Dawn Of The Dead

 The Envy Of The World 

In The Newsroom series, there's an episode where the fictitious ACN network covers the 2012 elections. Before airtime, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) , president of  the news division, asks for everyone's attention in the studio. On overhead monitors, Skinner shows a series of still photographs.

This is China -- people having their picture taken pretending to cast a vote [in a facsimile of an American polling station]. In India, they're waving [American] flags and having viewing parties of the coverage... In South Korea, they're watching an electoral map... Our elections are the envy of the world.

ACN was fictional. The photographs being shown were not. Our elections have been seen as a symbol of an America continually reaching for an ideal form of union, of society. It's the right to vote in a fair election, where We, The People, elect politicians who are supposed to move us toward that ideal society. Supposedly. Ideally.

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Hell:  San Francisco's Tenderloin, 2019.  It's no different in 2024.

At this juncture, my cynicism compels me to say Blow it out your ass, man; just walk six blocks downhill into the Tenderloin and tell me how ideal it all is. Check out the corrupt, money-fueled, Fuck-The-Peasants viciousness of our Tech Bro Oligarchs and our Gang-Of-Six justice system and tell me about perfection. 

Fair point. But both are true: America's elections are expressions of reaching for an ideal, and the priorities of many politicians being elected reflect corruption and degeneracy.

The majority of those narcissistic politicians are attracted to one political party -- and while we should keep that in mind, it's not entirely the point. That is worse.

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Stuff You Already Know

Votes in each municipality, county, and state are tabulated and results 'certified': election officials attest that all processes necessary to confirm those results were performed. Some Presidential elections have had questionable voting results -- but the overarching fairness, accuracy and impartiality of our elections has been a bedrock assumption in America for generations.

 In Presidential elections, state results drive the Electoral College process; Electors' votes, recorded on Certificates in each state, are delivered to the Congress. The Vice President accepts the Certificates before a joint session, reads the results, and the Senate certifies the totals.

That long chain of certifications -- cities and towns, to the states; to the Congress -- is a legal requirement, but mostly a formality, an afterthought, because of course we have rules and checks and balances. Of course it's fair. We're all Americans, for god's sake.

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After The Scalia Court appointed "Lil' Boots" Bush as leader in 2000, the Thugs wanted to ensure Forever Republican Rule. One method would be elimination of votes cast by Liberals, under the guise of "election integrity". Suddenly, the Thugs claimed voter fraud was epidemic.

Fat Karl, "The Architect": A Boot, Smashing Into A Human Face, Forever

Over the next twenty-four years, Red states adopted draconian and exclusionary ID requirements, purged voter rolls, created obvious gerrymandering; and groups were founded to organize voter suppression efforts. Funding for many of them came from the Kochs, and a half-dozen other Bundist billionaires.

"Election integrity" was the backdrop for Trump's absurd, delusional claims about the "stolen" 2020 election, which culminated in the January 6, 2021 attempted coup.

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The Third Reich Tiki Room At Charlottesville.

Death Cult  

The political and religious Right in America is a delusional death cult. Donald Trump is its figurehead -- a corrupt, narcissistic con artist. The cult has absorbed the GOP; it is the Republican party now.  It intends to force America to become a white supremacist, fascistic and theocratic state. Project 2025 details how that will happen.

On The Walkway To The Pavilion; Jonestown, Guyana; November 1978

But first, Trump must be elected. Or something. He was running against Biden, and LaCivita and Cheung -- The Smartest Guys In The Room -- told Trump yes, Leader; the election is in the bag. You are the strong, the all-wise. Trump smiled, and strutted, and preened and played golf -- taking mulligans, cheating; always the top score when he played on his golf course.

Then, suddenly, Biden dropped out -- and supported Kamala Harris, a younger, charismatic Black woman whose campaign solidified and hit the street within thirty-six hours. 

Everyone had expected a long, nasty public bar fight within the Democratic party if Biden left the ticket, but it was an astounding transition without any visible friction. And after just two weeks, polls and the vibe on the street are saying it's a much closer race -- possibly, a down-ballot Democratic Trifecta; the Presidency and both houses of Congress.

(Whether you like Harris or not; or see the election as Americans being fooled by a bourgeois political elite into voting for a non-fascist neoliberal -- a large number of people appear grateful, overjoyed at feeling any hope for the future in Harris' candidacy. Blame it on human nature, I guess.)

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Trumpo, Magic Murder Clown; August 8, 2024

Political Seppuku Will Be Televised

In Trump's hour-long self-parody whatever, broadcast from the Florida Reich Chancellery last week, he appeared old, muddled, and pale -- unbelievably, he wasn't wearing his signature skin bronzer. He took questions from the press but said nothing new; it was the same repetition of themes (immigrants, crime, economic collapse), grievances, victimhood, and lie after lie -- but his voice was up an octave; his throat was tighter. In addition to seeming confused, he sounded frightened.

Trump's pathological narcissism won't admit he could lose. His multiple criminal indictments have been dismissed or delayed, but aren't gone. Unless he returns to power, it's possible he will die in a prison infirmary, like Bernie Madoff.

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The death cult was jubilant, celebrating: after fifty years, they are within inches of fulfilling their dream of controlling America -- once Trump is elected. The agendas of dozens of Rightist political and religious organizations are in Project 2025, and they all want those agendas realized.

This Photo Makes Me Ashamed To Be Over 70 Like Nothing Else Can.

Through the falling snow, they can see the spires of the Kremlin. They've taken all but a few thousand yards of that city on the Volga. So much is at stake. The anticipation of victory, revenge, domination for the glory of somebody's god, after so long is palpable. 

 -- then, suddenly, Kamala Harris' Morning-Star rise. Trump is apparently disintegrating. In the blink of an eye everything has changed: the death cult leaders are angry, confused: What do you mean, we're losing??

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Your Continuing Freedom May Be In The Hands Of Bubbah

My concern is that, if Trump loses, the death cult feels risking a second coup is worth it -- What have we got to lose?? Trump will support it -- he approved the coup planned in 2020 -- but the stakes are higher in this election. The death cult may feel they'll never have as good an opportunity, and pull out all the stops. Trump has to win or his world collapses.

The 2024 coup would follow a path similar to the 2020 claims of election interference and fraud. But before, Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell filed 70 separate legal actions, trying to overturn Biden's win. All seventy were dismissed for an astounding lack of evidence -- That Court wouldn't even hear an appeal on so flimsy a case. That can't happen this time.

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In early June, Rolling Stone reported that a Republican county election official in Georgia, who has worked for prominent election denial groups, filed a lawsuit to allow them the discretion to refuse to certify election results based on nothing but their judgement.

