semblance of pride, equity, and a sense of actual lasting justice and change:

That day, it was minimum wage she gleefully condemned to hell.

Tomorrow, it’ll be the infrastructure bill that will help seniors looking for guaranteed long-term care.

And soon enough, she’ll say the same when it’s time to expand a historically imbalanced and anti-American Supreme Court, federal protection of voting rights for all Americans (her constituents included), and of course to abolishing the filibuster, permanently gridlocking Congress in a battle of wills between the Democrats seeking to govern, and the GQP wishing to sew enough discontent and frustration among liberal and left-leaning voters to dissuade (or just outright prevent) them from voting for progressives who could otherwise fix this broken merry-go-round of idiocy after the midterms.

Meanwhile, the virus isn’t going anyway.

The pandemic still rages on thanks to Gym Jordan and every other Trumpist goon looking to stop people from ending the virus because maybe they like the reports of horrifyingly disproportionate minority deaths.

After all, that’s fewer people to vote them out of office, right?

Listen, folks.

We’re in some motherpfucking deep shit here.

People are dying and our politicians seem to want that.

They don’t want us to use our voices to push them into doing their actual jobs rather than using their newfound fame to self-satisfyingly smirk like the cat that ate the canary as their own voters die from endemic poverty and other inequalities along with this never-ending virus.

Don’t forget that this is what insignificant afterthoughts truly desire:

Remember this degenerate when January rolls around. Because soon after the new year, it’ll be campaign season 2022. And thanks to our leaders and their inability to get shit done, this next election, and the election after, and the election after that one too, will all be the most important elections of our lives.

Until we empower progressive lawmakers to give us a green economic strategy to transform our energy consumption and output, a healthcare system that cares for us as opposed to treat us in our dying days, and an equitable society that won’t murder Black boys, girls, men and women for simply breathing in front of a poorly-trained and emotionally-feeble gangbanger with a badge, men like this will continue protecting the black holes within our society that allow for the continued and dogged denigration of our country while perpetuating a false dream of opportunity.

We must make that country for ourselves, or else face the same fate as the previous dominant species of this realm.

Good luck to us all.

Categories
Coronavirus

Thanks, Assholes.

Maybe you didn’t understand what was happening here the first time around.

Fair enough, neither did I.

We’ve never had such a pandemic unfold in our lifetimes.

You were confused by some conflicting stories from the outset, signs of infection that weren’t particularly unique to COVID, or perhaps like the majority of us, you just didn’t know better.

All valid, all somewhat understandable.

But when they told us to wear masks, what did you do? You ran up state capitols with guns and screamed in the faces of anyone you could corner about mY uNaLiEnAbLe RiGhTs to get haircuts, eat at Applebees, hang out at ­­bars, high five your bros, piss without washing your hands, dry hump women at nightclubs, etc.

When they told us to stay inside, what did you do? You protested on street corners and did pushups on the sidewalk. You pushed “Plandemic” and other certifiably psychotic lies, shouting to the globalists “You won’t catch me with no burka on, SOROS!”

All you motherfucking limp-dicked pea-brained baskets of dogshit did was undermine the entire lockdown. We sacrificed 3 months of our lives ultimately chasing and then eating our own fucking tail to bring us back to Outbreak Day.

So now, instead of losing 3 months to this godforsaken pandemic, we’re about to lose not just summer, not just sports, not just TV shows and movies or the vast assortment of real-world distractions we stupefy ourselves with to make it through the day. We’re going to lose brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents, ENTIRE GENERATIONS.

The virus erroneously portrayed as the “one with so many names” by President Bonespur von Jackboot, SARS-CoV-2, is a variant of a coronavirus we encountered back in 2002. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) debuted and scared us shitless right before intelligence was officially murdered here in the States by the Trump Party.

This was no goddamned hoax.

This was no weaponized biochemical pathogen engineered in a Chinese laboratory.

This was a newer version of something that the entire planet not even 20 years ago knew of and eventually defeated, vastly mitigating its collateral damage.

Now, we’ll be lucky if society survives through to October.

To be clear, it’s not just Americans contributing to the outlandish number of deaths at the hands of COVID-19. Brazil, China, the UK and others all bare considerable blame as does any country that underfunded the World Health Organization or other similar medical research bodies that could have seen this coming far before allowing a pandemic to halt the world in its tracks.

