I don't actually have much to say, because I've refused to watch any of the 2024 clown show, so what little I know comes from headlines and chatter. Apparently it's a charm offensive and the whole thing seems so...scripted. "Assassination" (no I don't think it's legit) to get a boost of sympathy and a handy excuse for hustling Donald Trump further out of sight behind a wall of "security". A suddenly chastened mood, as if he were thankful to God for his deliverance! Meanwhile the sinister mercenary figure of J. D. Vance is ushered in. "Insurance," Elon Musk actually boasted, presumably clueless about the meaning of the word: Vance is like Spiro Agnew, so foul that he makes Trump look almost friendly in comparison. Superficially, though, Vance is a great American patriot and inspiring success story argle bargle. Who the fuck cares, right? I sort of want to see what Trump was like when he spoke but I'm afraid to find out that they'd somehow managed to get him to sound less garbled, for once, which means they score a win against the charge of senility.
Exactly one thing happened at the GOP Convention that actually got my special notice.
It was one single line from J. D. Vance, and the Xitter Republicans seemed to think it was a big winner, even though it creeped me the fuck out. Here it is.
“People will not fight for an abstraction, but they will fight for their home.”
"People don't fight for abstractions." Is that so.
I could go on and on about World War II and the Spanish Civil War and the wars of the French Revolution and all manner of conflicts in which someone was, in fact, fighting for abstractions. People are genuinely moved by these intangible things sometimes. People do believe in love and justice and democracy and all the other things that Republicans, Christian Republicans even, have plainly left in a ditch somewhere on the road towards absolute power.
Everyone who's on the outside of the GOP bubble has seen it, experienced it, known it—these people believe in nothing, they're living only for themselves, and they've probably convinced themselves that "abstraction" was foisted on humanity by "cultural Marxists". Slowly they've been whittling away at their lexicon of acceptable human concepts, and "abstraction" went flying away at some point, along with "morality". They actually get very irritated and laboriously sarcastic if you speak to them of morality. Morality now disgusts them; they must have thought they'd successfully staked "morality" and buried it.
If I ever doubted that Republicans are little more than contemporary barbarians, people who haven't any more complicated notion of how humanity ought to be organized beyond "single family" and "mob of people led by a king", I don't doubt it any more. Thanks, J. D. Vance!
~Chara