Category The Fight

I Wish for Each

Dusty Leave a comment

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

So all right. We’ve been hearing a lot about this lately, right? Those are the words of the First Amendment to the Constitution. But what does it mean?

What is free speech?

Does it mean anybody can say anything they want? Anything? Or are there limitations? Should there be?

Does it only apply in American? Only to citizens? Does it apply differently to public figures, to famous people?

And why the hell are we still talking about this? Do we not know what it means? Shouldn’t we know what it means by now? I mean, really?

Okay: well first, let me just address that. I do not think there is anything wrong with having a conversation again. I don’t believe that something can be talked through once, and then that’s it, and we all know everything there is to know, and there’s no need to bring it up again. I understand that people get tired of having the same conversation over and over again, but you see, I’m a high school teacher: my whole job is essentially to have the same conversation over and over and over again. From one year to the next, from one class to the next, from one student to the next, I have to continuously repeat myself, and that often means I have to continuously find new ways to say the same things I have said before. The fact that I am willing to do that, even eager to do that, is what makes me a good teacher: because if I got impatient with students who didn’t hear or didn’t understand what I said to another student, then nobody would learn after the first student. I confess that I do get tired of saying the same things to the same people over and over again, but that’s not the same thing as having the same conversation: that is stating the rules, the limits and boundaries which are necessary for us to live and work together and abide one another, and then stating them again because some childish, selfish person decided they didn’t have to follow the rules. And then I repeat myself: and then I get angry about it.

But if you didn’t understand what I said before? I will say it again. If you don’t understand it after the second time, I will say it a third time, in different words or with different examples. And I will keep repeating it until it is clear and fully understood. And then, when you have a new thought or a new experience, and that changes how you view what we talked about before, I will happily talk about it again: perhaps after I have thought about it some more, to integrate whatever new concept or perspective you brought into it today, apart from what we discussed yesterday. No problem.

We seem to still be having trouble with freedom of speech. We are still talking about it, still debating it, still disagreeing over it; and now we are doing this in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. In that wake, and, I suspect, pretty directly related to that terrible crime, my wife was censored by Facebook, because someone reported a post she shared about Trump, calling it spreading misinformation. It was not, it was simply a joking criticism of the administration; specifically, it was this:

Exploring Shutdown Day 1: Discovering New Perspectives

My working assumption is that the person who reported her post was a Trump supporter, angered (as always) by libs and the left and so on, and recently energized by Kirk’s murder and the gaslighting from the right, convincing people to take action now to defend free speech (And please stop talking about the Epstein files and the still ongoing wars in Gaza and the Ukraine and the swiftly tanking U.S. economy), who probably reports every left-leaning or Trump-criticizing meme they see. Probably laughing while they do it. Facebook, as a private company that doesn’t want to suffer the wrath of the Trump administration, not only took down my wife’s post, but has also been monitoring and restricting her posts ever since: they are limiting her free speech. These new situations — unique neither to Charlie Kirk nor to my wife — has given people a new perspective on the issue, so: let’s talk about it again.

Here. This is where we start.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Okay, so the First Amendment actually says a lot of things. It restricts Congress’s ability to control religion, and the press, and peaceable assembly, and the right to petition, all in addition to the freedom of speech. Let’s put those other aside for now: though it may be worth considering why all of those different, and all of those important, ideas were all packed together into a single amendment, and then the next one is only on one issue: guns. And the one after that is only about not letting soldiers sleep in your house against your will. Both important, maybe (though neither as important as freedom of speech) but both very narrow topics. Why are all these other things together in one place? Honestly, I haven’t read enough on the Founding Fathers and their choices regarding the Bill of Rights, so I could only speculate; but either way, we can ignore this topic for now, because we’re only here talking about the freedom of speech (and the others will become more clear as we focus just on speech, I think). Freedom of the press might come into it directly if we want to talk about Jimmy Kimmel, but it’s not clear to me that that discussion needs to involve anything other than free speech; that one right seems enough to cover what happened there. So let’s focus.

What is freedom of speech? Why do we have a right to it?

So hot take: freedom of speech is not actually critical. It is a roundabout way to protect the actually critical thing — or rather, two critical things: freedom of thought, and freedom to express those thoughts. Freedom of thought is absolutely critical to humanity, because in the most essential sense, we are our thoughts. I am what happens inside my skull. My body is also a critical part of me, but if I have a broken body, I am still me, because it doesn’t change what is inside my skull. It changes how well I can act out and reflect the decisions I make inside my skull — my freedom to express my thoughts — but it doesn’t change who I am. But if my brain dies, then who I am is gone, even if my body remains. My body can’t express my thoughts if I have no more thoughts: and without those thoughts, there is nothing for my body to express, no purpose for it to achieve; it can continue for a period of time, and then it will, mercifully, stop.

I wonder if my body would be sad if my brain died. Would my body grieve the loss of my mind?

Well: I would grieve the loss of my mind, so the question of my body’s reaction is academic. It is a part of me.

Now, in the ordinary way of things, there is nothing that could limit my freedom of thought. It’s one of the great things about being a sentient, thinking being; on that most essential level, we are always free. (Well, almost.) It’s because we are always essentially alone, and because there is no substance to thoughts: they can dance and flit anywhere we can imagine, always within the skull that holds the brain; and nothing will change other than the thoughts themselves — and potentially the mind having those thoughts. Nothing else is affected, and so nothing else can affect those thoughts: they can dance and flit to anywhere else, faster than anything that actually exists. Nobody else will even ever know where our thoughts are going, inside our minds. This was what Henry David Thoreau was talking about in On Civil Disobedience, when he described the inability of the state to actually punish him with a night in prison after he refused to pay his taxes:

I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. Source

As he says, his thoughts cannot be trapped inside the cell, but can go anywhere that Thoreau wishes to send them: and the attempt to punish his body because they cannot punish his mind is just pitiable. What the State wants here is to control his thoughts, because they want to control Thoreau’s actions through his decision-making ability. Because their initial attempt to control his actions, through a threat to his body’s freedom if he made a certain decision the way the State didn’t want him to decide, didn’t work: knowing the threat, Thoreau still decided not to pay his taxes. His thoughts were uncontrolled, and his person/body/being followed along that thought decision, and didn’t pay his taxes. So then the State put him in jail: and he just kept right on deciding not to pay his taxes, regardless of what they did to his body. His thoughts were entirely unaffected, and uncontrolled, and they did the thing that the State didn’t want them to do — without any influence from the State at all. And so we all do, every thought we have that is in defiance of what our society demands of us. We are free to think whatever the fuck we want to, even the thoughts we’re not supposed to have, or not allowed to have.

Please take a moment and think a thought or two, which people outside of your head would not allow you to have, if they could tell you what to think. Any thought you like. Any thought at all.

Nice.

So because nobody can control a person’s thoughts, the laws focus on the second critical part of the process of having a free mind: the expression of our thoughts. Free speech, and in a broader context, free expression. Let me focus on that second aspect for a moment, because it shows more clearly what the point is here.

I can have my thoughts, and you can’t stop me. So far so good. But obviously, if I can’t act on those thoughts, then my thoughts cannot be complete. If, for instance, I think about spitting on the sidewalk, decide to spit on the sidewalk, but I cannot spit on the sidewalk — at the moment that is just because there is no sidewalk near me; I could spit on the floor of my office and call it a sidewalk, and to some extent I would have acted out my thought, and brought that thought to its completion, but then I would have to deal with my spittle, and also my wife would kick my ass — so I don’t spit: and thus the thought is not free, it is limited. I think, “I’m going to spit on the sidewalk!” and then I can’t do it: the thought is constrained. When the thought is constrained by reality — “I want to grow nine arms and use them to juggle chainsaws!” — then again, my thought is not free, but there’s no point in talking about our freedom to do things that we can’t do, or the need to pass laws to prevent things that are not possible. At that point, all we can do is shrug, and say, “It sucks to suck, Dusty. But you go ahead and dream of nine chainsaw-juggling arms, that’s fine, you can think about it all you want.” Freedom of thought is still protected, because I can carry the juggling arms thought as far as it can go; and as thought is still the most essential aspect of being human, that’s fine then. Thoreau can think that his taxes should not be collected by a government that supports both human chattel slavery and a war of conquest against Mexico (the reasons Thoreau didn’t pay his taxes), and if the action is not possible — if taxes didn’t exist and so he couldn’t choose to pay them or not to pay them — then he has all the freedom he could ever have.

But see, what happened is, Thoreau’s aunt paid his taxes for him, against his will. I don’t know why: I suspect she either thought he was suffering in jail and wanted to help him, or she was ashamed that her nephew was in jail, and wanted him to stop embarrassing her. (I would guess the second one, because she did not consult with him before she did it, and if she wanted to help, seems like she would at least visit and ask if he was okay.) Which then limited his free expression of his thoughts: he could think his money shouldn’t go to the government, and he could decide not to give his money to the government; but the government got his money anyway. Not because it was impossible for the government to have his money, but because someone else took his choice away. I guess it wasn’t really his money, it was his aunt’s money; but Thoreau’s idea was not to save his own pocket change, it was to refuse to participate in the government’s immoral acts, and when money went to the government in his name, it defied and negated his decision. Imagine if he talked to someone about not paying his taxes, if he argued with the government tax collector about the issue, and expressed his disagreement with the government, and said, “I will never contribute to this immorality, sir!” Can’t you just see the agent smirking and saying, “Sure, buddy. I mean, we already have your money, so you can say what you want.” Thoreau’s thought, while still free, has been constrained in its expression: and that pretty much ruins the thought; a thought which was not constrained by impossibility, it was possible, and he could have acted upon it — but then the option was taken away.

This is why, of course, jail is actually a very effective punishment for most people: because while we are all free to think our way out of jail, I would guess most people in jail want to walk out of jail: and they can’t. Which means their thoughts, while potentially free, are nonetheless really trapped along with their bodies. It is worth noting that, if you can find a way to free your thoughts, then prison wouldn’t matter so much; it would become a struggle to try to force you, through continued discomfort, to think about being in prison and how much you don’t want to be; then your thoughts are controlled, and trapped, and you are suffering for your punishment. But when Malcolm X was in prison, he found freedom in learning: and he talked in his autobiography about how prison really didn’t bother him at all, once he taught himself how to read and found things worth reading — and also once he found his faith in Islam, which also gave him something to think about that wasn’t constrained by being in a cell.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in
prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read
awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any
degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave
me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness,
and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer
telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him,
“Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I
feel might be able to help the black man.

…

But I’m digressing. I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every
time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read-and that’s a lot of books these days.
If! weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just
satisfying my curiosity – because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about. I don’t
think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study
far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some
college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions,
too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that. Where else but in a prison
could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen
hours a day? Source

So again: the real goal of punishment, the only kind that is possible being constraint of the body, is to control the mind; and if the mind is able to continue thinking, then the constraint of the body is essentially meaningless. But in the vast majority of cases — and also, I will point out, in these two cases I have mentioned, because I don’t doubt that at some point Thoreau would have wanted to get out of jail and therefore would have felt trapped, and therefore actually would have been trapped, and Malcolm X would have been severely constrained if he had not been released to become the leader he became — trapping the body, because it limits the expression of thoughts, is an effective way to control a person’s thoughts. And even more importantly, for the purposes of society in general, constraining someone’s actions, the expression of their thoughts, is enough, because the purpose of prison is to stop a person from affecting others, and thoughts have no effect without expression. So just like I accept that I can’t ever have those juggling arms I dreamed of, society accepts that it can’t ever control our thoughts: and it just makes do with having potentially total control over our bodies.

And that’s where the amendment comes in.

I hope it is clear that thought without expression through the body, whether through action, through communication, or through a public display of some kind, is incomplete, and more importantly, useless. A useless thought is not a bad thought: all impossible thoughts are useless in and of themselves, which includes every dream, every fantasy, and every imagined existence; but they can still have enormous impact; and even if they don’t, they can encapsulate important things about the person who thought them, and that’s good, even if that encapsulated thought never reaches outside the mind that dreamed it. But when society wants to control us, controlling the impact we can have on other people is the primary goal and thus also the primary means of controlling people and the thoughts that define us. And that’s why the Founding Fathers included an Amendment that protects free expression in several different forms, most importantly speech and press and peaceable assembly.

Let me be clear now: the Founding Fathers were not always right. You don’t have to look any further than chattel slavery to know that they and their ideas, and the documents and the nation that they built, were fundamentally flawed, right from the beginning. There were some bad thoughts in there, and we’re still dealing with the legacy of those bad thoughts. But they were right in this: government wants to control people, and that means they need to control our thoughts — but they can only control our bodies, which is what they try to do. The First Amendment is there to set a baseline protecting our thoughts, through protecting the only things the government can attack and control, which is our actions.

So that is the essence of the Amendment, and the right: we have the right to express our thoughts, freely. The government cannot control our expression of those thoughts, so long as the thoughts do not have a direct impact on others in a way the government can control, and should control. In other words, if I decide to pick up a rifle and shoot someone I disagree with, that is no longer simply the expression of my thought, now it is an attack on another person, and it can be controlled, and should be because it is harmful. Though I will point out that, to some extent, the expression of that thought can’t always be controlled; sometimes it can only be reacted to after I have already done the thing I decided to do. But insofar as it can be predicted, and thus prevented, it should be.

Do I need to talk about why I shouldn’t have the unfettered ability to inflict harm on my fellow humans? Or can I assume we’re all on board with that? Just for the sake of saying it, the issue is that I have no right to control other people’s thoughts, nor their expression of their thoughts, except in the service of preventing harm. If I do harm to another person, I am affecting their ability to express and complete their thoughts, or possibly even their ability to think thoughts in the first place. If I am the one looking to do harm, not just prevent harm, then someone should have the ability and the right to stop me before I do harm.

Should that be the government? My first thought was to say that of course it should be; that this is the reason why we create governments and cede to them the power to control us: so they can prevent us from doing harm to one another. But government is frequently bad at this, and in that case, maybe other people and other authorities should have that power, that right, that responsibility, to prevent my harmful actions. But this is where we get into a conversation about how society should work, and that’s too complicated for right now. Suffice to say that the government, as imagined by the Founding Fathers — that is, existing with the consent of the governed — is a reasonable place to invest the power to control people’s obviously harmful actions. I would like to expand on the FF’s ideas about the governed who were consenting to the government, to include all of those who are governed, which would include people they didn’t consider worthy of consideration, or even consider to be people; it would also include all those who reside within the jurisdiction of the government in question, and who would be subject to the government’s control: those people should be considered “governed,” and therefore should be asked for consent to the government over them. Yes, that means undocumented migrants as well as those who don’t have full legal status. And also suspects, convicts, prisoners and parolees, all those governed by the justice system: they, too, must consent to the government over them, or else it becomes illegitimate and tyrannical.

And to be clear, when I say “consent,” I mean continuous, affirmative, and enthusiastic consent. The only kind of consent that matters.

Also at this point, I would like to express my burning volcanic rage that the First Amendment does not include the right to vote. What the actual FUCK, Madison? Why did you leave that one out?

It was the slaves, wasn’t it.

So all right: we should give the government the power to control our actions which can be harmful (and which can be controlled): but we retain the power to consent to be governed, and also the power to abolish the government if it becomes destructive of the ends we created it for, ideally through voting in free and fair elections. Since the government exists with our consent, what one thing do we most clearly need in order to legitimize that government?

A voice. The power to say “Yes,” and the power to say “No,” and to have those words heard. The power to consent, in the simplest terms. Continuous, affirmative, enthusiastic consent. If we don’t have that power, the government has taken too much control and has lost its legitimate authority, and should then be abolished: and that is the intent of the First Amendment, to protect and enshrine, first and foremost, our power to keep or abolish our government, which would otherwise have unchecked power over us.

You know: the power to vote. But in the absence of that, the power at least to speak, and to be heard. Not just to think freely, but to actually express those thoughts. The power to spit on the sidewalk. And on fascists.

So. Now. Did Charlie Kirk have freedom of speech? He did, and he should have: he spoke, and was heard. He lost that freedom when another person caused harm to him, murdered him, in an act that our government should have done all it could to prevent. Was Charlie Kirk a promoter, and therefore a martyr, for the cause of free speech? He was not: it was not his job to protect people’s right to free thought nor to free speech as an expression of their thoughts; inasmuch as he encouraged free thought and the free exchange of ideas through debate, then he was a proponent of free speech; but watching his debates makes it very quickly clear that he was not interested in the expression and free exchange of ideas, he was interested in scoring points and (as my students would say) farming aura: trying to get famous and powerful because he was seen as a staunch defender of his political and religious views. This is no criticism of the man: I would also like to get famous and powerful using my words, though I’d probably rather write than speak; but I want the same thing. But it does mean he was not a martyr for the cause of free speech, because free speech was not his cause: it was the means by which he tried to achieve his purpose, to fight for his cause. He shouldn’t have had to defend his free speech, he should have simply been able to exercise it. And just like Charlie Kirk, as a private citizen, it is not my job to protect free speech directly: that is what the government is for. To secure these rights, to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Let me emphasize that again, because we talk about free speech as though it is just something that needs to be protected from the infringement of the government on our rights, that the point of the First Amendment is to constrain the government from taking away our free speech; the First Amendment is that thing, that is its point — but also, the real point of the amendment is to tell the government that it should be working to protect and secure that right for all people within its jurisdiction and influence. Actively. Affirmatively. Enthusiastically. Continuously.

Which means, in practical terms, that the government should not only have done more to protect Charlie Kirk from being murdered (if we believe the government could have done more to prevent that, which I think is self-evident, but that’s not the argument I’m making here), but also, it should be doing more to ensure that all people under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government, all persons resident in this country and under its control around the world, have the opportunity to be heard, to express their thoughts freely. By publishing their opposition to the war and genocide in Gaza, without losing their legal status. To have their case heard before an immigration judge, through the due process of law. Through posting whatever the fuck you want on social media, even if other people don’t like it, so long as it is not actively, directly causing harm. Through speech, through the press, through petition, through peaceable assembly.

Which means the government should have kept the Fairness Doctrine. And in this modern era, the government should ensure that social media does not censor people’s free speech, so long as that speech does no harm. In fact, I would argue that the government should have a platform for people to be heard, to be seen, to which all people who must consent to the government over them have access. I would include NPR, PBS, and VOA among those platforms, but I would argue the government should also provide some simple form of social media, to at least offer an alternative to the private companies, which are all controlled by billionaires with agendas. I don’t think the government should seek to control the social media companies per se, but they have a responsibility to ensure our rights: including the right to speak our thoughts, online as well as through print and speech. The government should also protect protestors and ensure that they have the right to assemble and petition for redress of grievances, so long as they are peaceable in that assembly.

Yes, that last clause, as well as the earlier condition that speech should be protected as long as it does no harm, does create an opportunity for the government to limit free speech, depending on what we mean by speech that does harm, or by peaceable assembly. I think the current laws distinguishing between protest and riot, and the laws preventing libel and slander, make sense and should remain (I don’t know enough about the specific laws and so can’t speak to their current efficacy, but conceptually, I’m in favor), and where these two rights cross over, with the law preventing speech that incites to violence, is also a useful law that protects people from harm. I also think there should be a gray area around and beyond those laws (Does “Fight like hell or you won’t have a country” count as incitement to violence? I honestly can’t say, not without further evidence of intent and context. If only there had been a trial…), and that the burden of proof within that gray area should definitely be on the government, as the ones who enact the control of people’s speech, to show that someone lost their right because they were causing harm with their speech. We have a system in place to carry out that process: but we need to have people in the government who are dedicated to maintaining and using that system.

We do not currently have that. We have an authoritarian who wants to eliminate free speech because he doesn’t want anyone to have rights except himself. We have a legislature that agrees with him, completely and slavishly — they are not expressing their thoughts, they are expressing only his. (The opposition, presumably, is not expressing the authoritarian’s thoughts. We just need to find where that opposition is hiding…) We have a Supreme Court that also thinks no one should have rights other than the President, and themselves, because they think their trump card over Trump (pun obviously intended, as all puns should be — also, we should have a right to pun…No, we do have a right to pun, and it should be protected by the government.) enables them to live as exceptions to the dictatorial power they want to give him, and they like the idea that a dictator could enhance the lives of the people whom they (the “justices”) deem worthy of enhancement, and destroy the lives of those whom they deem worthy of destruction, without they themselves dirtying their lil fingies. They’re wrong, of course, because if Trump ever did become a dictator, he would end up killing or jailing the justices because they have defied him in the past, and no dictator can abide that kind of challenge to their power; but then, all of these people are wrong. They all think that the dictator would only use power the way they want him to use power, and that’s not how dictatorship works.

Please take note, all you MAGA voters who want Trump to hurt the people you hate, but not you yourself. That’s not how dictatorship works. He doesn’t dance to your tune. If the Supreme Leader is the only one with rights, then we will no longer have rights ourselves: not the right to life, not the right to liberty, not the right to the pursuit of happiness. We will then not have the right to express our thoughts through speech or writing, through assembly and protest and petition; more importantly, we will no longer have the right to consent, and though that immediately means the government will no longer be legitimate, it also means that we won’t have the ability to remove it without violence.

That is where the Second Amendment comes in. It is not, as the fools who care only about that one and not the First would have us all believe, the right which ensures all the others; that is the First Amendment. It is free speech. It is the power to consent, and to withdraw consent. The practical power that enforces the moral and intellectual power is the right to communicate, to agree, to assemble and stand together: that is what changes governments. (Also, if we don’t lose it, the right to vote. Tell me why the right to free exercise of religion usurped the place that should have gone to the ballot, I beg you.) The right to defend ourselves physically is the last resort when the first one has been lost: and every one of those gun rights advocates, from the rational ones to the chuckleheads, have been ignoring the infringement of the First Amendment while trying to protect the Second. Protecting it, I might add, through their right to free speech.

So. Free speech is not only important, it is critical, it is definitive, both to us as humans, and to our country as a free country, with government of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the most important right we have, and it is the best way to delegitimize, remove, and replace the current government, which I think we can say safely does not have our consent any longer to govern us, taking “our” and “us” in the largest collective sense, meaning the majority of people governed by this administration. The government should not only not be infringing on it, the government should be actively protecting and promoting it: that is the government’s job, the reason it exists, and the best way to ensure that the other rights are also maintained. Because free speech leads to the free exchange of ideas and information, to the shining of a light into the darkness where tyranny grows. It’s what lets us all communicate and understand each other, and then agree: and take action.

Before it’s too late.

Opening The Window

Dusty Leave a comment

…Maybe Shouting Out of It

I have been thinking about writing. I do that a lot: mostly because I haven’t been writing a lot. But I just don’t know what to write.

