Marking Time: A tide-turning moment?
Upon opening this site's admin page, I see that my last post was over a month ago, on August 9th.
Oh well. That's the good thing about having a journal like this that is almost 100% based on the self-gratification of seeing my words in print, without it mattering how many hits the site gets. Because this way I don't have to hold my feet to the fire of a stressful schedule of posts. The only deadlines are … well, there are no real deadlines. And that's the way I like it. I just do my paying job of being a consultant to social workers, pursue my responsibilities as chair to the local Democratic Committee, and indulge my pleasures of travel and pleasant distraction. Then when I feel like it, I can make a quick post to leave a mile-marker of some sort … or perhaps a trail of crumbs pointing to what direction my thoughts and moods are going. On rare occasion, modest fellow that I am, I do run across something that makes me inclined to beat my own drum a bit, and am comfortable doing it for a small audience.
So here I am, with my thoughts and moods lately heading in a positive direction, and with a desire to record for posterity that (once again) I recognized something going on in society that no pundit I read had yet articulated.
The utterance of the recognition came, as some of my best news flashes do, as a casual post on Facebook … which I treat as a blog for like-minded friends, posting to news content that I think is important with a few memes that amuse me thrown in. But most important to me is that I often use it as a venue for short op-eds and commentaries I write. Sometimes these are stand-alone mini-essays, but usually they're a response or addendum to one or another news article that I post. The writings are always spontaneous and unpolished, and often not durably noteworthy even to me. But occasionally one will feel so right, or be sufficiently provocative, that it will draw some number of positive or critical responses. And if I like them enough, I'll maybe polish them just a little bit before sharing them on this website.
So … there was one such comment four days ago, on Saturday morning, September 20. A piece that I wrote while drinking my coffee at the little computer in the dining room. I'll paste it below … again, for posterity's sake … because it reflects a thought that occurred to me two weeks earlier, in the middle of our 2.5 week trip to Guatemala: that something has changed in very recent times. That my clouds of despair over encroaching fascism have dissipated a little. I was not able to discern why I thought things might be getting better when I first sensed rays of hope emanating from around the dark clouds of triumpidiocy and ugly magatism.
But it seemed undeniable to me that yes, suddenly there was some still preconscious reason, or reasons, for my mood to lighten. Mary, my wife, did not share the sensation. And as short a time as 4 days ago, when I made the FB post pasted below, neither did many of my friends. I get that. There's been so much disappointment, time and again over the last 9 years, as somehow the insane public devotion to diaper don persisted despite an ongoing avalanche of evidence that he is a self-obsessed pathological 5 year-old in 80 year-old dictator's clothing. But this time, after a week of a more sunny disposition, I said so … just before, inspired by the Kimmel Bomb that blew up in Disney's and magatland's faces, professional pundits began to comment on it.
The first solid affirmation I got was 3 days later, yesterday, from Jay Kuo's post in “The Big Picture“, in which he asked the question, “Is the Tide Turning?: On multiple fronts, Trump has been pushed back or forced to dig in and defend.” Kuo didn't assert in the long op-ed, as I didn't in my own short FB post, that the tide definitely is turning. But he does point to reasons to think that trumpidiocy and magatism are under fire from a public whose mood seems to have shifted.
And then, just this morning, with another turning tide metaphor headline, Paul Krugman also writes in a substack post titled “Is the Jimmy Kimmel Saga a Sign that the Tide is Turning?” He lays out his believe that we might be at some sort of juncture at which Trump's bid for dictatorship is on the rocks. Krugman, being Krugman, presents a number of graphs showing why rational people should and may be resisting the decrepit naked king. But the bottom line is that Trump may not be able … or likely will not be able? … to follow through with his model of emulating Putin's and Orbán's ascent to power. Like Kuo, Krugman suggests not only that “Trump has not yet locked in his autocracy,” but that the backlash demonstrated in Disney's Kimmel Debacle bodes badly for the success of this very unpopular Candidate for Dictator to follow through with his bid to be Repressive Putocrat in Chief.
Both Kuo and Krugman suggest that there is room for optimism at this point. Or maybe, just maybe, an inexorable moment is underway? And that the general voting public has the responsibility to speak out loudly and protest the madness of a self-obsessed bilious Diapered King. THAT cry is being echoed all over the infosphere. Finally. I've been screaming into the public void for years now! But now, it seems like every liberal pundit is suddenly awake to the need for the public to make a defeaning and disruptive hew and cry for justice (set aside October 18, all, for the big No Kings demonstration. We need to rock the nation!)
Anyway, just as evidence for my own prophetic capacity, here's the unedited FB post I made on September 20:
Something strange happened in Guatemala over the course of the 2.5 weeks we were there: I became more optimistic.Not sure why. It's certainly not that I was offline and not following the news. No, every NYT and WaPo and any number of substack notifications landed in my phone and email all day, every day, and I generally paid as much attention to them as I do when I'm in the Disunited States of America.But still, I sort of eased into a better place. It's real, I've no doubt about that, but it's still subliminal. Still ineffable. I think maybe I'm just starting to feel the outline of what, exactly, is feeding my newfound hope, and am just starting to get an idea … which is that while the political universe is still very, very dark, people are actually starting to see the light.I had that tentative realization this morning as I read my son's usual morning email. He's high on life right now. He's a music producer, records and mixes music for bands and individual musicians, and lately he's had a flush of new business. That makes him happy, and me happy for him.But what caught my eye was his comment that half the music he's working on falls within the range of “protest music,” with lyrics decrying the barbarity of trumpslut-magat policy and social pressures.The bands he works with are all over the place … different cities, even different countries. But some of them are, like him, from Texas. And these folks are not only writing protest music, but apparently playing it in venues you'd think would be dangerous. He says they do catch hell for it … but they write it and perform it anyway.So I THINK that I'm picking up on an incipient thread of consciousness among Americans that enough is enough. Ya basta! We're not going to take it anymore. And I THINK that if the sentiment is there, if it's even very slowly swelling, it means that American are FINALLY willing to do battle with the repressive cretins that are trying to enslave and kill us.Or maybe I'm delusional. But I don't think so. I had this feeling even before returning to the Disunited States … and it made me less anxious about coming home. I'm feeling much more sanguine, and believe we have gained the high ground, from which we can launch real campaigns of resistance … and take the offensive. It certainly won't be a glide path to a more reasonable reality. And for sure we will lose battles on the way to some sort of necessarily compromised victory. But subjective as it is, I feel that a much broader array of my fellow citizens are ready to lance the boil of ugly American magatism.And THAT makes me happy.