The Remedy That Dare Not Speak Its Name
By all means, yes, make sure to get out the vote this November. Take a friend, or two, or a thousand. Be sure you tell your college kids to cast absentee ballots and pay attention to what hellish new rules have been enacted to stop them from voting because they’re out of state. Voting this November, so we are constantly told, is the only remedy to impeach the entire Republican party and its wretched “governance†by kleptocracy.
Actually, there is another remedy, but it’s the one you all prefer not to do. There are not enough of you willing to get in very large groups that refuse to go home, creating a great deal of pressure on your spineless, feckless and useless Congress. They aren’t afraid of your tweets. They are not afraid of your epic Facebook posts. They don’t pour over Daily Kos entries or Talking Points Memo responses, fretting that they’ve “lost the people.†They are not afraid of your #BlueWaveComing clip art.
They **are** afraid of people that won’t leave. You might point to Occupy Lafayette Park, but that’s basically devolved into a fundraising gig. It’s got no teeth because it has the air of parody what with one night a mariachi band, and another night, cameo turns by Alyssa Milano and Michael Avenatti. And Koresh knows, you ain’t gonna have anything resembling a general strike. Hell, you people can’t even abandon Twitter, a garbage platform that protects neo and other Nazis and really doesn’t given a damn about being used for disinformation assaults by Russian and East European bots.
Americans have a flair for the dramatic, with all the breathless “Democracy dies in darkness†(an eye rolling phrase if there ever was one) and “Is our Republic over?†nonsense. If it really mattered that much to you, and if you truly grasped the absolute sheer danger that you are in, and if you took those slogans seriously, you people would be giving the protests of the 60s a run for their money.
But, no.
And don’t accept my word for it: I’ve been pouring through the second volume of Richard J. Evans’ trilogy about the Third Reich and honestly, you are all making the exact same mistakes. That’s not hyperbole. You have a tyrant in office. You have a literally lawless government perpetrating outrages that don’t seem to be too obscene enough for you all finally to rise up in sustained anger. I will remind you that the Roman people did not wake up one day and wonder when they started talking about a Roman empire. No, they simply eased into the end of their republic and autocratic rule because they were willing to maintain the fiction of an independent senate and the falsehood of a “princeps senatus, princeps civitatis.†The trappings of their former freedoms were all there, and they were happy to go along with that bright shining lie.
Your apocalypse has already done its unveiling. You just keep thinking it didn’t happen.