Terrorizing a nation is expensive

 Terrorism depends on emotional impact. The 9-11 attacks killed a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States, but drove a precision chisel into divides in the country, starting the fractures that led us to two costly wars and the election disasters of 2016 and 2024.

With an authoritarian government in place in the United States, we now have government forces terrorizing US citizens under the pretext of terrorizing "illegal immigrant criminals." They're on a rampage in Minnesota, focused mainly on the Twin Cities area, after a summer that included a shock raid in Chicago that could have come from a movie script. Remember that Donald Trump comes from reality television, and Steve Bannon made his money in the movie business. It's all show biz to them. Coincidentally, terrorism is all show biz, too.

Terrorism is performance art. It's guerrilla theater. It's improv in the wild, only it's not improvised by its writers. It's only improvised by the unwitting characters in the general public or target population who have the situation sprung on them.

Despite having an enormous budget and now asking for more money, and hiring anyone from 18 to 80 who is willing to buy their own tactical kit and pepper spray old ladies and school kids, ICE can't put big touring companies in more than one or two cities at a time. The expense goes beyond money to personnel. A goon squad needs goons. While humanity seems to produce an endless supply of people who like to be mean to other people, they're still a small enough percentage that the Department of Homeland Security will soon have to hire people who have to get their parents to drop them off at work.

All of this malicious incompetence comes at a cost to taxpayers. You, the average citizen, are paying all of the budget for ICE to commit acts of brutality without fear of penalty or pushback. Their funding was specifically secured in the One Big Bucket of Bullshit reconciliation bill the Republicans managed to shoehorn through last summer.

The Republican members of congress aren't spineless, they're complicit. Republican voters: is this really what you voted for? In some cases, I'm sure it is. But the rest of you: even if you long to live as the privileged class under apartheid, don't you realize that the strategies of xenophobia and isolation are demolishing your precious American exceptionalism? Even without the Toddler-in-Chief stomping his feet because he didn't get a Nobel Prize, the rest of the administration has the foreign policy plans of a 12-year-old. At best they're led by Stephen Miller, who hasn't evolved spiritually and intellectually since high school. He was a nasty piece of work then, and now he has years of experience. They have not mellowed him.

Stephen Miller is another chickenhawk playing toy soldier with other people's lives. Never served a day, but he's all about "might makes right" when it comes to sending other people's kids to pick fights on behalf of white nationalism.

At Davos this week, where America once held considerable influence, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a plan in which the United States is left to devour itself with petty squabbles while the rest of the world moves on to outgrow the era of superpowers. The US was described as the last superpower in the 1990s, even as a "hyperpower" because it was the apparently victorious survivor of the Cold War. Drunk with power, the country has lurched through the decades since, believing its own hype to the point that ignorant voters were convinced to hollow out and undermine the bipartisan structure created after World War II to facilitate peace and prosperity through diplomacy and global trade.

And now the neo-Nazis who can't get over their side losing the second world war have merged with the white supremacists who couldn't get over losing the American Civil War to throw us back into the hostile and destructive worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries. They'll squander as much of your money as they can to lift up the worst elements of racist government and suppression of labor. Labor is most of us. The myth of upward mobility is that there's always room at the top. The myth of meritocracy is that the best people always rise. The truth is that there's only so much room for middle management. The bulk of us will always be down in the massive pile of the lower part of the pyramid, carrying the load of all of the pretensions of the few rich and powerful manipulators acting out their disparate fantasies of how the world should be to suit themselves

Fascist Fatigue

 Opponents of the current regime and the institutions behind it have been using the f-word for years now, with a sprinkling of the n-word as well. The terms "fascist" and "Nazi" have become meaningless epithets, as both sides fling them at each other.

Voices on the left face accusations of crying wolf because they have been calling "fascist" for so long. But there's a difference between crying wolf in the sense that we've all come to scorn: alarming the populace about an imaginary peril; and simply providing advance warning long before the general public is ready to see where the trend must inevitably lead. The wolf was a long way off, but its path was clear.

