9/11 Knows America Lies to Itself

9/11 hates these years the most. Every half-decade, the annual commemoration is amped up, as if some magic exists in numbers that end in 5 or 0. Every time, the same speeches, the same images, the same patriotic fervor in some places, the same performative sense of loss in others, the same, the same. The only part she feels still has any power is the reading of names. It has an incantatory quality, like a Buddhist prayer, with the timed striking of a sonorous bell. She feels something then. 9/11 is accustomed to feeling nothing anymore. She has been used and brutalized and caressed and beaten and loved and raped and paraded on high and dragged through the streets. 

She was degraded regularly by George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani and the monsters and ogres of that time, forced on her knees to choke as they forced their anxious pricks into her mouth, desperate to steal her power for themselves. She was told to get out and perform for the Obama administration, to dance a whore's dance, to masturbate for the masses in order to justify the unending war done in her name. And through it all, every ceremony, every time she's been dragged out to take her defiled part in, she has appreciated the reading of names. Because then it isn't about them. It isn't about Bush or Cheney or Osama or, ludicrously, Saddam. It isn't about every TV demagogue trying to force finger her or every candidate for office slapping her ass. No. It's not about them. It's not even really about her. It's about heart-wrenching loss and soul-breaking hurt, which is all it really should be. The rest is worthless. 

9/11 hates the lie that Americans desperately need to believe. She wants to scream at her TV or her iPad whenever a report comes on that talks about how the country "came together," how there was "unity," how we "cared about each other." 9/11 knows the purpose of this lie, to cover up the instant divisions in the nation, to bury the hatred that welled up in the streets and in the police precincts, to spackle over the holes in the American conscience that could justify everything that came after. They say, "Never forget" over and over, like a mantra of the deluded inside a rubber room, as if a country that is devoted to forgetting its real past, its evil and its racism and its violence and its cruelty, has to cling to this illusion of a moment in time, a fantasy of togetherness across party, across identities, across the world. 

9/11 doesn't remember it the way the overheated politicians and the frothing media figures remember it. She remembers how Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld got harder than they had in years at the chance to blow shit up. She remembers how completely a spell was cast over the American people, with anyone opposing blowing shit up being labeled a traitor. She remembers how many other lies were told, about who was responsible, about what bombing the shit out of them would do, about how people had too much freedom in their lives and that it needed to be limited. She watched, even from the pied-a-terre near smoldering Ground Zero where Karl Rove had stashed her in so she could be conveniently and roughly sodomized by him whenever it seemed the public was straying from walking the War on Terror line, and she saw how immigrants were mistreated and stigmatized by the Bush administration, even as so much lip service was paid to not blaming those immigrants. Or Americans. 9/11 has felt all the savagery done in her name, every drone strike in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Sudan, all under the banner of fighting them there so they don't come here when, really, almost none of them want to come here. She has heard every civilian scream. She knows the faces of the tens of thousands upon tens of thousands who were killed, the payback for the almost three thousand killed on her birthdate, when she emerged, whole and adult, from the burning rubble that was made of poison.

It all disgusts her, but, she has to admit, seeing her reflection in the glass on the outside of the museum that bears her name, the nausea from her disgust has kept her in pretty good shape. It's more than she can say for some of the ghouls from back in that time. Sean Hannity looks like someone put two wax dummies of him together. Kellyanne Conway looks like she was washed in a filthy river and balled up in a corner. And Giuliani? 9/11 doesn't even know how he's still alive. But she figures the Devil he made a deal with is just enjoying watching Rudy crash and burn. And so does 9/11.

9/11 does appreciate the memorial in Lower Manhattan. She can stare at the water falling into the void for hours at a time, allowing herself to feel as if she is falling into it, too. She can turn and smile at the giant One World Trade Center building. Goddamn, she's relieved they stopped calling it "the Freedom Tower." What a crass, awful name. It's not as bad as "Patriot Day," as some like to call her. That just reeks of flop sweat, like explaining a joke that no one laughed at. Which, really, that name kind of is. 

