Independence

This year's national birthday celebration seemed very...troubling.

It was hard to wave a flag and celebrate the nation's government that has spent the past half-year speed-running every fucking thing that provoked the white guys who mattered in the British colonies to piss and moan about their government to the point of rebellion:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

What the actual fuck has Donnie Dollhands done that his counterpart George of Hanover didn't? Substituted his immigration Gestapo for "foreign Mercenaries"? Yeah, right.

Is there any particular reason that anyone not completely in the basket of deplorables would WANT to be part of that shit? The 1776 crowd would have rebel against his ochre-colored ass as they did against the king of their day, and we owe it to them to rebel against the modern version of German George.

Fuck that 1776 noise; there's an old school 1789 solution to King Trump, and rather than bands and fireworks, using it on him and a whole bunch of the crowd of MAGAts clustered around his golden throne seems like a much more joyous use of the day we mark the founding of this nation.

Because the country I served, the country I believe in, is the mirror image of the white man's neighborhood Trump and his the Trumpers believe in.

It's the one where anyone can be "American". No matter who they are, no matter where they were born, no matter what language they speak. All that's required is a fervent, passionate belief in the ideals of this country; equal justice under law, the republic that the foundational documents - ALL the documents, including the important changes wrought by the Civil War amendments that define the Second Republic from the slave-holding First - promises.

Ken ("Popehat") White has a moving story about what that means - or meant - in practice:  

"The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not...I am just more acutely aware that doing better will not be easy and may not be peaceful, and that doing it will require fighting people just as dedicated to low and ugly values, and that we may lose.

America’s history is the story of people — like those Filipino-Americans — who had much less and faced far more daunting circumstances and kept fighting. It would be shameful to give up that fight. The bullies may win, but they will not win by default, and they will not win without a bloody battle."

The thing is...I'm old. Dying slowly of a neurological disease. Tired of "fighting", fighting what is now the weight of my own government. Tired of re-fighting battles I thought we'd won and settled long ago.

Last night sort of reminded me how ridiculous this nonsense all is.

Several years ago the City of Portland passed an ordnance prohibiting personal fireworks during the summer. It made total sense; we're highly flammable in July. Turning thousands of knuckleheads loose with pyro? NOT a good idea.

For years the family used to go north to Washington - where "projectile"-type fireworks were legal - and haul back a load of mortars, rockets, and roman candles to fire off in the blacktop playground behind Astor Elementary School. 

It was a critical part of "fun" on the 4th, history and patriotism be damned. It was all about the pyro.

But the City was right; it's a damn dumb idea. So they banned it.

Well, turns out that here, in the neighborhood around my new condo in the Lower Depths of St. Johns, we laugh at your silly fireworks ban, Portland. The firefight was in full swing moments after sundown.

At which point, sitting out on my porch to admire the lawlessness, I discovered two things:

1) Someone in the demo site down at the end of the street had some really BIG explosives. Either a seriously big-ass mortar or just the old "M-80" quarter-stick dynamite-type charges we used to use to blow our fingers off as kids in the Sixties. Big. Loud. I mean seriously loud.

So interspersed with the "regular" fireworks every so often there'd be this ginormous flash and BOOM!! when one of these things would go off, rattling the windows and shaking the tree branches.

And...

2) Someone else had set his car alarm, including the fucking motion detector.

Which went off every time Person #1's bombs would explode.

Which meant that all evening we were serenaded with a fusillade of smaller pyro, a massive blast, and then the whooping of the fucking Car Alarm of Freedom.

"Boom-crackle-boom-pop-pop-crackle-boom-BOOM!!!whoopwhoopwhoop!"

It that doesn't say something about the State of This Goddamn Union right now, I can't think of a better.

 

Damn it. I miss my country.

Game recognize game

Now.

Then.

These numbnuts are deeply ignorant, profoundly stupid, and utterly incompetent. It's their good luck, and the rest of our misfortunes, that their MAGAt party is even more ignorant and stupid and cares nothing for competence so long as they get the performative spite and malice they crave.

And there is no remedy for them in the Constitutional system. No checks. No balances. Nothing.

The United States is now a Stupid Fascist state in fact, if not in name, and if We the People don't want that, well...history shows the path from autocracy to republicanism is ugly, brutal, and very often futile at least in the short and even medium term. 

The Revolution of 1789 led to military dictatorship by 1800 and decades of ruinous war. The Revolution of 1917 led to partisan dictatorship by 1921 and decades of brutal immiseration. Our own revolution was only prevented from a similar fate by a unique combination of individual probity and isolation from neighboring Great Powers.

So, no. There is no Good Way past this disaster.

The trope of 1776 is that roughly a third of the then-American colonies was Loyalist, a third were rebels, and the remaining third just wanted to keep their heads down. Logistical difficulties, strategic incoherence, and Great Power rivalry with France ensured the rebellion became revolution and overthrow of the ruling order.

We certainly have ruling incoherence and economic difficulty from the fascists.

But we have no Power to come to our aid, and the internal division is even less favorable; the fascists run from about 30% - the true hardcore MAGAts - to 40% and the "heads-down" lumpen herdbeasts are another 30-40%. The police and military will obey The Chief Executive; there is no competing "Garde National" or rebellious militias to opposed regime gunfire with rebel gunfire.

We are, in fact...

 

I honestly have no words of hope or encouragement. I can't figure out a way to overthrow these sonsofbitches short of actual violent rebellion, and history also shows how often that goes badly for the rebels.

The time for phone banking and postcard writing is past.

But I can't stand the idea of simply bending the knee to these people. Is it time for building IEDs? How can that ever work? 

I can only stand, shaking with rage, as my country devolves before my burning eyes.

A letter to my sister

My little sis called me today. Left a voicemail about TrumpFuckery, and in particular mentioned Ukraine.

I just didn't feel like spending half an hour moaning and pissing about all that, so I wrote her this email:

 "The reality is that we’re screwed for at LEAST the next two years, and that assumes that these fucksticks’ idiot rampage fucks things up bad enough that even the idiot public gets pissed enough to vote Democratic. Which is far from a given; it’s just as likely that there’s a third party nonsense (which means the GOP wins) or they just don’t vote at all (…so GOP wins…).

