Deus f*ckin' Vult

 Insecure man and evangelical preacher Joel Webbon recently tweeted (X-ed?) that "Young men are waking up. Women will learn to have a quiet and gentle spirit, or they will learn to be alone." And then he caps it off with a favorite incantation of Christian Nationalists, "Deus Vult."

Our hard-drinking, unqualified Secretary of Defense has the same phrase tattooed on his arm.

Nothing classes up your gang of misogynist punks like a punchy slogan in Latin. It sounds really tough. You can sort of puke up that word "vult." Spit it in some liberal's face. "Uh oh! Take cover! They got Latin!"

It's just another way of saying, "inshallah." Or maybe, "mashallah." Crusader versus Muslim, more god-on-god violence in a clash between religions of peace.

The fundamentalists on either side of that pairing, and numerous other religions, are notoriously incapable of handling free women making their own choices, living as fully adult citizens.

I have the impression that a lot of women are quite willing to choose the "alone" option in the face of even less coercive philosophies than fundamentalist Christianity. And who can blame them?

Young men who follow the teachings of weak men are not waking up to anything. They're just surrendering to the natural insecurity common to all young men. The saying that "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them" is based on very real observations over generations.

Men are not just performing for women. They are performing more for other men than for women. We're talking about cis hetero men now. That's all that the evangelical crowd will admit to being, and is the basis for their public judgment of the behavior of others. Manliness is expressed through power and control.

Just as slave owners attempted to convince the enslaved that they belonged in their inferior status, so too does sexism attempt to convince women to give up and let the man decide. As a competitive strategy, it makes sense. Why compete against a large field for whatever status you crave when you can persuade a bunch of them to forfeit without even trying?

Women have options. The religious right hates that, and is doing everything it can to eliminate those options.

I can understand why a woman would want to forgo the option of independence. Adulthood is scary. Women have had the shelter of a dependent relationship without the social stigma that would attach to a fearful young man who didn't want to face life as the master of his own destiny. But apparently some women felt enough shame and insecurity about that to oppose feminism for as long as there has been feminism. The stay-at-home wives and mothers want their role to be unchallenged. Don't make them look bad by achieving things. They have a strong ally in the religious right.

The problem with good old fashioned subjugation of women is that not every woman is going to find a lord and protector. What happens to the spare women that no one has wanted? If there is only one measure of womanhood, and that is marriage, the unclaimed brides can all go do what? Drown themselves?

Monotheism breeds simple minds. Atheists will go one step further and say that theism breeds simple minds. There's something to that, but we are so many generations away from giving up the belief in things unseen that we have to figure out how to get along in the meantime. Don't let the religious folks get too riled up into an apocalyptic frenzy. Don't let them make the laws. We can't stop them from talking shit to vulnerable young people, but we can prevent them from enacting drastic official legal penalties for behavior that doesn't adhere to their scriptures.

We have a problem with superstition in this country. People who do not attend an evangelical church, or maybe any church, continue to be swayed by moralistic-sounding arguments from authoritarian religious figures. It's Pascal's stupid wager, made by people who don't even know what that is. They enact it because they're not interested in a life ruled by religion but they're not sure enough that they can disregard it to shore up the wall between church and state.

At the risk of sounding like a libertarian here, we have to get back to celebrating the increasing freedom of individuals. We cannot extend unlimited liberty to groups who only feel fulfilled by taking away the liberty of others. Individual freedom does not transfer to organizations and associations that those individuals may join.

In defense of government, no one can have completely unlimited liberty. Participation in a civilized country has to include some firm elements of a social contract. We debate these constantly, as we should. But we can't let a mania for liberty lead to chaos and destruction any more than we let a mania for authoritarianism do it. Government has a role to protect and serve. Citizens have a role to guide those decisions. Not every government function constitutes oppression, but oppression is constantly trying to take over government functions. It's making a damn good try right now.

Transgender athletes and the religion of sport

 People whose bodies don't match their inner identity confuse the hell out of people who are fortunate enough -- or limited enough -- not to experience such a fundamental inconvenience. The spectrum of acceptance varies from absolute rejection of the concept to full embrace and acknowledgement, with a substantial proportion in the "yes, but" category. Conditional acceptance often comes down to sports.

Sport is held up as the ultimate pure contest of strength and skill and whatever methods of cheating haven't been detected yet. The winner is the winner because they were the best at managing all aspects of this. Thus, competitors need to be on as equal a basis as possible at the outset, to fairly prove which one is the best.

Gender has played a role in the modern era for as long as I can remember. In the 1960s through the '80s, we would hear about Soviet women athletes whose gender ID was suspect. We swam in a sea of anti-communist propaganda at the time, but you could see that some of their competitors looked suspiciously bulked up. At the time, it was presented as artificially induced rather than full gender substitution, but the qualities that conferred the advantage were considered "male."

