The governments we deserve...
There are flood warnings for tonight, which is to be expected when you pour lots of untimely rain onto frozen ground and drains clogged with impacted icy snow - my commute home involved at times wading through knee-deep puddles, if that is the right word for something moving that fast, and at the shallowest was 3" everywhere - and no, I wasn't about to accept the offer of a ride home from my increasingly-creepy boss (who did the back-rub-touching thing AGAIN today and laughed it off when I said "[REDACTED]! PLEASE don't touch me like that, it's CREEPY!" pretending that it was me overreacting to a perfectly normal tap for attention, saying "Oh, haha, sorry, I didn't mean to startle you..." and who in addition to being smarmily-"fatherly" is also a terrifyingly bad driver even when the weather isn't against us, taking his hands off the wheel continuously and swerving abruptly when he misses turns - the accident wasn't his fault, but I've come to think that was just a strange coincidence) and even despite being thoroughly soaked, leather boots and all, by the time I got home, not to mention the fall on submerged ice that left me seeing stars and with a scraped cheekbone (fortunately I didn't break my glasses!) I would (and will) make the same choice again.
The SERIOUSLY creepy thing, though, was getting stopped by the police en route, having my name demanded, and being required to provide my ID to prove I was who I said I was, on a route I take EVERY SINGLE EVENING, because supposedly they'd received word that a woman in a dark coat with a backpack was threatening to jump off the bridge. As I am the only woman I've seen walking with a backpack during my travels, and since I always wear a darkish coat, this was very wigsome. Being wished "a nice walk" after having proved my identity in the pouring rain, in the street because the walks weren't plowed, was just gravy.
This is the first time I've ever been confronted as a pedestrian and asked to show my papers, in this country or any other - it never happened to me as a foreigner abroad, not in Canada, not in the UK - even a short time after Lockerbie, and still during the Troubles - and not in Italy, during a national election, with heightened security on the streets as a result. I accept that this was just a bizarre coincidence of mistaken identity - but the whole thing was strange, felt off, and what could I have done if he'd decided I was lying and had to take me in "for my own protection"? I've never felt threatened by my hometown police, who have a strong and afaik wellfounded reputation for "community policing," in fact not 20 minutes before that I had been helping an elderly gentleman help a guy in a wheelchair get through the slush and two downtown beat cops had come along and joined us in lifting him onto the curb and parted with friendly thanks all round - but now I am going to walk more warily, as a result.
So I'm not feeling very merciful right now towards anybody, least of all the OMG! can you believe it?!? liberals going OMG! can you believe that we're having this debate? about government immunity for torturing, or corporate immunity for the telecoms who help the government spy on we the people, or that Democratic congresscritters are siding with Bushco in all this - hullo? remember the Truth & Reconciliation Hearings and official mea culpas and reparations after the McCarthy witchhunts? after we invaded Guatemala? after J. Edgar Hoover's death? over COINTELPRO etc? after the Church Commission? after Iran-Contra? Remember the harsh punishments for Nixon and everyone involved in his corrupt regime? For the government agencies and officials involved in doing secret radiation testing on unknowing citizens? For supporting people like Marcos, and tyrants all around the globe, so long as they scratched the back of our plutocracy in turn? For KUBARK? For Tiger Force? For Tuskeegee, for the massive national programs of involuntary sterilization of the "unfit" where "unfit" mostly meant "not white"--?
Neither. Do. I.
There's never been accountability - political or national, in the hearts and minds of we the people, for anything: "sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn't happen so we can go on pretending we're completely excepted from the common historical sins of everyone else in the world" has always been our MO here - I've written repeatedly here about how back a hundred years ago we waterboarded Filipino POWs to death (among many, many other atrocities committed in that "liberation") and Congress had hearings about it and there was naught but slaps on the wrist all round and the memory-hole for it all.
Why is it a shock that, absent any punishment, and plus many rewards, the institutions and heirs (physical and adoptive) of those who have profited from these behaviors for so many generations are just more emboldened as time passes?
