evening thoughts
he says it is very important to vote
does he know what’s going in this election?
is there a way to tell him that would be helpful?

morning thoughts
in a house that for the purposes of the dream is your parents’
people filing in, bringing food to share, almost none of them you know
your Aunt and Uncle from the nearby state are both round and blond when they used to be thin and gray
they are headed into the kitchen that sprawls into the dining room where everyone is assembling
who is this strange couple off to one side you thought the wife shaped kind of rectangular and somehow slavic with breasts leaning too far down, she is not old, and her man has tidy black hair in a small square head, who are they and you thought she was rude for muttering something you couldn’t understand when you asked her who she was, but then you think she’s maybe really shy and then you decide that no she just doesn’t speak English
who are all these people?
There are two Uncles but one is only heard and you are cross with the one who is only a voice and maybe he’s not there because actually the voices are jumbled and bouncing like in a ravine
You turn to your brother who is seated on a chair that is very wide and with a very flat seat — a kind of L that two people could cozy into, but that only your lank brother occupies next to your father in some other undescribed chair. You turn to your brother and say, “I don’t understand any of this.” He wrinkles his brow and eyes to tell you that that is not the thing to say here at this gathering. He does it so your father doesn’t have to, and your father merely looks a little astonished, although you would think everyone would be used to it by now.
And that’s when you are somehow past where they were seated by where the dining area flows into a hall that flows into the living room (I guess they were in that hall, it must be a wide hall; and they are on the side closest to the kitchen and the strange woman who mutters in intelligible languages as her worried- and fitter-looking husband sidles behind the table along the cushioned bench towards her)
I mean, it’s at that moment that your brother scrunches his face to tell you to pull it together that you are away from that area and are sliding past your Aunt and Uncle as they enter through a narrower hall that leads right into the kitchen where people are cooking and talking or maybe no they are just assembling dishes and talking
And you think you’ll go upstairs since this is no kind of a place
But then it seems you are in a wide hall that is partially underground, or no on like a the top of a little mountain or just a hill made mostly of stone and the hall is cut into the hill? No, I don’t know. Anyway, you are walking around inside this big square hall with one end open to the sunlit world but still the whole thing feels kind of claustrophobic
And that’s when it occurs to you that before lots of people in the US would have their crazy conspiracy theories and half-baked notions pawned off as realities, but the politicians wouldn’t go in for that stuff, and that’s what changed with Trump: he repeated the kind of crazy, unfounded, half-baked, implausible and unverified narratives that had always been the purview of the common people, and they loved that: Here is a man who gets it! Finally, a politician who tells the truth! Finally someone who doesn’t pretend he knows better than me! Someone who isn’t afraid to admit what we all know!
Then you’re awake and are thinking that the problem is that our media splintered into conservative and liberal and the conservative has skewed less and less fair and more and more willing to lie, and that without decades of cherry picked and biased news reporting and without the conservative internet more and more outright lying (repeating hearsay you’ve not fact checked as if you know it to be true = lying), Trump could never have happened. And you think — maybe not for the first time, but more forcefully here in the groggy beginnings of another day of clanging construction on several sides and endless-work yet again looming in the foreground — that what has happened in the US is that enough of the conservative media became the media source for a state-run autocracy. That was the first step in the autocratic takeover! That made Trump possible and it also made it possible for the GOP to choose to oust those members of the GOP who spoke out against Trump’s lying-based political strategy, and out against some of his more egregious and democracy-threatening ideas. And so the willingly autocratic media — the post-shared-reality, everything-is-perspective and all-perspectives-are-political and politics-reduces-to-power noise machine in service of the conservative agenda easily became a tool for a post-democratic conservative politician to remake his base and his party in his own image.
Oh but so then maybe they weren’t so much autocratic as merely post-shared-reality, and with them the GOP base, and then all together they followed the pied piper off the cliff into the abyss of a post-facts Reality and an ends-justify-means manipulation of the tools of democratic government toward anti-democratic ends — the abyss of self-justifying top-down crime covered in layers of lies and cynicism, so that those more “in the know” can be more cynical and less honestly duped, and those “who just know they can trust the leader” can be more honestly (but still at some level clearly willingly) duped.
And so the 2024 Republican Party wears political evil like a cloak.
Where will it end?
The rot should’ve been stopped in Donald Trump’s conscious moment, but he never understood the beauty of representative government.
So then the rot should’ve been stopped by the GOP’s process for selecting candidates, but in the primaries the most extreme voices rule and in the Republican Party those voices had been long marinating in a post-objective-facts media landscape.
(Not that there’s such a thing as “objectively true” news; but the conservative media took the inevitability of bias in news reporting as grounds not for trying to be more careful with fact-checking and fair analysis, but as an excuse for being more and more completely bias; and this is where the evil began; well, here and in K-street and in the democrats’ decision to also be the party of big money, oh, and then there’s the undemocratic advantage the smaller states enjoy coupled with the extreme-selecting primary process and the gerrymandering of so many safe seats; anyway, the evil finds itself, it coalesces, it rubs itself right.)
Anyway, the rot should’ve been stopped here and there and there and here and … and now we are where we are.
Let’s say No to Donald Trump and his GOP enablers
Let’s stop the rot
Gently but firmly
Let’s remember that the citizens of a democratic republic are the final and most important branch of government
And there first and most important duty is not to win partisan victories, but to keep the playing field fair: to protect the rules, norms, values, and institutions of democracy — so that we can share with one another and our nation those values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us: aware, clear, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing.
Come on!
We’re not supposed to be political and economic geniuses like the talking heads would seduce us into pretending they and we are
We’re supposed to be the referees of a game where everyone wins because it is played for fun and fairly and with good intentions — played aware, clear, honest, accurate, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing.
Played at the fun and joyous level of ideas and feelings rather than the cold cruel boring oppressive level of top-down crime, state-sanctioned crime, governments for by and of the thug who for that moment happens to have the gears and levers of state