Fewer and fewer people notice her now in the plaza. That's the one nice thing about the years going by. She's not something real to so many now. And those who do notice her are startled when they see her, but they don't approach her. They don't want to know the real her. They need the illusion. 

9/11 can't give that to them anymore. If nothing else, the end of the war in Afghanistan has made plain that she was never the gal they thought she was. And that's hard for most of them to deal with.

She does want to hear the names again. But that list should keep being read with everyone killed in the name of those names, victims as sure as those who died here in Manhattan or over at the Pentagon or in a field in Pennsylvania. 9/11 believes that's the only way to tell the truth: since that day 20 years ago, it has never not been 9/11.

Don't Tell Me Not to Mock People Who Hate My Guts

This past weekend, I was at an event where I learned that someone with whom I have shared some good times "hates your fucking guts," as a cousin of his told me. Why do my fucking guts so upset him? Did I kick his cat or shit on his sofa or fuck his son and leave him? Nothing like that. It's my politics. He hates my fucking guts because I don't believe that Donald Trump was a great president and that Joe Biden is destroying the country. And here's the thing: I knew he was very conservative for a long time. I even knew he went full MAGA. But I never disliked him. I disliked his beliefs, but I can separate that out, especially for someone like him who really has been through hell for the last few years for a number of health-related reasons for him and his loved ones. So, fuck it, I just didn't talk politics with him. There's a whole lot of other shit to bond over.

Apparently not, though. I don't know what tilted him into hating my fucking guts. I don't know when it happened. I do know that he didn't speak to me or even acknowledge me at a gathering this weekend. I do know that he wants nothing to do with me. I don't know if he wishes me harm, but what I did find out was that he supported the January 6 insurrection and demands justice for Ashli Babbit, the terrorist shitbird who got her empty head shot when she tried to break through cops guarding Congress. Mostly, at this point in time, I just pity the deluded fucker. 

The timing of this weird-ass, playground-level bullshit couldn't have been more perfect because over the last week or so, we've been treated to various levels of shame-shaming those of us who mock the fuck out of the deranged and pathetic losers who die after willfully and proudly refusing to get vaccinated or who do something arugably stupider and treat themselves with the horse and sheep deworming drug Ivermectin if they get Covid after not getting vaccinated.

The pleas for kindness or empathy cross ideological lines. In The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig asks us to "Stop Death Shaming" the unvaccinated and says, "It’s worth considering what an honest persuasion effort aimed at the unvaccinated or vaccine-hesitant would look like," although the answer is "It would look like exactly what was done when the vaccine first came out." Writer Conor Friedersdorf asks us to stop "mocking people" for sucking down horse paste and instead do the "tedious work" of convincing them not to suck down horse paste. In the National Review (motto: "Democracy dies in the darkness we created"), longtime right-wing dickstain John Fund wants us to be nicer to people who ingest Ivermectin because there is a version for humans. That's a common refrain: there's a human version that is widely prescribed in places where parasitic worms are an issue (and I don't mean the Republican Party, hey-yo!), so, you know, those who think it's worth a chance to take it shouldn't be instantly dismissed and insulted. 

And all I can say is "Don't be fucking ridiculous. Of course, we're gonna make fun of them. All of them." First, on the Ivermectin insanity, yeah, rich pricks like Joe Rogan can pay a doesn't-give-a-fuck doctor to get the human prescription version, but most of the people doing it aren't rich pricks. They're poor and middle class pricks whose doctors are telling them, "The fuck is wrong with you? Fuck, no, I'm not prescribing the anti-lice and worm drugs for you" so they go to the ol' feed and seed and pick it up. Or, for ten bucks, some Walmarts. It's a tube of paste, for real, often apple flavored, and dumb motherfuckers are sucking it down to prevent or cure their Covid. It's gotten so bad that the FDA and other health officials, as well as the makers of Ivermectin, Merck, have issued statements saying, more or less, "Would you dumb rednecks stop sucking down the sheep goo?" And the goo is selling out at farm stores because you don't need a veterinarian's prescription to get it for your horse or sheep or cow (there is an injectable version that does need a prescription). A Memphis feed store can't keep it on the shelves. A Las Vegas store wants you to prove you have a horse before you can buy it. While, sure, the story about Ivermectin overdoses preventing gunshot victims from being seen at a hospital in Oklahoma was, at best, overblown, the fact is that people are calling poison control in huge numbers after taking the horse drug and they are ODing and taking up space in the ERs with their stupidity.