Then I saw this:

@therapyjeff

You’ve got, like, 1 to 3 business days before hypernormalization drags you back under. #mentalhealth #therapy

♬ original sound – TherapyJeff

It hit me.

It’s hard to predict what will hit you, what will have an impact; that’s part of why I haven’t been writing as much — I don’t know what to say to have an impact on my audience (if I even have any audience left), and I can’t predict what will have an impact on me. And the hypernormalization that he talks about is definitely real, and strongly controlling of my day-to-day interactions with the world and the world of current events. I will also say that my role as a teacher is partly to encourage some of that hypernormalization, because my students freak out, often because they enjoy freaking out and more often because they are young people in a terrifying and confusing world; and whether they are freaking out for the sake of their shattered nerves, or for the sake of the meme (or freaking out for the meme as a way to disassociate from their shattered nerves) , the answer is always to remain calm and to try to pour water on the flames they are fanning. So I spend part of pretty much every working day trying to calm the tempestuous waters of teenaged souls. Then I come home, and sometimes my wife is freaking out — in that case it is never for the meme, it is only because of her shattered nerves or because the world really is a dumpster fire and sometimes we are caught in the flames (which is NOT FINE) — and then sometimes, again, my job is to make awful things seem normal and manageable and not a big deal. Sometimes my job is to freak out with her, which, sadly, I am bad at, because my freaking out usually looks like me getting really mad, and that doesn’t always make people around me feel peachy; but I do my level best anyway, Partly because my nerves are shattered, too.

But this is counterproductive for my writing, because I don’t want to write about how things are normal, how they are just fine. I want to write about how they are fucked up. I don’t want to freak out, because nobody wants to read pages and pages of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuyckfukfuyckfuckfuckfukfuckfuckfuck Hey that’s pretty fun when you get the rhythm going!

But it’s hard to write, calmly and rationally, about how things are fucked up when you are yourself freaking out. Which is, of course, what the powers that be want: they want us to draw into our individual isolated shells and hide from the horrors they have put into the world, because that makes us easier to control, and easier to eliminate; and that’s why this very nice therapist made this TikTok, in which he tells us to take a step, even a small step, towards interacting and connecting with others during this particular moment of jarring insanity; because, as he says at the close of that video, even that small step of having a conversation or connecting with a group of potentially like-minded people, is much bigger than sinking back into the hypernormalization without having done anything other than twitch bonelessly for the 1-3 business days of this moment when we can break loose.

So let’s break loose. Rationally. Without freaking out, but also without rationalizing everything into normality. Because this is not normal: a man shot Charlie Kirk in the throat. Charlie Kirk is dead — apparently assassinated, though one thing I will say is that we absolutely must stop speculating about shit we know nothing about, until we actually know what is going on. We don’t know that the murderer was an assassin in the sense that we know for sure that the killing was politically motivated, and that Kirk was murdered because he was a prominent political voice; he was a prominent political voice, so in the case that we see any such death as an assassination, then it was, but I think it is important to distinguish between John Hinckley’s attempted killing of Ronald Reagan and Lee Harvey Oswald’s successful killing of John F. Kennedy: Oswald intended to kill the US President because he disagreed with Kennedy’s political stances and actions, and maybe what Kennedy represented; Hinckley thought Jodie Foster would notice him if he shot the President. That second one is not, to me, an (attempted) assassination. If we assume that this one was an assassination, which is a reasonable assumption but not a certainty because the killer carved fucking memes into his bullet casings — “If you read this you are gay LMAO” is not a political statement — it is also not clear if it was done because Kirk was too right wing, or if he was not right wing enough, which means we may be able to label it as an assassination, but not then go on to say anything meaningful about that fact other than it was a terrible, horrible thing, like every murder, especially unnecessary ones. (Yes, there are necessary murders. Not many, and they are still terrible, but there are. Not this one, so that is not our topic.) We do not know, and I will disagree with the people saying all over the internet and TV, that Kirk was killed for his political views, or his ideological beliefs, or his past statements which the killer may have found too offensive or not offensive enough; when all of that becomes clear, then we can discuss it — though we are unlikely to come to any useful consensus about it. And that’s partly because of Charlie Kirk.

I don’t want it to be because of me, too. I like to think it never could be, because I, of course, am rational and reasonable — and also correct, which, as I like to tell my students (quoting the late great Bill Hicks), gives my argument that extra oomph — but of course we all think that about ourselves. I do certainly write divisive things, both because my arguments are aggressive and confident, sometimes even spoken in words as hard as cannonballs (to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson), and because my language and my personal statements about my opponents and enemies are frequently deeply offensive. If people who disagree with me read these posts, they probably get pretty mad at me, and at them. Though they may deny it, because of course online debaters must never admit that they are upset, that they are emotional and out of control.

I am quite emotional. I am often somewhat out of control, usually, as I said, because I have a temper, and because my nerves are shattered. Anybody who doesn’t feel the same, at least that last part, is either lying or a sociopath.

Because stuff is fucked up. Deeply, multifariously, evilly fucked up. A man was murdered, and we all flipped our shit about it: and on the same day, two children were wounded by a third, who shot them at their school and then killed himself. I don’t even know how many other people have died in the days since Kirk was killed, but if we keep up this year with last year’s average it would have been about 47 per day. The right accused the left of causing Kirk’s murder with our political rhetoric; the left accused the right of causing Kirk’s murder with their violent fascism; people posted about how saddened they were by the death, especially because his wife and children were there and saw it happen; other people posted about how they were glad Kirk had been killed because of the awful things he had said and the positions he had espoused in the past, including racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia.

It’s all fucked up. And even the virtuoso guitar playing of Stevie Ray Vaughan (Who was only five years older than Kirk — 36 to Kirk’s 31 — when SRV died in a helicopter crash) can’t make it better, can’t make me feel calmer and more in control at this moment.

So I had a thought. A step to take, in this window (which may have closed already, because it’s been four days since he died; but I’m going to try to do this anyway because I don’t think I’ve sunk back into the hypernormalization yet) of opportunity. Not to argue for gun control, though I am doing that on social media; not to argue against hyperpartisanship because arguing against people arguing badly is a losing endeavor, no matter how you slice it; not to lament the loss of free speech in this country, because Malcolm X was assassinated sixty years ago — also in front of his wife and children — and the Alien Enemies Act signed into law by President John Adams in 1798 was used by President Donald Trump in 2025 as a legal justification for deporting both citizens and non-citizens without due process, so I would argue that we have never had fully free speech in this country.

I want to try to reverse the polarity of this moment. I want to try to speak positively. Not about Kirk’s murder, which is nothing but horrendous; I just want to use this moment to try to imagine a world in which Kirk would not have been murdered. A world that certainly could have existed, if we had made different choices as a nation and a people, and one that we can certainly bring into existence if we try. Maybe if I try to normalize hope, then we can have some when we sink back into our absurd routines.

Let’s start with a beautiful image. This one came from here, and is advertised as using no AI.

I don’t see why not. Hope is not any harder than despair: hope takes work, but we have to work to keep our despair gurgling inside of us, just as much. We have to spend time looking for more reasons to feel despair, have to keep thinking negatively about what is in our world or in ourselves — or what is not there — have to keep all of that front of mind, or else we might spot a video of a cute puppy and not be sad any more. If you’ve ever felt sorrow or despair, then you know the struggle to keep it that I am talking about. (Depression, now: depression does not require any work to maintain; that’s why it is depression. But I’m not talking about mental health, other than to say that hope and positivity in a non-toxic way might help with depression, as well. Not going to oversimplify the facts of depression, but still. Here’s that puppy.)

Your Puppy: What to Expect at 13 to 16 weeks - Vetstreet | Vetstreet
This is my favorite ear configuration: one up, one down. And nobody does it better than Corgis. This image is from here.

I’m not trying to slap some pretty pictures up over the horrors: that kind of forced, hollow veneer just makes things feel worse because we know how thin it is. I’m just using the images to counteract the — let’s call it the acidity of the first part of this post, the corrosiveness of horror and violence and conflict. But for the hope, I want to speak genuinely. Because I think the hope is real.

First, what am I hoping for? I’m hoping for a society that recognizes the value of all of its members, and takes all stakeholders seriously when considering what to do collectively. I’m hoping for a world where people are able to find and create joy, consistently, throughout their lives. A country where we try to find our common ground, and respect our common humanity, before we disagree about what our country should look like. A life where people recognize the liars and conmen, the gaslighters and manipulators, and see the corruption for what it is, and don’t tolerate it because it smells just like our own. A world of integrity and trust.

No. It isn’t impossible. I’m certainly speaking in broad generalities, because no, I don’t expect any world to reach a point where problems are eliminated, where there is no conflict, where liars are vanished and corruption is prevented before it taints everything. But I do know that our world, our society, our ethos, used to be different, in at least some ways and to some degree; and that means that change is possible. We talk about the pendulum swinging, and it does, and it will — though I suspect that the pendulum, like most other political machinery in this ever-so-exploitable country, has been manipulated in some way to ensure that the people in power don’t lose that power when the pendulum swings; but the power of the pendulum metaphor is that the swings are inevitable, and reactive: you can hold back the pendulum, you can even push it farther away from plumb; it’s just going to swing harder and faster when it finally goes, and swing farther in the other direction when it does. It can’t be stopped. And it can’t be stopped because people are essentially good, despite what our cynical profiteers would have us all believe — because they want us all hiding in our individual isolated shells, hiding from the horrors, easily controlled and easily exploited. No: people are essentially good. We are just — we’re really, really scared. That’s what we have to overcome.

Here’s a nice picture of individual shells:

🔥 Cuban snails ( Also said to be the most beautiful land snails ) : r/NatureIsFuckingLit
These are Cuban snails. Image from the subReddit NatureIsFuckingLit. Hell yeah.

And it begins with trust.

That’s the message I want to share today. Hope is possible, and achieving what we hope for is possible, especially if we all hope for (essentially) the same things. It begins with trust: we need to trust each other, to believe that we all will cooperate, so far as we can, to achieve those things we hope for.

I know this because I am a high school English teacher. And I have watched my classes struggle more, in some ways, every year, as their attentions spans wane, as their interest in reading disintegrates, as they become less and less literate. I have certainly lost hope at times; I have certainly lost trust in my students, have believed that they do not want to learn what I have to teach, that they do not want to read, that they do not want to do anything other than play video games, watch TikToks, and be annoying. I have believed all of those things because there are days when they act like that. Some of my students act that way all the time, and some of those even say that they have no interest in learning to read better, no interest in ever reading as long as they live. It’s hard to keep trusting kids who say that to me, especially the ones who know the impact on me of what they are saying.

But those are only some days. And those kids? They are only kids. They don’t want to read because they don’t have any hope. They are not incapable of reading, and they are not incapable of hope. On my worst days, I don’t believe that; but on my best days, I inspire hope in them. I know it: I’ve seen it, and I’ve been told about it, both in the moment and years afterwards. I was having a rough day this last Friday: and then one of my students — now former student, because they have departed my school for online schooling — came back to thank me for being their teacher. They gave me a lovely hardback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, the book I taught them. Because they saw it and they thought of me, and they wanted me to have it. They saw a book: and they recognized the value of that book, because I taught them that book had value. And, I mean, I’m a good teacher: but I’m no miracle worker. This was just an ordinary interaction, a regular unmotivated and difficult student, who I happened to connect with enough that they trusted me when I said that TKAM was worth reading: and then I proved it. And for the rest of their life, they will know at least one book that has value, that is something worth giving to another person as a thank-you gift.

That’s hope.

And it starts with trust.

I’m going to keep going with this idea, because I like it, and I think there is value in it. Hopefully I can get some of you (if there are any of you — but I trust that there are) to trust me enough to start hoping, as well. And if we can agree on what we should be hoping for, then we can make it happen. We’ll turn that goddamn pendulum into a wrecking ball — one made of candy.

@rbxraw

The ball got tired of his yapping🤣🤣😂 #fyp #foryou #neildegrassetyson #astrophsics #comedyvideo #meme #wreckingball #whydidntiflinch #noflinch #funny #foryoupage #viral #fypシ #blowthisup #trending #cutoff #caughtoffguard

♬ original sound – RbxRaw

That’s how we’ll change it.

Day of Hope

Dusty Leave a comment

Yesterday was my birthday. I had a great day: my wife and I went out for an incredible brunch at a restaurant in Tucson called Blue Willow – HIGHLY recommend the breakfast burrito, if you go – and then went home and had presents – I got two awesome t-shirts and a video game, Skyrim for my Nintendo Switch, which is a lovely thing mainly because Skyrim was one of those games I avoided when it was new, since I knew it was exactly the kind of video game I love most (sandbox swords and sorcery) and would therefore consume all of my waking hours once I opened Pandora’s Box and started playing it, and as I told all of my students at the time when they asked if I was going to play Skyrim, I have a job; which means that now I have been given permission to go ahead and let my free time be consumed, partly because I deserve and need nice things, and partly because the truth is that I will not actually allow ALL of my free time to be consumed, that I can be trusted to do what is necessary even if I would rather just dive back into the video game (Hold on, the t-shirts reminded me: I need to cull my collection. Be right back. [Got rid of seven shirts. Good progress.]) – and then we went to an arcade with friends, where I got to play pinball and a car racing game and a pirate shooting game and the BIGGEST SPACE INVADERS IN NORTH AMERICA, and then we came home and ordered Chinese food in and then had huge slices of an AMAZING cake. It was a great day.

Yesterday in Washington D.C., the Republican party passed Donald Trump’s “Death to the Poors” bill (I will neither call it the B.B.B. as that shitmouth named it – though honestly I appreciate the bald hypocrisy of that, coming from the party that has been loudly and repeatedly criticizing large omnibus bills for years if not decades, until said omnibus comes from President Turdtongue – nor talk about it as a tax cut bill as the news outlets insist on calling it, while they also name it as a Asslips’s “most significant accomplishment,” which is a wild phrase: just imagine talking that way about, say, Auschwitz, or the Night of the Long Knives, or the invasion of Poland, as Hitler’s “biggest achievements” to date. I will come back to hypocrisy.), which Pres. Butt-Teeth will be signing today, in a continuation of his efforts to taint and corrupt every single piece of American culture so that nobody can ever enjoy anything ever again in this country.

Not that this is my favorite holiday: I’m a vegetarian, and I live in Tucson, Arizona, so barbecues at the park are out on both meat-related and heat-related grounds; plus my dog is terrified of fireworks, and I personally dislike the strong possibility of wildfires being started by an idiot with a bottle rocket and a match. But there are, nonetheless, reasons why I want to celebrate this holiday, and hold onto it in the face of ol’ Colon-Throat’s attempted appropriation. And I want to write about it today because I realized that the reasons for me, for us, to hold tight to the Fourth of July are the very same ideas that I want and need to write about.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. Part of me doesn’t want to write at all: I just want to curl up on my couch, pet my dog, and play video games. (And not only because I just got Skyrim, though that is definitely part of the draw… I can hear it calling to me right now… No, wait, that’s my cockatiel Duncan screaming because he’s upset about something.) And while I want to rant about Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court, and the Congress, because all three branches of government have been captured by the proto-fascists who want to turn America into a white Christian ethnostate with a patriarchal dictatorship that is decidedly unChristian, I don’t know what the value would be in ranting: the people who would read it already agree with me, and it would just make them sadder than they already are because the horror is relentless and it’s hard to remain so ourselves; and the people who might read it who don’t agree would find it tiresome to just hear more ranting; and the people who are on the opposite side of these issues (who don’t read, but just hypothetically) would be giddy with Schadenfreudish glee, cackling about how angry I am and signing up for WordPress accounts just so they can comment “Cry more!” and throw down some of the memes I’ve been getting hit with because I have (foolishly) been commenting on news stories on Facebook. And I don’t want to create any of those responses.

I recognize that the most important thing we can do is spread good information, and so that makes me want to become a journalist, and share correct information, and – I mean, maybe I should do that. But I already have a job. And it’s a hard job, and I work hard at it. And I have a family which I love, but which, like all families, requires a lot of time and energy – and not that I begrudge that, I do not, I would spend all of my time and energy on my family if I didn’t have to work, and I look forward to the day when that happens; I’m just saying that I will not take time and energy away from my family in order to become a journalist. There are already better journalists, trained and professional journalists, out there doing that work, so I shouldn’t have to. Clearly my fight against misinformation is in my teaching, and I will continue to do my very best there, in every way I can.

But that leaves me with nothing to write about.

It is summer, and so that makes me want to write, because over the school year I am often too tired and burnt out and frustrated to write; but I have been facing this conundrum about what to write about, and I haven’t been writing much. (Also my summer has not been all that restful, but it’s mostly been family stuff, so I don’t resent it.) As I haven’t been writing, however, I have been trying to get back into my other great passion that I haven’t been able to spend enough time on: I’ve been reading. And one of the things I’ve been reading has been these:

These are my great-grandmother’s novels, published in the late 50s, when she had retired from teaching. (Have I mentioned that I come from a line of teachers and writers on  my mother’s side? This is part of that line.) I’ve never read them before, partly because I never knew my great-grandmother; for most of my life I didn’t even know that she had written books or published them or that we had copies. So I’m reading them now, and they have shown me a couple of things. First, because these are young adult books, and historical/regional fiction (They are all set in western Washington, where the Mitchells lived and where both my grandmother and then my mother were born and raised, during the frontier times between about 1970 and 1890, when the Mitchells did not live there – Faye and her husband Burt emigrated from Kansas), they are not great literature in a canonical sense: but they are good stories. And this helps to settle in me something I have always struggled with, because I am not a writer of great literature, and though I don’t want to be, I always think I should be; but I think that in truth I am, like my great-grandmother, a storyteller, not a literary giant. And I would rather be that. Second, these books, because they are set where they are and because the main character, Abby Conner, is a young woman who wants to become a teacher and a writer and who talks about what it means to be a teacher and a writer, are helping me to be prouder of the teacher and the writer that I am, because I think that my great-grandmother would probably be proud of me, and I like that – and my Nonna, whom I loved and respected but who passed before I had even decided to become a teacher, would definitely be proud of me, and I love that. And third, because my great-grandmother clearly wrote about what he knew, I have been thinking about how I need to do that. Not with my novels, which are almost certainly going to stay fantastic and more about vampires and time-traveling pirates and magical dreams that change reality; but with these blogs, and with the things that I write every day: I need to write about what I know.

So this is what I’m going to do: I’m going to write about what I know.

So. What the hell do I know?

…

I used to be optimistic.

My wife talks about it, about how I used to be much more cheerful, and much more calm, and much more positive. She doesn’t make it sound as bad as I just did: she doesn’t say all those things at once, and she doesn’t say it with any kind of accusation or disappointment or anything – never “You used to be a lot more fun!” or anything like that. She has taken note of it out of concern for me: because my general demeanor has become darker and angrier over the last decade or so. And it’s coming out in ways and in places that I don’t like: I have had a hard time keeping myself from losing my temper with my students, and I have failed at that, and lost my temper, several times in the last few years, sometimes to my real regret. I am also having a hard time keeping my spirits up in order to push back against my wife’s occasional depressing outlook, which is sometimes something she needs me to do (Don’t we all?), and which I have not been doing as well as I used to.

I suspect this happens to a lot of people, if not to all of us. We lose our idealism, and our hopefulness – those of us who ever had it, that is, which is not everyone. But I think as time goes on, and life gets harder, and as people just keep on disappointing us, over and over again – say, by re-electing an orange-tinted fascist would-be dictator even after he tried to overthrow our government the first time: it’s hard to look down the road and think that it actually goes to a better place. And while Trump certainly wasn’t inevitable, the difficult and sad things that happen as we get older are inevitable: we lose people we love, and eventually we lose ourselves, and there is often a great deal of suffering on the way to that. As that happens to us more, and as we are shielded from it less, our lives become sadder in many ways, and it makes sense that we would do the same.

I do also think the last few years have been rough on people in this country. Trump’s two electoral wins and two administrations, the pandemic, the various economic and global crises: it’s been tough to keep looking on the bright side of this pile of shit. I certainly haven’t been immune to that. In fact, it has been directly detrimental to my optimism: because I keep thinking, and saying, and arguing, and preaching, that things are going to work out the right way: and I keep being wrong. I said that Trump was going to lose in 2016, both in the primary and then in the election, and I thought that he would go to trial for his crimes and that he would get convicted, and I thought he would lose in 2024. Wrong, every time. (Okay, he was convicted, but only of the least important one, and it didn’t affect his political ambitions in any way at all, which I also thought it would. Still: he is a fucking convicted felon, and anyone who claims it was only a politically motivated prosecution, you’re goddamn right, and it was a successful one, and it should have kept people from voting for him, and it was therefore the right thing to do – but I think we can see that, even though it was a politically motivated prosecution, that didn’t affect the general populace very much: the election is evidence that the jury was honest and sincere.) That record makes me not want to keep my hopes up: not mainly because I hate being wrong and looking dumb (though I do, both), but mainly because I don’t want to give people false hope and then have them fall farther and harder when my false hope is proven wrong. Again.

But okay: now let’s talk about the Fourth of July. (See, this is why I’m so goddamn wordy and circuitous in my writing, even though the only way to write great literature is to keep it short and simple, as much as possible, to edit even more than you write: because I’m not a great literary mastermind, I’m a storyteller, and this is how stories get told. Thanks, Great-grandmother. Actually, since I called her daughter Nonna, I’m just gonna call Mrs. Mitchell Grandnonna. I hope she would like that. And let me note that, as wordy and circuitous as I am, I get back to where I want to go. Eventually.)

The Fourth of July is a convergence of three of my heroes. Three of the greatest writers in American history, because all three were three of the greatest thinkers and idealists in American history. Not all the best people, but I generally think the art, and the truth, can transcend the people who discover it or create it. If you look at science, for instance, there is not and never has been a scientist who was worthy of the power of what they discovered: not Newton, not Darwin, not Einstein… maybe Carl Sagan. I don’t know if Galileo was a good man, honestly, but how could he possibly be good enough to live up to what he did for our understanding of the universe, for what he made possible? He couldn’t. The same with great artists: the people who affect the lives of millions and even billions of other humans in positive ways couldn’t possibly be good enough in and of themselves to really be seen as deserving of the praise that their impact deserves. Martin Luther King, Jr., could not possibly be good enough as a person to actually deserve the honor that he rightfully gets as the civil rights leader and genius communicator that he was, even if he hadn’t been an egotist who cheated on his wife. But his impact, his positive impact on the world, is beyond measuring: is beyond what one person could contain. So I am willing to praise the work, and the words, and the ideas, even if the person who created those things was worse than their impact.

