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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 1 year

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Chris Britt, Florida Politics

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But really, this all goes back to 2008, when the Republicans lost to a ni-i-i-, Barack Obama, which was just so Not The Way Things Work For Us that the party that had first attracted the Old Confederacy to the candidacy of Barry Goldwater; followed by a formal invitation to the unreconstructed Southern inbreds made by Richard Nixon; confirmed by “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan who was smart enough to announce his candidacy as the proponent of “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a dog whistle heard by every Southernist from coast to coast; followed up by “respectable” G.H.W. Bush and the “Willie Horton ad;” followed by the incendiary speakership of Newt Gingrich, who proved that the graduate of a Pennsylvania trailer park could be as good a Confederate as any Georgia peckerwood. The result of the loss to That Guy in 2008 was the party going full CuckooBird Crazy - the knuckle-draggers who attended Palin rallies carrying “monkey dolls” turned into the Tea Party, which was institutionalized in 2014 with the creation of the House Freedom Caucus..

From the swearing-in of the Tea Party-dominated 113th Congress in January 2011, the Republicans who actually believed in governing were in the minority and on the way out, whether they knew it or not. The “Establishment” that had previously laughed at the “kooks” who were now newly-sworn-in congress critters, realized that the part of the Republican base that had sent “those guys” was part of their support too.

From that point onward, the two factions of the party were in an unspoken alliance.

The Serious People who knew that the embarrassing grandstanding and performative nonsense the “crazies” were engaged in were sure that the crazies and “learned their lesson” with their failure in the 2013 government shut down that led to the credit rating of the country being lowered, with all the blame focused on the “crazies.” The Serious People just needed to be sure the “crazies” were kept in check.

The “frontman” in the House might have been John Boehner, but the Freedom Caucus that couldn’t govern openly could prevent him accomplishing anything they didn’t agree with. And when he didn’t say “How High” on the way up when they said “Jump!” he found himself obn the slow train to Palookaville.

All Donald Trump ever did was come along and toss a lit match into the fireworks factory.

All the white supremacy that had gown in the Party of Lincoln since 1964 - quietly, of course, the way such racial order is maintained privately in most of American history - finally achieved critical mass and the crock pot boiled over when Trump turned up the heat.

It wasn’t just that Trump didn’t know anyone in Washington to bring into government that the top people in his administration were all Freedom Caucus alumni. They recognized him for what he was: the guy with the key to them running the party openly

As Josh Marshall pointed out, “It’s not the case that every Republican member of Congress is the same as Jim Jordan or Matt Gaetz. But virtually all of them rely on a coalition of voters that wants to support Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz. That’s really all that matters. The GOP is a balkanized party made up of elected officials who either are Jim Jordan or aren’t willing to cross Jim Jordan.” Or as Will Saletan put it, “The GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord.”

In fact, the “Republican Establishment” has been dead since January 6, 2021 when - mere hourse after a violent mob had assaulted the Capitol, 137 Republican members of Congress voted in favor of the mob.

What is going on this week is not a fight between the extremists and the establishment.

It’s between two camps of extremists.

McCarthy and the rest of the “establishment” were among those who refused to certify Biden’s Electoral College victory. McCarthy, would-be “replacement” Steve Scalis, and all the others have faithfully repeated the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen; they all pushed for an end to the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate during the budget negotiations last month; they all gave money to Harriet Hageman to assure the defeat Liz Cheney in the Wyoming primary last summer; they all see Marjorie Taylor Greene as being worthy of major committee assignments; they’re all ready to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the first thing they did yesterday morning was to remove the magnetometers at the entrance to the House floor. They all failed to condemn the attack on Paul Pelosi; they were silent when Trump dined with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes; they support removing Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar, as “payback” for Democrats removing Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committees. Even the ones who “support” Ukraine say there can be no “blank check. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan are among McCarthy’s strongest supporters now.

How has McCarthy and any of the “responsible Republicans” been different from the 20 House Freedom Caucus members?

Well, so far, neither McCarthy nor any of the “responsible Republicans” have taken positions like those of 20-19-2022 HFC leader Andy Biggs, who refused to wear a mask even at the height of the pandemic, sought a presidential pardon for participation in the fake elector conspiracy, voted against recognizing the Capitol police who defended him on January 6, opposed aid to Ukraine while the border with Mexico is unsecured, and opposed admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO.

None of them voted with Scott Perry, who opposed a House resolution condemning Qanon and recommended Jeffrey Clark be installed as Attorney General, and also requested a presidential pardon for his activities.

These views place the Freedom Caucus outside the realm of reason, but that didn’t stop McCarthy from announcing surrender to their demands. There is no price McCarthy would not pay, but there is no way for McCarthy to negotiate with people whose only aim is to be seen as opposing him.

This is the predictable end of a political party that descended into mindless demonization of Democrats, the “deep state, immigrants, the medical profession, the “woke” military, the FBI - because it was what its Foxified base demanded.

