Apocalypsos

The Democratic Party I Know and Don’t Love

William Timberman2 Comments

Lyndon Johnson, our second great emancipator, did his utmost to ship me to Vietnam. Richard J. Daley and his uniformed thugs had my friends beaten up in the streets of Chicago. Hubert Humphrey, the great defender of organized labor, spent the last years of his political career solemnly licking Lyndon Johnson’s boots.

Still, I went to work for the McGovern campaign in 1972. On election day I walked a precinct in Southern California until the polls closed at 7:00 p.m. Pacific time. I didn’t have the cell phone that would certainly be in my pocket today—I didn’t even have a transistor radio—and so it was that people who opened the last few doors I knocked on in the near darkness of that California evening actually burst out laughing at me before closing the door in my face. I may have been the last person on earth to hear that the election was already over, that McGovern had won only one state and the District of Columbia.

Thirty-four years later, at a fundraiser in Arizona a liberal friend had dragged me to, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, a property developer in Phoenix and ex-chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, let me know in no uncertain terms that it was those anti-war crazies who got Nixon elected, and that we (meaning the Democratic Party) were never going to go there again if he had anything to say about it. He wasn’t the only senior Democrat of consequence who’s served me up that deeply cherished nonsense over the years.

And so it’s gone since—the Clintons and their “New Democrats,” Obama’s “more than a collection of red states and blue states,” et cetera, et cetera. The members of the DNC, who, like Godechot’s Bourbons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, now reverently present us with the ghost of Joe Biden—take him or leave him—and warn us earnestly that if Trump gets elected in November it’s all going to be our fault again, just as Nixon was in 1968 and 1972, and Trump was in 2016.

To which I say, “I’m done with this. No matter how it goes this time, we’re done. Peddle your paralysis elsewhere.”

Reaping the Whirlwind

William Timberman8 Comments

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.

Unbidden Bits—May 30, 2024

William Timberman1 Comment

I’m in Arizona, in the checkout line at Walmart, clutching something I need today that was two days away by Amazon.

I look around at the patriarchal beards, the camouflage cargo pants, thinking idle thoughts about the carnival barkers on Fox News, Samuel Alito’s wife, how temporary the privilege of calling Trump a felon will probably turn out to be.

It comes to me then: A people camping out in the ruins of their own civilization. I pay for my indispensable, cross the parking lot, head back home.

I throw my car keys on the kitchen counter, hearing Hillary the imposter’s earnestness, her arrogance, back in 2016. It was way too late even then, and now….

“Going forward,” as the Wall Street pundits are so fond of saying, it’s not what we do with them that will matter. It’s what they’ll do with us.

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar*

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*Human dignity is inviolable (The first sentence of Article I of the postwar Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany)

If we actually wanted any further proof of Santayana’s contention that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we’d need look no further than the current resurgence of fascist sentiment in Europe and the United States, and the rising support worldwide for authoritarian governments devoted primarily to exclusion, punishment, and degradation.

The Germans, of all people, should know better. They did know better in 1949, when their remarkable postwar constitution was written and enacted in the western half of their still divided country. If the strutting members of the AfD have already forgotten what motivated their great-grandparents to enshrine Article I as the only article which by law cannot ever be amended or repealed, there seems little hope that any of the rest of us will remember our considerably more ambiguous commitments to the same principle.

There are reasons why the Nazis are back in Germany, why a paranoid and vicious authoritarianism is once again the shiniest of political baubles everywhere in the world. As comforting as it might be for those who dread what’s coming to think so, none of these reasons can be attributed solely to the historical blindness of the generations born since the end of World War II. The truth of the matter is that neither democracy nor capitalism, as practiced by our supposedly enlightened postwar governments, has ever been overly concerned with the dignity of all human beings.

It should surprise no one who’s been paying attention that in the nearly eighty years since the end of World War II, the distribution of wealth and power in western democracies has gradually come to resemble that of some of the worst hierarchical societies of the past. The disenfranchised, dispossessed, and disenchanted armies of the underemployed and unrepresented are back with us, and they will absolutely not be mollified any more easily by our well-meant homilies about human dignity than they were in 1933. As right-wingers in the United States like to say, the die is cast. It’s hard to see how there’s any good news in that for anybody.

Just Sayin….