This does not excuse J.K. Rowling, by the way, though I do also think the criticism of Harry Potter is lazy and vicious and incorrect; but Rowling is, it turns out, a terrible person who should absolutely be canceled entirely. While we all keep reading Harry Potter. Don’t worry, it will get easier when she is dead.

So: the three people who are connected by the Fourth of July and whom I find inspiring are Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. (See what I mean about not the best people? Douglass was a saint, but I only say that because I don’t know enough about him to know the bad stuff; Lincoln was a racist egotist, and Jefferson owned his own children. But the point here is that we need to look at the work, and the ideas, and the words.) Thomas Jefferson, of course, wrote this:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Those two paragraphs might be the best argument ever written: because the words are perfect, the logic is perfect, and the idea was so much better than the people who formulated it that it has led to better outcomes and a better world for hundreds of millions of people, for two and a half centuries. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

All men are created equal.

(Which also means that we all suck. Just sayin’.)

And I think we know why this idea, these words, and this man are connected to this day, for me. For all of us.

Lincoln, on the Fourth of July in 1863, said this:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This is sometimes described as the perfect speech – partly because it is so short, and therefore nothing that I ever could have produced – and there’s an argument to be made for that. I find it inspiring because I think it translates some of Jefferson’s ideals, which were intentionally more universal, into something more personal, more grounded: this is how the idea that all men are created equal comes to be an American ideal instead of a human one – though it is still, and always should be, a human ideal. Still, Lincoln and this address are why we as Americans should consider this to be something personal, something we own, not simply a truth that exists in the world. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers are part of that as well, because the Declaration of Independence was not just a statement of ideals, but also a political and pragmatic document (which is why I include the first paragraph in the quotation from it, and in what I describe as the perfect argument: that sets the purpose for the second paragraph, where all the intellectual brilliance is. But as a rhetoric teacher, purpose matters, so the first paragraph is part of that, and part of what Jefferson and the rest of them were committed to, like Lincoln.); but because the Founding Fathers were patriarchal slaveowners who didn’t want to pay taxes, their purpose doesn’t rise to the level of their ideals. Which makes them fascinating, really, because slaveowners who didn’t want to pay taxes somehow managed to formulate and then enact one of the greatest ideals in human history, that all men are created equal and that government should be based on that fact and all of the logical consequences of that fact, such as the necessity of consent; but Lincoln’s purpose in saying his words was, first, to honor the sacrifice of people who died for those ideals, which is one of the most important and perhaps most abused elements of recognizing the worth of all humans (and not something expressly focused on in the Declaration, not even in its lists of abuses and usurpations), and second, to maintain the existence of the nation based on that fact, and to help bring it closer to being a nation that lives up to its own purpose, a nation governed by a system based on the fact that all men are created equal. Those purposes are worthy of those words, of the ideas they express, as the words and the ideas are worthy of the purpose. Probably not so with Jefferson.

And then Douglass. I wish I could have heard Douglass speak, because unlike the other two, Douglass was a great speaker as well as a great writer; but at least we have the words he wrote down, and the story he told with them, the story of his own life. And if you don’t know why Frederick Douglass is connected to the Fourth of July, it’s because of this:

(1852) Frederick Douglass, “What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July”

Frederick Douglass

Daguerreotype photo by Samuel J. Miller

That whole speech is worth reading. But let me focus on this:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been tom from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

Here we see Douglass’s purpose, and the reason he also needs to be included in this list of great writers connected to the Fourth of July: because Douglass held this country to account for its hypocrisy. (Told you I’d come back to it.) Douglass showed, more clearly than anyone else, that the United States has never lived up to its ideals.

He said this:

I remember also that as a people Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait—perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout —”We have Washington to our father.”—Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones.

And this:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Douglass said a lot that could apply to us today, which is why it is worth reading the whole speech. (And I’m thinking now I may teach it next year. We’ll see.)

But, since I have now gone on for far too long (Not gonna feel bad. Storyteller. Also, I was quoting.), let me get to my purpose: the reason why I wanted to talk about these three men and their writings on this day, the Fourth of July.

Because all three of these men represent hope.

If they did not believe that this nation could exist in its ideal state, or at least that it could come closer and that approaching that ideal would be better than moving away from it, they would never have said what they did. None of them lived in this nation in its ideal state, and probably none of them thought they ever would live in that nation: but they all believed it (or something close to it) could exist, and that that wonderful reality was worth fighting for. I know because all three fought to achieve it, for essentially all of their adult lives, with all of the considerable powers at their disposal. They fought, for years, for decades, in the face of insurmountable odds, of endless trudging through swamps of opposition, the stinking mud sticking to them and tainting everything they did and everything they saw, making absolutely no progress, for longer than some people have to live their whole lives.

But they kept fighting. Because they believed they could succeed. They did not give up. No matter what.

That’s what optimism is. It’s determination, and belief. It is hope. It doesn’t have to be based on reality and an understanding of the truth and the terrible odds stacked against us: but when it is based on that, it is that much stronger, that much more potent. That much more indomitable.

I don’t know if I’m indomitable. But I do know I’m stubborn as fuck. And maybe that’s the same thing.

I don’t know if I have that kind of optimism. But I hope I do: and so I’m going to keep fighting, and keep trying, and keep writing. Because I think that my purpose, and my ideals, are worth all of that effort, and all of that fight, and all of that struggle. And because I believe that the world I dream of is possible. Even if I never see it.

But I hope I do. And I hope you will, too.

Happy Independence Day.

Bi(Partisan) Curious

Dusty Leave a comment

Donald Trump is going to turn me into a conservative.

That’s probably not true. But it does feel like I have grown a bit more in tune with conservatives as I understand them – certainly how I idealize them, which I know is about as far away from the truth as are the demonizations of the left that are so popular on the right, that we are babykillers or pedophiles or corrupt Fascist socialists who sell American secrets to China so we can feed that money to Hamas to promote anti-Semitism. But one obvious thing keeps coming up: I have grown much more suspicious of government, and much more frustrated with government inefficiency; and both of those feel conservative-leaning.

I mean, maybe it’s not Trump: maybe it’s because I’m getting older, which supposedly swings people to the right; though to be frank, I’m not getting richer, which I think is the actual reason why people become more conservative as they age. It’s always easy to demand higher taxes on the rich when you aren’t one of them – though it is also true that liberals, masters of NIMBYist virtue signaling, are also fond of raising taxes on other people and not on ourselves. I suspect as well that growing anxiety and paranoia contributes to the stereotypical political changes that come with age; as my own anxiety and paranoia are focused almost exclusively on government and authority, it’s basically driving me closer to socialism – or anarchism, even – rather than the increased fear of crime and of marginalized people which I’ve seen in older people around me.

But I’ll tell you what, I do think there needs to be a rebirth and resurgence of the conservatism that I grew up with (Now THAT makes me sound like an old man), at least the conservatism I think I grew up with; though it would be swell if people would first figure out that trickle-down economics is a lie intended to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of those who already have it and who then espouse trickle-down economics. The economic side is coming along, I think, as Americans may actually be figuring out that the Republicans we elected last year have done somewhere between fuck-all and fuck-you in terms of helping make life more affordable, while they fire thousands of people, reduce useful and vital government services, and cut taxes for the rich, as personified by Elon Musk. (I tell you what, if Musk turns out to be a double-agent for progressives, I will yell “AHA!” Because not a lot of genuine conservatives could have managed to throw as much shit on the GOP as Musk has done. I mean, he’s no Trump, but it still seems too much for it to be coincidence.) But I think the rest of what I imagine as idealized conservative values, like small government, local government, a clear focus on maintaining the rule of law and of the Constitution: that is what I think we actually need. And then, inasmuch as conservatism ever represented the values of independence and personal integrity, “family values,” patriotism and Christianity both in a humble, individual sense, I think people turning back to that would be an incredibly good thing.

Though honestly, it would be best if that happened to the people who are actually supposed to be conservative, namely Republicans, rather than if it happened to me. But I will confess a certain imaginary scenario in which someone like me, and maybe actually me, steps into the void left in the GOP after Donald Trump dies or becomes politically insignificant (and God willing let that happen soon), and helps people to remember that there is nothing particularly wrong with conservatism, that progressive ideas need to be tempered in rational ways, that there is benefit in a marketplace of ideas and a political process that features opposition and negotiation, that a single-minded government is dangerous no matter how right-minded (or left-minded) that government is. That the problem with the current GOP is, first, Donald J. Trump, and second, everything that Trump represents: authoritarianism, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, hypocrisy and narcissism. Not the essential values of conservatives, which, while I generally don’t agree with them, I don’t think they are at all bad. I think the Republican party returning to those values – maybe a little more modernized than the 1950’s Eisenhower Republicans I’m probably imagining – would be the best thing for our country, barring an actual leftist revolution that swept the entire nation along with it, and I keep looking for someone to carry it out.

Can’t find them. Not in Trump’s GOP.

Can you imagine that, though? If someone charismatic enough to actually get Republicans to listen reminded them of what the party of Lincoln should truly be about? I can’t imagine a change in the politics of this country that would have a more immediate positive impact. Not even the hard pendulum swing to the left which I suspect is coming after this particular round of violent greed is over, because as long as progressives and liberals and Democrats in government are opposed by people who will lie with every breath, spread rumors and character assassination with every press interaction, start pretty literal fistfights over every disagreement, and ignore all political norms (Which, to be clear, are the ESSENCE of conservative sensibility, and there is not a much better indication that the Trump movement is not authentically conservative – other than the obvious abandonment of respect for law and order and police authority, in favor of supporting a multiple felon and the complete discarding of all due process) in order to exploit any opportunity to harm their opponents and increase their own power, government will continue to be too dysfunctional to inspire any long-term support for progressive ideas and movements.

Think of it: if the Democrats as they are currently constituted, headed by people like AOC and Cory Booker, Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff, and Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom, rather than Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, trying to actually enact Medicare for All, over the objections of Senators Donald Trump Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Greene-Trump (Dunno if she’ll marry one of the Trump boys or get Trump himself to adopt her, but I promise that she’ll be part of the family in the next decade. I am going to put my money on her taking up with The Nazi Cheeto himself after Melania finally divorces him.), who holds a filibuster on the floor of the Senate to accuse every one of the Democrats of supporting Chinese Triads in smuggling Fentanyl into Gaza to make Palestinian super-soldiers who will be unleashed across the southern US border to rape white women in order to bring about a wave of abortions which will then be used to distill that baby brain juice which keeps the Clintons alive.

What are the chances that any progressive/liberal alliance would be able to survive through that kind of inferno of flaming horseshit?

As long as Trumpian MAGA fanatics remain popular, they will ruin all attempts at a functional government. Because that is the larger Trumpian project: the undercutting of a functional federal government and a social power structure that serves the public interest and the general welfare promised in the Constitution, in service of the two main goals of the movement, namely a more lawless society where wealthy people and the white supremacist power structure can have free rein, and a right-wing-media-fed zeitgeist of apocalyptic terror that allows Daddy Trump to claim that only he has the strength and intelligence to save us all from the dangers and threats that surround us.

I do think that there is real value in conservative ideas and values – at least in real conservative values. It would have been wonderful if the last twenty years had included more genuine attempts to balance the federal budget and reduce the deficit and the debt, particularly in the times of economic growth, so long as it had been done the right way, by raising taxes on the wealthy. You know, the way Eisenhower did it: because asking the wealthy to contribute their fair share would show a respect for individual responsibility, and patriotism in the humble sense that asks everyone to contribute to the betterment of this nation and the people who make it up. (Also, while I’m no expert, I swear that taxing the rich seems pretty dang Christian…) Which value, when taken to a Trumpian extreme, is turned into that your-own-bootstraps nonsense which then justifies – or rather pretends to excuse – cutting Medicaid and food stamps and all of the social safety net, while allowing billionaires to extract all the wealth they could ever want without any return on our investments which made the wealth possible in the first place. I think the progressive desire to create programs that produce positive change is wonderful, but when combined with the liberal/Democratic desire to protect everyone and everything that needs protecting, it leads to levels of red tape and bureaucracy that undercuts the progressive program entirely; and, at least in theory, real conservatives would be useful in tempering or preventing that excess. Take, for example, this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0uxWGBxJWf2oAB9uyDMoOB?si=407ef6fb2213428a

This episode of Jon Stewart’s wonderful podcast features Ezra Klein, the progressive former MSNBC host, who discusses a program intended to build rural broadband access under President Biden’s infrastructure bill. The program had a fourteen-stage process before a region – state or county or city – could receive grant money, which process produced so much red tape that out of 56 regions that applied for grants to build broadband infrastructure, only 3 had finished that process in the three years between the law being signed in 2021 and the end of infrastructure spending in 2024. And none of those three had actually managed to get the money and build the broadband. Klein goes into agonizing detail – he wrote about this in his most recent book – and shows how all of the delays and all of the red tape are well-meaning, but basically none of it is necessary, and taken as a whole, it was destructive: because no rural broadband was built. Multiply that by every other program Biden’s administration passed, and you can see why the Democrats lost the election: because even their important and genuine accomplishments never actually came to pass in the real world. Klein talks about how Biden planned everything on a six- to ten-year timeline – when elections happen every two or four years.

The best line in the podcast was this: “We are stuck between a party that wants to destroy government, and one that can’t make government work.”

I would argue that conservatives arguing for real conservative values could have counteracted the problems that come with a too-singleminded focus on liberal and progressive values. To be fully transparent, I do think that much of the problem is in the liberal influence on progressive movements, because I think it is liberals and Democrats who insist on political correctness and purity tests and virtue signaling, where progressives are focused on functional efforts to improve people’s lives. Klein talks about that, too, that part of the issue was things like a requirement that the subcontractors hired for the broadband installation represent women and non-white minority-run businesses, which is a great intention to have and a wonderful thing to try to do – but it’s not the point. The point was to build rural broadband (Which, coincidentally, would do a hell of a lot to help a large number of marginalized people; remember that women in rural areas are the ones who can’t find meaningful work opportunities, and also remember that the rural areas of the South are largely not white. Or maybe that’s not so coincidental, but it does show why liberals given total control can sometimes step on their own feet.). It’s this desire, not to achieve real progress, but to be liked, to be good, while working through the process, which makes the left twist itself into knots and get nothing done – though what I am ignoring is the fact that progressive goals and projects are frequently unpopular, because they are expensive and difficult and do not tend to aggrandize benefits in the hands of those who already have privilege, and it requires a spoonful of liberal/Democratic people-pleasing to help the progressive medicine go down… if there’s not going to be an actual leftist revolution, that is.

I don’t really know, at this point, if conservatives really do have that no-nonsense gruff exterior that we think of as people just getting shit done; but that’s what I’m imagining. I just picture a 60-year-old white man (Hey, I’m not stupid enough to think that the GOP will suddenly become multicultural; let’s not go too far into the fantasy) in a committee meeting, who just keeps responding to every liberal feel-good virtue-signaling suggestion with a steady beat of “The goal here is to build rural broadband.” Basically, I think we need people in government who just want to get shit done: not necessarily make sure that everything gets done in exactly the “right” way.

There is an important point to be recognized in the conservative drive to demand people work hard: because while government is necessary to make changes for large groups of people, particularly changes that are not profitable for any other group currently with privilege and power, what it comes down to, always, is people working hard. People in government work hard to make it possible for everybody else to work hard, by trying to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to actually benefit from their hard work. That’s the truth. Take it from me, a government employee who works hard to make other people work hard, so they can benefit from their own hard work. That’s what school is. And I don’t know that liberalism actually pushes people to work hard; within my example of myself and schools, liberals are the ones who get 504 accommodations and IEPs enacted and followed, and who make sure that the curriculum includes social-emotional learning and multicultural perspectives: conservatives are the ones who teach math and science and history. (English teachers are all liberals. With very few exceptions, who are mostly psychopaths.)

In the most simple sense (And I know I’m oversimplifying and basing this on stereotypes; doesn’t make me wrong, though), the recognition in liberal politics of the burdens of social marginalization and intersectional oppression, of mental health struggles and of the value of self-care, promotes a deeply valuable drive for people to take it easy, to relax and take care of themselves. But conservatism does value and push individual hard work, personal responsibility, self-reliance. Not Trumpian pseudo-conservatism, of course, which pushes people to hate everyone who doesn’t have dirt under their fingernails (Daddy Trump, as in all things, excluded, of course) unless the skin of those hands is brown, in which case they should be hated anyway no matter what is under their fingernails; but conservatism tells us that people need to do things themselves, and be responsible for the consequences of their decisions: which allows people to actually make those decisions themselves, without approval by a dozen committees, and then (in theory) holds them responsible for those decisions.

Liberalism is necessary to make sure that conservatives don’t treat people like shit in the name of promoting personal responsibility. (Also to make sure that conservatives in this country don’t go full white supremacist; which would naturally occur, as conservatism by definition is trying to retain and preserve a past system, which in this country means an oppressive racist and sexist system.) Progressives are the ones trying to make the world a better place, rather than trying to retain the status quo. I do not imagine that a United States run by conservatives of any stripe would be the best version of this country. But my God, watching the Democratic party fuck up every single opportunity that we vote for them has worn me the fuck out. The 2024 election broke me. The Republicans are going to lose in the midterms next year, and I am looking forward to that: but I cannot stand to watch Democrats win control of Congress in the coming reaction to Trump, and then do every fucking thing wrong again, so that 2028 swings back to the goddamn Republicans.

But right now, there is another reason. The main reason, the real reason, why I find myself wishing for a renewal of a conservative movement that probably never really existed. It’s not policies, not red tape and bureaucracy, not tax breaks, not cuts to the social safety net. It’s not the next election, not the future of how we see government. It’s none of those things.

I want to find a way to ensure that this country will still exist.

I’m trying not to overreact. I’m trying to see this as just more bullshit from Trump. But, I mean — he fucking sent in troops. Thousands of troops. To LA, to California, under his command, his and that fucking idiot Hegseth. He sent them not because they were needed, not because they were asked for, not because their presence will help: just because he wants to start a fight with the left, with California, with Gavin Newsom personally, who has been criticizing Trump for years, and who is willing to fight him back. Because MAGA wants to have the fight with the left — by which I mean the majority of the population of this country, the ones who don’t want a dictator, who don’t want tyranny, who actually want this to remain a Constitutional Republic, a country under the rule of law. They want to fight all the rest of us. They want to hurt us because they think we have stolen their country and filled it with illegal immigrants and trans people and abortions and fentanyl. They want us to pay for that: and Trump wants to help them do it. Not because he gives a shit about this country or what is happening to it; just because he wants to point his finger and see people die at his command. He wants the full might of the U.S. military to obey him, and destroy those he wants destroyed.

This is not about left and right, liberal and conservative. It’s about this asshole sending fucking troops to LA. It’s really just about life and death: life and death of immigrants and marginalized groups in general, life and death of this country and its self-image, life and death of the rule of law and the experiment in democracy that seems, at last, to have failed.

Our President sent troops to LA. Not to enforce the law: to enforce his will. To set off a fight — a fight that people are giving him — so he can escalate the tension until people finally snap, and fight, for real, fight for life and death.

Because Trump wants a war.

If Conservatives, real Conservatives, would help prevent that, then – yeah, I’ll be one.

I am a middle-aged white man, after all.

And whatever else I think of this country, I don’t want America to fall. Not like this.

Whatever it takes.

Shock and Awful

Dusty Leave a comment
SHOCK AND AWE IRAN 2020
Okay seriously I Googled Shock and Awe to find a header image for this post, and I found this — and WHAT THE COWABUNGA IS THIS???

Here: maybe this will be better. It’s a chimp, and that’s not actually poop — but the source is awesome, too.

Poop-Throwing Chimps Provide Hints of Human Origins | WIRED
Read this. Really.

It’s so hard to get my head around it.

I’m good at understanding things: especially people. I am extremely empathetic, I am a student of human personality and interactions, and I try never to underestimate the complexity of a person and their actions and the motivations. Because of my vocation, I have spent time with and communicated in fair depth with thousands of people; and because of my avocation, I have spent countless hours imagining people and creating their actions and motivations. So I think about this a lot: why do people act the way they do? And normally, I think I’m pretty good at understanding why people do what they do, and making sense of it.

But I can’t make sense of Donald Trump.

It pisses me off, and that’s part of why I call him a shit-flinging gibbon: that is my own frustrated attempt to fling that would-be dictator, that narcissistic Nazi, that Cheeto-skinned charlatan, the hell away from me, to dismiss him as nothing more than a beast, an animal without complex motivations. He tries to have sex with anyone female for the same reason he tries to eat all the cheeseburgers he can: because he is nothing but instinct, pure id. Just basic survival urges in a primate that is not currently in a survival situation, and so, just as if you imagine that great ape in a fine restaurant, for instance, he screams and climbs on the tables and the wait staff, and he chucks the table settings and steals people’s food, cramming it into his mouth while he threatens to bite anyone who gets too close to him.

I like thinking of Donald Trump as a terrified primate who is trying to bluster his way out of danger so he can hide somewhere with the bunch of bananas he just stole. And based on much of what he does, I think it’s a pretty helpful way to try to understand him.

Take his reaction, for instance, when he was first asked about the Signal group chat where his top advisors and his Vice President acted like braggadocious buffoons, while clearly violating multiple federal laws by chatting about war plans, in advance of an attack, on a non-secure, non-governmental chat app that the Russians had already targeted for hacking – the Russians who are years ahead of us in cyberwarfare.

Trump reacts to Signal group chat: ‘I don’t know anything about it’

Now imagine that’s a monkey being threatened by a reporter aggressively asking it a question that it can’t understand at all.

“I don’t know anything about it,” which he repeats several times, is the monkey first grunting and then screeching, backing away and baring its teeth; the nonsense attack thrown out at the Atlantic “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic, to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business” is the monkey swiping with a paw at the aggressor; the line about “Well it couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective” is the monkey trying to look taller, maybe beating its chest to appear tough.

See how well it works?

But it doesn’t explain everything. It’s fun to imagine, and there are some moments when, truly, Donald Trump acts like an unthinking animal just reacting – often overreacting – to what he sees as a threat or a challenge; but it doesn’t explain everything.