But thanks specifically to you rotten self-entitled anti-science snowflakes and your illiterate elected officials, I now have two friends fighting off COVID. They’re young, so perhaps they’ll make it through unscathed. But also thanks to you fucks, I’m missing meeting my best friend’s newborn son, his so far just once-rescheduled bachelor party, and more than likely his wedding in which I was to be a groomsman.

Through your own callous narcissism, you’ve made life for those us who might live through this thing unlivable, confining those with chronic illnesses to four-room prison cells once known as our homes. Make no excuses for your deranged bullshit. You have to live with the fact that you contributed to a preventable disaster. You, like so many Trump loyalists and James Woods/Ted Nugent lab accidents of your MAGA subspecies, have the blood of our 136,000+ and counting dead neighbors on your hands.

Hopefully G-d will forgive you.

The rest of us will await the day of your more-than-deserved comeuppance.

That is, if you don’t kill us first.

Postscript

Phew! Sorry, I’m just a touch frustrated right now.

I realize that I suddenly changed the format and look of this blog prior to the site’s most popular post from Juneteenth (sarcasm).

You’ll note that the site is now Diary of a Mad Millennial, a subtly blatant rip-off of a Tyler Perry movie. This blog is supposed to have an iota of sports discussion but given 2020 and its general 2020-ness, I’ve had next to no sports to write about, and thus have poured into this space my vitriolic mini-screeds over current affairs. This is either me doing a less than ideal form of self-therapy or perhaps I’m just losing my mind.

At any rate the blog formerly entitled This Site Has No Name (with the unchanged URL as proof of its one-time existence) is now this void of sorrow and anxiety I call my proverbial Internet timeshare.

My home is on Facebook like any other well-adjusted 20-something’s, duh!

Until next time…

Categories
2020 Election Coronavirus Politics

It’s All Part of the Plan

You are now witnessing the beginning of the end.

For four years, the Trump administration has lied about every conceivable thing you could imagine: from the size of the crowd at the inauguration, to the covering-up of bribes/veiled threats to the Ukrainians in search of dirt on Joe Biden, pretending to care about health care while simultaneously attempting to scrap Obamacare in the courts and bring back pre-existing conditions, to making up fake caravans, hordes of angry liberals, tiny child soldiers stealing ballots out of the mail, and refuting recorded-on-tape claims Trump made that COVID-19 was a new Democratic hoax. But perhaps the most devious lies told by this nightmare presidency came in the midst of the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis and cities across the country.

After the “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” controversy, administration officials and surrogates assigned blame to Antifa (anti-fascists) and the “far-left”. Trump named them along with anarchists at Cape Canaveral Saturday morning, and not long after consiglieri William Barr followed suit.

As before, the administration politicizes everything. They never fail to blame the Democrats for just about every negative occurrence befalling the United States right now.

And, as always, all was by design.

The demonstrations in Minneapolis escalated from peaceful resistance to all-out chaos after protestors began smashing windows and setting fires to businesses. Only these “protestors” stood out from the crowd:

Atlanta saw tensions boil over when more “demonstrators” shattered the CNN Center’s windowed entrance. A city whose last race riot took place over 100 years ago now hosted squad car burnings and rampant lootings.

My gut told me from the jump that something was off. Of course, the Ferguson demonstrations of 2014 and the Baltimore riots of 2015 indeed reflected both cities’ abject rage against the police. Not three days ago, Minneapolis Police’s 3rd Precinct and home of George Floyd’s murderers burned down. Gas stations, retail shops, and various other businesses have been turned into bonfires in Atlanta, New York, and L.A. But unlike these instances, I noticed the instigators of the early days of the riots shared one common trait.

They were all white.

Indulge me as I profile potential criminals in no way dissimilar to the prejudice generations of black people have absorbed and continue to absorb. Just ask Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. But if you look at the looters, the window-smashers, the men and women on the front lines at the beginning of the violence, they’re not black. Sure, black protestors have set fires over the past week, but mostly targets of their oppression. The majority are not seeking destruction. White supremacist fuckholes on the other hand?

You betcha.

