The New Year and the Continuing Notion of Apocalypse
Guess what? 2020 is barely different than the chaos of 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, all the way back to 1992. I want you to think about the moment that conspiracy culture consumed American political debate, and see where we are today.
In 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected, it wasn’t that the right particularly supported George H. W. Bush, but that they hated the very idea of Bill Clinton, whoever the fuck he was (no one really knew). Now Clinton, a scumbag, was not a particularly left-wing figure. He was a greedy man, more in line with the moderate Republicans of his day, a corrupt piece of shit who was merely looking for personal profit, and somehow he was targeted by the further right (in fact merely partisan, otherwise politically on the same page–think Newt Gingrich, a petty failure today, demanding money from all of us in order to support a questionable ideology that he clearly does not believe in–https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/newt-gingrich-resistance-trump-impeachment.
Gingrich cannot possibly believe whatever his aides are promoting, demanding Trump’s innocence, or else he is the definition of a hypocrite–
hypocrite
hyp·o·crite | \ ˈhi-pə-ˌkrit \
Definition of hypocrite
1: a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion
2: a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings
Seriously–this man who fucked someone other than his wife while she was dying of cancer–he is no different morally than Bill Clinton (or Donald Trump, for that matter), and yet he somehow still convinces partisans that he is a better person than the scumbags he attacks.
But Newt Gingrich is no longer relevant, really, other than the endless nonsense I get in my email from various right-wing promotions, decidedly not written by the celebrity names trying to convince me to give them meaningless money towards an agenda that they need to fund themselves.
The Democrats (definitely not the vaguely defined left) promote themselves like this:
Time is short, so we won’t waste a second.
Nancy Pelosi reached out this morning because what she’s seen from Trump and his top Republicans this week has her deeply concerned:
— They’re ATTACKING our Democratic Majority left and right.
— They’re VOWING to steal the Majority out from under us.
— They’ve already shoveled in over $3O MILLION just this week.
Lance, we might not be able to go dollar-for-dollar against Republicans and their billionaire donors, but we know we can rely on our grassroots Democrats to fight back.
Please, Lance, Nancy Pelosi and our entire Democratic Majority are counting on you.
Will you rush in $19 before the End of Quarter Deadline hits to make sure our Majority is fortified for years to come?
This is merely an example of the same exact thing, both left and right (or, not really, but Democrat and Republican:)
INDICTMENT!
The Deep State is in circle-the-wagons mode now that AG Bill Barr’s investigation in full swing.
And now Obama’s Deep State agents are starting to point fingers and eat their own.
But here’s the best part: President Trump’s order for declassification of intelligence has Brennan and his Deep State comrades scurrying like rats from a sinking ship.
So… we’re doubling down on our demand for Deep State Indictments!
Brennan hopped on MSNBC after Trump’s order, and revealed his poker tell:
“My former colleagues in the intelligence community are looking upon this with great concern and worry.”
John Brennan and his Deep State conspirator-pals are ‘concerned’.
What about?
They know that declassification of intelligence is going to expose their attempt to steal to 2016 election AND the collusion to stage a coup against President Trump!
Demand Deep State Indictments!
[SIGN THE PETITION]
Brennan was so deeply involved in the intelligence community’s collusion that he
Here’s the question for you and me: will Democrats succeed in taking down President Trump with their faux investigations or will we succeed in taking down the Deep State?
The bottom line is this: if we don’t keep MAXIMUM pressure on DC to indict the whole cast of dubious characters in the Deep State collusion — including Brennan — then the Democrats will win!
That’s why I need you to sign the Deep State Indictment Petition.
We’re inundating Congress, the White House and the DOJ with demands for justice so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the American people want answers.
Will you join us and sign today?
Steve Eichler,
CEO, Tea Party Super PAC
[SIGN THE PETITION]
TeaPartyPac.org
From the founding of the Tea Party in 1773 a growing movement of conservative Americans echo the call for smaller government and lower taxes. This is our banner and our calling as well.
Paid for by the Tea Party PAC. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
I mean, seriously, each partisan side promotes themselves in the same way, more or less, apocalyptic warnings about what if what if and what if. In Ron Chernow’s magnificent biography of George Washington (https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780143119968&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used) Washington decries, “the convention’s divisive sniping, which has come to somehow define an apparently endless flaw in the American revolution. Beyond being a a terribly conflicted man by today’s consideration (it is slavery, if nothing else, that condemns Washington to a terribly nebulous past), the eventual “father of the country” noticed numerous dangers that, prophetically, have come into being:
“Rather than quarrel about territory, let the poor, the needy, the oppressed of the earth . . . resort to the fertile plains of our western country, to the second land of promise, and there dwell in peace, fulfilling the first and great commandment.” This is George Washington speaking, a man who owned slaves and was ashamed of himself for doing so. He was an honorable man (surely), who condemned himself on his deathbed for denying the rights he had fought his entire life for to citizens working to create the great nation.