 

The Trumpenscum has it all; all three branches, the press licking their taint…all we can do is try and delay and go to court - and that’s a weak reed given the SCOTUS Furious Five - or the streets, and that’s both risky and dangerous, because Fatso WILL invoke the Insurrection Act and become a Fuhrer in fact as opposed to in practice.

 

So everything and everyone we non-scum humans care about - parks, public spaces in general, social safety nets, modern medicine..? All we will have is what they don’t want or just don't want to trash because they’re fucking trash people who are stealing perfectly good oxygen and that's what fucking oxygen-thieves do.

 

Ukraine? Fuck. If the EU doesn’t step up they’re doomed. Palestine? Doomed. Taiwan? If Xi is willing to pay off Fatso? Doomed.

 

I’ll see if I can find the link, but Amanda Marcotte has a piece interviewing someone who’s deep-dived into the wingnut bible-bangers. (It's here).

 

The bottom line? It’s a cult, they’re fanatics, and there’s no reaching them; it’s culture war as ACTUAL war. There’s no going back any more than there was for the Hitler Youth dying in the streets of Berlin or the kamikaze taking off from Kyushu in August 1945. 

 

I’m not exaggerating; we cannot “beat” these people using democracy. They see that as race and religious suicide. They must be destroyed…and that means real, actual, no-shit Civil War. And I don’t see “our side” as ready and willing to do that. I don’t blame them! That’s horrendous!

 

But that’s where we are.

 

I'm reminded of the passage in Tolkien where Frodo is pissing and moaning about how fucked it is that this whole “ring” shit has to happen on HIS watch.

 

Gandalf replies, no shit, Sherlock, really? Word up Frodo, he says; that’s what EVERYONE in this situation thinks. It sucks. It just sucks. 

 

But it is what it is and all you and I and everyone else can do is suck it up. 

 

And so we do. 

 

I'm not saying "Stop fighting". Even if you're doomed to lose, you have to fight. Even if it means you die, if what you're fighting for is worth it, you fight - and die - as hard as you can. Every Nazi you kill in Poland before you die is one Nazi that can't invade France, can't invade Russia, can't defend Normandy or Italy or Berlin.

 

But that doesn't make the dying any easier. 

As we used to say over at Intel Dump:

 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF!

A bas Citoyen Trump

 

Well, at least we know who "We the People" are...

In a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity the American public has chosen to elect a gibbering idiot who pines for the Gilded Age and dreams of Hitlerian policies towards everyone he hates - and he's a good hater - and his clutch of little Nazis who will take an axe to the 20th Century to ensure that no drag queen ever reads "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to second graders again.

To the extent they can, the GOP will root out workplace and environmental regulations and undo the already too-threadbare social "safety net". They will increase the already too-high economic inequality to ensure we become ever more an oligarchy.

Their open lunatic anti-vaxxer, anti-"Obamacare" crowd will undo public health and make us sicker and weaker.

In 1933 the German public had endured war and starvation, hyperinflation, militias fighting in the street, the punitive effects of Versailles...and STILL did not vote in the Nazis.

What's our excuse? That the cutie in the corner booth might be a transwoman in a cocktail frock?

That the roofers next door might be here illegally?

At this point all I can do is echo this comment from the election thread over at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

"The bottom line is that there are more fucking assholes in America than anyone wants to acknowledge.

More immature, misogynist, racist, greedy, myopic fucking assholes than anyone is comfortable admitting to; more really rotten, selfish human beings who choose hate over love, exclusion over inclusion and "fuck you, I got mine" over any sense of humanity.

It's time to face the facts. The fucking rot is wider and deeper than any of us want to admit, and it's growing.

It all makes me want to puke, and the worst of it is that I honestly don't know how to combat it all. All I DO know is that we must all keep fighting, because to capitulate is to descend into madness."

The madness is upon us.

We're in a Project 2025 World now.

Updated 11/6 p.m.: I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...
81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020. 
Only 67 million bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.
Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?

 Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If everyone who voted for Biden turned out yesterday...

Well..?

Intermission II: Weird Ass Boogaloo

 To follow up on the political part of my last post...

The Lawyers, Guns, & Money gang are having a good laugh over the latest Trump weirdness story:

"My take here, not that it matters, is that Trump is now in some sort of twilight mental world in which his lifetime habit of bullshitting — saying stuff that he doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether it’s true or not — is blending with his age-related cognitive deterioration, to generate stories like this, that Trump more or less believes are true at the moment he’s confabulating them, to the extent he believes literally anything, which to be fair is not much."

In the post they dredge up an old something I remembered about Tubby because it ran head-on into my military history fetish. 

This:

This weird fake "monument" supposedly dates back to the Oughts when Tubby bought the Northern Virginia golf club within which he set up this goofball thing.

IIRC when the story broke during his 2016 campaign Tubby's apologists tried to spin this as commemorating the 1861 "Battle of Ball's Bluff", one of the many early-war Union debacles. See, the narrative ran, that's what he means! Take him seriously but not literally!

One teensy little problem with that.

The two places - the battle site and the golf course - are nowhere even close. The red rectangle in the upper left is Ball's Bluff, the smaller square in the right center is this goofy plaque:

Ball's Bluff is over ten miles upriver from the golf course.

The essence of a good lie is that it has just enough proximity to some hard truth(s) as to be at least remotely plausible. You have to squint hard to see the lie.

The essence of good bullshit is similar; it can't be completely ridiculous. It has to have at least some elements of what sound like possibilities. If it's just flying donkeys? No, that's not effective bullshitting.

That's what I don't get about the MAGAt cult.

I have a certain wry appreciation for a clever liar, or an accomplished bullshitter, or a cunning grifter.

It takes a certain amount of wit, inventiveness, and brass to be one or all of them.

This stuff? The lies and bullshit that Tubby spews?

It's not even trying.

It's lazy. It's idiotic. It's childish.

History (and literature) is full of people who led others through a mixture of wit, nerve, inspiration, and brass...mixed in with genuine ideals and goals as well as some inspirational bullshit and even some outright lies. 