When, with the history of Tonkin Gulf and so much else so readily available, so many supposedly-literate and well-informed (with ready access to information, at least) liberals no less than "small-government" conservatives were first unable to withstand the lure of the strongman standing up and telling them to be afraid, be vewy afwaid, and to believe that the big strong men could be standing up there and lying to them, and then incapable of admitting that they'd been had, of saying "How could I be so STUPID?" and then trying to answer that question seriously, for so long (and some even yet) - when our pop culture has made brutality and violence towards "the foreign devils" a thing not only justified but dulce et decorum for so many decades, not to mention the whole ticking-timebomb meme stupidity - why is ANY of this a fucking shock? We are apparently a nation of Rip van Winkles.
And this applies to economics as well - having been present last week when two gray-haired small business owners, a blue-collar skilled but struggling to support his family worker, a young ex-Marine and his schoolteacher wife all unaninmously agreed about how they were TERRIFIED of the thought of either of the major Democratic candidates winning because the economy was such a wreck and the only hope for salvation was electing a REAL CONSERVATIVE this time, but there WERE no "Real Conservatives" running this time, they were going to have to hold their noses and vote for whoever the Republican nominee was, because no matter who, he'd be better than any Democrat with their socialism and welfare state that taxes would have to be raised to pay for - having heard them agree that the last Republican administration had been a fiscal disaster, and also having heard several of those in this croaking chorus complain about how the Republican mayor's tax cuts had left the city infrastructure (namely, the snow plowing) in a mess BUT the only important thing now was to vote for a president who would be less likely to raise taxes, and remembering that Herbert Hoover was simply the last of three Republican administrations and hence the one left holding the bag when the bill for their fiscal irresponsibility came due - as well as remembering that both Nixon and Reagan were elected and reelected with sweeping bipartisan majorities - I have no confidence in my elders or my contemporaries' ability to withstand the macho rhetoric of the national strongman and lure of greed/fear of the have-nots getting any benefit from their taxes, both of which hallmarked the Nixon and Reagan (and Bush I) campaigns long before we fell for it all over again from Bushco.
--I only stood aside and didn't vote, in 2000, because even though I didn't fall for the "Compassionate Conservative" rhetoric, even though I thought that voting for Bush - or any Republican, by that point - would be immoral, I DID fall for the male authority figures of the Church, insisting that I couldn't cast an "anti-life" vote for any Democratic candidate, and so I stood aside, immobilized by the moral dilemma and narcissistic fear of sin - which is why I have subsequently spoken so strongly against Chesterton's argument against votes for women, because the consequence of trying to stand aside and be untainted by moral responsibility in one's society is to be tainted all the same, with the further knowledge that you didn't even make an effort to try to change things for the better.
We have the government we have long, LONG deserved...
And if there is no housecleaning this time, if there are no convictions and/or no punishments, don't be shocked when it happens all over again ten or fifteen years down the line - there wasn't EVEN ten years between Nixon and Reagan, after all...
The SERIOUSLY creepy thing, though, was getting stopped by the police en route, having my name demanded, and being required to provide my ID to prove I was who I said I was, on a route I take EVERY SINGLE EVENING, because supposedly they'd received word that a woman in a dark coat with a backpack was threatening to jump off the bridge. As I am the only woman I've seen walking with a backpack during my travels, and since I always wear a darkish coat, this was very wigsome. Being wished "a nice walk" after having proved my identity in the pouring rain, in the street because the walks weren't plowed, was just gravy.
This is the first time I've ever been confronted as a pedestrian and asked to show my papers, in this country or any other - it never happened to me as a foreigner abroad, not in Canada, not in the UK - even a short time after Lockerbie, and still during the Troubles - and not in Italy, during a national election, with heightened security on the streets as a result. I accept that this was just a bizarre coincidence of mistaken identity - but the whole thing was strange, felt off, and what could I have done if he'd decided I was lying and had to take me in "for my own protection"? I've never felt threatened by my hometown police, who have a strong and afaik wellfounded reputation for "community policing," in fact not 20 minutes before that I had been helping an elderly gentleman help a guy in a wheelchair get through the slush and two downtown beat cops had come along and joined us in lifting him onto the curb and parted with friendly thanks all round - but now I am going to walk more warily, as a result.