On August 4th, Rolling Stone also reported "nearly 70 pro-Trump conspiracists are serving as election officials in key battleground counties" across the U.S., and were ready to attempt a "mass refusal to certify their county's election results" in November. They have no proof of fraud being planned, no defined threat; they just know it will happen. So they want to refuse certification, in advance, and yes, this is as insane as it sounds.

States do have rules to resolve election disputes -- but after results are counted and certified. It provides a baseline for an investigation. But Georgia's Board of Elections has voted to provide county officials in Georgia with the power to launch "reasonable inquiries" into election integrity -- before vote totals are certified -- and what 'reasonable inquiry' means was not defined. 

I Understand That The Film "Bubbah Ho-Tep" Was Released 

On The Same Date As The November 2016 Election, But That's Coincidental. Right?

Some states have regulations which prevent or mitigate these situations. But if voting results in several counties are not certified, the statewide results can't be, either. This gives the appearance of substance to charges of fraud where there is none. It's Alice-through-the-looking-glass logic.

One of the legal actions will find its way on expedited appeal to That Court -- where the Gang of Six will do their duty to an Opus Dei god and find in favor of Donald Trump. As they already have. Twice.

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If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are elected on November 5th, it's not over.

The death cult has come too far to lose. There is even some possibility (who knows how much) that, if Trump's return to power can't be forced through a Supreme Court decision, proponents of a violent attack on the government -- the Michael Flynns, Eric Princes and their mercenaries; Steve Bannons and Roger Stones -- may act. And then we are in truly uncharted territory.

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I Lift Up Mine Eyes To The Hills, Not Disposed To Mercy

 Yet One More Barking Rant To Begin An End-Times Laugh Riot Week

Mikey Johnson Reminds: Church Attendance Is Mandatory

This Might Replace Rodin's 'The Thinker'

This post seems incomplete, like two relatively unconnected essays thrown up on the wall which stuck, barking about the Middle East, and the omnipotent, they-are-always-with-us Rich. You may think this is low-hanging fruit, but it's not.

Not that it's important; if this blog's observations had any impact in the public discussion of serious issues, then this post would have more meaning. But, it's only unsourced opinion by one individual with no agency beyond their own existence. 

I am as singular as, and no more important than, any of the dead uncovered at Pompeii whose names we'll never know, all events and actions and experiences in their lives -- for what? -- unknown, lost.

Some of my observations offered will, in all probability, cause the few readers of this blog to say yeah, eyeroll, whatever the fuck, but this is what happens here in downtown Earth. Be well.

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   I Have Wanted To Say This

Listen to me:  Fuck all you motherfucking fucks; you murdering fuckers you.

The Middle East's history is woven in the interactions of generations -- families, clans, tribes; all part of religious sects, now become modern political movements and governments. This geography is steeped in misogyny, cruelty; art, science and spirituality; and blood feuds millennia old.

Comedian Don Rickles inadvertently summed it up on his first album, a live recording of his heckling standup routine in Las Vegas, which I heard in 1969: "What's your name, sir -- Habib? ... You got to laugh about people, Habib. I've met you before, haven't I? That's right, you hung my uncle." 

Rickles' joke was a rough equivalent of the history of Palestine and Israel, which was just 20 years old, then. It hadn't even been a year since the 'Six-Day' War, where Israeli troops occupied the West Bank, the Golan, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai.

The casino crowd on the Strip laughed at Don's joke -- but Habib might easily have pointed the same joke at Rickles ("Yeah; didn't you hang my uncle when you took his house and orchards?"), and few would have understood. It was all happening so far away, and Vietnam had everyone's attention. Including mine.

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Everyone knows what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. It was more than a massacre by Hamas; it was an obscenity. And everyone knows what happened next in Gaza, and what is still happening; more monstrous brutalities. War crimes were committed and are still being committed.

And all the participants -- Hamas, Hezbollah; Islamic State, Iran; the Houthis, the Saudis; the IDF, the Israeli government; the United States government; Netanyahu, Biden; members of Knesset and Congress -- are guilty.  No one is clean. 

I condemn every threat, every act of violence, of thuggery, viciousness; every calculated political decision allowing more violence and more suffering to continue: No one is clean. To argue that one side is more monstrous, more brutal than the other, is the comparative mathematics of lunacy.

It has to stop. The maiming and the killing, the abuse and enforced suffering. Stop bombing, stop launching rockets, stop seizing territory, stop starving refugees. You are all complicit. And questions of land, of statehood, of security, can't be addressed so long as anyone raises their voice or a hand in any way against any Other.

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During the 2006 Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, I wrote a post on a still-new Daily Kos, then republished it here six years later during another spate of regional violence. You may consider its conclusions simplistic and naive. I would argue the horror in Israel and Gaza passed beyond nuance, rhetoric and sophistication long ago.

There is a point where the amount of death and misery is so great that nothing matters, except that it ends. And damn anyone willing to sacrifice more children, use all the blood-feud deaths of generations, to justify more violence.

... look into that child's eyes. ... Look at the expression written there: Where are you taking us? Why are you doing this? What will happen to me?

Will you tell them, when you put your pistol to their head, burn them alive, drop your 500-pound bomb on their encampment, kill their siblings and friends in front of them, that it's for a greater good? For the glory of a faith? Because your wife or husband, brother or sister, your parent or cousins or friends, were killed and revenge demands that now this child's life has to end?

I do not care about the political or religious "dimension" in all this. I swear to you because I know: a dead child is an utterly final answer to all the puking, screeching human argument justifying our species' ability to commit murder. It all must stop -- followed by a final resolution to all questions of Palestinian statehood and Israeli security. Period. 

No one is clean; and It has to end. Stop killing the children, then make peace --  because the alternative is nihilism and obscenity, the blood-feud, forever. Agree and then act. It really has to be that simple, because every other convoluted attempt at peace has twisted around the axle of pride, history and hate. Enough.

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   Bring My Car, And Be Quick You Fucking Proles

I'll just say it: American / Western society is essentially owned by a vicious, arrogant layer of wealth -- call them the 0.001 % -- principally Old Wealth, maintained in the same families for generations. I've actually been around these folk, a bit, and they are just as venal and clueless, as well of course I should have this as I wish it arrogant, as if you'd lifted a cultural stereotype from a comedy-of-manners and dropped them into Real Life. They truly exist.

They own multiple homes, in neighborhoods which, if you don't live in them, you'd better have a verifiable reason to be there. They move in a cyclical progression from home to home, seasonal vacations at resorts and private hotels. Their children attend preparatory schools, a tight circle of European and American universities; eventually, sliding into sinecures at law and investment firms. They are members of clubs we wouldn't be allowed to join. They do not know how to build a fire, make coffee, set up a tent or cook a filet of sole: they hire others to do that sort of thing.