It's the old "Saint Elizabeth of Hungary" thing - you start with a lie and then make it true.

History is also full of ignorant liars and bad bullshitters.

The outcomes of following the leads of people like that are usually...very, very bad. Children's Crusade bad.

I get that there's a bunch of angry people who want an angry person to lead them against the people they're angry at.

But this joker?

Seriously?

THIS guy?

He can't even fucking lie right.

 

And if they give him to us again in November, we're gonna find out just precisely how wrong that will be.

Thoughts (and prayers)

Two opposing (or at least offsetting) things can both be true:

Political violence is lethal to democratic republics. Regardless of the target or the cause. Assassinating or assaulting the worst idiotic would-be tinpot dictator (coughTrumpcough) is no better than murdering Abe Lincoln. 

The bottom line is that if the cost of political disagreement is lethal, the wages of disagreement will perforce become violent. No sensible person will continue to oppose lethal force with reasoned argument. Bullets will drive out ballots and campaigns will become "campaigns" in the military meaning of the word.

But.

There's a bright line of fault to this sordid little drama, and it runs direct as a bullet towards the faction so now loudly aggrieved and self-righteous about it.

For generations that "conservative" faction has done everything it can to bring its candidate to this place.

It has single-mindedly fought every sensible effort to prevent people like this shooter from getting to that rooftop (synagogue, grocery store, concert venue, nightclub...) with the tool (military-grade firearms) he needed. 

It pranced around the halls of  legislation sporting adorable little auto-rifle pins on its lapels. Which "well regulated militia" did our boy belong to? Remind me..?

It has doggedly fought to turn our politics into a zero-sum battleground by turning its political opponents into mortal enemies. It has fled from "my distinguished opponent" to "scum", "animals", "traitors", "un-American". It has embraced its country's enemies, foreign and domestic, to win allies against its domestic rivals.

It has made violence the language of its "debate".

Once you've done that, once you've created the climate of anger and hate, once you've mobilized the freikorps of Threepers and Proud Boys, once you've declared open season on your political foes, you've effectively removed the firewall between political speech and political violence.

You've lost your right to be pissy when that violence comes for your guy.

The GOP got us here.

If we allow it, they will take us even further. Look up "Project 2025" if you want to be horrified for the head-on collision of venality, autocracy, and theocracy that the "conservative" faction is jonesing for in this country, and the actual violence it will do to millions of people here.

So this ridiculous drama changes nothing.

Tubby, stitches in his ear or no, is still our Sulla and his faction is our enemy.

And if We the People don't want to be ruled by that faction our path is clear, and it leads to the polling place in November.

It's up to us. As Jim Wright likes to say; if we want a better nation, we need to be better citizens.

Today's Wordle: Who Said It?

 “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections...They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy (the nation and it's promise)...the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within." 

Trump? Or Adolf?

"Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of...youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?"

Trump? Or Adolf?

We Report. 

You Decide...whether you want the promise of this nation...

...or this madman.

Dictator perpetuo

 First. Sorry for the long absence. No excuses. I'm just a bad blogger.

Second, I'll try and do better.

Third...this is not really a new post. 

It's just the latest in a long string of posts that began back in 2007 - Jesus wept, that's sixteen years ago! - with this discussion of how I kept seeing echoes of the Late Roman Republic in the then-U.S.:

"A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company."

 My prediction for the coming years was...dark:

"Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.

And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark."

From my vantage point here, though, I don't think I was fucking dark enough.

Because I didn't anticipate this magoo:

That a massive plurality of the American public would vote for, and a series of relict institutions - that the Framers crafted to continue to ensure the political mastery of fellow rich guys long after their deaths - would empower, a sleazy nitwit real estate grifter?

Yeah, well...who the fuck would have wanted to anticipate that?

And yet. 

Here we are.

And here's where we're going:

Fucking pay attention to this. 

It's important, and it's not a coincidence or a just a casual aside or a mistake or some random Elmo outgassing. The pissy little Afrikaaner rich kid isn't just bloviating. He's a reliable peek into the wingnut MAGAt id fever-swamps, and this is 1) what they want, and 2) what they think they have with Tubby.

They see him hanging their enemies - and that's me, by the way - from his long red tie the way Sulla's troops hacked and hung their way through Sulla's enemies.

So it's a good moment to talk about ol' Sulla.

Bret Devereaux did a terrific look at the old bastard. I direct you to him; it's all worth the read but here's his nut graf:

"The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter."

And here's mine: Trump has already become our Sulla because he's gotten away with jumping the guardrails. 

The guardrails are already smashed. The attempt to seize power has moved one entire party to become Sulla-ites; they would choose a Caesar rather than accept defeat, so the arrival of Caesar is now only a matter of time and individual, because the GOP is willing to take power through illiberal means rather than accept any sort of United States that doesn't conform to their already-reactionary vision.

We the "liberals", the not-Sulla plurality, are still trying to pretend that these fucking MAGAts are "our fellow citizens" who just have some teensy policy differences with the rest of us, rather than a blood-hungry mob who will kill to seize power rather than consider the horrifying possibility of the existence of a ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

The only hope of avoiding that would have been that in January 2021 the entire US public and the political leaders of all varieties to have 1) turned decisively and violently - in legal terms - against Tubby's attempt at Doing a Sulla, and 2) after impeaching him prosecuting him, convicting him, and jailing him and everyone who helped him try and overturn a popular election loss.

It would have been the equivalent of the Senate and the People of Rome rising against Sulla in 83 BCE when he forced the Senate to appoint him dictator in defiance of the mos maiorum and the traditional forms of dictatorship that had worked for Rome during the Early and Middle Republic.

Would that have worked for the Romans?

Given that Sulla's troopers were out in the Field of Mars butchering thousands of people as he gently suggested that the Roman governance might be well entrusted to him?

Probably not.

But it'd have at least driven home what a chancy throw trying to Do a Sulla was.

Now?

The only way past this mess is for the Republicans to do the same; not just refuse to support but to massively, violently reject Sulla Trump and all and everything he stands for. 

Hmmmm. Let's see. How's that going, again?

