I’m thinking about homeschooling the kids.
You don’t seem the type. Why would you even think about it?
Bible classes in Kentucky schools, that’s why. Not religious studies, or what passes for the general academic study of religion, which in principle has some merit... no matter what a contrary heathen like you believes. Rather, it’s a bill that proposes using Bible study specifically as a ‘prerequisite’ for understanding society and culture. This is state-sanctioned religious indoctrination. I can’t afford private school, and I don’t want my kids turning into apparatchiks.
Actually, I don’t blame you, mate: The idea is nothing short of medieval... in other words, right up Bevin’s alley. Assuming it gets to his desk, which seems as probable as an evangelical Christian flunking an ethics test, he won’t be able to sign it fast enough. That repulsive snake oil salesman is Mr. Charrington to Trump’s O’Brien.
Hark at you, quoting the classics. We’re living in the 46th-worst-educated state as it is, and now these two plonkers in the Kentucky House want to make the next generation even dumber — and, more important to them, I’ll wager, much easier to control. Anyway, I’d bet my last shilling that, although these wankers have probably memorised the Bible, they’ve also conveniently cocked a deaf ‘un to all the bits that encourage burning people who don’t share their beliefs at the stake.
The great irony is that what people like Bevin and these two Huckabee-wannabes really want is their own atavistic version of Sharia law, lawmaking based on religious principles. They’re no different from any other bunch of zealots, hell bent on fucking up people’s lives with their authoritarian lust for control and domination. This, my lad, is why resistance is more important now than ever. It’s make-or-break time.
Did you just say Huckabee-wannabe? If you did, genius.
You flatter me, sir. However, just to play devil’s advocate, an unfortunate and large part of me also thinks that resistance is doomed. Liberals can’t do it alone, and I just can’t see any GOP leader, including that feckless opportunist John McCain, really getting behind a movement to delegitimise Trump. They’re beyond shame, and self-enriching cruelty is their entire raison d’etre. None of them is going to scuttle the ship.
At the current rate of lunacy, they’ll all jump ship or drown. Saving their own skin is on their priority list. Funnily enough, the Right to Life march, in many ways the polar-opposite of the Women’s March, should be the inspiration. Conservatives think liberals are quitters, because they usually are. The March for Life, on the face of it a metaphor for futility, is on the verge of becoming unnecessary. Not because it is on the verge of total failure, but because it’s on the verge of total success. That’s the kind of relentless determination we must have, too.
Call me cynical, but the people who’re resisting Trump don’t have quite the same motivation as the people who think eternal life is running on it. Hence my bet that it fizzles out without achieving diddly-squat. Call it an emotional hedge.
Americans pussyfoot about when it comes to public opposition — and then wonder why it doesn’t work. It’s surprising really, because, in so many other ways, Yanks love a good scrap.
More accurately, they love a good unfair scrap, and especially one where the media can cover the whole thing with plenty of space for lucrative adverts. But I digress. When the rest of the world resists, it generally just engages in running battles with Old Bill. Foreign rioters aren’t armed with more than sticks and stones, and the police aren’t much better off. So it’s considered a fair fight, and both sides can eventually compromise without losing face.
Yeah. In Europe there’s still a sense that the government works for the entire population, and only when it doesn’t, the shit hits the fan. Or more accurately, the manure hits the pavement. But here, there’s no built-in expectation of the government being useful, so noncompliance is essentially just a friendly kick-about in the park from the get-go. And this of course plays perfectly into the hands of the people who’re stirring up the shit in the first place.
Gun nuts love to talk about how owning firearms makes them better equipped to fight government tyranny, when in fact it works the other way around. The presence of so much private ordnance actually makes resistance less effective because everyone’s terrified of being gunned down, either by the police or by their opponents. Whoever has the fewest guns — in this case, and in every case, Democrats or liberals or whatever you want to call them — is bound to end up on the losing side.
So as a result nothing will stop the GOP from implementing every cruelty they’ve spent the last decade masturbating over.
Totally. And you’re spot on — it is cruelty, make no mistake about it. All of them — McConnell, Bevin, Trump, Ryan, the whole lot — want a world where if you can’t afford it you don’t get it. Education, healthcare, even emergency services. A bunch of hypocritical Christian scumbags.
Vive le resistance, eh?
