Rusty's Armory

To my revolutionary comrade:

Posted on April 29, 2019

Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance?
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France!

~Les Miserables – Do you hear the people sing

So sang Feuilly* in Les Miserables.

But no.  I have charged the barricades for the last damned time.  My time has come and gone, so stop huffing in outrage at me over the shortcomings of the people and the nation.  I might agree with you.  The nation has gone soft, the wise have become fools, and the revolutionaries fail to attract a following, and how it galls them.

So what? But I am past caring about your damned crusade.  Show me more than your mouth or your disdain for everyone but your claque of malcontents. You aren’t the first revolutionary to come along in my lifetime. I am not going to oil my old M-1 Garand up with 50 year old ammo and go fight a battle under your banner.

Outside my door a warm summer is starting to beckon. Time to sit on the porch and watch another generation die like flies for “freedom”, only to have the power sluts rush into the vacuum and bring seven more demons with them.

So spout your rage, but I am out of here.

*Feuilly was a fan-maker, an orphan, who with difficulty earned three francs a day, and who had but one thought: to deliver the world. He had still another desire – to instruct himself, which he also called deliverance. He had taught himself to read and write; all that he knew, he had learned alone. Feuilly was a generous heart. He had an immense embrace. This orphan had adopted the people.

He has great interest in foreign affairs and history, and he has a particular interest for Poland, shouting, “Long live Poland!” while marching to the barricades. He is the only workingman among the Friends of the ABC. Feuilly is revered by Enjolras, and he dies on the the barricade in the June Rebellion.

Being without a mother, he had meditated upon his mother country. He was not willing that there should be any man upon the earth without a country. He nurtured within himself, with the deep divination of the man of the people, what we now call the idea of nationality. He had learned history expressly that he might base his indignation upon a knowledge of its cause. In this new upper room of utopists particularly interested in France, he represented foreign nations. This poor workingman had made himself a teacher of justice, and she rewarded him by making him grand.

In the 2012 film, he is killed by the National Guardsmen while he fends them off with a pistol, as they shoot him in the chest while firing up to the window that he was taking cover behind.