Nixon was inaugurated for his second term in January of 1973. He had won with 60% of the popular vote and taken the electoral college votes of forty nine states. Trump isn’t close to that margin of victory or that kind of power. By August of 1974 tricky dickie was forced to resign when it became clear that he had cheated. It took just over eighteen months for him to fall.
Let us remember, Donnie Dumbfuck is the guy who bankrupted a casino, and his followers all flunked the IQ test low enough to qualify for membership. As Jeff Tiedrich put it, these guys couldn't organize a successful fuck in a brothel. Witness everything they have tried to accomplish since the election. And now they will have a one-vote "majority" in the House, to institute all their planned dumbfuckery. You really want to bet they're going to pass that "reconciliation" bill that includes all of it at once??? They only have a year till the midterm campaign starts, and there are 10 of their members who are top of the list for a gutting in the election, who will be paying attention to those parts of that "reconciliation" that their constituents don't want. They've already shown they won't say "how high?" when he says "jump!"
If I had to guess at the many possible outcomes, I would pick "the infighting and ineptitude is so much that the whole thing collapses." But there are so many variables: the yen for despotism, his health, the spectre of JD Vance as POTUS, world events, Musk as wild card, etc.
I love this mode of thought and, frankly, it's not the only time in history things look very bleak and change much faster than anyone thought. French Revolution, for one. Thanks for this, Teri. I never bought what Boris the Weather Prophet was selling!
It’s not just you. But it’s not even you. By the end of your piece you were far from wanting to be curled up in a fetal position. Love it. Send this to Joe Biden. Can’t hurt!
Thanks, Mary Ann. Emotionally, no, I'm not curled up. Physically, I got my booster and my flu vax on Thursday and I was exhausted on Saturday. But yesterday, I felt much better. How do the kids phrase it? LFG!
This is an excellent piece—getting as close to how I feel as anything I’ve read since the election. I am definitely inside the whale, looking for clues on the way out. Brilliant work, thank you.
As a 12 year old freshman in HS my first trip into the library was to find a copy of The Tropic of Cancer. Having read a bit of Dostoevsky, and belonging to the Science Fiction Book Club, I’d read 1984 with either curiosity, or a nihilistic approach to the world, where my older neighbors and friends were disturbingly passing around their draft numbers.
Today’s Prevail is an extraordinarily crafted piece Greg!! You’ve definitely kicked loose some memories.
Having come to realize as we “breathe deeply our gathering gloom”, that too much of the peerless in vacuous idiocy of today’s epoch, has tainted our lives.
Mere existence is no longer predicated by the rebirth of a gilded age, fascism, mafia state, nor the neo-feudalism Americans face today.
The opportunity to put this mess in the rear view mirror is coming, thanks for the sharing this amazing piece!!
Greg, your thinking & writing have never, in the several years I've been reading you here, been less than very good. But this is your most fucking impressive work yet where smarts & empathy walk hand in hand as greatness demands they do for either of them to really matter. This is something I want to read over and over, the way I'd like to make a separate meal of each individual offering of an exquisite twelve course dinner. Bravissimo!
As your final words today rightly get it, the fatal weakness of nihilism is that its owners insist on being ignorant. They insist on seeing & memorializing mindless moments of the river's timeless current but block from sight the more real, interesting life on its banks. Only a Miller-type could, in 1934, extoll "the killers" and ignorantly comment on revolutions being "nipped in the bud or succeed[ing] too quickly" when the daily headlines showed that revolutions from Germany to China were grinding lives & worlds to hamburger meat & rubble day after day with no ends yet in sight.
As an aside, 1984's (faux scholarly) The Principles of Newspeak has its identically-voiced counterpart in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism putatively written by the 1984 government's fictional rebel Emmanuel Goldstein, a straw man created, like the Bolshevik spy chief Dzerzhinsky's Trust, to draw dissidents out of their hiding places.
Thanks so much, Richard. I take that as a high compliment, coming from you.
That's exactly it, what I was fumbling toward but failed to connect and articulate at the end: the willful ignorance. My sense, reading the essay, is that Orwell liked Miller but was completely bewildered by him...couldn't understand him at all. Left the dinner shaking his head (but with a new coat Miller gave him for the trip).
I forgot about the TPOC and Mr. Goldstein. It's been a minute, as the kids say, since I read it, and I should do so again one of these days. Especially since, in the coming months, we're gonna need a LOT of two Minutes' Hate, lol.
