COCKEYED SKEPTICISM

The glass is empty.

The scab has been torn off, leaving a weeping and yes, festering wound, which tempers any already guarded optimism in which I am tempted to indulge.

I took a ration of shit for this brief Facebook post repeated above, for having the temerity to rain on the optimism parade.  Apologies for hurt feelings, but as noted frequently, feelings aren’t facts.

Yes.  There are reasons for hope.  But there are also reasons for caution, and for anticipatory dread.   We do outnumber the other side, but to be unfortunately clear, not by all that much.  That’s why they call it polarization. The work to be done to undone the damage done to this country, presuming it actually gets done, will certainly never be accomplished in my lifetime, and possibly not in yours, so calm the fuck down.

I’m only somewhat relieved by the election results and the terrorist attack free inauguration, just not with quite so much kicking my heels in the air, everything’s going to be different now as I’m seeing and hearing.  I can dig it.  It’s an exhalation, a release of pent-up mortal fucking terror—terror, to be clear, exacerbated by the anticipation of further insurrection and treasonous activity on the day of the inauguration.

I am delighted and surprised that this terror never materialized.  I am not in any way convinced that my concern, was misplaced, deranged or foolish.

I live in a purple town in the bluest of states, and even at so sublimely Californian an establishment as Trader Joe’s there were a number of deeply disappointed men and women of all ages among the customers, who were palpable dismayed and dejected by the events that began on election day and ended on January 20th.

More than seventy million Americans voted to maintain and continue the state of the union as it has been governed for four years—and they’re not going away today, or tomorrow.   Or likely ever. 

Forget for the moment all the misbegotten mooks at the rallies, all the cosplaying shitheads in their toxically masculine gender binary quasi-military get-ups.  Forget even the feckless, smugly stupid and willfully ignorant insurrectionists who earnestly and honestly believed they could achieve the overthrow of an election, and were stunned by any resistance they met.  Which, to be honest, didn’t seem all that effective a resistance, from a security staff many of whom didn’t seem to disagree in principle with the insurrectionists.

Put aside the terrifying knowledge that an alarming percentage of these traitors were law enforcement or military personnel themselves, men and women we were asked to trust in their loyalty to the constitution and their oaths, who ignored those oaths and betrayed our trust in the name of what is no more than a bug fuck YA dystopia as real-life role-playing game. 

I remain deeply grateful for their ineptitude, their clumsiness, their outright fucking stupidity in the service of American Nazism.  Consider what the death toll might have amounted to had their competence been equaled by their confidence.

I have to assume that too much television, too many comic books, too many comic book movies, and too many video games, combined with the cheerleading so readily available via social media, gave their already dismally overconfident all American can-do spirit a boost.  And no, you won’t find any nonsensical, self-serving hand wringing “mental illness” excuses in my house.   

Those treasonous shitheels were there, in the moment and in their right minds.  Those right minds, of course, were vessels of willful ignorance topped off with a serious slather of stupidity committed to believe the fantastical shit they apparently hold dear in complete disregard of actual contrary evidence.

But, as noted, forget, at least for the moment, this quivering mass of deeply mistaken identitarians.

Rather, I want you to consider your quiet, well-mannered neighbors, people with whom you used to interact on a regular day to day basis.   The kind of folks—and I will never forgive Barack Obama for his reintroduction of that “folks” bullshit into the conversation—who quietly and privately voted for the men and women, and likely the incumbent, too, who took a disaster and made it an apocalypse in this American life. 

A lot of these people voted, as noted, to maintain the status quo, despite what was, to be sure, an endless eroding of the intrinsic nature of the United States, and didn’t make a fuss about it.  And to create even more dismay, according to post election research, there was a discomfiting uptick in voters representing racial, ethnic, social and sexual orientation demographics who, despite the endless stream of assaults, threats and calumny aimed at those very groups by the administration, its political party, and its misbegotten army of the willfully ignorant, quietly voted for that status quo.

If those treasonous and imbecilic swine invading the Capitol were infected with utterly unwarranted Dunning-Kruger related confidence, an echo of that guileless self-regard can be found on the left as well, which has for far too long presumed that members of these various ethnic, racial, social and sexual subdivisions could be counted on to identify as oppressed as opposed to identifying with the oppressor.

As noted, I live in a town with plenty of support for the previous administration, with some of that support coming from local immigrants from below the southern border and beyond.  My reaction to this back in 2016 was to regard it as an anomaly, a “pull the ladder up in the treehouse, I’ve got mine, you’re on your own” sort of thing. 

In the light of that uptick, and the fact that the widely anticipated and ultimately nonexistent blue wave barely touched the down ballot contests, I’ll keep my expectations of these identity groups voting in any way as the woke progressive left sees as their best interests to a bare minimum for the foreseeable future, thank you very much.

I have neither need nor desire to deliver a litany of what has been exposed about our country, nor to remind you of the bitter truths that have made the comforting lies we’ve told ourselves for years evaporate like so much steam from a manhole in these last four years.

If you agree with my stance in this, we are also in common agreement in regard to the disaster these years have been for us as a nation unto ourselves, as a once apparently united people, and as part of the global community.  We were far from perfect before, but that weeping wound exposed by that torn scab has confirmed, thanks to that seventy million plus phalanx on the other side of the Rubicon, just how far.  

Of course, if you were fine with the work done by this administration, or even if you felt there were issues, vast or small, problems which you were willing to accept, to ignore, in order to achieve some specific result based on where you stood on the social identity food chain, and you were one of that seventy million strong polity, you must take responsibility for a partnership willingly and in good faith shared with racists, with anti-Semites, with Nazis.

Just as all those good Germans who were never party members, but were able to be okay with aiding and abetting mass murder by ignoring it, all the good natured, pleasant neighborly cherry picking in the world cannot forgive such a choice. 

Blithe indifference and hypocrisy just aren’t the defense you’d like them to be.

That said, critical theory—an aspect of progressive woke culture whose presentation, and yes, to a certain extent misrepresentation, can, to my mind, be linked to the down ballot Democratic party shortcomings of 2020—applied to the task of rebuilding after our own all-American variation on Germany’s beer hall putsch, is a potential disaster in the making.

My fear, to paraphrase Winston Churchill—and yes, I know, I know—is  “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Churchill meant, of course, that he saw the events of the day as giving hope of eventual victory over fascism.  For me, I fear we are in for a Cold Civil War, a simmering internecine conflict of values, interrupted by unexpected acts of criminal violence in the name of delusion—cosplay with live ammunition—for the foreseeable future. 

And in that regard, I have a terrible suspicion that the left will bring culture to a gunfight.