TomFlannery.com

There are days. Damn. There are DAYS.

There are days worth remembering. The kind of days you’ll conjure up with a grandkid on the knee. You’ll say…..”I’ll never forget the day…let me tell you all about it…”

And the kid will look at you, and probably wonder what the big deal was. “Two people who love each other getting married. You mean….that wasn’t allowed? Wow….how old ARE you anyway Grandpa?”

Strange days mister. Strange days.

The last time I felt this way was when a black man was made President of the United States, less than a life-span from the time when he wasn’t allowed to order a cup of coffee at certain lunch counters or piss in certain urinals.

I sat there watching that inauguration in 2008, and I cried. I watched it alone. One of the reasons it was so monumental was because, to my kids, it wasn’t monumental at all.

Progress. We move. Sometimes at the pace of a glacier. But we move. Sometimes the right stuff is buried in a piece of rock…and it takes the patience and skill of a sculptor to hammer it out into something recognizable. Something that contains all the colors of the rainbow.

My kids don’t understand baby-boomer bigotry either. Or the kind cloaked in Bible-speak that has been around ever longer. They’ve known gays their whole life. They are friends with them. They are related to them. They don’t give a fiddler’s fart, and it’s the type of not giving a fiddler’s fart that we can all learn from. It’s glorious apathy. And, I might add, democratic as hell. Kids don’t hate by instinct. Only grown-ups do that.

But kids know this is special. They KNOW. This one touches them. This is the parting of the red-sea. They’re not about to CONGRATULATE anyone, least of all 5 near-octogenarians dressed in robes, for doing what should not have been necessary in the first place. Making love legal. But they can exhale and say…”well…at least the grown-ups FIXED something for a change.”

And yea, America is used to leading, or at least used to bragging about leading. In this case we dragged ass. The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, France, Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand, Britain, Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland, all of them beat us like a gong here….but…well….once we were blind and now we see.

Or at least some of us do. The rest are like that asshole who insists on wearing sunglasses indoors.

It’s absurd, on the face of it. And underneath the face too. That it HAD to come to this. But we’re a broken nation, living on fault lines manufactured by past haters and kept in working order by present ones. Hate drives us apart for sure, but it also brings us together, which is one of the reasons it’s so easy to fall into its ditch. So you’re some social misfit sitting in your basement on the weekends with your joy-stick in your hands? You know what….that’s probably somebody’s FAULT. And the only thing easier than finding somebody to hate is finding somebody to hate with.

Those who hate the most always seem to be the most “god fearing”. In the US nobody hates with more white-hot intensity than a lower to middle class white Christian egged on by a way upper-class white Christian. I don’t know why this is so. I stopped believing in an invisible man in the sky when I realized the Easter Bunny was a hoax, so those who think the lesbians across the street signify the end of America are a source of endless wonder to me…sort of like talking to a 50 year old who is afraid of short changing the tooth fairy. I do know that nothing divides us more than religion….and that all of the major ones seem equally intolerant, especially of each other. Talk about a crap shoot. There’s too much pressure choosing your god these days. You think people fucking hate you for loving the Dallas Cowboys? Try drawing a picture of Muhammad on the wall. Then wear a turtleneck.

And really, can you imagine Jesus coming back today? A socialist dark-skinned Jew who trashes capitalism and befriends the poor, lepers, the IRS, and whores? Poor wretch would be tasered in about 15 seconds. If he showed up in Texas he wouldn’t last that long.

(I wonder how long it would take Hannity or O’Reily to cut off his mic?)

But I digress. Because digression is fun sometimes.

Until this sort of mindless ideological jabbering goes the way of the statue of Baal and Tim Tebow….days like today will continue to be necessary.

But still, what a day.

Hug who you want. Kiss who you want. Love who you want. Drink yourself stinky tonight. And sleep in tomorrow.

But then come back. Because there’s so much left to do. Hate is nothing if not resilient.

Reptiles like Antonin Scalia (today his legacy as the Roger B. Taney of our time was, with his hilariously unhinged dissent, cemented in stone) are still out there….but they are a necessary evil, for they give a face to the abyss they represent.

