'Creep'

We have turned up the heat on this planet to the point that not all of us will survive the coming weeks.

That’s not hyperbole but a sad fact of our new reality.

Those that have caused this suffering - and become extremely wealthy doing so - are counting on your continued use of fossil fuels.

They have no problem keeping their hands on the temperature dial of the pizza oven that has become our atmosphere.

That should piss you off.

Your next thought should be what you can do to help save the life of somebody you have never met.

Not exactly our strong suit as Americans these days, given the reaction to COVID vaccines, wearing masks and the epidemic of gun violence of so many on the right.

Not caring about neighbors, let alone fellow humans, is one of the branding tenets of the modern GOP.

They not only display indifference towards their fellow man, they outright demonize them for political expediency and shameless grifting.

Many conservative organizations hold conferences seemingly every month where the stars of this movement prance and strut across their stages preaching hate and spewing vitriol in accent and tone ugly and ignorant enough to match their own.

A modern day minstrel show where people applaud the subjugation and marginalization of others and the folks who have been most abusive or lethal become their avatars.

Like the annoying teenager who became famous for no other reason than he murdered people who disagree with their views, protesting police abuse and racism which is rampant in the United States of America.

There’s an entire political party that is beholden to the oil and gas industry and the NRA.

It’s no accident that the best way to transport your AR15s in MAGA world is in a giant oversized pickup truck that burns too much fuel.

It’s a lifestyle that’s being sold - the accoutrements and toxic iconography involved are designed to enrich the folks behind the movement who are fleecing the followers.

It’s no wonder Donald Trump became the perfect beast for MAGA and the rise of authoritarian politics.

By instinct he matches and enhances the underlying themes of what the conservative movement was always about from the beginning: to keep mostly uneducated white rural and suburban voters from catching wind of who was really screwing them over in life by keeping them intoxicated with resentment of the other, using the iconography of battling your oppressors and projecting the illusion of power in powerless lives.

Most of the power they held was shipped off to foreign lands in the 1980s when Wall Street was deregulated by Ronald Reagan and greedy tycoons found out there was more profit in letting the industrial belt rust and exploiting labor overseas, where the fruits of democracy haven’t yet taken hold.

And by fruits of democracy I mean the labor unions and Social Security that were the hard won results of Democratic Socialism that they quickly and ignorantly turned their backs on when a Hollywood cowboy waved a flag at them and basically said he hates who they hate and will punish “them” at every turn.

Ironically, forty years later, a reality TV star used the same playbook (though with way less nuance) to rise to power from the same voting block. Even going so far as to steal the campaign slogan itself: Make America Great Again.

The Republican party has become completely populated with chaos agents and grifters.

Of course, this is mostly by design as the money behind the GOP doesn’t care if it’s buying a Ron DeSantis or a Donald Trump or a Neil Gorsuch and his corrupt cronies on the court - as long as the results are the same.

And let’s face it, we are in a boom time for bad business.

If you starve a people culturally and limit their worldview until all they really have is a flag to wave, you will have a very malleable group of people willing to do all sorts of heinous things on you behalf.

The Republicans and MAGA culture showed their hands in a way even more blatant that usual this week.

First we had the Jason Aldean controversy which was essentially just another single in an endless stream of written-by-committee country pablum, designed to keep its listeners dumb and ‘Pro-Freedom’ or ‘Anti-Woke’ while pounding White Claws and shopping at big box stores for products made in China. Humming along in the aisles as they head to buy another box of bullets should they be called on to defend ‘Murica.

Music for idiots, by idiots - I am of course referring to the tight-jeaned ‘Bro Country’ acts of which there have been a scourge since the dawn of MAGA, tracing its recent roots back to the Tea Party era when red state America needed a cultural reaction to the Obama Administration.

White Conservative Christian America always needs a vehicle to inject dog whistles for the ‘good old days’ and one unsubtle enough that its listeners would not miss the true meaning.

They needed a cultural pushback for the confusion and resentment they felt being led by a brilliant Black President, in a multi-cultural country with rapidly shifting demographics of the once ‘Good Ole USA’.

What they perceived as the disappearing of whiteness scared them even more than Al-Qaeda - which spawned the previous decade’s cowboy-hatted ‘Put A Boot In your Ass’ country that helped soften the invasion of Iraq for a people already not exactly given to questioning a war launched over false pretenses - if it comes with the promise of screaming eagle tattoos and the fetishization of hyper-militaristic patriotism.

Then we have Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his torture of migrant women and children by placing concertina wire along the banks of the Rio Grande - to ensnare and drown people who are trying to seek asylum and a better life on land that once belonged to them in the first place.

The United States was once entirely inhabited by folks who looked a lot more like the migrants than the men holding the weapons on the banks of the river ordered to push them back to protect ‘law and order’.

Certainly more so than the fake cowboys who promote white supremacy and racism and pretend to be Christians to appeal to the worst instincts of their voters, while selling them out to the highest bidder.

As Ron DeSantis is clearly doing in his attempts to rebrand slavery as some sort of jobs training program. A theme he has been espousing since his days teaching at an all white prep school in Georgia.

DeSantis himself has a degree in history from Yale University.

He knows damn well what he is saying is completely false and as offensive as anyone in public life could be when dealing with the ugly realities of our nation’s history.

It’s also not hard to picture DeSantis or Greg Abbott as the sort of men who could have committed such an offense against humanity as chattel slavery to begin with.

They both look as if they long for the bullwhip.

Ron in his GITMO days as a NAVY JAG advisor apparently took great pleasure in watching Muslim prisoners being tortured by force-feeding tubes during hunger strikes to protest their captivity and conditions.

An in-depth Vice TV investigation into these allegations was set to air last week and was abruptly pulled by parent company Paramount.

It’s too bad because it may have also generated a deeper dive into his days as a Seal Team advisor during the Fallujah surge, where his role was to advise soldiers on staying within the Geneva Convention when interrogating enemy combatants.

A role in which I am guessing Ron never lost a night of sleep or exerted himself much on Iraqis behalf.

The historical narrative of how some of our troops behaved when holding captives, such as Abu Ghraib, provides context to how events may have transpired and lends precedent to whatever was in the documentary that we will not see.

However we have already seen enough to know what to make of DeSantis and Greg Abbott, men who seem to relish the suffering of the people don’t serve their political ambitions.

Both are quite obviously wresting with some darker demons of their own and a sense of malicious entitlement.

In other words, creeps.