REMEMBER the last time the United States entered a civil war? You remember what caused it?
  The United States has actually been cursed to forever have this problem with the Other (or Others). After all, it was mainly born out of Protestants escaping Europe's disgust towards them as the European continent's new Others. From this insecurity, these "pioneers" in the "new world" would in turn develop their own disgust for a newer Other, that one that "greeted" them onshore, native Americans who themselves became disgusted with these pioneers' various attitudes and beliefs or disbeliefs.
  Fast forward to the future, and the still-Christian descendants of these European Others who escaped their oppressors in the old Continent developed an economics that had its own disgust for the idea of accepting black-and brown-skinned humans of the new conquered Earth as anything other than simple beasts of burden.
  Fast forward further to today, and the relatively-emancipated descendants of those black slaves would, in their turn, be singing gangsta rap celebrating the worship of material goods, the kind of worship taught them by their skin's former mastas, perhaps wrongfully thinking that the emulation of that worship (among others, including white misogyny) would endear them to their haters in Donald Trump's anti-socialist neoliberal Republican Party. Paradoxically, gangsta rap's sucking up to the white man's upper-bourgeois culture in love with signature bags and women in servitude would at the same time laugh at white men's ability to please their women (in what conservatives would now label as "reverse racism"). This last element would irk many white boys into positions that would open them to recruitment by growing black-man-hating movements in North America that, finally, found a most influential leader in Trump.
  Naturally, today, while academics continue to discuss unconscious bias (in everyone, but mainly against minority blacks), many police departments in the United States, mostly manned by white personnel, would carry on with ignoring the calls for reforms in police arrest procedures, profiling habits, and so on, or at least for the kind of reforms the various protesting groups (involving black and brown and red and yellow and white progressive folks) want.
  The calls have been expressed through sustained rallies all over the United States since the killing of George Floyd on 25 May this year, the latest significant one as of this writing being the July 28 salvo of a tour that started with a one-night projection of an image of Floyd onto the Zebulon Baird Vance Monument in Asheville, North Carolina; the tour's next stop is to be Richmond, Virginia.
  The party being blamed for all of the rampant racism among the rising rightists in America today is, of course, the Trump government. And, as if to lay down on the table evidence that would support this reading of it by many of its enemies, Trump's everyday-would-be-more-obviously-racist presidency decided to make the protests go away with a deployment of ostensibly federal forces in fatigues without identification marks instead of meeting with the protestors. Mysteriously, these deployments were given an enthusiastic go just when the protests started to decline in July. Many of these forces' arrests involved protesters being carried into unmarked vans, a fact that ultimately did not solve Trump's problem with the protests at all, instead exacerbated the flames of intermittent violence accompanying an unabated mass anger toward the Trump and Trump Republican Party regime's despotic taste.
  Within the threat of this physical and psychological escalation that appears to be the only "solution" the Trump regime is able to muster, one might observe that the deployments already looked on the whole as something purposely designed by the Trump government to taunt anti-Trump Americans to form armies of their own (against the Trump-deployed deemed-unconstitutional militias). Some city mayors already retaliated with warnings, viz., that should such unidentified heavily-armed federal troops be sent their cities' way, their local forces would arrest the former. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, some in Trump's right-leaning following expressed their willingness to officially divide the US with secessions, carrying Confederate flags to spite the still-blue North's insistence on the virtue of their values. Earlier in the second quarter, Mitch McConnell even expressed an absence of empathy toward suffering blue states, refusing to send money their way during the early height of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, forgetting that states like New York are one of the highest sources of revenues for the federal coffers.
  Is the Trump government wishing for a new civil war that might ultimately divide the United States into blue and red republics? Some in the Republican Party are very vocal about this dream, as we mentioned, and so have Vladimir Putin's people about the welcome likelihood of it. Indeed, the decades-long extension of violence towards African-Americans by possibly half of the US population is driving the concept of passive resistance to its limits, to the edge.
  So, suddenly, one mid-July night in Portland, amidst Portland's series of rallies and consequent resistance to the Trump-deployed mysterious forces, a couple of images emerged. These were human images that we actually think should, or must, give American leaders pause. People called the two images the Wall of Moms and the Naked Athena, respectively. Now, bear in mind that the noun-phrase Wall of Moms refers to both a human-wall product as well as a spontaneous collective of female protesters who formed this product (later movement). The Naked Athena, meanwhile, is another noun-phrase that refers to both a resultant moving sculpture and the individual who produced that sculpture.
