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.

______________________________

.

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.

________________________________

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.

_____________________________

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.

______________________________

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.)

________________________________

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.

__________________________________

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??

___________________________________

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.

_____________________________________

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.

____________________________

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.

______________________________

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.

____________________________

   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.

________________________

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.

__________________________

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.

___________________________

   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.

______________________________

   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."

_________________________________

Reprint Heaven: Bomb In The Back Yard: A 2020 Coda

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

(From December, 2020 -- prior to the coup to seize control of the government, and the assault on the Capitol. I wasn't predicting anything which others were not aware of, but this post is useful context to the next contribution I'll add later.)

Where the title of the previous post, 'End Of The Beginning', came from is obvious. The major events which began or rose to prominence in 2020 will, aber naturlich, continue to play out in the New Year.  We can party, but it's only the close of a Beginning. There is more shit to come.

____________________________

The greatest threat, the most dangerous unexploded munition waiting to go off in America, are the 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. 

Since the mid-2000's there has been a struggle between traditional, Good Ol' Boys of the GOP (McConnell the current figurehead), and 'Alt-Right' 'Tea Party' revolutionaries originally created by the Koch brothers, later taken over by evangelical 'christians' and anti-democratic opportunists  (Trump their current Leader), to control the Republican party. 

(Incidentally, the January 6th showdown over electoral college votes in the 2020 election is a contest between these two factions. Aside from being an act of sedition, this power play will show how much control over the Republican party McConnell and the traditionalists still hold -- and how much the GOP belongs to The Leader, and his howling Base.)

Trump's ability to connect with and direct his cult followers determines how much influence he has on the party. And in a larger context -- even with potential legal issues, reportedly precarious finances -- his popularity determines how useful he will be to the Bannons and Adels, the LePens and Weidels, the Hofers and Farages of the world.

These heads of more global, proto-fascist, nationalist movements will tolerate the cons which Trump runs on banks and 'investors' -- after all, as Bannon's indictment shows, they all have their own cons to run, their own sheep to fleece. In turn, Trump will make as much (or more) use of them as they of him.

But, Trump -- in his mid-Seventies, obese; addictions, unspecified health issues -- will eventually dwindle to a sideshow. He'll make incendiary remarks, appear at rallies for "Trump-True" candidates; 'write' books. Fueled by hate and his own inner demons, he will not go quietly, but go he will have to.

Meanwhile, the Murdochs, Mercers and Bannons want to find a 'Better Trump' -- charismatic, gifted; a worthy successor to the fascist energy of the 1930's -- to finish what Bannon Trump started. Someone who can speak to and mobilize the Base with A New Message for All Those Of (Dominionist christian) Faith, and American (Right-Wing Political) Strength -- All (White Heterosexual, Male) People; and those with full use of the 'physical gifts with which god has graced them'.

____________________________

Which leaves us 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 supremacy, for Dominionism. They voted for keeping a knee on the neck of every George Floyd, forever. That SARS-CoV2 is a hoax, and science is wrong. That America and the world is ruled by 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 that a sitting President could take money in exchange for favorable treatment, and to coerce the leader of another country to attack the President's political rival. That all political Liberalism equals Socialism, equals tyranny -- and so they voted for Trump as a way to "own the Libs".

Trying to comprehend how 70 million people can think this way (abandon fact-based reason; act more like superstitious Dark Age peasants than citizens in an industrial society) and follow a person like Trump, has been an enduring question in America for four years.

We've had nationalist politicians, rabid populists, in American politics before, but they've always had relatively few followers. Their ideas have never threatened to become mainstream belief. The malignant spread of Trump's hate-filled messages through the The Base -- which includes Congressional Republicans -- leaves the American Left dumbfounded. We pause and sputter, try to reason with them, find 'bipartisan consensus'. It fails, every time.

The Europeans I know are even more alarmed at Trump and 'Trumpism' than we are. They understand in their bones what fascist politics look and feel like. They've seen The Base before. And, they understand that Trump's expansion of the American Presidency into autocracy is only a symptom of a possible future even more malignant and terrifying -- and that Trumpism's followers, the Proud Boys and militias, will be waiting for the next Leader to appear and pick up where Trump left off.

