Reminder

Don't forget to turn back your clocks...to 1933 

Winter is Coming

  In the 2022 elections, some voters—no one yet knows how many—will cast their votes for a government that might best be described as authoritarian anarchy.

 This description may seem paradoxical, but unfortunately it fits.  Authoritarian dictators are at least supposed to make the trains run on time (which contrary to cliche, I'm told Mussolini didn't.)  In our 21st century American version, the trains may run only in the metaverse and on social media.  In the shared world of complex functions and dangers come breakdowns and chaos.

But on second glance, anarchy is the eventual state of authoritarian government, even (eventually) a police state.  These authoritarians at least are detached from reality twice: first because of their fealty to fanaticism, and more directly, because they are thoroughly corrupt.

For the Republican party is led by authoritarian demagogues, whose disdain for basic American democracy is loud and ever more audacious. But they have no actual policies that bear any kind of scrutiny, only slogans.  Most of them have no interest in governing nor skills to do so, and don’t much care. They are not serious people.  If they get the reigns of power in their hands, self-perpetuation will be their only goal, with other problems left unsolved, addressed only by hate and lies. Even previously routine functions are endangered by their ideological screen.  The end result is anarchy, and because of prior damage to previously resilient institutions, that end could come quickly.

 While these and other voters may have legitimate grievances, especially against the wealthy corporations and individuals that have stolen their incomes and redistributed it upwards, those grievances will once again not be addressed, and since they were enabled by several previous Republican administrations, likely made worse.

 Some of these votes, probably many of them, are in protest, and those who have thought this through may assume that, as in the past, this protest will result in the governing party (the Democrats) mending its ways and becoming more responsive.  But this time, with the very institutions that could make that possible under attack, it may become almost impossible.  Because this kind of anarchy is a kind of domestic war. 

 Most of these voters cannot imagine that the anarchy they loose will actually affect them.  But it will.  It reminds me of the notorious election of 2000, when well-meaning people on the left bought into the “Gush v. Bore” notion that there would be little difference between the presidencies of Al Gore and George W. Bush, and so it was safe to vote in protest for a hopeless third party candidate.  The next few years were shocking for all of us, but most of all for them.

 Imagination is an under-appreciated survival tool.

  Although a history through the past several decades can be traced that lead in this direction, it is supercharged to a frenzy by social media, and the resulting tendencies of news media that emphasize their worst impulses.  Still, in the still of the night, it is hard for me to imagine why anyone would vote Republican in this election.  It’s hard for me to imagine what people are thinking, as they spout venomous slogans against “the elite” that looks down on them, and then support candidates whose few discernible policies further empower the actual elites, who are already so powerful that in nearly every situation—prosperity, recession, inflation, peace, war and pandemic—they make even more money.  However, even for them, eventually the wolf will surely come.  That’s the future of authoritarian anarchy. 

October Surprise

 I saw a headline yesterday that provided the number of annual threats against Members of Congress, and added that it's surprising there aren't more.  This followed a headline about the attack on Paul Pelosi that said it was terrible but "not surprising."

Not surprising, that in America an 82 year old man is attacked with a hammer while asleep in his bed and  his skull is fractured, by an attacker whose stated intent is to shatter the kneecaps of his victim's wife, an 82 year old woman?  Who is second in line to the US Presidency?

When media cynics say shit like this, they add to the normalizing of the Dark Age that is coming upon us. They tell the many who are surprised, who are shocked, that they're wrong to be. We must be surprised, we must be shocked, or the humanity and human civilization that lives within each of us will die.    

Thoreau for the Days

 "These beans have results which are not harvested by me.  Do they not grow for woodchucks partly?...Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?"

Thoreau

Walden: "The Bean-Field"