It still hasn't busted up - today's edition
We're closer now, though
My last piece here was titled “It Still Hasn’t Busted Up,” and I guess the fact that that’s true could bolster the argument that everyone ought to calm down, because life continues to roll along with a sufficient backdrop of stability to absorb the systemic shocks that are undeniably gathering momentum.
But this brittleness of which I’ve been speaking is intensifying. Can there really be any question about it?
Consider the matters on post-America’s plate this day:
Over 150 of the nation’s top medical experts have organized themselves into a body called the US Public Interest Research Group and drafted a letter that went out to various Trump administration personnel and all 50 state governors. It basically calls for going back to a mid-March degree of national lockdown - staying at home except to get food and medicine, no non-essential interstate travel, only takeout from restaurants.
The sheriff of the county just south of Indianapolis says his department won’t enforce the governor’s mask mandate.
Somebody finally got through to the Very Stable Genius, at least enough to convince him that holding a semi-customary GOP convention in Jacksonville next month was ill-advised.
Just because CHAZ has been dismantled doesn’t mean that that area of Seattle is returning to normalcy. Quite the contrary. Last night, it experienced “massive” damage done by an Antifa mob. A giant fire was set. Windows smashed at Key Bank, Chase and Whole Foods, among other businesses.
The district attorneys for Philadelphia and Baltimore say they’ll arrest any federal law enforcement personnel that try to take Portland-style measures in their cities.
Professional sports continues its self-ruination. NBA and NFL courts and fields are now routinely emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter,” which is being sold as an innocuous phrase but is the official name of an organization that seeks to obliterate the nuclear family and impose a moratorium on rent, mortgages and utilities, was founded by self-professed Marxists and is training militias. The New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals, to a player, took a knee as the national anthem was being played before their game last night.
62 percent of post-Americans are afraid to fully share their ideological and cultural views in public, including 52 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 77 percent of Republicans.
More broadly, there’s no escaping the dismal choice before us as we enter the home stretch of the current election cycle. The current Real Clear Politics average of presidential-race polls has Biden over Trump 49.6 - 40.9. Senate races in several key states are at present considered tossups.
That means that there’s a good chance that a level of identity politics and redistribution that will make everything that has come so far pale in comparison will be imposed on what remains of our nation. DC statehood and the abolition of the electoral college will get more serious consideration than ever before. A Judeo-Christian view of God based on scripturally sound doctrine will get marginalized even further.
This is likely because the cowardly Republican Party became an active participant in the disemboweling of conservatism. Republican politicians who had built solid reputations as principled conservatives over the course of long careers have hitched their wagons to the monstrosity of the Trump phenomenon, or at best stayed silent. Certain think tanks, publications and websites have abandoned fealty to the core tenets of the conservative worldview. Indeed, they’ve fostered the rift that has mortally wounded the movement by belittling and humiliating the actual conservatives who have seen Trumpism for the mutation that it is.
Further harm is being inflicted by a certain swath within the remaining actual conservative cadre. This element has decided that an endorsement of what Democrats intend to do to America, by electing Joe Biden, is a principled stance. That constitutes as much of an abandonment of what they had previously stood for as casting their lot with Trumpism.
“It’s a binary choice, as it always is” is the tiresome rejoinder to pointing this out.
And that’s an excruciatingly clear snapshot of our present moment. That’s how brittle things have become. The leftists and the Lincoln Project tell us we have to press the button for them in order to bring about Trumpism’s demise. The Trumpists have an undeniably valid point that permitting a leftist victory will render our nation unrecognizable immediately after its achieved. (Witness the heels dug in over whether the Department of Homeland Security is justified in moving into a city like Portland in the wake of months of local failure to stem the anarchy and destruction. Do you expect me to here chime in on one side or another? That’s what I’m talking about.)
But the crackup is still in the future. You got up today. You may have poured yourself a cup of coffee, tended to some correspondence. Checked out the headlines. Maybe you prayed. If you have the time to be reading this, your financial situation is probably stable enough that you don’t have to focus on it with unmitigated urgency. If you have a family, you may have had some moments of affection, support, perhaps levity, with your spouse, children, parents or siblings. If you had places to go in your community, the traffic patterns and scenery probably looked familiar. (There may be an exception to that if you live in one of the cities that is still being subjected to nightly mayhem.)
But you can sense the cracks in the ground beneath your feel multiplying.
You’re not big enough to reverse the process. Neither am I. And, as has been demonstrated here, most people don’t understand what “the process” is. They think that a political defeat of whoever is on the other side of the brand they’ve signed onto is going to make everything okay.
I don’t know what to recommend, to you or me or anyone else. I guess the closest I’d come to suggesting a response to this juncture is brace yourself.
Hold fast to what is eternally true, the rock that withstands all storms. Everything else is set to crumble.