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

Find Out?

Two things about Tubby finally running into the long arm of the law:

1) the Stormy payoff might possibly be the LEAST illegal thing he’s ever done, because…

2) Everyone who is familiar with the joker from his real estate days in NYC knows he’s crooked as a dog’s leg and mobbed-up. He’s just a sleazy little development hustler and always has been.

That means nothing to the GQP/his cult. They didn’t care before and they don’t care now. He’s their crook, and his cons are their cons.

No, the real question I’d ask is “will this change the REST of the country, particularly the mainstream media?”. So far they’ve treated Tubby like any other Republican, meaning when he lies they report the lie rather than simply noting “he lied again” and when he crimes they report it as just a thing rather than "he crimed again".

IF – and that’s s big if and not a given – this gives the press the chance to actually report that this crooked shitbird is a) a crooked shitbird who is b) likely to be elected president again? 

Maybe suddenly the idiot “center” will wake up and turn out against him.

I’m not betting that way.

But at least this is an opportunity.

Wait...

“Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nicknamed MTG, isn’t afraid to share her opinions, no matter how intense and in-your-face they are. She sits down with Lesley Stahl this Sunday on 60 Minutes."

Okay, we're fucked.

Why we can't have nice things.

So my "news" is alive with "revelations" that the tax outfit that worked for the Trump Organization for a decade or more has bailed.

Yawn.

Here's the thing; all this sketchy Trump shit has been right out there for decades. 

He was a joke in the Eighties when he was bankrupting casinos and running as Veep for looney third party candidates. 

That, and he was an obvious ginormous asshole personally. 

He was a nitwit then. Spy magazine was the one that christened him the "short-fingered vulgarian" and everyone who didn't have to depend on him for income laughed. He was a punchline. 

He was also mobbed-up - mind you, it's hard to work in Manhattan real estate without being mobbed-up, but Trump was a freak even then by being out and proud about it. He was too much of an asshole to even hide it or have the social grace to pretend to be ashamed about it.

But that was Trump; lots of people knew him, lots of people despised him as a worthless, idiotic, asshole-ish if supposedly-"rich" dirtbag.

But now he’s got a third of the country willing to commit treason for him.

 

How fucked up is that? 

 

In a weird way I can get being in thrall to a hero conqueror like Julius Caesar or a charismatic maniac like Adolf Hitler, or a grim tyrant like Josef Stalin. 

 

But to be barking mad enough to go to war, to kill yourself with COVID, to try and overthrow your republic for Donald Fucking Trump? 

 

That’s like being willing to die for the Trix rabbit. Or a box of granola. 

 

That’s just so far beyond “stupid” as to change the meaning of the word “stupid”. 

 

I just don’t get it.

 

I mean...I get that the average GOP voter is all about "owning the libs". 

 

(That's kinda all they have at this point. Who's gonna vote for more COVID, or another tax cut for plutocrats?)

 

Problem is that if the result is that Trump is out there “leading” you in "owning the libs" a person with anything more than a room temperature IQ should have their bullshit alarms shrieking like a horn concerto. 

 

Buying ANYthing Trump markets is the political equivalent of dining at The E.coli Buffet.

 

Of course, these nitwits have been letting Rush Limbaugh take a dump in their skulls for the past thirty years, so there's that.

 

But that's kinda the problem. We're infested with these bucketheads; damn near a third of the public. That's enough to be a problem in and of itself, but in an open society like ours, where it takes a small handful of assholes to utterly fuck up the public space for everyone else?

That's lethal. There's no way a civilized society can work with that level of dysfunction.

 

Movement conservatism is a repulsive shitpile of Gilded Age plutocracy, Jesus humping, racist bull crap and magical thinking. But when somebody like Barry Goldwater was the figurehead you could, looking at it, at least pretend that an otherwise normal human could buy into it.

 

But when your god is fucking Trump?

 

You’re a turnip-grade moron who shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.

And yet...there they all are. All the Second Amendment Solutions in the world won't solve them, and short of an extinction-level genocide event, what else you gonna do..?

Nope.

WAJSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

So since I respect all Internet traditions here's a picture of a cat.

King of Spades and King of Fools

I'm sure I don't need to go into depth about my opinion of the idiot who claims credit for this.

Even so, this nitwit screed is a morass of ignorance and ignorant foolishness profound even for Tubby.

But it points up something that I'd like to briefly revisit that we discussed here way back in 2008, the myth of "Good Ol' Marse Robert".

The second link above points out the many examples of Lee as no better than his treasonous peers as a citizen, as well as no better as a man than many other Americans of his time about race.

But it's the myth of Lee the Military Genius that obsesses Tubby here, and just reminds us that the Artist of the Deal was always a conman and a grifter that knew and knows nothing about anything.

Lee was an excellent tactical commander, and generally decent up to the operational level (although his bizarre obsession with dividing his forces bit him in the ass both in 1862 and 1863 and led to his defeats in Maryland and Pennsylvania).

But above that?

His strategic assessment of the Southern means and ends helped doom the Confederacy. Yeah, he was that bad.

Granted, he had a lot of help from that military nimrod Jeff Davis, but as the rebel equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff it was his job to advise his political masters of the best way to win independence. 

His advice helped Davis & Co. choose battlefield victory as the means even though those means were always doomed - due to the Union economic and demographic strength, due to the naval mismatch, and due to the political freight of chattel slavery - and had Lee been the strategic genius of Tubby's worm-eaten brain he'd have recognized that.

Fortunately for this nation, he didn't.

Again, I expect little more from Trump. He's simply a bullying fool, a racist, a conman, and an ignoramus.

But this little screed, as misinformed, incoherent, and bizarre as it is, reminds us that Tubby's only real political genius, his dark magisterium, such as it is, is to find the bully, the fool, the racist, the conman, and the ignoramus lurking in us and usher them, blinking and stretching out into the light.

Still here

“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

That quote - often attributed to Mark Twain, by the way, instead of Clarence Darrow who was the actual speaker - is a pretty tidy summation of my reaction to the sad news that the official Donald J. Trump blog is deader'n Ashli Babbitt.