As Trump has always demonstrated, that insistence on ignorance is a real affect (& an effect) of narcissism; a statement that the owner already innately knows everything of value. And thank you for your thank you, we all need to live in mutual admiration societies (My baby & Me). The revealed chapters of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism are like the single Gospel for how the new mob in power want the world to end up. You may do another essay about the thoughts it'll stimulate.
But on the other hand, besides 5 fine fingers, we must appreciate the EU which evolved after the awful war. The US continues strong. China has
billion people out of poverty and India, the biggest country in the world, has thrown off the yoke of Europe and Will far exceeded it in productivity, science, and industry.
I’m not betting against Indonesia, Africa, and South America.
In many ways, the world is a better place for more people now than it was 50 years ago.
So give me upbeat writers, and more gadgets to show each other how to do it.
Great piece of writing—convinced me to upgrade to a paid subscription. Many of us trying to think of an appropriate balance between the insane frontal attack like the Army of the Potomac at Cold Harbor—and abject surrender (I will be 72 next month.).
My wife and I are retired California public school teachers and have relocated to Humboldt County, where there is a tenuous balance between the counter-culture influence of the Sixties with the 19th century “pioneer” scions that raise the MAGA flag.
We have purchased a home and have been building a community through pickleball, where we mingle with progressives and MAGA’s. We have engaged in local issues and are proud that the voters of Eureka rejected a proposition heavily funded by the hometown oligarch. There is an enlivening arts community and bookstores that invite perusal.
Finally, I connect intimately with your opening regarding books on shelves. I now have a room, a library with built-in shelves stuffed with my books. And, yes, they may sit there largely unread until that moment when a title leaps out at me and says, “It’s time for me.” And I have volume 4 of Orwell’s essays, letters, and journals that I purchased on whim in a bookstore in Mendocino. Favorite essay is his Politics and the English Language.
Michael, thanks for subscribing and thanks for the kind words and the thoughts here.
I have, in fact, been to Humboldt County, and to Eureka -- which is, I think, rather like a larger New Paltz, NY, where I have lived the last 15 years (or so we thought at the time). It's a lovely place, and I liked the energy there...although I could see how the counter-culture and the pioneers form a sort of horseshow politically. We have MAGA here, too, and I live in one of the bluest towns in the country. Good to hear the oligarch was defeated!
I am fond of "Shooting an Elephant," and there are pieces of "Why I Write" that are just spot-on.
Again, thank you, and welcome to the comment board community!
Those are empowering words. On the subject of fires: I heard fires can be prevented by raking the forests. Who knew? Only someone who has never experienced a forest could say that. Our National Parks must be protected from those who don’t know what one is.
As a long-time reader, I must agree with others here that this piece is probably the best one you've ever done. I got to the end and scrolled up and read it again to be sure I'd caught everything. Big Bravo, Greg!
I used to have the same feelings about physical books, but then I MOVED a couple of times, and now have a "digital spice rack" to choose from with more reading material than I will ever get to in my life. I just finished, "The Quiet Damage: Q-Anon and the Destruction of the American Family" by Jesselyn Cook. I have never understood, and still don't understand, the attraction to something like Q-Anon, which to me is on the same level as the attraction to a character like Trump. It is a good book, but the author isn't really able to give the reasons for someone's descent into such a thing -- so destructive, filled with lies, and inevitably leading to the falling away of family, friends, even acquaintances. One woman took it so far as to lose contact with her adult children so completely, that when she finally "recovered," they still wouldn't, that is, COULDN'T, have any contact with her ever again. The book clearly wanted the reader to feel some empathy for the people that had been sucked into the cult, but I couldn't get there. At some point, you have to voluntarily go from a normal person to believing Hillary Clinton was a child-trafficking pedophile running things out of the basement of a pizza parlor that had no basement. How does that happen? There are no answers.
I use that anecdote to illustrate that the idea of "withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy" is absolutely true. It's where I'm living now. A nihilist doesn't care at all what happens -- I was concerned that I'd become a nihilist in reaction to Trump redux and the virtual silence of the Democrats after the election. The truth is that I still care, I simply don't want to be involved in it because there's nothing I can personally do to change anything. So, with that, one either cocoons inside the whale or spends time being perpetually frustrated, screaming at the sky. I'm not doing that anymore.