My biggest problem is trying to understand Trump’s plans and strategies. Obviously this is where the primate metaphor breaks down, because while the great apes are capable of planning multi-step tasks and so on, they’re still not very good at it; and as far as I know, they are double plus ungood at understanding abstract concepts, which Trump clearly thinks about quite a lot: he wants to be famous, he wants America to be great. He may not understand what he’s actually doing and what really makes America great and what does not, but he does seem to have a grasp on the concepts “America” and “great.” So in this situation, he’s not just a shit-flinging gibbon. But it is difficult for me to think about Donald Trump as a person with a plan, and with a strategy. But I know it’s unfair to consider him as the opposite: having no plans at all, having no strategy – just the shit-flinging gibbon. That’s not right either. I genuinely don’t get it: too much of what he does makes no sense, at all. Take leaving the Paris Climate Accords: all he has to do is ignore it, as every past president has done, even the ones who sign these well-meaning but toothless treaties; somehow we’ve never managed to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels, and never managed to reduce our dependence on individual cars, and never even tried to have a national conversation about our consumption of goods and how it produces excess carbon (Here’s a wild thought: what if the tariffs are really just a four-dimensional chess strategy to reduce America’s carbon footprint by cutting us off from our international consumer goods?). Ignoring the treaty, and then making an ad about American energy production standing in front of some oil-spewing well in North Dakota, right in front of a giant oversized American penis-truck, which is parked in front of, let’s say, a single-use plastics factory which is belching out black smoke, would do all Trump wants to do to own the libs and encourage his base in their worst habits; so why make America look bad internationally by leaving the treaty? It doesn’t make sense, which makes me want to understand Trump as an idiot.

But is he?

Let’s examine the data and try to extrapolate a strategy. It makes sense to me that Trump wants the support of his base. That source of power, that he can sway his base any way he wants, has been much of the secret to his rise to the White House twice (Also twice losing the popular vote); so when he says things that make them cheer, that makes him happy. Makes perfect sense. I like saying things that make people happy with me, that make people clap for me; who doesn’t? And as that base following his lead helps keep the GOP in line, it makes even more sense that he would do things that make them happy. So because they are white supremacists, they hate DEI: thus he tries to crush DEI. Being also intolerant evangelical Christians, they hate trans people: thus he tries to ban trans people from existence. Back on the racism tip, along with the backwards-looking (and insane) patriotism, they like Confederate monuments: he tries to bring back the Confederate monuments that were removed after the murder of George Floyd. I don’t believe Donald Trump, who is a racist but also doesn’t seem to particularly care about anything that doesn’t profit him directly, and doesn’t mind spending time with people of color if they do have something to offer him, particularly cares about all of this stuff, but his base does and he likes to make them happy, so he does these things. I get that. No problem.

Another example: Trump is supported by billionaires, and considers himself aligned with billionaires and the pro-business wing of the Republican party. They do not care about DEI or the existence of trans people (Some of them do, to be sure; there are some fundamentalist Christian people who are obscenely wealthy and would really like this country to be a Christian theocracy; Betsy DeVos springs to mind. But for the most part, they just want more money and less government control over them.), but they hate government regulation: so he tries to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and tries to shut down the EPA, and so on. Okay.

Then there is the crazy shit: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and Mount Denali, and trying to take over Greenland and so on. Now, to some extent, that is sticking it to the libs, which his base and the billionaires love; and it’s also trying to look tough, which his base loves; and the Greenland takeover offers quite a lot of untapped mineral wealth, which the billionaires love. But also: really? I can’t imagine that he actually sees any of that as critical issues for the US to confront, and I can’t see even his base particularly caring about Greenland or any of the names of national monuments and geographic features that most of us never refer to by any name.

And then there are the things he is doing that are clearly just fucking stupid: the tariffs. I know the billionaires don’t want that to happen; they don’t want any government regulation. The regular folks in the base still love anything Trump does, and he has talked for years about how great tariffs are, so okay – but you know what he hasn’t done? Lowered the price of groceries or gasoline. Which was the most important issue that got him elected, by far, among both his base and the Republican voters in general. And if he wants to achieve anything in his term, he needs the Republican party to maintain control of the Congress, and he clearly knows it as he keeps trying to push the GOP candidates in the special elections, and he took back Elise Stefanik’s nomination so she could stay in the House. So why the hell hasn’t he tried to push the grocery stores to lower the prices of eggs? Why hasn’t he reduced or removed regulations that would make it easier to import eggs? Why hasn’t he cut deals with oil and gas companies to reduce the price at the pump – or even easier, gotten Republicans to remove gas taxes to lower the price a few cents a gallon? Anything he could do on that front would cement his popularity, and make him ironclad against any criticism. Even ineffective but well-publicized attempts, which is mostly how he gins up support from his base, would solidify his popularity.

So why hasn’t he done it?

Why is he working so hard to help Israel slaughter the people of Gaza? Sure, the conservative Jewish population supports Israeli aggression in general, and the right wing has used the Hamas attack to beat the drums of paranoia in order to sell guns to right wing Americans (who really need to be scared of military age men coming over the border, because maybe they are going to start gunning us all down just like Hamas did to the Israelis). And there’s this whole bizarre thing about evangelical Christians making Israel very important in their worldview because the apocalypse will happen there, or something. But as I understand it – I am not an evangelical Christian, which is perhaps an unnecessary disclaimer, and I am also not going to investigate their insanity too carefully – the idea is just that the Jewish people must possess the land of Israel before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can occur. And there’s also supposed to be a bunch of war, and an antichrist (I got a candidate for you…) and a bunch of other things; but it seems to me that none of that requires the full removal of the Palestinian people from Gaza, and nothing else other than religious zealotry would even begin to explain the support for the genocide of the Palestinian people by the most famed victims of genocide in the history of the world. (I also cannot understand the desire of the Israeli government and military to literally just murder every Palestinian person. Don’t they ever get tired of revenge? Have they all just completely lost all humanity?) But there’s Trump, meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, sending all the weapons he can, threatening to rain down hell on the Gaza strip if Hamas doesn’t surrender all their leverage by giving up all the remaining hostages, authorizing (I mean, I assume he authorized it at some point, but maybe it was just Hegseth) attacks on the Houthis for their solidarity with the Palestinian cause – and talking about ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip so that he can build the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Okay, I get that last part. Trump is a real estate developer who specializes in gaudy, ostentatious, appalling displays of gross wealth and egotism; of course he’d see an opportunity in Gaza, which is beach front property on the Mediterranean. It probably felt like a task he could actually do well, as contrasted by everything political he can’t do, and who doesn’t like a chance to show off their actual expertise? I think he thought about it like a resort development project he was pitching, and he can’t understand why nobody else can see his vision; I bet he made at least one call to a model-maker whose services he has used in the past. And I bet he was stunned that nobody else agreed with his idea. All of which helps to show that he has the mentality of a child, and maybe he’s just pouting until everyone else decides his idea was the best and then they’ll come back and ask him to fix Gaza.

I mean, we literally did that with the Presidency of the United States. So I wouldn’t even consider it dumb for Trump to expect us all to come crawling back, asking him to do whatever he wants to do. I bet he’s counting on it. After all, when you’re a celebrity, you can do anything to them you want.

I hope all of the MAGA voters understand now what it feels like to be grabbed by a sexual predator. I’m sure the Palestinian people – everyone else in the world, really – would very much like to avoid that experience.

Now, if all of this is merely the actions of a shit-flinging gibbon, then that explains the stupidity of it all. There are some understandable motivations – power-seeking, for instance – which explains some of what Trump has done at least adequately. But I have not been able to think of an overarching goal which gets all of it to make sense. If tax cuts and regulation reduction shows a desire to help business, the tariffs fly in the face of that. If his real goal is to help (or just to please) the MAGA base, then that explains the racist culture wars, but not the lack of even attempted action on grocery prices or the cost of living. And if he really wanted to be a dictator for life, he not only wouldn’t have told the country that he was considering a third term, thereby tipping his hand, he wouldn’t have kept Hegseth and Mike Waltz after the Signal chat, because I guarantee you that what they did pissed off the military, whatever they may say in public (or not) and however they feel about Trump. Hegseth and Waltz – and Gabbard and Rubio and all the rest – actually genuinely put American pilots at serious risk of being shot down by the Houthis, who have advanced anti-aircraft weapons systems, and who have channels through Iran to Russian intelligence, which easily might have picked up the Signal chat PARTICULARLY SINCE STEVE WITKOFF WAS IN RUSSIA WHILE HE WAS PARTICIPATING IN THE CHAT.

One complaint I have about the Trump era: I don’t even know when to use all caps any more. Is that the most egregiously offensive aspect of the Signal chat? Or maybe it was the emojis? When is it time to yell? I want to yell all the time, but obviously I can’t do that.  I have outrage fatigue.

Now, there is an obvious answer here, which would have pleased Trump’s base since they love when he is a heartless asshole, and it would have pleased the military, and it would have pleased the Republican party in Congress: he could have just fired everyone in that group chat. He loves firing people. It’s not even like he doesn’t want to signal that he made a mistake with his cabinet picks: he fired like 80% of his own picks during the first term, and the rabble just hooted and hollered and clapped their chapped hands and uttered such a deal of stinking breath that it choked him, and he fell down at it. (Sorry: that’s a Shakespeare reference. To The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, which I have taught often enough to have memorized some parts. I will have to write another post showing the comparisons between that play and Trump – and I better do it before he gets Et Tu’ed in the Senate, or else nobody will be impressed by my acumen.)

But no: Trump didn’t fire anyone. Which lost him (I would guess) support in the military and in congress, and indirectly with his base, who do not actually care about Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard or Mike Waltz: they care only about Trump. But they do generally support the military, so again, to shore up his own power and reputation, Trump should have fired them all, and made a big deal out of it. Tell me he couldn’t find another half-dozen nutballs to replace those “advisors” with. Are there no other alcoholic womanizing hyper-masculine douchebags in the military apart from Pete Hegseth? Seriously? And I even have a suggestion for someone to replace Gabbard as National Head of Intelligence: Maria Butina.

If Trump wants to be a dictator for real, he will never succeed without the full-throated support of the military; I don’t have to know any history at all to know that, but of course I know enough history to know that literally every single successful coup, ever, was carried off with the military’s complicity or at least tacit agreement and inaction.

So yeah, I don’t get it. Trump doesn’t make any sense to me.

But then I remembered this book I read with my book club. (By the way: I would HIGHLY recommend a book club like the one I am in. Half a dozen smart, involved people, and we read books that help us make sense of the madness of the modern world. It is – not necessarily comforting, because we read a lot of really disturbing shit; but it feels so very good to know that other people are thinking like you are and feeling like you are. Plus we get to have snacks, and the members who host our meetings make DAMN good snacks.)

The Shock Doctrine

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

This is a fascinating and deeply depressing book. It explains the economic paradigm known as neoliberalism, championed most effectively by the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, and the effect that paradigm and Friedman have had not only on the United States, but on nations around the world. The title comes from another – uh, “expert” – whose ideas have had enormous influence on our world, a psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron. Cameron believed that people who had suffered terrible trauma in their lives, and who suffered the natural and inevitable consequences of that trauma, could be “cured” by replacing their traumatic memories with a tabula rasa: a blank slate. No memory of trauma, no psychological or emotional damage. He thought he could rebuild the person afterwards into a healthy and well-adjusted citizen. He experimented, therefore, with different ways that one could destroy a person’s memories, and eventually, a person’s whole personality, because the personality kept stubbornly resisting the attempts to erase the memories – almost like memory is an essential part of personality, or something. And so the process didn’t work, as any sane person could have guessed it wouldn’t; his attempts to erase a person’s memories and personality essentially just fragmented both, but never erased them. Klein doesn’t say because she doesn’t know what his real goal was, whether he wanted to help people and was just completely soulless, or if he was in fact a monster who wanted to destroy people, but when his theories didn’t pan out, he kept working on them – and ended up working for the CIA, finally creating for them a handbook on torture based on his work. The idea of it was that you could disorient someone so terribly that they would lose the ability to remember things like loyalty to their country or cause, or the consequences of revealing secrets they might have, and would therefore, in an incoherent state following the application of repeated and awful torture, be excellent sources of information because they wouldn’t even realize that they were revealing secrets, and so wouldn’t have to be coerced; and because they wouldn’t know who they were or what they were doing, they wouldn’t do things like conceal key pieces of information or lie at specific moments in order to protect whatever they were telling the CIA about.

The reason Klein talks about Cameron is because the basic system he created was what Klein calls the shock doctrine: in various tortuous and traumatic ways – frequently just literal electroshock, and frequently psychedelics administered without the knowledge and consent of his targets – Cameron would start with an incredible and overwhelmingly destructive attack on the psyche of his victims. He realized – or maybe it was the CIA that realized – that the most effective way to do this to a person was to remove anything that could be used as a solid base to stand on, mentally and emotionally speaking: Cameron is the reason why torturers now disorient their victims as much as they cause suffering, because that makes it easier and faster to eliminate any sense of self, any sense of identity: disrupt sleep, disrupt a sense of pattern or time passing, take away the victim’s knowledge of where they are, of what time it is, of what to expect, of who they are talking to, of anything and everything at all: do it all at once, as rapidly and overwhelmingly and completely as possible. This shock, either electric or psychological, was supposed to create the tabula rasa. And as I said, it didn’t, but it did effectively destroy people’s ability to resist control, and thus interrogation. And Klein’s insight was to recognize that Friedman and the neoliberals he taught and trained, and the political actors they influenced – there are several in the book, which is long and thorough, but perhaps the two most effective examples would be the George W. Bush administration, and Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from his 1973 coup through his overthrow in 1990 – used the same concept as a way to effectively short-circuit the democratic rule of law in countries they wanted to control.

Pinochet does it first, and he does it with the explicit assistance and advice of Milton Friedman himself, who advised Pinochet on how to establish a capitalist paradise after Pinochet had assassinated the democratically elected leftist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Friedman’s advice was to take advantage of the shock of the coup and the violence that followed – Pinochet had been a general before his takeover, and so he knew very well the value of the military in overthrowing a legal government; he then used them to silence dissent by jailing political opponents, torturing them (of course) and in his own signature atrocity, having his enemies thrown out of flying helicopters – and force through the changes as rapidly as possible, before the people and any potential resistance could recover their balance and begin to push back. Pinochet did it, and it was largely effective (I’m leaving out a lot of this, of course – I recommend the book), and so it became the standard: the Shock Doctrine. Overwhelm people with something so outrageous, so devastating and unbelievable, that they won’t know up from down, day from night, or friend from foe, and then ram through your agenda before any potential resistance knows what’s happening. Exactly how Ewen Cameron taught the CIA (Who, of course, actively supported Pinochet, who replaced a leftist government with a far-right capitalist one – rule of law and liberties be damned) to overwhelm a person with a complete assault on all of their senses and touchstones, any sense of reality, so that their personality and therefore their resistance could be destroyed.

The book is a little out of date now; it was published in 2006. So of course the last use of the Shock Doctrine by neoliberal political actors that Klein talks about is the George W. Bush administration and 9/11. The terrorists created the shock: and the neoliberal Bush administration followed up with their agenda, mostly the USA PATRIOT Act and the rise of the surveillance state, along with, as Klein explains at length, the capitalist takeover of the military, pushing it through before anyone even knew what was happening, let alone how to resist. If Klein had written the book just two years later, she would have had another perfect example from the same actors: the way that the Bush White House got the TARP program passed directly after the economic collapse of 2007, which simply handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the very same corporate actors who had destroyed the global economy, as the administration enabled the Fed to purchase the “toxic assets” of companies that were, of course, “too big to fail.” If she had written the book fifteen years later, she could certainly have made much hay with the COVID-19 pandemic, though also I would argue that the incompetence of the first Trump administration, and the imperfect allegiance to neoliberalism that was held by the Biden administration, meant that less was done to change this country, and that opportunity was – uhhh, “lost.” I guess. But you can definitely see small instances of the Shock Doctrine being utilized, first in the Paycheck Protection Program that allowed anyone who wanted to get free money to apply for loan forgiveness; and then in some of the more controversial executive orders that both Trump and Biden used – such as Order 42, which kept asylum seekers in Mexico in order to quarantine them indefinitely.

But the neoliberal grip on the country, which probably peaked during Bill Clinton’s presidency if not George W. Bush’s (Every president since Reagan has been a neoliberal, regardless of party. George H.W. Bush was bad at it, possibly because he was actually concerned with helping the country; and Joe Biden moved away from his neoliberal roots, partly because he was influenced by our own Wizard of Oz, Bernie Sanders. Trump is a neoliberal, but also a shit-flinging gibbon, so not nearly as effective as Clinton or Reagan or even Obama.), has been slipping, under both Trump and Biden. So I don’t necessarily see the same unified, effective effort to achieve neoliberal goals (Complete laissez-faire economy, total free market – for details, read the book, or listen to Unfucking the Republic, who have a special, warm hatred for Milton Friedman) happening under Trump the first time, and especially not now – the tariffs are, if there is a God and any justice, making Milton Friedman flip over and over and over in his grave – but in thinking about Trump, and why anyone would want to support him in EVERYTHING that he is doing, I remembered this book.

And so now I’m wondering.

Let me also clarify: I do believe that Trump has handlers. The first term it was Steve Bannon, primarily, and maybe it still is; maybe it’s Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Bannon and Vought are both white supremacists who seek a theocracy, Vought including a neoliberal paradise and Bannon imagining a full-on Reich. I think anyone with more brains than morality, which includes almost everyone in Washington and certainly everyone in the administration (To be fair, Trump has, I suspect, very little in the way of functioning brain cells – but he is entirely amoral and frequently immoral, so “more brains than morality” is so low a bar it’s basically just a floor for the Donald), can manipulate Donald Trump as easily as breathing: tell him he’s a genius, make him feel like he is about to be asked to explain something but you won’t ask him if he just makes this very smart, very good decision, and then when he agrees not only that he should make that decision but it was originally his very smart idea, praise him for his intelligence and his ungodly machismo. Lather, rinse, repeat. I can’t imagine that everyone who wants to wield power in Washington would give up this golden opportunity to be the power behind the idiot.

But I can’t believe anyone would want all of what Trump is doing – or that someone who really wanted to control him would be unable to stop or blunt or reduce some of his stupid fucking ideas. If Vought wants the federal government eliminated so that white supremacy can reign again, why wouldn’t he want the dipshits in the Signal chat to be fired? (Though as I write that, I remember that incompetent government advances the agenda… so maybe this is the right guy to look at if we want to find the puppetmaster.)

So I’m wondering. What if Trump himself, and Elon Musk and DOGE, this whole administration, with its incredible stupidity and its incessant destruction of everything good, carried out entirely haphazardly and with brainless abandon – and yet ALL BAD as though it really was planned – is actually just the shock? What if the goal is to disorient us all so much, to make us all lose faith in so many things, that we don’t resist when the actual agenda is put into place, because we won’t even know who we are or where we are, let alone what is being done to our country?

I don’t know that this is true – I’m a little thrown, now, by realizing that a lot of this might fit in with Vought’s agenda – but I think it does make sense. I’ve always thought of Trump as the distraction: the gibbon flinging shit is impossible to look away from, and hey presto, tax cuts and the repeal of Obamacare. That last was stopped, finally by John McCain, who, I suspect, was not very susceptible to the disorientation of being tortured. (RIP, Senator. We miss you. Even if we don’t miss all of your policies and positions.) And maybe that’s all it is – but the problem is, if I’m right and ALL of this is the distraction, all of it part of the grand application of shock to the whole country and maybe the whole world, then either the plan is already happening while we are reeling – or it hasn’t started yet. And if it hasn’t started yet, I have to assume it is intended to be something so much worse than what we are currently dealing with, that they can’t try to put it in place until after the full shock has sent us all into a tailspin of confusion and desperation, unable to resist control.

I think I need to get my book group to read Project 2025.

And maybe The Handmaid’s Tale.

How the Handmaid's Tale Sheds Light on Our Own Dysfunctional Relationships - One Love Foundation

The Price

Dusty 1 Comment

I saw an opinion piece which stated that schools today don’t teach enough economics.

Fair enough. I don’t think that’s the biggest problem – I will argue, probably in future posts, that the lack of humanities education is at least partly responsible for the loss of empathy which is at least partly responsible for the rise of Trump – but it’s certainly true that schools don’t teach a whole lot of economics.

But you know what? Even though I didn’t learn economics in school – not one jot, not one tittle; I knew nothing whatsoever about macro or microeconomics by the time I finished my compulsory education – I did learn how to learn: and I have learned some of the basics of economics on my own.

I have learned enough now to correct the mistaken argument I accepted from my students in Oregon over a decade ago, which was part of the impetus for me to learn some economics, because I hate losing arguments, and I hate feeling stupid, and I thought, back then, that my students had won an argument and made me look stupid in the process. They were saying that immigration caused inflation, which I thought (without any strong factual basis, just vibes) was false; they said, “But immigration means more people buying things, which raises demand.”

“Right,” I said, waiting for them to get to the point.

“Raising demand raises prices,” they said.

“Right,” I said, still waiting for them to get to the point.

“…That’s inflation!” they said, and then chortled when I turned red and flapped my open mouth uselessly, unable to reply. I felt dumb. They won that argument.

Well, kids, it’s not that simple, and I know it now. Now I would say, “Increases in demand only raise prices when there is a restriction in supply; once the supply increases to match demand, that should level out prices unless there is some other upward pressure on the prices. So if immigration is slow over time, and spread out over an area as large as the US, it probably wouldn’t change prices at all: it might lead to a temporary spike in any given location, but once the supply chain adjusted, then all that would happen is a greater volume of sales, spurred by more customers, who also enter the supply side of the chain by getting jobs and adding to the aggregate productivity – and we call that growth. Not inflation.”

What’s that? You say the actual information, the specific content, which I gained during my primary education wasn’t nearly as useful as the skills I gained??

BUT ANYWAY.

(I don’t doubt, by the way, that I have made some errors in the above long-awaited rebuttal to students who couldn’t possibly remember the original argument; none of them will even see this post, I’m sure. My economics understanding is far from complete. But it still feels good to say that, so I’m going to leave it there.)

Here’s something I do understand, and would like to discuss now that we have some better idea of what the numbers are: the costs, and the benefits. We’re looking for a balance: and preferably greater benefits than costs. Right?

So what has Trump cost us? Compared to how we have benefitted from his election?

When Trump got into office, and I learned from at least one friend on Facebook that their vote had gone to Trump in hopes that he would bring down grocery prices and restore the (apparently) wonderful economy that we had in his first term, I decided I would keep track of the prices people wanted to elect this man for. Because I understand: I have spent most of my adult life not making quite enough to be comfortable, not enough to have it easy; things like price hikes and tax increases and wage freezes, furlough days and interest rates and insurance – I have been pinched by all of them, and slammed by some – have all caused pain and worry. Not to mention what I’ve had to go through with student debt, house debt, deferred maintenance costs, and medical bills – including medical bills for my pets. I get it, I really do, I understand why kitchen table concerns override most ideals, no matter how important those ideals may be. I understand that people are hurting: believe me, my family is too. We have debt. We have a mortgage. We have family medical costs, now. My mother, who will turn 81 this summer, is working, full time, to pay off her mortgage and her back tax bills. (I will mitigate that last one slightly by saying that my mom is a nurse, absolutely loves being a nurse, and the work she is doing now is in-home hospice care, mostly things like keeping an eye on someone overnight or while family caretakers are away. It is not heavy work, and she likes doing it. But she’s fucking 81, and she is still working. Full time.)