Word, Tubby; as the George Washington character says in Hamilton: Governing is easy. Blogging is harder.

I get it. The long-form blog is dead (he says, as he gazes out over the vast herds of Substack grazing on the lush green lucre of "voluntary contributor"). Nobody wants to read your stupid thoughts, random person.

Nobody wants to read MY thoughts, that's for sure; the traffic on this site has dropped to nothing even from the halcyon days of 2018, when a post would routinely get triple figures in views. Now I'm lucky if I can break 100 pageviews, and even that hasn't happened since the Bay of Pigs post back in April (all the "battles" posts garner looks more than anything else)...

...except for this one:

This is an obscure thing I tossed off in 2011 that included recounting this weird dream I had where my in-laws were Korean; the title is Internet-Hangul for "What dreams may come". 

The only thing I can figure for that bizarre spike in January 2020 - it got over 2,000 looks between the end of 2019 and 1/31/20 - is that someone or someones in Korea Googled the phrase and came across that post instead. It looks like someone found it in October-November 2018, where the pageviews jump from a handful to several hundred and then rise steadily until November 2019. Suddenly they spike from there until the end of January 2020, and then drop back off.

So my guess is that for about a couple of months I was a meme in South Korea.

Who knew?

Whatever. The point is, that it's been almost 15 years, and over 2,000 posts, and I'm still here, still doing the old-school (seriously? Who would ever have thought in the Oughts that here in the Twenties we'd be calling blogs and blogging "old-school"? Jesus wept!) blogging thing, unlike Orange Foolius who couldn't hack it for a month.

Just to celebrate? Since I revere all Internet Traditions?

Here's some cat pictures.

That's the Small Cat, desperately hoping that a squirrel or bird will break the window and hurl itself into her mouth.

Dueling kitties, trying to figure out how to duck the early-summer heat (it was well up into the nineties in mid-week) whist wearing a fur coat you cannot remove.

Sometimes you just can't escape the heat, so you just conk out and accept that your furry ass is whipped.

Drachma in cooler times, loafing on the deck railing.

They're good cats, or, rather, they're good at being cats. And I supposed that's enough, when you're a cat.

I have more to say, but I've got to run and will be back later today to say it.

Point is...I'm still here. And there's something to be said for that.

The clouds return

 

 Today the United States Senate voted that Donald Trump did not do what he very visibly and obviously did between late October 2020 and early January 2021; betray his oath of office as President to faithfully execute the law and support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

To me this has the feel of the point in watching one of those historical dramatizations where the characters have come to a decision you know is going to end badly. The conspirators have chosen to go ahead with the plot that you know will end in betrayals, prosecutions, hangings, and beheadings. The commander has made a decision you know is based on bad intelligence, or is because of his hubris or pure stubbornness, that will result in the deaths of thousands of his own troops.

It was years ago that I wrote a whole series of posts comparing my nation today with the Rome of classical times, noting that we seem insistent on repeating many of the same foolish mistakes the Romans of that period did, and with much the same likely result - the end of functional democracy and the establishment of permanent minority rule.

I've been pretty merciless in castigating American "conservatives" (who are, by the way, in no sense "conservative" but are radical reactionaries) for being the driving force behind this and, as this vote shows, they still are.

(What this also proves, in a way I didn't begin to anticipate before the past year, is the extent to which the GOP has become the American Party of KimIlSungism-KimJongIlism. Turns out that we aren't even dignified with the bad examples of Rome. We're fucking North Korea with Pizza Huts and Chevy dealerships.)

So.

Now what?

When I talked about how impossible it is to "talk" to Republicans now it turns out that it's not because they're some sort of rigid ideologues. As far as I can tell the current Republican orthodoxy consists of a bizarre farrago of culture-war nonsense ("cancel culture", "wokeism", anti-"nanny state"-ism, and "personal freedom" that seems to largely consist of violent rejection of common sense like reducing stupid firearm-related behavior and public health precautions during a pandemic) with pure delusion about finance (stuff like "trickle-down economics", the Laffer Curve, taxation-as-theft...that sort of thing).

But the real break-point appears to be that the GOP is now the Party of Kim Trump Q, a personality cult, overrun with bizarre conspiracies and paranoia, devoted to owning the libs even if the cost is its own misery and impoverishment.

There's no hope there.

But what about the rest of the US political world?

The Democratic Party - the only remaining party that the US has allowed itself - has been a willing accomplice in our neo-Roman imperial foolishness. It has either acquiesced, or encouraged, the increasing inequity of wealth in our return to the Gilded Age.

It has been willing to go along with the hollowing out of the American economy, shoving millions of people into precarious "gig" jobs and helped "business" to close out by downsizing, automating, and offshoring the sort of living-wage/good-benefit/stable-pension jobs that helped create the white middle class after WW2. 

It has blinked at, or encouraged, foolish imperial wars.

It has been unwilling or unable to challenge our headlong plunge towards the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum.

But - given today's proof that the entire GOP has gone full juche and the utter desolation of actual sane political ideas in the American Right - if there IS to be a hope of avoiding a collapse-of-the-Republic-fate it will have to come from what passes for the "Left" in US politics.

Can it? And, if so, how?

So that's what we're going to talk about after this.

But you'll have to give me a moment or two. Right now I'm too depressed at what today says about the State of our Union.

Talking to the hand

 One thing that has come up repeatedly in discussion of the current state of the Second Civil War - in the "cold war" phase, but, still... - is "how do you back the public away from the abyss" or, as Ael likes to put it, how do "...you start (really) talking to them."

I'll say upfront - I'm all in on jaw-jaw as better than war-war.

My point, and our problem, is that I don't see how there's a "jaw-jaw" that works with the 30% of the US public that's currently stroking their Trump flag and dreaming of revanche.

Back in 2016, when Trump was the frontrunner for the GOP, I characterized it's and his "platform" (as much as there was anything there other than Trump's million lies about criminal Mexicans and his beautiful health care and Infrastructure Week "plans") as fluffing plutocracy and tossing red meat on social issues to the Base.

I think we've seen that proven beyond a scintilla of doubt over the past four years. 

