God, guts and guns

[Photo from here]

It was a fairy new Hyundai, blue in color. At eight o'clock in the morning, the driver ran a stop sign, then accelerated down the road at a pace well over the speed limit.

But he was, as so often happens with speed demons, stopped at a red light when I puttered up behind him.

A sticker on the back of his car screamed "Throw the bums out" next to a picture of the U.S. Capitol. On the left side of the rear window was a NRA sticker. On the right side was another sticker which read:

"God, Guts and Guns made America. Let's keep all three."


We have too many stoopids in this country! Here's a guy who pompously proclaims his faith in "god, guts and guns" while at the same time defies basic traffic laws which are essential to our common good, e.g., the ability to share the roadways without killing each other in accidents that are not really accidents but simply piss-poor driving habits.

But his hypocrisy is merely a part of his stoopidness.

Obviously, he doesn't read books. Probably doesn't read the newspaper and if he did read the newspaper, he'd read the Washington Times. Also, obviously, he learned very little in school and has not bothered to learn anything since.

He lives in some mythical world where the deity is his buddy, and like a good buddy, his god carries a .38 strapped to his waist under his robes, and when he created the world he created the US of A for white anglo-saxon descendants of white, anglo-saxon immigrants.

In this mythical world, when those white anglo-saxon immigrants came to this country, the Injuns were the bad guys, and it was only right that the U.S. Calvary and the settlers did what was necessary to rid the land of the "red" man so the whites could move in and take it over. Damn Injuns didn't need it anyway.

Today, in his pea-brain, he "knows" it's not Injuns who are the problem, but "Mescan" illegals and Arabs [read Muslims] and others of dark complexion.

Ronald Reagan plays a big role in the wild driver's mythical world; and because he is stoopid and fanatically ignorant, our friend thinks Reagan struck down the mighty Soviet Union with his capitalistic sword, another myth repeated with increasing fervor by Repugnican nogoodniks bought and paid for by the corporations. He knows not that Reagan had little to do with the Soviet disintegration. Our friend also doesn't understand that his B-movie star hero is responsible for initiating a financial process which ended with the destruction of our financial system under Georgi W. Bush.

Our friend remains stoopid because he gets what little information his brain can process from the folks at FAUX News, and from Rush Limbaarger, and really believes Obama might not have been born in "Amurica" and may even be a Muslim, if not the anti-Christ.

No doubt he thinks the quitter from Alaska would make a wunnerful pres'dent. I mean, she believes in God and ev'rything!


God, guts and guns. God, if he or she existed, would probably destroy this country for all the evil it has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate. The ancestors of today's "WASPS" wiped out an entire native population, sometimes with deadly efficiency, such as handing out blankets infected with smallpox. Then our ancestors stole the land. Then, they herded the natives off to concentration camps called "reservations." They made 150 treaties with the Indians beginning in the middle of the 19th century and broke EVERY SINGLE one of them!

During the early years of the 20th century our troops marched off to Latin America to ensure that American corporations could exercise their license to steal the natural resources of the people living in those lands. Proclaiming a belief in "democracy," we proved the opposite by propping up dictator after dictator for the simple reason they looked the other way while we raped the country. U.S. Marines were posted in Nicaragua until 1936 for precisely that purpose!

It is true we fought a couple of world wars in order to rid the world of some nasties, and we did a good job, overall. But we also used poison gas. We fire-bombed entire cities filled with civilians. We corralled our own citizens and put them in concentration camps because they were ethnic Japanese. Furthermore, we were betrayed by some of our own companies, including those owned by the Bush family. And "Big Blue," aka IBM, made it possible for Hitler to round up and murder 11 million people (including 6 million Jews) with deadly efficiency.

Slavery was the epicenter of evil in this country for over a century. God-fearing Americans bought and sold other human beings and claimed the right to do so based on their interpretation of the Bible, just as today's christianists deny gays and women their civil rights based on their interpretation of the Bible. Nor did the Civil War end slavery; it continued by another name. In fact, thousands of black Americans were enslaved up until the 1940s, many by companies well-known to us today, such as U.S. Steel.

