Blackmoor Vituperative

I had a sombre thought today. The world I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore. In some important ways, that’s a good thing. But it’s a bad thing, in a few ways. I feel sad for people who’ll never be able to live in it. Ah, well.

Every second of your life is the most precious, irreplaceable resource you have. Spend it with people you love.

“I have absolutely no idea what we’re doing here, or what I’m doing here, or what this place is about. But I am determined to enjoy myself.”

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming“, W. B. Yeats, 1919

Fun fact! Yeats went on to embrace fascism and authoritarianism — the “passionate intensity” of “the worst“. “The Second Coming” is the most compelling proof I know of that an artist is not their art — and if we insist on conflating the two, or on depriving ourselves of great art by less-than-great people, that it is we who suffer for it.

Yeats, after all, is long dead, and quite beyond our reproachment.

What had me thinking about this was, of course, the results of the election yesterday, in which the “the worst” — angry, hateful, and completely detached from reality — won virtually every election.

I am glad that I don’t have children. The United States is a dumpster fire, and it won’t get better in my lifetime.

If it ever does.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

— Rita Mae Brown

On the one hand, it’s my opinion that the specific word someone uses means very little compared to what they mean by that word.

On the other hand, yes, vocabulary changes over time. “Decimate” used to mean “kill one person in ten”; nowadays it means “destroy most of”, almost the opposite of its archaic meaning.

But context matters. Intent matters. Chasing the term-of-the-moment is a distraction from what actually helps or hurts people. This semiotic scavenger hunt is one of the ways in which well-meaning people are kept occupied by trivia, while the Republican death cult burns the United States to the ground.

That being said, if someone from Mexico tells me that they consider “Mexican” to be pejorative because someone, somewhere has used that word as an insult, I will make an effort not to use that word around them. (Note: this is a hypothetical example, but it very easily could be a real-life example tomorrow.)

Is good news even a thing anymore? Not “making the best of it” news. Not “people staving off doom for one more day” news. Not “here’s some trivia about some stranger’s personal life” news. Not “be thankful things aren’t even worse” news. Actual good news.

That would be nice.

The United States was founded on good intentions, which are continually foiled by 1) racism so entrenched that some people think it’s synonymous with being American, 2) ordinary people’s worship of the ultra-wealthy as our “royalty”, who are rich by divine right, 3) a cultural obsession with warfare, and 4) neo-Puritan hypocrisy of such an intensity that it would be difficult to exaggerate it — no matter how bad you think it is, it’s actually worse. One-third of the USA literally belongs to an apocalyptic death cult which extols lies, hatred, and death as the core of their “morality”.

It is bad for people to be obeyed too readily. It is corrosive to good manners and a healthy relationship with those around them. When you resist someone with authority, you are looking out for the well being and sanity of that person.

Personally, I think we have too many punctuation symbols. Do we need commas, colons, and semicolons? Do we need three different kinds of dash? If you used a comma instead of a colon or a semicolon, or vice versa (as millions of people routinely do), would anyone be more or less confused about the meaning of the sentence?

My answer is: no, they would not; most people couldn’t tell you the proper usage of a colon vs. a semicolon — or an n-dash vs. an m-dash — if you paid them.

A lot of states have a very nearly 50/50 split between reasonable voters across the political spectrum, and Republican death cultists. Who wins an election in most of the USA boils down to a tiny fluctuation in the electorate. There are two significant consequences of this.

First, in places like Texas, where that tiny difference leans ever so slightly in the direction of far-right extremists and would-be fascists, you get state legislators calling for their state to secede (taking with them the nearly 50% of the populace who aren’t overtly delusional death cultists).

Second, in places like Virginia, where that tiny difference leans ever so slightly in the direction of people of good will across the political spectrum, the state is run by well-meaning people, but those people are continually struggling against the nearly 50% of the populace who are death cultists.

Don’t be too proud of the fact that your state veers ever so slightly away from the Republican death cult. In most of the USA, it wouldn’t take much more than a stiff breeze for that to change.

Trump is just a symptom; Republicans are the disease.