  And while a tear gas canister was thrown into the Portland Wall of Moms, the troop facing the Naked Athena actually withdrew. Here are the contexts by which they exist:
  The Wall of Moms and Naked Athena are actually warnings. Whether Americans or the Trump and new US Republican regime will be able to see it or not, these images warn about something else beyond what the mayors flaunted toward the White House like a dare. These images' having come forth, whether naturally or inadvertently, should remind the Trump government of what a civil war, a civil war that it might be blindly hoping for, would actually look like.
  You see, a new American civil war will definitely involve women, whether they be mothers or wives and girlfriends, of the left or of the right. Yes, they will be there as warriors, but definitely as victims, too. And then, finally, as absences. Expect mothers to die. Expect American wives and sisters and girlfriends and daughters to see the end of their days on Earth, which could potentially expand the gap between living males and females in US demographics that might parallel those in countries like Afghanistan.
  However, true, most battlefields usually involve men going away from their women, although now it is likely that many women will fight with them, as we already mentioned. But that doesn't mean that women left at home to live on after the war won't be fighting a war of their own in the house. You see, if motherhood means families, and both words visually denote peace, the pictures that those two words will bring to the table will have to be postponed to a far future in light of the war. Overnight, a civil war picture would have to cancel the beauty of family life temporarily for an indefinite number of decades hence. What does that mean? Well, . . .
  How many women will die? Sure, in this war a lot of black women will die, which may please the alt-right racists of America. More native American girls will disappear, too. But make no mistake. So will a lot of white women. The rape of women on both sides will be rampant and will be used as a weapon. Although, of course, there will also be a lot of surprises as to what women can achieve as the angriest of warriors. It might even be possible that the first women war criminals to be tried by the United Nations in the near future will be American. We wouldn't discount the probability of that, given all the anger and hate on both sides today, thanks to the instigation of the Putin-supported racists and sexists and xenophobes inside the US Republican Party.
  But, wait. Women as mothers and as wives or girlfriends are images that also symbolize potential births. And, yes, in a civil war there will still be births, legitimate ones and not, willed or accidental or forced. But it is the converse of those images qua symbols that might actually be the more visceral ones. For it is almost certain that the number of deaths will overwhelm the number of births. Thousands, possibly millions of deaths will occur in America, much more than the deaths of Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic that the Trump government also didn't show itself to be much worried about. In these deaths, even triumphant families of NRA-affiliated manufacturers of automatic weapons won't be exempted from the statistics. In a sense, this forthcoming American civil war will, once more, put emphasis on machismo as a character of heroic feat over everything else, defocusing on the value of families and lives (especially enemies' lives). No race's life will matter.
  Many American births will have to be postponed to a later time, which in fact already started in the last decades that celebrated Republican values favoring mass shootings and the killing of black lives. As for this latter achievement, these were black lives that, if you think about it with a patriotic eye or a military perspective, could actually have been used for service in the US Armed Forces guarding areas in, say, Ukraine or the West Philippine Sea. After all, China boasts of having the largest artillery army in terms of number of personnel.
  American births. To be postponed indefinitely to a later millennium. The Wall of Mothers and the Naked Athena are already signifying their lament, their cry, expressing today real visual elegies beamed toward the nearing end of America's birthing age. For, indeed, with Donald Trump at its helm, the United States has reached a point where it shall gradually cancel its need for women, or men for that matter, as well as families. America has reached that natural time for it to go back to being the jungle that it once was, inhabited by male and female animals tearing each other's guts at the signal of one Putin-backed king with a whistling mouth.
  When a community stops listening to its mothers, wives, girlfriends, and daughters, its Walls of Moms and Naked Athenas, considering them as Others who've renewed their earlier inferior social positions of Otherness, a turning point for an angry macho decade shall naturally unfold. That cannot be anything other than the image of America paving a final manly Ancient Roman or Afghan road to its own obsolescence. For better or worse, the America that we know will cease to exist.
  Now, sure, Trump's forces have temporarily been withdrawn from Portland after it seemed they've only created a backlash against the all-too-powerful self-serving President's plan to please his right-leaning base. Not much cheers were heard, even from his own camp. But, again, make no mistake. Those forces are going to be back in some other scene. Maybe on the day the white nationalist President refuses to vacate his office at the White House in January 2021 and people again protest against his non-concession. Next time, don't be surprised if the Trump camp simply throws a flame at any wall of mothers and allows its neo-Nazi allies in all the states to take care of any new naked Athena. Trump will be happy to be remembered as the instigator of the second American civil war that will be celebrated both in Russia and China.
  Which makes you ask: which macho foreign god, indeed, is funding Trump and his civil war-mongering, nay, his own-country-destroying, party?