William Timberman

“Das wird immer einer der besten Witze der Demokratie bleiben, dass sie ihren Todfeinden die Mittel stellte, durch die sie vernichtet wurde.”

“This will always remain one of democracy’s best jokes, that it provided its mortal enemies with the means by which it was destroyed.”

Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, 1935

Yeah, probably ain’t gonna happen here. Almost everybody says so. No harm considering what it’s gonna take to stay out of the cattle cars if it does, though.

A Brief Reminder

William Timberman

Our grandchildren aren’t stupid. Their mental equipment isn’t inferior to ours. They just live in a different world, one which no longer belongs to us even though we helped create it. It’s theirs now, and whatever we imagine, we’re no longer in any position to judge them. Likely they’ll be fine, but if they turn out not to be fine, it’s going to be very hard to show how listening to us would have made the slightest bit of difference.

The Enlightenment’s Farewell Tour

William Timberman6 Comments

In the U.S., the Republicans’ sad entourage of the desperate, demented, and enraged are tearing at the Constitution’s exposed achilles tendons. In Russia the gangsters of Prigozhin are battling the siloviki of Putin for control of the spoils of a twice-failed totalitarian state. In India, Hindutva pursues a scorched-earth battle against Islam. In Germany the AfD tidal wave has engulfed the SPD, broken the CDU, and arrived at last in Bavaria, intent on washing away once and for all what little is still left of the CSU’s liberal democratic pretensions.

In Italy a fascist consumerism has sprung full-grown from the brow of Meloni. The trains now run on time, and foreign investors are once again reassured. In Finland and Sweden, the local populists have decided that white people are the only real people after all. In Israel, Syria, Hungary, Belarus, and Turkey, the warlord grifters have outlasted everyone. In Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, the kings, emirs, sultans and satraps of one kind or another are now completely convinced that having more money than Allah the Merciful means not having to apologize to anyone ever.

In Iran, a cabal of wizened religious fanatics calling themselves the Islamic Republic have yet to see any reason to deny themselves the perverse pleasure of beating and imprisoning women at random, and of shooting their own children whenever the kids act like they might be the coming thing. In China, a suspiciously but undeniably prosperous Communist (sic) Party oligarchy has decided that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is nothing more than a confession of the failures and arrogance of so-called Western civilization.

I don’t think Web 3.0 is going to be a lot of help in preserving what’s left of the secular humanism that evolved over four centuries in Europe, and was sealed with the French and American revolutions. Neither will eleven aircraft carrier battle groups or a triad of delivery systems for nuclear weapons, given that both have long been controlled by people who bear no allegiance whatsoever to secular humanism either as a creed or a philosophy of government.

I’m not one to cry O tempora, o mores! every time someone in Washington does something stupid, but I do think that if the last sad road show of the Enlightenment comes to your town, you should go and listen to what was once promised us, and what very shortly we’ll all be missing.

The Republican Presidential Mud Wrestle

William Timberman

Trump versus DeSantis, the Ron and Don show, is about to begin in earnest. Oy gewalt! Watching the handicappers on Fox News counsel the Republican Party’s animal farmers to trade a pig for a weasel in the upcoming presidential primaries can evoke a litany of gruesome probabilities, but at this point it’s hard to see how following their advice can confer any great advantage on a party that seems more interested in self-immolation than winning elections.

In any event, for the MAGA faithful, escaping the lottery of potential regret is no longer an option. Dumb as they are, it’s hard not to feel at least a poquito bit sorry for them. Trump’s always been the guy, right? Right? So what’s all this stuff about choices all of a sudden?

They have a point. As a would-be herald of the coming cracker apocalypse, Trump has always had a certain way about him—if standup comedy in Hell’s your thing, Don’s your guy. If you’re a sadist pure and simple, though, DeSantis can offer you the purity and simplicity of Conan’s gladness—elect him and he’ll crush your enemies, have them driven before you, and guarantee you a seat close enough to hear the lamentations of their women. This shorthand caudillo doesn’t need to play golf, or crack jokes, he’s got vengeance to sell. That’s it, that’s the whole deal. There’s not the slightest hint in his public performances of the titillating foreplay that good old boys find so endearing about Trump. If Ron’s your guy, there’ll be no laughing ever. Triumphant sneering will still be encouraged, laughing absolutely not.