If you're a Left / Progressive voter; if you're a Person of Color, LGBTQ; if you're poor, homeless, an immigrant -- and if 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  The Base's 70 million, and those Thugs in Congress, do not believe you are even human.

They believe you are agents of Satan, Socialists who want to destroy America. They believe this as fact. You are the enemy. Think about that.

______________________________

In reading through Digby, I came across a Tom Sullivan piece, "What's Reason Got To Do With It?", which I recommend:

... 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.’”

________________________________

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.

__________________________________

Ten Dead In Buffalo

Chickens, Roosting

Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes really -- pressure, and time.

     -- Ellis Boyd Redding (Morgan Freeman); Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Racism is part of the fabric of American society. Our system was built to automatically, unconsciously, reserve and protect power for Caucasian males at almost any level of society. Cultural assumptions are like that. If you're White, you're soaking in it, breathing it, benefiting from it. 

Class is also part of the fabric of America. Even a poor, Cletus Red-Cap who knows he's poor also understands The System has been arranged and maintained to his benefit. Because he understands that -- like America's wealthy, the Owners -- he's White, and male, too.

But among a White majority, The System is built to reserve and protect power for a small percentage: the Owners. Every poor Cletus Red-Cap knows that, also: It's Chinatown, Jake.

__________________________

Story-telling and Imagination are part of the human experience. Some stories draw on tropes that are DNA-deep -- monsters in the dark (devils, vampires, aliens), magical powers; glimpses of the sacred and the profane; fear and hope. 

Stories are shared now, globally, instantly, through social media and mass entertainment. Fox, Google, Facebook, Twitter; all harvest information about their users to manipulate them, sell advertising -- and influence public consciousness on a societal level. Look at Cambridge Analytica, at the UK and Brexit. Look at the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections.

And, when imagination is mixed with politics, and boundaries between Stories and experienced, verifiable reality are blurred -- you end up with millions of people believing that stories of monsters and conspiracies they see on social media are objectively real.

Obligatory Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Rant

They believe a national election was stolen by Ballot Mules. That Sandy Hook was a hoax. That JFK, Jr., will bring Trump back to rule us all. That America is being stolen from its rightful White population by Non-Whites, supported by demon-possessed creatures: Liberals; Soros and the Clintons; LGBTQ+, Antifa. That Whites are being "cancelled". 

They believe that "we are at war with our government" (as Limbaugh used to say). They believe in themselves as the real victims. 'Hillbilly Elegy' said so. The Murdochs' media implies it, daily.

They believe acts of brutality and gun violence have no cause beyond Operator Error -- "just some crazy guy" -- because guns don't kill people; only other people do.

________________________

Points of pressure and division in America, created over 400 years, have been cracking for decades and the tempo of the fracturing is increasing. Some points of division are kdue to legitimate, long-standing demands for historic, social and economic justice. Others result from attempts to destabilize American society and government.

All of it is happening against a background of global climate change -- rising temperature, sea levels, food shortages, pandemic disease. Authoritarian and fascist political movements are also rising -- Russia's government among them. Russia has brutally invaded Ukraine, and the mystic vision of its dictator-leader boils down to Make Russia Great Again.

The 'stable' Post-WW2 world my generation grew up in is gone. But what could we expect, after almost 70 years of CIA-fueled regime changes in Africa, West Asia, South and Central America; actual war in Southeast Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan; and twenty years' massive surveillance of American citizens?

_________________________

With every new massacre by a white-supremacist, ideologically-motivated shooter, I put my face in my hands. In my view, the Murdochs and their paid talking heads; the white supremacist militias; the braying and screeching Rightist politicians want this to happen. They want a civil war.

And the more persons -- like the Buffalo shooter -- are incited by the Right's rhetoric, convinced that planned, brutal acts are self-defense against a world controlled by a conspiracy of liberals and non-white monsters ... then the closer we get to the war America's political Right dreams of.

My country has sown the wind, and here are our Chickens, time coming 'round at last: slouching home to roost, to be born. 

