Winchester Virginia changed hands 70 times in the civil war. The accessible version of history of this area is tangled up in the recent squabbles of the colonisers. You will usually get half a sentence about the true history, and then a load of noise. “The Burgernurga valley was significant to the native Americans, and then Murduck Bumgitt opened his goat farm here in 17xx.”
There was a lot of death in this town though. The confederacy, the unionists, going round and round. We went into the town hall and it was a slaughterhouse. What the fuck would the world look like if the confederacy had won? It seems the current president is keen to find out, as he dismantles all the things that made this country great in our lifetime, all in the name of making it “great again”. Aka plunging it back into the anarchy that this town is a warning about.
The staggering arrogance of unexamined wealth and power. What an absolute twit.
But here I am and it isn’t as bad as it looks in the media, on the ground here. We haven’t had much bullshit. I did karaoke and built a “fuck ice” into my song twice and nobody shot me. The majority of people are reasonable, but yes there is an untrained self elected militia here controlled by a child who has never grown up. There’s a cancer at the heart of this once great nation. I’m terms of international standing, it might recover, it might not. It depends how the eventual collapse is handled, and who takes the public eye in the aftermath. It’ll need to be a strong hand that can negotiate all the “left” “right” poison that is being propagated by those who want things to continue to be just as they are now for their own financial concerns.
The “left” is allegedly weak and stupid and doesn’t realise how we are under attack from nebulous agents controlled by unfamiliar religions or slightly alien worldviews. The “right” is allegedly cruel and selfish and can’t understand that most people aren’t as acquisitive as they are personally – the only people we need to be protected from is the right because they will take everything for fear that someone else will if they don’t. These are the polarities.
Going to these civil war museums, I can really feel how people got behind their polarised worldviews. The slave owners desperately needed an ascendant worldview that allowed some people to be merely property. The unionist held truths to be self evident that all men are equal. Hundreds of thousands of people died right here in Washington for this ideal. 20000 casualties in one day just down the road from here at Antietam – the single worst day of American warfare.
This nation self determined as champions of equality after a dalek-like systematic extermination of the mostly welcoming indigenous population. And then they fought for equality and won, abolished slavery, became an almost laughable self styled world police. And now… this fuckery. A deluded fool shouting and millions of people echoing his shouts.
It’s not as bad on the ground as it seems in the media, but there’s something rotten in the state of America.
AlBarclay 