Trump's approval level and the 2020 popular vote suggests that about a third of the US public is hardcore Republican. That tracks with the base-level "crazification factor" of 2008 - about 27% of the public still "liked" Dick Cheney by that point. 

If you're all in for Darth Cheney after eight years of the Dubya Shitshow? You're a hardcore Republican.

So, now that we've seen how many of us they are, and what they are and what they want, what can we do to "really talk to them"? How many will talk back?

Let's take them as the groups in which they present themselves.

The Plutocrats.

The keystone of the GOP Archway to the Gilded Age are the fatcats. The 1%. The plutocrats and wanna-be oligarchs of business and finance. The people that the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" of 2017 were written for.

These folks were the ones that were shaved by FDR back in the Thirties and had to bend the knee because an infuriated public had the examples of the Soviet and Italian revolutions to look to, and were at least potentially likely to go to communist or fascist revolution if the US government hadn't done something to ease the brutality of the Dickensian/Randian crony capitalist society of 1929.

They hated that haircut, and have worked tirelessly and successfully to largely reverse it.

The Left has nothing to offer these people except safety from the popular mob. And the current lack of danger from the Left - there's nothing remotely resembling the weird coalition of muckraking journalists, militant (typically socialist or even communist) labor, and political strength ranging from Huey Long every-man-a-king "populist" to noblesse oblige aristos like FDR - means that the "danger" there is nonexistent and the need for "safety" is, as well.

The Rich have neutered "populism" by monkeywrenching the delusions and racism of white people. And since they have nothing to fear from the pop mob they have no real reason to compromise or even talk to the Left. They've succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the aristos that wrote the Constitution, so why give ground now?

The way arrant nonsense like "trickle-down economics" and "tax cuts create jobs" have succeeded with the public just confirm their wisdom. They're not going to fold unless they lose the bulk of their coalition, of which the next segment we'll talk about are

The Idealogues.

I'm not sure to what extent "true believers" make up any significantly large group within the Republican Party or the US Right in general. To the extent they do I'd have to say that they're living embodiment of Chief's Third Law of Republican Politics: "Any sufficiently ridiculous Republican idea is indistinguishable from magic."

(The other two are "Nobody went broke betting on the stupidity of the Republican voter" and "Never give a Republican the benefit of the doubt.")

I mean...you can't really believe ludicrous stuff like the contents of Atlas Shrugged or the Laffer Curve or the Ledeen Doctrine. Well, I suppose you can, but you'd be such a complete wanker so as to be unable to appear in public because you'd be too stupid to figure out how to unlock your front door.

But to the extent there are people who pretend enough to get the cosplay close to real, well...if you do believe this stuff I can't see a way to wrangle you out of that cult by talking sense to you. 

That sort of belief depends on utter disregard for actual practice and life experience, factual evidence, and common sense. You believe it because you WANT to believe it. It's like a religion or, more precisely, like a cult, and like both of those it's not about "talking" it's about belief.

Which brings us to two related groups,

The Bible-bangers and The QANuts.

I'm sorry, but to me there's no true distinction between "talking" to these two groups of fanatics. They both believe impossibilities so they can both be convinced to do atrocities and they can't be talked down out of their trees.

I'm not talking about nice suburban Presbyterians or douce Catholic church ladies. I'm talking the reeeeeal red-meat foursquare megachurch fanatics and the QANut-Pizzagate-conspiracy-threory-wingnut hordes.

Ever tried to discuss how unrealistic the basic tenets of monotheistic religion are with a real hardcore fundamentalist believer of any faith? The responses are either to simply shut off the conversation, or to respond by saying that faith is belief beyond reason.

I'm not saying "religion is bad"; religious faith has been the engine behind some of the great works of art, music, literature, and even politics in human history. It's also been behind some of the most appalling atrocities and horrors, which simply points up that it's 1) not "religion" per se but the tenets of the religion and 2) not religion but the people who are involved. 

One person creates a transcendent work of art, another slaughters other people for their "sins".

But regardless of the person involved, "talk" is a another term for "debate", and faith isn't debatable, it's based on emotion, not reason.

There's a rather sad little story in a recent NYT about some sort of QANut "meme queen" (paywall, so no point in linking) but the author sums up the whole futility of "talking" to these people pretty well:

“These people aren’t drooling, mind-controlled cultists,” Mr. Rothschild said. “People who are in Q like it. They like being part of it. You can’t debunk and fact-check your way out of this, because these people don’t want to leave.”

There's a sort of bizarre subset of these groups, or a parallel to them;

The Trumpkins.

MAGAts. Trump Cultists. People who either genuinely or performatively believe that Trump is like a living God.

I have NO fucking idea how to "talk" to these people. If you're literally in thrall to this mook after his four year reign of terror? I can't possibly have anything to say to you that you'll listen to, or whether you can get through to them with anything short of those "deprogramming" things they use on other culties

So, "talking" to any these cultists? Not really helpful.

 

The Racists.

Yeah, well.

The only real disconcerting part is how the sheer number of these sonsofbitches seems not to have dwindled since the Civil Rights Era and how, despite all the talking we're already done since the 1950s (and before), how they're still the same goddamn ignorant shithead racist sonsofbitches they were then.

Good luck with trying to talk to them about being less racist sonsofbitches. I'll go get some coffee and wait for you here.

The Gun Nuts.

I'd like to think that there's a reachable discussion here, simply because I'm a gun owner and enjoy both hunting and target shooting.

I think the problem is that there's a couple of subgroups within the larger assemblage of "gun owners" whose obsessions drive them into wildly and irretrievably into Right Wing politics; the "Second Amendment" cultists who have managed to completely blank out the "well-regulated militia" portion of the amendment as well as the documented reasons that it was added, the "Fallujah-cosplayers" who want the military hardware without the nuisance of actually having to join a service.

The bottom line is that there's no demonstrable reason to assume that the Founder and Framers wanted to reserve the "right" of Joe and Molly to overthrow the US government. 

(Hint - That's why we have fucking voting..!) 

