The Desecration of Independence Day (Updated and Revised from Memorial Day, 2019)

So President Trump want a military parade, deploying all of our might, and presumed manhood, like a grizzled drunk slapping his cock down on a table in a bar and challenging anyone to a size contest. Donald Trump seems to think very highly of his penis, like other leaders from the past who celebrated their nation by threatening everyone else in the world. Here, take a look:

Here’s something the Nazis did (beyond the handful of pictures mixed in above, alongside Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, White Nationalist upon winning a third of the parliament in Norway, among others). This is a march of prisoners of war through the streets, being laughed at and shamed by the crowds.

This is an arrest at the US-Mexico border, migrants being taken to some holding cell. I want you to look at this image a few seconds longer than you might and make a historical comparison or two:

This past Memorial Day I wrote a piece about how that patriotic holiday, meant to celebrate the sacrifice of our national heroes in the military and other branches of service, has been perverted into a partisan sideshow, Trump trying to one up everyone else and trying to define an absolute meaning for his limited understanding of patriotism. It is frankly a nightmare and a true desecration of our national identity, transforming what was once meant to celebrate freedom into a glaring response as to just how ready for war we are. It is meant to be a celebration of freedom, or at least the idea of freedom. And watch what it turns into, listen to the speech (in front of the Lincoln Memorial!) and try to wonder if anything you see or hear resembles what you once thought the United States of America was meant to be.

I will follow with an updated reprint of my earlier piece on Memorial Day, which applies perfectly to the 4th of July.

Remember this?

President Donald Trump has stated that he plans to pardon numerous soldiers convicted of war crimes on Memorial Day this year. For those of you outside the US (and in many ways this piece is meant to provide you folks with some insight into just what has happened to the idea of the United States, a land that was once the envy of nearly every other nation in the world), this national holiday used to be a celebration of the sacrifices brave soldiers have made defending our nation–defending the very notion of liberty and far too often giving their own lives in the name of the vague notion of freedom.

Our military, while certainly never perfect, used to be the definition of discipline and patriotism. But this is less the case today. It is not the fault of the soldiers themselves (outside of the handful of psychopaths who see military service as a way to literally get away with murder). But there has always been an understanding about what going too far meant. There have always been military prisons, convictions for war crimes and punishments that sometimes go so far as death.

But Trump, an insincere fool who understands nothing of sacrifice (except, that is, the sacrifice of those loyal to him in his own interest), is merely using the soldiers as pawns in his propaganda game to get his craven followers, most who have also never served (and those handful of others who did and who for some reason believe anything goes is how armies are supposed to operate), to celebrate torture and cold-blooded murder. Let’s have a quick rundown on who these horrible people are that the President plans to publically state what they did were not only not crimes, but were in fact heroic:

This is Edward Gallagher, a special operations chief navy seal. He had been a highly decorated soldier earlier in his life. Know what he did? He randomly gunned down a young woman and an old man wandering in the war torn streets of Iraq, both dazed and terrified. Then–and this is the crime without any forced justification like some people will inevitably attempt regarding the first two–then this supposedly honorable man tortured a fifteen year old girl with a knife, laughing, eventually slitting her throat, not terminally, then shooting after her, intentionally missing as she ran away in terror. Apparently he won a bet he had made with an amused audience. The President of the United States wants to tell this man and the rest of the world that this is okay.

*Gallagher was recently found not guilty of every one of his murder and torture charges, and only convicted of the disgrace of posing with a murdered corpse, a crime that offers three months in prison, nine of which he has already served. Here is a rundown of what he was charged with and the results:

Notice that he was not even charged with the torture he was also reported by members of his platoon who witnessed it. This is a free man and I hear that the President has invited him to serve in a place of honor in the parade.

Mathew Golsteyn. He had a habit of picking off unarmed Afghanis on his off-time. The number he killed is unknown. He was finally convicted of what passes for first degree murder in the military for shooting one. Trump calls him, too, a hero.

This is real. No matter how just in war the killing of the individuals on the ground (Taliban fighters), these guys are already dead, their threat ended. Within an institution once considered the best of the best, the noblest soldiers in the world, these jackasses, snipers who gunned the twelve Taliban down, decided that it was the right thing to do to urinate on their corpses, laughing and high-fiving. These guys were savagely condemned by the Army higher-ups, referred to as disgraces to the very nation they were supposed to defend. The President, however, their commander in chief, thinks that this is funny. He says they did nothing wrong. Trump has even encouraged other soldiers to loosen up and piss on a few more corpses. I kid you not.

See these guys? These are perhaps the worst of the people President Trump plans on pardoning. They aren’t even soldiers, but Blackwater contractors, which is really nothing more than paid mercenaries–soldiers for hire. Know what these worthless pieces of filth did? In states of joy they open fired on crowds, gunning down countless people–women, children, even infants. They were almost immediately convicted of their crimes in 2007. Yet the President (whose Secretary of Education’s brother is the CEO of Blackwater Contractors) has actually called these petty monsters–people who committed acts that in any other circumstance we would call terrorism–he actually called them “true American heroes.”

This is the broken and meaningless patriotism the United States suffers from in the age of Donald Trump. I have no idea if this is due to a lack of understanding, simple cruelty, or from much darker, violent, video-game inspired urges that find joy in murder and laugh at the torture of innocent souls.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected to office I made a vow to myself and to the nation I love (and I do love America–I love her, for all her flaws perhaps even more). I do not perform the Pledge of Allegiance, will not stand for the National Anthem, and refuse to wear anything with an American flag for as long as Donald Trump is in office. This, to me, is true patriotism, declaring Trump invalid as president not because he didn’t win the election (he did), but because he understands and upholds nothing that was ever believed to be the meaning of the United States of America. I declared that we were not even any longer the America of our founders ideals (we are not). I watched the people of this nation roil and fight and break apart over stupid issues, and noticed how the president, instead of tampering the flames, simply poured more gasoline on the raging conflagration, then sat back on his throne, laughing and laughing and laughing. In ancient times he would be referred to as a “mad king.” Today, to about the third of the nation, he is considered a true patriot, or even “the greatest President in American history.”

What happens when a president justifies the torture and random murder of people in other nations? Does our outrage when this happens to our soldiers therefore cease, because it is only what they have earned? If we think this way, generalizing all the people in the world as those deserving of suffering, how can we condemn anyone else for feeling the same way about us?

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And so we return back to the same place, with the same growing fear about the end of liberty. Happy birthday, my beautiful United States of America. I hope this is not your last.