I was basically blog and news free this weekend, and by choice. Sometimes I get angry and it’s just better if I say nothing. The state of things just gets a little overwhelming, and the past two years have made me question things even more.
It’s hard to wake up every day and know that you just don’t know most of the people you thought you did. I don’t man this about close friends, but people you live near and around, people you see in town, people you run into at the store. It’s jarring to see that you really don’t know these people at all. It’s hard grappling with the fact that the majority of the people around you have decided that old people and people with pre-existing conditions don’t deserve to live. It’s hard to deal with the fact that most Americans, if you inconvenience them in the slightest, don’t care if you die. They don’t even care about their families or loved ones. Just the mildest request to do something for others is met with outrage.
We would not win World War II if it happened today. We just wouldn’t, and thank god Polio and Measles and Diptheria and all the other happened before modern times. I sometimes really think that a lot of white people just lost their shit because we had a black President, and then decided fuck everyone and everything and Trump galvanized it and opportunistic shitlords are taking advantage of it.
Part of what is driving this is homecoming is in a couple weeks, and while I trust the people staying here, I keep having to reiterate that there are no parties here. If people not staying here want to sit on the front porch masked, ok. But no one but the people staying here, who have been tested prior to coming and vaccinated, are setting foot in this house. Part of me is just thinking of renting a motel room in Pittsburgh for the weekend and letting everyone have the run of the house.
And then there are the people I never cared for who are going to be coming back, and I just don’t have it in me to listen to a bunch of meatheads with college degrees spew fucking nonsense. I don’t have it in me.
I see now how it was so easy for Hitler to demonize the Jews, and I don’t for one second think that any of the German people didn’t know. And I see how easy fascism could take root here. In some places it already has. Hell, a large part of our country already holds many of the beliefs- racial superiority, authoritarianism, hyper-capitalism, dehumanizing the enemy, belief in the occult (Q-Anon and lizard people and what not) and being easily persuaded by cult figures, the belief that nothing bad will happen to them (I’m a good German nothing will happen to me) except the police and covid don’t fucking care who you are, easily persuaded by propaganda, violent, and heavily armed.
So sometimes when I get in these funks I just shut it all down until I can foolishly persuade myself to remain positive. The one thing life truly did not prepare me for when I was a kid is how fucking stupid and selfish and shortsighted adults are.
RepubAnon
This era is more typical of our country if one looks at our entire history. The Trail of Tears, slavery, Gilded Age abuses – the list goes on.
The critical mistake was allowing media ownership consolidation and tax cuts on the wealthy. This took us back to historical norms.
dmsilev
I remember feeling much the same the day after Trump was elected in 2016. Just despondency and a sense of not understanding how we could have reached such a point.
Also,
I choose to believe that was deliberate and not a typo.
Mowgli
Not Warner Herzog’s quote, but perfect anyway:
“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.”
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/26/viral-image/no-werner-herzog-didnt-say-about-america-and-germa/
Nicole
Yeah. Just, yeah.
I rewatched the documentary Class Action Park last night and I feel like the teenagers screaming insults at the kids who got injured on rides back then grew up to be the FOX News viewers screaming at school board meetings.
gdief
You’re not alone. I’ve been an optimist all my life, always pretty certain that we’ve evolved and will continue to, and that, truly, all will be well. Now, some days, I’m sick with worry.
Mowgli
@Nicole: oh I need to watch that, I read about that park but never attended.
Mary G
It is hard and so unfair. I naively thought things would get better and better over my lifetime because Americans could see how letting go of racism, sexism, and homophobia was just making the country closer and closer to what it was founded to be. At least I lived to see TFG out of office. Nothing to do but keep fighting and hopefully with the enemy and not other people on this blog.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mowgli:
I think that’s apt. I’ve always thought the real strength of trumpism isn’t his supporters, it’s that apathetic third
John Revolta
The one thing life truly did not prepare me for when I was a kid is how fucking stupid and selfish and shortsighted adults are.
It couldn’t, because they weren’t. The Krazy Kurve in the last 20 years, and esp. the last 10, has been breathtaking.
Splitting Image
Oh no! Don’t tell me you’ve been taking that horse stuff!
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Yeah. I think it really was Obama getting elected that turned these people up to eleven. Things were changing, and that really pissed them off, but there were still things they thought they could count on, and I guess having only white people presiding over the country was one of those.
And I think it wasn’t just Obama being president, I think it was also the fact that so many millions of white people voted for him. I think that really shook them, that they could no longer count on their fellow whites to do the right thing when push came to shove.
It scared them, it freaked them the fuck out, and it really drove them over the edge.
I don’t have the first damned clue how we’re going to deal with these people over the long haul.
NotMax
@Mary G
Strive to not embrace despair.
Two steps forward, one step back is still one step forward.
prostratedragon
@John Revolta: Not sure about that as far as what too many adults are is concerned (see first comment above), but as a statement of the amount of boorish, aggressive, and plain childlike (for very ill-behaved children) behavior that is so frequent now, I have to agree. I wouldn’t have expected it maybe 20 years ago, though I was getting a bit uneasy going back to the Gingrich days or maybe I mean Reagan.
We have grown a major cultural problem.
