Moving Chaos

 

White House East Wing, Before and Obliterated

Chaos the Destroyer: Nothing illustrates the hubris and direction of the Chaos administration  like the sudden obliteration of a deeply historic East Wing of the White House, the demolition not coincidentally beginning 48 hours after seven million people registered their protests against its actions, all across America.  

There is no comparison in American history to what Chaos did--not even the British torching the White House in the early 19th century.  Even when Harry Truman was forced to essentially scoop out the innards of the White House to build a steel foundation under the badly wobbling structure, the outer walls were carefully preserved, so as not to alarm the public or threaten the historical integrity of "the people's house."

This destruction may have been essentially capricious, but its boldness more than symbolizes both tyrannical intent and confidence in wreaking more havoc with totalitarian aims.  The nature of those aims were reinforced in other ways, like the end of all refugees except white South Africans--nothing screams racism and white supremacy better than privileging the architects of apartheid.  

But especially at this point it would be a mistake to think of Chaos as one man--as the face that appears daily on every screen and front page.  Other power centers are becoming clearer--notably Psycho Stephen Miller (and his war on "immigrants") in the White House, and budget-master Russell Vought, who has used the government shutdown to unilaterally make more cuts to federal departments and especially to any programs funded during the Biden administration, and most especially benefitting blue states.

Behind them is the less visible jockeying for power--VP Vance and Marco Rubio for example--as their official leader loses touch with reality to an ever-increasing extent.  So today the term Chaos represents more--more even that the White House and the cabinet.  It also includes the Supreme Court majority and Congressional Republicans, as well as those think tanks and supporting institutions that do their work in the shadows, if not the absolute darkness.  Increasingly it spreads to encompass huge chunks of corporate media.  Consider just the Washington Post editorial defending the obliteration of the East Wing and the promised building of a huge ballroom, allegedly financed by ultra-wealthy private contributors that includes the billionaire owner of the Washington Post.

Chaos on the Move: Slowed by court decisions and other resistance, Chaos is nevertheless making progress on nearly all fronts, with one big exception: public opinion.  The people seem to be self-selecting themselves as the enemy within.  But pieces are moving to at least be ready to apply military force to that little problem.

At the beginning of her twice-weekly politics chat last Thursday (Oct. 30), Heather Cox Richardson put together three separate news stories that indeed suggest an ominous pattern.

The biggest story has been very underreported in the US.  According to an internal Pentagon memo revealed by the UK's Guardian newspaper, Major General Ronald Burkett, appointed director of national guard operations in 2024, ordered most states to devote 500 National Guard troops each for training in quick response to quell "civil disturbances."  The total number of these troops is 23,500. They are to be ready for deployment in 2026.

How far are we from Chaos declaring No Kings protests as civil disturbances?  But there are other possible applications.  So Richardson's second story first appeared in the Washington Examiner:   The Chaos administration quietly removed top ICE leaders in five cities and replace them with Border Patrol officials.  The Border Patrol, Richardson notes, is the more aggressive agency with the broader mandate--applied to immigrants.  According to an anonymous official quoted in the story, this is just the beginning of this change, expected to spread to perhaps 24 cities in all.

It is the Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino that has become the face of the Chaos operations because of his aggressive style, according to the Examiner.  Notably in Chicago, where a judge admonished him for capricious use of tear gas against citizens and other acts that the judge had ordered to be ended.  (Not that ICE alone isn't bad enough.  Both have been shooting unarmed civilians and otherwise attacking people, then claiming they were attacked first.  Juries don't believe them because everyone knows they always lie, but they still capture people, typically in very tight handcuffs that itself leads to pain and lasting injury, and keep them in jail for awhile until judges and juries free them.  But they don't really care about convictions.  It's the terroristic bullying that's the point.)

Psycho Steve has been relentless in expanding the street war on immigrants, aiming to triple the current pace of arrests.  Richardson theorizes that such escalation could create greater resistance in communities, that could then be interpreted as social unrest.  This could push Chaos to its long threatened declaration under the Insurrection Act--and a cascade of consequences that could include cancelling the 2026 congressional elections, or at least surrounding polling places with armed stormtroopers.

