“But I don’t give a fuck
‘Cause I’m in my truck
and I’m off to the ro-de-o”
–southwestern folk song
The night of the transition of the year will also be a transition from mild weather and clear roads, to ice and then single digit Fahrenheit temperatures.
Once more I run the white truck a few blocks to the store to make ready for the storm.
On the way back I flip on the NPR for just those few minutes, and the mainstream media lottery brings me this.
Mary Louise Kelly, interviewer: “Given your work in election security and freedom, do you ever worry that January 6th was just a dress rehearsal, and that next time the coup might be real”?
Beltway legal egghead academic: Oh dear me yes. We could lose our whole system of democracy and free and fair elections, so easily. You’re right to be very afraid. The barbarians are at the gates.
So … a few things …
First off, let me be clear. I’m not for bloodshed, not even of random bacon drones Just Doing Their Stupid Jobs, if it can be avoided.
Secondly, the democracy is already gone, because the way things work now, you only have the choice to vote between Frick and Frack, and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. This applies not just to the presidential race, but all the way down to your local dogcatcher ballot. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez beat her corporate mannequin of a centrist opponent by preaching revolution, but the moment she sat down in her comfy new office, she just turned into him anyway, for all the purposes that matter.
The minimum wage is still unlivable. The health care system is still criminally and purposefully broken. No one with a student loan has gotten any relief, despite the fact that either Biden alone, or the majority Democratic congress could wipe it all away with the stroke of a pen. Even the last flimsy hope of a child tax credit has been ground under the fancy heel of the real masters. The kids are still in their cages down south.
The candidates, and their shadowy donors, and their hired academic goons, and Mary Louise Kelly, and the entire professional-managerial class, are deeply invested in believing the huge Lie that this is still a democracy, and that Americans are still free, and if we could only control a minority of unvaccinated redneck trumpers properly, everything would be good and normal again with the cozy confines of the Empire.
The corrupting lie, that that average person is so much better off being governed by the perfect hair of Gavin Newsom, as opposed to the doltish dead eyes of a Ron DeSantis … Oh darling vote blue. No matter who.
From California to Florida, your normal sucks ass, America, for most of your citizens and for most all the citizens of the world too.
Saving or going back to your normal is not a thing most sane people would waste anxious energy on.
The complete moral failure of the Biden presidency will inevitably mean that this new year will sweep Republicans into Congress en masse, and the result of that will be … nothing. Oh sure, a few more women may lose the right to an abortion, or a few more transfolk will find it harder to find a place to piss or play basketball–but that shit is just emotional window dressing compared to the economic reality of daily life. If you’ve got enough money, believe me, abortion will be easy, and so will the kind of proper medical care that all but guarantees no more unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
Nothing will change, just as Biden promised his rich backers verbatim.
In light of that, all through 2021, I personally have prayed for a real coup. Not against the allegedly democratic process or the hapless fools that supposedly run it, but against the plutocrats that actually do.
It didn’t happen. I doubt it will, anytime soon. There’s every indication that We The People are far too dispirited and broken for anything like that to happen on a mass scale.
2022 for me will be a year of quiet personal revolution. No protest sign, no war paint, no crowds.
A revolution based on the look of the sky and the shifting timbre of the wind, and on a tentative experiment in nomadics and cinema.