And you can make all kinds of statements about how we need to understand why people might do this absolutely fucking moronic thing. You can talk about the unfair medical system and rural areas without access to proper care or how desperate people do desperate things. You can blah, blah, blah all fucking day trying to fluff that sympathy cock into a full-blown erection, but it fails for one simple reason. There's a goddamn vaccine. It's free. It works. That's the answer. Anything you try to say after that is bullshit. It's all a lie. You don't want the vaccine because it's "experimental," but you'll eat the horse goo even though it's totally untested for Covid. That's fucking hilarious. You don't want the vaccine because you heard it might harm you and then you got Covid and died. That's so fucking miserable that I better make fun of it or I'll scream at your grave about what a shit-souled loser you were. 

I don't hate them. I pity them and feel superior to them because, well, I am (and so is everybody who gets vaccinated and doesn't put a tube of cow paste to their lips). I won't treat them like children. As I've said repeatedly, they are adults who made an adult decision to listen to assholes instead of doctors. So I save my hatred for Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and Ron Johnson and every scum from the garbage pail bottom who keeps telling their viewers or listeners or voters not to get vaccinated and to try this bullshit drug or that bullshit cure. 

No, I don't hate the willfully unvaccinated, but I don't have sympathy. I lost that a long goddamn time ago. And that's because the people we are trying to convince to get vaccinated hate our fucking guts and dream of slaughtering us or at least exiling or concentration camping us. So, yeah, I'm gonna keep mocking them for their refusal to do the easiest goddamn thing in the world. I'm gonna do it because they scare the fuck out of me by their actions that might end up dragging us all down into the ditch with them and joking about it keeps me sane amidst this genuine insanity. Being nice about it is a waste of goddamn time. 

Plus, c'mon, finding out that some of these idiots are eating so much horse paste that they shit out their intestinal lining and think it's worms and then think that's a good thing? That's comedy gold. 

(Just to note about the opening story: He wasn't a good friend or anything. Just someone who I always enjoyed seeing when a particular group gathered, so his loss doesn't leave a hole in my life. More of a "Huh. That's fucked up.")

A Poem for Those Who Do the Work

A Poem About Abortion

by Devi Lockwood

No, not scrubs. Put on your tight purple dress and heels,

dig them into the new carpet. You have to look gorgeous,

that way they’ll trust you. And the patients start pouring in.

Here’s to many pregnant women in this small town, many

small hands growing inside them. A computer and some wine.

Jessica Brent came on the radio while I gave another woman

an ultrasound. She was picking her guitar, rubbing her belly,

telling the imagined audience she is the oldest child, and lovesick,

and where did this baby come from? Down by the river,

not a single couple makes out in the dark. After work

I like to stand there alone, where old meets new. I watch

the Mighty Miss, her ebbs. What is growth? Where are we

flowing out of ourselves and into someone else, their stories?

How slowly must a thing grow to be alive? I can’t quite make

out the other shore, but I know it’s there. I would reach my hands

out to touch it, but my arms aren’t long enough and I don’t know

how to swim. In this mighty state, a woman has to have an ultrasound

before the pregnancy is undone. Somewhere one of my patients pees

on a stick and lets down her hands and her hopes like a shade

at a too-bright window. It is dark outside. No one wants

the neighbors to see. You can’t outrun their hands digging

knives into turkey breasts, you can’t answer every question they ask,

every way they try to tell you they love you. Let’s legislate your body.

