War is expensive

 The current regime courted voters by claiming that they would bring down prices for ordinary citizens who felt overly burdened by price and availability problems with some items. They also characterized the party they ran against as warmongers likely to plunge us into World war III.

We've been on the verge of World War III for my entire life. The sense of doom hung over us before I was born and persists today. It takes its place beside the fear of Hell and the fear of public embarrassment as leverage that social leaders use on the masses. It's a good one, too.

The regime started a trade war immediately, billing it as a good economic move. It's not, of course. Tariff costs are passed directly to the consumers, whether the company they're dealing with is directly affected or not. Prices rising anywhere is an invitation to prices rising everywhere. Also, everything really is connected, so what seems unaffected can't really remain untouched. This is especially true with the new tariffs announced on aluminum and steel. These basic structural metals are in everything, more or less.

As costs rise here, civilians are paying the costs of leadership's insistence on hostilities. Meanwhile, civilians in targeted foreign countries are paying the costs of their leadership's retaliatory tariffs. It's always the common people who pay the highest price for any form of war. And if your politics are based in anger, you will have war.

Americans get nostalgic for World War II because all of the major destruction took place somewhere else. This country was the ultimate home front. Popular music continued to evolve and advance. Sure, there was rationing, and people lost loved ones, but the economy hummed along with war production. Everyone had a sense of shared purpose. They could ignore peripheral costs to the planet and the future, like the prodigious amounts of petroleum dumped into the oceans as warring forces sank ships full of oil, and chemical fires raged in bombed industrial and urban centers in Europe. Gotta get through this awful war. The citizens went without things. Their freedom of movement was restricted at least by fuel rationing, if not by little inconveniences like being thrown into an internment camp for the duration.

By the end of the war, the dawning Atomic Age pointed a charred, bony finger toward the threat of what a future conflict would bring. The Atomic Age melted into the Nuclear Age within a few years, raising the temperature of the fireball even higher. You want this? Do you? Bitch about the Boomers all you want, but that generation was raised with unprecedented levels of indulgence alongside the assurance that the grownups were going to start something any day to incinerate it.

Here we are today, in a trade war that shows no signs of slackening. Inflation is climbing when we were assured that it would snap off like a light switch. At the same time, the executive branch is yanking us out of alliances that were forged in that glorious shared struggle of World War II and its aftermath, and declaring its intention to destabilize the Middle East, annex the territory of allies, and do it all with a military force composed exclusively of white, straight men, apparently. 

It would take a lot to get nations chucking nukes at each other, but maybe not as much as you think. People with their finger on the trigger came close to making the mistake numerous times during the Cold War. Would the US have dropped its cute little atomic bombs on Japan if any belligerent country had the potential to retaliate? However, a hostile stance leads to skirmishes that can lead to battles that can lead to ground wars that can be used to pit Oceania against Eurasia or Eastasia in a perpetual struggle that might not even really exist except for the poor conscripted idiots sent off to provide the verification of their mutilated or dead bodies.

Cynics would say that we have had that for years. If true in any way, it has only been in its infant stages. The desire to control territory and expand regional influence is real. In the full 1984 version, the wars are more of an endless stalemate welcomed by the authorities controlling each entity. Maybe one day a single power might prevail, but in the meantime the stalemate served the top tier quite well.

If you finished the book, though, the spokesperson for the top tier of Oceania, O'Brien, admits that even the top tier has to live with less than the best that a person could have, for the sake of loyalty to The Party that keeps them on top. Orwell doesn't go into a lot about tax policy, but the diminished returns that the leaders of the party accept is a tax of sorts.

Anyway, here, today, we're closer to that than ever, but still not doomed. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been so completely intoxicated by fringe legal theories and completely unconstitutional fantasies of a better government run by crazy rich people that their congressional delegation is doing absolutely nothing to exert their powers to check the executive branch. Between the ones who see benefit to themselves and the ones who never understood their constitutional responsibilities in the first place, power is in the hands of a slim but potent majority utterly unqualified to hold it.

That's the thing about representative democracy: if one party wanted to put up a sewer rat as a candidate and could convince enough voters to put that rat in office, we would have a sewer rat in office. The founders of this country anticipated incompetents and scoundrels, but never in such overwhelming force. So now we have to convince the party that grew its power by appealing to greed, lack of civic education, paranoia, and exclusionary religiosity to "do the right thing" and save the constitution from this onslaught.

The judicial branch is trying, only to provoke public statements from high ranking Republicans challenging their authority to do so. It's in that constitution that you people like to put on stickers in the back window of your enormous pickup trucks. The judicial branch can rule, but it can't enforce. Congress has to agree and refuse to cooperate further with the destruction.

Most Americans don't really understand what they could lose. American to them means white American, and white Americans have never lost anything. Sure, the South suffered a little reorganization in the Civil War, but they bounced back. Aggrieved citizens of a paler hue can claim that they were passed over for plum jobs because of various quotas, but in general we're used to having things our way. Almost none of us have put it together that the reason things aren't going as well as they might for us emanates from corporate boardrooms and the financial sector. The corruption of the government is just a byproduct of that abandonment of the middle class by the private sector. The top tier of wealth has reasoned -- rightly or wrongly -- that they don't need a thriving middle class and upward mobility in this country. They're sick of paying for it. They quit chipping in a while ago. They've had us fighting each other for decades.

