Slouching towards Washington

The Centre Cannot Hold

I don’t usually post two days in a row but this insanity has been on my mind. I am just a citizen sharing some of my thoughts but also the thoughts and opinions of folks who seriously know how to turn a phrase. Cobbling it all together is a temporary purge and also an attempt to enlighten…myself and you.

Most of my friends tucked away in our liberal, humanist, democratic socialist bubble have known for quite some time that the Republican Party is a species of unreflective, feeble-minded power and money hungry psychotics. And if it’s not evident to any semi-thinking being that the former occupant of the White House is the most crude and arrogant sexual predator, failed business owner, and con man to come down the pike, there’s no getting through to the followers of this cult.

As you know, the bill to establish a bi-partisan commission to investigate the insurrection on January 6 just needed the votes of ten GOP Senators. Ten. Guess what? Mitch “do me a favor and vote no” McConnell is either guilty of something or still lapping up the orange man’s discharge. There is no central place to meet and we’ve also known this since the days McConnell blocked every piece of legislation coming out of Obama’s White House.

Bi-partisanship and centrism has not worked for a long time.

Rebecca Solnit just wrote a a piece in the Guardian saying, “Centrists in the antebellum era were apathetic or outright resistant to ending slavery in the US and then in the decades before 1920 to giving women the vote. The civil rights movement was not nearly as popular in its time as moderates who like the more polite quotes from Martin Luther King Jr think it was. King himself famously declared, ‘I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice …’ As King notes, the status quo is always changing, and the centrists are often resistant to change that expands rights and justice, more mild about efforts by the right to shrink those things in favor of more inequality and more authoritarianism.”

She also said, “I saw a tweet the other day that said the Secret Service and US Capitol police must have been incompetent or complicit to be blindsided by the 6 January insurrection. The writer didn’t seem to grasp the third option: that the Secret Service was unable to see past the assumptions that middle-aged conservative white men don’t pose a threat to democracy and the rule of law, that elected officials in powerful places weren’t whipping up a riot or worse, that danger meant outsiders and others. A decade ago, when I went to northern Japan for the first anniversary of the Great Tohuko Earthquake and tsunami, I was told that the hundred-foot-high wave of black water was so inconceivable a sight that some people could not recognize it and the danger it posed. Others assumed this tsunami would be no bigger than those in recent memory and did not flee high enough. A lot of people died of not being able to see the unanticipated.”

Along with all that, anti-Semite Marjorie Taylor Greene has become the de-facto leader of the hillbilly party. Finger wagging aside, this nut is allowed to run free and tweet such drivel as, “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star. Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.” CNN’s Chris Cillizza writes, “Republican leaders are effectively condoning Greene’s rhetoric and actions by refusing to take any actual steps to walk away from her.”

Lee Papa penned on May 26th about Greene, “It's not just Cro-Magnon Barbie doll Marjorie Taylor Greene and her antisemitic grunts while waving a spear and screaming at the moon for murdering the sun. She and a few other hysterical shit babies just sent a letter to the Secretary of Defense whining about ‘the creeping left-wing extremism in the U.S. military.’ What's the evidence of this? Is it an attempt to steal military equipment to attack Wall Street? No, it's that soldiers might have to watch a video with a lesbian couple and their kids. Or they might have to do some diversity training. This is their response to an investigation into right-wing extremism in the military, which is not about teaching soldiers not to be racist, but is about violent motherfuckers joining things like, oh, hey, a coup against the U.S. government.”

To add even more fuel to the seriously radical GOP agenda, Heather Cox Richardson penned last night: As if in illustration of the party’s increasingly antidemocratic radicalism, in Georgia last night, Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) continued to stoke the same Big Lie that drove the insurrectionists, claiming (falsely) that former president Trump won the 2020 election. The two representatives are on a tour of rallies, possibly to distract from the scandals in which they’re embroiled. Last night, Gaetz, who is under federal investigation for sex trafficking, told attendees that the nation’s founders wrote the Second Amendment to enable citizens to rise up against the government. “It’s not about hunting, it’s not about recreation, it’s not about sports,” he said. “The Second Amendment is about maintaining, within the citizenry, the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary.”

“The bloody rich. The quality. They worried about everything, unaware of the soft life they enjoyed. They looked down on everyone, including other rich people, and not a single one of them, in his experience, was ever happy. They lacked respect for life.”
– Gil Adamson, The Ridgerunner

The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?