If there ever was any doubt, there’s none now. There’ll be no justice, no mercy, and no place to hide so long as Trump, Vance, Musk, and their coterie of bootlickers, wannabes, and volunteer thugs are running things. Act accordingly.
Dogs of War
A Quasi-biblical Revelation
I’ve never been in any doubt about the depth of Donald Trump’s depravity, but I’m familiar enough with German history to understand why half the country voted for him, and why our titans of industry rushed to provide him with the means to fulfill his vile ambitions. I am surprised, though, at some of the people I’m belatedly finding in the miles-long line of fools waiting to kiss his ass.
It’s not just the hypocritical gasbags who’ve been lecturing us for decades about ethics, morality, courage, manliness, and the sanctity of free enterprise. Everyone knows that commoditized list of virtues by heart, and all of us know at least one person who’s made a career out of preaching from it. It’s not as shocking to me as it should be to see them now suddenly burning their own books, scrubbing their own mottoes off the walls, and looking down at their shoes when I ask them why.
No, the people who’ve surprised me are those I’d come to know as decent, compassionate, human beings, who now refuse to defend the defenseless, who turn away now from those in the greatest need with a shrug, with platitudes, with lectures about choosing one’s fights, with supposedly sage advice that one must be patient, that this too shall pass. This won’t do, this won’t do at all. If we want to keep calling the United States the Land Of the Free and the Home Of the Brave without being consumed by shame, this temporizing, compromising, agreeing that black is white, that President Zelenskyy should wear a suit when invited to lick the tyrant’s boots—all this nonsense will have to go. We need to do better. A whole lot better.
Слава Україні!
How About We Deport This One?
My father was wounded twice fighting assholes like this
Reaping the Whirlwind
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.
Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar*
*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.
How To Make a Shithole Country
This is thanks to Paul Krugman, who keeps an eye on things—like Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers—that I just can’t bring myself to look at.
Just Sayin….
“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.
Responsibility
Another half-awake visitation:
The text is brief. “Leave now. Do not pack. Kids already in transit.” As I pass reception, an upturned face. “Madam Secretary…?”
“Out. Go Now. Everyone. Move.”
Three minutes forty-two seconds later a flash in the rearview mirror, followed by a sharp jolt transmitted through the suspension. A glance upward shows a column of dark smoke already rising where we all used to be.
Once I’m back under, I send a text of my own. “The warning was timely. Your attempt was not. My representatives will be with you shortly. If you’d rather not wait up for them, I’ll understand.”
After that, a drink. Then once more unto the breach, for now, as before, what we do is who we are. No more, no less.
The Wages of Pandering
The most egregious recent graduate of the Republican Weasel Academy gets what’s coming to him.