Collision Course

 “As a result of climate change, as many as 200 million people may be driven from their homes by 2050.” Ursula Lindsey, New York Review, July 21, 2022

I’m at the saturation point when it comes to bad news and dark portents. Galloping Christian theocracy, endless gun violence, the radical and rogue Supreme Court, and the ongoing, interminable case of Donald J. Trump and his failed coup attempt. The content in my Twitter feed pisses me off, and the YouTube videos I view are too full of conjecture and hearsay to settle my uneasiness. It seems that the rusted and rickety wheels of American justice barely turn when it comes to white collar and political crime, and more than ever I’m convinced that when push comes to shove, Donald J. Trump will skate. The United States Department of Justice doesn’t need a congressional referral to indict Trump or any of his co-conspirators, and even if a referral is delivered to the DOJ on a golden platter, the agency is under no obligation to act upon it. Attorney General Merrick Garland would have tipped his hand by now if he had any intention of indicting Trump; we would have had some sign, a leaked memo or something, a clue. Garland has largely maintained radio silence regarding the disgraced former president as he, Garland, seems terrified of being tarred as politically motivated. Can’t set that precedent for the DOJ, though when Trump regains power he will corrupt the DOJ and use the agency for his own ends. My guess is that Garland will duck, dodge, delay, defer, and dither in the hope that January 6 simply vanishes from public consciousness. When he’s forced to announce his decision not to indict Trump, Garland will go to ridiculous and tortured lengths to justify and rationalize his inaction. 

Fear and cowardice are powerful things. 

I’m old enough to remember the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980’s, the televised hearings, the Tower Commission, and the Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh. Some of the miscreants in that sordid affair, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger among them, received presidential pardons from George H. W. Bush in 1992. Ronald Reagan was criticized but of course escaped punishment. It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening with Trump should he be indicted and convicted before the 2024 election. The next Republican president, like Ron DeSantis, will, with great fanfare, immediately pardon Trump and his entourage. The only people who will pay any price are the misguided slobs who stormed the capitol and spread their feces on the walls and maybe a few bit players a rung higher on the ladder. But none of the major conspirators will be inconvenienced; they will continue to appear on cable news gabfests, pen op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post, run for office, and write books. To expect another outcome is to believe in magic and make-believe. America is nothing if not entirely predictable. 

Trump is the current figurehead for American fascism, but what’s happening in the country is bigger than Trump and more insidious. The political and cultural and factual divide is real, and closer than we realize. If it’s not in your city, it may be in your county or state, in pockets and clusters. It’s a divide that cannot be bridged by appeals to facts, reason or logic, it’s emotional and tribal and as combustible as a gas leak in a match factory. Christian churches and Fox News and right-wing radio propaganda are heavily implicated in exacerbating the division, in drawing the lines and naming the enemies. Democrats bear responsibility, too. Fascism needs an enemy, and just about any enemy will do: Muslims after 9/11; immigrants; Antifa; Black Lives Matter; Critical Race Theory; transgender folk. The unholy alliance of evangelical Christians and the Republican Party, the Bible and the Stars & Stripes, the gun and the cross, is producing its angry fruit. Florida and Texas are fascist laboratories. Follow the bouncing ball of authoritarian ideology as it bounces around the red states; look at states like Wisconsin where Republicans control the legislature but the Governor’s mansion is inhabited by a Democrat. Democrats in Wisconsin represent more citizens and win more votes overall, but have less representational power because the GOP plays by the dark arts of gerrymandering and voter suppression, as well as stacking state courts with partisans, and capturing or neutering the regulatory apparatus. The party has had plenty of help from the Supreme Court led by John Roberts. The Citizens United decision, which allows dark money to flood the political system, and the gutting of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby case in 2012, has paid major dividends to the religious/political right in its quest to prop up white supremacy and take the country backward. The GOP controls 60% of state legislatures, more than enough, with a little help from the Court in regards to election law, to own all three branches of government for a decade or longer. One party rule is America’s destination. Next term, just in time to be useful in the 2024 election, the Court will hear a case out of North Carolina called Moore v. Harper, which revolves around the authority of state legislatures in regards to federal elections. If the Court rules as many expect it will, a GOP-controlled state legislature could use all manner of tactics to overrule the will of voters. It would play something like this: Biden wins the popular vote, but the Legislature awards the state’s electors to Donald Trump. No legal challenge is allowed by law. Done deal.

Here’s another thing that is happening that exacerbates the American divide: the balance of power, propelled by the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, is shifting to the States at the same time the power and legitimacy of the federal government is declining. 

Despair and contentment sit side-by-side on the same shelf. For me optimism is fleeting and hope is almost always out of reach. The world is fucked, and yet there is beauty and peace in it that seems contradictory. California is drying up yet all day long hummingbirds swoop across our patio to drink from the feeder. Babies are born, weddings happen, young men play pick-up soccer in Ortega Park, children run into the surf at East Beach, fully immersed in the here and now, shielded by their innocence. Families go out for ice cream. Young lovers stroll hand-in-hand thinking their love is unique and fixed forevermore, locked in time, as bright as the new moon and capable of enduring whatever comes. Have I become cynical about love, too? Maybe. I cannot seem to stop myself from looking to the shelf where despair and contentment sit side-by-side. I must find the balance point between the two, but some days, when the black dog of depression follows close on my heels, I can’t find that point to save my ass. I feel powerless and insignificant, impotent and invisible, with too few resources to hand. It was in this state of mind I came across an essay by Albert Camus that contains this: “Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything.”

That made me feel better. Temporarily.