A smog-shrouded theocracy

When America resoundingly failed its second civics test since 2016, it ushered in what will probably be the most destructive American government of all time.

The fault lies only partly with the hard core of believers who somehow manage to embrace every statement without choking on the paradoxes. The real blame lies with voters who either voted for nonviable candidates or didn't vote at all.

Didn't vote at all? Really? Decided to sit this one out because you didn't like either side? You were going to show that you weren't going to settle for the lesser of two evils by sitting back and letting the greater of the evils secure complete control of the most dangerous country on earth.

Nihilism surely played a role. Scroll social media for more than a few minutes and you're bound to find someone posting longingly for a giant meteor to wipe out all life on earth, just because they themselves have decided that their own beef with life reflects the value of life itself. You want to give up? Go ahead. There are mental health counselors and compassionate bystanders waiting to tell you why you shouldn't, but ultimately the choice does rest with you. Just leave the rest of us out of your suicidal fantasies.

Political protest surely played a role. The current administration didn't slam the brakes on Israel's genocide of the Palestinians, which should have been an easy, almost instantaneous act. Yeah. The Middle East is that simple. Personally, I feel like a region steeped in war for thousands of years is a poor investment for any outsider, but here we are. The cultures that sprung from there have had nothing nice to say about each other as far back as we have written records. The equation 3X(One True God)=Bloodshed has been calculated and recalculated for more than two thousand years. It has extended far beyond the sacred dirt they all insist on owning, and dragged in other deities and their believers.

"We believe in peace and love and we're ready to kick your ass to prove it."

Christ himself, according to the story, refused to break with principle. He took the beating and the gruesome execution, and called upon God to forgive the assholes who either took part or just stood there slack-jawed and watched. Martyrdom became very fashionable for a while, until the political church realized that it was hurting attendance and income.

A life lived according to strict Christian principles would be nasty, saintly, and short. Through generations of rationalization for the sake of extending and enjoying this mortal existence, we have evolved the prosperity gospel, megachurches, and Bible Belters who embrace their firearms with loving arms, and prepare for the final battle with anyone who differs. It could start today, or it could remain a future threat for as long as anyone can profit from it. 

We've already seen how an institution can lose control of dangerous elements it had been wielding as a political weapon. The Republican Party was devoured by its beast in 2015. The evolved Democratic Party, post 1960, never had such a beast at its command. Instead it has repeatedly lost control of factional elements in its untidy coalition. None of them could ever take over a party that has been focused on realistic and sustainable levels of individual liberty.

"Realistic and sustainable levels of individual liberty." See, that right there is the problem. It's not a simple "God, Guns, and General Motors" kind of slogan. It's an honest statement using long words. They're not complex and difficult words, but they don't have the punch of most right wing rhetoric. The right wing fantasy is that everyone can be heavily armed, excessively fertile, and comfortably rich if we can just get rid of all these eggheads pimping science and raising taxes to give to poor people.

Except for the fantasy of universal tax-free wealth, it's true that the collapse of civilization would free up the survivors to fight and fuck with joyous abandon. Infant mortality would jump back up to pre-vaccine-era levels, requiring plenty of replacements to ensure that a sufficient number reach adulthood. As local chieftains gathered their forces, anyone interested in a warrior's life would find plenty of employment. Ambitious types interested in being chieftains would ravage the countryside, culling the weaker players. Would anyone seize and use what was left of nuclear arsenals? Since the whole premise relies on stupidity to collapse civilization in the first place, no doubt someone would give it a shot.

No one can be sure how the conflict between science and superstition would play out. Destroying many modern conveniences would not magically restore the human species exactly to pre-industrial or early industrial parameters. We know what we know. But we're getting far ahead of ourselves anyway.

The problem with post-apocalyptic fantasies is that they tend to skip over the horrors and misery of the collapse itself. That's fine for a fictional diversion, but we're on the wrong side of that sequence. We get to experience the destruction while probably everyone alive today will be dead long before things settle into a new equilibrium.

Space explorers plan "generation ships" in which whole eras of humans will live and die before reaching a habitable planet on which to land and start messing things up again. Or maybe they never arrive. The planet turns out not to be as good as it looked from our far vantage point, or it gets destroyed by something else before the mad, inbred survivors of the generation ship crash onto it. But don't worry. By screwing up our own planet, we turn it into a generation ship. The people we create now will sire generation after generation hurtling through space, hoping to find conditions that support intelligent life.

The smog-shrouded theocracy craved by the winners of the 2024 election is only the first step toward tearing it all down. Maybe that initiative will fail. Hard to say. Elon Musk and other proponents of the destruction of earth to drive enthusiasm toward colonizing other planets want you all to hate it here, so that going there -- wherever there turns out to be -- will look like a better alternative. It's exactly the way consumer goods manufacturers of addictive technology like automobiles, computers, and phones do their best to make sure that you hate your devices just after the warranty period runs out. Ideally, you loved it up to the point that it tragically failed. So you run right out and get a new one of the same thing, even though it's just going to screw you like the last one did, when the time comes. Sounds just like a corporately owned politician.

We may have a chance to wrest back some power and hope in the midterms in 2026. We may have a chance after that to yank the steering wheel completely away from the oligarchs in 2028. But we face the full power of their media machine, far beyond mere legacy media, pounding incessantly on susceptible minds. They did a great job steering voters in this most recent election. They will only get stronger and more active going forward.

