Fear Will Keep You in Line

At an early point during the Convicted Criminal's first abomination of an administration, I couldn’t help but be struck by how afraid everyone was of the United States. It was the weirdest spectacle to see so many world leaders just absolutely having zero idea how to deal with a clearly incompetent president, standing around blinking helplessly at each other.

I was especially taken by the reaction in the Arab world: they genuinely seemed to be fearful of the obvious instability of the American president. At the expense of making a wide generalization, the Arab world (and Iran) is used to bombastic and dramatic threats of its leaders, but an American president who seemed to match their bullshit with his own, was something they not expecting or used to, and thus, were deeply unsettled. No one in that region was ever truly afraid of Obama, Clinton or even Bush to the degree that the Convicted Criminal gave them serious pause.

We Americans have grown up with a sense of diplomatic politesse, and rules and protocols. Sure, our government can saber rattle, and even launch a war searching for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, but we counted on an overall consistency dealing with our allies and understood the quiet respect of our enemies, even if they blathered to the contrary that they could stand up to the American bully.

And here we are roughly a decade later, and the Convicted Criminal now has no boundaries. Barely kept within the lines before, now it’s truly uncharted territory. World leaders are afraid, and yet they make their pilgrimages to the White House as a matter of course. But it’s not just them anymore: Americans are afraid. Businesses all lined up and decided it was better to serve, so we get to witness the parade of chickenshit tech leaders doing their best to out-praise one another for the approval of the Convicted Criminal. All he has to do is demand map names be changed, and they all obey.

And universities? Oh, what a display of cowardice! Every single one of them, of the major educational institutions in this country, quickly folded in the face of this administration’s extortion of federal dollars for them to end their diversity units. One by one, universities sought to obey and carried out the whims of racist government officials as they toadied to get on the good side of this wicked cabal. This is when an historical appeal to Nazi Germany is correct, for it was universities that first carried out the race laws of the 1930s by getting rid of their Jews before anyone else did. Many people don’t know that, but I certainly did, and I was just flabbergasted to watch the pattern repeat itself. And quite dismayed at the rapidity by which they folded.

The cowardice is so widespread and so deep, that it occurred to me why there aren’t massive crowds outside the White House or across the country demanding resignation: fear. People are genuinely afraid that the Convicted Criminal will seek any excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act, so this keeps them in line. Oh sure, we had those “No Kings” rallies that made us feel like we were freedom-loving patriots, but we also made sure they were telegraphed far in advance and on a schedule that was convenient for everybody. Unlike say, protests in Albania, a small and poor European country whose people demonstrated in growing numbers over weeks and weeks against a corrupt development deal involving the Convicted Criminal’s family. How did we get so cowed? How was it that another country like Bulgaria could have protests so large and persistent that they actually chased out the government? In the land of the free and the home of the brave, we accommodated ourselves to a federal assault on major cities that is still ongoing in places! I keep thinking of all those invocations of Thomas Jefferson’s well-worn phrase “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” and I realize that we are full of shit. (And when quoted, we are quick to deny that we are calling for violence, just for safe measure.)

Now, black people have already been here before. They know what it’s like to have every level and lever of government power used against them, even at the cost of their lives. And I think I can safely say that none of their protest was done with the aim of being a martyr. But the rest of us? We think we’re being clever by a half reasoning that we won't give this corrupt, racist and evil administration the excuse to attack us. There were people who rode buses into the Deep South to register voters and some of them never returned; today, we make posts on social media and call it “resistance.”

So my friends, there you have it: we have been beaten and defeated by a convicted criminal from Queens who will never be held accountable because we were afraid.