When you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it.

Posted by Pointman on March 29, 2017 · 11 Comments 

A man once lifted me over his head and then threw me over a bar to crash into the optics and rows of glasses behind it. He was a big brute of a bastard and was used to being the boss of the bar. Roughing up smaller guys was his pastime and reinforced his alpha male status in the joint. I’d just dropped in to use the payphone and made the mistake of deciding to stop for a beer.

It was one of those situations where somebody decides to push you into a corner for no good reason and despite a bit of turning the other cheek, you know in the end it’s going to kick off whatever you do, and of course it did.

After disposing of me, he’d already turned his back to accept the plaudits of the shocked onlookers and his lackeys in the bar when he heard the tinkling of broken glass caused by me physically extricating myself out of the wreckage. He wasn’t expecting that. I stood up and looked at him from the other side of the bar and he saw my face and what was in it and I saw what was in his. In that instant, he knew he’d just made the mistake of his life.

There are no rules in a bar fight.

I came back around the bar, he swung a roundhouse at me, I ducked under it and cut him good across the width of his stomach with a shard of glass I was holding. He made the mistake of looking down to see how bad the blood flow was, giving me the opening to break one of his knees with an inside kick. Once he hit the floor, I kept booting him until he was unconsciousness and then a bit beyond, just to be sure I’d put him down good and hard, and to frighten the bejaysus out of his lackeys to keep their bums on their seats.

In some bars, fights don’t get stopped.

That’s not the nicest of stories, and I know that. It’s not something I’m proud of but also it’s not a thing I’m ashamed of either, nor one that I wouldn’t repeat in some fashion given similar circumstances. Every person has the right to defend themselves by whatever means come to hand because violence and aggression can only be fought using the same methods, or you simply accept the status of being a victim.

Despite what you might have been led to believe, the vast majority of people have real difficulties dealing with hard violence, whether they were just an observer of it, a victim of it or the one dishing it out, and I include myself in that general category. The only people whom it doesn’t trouble are pure psychopaths, sadists or bullies, which is what big boy in the bar was. He’d got away with it for years, but he was takeable and inevitably one day there’d be me or someone like me coming down the turnpike to take him. It was just a matter of time.

In the immediate afterwards of violence, it’s usually about dealing with a degree of shock, but longer term it can take years if ever to find some accommodation with the memories. That’s the reason why there are so many veterans whose life after service is in chaos. The universal human inhibition to do lethal violence was detuned in training and by the experience of war but nothing is ever done for them to cope with civilian life in the aftermath, where all their first reflexive responses are now wrong.

What is also universal is that when you attack people, at some point they’ll fight back. There’s always a period when they try to calm down the situation before it escalates to outright violence, but when push comes to shove, they’ll fight.

There is a political situation developing in America which in essence is starting to run along the lines I’ve just described. The establishment left lost the presidential election, but instead of accepting the result, they’ve instituted a war of petty obstruction in congress, but also more seriously an indirect proxy one of sidewalk level intimidation by thugs being paid to appear by various organisations behind which are shadowy figures like George Soros. The deafening silence of the Democrat leadership condones this violence.

Six months ago, I would have thought such a claim was deep into the conspiracy nutter zone, but after the revelations of the WikiLeaks material and the work of Project Veritas, it’s all too credible.

Beyond creating an exaggerated impression in a lying media of an impending breakdown in law and order, I can’t see what on Earth such a strategy is intended to achieve, if indeed it can be called a strategy. It might make some people feel better, but politically it’s simply pushing them away from the centre and towards the unelectable margins. Despite the media spin, the common perception is of ordinary people being attacked by masked thugs.

Law and order won’t break down and even if in the unlikely event it did, Trump would still be president and in a still fundamentally conservative country like America, him declaring a state of emergency to get it back under control would be a shoo in through congress.

Will it improve the Democrats chances in the mid terms? No, quite the reverse. They’re increasingly being associated with a rag bag collection of ne’er-do-wells and thugs the average American voter recognises only too well as the intimidating types who hang around in gangs on street corners looking to do no good. They’re universally considered to be feckless types to be held in contempt. When you lay down with dogs, don’t be surprised when you catch fleas.

In a democracy, a mainstream party has to hold on to its share of the political middle ground vote because without that fundamental springboard, it becomes irrelevant how well you do with the usually decisive swing vote – you’ll never win election into power. This “strategy” and the failure to condemn it is an open wound, steadily draining them of the middle America votes that in the main constitute that vital demographic.

Ignoring that portion of the electorate lost them last year’s presidential election and in a prolonged and inexplicable fit of pique they don’t appear to have learnt the lesson yet. With every day that passes, it becomes obvious that if the election was re-run, Trump would win bigger or more bigly, to prefix a comparative to a new word that’s rapidly entering mainstream usage in English.

Paid thugs physically attacking Trump supporters and the latter trying to ignore the provocation, has been the pattern since the inauguration, but events last weekend at a pro-Trump rally in California show sentiment towards passively accepting that treatment and specifically what’s labelled as the antifa movement has hardened.

When a sixty-four year old man was suddenly punched in the face for doing nothing more than carrying an American flag and the organiser of the rally was pepper sprayed in the face by another thug, what was a peaceful march suddenly came very close to becoming a lynch mob.

The sight of masked provocateurs being chased down a Californian beach and being unmasked as they were laid into by Trump supporters was a new thing. Add in the cops turning a dog loose on them while at the same time keeping the Trump crowd at bay from tearing them limb from limb was a turning point. Four of these antifa thugs have since been charged with various felonies and I hope the judge throws the book at them.

Like every bully and thug, they broke and ran down the beach once they encountered some people who were prepared to fight back. A brief surf around the pro-Trump message boards shows people are from now on prepared to dish out some payback.

Once you open up the can of worms that is street-level political violence, you better have some better storm troopers than the skinny-shanked wannabe ninja shown above being chased by what looks like a construction worker carrying an American flag and determined to open up a different can just for him, and the label on it is whupass.

©Pointman

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