"I Want To Hear Them Scream"

(My young friend “Bill Reader” passes this along…)

I have not got much time to write this, so I will keep it brief. This is all to the good in the current political environment anyway. The last couple of projects I have started have become non-topical before I could find sufficient mental space to comment on them.

Right now, I want to talk to you… you personally… about how battles are won and lost. Why? Because your life depends on it, soldier. You… sitting there in your office chair and grimacing at the unspeakable horrors that crawl out of the president’s mouth like under-boiled crawdads… are really sitting on the front lines of a war. And you will fight in it, like it or not, because out here there is just one alternative. Don’t believe me? Take one look at that debt clock, and then go ask those master clock-makers in Greece what happens when that sucker ticks too long. The life on the line in the culture war is your life. It’s time to take it seriously.

Now, we don’t have the luxury of a boot camp out here, and if we did, we wouldn’t have the time to train you. But that’s all right. Out here on civilian street, we’ve got it a lot easier than the brave men and women from our armed services who fight on dusty battlefields, instead of from a comfortable desk. All you really need out here is a philosophy.

I’ve been fortunate enough to hear a lot of liberals whine, moan, grouse, grouch, and pitch temper tantrums. In the midst of all of it they’ve got one tactic that seems unfailingly effective, however, and why this should be, I don’t know. They just tell conservatives something is out of bounds, and magically, it’s suddenly out of bounds. If something is really effective, or gathering steam, well then, it’s crazy and can’t be used. I often wonder to myself, how does that mystical process work?

I’ve got it figured out, though. See, you, right now, you’ve got what we like to call decency. Reams of it. Miles of it. Much, much more of it then you need right now, in fact.

Oh, wipe that expression off your face, soldier. You don’t need to become Freddy Krueger to understand that your sweet aunt Fanny would be utterly useless on the battlefield. Don’t expect to doily the Dems into submission. Sure it’s a nice sentiment. Suitable for framing. But like most nice sentiments, it sublimates into mist on contact with reality.

Your problem is that when you land a punch on the other guy and you hear him scream, you stop or you pull the next blow. When you start to get ahead, you slow down because the other guy starts protesting that it’s not fair. You get a guy who broke in and is trying to kill you on the ropes, you give him a breather if he says he’s tired.  Maybe you don’t act like that in real life. Fine. But don’t try to tell me you don’t do it in politics. I’ve watched you do it.

You wanna win this thing? I hope so, because you probably won’t survive losing it. So learn to channel your inner madman. When the media cries and wails that they don’t like what you’re saying, don’t quiet down like frightened church-mice faced with an enraged friar. Say it louder. Say it twice as loud. When they scream that it’s not fair, I want you to find the part of your mind that loves to hear them cry. Say the same stuff, but elaborate on it in detail. And when they do finally go from distressed to anguished, then I really want you to start buffeting them with the argument. Do. Not. Give. Them. A. Moment. To. Rest. Scream until they stop trying to win the shouting match, laugh when they burst into tears, never miss an opportunity to kick them when they’re down, and do all three until they realize that the best way for them not to lose is not to play.

Rest assured, you still won’t have come close to sinking to their level. We have not had the decades of practice at studied nastiness it takes to become that kind of twisted creature. If you learn to take off the kid gloves now, fight the battle like you mean to be alive at the end of it now, we’ll never be in danger of becoming like them. Protract this by letting them take the US over the edge and I make you no promises.

But you must learn that when your enemy tells you he is in pain, that’s a good thing, and you should do lots more of whatever you just did. I’m not telling you that “nice guys finish last”. Stupid guys finish last. The way we act in one-on-one conflicts would be laughed out of the tactics book by a battalion of pacifist dodos armed with sharpened vegetables. I’m not telling you to “fight fire with fire”. I’m not advocating for voting in the name of the dead or saying we need militant people swinging batons wandering around outside polling places. You’ll know I’m reading from the Democrat playbook the day I tell you that our politicians ought to use massive sums of public money to pay off voting groups. I’m not telling you “the ends justify the means”. In the boisterous history of political theory a call for the grassroots members to cherish the discomfort of their opposites is so quaintly polite as to be practically invisible… not that you’d know it by looking around you these days. The means are hardly extreme. And answer me this: if you aren’t looking to make them uncomfortable, why talk to them at all? All I really want you to do is act like you actually want your country back, not like it would be kind of convenient if they could see their way clear to considering the possibility of potentially relinquishing at least a small portion of the nation they’re crushing with their intolerable regime of lies.

Think you can handle that, soldier?