But now that we are two months in, almost two-thirds of the way through that “First 100 Days” marker that we like to make so much of, I think it is time to look at different prices. To be specific, I think it’s time we looked at the price we are paying for Trump: what it is costing us to have Donald J. Trump as our president, this second time around.

Ready?

First, gas and eggs:

As you can see, they have not gone down. Egg prices shot up because there has been an outbreak of avian flu, and millions of chickens have died or been put down to prevent further infection; eggs are in comparatively short supply right now. They will remain in relatively short supply until the chickens can be replaced: which means that even more of the eggs that might go to market will instead have to be used to hatch new egg layers (Not directly, of course, because the eggs we eat aren’t fertilized: but some clutches, some hens, some broods, however the egg farmers arrange and measure this, will need to lay fertilized eggs instead of unfertilized eggs, and that means fewer eggs produced for sale. And we are talking a LOT of chickens, and thus a LOT of eggs.), and then we’ll have to wait until those new chicks get big enough to lay eggs themselves. So it will be a while. And all of that assumes the bird flu which caused the problem gets resolved, the chances of which don’t look great right now. But while we are waiting on our egg prices to drop, it is also true that grocery prices in general have not dropped. Grocery price tracker: Inflation trends for eggs, bread and more during the Trump administration

It is to be expected that, assuming that some (or all) of the tariffs remain in place, prices will go up, which will include grocery prices. Trump Tariffs: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War

It is to be noted that Trump’s constant promises to lower grocery prices starting on day one appear to have been lies: this has not been his focus since taking office.

Gas prices have also not gone down, because again Trump has done nothing to lower them. “Drill baby drill” means nothing if you are looking to drill within the continental US; our oil is the wrong kind to make gas. And Trump has proposed a 10% tariff on Canadian energy – which is where we get most of the crude oil we turn into gasoline.

Why Trump’s fix for gas prices won’t work | CNN

“Why don’t we just start using American crude oil? Champagne oil sounds so nice!” Because oil refineries are set up to handle certain products, and changing them to other products is either too expensive, too slow, or just impossible. I mean, in theory the federal government could step in and use tax dollars to make the changes or subsidize private refineries so they could make the changes…

But that would require actual reliance on, and responsible management from, the federal government.

So: gas prices are not going down, probably will go up. Egg prices are not coming down for a long time, months if not years before all of the supply chains are back to where they were before the avian flu (and that also assumes there won’t be any other price shocks in the egg industry, or the grocery industry, or anything else – like changes in interstate commerce, or retaliatory tariffs, or hell I don’t know, a nuclear war with Russia).

How else are we paying for Mr. Trump’s return to power?

Well there’s the stock market.

United States Stock Market Index – Quote – Chart – Historical Data – News

You can go look at the graph. The stock market jumped up right when Trump was inaugurated, and climbed slowly upward to a new high a month in, on February 19th – and then, tariffs. And the Dow Jones took a dive. It’s coming back up, the last couple of days, because the Fed announced they still plan to lower interest rates this year, because the overall economy is still strong and improving; but the temporary stays and exemptions Trump put on his own tariffs expire in two weeks.

So we’ll see.

The stock market is not the economy, and the market is volatile, so I don’t intend to use this as the only or even the main measurement of the cost of Trump; but it’s surely been a jolt to people with retirement savings in mutual funds.

I wonder how many of them voted for Trump?

So what else is there?

Well, there are all the people who have lost their jobs. And while I’m sure that hardcore Trump supporters will argue that these are actually benefits to the American people, because we are saving money by cutting these people off the government payroll, I’m going to look at the other side: we are losing their services.

DOGE Cuts Update Today: Social Security Changes, Pentagon Slashes Jobs – Newsweek

Let’s see: the Pentagon is cutting 60,000 jobs, which is actually fine with me in terms of our military budget and activities; I would like both to be curtailed. But that sure is a lot of people to put out of work. I’d really rather see those people still working, and maybe a couple fewer aircraft carriers and whatnot.

The EPA is cutting 1,000 scientists. The Department of Education is laying off 1,300 employees – and now Trump has issued an illegal order to shut down the department entirely. 24,000 probationary employees were fired; several of them will go back to work because the administration lied about having fired them for cause – but also, by the time the cases work through the courts and these people are allowed to go back to their jobs, many of them will have found other jobs, because who wants to wait several weeks or months to go back to work for somebody who fired you with a goddamn email from Elon fucking Musk?

The IRS is cutting 20% of its workforce, 18,000 jobs – which is great if we don’t want to find waste, fraud, and abuse among billionaire tax cheats and corporations contorting through loopholes and government contracts – and the USPS is cutting 10,000 people, which is great if we don’t want to, you know, communicate and stuff. But that’s fine: nobody even wants to know what’s happening now. We don’t want to watch this shit show.

The Veterans’ Administration is cutting 80,000 workers. I have no jokes at all to make about that. I have spent the last year and a half, with my wife, trying to work a claim for her mother, who is the widow of a veteran, through the VA’s system. I tried to do it myself. I couldn’t do it: after thirteen months of trying to make it work on my own, I finally got help from a VA counselor whose expertise is in helping people finish their claims. He got it done for us in two months. Now my mother-in-law is receiving the widow’s benefit she deserves, and needs.

Was that guy cut?

He is a veteran himself, and now he helps fellow veterans and their family members get into and through the system. He is kind, and professional, and very easy to work with and to talk to. He helped us.

So you tell me: if he was cut (and I honestly don’t know if he was, but 80,000 is a big fucking number, and I have no idea how many of these counselors and account managers are going to be cut in the future even if they weren’t thrown out in this first round), was that a benefit to our country? Or a cost?

How about the Social Security Administration? There are cuts coming: they are closing regional offices, and they are reducing workforce – firing people, that is. Oh, and also they are making it impossible to verify your identity over the phone, which means people who need to talk to the SSA will have to actually go into an office and talk to someone to get help with their account.

Right when they close offices and cut the number of workers available to help people.

How about that one? Cost, or benefit?

How are those eggs looking now?

My problem with all of this, of course, is that I don’t see any benefits: I only see costs. I see our economy getting battered, and people being callously thrown out of work, and services that I know directly are incredibly important to the point of life an death being cut. I guess people who hate the government are happy, but as I understand it, people hate the government mainly because it doesn’t help people: and while I’m sure that is the experience some people have, it is not the experience that others have; and surely, we can see that ripping the whole system into tatters is not going to help people more. Trump claims that there will be benefits in the future, but Trump is a known liar; and to my knowledge, he has never explained clearly what benefits will come from all of this, or exactly how they are supposed to arrive. Are we really supposed to believe the same old trickle down economics lies? That if we cut taxes for the richest 1% then the rest of us will be better off? It didn’t work the first time Trump did it, or when George W. Bush did it, or – EVER. So I’m not going to accept it now.

So if anyone actually knows what benefits there are to all of this to offset these costs, please, write me and let me know. I would really like to know what the upside is.

I would love to learn.

The Trump Doctrine: Bullshit, and Fling Shit

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay. Let’s talk. Honestly. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

The truth.

I’m trying to get my Freshman English students to do that. To talk honestly. They don’t – ever – but I think it’s mostly because they don’t know how.

See, what we have done in education over the last ten or twenty years is reward lying. Reward cheating. To a certain extent that is not new: I lied constantly when I was a teenager, especially to my teachers and my parents, and I would guess that most teenagers had similar experiences. And for the same reason: schools reward lying and cheating. For as long as schools have been product-focused, rather than process-focused, we have given students an opportunity to achieve all the rewards of school (All the apparent ones, at least) without doing the difficult parts. My grade in my classes was based on the work I turned in: which means that if I can find a way to cheat on those assignments, then I get the exact same grade I would if I did the work myself, the hard way. And sure, we also try to stop students from choosing to cheat, through threats of dire consequences if they get caught; but that “if” in what I just wrote is a humming, glowing, throbbing beacon of glorious light. Because teenagers are dumb: we think that we can get away with anything, even while we are actively not getting away with it. The very first time I caught students cheating – and they were cheating on a small, simple, easy assignment, a set of study questions that came after a reading, which they did with the reading in hand, in class – I realized while I was reading their responses that three young women, all friends, had given identical, word-for-word answers. They had copied. And the giveaway was they had used the word “oasis” completely out of context – something like “and the oasis of the story was the courage the characters had.” One of them – the one who had done the work and given it to the other two, the source student – had written “basis,” in cursive, and the other two had misread it. So I gave them all zeroes for copying, two for doing it and one for letting them, and when I handed the work back, I told them they had gotten zeroes. But instead of confessing, they argued with me. Vociferously. Angrily. Denying that they had ever done such a thing. I hadn’t handed back their papers, choosing to keep them as evidence, and just informed them of their grades; when they demanded I show them the evidence, I realized I had left the papers in my other classroom (Like many first-year teachers, I got the crappiest job assignment, so I floated between three different classrooms and taught two different remedial classes), and they insisted on coming with me to see the evidence; they yelled at me the whole way across campus, about how dare I accuse them, and they would never do that, and it was not fair, and so on. We got to my other classroom, I showed them their papers, pointed at where they wrote “oasis” and said, “Explain that.”

And they actually tried. They tried to come up with some bullshit on the spot about how “oasis” was meant to represent the safe space that had been created in the story by the characters… the girl who was talking trailed off in the middle of the sentence. I just shook my head and said, “No.” And they left. Grumbling. Still denying that they had done what they couldn’t actually prove that they hadn’t done – because they had done it.

But what happened? The student who had done the work had her mother complain to the administration, and I had a meeting with one of the vice principals and this mother. Who told us that her daughter was under a lot of stress, and after all, she had done the work, and then had made the poor choice to let her friends copy because they all just wanted so badly to do well. That’s not really bad, is it?? So, as per the decision my administrator made, that girl got the grade. The other two had a chance to make up the work and get a grade. They got a warning.

A few days later, one of the boys in the class told me that he had actually let the first girl, the source girl – the one who got the grade – copy his work.

So. This is the structure we have built for students. Cheating is overlooked; copying is standard; getting “help” with the answers is encouraged. Because the product is what matters, not the process by which you create that product. (It’s the perfect conceptual framework for a life cut short by working yourself to death in order to get the company more profit. But surely that’s just a coincidence…) And onto that structure we have added the internet, with all of its access to perfect information and perfect writing; and now AI, the same perfect information and perfect writing, but now both customizable – and untraceable. And we still grade students on product, not process. We still assign homework, so they can complete the assignments in privacy, without supervision, with full access to resources like AI and Google. We use the same assignments year after year, so students can pass on work they did to the next year’s class. And we tell them that what really matters in school is getting good grades, so you can get into good college, so you can have a good job and make money. Oh, we tell them they need to learn, they need to master the skills; but that’s just talking. Every single reward in school is derived directly from product. (With the exceptions of PE, the arts [which sometimes reward product, but not always – my wife’s Life Drawing class is graded only on process, her AP Art class graded largely on process… though in that last case that’s because if she graded their art work as she would grade a college student’s work, they’d all fail. She has high standards. And we don’t work at an art school.] and a few classes like foreign language, where students are graded on their conversation and pronunciation and so on: performance metrics.) And almost every product can be completed with some kind of corrupting assistance, whether it is copying from a friend, getting help from a family member, or using the online resources they have available. Even just using the excuse of “Oh no, my paper didn’t upload!” to get extra time to complete it and turn it in, with permission, a second time. Because after all, I can’t blame a student if the WiFi went down, right?

Right.

So I’m trying to get my freshmen to think about lying, and whether it is good or bad. They all, without exception, think it is good in the right circumstances, which are always two: to spare someone’s feelings – the classic “Do I look good in this outfit?” conundrum – and to save yourself from getting in trouble. They do usually offer a third circumstance: when someone threatens to kill you if you don’t tell them something, like where you hid the money, then it is acceptable to lie to save your life. Thank you for including that hypothetical, children; surely an important one. But it’s that middle one, the lying-to-get-out-of-trouble, that I want them to think about. Actually, the first one, too, because I gave them the counterargument: if you tell someone they look great when they look terrible, then you’re telling that person to walk around proudly, while they look terrible, and don’t know it. They didn’t have an answer to that. They’re not ready to admit what I think is the answer, that honesty really is the best policy, and the key to getting along is knowing how to speak truth without being harsh and insulting – you don’t have to say “Damn, you look terrible!” when someone looks terrible in an outfit, but you should not lie and say they look perfect when they look terrible – and the key to not getting in trouble is… not doing things you shouldn’t do. I don’t think they’ll all come over to my side, but I want them to think about it, because they lie to me constantly, and I’m sick of it.

But then, last night, I watched our President stand up in front of Congress, his words broadcast to the whole world, and tell lie after lie after lie. After lie. After lie. For ninety minutes. And the whole time, without exception, the Republican majority clapped and cheered for his lies. The two grinning dolts behind him, Mike Johnson and J.D. Vance, grinned and laughed – because Donald Trump didn’t just lie, he was also needlessly, gleefully cruel, and appallingly stupid, again and again and again, and clearly that stupid cruelty was even more popular than his lies. Because the cruelty won’t even get the apathetic next day fact-checking that his bullshit has gotten today; the cruelty we just let go, maybe frowning a little at how our President doesn’t show the same decorum we enjoyed so much from President Obama (When he wasn’t bombing people in the Middle East or deporting families from the US), who was always polite and well-spoken and never overtly cruel and bullying like this guy, with his goddamn shit-eating grin when he tells some joke about innocent people he’s going to harm, because it will save money, or because it will win him points with his equally cruel, stupid, bullying base. But he won’t have to suffer any consequences for his lies or his stupidity or his cruelty; he did all the same things last time, and we elected him again. Because eggs were too expensive.

(Please understand – and know that I am in the middle of writing a piece about that, about grocery prices and inflation and Trump’s broken promises regarding the issue, but I had to address this absolute horror show of a “speech” – that I recognize the genuine damage and stress that inflation and high prices inflict on those of us who are on the edge of not having enough. I am a high school teacher: I can’t afford eggs. I am also a partial vegetarian: eggs are one of my primary sources of protein. So I get it. I only mock the idea of egg prices as a reason to vote for Trump because even if we do see that as a valid reason to elect a president – and I will argue all day that presidents just don’t have that much control over prices in our system – it ignores SO MANY other things about Donald Trump. I get the need for relief from the cost of living: but that’s not the only thing that matters. That’s why I say it. If you disagree with me about the right priorities to focus on for a vote, then so be it. We’ll discuss this more another time.)

For now, let’s start with talking about what Donald Trump lied about last night in his address. This is easy to find, of course – here’s a good source FactChecking Trump’s Address to Congress – FactCheck.org, that gives a clear list followed by more careful analysis – but while they do include some of the things that sometimes slip past fact checkers, like that Trump ignored the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on creating the economic situation that the Biden administration dealt with, they focused on the specific lies Trump told in the speech: and that means they don’t talk about the lies he has used as the justifications for his actions thus far, which he then discussed in the speech. And that’s where I want to focus.

But let me also list out, if you are not interested in following the link – if you believe, as many people do, that fact checkers are unreliable, that only independent media sources are believable, which means you have not thought a whole heck of a lot about why “independent” is more important than “part of an organization whose business model relies on truthful reporting rather than garnering attention” – some of the more egregious falsehoods that Trump spouted.

First, the savings he and Elon Musk have found through the “work” of “DOGE.” They have not found hundreds of billions in waste: they have “saved” about $20 billion, claimed $105 billion, and proved that exactly none of it was savings from eliminating fraud. It’s all “savings” from firing employees. Which, sure, that saves money – but it also eliminates work and productivity. If you have three people working for you and you fire one, you save one-third of your payroll costs – AND YOU LOSE ONE-THIRD OF YOUR PRODUCTION. Seems like this would be already known by two guys who run such huge and successful companies, but maybe not. They do both seem to believe that they personally do the work which is actually done by their employees, so, maybe they’re unclear on the concept.

Or maybe the only fraud here is the one being perpetrated by Trump and Musk and DOGE.

Kabosu, Dog Behind Famous 'Doge' Meme, Dead at 18

Next: Social Security. Trump went on and on and on about the MILLIONS of people who Social Security “believes” are over a hundred years old, including some that he said were older than the United States. So let’s be clear on this: when we say that “Social Security” “believes” these people are impossibly old… who are we talking about? Is Social Security the name of the person in charge of the organization? Is it the hive mind of all the bureaucrats who work there? Is it the AI who runs the database? Is Social Security here in the room with us now?

No: social security is the much-beloved system whereby we ensure that senior citizens don’t have to starve to death in shantytowns after they stop working. And it is also the biggest “entitlement” in the Federal budget: and therefore it is the one the Republicans most want to cut. But since so many of their voters are senior citizens, they can’t cut it without facing the wrath of their voters: so they try to turn their voters against social security. By talking about it like it’s the Avatar of bureaucrats, and that it’s stupid enough to “believe” that there are impossibly ancient people still getting social security checks.

Here’s the truth: the social security database is enormous. Tens of millions of people receive checks every month; hundreds of millions of people make payments into the fund for those checks every month. When people pass away, there is a form that one’s survivors are supposed to fill out and file with SS to let them know that someone on the roll has passed and no longer need checks. But: people don’t consider that to be an important job, especially while grieving, so they don’t always do it. Also lots of people don’t have loved ones to file the form. I would guess millions of people, over the years. The ancient people in the database are not people that Social Security “believes” are alive, they are people who were on the rolls as alive, and who have never been confirmed to be dead. See the difference?

Trump doesn’t. Well: he does, he just lied about it, and pretended these two different things are the same. They’re not. If you want to see this as a moment when Trump is monumentally stupid instead of a liar, I’m fine with that. And yes, it’s monumentally stupid: if someone told me there were people on the SS database who were over 120 years old, I would assume there was a mistake in the data, not that Social Security “believed” there were Americans living over 120 years old. Especially not the millions whom Trump gobbled about.

And while thousands of those people – thousands out of the millions, which is fractions of a percentage point – may still get checks, and some of them get checks because living people are using the name of a dead person to collect social security (Frank Gallagher does this with his dead mother in Shameless.), which is fraud, the rest of the millions of unconfirmed-dead people on the roll are just – on the roll. In the database. They don’t get checks. Money is not wasted on them, and it would not be saved by cleaning up the database. Of course cleaning up the database would be a good idea, but how many man-hours would it take to confirm that millions of people are actually dead? And if you decide to remove everyone who is over, say, 100 years old, there will be at least 80,000 people who will want to have a word with you.

Centenarian, older adult population change by state | Northwell Health

Several of Trump’s other lies were of a less serious nature: claiming that 38,000 Americans were killed during the construction of the Panama Canal (5,600 workers died during construction, mostly from diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Not all of them were American. Special Wonders of the Canal – PMC), that Biden inherited a great economy and Trump inherited a terrible one twice, that Europe has given less than the US to the Ukraine and that the US has given $350 billion – these are just bad facts; they’re definitely lies, but they are small, because none of them change people’s minds, and none of them serve as the primary justification for Trump’s bad policies: he wants to take us to war over the Canal because China has an influence there, not because some number of Americans died during construction; he constantly lies about his accomplishments and, especially last night, about Biden’s failures, but that doesn’t change anyone’s opinion about either man; Trump is going to give as much of the Ukraine to Russia as he can, because he wants to be allies with Putin, not because of how much Ukraine costs to defend. And he doesn’t want to be allies with Putin to save money, it is to make himself into a strongman, in appearance if not in fact. (Though I have to note here that when I said last night that Trump wanted to be Putin, my wife’s immediate response was “Trump will never look that good with his shirt off.” Savage, she is. But: she ain’t lyin’.)

But the lies I really want to get to with Trump’s speech are the ones about people who are disenfranchised in this country. Such as people who are described, by that shit-flinging gibbon and his handlers, as representatives of DEI: like General C.Q. Brown, whom Trump fired from his position as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whose fucking resume looks like this:

EDUCATION
1984 Bachelor of Science, Civil Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock
1991 U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
1992 Squadron Officer School, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
1994 Master of Aeronautical Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla.
1997 Distinguished graduate, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2000 Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2004 National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va.
2008 Air Force Senior Leadership Course, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, N.C.
2012 Joint Force Air Component Commander Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2014 Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2015 Pinnacle Course, National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.
2017 Leadership at the Peak, Center for Creative Leadership, Colorado Springs, Colo.

