Los Muertos

There's lots to consider what with democracy becoming an increasingly open question right here in the country I inhabit, with my children and all of my stuff. I guess I can take some comfort in the fact that just by putting all my voting behaviors and voter-brain activities in writing for the better part of 20 years now, with a measurable portion of the polity announced as being murder-violent hostile to "globalists" and "leftists," all of this typing now counts as an act of political courage. And before you say "yeah, but you're using a pseudonym, you fucking coward," that's not to hide from the Randys and the Travises kitted out in what they could grab from the discount bin at the Wal-Mart Men's Tactical section, that was just so I could talk shit about my mom without her finding out. Reading it back, I guess that doesn't really make me sound more brave.

If anyone was determined enough, in 2022, given that this is Blogger and not something SUPER secure like a bank or a public utility, I'm certain it would take next to no effort to find my name, pinpoint me on Zillow or Google Maps and then tie me up while they look for all the kidnapped children in the basement I do not have or whatever it is they do to people these days. But I sleep OK at night trusting in the nearly impenetrable shield that having single-digit levels of readers provides. I'm not saying I've cultivated all this necessarily for security purposes, but it really does take something special to make an ostensibly public endeavor like a regularly published blog as thoroughly non-public as I've made it. It's like a panic room if the walls were made of indifference.

I guess at the very least* I can say I'm doing something, but only in most narrowly definitional sense, where it falls outside the criteria for being qualified as immeasurable nothing. In the end though, in this climate, to be maximally cynical about it, too much activism is ultimately self-defeating from the left. The now generation-long effort to cow the press into believing in its own bias, cornering all media to pay some kind of lip service to "balance" has arrived at the point where a nominally centrist enterprise has literal white nationalist talking points on one side (and no, I'm not linking to any of them as an example. You fucking know) to counterbalance the lefty bomb-throwers in "mainstream" news whose most strident positons these days amount to "c'mon, guys, can't we be more reasonable?" Now Jon Stewart interviews go lightly viral not really for the content, but mostly because nobody in living memory can ever remember seeing anything like that on any form of broadcast. An interrogatory exchange, necessarily adversarial, instead of the interviewer immediately morphing into a mute receptacle of whatever it is the person across from them feels like vomiting out, where any challenge to any statement, however fucking bananas, is "bias." Maybe that looks like passive surrender of airtime for advertising a point of view. Maybe more it looks like tacit-bordering-on-explicit endorsement of whatever position they just quietly received, no matter how solemn the nodding or furrowed the brow was while doing so.

I'm not a journalist. This is just exercise for me, writing so I remember how. Most journalists are trying to do something in an industry that is dying the same way the labor movement died in this country, crippled by a changing economic landscape, leaving them weak to push back against the fact that their loudest detractors' loudest condemnations weren't 100% untrue. It's heroic as most of them soldier on, but Plan B can't really be "comedians, sometimes." John Oliver's larynx is going to give out eventually.

But the catch-22 is here, for the moment. The conventional wisdom, even from the left, is: calling out anti-democratic impulses, groups and individuals is exactly what causes them to act out. If we think about it, it really is the fault of the left. After Obama, racism was over, but we kept saying things were racist, therefore, what else did we expect to happen? In that way, Jan. 6 really kind of was Antifa, if you really, really, really think about it.

All I can really do is encourage you not to. At least not in that specific way.

For now, let's brace ourselves. Election Day will probably be a total shitshow, the way all midterm elections are for the party of sitting presidents. But we'll hear about how it actually means something about the country turning rightward even though a few million more people on the whole will have voted for Democrats, as per usual. I'm sure I'll have something snappily nihilistic to say about it next Thursday.

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*or, looking at it another way, to make something out of it that it is most definitely not in either intention or execution, so I guess the opposite of "least."