It is this time
And that’s not Kamala Harris’s fault
It’s not the democrats
It is Donald Trump’s fault
It is Mike Johnson’s fault
It is this GOP’s fault
A vote for democracy is anyway a joyous one — it is a vote for honesty, clarity, competency, fair play, and the kind of loving everybody-wins tussle that only one whose heart is bent on crime would find oppressive.
Why do believe that Donald Trump’s project is essentially an evil one?
And how is it that this is so obvious to me and not to everyone?
How can it be, for example, that sincere religious believers can imagine Donald Trump is on God’s side and his opponents are aiding the forces of evil?
What makes Donald Trump’s political career fundamentally different from the normal arguing, tussling, biased, truth-bending US American politician?
It comes down to agreeing to be constrained by democratic standards, rules, and norms.
Before it was taken for granted that our politicians would submit to the fair fight of fair elections.
It had seemed impossible that the nation would let them not, so they weren’t really tested, but the politicians who thrived understood and embraced the concept of representative government: I will do my best to govern well for the entire nation, and then when my term is up, I will take my case to my constituents, and if I did a good job and had a little luck, I will win again. And if I lose: Well, who cares? It’s not like we live in a dictatorship, where only people who are actively ruling don’t have to worry about the rulers using the power of the state to intimidate, punish, and destroy their political enemies.
Trump was not comfortable with the checks on his power and worked against press freedoms and the independence of congress and the judiciary in his first term. Also, lying has always been a core part of his political strategy, and his reliance on this fundamentally anti-democratic tactic has increased as his political career has matured. In a healthy representative government where the people have the final say and everyone is protected with fundamental rights like the freedom to speak without government retribution, the free press calls you out on dishonesty and eventually your lies catch up with you. Well, at least that was the old idea; but in the fracturing of the nation into separate realities, the Republican Party had already become the party of rampant disinformation (Fox News has long relentlessly cherry picked and spun the news to suit conservatives, Breitbart repeats false narratives they I guess heard somewhere; and in the case of the Domino voting machines, Fox News let their hosts repeat conspiracy theories that Fox News knew to be false, was sued and lost — in which catastrophe Rupert Murdoch learned not that you shouldn’t let your hosts spread stories you know are false, but that you shouldn’t ever put anything in an email). And so lying worked amazingly well for Trump, and then, and then came the corruption of the Republican Party.
When did the Republican Party embrace political evil?
They did this when they silenced the voices who spoke out against Trump’s lie about the 2020 election and elevated those voices who echoed, or at least corroborated his lies.
At this point, they became a party of political evil — a party willing to use the tools of the state to commit crimes against their own citizens.
Why do I say this? Because we have hours and hours of testimony from members of Donald Trump’s own administration explaining how they thwarted his month-long crusade to overturn the 2020 election. And those people were not celebrated by the GOP, but sidelined. And who has risen to the top? People like Mike Johnson who first repeated one unfounded conspiracy theory after another before settling on a specious constitutional argument to call the entire 2020 election into questions, and who used that nonsense to justify Trump’s behavior, even though Trump was clearly not thinking in legal intricacies, but was merely attempting to find any way, legal or illegal and with morality not even a topic, to stay in power, to not lose, to not be a “loser”. [For more on this argument of Mike Johnson’s, please see What we Know, an essay maybe thirty entries back in this lonely blog.]
With the embrace of Donald Trump’s lies, the GOP has become the Russia of my youth. I remember Dad shaking his head in disbelief and saying, “The Russians just say anything, and then they repeat it, or maybe they change it, they just lie all the time.” Yes, they did then and they today. Why? Because then and now the government of Russia was an autocratic regime where the government uses its power to suppress dissent and force itself on the people, who cannot remove it, and who must live under it and can therefore chose to either acquiesce to a leadership that routinely and as a matter of policy commits crimes against its citizens, or they can risk their livelihoods, the safety of themselves and their loved ones. In Russia fear makes true. And in Trump’s GOP, the same upside logic holds. Truth is on its head; those who would stand up for truth are drummed out; those who embrace any ridiculous lie to support Donald Trump are raised up, are the “future”. This is evil. This is so clearly evil.
