"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material."
I had originally figured I'd post a photo of our new $12k furnace in the basement, which for all the world looks like a robot from a 1960 children's book. We're hoping our gas bill goes down a little as its 100 year old predecessor shuffles off into retirement.
Instead, here's a photo I took from our balcony on Canandaigua Lake two mornings ago.
This is truly the most beautiful place I've ever lived. We need to figure out how to make a go of it up here, as our old home slips into madness. Now the Wee Guv wants to convene a special legislative session, to address the pressing emergency of . . . immigration. Because Florida has that long unsupervised border with the aquatic world. And Georgia.
Meanwhile, the City of Perry can't afford to fix its trash trucks. They're picking up garbage with a backhoe, because it's all they have available.
Apparently since this article was written, they found the money for a new garbage truck. But still.
And these folks almost all to a person voted for this.
Meanwhile in Washington, the vanguard for Cadet Bone Spurs is busy picking through the financial contributions of the professionals assigned to the National Security Council, trying to ferret out those disloyal to MAGA.
I saw this when I put my hat in the ring for judge nearly two decades ago. "You may get an interview, but you'll never get appointed," was the candid advice I received from a well-connected friend. My transgression? Giving $100 to the Florida Democratic Party. The Rs have operated this way since the Contract With America. They're just out in the open about it now.
And no, the Ds never seemed to engage in these sort of litmus tests in my experience. Too disorganized for that, I suppose.
Meanwhile, the guy we just elected, had the election gone the other way, would've likely been convicted of inciting an insurrection.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/jack-smith-donald-trump-election-interference-report-f2ecf0fa
All this has led to a certain despair that's settled over our otherwise happy home, pondering how awful a plurality of our neighbors must be to vote for all this.
And make no mistake, they are in fact awful. I've given up trying to explain all this as a cry for help, a symptom of economic inequality and hopelessness. The Atlantic ran a great essay this morning about how the counties that benefitted the most from Biden's populist push to bring good manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt voted heavily for the other guy.
No, it wasn't the economy, stupid. That's actually in pretty good shape, all things considered, the envy of the world. This is something darker, and less objective. A malignancy in our souls.
But I'm starting to come out of my foggy funk. For every mouth breather or bigot who voted for 45/47, there's another who did not. And all that talk about cutting our losses and running to Greece is just that: talk. And it's sort of irresponsible of me. We all make our own choices in that regard, and I don't judge anyone else's, but this country gave me an education and opportunities my great-great grandparents couldn't have imagined when they disembarked after that long voyage from Ireland. Leaving would dishonor and discard the risks they took to get here. And as for going full Montaigne, and retreating to my tower to write while the St. Bartholomew's Massacre is going on out in the yard, I've sort of done that anyway, and in this digital age one can sip coffee in the ivory tower and still interact with the wider world.
What called me up short on all this was a blog by a thinker I admire, contemplating the death of one of our last remaining civil rights icons from the '60s.
And I don't just think highly of him because he and the beloved Peg share the same alma mater.
Loomis was ruminating on the legacy of Charles Person, when he veered into discussion of our present situation and the hopelessness felt on the anti-MAGA center-left:
But I was also thinking of the absurdly stupid hopelessness so many liberals today have toward Donald Trump, as if a guy who barely won an election is a godking that simply cannot be stopped. The shrugging of the shoulders is so frustrating. People say they are “tired.” Tired of what? Doomscrolling? Attending a single protest 8 years ago that was in fact quite effective (whether the women’s march or the anti-Muslim Ban protests)? Sending postcards to potential voters that didn’t work? I mean, really, what have you done that makes you so tired?
Loomis calls us back to the reality that the resistance movement that led to social change in the '60s didn't do it at the ballot box in Alabama or Florida---if that were the only vehicle, we'd still be waiting for blacks to sit next to us at the lunch counter or on the bus. They prevailed by having an agenda and an array of tools--voting being but one of them--to bring about that change.
He ends the essay back where he began:
And at the very least, if you feel “tired” or “hopeless,” well, I think honestly asking yourself what you have done to earn feeling that way is a really good thing to do. Because the answer is almost certainly “next to nothing.” Get off your asses and resist the bullshit coming our way.
Preach it, brother.
So today I subscribed to the Contrarian, a cool offering created this very week on Substack by Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen after she quit the WaPo so her content wouldn't be moderated by its fascist oligarch wanna-be-astronaut owner. We'll see if the promise of unvarnished truth telling comes about. You should give it a look.
I also regularly read Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson's daily blog summarizing what's happening in DC lately, often connecting it to antecedents from her primary area of scholarship, post-Civil War American history. It's heavily foot-noted, and always thoughtful.
Today she linked to a Paul Krugman essay this week, written in response to the idiotic and cruel suggestion by a Republican congressman from Ohio (where else?) who'd like to see federal relief to help rebuild after the California wildfire debacle conditioned on whatever's on MAGA's mind (such as it is) this week. In his case, it's forestry management. Speaker Johnson, an ever bigger dickweed, has suggested the Dems agree to lift the debt ceiling if they expect any tax money to flow their way to help the 100,000-plus displaced Californians.
But the thing is, as Krugman observes and our son is fond of reminding folks, that's actually California's tax money, in the sense that they actually contribute more than they get back.
In sum, Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle are subsidizing all those communities that are now spitting in California's face in an hour of catastrophic need. Krugman's right: if this is the game, we should just take "United" out of our moniker.
So buck up, fight back, don't take it as a given that the oligarchs and the religious nuts are running the country and there's no point in resisting. To use one of their own favorite memes against them, quoting the plucky citizens of Gonzalez, Texas, when Santa Anna came to repossess their town cannon,
Fight's on.
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