In the days following the election, our upstate NY, rural neighborhood resounds with lawn “care” (effected through gasoline powered, loud whining machines that drown out all nature), oil and gas deliveries, sawing down trees, leaves blown not by nature but by high-pitched machines. All providing an apt metaphor while consuming power as noisily as possible. Pushing back on nature’s desire to grow in the most mundane ways while a regional drought drags on, our lake dries up, and climate catastrophe shifts into higher gears. Today it will be in the upper 70’s. In November in New York. A “beautiful day” As was September 11, 2001. Disaster dresses up to distract us from apocalypse. Nature staggers on, winded. The leaves were so pretty and then they fell, leaving us with bare branches allowing us to see further than we might wish into the forest, into the neighbor’s backyard but not into their mind.
I don’t feel despair, I feel anger, impatience and a desire to find a fighting strategy. And to radically rethink the progressive dependence on the Democratic party. Once again, it is clear that progressives are the underdogs, and we tend to fight harder when facing power then when wearing the face of power itself.
Now is the time for strategies to undermine everything that the Maga Republicans want to force upon America, snatching a strategy from the wretched Mitch McConnell who, at Obama’s re-election announced he would put all Republican forces into blocking any action by the President.
In this year’s campaign, was the Democratic party, fueled by an overwhelming storm of dollars, effective in speaking to contemporary voters? Clearly not. This is not about personal blame (Harris was hampered by an absurdly late entry into the race) but updating strategies, not in isolation but in sync with policy. The corporate, monopolist focus on their idealized economy (interest rates, stock market, bonds, statistics, reports, graphs), failed to visualize the despair and distance from power far too many voters feel in their own “economy.” And the party most visible in appearing to rattle the cage was the one with the heavy breathing, toxic monster inside, promising disruption, change, throw the bums out. Since Ronald Reagan, the goal of the Republican party has been to create in ill-informed, distracted and superficially educated population. The rewards for this strategy have never been more successful.
An email from the Center for Artistic Activism arrives: “Despair is the ultimate tool of authoritarianism. Eroding our will to resist. Our despair is their victory. They haven’t won until we stop.” So we must not stop, but start again. And again. Seasons persevere and pass on, as another cycle of reaction, ignorance, desperate self-centeredness has arrived. We have been through this before, and it is always a new group who gets damaged, though never those in power or even the official opposition. This is the whole point of power, to defer damage onto others and retain gains while the rest of the “market” is down.
When Reagan was elected we thought it was the end of the world, not knowing that indeed it would be for so many of our friends, soon to be swept into the maelstrom of AIDS, with a government caring not at all. Many of us lived through it, many died during it. Endurance became an invisible drain on our souls. Clinton pantomimed progressivism while demonizing welfare recipients and elevating monopoly enterprise, the elixir of free trade. Mexico was to be maquiladoras with their workers serving as creators for our consumption. The Democratic party abandoned its own workers stateside, for the Republicans to have their turn deceiving. The Supreme’s selection of George W followed by his re-election mid-war, having started that endless intervention for no reason but pique and pride, led to the deaths of our soldiers, thrust into something they had not expected, and to the slaughter of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Yellow ribbons were tied around trees but our country’s aggression had no shackles. American soldiers returned to be initially ignored and then labeled as victims of PTSD, permanent exiles from the reality they were not considered worthy of. No PTSD plagues the leaders who lured us into this disaster; as a Bush official bragged, “we make our own reality.”
Yet it is reality that I suspect will derail the Trump train. So many aggressive promises have been made, so many targets selected, from deporting millions of refugees and immigrants, to finishing “the wall,” to lowering taxes on everything and everyone (after relieving his actual core constituency, the super wealthy, from that civic responsibility) and dismantling the civil servant class. Many of these moves will do nothing to help the voters who accepted his payday-loan promises to lower gas, grocery and housing costs. His zeal to lower workplace, health and environmental safety will only hurt them. Trump’s short shift at McDonald’s avoided any movement on minimum wage. He will ignore the catastrophe of climate change, unless Elon Musk can convince him there is money in moving away from carbon. In two years, if he has not delivered to the fickle voters who put him over, he will be ousted. Nature will not notice, exacting its own retribution for our selfish and stupid inaction. We are cooked, yes, but this chef may not last long.
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