We will have to continue this essay later.
Not here to defeat Donald Trump
Here to rally the nation to see clearly enough to stop the evil that has corrupted him and his party
emotional violence paired with intellectual haze
A will towards might makes right and fear as proof of truth
The ends justify the means and the co-opting of spirituality in the service of justifying evil
What is it?
How has it happened?
It is political evil
It has happened because the people have forgotten their most important job
Our first priority is to safeguard the structure of a government by for and of the people — that they might protect themselves and their fellows from top-down crime and the topsy-turvey morality it engenders
Getting our way in xyz policy detail is a secondary concern
After all, if we hand our shared government over to tyranny, we all lose — victory in such settings comes at the price of soul
I need your help
You need my help
We need our help
This game is still being played on the level of ideas and feelings
Trump wills and his GOP enables an adjustment of the rules into violence and state sanctioned crime
That is what is going on here
That is what we must make this election about
That is why we must speak as one clear gentle but firm
No Donald and Co, No: this country is not your weapon and show piece
It is our home and we have a right and a duty to stop you here and now
You have shown your cards
And they are evil
This man embodies the fears of the founders of our democratic republic
You know this
So please help us find the voice to do our collective duty —- not to bitch and moan but to actively stop this evil
where?
Into a sinkhole?
Down the drain?
Into your hills and valley?
It has to go somewhere
I have to be allowed to be both through and beyond it
Otherwise
its lie grows
and
its truth shrinks
and I have nowhere any good to put so much of what would be both me and good
in the right
fishbowl
I can’t do this anymore
Please, no more
Tired
Don’t want to keep pretending
Pretending I don’t feel the hurt and what it implies
Pretending some lonely stressful-boring slowly-drowning-while-desperately-treading ritual is my metier
Pretending I don’t taste smell and feel political evil dripping off the gears of the city waterworks
Pretending this lonely life is some kind of a home
Pretending frustration is just a background noise
Waking up with the unresolved wounded seething threads once again writhing through
Please no more
what you are doing is evil
at some point choosing conspiracy theories and disinformation over a readily available adequate-accuracy is choosing evil.
You are choosing evil.
That is evil.
I cannot wake you up in time.
You have let me down.
You have crushed my spirit.
You have told me that I am so worthless that my voice should no longer count.
Not just me — but pretty much everyone I’m close to.
We’re all so worthless that democracy should be taken from us.
And given to, well, actually, you must realize: it will be given to no one, it will just be killed.
What you’re doing is evil.
You don’t know it, but people rarely do.
What would you have me do?
And when we die, am I to be reconciled to your evil?
Am I to know you again as if you were just a victim of circumstances?
I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in you, in my country.
Everything I’d known was true and trustworthy has been proven to be a lie.
You were just pretending all along.
Just pretending to want to share this nation with me.
Just waiting for the chance to force yourself on everyone else.
I call it abuse.
It feels like abuse.
I call it crime.
I call it evil.
It smells, tastes, feels like the same boring old evil that always wins in the end, because people always betray each other sooner or later.
I didn’t betray you.
You betrayed me.
And I have no response.
I sit here and wait to die.
I give up.
What you are doing is evil.
You should stop.
You have really hurt me.
I did not think you would do this to me.
I wish I had never been born
I don’t want to live through this
What you are doing is world-historically evil
You have a clean conscious
But that does not mean it doesn’t count
It just means you are lying to yourself
Am I crazy?
I feel like I am in outer space
When I was a kid I remember my father saying that the Russians just say anything, just lie and then repeat it, and that works there
Not here of course
Oh?
Not here?
A man corrupts himself; he then corrupts the party he leads; what happens when that man and that party are given power over the nation?