___________________________ 

Right-wing pastor Perry Stone declares that Democrats in D.C. who oppose Trump "...are not normal people... [they] have demons in them." (Newsweek, October 28, 2019)

__________________________

By imagining [actual] demons behind social welfare, economic and environmental regulations, or legal protections for marginalized groups, spiritual warriors frame the dismantling of these systems as ridding the US of demons. More than this, they frame the people and groups they see as benefiting from those systems as agents of evil incarnate. Only after such people are removed can there be a national rebirth. ("Demons of the Deep State"; The Conversation, September 19, 2020)

__________________________

"Think of what the enemies of America have done over the last 14 months [Ted Nugent told the audience at Trump’s May 14th rally in Austin, TX]. They didn't sneak into the White House -- they lied, they cheated, they scammed; and every day the Democrats violate their sacred oath to the Constitution. And if you can't impress your friends on that, they shouldn't be your friends.

“I love you, but I would love you more,  if you went out and just went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the communists," Nugent said. "Evil [must be] stamped out.” (via Daily Kos May 15, 2022)

__________________________

It's All Funny To Herr Carlson: But, Then, He's Getting Wealthier

Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege -- by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain.

(Nicholas Confessori, "How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable"; New York Times, April 30, 2022)

_________________________

[In mid-December, 2018] Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing.

Within Fox... [m]any wondered what price he might pay. The answer became clear that night ... absolutely none. When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down ... citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. 

Afterward ...Mr. Carlson spoke directly with [Rupert] Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee...

(Nicholas Confessori, "How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News And Became Trump's Heir"; New York Times, May, 2022)

_________________________

MEHR, MIT 'DER IST SCHULD':  The Best Friend reports that here in San Francisco on May 14th, the Women's March was not that well attended. The most disturbing aspect were the counter-protestors -- all of them evangelical 'christians', who almost outnumbered the marchers, standing on the sidewalks as the contingent made its way down a nearly deserted Market Street, "shaking their fists at us and shouting that we were going to hell. It was really creepy; we felt alone out there."

And that was in San Francisco.

__________________________

This Is Your Steerage Saturday Update For 3rd Class Passengers

 Another Very Long Howl

When things happen, they come in a waterfall, a cascade, a torrent. If you haven't been paying attention, they will seem to appear as if by magic, out of nowhere.  But they never do.

_____________________

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Weimar Germany. On February 27, the Reichstag was gutted in a fire, set by the nazis* themselves, who claimed it an act by German Communists.

On February 28, Hitler used emergency powers to suspend every part of Weimar's Constitution which ensured personal freedoms, and legalized the arrest of Communists and other political opponents. Many elected members of the Reichstag were arrested, or went on the run, or simply disappeared.

The nazi party was suddenly the majority in parliament. It could rubber-stamp any legislation Hitler and his crew might want.

On March 13, Hitler established the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels immediately began to exert control over every form of public expression, all of which would be used to push the nazis' message, demonize anyone the nazis considered enemies -- and to ceaselessly praise Hitler, The Leader, personally.

On March 21, the nazi-dominated Reichstag voted to approve the Enabling Act, giving Chancellor Hitler powers to enact laws, and imprison anyone he declared an enemy of the state.  He issued a decree making it illegal to speak out against the government or criticize its leaders. Also on March 21, the first concentration camp, at Dachau, was opened for Communist and other political prisoners.

On April 1st, citizens in Germany woke up to find their local SA, the nazi Brownshirts, had been up before dawn, out on the streets with brushes and buckets of white paint. They painted Mogen Davids and insults on the windows of businesses owned by Jews, and stood outside on the sidewalks demanding people only shop at "Aryan" stores -- move along, nothing to see here.

Also in April, Jewish and Socialist judges, lawyers, and other court officers were removed. The Academy of German Law called for nazification of statutory law, "cleansing it of Jewish influence". Judges were directed to use a "healthy community [Volk] sentiment" to guide their legal decisions.

On May 1, 1933, all labor unions were outlawed.  On May 6, Goebbels organized the first public burning of books in Berlin, to begin a nationwide action "against the Un-German Spirit.” Libraries across Germany were purged of 'un-German' literature and textbooks in public burnings organized by nazi student organizations.