But these people - and I think this includes the weird sub-subgroups like the "open carry" loons and sovereign citizens - believe they did, and seem to have gone way too far into the weeds to be talked back; they're the American equivalent of those post-WW2 Japanese troopers who hid out in the jungle.

And the thing is that I've been involved in "talking" to the real hardccore gun cultists and there's always something. You mention background checks and there's always a hardcore that tells you it's a slippery slope to confiscation. It's all paranoia about "confiscation" all the way down, no matter how reasonable you start. The notion that any and every jamoke can tote a semiautomatic assault rifle knockoff isn't really a good idea can't even get through the door because if so, confiscation is next.

I'm not sure these people are gettable. I'd like to think so and I think it makes sense to try and have a sensible discussion of "what is a reasonable well-regulated firearms policy". But given my experience when I've tried? 

I'm not super hopeful.

The Social Conservatives.

I'm calling these the "gays-are-icky" group. They're not the American Taliban-type religious nuts from above that think anything but penis-in-vagina sex is a Sin and that God Hates Fags, but the "I-think-we-should-all-dress-and-act-normal-like-me" people who have been convinced that electing "liberals" mean every kindergartner will be forced to have Drag Queen Story Hour every friday after naptime.

 Here's the thing about them.

They can't have what they want.

They can force the trans kid into a certain potty. They can force the gays or lesbians back into the closet, and by that I mean in any way. They need to accept that other people's behavior (that doesn't involve physical or political danger to others) is neither their business nor their problem.

If they can be willing to buy into that? Fine.

But if "talking" to them includes throwing all those non-cis-het-"normie" people under the bus?

No. That's not okay.

So there's "talking"...but the "talk" has bounds, and if they're not willing to accept those, the talk probably won't convince them of much.

The Rest.

This is where I lump the generic "conservative"; not a wannabe Roeckfeller, not fanatically religious, not a conspiracy theorist, not a crazed Trumpkin, not a lunatic gun-humper. These people are as close to what used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans" as 2021 can come. The groups above probably call these people "RINOs". They accept the fundamental tenets of the New Deal - that unrestrained "capitalism" is dangerously punitive and you need to balance it with intelligent regulations and some sort of "safety net" to help the people run over by corporate power.

It's pretty much what the Master Chief was until Newt Gingrich's Contract on America drove him out of the GOP because he could see through the transparent bullshit.

Can we talk to these folks? Sure. They're not going to agree on everything - they'll want more guns and less butter, for one thing - but they'll agree on enough of the basics that we can at least agree to disagree.

But...how much of the GOP is left for them?

It's pretty obvious that the real nutjobs - the cultists of whatever sort - are by far the dominant force in the GOP right now. I'd say that something like half of the GOP are MAGAts, QANuts, Christopaths, or some version of the gun-nut/sovereign citizen/Klansman type. Another half of the remaining half are plutocrats. 

That leaves only about a quarter - so something like 7-8% of the US public - as the sane conservatives we can talk to.

Which is why I keep coming back to how utterly fucked we are.

If a third of the public doesn't care even though they've lived through the GOP's malfeasance killing hundreds of thousands during a pandemic disease.

And three-quarters of the remaining third are too far gone to even get to the table, much less to some sort of accomodation.

How the hell do you have a "We, the People" left out of the remaining third-and-change?

I truly, honestly, frustratingly don't know.

I know you have to for a functional democratic republic.

But if you don't...if you can't?

That's what really worries me.

Blood Red Dawn

 

The dawn of Election Day, 2020, was appropriately colored.

I can think of only two elections in U.S. history as consequential as this one; 1860 and 1932.

In both of the earlier elections the public had stark choices.

In 1860 it was slavery or war. A vote for Breckenridge, or a vote for Lincoln, were equally votes for the war that even then many, if not most, Americans must have known would come of those votes. As Lincoln himself put it; "Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

In 1932 it was plutocracy or...something else. A vote for Hoover was a vote for the Gilded Age status quo that had impoverished the nation. A vote for FDR was a vote for some new thing, the "New Deal", that promised to change that. The background to that election were the dire warnings from Europe; the communist and fascist revolutions of the Twenties, and the growing power of Naziism of the Thirties.

In 2020 it's just as binary. A vote for a Republican - any Republican - is a vote to end the promises written into the Constitution by the amendments of 1868 and a return to the original of 1789, an end to the pretense of "equal justice under law". It's a vote for Making America A White Oligarchy Again, a return to Gilded Age economics and pre-Twentieth Century social rules.

A vote for a Democrat - and let's not kid ourselves about silly emo "protest" votes (or NOT voting); the First-Past-The-Post U.S. electoral system means that there's always going to be two large parties. Your only choices are which party, and what you can make that party into - is a vote to try and continue to move away from those things towards a country that tries to make good its promises to all its people.

Here's the thing.

A Republican win today will mean absolutely nothing harmful to me, personally.

I'm an old fairly well-off cis/het white guy. By my demographic I should be a raging red MAGAt. I'll be dead long before the bill for the idiocy the GOP is locked into regarding climate change comes due. I might lose a slug or so in the tax-hate the "no-new-taxes" morons have for blue Oregon's recognition that without the damn taxes you don't have roads or schools outside the gated communities. I'm not going to miss a meal or a buck because my country is governed by a pack of nitwits who want to repeal the entire 20th Century.

The Plague might kill me - they're going to completely screw the pooch on that - but otherwise?

I'm MAGAt-proof.

No, the fury I feel is purely for the fact that the GOP enthusiasm for returning us to 1822 is over such petty, worthless, insignificant, idiotic "causes".

Seriously, people?

Abortion? Drag Queen Story Hour? Owing fifteen Armalite knock-offs? Paying taxes? Having to not call people childish names, sit down, shut up, and listen to people who actually know what they're talking about?

The reality is that the GOP's primary objective is fluffing rich people. You'll note that the actual "accomplishments" of Trump's administration have been a massive tax cut for the wealthy and a fanatic drive to eliminate any and all restriction on wealthy people's businesses to dump their shit in the public air and water, fuck up perfectly good land, and screw over customers without risk of punishment.

Everything else has just been pure assholeism; punching down on poor people, immigrants, anyone duskier than printer paper, lefties, and anyone to the left of Pinochet or religiously less fundie than Falwell.

