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"

Rising Up

Well, it's been a long time.  I've got excuses - actually a lot of great excuses - but they're about as useless as excuses usually are.  The truth is, I've gone numb.

It's not worth the time to even read the headlines anymore.  They arrange themselves in a few broad categories:  Outrage!  Cabinet member is stupid and incompetent!  Dems are asleep!  Illegal! Here's what's going to happen!  Constitution!  Millions affected!  And my favorite, and I'm sure your favorite too:  Trump backs off!

They all have one thing in common:  None of it matters, because nothing will be done.  It will continue for years.  The media circus will charge along happily, with another breathtaking act every day.  Elon Musk and his gazillionaire buds will have all your personal information:  all of it.  The economy will continue to be a very, very slow train wreck.  More and more people will be without healthcare.  We will continue to discover that "Oh - the Federal government does that?  I never knew" when it stops doing that and we notice.  Other people, not us, will be affected, until it is too late.  The liberal consensus (not a partisan term - look it up) will be history, something the Republicans have worked at for decades.  There is no hope in sight, at least not yet.

There's no way to know how it will end.  It could end in any number of apocalyptic disasters, which I don't want to think about.  But it also could happen when someone gets up and does... something.   Who?  I don't know.  A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker.  A housewife.  An activist.  A teenager.  God help us, maybe even an elected representative.  What?  I don't know.  A viral video.  A growing organization.  A young man with a grocery bag, standing in front of a tank.  God help us, maybe legislative action with teeth.  

Early on in this blog, I noted that "denial works only so long, and then you've got to get up and do something.  This is my something."  I made the promise, so I have to do it, however I feel.  OK.  If this guy can rise up, we can all rise up.

I had a vision, which is nothing exceptional:  just an idea that I could see.  It's a foolish idea, but this is my blog, and so here it is.  Every American who is sick of this shit - which polls tell us are a healthy majority - travels to a nearby big city - preferably in a red state, but it probably doesn't matter - and sits in the street somewhere.  This would be, like, 200 million Americans scattered among twenty or thirty cities.  Do the math.  Each of us - every one - has a small sign.  The sign says, "NO."

Like I said, a foolish vision.  But somewhere there's a foolish vision that will take root, grow, and overwhelm us with its brilliant simplicity, it's undeniable truth.  

Watch for it.

Town Meeting

It's the New England Town Meeting time of year.  Registered voters in most towns in New England meet for Town Meeting (never "the" Town Meeting) at least once a year, and act as the legislative body of that town.  Not their representatives - the people themselves.  Their job is slightly different from state to state, but they all gather to decide on policy, planning, taxes and budget.  And anything else that comes up.

It's the purest form of democracy you've ever seen.  They've been doing it for four hundred years.  Everyone gets a say, everyone gets to speak, including Jim Edgerton (left), subject of  "Freedom of Speech" by Norman Rockwell.  He was a real voter in a real town - Arlington, MA - at a real Town Meeting in 1942.  He was against building a new school, and got up to say so.  He was the only one there who opposed the project, but everyone else listened to what he had to say until he was done.  Then everyone voted - one person, one vote - and they went on to the next item on the agenda.

Voting is a serious thing.  All registered voters attending Town Meeting are given a voting card, maybe the size of an IPhone, and when it's time to vote you raise your hand with the card in it.  First the "ayes" and then the "nays."  The moderator decides who which has prevailed, unless it's close, at which time the tellers get up and count their sections and report the results.  Majority rules.

As you probably know, we've had a house in Truro, MA for almost ten years; we pay taxes there but vote in Oneonta, NY.  We're "non-resident taxpayers," and we get to attend Town Meeting and have our say, just like everyone else.  We just don't get to vote.  I've been to Town Meeting, but haven't spoken.  This year, it was televised on local-access TV, and I watched the whole thing - all five hours of it.  I was moved by the ordinary people just like me who gathered under a big tent on the school ballfield, on a perfectly good Saturday in May, to do democracy.  They came together with their neighbors to make decisions that ranged from the annual budget to a massive affordable housing project to giving seniors a $50 break on a dump permit.  It was community, it was responsibility, it was, in many cases, passion, and it was democracy in action.

Arlington still has Town Meeting.  This year, in the deep, dark days for democracy, Arlington Town Moderator Greg Christiana said this to his fellow moderators, at a gathering before the season started:

“Right now, people are afraid. They see a government systematically chilling free speech. The tyranny of fear is setting in. It might seem like a good time to keep your head down and stay quiet, but silence at a time like this would be a grave mistake. Here in New England, we always stood against tyranny, including by votes at town meetings like this, and I hope we always will.”

Turns out the town was named Arlington to honor those who had fallen while defending democracy, and who are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  New Englanders are like that.  There's a bridge here.  It's in Concord.  Come for our democracy, and we'll be waiting on the other side. 

Why We're At Where We're At

 .

                      "I don't really mind the government's new death ray, 

                                             because it hasn't hit me yet."

                                                                                               The New Yorker, yesterday

Circles

I've long searched for a way to describe the difference between progressives/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans, without being judgmental or condescending.  We hold different fundamental views about basic values and how human interaction works - but how to describe these difference?

And then Heather Cox Richardson, reporting on the new Pope, juxtaposed the fundamental beliefs of two Catholics, a Pope named Bob from Chicago, and a VP named Vance from Ohio.  Vance first: 

Vice-President J.D. Vance is one of those hard-line right-wing Catholics. Shortly after taking office in January, Vance began to talk of the concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love,” articulated by Catholic St. Augustine, claiming it justified the MAGA emphasis on family and tribalism and suggesting it justified the mass expulsion of migrants.

Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “[Y]ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” When right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, who is Catholic, posted Vance’s interview approvingly, Vance added: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.”

And now Pope Bob, in a tweet on X:

“JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Subsequently, his mentor, a Pope named Frank from Argentina, had written: 

 On February 10, Pope Francis responded in a letter to American bishops. He corrected Vance’s assertion as a false interpretation of Catholic theology. “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

In other words, we have the motto of a cop named Harry from LA:

Everybody counts or nobody counts. 

So what it comes down to is - who counts?   Is there a hierarchy, or is everyone in with no one left out?

There's a lot to process here.  How does this work in the real world?  I think the difference we're trying to understand boils down to the effort we make - effort that is successful or not.  That effort is only hinted at in what seems like a simple, whimsical poem by Edward Markham:

“He drew a circle that shut me out-

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle and took him In!”

I think that the lifelong struggle to "take him in" is never easy; we can - must - orient our lives around it, or not.  That's the difference.  It's what kind of circle you draw.

For me, I'm glad to 'violate basic common sense' and try my best to draw a circle that includes everyone, with no one left out.  It ain't easy, and I'm often unsuccessful, but it's just part of who I am.  And that's where my politics comes from.

UPDATE:

tl:dr:

The Arc of the Tariff

 

                     "For too long, we've all suffered the bizarre and oppressive policies

                                                     that I installed last week."

                                                                                                                  The New Yorker, today