Yesterday Deleware Dem gave us the
parable of the frog Today I submit that the pot is boiling.
Before taking up residence at the corporate headquarters of the global oil and gas industry, I lived for several years in Biloxi, Miss. Every summer my buddies and I would war-game the "big one" on our work breaks. We knew Biloxi would be destroyed. We knew New Orleans would be submerged. We were all armchair hurricane hunters, and we worked out in excruciating detail what disaster would look like and what we would do. But we never really believed--I mean down in your gut where only experience can teach you--that it would actually come to pass.
When it did I was no longer in Biloxi. I read the headlines before going to work and, like everyone else, was relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet." Then my wife called me in tears. Everyone, it seems, was celebrating the fact that Katrina had hit Biloxi instead of New Orleans. Not just hit it--wiped it out. The horror had only begun. The next night six of her close family members who lived in the GNO were staying with us until they got the all clear to return to their homes, and something wasn't right. The levy breaches had not been reported, but water was rising on Canal Street. A sickening feeling began to set in. But still, nothing could have prepared us for the horrors that unfolded over the next several days.
Now I know--deep down where it counts--it will happen. It is happening.
Last Friday, Kurt Weldon (R-PA) was on The News Hour yelling at Eric Lichtblau over the SWIFT story He wasn't making a point. He wasn't arguing. He was yelling the way an incompetent parent yells at a child who has disobeyed. The politics of rage. A couple of days later, right-wing blogs were posting the names and addresses of NYT photographers and executives and their children along with thinly-veiled exhortations for readers to make themselves famous and "grab the brass ring." A right wing commentator expressed his comfort with the idea of NYT executive editor Bill Keller placed in a gas chamber. Gas chamber?
Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) and Robert Kennedy Jr. have persuasively documented the systematic and illegal undermining of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. We all sort of know it was stolen. Yeah, I read all the diaries about using stolen elections as an alibi for disengagement. No alibis here. I know my responsibilities, and I will meet them to the best of my ability. But there it is.
In February 2003 some of my colleagues and I exchanged nervous glances. Only one-on-one did we discuss how afraid we were. We knew things were going horribly wrong and wondered how we would deal with it. In time we acclimated. The following year I taught history at a liberal arts college. I spoke frankly of the state of democracy in the US, half afraid the thought police would arrive and show me to the door. It didn't happen, and a few students privately let me know that they got it. Most just took their C and moved on.
Now the Army is being ground to pieces in Iraq; the new occupation of Gaza looks a lot like the occupation of Iraq (at least from the Arab point of view); Iran is arming itself with nuclear weapons as a deterrent to a possible invasion by the US; North Korea is launching missiles and credibly claims to have nuclear bombs; The middle class is all but hollowed out; and New Orleans is still in ruins. Republican support seems limited to a solid thirty percent representing the bedrock of right-wing conservatism.
Republicans, in the wake of Brian Bilbray's narrow victory in CA-50, have determined to run on a strategy of demonizing immigrants. The Republican majority in Congress is no longer even pretending to govern. Vigilante groups patrol with guns, build fences, and string razor wire. The Washington cabal, the right-wing gasbags, and the wingnutosphere have announced in unison, loud and clear: "we will stop at nothing. We will do whatever it takes to hold onto power."
I believe them.
This is not North Korea or China or Cuba. As of now, dkos is still allowed to operate, people sell buttons ridiculing the president on the Washington Mall. Most people I know today hold the right wing in derision. The press has become refreshingly skeptical of the Washington cabal, and the SCOTUS has recently ruled that presidential power has limits. Some of our liberties are intact. But the full fury of this storm has not yet been unleashed. The horrors are only partially upon us, and I fear what lies ahead.
I was complacent for far too long. Although I voted regularly, and spoke out personally, I never got involved in the grunt work of democracy until I was inspired to action by you of the netroots. I am now trying to do my part, and I am in it for the long haul. But in contemplating the near term, I am haunted by the line from Yeats's Second Coming, "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"