ASSIGNMENTS
1. May 1985 – April 1986, Student, undergraduate Pilot training, 82nd Student Squadron, Williams Air Force Base, Ariz.
2. May 1986 – July 1986, Student, lead-in fighter training, 434th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, Holloman AFB, N.M.
3. August 1986 – March 1987, Student, F-16 training, 62nd Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, MacDill AFB, Fla.
4. April 1987 – October 1988, F-16 Pilot, 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Kunsan Air Base, South Korea
5. November 1988 – April 1991, F-16 Instructor Pilot, wing electronic combat officer, and wing standardization and evaluation flight examiner, 307th and 308th Tactical Fighter Squadrons, Homestead AFB, Fla.
6. April 1991 – August 1991, Student, U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons Instructor Course, Nellis AFB, Nev.
7. August 1991 – August 1992, F-16 Squadron Weapons Officer and Flight Commander, 307th Fighter Squadron, Homestead AFB, Fla.
8. September 1992 – October 1994, Weapons School Instructor, and standardization and evaluation flight examiner, F-16 Division, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, Nellis AFB, Nev.
9. October 1994 – July 1996, Aide-de-Camp to the Chief of Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
10. August 1996 – June 1997, Student, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
11. June 1997 – September 1997, Student, Armed Forces Staff College, National Defense University, Norfolk, Va.
12. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
13. November 1999 – June 2003, F-16CJ Instructor Pilot and assistant operations officer, 79th Fighter Squadron; Weapons and Training Flight Commander, 20th Operations Support Squadron; Operations Officer, 55th Fighter Squadron; and Commander, 78th Fighter Squadron, Shaw AFB, S.C.
14. July 2003 – June 2004, National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va.
15. June 2004 – June 2005, Deputy Chief, Program Integration Division, Directorate of Programs, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
16. July 2005 – May 2007, Commandant, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, 57th Wing, Nellis AFB, Nev.
17. May 2007 – May 2008, Commander, 8th Fighter Wing, Kunsan AB, South Korea
18. June 2008 – May 2009, Director, Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff Executive Action Group, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
19. June 2009 – April 2011, Commander, 31st Fighter Wing, Aviano AB, Italy
20. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
21. April 2013 – February 2014, Deputy Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command; Deputy, Combined Force Air Component Commander, U.S. Central Command, Southwest Asia
22. March 2014 – June 2015, Director, Operations, Strategic Deterrence, and Nuclear Integration, Headquarters U.S. Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa, Ramstein AB, Germany
23. June 2015 – July 2016, Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command, Air Combat Command, Southwest Asia
24. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
25. July 2018 – July 2020, Commander, Pacific Air Forces; Air Component Commander for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; and Executive Director, Pacific Air Combat Operations Staff, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii
26. August 2020 – September 2023, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon, Arlington, Va.
27. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

SUMMARY OF JOINT ASSIGNMENTS
1. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a major
2. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a brigadier general
3. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a lieutenant general
4. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

FLIGHT INFORMATION
Rating: command pilot
Flight hours: more than 3,100 including 130 combat hours
Aircraft flown: F-16A/B/C/D and 20 additional fixed and rotary-wing aircraft

MAJOR AWARDS AND DECORATIONS
Defense Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Distinguished Service Medal
Defense Superior Service Medal
Legion of Merit with three oak leaf clusters
Bronze Star Medal
Defense Meritorious Service Medal
Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Aerial Achievement Medal
Joint Service Commendation Medal
Air and Space Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Combat Readiness Medal
National Defense Service Medal with bronze star
Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal
Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal
Global War on Terrorism Service Medal
Korea Defense Service Medal
Nuclear Deterrence Operations Service Medal
NATO Medal
Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Tongil Medal)
Republic of Singapore Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) Meritorious Service Medal
Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Samil Medal)
Brazilian Order of Aeronautical Merit (Degree of Grand Officer)

PUBLICATIONS
“Developing Doctrine for the Future Joint Force: Creating Synergy and Minimizing Seams,” Air University Press, September 2005 “No Longer the Outlier: Updating the Air Component Structure” Air University Press, Spring 2016

Yeah. That guy was a DEI hire.

People who are endangered by the anti-vaccine movement that Trump supports and promoted last night – which is all of us, but is especially those who can’t work in close proximity to others, for any of a thousand reasons (permanent disability, mental illness, inability to travel, along with being immunocompromised, again for a thousand potential reasons), but who do work, and who who now have to return to work because Trump is a cruel idiot and a liar who claims that “not coming IN to work” is evidence of laziness or fraud. It is not clear to me whether the real goal here is just to fire valuable workers for a reason that Trump’s base can stand behind, so that Trump and Musk can channel the money “saved” from payroll into tax breaks for billionaires, or if it is to undermine the very idea that a person who cannot come into an office can nonetheless, in this day of complete interconnectedness online, still be a productive worker because that idea is, I dunno, woke or some shit. Either way, it is a stupid lie that is cruel to those who need the accommodation of remote work – and also cruel to those who just like it better, because what the hell is wrong with working from home if you can do the work?

Trump is going after people with neurodivergence, in addition to attacking those who need to live in a vaccinated world, by lying about the history of autism diagnoses, in conjunction with his comments about naming the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a post for which he is not only unqualified, but entirely unfit. It is not true that “not long ago” 1 in 10,000 children had autism; it is true that 50 YEARS AGO we did not understand autism nor how to diagnose the entire spectrum of conditions associated with the term. It is also emphatically not true that autism is a disability that would justify removing or changing the vaccine schedule, as Trump was implying. The entire argument that parents would rather risk their children dying of measles than “becoming” autistic because of the MMR vaccine is disgusting, along with being a thoroughly debunked and incredible lie. Even where autism does present as disabling, ask a parent of an autistic child whether they would rather have their child living or dead – and then duck, before they quite rightly punch you in the face. Though I’d be really happy if all of those theoretical punches landed on Elon Musk, and also on whoever suggested that Elon’s Nazi salute was a sign of Musk’s own autism. Remember: “Always Punch Nazis” includes punching those who argue that being autistic explains away Nazism.

But I will admit that, despite all of the terrible and cruel and stupid things that Trump said in that speech, the lies that actually bothered me personally the most were the transphobic ones. Maybe because they got the loudest cheers. Maybe because he seemed proudest of his anti-trans policies like the declaration that there are only two genders in the U.S. – which is both a lie, and a cruel and stupid statement. Or his executive order keeping men from playing women’s sports, which, HOLY GOD THAT I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN CAN WE STOP? Can we just stop? Can we just agree to never again allow anyone to repeat the absolute and utter nonsense and poppycock that there are “men” playing “women’s” sports? There are women playing women’s sports. Nothing more. And 99.99% of those women are those who were assigned female at birth. And also, this is fucking sports we are talking about. Not something important. Sports are entertainment. They are inconsequential. They don’t matter. They matter plenty to the people who play them, both professionally and passionately, and therefore they are worth consideration for the sake of those people; but the idea that a national policy, as a focus of what is essentially a state of the union address, would make such a deal of opposing the existence of trans people, particularly in relation to sport? What the hell are we doing here?

The answer is simple: we, and by “we” I mean that orange-tinted shit-flinging gibbon and his flying monkeys and most definitely not me, are attacking and belittling and trying to destroy and torment and kill anyone whose destruction would make the stupid, cruel base of the Republican party feel stronger and meaner, which is how they want to feel. Trans people are not the danger, regardless of what nonsense some goddamn volleyball player claims (Want to know how many volleyball players get hurt every year? About 35,000. Volleyball Related Injuries in Adolescents: A Decade of Data | Published in Orthopedic Reviews How many of those injuries were caused by trans athletes? Conversely, how many trans athletes suffer injury and abuse and death because of the way they are objectified and demonized and ostracized and assaulted in every way by the entire Republican establishment of this country? I bet it’s more than the one injury Trump claimed was caused by a trans athlete.)

I don’t know why this one upsets me more than the other loathsome false accusations and attacks that Trump launched at everyone who is morally and ethically and humanistically better than he is himself. But it does. I suppose it doesn’t matter why it bothers me, any more than it matters why the base and the Republicans and the shit-flinging gibbon himself chose trans people to try to destroy: it’s just that they found someone they can harm, and I have found someone – millions of someones – whom I want to help protect from that harm, in whatever way I can assist. I don’t really need to justify which fight I choose to take on: I just need to be aware of who my real target is.

It’s not just Trump. Just like Adolf Hitler, who was a uniquely effective figurehead for the Nazi party and the apparatus that rose during the Third Reich, but neither the brains behind that apparatus nor the one in control of it, Trump himself is not the cause of the problem, he is simply the most visible pimple on the very wide flabby ass of the MAGA movement. It is possible that, after Trump is gone (Hopefully before the end of his term, though personally I’m hoping for impeachment and jail rather than the death that many others think he deserves), JD Vance or one of the other flying monkeys will take over as the chief shit-flinger; and that might even be worse. It’s not even the billionaires who back Trump and who are taking advantage of the distraction he is because of the shit he flings – shit that is flung like no one has ever seen before – because the wealthy have always been there, trying to control things, trying to take advantage of every opportunity to have wealth and power, without being in the spotlight themselves. I know it’s not Elon Musk: there’s a reason why the real power brokers don’t ever do what he is doing, and put themselves out front. It’s because when people get mad enough to pick up the torches and pitchforks – and the more effective Musk is, the sooner that will happen, as it always does when inequality gets too extreme – they look for an obvious target for their anger. We all know who Elon Musk is. Who the hell is Rebekah Mercer?

(Is it wrong of me to point out that, were she to become known to those with torches and pitchforks — or, let’s say, were she to get targeted by the next Luigi Mangione — nobody would miss the ENORMOUS target that is her head?)

Natural History Museum Curators Revolt Against Trustee Rebekah Mercer for Funding Climate Change Deniers | Artnet News
Now we know what Megamind’s mom looked like

What I oppose is what Trump represents and distills. It is stupidity, chosen because it is easier than learning, and more comfortable than truth – because stupidity lies to us, even as we lie to the stupid. It is cruelty, because cruelty, also for the sake of ease and comfort, brings the displaced self-hatred of the stupid crashing down on the innocent; and not only do we then have that many more victims, some of whom will lash out at other disempowered people, but we also have those among the stupid who now cannot face enlightenment because then they would have to admit what they did to people who never deserved anything but the kindness and empathy due every one of our fellow human beings, and so those angry, cruel, stupid people will be even more incapable of changing what they are doing, no matter what truth is put before them and no matter what pleas for mercy they hear and ignore.

The worse we act, the less likely we are to stop acting badly. That’s why Donald Trump is the way he is: because he’s always been this way, he’s just been getting worse, for his entire life. And he’s an old, evil, man, now.

And everything he says is bullshit.

Upon Further Consideration

Dusty Leave a comment

*Let me give one disclaimer: I use a lot of ways to call someone crazy in this piece. At no time, not even for one second, not in any instance or in any way, am I actually referring to someone with mental illness or neurodivergence. I’m using every form of “crazy” to mean only someone who holds a position or acts in a way that I don’t agree with, and generally that I can’t understand. That’s it. Okay?

Okay. Here we go.

Conservatives are crazy.

charlize theron – foolish watcher

Okay, not ALL of them. And they’re not crazy about everything: taxes and regulations can be onerous, and while society absolutely needs to progress, it needs to do it in a way and at a pace that allows people to grow comfortable with change, which is never easy.

But conservatives created the monstrosity that is President Donald Trump. And before that, they created neoliberal economics, generally known as “trickle-down” economics, which has been devastating people in this country and around the world for the last half-century or more. And they just kept supporting it, that entire time, all facts to the contrary notwithstanding. Libertarians are conservatives, for the most part, and so was Ayn Rand — and between Rand and Trump, I don’t need to say anything else to show that conservatives, broadly speaking, are crazy. A few sandwiches short of a picnic. Daft. Cracked. Meshugge. Bonkers. Non compos mentis. The cheese fell off their cracker a long time ago.

They think that we’re crazy, of course, mostly in how we accept things that seem so obviously counter to what conservatives call common sense — like the existence and worth of trans people, for instance, or like believing the government can do good things and can be trusted (in some ways — we know about the Tuskegee Experiment, too), or thinking that guns are somehow to blame for gun violence — and partly how we are so entirely hypocritical while we accuse them of being the real hypocrites.

I gotta pause on that last one, because — really, y’all, there are some pretty upsetting things that we argue, and never even think about. Like how we argue that guns should be banned in order to reduce gun violence, but that drugs should be legalized in order to reduce drug crime. Abortion and the death penalty is another one: we mock conservatives for being pro-life with fetuses, but very happy to kill people on death row, but somehow we never talk about how we hold exactly the same apparently contradictory positions, just in reverse — we are willing to accept the death of the unborn, while we work to preserve the lives of the worst people imaginable. And that’s not to say that the left is wrong on those issues and the right is right; but it is — I’m going to say disingenuous — that we don’t actually engage with our own apparent hypocrisy while we are simultaneously aghast that the right doesn’t engage with their apparent hypocrisy.

To be clear, since I brought up the examples: the ban on drugs is different from a proposed ban on guns mainly because the users are entirely different. I suppose some gun owners could be characterized as addicts, though I think they wouldn’t enjoy that description; but mainly, drugs create a market for themselves, the members of which have very little chance to refuse to consume the substances. Certainly there are forces that push people to buy and use guns, and certainly those forces would make it impossible to remove all illegal guns from the country, should guns ever be banned here; but they are not the same forces that have made the drug war unwinnable. That’s the essential difference, and the details are worth thinking about and talking about. And with abortion and the death penalty, it is only necessary to point out that “pro-choice” is not and never has been “pro-abortion.” The left does not wish the unborn to die, any more than we wish murderers to die; that is the unknotting of the apparent paradox in our opinions. And I also have to point out that the apparent contradictions in conservative stances can be just as easily explained away: it’s just that they make assumptions that the left doesn’t make, like the idea that innocence makes a child’s life worth more than an adult’s life, or that an armed citizen is the best defense against an armed criminal. Or more simply and more importantly, that God and the Christian faith should be an important part of our political consciousness.

The point is, there are things the left accuses the right of being crazy about, which the right is not at all crazy about, and there are also things that the left thinks which are batshit insane — a whole bunch of people in the Democratic establishment who thought that Hillary Clinton made a better candidate than Bernie Sanders, for instance, and then that Joe Biden also made a better candidate than Bernie: and then that Joe Biden should have ever been a candidate for a second term. Bat. Shit. Insane. And a lot of us swallowed and set our faces right and stood in line. I did.

I have decided that I have been wrong.

I don’t need to rehash the last several elections, though; as I have said several times, Joe Biden was a much better president than I thought he would be, and MUCH better than he gets credit for being, and I don’t know that Bernie could have beat Trump either in 2016 or 2020, and I’m not sure anyone could have beat Trump in 2024. I don’t understand how that could be true, considering all of Trump’s baggage, but the truth seems to be that the economic situation in this country ensured that only a Republican could win in 2024 — and as the primary showed, Trump had ensured that of all the Republicans in this country, only he can be on the top of the ticket.

Because conservatives are crazy.

I’m not going to back off of that, not even with my both-sidesing liberal and conservative positions and arguments: there is no other way to see how the entire right side of the political spectrum in this country has embraced Donald Trump so completely other than as totally nuts; and the way people still — still — STILL!!! accept trickle-down economics as viable even after FIFTY FUCKING YEARS of increasing inequality and the resultant social unrest is proof that those same people are either insane or so utterly drool-fountain stupid that there’s no reason to even talk to them any more, because they can’t understand anything stated in standard English — only things that look or sound like this:

(I would say that conservatives are crazy because they listen to country music — but a lot of country music is good, so that’s not enough to prove that conservatives are crazy. Also, I first heard this song on Dr. Demento in the 80s, so really, who’s the crazier one? The one who listens to country music, or the one who listens to a guy named Demento who also played this?)

I guarantee you nobody in middle America listened to that garbage. I’ve been listening to it since I was in middle school. I think you see my point.

But you don’t, because in my usual inimitable way, I have failed utterly to get to my point. So let me stop screwing around and make it now.

I have for DECADES now thought that conservatives — specific ones, especially the ones in Washington — were crazy because they refused to compromise. Compromise, I hope we all know, is good. Compromise is how people get along, and how things get done. Compromise respects the value of both sides of an issue, both the humanity and the intelligence of people who happen to disagree, which makes it the best possible outcome — two heads are better than one, after all. I have essentially never entered an argument where I was totally unwilling to compromise. Okay, there have been a few online debates, sure — I’ve argued against normalizing pedophilia, and I’m not gonna meet them halfway on that one — but in real life, I have never drawn a line in the sand, put my foot down, in a place I was utterly unwilling to move. I am always willing to compromise, because in every case in my life, I have argued against other rational human beings, who deserve as much consideration as I do; so how could I do any less than be willing to compromise with someone? What on Earth makes me so much better, so much righter, than them that I would not take even a step in their direction? On a larger scale, how can you have a society where people don’t compromise? How do people get along if they can’t agree on at least some elements of their disagreements?

That’s what I thought. And I still think that, because it’s true — you can’t have a society without compromise — but also, that’s a social truth, and a practical idea.

It’s not good politics.

In politics, refusing to compromise is the right thing to do. Compromise is dangerous. And self-defeating.

My point today is this: it is time, and past time, and long past time, that Democrats specifically and the left in general started doing what is actually good politics.

I listened to an episode of Pitchfork Economics — an outstanding podcast which I recommend to everyone; though I would say you probably shouldn’t do the absurd (crazy?) thing I’m doing, which is listening to the entire archive from the beginning, in 2017; it’s a little strange that I have been listening to this podcast for two or three years now, and they still haven’t reached Joe Biden’s election as the 46th President — and they interviewed Professor James Kwak, whose books I now have to read. (One of them is free online! Nice!) But more to the point for this particular writing, in the interview Professor Kwak was talking about the Democratic party, which he both called the most important political party in the world, as the only thing standing in the way of full-on fascism on the part of the Trump GOP (My words, not the professor’s; he said the Dems were the most important party, but was more polite about the rest.) and also described as having drank the Kool-Aid of neoliberalism (Again, my wording) around the time of Bill Clinton’s administration, and thus gave up being the actual party of the people, of labor, of the poor, of progressivism and liberal ideas.

Here, if you are interested. It’s a good interview.

How neoliberalism captured Democrats (with James Kwak)

As I listened, I thought the professor was right: the Democrats have had a critical job especially for the last eight years, because it was up to them to stop us from having President Donald Trump, and for two of the three chances they have had to step up and do that critical task, to preserve the United States, to protect the rule of law and government of the people, by the people, for the people — they failed. Pretty badly, really.

And I thought, Maybe the Democratic party is really bad at this politics thing.

It’s not the first time I’ve had this thought. I listen to another podcast which I’ve talked about frequently before, called UNFTR, UnFucking The Republic. One of the essential claims from that podcast is that the Democratic party is bad at politics, and a bad bulwark against Trump and the rise of fascism; but because they are one of the only two parties with full access and the full machinery to mount and win a national political campaign in this country, the answer is not to create a third party: the answer is to take over the Democratic party, much as the Tea Party and then the MAGA movement have taken over the GOP, from the inside, and then turn the Democratic party into what it should be, but currently is not. Progressive. Successful. A party for the left.

But I’ve never been willing to follow that thought to the end, and to start actually arguing against voting for the compromise candidate — for Hillary Clinton, for Joe Biden, for Kamala Harris; none of whom I supported, all of whom I voted for and encouraged others to vote for.

That’s where I’ve been wrong.

In talking about how conservatives differ from liberals in the U.S., and how conservatives have managed to become so incredibly dominant, Kwak said that there were several things that conservatives had done over the last fifty years which had enabled them to become this unstoppable force that managed to sweep Trump back into the White House despite everything (Again, the interview is now five years old, so Professor Kwak is not actually talking about the current travesty in Washington, but it’s not any different, it comes from the same strategy and worked in the same way): and the main one was that they were willing to stand for their ideology, even if it cost them elections. He said that the right had been putting up more conservative candidates against moderates in primaries even when the more conservative candidate was less likely to win the general election. Which sounded crazy to me — but the result is that the right is seen as dedicated to their beliefs, their ideals, where the left is seen as — wishy washy. Because the left will back a politician who doesn’t represent all of the ideals we ourselves espouse, where the right is not generally willing to do that: you can see it in how the GOP has purged all of the members unwilling to support Trump, like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney. Their choice to throw every single bit of their support behind Trump is crazy: but the way they do it is impressive. It shows determination, and dedication, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own preferences or ambitions for what you see as the greater good. And before this, you could see in how the GOP starting in the 80s forced all national politicians on the right to sign Grover Norquist’s oath never to raise taxes, for any reason — which was one reason George H.W. Bush lost his reelection to Bill Clinton. Which, I mean — that’s crazy.

But it got them the right reputation. A reputation that can resist anything, even facts. This is why the right is seen as willing to fight for what they believe — and why the right is seen as more reliable on the issues that they all stand for, like opposing immigration and making the economy work for people. Do they do those things? Not always: but they ALWAYS stand on those principles, and they ALWAYS stand together, and cast out those who are more willing to compromise.

They’re crazy. The shift in the GOP from the conservative party to the party of Trump has been unbelievable to watch: it has felt like a Soviet purge, removing everyone who did not fawn at the feet of the Great Leader. And the rise of Trump has definitely shown the downside of the GOP’s strategy of absolute loyalty to the ideals of the party.

But on the other hand, they fucking win elections. And then gerrymander the districts so they can win every election in the future. Which the Democrats do, too, because our system is deeply corrupt: but the main difference is that, most of the time, in most states, the Democrats DON’T win elections. And it’s partly because the left is more willing to compromise. So we’re seen as wishy washy. Soft. Unreliable. And in worse cases, or as the stakes rise and the rhetoric gets harsher, as hypocrites, and as liars.

And even worse, as corrupt, unreliable politicians who are willing to do whatever it takes to retain power, whether that requires compromise of our apparently most important ideals, or lying about what is at stake in an election, as we argue that Trump is a fascist who signifies the end of this country — and then the second he takes power, FIFTY-EIGHT FUCKING DEMOCRATS VOTE FOR THAT BULLSHIT LAKEN RILEY ACT. Fifty-eight. How many Republicans voted for Biden’s priorities? Or Obama’s? And, I mean, we claim to believe that white men should not be put ahead of, or above of, women or people of color; we chastise the right for their overwhelming whiteness and maleness. And then what do we do?

We nominate and elect Joseph R. Biden.

And then Biden waited until after the election was lost to do a whole heap of things that he should have been willing to do on day one — if he really believed in what he claims to believe. Only at the very end did he hand out the pardons. Only at the end did he warn us about the technocrat oligarchy. Six months before, he was still taking their campaign contributions.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being strategic with the support a politician has, and the public opinion of the things they want to do; that’s necessary. I love the idea of going in and just doing whatever the hell one wants, what one knows is right — but also, that’s how Trump does it. It’s not good strategy.

It’s just why he wins.

But I don’t think Biden did anything wrong, in waiting until the end of this term to, for instance, commute the sentences of people on federal death row. But when the other side is so bold, so forward, so utterly confident in their rightness that they will do whatever they think is right at any time and damn the political consequences — well. The decision to be strategic in any way certainly seems like political manipulation. Not wisdom.

And while I do not want to imitate the right, because they are crazy, I also do not want to continue losing elections to them.

So this is where I think we need to adopt an aspect of their system, of their overall strategy, that works for them.

I want to stop compromising.

Not on everything: but there have to be some issues that the left is not willing to negotiate on, that we are unwilling to accept anything else because we know, down to our blood and bones, that we are right, and the right is wrong. That anyone who disagrees with us is wrong. That we can discuss ways and means, to some extent, and even compromise on that sort of thing — or on the timeline, or the order of specific priorities; the details can almost always be discussed. But the central idea, the heart, the essential concept: that never goes away. It never stops being the ideal, and we never stop fighting for it. For them. Think of the heroes of the left: the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; think of Bernie, whose appeal was based partly on this fact, that he never, ever changed what he was saying about economic inequality and the need to address it. Not in fifty years. THAT. THAT is what we need to do, that is how we need to fight for our central ideals. (It’s why we should have nominated Bernie, but I guess that train has already left the station, huh?)