.And their would-be warlord has discovered he has no control over his minions, because the minions don’t see themselves as such.

Yesterday, people were asking, “Where is Trump in McCarthy’s hour of need?” It’s reported today that he was working the phones for McCarthy all day, but his pleas had no impact. There’s a story that those who received his calls responded to his request they support Kevin with suggestions that Trump should become their Speaker. Naturally, such obvious flattery is Trump’s ultimate aphrodisac; it put him off his demands for loyalty. But this evening, Lauren Boebert got up in the House and publicly told “my favorite president” that he should “knock off telling us to vote for Kevin McCarthy and start telling everyone else to stop (voting for McCarthy).”

Yes, the Purveyors of Conventional Wisdom say that the opposition to McCarthy comes from the fact the 20 rebels can’t trust him, despite his demonstration that he will give in to literally every t demand. But that isn’t enough because they want to break things. Breaking things is now their only goal. Right now, that thing top be broken is Kevin McCarthy.

But all this shows that they cannot be trusted with power. McCarthy and the House Republican caucus are now defined as unfit and weakened by their behavior these past two days.

They can probably kiss their tiny four-seat majority goodbye sooner than 2024, starting with the special election to replace George-Anthony Santos-Devlolder, or whatever his name really is.

They are the Breaking Things Party. That’s it.

[That’s Another Fine Mess]

#TCinLA #That's Another Fine Mess #US House of Representatives #Chris Britt

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academia-etudiante · 2 years

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Todos os 339 livros referenciados em "Gilmore Girls":

1. 1984 by George Orwell

2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

3. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

4. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

5. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

6. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

8. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

9. The Archidamian War by Donald Kagan

10. The Art of Fiction by Henry James

11. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

12. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

13. Atonement by Ian McEwan

14. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

15. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

16. Babe by Dick King-Smith

17. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

18. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

19. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

20. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

21. Beloved by Toni Morrison

22. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney

23. The Bhagava Gita

24. The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy

25. Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

26. A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy

27. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

28. Brick Lane by Monica Ali

29. Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner

30. Candide by Voltaire

31. The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

32. Carrie by Stephen King

33. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

34. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

35. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

36. The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman

37. Christine by Stephen King

38. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

39. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

40. The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

41. The Collected Stories by Eudora Welty

42. A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

43. Complete Novels by Dawn Powell

44. The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton

45. Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker

46. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

47. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

48. Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac

49. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

50. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

51. The Crucible by Arthur Miller

52. Cujo by Stephen King

53. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

54. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

55. David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D

56. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

57. The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown

58. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

59. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

60. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

61. Deenie by Judy Blume

62. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

63. The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx

64. The Divine Comedy by Dante

65. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

66. Don Quixote by Cervantes

67. Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv

68. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

69. Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

70. Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook

71. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

72. Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn

73. Eloise by Kay Thompson

74. Emily the Strange by Roger Reger

75. Emma by Jane Austen

76. Empire Falls by Richard Russo

77. Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol

78. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

79. Ethics by Spinoza

80. Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves

81. Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

82. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

83. Extravagance by Gary Krist

84. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

85. Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore

86. The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan

87. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser

88. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

89. The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

90. Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein

91. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

92. Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce

93. Fletch by Gregory McDonald

94. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

95. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

96. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

97. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

98. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

99. Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

100. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

101. Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

102. George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg

103. Gidget by Fredrick Kohner

104. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

105. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

106. The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo

107. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

108. Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky

109. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

110. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

111. The Gospel According to Judy Bloom

112. The Graduate by Charles Webb

113. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

114. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

115. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

116. The Group by Mary McCarthy

117. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

118. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

119. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling

120. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

121. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

122. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

123. Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare

124. Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare

125. Henry V by William Shakespeare

126. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

127. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

128. Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris

129. The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton

130. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

131. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

132. How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

133. How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss

134. How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland

135. Howl by Allen Ginsberg

136. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

137. The Iliad by Homer

138. I'm With the Band by Pamela des Barres

139. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

140. Inferno by Dante

141. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

142. Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy

143. It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton

144. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

145. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

146. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

147. The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain

148. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

149. Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito

150. The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander

151. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

152. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

153. Lady Chatterleys' Lover by D. H. Lawrence

154. The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal

155. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

156. The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield

157. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

158. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

159. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

160. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

161. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

162. The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway

163. The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

164. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

165. Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton

166. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

167. The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

168. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

169. The Love Story by Erich Segal

170. Macbeth by William Shakespeare

171. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

172. The Manticore by Robertson Davies

173. Marathon Man by William Goldman

174. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

175. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

176. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman

177. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

178. The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer

179. Mencken's Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken

180. The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

181. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

182. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

183. The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

184. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

185. The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin

186. Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor

187. A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman

188. Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret

189. A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars

190. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

191. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

192. Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

193. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It's Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh

194. My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken

195. My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest

196. Myra Waldo's Travel and Motoring Guide to Europe, 1978 by Myra Waldo

197. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

198. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

199. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

200. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

201. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin

202. Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen

203. New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

204. The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay

205. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

206. Night by Elie Wiesel

207. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

208. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan

209. Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell

210. Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

211. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

212. Old School by Tobias Wolff

213. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

214. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

215. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

216. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan

217. Oracle Night by Paul Auster

218. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

219. Othello by Shakespeare

220. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

221. The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

222. Out of Africa by Isac Dineson

223. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

224. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

225. The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan

226. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

227. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

228. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

229. Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington

230. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

231. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

232. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

233. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

234. The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche

235. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind

236. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

237. Property by Valerie Martin

238. Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon

239. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

240. Quattrocento by James Mckean

241. A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall

242. Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers

243. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

244. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

245. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

246. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

247. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin

248. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

249. Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman

250. The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

251. R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton

252. Rita Hayworth by Stephen King

253. Robert's Rules of Order by Henry Robert

254. Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton

255. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

256. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

257. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

258. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

259. The Rough Guide to Europe, 2003 Edition

260. Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi

261. Sanctuary by William Faulkner

262. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

263. Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller by Henry James

264. The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum

265. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

266. Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

267. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

268. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

269. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman

270. Selected Hotels of Europe

271. Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell

272. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

273. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

274. Several Biographies of Winston Churchill

275. Sexus by Henry Miller

276. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

277. Shane by Jack Shaefer

278. The Shining by Stephen King

279. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

280. S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton

281. Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut

282. Small Island by Andrea Levy

283. Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

284. Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers

285. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore

286. The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht

287. Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos

288. The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker

289. Songbook by Nick Hornby

290. The Sonnets by William Shakespeare

291. Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

292. Sophie's Choice by William Styron

293. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

294. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

295. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

296. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

297. A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams

298. Stuart Little by E. B. White

299. Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

300. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

301. Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett

302. Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

303. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

304. Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

305. Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

306. Time and Again by Jack Finney

307. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

308. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

309. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

310. The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare

311. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

312. The Trial by Franz Kafka

313. The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson

314. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

315. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

316. Ulysses by James Joyce

317. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath

318. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

319. Unless by Carol Shields

320. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

321. The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers

322. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

323. Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard

324. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

325. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

326. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

327. Walt Disney's Bambi by Felix Salten

328. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

329. We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker

330. What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles

331. What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell

332. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

333. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson

334. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

335. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

336. The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum

337. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

338. The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

339. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

#papillonparle

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pscottm · 8 days

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RFK Jr. Spreads Conspiracy Theory That His Mind is Being Controlled By Total Idiot

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it the “most shocking conspiracy” he has ever unearthed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed on CNN last night that his mind is being controlled by a moron.

“I don’t know exactly how my brain is being operated remotely, by an electronic beam or microwaves or whatnot,” he told the network’s Erin Burnett. “But somehow, some way, there’s a total numbskull making me say the things I say.”

Kennedy said that he had “suspected” that his brain was being manipulated by an egregious dunce “for some time,” but when he heard himself claim that President Joe Biden was a greater threat to democracy than Donald J. Trump, “that clinched it.”

The independent presidential candidate revealed that he pinned index cards to his basement wall featuring his most ludicrous utterances about Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci, vaccines, January 6, Ukraine, and microchips, and then connected the cards with colored yarn to see if a pattern emerged.

“If I’d said one or two dumb things, I’d brush it off,” he said. “But when every time I open my mouth something irredeemably idiotic comes out, that can’t be a coincidence.

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cogitoergofun · 4 months

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Taylor Swift, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2023, perfectly described congressional Republicans in the age of Donald Trump with the line — “You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”

The first “stupid prize” for this past year’s GOP’s House majority is the trophy for the second least productive year of legislation in the history of Congress.

“Stupid prize” number two also goes to them, for producing so much public contempt for Congress.

According to a November Gallup poll, Congress has a dismal 15 percent approval rating and 82 percent disapproval. As the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) used to quip, the votes of approval could only have come from blood relatives and paid staffers.

So much of the negativity around Congress is directly tied to the fact that Republicans have passed only 22 bills into law this session. Of those 22, one bill established a commemorative coin, and two renamed medical centers.

Even the 80th Congress, famously by labeled by President Harry S. Truman as the “Do Nothing Congress” (1947-1949), managed to pass 906 bills.

A third “stupid prize,” goes to this Congress for being the first to expel a member for lying and embarrassing behavior.

A damning House Ethics report found Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) used campaign funds to buy Botox, and designer clothing, and to pay for access to the pornographic website OnlyFans. It was the first time in Congress’s history that a member was expelled without being convicted of a crime or supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Another dunce prize goes to the current House for censuring more of its members than any congress since 1870.

