It's a beautiful day!

Be in it

I knew the political landscape was going to get weird as the day when the voters hold the elites (who have made a hash of everything) to account drew near, and I knew that boundaries--legal, ethical, and moral--would be ignored, but damn! I didn’t expect this.

On September 1st President Biden gave the most eerie and bizarre speech I have ever heard from an American politician. Biden’s message was clear. The 70+ million citizens who voted for Trump, and who presumably intend to mop the floor with incumbent Democrats in November, are a threat to democracy. Not China, or Russia, or Islamic terrorists. Americans who disagree with the progressive pipe dream are the real existential threat.

Turn this around to understand how unusual this is. Imagine for a moment that Trump had appeared, weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, not under bright lights and surrounded by American flags, but before a backdrop washed with deep red light, flanked by Marines, and that he then said said in no uncertain terms that the people who voted for Hillary and opposed him were a threat, The Threat, to the very fabric of America. The media would have, rightly, wondered why a President would do such a thing. “Why,” the press would have said, “he sounds just like Hitler.”

Years ago Charles Krauthammer observed that the fundamental difference between the American right and the American left is that where the right will disagree and say that their opposition is wrong, the American left has taken what they believe a moral position, and those who disagree are not simply wrong, but actually evil.

When I first heard this I thought Krauthammer had nailed it, put his finger on the actual pulse. It sounded right. Everyone who opposes any progressive initiative is imagined to have awful motives. Reagan was “just like Hitler.” Then both Bushes. Now it’s Trump and Desantis. If you spoke out against BLM and Critical Race Theory you were a racist. No other possible motive was entertained. If you happen to notice that there is not enough copper, nickel, lithium and rare earth metals on the planet to “phase out fossil fuels” you are a “denier”. It can’t be that you are logical, precise, or grounded in reality. You are a hateful “denier”, and this is doubly true if you scratch your head and wonder if it is really possible that Biden garnered 81 million votes—more than Obama was able to rally. I no longer think this is because the progressives actually believe the opposition is evil, though. I now think this is a strategy. Ad hoc rhetorical judo.

One can not defend the progressive agenda on its merits. Look around. Everything they have touched has failed. I knew this was coming the day Biden took the oath of office. Nothing that was being proposed would do anything good and was poised to do great harm. Give it a few minutes of thought. What, precisely, has improved since Biden’s election? Anything? Anything at all? I can’t think of a single thing. Not Energy, education, crime, services, health care, or the economy. Not the environment, space exploration, our relationship with other nations. Not infrastructure, the national parks, water management. Not the mid-East, the far-East, the southern border, Europe, or Russia. Not sports. Not entertainment. Not travel. Nothing is better and in many ways many things are tangibly worse. Fealty to “diversity”, “intersectionality”, and identity politics does not get anything done. Policing pronouns does not improve a single life. This doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Given the state of things, what can Democrats run on? What can they promise or point to as a success?

Not much. So they need to run on fear and hatred and an existential enemy.

And it looks like we’re it.

I’m okay with this. At 64 years it is now obvious to me that nothing is permanent and those striving to shape history are delusional boobs. They have no more control over the future than you and I. What is the legacy of Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Che, Castro? Did their utopia arrive after millions were murdered to pave the way for the future they imagined? Sure, it may be possible to baffle a generation and sell them on the theory that boys aren’t boys and girls aren’t girls, just identical beings on a spectrum of gender, but how long will the fad last? You can indoctrinate a generation to believe that everything is a struggle between groups, but even really good ideas (Art Nouveau, Bebop, Art Deco architecture) fade over time. How long can a silly notion that runs counter to human nature, science, and reality hold up? Everything fades. Bad ideas just fade quicker.

So in the short run, what we are seeing is the comical result of hubris. Slapstick. A pie-in-the-face comeuppance. And those in power would prefer that we not notice that the sun is setting on a particular set of really stupid policies and articles of faith.

In the long run, this is just a bump in the road. Some individuals became wealthy and powerful for awhile, celebrated in the moment, but history will sort it out. I don’t have to participate. Global warming is not an existential threat. Words are not violence. The USA is not systemically racist. Boys can’t become girls and girls can’t become boys. Your pronouns are your issue, not mine. Dave Chapelle is funny as hell whether I agree with him or not. Cops aren’t the problem. A nation requires borders. Speech should be unrestrained. Weapons do not kill people; other people, wielding weapons, do. People who harm others should be punished. Amazon made a bad bet spending a billion dollars to rewrite Tolkien. Trump is not a threat to democracy, or a threat of any sort.

I don’t have to fix any of this. It is not up to me to sort this out and beat the stupidity into submission. Time will take care of that. Time marches along and humanity staggers along with it, sometimes tripping headlong, sometimes falling into a blind alley or a cul-de-sac, sometimes smoking an exploding cigar or stepping on a rake, but somehow humanity always gets up, finds it footing, and trudges on. Miracles happen. This is progress. This is history.

Ignore the noise. Build a birdhouse. Paint a picture. Make your bed. Love your neighbor. The sun will rise tomorrow and you’ve got today to revel in. Don’t let them infect you with fearful nonsense.

Peace.