Women who crossed sports barriers to perform surprisingly well against men threatened the masculine pride of insecure men. They inspired women striving for equal rights and respect outside of conventional subservient roles. They achieved high rankings in their own competitions. Things remained compartmentalized.

As the concept of transgenderism became more prominent, the people who transitioned male to female mostly did not infringe on the sacred ground of sport. Aside from tennis player Renee Richards, it just didn't happen to happen, at least not that the public heard about. Now it's all the rage. Or so it seems.

Opponents of transgender people in general latch onto the sports issue because they know it's an easy sell to a general public who mostly doesn't want to think about transgenderism at all. People who might be sympathetic to some theoretical person who transitions, or who might know one personally and haven't rejected them outright for being just too weird, dig their heels in when it comes to athletics, because boys are automatically more strong and dangerous than girls. That makes up a huge percentage of the "yes, but" category. A boy in a dress is still a boy, right?

Most sports sort competitors by age and gender. I don't know about a lot of them, but having competed in bike racing and fencing I know that in a mixed field of riders, for instance, the women would blend with the men. And in fencing, when we held mixed open tournaments, women would likewise defeat male competitors. We didn't have a lot of those tournaments, and I don't remember if men consistently won overall, but I do remember that you had to fence every bout with no assumptions about your superiority. In the artificial world of pretending to stab each other to death, male or female anatomy didn't automatically convey super powers or their opposite. Overconfidence was pretty universally deadly.

So far, this just applies to cis women competing against cis men and taking what they get without complaint. But when a person identified as male at birth decides to surrender as much of that advantage as medical intervention strips away by transitioning, they become unclassifiable. Competing in a mixed field, they just end up where they end up. If it's a top place and they just beat out a cis female competitor, she might protest, but if it's just a mid-field showing it doesn't seem like a huge issue. But in a pure female category, most of us can't say with confidence how much advantage a formerly male body conveys. We depend on our experts to tell us.

Because trans athletes are so rare, there have been few detailed studies of their relative performance before and after transition. Age alone makes a huge difference, so we would need years of data about thousands of people, cis and trans, to determine what the average change might be, and where the extremes are.

It only matters because we place such significance on our games. As a lifelong athlete who wasn't much of an athlete I can tell you that a lot of factors go into success or failure. At my best, I was far below the top in the sports I pursued in my haphazard way. I decided to direct my energy to practical purposes like bike commuting, and less overtly competitive activities like hiking. Gender identity doesn't matter at all to me in those arenas. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I don't follow sports. But it does matter, a lot, in the way that it influences people's political decisions.

The other angle that opponents use to target transgender participation in athletics connects to their fixation with bathrooms. What do we do about trans female athletes getting naked with "normal" women and girls? 

Just growing up in what was considered normal circumstances in the 1960s and '70s, I was no fan of locker rooms in general. I don't know how much ogling other people did in there. I do know that you're going to see things and show things whether you want to or not. But how much of a person's comfort or discomfort around other people's nudity is externally induced? How much are we taught to feel awkward before we ever encounter it in real life?

Sexual feelings are complicated. The locker room concept either predates this awareness or accepts that anyone in there is likely to feel things, get ideas, and perhaps make arrangements to explore them. That could be equally true about your precious girls discovering that they really enjoy seeing each other naked in the purely segregated and strictly protected changing room. Same goes for your manly young men admiring each other's physique in their own male-only domain. And no one seems to speak up about the trans male in the boy's locker room. No one seems to make a public spectacle of statistics about trans male competitors kicking ass against "normal" opponents.

Most of the time, the opponents of transgender recognition and acceptance present it as a perversion, a subterfuge by which a scheming dude gets to look at naked girls or women. How far would such a person go to gain this access? Hormone replacement therapy? Lose muscle mass? Grow breasts? If you want to get with the ladies, just try good personal hygiene and a pleasant personality.

The creators of the pervert poser character say that this infiltrator of women's protected spaces only needs to declare intent and make minor changes to qualify for a pass. Grow long hair, move a little swishy, wear women's clothing... but if the intent is heterosexual gratification of some kind, the deception will fall apart sooner or later. The perv can't collect the payoff by remaining in character. That perv is not a true transgender female. If the goal is sexual assault, there are many other, easier places to commit that, as the number of sexual assaults will attest.

We are now living in prison

 We are living in prison. This thought struck me as I watched a video by a German immigrant to this country, regarding the recent travel advisories that Germany and some other countries have issued to their citizens who might be planning to travel to the United States.

So far, it's a minimum security prison for most of us, but law enforcement is steadily becoming more strict, especially regarding travel and border crossing. It's focused on foreign visitors, legal permanent residents, and naturalized citizens at this point. It's focused on brown people with tattoos. But perfectly Aryan-looking actual Germans, and innocuous-looking British citizens have been slapped into detention over issues that seem -- as reported to the public -- like things that could have been resolved far less drastically.

 Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was detained for two weeks. Fabian Schmidt, a green card holder from Germany, was detained back in March when he arrived at Logan Airport on his way home from a trip to Luxembourg and is still being held. And, of course, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was snatched up in that collection of supposed Venezuelan gang members who were sent to prison in El Salvador. He has no criminal record, although he was contesting potential deportation proceedings resulting from an informant claiming that  he was a gang member back in 2019. The regime has said that his rendition was "an administrative error," but they can't undo it. 

Can't undo it? We're supposed to be the most powerful, respected nation on earth according to the current occupant of the Oval Office and his band of braying sycophants, but we can't call back one prisoner from a small country with whom we merely contract to outsource our cruel and inhumane punishment? 

Even traveling domestically, immigrants, legal permanent residents, and visitors on various visas need to carry portfolios of documentation, and even that may not be enough. Ultimately, the decision to deny entry or detain one of them lies with the individual agent with whom they are dealing. And once in the system it's terrifyingly difficult to get out, because our aspiring totalitarians ignore due process.

Kids are being snatched from schools. Workplaces are being raided. Kristi Noem has a different outfit every day to play Gestapo Barbie.

Airport security presents the highest risk because air passengers still receive the most scrutiny in the years following 9-11-2001. This means that Homeland Security gets a gander at you even if you aren't flying out of the country. If an agent decides that you look unsavory, you get special attention. Maybe you disappear.

Germans and Canadians and British people look like plain white folks. Authoritarian regimes are paranoid. In addition to the broad categories of public enemy that they might appoint (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, gang members, terrorists, trans people...) they will have private and specific enemies from within their own social classes: rival politicians, journalists, academics, business leaders who don't pay tribute... And they'll find ways to kick down at community organizers and the working class in general.

What we're seeing now is the beginning of general travel restrictions and the specter of abduction into a prison system run by officials who interpret the law at their whim. You could be anyone. If a front-line agent or cooperating police officer says that you look like a threat under one of their categories, you will disappear. The press release about it will make you sound suspicious. Think about it: you can describe anyone in a way that makes them seem weird and creepy. It's really hard to bring receipts to disprove any and all allegations.

As with anything: air crashes, massive highway pileups, and countless other genuine possibilities for catastrophe, the odds are in your favor, and thousands of people arrive at their destinations every day, no worse for wear than perhaps rumpled and sweaty. But it's worth paying attention to the fact that the current level of scrutiny at all points of entry and exit is beginning to corral us. 

The policies that subtly discourage travel form an interesting counterpart to the policies that discourage voting. Under the guise of "election security," laws are being enacted in state after state to require ridiculous levels of voter identification. At the national level, HR 22 in the House of Representatives amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require such elaborate proof of citizenship that women who took their husbands' name when they married may have trouble proving their identity satisfactorily to register to vote.

So...you shouldn't travel and it's at least a hassle if not downright impossible for some perfectly legal residents to vote.

The thing about totalitarianism and a police state is that they evolve gradually. Anyone sounding the alarm early, when the remedy would be fairly easy to apply through educated voters saying that We the People do not approve comes across like a paranoid weirdo. Sometimes, even the first victims don't identify the full extent of the danger. They focus on their own individual plight without seeing the broader systemic implications. 

We got broader systemic implications, people. You're probably fine. But you have no control over that. If you get caught in the machinery, you could end up in a cold cell while the government that could demand your release just shrugs, because you don't really matter to them, and never did.

It will always be an emergency with Trump

 Over the years, the US presidency has accumulated more and more emergency powers. The overarching law we have heard about recently is the Insurrection Act, which originated with legislation passed in 1792, and evolved through 1871, according to an article on the website of the Brennan Center for Justice. But further presidential autonomy seems to collect naturally during any national crisis. The most recent massive infusion followed the national bowel-watering panic induced by the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001.

Humans are simple-minded creatures. I say this as a human. It's easy to fall into the idea that the President is the most powerful official in the country. In fact, as the Constitution is written, Congress is the dominant branch. Wonder why government seems to be such an unproductive mess? We were literally designed to be run by committee -- a really big committee, gathered from a wide and varied nation where the voters know very little about how their fellow citizens live in other parts of it.

As a result of the time lag in Congress to negotiate actions, and the natural human tendency to identify a single leader, even Supreme Court justices fall into the belief that the power of the President should be absolute.

Enter the con man, mob boss, silver spoon baby grown into a massively self-centered adult-size body with a 12-year-old's understanding of history. And the Supreme Court has made him untouchable. His word is law, sort of. He spews out executive orders like royal decrees, and his Congress does not challenge him. Some of them are now, because he finally did something that might make the rich poorer, but even that effort faces headwinds from MAGA faithful and jelly-kneed Republicans who still think that facing a primary challenge is the worst thing that can happen to them.