In June, the SPD was abolished -- in Weimar Germany, the Social Democrats were the nazis only real political threat. By July, all remaining political parties had also been abolished: the nazi party was the only legal political organization in Germany.

And that, friends, is How It Happens.

(* NOTE:  I don't capitalize the term or Noun, 'nazi'. The concept of providing any justification or convention to and for individual nazis or their organized state is personally abhorrent even if a violation of grammatic rules.) 

_____________________

The Past Is Present Tense

An aspect of quantum theory has it that reality may be created, moment to moment, in determining one set of conditions of the great cosmic Waveform -- all possible variations in the state of all matter. The world exists in all its multitudinous forms simultaneously: snow falls (hopefully) in the Himalayas, at the same instant billions and billions of other things are happening.

This is where all of us, and novels, live -- and the debate whether Flaubert, or Hemingway, or Gaddis, Tartt or Sebald, or Attwood, or Chelsea Handler, has described Reality more closely in their works to how it's actually experienced. Terrible, beautiful; it's all going down -- whether you see it, acknowledge it, or not.

_________________________

Some of this long howl and bark I've said before. Many times before. A portion of what follows was already published, last year -- before everyone seemed to think Covid was over; before Putin's gamble, before the trail of breadcrumbs left by the January 6th Committee was followed, in a disinterested ho-hum way, by the mainstream corporate media -- when it wasn't publishing story after story about the Failed Biden Presidency; and when it wasn't being denounced by the Murdochs.

___________________________

After the election in November of 2000, and over the fourteen years I've been sporadically writing this blog, decline and dissolution in America have been both easier to see, but more difficult to convince people to believe that it is happening. And that bothers me more than anything -- the laconic, not-my-problem attitude. 

(Via The Soul Of America) Here is Adolph Reed ("The Whole Country Is The Reichstag"; Nonsite.org, August 23, 2021):

"The right-wing ... [has] a single concrete objective—taking absolute power in the U.S. as soon and as definitively as possible. And [they] even seemingly want, to destroy the social fabric of the country [in taking power] ...

"Discrediting government ... has been a component of the GOP game plan ..  and Democrats have reinforced [that] in their own way. ...Four decades of retrenchment and privatization ... steadily increasing economic inequality and government’s failure to address it in any meaningful way [fuels a] lack of confidence, distrust, and hostility toward government ... and eventually even the idea of the public itself.  And [Right-wing billionaires who] bankroll the ultraright have taken advantage of that, [stoking] frustration and rage into a dangerously authoritarian political force."

Through my life, I've kept track of events, but nothing I've read or watched surprised me much. I am very cynical when it comes to the behavior of individuals, and in groups our behavior is too often amazingly stupid.  However, being cynical can also be a dangerous, and stupid, position -- a lazy person's way of abandoning critical judgement.

I'd grown up in the Fifties and Sixties; saw Southeast Asia personally and, as they said about The Fugitive, "toiled at many jobs". In the Seventies I studied history, focusing on interwar Europe --  Germany in particular; Weimar, and after. 

I knew things, but coasted along believing the High School Civics Class view of America -- the long national Narrative of an America, not perfect, but on a constant upward (and of course, liberal) arc into an inevitable, enviable future. Even Vietnam could be seen as a a tragedy, but a regrettable episode, a blip, in that long view. This of course ignored the experience of lives lived by Others -- the great Internationale of White Blindness.

And during Watergate, Liberals rejoiced: America's Great Silent Majority was wrong. Their hero, Nixon, was a Crook -- but he could be explained as an aberration in the American Narrative; an exception. And the political Right was, too: they were the Fringe, on the wrong side of history. Easily dismissed. The future would be a moderate Liberal culture. Always upwards.

Sure. Of course it would be.

Do Not Skip This Part Of The Exam

Please listen to me when I say this -- and I want to be wrong, but:  50 years later, the children and grandchildren of the Silent Majority are back. 

They're bully-mean in their MAGA caps and January 6, 2021 - Civil War T-Shirts, they see the world through small, piggish eyes, and they hate you.