Everything we ever depended on has failed us -- the media, Democratic politicians, the rule of law, our courts, our judges, prosecutors. To describe Biden's after-election speech as "flaccid" was being too kind by half. During the campaign, Trump was an "existential threat to democracy," and "a presidential candidate with fascist aspirations," and suddenly, after the election, NONE of that language was heard anymore, as if it was all just stupid campaign rhetoric. After the election, it was, "welcome back to the White House, where we will make the transition as easy and efficient as possible for you." What the fuck? No one, including Democrats, appreciated Joe playing the "bigger man" in the room at that point. It was ridiculous.
The MAGA right-wing has, yes, made it impossible to denounce anything they do because they've been playing "I know you are, but what am I?" for years. It's a childish, yet a very effective strategy to defuse any criticism from the left. Now, WE'RE the fascists! And as a thousand violins need a conductor, we need someone (or several someones) to take the reins that have been dropped, and I haven't seen anyone up to the task. Joe Biden is retiring (although trolling the FUCK out of the right-wing before he leaves; Hillary Clinton AND George Soros being bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom? George Romney? LOL, Joe, LOL. Not that they are undeserving of it, but the timing is hilarious), Kamala Harris will carry the stain of this election into the future -- and the stain comes from the unfounded, racist, misogynistic criticisms of her from the right-wing, which seem to stick to everything, so her future presidential candidacy seems doubtful right now. Hakeem Jeffries? I STILL don't know enough about him to make a judgment as to whether he's a future leader or not. Adam Schiff? Still too much Trump-stain on him.
So, in the whale we wait, withdrawn in disgust. I will NEVER accept this, but will still pay attention to it, because a fall is coming, and I'm here for THAT, surely. MAGA is drowning in hubris right now, and they think that they've started a thousand-year Reich -- the Fourth, I guess. We will, as always, see what happens.
Hi Steve, I agree about physical books. My attention span does not allow me the luxury of physical books. My e-reader lets me pick up right where I left off and keeps thousands of books at my fingertips at a moment's notice. If you would like a spark of hope in our Judges, please see Joyce Vance's essay about Judge Merchan - he's playing the long game with the limited cards he's been dealt: https://joycevance.substack.com/p/before-inauguration-sentencing?
The virtues of the e-reader is you can fit so much in one slender device, and also, you can make the type bigger. My eyes are bad now, and there are books I won't read because I can't read them!
Merchan has stuck his neck out further than any other judge, but he should sentence him to prison. Even for two days, it would send a powerful message. But...nah. And Trump will seek revenge on him anyway.
Thanks for this, Steve. I worked longer and harder on this one than usual, and I'm glad of your assessment. I feel as if, like Orwell, I'm not quite all the way there. But it's enough to get the ship launched and the ball rolling.
I went through a phase about 20 years ago where I went down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Not that I believed in any of it, but it was interesting to see how people put their theories about, say, the JFK assassination together. The appeal, I think, is similar to "figuring out" the meaning of a poem, or solving a difficult crossword. There is a rush of...something. I read a few of the Sitchin books, which advance the theory that the pyramids were built by aliens (he makes it sound a lot smarter than what I just typed). I even attended a conference where he spoke, and that was one of the most diverse, interesting and above all BRILLIANT group of people I've ever sat in a room with. So I do understand the appeal. Having said that, the Q stuff was always fucking stupid. Like, really stupid. There's no basement! George Soros isn't paying anyone! (Alas) Mike Flynn and Devin Nunes are not heroes! JFK Jr is not alive! Duh! My guess is that it's partly a community thing, but mostly a reaction by dumb, under-educated people to well-educated smart people like me and you being right all the time. It's kind of "own the libs" but through a funhouse mirror. And I'm sure that, if you were around for the original Q drops, it was intellectually stimulating to puzzle it all together.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that, most of the time, the fatal flaw is in assuming that all the alleged conspirators operate in lockstep, as some giant Davos/Bilderberger monolith. And that just ain't true. The alliance of, say, Trump and Musk isn't a conspiracy; it's an alliance of parties that don't have a lot in common, like when the US was allied with the USSR in WW2.
I knew the media would fail us, and I understand why. I knew the courts would, too -- same reason. There is an awful lot of Merrick Garland apologism happening now on social media, and sure, he didn't do NOTHING, but this is a results business, and at the end of the day, he had one job to do and didn't do it. Even that I sort of understand. But the utter capitulation, sane-washing, gas-lighting, surrender of Biden, Harris, and the other Dems post election, I will go to the grave never understanding. As you say, no one wanted Joe to act that way. And where has Kamala been? I knew when I wrote my piece that he would never do any of the things I recommended. I think that, in the end, he is just too old and too stuck in the ancient regime to understand that nothing works the way it used to. We are streaming movies and he's reminding us to "be kind, rewind."
