You want him dead, you wish he’d died, you say, because he is just such a threat to the beautiful democracy you love sooo much.

(I seem to recall you recommending the same solution for the Putin once too.)

Meanwhile, your favorite news channel had on a Thoughtful Security Expert today, who said that incidents like this attempt to kill him are also … a threat to democracy.

I sense stresses and tensions–nay, real and ripe contradictions–inside your worldview.

***

Do you think it’s a coincidence that the shooter showed up in a Blackrock commercial a couple of years ago when he was still in high school?

Of course it is.

Anything else would just be another one of those lame conspiracy theories like JFK.

+++

Or maybe there’s a third way of looking at it.

Maybe this society is stuffed to the gills at every level with such ugliness and contradiction that such coincidences are inevitable.

That even so gloriously civilized a thing as teaching or taking an AP Economics class has been corrupted and perverted into something unrelentingly dark, into itself a threat against Democracy and everything else good and right and free.

***

Joe and Kammy and little Petey B. have no answers to addressing this rot. They are products of it, and themselves stuffed to the gills with it. Wave no flags at me, demon spawns. I know all too well who you are deep down and all too well why.

The same is true of Trump of course, and of one of the front-runners for his VP slot, one Marco Rubio.

But the other frontrunner, quite surprisingly, might offer a kind of partial and tentative alternative.

I say this in spite of the fact that he is rabidly Christian, an avowedly family-values kind of guy, and a vituperative critic of the “childless left”, of which I myself am a card-carrying member.

He is also the author of a book called Hillbilly Elegy, an autobiography, which was made into a film directed by Ron Howard, starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

The book tries to create a portrait of the rot as it appears among the hillbillies of Kentucky, and contrasts it to the rot as it is practiced in the clean suburban streets of Middletown, Ohio.

That’s the town that the author, and congressman, and other VP hopeful JD Vance grew up in.

***

Why in the fuck would I of all people be the slightest bit tempted by a prescription of fundamentalism and conservatism? Isn’t that insane?

Yeah. I feel you, darlin’.

But maybe just not quite as insane as your homicidal fantasies and your gutted, hollow stance of embracing and cheering for the dark side on every concern they try to shove down our throats, be it Ukraine or Gaza or Syria or Taiwan or Yemen or Iraq and Afghanistan before them (let’s throw in the cadillac welfare queens and the crazy homeless rejects besides).

Like Candace Owens and a whole lot of other people, Vance holds views that I almost reflexively reject, about the importance of christian and family values and the basic goodness of average people trying to cope with a malicious world that is broken on purpose for the gain of evil elites.

But he’s also done with the rot of empire and the forever war that fuels it and keeps it so very shiny, for now, while they can still suck enough tax money out of you to keep the bullshit facade up for another month, or election cycle, hoarsely quavering about communism or autocracy or orange fascism or whatever is supposed to be the bogeyman lately, the thing we must all fear, and unite against.

Those things are not the real enemy.

Christian conservatives like JD Vance, gross as it sounds coming out of my mouth, are also not the real enemy.

That’s not quite the same as considering people like him or Candace Owens allies.

But sometimes, in dire times like these, the enemy of my enemy can start looking like a viably convenient compatriot.

Or at least an blessed relief and alternative to the constant yapping and propping of those so blind they consistently and doggedly refuse to see, preferring instead to just keep foaming at the mouth like dogs both rabid and blue.

(I’m sorry. Excuse me, but you have something in your hair and it’s fucking disgusting.)

***

If I should twist and mutate into a reactionary as a result of all this and a text thread too, I’m going to be blaming you personally in a paroxysm of bad faith and some profound contradiction myself.

Fair warning, honey lambs.

Just like Biden-as-the-nominee, you brought this shit down on your own heads.