Until There's Blood All Up in Your Mouth
The ramping up to + the test driving of the most crucial of outcomes has almost reached escape velocity. What will it eventually look like? You: dead. And, oh yeah, Happy Father's Day!!!
There’s a great scene in an early Brad Pitt flick where he still imagined he could act, and well before he finally settled on just cashing those “movie star” checks. He plays a serial killer who is unknowingly adopted by a documentary husband and wife team that wants to do a film on American murder.
The film that they imagine that they are making takes an inevitable turn when it starts to dawn on them that they’re actually traveling with the real deal, much more than ably recreated by Pitt who, as we later discover in real life, might have had some very real sense of how that plays out beyond reel life.
This is not about his failings as a father on the kind of Father’s Day that’s shown him previously taking public broadsides from his offspring. This is about one scene in particular.
In the scene Pitt, the coruscating Juliette Lewis, David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes roll into some honky tonk bar. The idea being that Duchovny was going to bro down with Pitt, figure out what makes him tick and decides the best way to do this is via a game of pool. He places his money on the pool table in the time-honored tradition of “getting next”.
A local takes his money, ignores his place holder and then denies it when querulously called on it by the soft as baby shit Duchovny. The local makes with the “you calling me a liar?” deal and as Duchovny weighs his options up against his prep school pedigree, Pitt sidles by and under his breath offers a commentary for the ages.
“It’s coming, boy.”
[W]hen there’s an ass kicking with your name on it, fighting is actually not the most unreasonable option…. [But] there’s only really one way to figure this out and that way, well, let’s just call it “the hard way.”
It most certainly is as it always most certainly does. The theater act greases the skids to the main act, which is always and remains that moment when the oldest of laws are the only ones that matter. I remember when I was being interviewed on NPR by Farai Chideya. She of the professional managerial class at the home of said class (NPR) where it would not at all be possible for them to greet the FIGHT book with anything other than semi-smirking derision.
I was patient and stayed on brand but as the bastard son both of beatnik parents who advised me to talk/run away from street fights and New York of the ‘70s, I had figured out what Pitt had tried to make most certainly clear: when there’s an ass kicking with your name on it, fighting is actually not the most unreasonable option. Which, if you don’t want to buy the FIGHT book, is its premise in total.
There’s only really one way to figure this out and that way, well, let’s just call it “the hard way.”
And there’s where my head’s been all week. The “when they go low, we go high” crowd getting pasted again and again because they’re so busy keeping hope alive that they’re incapable of imagining that this is exactly what some people hope for. Or as a comedian friend once described it when describing a specific type of Alabama anger: they don’t like you AND they’re happy to see you.
So on No King Day, aka the birthday of President Donald Trump, a fact that he’s appended to some trumped up military “holiday”, protests have alighted on cities all over America, cities where aggrieved Blue State-ers are taking to the streets to freely exercise their constitutional right to do so against the backdrop of a president who doesn’t give a fuck about the Constitution.
[T]hese camo-sporting cosplayers, geeked beyond all measure with what Heinrich Himmler used to lovingly call “the freedom of the streets” are finally getting to do whatever they were “ordered” to.
Protests and the need to protest seem causally connected/activated to/by the recent almost extra-judicial violations of other constitutional rights. Like the ones involving free assembly. Rights Trump is comfortable impinging because they run counter to his spoken and unspoken desire to create a white ethno-state.
Which has social media showing us masked men (always white in my viewing) trundling people (almost always women or children, and always brown, or at least Latino) into unmarked Handmaiden vans. Offering no IDs, these camo-sporting cosplayers, geeked beyond all measure with what Heinrich Himmler used to lovingly call “the freedom of the streets” are finally getting to do whatever they were “ordered” to.
Or what precisely all of that “standing back/but standing by” shit was about.
“It’s coming, boy.”
And early Saturday it most certainly did as a man, disguised as a police officer, shot and killed two politicians in Minnesota. So much for Minnesota nice. As of this writing the manhunt continues for a person identified as 57-year-old Vance Boelter. While I suspect he’ll soon be found, suicided somewhere, it’s almost not the point.
What is the point is this is where what we’ve all been both leading and following had done to us, our language replete with headline screeds of some celebrity “slamming” another, for G-d knows what reason. Slamming or any other bellicose phrase that takes the internet ethos of all arguments-all the time and gives it flesh. And some freedom of the streets.
Creating the sacrificial crisis recently departed French philosopher Rene Girard described as being resolved one way and one way only: through bloodshed. But the bloodshed didn’t start in Minnesota and it won’t end in America. Government Hawks have been aflutter over the enriching of uranium in Iran. Uranium enriched by Iranian hardliners. And now Tel Aviv and Tehran are enjoying a new missile exchange program that will payout dividends of misery for everyone who just read that.
Casts of characters, on the Trumpian “both sides”, that are hungering for the tension relieving bloodletting, the hangover from which, if World War 2 is any indication, will make us both feel noble and like something super significant had happened. But in actual fact, nothing of the kind has happened.
And this is the thing about all of this Trump-era agita, in its general hostility to norms, there’s no reasoning with it. Both no point in trying to and no point in actual reasoning with a philosophy that’s sole deal seems to be the joy of seeing you/me/anyone, bent over a pool table bleeding.
And as an end note here we’d turn to Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh who asked, right before he killed who he was asking, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
Is it governance? Are we having policy disagreements? Are these products of seasoned debates and thoughtful analysis?
Let’s answer those questions with a question: are you out of your fucking mind?
Easy to ask because the only reality to any of this, the pure unadulterated joy of all of it, all of our civilization, and our congratulating ourselves for the same, shivering down like walls of wet sand. So in whatever is left of our futures whoever is left standing can point to it and urge whoever else is left to admire what was done.
So if you’re alive enough to be reading this now know one thing: “It’s coming, boy.”
Not to be avoided or mitigated. And as an end note here we’d turn to Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh who asked, right before he killed who he was asking, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
A question for the ages, and unanswered for just as long.
But, you know…today is Father’s Day and while avoiding being disgusted for what we’ve gifted our children by way of “civilization” is almost impossible, me and other dads worth a damn are going to try. We absolutely are because not doing so is way too fucking sad.
So bring on the Hai Karate, the vacation ties and World’s Number 1 Dad coffee mugs. It’s Father’s Day for Dad’s Who Are Not Assholes. Be about it!
TICKETS?!?!? GET YOUR TICKETS HEEEEERRRRREEEE…..
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Like THIS one…Please DM.
Bookmarked the event in AA... hope to be there if we're back from the wilds of the Upper Peninsula by then! <3