As with original recipe fascism in the 1920s and '30s, the current iteration has had its supporters who like some or all of its tenets, whether they just hope for the economic prosperity or also relish the suppression of fringe elements in society. Maybe they believe that what really brought down the fascists and Nazis was their expansionism (which is true), and believed the rhetoric of the current regime about ending foreign wars and concentrating on some nice ethnic cleansing at home. Now, of course, the regime has struck militarily at Venezuela, threatens to steal territory from a NATO ally, has eyes on Cuba, and is rattling sabers at Iran.

Nothing annoys a modern fascist more than being called a fascist. They will lead the chorus saying that anyone who points out their fascistic tendencies is overreacting. They find harmony among all of the ordinary folk who don't want to believe that their simple struggle for survival and economic advancement is going to be interrupted by either an authoritarian crackdown or a messy resistance to an authoritarian crackdown. Surely things aren't so dire! We just want affordable housing, food, education, and transportation.

America is the land of the open mind when it comes to debating political philosophies while ignoring systemic oppression of women and minorities. Let's argue fine points of whether we're really well into a fascist state, while said state sends armed goons into selected cities to harass, maul, and even kill without remorse or restraint. Don't get between them and their targets of ethnic cleansing, or you will be punished, up to the point of summary execution in the street (you fuckin' bitch).

Sounds pretty fascist to me. And the playbook was public before the election that threw this regime into power. We knew what they wanted to do. Now they're doing it. Call it what it is and declare your support or opposition. It's that simple.

Is it time to start sleeping in our clothes?

 With Vice President JD Vance threatening that ICE will begin "door to door operations," and the rogue agency clearly targeting anyone even slightly uncooperative with the regime, maybe those of us who are at all vocal in opposition need to start sleeping in our clothes. Especially in colder climates, who wants to be dragged out in their PJs for the humiliating spectacle of being cuffed and stuffed, carted away to a mysterious fate by secret police?

Keep some sturdy slip-on footwear beside the bed to complete your ensemble. And be mindful of how your nightly moisturizing routine might make you look to the cameras.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!! Likewise, you may have no hint that the all-seeing eye of the regime has settled upon little old you. Dress for the weather outside, in case you have to face it unexpectedly.

Lots of apocalypticists and general preparedness advocates have kept a "go bag" handy for years. Unless you plan to beat feet through the back door as the agents kick down the front one, don't expect to be able to retain a handy kit of personal possessions after your arrest. You'll probably have a shaved head and an orange jumpsuit within hours. But, for the sake of dignity and protection from the weather, stay suited up at all times, in anticipation of your time in transit to that fate.

Even if they just pop the door and shoot you in the face, you want to look good. On the other hand, in the case of summary execution, sporting the flannel pajamas, mug of cocoa, and fleece blanket will get the point across that maybe you aren't such a terrorist mastermind after all.

Everything in political violence is for emotional effect. That's why we keep our protests scrupulously nonviolent. They call us a threat, we show up in goofy costumes, or cheerfully assure them that we're not mad at them. And they shoot someone in the face. Who looks like a threat now? All of this posturing from the regime on one side and positioning from the opposition on the other is ultimately to persuade the sideline public that they want to support one side or the other. Do you prefer the goofballs in frog suits who want to share a living wage and universal health care, or the masked, armed, angry men who want to shoot you because you don't grovel quickly and thoroughly enough?

The vast majority of us do not have to worry about the goon squad kicking our door in and dragging one or more family members away. But no one has perfect immunity. Just because it probably won't be you does not mean that it never could. Certainly the percentage of people who should be subject to home invasion by law enforcement, after thorough investigation and under a valid warrant, is minuscule. There were already enough mistakes before the current regime decided to make it a regular occurrence. They're being sloppy both in preparation and in accountability afterward, because the people in power don't really care about accuracy. They care about intimidation, about maintaining order by making obedience seem like wisdom and self defense.

Voting seems like a feeble response, but...

 As murderous thugs kill citizens with impunity and the regime lies about it, you might feel that we've gone beyond the humdrum norms of political engagement. But what's at stake are exactly those humdrum norms.

Protest. Yes. Demonstrate. Yes. Absolutely barrage Republican officials with harsh criticism of their cowardice, corruption, and treasonous betrayal of the United States Constitution. Lean on irresolute Democrats to make sure that they know we are behind them in their opposition to the un-American (to say the least) operations of the current lawless regime.

