Samain Healing Moon
“While laying over in the Detroit airport today I saw a fellow wearing a T-shirt with a caricature of an alien on it with the text: “Please don’t take me to your leader” ” Friend Tom Crane
It has come to this. A barometer reading of the pressure against our democracy. I am, as I said a couple of days ago, unsure of the outcome, but hopeful. That hope is based on little knowledge since I’ve stayed away from polls, a strict diet meant to untangle my mind from the misdirection I found there last time.
My gut tells me that if a blue wave sweeps the country, perhaps especially if it’s a tsunami, we’ll have an even more divided nation afterward. I read an essay that suggested a win by the Democrats, taking the House back for example, might help Trump in 2020. Gag.
The NYT re-presented this 5 minute film yesterday: If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be. It features Jason Stanley, a Yale professor who has spent the last twenty years studying fascism. It will not help you sleep tonight.
Since Trump is who he is, a man like Berlusconi, Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsanaro, and Orban, he has no special qualities that make him a good leader. What he does have is the instincts of the demagogue, the ethics of a rock, and a (rock)solid, factless sense of his own superiority. As Stanley points out, fascism follows a predictable path and comes in times like ours when economic and political transitions have undermined the lives of many, leaving them desperate for a sense of order; that is, a sense that the old order, by now already gone, will somehow be restored. The How is unimportant.
The last years of my third phase will, it seems, be lived in a world riven by the politics of fear and baked by a climate heated by our own stupidity. Not exactly a rosy picture. And, not one that can be ignored. In one sense our generation, the oft derided baby boom, is now a deposit of memory, memory of a time when politics, while far from perfect, were not ruled by disinformation and a heightened sense that the other was about to steal your job and your life.
It feels peculiar to me to remember fondly the politics of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford era, a time, beginning with Johnson, when I spent much of my life protesting establishment politics. But I do. Even the Gipper was not crazy. Trump is.
As the old Chinese curse goes, “May you live in interesting times.”