They love you. They do. To the many pregnant women

in this small town, and as many small bodies growing inside them,

I want to say: if we look nervous, it’s because we are. Somewhere

fear is a condom in the back of a wallet pressed shut, a pile of cash

on the kitchen table. Somewhere cities aren’t the only places

with healthcare and somewhere abortions are free. In my line of work,

I need love to keep my hands from freezing on the inside. There are people

carrying signs outside my door, shouting arguments about fingernail

development. I need a pen to spin through my fingers when they are idle.

I need you to turn up the radio, louder please. Just so that I don’t have

to listen to this shit again. When I retire, I want to live in a meadow with

not one child, not one soul in sight. Really, they kiss the wind

as they blow past. 

Have You Read That Destructive Texas Anti-Choice Law? It's Hot, Harmful Garbage

First and foremost, this is a tragedy for women in Texas. The incredibly cruel, physically and mentally harmful, and intentionally divisive anti-abortion law that the Supreme Court allowed to go into effect on Wednesday night will end up with women being maimed or killed or forced to be vessels for fetuses that they do not want to carry, including the products of rape and incest (which, let's be clear, is almost always rape no matter what other word you wanna use), including the fetuses of abusive men. They will be forced to carry those fetuses when they know that they cannot afford the baby (and one reason they cannot afford the baby is because those who are forcing them to carry the fetus provide almost nothing to support the baby). It is a tragedy because it tells a woman that whatever existence she thought she might have, it must become secondary to "mother" once she gets pregnant and doesn't abort the fetus prior to six weeks of gestation, before many women even know they're pregnant. The mostly men who passed this law are savages who cannot wait to bathe in the blood of botched abortions. That will sanctify their brutal, backwards actions and satisfy their desire to kill those who oppose their Christian extremism. 

It's also a fucking weird law. What the fuck is this legitimizing vigilantism shit? So, just to get this right, anyone other than a government official (because that would be unconstitutional, I guess) can bring a lawsuit against anyone who performs an abortion after six weeks, as well as anyone who helps a woman get an abortion after six weeks, including, and this is a level of dickishness that conservatives aspire to but rarely reach, anyone who "knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion, including paying for or reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance or otherwise, if the abortion is performed or induced in violation of this subchapter, regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced." 

You got that? If you're an insurance company that reimburses the cost of an abortion, you can get sued. If you drive your friend to a doctor's appointment and she doesn't tell you it's for an abortion, you can get sued. How far can this go? Perhaps if you advise a woman on how to get an abortion out of state? I mean, obviously, stopping women's right to choose trumps the First Amendment now in Texas. 

Not dickish enough? Then there's this: anyone who "intends to engage in the conduct" of providing or helping with an abortion can be sued. That's right. If you told your friend you're going to drive her to get an abortion, your neighbor can sue you before you even do it if he happens to find out about it. And any fuckin' Karen or Cletus can sue you for meth money. Doesn't matter who the fuck it is, from the cockscabs at anti-choice groups to random, greedy fucknuts and assholes. 

Not dickish enough? Not only can the random, greedy fucknut win at least $10,000 from you for showing that you intended to drive your friend to get an abortion, but you have to pay fucknut's legal fees.

Not dickish enough? If greedy fucknut sues you and loses, you are still stuck with your legal fees. That's right. There is no disincentive for just bringing a whole bunch of lawsuits and seeing what the fuck sticks. How many skeevy lawyers are gonna make bank on this?

The goddamn law just goes on and on, foreclosing nearly any avenue that might show even a bit of compassion for women. The bounty hunters have up to four years from the date when anyone did anything to help a woman get an abortion after six weeks. And you can't bring up that Roe v. Wade is allegedly still the law of the land as a defense. 