Trump is himself an emergency. His election was quite possibly a mortal wound to this country. We won't know for a little while yet. According to a post I saw yesterday on social media, he will probably invoke the Insurrection Act on April 20, giving himself the power to use the US military against US citizens on home soil. The lengthy post laid out the dire consequences of this action. Basically, get ready for a lot of arrests and show trials of high profile Trump opponents, a clamp down on all forms of journalism, immediate harsh restrictions on free expression, and the roundup of millions of uncooperative people. Protests will be infiltrated by impostors who will initiate violence, justifying violent response by the activated military forces. Lots of people will disappear. All of those mean-looking people who march with swastika flags will suddenly be deputized to bust heads officially.

In other words, we will undergo a parallel to the first days of Hitler's power, followed by a climate of forced agreement maintained by deadly force. Execution for treason will be common, and swiftly administered. Treason means any criticism of the regime.

Authoritarians depend on official violence and the fear of it to compel citizens to obey. The loudmouths with the AR-15s and tactical gear who have been braying about tyranny will do nothing to fight it now, because they never really wanted liberty for all, only for their own narrow beliefs. They don't believe in freedom. They believe that might makes right. So they will make up the citizen militias that energetically crush the liberty of anyone who strays from the permitted roles and behaviors of the dictatorship.

Trump's arrival in the Oval Office for his second grab at the wealth of the country guaranteed a cascade of emergencies. He overlooks most of them, because they're hitting little people. No reason to skip a grotesque party at Maga Lardo or miss a round of golf because some peasants just suffered tornado damage or flooding. The increasing negative emotions in the country give him more power, because so many people have been so well trained to blame the wrong actors for their troubles. Their emergencies set the stage for whatever event the administration chooses as the excuse to unleash the full power of government sanctioned violence against its own citizens.

Trump is just a symptom and a tool of two major promoters of authoritarian government: theocracy and technocracy. The Christian nationalists want boys to be boys and girls to be girls who grow up to be men and women who understand their places under a God whose words and motives vary at the convenience of whoever is in charge at the time. The technocrats think that the world should be run by emotionless people who aspire to be machines. Both groups have a central idea of what our human purpose should be. Neither of them think that it's "to have fun."

When Jimmy Carter called for nationwide introspection at the end of the 1970s, he was just repeating the age-old human question: Why are we here? Humans used to fight over territory and resources. That period merged with the long spell in which we fought over ideas. Those ideas usually hinged on who should control territory and resources in the name of what god or philosophy. Most people seem to prefer the periods between conflicts, but a percentage of humans enjoys war, destruction, cruelty, torture, and killing. There may be a majority opinion, but there is no universal standard. The violent minority -- known by their passionate embrace of firearms -- has long railed against democracy, because they each only have one vote but they have 30 rounds in the magazine. No fair!

The same social media post warning about Trump invoking the Insurrection Act on April 20 said that Project 2025 had called for invoking it on the first day of his term. Many of us expected something like that. Reality seldom follows the script exactly. It was better politics for the administration to bumble and stumble toward a full crackdown. It looks more organic that way, less plotted. He doesn't have to satisfy voters to win reelection, but he does have an easier time if the population believes that "he's only doing what he has to do to protect us." He's promoting the general welfare and providing for the common defense. His Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Homeland Security will attest to that. Coincidentally, they're both on the advisory panel who will recommend for or against invoking that Insurrection Act.

If your vision of humanity's future is a soft-focused, congenial anarchy in which we're each free to be whatever benign thing we want to be, understand that even that will need some organization like the government institutions that we had, to assure that needs are met. The mob currently in power stands for the exact opposite. Their view is regimented, narrow, and not afraid to hurt you. They will do that with or without something as drastic as the Insurrection Act.

Big country, Big Business, bad news

Come along on a quick, blurry drone flight over the history of journalism in America. This comes to mind now as I see complaints online that the mainstream media are not covering the massive protests today against the Republican administration

When the First Amendment established freedom of the press, the entire country didn't even take up the entire east coast of what we call the United States today.

 Newspaper circulation was limited to a small radius around the point of publication. Editors and publishers felt no obligation to be neutral, but the low startup cost meant that multiple papers could cover a heavily populated area. Advertiser-supported funding didn't threaten to warp coverage, because advertisers were already sympathetic to the paper's editorial stance or they could be replaced if they objected to content and took their business elsewhere.

As the country grew, so did the influence of major publications. As controversies grew heated, sometimes a newspaper publisher would be murdered and their offices destroyed, but the general business model managed to survive. That tended to happen in smaller market areas, so it didn't disrupt the industry as a whole.

By the end of the 19th Century, newspapers wielded massive power. This held up all the way to the late 20th Century. Television pulled some revenue and had greater impact on the senses, because of moving pictures and audio, but broadcast presentations couldn't go into the depth of analysis that print articles could. And newspapers were always on. A newspaper could pass from hand to hand for hours or days.

