Ok, this one I might not really ‘get’ in the classic sense of ‘do you get it?’
I admit, however, that a person who has only ever practiced standing UP might be observationally incapable of knowing what such a…wait, is it a command also? How does THAT even work?
Herein we begin with among the most ‘solemn’ pledges of the United States of America:
In God we trust.
Alright. I sort of see where we’re going to build this skyscraper. Seems like the foundation is rather sandy but let’s get over that. Maybe the world is really just a sandbox, after all.
So if the US (which I believe includes most — certainly includes some of its military) ‘issues an order’ to “Stand down” — possibly even when it does so
loudly
emphatically
with many guns present
or in any other perceivable and generally-accepted-as-convincing fashions…
Well it looks as though they could *still* be ‘polite’ about it (technically it is TRUE that they could. Can’t be false.)
Which means,
“God suggests you stand down. Says we can do what we like to you if you don’t. Kind of an ‘executive order’ thing. It was not at all written in the Bible, but something on our currency says E Pluribus Unum which sounds Latin and might have nothing to do with it but anyway yes, could you please stand down for a moment?”
Which kind of implies that “fair treatment will be had by all parties involved because God is ALL ABOUT fair treatment and not at all about not fair treatment.”
At least that’s what scholars suggest was the general idea.
[pause to analyze this situation, something fishy appears to be going on here.]
Stand DOWN clearly means nothing even if one assumes that God grants someone(s) the authority to say it:
You can’t stand DOWN if you’re already standing UP because standing is the process of straightening your knees to get taller, and that usually means that if you’re trying to get taller or at least not smaller then the only way you’re going anywhere is if your eyes are on the horizon and you like a flash bolt in one of something like 360 degrees worth of directions while making sure you stay parallel to possibly uneven ground.
Fuck. This one IS complicated. Couldn’t they at least just have the decency to say SIT DOWN rather than STAND down? It’s fewer letters even if it isn’t fewer syllables and even if you’re not sending it as a message in a bottle but rather with a blowhorn attached to the lips of a five star general who ought to be using them to suck the peanuts out of my shit.
Yep. New title: Bizarro Rodney Dangerfield. Because I get ALL the respect on this planet, which implies that no one else gets any, and also seems to be confirmed by the Richtor scale nearest where Rod the Man Dangerous Fields of Comedy got buried, because there was a slight tremor while his bones rolled around in the probably cheap coffin they laid my man to rest in.
Dude, I gave you as much as I could of that respect you always deserved. I didn’t get ALL of it on this side of the grass until this past week so I couldn’t a done better.
And that shit makes me sad. About as sad as waking up this morning without having a blue ray of Good Morning Vietnam on the shelf four feet from the end of the cheap couch I sleep on, because a guy like me don’t need respect from the abode he uses to keep rain off his head when all he has to do to keep rain off his head is walk out his front door and straighten his legs all the way out.
The clouds look better when your head ain’t in them but from further up. Check with Elon, I think it’s called the ionosphere or something. The stratocirrus look crazy when then swirl in upside down ‘twisters’ into your nostrils.
You can’t hear the sirens of the little people who send out ambulances whose pitch and volume have been far louder than the 99.999% of people born with functional eardrums have needed since about 1960 or so.
I wasn’t even alive way back then, so that’s speculative. I just sort of guessed they had to be the same the whole time or very similar, because:
- They almost couldn’t get louder and certainly don’t need to be any louder.
- If they had gotten louder over time, it implies that no one knew where to draw the line as to how loud something should be and “everyone knows” how loud things should be.
And both parts of #2 above prove that you’ve got no business whatever telling ME of all people to “quiet down” or “chill out” or “not so offensive” (didn’t understand that one, exactly, since offensiveness is not the same as volume
except insofar as you can prove things which are offensive are “overly loud.”
Which you *could* do if anyone had the balls to say [prove] that overly loud might validly be taken as either literally or metaphorically. Which I would say might be good, except insofar as
You wouldn’t like it berry berry much because that would mathematically mean that I was automatically in charge for the simple reason that I am the only one who has anything like ‘reasonable control’ of his volume.
The reason we know this to be true?
I can get from louder than anything you ever could conceive was ‘hearable’ [the kind of loud that vibrates your skull bones into a fine powder within the fleshy confines which encapsulate the thick thing and help you grow hair like Peter Fonda or at least not like Telly Savalas] to softer than the sound of an arm of a liberal snowflake when it melts (not breaks, mind you, because those guys really cry loudly over the smallest of things.)
Liberal fucking snowflakes. Complaining that I’m ‘riding out to the open road’ on my non-electric Harley and using the strip of “open road” in the middle of a quiet suburban neighborhood at 5:30am on a Saturday morning
“to get an early start of things.”
Tell you what, my flag-hiding-behind friends of both the NRA and the Evangelical church (nope, haven’t quite sorted that one out either, not yet) —
How about you get a better clue than the second-in-command tub of lard (who made his exit out of a helicopter door in a evergreen forest canyon because of a rock a buddy of mine might have thrown) had when *HE* had the audacity to say — out loud, actually —
“You lookin for trouble, you came to the right place, buddy.”
Now I want to think that he really just didn’t know what he was saying when he opened his mouth, but unfortunately, since that is something which is equally true whenever anyone from ‘the Right’ opens his/her/its mouth I can’t ‘pity’ him/her/it at those times anymore than any other time:
You can’t exactly pity a wild animal who has literally zero point zero chance in the ‘forests’ it travels in versus the kind of person who goes out with a semiautomatic assault rifle to hunt one:
Neither have pity for the other, so they might as well all be eliminated.
And since that conveniently brings us to back to the point of when people have had enough, you might better stop yourself shy of blowing a bugle in the form of a Harley into their ear while they might be trying to SLEEP after a hard week
Because you reap what you sow and I’ll sow your ass right into the fucking ground if you pull that shit with me more than about two more times.
Seems like YOU are the one taking your chances at that point, since I don’t really care too much about your form of justice and a 3 pound rock well aimed takes down a dunce on a loud bicycle traveling awfully slowly but awfully loudly through a quiet neighborhood.
Sometimes people just look for things they’ve seen before. Perhaps while reading the New York Times or a wikihow about throwing rocks very hard and very precisely in dim light at dim lightbulbs riding Fat Wheels like no one’s problems matter but theirs.
With a rock in their dominant hand — or nondominant if they want to play for ‘sport.’
Ciao for now.
