A word to the loudmouths of the Republican Party:
We get it—the future scares you, and you want to make that our fault. You should think again. The future can’t be bullied into submission. Neither can we.
No matter what you tell each other, the cruelty and ignorance that govern your behavior wll never govern ours. We won’t allow it, no matter how many guns you have, or how willing you are to use them. If you doubt this, keep going the way you’re going. See how far you get.
The thing about people crazy the way Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are crazy is that their own exquisite craziness, as many-faceted as they imagine it to be, is never enough for them. They’re rapists by nature, not onanists.
I learned 56 years ago, sitting in my underwear on a bench in the Armed Forces Induction Center in Los Angeles, how to avoid being cast as a bit player in someone else’s psychodrama. I don’t believe that what I learned there is something that social media can teach you, but bullies certainly can.
Twenty years of ill-advised and often vicious U.S. meddling in Vietnamese affairs ended with TV images of overloaded Hueys lifting off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, of Vietnamese who worked for us stumbling down the runway after the C-130s taking off from Tan Son Nhut airbase without them, leaving them behind to face whatever suffering the North Vietnamese government intended to inflict on them.
Twenty years of ill-advised and often vicious U.S. meddling in Afghan affairs are now ending with Internet images of overloaded Chinooks and Blackhawks lifting off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, of Afghanis who worked for us clawing at the sealed doors of a C-17 taking off from Kabul airport without them, leaving them behind to face whatever suffering the Taliban intends to inflict on them.
Have our earnest media news and analysis teams really not understood the pattern at work here? Have the self-appointed custodians of our shriveled Pax Americana really learned nothing since 1975?
Bet on it.
Real Men™ shouldn’t need to:
1. Call themselves boys, even if they have fond memories of once having been one.
2. Take steroids, or cultivate patriarchal beards.
3. Own bulletproof vests or camouflage-patterned caps, hats, jackets, shirts, cargo pants, underwear, jock straps or socks.
4. Store 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a crate of hand grenades in their garages.
5. Buy or carry any device or appurtenance labeled tactical, including knives, flashlights, dog-tag holders, hip flasks, and roach clips.
6. Wear machine guns in public the way Donald Trump wears a tie.
7. Strike Rambo poses in front of fifty American flags.
8. Decorate themselves or any of their possessions, especially trucks, with Confederate battle flags, swastikas, or Nazi slogans.
9. Mistake mobs of vicious degenerates for patriots.
10. Bully their wives and beat their children (or vice-versa, or both.)
11. Go home at night and lick their AR-15s.
The New York Police Benevolent Association’s bid to turn urban police departments into America’s Sturmabteilungen.
Now that Patrick Lynch, President of the New York Police Benevolent Association, has dreamt up a left-wing war on cops, and enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, there’s no longer any reason to pretend that metropolitan police forces in the United States aspire to anything beyond remaining the largest and best-funded gangs in their respective cities.
Translated into plain English, the message from Lynch is clear enough:
If we feel like sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken broomstick, or pumping 19 bullets into an unarmed Amadou Diallo, or choking out Eric Garner, we’re just gonna do it, and if you know what’s good for you, you civilians are gonna keep your mouths shut about it. None of this shit about black lives matter, or defunding the police, you got it? Otherwise you can just call a fucking Democrat instead of 911 the next time you need protection. Finally, do we REALLY need to remind you that there’s 50,000 of us, and we’ve got body armor, tanks, helicopters, and automatic weapons? If you think Bill de Blasio runs this fucking city, think again. The Donald understands us, so we’re down with him. We’re gonna make sure he gets four more years, and after that, you can go fuck yourselves, all of you.
This is interest group politics transformed into something far more toxic to civil society, far more likely to qualify as fascism with American characteristics than anything we’ve seen so far in national politics. The question is, what happens now that Lynch and his boys have so openly crossed the Rubicon? Regardless of the outcome of the elections in November, the political class is unlikely to return unchallenged to the kind of neoliberal centrism touted by the DNC or Atlantic magazine. It seems far more likely that an ever-capricious Donald Trump will offer urban cops, white supremacist biker gangs, rural sheriff’s departments, Oath Keeper and Proud Boy militias, Christian Dominionists, and the rest of his proud deplorables whatever cover they need to attack people living happily in circumstances that their peculiar subcultures find unendurable.
Why would he not? There’s surely nothing more perfectly suited to Trump’s ego-driven triumphalism than starting a civil war, especially one that his very stable genius can’t imagine losing. The only thing stopping him, the only thing keeping his malignant meddling from turning a disorganized rabble of volunteer culture warriors into a full-blown fascist movement, is his own lack of character.