The influence of the written word on anyone who can read retains its impact as it goes from a breaking story to old news to history. The impact may vary at each of those stages, but it can actually increase at the history stage, as unfolding events after it was new give it more significance. Video  -- especially if the broadcaster opts not to archive it -- only lives for as long as it takes to perform it. It's much harder to review in sections, too. Reread this paragraph a few times and compare it to rewinding a video to exactly the right spot over and over.

Whatever the medium, news outlets seemed to prize their position as a foil to the government. They might not be opposed, but they represented the critical, independent observer. The people had a right to know, and journalists had a Constitutionally protected role in providing that knowledge.

Prosperity makes life more expensive. Subsistence is a basic equation: get enough food and find sufficient shelter to survive whatever conditions nature is throwing at you. Once subsistence is assured, the human mind starts looking for something else to do. This cave is damp, this hut is leaky. The trail to the next village could be a little smoother. Speaking of the next village, those smug bastards have some pretty nice farm land, and they don't look so tough... Next thing you know, you have a major civilization, where basic shelter costs you more than you can scrape up from this thing you have now called a job.

Running a business, especially a news business, in a prosperous, civilized country takes a lot more money than it did in the 18th and at least the first half of the 19th centuries. At the same time, multiple factors have reduced Americans' ability and willingness to read. I have no solid statistics on it because I can't be bothered to look them up, but the dominant forms of Internet content certainly seem to be video based, while television news and news-imitating programs dominate in forming public opinion. Blogs of the early 2000s gave way quickly to video blogs and now to quick hits like TikTok.

The internet supports small content providers, but they rent their space from the large (or huge) corporations that own the actual hosting sites. Huge corporations, meanwhile, blast out their content directly over online and broadcast channels. Newspapers put content online, constrained then by the space limitations and intrusive ad formats of those spaces, losing all of the advantages of paper publication. I live beyond the reach of any major newspaper, so I haven't seen an actual paper paper in years. But I can subscribe to the web versions of major papers all over the world. Or I could if I could afford it.

News has always been curated. "All the news that's fit to print" reflects the editors' opinion of what's fit to print. When I worked for a small weekly paper I joked that our motto was "all the news that fits." The "news hole" is what's left on the page after that edition's ads are blocked in. The size of your news space is determined by your ad revenue. That revenue also has to pay the rest of the newspaper's overhead.

Advertisers generally don't care about the news. They care about whether a publication or broadcast outlet can deliver their message to a lot of eyeballs. If enough people aren't reading stuff on paper, it doesn't matter that the paper medium was much better at presenting detailed information. Detailed information is no longer reliable bait for enough people to reward the advertisers' investment.

Advertisers do care about news-imitating content that will stimulate desirable buying or voting behavior. It doesn't have to be true. That's not just a sad truth about human susceptibility to gossip, it's legally true since the 1980s, when the Republican administration got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, which required genuine balance in presenting controversial topics on broadcast media, and made hysterical exaggeration more difficult. "Free speech" advocates said that this stifled free expression -- i.e lying -- and demanded its removal. The conservative administration knew a good thing when they saw it, realizing that their positions never polled well when presented in a non-partisan way. So down went the Fairness Doctrine and up went Fox News and talk radio.

Broadcast news had an advantage over print in reaching rural areas, which was later boosted significantly by cable television. Small local newspapers could only reach so far and cover so much. Big papers would mail out to anyone willing to pay, but news wasn't fresh when it arrived. The simple beliefs and perceived wisdom of rural populations living closer to basic subsistence is no more valid than the opinions of city dwellers who have lived for generations cut off from firsthand contact with agriculture. These demographics, isolated from each other, shared some similar receptiveness to misleading content, albeit from opposite gaps in their lived experiences.

Fox disguised their right wing goals by hosting liberal entertainment content, but their "news" department has now evolved into a blatant megaphone for authoritarianism. The corporation plays hardball with cable providers, which raises fees for cable subscribers and forces Fox onto basic cable lineups with no opt out.

As corporate consolidation has cut down the number of corporations that fund broadcast outlets, the natural inclination of capitalism toward authoritarianism shapes the content that you are allowed to see. Similar pressures fall on print media, with the Wall Street Journal, for instance, owned by the same corporation that owns Fox. And of course Jeff Bezos, lovable potentate of Amazon, drew a lot of attention to his ownership of the venerable Washington Post when he kneecapped their editorial integrity before the 2024 election.

Gone are the days when you could pick up a newspaper with a reasonable expectation that you would find bland, boring, but factual content about issues of importance. Fans of the new dispersed media model of independent journalists all over the internet will say that even then you couldn't trust that the big paper wasn't burying something that the ownership didn't want the common folk to know. But now you can't trust that the valiant independent muckraker of your choice isn't blatantly making shit up or hiding facts just as much as the big corporations are. You may have more options for fact checking your fact checkers, but you have to put in the time and find the sources to do so.