Lawless is the only word for it. The dictatorship currently holding the executive branch with the full support of Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court simply does what it wants. Their behavior reflects the cancerous libertarianism of people like Peter Thiel, who have declared that their freedom to wield power solely based on their money completely outweighs any influence that ordinary  voters should have on how  the country is run, and for whom.

All that patriotic bullshit about 1776 and independence and freedom? They don't believe a word of it. If the popgun patriots try any Second Amendment shenanigans against the regime that they thought were their friends, they will probably find themselves on the receiving end of a drone strike. That goes double hard and double quick for anyone who has been openly opposed to the slide into fascism.

The first, indispensable step in reclaiming our constitutional republic is to vote in overwhelming numbers in the upcoming midterm election, and any special elections before or after. It's a shame about the Republican Party, but they've been digging this hole for themselves since the 1970s, and started using heavy equipment on it in 1980.

I'm all for self interest. That's why I'm all for a government designed around taking care of ordinary citizens as the default. Spend my tax dollars to make life go a little smoother for people who have it rough. Make a charitable outlook the standard. Make society function more smoothly to reduce the burden of private charity to try to treat symptomatically a disease that is caused and intensified by a government that only favors the wealthy.

The system we're trying to preserve and defend provides us as voters with the ultimate check on power. The Constitution itself begins with the words "We the People." Yes, "people" in those days meant white male property owners, and property included both Black people and wives. We've literally fought a war over that and amended the document to clear some of that up. More work is required, but we were moving in the right direction.

It's hard to keep up with the actions of elected officials after they get elected. I get that. Depending on where you live, you may have municipal officials, county officials, state officials, and federal posts to monitor. Maybe a school board, a water commission... it's a lot. We have to trust each other, when the positions attract unscrupulous types who want to take advantage of that trust. 

Time to get back to expanding the inclusiveness of who people are. Time to get back to selecting and maintaining a representative government that responds to more than bribes from corporations. Such a government is assembled through the boring mechanism of voting.

Even Hitler's power came from the bottom up

Back during the first Trump regime, he supposedly said that he wished he had generals like Hitler had. But what he has really needed, and lacked, is a populace like the German people in the 1930s.

The winners of the Great War were both righteously pissed off and more than a little opportunistic in their punitive attitude toward Germany after what was known at the time simply as The World War, because no one knew at that time that there would be a sequel. It was the most horrific conflict the world had known so far, taking machine guns, artillery, and aircraft to completely obliterate the last vestiges of the 19th Century style of military engagement. Once it started, no participating nation would dishonor itself by stepping back and saying, "Hold on a minute! This is complete bullshit! We need to figure out a better way to solve our problems."

The oversimplified version is that Germany started a fight it couldn't finish, despite doing a really good job for the first half or so. When they lost, the other combatants stuck them with the whole bill. This hobbled Germany's economy and battered their national pride. After the nastiest war in human history (to date), the opposing nations all said, "Good. You have no right to pride after the way you acted!" In that oversimplified version, the decision looks rash, but totally understandable after what Germany put everyone through.

In the book The Origins of the World War, published in 1928, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, professor of modern European history at Smith College, went into great detail about all the ways in which the other world powers of the era played games with each other and set up the calamity through more than the simple "entangling alliances" that supposedly tripped everyone at the last minute, more or less, into having to have this disastrous war. The book can be heavy going, because it backtracks a lot, covering colonialist rivalries, French resentment after the Franco-Prussian War, Balkan politics, and various movements swirling through Europe to try to create shared interests. Entangling alliances barely describes the uppermost surface of the deals and double crosses and shifty shafty shit that the French and British were pulling, in the European land grabs of late stage colonialism. So the Germans had more to resent than just a heavy handed treaty at the end of the war. They were in some sense set up beforehand.

You don't need to know that, but I found it fascinating. I was really bummed when I noticed that the book I had was only Volume I. How will I ever find out how it turned out?

Anyway, Germany was already ripe for a change, and the National Socialists already existed before Adolf dropped in. In many ways it was like Trump jumping to the front of the Republican Party's grievance wing and showing the rest of the party how to really exploit all the anger and paranoia that they had just been stringing along since the 1970s.

The thing is, Germany had a much higher grievance percentage than the United States had, regardless of how obnoxiously those bastards fill the airwaves today. Hitler could really pack a stadium. Trump on his best day couldn't match it.