Most families know (or are at least aware of) each other. They intermarry. Their children grow up with each other. They are supported by accountants, financial and investment advisors, personal assistants, tax and estate attorneys, physicians and surgeons, tailors, chefs and valets. Their children walk in comfort and anonymity along the same private, manicured paths as their predecessors in generations before them.

Within their class, maintaining their family's fortunes is the critical priority ("You don't love it as I do," Lord Grantham explains to his cousin as they regard Downton Abbey. "But I am merely a steward of all this"). There's also a certain amount of social Darwinism between players, a jockeying for position: It's Edith Wharton and John Cheever with a touch of Voltaire (see "Discrete Charm Of The Bourgeoise", and The Ruling Class).

They tolerate the Zucks, the Musks, the Jobs' and Bezos' and Thiels and Andreesens; all the Tech Bro billionaires, as nouveau riche arrivistes; pool boys, waiters and office workers who somehow struck it rich. Not the right sort -- no history, no breeding- -- but, they can afford to live well, and, if the past is any guide, eventually they and their money will disappear. Or, they'll be around for a few generations and finally become acceptable. 

They have serious class solidarity: depend on it.  Even if Claus von Bülow appeared to have attempted to murder his wife, members of their class might disapprove, but would "support the side", "maintain common cause" against a greater mass of humanity: We are the Owners, and Fuck the Peasants (see 'The Draughtsman's Contract').

These persons are not accountable under any law in the same way, or to the same extent, that you or I are. They don't wait in line, don't submit to passport control or customs checks; aren't required to appear in court for all but the most serious charges (if they appear at all). They are anonymous to all but each other.

And collectively, they own you whether you believe it, accept it, or not.

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   You Are Pwned -- A Dream Coda

Years ago, I had a dream which stands out in memory -- because I don't often dream with details that I recall so completely. 

I was some kind of mountaineering guide, taking wealthy persons up -- not Everest, but some similar peak. I was "inside" myself in this dream (sometimes dreams allow you see yourself in 'camera view'), looking out on a snow-covered slope -- a right triangle of pure white, from upper left to lower right -- against a sky of deep Cobalt blue.

A man in his late twenties / early thirties stood a few feet in front of me, wearing an orange parka with the hood pulled back. He had a light stubble of beard, curly, reddish-blonde hair, and wore a pair of aviator-style sunglasses. He was completely at ease, smiling, and spoke with an accent (French, I remembered). He wasn't arrogant or emphatic with his delivery, but matter-of-fact, as if describing the weather.

"I will tell you how it is," he said. "My family is thirteen hundred years old. One of my ancestors was  knighted by Charlemagne. We've survived plagues, wars, financial collapse, revolutions, occupation. We've had our black sheep, our idiots -- but mostly, we have made fortunes and passed them down to the next generation. We've been good at it, and lucky. 

"If you can't trace your family back more than a few generations? I don't care. You've always worked for pay -- but maybe you get lucky, win some lottery, and your children inherit that money? I don't care. In one, maybe two generations, it will be gone, absorbed into banks, financial houses, and by taxes. Perhaps my family owns some of those financial houses.

"We own forests and mines. We own companies" -- he waved at me with one hand -- "Maybe you have even worked for us. But some day, you will be dead, and that will be the end for you. Your name will be forgotten, as if you and everyone in your family line before you had never existed. My family will still be here.

"And if that's unhappy for you, if it makes you angry, I don't care," he said, and smiled again. "And that is how things are."

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Reprint Heaven: Brutality

 The Normalization Of The Night World
(From June, 2022: Still meaningful today as it was in the olden times.)

Ken McElroy's Chevy Pickup, Elm street; Skidmore, Missouri; July 10, 1981

My favorite opening in a short story is T. Coraghessen Boyle's 1984 "The Hat": They sent a hit squad after the bear. It's really a story about people caught in a cul-de-sac of life, marginal at best, and not a large Ursine animal just doing its Bear Thing -- but I dare you to pass on reading a story with a hook like that, just to find out where it would lead.

This doesn't have much to do with the little screed which follows. Oh, maybe a little -- I'm in my own corporate / retirement merry-go-round cul-de-sac at the moment, wondering when They will send a hit squad after America; how long the current precarious balance of all things will last. Who knows.

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The population of Skidmore, in Nodaway County, Missouri, as captured in the 1980 National Census, was 437 people.  One of them was Kenneth Rex McElroy, born 1934; according to Wikipedia, the next to last of 16 children, born to a dirt-poor, migrant tenant-farming couple. At age 15, still in 8th grade, he dropped out of school "and quickly established a local reputation as a cattle rustler, small-time thief, and womanizer."

McElroy worked on occasion, stealing and selling to fences when he wasn't; barely drifting along at the edge, smack in the middle of flyover country. He had a reputation in Skidmore as a rough customer, someone you shouldn't cross. 

Reportedly, while working on a local construction site, an iron girder fell and grazed him on its way down; he suffered skull fractures and other injuries. He healed -- but some in Skidmore believed the injuries, particularly to the head, changed him. 

The Grendel Of Nodaway County; His Grave Marker Says, "Fearless... Compassionate"

McElroy was already a town tough, but then he went further: he became proactively vicious and cruel -- someone who went after people, because he could. Because he wanted to. Because it seemed to give him pleasure to do so.

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For the next twenty-plus years, McElroy was the the monster in the Corn of Nodaway County.  He was suspected of stealing "grain, gasoline, alcohol, antiques, and livestock", and was charged 21 times with various offenses. McElroy was helped by a clever, not very principled defense attorney, Richard Gene McFadin.

Reputed to have connections to organized crime in Kansas City, McFadin did the legal work. McElroy terrorized witnesses against him, or members of juries; several times, he put rattlesnakes in the Rural Route mailboxes of his targets. And -- su-rprise, su-prise -- suddenly, witnesses' memories faltered and became hazy, or complainants withdrew charges, or if matters ever got as far as a courtroom, juries hung when some members claimed they just couldn't reach a decision.

Rape, theft; extreme physical violence -- McElroy did more or less whatever he wanted. There is plenty of reporting on McElroy's reign of terror in Skidmore. He was a living Id, untethered and loose.  Some stories leave you shaking your head, wondering just how this violent, narcissistic sociopath was allowed to get away with it all for over 20 years.

Example: McElroy was married to his second wife when he met Trena McCloud, a twelve-year-old girl. He raped her repeatedly. The McClouds told him they wanted his 'attentions' to end. McElroy didn't like that, and so burned the McCloud family home to the ground and shot their dog.

Trena moved into McElroy's house, living there with him and his then-wife, Alice. According to Wikipedia, "McElroy divorced Alice and married Trena in order to escape charges of statutory rape, to which she was the only witness. Sixteen days after Trena gave birth, both she and Alice fled... McElroy tracked them down and brought them back. He then returned to Trena's parents' home when they were away and, once again, shot the family dog and burned the[ir] house down."

