Among the most predictable events of the next two years is a terrorist, or "terrorist," attack on a Trump property somewhere in the world, perhaps even in America.
The intention behind this attack will be the destruction of American democracy.
It provides a structural advantage to rural states with majority white populations.
It elects the president, completely irrespective of the outcome of the popular vote.
Both of these points need to be kept in mind.
Because you cannot say that the Electors are bound by the final Electoral Vote, and accept the basic logic of the Electoral College. Electors are as free to reject the Election Day outcome as regards the electoral vote as they are the popular vote.
Hey, what was the original purpose of the Electoral College again?
To prevent a hideously unqualified foolish demagogue in hock to an inimical foreign power to achieve executive power in such a fashion that it renders the entire constitutional apparatus of checks and balances irrelevant, antique, and useless?
Look back at every argument in favor of the Electoral College at the time, and suppose the principals were contemplating Donald Trump.
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?
A wildly corrupt fool, of whom there exists ample evidence of obeisance to a foreign power, is about to become president.
I don't think this post will make any difference, but I will insist that if you argue that the EC needs must ratify the Election Day results, that is Some Bullshit.
I grew up in NYC in the 1970s, and any whale in the Hudson back then would have surely developed evil superpowers from the toxic sludge and have mutated into an enigmatic quasi-villain character from the animated The Tick series (deep cut!).
For two years in a row, Dr. Dubroff said on Tuesday, she has spotted a whale swimming outside her living room window. Last year, she didn’t quite believe the sighting was real. But she saw a whale again on Saturday — and in the same spot again on Sunday — and news reports confirmed her hunch: The Hudson River has a resident humpback.
“It was general excitement and shock,” Dr. Dubroff, 39, said, “and how thrilling that a whale can be in the Hudson, based on what we see float by sometimes.”
Indeed, the Hudson, as scenic as it is, does not scream “whale habitat.” But experts say cleanup and conservation efforts have led to cleaner waters and an abundance of fish, amenities that have attracted at least one humpback whale to the river waters off Manhattan this month.
So that's nice.
Speaking of sewage, my return to the long, hard blog would not have been complete without the reminder that there exist on the Internet horrible psychotic assholes, and sometimes they link to you. I've always despised this idiot, who back in the day would regularly link approvingly, until one day I said that in Putin's Russia, gays get beat up. Then I was no longer fuckface's idea of a Good Leftist. Oh well!
Everything systemic and substantial and strong seems like it will last forever, until precisely the moment it all goes to shit. This is as true for ice sheets as it is for nation states.
So what would it take for the United States of America to fall apart, for the last trappings of democracy and civil society to shred and give way to anarchy or brute authoritarianism?
Probably not much, at this point.
I'm so old I remember 9/11. We as a nation did not react very well to that bad thing. We had the torture and the dumb wars and the overall lunacy.
In the immediate aftermath though I had a Dark Thought: suppose after the Towers fell and the Pentagon got hit, and etc., small groups of terrorists, you wouldn't need more than a score, did something incredibly easy -- legally bought some AR-15s or some similar shit, and then went around shooting up soft targets like shopping malls, synagogues, churches, main streets, regional airports, train stations, schools, you name it.
That sort of a tactic, I imagined, would have been devastating. The overreaction would have been fierce and overwhelming.
We would have fallen apart.
So surprise! In 2016, it turns out, you didn't need terrorism, you just needed the threat of a lady president for it to all go to shit.
Which is to say, a single act of terrorism on US soil under Trump, and that's all she wrote for the USA. We already don't have such pretty toys as majority rule or checks and balances. Are we as a nation mature enough to endure any external shocks?
Look at the person in the White House, at least part-time. Motherfucker thinks he won a reality show, his advisors are pig-ignorant fascists, there are no institutional checks on these maniacs, and the fucking W Bush administration looks like Weimar.
My stepdaughter is in her mid-twenties. She never got a "participation trophy." When she was a kid, she didn't really fit in -- oh boy, do I have stories. Turns out, gay kids had it rough.
My oldest son graduates high school this year. Honors in math and engineering. Was nearly driven to suicide his first year in our very nice local high school because he is who he is, geeky and gentle; he got into an alternative school and blossomed, and if you see him and his nerd girlfriend together now your heart will just melt from the cute. He never got a "trophy."
The "participation trophy" lie is all about "bring the pain to the weird kids."
There are things that break your heart, things you don't see coming, and you can't even explain exactly why your gut got punched. This just makes me sad.
The latest visual manifestation of Trump's America comes from Adam Yauch Park, a playground named for the late Beastie Boy in the neighborhood he grew up in, Brooklyn Heights. On Friday afternoon a few photos surfaced on Twitter showing two swastikas painted on the children's playground equipment, along with the words: "Go Trump."
City Councilman Brad Lander tweeted a photo, adding, “Yet more hatred & anti-Semitism from Trump supporters." Lander says the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force and the Parks Department were on-site immediately, and the equipment will be repainted tonight.
We have reached out to the Beastie Boys and the Parks Department for further comment and will update if we hear back.
The GOP has all branches of government, except for a SC that is for the moment balanced, but won't be for long, because of a principle that would have not at all shocked the Founders, "Only White Guys Get to Decide." This is when I started writing on the Internets, the last time these shitful planets collided.
Whiskey Fire has existed since 2006. Before that it was Whiskey Ashes (this still holds up, I think, in spite of the r-word, which I'm embarrassed by), and before that, it was Metacomments. And before that it was Eschaton comments and a lot of hi-jinks that to my surprise actually attracted attention.
