Wednesday, August 27, 2025
D+291/220/-1242
1979 Lord Mountbatten was killed along with three companions, two of them children, by the IRA when his boat was blown up near Sligo, Ireland
2008 Barack Obama became the first African-American to be nominated by a major political party for President of the United States
In bed at 9, up at 4:30. 53°, high of 74°, partly cloudy.
Meds, etc. Morning meds and Kevzara injection at 8:30 a.m.
Some of the words of wisdom from yesterday's cabinet meeting.
Steve Witkoff, Special Envoy: "There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about.”
Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Secretary of Labor: “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor — because you are the transformational president of the American worker, along with the American flag and President Roosevelt …and I was so honored to unveil that yesterday.”
Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary: "Sir, as you've said many times, economic security is national security and our country has never been so secure since you. You have brought us back from the edge. You have the overwhelming mandate from the American people. You are restoring confidence in the government."
Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce: "This is the greatest cabinet working for the greatest president and I just want to say thank you. I'm having the time of my life working for you!"
Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture, thanked Trump for saving college football, taking back Labor Day from the Democrats, and reinvigorating Christianity in America. “The country just feels different. There’s such optimism and love. There’s a faith movement going through—especially with our younger Americans—and for those of us with kids in college, I know we feel it, and I experienced it firsthand last week.”
My FB comment to a long sharing post by JJA.
Janice Jenkins Anderson to Jim Homan: all good and valid points! Without doubt the prevalence of firearms among the population will play a role. Perhaps in that respect, the country is more in the position it was during the Civil War, when so many were personally armed and when the Confederacy was in an economically inferior position.
I think the author’s point about how the US falling to fascism is wholly uncharted territory is well taken. And that will hopefully factor towards changing our result versus the “historical” outcome. His possible solutions or options are by his own admission, extreme however I don’t find his argument about where the country is at this point in time to be simply alarmist. I absolutely believe that this administration is quickly moving to take control in an authoritarian regime, and with Trump’s reelection despite there being a clear playbook (Project 2025) that they are still closely following, many doors toward stopping this fascist takeover have already slammed shut. If you haven’t looked into Curtis Yarvin, he is someone that Vance has followed. Yarvin openly posits that the country needs a “National CEO,” which he admits would be a dictator. The Project 2025 authors followed much of what he preaches.
I also believe that, unfortunately, many people do not know history well enough to understand how quickly our fall to authoritarianism is occurring. This article a is an excellent comprehensive trip through the history of fascist leaders. I fear that too many are the proverbial frogs in water slowly brought to a boil and will remain unaware until it’s too late.
Hope you found the article thought-provoking. We can’t chart a course and solution until we acknowledge and understand the question.
Charles D. Clausen: I think the principal author's historical analysis is pretty accurate and, as JJA suggests, many of us have been frogs in the ever-heating water, unable to detect or unwilling to admit what is so clearly happening, what has happened already. We are in deep, deep trouble. I appreciate the author's suggesting paths of resistance, and wonder whether some of his ideas might help stem the tide, but I also think of likely countermeasures from a fascist regime and a Dear Leader that treats any opposition or even mere irritants as "treason" meriting the death penalty. I am mindful too that our Supreme Court has effectively immunized the Dear Leader from any liability for criminal acts. Bill Maher has argued that a slow-moving military coup is already underway, and it seems to me that the government's actions since January 20 support his argument, especially the massive ouster of senior military leaders, inspectors general, and other 'guardrail' figures and their replacement with apparatchiks. I wish I could see some effective ways to slow down and stop where we are headed, but I can't. I'm reminded of an old quote from the Italian investigative journalist Oriana Fallaci, "No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruellest, the least generous who win." In any event, if there is any hope, it must begin, as JJA states, with recognizing and admitting where we are now and where we are clearly heading.
I'm not alone in thinking there is probably no way out of this situation. Here is an excerpt from Ezra Klein's interview with policing expert Radley Balko:
The other thing we’re seeing is, obviously, the masks. And there’s an anecdote I’ve told a lot over the years about the writer Michael Ledeen, who around 2007 or 2008 was one of the neoconservatives agitating for war with Iran.
There was a series of photos of a cocaine raid in Tehran that came out, and all the officers in the raid were wearing masks. Ledeen wrote at the time: When the agents of the government hide their faces, it speaks volumes about the relationship between the government and the people. He was saying that this is a sign of a totalitarian state. And now it’s just routine. We’re seeing this all over the country.