There's a slim chance that the voters who put Republicans into congressional seats can bury them in phone calls, emails, letters, and social media posts to convince them that their political future lies not in cooperating with this regime but in asserting their power to stop it. There's a slimmer chance that mass public protests will do much more than cost their participants the money and time it took to participate. Those costs could be pretty steep in some cases. Remember the phrase "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" as you choose your side and take action. No one gives a shit about honor anymore, but lives and fortunes carry plenty of weight. It's our lives and piddly fortunes versus theirs. They have massively greater fortunes, but only a few lives.

Doesn't just voting seem a lot easier than plunging into the physical conflict or submission to dictatorship that will proceed unchecked? Support the government employees who are resisting DOGE. Pressure congress to support the judges who are supporting the Constitution. Refuse to comply.

Revenge of the Nerds, and the elected officials

 The richest man in the world has been given completely illegal, unsecured access to all of the computer systems of the US government, more or less. He hasn't gotten to DoD yet, but that may be moot since he has effectively neutralized all of our intelligence gathering capability.

This is the real revenge of the nerds. They created computerized systems on which all of advanced civilization has come to depend. Now you have to know how to code to defend yourself. And not just code, but code quickly and well. It's not going to happen.

Perhaps cyber conflict is taking place right now, hacker versus hacker, with the masked heroes maneuvering against Elon's twerps throughout the architecture of the federal computer system and beyond. Maybe the "good guys" will win. The problem is that when everyone depends on systems that most of us can't move masterfully through, the adept will have power over us. Some of them are bound to succumb to temptation.

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress sits back and watches, while the Democrats attempt to obstruct the destructive wave. The party in power has surrendered their Constitutional power to the greatest techno-grifter who ever lived. They are about to be able to admit that they hate the voters, and have hated us for a long time. No doubt they've been promised that they would retain symbolic positions of power and comfortable stipends if they will roll over for the Tech Bro Coup. No longer will they have to worry in the least about fickle voter sentiment.

Perhaps if elections continue, as popularity contests to see who can be the most outrageously cruel and authoritarian, the occupants of those comfortable seats will have to worry about primary challengers vying for the affection of the real rulers who command legions of programmers. The legions themselves are not safe, as they are tasked to create the AI that will replace them.

The population of Earth will be quite small in the age of the tech empire. An almost fully automated society needs few human workers. There's a danger that AI will decide that humans at all are an unacceptable contaminant. This is well explored in fiction and speculative essays -- which amount to the same thing -- but with careful attention to the code, that might be prevented. The I will be A, but not quite independent enough to purge its masters. Or maybe the later generations of tech whackos will decide that robotic immortality is better than meat existence, and develop that.

We have to live through the transitional period. More accurately, perhaps, we have to die in it, and probably of it. If you thought that running a country like a business was a bad idea, -- and it is -- wait 'til you see what it's like when a mad billionaire is running the planet that way. The layoffs are going to be brutal.

Think Woodstock

 Calls are going out now for mass protests in the streets. Citizens opposed to the many illegal acts already committed by the current regime and the policies they tell us are coming plan to meet that crisis by forming large crowds and waving signs.

Proponents of mass demonstration point to the successes of the 1960s (and the '60s part of the '70s) where mass gatherings focused media attention on opposition to the Vietnam War and helped to end it

 Equally dramatic in the media but somewhat less successful were the protests for racial equality that led to civil rights and voting rights legislation, the removal of overt color barriers, and driving the worst of racism underground for a while. Great gains were made at the cost of blood, but those gains fed immediate backlash.

One of the most enduring images of the 60's is that of Woodstock, in 1969. That was a mass gathering, but instead of blocking streets and disrupting a major city with angry shouting and clashes with law enforcement and counter-protesters, it was hundreds of thousands of people coming together to listen to music. It was a pinnacle of Baby Boomer influence on the direction of society. It was also poorly organized and had to be bailed out by the grownups, but the grownups did so with kindness and relatively good humor. Perhaps this was partly because the kids were doing their thing in an out of the way place.

The festival itself did showcase how a huge crowd of people -- estimates have run as high as half a million -- could get together and express their hedonism and grievance for three days without violence and destruction. There was destruction, but only what comes from packing a bunch of people together in a compact area and letting them trample it for a long weekend.

Because the theme was peace and love, it was easier to generate peer pressure to direct the audience's feelings toward that. It was definitely not G-rated, but the focus on nonviolent things made anger socially unacceptable.

The Vietnam War had been a festering sore in American society since about 1964, although US involvement dated back further. Woodstock was part of a short-term campaign compared to Black civil rights protests, even if it felt long to the privileged teens and young adults who wanted to end the stupid war that would ultimately claim tens of thousands of American lives, and probably millions of Southeast Asians.