West of the Rockies
The assholes are incapable of admitting they’ve been wrong, duped, or that they’ve made selfish choices based on greed and bigotry. The media doesn’t challenge them enough on this. And until a lot of 1/6 traitors get publicly castrated (so to speak), they will continue in their A-hole ways.
Jude
Today’s my birthday, John. I turned 50, which makes me almost the same age as you. I distinctly remember making myself a promise at 16 to never harden into one of those old, bitterly hopeless old people who surrounded my childhood. Ha! It’s a daily battle not to give up on humanity.
Never would I have dreamed people were so stupid and so selfish. I’ve been so naive. I guess that doesn’t make you feel better, but at least you know we understand you and commiserate.
Splitting Image
@John Revolta:
I’m not sure I agree with that. I don’t think they’ve gotten crazier. They’ve just gotten more open about admitting they haven’t changed much since the 1950s or even the 1850s.
The decline of the union movement, for example, began once the major unions had organized all of the white male-dominated industries that they were going to and that further growth was going to mean organizing jobs dominated by women and people of colour. Reactionaries in the unions went over to the Republicans and voted to de-unionize rather than let that happen. Stupid and selfish and shortsighted, then and now.
I know they seem crazier, but the reason so much of their crap seems like warmed-over John Birch conspiracies is that they’ve been talking like this among themselves for decades.
hitless
John – I share your feeling of realizing you don’t know a country you thought you knew. And I share your feelings on optimism.
But, I do want you to know that this blog and the people on it are pretty great and I am indebted to you and the community. You and I are the same age but from very different places and yet have arrived at the same destination in some sense. Reading the blog has made me feel less alone and I hope has done that for you as well. I wish you and your animals all the best.
Kelly
I grew up in rural Oregon. Went to the city for a university education and a career. Moved back to where I grew up when I retired. Beautiful forest and rivers. I’ve never lived more than 2 hours from here. I knew my views on environment, civil rights, economics were different than the folks around here. Did not realize how mean and crazy these country people are until Trump. A lot of them are friends of my youth.
The air was full of smoke today. I try to cheer my self up by thinking about how the forests of Cascades evolved with fire and has to burn sometime. Sorta works.
It’s the one year anniversary of Oregon’s Labor Day 2020 fires. We fled the Beachie Fire 2:00 AM Sept 8th while it was blowing up from 500 acres to 130,000 acres overnight. Hurricane force winds similar to California’s Santa Anna fanned several minor fires to catastrophes and brought down electric lines which sparked dozens more fires. By late Sept 8th around a million acres were on fire. Eleven people died. Around 40,000 people evacuated most with little notice. Around 4,000 structures burned. I’m amazed there were not more fatalities. People’s homes were overwhelmed by flames within a few hours in the dead of night.
We were awakened at 1:00 am Sept 8th by our neighbor who, worried about the situation, stayed up and followed the news on our local, low power, all volunteer community radio station KYAC. Our friend that runs the station, Ken Cartwright, stayed on the air until 2:00 am with flames a couple blocks away and first responders rounding up stranglers. His home burned but the radio station did not. “I was a radioman in the Navy, and you don’t leave the ship until you send the last signal,” he said. “So that’s my motto here at the station … you’re the last person to leave after everyone’s warned.”
Our home was mostly unscathed. The outside was filthy with soot. Lost some trees and a shed. It’s been a weird year living amongst the ruins. Probably another year of cleanup will help.
Poe Larity
People keep asking when I’m going to retire and travel full-time.
Like where the fuck could I go and not be surrounded by sociopaths? Even if we built a BJ commune in BF WV it would be like Lord of the Jackals.
We’ll all end up in nursing homes surrounded by anti-vax roommates and nurses,
hrprogressive
I did the same, for the same reasons.
I’m so angry that people are so fucking shitty.
I often feel like we’re so screwed, and that it’s really only going to get worse, and, really, I don’t optimistically see it getting sustainably better.
COVID? Even post vax I don’t feel good about it anymore.
Solve COVID? Here comes Fascism ready to just declare your elections null and void
Oh, did we manage to get Manchinema on board and we stopped Fascism?
Great, now we’re all dead from Climate Change.
At least the dinosaurs didn’t know what was hitting them.
The human condition does not allow for that kind of ignorant bliss.
cmorenc
@John Cole:
A corollary is when you have your own first child and it dawns on you from your own experience, how much your own parents were ignorant and totally winging it while raising you.
Wyatt Salamanca
Hey John,
Have you seen this poll?
h/t https://emersonpolling.reportablenews.com/pr/september-national-poll-americans-say-us-lost-war-in-afghanistan-blame-bush
After all of the atrocities Trump committed while in office, is he still the Teflon Don?
JaneE
I second that Obama made them lose their minds. I also agree that they really can’t let anything go because their entire world will start unraveling.
When they realized that most of the voters preferred a Black man to a white one, they broke, and just refused to believe it. From there, just about ever other thing could no longer be believed either.
From there, all those old-fashioned values like honesty and compassion and all the glue that unites societies just started dissolving.
I still believe, or hope, that most people are basically good. But – they are still stuck on doing nothing for the time being.
Chetan Murthy
John *nails* the singular paradox of this pandemic and Americans’ response to it. I watched The Good Place this spring, and …. “What We Owe To Each Other” was a thru-line thru the entire series. And so …. looking around at our fellow Americans, it’s just *shocking* how little they seem to think they owe each other. It’s like some sort of Bizarro Christianity timeline, where the *opposite*of the Golden Rule is the defining gospel.
