The Butcher is Scarier than the Ghosts of the Civl War

I arrived home to a door locked and deadbolted and, as the cat rubbed my legs and waited for me to let us both in, I heard nothing, just the quiet of an empty house. I sat down, checked my email, and then called the Butcher.

He answered and I could hear a lot of noise in the background.

“What are you doing tonight?” I asked.

“Playing some video games, maybe watching a movie.”

“Cool. What time do you work?”

“Five thirty.”

“Well, I’m going to head over to the Professor’s after a bit, so I probably won’t see you.”

“What are y’all doing?”

“Hanging out. Eating potato pancakes. Watching a movie.”

“You should see Thank You for Smoking.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Bye.”

I’m sitting here a little longer, reading my email from Coble when all of a sudden, as plain as day, I hear the refrigerator door open. I turn to look to see who it is.

It’s the Butcher!

And even though my eyes could clearly see it was the Butcher and my brain clearly registered that it was him, I still screamed like a little girl and about peed my pants.

So, apparently he was not over at a friend’s house playing video games, but upstairs.

Anyway, this heart is by the same artist as the skull from earlier. It’s supposed to bring love. If it works on the same principle as the skull, I’m not sure how.

Yep, We’re Talking Kleinheider Again, Probably for the Last Time, at Least for a While

Check this:

We are undergoing a rapid demographic shift in this country that will
eventually tilt this country’s politics leftward. If we do not slow it
down not only will the white majority in this country disappear but any
chance for a Republican or conservative majority will disappear as well.

Y’all, I give up.  No, I’m serious.  I give up on trying to tease Kleinheider into behaving himself because now… now we’re really beyond parody here.

I mean, look at this.  Here we have a conservative Catholic American of European descent bitching yet again about the arrival, in large numbers of people who are, by and large, culturally conservative Catholic Americans of European descent. 

Kleinheider, have you no sense?  Is your head so far up your ass on this issue that you cannot see the forest for the trees?

As long as the vast majority of immigrants to this country come from other American countries, chances are that they’re going to be very, very much just like you–socially conservative Christians of some mix of European stock.

 What the fuck is so scary about that to you?

Kleinheider, need I remind you that Catholics in the United States have faced and continue to face persecution from White Power groups?  Do I have to spell out for you what that means?  You’re not White.

You might have white skin.  You might have blond hair and blue eyes.  You might be able to quote from Pat Buchanan at length, but guess what?  He’s Catholic, too.  He doesn’t count.

 And it doesn’t matter how certain you are that you’re white, when the whities with the “right” beliefs about Jesus start drawing the circles around who gets to be White and who doesn’t, you’re on the outside looking in, buddy.

Can I just share with you my pet peeve about conservatives (speaking broadly and caveating the fuck out of this by saying that, of course, not all conservatives are like this blah blah blah), it’s that they’re so big into tradition–“We have to make a stand for traditional marriage.  Someone needs to take a stand for the traditional working man.  What can we do to keep this country traditionally white or Christian or whatever.”–but when you try to nail them down about when this fabulous time that everything was working so great was, they can’t tell you.

 Like, right now, I’m going to ask Kleinheider when this fabulous time was when Catholics were welcomed with open arms into the definition of “Whiteness” and he’s not going to answer.

Because there is no time.  There’s no time in the past when everything worked how it should and all white men were skipping gayly around the United States back before gay meant anything other than happy, back before when all women stayed home and raised the children, and no one got divorced or had abortions or was ever unhappy, and everyone went to church and you could trust the government and look up to politicians yippy skippy rainbows. 

That time did not exist.

The only way you can look back at our past and pretend like things were better back then than they are now is if you shut one eye and don’t look too hard with the other one.

We have no “traditions” that map neatly and unproblematically onto the things conservatives call “traditional.”  That doesn’t mean that many of the things conservatives stand for aren’t useful ideas; many of them are.

But to cloak them in the term “traditional” when anyone with half a brain knows we aren’t talking about the real past but some fairy-tale version of it is intellectually dishonest.

So, Kleinheider, I’m done with you.  Probably not forever, but for a while.  Because I like you and it hurts my heart to see you being such a dumb-ass.

Be conservative; I don’t give a shit.  But base your conservatism in reality, not in fairy tales.  That I can’t abide by. 

The Wind

It was the kind of dawn that makes you wish you were a witch–not a real witch, but a woman with a wide brimmed pointy hat and a broom for flying.  The sky was pink–the parts that were not covered by clouds the color of bruises–and the wind squeezed around me and mussed my hair, like a fond uncle with quick, but real, affection as he hurries out the door, late for work.

The wind is so… tangible… in October you can almost understand where the belief came from.  The way it grabs your waist and tugs on your jacket, doesn’t it seem like, if only you knew what to whisper to the earth to get it to let you go, you could just fling your arms wide open, and let go first with one foot and then, slowly, the other, until you were nestled safely in the cold grasp of the breeze as it sweeps you along?  And from that point, how hard is it to believe that, with something to act as your rudder, perhaps a thick fan of straw attached to a stick for easy handling, you could change your direction and move along the currents of the breeze with the ease a boat captain steers along a deep, moving channel?