No one knows the order in which things will go bad, or how bad they'll get. The administration could start with a big jolt or just teeter and wobble for days, weeks, or months, like an armload of fragile packages falling from your arms.

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.

A dark truth becomes ever more obvious

As a Baby Boomer, I accepted without question that the human race wanted to last a long time and grow ever more friendly toward each other. How could I have been so blind to the fact that nearly half of all people are outright hostile to such a utopia? I joined vast numbers of others who bought into a vision of a world beyond hatred and divisiveness, unaware that the very concept fostered deeper and more bitter divisions.

The descendants of that world view continue to work toward it in spite of the continuing opposition. We dig through the muck of hostility and greed, thinking we're building a permanent road to higher ground, only to see the mire close behind us and grow deeper in front.

Believers in a higher power have an advantage when it comes to organizing. That's the way in which they will gather and march forth to destroy a secular society created by ethical -- but non-religious -- citizens who may come to outnumber the believers in a specific, narrow version of religious doctrine. The believers in their small groups can plan their campaigns of violence and sabotage in the name of goodness and righteousness. With the stamp of God's approval they can dedicate themselves to destroying the enemies of their belief system. These enemies include religious people who believe that believers in different faiths can and should get along.

Any way you look, you can see a final confrontation brewing. Obstinacy and superstition demand it.

In the Christian tradition, God will whisk the virtuous true believers straight to heaven before the shit hits the fan. It would be interesting if this roster included a lot of people who were not scripture-waving churchgoers.

Meanwhile, in another Abrahamic religion, the self-styled Islamic State is trying to bring about their own version of the final battle, as described in an article from 2016 about the attacks to date in Europe and America.

No religious narrative has to be true for religious warfare to bring about the end of our species. Everything does happen for a reason. Unfortunately, the reason turns out to be that humans are suckers for suicidal delusions.

What would you do? Way beyond Quinones

As we enter what could be a period of violent upheaval in this country, you might want to think about how you would react in various scenarios.

The ABC show "What Would You Do?" plays with light versions of social issues, but the legitimization of white nationalism, sexism, LGBTQ-phobia and strong-arm tactics in general coming out of the recent presidential campaign has already spawned incidents of violence.

The wonderful Women's Marches all over the country and in the world in general made a commendable display of peaceful protest. However, the climate in authoritarian circles, and in the right wing, is not at all receptive to protest demonstrations.

What would you do if law enforcement covering a demonstration opened fire with automatic weapons? Would you back down immediately, take cover, and run? Or would you march forward to be mowed down, as a rebuke to the vestiges of conscience left in the world? If you fled on the first day, would you come back for a second day? If you fled on the first day, would you begin to organize for civil war?

What would you do if you saw a group of white people beating up a brown person? A non-heterosexual person? A Jewish person? What would you do? How would you intervene, if at all?

What would you do if Jewish businesses were vandalized and ransacked in your town? What about Muslim businesses?

What would you do if lynching began again, law enforcement did not investigate, and district attorneys did not prosecute? What would you do if perpetrators who did face token trials always went free?

The current administration drew heavily on the influence of paranoia and hatred to build momentum for their campaign. They used voters disenfranchised by corporate influence, economically burdened by overpopulation and by technological advancement, feeding the popular myths about poor people, dark people, unfamiliar religions, and government conspiracies to advance the real conspiracy, which is corporate dominance of political, social, and economic life.

What would you do if oligarchy took over your country and you still had to look the word up every time you heard it, or just ignore it and hope it goes away?

It will start so slowly that you can easily tell yourself it's going nowhere. And it may really simmer down. But if it doesn't, you should have some idea what you would do.

Deadly, self-centered attention whores

The shootings in Orlando are just the latest act by deadly, self-centered attention whores who want to end their lives in spectacular murder-suicide. They probably won't be the last. Murderous suicide is an increasingly common emotional disorder with deep roots in the human psyche.

This latest performer has done a great service to the Stanford rapist, Brock Turner, by pushing him out of the internet's spotlight of shame. The sole imperative of the attention whore is to get attention, to the detriment of whatever else might still deserve consideration and detailed, careful discussion.

The attention whore is irrational. The motives of the attention whore are also irrational. This is particularly conspicuous now, when atrocities are committed by home hobbyists claiming cosmic motives of religious devotion. They are condoned by the manipulators of such passions, who themselves see only a new way to operate a global power play. Religious militancy is nothing new at all, but using it through widespread media and communication to launch attacks here, there, and everywhere is up-to-the-minute use of technology. No need to gather troops and transport them to a battlefield. Just broadcast suggestions and let the volunteers create the killing ground at any convenient location.

Attention whores never realize that they are pathetic. They have no shame, because they are the innocent, the aggrieved, the brave martyr. It's a seductive role. Never worry about old age, retirement, sickness, a bad credit rating, a failing marriage, or any other stressor in modern life. You're going to die anyway. Why not go out in a blaze of glory? Strike a blow for something noble, best expressed by slaughtering defenseless people in an undefended environment. If you have properly dehumanized them before you start, the rest is truly easy.

Brussels, the latest insanity

The stated motive behind the current generation of terrorists is to institute their own authoritarian state, an Islamic theocracy. However, if they succeed, they will have to govern a populace that now accepts suicidal terrorism as a proven method of driving social change. Very much like the Republican party now facing the ultimate blowback from its own deal with the devil.

The knowledge of our own inevitable mortality has bred some bizarre coping mechanisms. Explosively rushing off to your "eternal life" is just about the worst.