Near the time that the idea of American government was formed, the first leader of the nation wondered, “What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! . . . I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror.”
That was stated in 1786. Think about today, with a president and a small percentage of blindly radical supporters promoting things like this:
Now, regardless of whether you agree with this on a personally political level, consider what you dashed idea of “patriotism” means, in the concept of America and it’s revolutionary impact on the world. Washington warned, urgently, upon uncomfortably taking office, the first and most exhausting president of a new nation, that the roiling partisans seeking to overtake the very idea of freedom, “are in the habit of thinking that everything (the opposition) says and does is right and . . . they will not judge for themselves.”
The cycle of political chaos, not just within the United States, but for every nation that cynically declares itself “democratic,” is never-ending. For however much we, living within whichever moment of any given time in human history declare that whatever is happening is an absolute apocalypse, we need to remember what people were thinking a very long time ago:
Washington worried that ‘”Scarcely a day passes in which applications of one kind or another do not arrive” . . . ‘To simplify life and set a high standard for future presidents, Washington refused to favor friends or relations in making appointments.’ This was the ideology of the so-called “father of the nation,” a man who would clearly be condemned in the divisive, social-media funded, idiopathic cynicism of today, as one side or the other, a fiend, a crook, someone not worth listening to or considering. And no matter how much we cite these magnificent historical figures, regardless of the ignorant praise we offer to distant relatives we learn about in school without ever realizing the definitive warnings they shriek, everything from the increasingly distant past somehow gets used to justify both, if not all sides of an argument, creating the nonsense world we argue about today, angry and partisan, unwilling to seek a common ground when Washington himself, annoyed by the opposing sides to his Federalist ideology, “accepted the need for painful compromises to form a union.” Somehow we have gone back in time, before the struggles of founding a revolutionary nation meant to declare all citizens free. We once more live in the past, back towards monarchy, the ignorance of history and political reality transformed into some YouTube rant about a douche bag playing world conquest games, Risk, ignoring the idea that everyone has a voice and resuming a once lost idea that one, and only one, along with their blind, submissive followers, are the only people who matter and that the rest of the world is not just the enemy, but should not even exist, their violently shrill voices shouting words that clogged ears can never hear.
History matters. It matters, you blind motherfuckers. History gives us an idea where we come from and where we are going. And if we claim that history continues to repeat itself, just remember one last thing: “Perhaps most disturbing to Washington was the prospect that liberty would descend into anarchy. Some populist demagogue, he feared, might exploit the weakness of a feeble central government to establish a dictatorship.” This was the founding father of our nation. Even his compatriots argued with him, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton (the first destructive partisans in US history), “dread(ing) a powerful national government as the primrose path to monarchy,” with Washington and the duplicitous Alexander Hamilton (and realize, these were all sincere men in favor of the best for our nation at its birth) viewing “a strong central government as the best bulwark against that threat.”
So where are we today? The same arguments, ultimately, still exist, a strong federal government controlling the future of the nation (Washington, Hamilton, John Adams and John Hancock, among other less famous founders), versus a states rights party: Jefferson, Madison, and any number of large slave owners outside of George Washington. And yet somehow we still exist in this divisive pettiness today, the same social and racial arguments, certainly exactly the same ideas on economics and fair play. Somehow we have not advanced far beyond 1783, when the American Revolution was over and we struggled to form the idea of a brand new government in favor of everyone. We have yet to reach those ideals. Ever since the dawn of our nation we continue going backwards. Look at the years since Bill Clinton ascended to the throne. See George W. Bush. Barrack Obama. Donald J. Trump. Each leader has risen in an age of increasingly panicked paranoia, a threatening gesture born at first out the the early cold war anti-Communist panic, and then through the confusion over the Kennedy assassination, the lies over Vietnam of LBJ and the chaos of Richard Nixon. There was the failure of Carter, the greedy corruption under Reagan, and the aloof indifference of George Bush number 1. The conspiratorial mindset of the American public, always a crazed question mark, going all the was back to the post-French Revolution year of 1798, when the first suggestions of a Freemason/Illuminati conspiracy were alleged by John Robison (https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9781534845893&n=100121501&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-new), has found a new leader in the mind of Donald J. Trump, a man consumed for years (well before his presidency, in a gruesomely cynical rage, pointing fingers at everything not going exactly his way) by conspiracy theories, some of which are possibly even true (and we should doubt he is even aware which ones). This is the greatest fear of our founding fathers, for whatever historical flaws they are guilty of. I have little doubt that Donald Trump (or, for that matter, Bill Clinton) would nervously support slavery. And yet neither of these men really seem to care about the ideals that founded America. Treason, a loaded word, is a terrifyingly apt consideration when thinking about what these men (and the current man is of course now in question) presuppose about where we are and what we are supposed to be.
History matters. History always matters. For those of us who ignore it–and I will not turn this into a bland cliche–those who ignore it deserve whatever miserable failure they have forced upon themselves.