So I'm not feeling very merciful right now towards anybody, least of all the OMG! can you believe it?!? liberals going OMG! can you believe that we're having this debate? about government immunity for torturing, or corporate immunity for the telecoms who help the government spy on we the people, or that Democratic congresscritters are siding with Bushco in all this - hullo? remember the Truth & Reconciliation Hearings and official mea culpas and reparations after the McCarthy witchhunts? after we invaded Guatemala? after J. Edgar Hoover's death? over COINTELPRO etc? after the Church Commission? after Iran-Contra? Remember the harsh punishments for Nixon and everyone involved in his corrupt regime? For the government agencies and officials involved in doing secret radiation testing on unknowing citizens? For supporting people like Marcos, and tyrants all around the globe, so long as they scratched the back of our plutocracy in turn? For KUBARK? For Tiger Force? For Tuskeegee, for the massive national programs of involuntary sterilization of the "unfit" where "unfit" mostly meant "not white"--?
Neither. Do. I.
There's never been accountability - political or national, in the hearts and minds of we the people, for anything: "sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn't happen so we can go on pretending we're completely excepted from the common historical sins of everyone else in the world" has always been our MO here - I've written repeatedly here about how back a hundred years ago we waterboarded Filipino POWs to death (among many, many other atrocities committed in that "liberation") and Congress had hearings about it and there was naught but slaps on the wrist all round and the memory-hole for it all.
Why is it a shock that, absent any punishment, and plus many rewards, the institutions and heirs (physical and adoptive) of those who have profited from these behaviors for so many generations are just more emboldened as time passes?
When, with the history of Tonkin Gulf and so much else so readily available, so many supposedly-literate and well-informed (with ready access to information, at least) liberals no less than "small-government" conservatives were first unable to withstand the lure of the strongman standing up and telling them to be afraid, be vewy afwaid, and to believe that the big strong men could be standing up there and lying to them, and then incapable of admitting that they'd been had, of saying "How could I be so STUPID?" and then trying to answer that question seriously, for so long (and some even yet) - when our pop culture has made brutality and violence towards "the foreign devils" a thing not only justified but dulce et decorum for so many decades, not to mention the whole ticking-timebomb meme stupidity - why is ANY of this a fucking shock? We are apparently a nation of Rip van Winkles.
And this applies to economics as well - having been present last week when two gray-haired small business owners, a blue-collar skilled but struggling to support his family worker, a young ex-Marine and his schoolteacher wife all unaninmously agreed about how they were TERRIFIED of the thought of either of the major Democratic candidates winning because the economy was such a wreck and the only hope for salvation was electing a REAL CONSERVATIVE this time, but there WERE no "Real Conservatives" running this time, they were going to have to hold their noses and vote for whoever the Republican nominee was, because no matter who, he'd be better than any Democrat with their socialism and welfare state that taxes would have to be raised to pay for - having heard them agree that the last Republican administration had been a fiscal disaster, and also having heard several of those in this croaking chorus complain about how the Republican mayor's tax cuts had left the city infrastructure (namely, the snow plowing) in a mess BUT the only important thing now was to vote for a president who would be less likely to raise taxes, and remembering that Herbert Hoover was simply the last of three Republican administrations and hence the one left holding the bag when the bill for their fiscal irresponsibility came due - as well as remembering that both Nixon and Reagan were elected and reelected with sweeping bipartisan majorities - I have no confidence in my elders or my contemporaries' ability to withstand the macho rhetoric of the national strongman and lure of greed/fear of the have-nots getting any benefit from their taxes, both of which hallmarked the Nixon and Reagan (and Bush I) campaigns long before we fell for it all over again from Bushco.
--I only stood aside and didn't vote, in 2000, because even though I didn't fall for the "Compassionate Conservative" rhetoric, even though I thought that voting for Bush - or any Republican, by that point - would be immoral, I DID fall for the male authority figures of the Church, insisting that I couldn't cast an "anti-life" vote for any Democratic candidate, and so I stood aside, immobilized by the moral dilemma and narcissistic fear of sin - which is why I have subsequently spoken so strongly against Chesterton's argument against votes for women, because the consequence of trying to stand aside and be untainted by moral responsibility in one's society is to be tainted all the same, with the further knowledge that you didn't even make an effort to try to change things for the better.
We have the government we have long, LONG deserved...
And if there is no housecleaning this time, if there are no convictions and/or no punishments, don't be shocked when it happens all over again ten or fifteen years down the line - there wasn't EVEN ten years between Nixon and Reagan, after all...