Did you ever in your life think it would get this bad – in your lifetime?

He whose name I shall not mention, the one who refuses to say he would accept the election results unless they met his fairness standards (translation: unless he were to win), he who is the tool of the Heritage Foundation and the one they depend upon to enact their Project 2025, he who blasphemously advertises himself as the next Jesus Christ (and is somehow accepted as such by people who were once people of true faith), promises to bring about a “Second American Revolution.” Irony hardly seems appropriate in this nightmare scenario, wherein the tool assures his followers that he will be a “dictator for a day” -- was there ever such a thing? -- to help them “take back our country.”  Those he wants to “take it back” from are legion: -- well, there! I saw a video in the morning and thought it would be easy to find again. It was not, and I wasted a lot of time looking through online crap. I do remember mention of "Communists" and "vermin." Naturally, undocumented workers would be rounded up, along with "criminals." (He forgets that he is a member of that category).

 

What the Heritage Foundation and presumably the Republican candidate (oh, how a once respectable party has fallen!) want to establish, however, is nothing like the U.S.A. but a government more repressive than any the United States has ever known. In this “brave new world” they would put in place, the teaching of history would be banished. (Teachers and librarians are already under siege in many places.) Many government agencies would be abolished and the ones allowed to continue purged of "disloyal" experts, to be replaced by loyalists, whether expert or not. Undocumented aliens would be swept up in the largest-ever dragnet for mass deportation. Not only abortion but also contraception would be outlawed. 

The devil in the details goes on and on, but the keystone is that the president, under Samuel Alito’s “unitary executive” theory -- only last week given a massive accelerative boost by the Supreme Court -- would have almost unlimited powers if and only if what the president did were approved by the Republican-stacked Court, so a president elected on the Democratic ticket obviously could not, literally, get away with murder, as could a Republican. 

 

Make no mistake: Call it what you will, this plan is not conservatism, which is why I call the Court “Republican-stacked” rather than “majority-conservative.” Privileging one political party over another is not conservative. Purging government agencies of the those denoted as “disloyal” is not conservative. Turning the president into a king, above the rule of law, is absolutely not conservative. 

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….”

 

Confession: I post on Facebook. On July 4, I posted a link to Heather Cox Richardson’s July 2 podcast on three recent Supreme Court decisions, the so-called “debate” between the two presidential candidates, and the obvious truth: No one is coming to save us. As HCR notes, we certainly can’t depend on the so-called “liberal press”!

I was disappointed (though not, I admit, surprised) at how few Fb friends bothered to follow the link to the podcast. It wasn’t, after all, a cute puppy picture or a pretty garden photo they could simply “like”  before moving on, so they simply scrolled by. I tagged a couple of friends and edited my introduction to say that the link might take them to the most important words they would hear that day, but -- deaf ears, for the most part. Not that people don’t care. Some are so firmly convinced that the game is lost, so demoralized, that rousing them from their lethargic stupor seems all but impossible. 

 

This morning I was thinking about personality traits and what I would say if someone asked me to name my worst. Of course, I don’t know what others would say about me (and maybe don’t want to know), but I do know myself to be very stubborn. On the other hand (and this fits right in with my philosophy of life, i.e., that everything is a double-edged sword), if I weren't stubborn, my bookstore would not have survived for 31 years, because I would have quit when the going got tough, rather than taking on one part-time job after another to hang on by my fingernails. And in this case, which involves nothing less than the future of our country, I don’t see giving up as an option.

 

So if you have lost all hope, please ask yourself what you have to gain by infecting others with your defeatist attitude. You need to vent? Vent in the shower! When you speak your presumptive defeat publicly or smear it all over social media, you only give aid and support and endless amusement to the opposition. 

 

Fear is something to overcome. Defeatism is not a game plan. Another name for stubbornness is perseverance or persistence. If you can’t summon up any positivity or determination, then, if you got no sisu at all, put a sock in it. Or – 

When you just can't keep it zipped!

The Screaming Lie

When I was six years old, my best neighborhood buddy was a five-year-old boy named Jimmy. We climbed the apple tree in my backyard together, and we watched television together at his house. (Our family had no TV.) One day Jimmy and I wandered up to little Maureen’s house to play in her sandbox while she and her family were away from home. 

There had been rain the night before, and the sandbox was uncovered, so the sand was soupy and wouldn’t hold shapes well in the rain-filled box. We enjoyed dribbling wet sand through our fingers for a while. Then we discovered — and oh, the joy of childhood discovery, independent of adult guidance! — that if we threw dripping globs of it onto the nearby asphalt siding shingles of Maureen's house, they would stick, like molehills on the vertical surface! Defying gravity! It seemed like magic! Intoxicated with our powers, we soon had a whole section of the lower back wall of the house pock-marked with lumps of sand. It was quite wonderful fun, and when the excitement wore off, we found our way back down the hill (all of eighty feet) to our own homes and thought nothing more of it. 

That was the prelude.

Later in the day — it must have been evening, because my father was home — Maureen’s father appeared at our back door, livid with rage, quivering with rage, and demanding to know the identity of the “delinquents” who had thrown sand on his house. In his rage, he was threatening to call the police and have the miscreants thrown in jail! Terrified, I screamed and sobbed repeated denials! Jail! Locked up away from my family! I knew that lying was wrong but  could not face the punishment threatened and the shame of being branded a criminal. 

All these decades later (and thinking of Mr. Rogers, too), I look back on that incident and am astonished by the lack of proportion and reason Maureen’s father exhibited. We were such tiny children, Jimmy and I, and we had not thrown paint, only sand. Water from a garden hose would wash it away! Police? Jail? Were these appropriate threats for a grownup to shout at a frightened little girl, his daughter’s playmate?

If anything, Jimmy and I had been guilty of poor judgment. Well, again, we were five and six years old! I don’t recall if “trespassing” was an issue. That would have been strange in our modest, lower-middle-class neighborhood of forty-foot lots, where we kids were always running from one yard to another and “cutting through” from one street to the next. The whole neighborhood was a "commons" for us then, as well as for unleashed dogs and outdoor cats.

What we had done was neither malicious nor irrevocable. We had had fun and made a mess, a mess that could be hosed away in minutes. Maureen’s father could have asked us to clean it up, but apparently he didn’t think of that. Only police and jail. 

So I lied. Now that was very wrong, and I knew it. I lied to my parents and I lied to this other suddenly threatening adult, and because I knew lying was wrong, I screamed and cried while persisting in my lie, both out of fear of discovery, for what had now been labeled a “crime” (the sand), and out of guilt for the lie.

After a while, after Maureen’s father finally left, my parents calmed me down and assured me that I would not go to jail, even if I had thrown the sand, but that I needed to tell them the truth. And so, tearfully, I did. 

That incident came back to me yesterday as, one by one, so many members of the House of Representatives lost control of their emotions and yelled and screamed in rage. At first I thought, they have to know [the truth], so why this  lack of self-control and dignity? That's when I remembered my six-year-old self, caught between lying and fear of punishment, screaming and sobbing uncontrollably. Oh, yes, I thought then. They know, all right.