A Poem for Memorial Day

Dirt 

by Garett Reppenhagen

Iraqi dirt is everywhere

in my boots and in my hair

the dark clay that soldiers keep

where they march and where they sleep

to prevent the ache in a mothers heart

white sand becomes penned pure art

we exaggerate and bring to light

when the gravel grains are colored bright

under wheels and under track

dirty bombs reality lacks

stuck to sweat under trigger finger nails

that itches and stings when a child wails

dirt so heavy that one can't hide

inside sand bags that divide the sides

turning to grime when it begins to rain

American pride turned to pain

Scandalous chit chat in day to day gossip

"those veterans are insane they really lost it"

closed minds, mass destruction of innocence

and truth gets a purple heart amidst all the ignorance

red white and blue covered in dust

the color of money, oil, and lust

soiled uniforms brown with taint

breathe uranium air contaminate

Jesus pimps our children like whores

like Uncle Sam's hate crimes that the family ignores

under patriot makeup is the garbage and filth

body bags filled with love, swept under the rug is guilt

scum put on sale, but they put us on trial

it's in our teeth when we bite and we smile

grease fed to the masses on the daily news

if the war never ends we'll never lose

we dig and dig, but they cover the hole

when we discover the truth we pay the toll

an unknown soldier in a shallow grave

burdened and battered and buried alive

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)

We Cannot Forget That the Climate Crisis Is Coming For Us All

Look, I know, I know, I fuckin' know that with all the more immediate threats that are looming over us, from outlawing dissent to anti-vax madness to the destruction of the economic safety net, your brain might not have the bandwidth to also include the climate crisis in your daily incantation of everything that's going to wreck us, but that motherfucker is coming and we're now on a path that not only doesn't mitigate it but leads to our end. Trump and his savage band of grotesque industrialists, cancerous capitalists, and greedy shitheels are in the midst of gutting anything that would allow the earth to take a fucking breath and slow down our imminent descent into floods and fires and famine. 

For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency, a name that was never meant to be ironic but here we are, is working on a plan to "eliminate all limits on greenhouse gases from coal and gas-fired power plants in the United States." That seems insane, right? Like against everything that nearly every scientist has been saying for decades? Well, the Trump EPA has that covered: they're just gonna say, "Nuh-uh." Actually, it's a little more nuanced, but only a little: "Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants that burn fossil fuels 'do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution' or to climate change because they are a small and declining share of global emissions." You got that? Because of the reduction in greenhouse gases due to policies that recognize the climate crisis is real, it's okay to increase greenhouse gas emissions. It's like when you lose a little weight and you decide you can eat cake more because that won't make you gain it back. That always works. 

Oh, and they want to shitcan the "2009 E.P.A. finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health" because that makes it easier to "regulate carbon pollution from power plants, vehicles, oil and gas infrastructure and other sources," which seems like a good thing. That's a regulation too far. And if you believe that more greenhouse gases are a bad thing, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the EPA, says you belong to "the climate change religion." That one pisses me the fuck off because, see, I can show you a thousand things that prove climate change is real. You can't show me one that proves your god is.

This administration's war on the future is starkly clear in its refusal to not only acknowledge the climate crisis but in its effort to actively make things worse. Trump issued another executive order of the damned to go after states that try to do anything to mitigate the crisis, like suing California for its stricter emissions standards on cars or Vermont for wanting fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up some of the mess they've made. The EO says, dickishly (which is the mode they're in all the time), "Many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated 'climate change' or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security." Yes, the phrase "climate change" is in quotes, as if it's "so-called" instead of abso-fucking-lutely real. But if your state wants to try to make life livable for even the short foreseeable future, you live in a dream.

The fuckery doesn't end with the climate crisis. Last month, the Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of Interior put out a proposal for commentary: "Rescinding the Definition of 'Harm' Under the Endangered Species Act." See, the ESA has allowed the FWS to say that harm can be done through the modification of a species habitat, like the destruction of a forest or the polluting of a lake. Now the evil fuckers at Interior want to limit "harm" to when someone "takes" an endangered species, as in to "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct." So, in other words, if you shoot an arrow through a bald eagle, you broke the law. But you can build a plant that exists to burn coal for no reason and if that kills hundreds of bald eagles, you didn't do any harm. Like I said, evil fuckers. 

