Fist Fighting

Unlike some people I associate with I am not combat trained, I don’t know 16 ways to kill you with my little finger though I’m pretty sure I could bash you enough times with a rock to do the job (I am after all elderly and non-threatening). I’d ambush you, you’d never see me coming and I would not disguise my murderous intent.

I’ve struck someone with purpose exactly twice, once in third grade and once in fifth. Same guy, same reason (he was attempting to bully me), same place (between the eyes, breaking his glasses), same result- he backed off (fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Won’t get fooled again. Did I mention he was dumb?) and we were both suspended for a week which was fine with me and I had to pay for a new pair of glasses which was not exactly fine with Emily and Richard. Vacation!

So I’m a violent homicidal maniac, a great huge green rage machine (that is actually true), a psychopathic serial killer who you can’t have dinner with unless you like brains acidulated in white wine vinegar, dredged in flour, sautéed in butter, and served with a white wine and garlic pan sauce.

With Fava Beans and a nice Chianti.

And/or Liver which is often over cooked and best served with Bacon (mmm… Bacon), Onions, and Ketchup. I’ve never actually cooked brains- ick.

I’ve also been on the receiving end and it’s almost exactly like this-

Tough guy Donald Trump
by Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
October 20, 2018

Musing on Gianforte’s skills as a body-slammer Trump recalled that Vice President Joe Biden had “challenged me to a fight, and that was fine. And when I said he wouldn’t last long, he’d be down faster than Greg would take him down. He’d be down so fast. Remember? Faster than Greg. I’d have to go very fast. I’d have to immediately connect.”

Let’s take a moment and consider these fine words from the President of the United States. First, what Trump is praising Gianforte for is the wrestling equivalent of a sucker punch. Ben Jacobs, the reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian, was asking him a question about the Republican healthcare plan when Gianforte suddenly “grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him,” according to Alicia Acuna, a Fox News reporter who witnessed the assault. “Gianforte then began punching the man, as he moved on top the reporter and began yelling something to the effect of ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’” (You can listen to a tape of the incident here)

“At no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies,” the Fox News reporter recalled.

So what captured Trump’s attention wasn’t a story of a man defending himself, but rather a man violently attacking an unsuspecting victim who had a legitimate reason to be asking the candidate questions about issues in the campaign for the office he was aspiring to. An attack that got him arrested and convicted of assault.

With that, Trump was off into dream world. Everything he said there after was all in his imagination. He wasn’t telling his Montana audience what he did to Joe Biden. He was telling them his imaginary fight with Biden “wouldn’t last long” because “I’d have to go very fast. I’d have to immediately connect.”

What? Who talks like that? Who says “go very fast?” What does “immediately connect” even mean? Huh? What the hell is he talking about?

Trump has never seen a punch thrown in anger in his life. He’s never thrown a punch himself. He has certainly never been hit by one. He’s never had anyone on top of him, punching him in the face; or been on top of someone else, punching another person in the face. He’s never been knocked out. He’s never come back to consciousness, unable to see, both of his eyes swollen shut, nose and ribs broken, blood from facial cuts and mouth pooling in the dirt next to a gravel road.

I have. That was a beating I took one night in Columbus, Georgia, when I was jumped by four guys who were out cruising the back streets of the town, looking for someone to beat up. I was in a phone booth making a call across the street from my rented trailer when the accordion door slammed open, I was spun around, and the next thing I saw was a gigantic fist wearing a big ring about three inches from my eyes. The fist hit my face, snapping my head back, breaking the glass wall of the phone booth. They dragged me out, and I managed to flail a couple of punches before I was thrown to the ground. They took turns pounding my head while the others kicked me.

Only the headlights of a passing car saved me. The guys who beat me fled the scene, but they weren’t finished. The same four were arrested a few hours later in the process of beating a guy they had picked up and driven to a secluded parking lot behind a junior high school. Their second victim that night died in the emergency room at the Fort Benning hospital in a bed on the other side of a cotton curtain from me as doctors worked feverishly to save him (emphasis mine).