Reading your comment, I realized that Casablanca, the place in the movie of that name, IS a whale, and Rick is stuck there...until he isn't. I have to explore this idea more...
I know where Kamala Harris will be today, and that's something I'm not watching. The TV reception for something like the certification of the election is just HORRIBLE inside the whale. Besides that, I know that the coverage will be all "four years ago today.... blah, blah, blah," while they look in on a ceremonial task of Congress that should take all of an hour. We'll see if there are going to be any troublemakers on the Dem side, which to me would be just as useless as there was four years ago. There is fencing around the Capitol again, "just as a precaution," to what, I don't know. I did notice that this year, the Electoral College voted back in December without a peep about it from the media. I expect today to be just as "exciting."
Others have said, I shall add my bravo, an outstanding read.
Active vs passive, such a conundrum. Thank you for allowing me to believe that passive may be a virtue, not a negative bury one's head in the sand sin.
Reinhard Niebuhr may have said it best in the anthem adopted by AA that has saved so many lives:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference." This the essence of the active passive human being.
Thinking about revolution, the thing is that the target is an evil, in Russia the tsarist regime, France an indifferent and "Qu"ils mangent de la brioche" monarchy. If MAGA is a revolution, its target was what, expensive eggs, this the evil? Perhaps an expansive thinker might say capitalism and it's offspring, globalization. This however cannot be as the leaders of the revolution are icons of this evil, Musk, Thiel and just about every cabinet appointee. This makes MAGA not a revolution, rather a cult, leading followers down the rabbit hole of supporting just about everything they despised. The thing about cults, the leader always destroys his/her followers. Perhaps being passive will keep decent folk out of harm's way.
You're right: MAGA is not a revolution. It certainly bears the hallmarks of a cult, but in the end, it's a scam. It's fraud. It's an elaborate, Mogilevichian scheme to steal our money and our resources.
I remember writing in November or December of 2016 that once the average Joe figured out that Trump was swindling them, they would turn on him, because no one likes being made a fool of. The public figures I most despise are the ones I once believed in before waking up to the con (Michael Moore, Glen Greenwald, etc). I'm still waiting for this to happen. Maybe now, so many years later, it will?
You're right: passivity may save lives. Let these idiots beat each other up.
Hoping that Biden and Harris have been keeping a low profile so that they are able to put plans in place; maybe that’s wishful thinking, maybe not.
If I have to be trapped inside the whale I’m going to be kicking the back of its throat as long as I can. I know my pennies mean next to nothing, and our dollars little more until the profit margins and stock prices of the donors suffer. I’ve been preparing and starting on Inauguration Day I’ll be boycotting the oligarchs as much as I can and for as long as I can. One day isn’t going to do it.
I’ve made screenshots of Sonny’s lists appearing under the video and will refer to them before any spending. There are apps also, this will be easier for me.
Thanks, Teri. There is a wonderful line at the end of "Zero Effect," a lovely and underrated movie, where the man and woman are on a phone call. He is at his house, she is at the airport. She says, "If you knew I'd be at the airport, why are you at the house?" And he says -- and this is the relevant line -- "I knew you'd be at the airport, but I hoped you'd be here." That explains how I feel about the Dems. They may not be at the airport, sure, but I'm positive they are in line with Ted Cruz on the way to Cancun...
I have a feeler out about economic activity we can do. I'll keep you posted.
Well that was really well done. I'm keeping this one. Thank you for bringing thought-food to the table once again!
Thanks so much, Meemaw!
Nixon was inaugurated for his second term in January of 1973. He had won with 60% of the popular vote and taken the electoral college votes of forty nine states. Trump isn’t close to that margin of victory or that kind of power. By August of 1974 tricky dickie was forced to resign when it became clear that he had cheated. It took just over eighteen months for him to fall.
The weather will change, it always does.
I’m hoping you’re right Teri!!