What got me on this whole subject today was that I woke up this morning, probably still drunk on last night's whiskey bender, thinking very quickly I should just start drinking again, and opened up the BlueSky to get a link to a CNN story titled, "The birds on this tiny, remote island are so full of plastic their bellies crunch," which is exactly as fucked and disturbing as it sounds. And then I saw this one: "An ecological disaster has been unfolding on Australia’s coast," about a toxic algae bloom in the ocean that you can barely see but kills sea life and sickens humans. The bloom was about 4000 square kilometers in size a couple of weeks ago, propelled by climate change that keeps the ocean warm. 

And that's the kind of shit that, with just a tweak or two in the circumstances, could lead to a massive die-off, tilting the very balance of the ocean ecosystem that would then tilt the balance of the entire earth's ecosystem, which, as much as we try to live in our silos of denial, will fuck us harder than any Trump-made dildo of dead democracy. 

It keeps going. Trump fired the 400 climate scientists that were working on the National Climate Assessment. And don't even get me started on the demolition of NOAA and FEMA, which is like firing the military, considering how vulnerable it makes us.

So, yeah, this shit hasn't stopped mattering, and it's still a fucking crisis, and the United States is now in the midst of fucking over the entire world. We better be ready to fight this battle, too. 

There Is No "America" Without Birthright Citizenship

Something has bugged the shit out of me about the whole attempt to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US whose parents are visitors or, dear heavens, undocumented migrants. And that's the way those who seek to gut the first section of the 14th Amendment, you know, the one that says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," keep wanting to tie it to what they say is the original intent: to make sure that freed slaves and their children are US citizens. 

Now, I'm not a historian of the Constitution and I'm not gonna give you my sub-Wikipedia summary of what I know about the Reconstruction Amendments or how the 14th Amendment is also a response to the heinous Dred Scott decision, but I can tell you this: if the congressmen and senators debating this in 1866 (it was ratified by the states in 1868) had intended it to only apply to the children of freed slaves, they would have fucking well said so. It's not like this country was shy about segmenting off populations in its founding legal documents. They decided "all persons," not "all those who were once bound to Service" (to use the language of the Three-Fifths Compromise in Article 1). 

The Trump administration's and their ideological fellow fucknuts' argument is, "Well, they meant slaves because that's all they were really thinking about then." It's what Donald Trump himself pissed out over on Truth Toilet: "We didn’t have people pouring into our Country from all over South America, and the rest of the World. It wasn’t even a subject. What we had were the BABIES OF SLAVES." It's what Solicitor General Dean John Sauer said to the Supreme Court this past week: "Our primary contention is that the Citizenship Clause related to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens who weren't even present as a discrete class at that time."

Now that's a motherfucker of a thing to say because if you take that logic with the 14th Amendment, that they couldn't have known about undocumented migrants because we didn't define immigrants as "legal" or "illegal," then how does that fuck with the other amendments? The authors of the Bill of Rights couldn't know that arms would advance to the point that one person with an assault weapon can tear the bodies of a classroom full of children to pieces. They just knew muskets, flintlock pistols, and various bladed things. And almost no one was gonna own a goddamn cannon. What about the First Amendment? Would they have been so keen on a free press and free speech if they knew that giant corporations and ultra-wealthy fucks were going to control the press and that certain points of view wouldn't get heard? A Thomas Paine ain't gonna publish enough pamphlets to overcome the Fox "news" shit wave. Maybe they would have guaranteed equal time or something. Who the fuck knows? 

In other words, it's a bullshit argument that is, as I said, undone by the fact that they could have limited it but they didn't. Indeed, despite the argument over the "subject to the jurisdiction" phrase, which has been ongoing for years on the savagely white nationalist right, the only way to get around the 14th Amendment is to argue that the children of undocumented migrants aren't actually "persons" by some weird and contorted mad legal reasoning, and, you know, I don't put it past these twatmites to pull that kind of shit and for at least Alito and Thomas to agree as they fellate whatever billionaire is funding their next vacation. (By the way, if they take away the humanity for one group, that can pave the way for shitcanning the rest of the first section of the 14th Amendment, which is about how habeas corpus rights are for every person, not just citizens or legal immigrants.)