The media have always helped Trump immensely. If he had not been a reality television star, he would have had no power in the political arena. Once he launched his campaign, the analysts dutifully analyzed him, rating his chances very low on the basis of experience, ability, character, and couth. None of those qualities mattered in the least to the voters who chose him. In many ways those were his best assets. And the cynical plutocrats and ideologues who briefly opposed him before going all in just saw him as a vehicle to their own ascendancy.

The Trump base is committed enough to be good German citizens of the 1930s. But they are a much smaller percentage of the overall population. And Trump lacks another critical element that Hitler had: a world where he could entertain a realistic fantasy of conquest. War was hell, but it was not yet capable of peeling the entire crust off of the earth in one glorious nuclear exchange. So while Hitler riled up his followers about the enemies within, he also fired them up to take revenge on the smug bastards in France and Britain who had done Germany dirt since way before the shooting started in 1914.

The combination of conventional warfare (more or less. Germany did innovate there, to its obvious advantage in the early stages of the war) and a Europe reluctant to get into it again helped him convince his people to throw their support behind the glorious campaign to claim what rightfully should have been theirs. Look outward to the foe! Those decadent people in other countries are soft! Now let's go get 'em!

Hitler's generals were actually good at generalling, unlike the current Secretary of Defense. And Trump and Major Hegseth's obsession with loyalty to the regime is further hollowing out the officer corps. Hitler's generals famously tried to off him more than once as they realized that he could fire up the people but he couldn't strategize worth a crap.

Regardless of whether the Republicans succeed in their decades-long campaign to gerrymander the country and suppress voting so that they always win, the general population is not behind them. It's statistically unlikely that the general population can be coerced into getting behind them, either.

They might be forced to try machine gunning a few public gatherings just to see how that goes. It's a risky gambit, though. The majority of the citizen militia types who stockpiled weapons so that they could fight in a glorious revolution against government tyranny only meant the tyranny of having to be nice to minorities and weirdos, and pay into a universal health care system that actually treats people without a lot of rigamarole. When it comes to actual masked, unidentified quasi-law-enforcement troops dragging people off to prisons without due process, a lot of them have already signed up. I've seen the bumper stickers. This is their dream job. Tyranny is great as long as they get to inflict it. But they're still spread too thin to subdue the entire country.

I said years ago that our enemies would finance our civil war. They may be chipping in a little right now, but the tensions that the right wing has stoked on behalf of the wealthy are so great that we can tear ourselves apart with very little input from outside. If the United States implodes, China and Russia will compete to take over the space and develop it for themselves. My money's on China, but I'd prefer that we didn't come to that at all. How about we reclaim our goal to be a shining example of how a nation can be run by its people, for its people? We need to set aside the politics of selfishness in order to achieve our full potential as a force for good.

There is no great era in our country's past to which we should aspire to return. Our wavering progress has always been linear and, until the last decade or so, generally upward. The only parts of the past that were good were the platforms from which we could build better. Not bigger. Not more posh. Actually, fundamentally better. We squandered our opportunities to correct course with relatively small adjustments, in favor of our experiment in unchained greed. The enemy within is not in slums and trailer parks and drag queen story hour. It's in boardrooms and brokerage houses.

As much fun as it sounds, storming the mansions and office towers of our overlords and putting them to the sword will not provide the lasting value that simply voting for higher taxes and other curbs on them will bring us. Our species needs to outgrow violence before it permanently stunts our growth.

Government is boring. Government should be boring. Pledge to dedicate yourself to plain old boring, effective administration. If your chief executive needs lapdog generals, military parades, a reign of terror over any portion of the country's inhabitants, and a giant ballroom appended to a very modest presidential mansion, that's a very bad sign for the health and well-being of ordinary citizens. I know each of us is extraordinary in our own way. We need to appreciate that about each other. Ya bunch of lovable weirdos.

The bullies are in charge of the playground now

 A minuscule majority of the voters who actually bothered to show up in November, 2024, put into office the worst executive branch in American history, and paper-thin majorities of GOP enablers in the House and Senate.

In "A Christmas Story" the narrator states that "in the kid world, you're either a bully, a toady, or a victim." In a momentary triumph, Ralphie beats the bully so badly that if it happened in a schoolyard today he would be charged with aggravated assault. Many of us smaller, nearsighted boys had similar experiences growing up, though perhaps without Ralphie's primal ferocity.