Whatever actually motivates him, Trump is clearly a narcissist, not an ideologue, a Perón rather than a Hitler. His followers are good at resenting anything they can’t understand, and threatening people who can’t defend themselves, but they’re not much good at anything else apart from bootlicking and delusional aphorisms. This might not matter if they had a halfway committed leader, but Trump himself is far too lazy and far too incompetent to take personal charge of forging their resentments into a set of principles robust enough to govern a country of 330 million people.
For those of us sane enough to want out of this whole demeaning Todestanz, the absence of anyone in Trumps’s entourage actually competent to seize state power might offer us exactly what we need, namely a little more time to get our affairs in order before the real apocalypse — climate change, famines, mass migrations, collapsing global economic interdependencies and real wars, with real armies — is upon us in earnest. We can only hope.
Attention Kayleigh McEnany:
This is the most famous picture of Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, Axis Sally, in U.S. military custody in 1946, on her way to be tried and convicted of treason against the United States. Is this really who you want to be when the sadistic lunatic whose lies you’re so diligently passing on to us finally gets his comeuppance?
Watching President Trump try to beat the Congress into submission has been a uniquely gruesome experience, but also an edifying one. For decades now, the dysfunction of the federal government has been something sensed rather than seen, partly because it was in the interest of the political class to keep it hidden, and partly because the media, ever conscious of which side their bread was buttered on, shared that interest.
Today we’re told by Marc Short, the President’s director of legislative affairs, that the White House is simply “asking that the Congress do its job.” I wonder if he, or his boss, for that matter, has any idea just how big an ask that is. If the experience of the past 40 years or so is anything to go by, the problem isn’t that the Congress won’t do its job, it’s that it can’t. Our tolerance for venality, it seems, has drawn the veil over an alarmingly complete incompetence as well. What happens when you bully a moron? Nothing good, I’m thinking, but with the two-minute warning already being signaled, it looks as though we’re about to find out.
Revised from a recent comment of mine on this Crooked Timber thread:
A sort of Marxist point about our present distempers: the conditions of existence have changed, probably irrevocably, for the Scots-Irish coal miners of West Virginia, the libertarian ranchers of the West, and the industrial workers of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and they’re not happy about it. Should Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk feel any more sympathy for them than their own ancestors felt for Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, or Geronimo? A similar observation could be made about our lack of sympathy for the Taliban and the Salafists.
One difference is striking, though, about our current last-ditch defenders of traditions outmaneuvered by modernity. They’re more widely distributed, and they’re also much better armed. The consolations of Whatever happens — we have got — the Maxim gun — and they have not have succumbed in their own fashion to a modernity not even the Moderns themselves seem to understand. Not yet, anyway.
Marx thought that once the conditions of existence had changed sufficiently, the past would be, or could be, swept away by revolutionaries with their eyes on the future. Seen up close, from the vantage point of an individual life, the process is far uglier, no matter what subsequent theoretical revisions from the foundries of Marxist ideology, or cheerleading from neoliberal think tanks promise us. Somewhere between Faulkner’s The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past, and Gibson’s The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, there’s a place to stand that won’t offend either our conscience or our common sense. Maybe. One hopes. YMMV.
To all of you with your well-rehearsed defenses of universal kill lists:
The quality of mercy is not feigned….
That is all.
Today Juan Cole has written An Open Letter to the Left on Libya. In it, he urges …the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time, meaning that it should support the UN Security Council/NATO/US bombing enterprise in Libya. (Among all these august agencies, it’s hard to know which is wearing the fig leaf — and which isn’t — but I suppose that rounding up all the usual suspects stands a decent chance of including the real actors in this latest morality play put on for us by the rulers of Oceania.)
Since my views make me more or less part of the Left, albeit not a very prominent part, I feel duty-bound to respond:
When I read of the The Responsibility to Protect, I’m reminded of the motto of the old Strategic Air Command: Peace Is Our Profession. There’s a sense in which that motto was perfectly true, and another in which it represented a ghastly moral inversion—Thanatos dressed up as Eros, complete with rouged cheeks and false eyelashes.
I remember too that the Pentagon found Dr. Strangelove insulting. Perhaps it was, but it was also a cry of desperation, which, now I come to think of it, had less to do with H-bombs per se than it did with the men who built and deployed them with such perfectly clear consciences.
I first wrote that elsewhere, for another audience, but it will do very nicely for Juan Cole today, or for anyone else overcome by such well-meaning delusions of grandeur in the future.