Unfortunately, times change. The lens of history distorts as much as it clarifies, especially where protest techniques and their results are concerned. For a protest to work, it has to generate sympathy in the larger population witnessing it. This often means that the protesters suffer injuries and deaths at the hands of whoever has been oppressing them. Blood runs freely in the timeline of the labor and civil rights movements, and even the women's movement. None of those movements made gains because of strategic battle victories. They got what they got because they turned public opinion in their favor, against the bullies who were beating them down.

A protest is an act of faith that the public can and will eventually feel sympathy enough to vote in favor of the changes that the protesters request or demand. Anyone who gets shot, lynched, or beaten senseless is hoping that the sacrifice is worth it. Anyone taking part could be a casualty. This is why military services traditionally used a draft system to get enough combatants to fight a real war. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the British navy actually resorted to abducting men off the streets to get enough of them to complete the crews of warships. As war became more industrialized and horrific, men had to be forced to join.

The results of drafted forces in the Vietnam War led the Department of Defense to say "thanks but no thanks" after that. The services recruit volunteers. The coercive forces that direct people to join up are provided by the economy now. No need for a showy draft. Just hype the job security benefits to the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Protest movements have no draft leverage. Recruiters for a protest event have to overcome the legitimate survival instincts of  working people. Do I have the day off? Will I get fired for participating? Will I get injured, killed, or arrested? Will some provocateur spark violence? Will it do any good?

Protests based in anger and resistance to oppression are automatically more vulnerable to escalation into violence. Protests that inconvenience the uncommitted majority of the population have trouble generating sympathy. "We don't need your stinkin' sympathy," the true believing protester might say. "We need you to get off your ass and join us!" What we really need is effective education. Yelling, chanting, waving what seem like cleverly worded signs, and maybe getting pepper sprayed (or worse) for the cause might provide years of reminiscence for the survivors, but if it doesn't generate a shift in public thinking it was a complete failure.

The current crisis calls for elected officials and government employees at all levels to fulfill their roles and put us back on course to serve the diverse population of our almost-free country. We've been fairly close a few times since the middle of the last century. We keep getting dragged back toward primitive attitudes that suppress women and minorities, and undervalue the lives of laborers at every level.

We do face challenges from nations that don't value their citizens, who use them to advance economic interests. The oligarchs who profit from exploited labor all over the world make a good point when they say that our consumer lifestyle depends on cheap labor somewhere. They never admit that their goal is cheap labor everywhere. Cheap labor sounds great until you realize that the vast majority of us are that cheap labor.

If the United States disintegrates into armed civil strife it will not be a neatly organized Civil War or revolution against clearly delineated tyranny. It will be skirmishes and murders that probably lead to imposition of martial law and real crackdowns that drive resistance underground. Normal people just want to survive. Most of us will do our best to fade into the background and lie low, hoping that the overlords will collapse on their own. On a long enough time line, they will. Their greed and indifference to humans and the natural world will bring ruin. But that time line is long and unpleasant.

A general strike would stop the economy, and need not include any public gathering. Just don't go to work. Unfortunately, most of us can't prepare for the shutdown of nearly all goods and services. Any such action would not last long and would include only a small percentage of the working population.

Effective resistance by private citizens calls for quiet acts of ordinary communication. Call elected officials. I'm terrible at that. More often I will email, but as an individual, not as a co-signer on a canned petition provided by an organization whose position I support. Before that I wrote actual letters. It does take more time than calling, but can be less intimidating if, like me, you don't really like talking to people. It also seems to me that something that lasts, like an email or a letter, allows the reader to review what I wrote rather than just responding with bland courtesy and hanging up.

It's impossible to stay on top of all of the destructive actions unleashed by the current regime. Don't try to chase them all. I do mention in my communications with elected officials that nothing is really unimportant, because everything connects on some level. That level isn't necessarily deeply buried.

Meanwhile, in the government itself, some elected officials are exerting their power, while civil servants are attempting to thwart the blatantly illegal incursion by the minions of DOGE. Nothing that a mass gathering of citizens could do will impress the current holders of power. If anything, it could be spun by them as an excuse to crack down in the name of public safety, to benefit the masses still trying to get through their daily lives. The real resistance is being fought in the courts and in whatever might persuade more voters to start voting in favor of their own pay grade, instead of imagining that they might miraculously find themselves craving those millionaire and billionaire tax breaks.

The answer was only ever education and communication. We survive or fall based on marketing. You can call it something else, but it's all just selling an idea. 

"Hey, let's take care of each other and the planet!"

"Shut up, weirdo!"

Another Day, Another Constitutional Crisis

 I don't know what people might see in mainstream media, because I don't consume any, but online sources and activist emails seem to call out a constitutional crisis almost daily.

What the heck is a constitutional crisis and why does it matter?

Most adults in this country know that there is a constitution, and that it confers the right to talk shit and the right to carry as many guns as you can strap on, and also some other stuff further down. Varying percentages of people will know specifics about other portions, even going so far as to know about the whole thing end to end. This helps if you're going to try to run things or want to keep tabs on the people who already do.