The thing is, the world has changed.
I don't suppose it is a surprise to anyone who has stuck around this long, but me, "Andrew Haggerty," is not exactly "Thers." "Thers," who started in the 1990s on various message boards as "Thersites," was deliberately foulmouthed, scabrous, uncharitable, and unpleasant. I can be all of these! But I can also be other things. The major problem in that moment, as I saw it, was that especially after 9/11, it was considered by Polite Official Culture, including Media Culture, that it was Shocking and Rude to point out that these patriarchal Republican authorities were bugshit nuts and proposing obviously doomed and destructive horseshit.
As I said at the time, I am perhaps the only person who has ever said "fuck" on the internet as a conscious attempt to apply the lessons of a French sociologist, namely Pierre Bourdieu in Language and Symbolic Power, who observed that if you're excluded altogether from Official Discourse, you are "condemned to shocking outspokenness," so you might as well make the most of it.
And back in the day, that had some efficacy.
But I don't think that will work this time.
What is the point of the strategic employment of vulgarity or obscenity in opposition to Trumpism? Trumpism is vulgar and obscene.
So I guess I'll be spinning my wheels a bit until I find my new rhetorical footing here. But I think "Thers" has to go. He is me. I love him. I will be too lazy to change him as my byline. But he is from the last battle. I'll have to adapt for the new conditions, to find the new place from where I can write my resistance.
Last night MollyI, who has been taking this shite harder than I have, because (1) she is a nicer person than I am, and (2) because she knows from being a highly competent woman getting shafted from jobs for which she is eminently qualified solely because of yahoo sexism, told me that she's worried about going down to DC for the Million Woman March. This is because that protest is scheduled for the day after the inauguration, and "the city will be full of Brownshirts."
She's not so much worried for herself.
Since we raised her right, my step-daughter of course wants to go. She's 26, wants to march with her gay homosexual partner, and is mouthy and feisty and pissed off. Then our daughter, who is 12, wants to go, because she is already mouthy and feisty and pissed off -- because she's in fucking middle school and already every girl her year knows not to put anything on the floor of her locker, because some snotty little boy will ass-grab. And that snotty little boy will get away with it. And Donald Fucking Trump is now president.
The boys want to go because even if they would sooner gargle hot lead than admit it, they love their mom and sisters dearly, and also it would be an Adventure, and also because they are shrewd enough to know they will get fed and might have a day off school.
But this is the rub:
MollyI is terrified because she might not be able to protect her kids, if we go.
This is not an unreasonable fear.
Trump rallies are indeed Brownshirty. It is known. Trumpite fanatics are rapacious and currently feel themselves uncorked. This is clear.
And you'd have to be even dumber than a Trumpite Facebook troll to think the police would keep you safe.
On the other hand, well, we went to the Iraq war protests; we knew those would not have any effect, but what was the alternative? Sometimes, as an American, your duty is to stand up and say "no." You can't just stay home. And as Americans, you can't just stay quiet because of the threat of physical intimidation. As soon as THAT happens, well, the trigger on the fascist gun has just been pulled, hasn't it? And if that happens, well, they're coming for you anyhow.
So there's two sides.
Or not.
If we are in nation where one can very sincerely fear for the physical safety of their 12-year-old daughter as regards taking her along with you to a peaceful political event...
A lot of ink and other fluids have already been spilled over the reasons we now have to put up with this shite, but clearly it is mostly because I got busy with work and stopped updating. Whoopsie sorries all around.
I am not especially surprised at this outcome. Annoyed, sure. Aggrieved. Maybe a tad depressed! But not surprised. See, I've always firmly believed in American Exceptionalism, and here we have that particular concept pretty well frickin' crystallized. Other nations have been led by similar mean-spirited ignoramus angry sexist racist homophobic buffoons, but none of them so far have had the capacity to launch multiple nuclear missiles because someone called him a dickhead on Twitter. Yay us.
I could catalogue the other ways we're fucked, but you know these.
As to who on the Democratic side, or the Left, is to blame, I'm only going to say this once, and then we're going to just let it go.
It was your fault.
You fucker.
It was my fault.
Me fucker.
FUCK ME. This was our job, and whatever it is we tried to do, we fucked it up, even if most Americans broadly agree with us. This is not to say there weren't and aren't major structural obstacles. The Electoral College is a big one. Was this in YOUR top ten list for the last eight years? Wasn't on mine. Black voter suppression? I didn't do enough. The outrageous refusal to even consider a sitting president's Supreme Court nominee? I was kind of mum.
And when I say "we," and "me," I mean YOU TOO, fellow Online Left. And by that I mean my cohort, the community and ethos that was the nascent and then burgeoning and then strong Left Blogosphere during the last Idiot Interregnum. What the fuck happened to us?
Treat that as a Discussion Question for the comments: but here is a rule. The spirit of Whiskey Fire has always been "fuck you," but for this post, start with "fuck me."
If you call yourself a liberal, leftist, whatever -- start your comment with FUCK ME. Like I did, above. This is not about donning a goddamn hairshirt-- it's about what comes next. Feel free to give hell to someone else, but not until you've raised it on yourself.
If you are NOT a liberal, leftist, whatever, well, bite me. You idiots have just made the White House a dumpster; liars of Trump's caliber produce outcomes of Trump's caliber, namely, failure. The past is prelude, and Trump will leave behind a smoking crater and you'll be signing him checks you can't understand. So fuck off. But feel free to comment, who cares.