In the America I would have expected, I would have thought people would have been singularly concerned for the lives of their elders, or at least, at least, *at least* the lives of their children, and their neighbors’ children. Somehow, that turned out to be a complete fancy, and at this point, it seems like they’re less concerned for even their own lives, than for confirming some cray-cray ideology. And again, this “Bizarro World Anti-Golden-Rule Christianity” just completely flummoxes me.
It’s all very disheartening, and makes me hate these people. So their iniquity induces iniquity in me, too. All disheartening.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Maybe a way of putting it is: “is contemporary America The Bad Place?”
M. Bouffant
One can never truly know others, but one won’t be far off assuming most of them are scum, at least some of the time.
M. Bouffant
@dmsilev: Wouldn’t it be nice to shit it all down & flush it away, & be done w/ all of it?
Unless a hurricane has backed up your sewer.
Mary G
@Jude: Happy Birthday! ?
Viva BrisVegas
There’s always been an undercurrent of right wing nuttiness for hundreds of years, cf. Birchers. The difference now is that FoxNews and Facebook have metastasized it so that it now infects the RWNJ adjacent.
Of course the reason for this (adjusts tinfoil hat) is money. In particular the greatest wealth transfer in the history of the world, from almost everybody to a tiny number of multibillionaires. From Omsk to Oklahoma, these billionaires have no need of democracy or civil society. So they translate that money into the political power to divide and conquer and to keeping the money train rolling.
And so it goes.
CaseyL
I wish I had something cheerful to say, something hopeful. But the past few years have been a ghastly revelation to me, too. I look askance at an awful lot of people now who in the past I might have given the benefit of the doubt.
In my darker moments I agree with RepubAnon: the era of liberal ascendance from FDR to Carter was the anomaly; what we have now is a reversion to the norm. Add to that the changes global climate change is bringing, when (among other things) monied and powerful interest groups will be intent on stealing all the water for themselves…
There’s just no daylight I can see. Biden is fighting to save a country that doesn’t exist anymore.
mrmoshpotato
I’ve thought this at least once a week for the past 20 months. Additional, the greatest generation needs to come back to live and seriously smack some of their descendants. I mean, “Waaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!! Wearing a cloth over your face is tyranny! Wwwwaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!”
Fucking selfish, asshole, whiny ass titty babies!
mrmoshpotato
I’ve thought this at least once a week for the past 20 months. Additional, the greatest generation needs to come back to live and seriously smack some of their descendants. I mean, “Waaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!! Wearing a cloth over your face is tyranny! Wwwwaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!”
Fucking selfish, asshole, whiny ass titty babies!
MisterForkbeard
@Wyatt Salamanca: Eh. Biden has just gone through 1 month of extremely unfair coverage on ending a war, where the media went out of its way to constantly put warmongers on and in many cases literally refused to put a supporter on air to defend the withdrawal. Trump’s had his name out of the news for awhile and his cult is super into him.
If he ran again, his negatives would go right back up super fast, and Biden would look very good in comparison.
Matt McIrvin
We’d win World War II but we would be on Hitler’s side.
Omnes Omnibus
Okay, so dealing with stupid and selfish fucking is our WWII and Great Depression. Well then, how are you (each individual you) going to handle it? No lectures from me. No trying to talk people off the ledge. Here we are. What are you going to do?
Chetan Murthy
@Omnes Omnibus:
Stay in California, where that sort of selfishness is a lot less prevalent than elsewhere. Esp. here in the Bay Area. That’s how. And I think it’s probably time to start political donations here in CA, and not sending it all to try to save the rest of the country.
mvr
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Actually, I think that for some of them it was that they themselves (or their kids) voted for Obama that they felt gave them a get-out-of-racism-free pass. Or so I thought a year of two into Obama’s term based on a few people I know, and I have seen little that changes my mind.
MoCaAce
Wait for them to die… the inexorable march of time is the only thing that really works against the evil/stupid minority. They instinctively know this and lash out when they see it manifest in their lives. That is why Obama was such a trigger.
Tazj
I’m so angry. We can’t mollify idiots and sociopaths anymore.
Biden is giving an address tomorrow about COVID and I heard it’s mainly going to be about the booster shots. However, he has to address the increased hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated (I’m sure he will) and make an appeal to people to get vaccinated for the sake of the medically frail and children who can’t get vaccinated. Most unvaccinated Trumpers probably won’t care but even though he said these things before he has to make it absolutely clear that being unvaccinated and unmasked kills people.
I hope the Federal government mandates vaccinations for travel on airlines, trains and cruises and however else they can mandate vaccines. There also is a need for more testing and cheap at home COVID testing. We have to try to mitigate the harm of monstrous governors like DeSantis and Abbot and rwnjs everywhere.
Matt McIrvin
@MoCaAce: They keep making more.
Chetan Murthy
@MoCaAce: The armies of MAGAt Branch Covidians who are my age (50s) or younger, give me great pause. We’ll be waiting a *long* time for them to age out.
Now, the kids, I think we need to find a way to inculcate in them a sense of shared destiny and responsibility/duty. I wonder if a mandatory conscription into a national service corps could help. Not military, obvs.