In the adult world, bullies organize. The fascist movements of the 1930s were just super organized bullies. The regime in the United States today formed a coalition of narrow-minded bullies, because narrow minds are easier to capture and control. The coalition will fracture, because the factions want different things, but it won't happen soon enough and completely enough to save American stature and power in the world.

The tech oligarchs want to use up the Earth to build their starships and leave behind the dead weight of people they consider inferior. It's a grand sci-fi fantasy. Thus they are strip-mining the government for resources that can be transferred to them in contracts and subsidies, making those inferior people subsidize their greatness through our taxes.

The ideological bullies include the Christian nationalists who want to cement the patriarchy and the libertarians who just don't want to pay taxes. There's some overlap between the libertarians and the religious dictatorship, in which male libertarians feel adequately  liberated as long as they can control their subservient women and shoot nearly anyone who pisses them off. But true libertarians want everyone to be able to shoot anyone who pisses them off, and to make bank on all of the toll roads and other privatized services that are going to be so wonderfully efficient and profitable.

The oligarchs consider nations to be tools to help control labor costs in the short-sighted grovel to control what's left of the planet's resources. The libertarians imagine exuberant anarchy in which they always manage to draw faster and shoot straighter in a world no longer encumbered by law enforcement.

To beat these bullies will take more than a single Ralphie to go berserk. It will take more than a handful of Ralphies to administer the beat-down. It will take the impossible dream of millions of ordinary voters getting together to defeat the voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ignore the oceans of money that the oligarchs will use to flood the election with advertising. It will take damn near all of the indoctrinated toadies defying the demographics that put them all in weird, sprawling voting districts and voting against the candidates that we all know were anointed for them.

The toadies think that they're bullies. Remember Scott Farkus's shrimpy little sidekick trying to exchange shoulder punches with him? "Scut" escalates until the little guy gives up. And when Farkus goes down, Grover the toady has no one. All he can do is run, and threaten to tell his dad.

The toadies of the current regime haven't been abandoned yet. The bullies are still in charge. Their little cheerleaders keep wearing the clothes and displaying flags and stickers. In the administration itself, politicians like Marco Rubio, who once considered himself a presidential contender, shames himself and his country as the Secretary of State. Republican senators and representatives abdicate their responsibility to stop the bully in chief because they support and expect to profit from the devastation.

The victims are starting to mount up. They're not the legions of illegal immigrants that the presidential campaign assured its followers would be marched onto cattle cars and made to disappear. It's thousands of federal employees, most of them far from DC, who, until yesterday, contributed vital funds to the local economies where they were working and living. It's workers at businesses who just had federal contracts canceled. It's veterans losing health care and mental health support. Thank you for your service! The silence of Republicans about the betrayal of veterans proves that Donald Trump was hardly the first person to consider them "suckers and losers." These are added to the casualties of Republican health care and reproductive rights policies who have been adding up since the midterm elections of 2022.

Victims include any of us who like to visit national parks and forests. Do you like good roads? Enjoy the state of the pavement now, because this is the best it's going to be for the foreseeable future, unless you happen to live near a rich neighborhood or along a route important to the burgeoning private space industry. The rest of it can crumble and rot in the name of tax cuts and deregulation.

Anyway, as long as the regime leaves the forms of democracy in place to set the stage for their sham elections we have the power to surprise the shit out of them by voting en masse for their opposition. That may lead to the sort of accidental deaths that plague opposition candidates in Russia. Then I don't know. 

I'm just glad that I never had kids. In the meantime, whether you have kids or not, it's time to step up and vote in favor of the younger generations. They deserve a planet that hasn't been hollowed out and burned over, presided over by bullies.

Final note: being asked or even required to accommodate people who diverge from an exclusively white, male, hetero stereotype is not bullying. It's the opposite.

Have they got us by the founding document?

 I keep seeing posts on Xwitter asking whether we should impeach Clarence Thomas. Other posts ask about investigating and prosecuting members of Congress and other public and political figures for crimes associated with the Trump administration.

Of course we should. The Constitution provides a few avenues through which this can be done, and the legend of the Rule of Law in this country promotes the belief that the public should welcome it. Investigate fully and fairly. Penalize appropriately.