I have some ideas about what those things should be — five of them coming directly from UNFTR — but I want to think about them some more before I take a stand. Because once I take a stand on these things, I don’t ever want to back down from them. Not ever. Not for any reason, not under any circumstances. Even if it costs us votes in a specific election — because look at what compromising has gotten us. It’s gotten us fucking Trump, and a Republican congress, and a ludicrously “conservative” Supreme Court. We supported the moderate candidate in order to protect the things that mattered most, like the right to choose; and we lost the things that mattered because we lost the elections. And I think this is quite a large part of why. It’s not all of it, this isn’t the only thing we need to do: but I think this is part. I think we need to do this.

Compromise in politics, on the most essential ideas, is a path only to losing. Which protects nothing, not even the compromises we tried to fight for. Look at Obamacare. Do we think that’s going to live through the next four years? John McCain saved it last time. And John McCain is gone, along with everyone else who thought the way he did, on the right. No disrespect to Senator McCain, who was a remarkable man and a man of principles, who died sadly of a terrible disease; but I think we know that if he had lived, he would have been voted out of the GOP for opposing Trump. Just like everyone else who did so, who was willing to compromise with the left. Jeff Flake. Mitt Romney. Liz Cheney. All gone. They all lost. Just like us.

So I think we should stop compromising, and start winning.

Now we need to decide what we will not compromise on. It can’t be everything: but it has to be something. And once we decide, we can’t ever back down. We can’t every compromise, not on these things.

And then there’s this: it makes sense to me not to compromise with the party of Trump. After all — they are crazy.

Wrong.

Dusty Leave a comment
Youre Wrong GIFs | Tenor

This isn’t about Trump. (That GIF aside.)

There’s going to be a lot about Trump, for the next four years (and then, with any luck at all, there will be NOTHING about Trump, ever again; I mean, I don’t care if he goes around the country on a Fuck The Libs Resentment-Palooza tour until the day he dies, but I very much want him to be irrelevant politically after this second term in office) and I’m certainly not going to apologize for that; I have been accused before of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, and I will be so accused again, but every accusation of TDS rests on the mistaken supposition that Trump is not, in fact, the biggest single influence on American politics and culture right now, and the speaker allegedly with TDS is making an issue about Trump when it’s not about Trump. But he is the biggest single influence on politics and culture right now: not only do half of this country’s elected officials kneel to kiss the ring in all decisions, but somewhere between a third and a half of the voting populace base their identity on him, in part or in total. If I keep bringing up Trump, and blaming Trump for things that go wrong for the next four years, it’s not because I’m obsessed with Trump: it’s because there has never been anyone more successful at taking over this country, mind and soul, in the past. Ever.

God, that’s depressing. The most successful and popular public figure in American history is that fucking stooge.

So when Trump comes up, and we complain about Trump and his actions, that’s not TDS; that’s reality. It is all about Trump. We on the left would really much rather that not be true, believe me. We really don’t want this country to revolve around that asshole. It just does. And so, therefore, does our conversation.

But this? This post, this argument? This isn’t about Trump. Honestly. And I’ll prove it, as soon as I get into the specific argument I want to make.

To show that I’m not simply targeting conservatives (I know, nobody who reads my blogs would think that – except wait…), and not even because Trump is not a conservative (But he’s not) and does not represent conservative thought or values (as he does not), but to show that I’m not simply targeting Trump or his supporters, I’m going to start with myself. I’m going to start with a confession, and then I’m going to proudly declare my innocence of wrongdoing, because that’s apparently what shows that I’m not only innocent, but above reproach.

Okay, that last one was about Trump. More about his supporters. But that’s not the subject.

The subject is wrongdoing.

I did wrong, recently. A couple of times. I have done wrong in the past: not often, because I generally get caught, and then I get in trouble, and I have an almost pathological need to avoid disappointing people – but when I was a kid, I stole, I vandalized, I trespassed; I consumed illegal substances; I threw a big ol’ keg party while my mom was out of town and my “guests” wrecked the house and drove the neighbors to call the cops. I’ve lied, though not a lot and never officially; I’ve certainly been nasty to people in various ways, insulting them or ignoring them or taking advantage of them.

That last one is the kind of wrongdoing I have done recently. On this most recent Election Night, I posted on Facebook, out of a sense of rage and outrage that my countrymen would re-elect the worst president, and the most dangerous man, to hold the office in better than a century (I’m going back to Andrew Johnson for the closest rival to Trump for that title of Most Dangerous, though Warren G. Harding may take the taco for “worst.” Still a century ago.), and I made – something like a threat, I suppose. It wasn’t a threat, but I worded it like a threat: imagine if I said, “If you say that about my mom, I’m going to fluff your pillow until you can’t lie down flat!” See? Sounds like a threat, and in context with the rest of the sentence it might be taken as a threat, because clearly I’m mad about what you’re doing, even though I’m just saying I would fluff your pillow. It isn’t important exactly what I said on Facebook and I don’t want to repeat it, because when I posted it the first time, someone complained to my employer, saying that I was giving the school a bad name, posting political statements and “threats” online. My boss called me in for a meeting to take the post down, which I had already done before the meeting; that resolved the problem because it is clear to anyone who knows me that I do not make genuine threats and I do not cause harm to people, not even over politics, so the only problem was the post.

But the post might, conceivably, have been bad for my employer, because people might have taken it the wrong way, and that might have done harm to my employer’s reputation and so on. So okay: I did wrong. I did the wrong thing in putting other people at risk for the sake of my online statement of my opinion in a less-than-friendly way. I got consequences, then, for my wrongdoing: I got called in by my boss for it, and asked to remove it. Not a serious consequence, but about what the act deserved. My boss was very cautious in that meeting, partly because he and I were friendly and he didn’t want to upset me, but more because I could have raised a big ol’ stink about my freedom of speech and censorship and so on; but I didn’t do that. I accepted that my act was wrong, if not very wrong, and a natural consequence of that was that I should eat my words – or delete them, rather. So be it. Deleted.

Then I got in more trouble for something else I did. That one I don’t want to talk about, because I dispute part of what I was accused of, but not the other part; and again, I don’t want to put my employer or my employment at risk by talking publicly about what happened. It was not that severe, please believe me; my violations fifteen years ago (Wow! Is that really how long ago it was?! Yeah, 2010. Wild. Back when Trump was just a shmuck in New York with a bad reality show, rather than the guy who turned our entire country into a bad reality show.) were much worse, and I’ve written about those in detail before. All I want to say is, I got written up for that recent one, a warning placed in my employee file, and I acknowledge that I shouldn’t have done what I did. My actions – my words, to be a little more specific – were wrong.

When I violated the rules in Oregon fifteen years ago, I acknowledged that, too. What I did was this: I posted angry, insulting things about my students during class, from my school computer, which I should not have done; I named three of my former students and insulted them in a second post a month later. After four years of wrangling, I was found to have committed gross neglect of my duty as a teacher and an employee of the St. Helens School District, and I served a 30-day suspension without pay for it. I accepted that punishment, even though I still think it was undeserved. I mean, sure, I shouldn’t have used class time to write angry things about my students; but how many times have people called friends and bitched about work while at work? How many private messages and emails, and letters and diary entries, have been written by people on the clock, complaining about the people who own the clock? I always thought the violations in Oregon should have been handled the same way these more recent (less serious) violations were: I should have been called in for an uncomfortable meeting; my violation should have been put into my employee file so my future employers can know what I have done in the past; I should have been asked to remove the offensive posts – which I also did, in that case fifteen years ago. Give me a warning, get me in trouble, so I won’t do the same thing again.

It’s funny, though: I thought, when I got called in for that meeting in Oregon about my online activity, that I was going to hear about a complaint filed against me by a local political figure whom I had lambasted a couple of times on my blog, and who I figured would absolutely go to my employer about his ire over my words; I was ready and willing to defend my First Amendment rights, that time. It went further than that because my superintendent was advised by the district lawyers to report me to the state, mainly to cover her and the district’s asses; and, my union lawyer told me, the state wanted to make an example of me because it was 2010 and they wanted to establish a precedent regarding teachers on social media: and my case connected to both a blog and Facebook. (That was another parallel: I had posted something – certainly more insulting, but also ENTIRELY unrelated to the blogs – on Facebook, something which got reported to my district by an irate homeschool parent who had a bone to pick with public school teachers. The district Googled me and found my much-more-offensive blogs. Guess I haven’t learned to keep my mouth shut, huh?) So essentially, mine was a political prosecution: it was a savvy political move for my district, and then an aggressive political move for the state agency. They went after me to serve their own agenda, not because my actions deserved that punishment, not because there was any real risk of me being in front of a class. I spent the entire four years between my offense and my punishment teaching, successfully, without any further incidents. I did nothing else wrong. As I said, nobody who knows me would believe that I would actually do harm to a student, nor to my employer.

But whether my actions were justifiable, or whether the punishment was deserved, or whether I was thrown under the bus for political reasons, or not, the fact is that I broke the rules, and I got punished for it. And I accept that: I accept my punishment as what should have happened to me in response to my wrongdoing. I accept it because there are worse people, doing worse things, and they should also get punished for their wrongdoing, because they actually do harm, which I maintain that I did not do (Mainly because nobody, certainly not the students in question, ever read those blogs.), but if I get away with doing wrong by breaking rules, then it makes it easier for them to get away with doing wrong by doing harm. It is not lost on me that, at the very same time my district was throwing me under the bus for saying mean things on a blog, there was another teacher at the school who was receiving multiple complaints for acting inappropriately with students, but the school ignored those complaints and did not punish that teacher at all; ten years later, I had moved out of the state, and that other guy was in prison for sexual abuse of a student.

And I got called morally reprehensible. (To be fair, I don’t know what they called that other guy. It was probably worse.)

That irony, though, that discrepancy between my crime and punishment and the abuser’s crime and punishment – that injustice – does not mean that I should have gotten away with what I did: it means that both the other teacher and I should have been punished for our actions, preferably in an appropriate way. I should have been written up; he should have been at least fired and banned from being around children, and maybe arrested (I do not know if he had actually broken the law and harmed a student when the complaints were made. Neither does the district: no investigation was carried out.). He did harm. I broke the rules. We both should have consequences.

We live in a society of laws. I actually could have stopped at “We live in a society,” because society does not exist without rules of some kind; and the important ones that restrict the misbehavior of everyone in the society should be called laws. Without laws, there is no society. (I invite any anarchists to explain to me where I’m wrong on that, but not here and not now.) That is not to say that I think that humans are inherently evil and will always do the wrong thing without a threat from the state to keep us in line; but I think we all do wrong things, often without realizing what we are doing. I honestly didn’t even remember doing the thing I got written up for recently, just as I didn’t remember the blogs I had written in violation of the rules in Oregon when I first got called in for a meeting with the superintendent. But now that I have gotten in trouble for doing those things, I can guaran-fucking-TEE you that those things will not happen again: because I do not want to get in more trouble, and now I know clearly what actions of mine will get me in trouble. It’s not just that I don’t want the trouble, either: I don’t want the other consequences of committing those acts again. I do not want to have the reputation of someone who would break the rules like that. I do not want to lose my job, my career. And I recognize, and regret, whatever harm I have done, both actual and theoretical: because I can see that someone who read what I wrote in Oregon could have been genuinely hurt by it, even though I don’t think anyone did. It could have happened, which is why I shouldn’t have written what I wrote and posted it.

Okay. That kind of sucked, honestly; I don’t like talking about the things I’ve done that are wrong: I want to justify all of them, to explain or excuse everything that I have done, so that nobody thinks I am less than a good person. I want to be a good person, and be known as such. It’s important to me. I would hope it would be important to all of us, even if there weren’t direct consequences for misbehavior. But it’s not, not for all of us. Which is why the rules have to apply to everyone, both people who will not do wrong again, and people who will, but who might not want to have consequences again after they have them the first time.

Now let’s talk about Trump.

Donald J. Trump is a felon. He was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, tried, and convicted by a jury of his peers. He is still appealing the decision, under the argument that some of the evidence in his trial should have been inadmissible because the Supreme Court decided that the President of the United States – specifically Donald J. Trump – is above the law (HA I wrote “against the law.” Thank you for that, subconscious. But it is not what I meant. More’s the pity: we’d be a lot better off if Donald J. Trump was against the law.), and that appeal may bear fruit, because every other judge in this country does what the Supreme Court majority has failed to do: actually follow precedent and respect the rule of law and the role of the courts. So if that appeal does bear fruit, then Trump’s conviction will be overturned. And then the breaking of our society will be complete: because then Trump will actually be entirely above the law, untouchable and unrestrainable.

Please understand me. I am not talking about what Trump will do as President; part of me – the cynical, angry, irony-loving part – is looking forward to that, because I want everyone who voted for cheaper eggs to see what they actually brought down on all of us; and more importantly, I want the actual villains, the bastards who want to tear down the government so they can abuse all of us for profit, and who installed Donald Trump (because he was able to bring together all of the disparate parts of his base to vote for him and because he distracts everyone who opposes those profit-driven bastards) to regret the achievement of their actual goals: because they will make the world a worse place, and no matter what they think their money will insulate them from, they still live in the world they are fucking up. There will be consequences for their actions, and I want those billionaire corporate overlords to suffer those consequences along with the rest of us. (I’m tempted to just drop a picture of Luigi Mangione here, but I don’t want anyone to take this as a threat. I don’t think what Mangione did was right, he is a murderer; but it is an example of the consequences you risk when you make the world a worse place, and then live in that same world. I will also note that Mangione is facing the consequences for his actions.) The people that support Trump and who use Trump to achieve their own agenda want him to get away with anything he wants to do because they want him to keep doing what he does: mainly flinging shit everywhere he can, because that’s what distracts the rest of us from the agenda going on behind Trump. I mean, come on: the Gulf of America? Conquering Greenland? He’s just a gibbon flinging shit, and we can’t tear our eyes away.

But when the specific way that Trump is enabled is to take away the consequences for his actions, the damage done is so much more serious than Trump making a fool of us all on the international stage. So much more serious than Trump increasing oil drilling in this country, even though that does nothing good and creates irreparable harm. Trump’s backers only did it, I don’t doubt, so that Trump could keep flinging shit (That’s why the Supreme Court left themselves as the arbiters of what should be considered an official act, and therefore immune to prosecution, so that if a president whose name is NOT “Trump” pulls any shenanigans, the Court can send them up the river), but what they have done is create a situation where there is no consequence for breaking the rules, and more important, no consequence for doing harm.

To be entirely clear: the case where Trump was actually convicted was a rule-breaking case. He didn’t do any immediate harm with that one. But the rules he broke were about election finance, and transparency, and to allow those rules to be broken without consequence allows other people to do the same: and that does unimaginable potential harm in the future, because it allows even worse people than Trump to hide where they got their money, and how they spent it, in pursuit of power. That’s the scary part. And the MUCH WORSE part is that the other cases, the ones that have been dropped or dismissed, those were even closer to doing actual harm: and the January 6th case was entirely about Trump doing actual harm. People were hurt on January 6th. People died. Our country, our democracy, was endangered. Trump was partly responsible for that harm. And Trump got away with it. Without any consequence, at all. The Senate refused to impeach because he would face criminal charges – and then he didn’t face any criminal charges because the Senate didn’t impeach, which allowed him to run for the White House again. And he won because Americans wanted cheaper eggs, and forgot about everything Trump did wrong: because there were no consequences, so there was no clear line drawn as to what is allowed and what is not. If what Trump did was allowed, then he did no wrong: and if he wasn’t punished, then it was allowed. That’s the situation that was created. That’s the damage.

And it was done for Trump, but the problem going forward is not only Trump: it’s everyone else who might now do the same things, or much, much worse, and get away with it because Trump got away with it. I am definitely not saying that Trump should have been singled out for his actions, or that Trump should have suffered extra undue consequences; I don’t think the courts or his conviction should have stopped Trump from running for office, for example. I said, well over a year ago, that I didn’t want Trump to lose the election by going to jail: I wanted us not to vote for him.

I guess the rest of the country doesn’t have my hangup about disappointing people. Or at least 75 million or so of you.

I do think Trump should have been impeached. But when he wasn’t, I was willing to accept that, because I was sure he would be tried and convicted for his crimes; even when the trials got delayed and delayed and delayed, I wasn’t worried, because I was sure he wouldn’t be elected again. Surely people wouldn’t support that guy, the one who did all those wrong things. But since so many of you all did, I don’t want the courts to take away the choice, the votes, the will of the people. As a result of the last election, I now want Trump to be president, and I’m not saying otherwise in this argument.

No: I am saying one thing. Trump was accused of crimes. Credibly accused of crimes, because in all four criminal prosecutions, he went through a grand jury process and was indicted: for falsifying business records in New York, for conspiring to suborn elected officials and steal the election in Georgia, for taking and keeping and mishandling classified government documents in Florida, and for conspiring to overthrow the government in Washington, D.C. Those accusations should have all gone to trial, unless there was a reason in advance to discard the accusation without trial (And the dismissal in the Mar-a-Lago documents case was not, in my opinion, valid, because the judge, an inexperienced political appointee with loyalty to Trump, based her dismissal of all charges on the idea that the special prosecutor does not have authority to investigate and bring charges: and that’s horseshit. But I’ll tell you what, I would be willing to accept the court’s ruling on the appeal that Jack Smith brought to overturn that dismissal and reinstate the charges, because I trust that other judges are willing to do what Aileen Cannon is not, and follow precedent and respect the rule of law and of the courts. I’d even be willing to accept it if our corrupt Supreme Court did their bullshit again and upheld Trump’s invulnerability, because that would be another dagger that might help to get rid of those particular destroyers of our society, which should absolutely be the consequences for the Supreme Court majority’s wrong actions – and the three other prosecutions would have gone forward. I would accept that BECAUSE I ACCEPT THE RULE OF LAW.). The trials should have offered Trump a chance to face his accusers, to see all those who testified against him, and to be competently defended. The proceedings should have been ruled over by an impartial and competent judge, in every case. Trump should have been convicted – or acquitted – by unanimous vote of a jury of his peers, randomly selected and vetted by both Trump’s accusers and his attorneys. And he should then have the right to appeal, to object to any injustice in the procedures: as he has been doing all along, and as has borne him fruit, quite spectacularly.

And then, if any of those convictions happened and held through appeal, Trump should have been punished.

His punishment should be appropriate to his crime. In the case of his sole criminal conviction, I think the punishment given to any first-time felon would be acceptable in this case; I’d expect it to be a fine, maybe some community service, maybe some probation. Maybe an auditor, of some kind, to watch over his business records and make sure he doesn’t do the same thing again. And he should have, and bear, the label “Felon.” The reputational damage, and the consequent damage to his career. I mean, 75 million people decided that Trump was above the law and that he should be put back into the White House to get us cheaper eggs and destroy the lives of as many people as possible, and that’s – well, it’s not “fine.” But it is part of our system: being a convicted felon is no bar to running for, winning, or serving in the Presidency, and I accept that.

Because I accept the rule of law.

This is the part that drives me nuts, the worst part of all of this. I hate Trump and what he stands for, and I hate what he has done to my country, and I dread what he will do to my country in the next four years. But the thing that makes me start yelling cuss words, out loud, even when I’m just listening to podcasts and walking my dogs, is hearing about how Trump has taken such an enormous shit on our justice system: and how it has broken under the weight of Trump’s feces. Forgive my continued scatological metaphors, but they show both the contempt, and the filth, that Trump has dropped onto the fundamental structure of our society, by breaking the law, and getting away with it, with the help of his supporters and backers. Gotten away with doing wrong, without consequences. Of any kind.

Have other people done it before him? Of course: in our capitalist society, there have always been two tiers of justice, justice for the poor and justice for the rich; and Trump already enjoyed all of the protections of wealth – it’s how he was able to delay three of his four trials until after the election, and how he has been able to delay or avoid actually paying all of the money in his two civil cases (He has posted a bond that will pay E. Jean Carroll if he loses his final appeals to her two successful lawsuits, and the other case for falsifying business records, which ended in a $454 million fine, was reduced to $175 million, which he paid. Why did he only have to pay a third of the original fine? Because he’s rich, that’s why.). But now there are three tiers of justice: one for the poor, one for the rich, and one for Donald J. Trump. Maybe for future Republican presidents (Forgive my cynical assumption that our current Supreme Court would be much more willing to find that a Republican president’s criminal acts are immune than a Democratic president’s acts, but – come on. We all know who and what we’re dealing with, now.), but for now, Trump is the only one who gets to get away with everything.

For now.

Again: I don’t want him removed from office for his crimes. (Other than the January 6th case. That crime was sedition, and someone guilty of sedition should not be in elected office of this country. He should have been impeached for it. He wasn’t because of partisan politics, not because he wasn’t guilty or didn’t commit a wrong act. But since the actual charges were conspiracy and obstruction, I am still willing to accept that a conviction of those crimes would not equate to sedition, and would not bar him from running for office. Though in that case I’d be yelling a lot more.) I am not opposing Trump here on political terms. Let him run the country: let him fuck it up and show all of you who supported him what you have done. And hey, if he manages to do some things right, as he did some things right in his first term, I will applaud him for those things. Go ahead and reform prisons more. Release money to the general public to help us endure a crisis, like a good Socialist would. Love it. Thank you for that, Donald. Do it more.

And I am in no way singling Trump out for any of this. You want to put Biden and Obama on trial for having documents in their homes? Do it. If they committed wrong acts, then they also should suffer the consequences for what they did. (Just bringing documents home is not a wrong act. No one is saying that is all Trump did, other than Trump. And he’s lying.) Any Democrat who claimed that Trump’s win in 2016 was illegitimate, who argued that the government should in some way block his election because he received assistance from Russia, and who the right has since accused of obstructing or conspiring to overthrow a legal election – put them on trial, too. Or rather, go through the process: have an investigation, put the facts to a grand jury, and have anyone who is then indicted put on trial, with attorneys, with the full protections of the law.

Right after Trump goes to trial for taking and mishandling classified documents, and for conspiring to overthrow Joe Biden’s legitimate election win in 2020. Because his trials were already in motion. He had already been indicted by four grand juries. He already had attorneys defending him, and judges overseeing the cases – three of them impartial. I’d like to see him go to trial for sedition, too, since he’s guilty of that; but I’m willing to accept the process, and the DOJ’s determination that Trump should be prosecuted for conspiring to obstruct and overthrow the election, and I want him to go to trial for that.

Because I accept the rule of law.