If Daniel Ellsberg sent his bombshell information to the New York Times today, they'd rat him out to the government in seconds. Either that or the reporters who received the information would sit on it until they could put out a lucrative book a year or two later. Prove me wrong, Gray Lady. But finding a replacement media channel that we all can share is impossible. When there were three broadcast networks and a handful of major newspapers, we all argued from the same fact sheet. Now the political discussion has to weed through all of the relevant information and dismiss influence operations and insane conspiracy theories every damn day.

I don't present news here. I just present emotional support. And dismissive insults as appropriate, but that's emotionally supportive to people who share my point of view. Good luck out there!

People only vote against

The Republican Party figured out decades ago that people don't vote for things, they vote against them. What is conservatism but the commitment to hold back change? What is bigotry but the insistence that a particular group should be prevented from taking a full and equal place?

The opponents of this exclusionary point of view vote against it at every opportunity.

Voting for civil rights was voting against firehoses, and police dogs, and police with teargas, and lynch mobs. Look at how progress on civil rights slowed and has reversed when the tools of oppression became almost invisible except to the people on whom they were used.

Voting for environmental protection was voting against brown air, and rivers that catch fire, and polluted groundwater, and pesticides sickening and killing humans and wildlife alike. And so much more. The idea of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been a harder sell, because they are less obvious. Are we against an earlier spring when winter is so damn dreary? How bad is it really? Maybe we won't get devastating super storms this summer. And aren't the early crocuses a welcome sight?

The Democratic Party has been rightly inspired and energized by Cory Booker's historic marathon speech in the Senate on Monday and Tuesday, and with the resounding defeat of billionaire Elon Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin supreme court election. I have received a blizzard of fundraising emails and seen a barrage of social media exhortations to rally the faithful with the idea that "we can win elections!"

Here's the thing: Neither party can win an election with its base alone. The margin of victory always lies with the unfaithful. I can't speak for elections before I was born, or old enough to understand, but you could say that Franklin Roosevelt came to power because the voters were rejecting the Republican mismanagement that had wrecked the national economy. They continued to support him because they liked what he was doing -- so they voted for it, but by extension voted against letting the screwups who had wrecked things in the first place get control again. Then, through World War II, FDR remained at the helm because voters didn't want to disrupt leadership.

Truman won his election in 1948 basically on voter complacency. All the experts had stated pretty strongly that he was sure to lose. Come 1952, the voters voted against letting the Democrats continue their hold on the White House after 20 years in power.

Policies are important. Our economy has been mutilated and our elections sold out by the policies championed by Republicans. They have been largely unopposed by corporate Democrats, but corporate Democrats are a product of the corrupting influence of big money on elections. I apologize for my generation, but I think that a great many of the Baby Boomers believed that they (we) were not only going to enjoy the most protected childhoods any generation had received that far in history, but that we were also somehow miraculously going to become rich. It should have been obvious by the late 1980s at least that we were wrong, but faith is persistent. That's what makes it faith.

The bigotry just came along for the ride.

Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 because voters voted against Nixonian shenanigans, which slopped over onto Gerald Ford by association. Reagan won in 1980 because voters voted against what was seen as Carter's weakness in the face of global threats, and the faltering economy as the country as a whole was deciding what to do with itself after partying for most of the 1970s.

Bill Clinton won in 1992 because the Reagan recession had eroded faith in the Republican brand. You could say that we voted for youthful enthusiasm, but that also means that we voted against stodgy old men. But then in 2000, voters voted against Clinton's sexual escapades, which stuck to Al Gore like a suspicious, waist-high crust on the Oval Office drapery.

It seems like the thing that the uncommitted voters (and the Republican base) seem to like to vote against the most is their own interests. That's a tough one, because they're also voting against "socialism," "terrorism," "lawlessness" (particularly hilarious), "tyranny," "government overreach," "globalization," all of which need to be addressed with counteracting negatives. Because they're never going to vote for you.

Voters in Wisconsin voted against Elon Musk. They might have voted against what the MAGA candidate for the supreme court seat represented, but Elon really crystalized it for them. That jackass is so despised, people are setting fire to his cars even in other countries. He's living proof that you really can be too rich. It's encouraging that enough voters wanted to prove that democracy was not for sale on that day in that state in that race. Now let's see them bring that same energy to every other election in every other place.

As much as we all want to be positive and live in a supportive environment, we can never escape the essential negativity that goes into choosing our elected champions. As a representative -- rather than a direct -- democracy, we have to pick people who will defend our position up where the decisions finally get their legal weight. We the people do have the power, but that requires us to exert it every day, not just on election day or -- worse yet -- only on occasional election days. This ain't your church. You can't just show up on Christmas and Easter, have a slug of wine and a piece of bread and call yourself right with the Lord. The politicians need to hear and see what we are against, every day.

