The XFL is Coming Back. Can We Destroy America Now?“The liberal notion that good ideas win their own converts, that sworn enemies are a debate away from becoming friends is a foul-smelling jar of pure horsepiss.”
From Dr. Bones
Where does the revolution go when the people merrily choose fascism?
I can’t speak for the strange and frozen territories beyond the oaks and Spanish moss. Perhaps the world is different where you’re from. There is a level of honesty in the South between radicals and the voting majority clearly absent elsewhere. We know, like komodo dragons sniffing the air, just how much we won’t get along. One of us has got to win and one of us has got to go. Simple as that. Life reduced to a contest of sharper claws and longer teeth; maybe the ideology is just a convenient cover to make it more civilized.
The “working class” is a difficult notion to peg when electricians view gas station cashiers with utter contempt. Here in the South you can watch the same folks Marx and Lenin saw as the primary force for human liberation vote Republican breathlessly, just as shamelessly as they pop open a laptop and jack off on their lunch break. They don’t care about the rich getting richer, they think it’s perfectly fine, natural even. Necessary. So long as black people know their place, gays remain hidden in hair-dressing studios, and Christ is first in everything you can bend them right over the economic sofa and fuck them till their assholes run red.
The working class has risen before. Countless times. Behind the souls of the assembled, chewing processed meat in a simulacrum pretending to be barbecue, lies a twisting nebula of ancestral spirits. I see their struggles, the plantations growing cotton in the middle of the Civil War while children died of starvation. Confederate soldiers used as mere pawns, just as Jefferson and Washington sent settlers into certain death all for political aim. The pain lingers. I feel them often signing up with Federals and decimating Confederate supplies, like one might still feel a neighbor long dead. Organized armies hungry for beef and revenge, threatening the wealthy, seizing property. And yet…
Uneducated. In need of teaching. By the gods man, have you told them The Good News? The gospel of the working class? Maybe. But I can’t deny many of these good, honest, simply misguided folk burned hearts alive and hung throats from oak trees.
Maybe I’m just not a good missionary. Still…the question lingers, a stick in my craw.
How is it fair to tell every person of color, every awakened soul desiring to be free, that they must wait for any revolution until “class consciousness” reaches these people? How many bodies must continue to fall, how many tired mothers must weep as we discuss new strategies to convince on-the-fence racists that black people deserve to live?
How much longer are we going to hope?
The one fact Leftists have never really settled for me is that, statistically and purely on a probability basis, you can’t convince everybody. It’s impossible, defies the very laws of the momentary illusion we call material existence.
Odds can be shifted, any conjurer could tell you that. But there is a damn big difference between “radicalizing” somebody, pushing an open question, and converting them to a totally different worldview that goes against everything they hold sacred.
One of the greatest strengths the South ever had was its inability to listen. There is no argument between ideas. There is blood and bullets and teeth and fists. The Klan didn’t exist as a debate society. They came to your house and made what they believed true, even if it cost you your life.
The liberal notion that good ideas win their own converts, that sworn enemies are a debate away from becoming friends is a foul-smelling jar of pure horsepiss. Slavery didn’t end because the South was “convinced.” Sherman marched to Atlanta burning every building along the way. Confederate soldiers, drawn from the feudal peasant class of farmers, had to be met on the battlefield and killed. People thought the South was beaten but, as soon as the troops went away, the old order reared its ugly head. The Federals failed to deliver the killing blow and Jim Crow grew mightier with every day.
And they happily murdered people to preserve this status quo.
The Civil Rights movement wasn’t about pleasant conversation. There wasn’t a “change of heart.” It wasn’t about beautiful arguments or realizing we’re all in this together. It was about federal troops invading Southern States at the threat of martial law, the government themselves absolutely terrified at the idea that Black folks were going to begin killing cops en masse if something didn’t change. It is something that, so many years later, is still far from settled.
Because it never came to blows.
There are towns down here people are warned about, stretches of countryside filled with stories many would refuse to believe. Every one of those stories involves good, honest, working class people acting like unadulterated nightmare fuel. Football fans and proud Americans, rabid beasts just barely capable of holding back their bloodlust.
Maybe you still see people in need of The Gospel. The great Truth of The Proletariat. Surely, surely they’ll eventually come around. Hell, Jesus might come back too.