But what galls me and what ought to gall everyone is this simple idea: the United States is what it is because of immigration and birthright citizenship. The very concept of "America" is that it's always been a mongrel nation pasted together by people from fucking everywhere, man, all, in theory, working towards that mythical "more perfect union." We're the only country in the world that has even attempted to do this. We're an incredibly diverse, and an incredibly inclusive country, and if you don't see that as a strength, then you don't actually understand who the fuck we are. 

And I know, I know, I fucking know that much of this exists in the realm of theory, not practice. I know that, in practice, this country has been dickish and oppressive and violent to every new group that came here (and that's not getting into how we genocided the indigenous population). Fuck, in 1856, the Know Nothing Party accused Democrats of getting Irish and German immigrants naturalized in large numbers so they could vote for James Buchanan (a plainly shitty president, by the way). Fuck, we have the concept of "illegal immigrants" because of a late 19th-century freakout over Chinese immigrants "taking our jobs" or some such shit (or, you know, racism). Hell, in this cursed century, we've seen the mass mistreatment in the United States of people from the Middle East, AAPI people, and the migrants from Central and South America. The vast majority of them are not coming here to fuck anything up or take anyone's jobs. Stephen Miller and his ilk don't believe in this country. We who want immigrants here and welcome them are the ones who do.

That concept is something to strive for. It's worth saying that, yes, we want you to come to this country and we want you to do amazing shit that makes your life better and perhaps the lives of others better and if you have kids here, awesome, they are citizens and they're welcome to the fuckin' party, man. Fucking hell, if I sound like I'm in some kind of punk-ass meltdown over this, it's because one of the few things to be genuinely proud of in this country is that idea, however imperfectly or even badly actualized, that we don't just welcome people from elsewhere, we fucking want you here. And I've seen that lovely idea betrayed over and over in our hysteria over migrants, almost all of whom just wanna come here, do some work, and live their lives, but I've never seen this shit that the Trump administration is trying to do in getting rid of birthright citizenship. We're not a white man's nation. We're not a Christian nation. We haven't been for a long, long time.

As SCOTUSBlog pointed out, during the hearing this week at the Supreme Court, "although the court’s liberal justices were the most outspoken in their belief that Trump’s order [ending birthright citizenship for some migrants] violates the Constitution, there was no support voiced by the other justices for Sauer’s contention that it does not." I'm not holding my breath that the conservatives don't dick the nation over as they have so many times before. But even Brett Kavanaugh was aghast at the logistics of what the Trump administration was asking for. Maybe even they see what we lose when we give up what makes us an actually great country. Or at least one that used to like to pretend it was.

Stop Buying Republican Bullshit on Immigration: There Is No "Invasion"

The red lights flashing the word "pretext" were turned up to 100 in a presidential "proclamation" last week (if by "proclamation," you mean, "a steaming, stinking heap of buzzwords guaranteed to make the yahoos go dick-punching mad with rage"). "Over the last 4 years, the United States has endured a full-scale invasion of aliens entering and remaining in the country illegally, causing a relentless onslaught of crime, vagrancy, violence, and death in countless American communities," it says. This "lawless invasion" has apparently made it harder to get into a hospital or go to school. 

Now, you, being a hopefully rational human or freakishly smart animal, might think, "Umm, isn't crime at historic lows?" And you'd be right. You might then question whether there is a "relentless onslaught" of anything but hard workers who commit crimes at a lower rate than the fucked-up Americans who are accusing them of committing crimes. In fact, even as the numbers of people crossing into this country at the southern border surged to record highs in the post-Covid era in the first couple of years of Joe Biden's presidency, the crime rate dropped, which, frankly, could be used to suggest that crime goes down when more migrants come here (I know that's not the reason, but I'm saying that the bullshit inferences politicians make can go both ways). 

Meanwhile, Republicans are going completely bugfuck insane on deportations and lies about our immigration system. Today, President Trump himself shat into his Truth Toilet, "Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order, and if we aren’t allowed to remove them because of a radicalized and incompetent Court System, the USA will quickly and violently become a CRIME RIDDEN THIRD WORLD NATION, NEVER TO SEE GREATNESS AGAIN." And then he went on to scream about winning the 2024 election and how that lets him do anything he wants, as if that's how the fucking government in this country works.