The third story, appearing in the Atlantic, is about the trend among top Chaos officials to move their residence onto military bases, supplanting the actual military officers designated to live in those houses.  The latest is Psycho Steve.  But both State Dept.'s Rubio and Defense Dept. Hegseth will live on "Generals Row" at Fort McNair (at least after a $137,000 renovation to Hegseth's home), while Homeland's Kristi Gnome moved to Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. 

The Atlantic story and others interpret these movies as cowardly responses to public indignation and opposition to their racism and cruelty.  But if civil unrest is expected or at least feared, and a military response in the works, they'd need to live behind the castle walls.

(There's also a certain niece of King Chaos who claims that her uncle's destruction of the East Wing is a cover for upgrading the bunker known to exist under it, because he was "rattled" by No Kings.)

And immigration is hardly the only sensitive area.  In other parts of the world, civil unrest seems to occur most often over the issue of food.  Scarcity, high prices and access to food taken away often lead to food riots.  Literally today, more than 40 million Americans who depend on federal food assistance are without it.  They are mostly children, women and seniors, and they are mostly white.  You wouldn't get that impression from the MAGA mouths, including congressional and state officials as well as social media ranters.  Entire communites will be affected, especially those that depend on small grocery stores that themselves depend on these funds for their narrow profit margin.

Already long lines are reported at food banks, and in Texas and California, stadium parking lots became mass food distribution sites.  Even if this particular cruel outrage doesn't continue long, how unrealistic is it to imagine that Chaos officials are watching those parking lots closely.  Even though nobody pays it any attention anymore, nevertheless millions of children and others elsewhere in the world are still starving and dying of preventable diseases and injuries because US aid was summarily ended.   Those millions are invisible to us (thanks in part to an increasingly hapless, compromised and poor news media).  But what happens if they are a lot closer?  

Tombstone Blues

Halloween decorations have been going up in our neighborhood since early September.  Several yards I've seen feature fake gravestones, often with comic names for the bodies supposedly in the graves.  Here and elsewhere they seem to vary from impish death references  (Seymour Wurms, Ima K. Daver) to memento mori puns  (Noah Scape, Saul Overnow, U.R. Next) and the maybe too apt (a grave marked simply My Sanity, a little on the nose for 2025.)  

One irony may be that while the fake gravestones are increasing, the real ones are not, at least in direct proportion to the number of people dying.  The first change is the growing popularity of cremation over burial.  According to the National Funeral Directors Association, death is followed by cremation over 63% of the time in the US this year, with casket burials at under 32%.  The association expects cremation to be 80% of the total in another 20 years. 

Moreover, cremation increasingly does not end in burial.  The association's figures on this are a little suspect, since they add up to far more than 100%, but it looks like more than a third of people surveyed intend to have their "cremains" interred in cemeteries, with the rest being divided among family or spread in a "special place," etc. 

In my own limited experience, not only burial is becoming a thing of the past, but so are traditional funerals.  In my parents' generation and before, the process was always the same: a "viewing" at the funeral home one or two evenings in the week after death, and a funeral a few days after that.  For Catholics, that meant a funeral Mass, followed by a procession of cars with their lights on, to the cemetery where a ceremony at the gravesite would follow. The coffin would be lowered into the grave, though the actual burial would usually occur after the mourners were gone. (The Catholic Church has gradually loosened its attitude towards cremation--in my youth it was a mortal sin--but it still insists on some sort of ceremony and interment.)   

But in recent years the standard for people of the boomer generation and younger has been a private cremation followed days or weeks or even months later by a celebration of that person's life.  

There was always a bit of circus even in the traditional way.  Family lined up to chat with people they hadn't seen in years with an embalmed body lying in an open casket behind them always struck me as more than a little grotesque.  And having been a pall bearer, trying to maneuver a heavy steel casket with five others had its tense and sometimes comic moments.  

The circus aspect is one thing that hasn't changed.  Some "cremains" are made into jewelry, bullets or fireworks.  The most popular place to spread them has been Disney World, though such a practice is officially banned there. 