Ivan X
Is the title of this post a reference to Margin Call, one of my favorite movies?
VeniceRiley
The cities and multiethnic burbs are much much better.
Barbara
@Chetan Murthy: This is what is really getting to my husband, that people would put their children in harm’s way in order to prove a political point.
mvr
Yes. This place has been a place of light for me in what seemed like dark times for coming up on 20 years.
FWIW, I was raised by parents who lived through 5 years of Nazi occupation (using very different strategies) and was always taught that this could happen here.
My reaction was partly to think that we were lucky to have such a shining example of what to avoid and that likely that would save us from repeating the evil. I’m not sure we are quite there, but we are closer than I thought we’d get.
I think the difference between now and WWII is not the quality of the people. People have always included assholes, but more importantly people who could treat assholery as normal if enough people around them engaged in it. It doesn’t help that the institutions that in the past constrained assholery (even while they protected a bunch of it) no longer seem to constrain at all. Seems like too many people are still wanting to act like this is business as normal, or something newsworthy to bothsides.
I’m glum too, but appreciate this place.
MoCaAce
@Matt McIrvin: So do we.
PenAndKey
@Omnes Omnibus: After figuring out that I don’t under any realistic scenario qualify for Canadian immigration, my current plan is to acquiesce to my wife’s desire to stay where we are while I teach my kids everything they need to know to apply for school internationally and gtfo after high school. My son is already planning to attend school in Canada or Scotland and use that to springboard his immigration to wherever he attends college. He just started middle school, so he’ll have plenty of time to work toward that goal and he has my full support doing so.
Coloradoguy
It’s that 27%. They’ve been there since the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850’s. They switch back and forth between the two major parties … and in the period from the Civil War to 1965, they were Southern Democrats, controlling the fascist Jim Crow South. Now they are unmoored, know they are unwelcome in the New Democratic Party, and have parasitized the Republicans, after Reagan and Newt Gingrich made a cozy home for them.
Chetan Murthy
@Barbara: Yes. What kind of twisted thoughts go on in these people’s heads, that they can’t even be realistic about the danger to their own children, their own parents, in the middle of this pandemic? I mean, lots of us literally didn’t get within six feet of our elders for a whole damn *year*, just for fear of killing them. And these yutzes just waltz around blithely. It’s frightening.
The death rates we read about are all among the young (well, at most, middle-aged) and otherwise healthy. It’s crazy. Just crazy.
mvr
@Kelly:
Glad your home survived. I used to live in PDX and would still consider Oregon my home if I could afford ever to live there. The fires burned the place where I taught myself to flyfish and I followed them throughout last summer, with a feeling of horror. Oregon ought to turn people into environmentalists but I know that it doesn’t always work that way.
Anne Laurie
The counter-argument to your & our (thoroughly justified) despair: There is no way I am going to let these bastards win.
If it kills me — it probably will, someday — I’m taking as many of them as possible with me.
Sometimes bloody-mindedness is as close as one can get to hope.
lurker
@VeniceRiley:
@Chetan Murthy:
@mrmoshpotato:
The bay area has its good and bad points – it is less homogeneous than some of us would like. Much of the rest of California is much less inviting to sanity than we would like as well. That xkcd comic about how more people voted for Trump from California than from Texas (see xxx) is a great illustration of this.
I tell various people that each dawn brings a new day with possibilities, and I believe this. However, some days it feels like the only hope is that the horse will learn to talk. Not much to pin hopes on.
We talk about how the nation banded together to fight and win WW II. That memory – or recorded recollection for pretty much everyone reading this blog – does not capture how many divisions existed like a network of fissures in this country even then. Lindbergh was very pro-Nazi for a long time, for example.
We collectively, as a nation, probably had a better sense of coming together in times of crisis back then. My sense is that Reagan and particularly Gingrich eroded that pretty well. Reagan was more subtle and less willing to go in the Ayn Rand direction – he seemed to believe in some sense of national unity, if he disagreed with a lot of us about the right goals and ways to achieve things. Gingrich really seemed to want to burn things down and take over and was willing to be much more open about it (or failed to hide it even when he tried). (Keep in mind, Gingrich was elected in ’78, active in the ’80s, even if it took until the ’94 election to see things come together.)
One area I can see for hope is that new generations tend to see at least some of what old people do as old fashioned, and that has trended in the progressive direction long term. Still seems like that today. Part of where we see that is in the rising stars of both parties, where the R side has to out-MAGA each other, whereas the D-side has much more room for everyone from Abigail Spanberger to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a bunch of people in between. The R side claims to have a similar spectrum, but they are much more willing to apply litmus tests and cast people out, whereas there are a lot of small groups of D-side types who want to do this (various Bernie-bro type factions are a good example), but there is not a lot of agreement about who gets to be cast out – leading to a lot of heat without as much lasting change.
done rambling for the moment…
Matt McIrvin
@MoCaAce: But the assholes also do their best to make life unpleasant for people unlike themselves, with the result that liberals who have the means sort themselves in ways that rob our side of political power. I used to think the answer was to get people to move to swing states but that’s becoming physically dangerous.
lurker
@Coloradoguy: there were plenty of loyalist/royalist sympathizers during the Revolutionary period too. Maybe not a completely apt analogy (no idea how it approximates the crazification factor, or if that would cut across that fault line rather than line up with it.) We tend to downplay our minority opinions in history.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The German Army in 1915, back when Pvt Hitler was just some messenger in the German Army, pushed “the Jews Stabbed Germany in the Back!” to explain why the German Army didn’t just overrun France in 1870 because the German public was outraged at the bloodbath. The lesson from Nazi Germany is that what’s happens when the elites use bullshit to excuse their incompetency.
mrmoshpotato
@Chetan Murthy: “This is the Bad Place!”
