Tuesday, January 10, 2023
In bed @ 10:30, up at 4:45. CPAP on all night, another 20/20 seal score. 33 degrees, high 40, wind S at 5, w/c 28
Mother Country Radicals. I woke up thinking of the Weather Underground, thinking about the young white radicals, and terrorists, about what it was that led them to abandon their anticipated (scripted?) lives of material comfort, lives of 'going along to get along' to become outlaws, fugitives. And the same kinds of questions about today's radicals on the Right. I'm persuaded that Race issues and perceptions of injustice play a big role: anti-racism on the Left, White Supremacy, and/or White Grievance on the Right. But there were millions of Americans in the 60s and 70s, including me, a young White guy from Englewood, who knew they lived in a semi-apartheid society and were troubled by it. The Black Panthers, Black Muslims, and organizations like SNCC needed no catalyst in addition to apartheid to trigger organization, resistance, and opposition. The White radicals, I think, needed a catalyst and that catalyst was Vietnam and the draft. Just as I bear a share of responsibility for the death and destruction visited upon the Vietnamese, I bear some responsibility for the Weathermen, for 1968, for Sterling Hall. ' . . . and not a day / But something is recalled, / My conscience or my vanity appalled.' But if I was 'tattooed in the cradle" with the values and myths of my tribe and followed the path laid out by family, Church, by Catholic schooling, by my government, by Hollywood and the media, why wasn't the same true for Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Diana Oughten, Cathy Wilderson, Kathy Boudin, and their comrades? Why was the Marquette campus so peaceful throughout the war while Madison, Berkeley, and Columbia exploded?
"The January 6th Committee Report, for all its weight and consequence, never asks why anyone believed Donald Trump['s Big Lie], which is why it is unlikely to persuade anyone not to. Why believe? Answering that question would have required a historical vantage on the decay of the party system, the celebration of political intolerance by both the right and the left, the contribution of social media to political extremism, and the predicament of American journalism. Calling the system rigged when you’re losing is an old trick. At the end of the Cold War, American zealots turned their most ruthless ideological weapons on one another, Manicheans all. In 1992, Newt Gingrich told Republican candidates to get the message out that the Democrats were going to rig the Presidential election. It didn’t matter to Gingrich that this wasn’t true. “They’re going to buy registrations, they’re going to buy votes,” he warned. “They’re going to turn out votes, they’re going to steal votes, they’re going to do anything they can.” After the contested Bush v. Gore election, of 2000, sowing doubt about elections became common practice for outsiders in both parties. “The system is rigged” was the watchword of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign: primaries rigged against challengers, the economy rigged against working people. Suspecting that things like elections might be rigged, even when that’s not true, isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory; it is a political product routinely sold to voters in every city and state in the country. Why believe? In the past two decades, public approval of Congress has fallen from eighty percent to twenty percent. Might it be that Congress has lost any real grip on the American experience, and no longer speaks for a nation and a people that Richard Hofstadter once called a “huge, inarticulate beast”? The report lacks not only a sense of the past but also a meaningful sense of the present. A chronicle that runs from April 2020, to January 2021, it is a story told out of time. . . . Why believe? Nowhere acknowledged in the report is the fact that November 3, 2020, really was a weird Election Day. In the middle of a pandemic, unprecedented numbers of people voted by mail and by absentee ballot, and, even if you trudged out to the polls, you were met with the general misery of masks and loneliness and loss and, for many people, a sense of impending doom. For the entire stretch of time chronicled in this report, it felt to many Americans, not always for the same reasons, as though a great deal was being stolen from them: their jobs, their co-workers, a sense of justice and fairness in the world, predictable weather, the idea of America, the people they love, human touch. The January 6th Report offers no shuddering sense, not even a little shiver, of the national mood of vulnerability, fear, and sorrow. . . Why believe? During the pandemic, more people spent more time online than ever before. The report fails to examine the way in which Facebook and Twitter profited by spreading misinformation about the election, providing the organizational architecture for the insurrection, and making possible the doxing and harassment of courageous and dedicated public servants who refused to participate in the conspiracy. Why believe? The answer to that question—the knowledge of what has happened to America—will have to wait for another day. From beneath the Capitol dome, the January 6th Committee has issued its report. It blames Trump. It explains very little. Outside, the whirling wind heaves and twists and roars. ♦
The best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Recent shootings. Newport News, VA, a 6-year-old purposefully shot his 1st-grade teacher. Racine, WI, the 14-year-old girl was shot multiple times by a 14-year-old boy. Mt. 18:5-7 And whoever welcomes a little child like this in My name welcomes Me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world for the causes of sin. These stumbling blocks must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!…
De Mo.rtuis Nil Nisi Bonum. Not a fan of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Want to think about this for a while.
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