Meanwhile, the man who is no doubt the infected cockhole creating the racist deportation policy, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who looks like he brags about how he jacks off to videos of starving Palestinian children, makes Trump look like a model of rationality as he screams on various news shows about how much he loves "Americans," which means, you know, "white people." He gave away the game on the rhetoric being used by the White House and the rest of the Nazi right. "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended at a time of invasion," Miller slurped lizardly. "So I would say that’s an action we’re actively looking at." And while the White House insists it's just for undocumented migrants, I mean, come the fuck on. Of course not. Of fucking course not.

See, that's the whole thing about the calculated use of "invasion." It's necessary to say that we are under some kind of coordinated attack in order to unleash the unchecked, unreviewable ability to simply jail, deport, kidnap, or, fuck it, murder anyone who gets in the way of the Christian nationalist takeover of the country, starting with the Alien Enemies Act and getting to martial law. And, no, I don't think I'm overstating it. I think with the arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka for trying to find out what the fuck is going on at an ICE facility in his own goddamn city, with the threats to arrest Democratic members of Congress who were there with him, and so much more, including the ongoing effort to disappear non-citizens who say things like "Israel shouldn't murder every Palestinian and take Gaza" (I mean, the war's end would limit Miller's spank bank), but I think with all that, I'm probably not freaking out enough, and I am freaked the fuck out.

What is encouraging about Democrats directly confronting the increasingly lawless actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs and their increasingly brazenly thuggish behavior is that it shows they are finally giving up on trying to stupidly appease Republicans on border policy. Simply put, there is no appeasing them without mass deportations and suspension of constitutional rights. It was stupid when Democrats shifted right with the proposed border deal that Trump got shitcanned last year, and it was stupid when they didn't counter Republican hysteria over every single individual crime committed by an undocumented person. Instead, they leaned into the shift in public opinion on immigration that the fearmongering had achieved and essentially gave credence to the GOP's lies in a moment when they should have said, "No, they are fucking liars." 

Take just one thing that Trump, Miller, and the rest of the liars use: the supposed war being waged against this country by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Remember how they supposedly took over the town of Aurora, Colorado? And Fox "news" and its devolved descendant news outlets went berserker over the idea? Yeah, you know how many gang members local cops in Aurora found there? A dozen in a city of nearly 400,000 people. Either the 12 gang members had a fucking nuclear missile or everyone was lying. Oh, and Trump tried to say that the Venezuelan government was sending these highly-trained drug dealers in to overthrow the country. But a leaked intelligence memo said that was fucking bullshit, as if it ever made sense that the estimated 600 Tren de Aragua cartel members in the United States are an actual threat. Yes, I said, "600." You can arrest them, you know, and give them their habeas rights and then incarcerate them, like you would any other fucking criminals found guilty.

I will say it again: There is no invasion. And it's some punk-ass bullshit to act like there is one, like the United States can't handle a handful of criminals.

Last week, Andrea Flores of FWD.us addressed Senate Democrats and told them that it's time to stop ceding the border issue to Republican scare tactics, that being MAGA-lite lost them votes, and that they needed to come up with actual solutions, not just shit like limiting asylum. They need to come up with paths to citizenship, support for due process, and more. That also includes getting funding for immigration courts while opposing funding for the savage actions of ICE. Hopefully, it's a message Democrats take to heart because if you allow that the savages have a point, then you're pretty much a savage yourself.

Hell, I'd start hammering away on the most blatantly racist thing I've seen in a while: the quick approval of refugee status for white fucks from South Africa. That's literal white privilege. The refugee program was shut down for anyone who was a shade darker than eggshell. But, here we are, letting actual apartheid lovers jump the line. That's an easy story to make people appalled.

Donald Trump on Meet the Press: Because Fuck You, America

Today, in his "interview" (if by "interview," you mean, "a psychotic head trip into a soulless abyss") with Kristen "I'm not a reporter, but I play one on TV" Welker on Meet the Press, President Donald Trump repeatedly told the average American to kiss his gargantuan ass. Time and again, offered a chance to provide comfort, reassurance, or any measure of empathy, Trump's answer was, essentially, "Everyone can fucking kiss my gigantic ass. Just plant your lips on it. There's more than enough room for all you suckers and losers."