Negatives can be positive. I'm against bigotry, persecution, environmental destruction, sprawl, overpopulation, anthropogenic climate change, moto-centric transportation planning, and so on. That means I am for the policies that act against these things.

In the film Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey's character suddenly gets to receive the prayers of everyone in the world. It's an overwhelming flood of messages asking for benedictions or divine wrath. This is basically what an elected official faces. We owe deep gratitude to them and their long-suffering staff members who get buried in this avalanche. However, every contact shapes political decision making. They have to hear it everywhere they go. It doesn't have to be obnoxious direct confrontation, although sometimes that is warranted and makes highly entertaining video. It just has to surround them. While you live as you believe people should live, narrate it to no one and everyone. Make no secret of it. Drop them a note from time to time. Keep it short and courteous. Just try to remember to be there, in their inbox or voicemail or even an old fashioned paper letter.

Citizen government is hard. Benjamin Franklin didn't know the half of it when he said, "A republic...if you can keep it." We have way more to keep track of than he ever imagined. But it is more important than ever to pay attention. I know it's hard. We can't know everything. We have to trust office holders and civil servants to take care of the sensitive stuff in a way that will promote the general welfare and not reflect badly on our national image. We're certainly not getting that now.

The big challenge for a party interested in ultimately positive goals is to find the right negative approach to gather in the fearful and pissed off to support them for more than one lousy election cycle at a time.

The United States is an occupied country

We are under occupation by hostile forces, and have been for a while. Ordinary citizens are held hostage by a cruel minority that does not care who gets hurt by their abuse of power.

Our economy and the industrial system already held the people as economic hostages. The citizens of the United States have been the victims as well as the beneficiaries of its economy since the beginning of industrialization. The original investors in factory-style manufacturing took advantage of the prevailing modesty of most people's expectations, and the desperation of some of them, to keep wages low and hours long, while newly discovered pollutants poured into the environment.

Every problem turns into another industry that creates jobs addressing the problem and creating new problems. As the profits of the industrial system spread to the lower classes through determined and sometimes bloody insistence, consumers prospered and desired more things. The proliferation of automobiles led to the spread of junkyards. The time-honored practices of throwing our rubbish into a hole in the ground or shoving it down the nearest riverbank became serious public health issues.

Until 1980, American problems seemed to be American problems. We did not progress rapidly, but our society absorbed women and minorities into more complete participation as if it was inevitable and ultimately good. There was always an element of strong resistance to this, but those voices seemed to be fading as the 1970s ended. Inclusion was better than exclusion for the economy and national identity.

As the Reagan administration introduced the era of hard-core partisan conflict, the edge of the blade was lubricated with oil and honey. Conservative revulsion against anything outside of their concept of normal did not manage to snuff out a popular culture that continued to love bright colors and weirdness. However, that same culture began to rehabilitate the idea of militarism.

Through the 1990s, the partisan divide became a muddy field crisscrossed with barbed wire. Conservatives became increasingly truculent about working with liberals. Liberals became increasingly concerned about funding, leading to corporate alliances that undermined social progress.

Nothing is simple. The actual events of those decades are more complicated at ground level than this flyover summary relates. Bear with me. The Republican tactics of the Gingrich era began to identify the Democratic Party as not merely mistaken about policy but as actual enemies of the country. At first it was done just to put the party in power, where they planned to govern in the ways that had worked for decades. Foreign policy might shift slightly, but the overall tone was consistent enough to make the USA a trustworthy ally. Domestic policy was marching steadily toward oligarchy, but the oligarchs still thought that they needed American consumers to have some money. 

The attacks on 9-11-2001 split the country between the warlike and the thoughtful. The vengeful warriors who sought approval to unleash hellfire on the Muslim world said, "If you're not with us, you're against us." If you did not line up and cheer to support their every move, whether it limited civil liberties at home or scorched earth abroad, you were a coward, a traitor, a suspect.

Political conversation since 2001 has only gotten worse.

The demonization of the Democratic Party is so complete in at least 25% of the population that they will never ever trust a Democratic official, elected or otherwise. It's completely protected as their religious belief. They have every right to vote their conscience, no matter how poorly educated their thought process may be.

It has always been popular to say that all politicians are completely full of crap and are basically interchangeable and disposable, but it's not true. People are imperfect. People who seek power probably have at least some ulterior motives. But others who accept power do so out of a sense of responsibility. Governing is largely thankless work, especially in a country that allows unlimited dissent. Anybody with a gripe can sound off, sending nasty messages by whatever means they have. The Internet has made this extremely easy to do in large volumes. Your average comment thread is never a reasonable exchange of well thought out ideas discussing the pros and cons of a particular policy position.

With the election of 2024, the United States came fully under occupation by a hostile force bent on its destruction. They landed initially in 2016. They were pried out of office in 2020 and contained only until 2022, when the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives. The mechanisms intended to prevent a coup like theirs moved too slowly to bring them to justice. We were not liberated. 