As the Washington Examiner’s Cami Mondeaux reported, the “trio of Democrats censured by the House this year marked a milestone not seen in more than 150 years, raising questions over whether the historically rare form of punishment is becoming weaponized in the lower chamber.”

“Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) became the 27th member in history to be censured…following earlier reprimands for his colleagues Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.),” Mondeaux wrote.

The practical effect of these censures is zero. But the time wasted that could have been used on serious issues is mountainous.

The biggest impact of Republican breakdown came when they ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy, (R-Calif.), who has announced he is immediately retiring from this clown show. He does not want to watch as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) threatens the current, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in case he dares work with Democrats to fund the government this winter.

“If we are seven months into the Mike Johnson speakership and we’ve only moved a single-subject spending bill, then Mike Johnson would likely face a similar fate,” Gaetz has said.

These repeated episodes of Republican self-sabotage prompted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to write on X, formerly Twitter, that her GOP colleagues risk destroying one of the great institutions of democracy — the U.S. House of Representatives. “I can assure you Republican voters didn’t give us the majority to crash the ship,” Greene concluded. “Hopefully no one dies.”

They are not dying, but lots of Republicans and Democrats are leaving. More than 35 have decided to retire.

That includes McCarthy, who was House Republicans’ number one fundraiser. That is bad news for the future of the GOP caucus.

Meanwhile, the GOP House is trying to impeach President Biden with no evidence.

All these problems result from GOP members kowtowing to former President Trump.

His complete control of the party is evident in the loud criticism of Ronna Romney McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, for being insufficiently pro-Trump.

As former congresswoman Liz Cheney warns in her new book, Trump’s command over scared Republican lawmakers will end the balance of power between Congress and the presidency if Trump wins a second term in the White House.

“People who say, ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances,’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted,” Cheney told CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.” “One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”

Historians will have to figure out why House Republicans remain loyal to Trump even after witnessing the losses Republicans have endured under his leadership, especially in the 2020 election.

There has never been a demonstrable Trump “coattail effect,” whereby having him at the top of a GOP ticket leads to a major victory for congressional Republicans.

And according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released last week: “In the seven states where the election was closest in 2020 — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Michigan — Biden had a four-point lead among Americans who said they were sure to vote.”

Reuters also noted: “Some 31 percent of Republican respondents said they would not vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony crime by a jury.”

Republican members of Congress who stand by Trump in the new year will be singing the refrain of “stupid games” leading to “stupid prizes” — in this case a potential blue wave of defeat.

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artcalledtheewhip · 7 months

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TheShit The shit was way dirty as you go down the Families War this war that It’s all been dirty Been binned and unclean All sides Humanity As whole as cities as is neighboring Nay the nay sayers Neighboring cries It’s all whole in states & mental platforms Talk Town majors and governors TikTok All is failing Now reaching into government U gotta a bump The shit Nah I didn’t never snorted Just in it I’m no pig No pig The shit No pig the shit No pig the shit Cheap methods not in my Atmosphere High dots Starred even Pigs takings Who’s to stop? Pictorial Formulas tried Pictorial Formulas trued & tried Snap chew a cap ingrown in sum Far from acid the lunacy sanity drug It’s all chemistry Breaking the bad If used properly IUP IUP iUP More flavorful than 7UP Inside there’s mine & theirs Shit Stained into a movie of alone You could’ve bought Purchased my rendition Better than a squatting Swatting Or Slap A dunce of muthafucks A dunce of A dunce of Mutha Fucks Chemistry and el dna For the shit Shine It Shine it Polished Pyramids For golden toilets Was z inside deposit like that of Trump In a bath tube New meme The Shit Artistic rendition of Donald Deposits The Shit Inside A MovieCritique I’m asking Not straining for answers! AC better than DC My bowel movement Has the shit in it Glory excavation G E Where’s Tesla? Testees In popular science The? Shite Have I posted this

#artcalledtheewhip #wordsbymm #art with pulse #artcalledtattoo #artcalledwords #tattoo #vent #artcallednaturalviews #so it lands on self #artcalledoddities #hoobastank out of control #ukraine #art called #mmybsdrow #i #west

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artcalledcinema · 7 months

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#wordsbymm #cinema #artcalledcinema #mmybsdrow #maybe I’m too busy #families #border crosssing #you may not be enough #theshit #a new #hit #person

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malenipshadows · 3 years

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+ Woodrow Johnston, the vice president of McShane LLC who had been hired by the Republican Party to investigate election fraud, tried to recruit the Proud Boys for a November rally held at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, The Post reported. + In doing so, he contacted Sarah Ashton-Cirillo -- a liberal activist who was working closely with people on the far-right under a fake identity -- saying that they would "need to get the Proud Boys out" to Nevada, according to The Post.