Dammit! Now I’m going to rewatch The Good Place!
Thanks a lot! ?
MoCaAce
@Matt McIrvin: Yes it’s a long game. The self sorting is real but still favors progressive ideology. The real game changers are global war or environmental upheaval (hello global warming). I still need to hold onto the hope that the yutes today are smarter and more discerning than we olds give them credit for. The arc of History… yada yada yadda.
TriassicSands
Oh, Jane, I fear you are headed for disappointment. There is something to Werner Herzog’s formula. Even when the majority is not doing the “killing,” the number of people willing to stand by and either enjoy the show or not get involved likely creates a very sizeable majority.
“American exceptionalism” is dead. The whole concept must be stricken from public discourse unless it is to point out it never existed except as a myth.
TriassicSands
@TriassicSands:
There should be quotes around Werner Herzog since it’s not his quote. I was simply referencing the original comment, which mentioned the name — I suppose someone claimed he said that. I had a catemergency (asthma) and rushed things. My apologies to Werner.
Geoduck
Along with Obama, there was 9/11. The swarthy brown heathens who half-exist off on some scary planet somewhere which we could lob bombs at with impunity actually managed to lash out in return and give us a bloody nose. I’m not in any way saying the attack was morally justified, just that it was another reality-shattering event for a lot of people.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: I have to confess that I was hoping for a bit more of this when I posted my comment above. I will take bloody-mindedness any day of the week. Because fuck you that’s why.
Professor Bigfoot
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m in for sheer fucking spite.
Fuck these motherfuckers, and if I have to go down fighting them, then so be it.
Gretchen
Thank you, John, for providing us with this space to figure things out. We really appreciate it and it’s putting good things out into the world.
Yesterday my daughter got a note from the preschool that there’s a virus going around the infant and toddler room and among the teachers. At least one of the teachers isn’t vaccinated. What goes through someone’s head that their job is literally holding babies all day and they don’t think they need to prevent infectious diseases? We’ve kept the 3 year old safe for the last 18 months, and this idiot decides she doesn’t need to take precautions to keep him safe.
When I was a kid my dad taught me, when making a fist, to keep the thumb OUTSIDE the fist. You keep your thumb inside the fist, you’ll break it when you punch someone with that fist. I’m sure it’s just coincidence that this memory came back to me this evening.
MoCaAce
@Professor Bigfoot: Seconded. I’m all for hope but I’m not sitting on my front porch waiting for better days. That arc of history doesn’t fucking bend itself.
Mai Naem mobile
I’ve said this before. Obama might have been a trigger but its also the population browning and its becoming hard to deny which i think scares some white folks that they’ll be a minority.
Gretchen
@Chetan Murthy: One woman’s response to people saying that only a few kids die of covid, is that she only has a few kids. It’s appalling that even kids dying just makes them trot out new talking points.
One hopeful thing: My sister is a long-term wingnut. I felt duty bound to call her for her birthday the other day, and was relieved when she didn’t pick up. Our calls are always her picking fights, going through talking point after talking point to attack me, the liberal. I avoided her.
She called me back, and we had a very pleasant, normal conversation! That hasn’t happened forever! What’s new, how’s work, how are the kids, what have you been doing? Her one step out was saying that our brother’s grandson wants to go to the U of Texas, but white kids dont get in because affirmative action. I said isn’t his mom Hispanic? Oh, yeah. She dropped it. Have we finally reached peak wingnut and they’re moving on? I never thought I’d have a normal conversation with her again.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
When I finish this LL.M., the only way I would consider moving back to a red state again is if the alternative is starvation.
toine
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
COVID — encourage them and be prepared to bunker down for 5 years.
The Dangerman
WW2: The Greatest Generation
Civil War 2 (cold, so far): The Grating Generation
I don’t know how this plays out without much darker days. Buckle up.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: how literal do you want it to get?
Because it means killing our neighbors. Burning our own cities and towns. Shooting civilians, setting bombs. Killing old people and children. Becoming monsters to kill monsters. Turning this country into a charnel house, a minefield, burned rubble and piles of bodies. When we’ve already seen so much death.
I think a lot about some total civil war, some wave of mass murder coming. And sometimes, a part of me almost wants it and I don’t like that at all. Writing it out like this, it’s not so great.
MikefromArlington
I am u
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin:
The problem is, I don’t see RWNJs as people. I see them as a disease, a parasitism that will kill us if they can. By every act they show they’d be happy to see us all die; in the past year, they’ve done their best to actually kill as many people as they can.
Human, yes. People, no. Parasites in human form, like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And I have no intention of letting them kill me or mine without consequences.
