The King And His Men

My darling girl, when are you going to understand that being normal is not necessarily a virtue.

Look at your decaying white supremacist empire in the eye.

Everything that the Trump administration has ever done has precedent in American history.

Trying to cast him as a “Russian asset” is an attempt to rearrange the ingroup-outgroup dynamic of American political power to say “No-one from the proper ingroup would do this.” But Trump is a part of the one ingroup that trumps all others: he’s fucking RICH. And what about the entire right wing faction that is right there with him, contributing their own efforts and ideas to the reactionary project? Are they all “Russian assets” too?

He’s kind of like a combination of the worst attributes of previous Rich Guys In Charge, like he has Clinton’s sexual predation, Reagan’s entertainment industry background, G.W. Bush’s brutal foreign policy, et cetera.

Liberals look at the brutal crackdowns on immigration, and are like “where did this come from?”

But they cannot answer where the Chinese Exclusion Act came from. Where Executive Order 9066 came from. Why post-Civil War Reconstruction was dismantled. Where Jim Crow Laws came from. Who created DHS and ICE. Who continued to fund DHS and ICE for the last 24 years. Et cetera.

People say that the attack on Iran is unprecedented. But it has deep historical precedent, the USA has a long history of unilateral invasions, and the ruling class of the USA has been trying to generate consent for invasion of Iran for over 50 years.

I’m tired of all of this. I just want people to face reality.

In short:

Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (1589–1662)

“The End of Misery” [detail]

oil on panel, 1632

Inspired by the Gothic novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) — one of the earliest vampire stories in English literature, written decades before Dracula.

“Carmilla”