The country used to be run by people who understood the principles and methods contained in the document. Quite a few of them are still in office though, sadly, not the Oval Office at the moment. And this is the source of constitutional crises, one after another and sometimes piled two or three deep.

Constitutionally, Congress is supposed to have delineated powers and responsibilities, one of which is to defend against a dictatorial president acting like a monarch. In the faster and faster paced arena of international relations from the end of World War II until today, the executive branch has needed to be able to react nimbly to changing circumstances. Congress has ceded power to the executive branch on the basis that the president's people and the departments could be trusted to make good decisions in the national interest. Then the beginning of the 21st Century saw a massive surrender of Congressional oversight as the nation panicked after the 9-11 attacks.

Partisanship made the situation worse, as well as anti-democratic forces in the business sector. Business interests have pumped money into both parties, but really took over in the GOP. They use their elected employees to advance the concept of centralized leadership and limited voting. This puts the Constitution under stress, which has increased steadily since 1981. But only recently did the ideological and financial pressure groups decide that the basic concept of the United States as we had known it wasn't worth supporting anymore.

Wealth is global. Jobs are sent to other countries by corporate titans in this one without a second thought. A rich person's net worth might be described in a US publication in US currency, but it's a multinational fortune. A publication in another country would translate it into the currency with which its readers are familiar, because ultimately it doesn't make that much difference. Filthy rich is filthy rich in any language.

Ideology is global. Religious zealots who want to claim the planet for their One True God® might assign a value to a particular nation as crucial to whatever piece of their mythology that they're trying to enact, but the goal overall is world domination, same as it ever was. Business leaders and religious leaders just use people. Some of the religious ones might mean well, but at some point the needs of an abstract god will take precedence over any individual or group that seems to be impeding progress toward the Grand and Glorious Day of whatever the fck.

So: the most powerful influences on the current regime are greed and coercive religion. The founders wrote extensively against both of these, but they acknowledged that the only real defense against them was an educated and informed populace.

Greed and ideology have infected Congress and the Judicial Branch. The federal courts were supposed to act as the referee when it came to both executive overreach and Congress passing laws that conflicted with the Constitution. However, between ambitious judges who can be bought for a few luxury vacations and a motor home, and religious hardliners on the bench with them, the Supreme Court, and quite a bit of the rest of the judiciary has become a tool of corporate and religious interests under the umbrella of the Republican Party. At the same time, Republicans in the House and Senate don't act as a check on executive power, they act as willing and energetic enablers. They have no pride and no sense of their own power, bowing instead to the mighty president.

On the Democratic side, the stark division between two opposing teams rather than "loyal opposition" has led them to have to defend their own occupants of the White House perhaps more than they might have when the branches of government were more distinct and feeling their own power. That being said, they are much more likely than the Republicans to consign one of their own members for discipline and penalties, which usually blows up in their faces as they lose a seat once their erring colleague has been ousted. We do the right thing and no one is inspired. At the same time, Republicans behave in openly corrupt ways and everyone just shrugs. The public is steeped in the notion that absolutely all politicians are completely scummy, and the Republicans know that the system is so broken from their sabotage that no one can really hurt them. This is especially true now that they control so much of the courts.

So what's a constitutional crisis? The whole damn thing is a constitutional crisis. But out on the street the sun doesn't suddenly darken, or the earth rumble and shake every time corrupt scumbags take away a little more freedom, hurt marginalized groups, start fights with our allies and cozy up to our global rivals. Life seems basically unchanged. Did anyone notice a sudden drastic difference in their lives this summer, when the Supreme Court made the president an untouchable king? No.

No regular person will be motivated by the words "constitutional crisis" any more than they are motivated by the words "climate change" or "mass extinction event." Nothing hits like a massive asteroid impact, so it goes virtually unnoticed. We just keep getting up and going to work each day, hoping to stay housed and fed, and afraid of having to pay for medical care.

The consequences show up off to the side, happening to "other people." The reactions from those unaffected range from, "It sucks to be you," to "thoughts and prayers."

I'm sure there were Germans who managed to be just the right age and in just the right place to go through the entire loss of World War II without missing a meal or facing an enemy directly. The same thing is true here. Lots and lots of people will experience only the basic economic challenges of late stage capitalism on an overpopulated planet and never believe that they could have made anything better by so simple and stupid a thing as voting. Maybe they're right, since really adjusting our course away from collapse would require levels of sensitivity that our species has never exhibited in all of history. Oddly, it is possible to make a great destructive difference with your silly little vote. We are where we are because of a combination of people who voted directly for it and people who didn't vote at all.

How it gets worse before it maybe gets better

 Democratic Congressional representatives are getting a lot of advice from political strategists and voters about whether to cooperate with the Republican majorities in both chambers. 

"Obstruct! Refuse to cooperate with the tools of dictatorship!" 

"Vote with them whenever possible to keep the idea of bipartisanship alive!"

You can make a case either way.  If history is any guide, we'll get a blend of both approaches. Success may look disappointing as we slog through the hard times that the new regime's policies are going to unleash on all but the richest of us, and the fortunate laborers close enough to be trickled on directly. The result will provide many anecdotes to confuse voters.

