Progressives Invite Nuclear Winter by Bending the Knee to the Knights of Summer
The final season of Game of Thrones was the most disappointing thing to happen on television since Geraldo opened Al Capone’s vault only to find ugatz. But before Right Place/Right Time lottery winners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss ran out of George R.R. Martin books to plunder, the show was glorious and left us with at least one permanent addition to the language: bend the knee. As in, the night before Super Tuesday, Barack Obama forced all the remaining contenders to bend the knee in order to ensure the nomination of a man who once described him as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
Knights of Summer is another phrase that appears frequently in the books (along with naked as his/her name day, washed it all down with beer, and I am a lion of Casterly Rock, which can get quite tedious, frankly). But rarely, if ever, is the description used in the show, possibly because the meaning of bend the knee required no subtlety or art to convey, while to communicate and weave in the notion that the generation depicted in GOT had been reared in a years-long summer, and so lacked the character and judgment of the previous, winter-born generation, may have been beyond the skills of a writing team that, as it turned out, primarily excelled at stenography.
Dwight Eisenhower was of a generation that had survived a metaphorical winter that encompassed a Great Depression and two World Wars. He coined the phrase, “military industrial complex” in his farewell speech to the nation, and once privately warned an aide, as he went through the Pentagon’s requested budget with a red pen, “God help this country when we have a man sitting at this desk who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.”
The day that the decorated general-turned-President feared has long since come to pass: our government is in the control of a summer-born generation that knows little of economic hardship, and has rarely seen the face of war personally, even though the country has been involved in one military action or another, almost since its founding. The days when the old winter-inspired European tradition of the aristocracy enlisting for military service, as John F. Kennedy (whose brother, Joe was killed in action), and George HW Bush, did in WWII, are a distant memory. Our government is now comprised almost exclusively of millionaires and billionaires, most of whom were born to wealth and few of whom have served.
This is why our leaders are so cavalier about ratcheting up hostilities with a nuclear power. JFK had seen war, and so refused to allow the Pentagon to drag him into Cuba. And while George the Elder did engage in a campaign of realpolitik in Kuwait, he gathered a convincing coalition first, and stopped short of invading Iraq, unlike his idiot son who had spent Vietnam in the Texas Air National Guard, known locally as the “champagne corps” for all the scions of prominent families placed there, out of harm’s way.
Our Knights of Summer have no such experience or judgement. Nor does the privileged portion of our population most likely to engage in political conversation on social media, even as they are least likely to enlist. These people know neither the sight of a battlefield nor the depths of an empty refrigerator, and all their political opinions proceed from there.
Eisenhower’s foreseen Military Industrial Complex now has complete control over our government, while the Knights of Summer that lead us indulge their every budget request. The war industry’s power in Washington has grown so great that even a President like Donald Trump - a summer-born asshole if there ever was one - who in a takes-one-to-know-one spirit, could smell their bullshit a mile away, was ultimately powerless to rein them in. Lacking the stature of an Eisenhower, or the native cunning of a Nixon, all he could do was drop the occasional dark intimation, as in his classic response to a question from Bill O’Reilly about the tendency of Putin’s enemies to mysteriously ingest polonium, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”
Say what you will about Trump and I have and I do - there’s no elected Democrat on the planet who would say such a thing out loud, in public, and on camera. Not Bernie, not AOC, not Ilhan, Rashida, or Cori. Not one of them.
But the Deep State is fundamentally Chinese in its outlook and tactics: it’s nothing for them to wait out a President. Presidents come and go. Their master plan spans generations and probably ends with most of us living in pods and surviving on some kind of nutrient paste.
After 2020, it was back to business as usual: Trump may have fucked up the proxy war in Syria plan, but with Blank Check Biden in charge (sort of), they could get right back to the game of double-dog daring the Russians to go into Ukraine, they’d been playing ever since 2014, when the US orchestrated a successful coup in that benighted land who’s citizens absolutely, totally, without a doubt, do not have a soft-spot for Swastikas, right-wing nationalism, and a good rousing chorus of Edelweiss.
It was into this den of Deep State liars and the people who love them, that the absurdly named Congressional Progressive Caucus, tossed their letter which ever so gingerly suggested in true Oliver Twist-fashion, Please sir, may we have some diplomacy? You know, not now, or anything. But eventually. As like, a goal. At some point in the future. With full agreement and cooperation from the Ukrainians of course. Because in the end, there’s nothing at all dangerous about allowing a deeply corrupt country with an ancient grudge against its nuclear armed neighbor to dictate to us what the terms of peace should be, even though we’re funding and arming their war effort, at which the Knights of Summer laughed heartily into their beer, pushed the Flea’s Bottom whores off their laps, summoned the Maesters, and set about making an example of them.
This wasn’t the first time Pramila Jayapal was forced to dine on big, heaping piles of shit fresh from the bowels of her betters for the cameras. The CPC’s stand on refusing to support an infrastructure bill, without first passing a larger reconciliation bill that included an extension of the child tax credit, and universal Pre-K, among other popular, potentially transformative programs, similarly ended in a humiliating bending of the knee by all involved.
On this occasion, within 24 hours after the release of the letter, Jayapal was already walking it back, emphasizing the absolute support of the caucus for whatever crazy shit our Knights of Summer want to get up to in Ukraine, and rightly pointing out that every one of these so-called progressives had voted in support of all of it. AOC even tweeted out: Nuclear Armaggedon? I-clap-am-clap-here-clap-for-clap-it, accompanied by a photo of her receiving yet another anti-Dobbs manicure. It was quickly ratioed and taken down.
But that wasn’t good enough. Nothing short of abject prostration would do. 48 hours after release of the letter, Jayapal was falling back on that time-worn scapegoat for the truly fucked: Congressional aides. Supposedly, they had released it without permission. From an old draft. Which in no way explains why Jayapal had at first defended its contents. But the Knights of Summer had gotten what they wanted - the CPC had once again bent the knee to their masters. Order had been restored to the Red Keep, or as we like to call it, Washington.
As I write this, the story of a missile landing inside Poland is breaking. Both the US and Poland claim it came from inside Ukraine. Only the Ukrainians contend that it came from inside Russia, proving once and for all that the Ukrainians are the last people we should be listening to regarding this war. They are a long-bullied people, manipulating a bigger bully to fight on their behalf. They could give a fuck if WWIII results. One gets the sense they may welcome it. Our Knights of Summer may, as well. Imagine the money to be made, provided the nukes stay in their silos. And even if they don’t, everyone who matters has a spot in a lead-lined bunker all set aside for them. It’ll be like Noah’s ark, except with fallout instead of rain. Clear out the refuse and make way for those God has chosen through the strength of their inheritance.
And so the Knights of Summer will continue to joust and feast at our expense with little care for the risks they continue to run with all of our lives. Is winter coming? Perhaps not for them. But for many of us, it’s already here.
According to Thom Hartmann before his present incarnation as a Democratic-Party sucking shitlib the original speech had the phrase Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex and was edited down because Eisenhower didn't want to offend his friends in Congress.