Every occupied country has had resistance movements and collaborators. The collaborators in our occupation are the voters who remain loyal to the hostile force, the functionaries of the hostile force, and the uncommitted voters who will not declare themselves part of the resistance. We are not quite at the point where the occupying force will seize "normal" (i.e. white) people for expressing dissent. This makes it overwhelmingly important for those "normal" people to declare that the occupying government is wrong, and to refuse to comply with its demands. And, when the next election comes, vote against every member of the party that supports the occupation. We told you that 2024 was the last chance, and it may well have been. 2026 is definitely the last chance to install a Congress that will reclaim its Constitutional authority and slam the brakes on the destruction of our citizen government and the devastation of our once-respected position in the world.

Yes, our foreign policy depended on our military might. We did export predatory capitalism mislabeled as democracy, and topple foreign governments to suit the desires of corporate leadership. It was bad, and needed to be reformed, but now our actions are nakedly and anachronistically imperialistic. Russia is not an evolved nation. Their -- really Vladimir Putin's -- obsession with claiming actual territory is so 19th Century. Why should we play an old, discredited game, while China and the other adults move forward with soft power? Soft power is much better for business. We're supposed to be pro business, aren't we? Instead, we are held hostage by a madman and his followers.

As hostages, we're all just trying to stay alive until we escape or are rescued. This means staying housed, fed, and employed, if possible. Retirees depend on their pensions. Workers depend on their jobs. Low level workers -- the working poor -- depend on the programs funded by taxpayers to make up for what their employers have refused to pay them. On top of this we're asked to go out in public to join protests, and to dig into our meager coffers to support the independent media who report the news, the candidates who promise to represent us rather than corporate donors, and the nonprofit organizations that protect the environment and other interests deemed unimportant by corporate leadership.

In any conflict, the poor do most of the dying. It takes a long time to get the rich to the guillotine. Sure, the sons of the privileged have also died in the cause of liberty, but as the conflicts became more focused, on labor rights, or Black rights, or women's rights, or indigenous people's rights, the ones with "less to lose" economically are pushed forward with what they do have: their lives. Even now, when we all have a lot to lose, too many don't recognize that we are in a real crisis, because they can still get gas and groceries, and no one has kicked down their door yet. Action now will definitely save bloodshed later. The longer we wait, the less we commit, the greater the cost.

But what does commitment look like? Stickers on your car? Flags on your house? Signs waved by the roadside whenever you can fit it into your schedule? I do not mock the schedule. We're all coordinating variables. We're told that we must sacrifice. The nature and timing of that sacrifice depend on your individual ability to let things go. That which is sacrificed is gone. Are we to the point where a terminally ill person needs to volunteer to quit being treated, or a seriously ill person with long odds needs to give up their chance and just get out of the way? Are we on such a war footing that anyone with a modest income needs to go on subsistence rations and siphon off every other spare dollar to fund the war effort?

How bad is it going to get? And can we do anything to keep it from getting much worse than it is now? You can find a lot of conflicting opinions, ranging from guardedly optimistic to flat out hopeless.

I can tell you this: if it is hopeless, do not expect anyone to rise up and fight back. Why should we? We're doomed anyway. Party like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't. Indulge yourself to the limit of your budget. Become lawless, because you really have nothing to lose. Go on a murder spree, or see if you can find enough partners to fuck yourself to death. Finally start trying to learn to play a musical instrument and torture your neighbors with it, or take up painting, not because it will do you any good, but because it doesn't matter anyway.

Except for the murder spree, that might actually be the best form of resistance: if we all become terminally lazy and utterly useless, who will carry out the dirty work for the overlords? The problem is that the forces of oppression are following their bliss just as much as the hippie dropouts are. We are under the heel of the percentage of people who like to hurt others. So far, their efforts scorn the law, but stop short of opening fire on dissenters. The pain is inflicted by pulling back the helping hand, not by swinging a clenched fist. Slap the bowl from the begging child's hand, but don't slap the child yet.

Far right groups march, but have not indulged in vandalism or violence. Will they, or have they fallen to the level of cosplay? They imply that they look forward to direct conflict, but have not initiated it. 

The thing is, the real destructive forces do not need their amateur bully boys to bust heads. ICE acts as the Gestapo, snatching undesirables off the streets and sending them to detention camps and foreign prisons. DOGE demolishes every department of the federal government without regard to its usefulness or popularity. The mad king raves about tariffs, churning the economy whether he ever actually enacts them or not. We'll know tomorrow (Wednesday, April 2, as I write this). Will they be on or off?

The current regime could do much worse things than they're doing now, but what they've done so far has caused plenty of permanent damage to our standing in the world. The voters who put the regime in power bear the responsibility for its misbehavior. This government represents them. Some have recanted, but they have not given up the beliefs that made them susceptible to it in the first place. So the rest of the world is right not to trust us in our degenerated state.