You are serving political evil
It’s called political “evil” because when it rules, sooner or later it becomes the old-fashioned evil (people lose their all their money and security for telling the truth; people disappear for disagreeing; people’s bodies are squished for saying No to a criminal government)
We were supposed to be on the same team
We were supposed to say No to evil together — to at least have each other’s backs that much
But evil is learning that we’re not going to say No to evil; that it’s too much to ask of us
We are failures
We are jokes
We are evil
Well, friends, I have failed
That’s all
I thought I could help
But I was wrong
Now I will move to Spain, or maybe Portugal
Actually, how am I going to pay for that?
So I’m stuck here, waiting for the evil with the rest of you
But the evil is already here — we failed to say No to the evil; that was itself an evil
Why was I born?
To watch this vapid fool waltz in and commandeer the gears and levers of the most powerful nation in the world, while it’s so-called free citizens get chips on their laps and beer on their chins
To live through this
For what?
I remember being a kid and being told I lived in the greatest country in the world because here we were free to tell the truth and make our own way, we didn’t have to fear our government, and we all had refrigerators and access to libraries
Hmmm
Per Jesus Christ, the most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
Therefore, if one uses Christianity in a way that does not further one’s love for God and everyone, one is — per the founder of Christianity — misusing Christianity.
Per the Constitution of the United States of America,
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Therefore, if one uses the Constitution of the United States of America in a way that does not further these goals, one is — per the writers of that document — misusing the constitution.
But all these goods require that We the People keep our shared government out of the hands of would-be tyrants.
There you have it, Mike Johnson: You’re own wisdom meme. I’m sorry, but you can’t unhear it. I’m sorry, but it seeps in and spreads out through your conscious space, lining the back of you. I’m sorry, but it will hunt you down and undo the truths you thought were yours until you remember who you were before you started needing to win.
Picture this:
It’s Saturday. You spent the morning writing another triumphant essay and doing a great shoulders and legs work out. Then you watch the last one and a half episodes of a series you’ve really enjoyed and are even calling “art”. You have one giant beer (nut brown ale) with a few nuts and head out to take in a salsa class, dropping your laundry on the way; after salsa you go shopping at the co-op, where you buy a lot delicious organic produce, some nuts and seeds, a Swiss cheese made in Switzerland with raw milk, and a few other essentials.
You are walking to the train and feeling sore. Your legs are sore and your shoulders are too, and so is upper back, and you’ve got a bookbag and two giant canvas bags — all laden down with groceries.
You see them, a man a woman and a child, standing in front of a bank. It’s night time on a Saturday, so the bank is of course closed. They have a sign. A sign on cardboard. You look away. You guess it says that they are from Ecuador and need help. Lately that’s what you’ve been seeing around Brooklyn: Young families with signs saying they are from Ecuador and they are stranded and they need help. You look away because it is embarrassing to walk past them with all these expensive groceries on your shoulders.
The essay that you’d worked on all morning and that you thought was good, but that you’d been tweaking a little in your mind as you made your way to and from your salsa lesson, made good use of Jesus’s most important commandment. And so, as you look away you can’t help but note that this is not what the Good Samaritan would do. It just isn’t. It isn’t at all the radical selfless love that Jesus preached.
When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, he didn’t go for any part of the Ten Commandments or other clear cut rules. He gave a mystical formulation: Love God with everything you are and love yourself and everyone else equally. That’s not a rule, or a rule of thumb, it is a poetic pointing-towards a way of being that is deeper and wider than human feelings, ideas, and words.
But when asked to clarify a point — who exactly counts as my neighbor? — Jesus gave a very concrete, real-life example and a very clear, albeit impossible to fulfill, command.
Maybe sometimes a person can stop what they are doing and fully attend to someone in need, but you can’t walk anywhere in Brooklyn very long without seeing people with signs, people asking for help who look like they could use a lot of help. You could give them a dollar or a few dollars. You could look away to save yourself the embarrassment of walking past them with lots of groceries that you bought specifically to satisfy your own habits, notions, and schedules. You could stop and talk to them and hear their story — your Spanish is pretty good. What would Jesus actually do? He didn’t stop and help everybody all the time. And sometimes he only seemed to give out miracles begrudgingly. And anyway it’s a big and pretty unfair advantage to be able to do miracles — although now that I think about it, he never magically wished away anyone’s poverty.