And he is one ugly motherfucker.

In a bit..

–tf

You’ve heard this one before,

“Only in America”.

What followed used to be a list of superlatives.

Yea…well….

The greatness is still there, but it’s getting shouted down by an invasion of stupidness.

It’s fun to be stupid. Stupid people really aren’t held responsible for anything, because they have the perfect excuse. If you attempt to explain rationality to a person who has none….you’ll truly understand the clinical definition of insanity (“Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.”)

So a stupid white kid walks into a black church, announces that he’s there to kill them because they are black, and then does so. He leaves one alive on purpose….so that person can tell the tale, lest there be no misunderstanding of the killers intentions (The other survivor survived by pretending to be dead).

In a matter of hours the kid is caught. His picture is splashed across front pages. With a Moe-from-the-3-stooges haircut and eyes that look like discarded Christmas lights, what we have is a poster boy for dumbness. We already know his story before reading the first sentence. Such an interesting nation this is. Always it’s the insignificant little shits who make the biggest news. News leaks out. Friends speak. No surprises. A run of the mill racist who told “nigger jokes” and, in a theatrical touch, posed for his Facebook pic wearing racist patches celebrating racist South African regimes. Black males made him nervous, especially when girls he liked seemed to like them more. So he killed for the same reason the goons killed Emmett Till 60 years ago. See how far we’ve come?

A hate crime for sure was this……except in the eyes of the people who hate the most, and thus should know better. The chain-gang for Jesus. The chaing-gang for Jesus sees this as an attack against Christianity….because the dead black people happened to be Christians. So they were not killed for being black. There were killed for loving Jesus. You know….the same thing the boogie-man-du-jour ISIS are doing to our blue-eyed sons….

All about as subtle as a hammer hitting a nail. But give them an A for staying on message.

And this stupid kid is sitting around listening to this and saying…..”NO you dumb shits……I killed them because they were BLACK!!!. I ANNOUNCED IT! Are you jackasses DEAF or what!?”

Thus, dumb and dumber. For real. The unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.

Because to admit that this kid killed simply because he hated black people might cause a chain reaction. It might cause people to wonder….”gee….I wonder why he hated black people?”……and thus……maybe, just maybe….bring them ’round in a great big ‘ol circle to the relentless barrage of hate spewed by people who….wait for it…..love Jesus the most-est in the whole wide world.

But….no, that ain’t gonna happen.

Imagine for just one second….if a dumb muslim walked into a Texas church and killed 9 white people.

The fucking military would be at defcon 3.

But 9 blacks in South Carolina? Probably just some atheist cracker who wasn’t taking his Prozac.

Nothing to see here. Move along. Go back to the Jenner’s.

And by the way, play no attention to that Confederate flag hanging from the State Capital. It’s not flying at half-staff because that would alert people that it was, you know….a fucking CONFEDERATE flag. In case you are wondering, the US flag also flies in South Carolina. That flag IS at half-staff. Isn’t that interesting?

Pause for a moment. The Confederate flag salutes a treasonous attempt to destroy the United States of America. To those who argue that the Civil war was fought for “states rights”, I agree. But the right your state was fighting for was the right for one human being to own another. So…..well….I for one am fucking glad you lost.

Make no mistake. You did lose. You can put up as many Stonewall Jackson or Robert E Lee statues as you want. You can even name the street the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church sits on after a virulent racist, but that doesn’t change the outcome. You fought for something ghastly and disgusting. That fact that so many of your sons were brave and even honorable in defense of that cause doesn’t make it fucking noble.

And I haven’t even mentioned guns. You know, that thing these dumb people use to kill people they don’t like because they have darker skin.

“From my cold dead hands” and all of that gibberish. Nine cold dead hands in this case. Less than half the butcher’s bill of Newtown, and no little kids this time, so maybe that’s American progress? The NRA already blamed the dead black guy for his own death because the guy voted against a law that would allow guns in Church. You really can’t make this stuff up. You can try, but that would make you stupid too.

The world is justly laughing at us, and what do we do?

Well…we just whistle Dixie.

In a bit…

–tf