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In 1980, McElroy shot the 70-year-old owner of Skidmore's only grocery store, for accusing one of McElroy's daughters of shoplifting. Just --  bang -- shot him. The man survived.  And, McElroy was finally convicted of a crime... second-degree assault. The jury specified the maximum sentence: two years in State prison. 

His attorney, McFadin, had McElroy released, pending appeal -- unbelievable, given McElroy's history of witness and juror intimidation. Predictably, he began harassing the grocer at his home, and any Skidmore citizens he encountered. None of McElroy's previous legal issues had gotten this far -- and possibly, he sensed whatever bully's magic charm of invincibility he may have possessed was disappearing. 

On July 9, 1981, he walked into Skidmore's local bar, carrying a Garand M1 with a bayonet, and threatened to kill the old grocer. Sheriffs were called; McElroy was taken into custody, his weapon impounded -- but again, he was released.

Parked In Front Of The Bar; July 10, 1981-

A Reenactment, In Skidmore, For Television Documentary

On July 10, McElroy drove into Skidmore with his wife, Trena, in his maroon-and-white Chevy pickup truck and parked on Elm street, the town's main drag, directly in front of the bar. He went into the town grocery store -- where he had shot its owner -- while his wife waited in the truck.

While McElroy was in the store, a group of Skidmore's men held a quick, impromptu meeting inside the bar. Other residents in the immediate downtown area had seen or were told of McElroy's arrival, and began to gather on the street. There was a sense something was about to go down.

McElroy walked out of the grocery, unwrapping the pack of cigarettes he'd purchased, and got into the driver's seat of his truck. The men came out of the bar and confronted McElroy. Several, apparently, were armed. McElroy, still sitting behind the wheel of his truck, casually lit a cigarette, appearing completely unconcerned.

Suddenly, and for the next twenty seconds -- which I can tell you is an eternity when discharging firearms is concerned -- several armed individuals shot McElroy. He was struck multiple times by .22 rifle rounds (a poor man's gun, for hunting small game, Foxes, Coyotes or other predators) from at least two different weapons. 

Apparently, McElroy took some time to die. He bled out, slumped in his truck. No one made any attempt to help, or call for emergency medical assistance. When the shooting began, Trena had jumped out of the truck in a panic; she was unharmed.

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As investigators worked the crime scene, canvassed, identified and interviewed, every witness to the shooting said the same thing: They didn't see who fired any weapon, had no idea -- as if, collectively, everyone present had suffered a crucial erasure of memory at the same time.

McElroy's wife, Trena, claimed to have recognized one of the shooters -- but they denied it, there were no other witnesses; Trena's testimony alone was not a strong enough case for prosecution. 

The same witnesses told the same story to County Sherriff's detectives, State investigators, and eventually the FBI.  Richard McFadin, the attorney who had helped McElroy to walk free on so many prior charges, said "the town got away with murder". 

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Skidmore's population as of 2020 had fallen to 247.  To date, no one has been charged in connection with McElroy's death. The original DA and chief investigator in the case have retired. McElroy's wife,  his attorney McFadin, and a number of witnesses have passed away. The case is still open. And for almost 42 years, no one who was on Elm street in Skidmore that July afternoon has said a single thing.

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Uvalde.

In America we are witnessing the blowback of a culture awash in guns, in hatred, in insane and illogical ideas about nearly everything, broadcast eagerly 24 hours a day by the political Right's private propaganda stream, its special opinion-makers.

We're watching a country where the political Left is marked by indecision and learned helplessness, by complicity with the same corporate interests and wealthy Oligarchs.

And, the political Right's rhetoric continues to become more shrill, more apocalyptic, by the day -- talk about "taking back" the country, before guns are taken away, before the liberals / gays / unchristian / colored persons and immigrants / socialists destroy America. 

They attempted to overthrow the government of the United States in January, 2021. They want to try again. It isn't guns that someone is coming for; the Right wants your soul.  This isn't hyperbole and it isn't exaggeration.

At the same time, Rightist-dominated state governments and their Rightist governors pass laws they know will be appealed to their Supreme Court, secure in the knowledge that whatever challenge to existing Lib-Socialist law will be taken up, and affirmed by a slate of second-rate, rightist legal hacks appointed for life.  With the fervor of the 'christian' zealots they are, they can't wait for their day, their chance to do god's work.

America and its citizens are being cowed, and bullied. The Right has decided if it wants to burn down your home and shoot your dog, they will. And no one is coming to your aid.

A nation's government which can't govern, a society which can't maintain basic public safety and human rights, is five minutes from being overthrown. Ask the Royal French bureaucracy in 1789. Ask the Duma. Ask the Cambodian government in 1975. Ask the Weimar Republic's Reichstag. 

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In the larger world, Western democracies were more concerned with making money -- making a world safe for the corporate interests, globally: a neoliberal New World Order, wonderful for business and the rising Oligarch class. Not so much for the little people. But, who cared.

The sages of the West believed the assumed stability of a post-WW2, post-Soviet world would be forever. Hitler and Stalin were dead; so was Mao. No one wanted to go back to the world on September 1, 1939. War was a thing we had tamed. Dictators could be dealt with through sanctions, economic coercion. 

NATO was just one method of maintaining the nation-state structure to support corporate business -- but the day of military force had passed, unless something happened in one of the shithole countries: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia; North and Central Africa; Afghanistan. 

And if it did, said the businessmen gathering at Davos, we don't care. No one is crazy enough to mount a major military conflict to grab territory and resources. This isn't 1938 or 1939, after all.

Trump Is A Fucking Tool.  But, Then; So is Sad Vlad.

But, Putin was crazy enough. He nursed a set of historical grievances which sound as delusional as the disinformation pouring out of the Murdochs' media. After more than a decade of coordinated manipulation and misinformation aimed at the West, Putin pushed the envelope in Georgia, in the Crimea. NATO and the West did little, or nothing. 

Europe was fractured, distracted by Brexit and the fumblings of the UK's Clown-Prime Minister. America was consumed with the predations of its own Clown-leader, then an attempted coup -- and above it all, a pandemic. Putin felt he could take Ukraine. The West could do nothing; the Ukrainians had elected a fucking comedian as their President! And like a bully in central Missouri long ago, Putin did what he wanted.

The stability in the world everyone has taken for granted is over. That of itself is a huge challenge to the neoliberal New World Order.  It isn't clear what will replace it. That it's coming at the same time as effects of climate deterioration are beginning to make themselves felt is rancid whipped cream on the proverbial Shit Pie.

The bullies have always been with us. They've just made it impossible to ignore them any longer. They aren't going away. Like it or not, we are going to have to deal with them individually, and collectively. One way or another.  And how that happens, or doesn't, is the story of the next months and years.

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MEHR, MIT DIE FRAGE:  Hey! Did you notice how many people in this story had last names that began with "Mc"? Pretty wild, eh?