More than that, in fact: I cherish it. I believe in it. I know that society needs it. And whatever may occur with a president who makes bad political decisions, who cuts taxes to raise the deficit and concentrate wealth in the top 1%, who destroys environmental regulations and makes climate change even worse, who flouts international diplomacy and all norms of politics and decent behavior, I will accept all of that. All of it. Because the law in my country says that Donald Trump was twice elected President, and that means he gets to fling shit everywhere he wants to, and we all just have to clean it up. Or live in the stink.

But I will not accept that Trump has gotten away with committing crimes, and suffered no penalty for it. (He is innocent until proven guilty, so even though I’m PRETTY GODDAMN SURE he would have been found guilty in the Georgia case [where he was on tape committing the act] and the Mar-a-Lago documents case [where the crime was photographed sitting in his goddamn bathroom, and he is also on tape committing the crime], I will accept that he has not yet been found guilty of those crimes: but he sure was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, and he should have had a punishment for that. First time offender or not. 34 fucking FELONIES. So I get to say that he has committed crimes. And the fact that the judge in that case had to forgo any punishment because it would interfere with Trump performing the office of the Presidency is horseshit: and it’s why I get to say he got away with committing crimes without punishment.) The fact that he has done so undermines the basis of our entire society. Trump has broken the rule of law, and without law, we do not have a society. Everything the most rabid conservative, who thinks every Democrat is a Marxist Socialist unAmerican Commie, accuses the left of doing, the right has done in uplifting Trump while he committed crimes and avoided paying for other crimes. The outrage over the tearing down of the DOJ and the FBI, the way the Supreme Court just fucking spit on both the Constitution and the separation of powers in deciding that Trump should be immune to prosecution for all of his acts while President, should have been deafening, and it should have come from the right: from those who (loudly) support law and order, who cherish the traditions of our country, who defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. I can’t accept that law enforcement watches this guy commit every crime possible, and cheers when he gets away with it. I can’t accept that military members, in large numbers, watch him destroy this country’s entire system, and still salute him. And vote for him. It is insane. It is deranged. It shows how damaged our country is, by all of this, how broken our society is, now.

75 million people voted for Trump, and even more supported him, even though he committed crimes, simply because people want him to be in office, because they think he will be good for the economy, or hard on immigration, or a strong defender of this country. (All political reasons. Political reasons to oppose the due process of law.) But no matter how much he fights for what he calls America, Trump is destroying it, he is destroying us, because he is destroying the rule of law.

I won’t accept that.

And neither should you. Whether you voted for Trump, whether you support him politically, or not.

No one should be above the law. Not me, and not Trump. Or else there is no law. And no America. At least no America worth defending. And nobody is worth that. Not even Donald J. Trump.

Waking Up

Dusty Leave a comment

I had a nightmare the other night.

We all had one two weeks ago. But that one is just beginning.

I don’t have very many nightmares. Although, I don’t remember my dreams very often, so it’s possible that I am running through a constant string of terrifying dreams all night and then blanking my mind of them when I wake; I do suffer from insomnia, and so I frequently wake up in the middle of the night and think anxious and frustrated thoughts for a while before I manage to get back to sleep — if I do get back to sleep. That might be from that hypothetical string of nightmares suddenly reaching some kind of tipping point, driving me out of sleep and into waking anxiety.

Hmmm… a series of nightmares that build up to a climax of anxiety which ruins sleep. That does sound like the current situation of this country, doesn’t it?

In my nightmare the other night, my wife and I were going through a zombie apocalypse scenario. I don’t remember the whole thing, but at the end, we were hurrying through the halls of a Generic School-In-A-Dream™, and it was right at the point of the zombie plague where you look around, and you realize that the people around you are not people, but are rather zombies: and not only that, but the people are giving you that sullen, angry stare that zombies tend to have right before they charge. In my dream it was particularly creepy because the one I saw and recognized as a zombie was a child, and the signal that the kid was zombied up was a bloody rip across his cheek. In the dream, Toni and I ran; but we didn’t get very far.

Zombie children staring at cell phones in dark theater. - Stock Image & Prompt | 2Moons
Not the kind of zombies I was thinking of — but also, isn’t it?

I am scared of zombies. Of course I am, and not just because the idea of being eaten alive is utterly horrifying; I am also scared of the zombie apocalypse because I know how it would go: I would die. Quickly. I have no survival skills, I have no combat ability, I have nothing that I could even offer to a group of survivors that would make them want to take me in, other than how well I could correct their grammar and help them interpret poems: two skills that I expect will not be highly prized in the apocalypse.

As they are not prized now.

But that is much less frightening to me than this: what would happen to my family?

My wife is a badass; she can fight, she can shoot a gun (which I never have), she is tough as nails. She could make it, at least for a while — as long as I was not slowing her down. But she wouldn’t leave me, so I would definitely be slowing her down; and that means I would have to worry about her survival, because I would be a liability for it — I would be putting her at risk. And then, even if we decided we would run for the hills or something, we also have pets: two dogs, a great big tortoise, and a tiny bird in a cage. Okay, the tortoise I could release into the wild; he would probably be fine — would zombies even eat tortoises? (Note to self: story idea — zombie turtle. Talk about slow zombies.) — but my dogs and my bird would not be fine. And I wouldn’t leave them. And that, of course, makes me think about the horror of watching my loved ones get hurt. Which is, far and away and always, the worst nightmare imaginable.

And that — watching people we love get hurt — is also the current situation of this country.

So look: I said in my last post that, if you were looking to solve certain problems and thought voting for Donald Trump and the Republicans was the way to solve those problems, that doesn’t by itself make you my enemy. I don’t agree with you, but if you did it without meaning harm, I don’t have to consider you that way, with full and vituperative enmity. But the thing is, voting for Trump was unquestionably voting for someone who will do harm: and while that doesn’t mean you wanted harm to be done, it sure as hell means you accepted the fact that harm will be done. Maybe you lied to yourself, and convinced yourself Trump would not do harm; but that was a lie, and you probably know it. The man not only did harm to people in his first term, he promised extensive harm for this term, and he has been accused and found liable for causing quite a bit of harm entirely separate from the trials he was able to maneuver out of because too many people voted for Trump over the rule of law. Again, I assume that if you voted for Trump, you weren’t actually thinking, “I don’t want the rule of law any more!” Maybe you even thought that Trump and the Republicans are the law and order party; which is fine, in some ways they are — but Trump himself is not, and you should have been cognizant of that.

More likely was that you expected harm would be done, but you expected it will not be done to you or your family, and you were willing to accept that outcome. If you weren’t willing to accept that outcome, obviously, you didn’t vote for Trump. If you voted for Harris, thank you, and I’m sorry; if you didn’t vote, well. You’re not my enemy. But you’re pretty damn pathetic. And if you voted for harm that won’t fall on you, then I want you to think about that, for the next four years, and then hopefully for the rest of your life.

(And don’t try to both-sides me: I recognize that voting for Harris was voting for harm to continue in Gaza with American support. I would have been thinking about that for the rest of my life. I probably already will be, as I voted for Joe Biden, who has been supporting that genocide for a full year now.)

So, when I had this nightmare about the zombies rising up to kill my wife and I, I woke up scared. I realized immediately that it was a nightmare and it wasn’t real (Unlike the current situation in this country, which feels just like a nightmare but unfortunately is quite real), but like an idiot, I thought this thought: What if the situation were real? How would I actually deal with a zombie apocalypse? And while most of the time (I don’t think about zombie apocalypse survival strategies all the time, but I have thought of them, when it isn’t 3:00 am on a school night) I can fool myself (See? I do it too.) into thinking that I would escape by hiding or running or just being super clever, on this particular night, lying in the darkness, I faced the truth: I’d be screwed. I would die. Probably in an awful way. And I would have to either hope to die first (which would break my most important promise to my wife), or I would have to watch my loved ones killed in awful ways in front of me, while I couldn’t do anything about it.

And that feels just like the situation in this country today.

I know that there are people who would read this and think, “Psssh. You’re just being dramatic. Come on, comparing the second Trump term to a zombie apocalypse? That’s ridiculous! He’s just gonna lower taxes and deport some people. Maybe ban trans people. Maybe go after abortion and birth control. No big deal! He’s not gonna end the world!” To be fair, maybe people who would think that way wouldn’t read this, but my point is that there are people, probably the majority of the 76 million people who voted for Trump, who would think I was exaggerating with this analogy.

You know those people in zombie movies who act like complete idiots? Who refuse to accept the truth? They deny that the zombies are rising, or that they are eating people; they refuse to accept the obvious danger, or to accept that their own actions — making too much noise, for instance, or opening doors without knowing what is on the other side — are unacceptably risky? You know how those people almost always get other people killed before themselves succumbing to the ravenous horde?

Humans vs. Zombies: Fight of the living dead – Basement Medicine

Right. This country has at least 76 million of those people.

No, I don’t know if that is true. Not all the people who voted for Trump are fools who think he won’t do any harm. Many of them want him to do harm. They are gleefully rubbing their hands together in eager anticipation of all that harm he will do; they probably have a list of intended victims they are especially eager to enjoy the suffering of. Maybe they have a pool, and are laying odds on who will get it, and who will be first. (To be clear, these people are my enemies.)

You know those characters in zombie movies who are rooting for the zombies, and hoping all of humanity dies in hideous agony?

Right: you don’t. Because there aren’t any people like that in zombie movies. There are no people, in a story of struggle between humanity itself and the vile corruption that is bent on destroying humanity, who want humanity to lose. (Note to self: zombie movie in which some people actually want the zombies to win and talk about how much cheaper eggs will be when most of the population has been eaten. Maybe include the zombie turtles in this?) Which just tells you that some proportion of Trump’s voters are even worse than the people in zombie apocalypse movies.

Which is pretty damn terrible to think about.

I really don’t understand it. I understand (though I condemn) the partisanship that kept people from being able to vote for Harris or any Democrat; I understand (though I deplore) the willful ignorance that allowed people to “forget” that Trump will do harm, or the barely concealed hatred and aversion that allowed people to accept the limited harm they think Trump will do, which they think won’t affect them directly. I understand and agree with the anger that I know many people felt over the DNC’s choice of Kamala Harris, who is not and never was the best candidate the left could have produced for President; though also, I have to say this: people are nervous about what Trump will do now that he doesn’t have the same guardrails keeping him in line as he had the first time, and the truth is that the biggest guardrail Trump had to get over was — us. We are the guardrail. We are the defenders of democracy and freedom in this country, because the actual political power in this country resides in our votes. And we had one job: to vote against Trump’s return to the White House. As people trying to get our apathetic, lethargic, cynical, disjointed, selfish political class to produce an actually good candidate who could provide actual positive outcomes, we had several things we could have and should have done; but as defenders of democracy, we had one job: don’t let the would-be tyrant get back into power.

And we failed. We let the zombie virus out of the lab. For the second time, too, because this is the sequel: and as with every sequel, the stupidity of those who fail to take the zombie apocalypse seriously has to be even more appalling and egregious — because Jesus Christ, we already went through this once, weren’t you paying attention when all those zombies were eating people?!? — and the violence and gore the zombies inflict on people has to be even more shocking, even more horrendous, either more disgusting or on a much wider scale; because the sequel has to up the ante from the first installment, or there’s no point to having a sequel. Right?

Zombieworld 2 - Movies on Google Play
Love the zombie in the bottom right looking the wrong way.

What kills me is the breadth and depth of Trump’s win. I can’t just blame those frickin Pennsylvanians: every swing state went to Trump. My state, Arizona, went to Trump. There are Trump supporters all around me, wishing harm but not talking to me about it. You know how the worst thing in a zombie movie is when the people are actually turning into zombies, and you don’t know who is going to turn next? Who has already been infected? Who is suddenly going to surprise you by revealing themselves as your enemy, as the person who wishes you harm, or even as the monster who is going to do you harm themselves, who is going to take a bite out of your shoulder on the way up to your jugular? Everyone looks the same, all looking normal, all talking about things the same way — and then suddenly someone’s eyes roll up in their heads, their skin turns chartreuse, and they groan and start nomming on their neighbors? Don’t you think that’s the worst part of zombie movies?

Okay, no, the worst is probably when people get dragged screaming into a horde that tears them apart and eats them alive.

I hope that there won’t be anything even metaphorically like that in this situation. It is just an analogy; I don’t think the world is going to go through even a human apocalypse, let alone something like a zombie apocalypse. I know we will survive this.

But also, Nazis marched in Ohio this past weekend. So I’m really not sure there won’t be a scene of savage and shocking violence where someone innocent is dragged screaming to their horrible bloody death.

So my dark-of-night thought about the zombie apocalypse was: I’d probably just give up. I’d run for a while — if we’re starting with my dream, I’d be with Toni — and then I’d end up giving in to despair, and I’d have to do one of those hideously sad scenes where two people say goodbye and then let themselves die together. And when I heard the election results, I thought sort of the same thing: maybe I should just give up. I mean, this is clearly what the people of this country want, more than I want to believe they want it. But they do. I don’t just think ignorant and evil people voted for Trump; I think there were rational people, good people, who made a bad decision, but who thought it was the right decision. I want to think that, given a chance to talk to them honestly and openly, I could convince those people that they made a bad decision: and then maybe they won’t make the same kind of mistake again — but also, I failed to convince them before this election. I failed to make any difference in this election. However hard I tried, it wasn’t good enough; I wasn’t good enough to solve the problem, to prevent this terrible outcome, to protect people from harm. I thought, Why would I try again when I failed the last time?

And that’s actually why I recognized this parallel between Trump’s election and the zombie apocalypse, and why I wanted to write about it.

Because what zombies represent is hopelessness.

The basic concept of the zombie trope is this: people, who are unique and special and valuable individuals, become zombies, a horde of identityless, soulless, lifeless husks, taken over and corrupted by some vile invader — a virus, an alien parasite, Disney. Having been corrupted, the former humans stalk other humans relentlessly, and turn those individual people into more indistinguishable members of the horde. It represents all of our fears of losing our selves, our identities, in the larger society, which grinds us up and devours us (along with the visceral horror of cannibalism, the idea of being devoured, reduced to mere sustenance and then destroyed and consumed by those who should shield and succour you). Zombies are seen as representing our fear of the future, particularly of technology, and the advancement and growth of our society into something that either doesn’t recognize our individual human value — or doesn’t care about it. Zombies don’t care that I am a teacher, or a husband, or a writer, or a man who loves animals; to them I’m just meat. And zombies are the meat grinder.

Zombies are the Machine. Zombies are the Man, in the abstract sense of an authority that doesn’t respect or value us, that sees us only as grist for the mill, or at best fuel for the engine.

But none of that is the horror of zombies. (That’s not true: much of the horror of zombies is in the eating, particularly in the eating alive, which is just appalling in and of itself.) The horror of zombies is in their relentlessness: the horde keeps coming after you, and nothing can make them stop. They do not get tired or bored or distracted (mostly), because they are lifeless and thoughtless and devoid of all desires other than hunger. They can not be killed, can not be scared off. You can sometimes destroy them, such as with the famed head shot, or with something like an explosion, a consuming fire, a bulldozer: some kind of overwhelming force, far more than would be needed to stop a human who was coming after you, which shows the sheer power to be found in giving up (or losing) humanity. But even if you fight the zombies, and win the battle, you can’t win the war, because you will run out of ammunition, you will use up all of your resources, and the zombies will keep coming: because we got the guns, but they got the numbers, to misquote the Doors. And of course, every one of ours we lose is one that they gain. You can outrun them — but eventually they will catch up with you, because you will get exhausted, simply because you are alive and therefore you need to rest. The dead — or rather, the undead — do not need to rest.

That’s the main horror of zombie apocalypse stories. There is no escape, and no way to stop what is coming for you. What is going to eat you, or turn you into another part of itself. And the result of that inevitability, (I have to link that clip. Also, the third movie is an interesting re-interpretation of the same fear, being consumed and turned into the corrupted enemy.) of course, is despair: a loss of hope, and the subsequent surrendering to apathy and lethargy and numbness, and then death and destruction.

Hm. Sounds like depression. Also sounds like the situation in this country right now.

So that’s what I felt, what I thought, when I heard that Trump had won the election. Fortunately, because I spend most of my time outside of politics, I didn’t feel that total despair, I didn’t lose all hope — because hey, the zombie hordes aren’t outside my door. They aren’t stalking me. I understand that some people don’t have that luxury, that solace, because the hordes are stalking them, and they are in real danger; but, without being selfish or trying to sound callous, I am glad that I can take solace in that I can still live. I can still teach — and while some of my students are a different kind of soulless zombie horde, many of them are vital and wonderful young people who learn from me. So there is hope there. I can still write, even though it is harder to find the time and energy to do it, these days. Because this is neither a movie nor my dream, I do not in fact need to sacrifice my wife, or hold her while we both die; actually, we are both quite healthy, which is nice to say. And the pets are safe and well. So no, it is not the apocalypse, not for me. I have hope, and hope means I can fight.

And it is not time to give up hope.

I mean that. While many of the guardrails that held Trump back from his worst impulses last time are gone now, and he will act like what he is, a cross between Veruca Salt (not the band) and a shit-throwing gibbon (Note to self: that would be a good punk band name.), there are still guardrails in place. We should be disturbed by the ones that are gone, and we should work to put them back in place, or even replace them with improved versions; but don’t think that Trump will be able to do all the worst things he or we could ever imagine. He won’t. The military will not betray this country, the Constitution, and their oaths, for Donald freaking Trump: and without the military, he can never have a coup or become dictator for life. He can get every single one of the Proud Boys, and the 3%ers, and the Neo-Nazis, and the Karens for Trump or whatever, and march them all on Washington: and a single armored division would wipe them out in minutes. So he cannot overthrow the government. And while the Supreme Court, themselves corrupted by something vile and awful and alien — namely a level of arrogance that we haven’t seen, I think, since literal nobles before the French Revolution — have given Trump the green light to do whatever official act he wants — they also reserved for themselves the right to decide what is an official act. And if you think they would ever give up that control over Trump, or any other President, well. You haven’t seen any movies with the nobility in them. Honestly, the people backing Trump don’t want him to overthrow the government and destroy this country; this country is where they keep their money. The Supreme Court serves that crowd, the billionaire class who want to retain the rule of law because that protects their billions — and, not coincidentally, the Court’s own power. So anything that looks like Trump trying to overthrow the Constitution and set himself up as a king will be thrown down by those who already consider themselves our overlords.

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Is this the Supreme Court — or is this:
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So no, Trump won’t destroy the country, or our democracy.

But he’ll hurt people. A lot of people. Starting with the immigrants he deports, the women he strips of rights, and the trans people he tries to exterminate by allowing bigots to say trans people shouldn’t exist. And all of the people who love them, and will have to watch those people get hurt.

So in the face of that, we shouldn’t feel helpless or hopeless, and we shouldn’t despair.

We should feel sober. And frightened, especially for those who are in Trump’s crosshairs, although that may not be us and our families; it is surely people we know and care about, and people we should protect, support and succour.

We should feel so. Fucking. Angry.

And we should then focus that anger, that fear, that seriousness, on the task at hand: to fight the horde. To stop them from breaking down all of the doors, tearing down all of the walls, and especially to stop them from devouring people, whether they are our people or not. Because now it’s down to this: you are human, and you are unwilling to sacrifice those who are threatened for your own sake, especially for your own convenience, or for something as trivial as the price of eggs — or you are not. If you are not, you are of the horde, and you are our enemy.

All of you humans, all of my kin and friends and allies: don’t stop. Don’t give up hope: this horde will be defeated. This will be one of those zombie apocalypses where the zombie plague is cured, or something happens to wipe all the monsters out. You know why?

Because Donald Trump is an unhealthy 78-year-old, who very carefully and determinedly built a cult of personality around himself. For reasons I can’t really fathom, he was incredibly successful at that — more successful than any demogogue since 1945, probably. He turned the United States of America on its head, and got us to choose the path that leads to our own destruction — twice — and to cheer while we did it. It’s goddamn 1984. (And by the way: I’ve read 1984. And I understood it. My allusion is accurate.) But the best and most secure guardrail that will help protect us from total collapse into the evil and anarchy of Trump’s world vision is that Donald Trump will not live forever — and while he is alive, he is old, and unhealthy, and lazy. Half the stuff he could do, he won’t do, because he’ll be too busy watching Fox News and telling his cronies that he really is smarter than everyone else. And because only he himself is the focus of that cult of personality, nobody else will be able to step into his shoes when he dies.

In the meantime, before he leaves office with his diaper and his hands full of his own feces, or before he drops dead of a massive coronary, he will do harm. To people we know. To people we love. To people. And so that is our fight. To stop that harm when we can, to mitigate it when we can, and to balance it always by being so fucking aggressively kind that even the zombies would decide not to eat us, would instead pick us a flower and smile with their broken teeth in their rotted mouths, and say, “Thaaaaangk yyyooouuuuuuuu!”

Cartoon Green Zombie Monster with Flower Stock Vector - Illustration of death, yellow: 75571689

I’m going to shoot for that result with my classes, too. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

As for me? After I thought I would give up in the zombie apocalypse, and then told myself that I would never give up — and then thought that I am too weak, too ignorant, too pathetic and lame to actually be of any use to anyone in that dystopian scenario, I remembered something. I remembered a different post-apocalyptic book I read, years ago: one where the collapse is due to a disease that simply kills people, not one that reanimates the dead — you know, a much more realistic book. Science fiction, of course, as the most accurate and truthful books often are. And in that book, the main character is, at first, a conman, a liar who manages to get accepted into the broken anarchic society that replaces our modern one after the collapse; he gains food, shelter, allies — a life. And he does it first by lying. And then, he does it by storytelling, and entertainment: he puts on plays for the fortified groups he visits; he recites poetry. As years turn into decades, he helps to teach the children born into this terrible world, and because he travels from place to place, around and around a particular circuit, he becomes something of a messenger, helping these small, isolated communities to build connections, and to unite, in the end, against the common foe.

By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the conman, the entertainer, has actually done something genuinely valuable for the people he thought he was just lying to: he has given them hope. He has inspired them to keep going, even in the face of despair, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. He has brought people together, and reminded them of what it means to be human, to be more than savages slaughtering each other for food and warmth. To be people, rather than part of the faceless horde.

The name of the book is The Postman, by David Brin, a wonderful SF writer. It was turned into a reeeaaalllllyy bad movie with Kevin Costner in the lead role; it was so bad it has probably been entirely forgotten. But the book was actually good.

The Postman - Wikipedia

And you know what? I can do that. I could do all of that. (Not the lying, hopefully, because I am not good at it and I very much hate doing it. But I can.) I can be entertaining, and I can bring people together, and I can maybe inspire people to keep going, even in the face of despair and the seemingly insurmountable numbers of the horde.

I can survive the zombie apocalypse.

We all can.

Let’s go.

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