Strictly speaking, the commandment is to have 100% love for God shining through everything, including your conscious moment and the conscious moments of everyone else, and to love yourself and everyone else with that God-directed and God-grounded loving. So the commandment is mostly and inward one. So, strictly speaking, you can tell yourself you’re following the commandment pretty well even if you aren’t. But the story of the Good Samaritan is harder to fudge. And we’re tested every day over and over and we come up wanting. We even sometimes explain to ourselves that the most important commandment has value as a poem and a type of koan and a meditation and an important point, but of course you can’t really do it because there’s things you have to do and if you open up your heart to everyone all the time in this busy world: why, you’ll just get sucked into everybody else’s problems all the time, and never get anything done! Right? The experiment seems too dangerous to take. And, anyway, it’s clearly impossible; so pretending you can do it is just a lie you tell yourself.
This is a problem for the mystically-minded seeker who finds Jesus’s formulation of the path convincing. It is a problem, also, for the practical-minded Christian who has decided to make following Jesus Christ a fundamental part of their own life. What do we do? We agree here, but our agreement is about the necessity of adopting a path that neither of us quite understands and that seems to conflict with both our needs to take care of ourselves, our loved ones, do our tasks, live in the world.
I think it is worth pointing out that our agreement here is part of the general agreement of humanity to be first and foremost mystical believers in Love, and to also not let any dogmas keep us from abiding by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing). For we all know that either Love is True or we have no path towards being meaningful to ourselves. And we all know that we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we think/feel aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully-sharing. But we all also know that our ideas about spiritual Love are not the same as spiritual Love, and that confusing one’s ideas and feelings about the True Good with the True Good account for a good part of human evil. Hence we all know — at some level — that we can only be meaningful to ourselves by centering our feeling/thinking/acting around spiritual Love and attempting to interpret that Love in our feeling/thinking/acting, but always remembering that that Love is wider and deeper than our feeling/thinking/acting, so we cannot pretend any of our ideas or feelings are the Truth, but must always keep working to better follow Pure Love — always self-critiquing -analyzing, and -adjusting, always starting over again, always pushing out from within and praying again for the wisdom to be gentle with ourselves and others.
It is for this reason that I argue that a liberal democratic republican form of government is a spiritual good: It allows us to keep our government from corruption and from committing crimes against us and others, and in this way we together safeguard those universal values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us; and we also keep the world safe for spiritual Love: after all, the great evil of tyrannical governments is that they require people to choose between (A) accepting, being complicit in, pretending not to see, and to some degree participating in large-scale evil, or (B) telling the truth, doing the right thing, sticking up for your neighbor, saying No to dishonesty, unfairness, corruption, and cruelty. It’s not that you cannot follow a holy path in a tyranny, but forcing those kinds of hopeless my-family-versus-your-family choices onto people does everyone a great disservice. In a healthy democracy, the aims of the government line up well with the universal values: Tell the truth, be accurate and competent, govern well, seek win-wins for the good of all, and then, when you are up for reelection, with a pure heart, make your case to the people and let them decide how well you did. And if you lose: Okay, because it is better to lose power in a liberal democratic republic than it is to have to spend your life desperately handing onto power in a tyranny, when to stay in charge you’ve committed crimes against your own citizens, and so if you ever lose power: uh oh!, so that’s not an option.
Donald Trump wants to be dictator. And that means he wants to imprison himself in a life of crimes committed against this nation. For everyone’s sake — including his — we must together tell him and his would-be lackeys: NO.
But I digress.