Let us remember, Donnie Dumbfuck is the guy who bankrupted a casino, and his followers all flunked the IQ test low enough to qualify for membership. As Jeff Tiedrich put it, these guys couldn't organize a successful fuck in a brothel. Witness everything they have tried to accomplish since the election. And now they will have a one-vote "majority" in the House, to institute all their planned dumbfuckery. You really want to bet they're going to pass that "reconciliation" bill that includes all of it at once??? They only have a year till the midterm campaign starts, and there are 10 of their members who are top of the list for a gutting in the election, who will be paying attention to those parts of that "reconciliation" that their constituents don't want. They've already shown they won't say "how high?" when he says "jump!"
If I had to guess at the many possible outcomes, I would pick "the infighting and ineptitude is so much that the whole thing collapses." But there are so many variables: the yen for despotism, his health, the spectre of JD Vance as POTUS, world events, Musk as wild card, etc.
I love this mode of thought and, frankly, it's not the only time in history things look very bleak and change much faster than anyone thought. French Revolution, for one. Thanks for this, Teri. I never bought what Boris the Weather Prophet was selling!
It’s not just you. But it’s not even you. By the end of your piece you were far from wanting to be curled up in a fetal position. Love it. Send this to Joe Biden. Can’t hurt!
Thanks, Mary Ann. Emotionally, no, I'm not curled up. Physically, I got my booster and my flu vax on Thursday and I was exhausted on Saturday. But yesterday, I felt much better. How do the kids phrase it? LFG!
Later for any comments by me. For now, some more information: https://quillette.com/2020/10/08/george-orwell-henry-miller-and-the-dirty-handkerchief-side-of-life/
Thanks Richard!!
Thanks, Richard. The dirty handerchief side of life is such a chef's kiss phrase. There are so many in that essay.
This is an excellent piece—getting as close to how I feel as anything I’ve read since the election. I am definitely inside the whale, looking for clues on the way out. Brilliant work, thank you.
Thanks, Peggy! Much appreciated.
One of your best, Greg. A keeper.
Thank you! This one took longer than usual, so I'm glad it turned out.
As a 12 year old freshman in HS my first trip into the library was to find a copy of The Tropic of Cancer. Having read a bit of Dostoevsky, and belonging to the Science Fiction Book Club, I’d read 1984 with either curiosity, or a nihilistic approach to the world, where my older neighbors and friends were disturbingly passing around their draft numbers.
Today’s Prevail is an extraordinarily crafted piece Greg!! You’ve definitely kicked loose some memories.
Having come to realize as we “breathe deeply our gathering gloom”, that too much of the peerless in vacuous idiocy of today’s epoch, has tainted our lives.
Mere existence is no longer predicated by the rebirth of a gilded age, fascism, mafia state, nor the neo-feudalism Americans face today.
The opportunity to put this mess in the rear view mirror is coming, thanks for the sharing this amazing piece!!
Thanks, Patrick.
OMG, what a book to read as a very young frosh. Were you bewildered by the whole thing? Captivated? I could see it being very dull to a 12 year old.
I was 12 when I read 1984, IN 1984. It had a lot of influence on me, and I remembered details for a long time after.
Thanks for sharing this!
Greg, your thinking & writing have never, in the several years I've been reading you here, been less than very good. But this is your most fucking impressive work yet where smarts & empathy walk hand in hand as greatness demands they do for either of them to really matter. This is something I want to read over and over, the way I'd like to make a separate meal of each individual offering of an exquisite twelve course dinner. Bravissimo!
As your final words today rightly get it, the fatal weakness of nihilism is that its owners insist on being ignorant. They insist on seeing & memorializing mindless moments of the river's timeless current but block from sight the more real, interesting life on its banks. Only a Miller-type could, in 1934, extoll "the killers" and ignorantly comment on revolutions being "nipped in the bud or succeed[ing] too quickly" when the daily headlines showed that revolutions from Germany to China were grinding lives & worlds to hamburger meat & rubble day after day with no ends yet in sight.
As an aside, 1984's (faux scholarly) The Principles of Newspeak has its identically-voiced counterpart in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism putatively written by the 1984 government's fictional rebel Emmanuel Goldstein, a straw man created, like the Bolshevik spy chief Dzerzhinsky's Trust, to draw dissidents out of their hiding places.
Thanks so much, Richard. I take that as a high compliment, coming from you.
That's exactly it, what I was fumbling toward but failed to connect and articulate at the end: the willful ignorance. My sense, reading the essay, is that Orwell liked Miller but was completely bewildered by him...couldn't understand him at all. Left the dinner shaking his head (but with a new coat Miller gave him for the trip).
I forgot about the TPOC and Mr. Goldstein. It's been a minute, as the kids say, since I read it, and I should do so again one of these days. Especially since, in the coming months, we're gonna need a LOT of two Minutes' Hate, lol.
