Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
(Some of the comments in this howl appeared on December 31, 2020, but have been updated to reference the pain and the stupid the stupid it burrrrns, yes it does, enjoy.)
Winston Churchill, utterer of quotable utterances, once said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the Beginning." All the major events which began or rose to prominence in 2023 will, aber naturlich, continue to play out in the New Year.
Nothing too big -- on one level, America's internal politics looking like Weimar Time more every day; on another, global fuckery expressed through the barrel of a gun. We can party, but it's only the close of a Beginning. There is more shit to come and everyone feels it.
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It's been almost normal, nothing-to-see-here news, in Europe (Germany and England, specifically) when an unexploded aerial bomb is discovered, somewhere. They still harvest unexploded German and French munitions from the First World War on the Somme every year.
Defused British 2,000-Pound Bomb; Frankfurt, 2017
Their outside metal is corroded, but the internal mechanics are clean as a new watch. In some, glass vials filled with fluids, vaporizing when the shell detonates -- Mustard, Phosgene -- are protected and intact. Explosive Ordinance Disposal teams, Démineurs, stop on farm roads to pick up shells neatly stacked by farmers. There are fields across northeastern France and southern Belgium where compasses spin uselessly, there is so much iron in the earth below your feet.
America has its own unexploded ordinance -- racial, structural, economic. We have roughly 70 million persons who voted for Donald Trump. They didn't vote for him, exactly; they voted for how he made them feel. How he still makes them feel; and more on that in a moment.
Since the mid-1990's, there has been a struggle to control the Republican Party -- between traditional Good Ol' Boys of the GOP (McConnell their figurehead), and 'Alt-Right' 'Tea Party' revolutionaries originally created by the Koch brothers, morphing later into MAGA Red-Caps when their love, their Leader Trump, came along.
Trump's continued ability to connect with and direct his cult followers has given him control of the party. He will be the Republican nominee for President -- in fact, he has to be. It's a matter of life and death for him, now. He either seizes power or, maybe, goes to prison.
The Leader In 2020, Displaying Double-Jointed Thumbs You Fucker You
If he loses the election, Trump -- in his mid-Seventies, obese; addictions; unspecified health issues -- will almost immediately dwindle to a sideshow. He'll have the limelight for a few months, make incendiary remarks, appear at rallies; 'write' books. He will not go quietly, but it's likely that enough GOP powerbrokers will want him gone; turn the page; find their next Hitler.
If he does not lose, Project 2025 will hit the ground running at 12:01 PM EDST on January 20th of that year, and things will get bad very, very fast. One thing is for certain -- once he becomes President, again, Trumpo will do whatever he wants -- being President, in his mind, automatically gives him a monarch's power.
America will reflect the pathological, twisted and infantile appetites of all the crawling, bottom-feeding sycophants of the political and cultural Right, their day come round at last. Living in America under the political Right will be intolerable, like living under nazi occupation in France.
... Sometimes, in a cafe, he heard the news on a radio. Nothing, he realized, could save them from losing the war. He left the roads, walked across springtime fields... He shared a campfire with an old man with a white beard, a sculptor, he said, from Brittany somewhere, who walked with a stick, and got drunk on some yellow stuff from a square bottle... "We'll all live deep down, now," the sculptor said, throwing a stick of wood on the fire. "Twenty ways to prepare a crayfish. Or, you know, chess. Sanskrit poetry. It will hurt like hell, sonny, you'll see."
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... But we're not yet there. We may never arrive at that place. But, where we are now is with 70 million unexploded bombs of Trumpism in America. 70 million people who believe -- one way or another -- in what Trump said and did, then voted on those beliefs.
They voted for white nationalism, white supremacy. They voted for keeping a knee on the neck of every George Floyd, forever. That the 2020 election was stolen. That SARS-CoV2 is a hoax, and vaccines are evil. That the Sandy Hook massacre was also a hoax. That America and the world is ruled by a "globalist" conspiracy of satanic pedophiles, through a bureaucratic Deep State.
They voted for a liar and a con artist. They voted for forced separation of children from families. They voted for tax cuts to the wealthy. They voted for a person who beyond doubt received assistance from a foreign power to win the 2016 election. They voted their belief, as shouted by The Leader, that the 2020 election had been stolen by that same global conspiracy.
They voted that a sitting President could take money in exchange for favorable treatment, and to coerce the leader of Ukraine to attack the President's political rival if they wanted already-agreed-to aid released. They voted their belief that all political Liberalism equals Socialism, equals tyranny -- and they voted for Trump as a way to "own the Libs".