They hate Colored people and Foreigners, and Eggy-heads, and Libs and Gay and Trans People and Ee-lites. The weak and the soft. They love god; yes they do (somebody's god, anyway), and America. They have guns and carry them -- and you have nothing to fear, so long as you do what they and their leaders say. 

Their ultimate leaders, America's Owners, are delusional, and rich. Very, very rich (Read Wharton's Age Of Innocence, or watch "The Daughtsman's Contract" for a notion of their society). You won't see their names in the media; they don't like publicity, and have generations of experience at being nearly invisible. 

They don't like Trump, or the MAGA-caps, or anyone who isn't part of their class. The world belongs to them, naturally -- whether by birth into their old-money, blue-blood family line, by the Will of Somebody's God, and their net worth.

The Owners have useful persons, like Eugene B. Meyer and his Federalist Society, to provide some philosophic framework for the nasty and regrettable decisions they will have to make. Persons like Meyer -- or even the Murdochs, brutes in bespoke suits, arrivistes who think they're in charge-- are useful but are not, and will never be, part of the Owners' class. But they are useful.

And, each in their own way, the MAGA Base and the Owners believe it is the Purity of their Strength, it is Blood and Soil, which calls them on.  The Base don't know they're being manipulated, but they'll do what the Owners want -- which is to Keep The World In Balance. 

The Base will do the bad things, and afterwards sing 'Amazing Grace' in celebration of 'god's great victory', after they dump your battered corpse in some nameless field. 

If you think this is simplistic, or hyperbole, you have that right. But I'm not the only person connecting the dots between the heat of rhetoric, and where that leads. 

_____________________

Top Of The List, Ma

Disease and climate deterioration are at the top of those conditions which frighten me; I suppose we have to put nuclear war back on the list, now. But what is happening in America makes me believe we are close to something horrific: Our own version of the world after Weimar, and What Comes Next. 

We've already had a taste of what that could be -- and an attempted coup. That we can have another seems to be ignored by the DOJ, and Biden's government, and far too many individual Americans who shrug and won't vote to save themselves. Whole fukin' system's corrupt, man.

 When I submit to my own fears, I see my country being dominated -- by the malignant, the vicious, the bestial -- with no cure except The Fire, Next Time; and no guarantee that where it leads will be a happy ending. 

Could America disintegrate into an even more obvious Oligarchy, like the old Soviet Union? Into Lebanon, or Syria? Could it become Atwood's Republic of Gilead? No one knows. The Waveform is always in motion. The Cat In The Box is alive and dead, until you open the lid.

But: I feel certain we can't continue down the same road we've been travelling without paying penalties we can't imagine. Chickens home to roost; and yes, the revolution will be televised.

_____________________

Ten-Dimensional Chess

Last year, George Packer (author of "The Unwinding") noted in The Atlantic that America's national narrative, Our Story, is a string of crises -- and about 'how we got out of it'. How we overcame and went on to even greater triumph: Upwards, always upwards.

I understand there are others who believe the world order is played out at a higher level of Weltpolitik -- constant competition between America, Russia, and China, and the dependent allies of each. It involves manipulating economies, technology, currencies, corporate and national intelligence. 

For the Players, this is ten-dimensional chess, an 'enlightened' upper class against Nihilistic Oligarchs -- a NeoLiberal World Order against Nationalist Autocracy -- one side saying The Greatest Good For The Greatest Number, and the other saying Fuck That, What's In It For Me?

The old High School Civics Class View of America -- that Hurrah! For The Flag National Narrative -- is a bedtime story, a tool to manipulate naïve and powerless fodder for the Leaders' dreams. In other words, We The People. 

__________________________

I'll Take 'Restrictive Nationalist Political Narratives' For A Thousand, Alex

There's much about the Neoliberal vs. Autocrat world Narrative that seems true. I also think that vision fails to make a galactically-complex system comprehensible. That may not even be possible. For the sake of this little screed, let's just focus on the National Narrative of America, told within our borders -- common assumptions about Us we've assimilated through time.

