So Is It Over?

I haven't really been following the tangled disintegration of the Oregon Standoff, quote unquote, but it sounds like there might have been something of a resolution -- following an extended period of sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll. Or something.

They say even the Old Man (Bundy) was rounded up as he de-planed in Portland.

My my.

And only one killed -- so far. Poor deluded LeVoy got his (apparent) wish and was shot down in the snow by state police as twirled and ranted after a botched attempt to flee a roadblock.

Well, I saw the same video everyone else did of his execution, and there appeared to me to be no necessity to shoot him at all, any more than there is a necessity for LEOs to kill this or that suspect, individual, person in the vast majority of cases. They do it because they can, and they can get away with it in almost all cases. Further, as in the case of the poor, deluded elder Finicum, they do it pour encourager les autres. To make a statement: "Fuck with us and you die."

Finicum fucked with the law and authorities a lot, he did. So he, of all those deluded individuals, had to die. I'm sure he was targeted probably very early on. An example had to be made. And it was in spectacular though tragic fashion.

Immediately afterwards, I saw a lot of cheering commentary regarding his killing, as if this time -- of all the thousands of police killings over the last few years -- the dude really needed killing, and hurrah! for the Feds.

No. He's liable to become a martyr, that one. All because he "stood up" to the tyranny of gubment. And they -- the vast, implacable They -- shot him down for it.

That's what makes martyrs, just as has happened over and over again throughout history, triggering one revolution after another.

I make mock of Bernie's pretense to "revolution" -- a "political revolution" as he calls it -- because that's what it is, a pretense of revolution, not the thing itself. I believe it is a deliberate move to stave off the real thing from the left, pressure for which has been mounting for some time. But what about from the right?

A neo-revolution (neo-colonial, neo-conservative, neo-liberal) actually has taken place, suddenly in the aftermath of the unsettled 2000 presidential election, and then slowly consolidating ever since. Because it's not actually a rightist revolution -- though it has many aspects of rightist action and rhetoric -- many actual rightists are unsatisfied. They want more.

They see power in the wrong hands. They want for themselves. Which is what the Bundy Bunch have been after for years.

Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of "patriot-rebels" (they say there may be three hundred thousand of these mooks or more) are arming and prepping themselves into a frenzy of rebellion, indeed potentially of revolution, the real thing.

So is it really over? No, not by a long shot as they say.

We're going to see more and more of this as the neo-crowd continues its consolidation of wealth and power. And those who would fight that consolidation of power become more and more radicalized.