Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Wayne LaPierre, who has made millions as the public face of the National Rifle Association, stuck his public face into the national debate on whether children have the right to protest the mass killing of other children. He says, emphatically, NO. LaPierre calls the act of children speaking out against gun availability in the US, and the inevitable bloodshed it leads to, communism. And socialism. And he calls Barrack Obama a socialist, and says that if the Democrats get control of any of the three branches of government, they, being socialists, will continue the job they began of destroying our freedoms.
No wonder crazy fascists are killing children, right? I mean, children are communists. Look at how their communist teachers teach them to share. They're trying to take away our freedom. So of course anxious white men are going to try to kill them. They listen to Wayne's story, get nervous, and go out and kill schoolchildren to protect America.
Wayne calls his wondrous fantasy, with a straight face, "the truth." In his fabulous tale, in his imaginary USA, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny don't exist. Those problems are invented by "Them," people who just want an excuse to complain and riot. No black men ever get killed by police, no men use their positions of power to abuse and rape women, Donald Dump hasn't enacted draconian laws against people who've migrated here from other countries, gay people are treated just the same as if they were just as good as Wayne LaPierre.
"They," he says. They. These socialists. These liberals, who are socialists. Liberals who are socialists because cheese is meat, smoke is water vapor, gold is friendship. "They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler," says Wayne. They. These liberals who are socialists and these children who are communists.
I'd like to propose a competing narrative, Wayne. In this fable, it's the neo-Nazis in the USA who believe Dump is another Hitler. That's why they came out with tiki torches and guns to march. They believed if they rose up he would give the word to kill non-white people. Now they're disappointed. He's a big disappointment, that Dump, just like Hitler.
Hitler loved torches, because he was part of the long tradition of torch-bearing, monster- chasing mobs – lynch mobs, they're called – and he would have loved tiki torches if they'd been available back then. Hitler would've loved tiki culture. I can see him in my mind's eye, sipping a mai tai, a Shagg print on the wall, Arthur Lyman's "Yellow Bird" whispering, twittering, tinkling and throbbing patriotically from speakers near the faux- thatched ceiling.
Wayne is what we old-timers call "a red-baiting fascist demagogue." I like to think he's not winning any hearts and minds outside of the NRA and its kinfolk. I like to think there are political conservatives with a reasonable conception of why lax gun regulations are being protested – and aren't ready to blow it up into a J. Edgar Hoover-style communist plot. I like to think the majority of people are reasonable and kind. I also like to think about Wayne LaPierre getting his face eaten off by bats. I like to think about smashing his head with a sledge hammer. I like to think of jumping up and down on his prone form and crushing his bones and organs until his blood and bile are splashing around my ankles as I joyfully dance like a toddler in a rain puddle.
There's an article in the Atlantic by a radiologist who's treated wounds from the AR-15 rifle used in recent mass shootings by Wayne LaPierre's co-religionists. High velocity rounds from the AR-15 do way more damage than bullets from a 9mm hand gun. Because of the velocity, a bullet from an AR-15 doesn't just cut a bullet-shaped tunnel through the gunshot victim's, say, liver, a wound from which it is possible to recover. The velocity causes a shockwave that turns the liver into jelly. Having jelly instead of a liver is 100% fatal. AR-15s should be banned from civilian use. It's not a difficult call to make.
But the sick situation is that the arms trade is big money, and as in thrall as we are to capitalism, even the most ginger attempt to nibble at the edges of it causes an a-hole like Wayne to blow. His clients are gun makers and arms dealers. He's a shill for weapons makers. Never forget that. Right now, he's trying to get people to hate the teenagers, teenagers who just survived a mass shooting in their school in which 17 of their friends were murdered with a rifle that can liquefy your liver. He's trying to get people to hate teenagers who are speaking out about gun violence, because he works for people who manufacture guns. Is there a word for that? Shill? Is that strong enough? Does it give one the proper stench of lower gastro-intestinal infection and rot? No. There must be a stronger word for someone who calls children who were present at the murder of their friends communists.
What do you call someone who tries to smear children who finally are standing up when the officials elected to represent them will not? What do you call someone who smears children as freedom-hating communists because he works for weapons makers? What do you call someone with so little character, so little integrity, that he prizes his job shilling for gun makers over even a little nod toward the courage of a child calling out the emperor's nudity? An afflicted idiot? An evil idiot? A sick lowlife scum? These terms are too general.
There is a hollowness in Wayne LaPierre that he fills with money. Is he a piñata? A money-filled piñata? No, that's silly and even a little delightful. Think of hitting him with a stick and getting money out.
No animal is as disgusting. No virus has such base, amoral, godless motives. No state of decay is comparable to the corruption of his heart. I can't even accuse him of extremism in the defense of anything. He's an adman. But even admen have a shred of soul. A pusher? A drug pusher? He's kind of like a drug pusher, if heroin mixed with meth and bath salts and Fentanyl were legal. He's like a spokesperson for the mafia, the legal mafia. What do you call that person? A consigliere? A failed human being?
He's no warlord. He's a warlord's fluffer. He's the fluffer of a syphilitic warlord. He's Idi Amin's fluffer and apologist and propagandist. He's a Nazi. He's definitely a Nazi. Now, back in the day, the day Wayne wants to convince people to return us to, with his tales of creeping communism, some Nazis believed they were protecting their way of life. But Wayne doesn't. He's just protecting his meal ticket. He knows what he's doing is wrong, he's just afraid to do otherwise. Because he's a Nazi coward. A Nazi coward hypocrite.
Wayne LaPierre would be happy if Nazis ran the USA. He would not defend the rights of non-white people to carry guns, a right the Nazis would take away ASAP, but he would make sure guns were available to people who wanted to illegally arm non-white people. Because an illegal market for guns is still a market. And guns only get into an illegal market if it's legal to make and sell them. He doesn't care about rights. He cares about gun makers. He doesn't care about freedom. He cares about money. He cares about money from gun makers. Whatever he says or does is so that he can get money from gun makers and gun sellers.
I don't own a gun. I could get one. But I won't. Not because I have principles, though. Because I just wouldn't use it enough. I don't buy things I know are just going to sit around gathering dust. I think that makes me a bad guy with a gun, in the mind of Wayne LaPierre. Because if I'm not using it, I'm not saving anyone.
I'm no savior, no one needs to tell you that. Here in the USA there's a narrative vein about saving people, saving the world, but Wayne has it backwards. I don't know how he got it so backwards. But he must not be the only one, because all the CPAC people were applauding what he was saying, that nonsense about communism. I want that narrative to die. If I could kill it with a gun, I would.
But they don't make guns that kill what I want to kill. I could never shoot enough Wayne LaPierres to kill what I want to kill. I want to kill the story that America comes to rescue. I want to kill the story that we were the good guys with guns in Vietnam. Where's the gun for that?
Remember, we're still fighting the Vietnam War in this country. We're still trying to win it. Wayne LaPierre wants to tell his lie, that we defeated communism in Indochina, because he wants more Vietnam Wars, there was just not enough killing for him. There will never be enough killing for Wayne. He will always want more.
Wayne LaPierre wants more deaths by guns because that's what he sells. He sells murder. He's a murder dealer. He's a death dealer. Wayne LaPierre is death itself.
Death is CPAC. Death is the NRA. "I'm the National Rifle Association of America. And I'm freedom's safest place," Death lies. Death promises freedom. The freedom of the grave. A better place, that's what Death calls it. They're in a better place. That's Death's story, and he's sticking to it.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!