Violence isn’t some lame-ass political candidate “body slamming” a reporter. People get beaten up badly enough to be hospitalized. Their bones are broken. They need to be stitched up. Sometimes they die.

This is the real problem with Donald Trump. He doesn’t just live in a world free of facts and morals and consequences, where he can idolize dictators like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He lives in a world where because nothing bad has ever happened to him, it doesn’t happen to anyone else, either. Violence isn’t real for him. It’s just words, and as he shows us with his disrespect for facts and the people who report them, words don’t matter to him. The 59 Tomahawk missiles he sent into Syria were just a “strike” against a “regime” which, that week, he chose not to be fond of. That $110 billion “deal” with Saudi Arabia he talked about every other time he opened his mouth this week? It’s completely phony, but we do have a deal to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia that was made by the Obama administration, and what are those weapons? Well, a good many of them are the so-called “smart bombs” they have been dropping on innocent civilians in Yemen in that slaughterhouse of a war that’s been raging for the last three years.

Last August, a Saudi airstrike hit a school bus in Yemen, killing 51 and injuring 79. Forty of the dead and 56 of the injured were school children. A 2016 report to the U.N. Security Council held that 2,682 civilian deaths were caused by air-launched weapons. Those were air-launched smart bombs sold to Saudi Arabia by the United States.

That’s violence, deadly violence that was caused by American made bombs being sold in a so-called “weapons deal” to Saudi Arabia.

And now what’s Trump doing? Now that Mohammed bin Salman is being exposed for having ordered the death and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, he’s looking wildly around trying to find a way to wiggle his way around the support he’s given the sinister prince and the murdering regime in Saudi Arabia.

Trump loves guys like Congressman Greg Gianforte and Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdoğan and Mohammed bin Salam. He loves them because he thinks they’re “tough.” The problem is, Trump doesn’t know what the fuck tough is.

That’s what it means to stomp someone in the face with Golf cleats. That’s what it means to crush a protester with a car. That’s what it means to offer to pay the legal fees of your Brownshirt rally attendees if they ‘rough people up a little’. Fascism? You’re swimming in it. Are you going to back the Communist Antifa or the Sturmabteilung? Perhaps you believe in Direct Action like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi. Good luck with that, it is a very hard path with uncertain outcomes.

Truscott attended the United States Military Academy, graduating in 1969. In 1968, Truscott and other cadets challenged the required attendance at chapel services. Later a court case filed by another cadet along with midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy resulted in a 1972 US Court of Appeals decision (and upheld by the Supreme Court) that ended mandatory chapel attendance at all of the service academies. He was then assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado. There, he wrote an article about heroin addiction among enlisted soldiers and another about what he felt was an illegal court martial. He was threatened with being sent to Vietnam, so he resigned his commission about thirteen months after graduating, receiving a “general discharge under other than honorable conditions.”

What are you fighting for?

Phil Ochs

Country Joe McDonald- Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag

1 comment

  1. Trump does not know what REAL toughness is, so I will tell all my opinion, take it or blow it off, up to each one. To me, toughness is a woman that comes out, and goes in front of a Congress to inform them of a sexual assault. She is well educated and knows that the party currently in control of Congress, will most likely crucify and vilify her. They will most likely ignore the fact that she, and her numerous witnesses, passed a polygraph test. Worse yet, all of her family and more personnel, added insult to injury, when they put on a sham FBI investigation. Then, they basically called her a liar and proceeded to appoint her alleged attacker to a full time SCOTUS position.

    Being tough is the numerous women, men and children that come out and protest against all of the atrocities that this complicit Republican congress has passed, as so called legislation, and all in the name of hate! These protesters all know that there is a chance that they could not only be attacked verbally and physically, but killed. Yet, in good weather or bad, they march, even though they are called “UNRULY MOBS”. Congressional members have refused to listen to these numerous constituents for years and they all are using their Constitutional right to demonstrate.

    Being tough is all of the ones that have the type of attacks listed above, and even while hurting, continue to march for American Democracy, and an unbiased politically affiliated Justice System and the RULE of LAW!
    These are the people that show to the world, just what tough is!

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