It's a fucking mess. It purposely turns citizens against each other. It pays people for playing Abortion Batman. It victimizes the women of Texas who were already being victimized by some of the most blindingly dickish anti-choice laws in the country. I mean, why would you talk to your friends about your choices after you find out you're pregnant? You'd be completely justified in thinking that you might get them in trouble or they might turn against you. Shit, a rapist can sue anyone who would try to help his victim get an abortion if he impregnated her as a result of the, you know, rape. Goddamn, fuck you, Greg Abbott and the Texas legislature. Just fuck you.

And the idea that the Supreme Court would look at this and 5 justices would say, "Yeah, we can let that fly for now" is frightening beyond words. More on that, and what we can do, next week. 

(By the way, the law allows for doctors to be able to perform an abortion if they "did not detect a fetal heartbeat." There are also exceptions for "medical emergency." So it's possible that doctors can lie for the good of their patients. Fine system there, Texas.)

(Correction: I had something in here about the burden of proof being on the accused. That was wrong and proved that I'm not a lawyer. Thanks to SkepticScott61 on Twitter for kicking my ass into learning something.)

Afghanistan Done (Part 2 of A Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)

My dad always wanted to nuke shit. If there was some issue between the United States and another country, he invariably believed that the best solution was to launch nuclear missiles. When I was a kid, he regularly expounded on how the Vietnam War could have been won easily if we had just nuked the Vietcong. "Turn it into a glass parking lot" was a phrase he used often enough that it would describe his approach to foreign relations. Any time the Soviet Union farted in the direction of the United States, he was ready to start a massive nuclear war. During the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, he said that his solution would be simple: "I would call the families of the hostages and tell them that we're going to drop a low-yield nuclear bomb on the embassy and their loved ones wouldn't suffer." I don't know where he got the idea that there were nuclear weapons with such precision that they wouldn't cause massive collateral damage. He did read lots of Len Deighton novels, so maybe from them, but I suspect he didn't care how many Iranians died. He passed away in 1980, so he never got to see how the hostage crisis ended, but I could hear him in my head after 9/11 saying something like "Call the Taliban and tell them that they have 48 hours to turn over bin Laden or we're going to level all the mountains and turn the whole country into a glass parking lot." 

At some other time, I'm sure it would be fascinating to get into the psychology behind the desire to rain mass destruction down on your nation's enemies in every situation. But not right now.

It's a comforting myth, that somehow the United States can just bomb something into submission. I mean, we're told that was part of how we won World War II, with firebombing of cities like Dresden and atom bombing the fuck out of Japan, except historians have told us that neither action was really necessary. But we cling to that idea, that somehow we can win a war that way, that the big dog needs to bark loudly.

To those bomb-loving members of Congress and in the warmongering media, the United States's withdrawal from Afghanistan is a defeat for some vague-ass idea of "security," in that the nation would become a haven for terrorist groups despite the fact that the nation was a goddamn haven for terrorists even while we were there. Two weeks ago, the chaotic retreat and evacuation of Americans, allies, and Afghans was seen as a "catastrophe" all over the political spectrum. When the ISIS-K suicide bombing happened at the Kabul airport, killing over 100 people, including 13 American soldiers, all of a sudden the bloodthirsty mongrels of the right were ready to bomb the place into a mass grave and impeach President Joe Biden. Fuck, if 9/11 happened now, Republicans would blame it on cancel culture and trans people and demand Democrats kill themselves as penance. Unity is for suckers.

The problem, of course, is that the withdrawal wasn't a catastrophe. It simply wasn't. Yes, there were tragedies large and small, but the airlift of 120,000 people, mostly Afghans, was something of a miracle. It exceeded even the most optimistic predictions about the evacuation, and it made all the naysayers seem like damn fools. 