It's not that I'm angry about losing. I'm angry about who I'm losing to; these fucking nitwits who vote Republican for these worthless things that the GOP tosses them so they can get the plutocracy that's their real endstate.

It's like being run over by a truckload of fatheads because they're desperate to snare cheap plastic Happy Meal toys.

It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world.

But for Wales?

I'll meet you again on the other side.

This Slave Country

 

One hundred and sixty-one years ago tomorrow a condemned man rose to address the courtroom in Charles Town, Virginia. He had been convicted of insurrection, treason - against the Commonwealth of Virginia, mind, not the U.S. government; this was a state, not a federal, court - and murder.

In his short speech, which included a surprisingly large amount of whining about the unfairness of the verdict and the amount of injustice done him, he included this:

"I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done"

 And with that he was taken from there to the place from whence he came where, after a month-long hiatus required by Virginia law, he was taken to the place of execution where the Commonwealth hung John Brown by the neck until he was dead. Whether the God he claimed was on his side has mercy on his soul, only he and he alone knows.

My understanding is that Brown was a symptom rather than a cause of the war that came soon thereafter. The country had been long divided on the question of chattel slavery. What Brown's aborted rebellion, trial, and execution did was simply push Americans further down the road towards war over that question.

What Brown did  was to help focus people's minds on the problem of a nation "conceived in liberty" that treated people that were born, lived, and died within that nation as property at worst and three-fifths of a human being at best.

Before Brown it was much more possible to compromise and prevaricate and elide that problem.

After Brown?

Not so much.

Not that you couldn't if you tried. And lot of people did; people are like that. We're good at doing everything we can to avoid looking straight at any really difficult, troubling, expensive, and (possibly or even probably) insoluble problem. Many, perhaps most, of us prefer the comfortable, happy lie to the unpleasant truth.

But Brown, like the harsh light on an aging actor's face, made that truth a lot harder to evade.

Donald Trump is the John Brown of our generation.

Personally he is as unlike Brown as a man could be; uninvolved, dispassionate, carnal, greedy, and foolish instead of driven, tempestuous, prophetic, and - perhaps - nearly mad.

But he exists in the same position in our lives as Brown did in the lives of his contemporaries. Trump is the balefire that throws an unforgiving light on the Great Issue of our time; the Conservative Question.

As slavery was in 1859, the current "problem" - American "conservatism" - is not a new one. It is rooted in the troubles of the Great Depression, grew to maturity through the Taft years of Republican exile, was watered by the Birchers and Goldwater and Wallace campaigns, bore the poison fruit of Watergate and Iran-contra, and burst into full flower with the rise of Limbaugh and Hate Radio, FOX, and the Wingnut Newsosphere that allowed the sort of people who were terrified and loathed Brown to be terrified of fictitious BLM terrorists and ANTIFA and Mexican rapists. To have not just their own opinions but their own facts.

Until Trump it was possible to pretend that these people were still "Americans", that they still had at least a tenuous link to the promise of this nation, that great promise of "equal justice under law". A promise, mind you, that had been ignored when not openly rejected many times over the history of this country, but still remained on the papers that founded it, in the amendments enacted after the great Treason to try and reform it, in the Civil Rights laws that attempted to force those traitors and their lineal descendants to accept it.

They didn't, not in any real sense, but until Trump we could at least sit next to them and try and ignore the Dixie Swastika patch on their camo jacket while we talked about sports.

But not now.

Trump has liberated them from the need to pretend. From public shame, and the need to hide their open contempt and hatred for "everyone else"; the liberals, the queers, the darkies, the women, the "experts" and eggheads and everyone else who isn't "us" conservatives, "us" Real Americans.

This coming Tuesday some 60 million of these people are going to vote for Trump. I have no idea whether it will be enough to re-elect him, and, frankly, don't really care. A re-elected Trump will likely be the quietus of a true popular democracy in this country. Four more years of Republican rule will do as much as humanly possible to lock in a "conservative" minority rule. 

But that's not the REAL problem

Because even if Trump loses the election - and by "loses" I mean by such an enormous margin that not even the most insane legal and illegal means of overthrowing that popular result will be possible, because you and I know that if it's even close to close the "conservatives" will just go full-on gleichschaltung to seize the nation they believe that they and only they deserve - we're still left where we were after Brown was cut down from the gallows that December. 

The problem will remain. Then, slavery. Now...that there will still be a hard, vicious, irreconcilable, indigestible knot of somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of the U.S. public who will burn the statehouse down and sow the ruins with salt before they accept that somewhere, some time, in some library commons room, Bubbles LaRue is hosting Drag Queen Story Hour.

We are a house divided against itself. 

The Right realizes that and plays our politics as if it's true.

Now, regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's election, the choice is on the rest of us; do we continue to pretend otherwise, or do we respond as if those people are, as they say they are, committed to not just our defeat but our destruction? Not just to their triumph but their tyranny? Not just to the advancement of their own causes but the utter ruin of any and all of ours?

To "bind the wounds" of the first Civil War first required four years of hard, bloody, unrelenting war that forced the unconditional surrender of the first "conservative" traitors.

We know that even if their current leaders are defeated at the polls the modern "conservatives" will not surrender. If anything, their fanaticism and lunacy are likely to redouble.

Trump's only accomplishment is to lay that bare, to force the choice upon us as it did on the Americans of Brown's time. 

We cannot remain undecided; we must become all one thing or all the other; we must become as close to the promised nation of equal justice under law as we can, or go back to the Constitution of 1789, to the Three-Fifths Compromise, to the Gilded Age, to the nation of White is Right and the nation of Corporations are People, my friend.

How will we now choose? 

Because there is only one way past the gallows where the body now hangs.

And that way is narrow and steep, and promises nothing but the same hard and bitter choices we faced one hundred and sixty-one years ago.

Because on that morning Brown wrote:

"I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

And he was not wrong. It was, and is, only through that way, only by making those hard choices, purging this land of "conservatism", fighting that fight to the bitter, bloody end, can we hope to see the dawn of that new nation.