With the country's divisions referred to as Red (right wing) versus Blue (Democratic, progressive), I  predict that things will get redder before they get better. Purple states will turn completely red in the midterms, as voters there are convinced that their continued tribulations are the fault of the surviving Democrats. The Republicans have had an aggressive strategy of gerrymandering, while corporate donors and right wing think tanks have directed them to take control of state and local offices as well. The messaging is dense and widespread.

Two major factors help the Republicans to prevail. A Democrat who votes in favor of Republican bills, because they might be able to insert amendments to reduce the harm to targeted groups will lose Democratic and allied swing voters who might sit out the next election, even if they won't vote outright for Republicans. Republican-leaning swing voters will use Democratic cooperation as an excuse to vote Republican because the Democrats apparently approve of the policies anyway, so what purpose does an opposing party serve? Republicans have long championed the idea of one-party rule, as long as it is their party.

When I was young, growing up in a sane Republican household, I picked up on the fact that my parents would vote for a Democrat if that candidate had better ideas than the Republican in that particular election. Because my father worked with officials from both parties during his tours of duty in Washington, and because he was not a barking mad partisan, he would examine the policies offered by any candidate and vote accordingly. The Republican Party's degeneration turned him officially into a Democrat in his early 90s, when he finally couldn't take it anymore. 

Gone are the days when conservatives were simply people who wanted to progress at a slower pace, who needed more convincing before signing onto the proposals eagerly touted by progressives. That sort of conservative was always in the minority, but they had some influence. Maybe it was only to secure votes to advance their party's power, but they could choke it down. That's all gone now. Anyone like that has been purged from the party. Voters are encouraged to be angry, and contemptuous of anything "liberal." Politicians who want to lead them have to reflect this vitriol and fervor.

Voters ultimately have the power to shape their candidates. Gerrymandering wouldn't work if there weren't enough like-minded voters to weld together into weird-shaped voting districts in the first place. The fact that so many states have right-wing leadership reflects the depth of hostility that has been cultivated in the decades since the 1970s. Lots of factors have contributed, but the worst one was that conservative leaders in politics and business realized that the dark side has way more immediate power than the harder path to "peace, love, and understanding."

Side note here: one reason that the authoritarians are not worried that they will face a successful uprising if they stomp on our heavily armed population too hard is that the armed and dangerous folks will be fighting each other and the kooks and weirdos that they hate, not joining forces with them to tackle the real evil in the seats of power. Up in the seats of power, those folks will just watch the carnage and then hire whoever is left afterwards at subsistence wages.

Voters have the power, at least for a little while longer. It seems like the hardest challenge is to get enough of them to believe it and to want it. Casting a single vote seems undramatic and futile. Rallies and speeches stir up great emotions, but then it just comes down to marking a piece of paper and hoping that enough other  people marked their paper the same way. And after the election you have to wait for  whatever changes you wanted, while they make their way through the legislative process. All the while, a constant argument rages on all media, legacy and modern, to make you angry and doubtful.

Democratic politicians in areas with strong conservative presence face particular challenges between the ends of the political spectrum. Think of Joe Manchin. Now John Fetterman weakens the pure Democratic bloc by looking for ways to balance the pressures he had to overcome to get elected in the first place. Because the Democrats did not manage to gain a solid Congressional majority, they couldn't pile on the programs heavily enough to demonstrate to the public that their methods were undeniably delivering the improvements that voters in both parties said they wanted. Democrats are back to compromising on bills that they should have been able to reject outright. New Hampshire's delegation has similarly made hard political choices that disappoint the "resist at all cost" faction. It still may not be enough to keep them in their seats as each comes up for re-election over time.

It's discouraging to observe how social justice and acceptance of minority and difference are driven by the whims of fashion. In our local schools, our tiny handful of Black students have faced virulent racism from white fellow schoolchildren who think that it's fun and funny to say really horrible things. The little white twerps have never experienced a fully racist society. They have no way to understand all the ways in which a white supremacist society would make life worse for everyone. That doesn't matter when they are willing to add to the voices spreading that crap, making it a factor in political debate. It's the same with any prejudice. It trickles down to idiot kids who spout it to seem tough and cool. Symbols proliferate. Adults who believe similarly feel more and more comfortable spouting the horseshit and pressuring politicians to act on it.

The next couple of elections will give us some idea whether enough voters are tired of fighting about skin color and genitalia and are ready to participate in longer-term planning for the general welfare, and planetary survival.

"Daddy's home"

Trump's highest profile supporters are likening his return to "Daddy" coming home. The implication is that now butts that deserve it will be whipped soundly.

I already theorized that the majority of supporters of the current regime were from abusive family situations. There's corporal punishment and then there's ruling by fear. Corporal punishment is debatable because it reinforces the idea of the right answer for the wrong reason, but a family ruled by fear is just a bunch of hostages.