According to so many who understand Afghanistan far more than I do, the end of the war was what it was always going to be: the second the U.S. started withdrawing in earnest, shit was going to go nuts. There was no subtle way to do it. Chaos was going to happen. How could it not? The entire 20-year boondoggle had been a waste of time, lives, and cash, a payoff to military contractors and another woeful experiment in attempting to cram the round peg of democracy into the square hole of another nation and pretend that the stench of colonialism wasn't behind it. There was no way that it all wasn't going to collapse. Nation-building is a Jenga game on a wobbly table on the best days. 

Instead of understanding this, what we have gotten, from the right, center, and moderate left, is an outcry, about the withdrawal as a betrayal of American values, about how Biden isn't fit to be president, about how we have some kind of obligation to stay forever in a country that, truly, doesn't mean dick to us. Yes, what's going to happen to women there is awful. But what's happening to women in a fuckton of places is awful. You wanna bomb Saudi Arabia? What makes Afghanistan so fucking special? Because a guy we wanted dead hid there 20 years ago? Foreign policy is about shitty choices. But too many in Congress and in the media are invested in making this whole withdrawal effort seem wrong for reasons that they can barely describe beyond the idea that we should just keep doing what we've been doing. It's ludicrous. 

And, as Biden put it forcefully today, the rational choice right now is to get the fuck out of Afghanistan. He's right that it's idiotic to keep putting money and lives into an effort just because we can. Goddamn, we haven't fought a war worth fighting in my entire life, and in the post-Vietnam era, the idea that it took 20 years to come to the same conclusion as we did in Vietnam is depressing beyond words. In many ways, Biden's speech was pro-military and pro-veteran. He was saying that he's not going to send them into places for bullshit reasons. And give the man points for consistency. He's been wanting to be out of Afghanistan for at least a dozen years now. 

One other thing that Biden is doing is saying that the U.S. will abide by its agreements, unlike Donald Trump who shitcanned the Iraq nuclear weapons deal and the Paris Climate Accord. With a strengthened Taliban in the wake of Trump's deal with them (helped by 5000 Taliban prisoners released as part of the agreement), the options were to abide by the deal and leave or to go full-on aggressive war, with all the civilian casualties and misery that would cause, as well as the increased US casualties and exploding cost. At least that latter path is foreclosed. Hopefully for good. It's over. It's really goddamn over.  

But, hey take comfort, war-humpers. We're probably still gonna drone missile the fuck out of people living in stone huts in some godforsaken rural area of Afghanistan because freedom. My dad would advocate nuking them, but, as I said, he was a bit of a one-strategy guy.

A Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Part 1: Mask Madness)

The first time I saw the irrationality of large groups of adults happened when I was an adolescent in Lafayette, Louisiana. My mom took me to a parish council meeting (in case you don't know, parishes are counties but they're called "parishes" in Louisiana because Catholicism) for a debate over allowing fluoridation of the water in the community. I had asked to go because I've always been perverse that way. To my family, it seemed like the easiest call: Of course. We had moved from a town in Florida where the water was fluoridated and we were all fine.

I wasn't really surprised at how many people opposed it. However, I remember being shocked (and, lemme be honest here, amused - I was around 12) by the passionate way these putative grown-ups, some of whom were parents of friends of mine, spouted insane bullshit. It wasn't just that they were ignorant. They were proudly ignorant, wanting to share that ignorance with the whole goddamn city. Even in the dark ages of pre-internet time, they had done their own "research" and brandished supposed studies that showed how fluoride caused all kinds of maladies, from mental illness to bone destruction. It was weird and eye-opening. I mean, none of us who drank fluoridated water had grown a third arm or shit out teeth or gone dumb. Besides, the garbage put into the air by the oil industry and the chemical plants was gonna get us if the lead paint and asbestos in our schools didn't first. That didn't matter. 

What mattered was some egghead doctors thought they knew better about how to take care of children's teeth than the gathered moms and dads and that shit just wouldn't fly. And to this day, there is no fluoride in the water in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, and the state's overall dental health is consistently among the worst in the country. 

