The Insurrection Was Live Streamed

Huh. Where is the tear gas? Why aren’t the cops beating these MAGA idiots with baton, hitting them with rubber bullets? Weird.

Here we are. Gil Scott Heron was wrong, the revolution, the insurrection really, was televised. The nation, the world saw it happening in real time. In real time we saw a group of speakers whip the crowd up over lies and fantasies of a ‘stolen election’ with the President aiming the angry thousands directly at his own Vice President. It is a stupefying fact that a sitting president of the United states tried to overthrow the government and install himself for another term as president is... well, is there a word to describe this? It's such an overwhelming thing, it beggar’s description.

Seriously, I am so angry, furious, and fascinated at the same time. I find myself pulled in every direction. Furious at Trump and his enablers, who have been building up to this since 2015 with his CYA talk of 'rigged elections' (in case he lost, which he expected to). Yes, something like this has been coming for years with the cynical exploitation of the fear and grievance of his base. But I am fascinated by the passion and anger that drives the 'disenfranchised' Whites to think a grifting 'billionaire' gives a damn about them.

I fully expected something like this insurrection to happen, but not so naked and raw, so exposed and open. It was a river of grievance and anger, flowing from across the country and firehosed by Trump and his enablers right at the seat of American government. We must hold these terrorists accountable, every last one of them to the full extent of the law, but they were following the orders of people like Trump and his sycophantic and cynical enablers. They are every bit as much to blame as the Trump insurrectionists themselves. All need to be dragged blinking into the light of justice, but blame should be apportioned to those who believed the lies and followed, and those who didn't but thought it would look good on their resume. Those who called to overthrow a government with their eyes on 2022, or 2024.

These are resume builders, the cynical enablers, the 'why not-ers' including most of the 147 Republicans who 'objected' to Biden's palpable win (the number went down, slightly, to 138 after the insurrection), to the process of democracy they took an oath to defend.  Yet, here they were, objecting to avoid mean tweets, to position themselves for whatever race was next, ignoring the Constitution to gain the favor of a man who also ignored the Constitution. 

And five people died.

Was it worth it?

The 'base' seems to think so, pledging their soul to Trump and his 'next term' that will never materialize, a phantom 'four more years' the promise of which Trump has used to suck 300 million dollars out of them. They are willing to destroy democracy in order to ‘save’ it, by installing the dictator of their choice. 

This is not who we are!

But really, it is

It's crazy, a plot of a movie review on a 'so-bad-it's-good' youtube channel, not at all the sort of thing you associate with America. But that is because I'm a middle-aged White guy. Black and Brown will tell this is the America they live every day. Angry White people shoeing their ability to do the things that any person not White would be killed for.

They see no irony in this. Angry Whites thinking they have the right to cut in line, say anything they want, do anything without fear of being shot and killed (screaming into a policeman's face, actually pulling them to the ground and beating them into unconsciousness with an American flag), yep, everyday reality to many. I look at this and wonder in horror, they look and nod in affirmation. I see sick aberration, they see nothing new. 

Trump and the GOP know this, and play hard to the fear, the hate, and anger of the dying light, the panic of the waning White power, they mine that fear like the desperate prospector chipping away at a played-out mine, knowing this is all they have. This is why they fall into line with Trump and 'Trumpism', because it has taken over the party.

Without that White anger, the GOP would be nothing.

On my other site (www.tompstewart.com) I write about pop culture, history, comic books, my life as an actor and writer, various odd things. I would like to get back to that, really. I would dearly love to write about 1960s Batman comics, but these are not the times for an in-depth discussion of Batman’s ‘New Look’ of 1964. I can’t look away from this shit-show that is the Trump administration, and neither can history. I have to look, whether I want to or not.

We must evaluate and assign blame, hold the guilty accountable, now, and in future elections.

It’s our duty as Americans.

They Need Gone.

Robert E. Lee, basically the South’s version of Jesus. Traitor to his country, and wasn’t even that good a general.

You know what?

Confederate monuments have got to go.

Yes, they need gone, they need to be trashed and consigned to the dustbin of history.

This should not be a controversial position, but the insistence and butthurt of the right makes it so.

I really have to question why the right is defending traitors, slaveholders, and racists, but that’s beside the point…. Or is it?

Seriously, people, the monuments and plaques to the Confederates serve only one purpose; to reinforce white supremacy. That’s it. The ‘Daughters of the Confederacy’ worked hard to promote the racist ‘Lost Cause’ myth (the poor, poor put-upon South!), to try and turn a righteous and deserved defeat into a phoenix victory. They worked hard to promote white grievance, supremacy and the view of the South that the Civil War was about more than slavery (it wasn’t). Don’t @ me with ‘states rights’ because those ‘rights’ were the ‘right’ of the one race to hold another in chains, steal their labor, their children, their lives. And the were perfectly fine about it, they used the Bible (of course they did) to excuse their behavior, bending Christianity until it broke into very tiny, fine pieces. Want to know why there were Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists for decades? Slavery. They broke apart because the North could not bend their Christianity to accept slavery (they were okay with white supremacy though, but that’s another post) and the South, all high, mighty, and pissed off, took their bat, ball, and slavery-infested religion, and stormed off home.

And started a war. Yep, they started it, all so they could keep people in slavery. That was the cause and the war ended it.

Well, in name. The South was able to end ‘Reconstruction’ (an era when Blacks had the vote, held elected offices and had power) and start the Era of Terror, where whites would violently take back power through intimidation, terror, and murder. And to mark their white ‘territory’? Statues of the great Confederate ‘heroes’. The DOC started founding chapters (you just needed seven women who had bothers or fathers who were Confederate soldiers, that was pretty much the entire South) and started collecting money for monuments. And of course, passing out their ‘Lost Cause’ propaganda. (They even had a Confederate Catechism. No, really!) They erected as many monuments as they possibly could; statues of generals, soldiers, plaques to dubious ‘achievements’ of the South (like the time a white mob, angry at the election of a Republican governor and his Black Lt. Governor, took over the statehouse for three days. Yes! There was a plaque up for decades calling these racist vigilantes ‘heroes’!). So, yeah.

The statues and monuments were part of a disinformation campaign for the white South, and a campaign of intimidation against Blacks and any notions of equality they might have. Flags, monuments everywhere, on public land, some paid for with public money. Imagine if you were Black, walking through your town, (the places you were allowed to walk), and seeing soaring tributes to your oppressors, the people who killed friends and loved ones, literally everywhere you looked.

Pretty fucking horrible.

Intimidation usually is.

And no, these didn’t go right up after the war, the majority went up at the end of the 19th century to the revival of KKK in the teens and twenties, and then during the later 40’s through the 70s. Notice anything? The most monuments went up at times when civil rights were being pressed. It was the 50s and 60s, the ‘Civil Rights Era’ (really, every freakin’ year should be part of a ‘Civil Rights Era’) that the Confederate flag was being adopted (yes, I know it was never the real flag of the Confederacy, don’t ‘actually’ me) as a well, a flag for white supremacy.  

The statues, these monuments, these plaques, these named buildings were all part of a campaign to spread lies and to intimidates and terrorize innocents. They do not commemorate history, they push lies. Ugly lies. We don’t need any more of their crud in our public spaces or our private minds.

They need to go.