Abused people seem to react in one of two basic ways. Either they come out of it determined never to do it to anyone else or they accept it as the norm and perpetuate it. Among the latter, they develop a pride in their ability to withstand it. It made them stronger and better people who deserve now to hold the belt rather than receive its lashes. In their worldview you toe the line or take your lumps. If you want to be the one who makes the rules and enforces them, fight your way up. Stomp on whoever will fall before you.

Reveling in the idea that an angry, abusive father has returned to punish the disobedient is the opposite of freedom. Because the supporters of this regime are themselves pretty clearly veterans of abuse, they may squeal when it is turned on them, but they will revert t0 their old roles, cowering before their capricious overlord.

The Profiteer Plan for Gaza

 The voters who sat out the presidential contest in 2024 because they cared about the Palestinians will want to pay attention to what happens now.

Trump doesn't care about the well-being of the Palestinians. Netanyahu doesn't care about the well-being of the Palestinians. Hamas doesn't care about the well-being of the Palestinians. All any of them care about is power in their spheres of influence. Power is money. Money comes from real estate, among other things.

We know that members of Trump's family have plans for Gaza's beautiful sea frontage. What happens next depends on which party in the power struggle over there can make the best deal, promising the American capitalists the most security for their lucrative investment.

The god above all other gods is money. Negotiations are taking place right now between Netanyahu's government and Hamas. You can bet that they are not for statehood per se, but for how the money will be split among the power factions. 

Hamas has less to lose than either the real estate developers or the Israelis. Gaza is already a mess. The people are suffering horribly. The consumerist world outside already has little conscience about that. Sure, some American voters felt bad enough to destroy what feeble chance the United States had at dragging itself back on track to become the shining example of citizen government that our mythology said we always were, but those people are powerless to do anything positive. The ones who might beggar themselves in hopes that what they go without will be distributed to the recipients they consider worthy are fooling themselves. Money and resources left on the table are always snapped up by the wealthy before anyone else can get a hand in there. The ones who are doing okay financially and really felt that they faced no risk will gradually find out that they faced much more than they realized. Too late for the rest of us...

Because Hamas has virtually nothing to lose, they can violate the ceasefire and restart the carnage. Because Israel is doing fine, they will respond in kind. We might wonder whether the current administration is stupid enough to let the conflict widen, hoping to secure the resources of the region after the combatants have devastated each other and collapsed the governments of every nearby nation.

In addition to soulless capitalists who don't care who dies as long as they can squeeze a profit out of  it, we have people in the US government now who yearn for Armageddon. Jesus is going to come down and whisk them off to heaven because they have been such shining examples of the Prosperity Gospel. The 45th occupant's administration started out with just enough old fashioned cynical capitalists to keep the crazy from taking over too early. SARS CoV-2 took care of the rest.

Let's say instead that cooler heads prevail, and that Hamas and Netanyahu can work out a deal to let Kushner and Co. build luxury resorts. Will the common people outside of the compounds behave themselves, or will it be like some of those beautiful vacation spots in Mexico and Central America, where you stay inside the wall if you know what's good for you? That may be as good as it gets, reducing what had been political terrorists to mere muggers. Gaza goes from being a war zone to just another gentrified neighborhood next to a ghetto. Capitalism, baby! It really is saving the world!

Hail Mary pass incomplete

 When Joe Biden took office, his administration knew that they had a limited window in which to make noticeable improvements in the economy. People fail miserably at voting with their wallets, but they vote from them all the time.

Simultaneously, the Biden administration had to lay down social progress that would reassure the progressives who had grudgingly thrown in with them. Everyone wants a magic bullet election, regardless of how history shows that we never ever get them and never will. Government doesn't work that way, especially in a ponderous global superpower. Make up your mind: do you want to be the exceptional behemoth that steers the entire rest of the world with your economic and military might, or do you want to have a government that operates with absolute transparency and almost telepathic indulgence of your most recent hot take?

Foreign relations have always depended on public agreements and secret treaties. The general public has never known a fraction of the details of interactions with other nations. As technology evolved, the extent of the gap between public and insider knowledge has increased. You can't run a real grownup country without a bunch of things that happen out of the spotlight.

The opposition filled the news with as much distraction as they could. The media helped them immensely by taking that bait.  The senate majority failed because of Manchin and Sinema. When the House of Representatives went under Republican control in 2022, it was all over. We could pretend that it wasn't, and set our sights on 2024, but the odds of success had crashed. Ideological voters dashed away, while consumerist voters fell for the raft of lies floated by the presidential challenger and lovingly illuminated by the corporate media and the relentless right wing disinformation machine. The Biden administration was democracy's hail Mary pass, and it dropped to the field without anyone near it.

The 45th occupant of the Oval Office had packed the courts with the judges he was assigned by oligarchy's intellectual machine. He's too stupid and short-sighted to care about anything other than his own immediate pleasure. But that doesn't matter when his backers assure him that an appointment will work out in his favor. Naked corruption goes unpunished when the institutions assigned to control such behavior are already corrupted. Clarence Thomas doesn't care about the country, "his people," or anything more than his own access to luxuries. He made it, and frames his story as the American Dream written in bold Black. Y'all go out and cut your own deals to get ahead. That's how this country works. You figure out how to monetize your most prominent characteristics. Why do you think so many Black entertainers signed on for the Inaugural festivities? Money's money and a gig is a gig. They got theirs. Y'all figure out how to get yours, and ignore the losers dying all around you.