Like in 1968, Trump seeks to turn this anger back onto the left. He’s blowing the right dog whistles the way Nixon did. And like Nixon, these snakes will use any tactics they can to undermine and smear the DNC, Joe Biden, etc. They’ll use their fabled “silent majority” rhetoric in hopes that white America will dupe themselves into voting for them once more. And if those moves fail to yield results, they’ll continue a long fascist tradition of staging false flag attacks.

Four weeks after Hitler’s rise to power, the Reichstag caught fire. Nazis immediately squared the blame on a suspected Dutch communist. Shaken by the attack on their government, the German parliament enacted a decree that gave Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich emergency powers, paving the way for the fascist scourge we all know and love.

It worked before. Let’s hope it doesn’t this time around.

Don’t kid yourself: Trump is doing the same thing.

Just yesterday, he angrily screamed at governors to be more “dominating” over protestors, announced his intentions to send in the military to quell demonstrators, and had a crowd peacefully demonstrating in front of the White House gassed and maced so he could take pictures with a bible in front of a church that didn’t want him there.

“I’m your law and order president,” the orange Nazi proclaims.

I’m sure he was dying to say Führer instead.

To recap, Trump’s people have already pre-determined who the “enemy” is, announced that only they are the true patriots safeguarding law and order, and are preparing a shock-and-awe response against citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

America, this isn’t a one-off.

This is your future.

This was the endgame all along. Trump wants to be a god, a supreme leader, El Jefe, the big boss man.

Why do you think he loves him some Kim Jong-un, Vlad Putey-Pute, MBS, and Recep Erdogan?

He aspires to BE these strongmen. He wants to be judge, jury, executioner for LIFE.

Trump intends to bend America to his will, have Congress enact any and all of his lawless schemes, and the judiciary to be his docile, doting lapdog.

The man in the high castle is already here.

It’s just a matter of how far he gets before we’re all shouting Heil Trump.

Categories
Coronavirus Politics

When A Nightmare Comes True

Captured by @kieroncg

In college, I anguished over a future day that riots would hit the streets of Atlanta.

I was mentally preparing myself for the moment that scenes from Ferguson would greet me on Sweet Auburn Ave and Andrew Young International.  

When Occupy Wall Street rose out of the economic crisis, hordes of protesters – mostly children of successful brokers and executives – flooded the streets of New York, railing against the very system that raised their priviliged soap boxes, allowing their denouncing cries against structural financial inequality to reach every corner of the national conscience.

Right at the same time, Troy Davis was scheduled for execution in Georgia. At this particular inflection point, the fires of rebellion and anger engulfed Woodruff Park. In a matter of days, the Occupy Movement re-christened their new home “Troy Davis Park”. Soon, Occupy Atlanta hoisted tents and filled them with disaffected youth, homeless old folks, and bored college students looking to embrace a counterculture. For what felt like three months, the space was theirs. Sadly, Troy Davis was executed, and the tent city fell at the hands of Mayor Kasim Reed’s Atlanta Police. By a small miracle, no one died. No unarmed black men gunned down like dogs near Aderhold. No beatdowns of rebellious 20-somethings on Luckie Street or Peachtree Center Avenue.

Somehow, The City Too Busy To Hate kept the anger to a simmer, but nothing more.

At the height of recent racial tensions of the last decade, I feared the worst. After Trayvon Martin, I prayed that the next death wouldn’t be in my city. When they murdered Mike Brown, I pictured the tear gas and fires overwhelming the Georgia Bookstore just up the block from my freshman dorm on Edgewood. When Walter Scott was shot in the back, I imagined angry protesters fighting police outside the Georgia Dome. After Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, and the countless unarmed black men and women murdered by police, I convinced myself that it would only be a matter of time until the streets of Atlanta would be alight in unbridled rage, indignant defiance against oppressive forces hellbent on maintaining the dynamics of Jim Crow and segregation.

Until I didn’t.

When I began working, I slowly lost that fear. Over time, the next shooting brought up anger, frustration, feelings of grief that things didn’t improve. But ultimately, I was preoccupied with bills and loans and building up my credit. I had to keep my head above water.

Even as the president morphed from a thoughtful black statesman to an incoherent orange zealot, I kept my nose to the grind as best I could.