The problem is that the government is not the Constitution. It is the visible manifestation of the intentions of the Constitution. It relies on people to execute the programming written into the Constitution. Partisan people. And it all plays out in front of an audience constantly being recruited by the two major political parties and a myriad of fringe groups.

You'll have your own opinion about which of the two major parties is more corrupt and why it's the Republicans. It's easy to spout the truism "power corrupts," and point to political machinery in strongholds of either party. How about this? Corruption empowers. Look at Jimmy Carter. A nice guy who made it all the way to presidency of the United States, and then spent his retirement helping poor people get houses. While he was in office he was terrible at playing the power games necessary to outmaneuver political opponents and impress the public. A little bit of sleaziness could have shined up his image.

Anyone who stays in the game develops a cloud of suspicion around them. No human reaches a position of power without offending someone, or worse. The more entitled to power a person feels, the more they will treat others as objects to be used. Power selects for corruption.

Power also selects for nobility. Some leaders have the ego to envision themselves in a prominent role, but the integrity to respect the humanity in at least some of the people they deal with as peers, rivals, and constituents. The greater the recognition of humanity, the higher the level of actual nobility. These are the people who concede elections when they lose, acknowledge their mistakes, and accept the just penalties for more serious transgressions.

The Constitution was designed to protect us from authoritarian leaders. But the country itself was formed by compromises between factions with opposing views of who gets the rights of full citizenship, and how the governments of states interact with federal authority. As the country expanded and developed, private wealth gained unanticipated power. At first this seemed to be a point of pride, that hardworking Americans could amass fortunes that rivaled the old money of Europe. It was only fitting that these achievers should exert leverage on the government. Weren't they of the people? Shouldn't the country be for them, as leading citizens?

We're still arguing over the place that massive wealth should have compared to the workers who generate the wealth. In the meantime, the country still needs to run. Power gravitates to the people best placed to exert it. The members of the Republican Party, and the billionaires pouring money into increasingly questionable plans for the country are already framing the constitutionally outlined processes for dealing with criminals who infiltrate government as totalitarian attacks on legitimate political opponents. Americans who have absorbed decades of anti-government rhetoric and stories about totalitarian regimes in other countries don't scrutinize the critical differences between a righteous defense of citizen government and American liberty, and a genuine act of dictatorial revenge.

The Republican Party declared war on the United States when Ronald Reagan gave his commandment that no Republican shall speak ill of another Republican. It squashed intra-party dissent and set them on the path to perceiving themselves as the only true Americans. It began the rightward drag that has dumped us here on the threshold of genuine fascism.

The f-word gets thrown around a lot, so I can't blame busy people for just tuning it out as more hype. Just remember that one day the boy who cried wolf actually got eaten by a wolf. If you never have a fire drill, how do you know what to do when there's a fire?

To get to the point where we could even consider investigating and prosecuting all of the criminals associated with the Trump administration, we first have to remove the GOP from power in Congress, deny them the presidency, and break their power at the state level and below. Then we have to remain vigilant so that the Democratic Party doesn't succumb to its own forces of corruption, because corruption cozies up to power.

Citizen government requires constant attention. This alone is why overworked, tired people are tempted by an authoritarian leader and his political machine, so that they don't have to think about it anymore. It's all nicely bleached and homogenized.

Our country has tried traitors before, and investigated presidents. What stops us now, besides the decades of paranoia cultivated in susceptible conservative voters, is the sheer scale of it: so many people in all three branches of the federal government and multiple state governments. Private citizens. Foreign agents. It's too big, too close to focus on. If ever something did need to be prosecuted to prove that the Constitution is real and powerful, it's this mess. Republicans are going to have to acknowledge it and join the Democrats in calling it out and taking it down. Many of them won't. Even if none of them do, the Constitution, the undying document from which we all get our notions of individual rights, must be defended.

It will be very hard to punish the most powerful criminals in the Trump administration, because they have legends now. Lock them up and they become folk heroes. If they die in prison they become martyrs. It will be very frustrating to watch, but nowhere near as frustrating as watching them skate away with no consequences, or far worse, getting elected again to cinch their theocracy and take us all to church with them. It was another Republican who declared to the world, "If you're not with us, you're against us." That all or nothing mindset is deadly for a country that wants to think of itself as the Land of the Free.

