So I guess we're getting the band back together.
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.
So from here on...
Call me "The Editors."
(KIDDING! Call me Andrew.)