So I think we’re in a pretty terrifying spiral right now. I have tried over the course of my career to be levelheaded and refrain from expressing things in too dire terms. But I think we have entered kind of the worst-case scenario, and it’s hard to see how we get out of it.
What is the worst-case scenario?
I think the worst-case scenario is that Trump sends active duty military troops into any city that displeases him — any city where there are protests.
During his first administration, we know that he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act. He wanted to send active duty military in to put down the George Floyd protests. And he openly floated the idea of just shooting the protesters.
To be fair, he said shooting them in the knee. I guess it’s not as bad as it could be. What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president.
The principal posting was by Karl J Martin, titled "We Live in a Fascist Nation. What Now? and started
“In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counterexamples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections.
Here's what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.
I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.
My last pinnacle? I have surmounted a significant pinnacle in my life. I have passed the midpoint between the ages of 80 and 90. I don't note this passage as anything to brag about, and I don't attribute it to anything I have done to merit a long life, since quite the contrary is true. I've avoided physical exercise whenever I could: jogging? swimming? Why, when I could be smoking, drinking, and watching TV? I've made a point of eschewing a healthy diet and chewing almost all the unhealthy stuff: eclairs, bacon, cheeseburgers with the works - , more, please?. Nor do I note this pinnacle passage with any hope of reaching the next pinnacle, age 90. I do not. A life as long as mine is a mixed blessing, a term I use intentionally. It's a blessing to be sure, providing more time with loved ones and more time to appreciate the good and beauty in life, of which there is an abundance, despite all the awfulness around us. But it's also a time of experiencing continuing losses, losses of loved family members and friends, losses of mental and physical capacities, more losses than I can list. It is a time when one is likely to fear a long, lingering, but diminished life much more than a near-term death. It is a time when death may look increasingly welcome.
I started thinking these thoughts this morning as I was posting some thoughts on Facebook, wondering why I keep posting on Facebook and why I keep writing at all. I've thought and written about these questions in this journal more than once, engaging in (or maybe wallowing in a mire of) some introspection or reflection. There is no single answer to either of those questions. The answers I have come up with before range from "it's something to do in my otherwise inactive life" to fighting my approaching mortality. What mostly has me wondering is why I feel moved to post very personal reflections like the very recent one about Kitty calling me "Sweetie," or those about my Dad's PTSD after Iwo Jima, or my apocalyptic rants about Trump, fascism, and the end of democracy. My FB friends post photos of their cats and dogs, vacation snapshots, and the like, while I'm all sentimentally gushy or engaged in a jeremiad. Wazupwidat? I need to give this some thought.
Another mass shooting, during a mass. A 23-year-old gunman has shot and killed an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old during an early morning mass at Annunciation church in South Minneapolis. He wounded another 14 children from age 6 to age 15, and 3 adults in their 80s. We are told by Julie Aquavia that the church is a mile or less from the home of Geri's niece, Sue, and her husband, Dave Froelich. We don't know yet whether the church is their parish church or whether the school is where their children may have gone to school. Land of the free, home of the brave.
From this date, 3 years ago: More in the intro to Moral Man & Immoral Society:
"As Niebuhr once remarked, it was only an unusual individual who could feel his own power or his wisdom to be such that they could claim to be the center of the world. As a consequence, most of us make this claim together, through the community of which we are a part: a tribe, family, religion, nation, race, gender, profession, or church. Serious sins are mostly communal sins. . . . We make the interests of our relevant group central to our thought and action, and so we give ourselves with all our loyalty and power to our group, to its security and success, and to its conquest and domination of competing groups. Thus result the social group sins of historical life: sins of class, race, religion, nation, and gender. These communities support, defend, and secure the individuals within them - as the social power of men over women aids each man in his domination of women.... "
Niebuhr wrote MM&IS in 1932, before WWII and Hiroshima, Dresden, Tokyo, and Nagasaki. It was reissued in 1960, and in a preface to the 1960 publication, he reaffirmed his belief in the main points of the work. He was a member of the faculty of Union Theological Seminary throughout most of his career. I find myself wondering about what his thoughts about "God" were in 1932 and in 1960, and what they would be today.
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