Fast-forward to 2003. George W. Bush, president by virtue of a Supreme Court decision which denied the vote of the people, a vote clearly in favor of Albert Gore, decided to wage war on a piddling little country in the Middle East which posed no threat to the U.S. But Mr. Bush and his friends wanted Iraq's oil, for under the Iraqi sands lie some of the largest oil reserves in the world! In order to gain the support of the American people for this murderous adventure, Bush told one lie after another. The "war," which was a preemptive invasion by a big, powerful country of a small, weak country, turned quickly into a disaster which continues to this day. It has caused the deaths of over 4,000 American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destroyed the country of Iraq and has depleted the U.S. treasury. Bush has not been held accountable and struts about on the world stage as if he were not a criminal but some sort of "conservative" hero.


God, guts and guns made America? To which America is this clown referring by flaunting his stoopid car sticker? If there should be a deity and if he or she should actually be an ethical god, he or she would likely strike down this person's "America."

Guts? We could come up with thousands of anecdotes regarding the personal courage of American people. But what would that prove? Nothing, other than there are Americans, who, like people all over the the world who are able to sometimes act heroically.

As a nation, we have indeed stepped up to the plate in times of world crisis, but the mythology is wrong.

For example, in 1939 and beyond, as Hitler's troops stormed over Europe creating hell on earth, there was no great uprising in the United States to take him on. In fact, many, if not most Americans, wanted nothing to do with him. Hitler, they said, was Europe's problem. Let Europe deal with him.

President Roosevelt had to resort to subterfuge in order to supply the British with the war materiel they needed to survive the Nazi onslaught. Many members of Congress hated Roosevelt with a passion and did everything they could to keep America isolationist. If they had had their way, we would have a very different world right now!

God had nothing to do with any of this. It was men like Roosevelt and all those fighting men and women who marched off to war that had the "guts" that made the difference. Miserable little wackos marching to Glenn Beck's corporate "tea party" drummers do not demonstrate "guts."


Guns. What is it with these guys and guns? I think maybe they have such little penises that guns provide some kind of compensation for their physical shortcomings. But guns are part of the American myth popularized by Hollywood from the early days. According to our friends in Tinseltown, everybody in the Old West carried at least one gun, strapped low on the hip, ready to go at a moment's notice.

The truth, however, is quite different. Few people carried guns. To carry a gun was dangerous; it was a good way to get killed.

And even if you can make a case for hunting and killing our brother and sister animals, why in the world do these wingnuts feel the need to have automatic weapons in their fevered little palms?

The reason has to do in part with the unrelenting war waged by the National Rifle Association on behalf of its corporate sponsors, the gun manufacturers, to ensure that any and all weapons be available at all times to every American who wants them.

So the NRA harps continually on the notion that any gun control is bad. Any attempt to regulate the purchase and use of any kind of weapon is evil, and will automatically lead to further restrictions and eventually no one will be able to own any guns. During the last presidential campaign, the NRA told lie after lie about Obama's position relative to guns and said quite bluntly that he was a threat to gun owners everywhere.

That's the mythology; again, not true.

But have guns made America "great"? Of course not. Such nonsense is another part of the mythical world in which too many of our citizens live!


"God, guts and guns made America" proclaims the moron in the Hyundai - as if this country, which is way down the list of countries in terms of infant mortality, education, health care, etc. is some kind of paradigm of righteousness.

It isn't. But still it is a great country in other ways. Our Constitution stands as a beacon of freedom in spite of the fact that Presidents and Vice Presidents like Bush and Cheney and other stoopid Repugnicans tossed it in the trash, and in spite of the fact some Repugnican nogoodniks don't know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (e. g. "Weepy" John Boehner).

The US of A is a country of possibilities, many unrealized and increasingly denied these days by rightwingnut religious and non-religious crazies.

But it sure as hell isn't Paradise. And God, guts and guns are not only not responsible for America's greatness (realized or potential) but each, in and of themselves, pose a real threat to, not only our "greatness" but our very existence.