#GOP consultant reportedly tried to recruit Proud Boys for Nevada tr*mp rally #Woodrow Johnston a Nevada GOP consultant #Johnston invited Proud Boys to Nevada tr*mp rally -- Washington Post #Tr*mp an embarrassment to the USA #Tr*mp administration a disaster - believe me #Drumpf is worst US president ever #but are Drumpf fans capable of thinking #after emigrating from Germany Drumpf changed named to Tr*mp #Donald Dunce #another court denies crooked donald bid to void 2020 presidential election results #bogus claims of 2020 U.S. presidential election fraud #Iran & Russia aim to influence 2020 U.S. presidential election #Capitol insurrection defendants outing Proud Boys leaders #u.s. capitol siege #Tr*mp foments insurrection at U.S. Capitol #Tr*mp foments U.S. Capitol riots

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 3 years

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#politics #us politics #magats #trumpanzees #trumpettes #trump supporters #maga #trump #donald trump #2020 election #robert e. lee #fuck the confederates #fuck the confederacy #confederate #a confederacy of dunces #confederacy

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vendimeyers · 4 years

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I haven't watched a whole lot of Duck tales but all the Donald and Daisy on my dash is making me soft.

#this is gonna sound hypocritical cuz i havent even watched Duck Tales past a few episodes in season 1 #but omg WATCH DUCKTALES #this is like the first time in my life ive felt genuinely invested in Donald and Daisy's relationship #and its just from a few random clips on tumblr #probably because up until this point the two have been characterized as dunce husband and nagging wife when paired together #but Ducktales (2017) really said mutually supportive couples rights #They really recharacterized their dynamic without changing who the characters were huh #WE HAVE TO STAN #anyway thats my rant #i wish i had disney plus so i could watch this show some more #dt #duck tales #DuckTales (2017)#dt 2017 #Ducktales

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tomorrowusa · 4 years

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If Trump is unable to meet his debt payments, he’s either going to have to sell assets or get bailed out by a friend with funds. Trump has never liked to sell anything, even when it’s hemorrhaging money. So if he’s tempted to save himself by getting a handout, that makes him a mark. If Trump was still just a reality TV oddity, that wouldn’t be earthshaking. But he’s president, and the trade-offs someone like him would be willing to make to save his face and his wallet taint every public policy decision he makes – including issues around national security. If Vladimir Putin, for example, can backchannel a loan or a handout to the president, how hard is Trump going to be on Russia?

Timothy L. O'Brien at Bloomberg Opinion on why Trump's personal financial mess represents a national security threat.

Spineless Republicans on Capitol Hill make excuses for Trump’s behavior and are themselves aiding and abetting his threat to national security. Republicans need to be completely ripped out of government in this election -- root and stem. Don’t just vote for Biden and hand in your ballot. Make sure you also vote Democratic for House, Senate, state legislature, and every other office.

#donald trump #financial dunce #money problems #personal debt #income tax revelations #national security #republicans #election 2020 #timothy l. o'brien

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dukeofriven · 5 years

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America: A Prophecy

‘What God is he writes laws of peace, and clothes him in a tempest? What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs? What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more obedience pay!’ So cried he, rending off his robe and throwing down his sceptre In sight of Albion’s Guardian; and all the Thirteen Angels Rent off their robes to the hungry wind, and threw their golden sceptres Down on the land of America. - William Blake, 1793

America is becoming ungovernable.

It’s simply much too large, too varied, and much too polarized for any one candidate to garner even the plurality of support needed to effectively govern as a president, complicated by the weaknesses of America’s social/political system that demands a democratically-elected executive somehow stand for the nation as a whole.

This isn’t a ‘diversity’ problem or a call for ethnic of cultural homogeneity. I’m from a country with greater diversity than the United States and we manage just fine. (I mean we’re facing a rising tide of rightwing resurgence exacerbated by decades of failure by ruling parties to replace the antiquated first-past-the-post voting system so I wouldn’t call us “fine” but those issues are rooted in numerous social trends, not racial demographics.)

It’s more a condition of the scale of Unites States and the internecine conflicts of groups within it. I remember during the last election hearing a lot about letting perfect be the enemy of good: ‘yes this candidate might not understand your ethnic/social/cultural group particularly well or speak to your issues, but you ought to vote for them anyways.’ From a certain point of view that’s true - I think it hardly uncontroversial to say that the world generally and America specifically is demonstrably worse under Donald Trump than it would have been under Hillary Clinton.

