Requiescat in Bello

How It’s Going

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Politics as usual hasn’t been as usual lately as it used to be. Were he still among the living, even our 20th century Nostradamus, Mr. Orwell, might be surprised to learn that Oceania has finally and definitively lost its war with Eurasia, and is presently hiding the rump of itself under the skirts of a demented real estate developer with delusions of grandeur. Definitely not the Big Brother Mr. Orwell promised us, this one, although the red hat rubes hardly seem to have noticed. Eastasia, meanwhile, is licking its chops, oblivious to its own vulnerabilities, doing its unctuous best to look as inscrutable as western racists expect.

A couple of degrees more of global warming, a nuclear exchange or two between idiot regimes, and even Elon Musk and his sycophant armies might find themselves roasting rats-on-a-stick over burning rubber tires somewhere where angels fear to tread. That, my fellow deeply concerned citizens of the First World, is actually how it’s going, and you didn’t even have to sit through a commercial to hear about it.

All Your Base Are Now Belong To Us

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen.
Der Musk maschiert mit mutig festem Schritt
Kam’raden, die Wokist’n vernichtet haben
marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.

(For those of my readers who don’t know German, this is a contemporary parody of the 90 year-old Nazi party anthem das Horst-Wessel-Lied.) In English, it goes more or less like this:

The flag held high, ranks firmly closed together!
Musk marches on with bravely stiffened stride
Comrades who’ve done away with Wokeists
march with us in our ranks in spirit now.

GERMAN CITIZENS PLEASE NOTE: Reproducing these lyrics is, with few exceptions, currently illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the US our laws are more permissive. My apologies to the citizens of the Federal Republic, but given the current constitutional crisis in my own country, I felt the need to fiddle with them here.

Im Westen Nichts Neues

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Judging by the chaos engendered by our Orange Furor’s decree cutting off all aid to everybody everywhere, it’s a good thing our cut-rate Nazis weren’t trying to invade France. And will somebody please tell Stephen Miller that even if he shaves his head, squints malevolently, and shouts a lot, people will still know he’s a Jew, and will still find a Jewish Goebbels unseemly.

Novus Ordo Seclorum

William Timberman2 Comments

Along with many others, I’ve long thought and said as much here and elsewhere that Americans would have a difficult time adjusting to the end of post-war US hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world order. It now seems fair to say that the re-election of Donald Trump makes that hard-core recalcitrance a certainty. And when you start finding things like this on the Internet, it’s probably also fair to say that none of that pig-headedness will go down well with what our previous leaders have been pleased to call The International Community:

A map of the united states with the words " dumbfuckkistan " written in it.

Unbidden Bits—December 23, 2024

William Timberman2 Comments

Historians of the Future:

Frank Herbert’s Dune seems to have been written by a man who’d read too much Gibbon. Max’s DUNE Prophecy, on the other hand, seems to have been created by people who’ve watched too much TikTok.

Viewed from a certain critical perspective, both are satirical masterpieces, and like all such masterpieces, feel eerily appropriate to their times.

Damnatio Memoriae

William Timberman

Despite its birth in slavery and genocide, there was always some hope that the United States would one day live up to the aspirations of its founders rather than continue to turn a blind eye to the evils inherent in some of their political compromises. Even when we were certain we wouldn’t live to see that day, we had reasons not to feel like fools when looking forward to its eventual arrival.

Today, as Trump and his sycophants begin gleefully making plans to burn our books and chisel our names off the nation’s monuments, we should take a moment to remind ourselves what will inevitably become of them once their political orgasm has spent itself. Winning won’t magically make them any less ignorant, any more capable of coping with anything more complex than their own appetites for self-aggrandisement. While they’re busy gloating, grifting, and genuflecting to their preposterous version of the Christian god, the Chinese or Russians may very well show up to eat the lunch so cluelessly laid out for them, or what is even more likely, climate change may finally turn Arizona into hell with the fire out, and blow down or drown everything in Florida from Mar-a-Lago to Tallahassee.

In the meantime, we should mind how we go. Remember that they don’t own the future—many of their children will come to hate them soon enough, especially their daughters. Ignore the taunts, save the bullied wherever and whenever we can, and never, ever forego an opportunity to pour a cup of virtual sugar into a coal-roller’s gas tank.

As it is written, so let it be done.

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.

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar*

William Timberman

*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.