Hogan's Heroes and the Confederacy

Baby Boomers will remember watching Hogan's Heroes on television. It was a comedy about Allied prisoners in a German camp. A comedy. At the same time you could watch the films Stalag 17 or The Great Escape for  more dramatic presentations of the situation, but once a week, for six seasons, our clever heroes outwitted the bumbling Nazis and helped to win the war against fascism.

By the time that show was winding down, Richard Pryor was cranking up. I first heard a Richard Pryor album in the dorm room of a southern white guy who thought it was totally great. Richard seized ownership of the n-word and freely mocked uptight white people. We really were putting all that segregation shit behind us, weren't we?

The answer then was no, but it was well concealed from the white majority, and even from some rising blacks. Now it seems obvious, but back then the vestiges of racism could seem like exactly that: vestiges. We made fun of the South, we made fun of Nazis, starting to feel at ease about mildly confronting the injustices that underpin all of white people dynamics.

Whites don't have an exclusive title to injustice. We just used it very effectively to become a dominant force in the world as we evolved. Injustice is a tool in the arsenal of evil along the continuum that runs from the most sadistic darkness all the way to unachievably pure goodness and light.

Funny how evil is always so much more accessible.

A generation made influential by its sheer numbers got to see these attractive but deceptive portrayals at an impressionable age. I met few openly and aggressively racist people along my path. Only decades later did I figure out how sheltered my life was. Bad stuff might happen in isolated parts of this country and in other parts of the world, but overall we were on a path to potential world peace and good times. It was an easy mistake to make.

It becomes increasingly obvious now that humanity's dark side can't be laughed off. Humor seems to make sense as a countermeasure, but evil notoriously lacks a sense of humor. That's why control freaks hate to be laughed at. If everyone laughed, it could stop totalitarian shenanigans like a punch in the face with an inflated pig bladder. Maybe fascists make everyone stand up at their rallies so that no one can put whoopee cushions on every chair.

Humorless leaders can always find humorless followers to carry out their unfunny wishes. They are joined by people with sadistic senses of humor, who see slapstick entertainment in bloody dismemberment. Laughter may be the best medicine, but power is the strongest intoxicant. An underling in a dominant group enjoys the power of their collective cruelty.

Righteousness sounds good. By the dictionary definition, it describes being "morally right or justifiable." Morality is whatever we say it is, but thousands of years of collected writings have yielded a few common principles that seem to emphasize respect for each other.

Self righteousness is invariably wrong and a gateway to evil. If you sincerely believe that you are living exactly the way everyone should live, you are mistaken, and you shouldn't let it go to your head. It's an easy trap, especially for young adults. From the late teens through the twenties, humans are looking for meaning. We're told that we're adults at that point, fully responsible for our actions and deserving of our rights and privileges. We feel physically strong. This happens to coincide with a period of emotional uncertainty as we leave our homes and childhood behind. Things that feel right and good seem very right and good.

Research that indicates that our brains are hard wired will make your head spin. You can soothe your insomnia and melt the battery in your laptop watching lecture after lecture to help you understand your behavior and other people's. Of course you are drawing your own conclusions through your hardwired circuitry. Maybe you're hardwired to be open minded. Maybe you're hardwired to put up walls and fences topped with razor wire. This makes it an evolutionary question. There are winners and losers in evolution, but evolution does not recognize concepts of good and evil. There is no right or wrong. There is only existence and nonexistence.

The Flipside of The Greatest Generation

Never underestimate the value of a good bad example.

Well-deserved praise has been heaped on those who answered the call of duty to defeat militarily the Axis powers in World War II. If you ignore the fact that we couldn't have done it without our own ally, that sweetheart Joseph Stalin, it really was a clash between Good and Evil.

The Nazis in particular did future generations a favor by being so categorically and undeniably evil. Of course they didn't view it as evil. They considered it an admirable rigidity of principle, and the iron will to carry out a ruthless plan to impose a virtuous monoculture across the globe. The urge itself is evil, but it has its adherents even now.

Because World War II came along when humans had developed film, broadcast, and recording technology, and because the Nazis were so stuck on themselves that they kept meticulous records, we have a lot of detailed history about who did what when. We can rapidly draw parallels to current events and show without a doubt what can happen when the logic of a hateful ideology is drawn out to its grimmest conclusion.