But leaving aside the candidates as individuals for a moment and viewing them purely as symbols the President-As-Unifier and the electoral circus around it becomes faintly absurd. The more often you have say to one group or another ‘stop needing a candidate to be exactly like you and just give them your vote because they’re more like you than the other guy,’ the more you overlook centuries of pain and marginalization. Groups that never had voices before have voices now: loud voices, prominent voices, and they are finding that they don’t want to sit down and shut up in the interest of some mythical unity anymore. They can’t. And therefore these presidential primaries are only going to get worse as things go on. They’re already getting acrimonious again, and those groups who have been told to swallow their voices again and again if they don’t want things to get worse are realizing that they’ve been used as tools as the status quo for far too long. Things don’t get worse when they shut up and vote like they’re told - but they never get better, either. Not in meaningful ways, or not rapidly enough to be meaningful to most of them .(‘By supporting the status quo you achieved a social victory and it only took you 45 years and your entire youth to see it come to fruition.’) The ‘baby-steps’ of change have started to seem less like care and caution and more like infantilization.

When the only people who could vote in America were white, adult, male property-owners you could have two political parties: there really was more that united voters then divided them, such as all voters belonging to the same class, ethnicity, language group, social background, Enlightenment-moulding education praxis, and willingness to compromise on treating human beings as disposable tools for labour. The greater the franchise has expanded in America the farther and further from that ‘unity’ things have gotten.

Since the Trump election in particular the question is asked: “What’s caused the polarization of America?” The real answers are a multitude of factors: unhealed wounds in the body politic after the Second Indochina War; the malaise, complacency, and self-indulgent omphaloskepsis of being the so-called superpower in the 90s; post-colonialism and free market economics bringing the worst ravages of capitalism stateside and decimating the illusion of a stable middle class. There’s lot of reasons as things are rarely simple.

Perhaps the most critical cause, however, the one with the greatest impact, has been this widening of not just the franchise but the gradual realization by the newly-enfranchised that they vocalize social discontent and express it - or at least attempt to express it - through voting. The ‘silent majority’ can only exist when the majority of oppressed and marginalized groups suffer in silence. The divisions that exist now existed in the 1950s, but they are only now being vocalized in such a prominent way. Even the labour movement and the Great Depression in the thirties did not sufficiently create an impression of intractable internecine rivalries such as now can be seen dividing America.

Republicans have understood this for a long time. This is why their politics have grown more and more tribalistic as the years have gone on. So long as they can dominate amongst specific strata of demographics they don’t have to care about winning any kind of nation-wide majority. They can fixate on the plurality that rigidly shares its belief systems: a rigidity created by and continually reenforced by the rhetoric of Republican doctrine and dogma. Democrats coasted on this for years, thinking that if Republicans focused only on a handful of groups then they benefited simply by having everyone else by default.

But it didn’t really work out that way. Gerrymandering by Republican bureaucrats helped a lot here by segmenting voting districts so that anyone outside the Republican voting base got split across multiple voting districts and never coalesced into more than a handful of centralized sources of power that the Democrats could rely on, but there’s a bigger issue. This Republican plurality positioning has only short-term value: they’re a demographic time bomb and as far back as 2012 I can remember their saner members talking about this as a matter of some urgency. But they were ignored, and the GOP is on a death-cult rocket ride to eventual obsolescence, although they’ll pull as much of American down around them as they go in an act of spite.

But that’s not the problem (or, rather, it is a problem but it’s not what I’ve come here to talk about today). Democrats got so used to coasting on being the party of the default that they lack any ability to talk to groups specifically. Nobody likes being taken for granted and they’ve started pushing back. Clinton’s failure to secure a margin of victory overwhelming enough to overcome the limiters of the Electoral College showed that two years ago: plenty of groups stayed home, an act of protest against a party that expected their vote for no other reason than 'not being the other guy.’

Nobody seems to have learned that lesson very well. Imagine two, three presidential elections from now, when the GOP is a spent force whose membership lists are now covered with dead people. (The oldest baby boomers are over 70, and when age brackets start to die in numbers it becomes a cascade. I can remember going from parades of WWII vets to a handful of wheelchair veterans in about a decade, and from some WWI vets to none in the same length of time.) For the younger among you two, three elections might seem like a long time, but it isn’t: years rush by faster than you think. So picture that world with a GOP in terminal decline and a Democratic party witnessing the prophesied triumph of demographic inevitability.

That’s essentially a one-party state, but a party that already struggles to be enough things to enough people now is going to buckle under pressures the American political system simply wasn’t built to handle. America was built around being a two-party state - of being a country in which the majority of people fit comfortably enough into two broad binaries and vote accordingly.

But they don’t, and they can’t, and America as it presently exists may be quite literally ungovernable. The centuries of appalling violence within America only complicate the picture further - it’s the sort of mixture of history, population, and anger that lead to the Balkan Wars, the conflicts between former members of the Warsaw Pact, and more recently the creation of South Sudan. America already had one civil war, there’s no reason to think that a re-fragmenting of America isn’t possible, especially given how contentious the language seems to be among different groups.

America has a scale problem, and I think Americans don’t really understand this. I live in the second largest country in the world by area but nobody actually lives here. See this?

