Read somewheres that some asshat radio guy is trying to foment a 4th of July march from Arlington across the bridge to Washington, DC. He says he wants a thousand people to march or he ain't gonna do it. They all have to be carrying loaded firearms. This would be a "peaceful" display of their vaunted Second Amendment Right. I reckon he needs a full K of bodies to walk behind. Just in case.
The new President of the NRA, who is probably somewhat like the guy who replaced Putin, because I can't imagine LaPierre actually going anywhere, or being contradicted by anybody on the team, gave a speech the other day evoking Appomattox and the South's Glory Days and all that stuff. Which kinda goes with the big gun march thing, since Arlington National Cemetery is or was the Plantation once run by Marse Lee and Ms Custis.
John Stewart did a particularly intelligent bit last week where he shows that all the various "rights" we supposedly have, enshrined in our supposedly quasi-divine Founding Documents, are being in various ways trumped these days. Except one--the Second Amendment Right. That one has become absolute.
This silhouettes a certain tension which, perhaps inadvertently, the divine Founders built into the Documents. See, on the one side you have all these different abstract legal rights, things you can write about, make laws defining more accurately, and so on. You have stuff like "freedom," "liberty," even perhaps "truth," "justice." "Equality."
And then on the other hand you have a little machine, devised originally back in the middle ages by the Chinese, which has come to dominate so much of our thought and history, and which confers power so great as to seem magical or even god-like. "Murder, it's just a shot away." "Power flows from the barrel of a gun." "The right to bear arms shall not be abridged." Surely the Keystone Arms folks are toiling at the legal foundry even as we speak here, since for some reason they are absolutely not allowed to send any machine gun pieces to the state of Washington.
These yahoos, ever since we elected a black President, have been brandishing weapons. The Tea Party eruption was full of it. "Water the Tree of Liberty" signs waved high. Fellows with pistols strapped to their thighs waved banners with "don't tread on me." The proposed march across the bridge, into DC, is the next event in this string. If it actually happens. Kinda ironic if it goes down on the very year Fort Bragg and Camp Lejune have cancelled their 4th of July celebrations because of the Sequester.
But it kinda makes me wonder if these gun rights absolutists actually can see past the end of their noses. Or their front sights. It's not like we don't already know the end to stories where weapons rule the momentum, is it? I mean, how can these 10th Amendment Nullificationists have forgotten that at the end of the original story it was, duh!, GUNS, that won the day for the Nawth. We've already been there. Grant's dogged willingness to keep running blue coats up the hill led Lee and his tattered, starving remnants to retreat to the southwest, and eventually to be surrounded at Appomattox, where Lee at last signed the papers, generous and humane though they were, which General Grant laid before him. To an Arms Absolutist, it is Arms that won the Civil War.
If you're going to put weapons up as a god, you're probably going to have to at some point put that cold steel barrel where the sun don't shine. Like Louisiana Red sang:
How can I miss you baby, with my pistol in your mouth.
You may be goin' nawth, but your brains are stayin' south.
What will this radio fulminator do, pray tell, when his little band of armed doofuses turn the corner and find themselves facing a few tanks? The tanks would be just bearing arms wouldn't they, in defense of all our liberties, and in defense of the laws of Washington DC. It's our national city, and our federal government.
I agree, of course, that in fact arms do not settle moral arguments. It is the materialistic absolutist who says otherwise, and I think history keeps proving the materialist wrong on this fundamental. A few weeks back I reviewed the film Katyn. The historical event was a monstrous war crime initiated by Stalin, and furthered by Stalin's minions during the time they controlled Poland--an effort to erase truth by the exercise of power which was ultimately defeated by, among other things, the very film which told the truth some 70 years after the facts had unfolded. But it is the NRA and its legion of jackanapes which gibber the illogic of Baal, the Golden 1911-A, glittering so bright it rivals the sun itself on a rainy day.
If they're going to keep on with their absurdities, I hope Mr. Obama will at some point meet them with those tanks. If he does, he will be simply speaking the only language they seem capable of understanding.
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*The photo is from Juno Beach, June 6, 1944. The history web page from which it was taken states in part:
First Hussars
The 1st Hussars Regiment was from London, Ontario. The 1st Hussars were equipped with DD (Duplex Drive) tanks. The tankers of the Hussars supported the Regina Rifles at Courseulles, the Winnipeg Rifles at Graye-sur-Mer and the Canadian Scottish on the right.
'B' squadron supporting the Reginas, landed at Courseulles at 0755 hours with 14 out of the 19 tanks remaining. The DD tanks engaged the German guns from a distance of 200 yards. An 88mm beside the harbour exit and a 50 mm behind it fired continuously until their protective shields were pierced by shells. A 75 mm on the right flank fired 200 rounds before it was knocked out. No tanks were lost in the spirited duel. When the Regina Rifles landed, they fought their way into Courseulles, and once beyond the town the tank squadrons reunited with their affiliated infantry battalions and worked their way inland against machine-gun nests and entrenched infantry.
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