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Twenty-Two

 Nine-Eleven

(Redux of a post originally published in September, 2010)

On November 22, 1963, I was outside for a 10:00AM break between classes at my Junior High School when it was announced the next class would begin prematurely. Immediately. We were told to sit quietly at our desks. When asked, our teacher told us nervously that President Kennedy had been shot.

After a few minutes, the school's public address system was broadcasting CBS' radio network, announcing the shooting of JFK in Dallas.  After a few minutes, someone -- probably the principal --  placed the PA system microphone next to the speaker of a television set; we heard what I now know to be the audio portion of Walter Cronkite on CBS television, announcing the President's death.

Where were you when JFK was shot? A standard question a large number of Americans (now discarded as 'Useless Boomers') have asked each other, due to the magnitude of the event and because it was shared in real-time by the primary media of the early 1960's -- radio and television.

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So, September 11th, 2001: Where were you on 9-11? I had gotten up to go to work around 5:30AM here in California, and turned on KQED-FM's NPR news. Getting out of the shower just before 6:00, I heard a report that a "plane" appeared to have crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

I lived briefly in Manhattan in the late 70's and had seen just how huge those buildings were -- and to me, "a plane" meant a small aircraft; a Cessna, or something similar. I remembered: sometime after WW2, a B-25 flying through dense fog over Manhattan had ploughed directly into the Empire State Building. A similar incident at the WTC would be tragic, I thought; but an accident, and on the other side of the continent. 

NPR suddenly updated its report, using the words "jet aircraft" -- which immediately moved the entire event from a tragically wayward Cessna into the category of Well-This-Was-No-Boating-Accident.

Turning on CNN, I sat watching an image of the WTC towers from the roof of CNN's Manhattan headquarters, roughly two miles away. Both towers looked like chimneys, topped by boiling clouds of grey-black smoke drifting away at an angle into a clear, morning sky. 

Aaron Brown was reporting, taking phone calls directed from witnesses in the vicinity -- only one of whom, the doorman at the World Trade Centers Marriott, was close enough to report on anything immediate and consequential. 

A CNN-affiliate local news helicopter, hovering over the Hudson, provided an extended telephoto shot of the façade of the Tower on fire; I looked at the pattern of the cladding of the building, a huge, black gash angled across it. 

Occasionally, I saw clouds of small white shapes fluttering in the smoke, like flocks of birds, swirling -- and realized they were sheets of paper, ream after ream of it, drifting out of the building's broken windows. 

Just as that thought registered, at the extreme right-hand edge of the screen, I saw a darker object drop quickly, straight down and out of frame. It took a second; less. I didn't know then, but I had just seen one of roughly two hundred people who fell or jumped that morning from the Towers' upper floors.

The Falling Man: Photograph By Richard Drew / AP

Images Like This Were Broadcast And Published

In Europe, But Not America (Photo: UK Telegraph, 2001)

By the time I had sit down, two airliners had slammed into the WTC towers. Aside from profane shock, the only thing I recall thinking was, This is what it had been like, standing at the curb in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, watching the Archduke Franz Ferdinand being shot. This is history. 

I've seen large explosions and been in crazy environments, but the scale of what I was watching made it all seem unreal; special effects. I sat in the armchair, watching, as first the South, then the North towers collapsed (Wikipedia's timeline of the events puts that at 6:59 and 7:28 AM PDST, respectively). News of a third plane crashing into the Pentagon was broadcast; I began flipping back and forth between networks for coverage. 

Finally, I left to make my way to work on mass transit. On a BART train, I was amazed at the languid attitudes of the crowd of commuters -- reading books and newspapers, a few tapping on laptops and Blackberries -- as if it were just another Tuesday morning. People were subdued; there was literally no conversation about what had just occurred.

Work closed down at Noon. At a friend's, we sat watching CNN -- clips of the second Tower being struck, and of each one collapsing, were replayed endlessly.  I made a few phone calls, primarily to The Last Of The Old Unit ("Fuckin' glad we're not eighteen right now," one observed). 

We were all expecting more information, something to provide a larger context to everything seen that day. We also knew we weren't going to get it -- the dice had been rolled, and we wouldn't find any clarification until they had bounced off the back of the craps table and come to rest. 

The dice are still bouncing. They haven't stopped yet. They never really will -- like Gavrilo Princip, shooting the Archduke, the dice which were rolled that day haven't stopped yet, either. That's how history works. 

_____________________________

That was September 11th -- a red line on the American calendar, the culmination of so many threads in our history going back to 1898 and 1917, the choices successive administrations have made since deciding to follow an Imperial course.

I remembered another image from this same period, within a day or two of the attacks: video of an Iranian soccer pre-game event, where both teams playing sang 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. I've looked for the footage, but AI sucks and Google sucks. I still know what I saw.

A gesture like that would only have been allowed with permission of the Iranian Powers That Be, and it was only a gesture -- costs nothing for forty teenagers to sing a song. But gestures can lead to actual events.

The 9-11 attacks could have been another kind of defining moment for America. Our government and institutions could have seized the opportunity to press for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy; the long breach with Iran; our over-reliance on the House of Saud. We could have opened a dialog with others, rather than dictate to them.

Lil' Boots, 2004 Republican Convention: Feared And Bigger Than His Daddy, At Last

This photograph exudes more punk-ass cravenness than any I've ever seen.

It was a crossroads moment. Our choices mattered. But, the government was run by men who had no interest in anything except power (personal, partisan, and financial) and policies that meant the use of force in furthering that power.  

This is what America got for allowing the Scalia Court to appoint "Lil' Boots" Bush as President of the United States -- a man who surrounded himself with Project For A New American Century neo-imperialists. 

Within hours of Bush's inauguration on January 20, 2001, they were sitting in the White House, discussing how to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was a foregone conclusion. And, after 9-11, what else could we have expected from Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld? From Rove, DeLay, Limbaugh and the Murdochs?

September 11th: An Excuse

And, they believed it would be 'Roses All The Way', 'Greeted As Liberators' ... so, no one planned for occupation, or fighting an insurgency for seven years; or for the effect on individual soldiers of multiple redeployments and 'stop-loss' denials of separation. They never conceived of failure; therefore, it wouldn't happen. The arrogance behind this conceptualization is stunning.

It was an utterly unnecessary, even illegal invasion of Iraq, supported by intelligence about WMD's invented by right-wing operatives to create a causis beli, and pushed by sociopathic egos 'journalists' like Little Judy Miller, and pundits like David Brooks and William Kristol, and Little Tommy Friedman, to name only a few. How eagerly they jumped on the War bandwagon; so good for their careers.