Packer said, we don't have one unified Story of America -- we have four, and the one chosen by the political Right is that of a beautiful America, stolen from its people by immigrants, noisy and uppity People of Color, women, Liberals, Socialists; girl-boys and boy-girls, and (the MAGA Base won't say so out loud) Catholics and Jews and all Them Other Religions.

The beautiful America can only return when these Demon-possessed culture-despoilers are destroyed. Then all will be good again. 

Belief in that Narrative shows why "Owning The Libs" is so visceral, so central and necessary, to the political Right. It's the logical culmination of forty years of resentment and hatred. That Narrative only leads out a one-lane gravel road to the open pit in that nameless field. 

The issues Trump had campaigned on waxed and waned ...What remained was the dark energy he unleashed... Trump’s people still talked about freedom, but they meant blood and soil. Their nationalism was like the ethno-nationalisms on the rise in Europe ... Trump abused every American institution ... and his people cheered. Nothing excited them like owning the libs.

_________________________

Owning The Libs Is A Team Sport

People can write opinion pieces calling out lying and bullying by the political Right, but it makes no difference. The Left focuses on the historical record. It's important to make certain choices, and make speeches which will be quoted by historians seventy years on. But it will not matter. 

We're in 2022; American democracy is a store that's being mismanaged and looted right in front of us. It's clear we must act.  It shouldn't even be a question.

The Rightist crazies can't be criticized into better behavior by waving "the historical record" at them. McConnell's corruption; Gaetz' degeneracy; Cawthorn's delusions about orgies and flirting with threats of civil war, Boebert's intimations of physical violence; Greene's barely coherent lying; Alito's shrieking hatred in his scribblings. The end of Roe is just the beginning of Owning The Libs.

The lies and pure hatred broadcast by Limbaugh, by the Murdochs through their hand-picked talking heads, for forty years, will be in "the historical record". But for each of them, what they've done are badges of honor. They're Owning The Libs.

Anything is permitted in Owning The Libs -- including reducing human rights to a joke, sedition and treason. It is all about the naked use of power. Consider: There was no penalty for their support of a coup on January 6th. There will be no punishment for them now, or ever. 

_______________________

When I first heard the phrase, 'Owning The Libs', it immediately conjured up an image of Slavery -- of another human being treated as chattel. "Owning" something implies possession, domination, the right as an Owner to use your property in whatever way you wish. What it's job is; what it is permitted, and how it will be punished. And that brought an immediate, up-from-the-gut response: Fuck this shit. 

____________________

"You Made Me Do This"

Last Fall, I saw a video of an anti-masker, anti-vaxxer, holding a list of names and addresses of the local Board of Supervisors in his area, shouting at a small rally. 

The Board of Supes was preparing to vote on a mask mandate. The anti-vaxxer held up a list of names, and was literally screeching (I'll paraphrase), "We know where you [Supervisors] live! We're going to be at your front door -- we're coming for you!" Asked what would happen if the Board voted for a mandate, he shouted back, "Civil war!! Civil war!! Get your guns!!"

This isn't some extremist, Fringe element, like John Birchers of the 1960's, spouting rhetoric that will never go further than a street corner. America's Right wing is pushing for confrontation.  They want a final confrontation -- bloody, retributive; like a battle on the plains of Armageddon. 

America's political Right is a madman with a gun, who keeps taking one step towards you, then another and another -- all while screaming Don't get any closer!! I'm warnin' ya!! I told ya to stop comin' at me!! 

And, when he finally shoots you, he'll say See what you did?? You Libs made me do it!! Told ya!! Told ya!!

_____________________

Peter Wehner, Republican New York Times contributor who wrote on November 5, 2016 about his predictions of Trump's presidency, appeared on PBS' News Hour on the eve of Biden's 2021 inauguration, to observe:

We're in an epistemic crisis... there has been an assault on truth and on reality, that [The Leader] has led, and his party was a part of, and his Base was a part of. We now live in a world where we don't just have policy differences -- we're living in different moral universes, different epistemological universes; we don't have a common set of facts, even a common reality. And when you lose that, it's very difficult to put it back together again... 

But if you don't... a free country can't continue. Ultimately, your politics breaks down and your society breaks down... there's no ability to have dialogue. [The Leader] did this... it wasn't just the lies; it was this intentional assault on reality, which ...spreads a kind of disorientation in the public that has tremendously damaging and long-term effects.