Mass killing is a human tradition. Some instinct impels us to try to wipe out rival DNA, to compete for global domination, starting right in our own back yards. It doesn't happen everywhere, all the time, but it recurs enough throughout history to show that we have a chronic problem. Returning to the bloodbaths of the mid 20th Century, we find plenty of historical records related to every theater of war and land under occupation.  Other examples than the aggressive Nazi regime haven't had the great marketing that makes the Third Reich such a strong brand, but the idea of killing people who don't agree with you needs no introduction, wherever it arrives.

It is this very archive of evil that gives us the graphic rebuttal to plans put forward now in countries that once considered themselves bastions of freedom. The hypocrisy of the United States is unfortunately evident in the persistence of official and unofficial racial segregation after the Second World War, but at least some efforts were made to acknowledge the rights of more than just white guys as the 20th Century passed the half. Those very efforts solidified the core of evil that predated the Nazis by a couple of centuries in our great country, and that sympathized with the actual Nazis in their rise to power.

Recognizing an evil does not automatically cure it, but it is the vital first step. Parallels to the Nazis are too freely drawn, but the sensitivity to Nazi-like encroachments is an early warning system for the advancement of a truly free and inclusive society.

The monoculturists consider the desire for a free and inclusive society to be the evil. They despise the weakness of accommodation. They pride themselves on their admirable rigidity of principle and iron will. That's why we keep having this argument. They must be refuted on principle, not just bested on the field of combat. In fact, combat merely obscures the real issues in a cloud of smoke and a spray of blood. That's why hardasses would rather fight a war than lose an argument. War is exciting, and some day they might win. Until then, they'll take whatever beating they have to, and retire, grumbling, if it goes against them again.

The real Greatest Generation will be the one that confronts and vanquishes its own evil in quiet meditation, and never inflicts its misery on the rest of the world. While I would welcome that at any time, I'm not holding my breath. Every generation has to interpret the world they find, and choose a way through it.

Republican nominee Trump

If Donald Drumpf ends up as the Republican nominee, America will have a referendum on hatred. So, if you are afraid of a Drumpf candidacy, you have already given up on America. He IS rallying angry, bigoted people. He's bringing them out, not creating them. They need to be repudiated at the polls. If they can't be, then this country was lost a long time ago. The truth may turn out to be sad and scary. That will make it no less true. At least then it will be out in the open and we can prepare for the rest of the world to decide whether to appease the real America or eradicate it.

Infamy seems to wear off over time

Maybe I didn't see much because I tend to avoid media most of the time, but Pearl Harbor Day seemed to come and go without more than a murmur.

I'm as bad as anyone. Caught up in the surprise attacks and extended campaigns of my own life I gave little thought to the Japanese attack more than 70 years ago that finally pushed the United States into World War II. As the Second World War appears to have solved fewer and fewer issues that plague us today, that great conflict between Good and Evil, as magnificent as it was, becomes a symbol of the frustrating endlessness and brutal human cost of that conflict.

We didn't even defeat the Fascists. They just rebranded, regrouped and took over the finance industry. They learned to be more subtle and play a longer game in their quest for world domination and discriminatory prosperity.

The dissipation of infamy happened suddenly in just a couple of years. The usual outlets that howl about exalting all things military shift their focus to the imaginary War on Christmas. The compression of the holiday season that follows a late Thanksgiving leaves little attention for remembrance of an inspiring defeat suffered before the midpoint of the previous century. Pearl Harbor Day suffers the fate of all children with birthdays in December. For years it was early enough to preserve its own little bubble of solemnity, but the accumulation of newer crises and the pressures of modern life have finally overtaken it.

We will never forget entirely. I'm not even saying that the degree to which we've forgotten already is entirely bad. Conflicts that occurred between people now mostly dead over political and economic issues that should never have led to war only deserve so much reverence before you have to shake your head and look at the whole shooting match as a waste of many things. It had to be done, but only because of events that precipitated it based on things that should never have been done.

Pull back far enough and Earth is a tiny dot in cosmic blackness, populated by microscopic beings who will destroy each other and the whole place, attempting to rule it. It looks large and invulnerable to us here in the roughness of its crust. We abuse each other mercilessly as we try to shape the illusion to please ourselves.