Chetan Murthy
@CaseyL: To extend a little on what Matt wrote: even if we see these MAGAt Branch Covidians as less-than-human, it remains that they live intermingled with us. And so, if a real conflict comes, it’ll be in our cities and neighborhoods. And it will entail …. ‘shitting where we eat’. We’ll be destroying our own built environment. And there’ll be death and destruction aplenty.
We all want to avoid that, and for good reason. But then we look at these people, and wonder how they can be turned, b/c they seem so lost to any sense of rational judgment, so lost to any kind of approach on the basis of “don’t you want your elders to live, your children to have a better life?” How do you change minds when they’re so transfixed by these crazy ideas of theirs ?
And again, the alternative is a war of all-against-all that cannot end well no matter what.
Ksmiami
@Matt McIrvin: thinking about what it took to rebuild Japan and Germany post ww2- the universities, the denazification, etc., we have a huge misinformation apparatus that must be dismantled piece by piece. It thrives on rage, lies and incitement for no other purpose than money. Go after that and we can start to rebuild. Just ignoring it is like ignoring cancer cells
mrmoshpotato
I highly recommend Lewis Black’s Rantcast. Available on YouTube.
Ruckus
John
Most Americans have heard their entire lives how superior Americans are, especially white Americans. So if you’ve been hearing this for decades and haven’t even really thought about it much, the shear amount of this BS can still take it’s toll. And a problem is that if you’ve heard that for a long enough time and not decided that it’s BS that will subject your thinking to false pride. And racism. So not everyone believes it but it’s out there and repetition does it’s thing of slowly replacing logic, especially if it’s not shouted from the roof tops but effortlessly repeated. And it is, in many subtle ways. We are now at the point that shouting it from the rooftops really reaches the already sold but not loud people. The loud people are the ones protesting, and carrying guns to support the concept of their superiority even though they are inferior in every way. The current conservative party has taken this as gospel, that they and their god, money and guns are the end all be all of human endeavor. I call this group a ship of fools but it’s a damn large ship and it has no use for logic, thought, or reality.
CaseyL
@Chetan Murthy: “Less than human”? No, quintessentially human: all the worst aspects of our species, with none of the redeeming factors.
I’d love another solution. No one’s come up with any that I know of. Dismantling the propaganda apparatus that deludes and lies to them at the same time it encourages and energizes them would take massive efforts in legislation and financial confiscation. Those things will simply not happen.
Ksmiami
@CaseyL: then we reduce them to ashes and rebuild. There’s no way to move forward when at least 30-40 percent of the country doesn’t live in reality. They are a Jonestown cult at this point so we either destroy them or they’ll drag us all down
Ruckus
One thing is that a lot of people are extremely pissed off. Enough to think that violence is the only way left. It might be but I see a lot that could changed and a lot that could be used against the idiots who don’t even have respect for themselves. It’s one thing to be ready for violence, to be able to fight back violent attacks. It’s another to call for violence even when it seems like the last resort. Even the military taught me that violence for violences sake isn’t the answer. The US military has seen over the last 20 years and actually far longer than that, that violence for violences sake often doesn’t work as intended. It’s what a lot of politicians have called for and the military being what it is has done, but tell me, how has that worked out over the last half century? Let’s not make the same mistake ourselves.
ellenr
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that it’s Year 5782 in the Jewish calendar. Shows it’s possible to survive somehow even when everyone hates you. Eh?
Cermet
Amerika has and always had a very strong fascist element; in fact, it has been the majority of the society early on but only slowly receded as the country managed to eliminate most the native population on the East coast and Mid-west. Lets not forget that slavery thrived not just before 1865 but even after in the form of State created gulags (called work gangs filled with mostly African-Amerikans that local police preyed upon for profit!) And remember the powerful brown shirt movement of the 30’s that wasn’t disbanded till WW II started.
With AGW getting worse and vast areas going to hell in time – from deadly droughts and heat waves – billions will be forced to migrate; and that, my fellow BJ’ers will absolutely mean fascism will grow like out of control weeds in a field. This will occur not just in the world but very much here.
I’ve enjoyed our progress – some gains will remain but certainly fascisms will continue to grow here as we have clearly seen and with our slaved based constitution that favors the most fascist element (rural white right-wingers) I really do not expect our democracy, as we have known it, to survive.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Citizen Alan: so you like Queens?
OzarkHillbilly
John, you and me both.
lowtechcyclist
I don’t do despair. I’ve been there before, and I seem to be immunized in a number of ways.
That doesn’t mean I don’t know fear. I am very worried about where we are. I feel this country, and the world, are on a knife-edge right now in many ways. Particularly with respect to global warming: we have only a short time to get our act together and at least limit how bad it will be. But also obviously with respect to democracy in this country and in many others too.
But I’m not going to curl up in a ball. I can’t do much to push things in the right direction, but I will do what I can. And hope.
Anne Laurie
Excellent point!
Tony Jay
Late to the party as ever, but an anecdote.
I recently inherited the common-law-mother-in-law’s beloved car of 20+ years (a nippy little Toyota Yaris called Bertie with 30,000 miles on the clock) and, since she never bothered with new-fangled malarkey like a CD player, I’ve been listening to the collection of cassette tapes she left in the glove compartment. Now, TCLMIL has always been a woman of some considerable coolness, so the collection includes a lot of Stones, Bowie, Lennon, etc,
Yesterday, I was picking up The Young Man from school and as we were pulling away he opened the glove compartment (an inquisitive soul, my boy) and asked.