Thanks again!
As Trump has always demonstrated, that insistence on ignorance is a real affect (& an effect) of narcissism; a statement that the owner already innately knows everything of value. And thank you for your thank you, we all need to live in mutual admiration societies (My baby & Me). The revealed chapters of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism are like the single Gospel for how the new mob in power want the world to end up. You may do another essay about the thoughts it'll stimulate.
Fucking A work.
But on the other hand, besides 5 fine fingers, we must appreciate the EU which evolved after the awful war. The US continues strong. China has
billion people out of poverty and India, the biggest country in the world, has thrown off the yoke of Europe and Will far exceeded it in productivity, science, and industry.
I’m not betting against Indonesia, Africa, and South America.
In many ways, the world is a better place for more people now than it was 50 years ago.
So give me upbeat writers, and more gadgets to show each other how to do it.
Billserle.com
Well said. Very.
Bill, your optimism is every week a balm. You are, of course, quite correct. Thanks for sharing this.
Greg stands and writes brilliantly outside the current immobilized heros.
Thanks, Cal!
Great piece of writing—convinced me to upgrade to a paid subscription. Many of us trying to think of an appropriate balance between the insane frontal attack like the Army of the Potomac at Cold Harbor—and abject surrender (I will be 72 next month.).
My wife and I are retired California public school teachers and have relocated to Humboldt County, where there is a tenuous balance between the counter-culture influence of the Sixties with the 19th century “pioneer” scions that raise the MAGA flag.
We have purchased a home and have been building a community through pickleball, where we mingle with progressives and MAGA’s. We have engaged in local issues and are proud that the voters of Eureka rejected a proposition heavily funded by the hometown oligarch. There is an enlivening arts community and bookstores that invite perusal.
Finally, I connect intimately with your opening regarding books on shelves. I now have a room, a library with built-in shelves stuffed with my books. And, yes, they may sit there largely unread until that moment when a title leaps out at me and says, “It’s time for me.” And I have volume 4 of Orwell’s essays, letters, and journals that I purchased on whim in a bookstore in Mendocino. Favorite essay is his Politics and the English Language.
Michael, thanks for subscribing and thanks for the kind words and the thoughts here.
I have, in fact, been to Humboldt County, and to Eureka -- which is, I think, rather like a larger New Paltz, NY, where I have lived the last 15 years (or so we thought at the time). It's a lovely place, and I liked the energy there...although I could see how the counter-culture and the pioneers form a sort of horseshow politically. We have MAGA here, too, and I live in one of the bluest towns in the country. Good to hear the oligarch was defeated!
I am fond of "Shooting an Elephant," and there are pieces of "Why I Write" that are just spot-on.
Again, thank you, and welcome to the comment board community!
For now, all we gotta do is take turns blowing on that ember.
Well put, Susan. "You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire."
Those are empowering words. On the subject of fires: I heard fires can be prevented by raking the forests. Who knew? Only someone who has never experienced a forest could say that. Our National Parks must be protected from those who don’t know what one is.
As a long-time reader, I must agree with others here that this piece is probably the best one you've ever done. I got to the end and scrolled up and read it again to be sure I'd caught everything. Big Bravo, Greg!
I used to have the same feelings about physical books, but then I MOVED a couple of times, and now have a "digital spice rack" to choose from with more reading material than I will ever get to in my life. I just finished, "The Quiet Damage: Q-Anon and the Destruction of the American Family" by Jesselyn Cook. I have never understood, and still don't understand, the attraction to something like Q-Anon, which to me is on the same level as the attraction to a character like Trump. It is a good book, but the author isn't really able to give the reasons for someone's descent into such a thing -- so destructive, filled with lies, and inevitably leading to the falling away of family, friends, even acquaintances. One woman took it so far as to lose contact with her adult children so completely, that when she finally "recovered," they still wouldn't, that is, COULDN'T, have any contact with her ever again. The book clearly wanted the reader to feel some empathy for the people that had been sucked into the cult, but I couldn't get there. At some point, you have to voluntarily go from a normal person to believing Hillary Clinton was a child-trafficking pedophile running things out of the basement of a pizza parlor that had no basement. How does that happen? There are no answers.