When I least expected it, the powder keg finally detonated. Hell, I forgot the fucker was there in the first place.

The sight of a burned out APD car and huddled masses smashing up the CNN Center jarred me.

As I watched Keisha Lance Bottoms angrily beg her city to cease and desist, the overflowing lava of pent-up hatred I expected to greet me during college suddenly stared back through a tiny laptop screen. I didn’t smell the tear gas, feel the stinging rubber pellets, wince from the ringing within my ears from flash bangs and sirens.

I stood dumbfounded that the moment I once feared on a near daily basis would happen in my lifetime was actually happening.

George Floyd’s murder feels gratuitous, a needless attestation of the current state of the world: festering, oozing, bloviating while bleeding out in the middle of a society-crippling pandemic and economic shitstorm. We lost 103,000 people to COVID-19 in three months, but now we’re reminded that indeed black lives still don’t matter in America? What is this Nietzsche-concocted sick joke that we’re trudging through?

Is this the true 9th circle of Hell? Was Dante wrong after all this time? Or perhaps Milton’s Pandemonium?

Are we really living in a 1984 that fucked Hitler to bequeth us alt-1985 Biff Tannen?

Is this what South Africans felt under apartheid?

Martin Luther King during the “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” days of the civil rights struggle?

The fires destroying buildings in Minneapolis look eerily like the ones that raged in D.C. following Dr. King’s murder. The final-straw rage and lashing-out of the streets echo 1992 L.A. Within the images of the past week, I see America’s vulgar history re-birthed from the poisoned ashes of past failure.

It feels hopeless.

It feels inevitable.

It feels like it won’t end.

I can pretend to say I have hopes for a brighter day sometime down the line, but I’d rather not patronize you.

That’s the world we live in right now.

Fight for something more.

Categories
Blogs Coronavirus Politics

No Justice, No Peace

When will this scene go away? (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

G-d damn it.

G-d damn all of it.

It’s not enough that the country faces a highly infectious respiratory virus without effective treatments or a vaccine.

It’s not enough that the unemployment figures continue to skyrocket in spite of callous state governors re-opening businesses against all recommendations from infectious disease experts.

It’s not enough to have COVID-19 be an everyday killer within minority communities.

It’s not enough that George Floyd died at the hands of a racist.

It’s not enough that the sack of pompous shit in the Oval Office laughs at American journalists being laid off, or that he accuses a man of murder to the dismay of the alleged murder victim’s widower.

It’s not enough. Any of it. And it’s fucking infuriating beyond belief.

When scores of white people march the streets protesting the tyranny of state governments protecting their communities from being obliterated by the coronavirus, they’re met peacefully by health care workers standing stoically in the face of batshit conspiratorial charges and insanity, and state capitol police officers taking up-close-and-personal vitriol by men with assault rifles without moving so much as an inch.

When unarmed black people protest the unlawful murder of a black man at the hands of the police, as has happened time and again over the past 10 years, they’re shot with rubber bullets and tear gas. They’re forced to not only disperse, but are violently assaulted by the same cabal of murderers that started this whole fucking nightmare.

Meanwhile, senators caught profiting off of insider information are essentially set free before a charge can be laid by the President’s new law firm, the Justice Department. An organization run by a man who openly admitted that the victors can rewrite history to gloss over the acquittal of a friend to the President even after said friend plead guilty to charges of lying to the FBI. A man who believes that the President can apparently do fuck all without so much as facing a congressional committee.

A man who can tweet utter bullshit at will because Twitter is too chickenshit to exercise its right as a private company to consign Orange Hitler’s Twitter account to the same fate as the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.

Tara Reade can lie about Joe Biden assaulting her and make him look like a potentially unfit candidate for the White House. Donald Trump can lie about hydroxychloroquine’s super-effective treatment of COVID-19 and receive one little “this is actual fake news” warning label after lying on Twitter for a decade and be given credibility when the press constantly asks if Trump has a point when sharing his crackpot musings because, you know, “objectivity”.

There comes a time when the needs of the many has to outweigh the needs of the few.

In America, the needs of the few have consistently outweighed the needs of everyday citizens seeking the preposterous and antiquated American Dream.

Now, it’s only a question of if this decades-old ailment will kill the country before COVID does.

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