There are a few things that apparently have changed, dramatically.  The absence of ceremony is the most obvious.  Humans have actually or symbolically buried their dead with ceremony for at least 100,000 years, from even before our species.  Though humans wantonly slaughter each other in war, there is at least the tradition ( in military circles for instance) of caring for remains with respect and ceremony. Identifying remains is considered important, even if many years have elapsed. Some Native peoples go to great lengths to repatriate the remains of ancestors and bury them with ceremony on home ground.  The funeral procession--especially when it was on foot--had great power and symbolism in many very different cultures.

Funerals for the well-known became historic occasions, and some state funerals--like those for Abraham Lincoln, FDR and John F. Kennedy--were important in beginning to heal a shaken nation.

But many if not most people in Europe and Asia and the Americas who were not wealthy could expect to be treated with a version of the respect for royalty maybe twice in their lives if they married, but certainly once: after their death.  Family and friends would gather in their finest mourning clothes for a ceremony that was entirely about the deceased, first in a place of worship with clergy, with ceremony that they probably shared with their ancestors, and then again in a green place where some of their family and their ancestors may also be buried. 

 Their bodies were buried beneath a tombstone inscribed with their names, the years of their birth and death to tell the future that they had lived, and when. Often the graves of other family members are right there, or nearby. Their survivors and their descendants, friends and their descendants as well as curious strangers could read those names and dates, generations later.  

This was considered the respect due everyone in a civilized society (even though it didn't work out that way for everyone.)  The scandalous thing was an "unmarked" grave.

I understand that a large factor is the high cost of burial, but it seems cremation is not a lot less expensive, and I'm not sure how cost necessarily accounts for the drop in ceremony, or even a marker. But it also seems that things are more complicated as people and communities shy away from organized religion, or don't share the same one. 

 Perhaps the community does not need to grieve together because often there is no community anymore, except maybe a diffused ad hoc one. (That's certainly true in my case.  My funeral would be among the worst attended in history. Nor can I conceive of an appropriate place where my marker would not be as obscure as if it didn't exist.)   I understand that people increasingly prefer to not have funerals or a marker, and wish to become immediate dust in the wind.  

But I do wonder: does any or all of this express that we've lost respect for the dead, and therefore for the living?  Or for ourselves?  Or have we just given up on any idea of permanence, even relatively speaking.  

 I don't know.  But I can't help wondering if these comic tombstones represent something more than the typically mixed and complicated feelings towards death that Halloween expresses.

OK, Non-Boomer

 

Among the ways that MAGA officials sought to denigrate the recent No Kings demonstrations was to scoff that participants were a bunch of old people.  Pretty much Boomers, in other words.  The implication was that because of this they could be easily ignored.

Joining in this scorn was a video opinion piece by Emily Holzknecht and Binyamin Appelbaum featured on the digital front page of the New York Times both the day before and day of the No Kings events on October 18.  This screed attempted to blame what they regard as the failure of the American Dream for subsequent generations on the 76 million individuals who happened to have been born between 1946 and 1964: the Baby Boom generation. 

Dumping on the Boomers has become fashionable, especially since it is pretty safe (though not very seemly) now that most of this generation are elderly and past retirement age.  It's not the first time the New York Times has fingered the otherwise unidentified Boomers for what are clearly disturbing features of contemporary America that affect all of us. But instead of analyzing what and who might be specifically responsible, they scapegoat an entire group, a practice familiar to us from dark places and periods in not always distant history.

 But apart from its curious timing, this piece had several distinguishing features.  It was plainly accusatory and smilingly contemptuous. At times it felt like hate. It employed lots of imagery, including using a child to advance their script--it always helps to make bigotry as cute as possible.

And published at the time of the latest No Kings protest. it more or less began by sneering at the signs carried by Boomers at this year's earlier protests against a racist, sexist, oligarchic and increasingly fascistic cabal with a stranglehold on the federal government.  