It’s about fifteen years out of date, but the population hasn’t expanded beyond those yellow borders: just make the red bits much redder and you’re golden. Yet even this is still not getting the full picture. Let me show you with my photoshop skills: Everybody in the green bit:

Does not equal the population of the blue bit. If Canadian politics ran purely off of direct voting the entire country would be dominated by a group of people who live in about 0.14% of the country. What this means in practice is that for all that Canada has different grouping of cultural diversity (i.e. the political/social/cultural makeup of PEI as distinct from Vancouver as distinct from Iqaluit), should a civil war of either literal or abstract nature break-out the power of bodies is still located in one place. This is the population density of America:

Look at all those different concentrations of people and power. Like I said Canada does, of course, have other centres of power outside of old Upper/Lower Canada: despite what it thinks Toronto is not the entirety of the universe. But the multiplicity of metropolitan spaces and concentrated population centres such as you have in America don’t exist here. What am I getting at with this? America has spaces of intensely regional identity on an enormous scale. In Canada, for example, even Quebec separatism seems to be dying a slow and painful death. We’ve all got our our local identities, but Canadians are still mostly Canadian first, something else second. America by contrast, have fought a bloody civil war over slavery that afterwards was reshaped (falsely) into a war about regionalism, which mutated later into tribalism. This is why right-wingers in Union states spout Confederate flags. The flag doesn’t represent the literal loyalties of the Confederacy but its values: racism, white power, using human being as disposable tools for personal enrichment, and racism. (Anyone wanting to argue is welcome to read the Constitution of the Confederacy, which is nothing but the US Constitution with extra bits about slavery and river trade stuck in: it’s not subtle, and the character of the Confederacy is not up for debate.) Americans - or at least a worrying percentage of Americans - tend to link their national and tribal identities quite strongly: all you have to do is watch a Trump rally to work that out. To be an American is to be like me - thus, anyone unlike me is unAmerican. That is the sickness, the rot that is chewing up America from the inside. The right wing seized hold of the idea that the only Real Americans are those just like them, and other groups have started to adopt the same mindset out of self-defence, and these fractures are only going to deepen. Take that and add to it the way that political tribalism is fusing with regional identity and you begin to see the scope of the problem: you’re reaching the point where nobody from Region A can ever be thought of having any authority over Region B because Region A people are the Other. (Trump will probably be the last New Yorker City dweller to ever hold sway in the GOP: his successors will bind themselves to the base not merely through the tribal shibboleths of hating brown people and the poor who believe in improving their lot through anything other than force of will, but also through regional identity. No Californian Republican is likely to ever see front-billing again: you’ll prove your loyalty by only living in the ‘right’ places - solidly red, with no compromising purple of ideological weakness.)