I use that anecdote to illustrate that the idea of "withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy" is absolutely true. It's where I'm living now. A nihilist doesn't care at all what happens -- I was concerned that I'd become a nihilist in reaction to Trump redux and the virtual silence of the Democrats after the election. The truth is that I still care, I simply don't want to be involved in it because there's nothing I can personally do to change anything. So, with that, one either cocoons inside the whale or spends time being perpetually frustrated, screaming at the sky. I'm not doing that anymore.
Everything we ever depended on has failed us -- the media, Democratic politicians, the rule of law, our courts, our judges, prosecutors. To describe Biden's after-election speech as "flaccid" was being too kind by half. During the campaign, Trump was an "existential threat to democracy," and "a presidential candidate with fascist aspirations," and suddenly, after the election, NONE of that language was heard anymore, as if it was all just stupid campaign rhetoric. After the election, it was, "welcome back to the White House, where we will make the transition as easy and efficient as possible for you." What the fuck? No one, including Democrats, appreciated Joe playing the "bigger man" in the room at that point. It was ridiculous.
The MAGA right-wing has, yes, made it impossible to denounce anything they do because they've been playing "I know you are, but what am I?" for years. It's a childish, yet a very effective strategy to defuse any criticism from the left. Now, WE'RE the fascists! And as a thousand violins need a conductor, we need someone (or several someones) to take the reins that have been dropped, and I haven't seen anyone up to the task. Joe Biden is retiring (although trolling the FUCK out of the right-wing before he leaves; Hillary Clinton AND George Soros being bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom? George Romney? LOL, Joe, LOL. Not that they are undeserving of it, but the timing is hilarious), Kamala Harris will carry the stain of this election into the future -- and the stain comes from the unfounded, racist, misogynistic criticisms of her from the right-wing, which seem to stick to everything, so her future presidential candidacy seems doubtful right now. Hakeem Jeffries? I STILL don't know enough about him to make a judgment as to whether he's a future leader or not. Adam Schiff? Still too much Trump-stain on him.
So, in the whale we wait, withdrawn in disgust. I will NEVER accept this, but will still pay attention to it, because a fall is coming, and I'm here for THAT, surely. MAGA is drowning in hubris right now, and they think that they've started a thousand-year Reich -- the Fourth, I guess. We will, as always, see what happens.
Hi Steve, I agree about physical books. My attention span does not allow me the luxury of physical books. My e-reader lets me pick up right where I left off and keeps thousands of books at my fingertips at a moment's notice. If you would like a spark of hope in our Judges, please see Joyce Vance's essay about Judge Merchan - he's playing the long game with the limited cards he's been dealt: https://joycevance.substack.com/p/before-inauguration-sentencing?
Gail, we need to get you some bookmarks. : )
The virtues of the e-reader is you can fit so much in one slender device, and also, you can make the type bigger. My eyes are bad now, and there are books I won't read because I can't read them!
Merchan has stuck his neck out further than any other judge, but he should sentence him to prison. Even for two days, it would send a powerful message. But...nah. And Trump will seek revenge on him anyway.
Thanks for this, Steve. I worked longer and harder on this one than usual, and I'm glad of your assessment. I feel as if, like Orwell, I'm not quite all the way there. But it's enough to get the ship launched and the ball rolling.
I went through a phase about 20 years ago where I went down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Not that I believed in any of it, but it was interesting to see how people put their theories about, say, the JFK assassination together. The appeal, I think, is similar to "figuring out" the meaning of a poem, or solving a difficult crossword. There is a rush of...something. I read a few of the Sitchin books, which advance the theory that the pyramids were built by aliens (he makes it sound a lot smarter than what I just typed). I even attended a conference where he spoke, and that was one of the most diverse, interesting and above all BRILLIANT group of people I've ever sat in a room with. So I do understand the appeal. Having said that, the Q stuff was always fucking stupid. Like, really stupid. There's no basement! George Soros isn't paying anyone! (Alas) Mike Flynn and Devin Nunes are not heroes! JFK Jr is not alive! Duh! My guess is that it's partly a community thing, but mostly a reaction by dumb, under-educated people to well-educated smart people like me and you being right all the time. It's kind of "own the libs" but through a funhouse mirror. And I'm sure that, if you were around for the original Q drops, it was intellectually stimulating to puzzle it all together.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that, most of the time, the fatal flaw is in assuming that all the alleged conspirators operate in lockstep, as some giant Davos/Bilderberger monolith. And that just ain't true. The alliance of, say, Trump and Musk isn't a conspiracy; it's an alliance of parties that don't have a lot in common, like when the US was allied with the USSR in WW2.
