The thing vicious narcissists like Donald Trump never seem to understand is that they aren’t any more bulletproof than the people whose blood they cry out for on a daily basis. I’m sorry he was a target today, and I’m glad early reports say that he’s okay, but I have to say I’m surprised it took this long for someone to open fire on him at one of his fascist rallies. Gunfire is, after all, the politics he encourages, at least as long as all the guns are pointed away from him.
That’s not how it works. That’s not how it’s ever worked. It’s a shame Donald Trump has had to learn that the hard way, if indeed he has learned it. Personally, I doubt he’s capable of learning anything, but I’m not sure it’ll matter much either way. The final acts of this particular American tragedy were written long before Trump had any real part to play in them.
Talk about whirlwinds…. And, if the GOP has it’s way with us, we’ve probably not seen the half of what’s ahead.
I bear no particular ill will toward Trump that I don’t feel for the greater half of the GOP since Ronald Reagan…. but my god this election. In my many, many decades of being a registered voter, this one is going to take a prize. The only one more devastating was RFK’s “forced removal” from having the opportunity.
Civilization is hard. Managing the shifting currents that can upend what may look for a brief period like lasting social, political, and economic stability depends on control of a far greater number of variables—orders of magnitude greater—than even the wisest and best-equipped administrations can track or respond to. We deceive ourselves into thinking that having better tools than our predecessors gives us an edge they lacked, forgetting that this apparent edge comes at the price of a corresponding increase in the complexity of our circumstances. Flintlocks to machine guns to nuclear weapons: are we better off after each technological iteration?
I’ve probably said this often enough to bore everyone within range of my voice, but it’s no use hating Trump. He’s a classc epiphenomenon. More significantly, decrying fascism will do no one any good who has helped create the conditions for the development of fascism, whether they realized at the time the dangers they were flirting with or not. So if we must, I suppose hating the Donald couldn’t hurt. More to the point, though, pitying Joe Biden isn’t going to help.
YAY!!!!
Looks like you’re “live” again.
This is the furthest I’ve been able to get in some time.
Thanks, WT.
Sigh…. There was a time when a reasonably savvy layperson could install and maintain a simple WordPress blog all by their lonesomes. Now we haz securitization, marketization, monetization, desperation, and finally, a bot that will tell us what word comes next in every context. “Trust us, we get this right 99.9999999999% of the time because we’ve trained on all of the words that have ever been placed in a similar context/sequence ever in the whole history of the internet.
This we call intelligence, and for a price we’ll rent it to you, because we know you’re much too busy and important to call upon your own.”
So we pay and we hope for the best. (They can almost always fix whatever it is they’ve broken.)
All that aside, welcome back. I’m glad you got through this time.
The comment I tried to post on the 14th:
Increasingly I find that events like yesterday cast me into what I call my ‘surreal mode’. It’s a dissociative effect that used to require alcohol – or really good weed. But it no longer requires anything more than another in a seemingly unending parade of jaw-dropping historical moments that also leave me unpleasantly breathless, despondent and wanting to seek out the best mountain cave I can possibly find to get away from the inescapable.
There is a wide range in the size of the targets that get assigned to those who that man – and the people who support him – hate. Mine is, by luck of birth, one of the smallest possible (I’m white, blonde … my sin: I mask in public). But every single one of those targets grew exponentially and that’s going to continue. The damning was complete the moment that man stood erect, raised his fist and told his minions to “Fight!”
Believe it or not, reading Gibbon helps. Unless they were very lucky, Romans of initially secure means and prospects who lived their fourscore and ten at any time between 44 BCE and 440 CE could have experienced almost exactly the kind spiritual whiplash that you’re reporting here. Gibbon reports on all of this from a very great, if often very jaundiced height, and that’s his gift to us—not just to see the mighty laid low, but to see quite clearly that our assessment of our own degree of civilization is at least partly a product of self-delusion. Cold comfort, but comfort nevertheless….
Whee! Success!!! Thank you for fixing this! I was convinced I’d done something to foul up my own settings and was completely incompetent to fix it. Glad to find out I can postpone that (probably accurate) assessment for the time being,
You’re welcome. If it hadn’t been for you and bystander, I’d still be blissfully unaware that anything was broken. GoDaddy moved the dogtown from one server to another last month, and as far as I could tell at the time, everything was working just fine, at least everything that I could see. Of course no one comments on their own posts, so I missed that very crucial failure entirely. Glad everything really IS working now, though. (Or at least we hope so, no?)