Palettes Of $100 Bills, Baghdad, 2003 (Photo: UK Guardian)

And let's not forget the $12 Billion in cash (at least; no one really knows), piles of U.S. currency shrink-wrapped and paletted and airlifted to Iraq. 363 tons of it. Some $9 billion of that cash simply can't be accounted for.  But, there was plenty of money to be made from the war, and tax breaks to the wealthy. It was a good time to be part of the Carlyle Group -- a founder of which was George H. W. Bush, who gave the Group its intimate connection to the House of Saud.

But, Lil' Boots kept talking about cutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security; cut any social programs which made real the pact between government and citizens that was at the heart of FDR's New Deal... because, Bush claimed, there was just no money to pay for that. Because of the war, you see.

And there was Guantanamo, CIA 'black airlines' flying suspected terrorists to secret prisons, and the extra-legal, secret program of 'renditions'. Let's not forget Abu Ghirab. Let's not forget people like John Woo, whose written opinions created what he still claims is a "legal" basis for torture as national policy.

Civilian Casualty Of Baghdad Suicide Car Bomb, 2007

And what followed wasn't just secret prisons and a lack of due process for terrorist suspects, but a matrix of information based on unprecedented data-mining of domestic email and cellular telephone traffic, banking records and public record databases. It became a government/corporate State surveillance and intelligence apparatus that outstrips the wildest dreams of the Gestapo and the KGB.

And, if it was all about defeating Al-Qaeda, capturing or killing Bin Laden and Al-Zwahiri, then Iraq would never have mattered. We would have kept promises to the Afghans about rebuilding their country, instead of ignoring it -- at least half the reason the Taliban were able to come roaring back.

The 'Go-Go', Lil' Boots Bush years were about leveraging the war to enact a larger Rightist agenda. It was a cover for deregulation, defense contractors, profits. It was about Fat Karl's dream of rigging elections for permanent Republican rule.

Victory, to these assclowns, had a very different meaning. The military portion of it was just a backdrop banner for Bush and his cronies: Mission Accomplished. The cynicism in that perspective is an obscenity; Yeah, a lot of that going around.

_______________________________

We had an economic collapse in 2008, then eight years of neoliberal nothing, followed by four years of proto-Fascism. After a three-year pandemic, an attempted coup -- roughly 37% of America's adult population claim to believe that 4chan posts by an anonymous fraudster are more real than mathematics, science, or common sense. That over 60% of those on the Right trust what Trump says over and above their own family members.

The blessed 37%  refuse to accept the vaccines for SARS-CoV2. They refuse to wear masks. They do this to "Own The Libs". They injected themselves with special magic pony blessed horse juice, or screech that the Blood Of The Jezus is all they need. 

And they died choking on their own phlegm in hospital ICU wards, wheezing that Covid was all a hoax. Incidentally -- if you want to gauge how likely it is a hot civil war will happen here, just remember that image: cult members, fanatics, behave that way. Not rational, normal people.

________________________________

Since September 11th, 2001, a quote by Bush (whom we are supposed to think well of, now; let the healing begin) comes back to me:

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: In history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause)

-- George W. Bush, Address To Joint Session Of Congress

Is that appropriate as an epitaph for those who wish to do America harm? Or, does it speak to how we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, and led; will it end up being our epitaph, a closing quote for the United States Of America?

There is no ‘populist’ version of a world where some few are born booted and spurred, and the many are born saddled, and ready to ride, and that's precisely the world which conservatism is trying to preserve.

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This Is Your Early-Week Reprint Heaven History Story

 Unraveling

A near-annual posting -- originally From 2016, before the Trump-Time. I forgot to post this on its anniversary this year, June 28th.  But, no time like the present.

Given a time machine, if there is any single event in modern history I would travel back to and attempt to prevent, it would be the killing of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary in the Balkan city of Sarajevo at approximately Noon on June 28, 1914. It triggered the First World War -- and the Second, and the First Cold War - now, the Second - a fractured, tribal Middle East, and a rising, hungry China.

Think about how this one historical event unfolded. If it was part of the plot in a novel or film, you might say Oh that's not possible, that couldn't happen. But it did. And its echo is still resonating. 

The Archduke and his wife's assassination was a 'Black Swan', rara avis moment which pulled out multiple threads that led to a collapse of the Old World of the nineteenth century -- though what the event triggered had been boiling for some time. It's how history works. 

After eight years of Trump, a worldwide pandemic (still in motion, no matter what anyone says) and the American Experiment in danger of being snuffed out by an armed, imbecilic 'christian' mob, we're still feeling the impact of what was set in motion that late June day, 109 years ago.

Cousin Ignatz, Asleep At Princip's Post: Sarajevo, 2014 (Matthew Fisher / Postmedia News)

109 years ago, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Grand Duchess Sophie, were shot by Gavrillo Princip, a member of an assassination team sent to the Bosnian city by the government of Serbia.

Collectively, the team was the gang which couldn't shoot straight: armed with crude grenades, a few pistols, and carrying some form of suicide pill, they waited along the route Franz Ferdinand's car would take as it drove beside the Miljacka river, which cuts through Sarajevo (local Austro-Hungarian authorities had helpfully published the Archduke's route beforehand).

Most of the team either was poorly positioned, or chickened out at the last moment.  One conspirator did throw a bomb at the Archduke's car -- which bounced off its folded-back fabric top and exploded near a second car traveling just behind. Several people in the car had minor injuries and it continued on to a local hospital.

The Archduke's driver, Leopold Lojka, continued to Sarajevo city hall. When Franz Ferdinand arrived, he effectively unloaded on the hapless administrators about the state of their local security ("I come to your city and am greeted with bombs!"). Meanwhile, back at the river, the would-be bomber had jumped into the Miljacka and swallowed his suicide pill -- which he promptly threw up. The police arrested him, barely managing to keep him from being lynched a mob of pro-Austro-Hungarian citizens, and so save him for later trial and execution.

At approximately 12:30 PM, having finally accepted the thanks of the Sarajevo city fathers, Franz Ferdinand and his wife got back into their car, planning to go to the local hospital to see those wounded in the bomb attack that morning. They used the same route, in reverse, that they had taken into the city, driving along the river. But when the Chauffeur, Lojka, came to a particular intersection -- to his left, a street; to the right, a bridge over the Miljacka river -- he was confused.

 The Royal Couple (Seated, At Rear) Leaving City Hall: Fifteen Minutes Left

Believing it to be the route to the hospital, Lojka slowed and turned left.  Almost immediately, he realized he'd made a mistake and stepped on the brakes. The car came to a stop a few yards into the street, and Lojka moved to put it in reverse gear.