“Do you know all these are in here?”
“Yes, I’ve been listening to them.”
“Can I look?” (while already rooting through the stack) “Ooooh! Johnny Cash!”
“You’re 8, how the hell do you know Johnny Cash?”
It turns out that they’d been doing Geography that day, and as part of a section on American states and cities the teacher used a Johnny Cash song where he lists all the cities and towns in which he’s performed over the years. I thought that was kind of cool, as did The Young Man, so he was extra disappointed that the song he was looking for wasn’t on ‘Johnny Cash – Live at San Quentin’, but we did have a nice chat about why Cash was performing in a prison, what (some) people thought about it at the time, and what it said about the kind of person Cash was.
Anyhoo, circling back to my point, I was listening to the whole tape while driving into work this morning and a line Cash came out with struck me as both pretty damned wise and very close in context to something Cole himself was saying here a few days ago. Paraphrasing, from memory.
“I’ve been here (San Quentin) three times before, and I reckon I know what you think about some things. It ain’t my business what you think about other things, and I don’t give a damn what you think about some other things.”
There’s been a crowding out of that kind of attitude to our fellow human beings, and (most especially visible on the Right) it’s been replaced by a self-righteous fervour that says anyone who doesn’t agree with what we think about every god damned thing (updated daily) isn’t just a fool, but an enemy and a threat. That’s very, very dangerous, and leads like a high-speed bullet-train straight to dark places, no stopping, no getting off.
But, if the forces of militant certainty don’t back off and the imposition of purity for profit keeps on swamping the marketplace of ideas, it’s off to the Dark Place we go and – say it loud – nobody has a fucking clue who or what we’re going to be when we emerge on the other side. I’d really rather not find out, thanks very much, so the only alternative I can see is pushing back in the here and now, taking the threat seriously and being honest about it. The propaganda machine and the money that funds it have to be dismantled and rendered inert. which means electing people who will actually do that, which means making it possible for people to vote for those people in elections, which means electing people who will take the need for free and fair elections seriously, and around and around it goes.
So, basically, I’m fighting for the right not to give a shit what Joe Bloggs in Fumbledick, Back O’Beyond thinks about my opinions on any bloody thing, because there’s no multi-billion Amero industry out there designed to weld Joe Bloggs’ vote in all perpetuity to the cause of destructive, recidivist violence. I’d like that, it’s worth fighting for.
Rant off.
Yutsano
I just got home from the hospital around 0030. i nibbled some food and am now hydrating. I will be going to sleep here soon. I will not address any further questions about my health until tomorrow.
I feel like Émile Zola right now.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE???
Why are you letting a vocal minority within a minority in this country live in your head rent free? Yes there is the possibility they can always come back to power. What happens every time? They fuck up. They overreach. They lose power because they’re too fucking incompetent to keep it! And the citizens of this country always want one thing: competent government.
Second: who the fuck do you think burns and suffers if you blithely leave the country? The people who can’t leave. What does that mean? The poor. Minorities. LGBTQ+. The disabled. It’s good you saved yourselves. but who were your burn victims? Who suffers under a (potential) scenario where you get to leave?
Third: I side eye all of you in The Thin Black Duke. You think this shit gonna be easy? OF COURSE IT’S NOT THAT’S WHY IT NEEDS TO BE DONE!!! We need to stay the fuck together on this. Whoever holds our goals back is with us. Whoever is not is not. Whoever can be persuaded should be. But we’re not without power. We’re not without agency. No one has “won” or “lost” anything yet. We don”t have to just lay down and pretend that everything is gravy and we all get along and fine and Kum-By-Yah. But from the Natives who resisted the conquistadors. to George Floyd, a flawed human as we all are who JUST WANTED TO BREATHE! You think the survivors of the White Smallpox blankets just said oh well and dusted themselves off?
I’m writing this under great personal difficulty. I’m physically and emotionally exhausted. I’m fighting my own personal battle right now. This absolute…I don’t even have a word for it when y’all are talking to someone who has almost died FIVE FUCKING TIMES NOW…I just can’t. I’m stocking up on frozen salmon soon because I swear I am going to hit people upside the head with it.
I need sleep now. Will not regret this.
Tony Jay
@Yutsano:
1) Yes, this.
2)
Your crime-fiction is something I need to be reading.
Yutsano
@Tony Jay: If none of the writers here steal this, I will be disappoint. Not to mention there are many methods of disposing such weapons.
Yes I need to go to sleep. Am doing so now. Pacem a tei!
EDIT: Just this: if anyone is curious, it took about 50ish minutes to type that.
Tony Jay
@Yutsano:
Sleep well, it’ll all be here when you get back.
Except the salmon… a bear ate it.
sab
@Yutsano: Thanks. I needed to hear/read that perspective.
lurker
@Tony Jay: well then, as we say in one of the places I inhabited…Go Bears!
Aimai
I just want to say that I love you, John, and the community you hsve built. I have to believe that you have had as great an impact in the real world as you have here. So you may be living among trolls but for the most part your friends are good people because thats what you attract.
I seem to recall that your college buddies tend to like doing something as well as hanging and drinking—why don’t you set everyone a socially conscious/covid aware task if they are going to visit? If you think they aren’t covid savvy or vacced/masked don’t let them come. Post signs at the porch and put out six foot markers, and adopt the staff at the local animal or human hospital and bring them pizza to support some midnight shift?