Around this time, with no overt reference to this Times hit job, Rachel Maddow addressed this critique common to MAGA and the Times, and expanded on Boomer (and older) participation through an interview with Bill McKibben, who is among other things one of the founders of Third Act, an organization for older activists, especially on environmental issues, with local chapters and a national at-large chapter.  (The only clip I could find of her comments on You Tube was in the form of one of those annoying short loops, but the McKibben interview is here in full.) 

Maddow listed some of the reasons that older protesters "is a good thing," including the higher propensity of older Americans to actually vote, and because every generation gets statistically more conservative as it ages, so the willingness of Boomers to put themselves out there should be scary to MAGAdom, which it is. 

McKibben admitted (with pride) that Boomers have been "over-represented" in this year's protests, which really means that a higher percentage of this largest generation is out there again, than that of any younger generation. And gee, ain't that awful of us?

Clearly the Boomers forcing their metaphorical or actual walkers onto the field of play aren't the only people out there, but their presence is important and for the most part, welcomed by other participants.  For one thing they add to confidence that participation is reasonably safe, and whole families can attend.  They bring experience, and a certain spark.  As McKibben said in that interview, younger people know this administration is bad, but if you've lived through a dozen or more presidencies, you have a clearer idea of how dangerously aberrant this one is.  

As defined by demographers but with some support in cultural history, the Baby Boom forms a huge generation.  Though it is known by the large numbers of its "members" at the forefront of activism and cultural change, in fact even larger numbers stayed on the fringes of this, or opposed it.  Something that actual Boomers know from experience.  Apart from this lived distinction, this generation includes just about every kind of person, with every kind of job and personal history, in every place in America.  To make the Times' generalizations is preposterous, and should be acutely embarrassing. 

The signs that Holzknecht and Appelbaum ridiculed, that said something like "I can't believe I'm still out here protesting," told one likely truth: that within the over-represented elders cohort, is the over-representation of those who'd been out there before.  They were among those who marched and agitated and voted for changes in society that, for instance, very likely benefitted those authors, who without them might not have gotten within a mile of the New York Times front page. 

Out in those protests today, those boomers provide experience in peaceful means, in how to conduct a non-violent but spirited protest.  I'm only guessing but I'd bet that they were also over-represented in the 20,000 people in New York alone who took some form of training to keep these events peaceful.  And I'm sure they were grateful that the tradition of training and monitors on the march has survived from Civil Rights and anti-war days.  They contributed to the most stunning fact about No Kings Day: some 7 million protesters, with 0 protesters arrested.

 Those scorned Boomers who joked about being veterans of years of demonstrations may have other stories to tell about them. Boomers were prominent participants when protests were threatened with violence and sometimes they were the victims of it.  Many of us knew the smell of tear gas more than once. These protests were seldom popular.  Some were very small, like a Civil Rights vigil held in the rain, or an anti-war vigil in the snow, with passing cars honking not in support but with ridicule. They often seemed futile.  But we persisted.

I recently reviewed photos of early 1960s Civil Rights protests, and noticed something I'd forgotten: how so many included a particular gesture of crossed arms linked.  And singing together.  I am nourished today by those revived memories.  I'm proud to have been there.

Younger people know things are bad, but it may take a perspective gained by blood, sweat, tears and time to better define what's wrong and what it means.  (I'm thinking of one of those Boomer signs, "Accusing others of crimes that you commit--that is fascism.")  The memory of early boomers can even include our parents' time through their stories and cultural artifacts: the Depression, World War II, Hitler, the Holocaust.  Among white Americans, we may well have been closer to family members who were immigrants, such as our grandparents and parents. 

McKibben called it "wisdom," and I'm sure there are elder Boomers with that.  Knowledge synthesized and tested over time is something Boomers offer to younger protesters, and younger people in general.  If only they can refrain from giving in to shadow resentment and fashionable scorn, and join in figuring out who is actually responsible for what's going wrong, and together doing something about it.

Well, I can't match the Times for slick visuals.  But I can arrange some photographs...

These Boomers at No Kings around the nation on October 18...

