I’ve been mulling over what the people currently abusing their power want. What is it that they’re longing for as they ban books, cancel cancer research, and outlaw human beings? My conclusion is that they want a time based on the past where they were somehow even better off than they already are.
What do all those magical days of yore have in common? They ended. All of them. They couldn’t survive the future.
I’m reminding myself of this almost daily. What they want never survives. They always fail. Yes, they can wreak havoc and despair, and bludgeon entire ways of life, but in the end, their center cannot hold, as the poem goes.
Many times when reading the accounts of some new outrageous behavior this administration then denies ever happened, I realize it sounds so familiar. Steal a list of names to hunt for enemies so you can persecute them, for example. Watergate anyone? Tech today lets them do it from a computer instead of hiring burglars, but OMG, they’re no trickier than Nixon.
Why hold a red-hat protest in a park historically safe for gay or trans people? Same reason the white conehat people marched in Skokie. For people younger than me, the bottomless pit of spite and cruelty feels new, of course, but I see in it the same-old-tired same-old-thing.
Their entire game plan, that they think they wrote all by their own little selves, is stolen from old playbooks for ways of life that failed.
The echo of “Have you no decency? Have you no shame?” is loud in my head. By the way, if you haven’t watched Good Night, and Good Luck recently, treat yourself. You will recognize the tactics. Right out of history, including archival footage – watch how the lies withered, and the witch hunt failed.
None of which is to say we don’t fight and resist. We have to. And we’ll win, and our children will win. Again. The foreseeable outcomes of their recklessness toward science and health are nothing but bad, and I don’t mean to make light of that. It’s very real. I share in the mass despair of “Not this again, do we really have to win this again? Seriously?”
Maybe it’s because I make a living with creativity that, on top of all the reasons I find these people universally contemptible, I also feel a pitying disdain for their copy-paste goals stolen from failed regimes.
So many lies. So much intellectual dishonesty. So much bad faith. So much open intent to simply hurt people because they can. Sometimes you have to grab your bunny and scream, “There are four lights!” Yes, I know I’m mixing up fandoms and I don’t care.*
History tells us how to resist: in big and little ways. There is no single best way. Every way matters. Individuals make a difference and yet we are still strongest together.
They want our joy, and they can’t fucking have it. And, yes, I will cuss the entire time.
*Fine. Screenshot from Thor: Love and Thunder of a really pissed off Asgardian girl. Quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 6, Episode 11 wherein Picard can gain safety if he’ll only say there are five lights.
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