This was a short essay I wrote a few years ago and have toyed with either expanding or publishing as-is. I decided upon the latter. It’s basic point, that rebellion is justified according to the prime value of a culture, is to my mind eloquently expressed. There’s obviously a great deal more to say on the subject, and someday I hope to do so.
Starting today, January 13, and for the next 5 days, it’s free to download. Hope you enjoy it.
I’m done with blogging about politics. It no longer interests me. This election has driven from me the desire to man the digital barricades. In the years I’ve spent shouting from my soapbox here, I’ve accomplished nothing.
Gun to my head, only vote that matters, forced to choose between Trump and Clinton? I’m not voting Clinton. That’s about as much as I can say.
For further details, hit this Medium article. If I have anything to say about political drama, I’ll say it there.
Not this election cycle. Maybe not the next one. But it’s coming.
In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.
It both explains the Trump phenomenon as a manifestation of this regime change, and explains why he is likely not the solution for it. Read the Whole Thing.
So, I was at the gym this morning, and in between sets I tend to gaze up at the TV. The one closest to me always has MSNBC on, which is fine, as it’s good to absorb the framing of the other side (for the record, I’m a declared Gary Johnson supporter, but I’m not very happy about it, which is sort of defeating the purpose. But some rictus in my soul wants not to vote for Trump, and every time I consider doing that, he says or does something that makes me realize that he’s a Democrat in GOP clothing, and I don’t want to vote for the more-tolerable Democrat in the race). And the crew on Morning Joe were discussing Birtherism, and seizing upon it as the way to upend the narrative of the last few weeks. The gist I got from Joe et. al was that The Donald had refused to admit that President Obama was born in the United States, that he was still a birther.
So I get on twitter, and I check on things, and I find this link to the Trump Campaign’s press statment on the issue.
Now, when you read it, you will likely be a) rolling your eyes, b) laughing in admiration, or c) both. Basically, he puts Birtherism on Hillary (which is true, her gang started it in 2008), and credits himself with bringing the issue to a close by forcing Obama to release is birth certificate.
But that’s not what’s important to me. What’s important to me is that the statement, released yesterday, contains these words:
Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.
Now, either the derps at Morning Joe don’t know this, in which case they suck at their jobs, or they do know this and are ignoring it, in which they know what their real jobs are: soulless Outer Party flacks in the business of denying reality for the sake of their Inner Party masters.
I mean, I know they’re a prog network, but this is the willful contradiction of evidence right under their noses relevant to the topic under discussion. How the hell do you even do that?
Of course, I didn’t watch the whole thing, so their may have been one of those “he said it, but he didn’t say it in such a way that satisfies our fine sensibilities” dodges. So I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt as regards the sophistication of their sophistry.
This election…
Now, before we get all transphobic, and talking about how someone born biologically male can’t ever have babies, or some such hate-speech, (because biology is a patriarchal construct, okay?) we need to recognize that this is really about consciousness being elevated.
“I would say ultimately all advocacy begins with elevated consciousness and because of movements like Black Lives Matter where you have seen trans women at the fore of that, because of the public accommodations legislation, because of so many things that are happening at a policy level, our consciousness is being elevated,” Pressley said. “I do believe that as our consciousness is elevated we will be better informed, better educated, and we can mobilize around those issues.”
Somebody paid a lot of money to learn how to talk like that. A Lot. Of Money. Someone wrote college admission essays, filled out FAFSAs, and read reams upon reams of cretinous po-mo argle-bargle so that they could, with a straight face, reconstruct this scene from Life of Brian:
These people are making it very hard not to pull the lever for Trump. I don’t like the guy, and can’t imagine he would be better than mediocre, at best, ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania. But I kind of want to make these idiots suffer, and he’s up for that job.
Edit: Fixed. The lack of video embeddage was bothering me.
Watch as a bunch of white people convince themselves that smiling is racist.
I don’t know why they’re bothering with these dialectics. A handy flow-chart will suffice for their needs.
I don’t know if Glenn Beck is really talking about what he sounds like he’s talking about here. As I read it, he was speaking hypothetically, like “what do we do if?…” The sentiment, however, is common enough to be talked of. Sometimes people feel like killing a President. But it’s been a while since someone killed a president out of patriotic obligation, out of the need to dispatch a tyrant. In fact, I’m pretty sure the last one to do that was acting out of patriotic obligation to an abhorrent rebellion aimed at using the rhetoric of liberty in order to keep men in bondage.
But let’s say that Trump, or Hillary for that matter, becomes the caudillo/caudilla of our worst nightmares. Is assassination the way to deal with him/her?
No. Here is why:
If classical references are lost on you, this is the Death of Caesar. Julius Caeser was assassinated at the beginning of a public meeting of the Senate by 12 Senators who had decided that Julius Caeser was a threat to the Republic, that his becoming Dictator Perpetuus was the latest in a string of unconstitutional excesses that would end in Rome becoming an authoritarian state.
In this, they were almost certainly correct.
But in assassinating them, they made that state certain. In assassinating Caesar, they made him a martyr, and themselves – and the cause they espoused – the enemies of good order. Within a few years, the Roman imperium is divided among Caeser’s heirs. Within 20, Octavian has legally obtained from a tame Senate all the authority that matters. And the Roman people stood mum as long peace obtained.
Brutus and Cassius failed. John Wilkes Booth failed. Assassination is not a path to liberty.