So look at the Democratic party two, three elections from now: the party of everyone in the country who isn’t the GOP. How is that a functioning political group? What could it stand for that would effectively cover such a diverse collection of people? You cannot be the party of the centrists and the progressives and the leftists and the disaffected rightists and the communists and the socialists and the ethical capitalists and the neo-Marxists and the socially-liberal libertarians and the left-leaning rich and the remaining middle class and the working class and the vested corporate interests unwilling to directly support fascism and on and on and on. Democrats can run on the ‘Not Trump’ platform for the moment because the GOP will likely be the party of Trumpism from here on out. (The GOP had enough sense of self preservation to distance itself from Nixon back in the day, but ever since it refused to repudiate Reagan after Iran-Contra it’s shown that it is only ever going to double-down on its bets from here on out: it’ll be riding this train until the very bitter end.) But ‘not Trump’ is barely sufficient even now - because people want to know what the party is for, not just what it’s against. And it can’t be for everything but Trumpism - it’s too broad a field. So America is rapidly become ungovernable, because one party wants to serve a demographic facing extinction, and the other wants to be the Big Tent of literally everyone else no matter how different they may be. Which looks great on a poster about tolerance that you’d hang in a kindergarten class but is untenable when trying to unify 18-year old queer anarcho-syndicists of colour and 50-year old suburban capitalism-apologist whites: their goals are too divergent for harmony to make political sense. (And yes, ‘suburban’ is an antonym of ‘queer.’ Trust me on this.) They want fundamentally different things; just because they mutually do not also want a third thing does not mean they make stable, good, or even plausible allies. The Waffle Guardians and The Crepe Defenders can come together and agree that Pancakes are garbage but that is the end of their common cause, not the start of meaningful co-operation on a variety of issues mattering to both groups, because those don’t really exist. So America is becoming literally ungovernable because its institutions are incapable of operating outside of a narrow binary between two relatively close points. It was not designed, and cannot handle, the intense tribalism of the moment, nor the future that will contain a multitude of independently-minded political groups who are no longer willing to engage with big tent politics that ultimately never forward their own causes. We talk right now about a battle for the ‘soul’ of the Democratic party, but that’s bull. The fight is for who gets to keep the branding and the cachet of the name ‘Democratic Party’ - the next step is party secession, first when the centrists realize the progressives really do mean to literally destroy them and the status quo they hold dear, and then further fragmentation from there. I could go on and on down various laneways here about how increasing tribalism is straining the American system on a structural level. Take the Supreme Court, which only functions without a heavily politicized judiciary because otherwise democratic desires are stifled by entrenched judicial positions that judge issues only on their political merits. Or take how binary elected government in general only works with the understanding that every time power swaps between two groups the next group doesn’t instantly undo everything the last group did out of spite. (We’re seeing that in Ontario right now, actually, as a serious of ‘fortunate’ events brought into power a man so craven he makes Donald Trump seem downright generous in comparison. Our new premiere realized that if he just stops caring about re-election he can do whatever he wants to enrich his corporate buddies in the short-term, so he’s doing things that are enraging even his base, like removing anaesthetic coverage from colonoscopies. He, like Trump, is a ‘political outsider’ but unlike Trump his ego doesn’t need people telling him they love him - he’s perfectly happy being a vindictive thug, so even though he used populist anger to get into power he feels no reason to do anything for anyone who put him there. This is what happens when you elect a suburban drug dealer whose only goal is to revenge himself on an entire province for not taking his brother the crack-smoking mayor seriously. Ontario is so, so screwed.) Fundamentally, presidential republics are a disease. The American republican system has damaged every country its ever been exported to as its central structural weakness - an ability to be easily subsumed by autocrats - has been taken advantage of in basically every case, not to mention its tendency to fall into political deadlock. America’s own legal experts don’t recommend the country’s constitution to other - RBGs herself said that she would not use the US Constitution as a model to any country creating one today. The fractures that so ruined South America and the emerging African states that took the Us as their role model are finally happening in American itself. This feeling of paralyzation will only worsen in the years to come: it was practically baked-in to the political system from the start, the inevitable breaking point of planned obsolescence. America must either change - such as adopting a parliamentary model better-suited to handle the diverse social, ethnic, cultural, and regional demographics of such a large country, or taking an axe to existing institutional binaries and demolishing the two-party state - or die. I recognize the irony in saying that there is a binary choice about handling the inability to handle non-binaries, but there is a third option: sticking with the status quo. A status quo that is groaning under the strain of modern America, a status quo for which simple, minor modifications are unlikely to be enough to relieve the pressures the system is under. You could try that. You’ve been trying it for decades. How’s that choice working out? Two to three elections from now the idea that you can neatly divide political extremes into Liberal and Conservative, and that harmony can only be found in collaboration, will be so dead that not even the most committed advocate of the status quo will be able to ignore the smell - though he will, of course, say that the onus is on other people to come back from their ‘extremist’ positions, because it’s never centrism’s fault when people reject it as insufficient to the crises of the present. To the Americans who read this, you’re going to have to choose - and it really is a choice, surprising as that may seem. You can choose to let America end. To let it die. Countries die all the time. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Say you’re from a blue state: do you still want a future of sharing a country with a red state? America stays together because ‘more unites us than divides us’ - but is there a point where that truism can no longer be consider true? And at that point is there still value in remaining a union? Meaningful value, and not just a sense of duty or obligation to an ideal that doesn’t seem to have any real-world resonance? What is the point at which political compromise becomes something you can no longer stomach - when working together goes from making deals with the opposition to making deals with the devil? When do hyperbolic statements like the other side being 'the devil’ stop sounding like hyperbole? For all that I talked about the Founding Fathers and their immediate voting heirs being ‘the same’ one point on which they disagreed was slavery - but they found themselves able to compromise on the use of humans-as-property for labour. That I one of the founding pacts of America: some of us don’t like slavery, but we can live with it in the interest of unity. Could you, a time-traveler-turned-Founding-Father, make the same choice? On what are you willing to compromise to keep the union a union - what agreements could you make and still be able to meet your own gaze in a mirror? Keep in mind that choosing ‘change’ is no guarantee that the change will be successful, or that the post-America that emerges from that change will be any more a place you want to live in than if you had chosen to keep America alive. I merely want the full and total weight of those decisions to be clear. American compromised on slavery at the moment of its birth: it has lived with the consequences of that compromise ever since. America continues to exist because matters were compromised on - some benign, some heinous, all done in the interest of a greater good. Are you willing to make such compromises future - and are you willing to accept the consequences of what might happen if you are not? There is no ‘going back.’ The post-Trump America will not be a ‘return to normal.’ It can’t. Too many lines have been crossed for there to be a simple return to ‘normality’ when all this is done: that normal is dead. If you choose to try and reinstate it - if you choose neither change nor death but the old status quo - then the problems that birthed this current crisis will remain. Is that status quo strong enough to withstand a second round with such events? That’s something you’ll have to decided. Until then, American will remain ungovernable.

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