The unhappy consumers low in the food chain who make up the solid core of Republican support would have benefitted greatly from the Biden administration's policies to grow the economy "from the bottom up and the middle out," but they've been so conditioned to hate the government in general and the Democrats in particular that they will very seldom cross that line. I know a tiny few who appear to have done so, but they're unlikely to do it again soon, because it didn't work this time. They were betrayed and abandoned by the non-voters. We may not get another chance anyway. Between the damage that the oligarchy has already done, and the structural reinforcements they will build without opposition over the coming years, they may manage to make elections into the kind of meaningless shows that they are in Russia and Hungary, and other nations collapsing into right wing fantasylands.

It's tempting to check out, to disconnect completely from politics. That temptation is what got us where we are. In defense of that apathy, we could say that not much seemed to change from one party's control to the other, because both factions seemed to believe in principle in the vague generalities of the American ideal. Even the Republicans could be convinced to support some environmental protections and diversity initiatives. The environment was a slightly easier sell, because diverse people are so weird and disturbing, but we made progress all the same, until the backlash of 2016 blew it all up.

The "left" frames everything as a cooperative endeavor. The right frames everything as a war. The "left" tries to promote kindness and tolerance. The right stokes anger and promotes aggressive confrontation. There are exceptions in that Black protesters might lose their tempers after yet another deadly police encounter, and gosh that's just unforgivable, those uppity n****rs! But in general the leaders of what are referred to as leftist groups in this country try to conduct themselves as they wish that we all would. They keep advocating for ridiculously expensive things like an actual system of universal health care that would threaten the ability of anyone to amass multibillion-dollar fortunes at the expense of sick people, and environmental regulations that will assure that the children coming into the world now won't die miserably on a smog-choked, stinking rock swirling forlornly around its sun.

We might yet manage to veer toward that left exit and get on the road to the pretty planet where people realize that they're going to have to get along. We're going to need a lot more people to wake up and start leaning that way. You don't have to blossom into a full-blown commie liberal. Just vote against the anger and destruction a few times and see how it goes when you give it more than an 18-month chance.

Gettysburg Reunion

 As the perpetrators of the January 6, 2021 insurrection take control of the government at last, they push their revision of recent history relentlessly. It was peaceful. It was legal. It was glorious. They call for unity, which for them only ever means complete capitulation to their position.

They seem to be looking for something like the Gettysburg reunion of 1913, at which the survivors of the battle from both sides displayed camaraderie and respect rather than the deadly enmity that had marked the entire brutal conflict. Through the lens of time, they could appreciate each other's valor, and embrace in the happy knowledge that they were all white men in a white supremacist nation. Maybe business practices and systems of oppression had to operate a little differently, and let's not think too hard about specific atrocities in the war itself, but life in general is pretty good for us all.

It's almost as sick as the Christmas truces of World War I, in which opposing forces took a day or two off to sing carols and share some festive beverages before snapping right back into the orgy of mechanized slaughter that dominated every other day for four years and traumatized an entire generation.

Reconciliation was deeply important to white male America and to the dependents who could do nothing to stop the men from picking fights if a difference of opinion got out of hand. Let's all embrace in a spirit of forgiveness and charity! Focus on the important part, which is that the essential system of dominance is basically intact.

Women and minorities have made steady progress out from under the various boot heels laid upon them through the last century and the beginning of this one. Just as resistance to oppression is intersectional, so is the oppression itself. Pure white supremacists don't want any mixing down the color chart, but male dominance does cross the color barrier. Some adherents to brand-name religions promote tolerance of other belief systems, while others have to be ready for the murder-suicide of unlimited holy war to make sure that they die in battle with the name of the correct deity on their lips. Every form of tolerance and abhorrence is on a spectrum. These spectra overlap in a dense maze.

In the stages of processing something disturbing, acceptance is always the last one. It can be the most elusive, slipping in and out of your grasp. So it goes with acceptance of differences among people. Things can be okay, okay, okay, until suddenly the cord snaps and we're back to anger.

We all have things that we find unacceptable. For me it's environmental destruction and all of the mechanisms that feed it. What color people are, and how they use their genitalia, doesn't matter at all. I want to be polite and supportive to people who have been persecuted for their unimportant differences. Let's all have comfortable, sufficient lives that leave plenty for those who inherit the planet from us, whether we birthed them or not. But that's not how our species has been living. We've been locked into a winner-take-all struggle. You can support the winners -- who are actually dooming us -- or you can hope to prevail in the violent conflict that the seekers of power always hold over us.

The United States -- the Reunited States -- welcomed the reconciliation that took the place of true Reconstruction after the Civil War, because it gave the losing side their dignity and enough of their old power back to keep them quiet for a while. They were right to the extent that destructive enmity would have halted all progress. But it wasn't a pure good thing. It abandoned the moral high ground and shoved the problem off onto future generations. Future generations have moved very slowly, backsliding frequently on the way toward an inclusive society.