Wehner's opinions ignore the development of the American Right since 1974 toward authoritarianism, 'christian' Dominionism and proto-fascism. It also ignores the devolution of both Republican and Democratic parties.  Because the counterpart to this long howl about the Right is the state of America's Left.

__________________________________

That something will happen seems inevitable. It's what the Right is being told -- by the Murdochs' talking heads, by Trump, by Rightist politicians -- that something must happen, after The Steal. 

It reminds me of a monument, erected by the nazis in the 1930's at Germany's border with Danzig, with an inscription -- "Remember, Germans, What Blind Hatred Has Stolen from Thee" -- which seems to sum up the basic attitude of America's political and cultural Right.

___________________________

Ian Welsh  sees the end result of all this as a collapse. He noted last year, when Texas instituted the 'Heartbeat Act' restricting abortion, and asking citizens to inform on each other for potential financial gain: 

"[enactment of the Texas anti-abortion law] is the thin edge: what’s coming to Texas now will be coming to you very soon. Roe vs. Wade is doomed; Republican Trumpists are taking over the party apparatus to ensure the next coup attempt succeeds, and Democrats are doing nothing to stop any of this... 

"The best case scenario is probably the US splitting peacefully. That will be unfortunate for those left-behind, but it beats the entire country falling, or a civil war."

_____________________________

Kleiner Mann, Was Nun?

America has never been as divided a country since the last time we took up arms against each other. The Right depends on stoking their outrage. There is an actual war, in Ukraine; and after four-plus years of Rightist rule, two-plus years of Pandemic, we are in a wartime of the spirit in America, and on that ground inside ourselves is where it will be fought.

If the future holds a Supreme Court removing Constitutional guarantees to personal liberty and privacy -- if there are elections skewed by obvious fraud, orchestrated by Rightist state governments -- if the demonization of others continues from the Right... then we will have a more violent future, an almost ceaseless negativity.

The future holds events which will come for us, whether we want them or not. How we pay attention to them, how we behave towards each other and the choices we make, may be more important than before. 

I'm deeply grieved for the state of my country. I'm not a nationalist; can surely be accused of naivety -- but Immerhin -- in spite of everything, believe in the possibility of a better world, based on compassion and justice.

I once had the opportunity to ask the Dalai Lama two questions. The second one was: If the essence of the Buddha's teaching could be summed up in one idea, what would it be? He thought for just a moment, then replied, "Just, 'Do your best.' "

I took the Lama's observation to suggest that Existence is too complicated for any person to say why they are, and what the end results of our thoughts and actions will be. Be kind; act with compassion; do the best you can, moment to moment. It seems simple, but is hard. That works for me.

As a comparative comment on purpose and values, I could have asked Albert Camus a similar question.

Camus did not believe in a god, an afterlife, or a higher purpose to existence. He believed the fact of humankind was all the justification necessary for what Buddhists would call Right Action, and for making a demand for Justice -- for a better world. And that works for me, too.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. [That] ... it has no justification but man -- hence he must be saved if we want to save the idea we have of life.

With your scornful smile you will ask me: What do you mean by 'saving man'? And with all my being I shout to you that I mean not mutilating him, and yet giving a chance to the justice that man alone can conceive.

(Resistance, Rebellion and Death)

_____________________________

MEHR MIT Im Dämmerung Ich Hat Gesehen Die Hühner Fur Ein Landung Zu Kommen

Inequality and polarization have not been this high since the nineteenth century. Democrats are certain that if Donald Trump is reelected, American democracy will not survive. 

Republicans are equally certain that if Trump loses, radical socialists will seize the wealth of elites and distribute it to undeserving poor and minorities, forever destroying the economy of the United States. 

Both sides are also convinced that the other side intends to change the democratic ‘rules of the game’ in ways that will make it impossible for them to compete effectively in future elections.

-- Mathematician Peter Turchin (quoted in "Ginsburg's Passing May Worsen The Crisis Of Our Democracy"; Max Boot, WaPo September 19, 2020)

________________________________