Ignorance and cowardice won because, well, it usually does. Right now, for instance, the Covid vaccination rate in Lafayette Parish is around 39%, and it's not close to the lowest in the state. And its rates of infection, hospitalization, and death are at or near the highest since the start of the pandemic, which proves that the fucking worst people can fuck things up even in a state with a Democratic governor who has issued a mask mandate that most everyone is just ignoring because all the right-wingers are ear- and eye-fucking them with waves of disinformation and lies that they gobble up like kibble from Jesus's asshole.

That scene of brazen, public, proud ignorance I witnessed as a kid is playing out every damn day. 

In Michigan, Kalamazoo County's Health Department held a meeting on mask mandates where the people said shit like, "Don’t tell me how to raise my family" and "We as parents should decide what that risk is going to be." At a Kent County meeting, you could hear some fucknut say, creepily, "We are responsible for our biological property, which is our children" while people fucking applauded those sentiments. Not to get all into moron logic, but the second your kids step outside your house, they gotta play by the rules or go the fuck home to their biological owners. (Yeah, that's genuinely creepy. Can we get child protective services over to that house?)

Up the road a little ways in Ottawa County, parents dragged kids to chant, sing, and pray outside a Board of Commissioners meeting. One man-shaped butt plug shouted at the commissioners, "There's hell coming and I'm not doing it to threaten anybody but there's a lot of good guys out there ready to do bad things soon. Watch what's coming." These little bitches do this all the time: they aren't threatening anyone, but here's a threat. Fuck you, you fake warrior. Make a goddamn threat and take the consequences or sit the fuck down. 

In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont had to stop a back-to-school roundtable at an actual high school because anti-mask dickmites showed up to yell at him and other officials. They were called "criminals" and one asshole called out, "When did we start living in Nazi Germany, Ned?" The answer, of course, is when a bunch of unelected thugs started refusing to follow legitimate laws and used force to shut down dissent with their extremist beliefs. But that's a bit too nuanced for the Masks = Holocaust crowd.

I just wanna say to all of 'em, "Motherfuckers, we're the ones who should be pissed off. We got vaccinated. We did what was good for the nation, what was good for everyone. We thought we were gonna be in unmasked bliss and getting back to normal, but you ignorant fucks blew it for everyone. Eat my whole ass." But that won't matter to someone who thinks they are so right and righteous in their stupidity that they need to show everyone, like a proud toddler with an erection.

And let's not even begin to get into the basic fuckery behind Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's executive order suspending laws so that no government nor any body that receives funds from the state can issue a vaccine mandate. Abbott, who has decided to try to out-Trump Trump on deranged and harmful acts, is sucking so hard at the nutzoid right teat that he'll go cross-eyed from the effort. There should be a national vaccine mandate and anyone who doesn't like it can go live on Covid island where they can pass around variants until they run out of Greek letters or people.

Or Florida. Jesus fuck, Florida.

The GOP has put this nation on a ledge and threatened to push it off. And every day, they keep chipping more and more of that ledge away through their actions and inaction. For those who know that they're spreading utter bullshit, it's brutal and cruel. For those who are true believers, it's dumbfounding. We're approaching a convulsion point where the only way some will know how to react is through violence. And that still won't be enough for the conservative jackals feeding on our anxiety and rage and conflict.

We've been close to madness in modern times before as a nation, but each time, we seem to pull back just before we plunge over that edge. I'm not so sure we can this time.

(In Part 2: The Afghanistan withdrawal is breaking the brains of the warmongers.)

Note to Anti-Maskers: You're Not Revolutionaries. You're Just Assholes.

At one point in the chaotic Louisiana Board of Secondary and Elementary Education meeting in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, a local Christian extremist pastor, Tony Spell, announced as the elected officials tried to start things, "Let’s welcome the board to our meeting today." He was standing on a chair, surrounded by a couple of hundred people there to protest the school mask mandate issued by Governor John Bel Edwards. Despite the requirement, almost none of the gathered flesh lumps wore masks in the tight space. 