You might have heard about the moment that he said that children can go fuck themselves. He insisted, repeatedly, creepily, that an 11-year-old "beautiful baby girl" doesn't need to own more shit. "I'm just saying they don't need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five," he said in response to questions about the effect of his tariffs. Later, pressed again on this point, he added, "We don't need to feed the beast." Now, I'm no fan of people being materialist assholes, but what the ever-loving fuck is he talking about? If a Democrat, like, say, Bernie Sanders, had ever said something as remotely anti-capitalist as this, the red feathers would have been tarred on them immediately by the GOP as they screeched about "Marxism" and "Communism" and probably Hunter Biden's laptop because, fuck it, they always do. It's the Benghazi of email servers. 

(And, by the way, 30? 250? Those are pretty precise fucking numbers. I'm betting someone's the dickhead grandpa bitching about all the things his grandkids have.)

Beyond that, look at the absolute disdain wrapped up in what he's saying. "You must do without," Trump's saying. "You must have less so that Elon Musk and I and all our billionaire friends can have more because fuck you. Fuck you for not being a billionaire. Now shut the fuck up before I limit it to two dolls and three pencils." 

That kind of abject hatred of people who have to make do with less than a gold toilet ran through the interview. When Welker brought up prices rising on basic things, like "Tires, strollers, some clothing," Trump found the idea ridiculous. "When you say strollers are going up, what kind of a thing? I'm saying that gasoline is going down. Gasoline is thousands of times more important than a stroller or some place?" Well, yes and no. A lot of people need strollers, which he'd know if he ever took care of a child. And he's lying about gasoline. 

Welker asked Trump if he would consider tariff relief for small businesses, and he scoffed. No, really, he scoffed, "Why do you always mention that. You know, you pick up a couple of little businesses. What about the car business?" Later, he said that he doesn't need to help small businesses because, through the magic of tariffs, they will make more money than they ever have. It's like he realized he said, "I don't give a shit about small business owners. How much money did they ever give me?" and had to throw them the bone of profiting in some undefined future when we have The Greatest Economy Ever.

It's not that Trump was telling Americans, "Let them eat cake." It's that he's telling us all the cake is for him and we can go fuck our selves if we don't like watching him stuff it down his gaping maw. Welker asked him about the price tag for his upcoming celebration of his tiny dick, the military parade he's forcing the armed services to do on his birthday. Like a toddler looking at dump truck toys, he responded that the cost is "Peanuts compared to the value of doing it. We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we're going to celebrate it." Yeah, to the tune of around $45 million. Trump take cake.

"Fuck you, America" was the theme of the interview, just like it's the fuel that's powering this cursed  administration. When Welker asked him, simply, straightforwardly, if he, as president, has to uphold the Constitution, Trump said, "I don't know." So Trump just said something that was so basic, so traitorous, that every American should be calling for his removal from office or the fuckin' guillotine. And he's such a little bitch about everything, constantly saying that shit is up to "the lawyers," as if he's not the goddamn president of the fucked United States. Man up and give an opinion, you dumb motherfucker.

Later in the bullshit interview, he left open whether or not he could run for a third term, which, you know, he can't unless there's an amendment to the Constitution. But he simply can't bring himself to say that he's term-limited because it would slow the fucking grift, like his "Trump 2028" hats. Trump said more legitimately anti-American shit on Meet the Press than Fidel Castro on a rum bender. Fuck, Castro's ghost was probably looking up from Hell thinking, "Oh, I wish I'd thought of that" before being sodomized with a giant lit cigar again.

This post could go on for another couple thousand words about the sheer abundance of ways that Trump demonstrated that he's an evil moron bent on the destruction of the country. But lemme finish with one more giant "Fuck you" to us all. Walking through Trump's whorehouse chic Mar-a-Lago shithole, Welker got Trump to talk about his future plans for his other residence. "We are going to make and build a ballroom, which they’ve wanted for probably a hundred years at the White House. And it’ll be a world-class, beautiful ballroom," he bragged. Now, the East Room has been used for dances and banquets and shit, but Trump wants to build a $100 million expansion to pimp out the joint like the aforementioned brothel. 

Trump says, at first, that he will pay for it. But then he adds a comment that gives the game away: "Yeah, I'm not going to ask the government for money. I'll fund it, and I'm sure we'll have some donations to it. But it's not an inexpensive thing. It'll cost a lot of money." 

He's gonna get a ton of bribe-donations to make his garish, loud, permanent impact on the seat of power. It will be corruption at levels we've never seen before, except for all the times Trump has done it. And no one will do a thing about it because fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck all of us.