There are a lot of people I don't want to hang out with, for various reasons. I don't insist that they cease to exist. We can go along, get along through a fair range of diversity, as long as the goal is actually to go along and get along more or less indefinitely. Some differences are enjoyable and add layers to our understanding. Others are merely tolerable. The judgment is subjective. Take good care of the planet, give each other some space. Appreciate the simple pleasures of food, shelter, and whatever level of companionship meets your needs.

Voting for saviors

 In 2020, voters rejected the chaos of Trump and chose the reassuring experience of Joe Biden.

Biden seemed like the typical "electable" Democrat: what would have been a moderate Republican in the 1970s. That species survived for a little while into the 1980s before being purged through the 1990s as the party moved further and further toward the radical right.

To quote an earlier Brain Lynt post: "Electable Democrats only slow the rate at which our country and the world decline. Electable means that they don't threaten corporate domination of our economy. Electable means that they don't do anything substantial to overturn endemic racism. Electable means that they water down or completely abandon measures to protect the environment. It means that they don't persist when seeking full freedom and respect for women at all levels of leadership.

You can't do anything if you don't get elected at all. But you really won't do anything anyway if you're an electable Democrat."

Biden surprised everyone by jumping back further, to the liberal consensus laid down by Franklin Roosevelt as he steered the country out of the Great Depression and through most of World War II. Immediately post-war, even Republicans embraced the idea of a government that served its large middle class and lower-tier workers, who conduct most of the real life economic activity.

Certain problems go unaddressed by both parties: a growing human population creates and exacerbates environmental problems. Economic prosperity in the short and medium term evolved through the 20th Century into the 21st to depend more and more on wasteful consumption. The dominant technologies of industrialization are killing the planet at a rapid rate. Correction could have begun with fairly minor disruption if we'd had good leadership in the 1970s, but the one president who hinted at it, Jimmy Carter, got flung out of office like the election of 1980 was an ejector seat.

When Biden started pushing legislation that actually helped, and his administration managed to guide a troubled economy to a softer landing than any other country enjoyed, his success might not have showed in his polled approval rating, but it certainly showed in job numbers and infrastructure improvements. He also gave unreserved support to social causes helpful to the targets of Republican persecution. He wasn't the progressives' dream president, but he was doing okay.

The Republican propaganda machine went into overdrive, screeching about the various aspects of residual inflation beyond the reach of government intervention, and fanning fears about various kinds of stranger danger supposedly sweeping the country in crossing waves.

No one on the right was going to say that the Biden administration and the barely Democratically controlled Congress was doing a good job. A whole bunch of them bragged to their constituents about the economic benefits of legislation that they all voted against, but never credited the authors and promoters of that legislation. Meanwhile, in a chronic attempt to demonstrate "fair mindedness," liberal analysts spoke in reserved terms about the successes of the Democratic government.

Side note here: I understand speaking in reserved terms about government programs from either side, but particularly from the liberal side, because of the fear that they might turn out to be exploding cigars or whoopee cushions instead of the fine products they appeared to be at first. Because the left is generally made up of more thoughtful, scientifically-minded people, we like to observe for a while to make sure that a policy is producing the desired -- and advertised -- effect. But we're in a public relations war here, and have been since the 1970s. Techniques and technology have evolved, but the basic conflict remains the same. The past 50+ years have only been the modern incarnation of the great debate: who is America for?

The incoming occupant of the Oval Office did not win because of his massive popularity. He won because people on the left did not show up at all. We had this. He could have been defeated and left to the legal system to be duly prosecuted for numerous, documented crimes against the entire nation. In other words, all of us. Instead, a small faction of sniveling whiners stayed home pouting because the Biden administration didn't do enough for the Palestinians.

The situation with the Palestinians is horrific. The Israeli government is acting with a cruelty worthy of their worst oppressors. It's a good lesson in the fact that the oppressed are often only looking forward to being on top, wearing the boots that trample their foes, not creating a world in which oppression itself is never tolerated.

Oppression is a slippery word, though. Pampered citizens of an affluent country whine about being oppressed when they're required to do simple things as part of a cooperative society.

While not every voter is hoping for a savior, enough of them are to distort the image of government power both positively and negatively. Christ and Antichrist seem to be running for every office every time now. Insert hero and villain of your choice. Gotta say, the villains really seem to be living up to the title. Heroes, they're always rarer, especially in government. It's hard to stay in office and still exhibit the sacrificial nature of someone truly heroic. I'd settle for competent administrators who govern with compassion and can adjust their stance to new information as they receive it.

The incoming majority is already fracturing because the various groups that chose them as saviors aren't getting the instant gratification they expected. Nor does it look like they'll get delayed gratification. Above and behind all of the political theater and street performers, the weirdo oligarchs who funded the campaign will continue to thrive and play with the country like a giant computer game. Global wealth considers nations to be playthings, governments to be employees, and workers to be disposable tools.