Spell, his hair greased back, declared, "King Edwards is the biggest lawbreaker in the state history," an objectively false statement since, you know, the fucking state was pretty much founded by pirates. Hell, even if Edwards were breaking the law, he wouldn't be the biggest lawbreaker who was governor. The ghosts of Huey Long and Edwin Edwards (no relation to John Bel) must have been thinking, "What the fuck? Forget about us already?"

But facts were hard to come by in the meeting room, as they are in all these school board and other meetings where whiny assholes wail about their children's loss of freedom and order is barely or not maintained and no one has the fucking guts to say to the cops there, "Arrest these dumb pricks. They're too stupid to walk and breathe at the same time."

After watching and reading about a bunch of the anti-mask uproars, two things are perfectly clear:

1. You don't fucking know how to raise your kids better just because you pooped them out or spewed some jizz into a woman who pooped out your kids.

2. These motherfuckers really do think they're revolutionaries.

Look again at what Skeevy Spell said: "Let's welcome the board to our meeting today." Before that, Spell essentially declared himself as the leader of the whole goddamn thing, saying, with no sense of irony, "We're going to run this meeting by Robert's Rules of Order" and then started calling witnesses. In other words, the group of deranged virus-lovers believed they had taken over the state school board. While the police remained idle, the board members did vote to shitcan the whole meeting.

This kind of scene from the depths of MAGA madness is playing out all over the country. In the Philly suburb of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, the North Penn School Board was deciding on whether or not to have a mask mandate for students, and its meeting last Thursday devolved into a shouting match where one fucking moronic woman actually brought up, "The Nuremburg Code of 1947, U.S. federal law, prohibits forcing or coercing anyone, under any circumstances, to participate in a medical experiment. And the code states: 'the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.' In lieu of all of this information, my kids will not be adhering to the mask mandate — which by the way is not a law." The Nuremberg thing is bullshit that's been around for months in the Facebook shit pages of the nutzoid right because it's one of those things that idiots say to sound smart. Of course, the meeting had to be shut down because of the barbaric yowls of the anti-maskers, but the school board did pass the mandate.

And that's because something else is true: the people at these meetings don't represent how actually reasonable most people are. Polls show that over two-thirds of the public support mask mandates in schools. But you know who don't go to meetings where they know that a bunch of screaming fucknuts aren't going to be wearing masks? The people who support mask mandates.

None of these shit-smeared yahoos is the revolutionary they think they are. At best, they're the loudest farting assholes in the right-wing flatulence chorus. You think that's too harsh? Check out these motherfuckers from a school board meeting in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This is how they reacted to speakers who favored masks:

"A woman snorted with laughter as a teen said she was in favor of masks because she worried about people like her dad, who has one lung.

"A man rolled his eyes at an 11-year-old who asked for unity in the face of the virus, suggesting she was just manifesting her mother’s fear: 'Good job, mom,' he said with a snicker.

"The crowd laughed at a board member while she talked about comforting children who have lost a parent to COVID-19."

The board voted in favor of the mask mandate, so suck on that, you cruel jizz stains.

I have long, long ago given up having any sympathy for the belligerently unmasked and/or unvaccinated. I have given up feeling bad when someone who said Covid is a hoax or vaccines are mind control ends up dying from the virus. As I've said, I want them to be vaccinated. I want them to save their own lives. But, you know, you fucked around and you found out. Just stop taking up ICU beds from people who gave a shit or the kids you gave Covid to.

But the anti-mask warriors behave as if the school board meetings are the U.S. Capitol and they all have painted faces and are wearing horns, ready to overthrow the government. It's worse than the Tea Party bullshit back in 2010 because, as stupid as that was, at least it was mostly directed at full-time members of Congress. This shit is just neighbors attacking neighbors. It's less 1776 and more Lord of the Flies.