Barry
@Chetan Murthy: “And I think it’s probably time to start political donations here in CA, and not sending it all to try to save the rest of the country.”
The problem with that is that a Red-dominated federal government can really f*ck with California.
debbie
@lowtechcyclist:
I do sad, and I do it whenever I see what this country has become.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL:
This kind of attitude doesn’t lead to effective fighting even in an all-out war. It does lead to indiscriminately bloody score-settling. I mean, it was probably good for us that we didn’t even regard the actual Nazis this way in the 1940s (though we did, to a large extent, regard the Japanese that way, because racism).
schrodingers_cat
75% have had at least one shot and about 70% support mask mandates. Stop buying into the RW narrative wholescale. They want to spread doom and despair. There is no need to do their work for them.
White people who vote R may be a lost cause the rest of the country isn’t
I am team Yutsano, Omnes and AL.
mardam
I sometimes really think that a lot of white people just lost their shit because we had a black President, and then decided fuck everyone and everything and Trump galvanized it and opportunistic shitlords are taking advantage of it.
This is exactly the full and unadulterated truth. Full stop.
Matt McIrvin
@Yutsano:
We want competent government when the crisis comes–and then we punish it for not immediately fixing the problem. Once things get better, we prefer entertaining government, and then everything goes to shit again.
NotMax
@ellenr
Ahem.
Bernie
We all kind of knew what people are capable of all along. We go along because we don’t know what else to do. Remember the old Twilight Zone episode? Monsters on Maple Street?
That is us.
sherparick
@RepubAnon: The 1980 election was a big turning point, although were drifting in that direction through much of the 1970s as the “New Right,” as it as called them started to emerge with its synthesis of Fundamental Protestantism & Ayn Rand’s nihilistic capitalism. I think we really underestimate how much Rand & John Galt worship became the ideology of the U.S. & British business & financial elite.
sherparick
@mardam: From Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary,” which was inspired by the first Gilded Age:
“Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
Josie
@schrodingers_cat:
Ditto
UncleEbeneezer
Right there with ya, Cole. This has been my struggle for really the past 6 years or so, and it kind of all started here.
I first started really noticing how shitty people could be (even on our own side) when I witnessed all the bullshit that Imani Gandy had flung at her when you made her a FP poster. The upside however is that it led me to start seriously thinking about Race, Whiteness, Privilege and Systemic Oppression. After the 2016 election I started working as an organizer/activist and have tried to use my privilege to support people and orgs of color in my mostly-white Indivisible group and have been a part of some serious victories on local and state (CA) police reform and immigration efforts. So while it’s nothing major, just know that your efforts and the space you created here has done some good in the real world.
As for what to do about the problem of having so many Nazis, anti-vaxxers, trolls etc., in our country…I have no idea. It’s a real problem that is crippling our society.
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: Me too.
JustRuss
There’s a lot of shitty people on this planet. I have two friends, unconnected to each other, who were arrested recently for child molestation. On top of all the anti-vax Trump-loving relatives and acquaintances, it’s so exhausting and discouraging.
But there’s a lot of good people too, and they’re not that hard to find. I try to focus on them as much as I can.
JustRuss
@mrmoshpotato:
Subscribed! Thanks!
JimV
Mr. Cole writing that we couldn’t have won WWII the way we are now sparked this thought:
I don’t have all the knowledge to jump to this conclusion, but I am tending to believe that WWII might have been the best thing which ever happened to us (USA) as a nation.
Going into WWII, I don’t get the impression that people here were any better than they are now. Most of them did not care what was happening in Europe and China and did not want to get involved. Then Pearl Harbor happened and suddenly we were all on the same side (give or take black people and Japanese Americans).
The engineering managers I had as a rookie had fought in WWII. They were willing to hire people of different colors. They were even willing to hire women engineers! They firmly believed part of their jobs as unit managers was to train their new employees, give them responsibilities, and stand by them when they made mistakes.
Then Jack Welch took over the company circa 1980 and things changed, but don’t get me started on that.
(Paul Krugman said something similar about the world needing an attack by Martians. Theodore Sturgeon said it in the 1950’s or so in a science-fiction story.)
taumaturgo
The comments today beg the question, when was America great?
The Lodger
@JimV: We talk a lot about Reagan, but Jack Welch and his cult bear a lot of responsibility for how f*cked up things got in the 80s and 90s.
Denali
Thank you Yutsano and Tony Jay. That is all.
artem1s
not Gen X or Y or Millennials, it’s cumulative…
The fucking Wonder Years mentality that pretty and clean equal good and moral. The Raygun Mentality that all we need is a big strong daddy to take care of us. The Perpetual We Are In The Endtimes! Evangelical Mentality that Jeebus will strike us dead if we dare have impure thoughts about god or country being omnipotent. The Greed Is Good Mentality that the only thing that matters is dying with the most toys.
Not sure which was a bigger contributor but I for one am relieved to see the upcoming generations are so much less focused on mall shopping for disposable plastic crap as the ultimate form of entertainment. Now if they can finally understand that rallies and FB and Tweet likes are not a substitute for governing, we might make it past Gen Greed and Gen Self-Absorbed.