   

Superior, Wisconsin

   

Manitowoc, Wisconsin

Eureka, CA (also top photo)

Michigan

West Palm Beach, Florida

...May well have been the Boomers at these events...

2023 Climate Crisis Protest in New York

2019 LGBTQ in Washington

2017 Women's March in Washington

Earth Day Denver 1970

Women's Liberation March 1970

Anti-Draft in late 1960s

Anti-War in late 1960s

1975 Boston

1965 Voting Rights Protest, Montgomery, Alabama

Mid- 1960s Washington

1964 Freedom Summer.  I was scheduled to help re-supply Freedom Summer workers
the following fall from my college, but an older student claimed my spot at the last minute.

That's me, captured on a B-roll film camera
as I got off the train at Union Station to
participate in the 1963 March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom.  Born at the very
beginning of the Boomer generation, I was
not yet 17.  And yes, I wore a suit and tie.
Most of the men at the March did, too.

We Care

Media coverage of crowds in the larger American cities Saturday mostly had the same estimate: huge.  With smaller municipalities, the emphasis was on the number of total places: some 2700 registered events in all 50 US states, with more in Canada and staged by Americans in Europe. 

According to its organizers, No Kings Day on Saturday brought out some 7 million people.  Some speculated and some (like Senator Bernie Sanders) simply stated that it was the single largest one day protest in American history.

Organizers estimated 200,000 in Washington DC.  New York City police announced their estimate of more than 100,000 across the five boroughs, "with zero arrests."

After days of Republicans predicting violence and small isolated crowds, characterizing protestors as terrorists and people who hate America, claiming they were all being paid, the official White House response to the actual events Saturday was: "Who cares."

Besides larger numbers than No Kings in June, there seemed to be more participation by labor unions, and protests spread deeper into MAGA territory.  Charlottesville, Virginia saw crowds double in size from June.  

Atmosphere in most places was described as festive, with the colorful animal costumes that went viral from recent anti-ICE protests in Portland, Oregon.  Protests in Jefferson City, Missouri were joined by American Revolution re-enactors.  There was no violence to speak of anywhere, which must be at least partly due to the organizers training participants in de-escalation and safety.  Every registered event was required to have a safety plan.

In Seattle, the line of marchers was one mile long.  No surprise that there were notably huge crowds in Portland and in Chicago where there have been anti-Gestapo protests every day, eventually in every part of the city and every suburb.  But I don't remember this ever happening: there was a No Kings protest in my hometown of Greensburg, PA.

Media stories often interviewed participants.  They were nearly as articulate as their signs.  Who cares?  Apparently a lot of us.

Note: Click on photo to see it full size.

This photo and top photo: Chicago

Portland, OR

Washington, DC

Pittsburgh, PA

Atlanta, GA

Kalamazoo, Mich.

West Palm Beach, FLA

Sioux Fall, South Dakota

Cincinnati, Ohio

Bozeman, Montana

Chicago

Hartford, Connecticut

Clearwater, Florida

Greensburg, PA (or maybe Pittsburgh)

Berlin, Germany

Rome, Italy

Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina

Seattle, Washington

Waxhaw, North Carolina

Eureka, CA

Eureka, Ca.  All Eureka photos from Lost Coast Outpost

Stupendous Fraud

 

“Let me make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy,” he said in a 2013 speech to NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, followed by a quip: “I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember?” 

But, he added in that speech, “there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy.” 

Bill Moyers

quoted by John Light    

NO KINGS SATURDAY OCTOBER 18                                                                                                                           

Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 

“In Pynchon’s telling, the strongest, most persistent force in this country is the ruling class’s effort to gain more wealth and power. The masses are led to believe that “compliance is the price of liberty,” as a federal agent in Shadow Ticket puts it, and they are threatened with violence if they don’t cooperate. But it’s not just that people are cowed into submission. Fearing disorder and rejecting freedom’s responsibilities, especially our obligations to one another, we willingly cede liberty in exchange for simplicity and a false sense of safety. Fascist tendencies have always been lodged deep in the American grain.”

Andrew Katzenstein, from his review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Shadow Ticket, in the New York Review of Books, October 23 issue.