Duty

Today Josh Marshall starts a conversation about how proximity to power - in this case the Trump administration - seems to constrain one's ability to speak one's mind - or even speak at all. He notes that the further you are from power, the better able you are to say what you think.  In It's a Good Life (later a Twilight Zone episode), by Jerome Bixby, if you said something that three-year-old Anthony Fremont didn't like, you found yourself under the cornfield.  Apparently, the same thing is happening in the Trump administration.

Here's how Josh concludes his piece:

But I do get the sense that the strongly inculcated assumption that you can say what you think, that you don’t need to censor yourself, is more vibrant and ingrained in people at some remove from the centers of immense power and wealth. When you’re closer you’re more practiced at rationalizing things. And if that’s true that’s a good thing.

But you and I, we're not close enough to power to be sent under the cornfield (at least, not yet).  We can speak our minds.  I have criticized the President* whenever I thought it necessary, and will continue to do so.  Millions like and unlike me are doing the same. That's what he means by the "good thing."

So I'm going to take the "good thing" and do another something.  In less than an hour, I'll be heading out to a vacant lot in Oneonta to join a lot of other people who are "at some remove from the centers of immense power and wealth" and speak my mind.  We'll stand in the rain and then march around Oneonta, with one message:  NO KINGS.  Not even - not especially - the one who has silenced the powerful.  

We'll keep our distance, take a stand, and send a message.  Here's mine:

I'm no good at making signs.  Doesn't matter.  I'll be there.  Remember these words from a terrorist's manifesto:

...when a government becomes destructive and abuses its power, the people have both the right and the duty to alter or abolish it and establish a new one. 

The terrorist was Thomas Jefferson.  The manifesto was the Declaration of Independence.

 

UPDATE:  And of course Heather Cox Richardson has made a video today that takes the point further, suggesting that the protests by those of us who have little power can influence those who do have power, and perhaps break the silence.

NO KINGS Oneonta was awesome.  Huge numbers of people doing democracy.

This is what democracy looks like

A New Language

Just passing on something wonky, but crucial and urgently true, that Heather Cox Richardson said toward the end of the Grounded video podcast (scroll down for transcript), which was one of the two I mentioned yesterday.  The host asked her, "Imagine you're helping prepare a future university history professor who will teach a class on the rise of Donald Trump to students in the year 2075.  What are the major points you would want to make sure that are not forgotten about what's happening right now?"

Here's the beginning of her answer:

Well, I don't think anyone's going to forget because it's pretty obvious, but the use of language by the radical right in the United States, beginning in the 1980s, but really taking off in the 1990s when you had people like House Speaker Newt Gingrich literally distributing lists of words to use to describe Democrats versus Republicans.  And the Democrats were words like traitor and weak and you know, poverty, and the Republicans were things like patriots, strong, powerful, really taking off in the 1990s*, and how that dovetailed with with the use of language and what became known as virtual technology in the former Soviet republics, where people who were working in politics quite deliberately created a false reality in order to get people to vote away their democracy. And I think that because I study ideas, I think that control of people's minds through the use of certain kinds of rhetoric is really the story of America in this moment.

And it has been building for a very long time. It's a mistake, I think, to look at Trump as an individual who came from nowhere. He was built by this system and took advantage of it. And that central misuse of disinformation and that concept of disinformation and its dovetailing between the U.S. and the former Soviet republics and then its amplification through social media is, I think, the story of this era. And one of the reasons I think it's so important for those of us who are grounded in reality to push back. In many ways, we are fighting a war today. 

The use of language.  Language matters.  They're good at it; us, not so much.  The 80s were nearly a half century ago, which is plenty of time to create a new reality, intentionally constructed for specific purposes.  Plenty of time to change the way people hear about and speak about the political landscape and (although for the most part they don't know it) their own lives and their own political behaviors.

We need to, somehow, make the language of both truth and compassion central to our culture.  The language is there; we need to agree to it, and use it.

* - This was also the time of the rise of AM talk radio, including Rush Limbaugh, and the rise of Fox News.

In Which We Are Surprised By The Possibility of a New World

Today I had the great pleasure of watching two video podcasts featuring Heather Cox Richardson.  I haven't even finished them (they're long), but am saving them to savor.  

Anyway, nerdy fandom aside, I heard some things that made me think, and think in a different, maybe more hopeful way.  I heard them taking about the new world.

This is exciting, of course, because it is exactly what I was writing about for three years in The New World, a blog about how the death and destruction and cultural upheaval of the COVID pandemic might allow us to reassemble and redefine our world, and the way we do things, to take advantage of the lessons we learned.  It was guided by what Peter Baker wrote in The Guardian in 2020:  "But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds."

As far as I could tell, we didn't learn anything, and I gave up.  There was no new world.

But in each of her two conversations today (one with Pete Buttigieg - a nerdy twofer!), I heard echoes of this hope:  we can upgrade the way we govern, and the way we serve Americans, if we can navigate this turning point in a way that results in the possibility of a better America.

This sounds a little crazy at this exact point in American history, but Richardson lays out what has happened before, during other turning points, and how we came out of them better than we went in.  She feels strongly that there is hope for our institutions and our people if we can do what has to be done now to survive this moment.  Her cautious optimism is built on a number of factors which I won't go into here (the inherent weakness of the Administration; the unpopularity of almost everything that is happening, etc.), and she is clear on what we need to do to achieve a new world:  we need to, pretty much, rise up.  As is noted in the previous post, this is starting in Los Angeles.

So go watch these conversations.  I would love to know whether you're hearing them the same way I am.  Is the new world possible, or is the damage permanent?  This may emerge as the single most important issue we face now and in the near future. 

The Shot Heard Round the World

I remember writing, a month or so ago, in a post about town meeting, "There's a bridge here.  It's in Concord.  Come for our democracy, and we'll be waiting on the other side."

The resistance in Los Angeles?  That's what I meant.  Will it be "the shot heard round the world?"  Probably not.  But it will be one of them, stretching over a period of time, becoming more and more significant.

Watch for it.

Not Funny

"I'm extremely confident about your case now that breaking the law doesn't carry the stigma that it used to"