A Simple Desultory Philippic
PAUL SIMON: “And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it’s all right, it’s all right
We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong”
In 1979, far left wing punk rockers Dead Kennedys released “California Uber Alles,” a nasty takedown of California governor Jerry Brown (then a quirky Democrat, whose allergy to liberal shibboleths involved swinging to both the left and the right of liberal conventions).
By 1981, a real conservative named Ronald Reagan became POTUS, and the duly chastened DKs issued an EP called “In God We Trust, Inc.” which contained an updated rewrite of “California Uber Alles,” focusing upon Reagan, rather than Brown.
Its title was “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now”
At the beginning of the year, when it looked like center-left Democrats were intent on fragmenting dozens of ways while the party’s left fought it out between Bernie “The Kid from Brooklyn” and his lite version, Liz (More Policy Fiber/Less Marxist Rhetoric), with the Berner faction practically slobbering at the thought of making establishment Democrats into Soylent Green, and the Orange Fever festering in the White House practically slobbering at the same seemingly inevitable eventuality, the idea that a coalition of nose-holding leftists, the establishment and anti-establishment wings of the center left, minorities, suburban “change we can avoid” moderates and “process conservative” could STFU long enough to beat the Phalangists in a free and fair election, seemed like a dream.
But, dislike each other though we may, we all watched Donald Trump’s flailing attempts, many of them successful, to cut down the last norm in England, and we understood that we had a real problem now, far worse than any problems we had with each other, and so we came together to deliver a message that “GENUG IS GENUG”
So, in the words of Gerald Ford, “our long national nightmare is over.” Grateful for the news, the purple haired 17-year old anarchist (whose pronouns are “They, “them” and “fuck off, dad”) who lives in my house breathed a sincere sigh of relief, as he said “by the way, I still hate Joe Biden.” And, nightmare over, we can now go back, for the time being, to living a mere bad dream. Or as a recently cancelled man of letters so eloquently put it:
WOODY ALLEN: “…life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So, you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.”
At this interval in history, it appears as if, despite the occasional sniper fire, we’ve entered into a cease fire period in our ongoing national cultural civil war.
As Bob Hope might sing: “Thanks for the Misery.”
However, no one sensible should be under the impression that we are now at peace, or that peace is even at hand. The worst may seem over for now, but we need to have some perspective.
Despite the occasional acts of running campaign busses off the highway, shooting paintballs at leftists, and threats of locking up one’s political opponents for such subversive activities as “attempted democracy” and “voting while black”, most of the battles in this war are being fought out culturally, which is not to say that they are not literal battles.
[I’d also cite some acts of violence committed by Democrats, if it weren’t so clear that the cosplaying, largely pale-faced, faux-revolutionaries committing most of the looting, arson and harassment of folks eating their brunch, mostly despise Joe Biden (who never failed to condemn them) as much or more than they do Donald Trump, while those attempting vehicular homicide against the other side were exclusively fevered supporters of the Orange Fever, acting with his direct encouragement.]
So, given our culture war, please forgive the abundance of cultural references scattered here; they are practically the only useful frame of reference for what we are currently “living” through (“living” being the word for those of us not already in the process of dying from the latest upsurge in our pandemic reality).
We have just survived what may be our first attempted national coup d’etat.
Barely.
Now, not all 70+ million people who supported Donald Trump subscribe to this madness. Some were just holding their nose and voting for what they perceived, probably wrongly, to be in their economic interests. And some few have even publicly recoiled at the shameful attempt to pervert the legal process and prostitute the law to overturn a democratic election.
Not that we should have been surprised after they attempted to use the Post Office to do the same.
But while many Trump voters don’t drink embrace the latest hypodermic hop-filled hype, a substantial portion of those folks do. And they live, by and large, in an alternate reality world, entitled to their own facts and all the Kool-Aid they can drink.
The America I grew up in, where the spectrum of media commentary on the nightly news ran the gamut from Eric Severeid to Howard K. Smith, is gone. The days of broadcasting are over, and now we have narrowcasting.
Fox News’s occasional flashes of sanity too upsetting to you? Try the ONAN network instead. That not enough? There’s a podcast for every point on the ideological spectrum, and some that don’t even exist, all dialogue guaranteed fact free.
The guy in the small town in the tin foil hat, who used to stew in his own juices is now connected by the magic of the web to every other hat of red or tin, and they’ve pretty much taken over a major political party.
And that’s not changing. And, as the Jewish scrap metal merchant told his mentee, Duddy Kravitz, “it’s war out there, and the white man has all the guns.”
Poor Joe Biden.
He’s proven himself, since the election, as a man of seemingly unparalleled decency, never losing his temper or his wits, as he attempts, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, to bring us together as one people to face the difficult times ahead.
But this decency faces a GOP, likely in control of the Senate, which has become absolutely Finlandized by their most hateful, authoritarian lunatics. Its Senate leadership is held by a cold cynic intent, as he was in the Obama years, of denying the new President even the smallest victory, even if that leads to economic disaster. Like the general in Vietnam, he is intent upon destroying the country in order to save it (or its remnants) for his Party.
Nonetheless, it being Thanksgiving morning as I write this, there is something to be thankful for: we all can reap the substantial reward of never having to listen to Donald Trump’s rants or read his tweets. “The Apprentice” has been cancelled, and the pros are attempting to take over.
It is sad that things have degenerated to the point where such small rewards lead us to dance in the streets.
But here’s the song I’ll be singing:
PAUL SIMON: We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
and sing an American tune
But it’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest
