The Outlaw Josey Wales promo from Storylabs on Vimeo.

Have to admit, I’m looking a lot like Josey Wales at the moment. Beard and hair, for sure, and I have the hat, except it’s black. Feeling a lot like him, too. Pissed off.

Sometimes it’s time to get mean.

Why would a rebel keep running, keep fighting? No, I’m not a confederate. No stars and bars on my flagpole. I’m just tired of the Gatling guns of the federal government.

Actually, I’m not talking guns in particular. Not all that interested in the Bundy Ranch standoff. Been there, done that with Waco and Ruby Ridge. Militias against trained federal troops, SWAT teams and the like? That’s a game for people who are just tired of living.

I’m talking about the real Gatling guns. The ones aimed at our minds.

Not that I expect you to see it or react beyond a tut tut. I’m in a Josey Wales frame of mind, which is outside yours, way outside, not judging because you’re trying to hold it all together while the center is dissolving. The Josey thing is knowing and seeing how it all works. Bad men on the loose.

Can I take on four or five at a time? Yes. But that still won’t turn the tide. Here’s what they’ve done and are doing to you: lying so constantly you’re inured to it; accusing you of racism, sexism, etc, so constantly you half believe it’s you not them at fault; acting so superior, so dismissive of your right to disagree about nonsense like global warming that you grow too tired to say, “Oh fuck off;” driving so hard to make your religion seem a perverted, genocidal offense against native human rights and dignity that you just turn away; declaring, declaiming that your opposition to abortion is not only evil but also possibly a fatal embarrassment to the cause of Conservatives everywhere; hectoring and hammering you about life and marriage and day after pills to the point that you feel you’re in the minority, and a shrinking minority at that, when the opposite is true; insisting, strenuously, against all the evidence, that Islam is a religion of peace that poses no threat to you, when you know deep down that Islam is a sickness, all of it and all of them, a machine for creating automatons and murderous states that slaughter their own women as well as any who believe differently. Are you too busy to get as mad as Josey?

All you really have to do is say, “No!” And mean it. Everything they believe is wrong. Every ideal they hold is corrupt.

Time for a metaphor switch. Josey was never in the kind of danger you are. He’d already lost everything. He could afford to walk into ridiculous odds. You need to be finding your inner Neo. The one who can perceive the Matrix and say, “No.”

btw, for all of you tempted to jeer at Keanu Reeves, match this for incentive in a role.

Yes, I’m Josey. Know how to shoot. Far more more important to know how to stop the bullets. Doesn’t matter if they kill me. Much more vital that they lose the power to kill all of you.

Time to explain my title. It’s a joke within a joke. Yes, ‘Da Nile’ is a river. It’s a river they have worshipped, devoted themselves to, promised every necessary sacrifice to. But they, like the ancient Egyptians they so resemble in their rigidity and lack of individuality and perspicacity, got the geography wrong. Completely. Didn’t you know? The Egyptians called the Upper Nile the Lower Nile and vice versa. They had the whole world upside down. Didn’t see it. What we call denial.

I have a dozen or more articles I’ll provide links to and quotes from, tomorrow. You’ll see. Sanctimonious priests of themselves as they are, they have everything upside down, in the face of proof to the contrary. That’s me, Josey, shooting. But you’ve got to become Neo, making their bullets drop helplessly to the floor.

Now to bed. That old Indian is trying to sneak up on me again. And you, look out for Agent Smith.