 The Intersection of Kaiser Franz Josefstrasse and Appel Quay Road, 2014: 

The Archduke's Car Turned Left, Up This Street;
The Restaurant Where Princip Bought Lunch, Now A Museum (Photo: CNN)

At that same intersection was a small restaurant. Gavrillo Princip, last member of the Serbian assassination squad, had gone inside to buy a sandwich, angry and dejected after the team's failure that morning. Standing on the sidewalk outside the cafe, he saw a large, dark-green automobile turn out of the boulevard and come to a stop directly in front of him. 

In the rear seat were the Archduke and his wife. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne had been delivered, less than ten feet away, from an armed assassin who had come to the city specifically to kill him. 

Consider: every event that had to happen, like a string of dominoes falling, to bring everything together to allow this moment to happen. If you were writing a novel or screenplay, anything that coincidental would be branded as implausible. Impossible. No one's gonna believe that.

Princip didn't hesitate. He dropped his sandwich, pulled a pistol out of his jacket and stepped towards the car, firing several shots, managing to mortally wound both the Archduke and his wife. Lojka, the driver, was ordered to rushed the royal couple to the local military governor's residence. Sophie died on the way. A military officer in the car, checking on the Archduke's condition, asked the wounded man how he was; Ferdinand said, "Nichts (It's nothing)", and died.

Just over a month later, Europe was at war. Over the next four-plus years, the entire social fabric of the continent and much of the world changed irrevocably. Monarchies ended; millions died; the map of the world changed as the victors annexed territory from Germany and Austria Hungary, and new countries were created. New technology was developed -- and, in the Versailles Treaty, the groundwork was laid for a second, even more horrible war to begin by 1939.

(And, in 1918-19, the Spanish Influenza infected 500 million people, killing 40 million, worldwide. It was the largest number of fatalities due to pandemic disease since the 'Black Death': the coming of  Bubonic Plague to Europe in the 14th century [which killed an estimated 200 million].  In the U.S., millions were made sick, and 675,000 died [0.6-plus per cent of America's population at the time, 103 million]. It's often referred to as the "forgotten epidemic" -- just one more terrible event in an ocean of violence and atrocity.)

 Cousin Ignatz, Worn Out By All The History

__________________________

Why the history lesson? We're living through history. When we read about events in Europe during the Interwar Years (1918 - 1933 or so), there's a feeling of being slowly pulled down into a drain of inevitability -- revolving-door failures of parliamentary governments in France; Britian's declining empire; the manic Totentanz of global capital leading to 1929; the rise and fall of Weimar; Italian, German and Japanese fascism. Regional war and civil war. 

Like the story of the Titanic or the Hindenburg, you know where the story is going. You know it will end in Nanking, Kristalnacht, Dunkirk; Auschwitz; Stalingrad; the Warsaw Ghetto; D-Day; the Führerbunker; Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But you read about the years leading up to all that with a mounting sense of horror, because we all know how it ends.

While the Brexit may be not have been a "shot heard 'round the world", the Tories are hanging on by their fingernails in the UK; the Scots still wonder about independence; the Greek, French and Italian economies are still at risk. Putinland, the Great Bear, still pushes the envelope here and there -- Ukraine and Syria. As IS loses on battlefields in the continuing slow-motion atrocity that is the Middle East, suddenly they appear in a Philippine city, on a London street. Disproportionate numbers of Black people are shot in major American cities on a routine basis. Climate change is not fake news.

America, ruled by Babbitry, greed and illusion, retreats from the world stage; its leader is Bloated, Sick, and Raving, surrounded by car-wash dilettantes. Other nation-state players, great and small, are happy to rush into the vacuum we leave behind, and any of them could easily start a larger conflict -- India, Pakistan; Kim Jong Fat Boy's Fun People's Republic Of Chuckles, and South Korea; Iran and Saudi Arabia.  

And no matter how you want to characterize it, there's a confrontation -- between those who want a globalist, centralized world (unfortunately, organized around the goals of international finance and business principals, together with the most powerful nation-state actors), and those who don't. The balances in the old alliances created after WWII have all but unraveled.  Kleiner Mann; Was Nun?

Hope you're not looking for an answer. I am, after all, only a Dog, and no one listens to me.

__________________________

Your Big Box Of Terror Weekend

 Bark Bark Bark Bark

Yet Another Long Howl

Recent conversations with friends, with The Last Of The Old Unit, over the past few weeks: we talked about Covid (Hey! Remember that? Still the 3rd-highest cause of death in America?). We talked about the Trump-time, and everything that's happened since.

We admitted feeling an uneasy sense that The World had changed, fundamentally, in a way we can't fully grasp or articulate. Everything around us has shifted, slightly -- like a kid's party game, where you're given ten seconds to look at items on a table. Then, you close your eyes -- and when you open them, you have to guess which items have been removed.

The Oldest Friend said: "It's like I went to bed one night, and woke up in an alternate universe that was just a little different than the one I went to sleep in. Like discovering there had never been Mars Bars. Or the original 'Star Trek' on TV ran for three seasons, not two. 'Stranger in a strange land' stuff.

"That's completely subjective, I know," she said, "but that feeling never completely goes away."

All of the people I spoke with defined that feeling with variations -- but there was common agreement that we perceived some difference between ourselves and The World that hadn't existed before -- which led us to feel mildly alienated from that world.

____________________

When we said "The World", we didn't mean the planet, Gaia; Our Big Ecosystem. Climate deterioration aside, the Natural World seems to be abiding. 

'The World' we referred to is built out of social fabric, stretched on a framework of collective relationships, stitched together by the cultural Ways our society accepts and agrees to in our relations with each other. It was something about that world we felt, suddenly, out of place.

____________________

The Girl Who Refused To Be Mrs. Mongo said it reminded her of the Cold War -- what it meant to live in the knowledge that nuclear war was possible (Hey! Know what? It still is). It was an understanding we kept in the basement of our consciousness, jammed in a dark corner, along with the box that has the big, yellow label with red lettering -- Terror: Or, we are Mortal; Death is Coming; Death Is Mystery.

There were times in the long years we've walked when we woke up in the middle of the night, thinking what if the sirens went off? But now the possibility of an apocalyptic event is replaced with... mass gun deaths. Some new repression by the Motherfucking Cletuses, whom no one can seem to stop. 

Nearly every morning, we get up and wonder what new outrage has been committed, what new boundary was crossed, while we slept. This was a singular feature of the Trump-time; now we come awake expecting bad news.

_____________________

Please understand: members of The Last Of The Old Unit, including me, have experienced Bad News. Every time there's a bulletin, a new "mass casualty 'event'," we have a moment of recognition. We know with almost cellular-level certainty what that experience is. And something still grips us after fifty-five fucking years, and for three seconds or three hours, we're right back in it.

We'd already experienced dislocation from reality (there was a reason people used the phrase "Back in the World" to describe a non-war zone environment) and thought, Thank Christ That Shit is Over. Except it's not.