The point is, Jesus is much more radical than any of his followers. If regular people get as radical as him, they end up becoming evil. Because they don’t have the fingers for it; they can get his zeal, but they can’t get the compassion that makes that zeal a spiritual good. Well, that’s not entirely true: There are saints, there are holy people, there are people who put Love first. But they are not most people, and they are not the person we imagined you to be today as you walked past the family on the street with the cardboard sign that you didn’t even read. So what right do you have to essays that invoke the most important commandment? And yet, what right do preachers have to preach the Gospel when most preachers are also not getting very close to the spiritual Love that Jesus said was the whole point of the religious life?
Where does that leave us? One hypocrite scolding another?
How did you do this, Charlie Covell?
I want to understand how you wove it, how you made Kaos, how you made art.
Everyone was worth knowing, all the characters had textures and hearts and minds. It lived for every episode. And it is true that no one can destroy the Fates, no one can destroy the intrinsic order — not the gods, not humans, not Kaos, not anyone.
It was a good series. I can’t imagine you can do it again, but I never guessed you’d be able to do it in the first place. So maybe! You couldn’t help but love them all, all the people, all the gods, all the Titans, even the Fates, even the only ones so truly blessed and immortal that the completely surpass our mortal frameworks.
It was good. A lot of times you keep watching these series because you want to see what is next, even though you don’t really care. But this time I cared, and I believed. I cared because I believed that every character was essentially human, a real human, a unique set of possibilities realized in unique circumstances.
What can we learn from this? How might we achieve this ourselves? Here and now in this art that we so desperately seek, the one that would actually help — not by being didactic, but by being true.
Because ideas were born, but they were not forced; they grew out of the characters and their shared reality and the always-plausible (within this reality) circumstances.
It was very good. And it was really neat to see a reality that we no longer take seriously taken seriously, made possible, made inhabitable — inhabited even.
Do we ever understand our fates? I don’t think so. Sometimes we try to submit to the will of God; sometimes we try to be our own person; and so we twist and turn, but at the end we are surprised by a Love that was always more than we could imagine, no matter how wise we were here and there — in flashes of insight or as the consistent fruit of steady practice.
Far beyond your mirror
Far beyond your dreams
Far beyond your moon signs
Far beyond your schemes
Far beyond the brother-hood
Far beyond James Dean
He was not James Dean
Is what I really mean
Where I am not the hunter
Still I am the hunter’s son
And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
Said and done
Far beyond what I believe
Or what my father said
Far beyond genetic codes
That run ’till we are dead
Far beyond the Catholics
Far beyond the Jews
I am safe here with the mother
I am safe here so are you
Where I am not the hunter
Still I am the hunter’s son
And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
We really all are women
When all is said and done
Said and done
The peeling of the onion
As the pieces start to fall
You begin to see the faces
And the shadows on the wall
Tearing down the missiles
The pictures start to come
The image of a rosary
On the barrel of a gun
Waiting for the big one
I am living on the coast
Why do we deny
The things we fear the most
I am safe here with the mother
I am safe here in her arms
Still I hear the voices
Sounding the alarm
Where I am not the hunter
Still I am the hunter’s son
And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
We really all are women yes
When all is said and done
Said and done
And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
We really all are women yes
When all is said and done
Said and done
John Stewart, “Women” from Bullets in the Hour Glass.
I always thought he was saying,
“And we really all are winning yes
When all is said and done.”
And this is what I believe most of all.
And this is the art I seek.
And this is the song I remember.
And this is the poem that carries us past ourselves, into the Light.
But what does Xenophanes think?
Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another. R. P. 99.
Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds. R. P. ib.
The gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning, but by seeking they find in time what is better. R. P 104 b.
One god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought. . . . R. P. 100.
He sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over. R. P. 102.
But without toil he swayeth all things by the thought of his mind. R. P. 108 b.
And he abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all; nor doth it befit him to go about now hither now thither. R. P. 110 a.
There never was nor will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so. But all may have their fancy. R. P. 104.
Let these be taken as fancies something like the truth. R. P. 104 a.
And Heraclitus chimes in:
“One being, the only wise one, would and would not be called by the name of Zeus.