Trying to comprehend how 70 million people can abandon fact-based reason; act more like superstitious Dark Age peasants than citizens in an industrial society; how they can follow a person like Trump, has been an enduring question in America since 2015.
When The Travel Media Influencers Start Talking About Fascism,
Maybe It's Time To Take It Seriously
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We've had nationalist politicians, rabid populists, in American politics before -- but they've always had relatively few followers. Their ideas have never truly threatened to become mainstream belief. But the malignant spread of Trump's hate through the The Base left the American Left dumbfounded and profoundly alarmed.
The Europeans I know are even more alarmed at Trump and 'Trumpism' than we are. They understand in their bones what fascist politics looks and feels like. They've assumed that, Puritan-prudish and childishly exuberant as we can be, America could be counted on to be practical, fact-based. That even when we broke the rules -- as "Lil' Boots" Bush did in 2003 -- we played from a recognizable script.
And, they see Trump's mutation of the American Presidency into autocracy as a symptom of a possible future even more malignant and terrifying -- along with Meloni, Orban, Erdogan; the recently voted-out Polish Rightist party; The Rightist Slovak party; Putin's Russia, Jim Ping's China. And Europeans are frightened of white, American evangelical 'christian' nationalism.
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Let me be clear: If you're a Left / Progressive voter; if you're a Person of Color, LGBTQ+; if you're poor, homeless, an immigrant -- and you believe The Base are people, Americans like you, who have the capacity to be compassionate and rational... if you believe that Republicans in the House and Senate want the best for all Americans, and that their behavior is just political theatrics ... remember: A majority of those 70 million people, and Thugs in Congress, do not believe you are even human.
They believe you are Socialists who want to destroy America. They believe you are agents of Satan; that you are literally infested with demons, that you are supporters of the great conspiracy of pedophiles and child-traffickers. They believe this as fact. You are vermin. You are poisoning the blood of our country. You -- are the enemy.
Think about that.
And consider: Even if Trump loses, what is the end game to all this? What will "winning" look like, for us or them? I hear a massive amount of dire prognostication about what a Trump victory next year would mean -- but when he loses, where does America go from there? Do we heal? Can we?
Remember history. When Hitler assumed power in January, 1933, Germans -- then Europeans, and eventually most of the western world -- had to live through roughly 4,500 days of nazi rule, war, terror and privation. The historical calendar is filled with the apotheosis of passionate, murderous zealotry.
Sometimes, it all goes bad, and there is no ambiguous-but-maybe-happy ending. Think about that, too.
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In reading Digby back at the end of 2020, I came across a Tom Sullivan piece, "What's Reason Got To Do With It?":
... Trying to understand Trumpism is like asking a hoarder why she/he hoards. ... The questions assume there are rational answers when rationality has nothing to do with it. For his followers, Trumpism is about how they feel...UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild tells The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson that Trumpism “exists beyond the logic of policy“... Hochschild wrote in her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land” that there is a “deep story” playing out with a large faction of Americans:The deep story went like this: You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. “It’s scary to look back,” Hochschild writes. “There are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time.”Now you’re stuck in line, because the economy isn’t working. And worse than stuck, you’re stigmatized; liberals in the media say every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And what’s this? People are cutting in line in front of you! Something is wrong. The old line wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a promise. There is order in the fact of a line. And if that order is coming apart, then so is America.Hochschild tested this allegory with her Republican sources and heard that it struck a chord. Yes, they said, this captures how I feel. In the past few years, she’s kept in touch with several of her connections from the Deep South and keenly tracked their philosophical evolution.She’s watched the locus of their anxiety move from budgets ...to the entrenched and “swampy” political class. She also witnessed the Trumpification of everything. “There used to be a Tea Party,” she said. “Now it’s all Trumpism.”The logic of policy has nothing to do with it. Trump is a kind of dancing orange dinosaur who has captured the imaginations of his base. He gave shape to their feelings. He gave voice to them.Hochschild explains, “From his first rallies, Trump’s basic message has always been ‘I love you, and you love me, and we all hate the same people.’”
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Watching a documentary on aspects of the Hitler-Time in Europe; someone in his inner circle noted, "Like Napoleon, Hitler affected the lives of every European -- he was the Napoleon of the Twentieth century. Napoleon used to say, 'I am the French revolution'. Hitler said, 'I am Germany'."
Trump has said, "I am your retribution". Think about that, too.
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