______________________

Another friend noted, "The Republicans are the new Cold War" -- meaning, like that time in our collective past, they have become symbols and avatars of that dark corner in our basements. Their collective antics are a reminder: The World, that social fabric, is just a construct and the control we think we have over it is an illusion.

Trump, DeSantis, Sarah-Huckafuckle; the lot of them, are the embodiment of malevolent unpredictability. They can destroy the World, the social fabric we participate in, as well as any ICBM with a five-pattern spread of MIRVed warheads.

As a 76-year-old, Trump will not live forever. Maybe he realizes this; maybe not. Spasmodically, he acts out and splatters America with his own feces, then revels in the disgust he provokes, the impotent anger of others -- all to feed an endless hunger for validation, and avoid the Big Box Of Terror at the center of his own being.

And there are those pending legal issues -- which, bizarrely, don't seem to slow him down. They feed the chaos engine, the endless urge at the heart of America's political and cultural Right -- to burn everything the fuck down.

________________________

So I wake up in the 2:30AM, sometimes with the Terror, sometimes not. I remind myself that we're animals, hard-wired to survive -- and self-conscious animals, who understand that our lives are finite. Provided the right stimulus, we hit the Fight-Or-Flight wall.  

Our World -- the actual one around us; and the perceived one in our heads -- is changing.  It has always been unpredictable in its details -- but not in our beginnings, rites of passage, ecstasies and sorrows, and our end. No one alive can say why we came to be or where we're going -- but we demand our Reason Why, even if we'll never receive it.

__________________________

I remind myself: all of our Details are in The Stories. It's why Gilgamesh. It's why Homer and Herodotus, Chaucer and Pope; Dickens and Melville. It's why statuary and panel and canvas and paper, camera, movement and words on a Stage. It's why music from Cantos to Paart, Bach to Ravel, Joplin to Pere Ubu -- and all of it, the virtuous effort of telling a Story of What Happened To Us When We Went Through It. All of our details will disappear. Only the Stories remain.

I considered this, and because I'm only a Dog and not a philosopher, passed my observation on to friends in the version used at the Soul Of America: Be Kind, Motherfuckers.

We all pretty much agreed we could get behind that.

_____________________________

Additional Bark Bark Bark Bark

I found Peter Fritzsche's 2016 book, "An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler", browsing at a bookshop, I was idly looking for resonances with the perspective that we're living in a country invaded by some alien presence and ideology.

I do actually know better. My life in America is not even remotely similar to the European experience between 1939 and 1945. As swinish, bloated and mendacious as the Rethugs are, they aren't foreign invaders. They don't speak a different language. And while they can be proto-fascists, they aren't nazis. I call them that all the time in the Twitterverse, but: I actually do know better. 

Nazis were members of the National Socialist Party, which existed from 1919 until the Spring of 1945, when it was put out of business at the cost of tens of millions of lives. The nazis committed a specific set of crimes between 1933 and 45. Calling DeSantis or Gosar or Cruz a nazi may make me feel better for ten seconds, but it cheapens the experience of survivors -- of the Occupation, and of the genocide of the Holocaust, which the nazis perpetrated, supported, made manifest.

I'd like to say Republican governments in Florida, Arkansas, Texas; Ohio, Montana, Indiana, Illinois, Wyoming; Idaho; North and South Carolina; Kansas; Kentucky, Tennessee; Mississippi and Alabama; Georgia and Louisiana, don't ban abortion, demand to check children's genitals; censor and ban books; demand prayer and 'christian' religious instruction are included in secondary school education; demonize LGBTQ+ persons, and Persons Of Color, and Women and Liberals and Immigrants. But they do these things, and more. 

As David Neiwert noted recently on Twitter, the political and cultural Right didn't stop with January 6. They're trying a slow-motion coup -- at County and State levels, introducing laws to force their vision and belief on America. The trick is getting Americans to admit to themselves that it's happening, 

Like the nazis, America's political and cultural Right is backing up its Thou Shalt Not rhetoric with laws -- fines, arrest; prison. Whole classes of people are being identified as the enemy. You know what comes next, because these Cletus Thugs certainly do.

And while these Thugs are not nazis, they do treat others like the nazis would have done. They'd just gotten started, during the Trump-time. And they intend to burn it all the fuck down.

_______________________________

In the 1970's in Europe, I noticed (with surprising regularity) something rarely seen in America -- it seemed a significant percentage of adults in their late forties to early sixties had serious facial scars, eye patches or glasses with one darkened lens; crutches, missing limbs, fingers, ears.

At a bus stop on a warm morning in southwestern Germany, a man stood waiting at a streetcar stop, wearing a Tyroler hat, topcoat and gloves. His face was a smooth mask of shiny, oddly pink skin, which made discerning his age difficult. Plainly, he'd suffered serious burns -- except around the eyes, where a pilot or air crewman would have worn a set of goggles.

I had been staring; the man looked over at me, took in my non-European appearance and clothing, and said, "Good morning," in English. I nodded back, said nothing, and so missed the opportunity for an insightful conversation with someone who at the least had an interesting personal story. He also might have confirmed what I was already guessing: that the European experience of the Second World War seared everyone by degrees, civilian and military, the persecutors and persecuted, right down to their souls.

Those who weren't killed in occupied Europe continued to experience degrees of cruelty, humiliation, betrayal, anxiety and uncertainty, at levels that would have been unthinkable before 1933 -- and all because it became acceptable and popular in Germany to believe ideas which first became policy, and then law. 

Europeans woke up one morning and the world was... different. A new set of outrages, every day, week, month. And while they could hope for Liberation, for more than four years -- one thousand, five hundred and fifty days -- there was no guarantee it would happen. And for those under occupation, each of those days had to be lived, experienced; suffered.

It isn't often mentioned, but the Germans, whether they recognized it or not, had their very souls disfigured by the experience of Hitler and the pack of animals around him. They became something else, for over twelve years: 4,500 days. And even after the war ended.

______________________

One aspect of the Holocaust is as a teaching moment for humanity about intolerance and hate, and where it can lead. Fritzsche's book shows clearly what the power of belief can do to individuals, and groups, in even more detail than any other look at the period I've seen -- something I didn't think was possible. 

Using only contemporary documents and writings, he shows how The Leader in an authoritarian system provides permission to his followers for accepting astonishing levels of violence (as well as committing it), and how The Leader becomes a psychological scapegoat for that violence if it should it all go bad later. 

America's history has already burned us, as Europe's before WWII had done to its own cultures and societies. We aren't living in an occupied country, but we are changing (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig... but already it was impossible to say which was which”).

We run the risk of being seared down to our souls (as Europeans were, over twelve years of nazism) by whatever seems to be coming.  I'm not sure what it will feel like to live here, when America gets to wherever we're headed.

We can try to be kind, first; perhaps that's all we can do. Perhaps it's just an act of resistance, in the end.

__________________________________