I knew the media would fail us, and I understand why. I knew the courts would, too -- same reason. There is an awful lot of Merrick Garland apologism happening now on social media, and sure, he didn't do NOTHING, but this is a results business, and at the end of the day, he had one job to do and didn't do it. Even that I sort of understand. But the utter capitulation, sane-washing, gas-lighting, surrender of Biden, Harris, and the other Dems post election, I will go to the grave never understanding. As you say, no one wanted Joe to act that way. And where has Kamala been? I knew when I wrote my piece that he would never do any of the things I recommended. I think that, in the end, he is just too old and too stuck in the ancient regime to understand that nothing works the way it used to. We are streaming movies and he's reminding us to "be kind, rewind."
Reading your comment, I realized that Casablanca, the place in the movie of that name, IS a whale, and Rick is stuck there...until he isn't. I have to explore this idea more...
Thanks again, Steve!
I know where Kamala Harris will be today, and that's something I'm not watching. The TV reception for something like the certification of the election is just HORRIBLE inside the whale. Besides that, I know that the coverage will be all "four years ago today.... blah, blah, blah," while they look in on a ceremonial task of Congress that should take all of an hour. We'll see if there are going to be any troublemakers on the Dem side, which to me would be just as useless as there was four years ago. There is fencing around the Capitol again, "just as a precaution," to what, I don't know. I did notice that this year, the Electoral College voted back in December without a peep about it from the media. I expect today to be just as "exciting."
Others have said, I shall add my bravo, an outstanding read.
Active vs passive, such a conundrum. Thank you for allowing me to believe that passive may be a virtue, not a negative bury one's head in the sand sin.
Reinhard Niebuhr may have said it best in the anthem adopted by AA that has saved so many lives:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference." This the essence of the active passive human being.
Thinking about revolution, the thing is that the target is an evil, in Russia the tsarist regime, France an indifferent and "Qu"ils mangent de la brioche" monarchy. If MAGA is a revolution, its target was what, expensive eggs, this the evil? Perhaps an expansive thinker might say capitalism and it's offspring, globalization. This however cannot be as the leaders of the revolution are icons of this evil, Musk, Thiel and just about every cabinet appointee. This makes MAGA not a revolution, rather a cult, leading followers down the rabbit hole of supporting just about everything they despised. The thing about cults, the leader always destroys his/her followers. Perhaps being passive will keep decent folk out of harm's way.
Thanks, Old Man.
You're right: MAGA is not a revolution. It certainly bears the hallmarks of a cult, but in the end, it's a scam. It's fraud. It's an elaborate, Mogilevichian scheme to steal our money and our resources.
I remember writing in November or December of 2016 that once the average Joe figured out that Trump was swindling them, they would turn on him, because no one likes being made a fool of. The public figures I most despise are the ones I once believed in before waking up to the con (Michael Moore, Glen Greenwald, etc). I'm still waiting for this to happen. Maybe now, so many years later, it will?
You're right: passivity may save lives. Let these idiots beat each other up.
Great Magnum Opus Greg. We can't see how to navigate what is to come but navigate it we must.
Thanks, Gary. The beauty of being inside the whale is the whale does all the driving! ; )
Hoping that Biden and Harris have been keeping a low profile so that they are able to put plans in place; maybe that’s wishful thinking, maybe not.
If I have to be trapped inside the whale I’m going to be kicking the back of its throat as long as I can. I know my pennies mean next to nothing, and our dollars little more until the profit margins and stock prices of the donors suffer. I’ve been preparing and starting on Inauguration Day I’ll be boycotting the oligarchs as much as I can and for as long as I can. One day isn’t going to do it.
I’ve made screenshots of Sonny’s lists appearing under the video and will refer to them before any spending. There are apps also, this will be easier for me.
https://youtu.be/vz6lHO4ezy8?si=DFf3eqp_4UF-Lcc3
Thanks, Teri. There is a wonderful line at the end of "Zero Effect," a lovely and underrated movie, where the man and woman are on a phone call. He is at his house, she is at the airport. She says, "If you knew I'd be at the airport, why are you at the house?" And he says -- and this is the relevant line -- "I knew you'd be at the airport, but I hoped you'd be here." That explains how I feel about the Dems. They may not be at the airport, sure, but I'm positive they are in line with Ted Cruz on the way to Cancun...
I have a feeler out about economic activity we can do. I'll keep you posted.