A Singularity

It's been a bit up and down lately. Yes, it looks like there have been some very public efforts to redress some long-standing macroaggressions inherent to systemic racism, mixed in with a lot of white-noise bullshit window dressing that does nothing to make anyone's life better. It's tough to be too hopeful when we still have police executing African-Americans in the street for the crime of falling asleep in a drive-thru. It's great the cop got fired and is up on murder charges, but the whole of the Atlanta Police Department deciding to throw a tantrum over the suggestion they should not be allowed to execute people for falling asleep in a drive-thru just shows how far there is to go and the level of entrenchment anti-racism as a social movement actually faces. If you listen to or read enough James Baldwin (as I'm still doing, it's a deep rabbit hole), you'll know that whiteness isn't a people, it's a stance taken for the exercise and preservation of power. Read about the murder of Rayshard Brooks, shot ostensibly for holding a weapon he did not bring to the fight, or just look at it in the face of the growing online archive of Karens pairing condescension with lies to bully and belittle and, yes, police "their" neighborhoods. Right now there's pushback. Sometimes even resistance. But we won't know anything about how far it's gone really until the next inauguration in January '21.

Real influence and real change can be instigated in the street, but (if the system as it is holds) can only be consolidated in the halls of political authority. Sometimes it comes as a nice surprise when the arc of the moral universe really does seem to bend toward justice, or at least spike towards it for a second, like the EKG of a fading patient. A presidential election is the most noticeable seismic rumble and yes, Joe Biden is... well, he's certainly Joe Biden, for better or for worse, but he's going to have to be what moves, even if it's as an aftershock of all the work being done by young people risking their lives in streets heavy with COVID and reactionary self-appointed paramilitaries (the ones who aren't also cops).

The political magnetic poles have never been farther apart, and the intensity of the pushaway will only increase as we get nearer the election. Points of common ground are few and far between. A tiny amount of credit to the terrible president for pretending to be interested in one in the form of Colin Kaepernick, but it's impossible to take that seriously when not that long ago the president openly contemplated deportation for people who would kneel at a sports thing, and who also is himself an irredeemable shitbag. The gaping lack of moral authority is a Goatsean* one. In a Dickensian worst-of-times, it's important to find anything to rally around, a point of gravitation to draw together against the centrifugal spin currently tossing us in all directions at once.

And again, sometimes by accident, the universe provides. For a flicker of a moment at least, literally everyone I know or will ever know agrees: we all fucking hate John Bolton. It was brave of him to make literally every wrong choice publicly, refuse to actually help by testifying under oath in the impeachment proceeding against the person he says is not fit for office and then napalm every bridge between himself and the Trump rump of a GOP with his book deal. Wait, not "brave," that doesn't sound right. I mean the other thing. What's the other thing...? Opposite of brave? Oh yeah, FUCKING BULLSHIT. Thank you, John Bolton, for falling on your sword and giving us all something to flip off at the same time that isn't each other. Now you can take your book money and retire, never to be seen again. Keep yourself busy by taking up a hobby, like maybe falling on actual swords, you dick.

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*Do NOT google that.