We Finally Get to Play the Game

Mrs. Kraken and I watched SNL last night VOD from the NBC network app with Adele hosting. I don't know if they are losing their nerve or what but Alec Baldwin and Jim Carrey played trump and Biden during the debate for the cold open lacked any power or energy. It just seemed kind of flat, like as we are all feeling, exhausted by the endless firehose and anxiety that has reality while being ruled by the most incompetent, lazy, cruel, and corrupt assholes in our history. 

What really got me though was the prerecorded skit from the "trump addicts of America" where a bunch of normal Americans fret that life will become boring without the zest of trump constantly threatening their well-being. It reminded me of a book I reviewed recently for a gig called Why Soldiers Miss War, the author gets an "E" for effort in trying to define the relationship between trauma and euphoria when one is constantly in danger and then that danger is removed. Nothing is exciting anymore, food doesn't taste as good, and things that scare civilians are shrugged off as not rising to the thrill of combat. Personally, I like boring, I like not having to maintain that hypervigilance you have to keep up in dangerous situations. I have never experienced that Raymond K. Hessel moment of being so thankful for being alive that everything is awesome. And I would really like the domestic enemies of the United States that I swore to defend the republic against to be out of the government of that republic. 

Of course it was a joke, SNL usually does a good job of mixing just enough reality into the humor to make it seem identifiable for average viewers. Not bad for a cast and crew that embodies New York City, where most Americans still really do not fully understand, but they understand us enough to entertain a decent-sized audience. Here's where it gets serious though, if by some miracle doughfacedonny (or donnyCOVIDseed as I've seen on Twitter) is thwarted in stealing the election. If the polls are to be believed and republicans lose power and seats across the country, what then? Just as some find the aftermath of war to be boring, the aftermath of a domestic reign of terror will probably cause a lot of people to tune out. Do schools teach much about Germany or Japan after WWII? Maybe those cases aren't relevant for our discussion but Reconstruction after the US Civil War certainly will be.

But to the title of this post. After seeing the SNL skit I got to thinking about an episode of South Park where the kids are playing a World of Warcraft type online game and there's the proverbial 300 lb basement-dwelling loser who has a super-powerful character who, for no explained reason, goes around killing other players and preventing anyone from having any fun. Eventually the kids train hard enough to barely defeat this tyrant and one of them asks "what do we do now?" Cartman replies, "what do you mean, now we finally get to play the game." I'm not a big South Park fan anymore, never really was but that really gets to the heart of what happens next if republican tyranny is finally cut down to size in January. Still, not to put the cart before the horse but there just hasn't been enough bandwidth to think about anything other than getting these monsters out of positions of power. If they are gone, we liberals go back to the same old struggle. Certainly, we all deserve a break after living through this trauma but probably 60 million republicans are still going to vote for doughfacedonny. They cannot be allowed to skirt away this time without consequences only to form a new tea party under the leadership of never trumpers and the Lincoln Project.

Beyond passing laws to keep republicans from cheating their way back to power, the big questions will return to real discussions. We finally get to play the game of "what are the optimal progressive tax rates for this country?" "What can be done to effectively limit corporate power and bring truth back to news media?" "How can we organize labor and bring balance back to the economy?" You know, the questions that could have been discussed during Hillary's term. We could finally play the game of working on the extreme backlog of reforms necessary in an age of climate change, cyberwarfare, beating back fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world (through diplomacy and economic warfare of course, bombs only seem to make the problems worse). It is time to rethink the first amendment because we cannot go back to simply accepting propaganda as legitimate or that monsters like Alex Jones or Qanon have any place in a representative democracy. 

While it will definitely take a far lurch to the left to address these issues, the end of reclaiming a vital center where democracy, compromise, and the defense of education will be worth radical action in the short term to destroy fascism in this country. I had an idea yesterday towards that end that would be easy and eminently doable, before you can comment on or share a news item or thinkpiece you should have to take a civics quiz. Then the button will be active, if you don't answer them all correct you will have to take a history or political science lesson before you can try again. The problem is that boomers and others who simply decided they never needed to learn anything about being a responsible citizen in a republic or had no need to maintain that knowledge because "how do you make any money off of that?" can voice their ridiculous, uninformed opinions with the same weight that an informed, responsible citizen can. There should be obstacles in the way of spreading propaganda or trolling good people. 

But that would be the kind of discussion we could have if we don't have to constantly worry that trump's three stolen Supreme Court seats will undermine the will of the people with impunity or that a madman has the nuclear button and command of the Armed Forces. 

Will any of this actually happen? Not if we don't dedicate ourselves anew to the project. In my lifetime there have been three consistent cycles of republicans stealing the White House, wrecking everything, skating away with no consequences, the Democrats put in office to clean up the mess disillusion the enthusiastic voters who put him there, liberals stay home and allow republicans to sneak in again to wreck things anew. Carter's poor performance allowed Reagan to sneak in by at least borderline treason with the Iran hostage crisis (which was shown to be effective when Nixon stalled peace talks in Vietnam to win). Twelve years of relentless tax cutting and hacking away at social and regulatory spending by the Reagan and Bush administrations gutted this country until Clinton won with a plurality (who knows if even that would have been possible without Perot spoiling) in 1992. Two years later and enough good people stayed home to let Newt Gingrich and his carefully trained asshole republicans to take the House of Representatives, hobbling any good that might have come out of the rest of Clinton's administration. And enough propaganda allowed a rather prosperous and happy America to sit back and watch Dubya steal the election. See where I'm going with this? The 24/7 fear-mongering and war hysteria reversed what could have been a correction in Congress during the mid-terms. Do liberals my age and older even remember being called traitors and terrorist-lovers during those years? It doesn't seem like it. Then there was the great "shellacking" of 2010 because "Obama doesn't inspire me" or the Glenn Greenwald acolytes sucking the oxygen out of any relief at Bush being gone. THIS CYCLE CANNOT CONTINUE!

The election of 2016 was supposed to be the first time republican fascism was really repudiated by a Democratic succession. I cannot believe that after four years of tyranny there are more than a handful of idiots still willing to vote for this disgrace of a man, but they are never going away until they are put away. So, we need to stay on that wall, stay frosty and alert, and most importantly not lose sight of how it can all go back to republican rule. No matter how the holier-than-thou left wails that Democrats don't inspire them or memories of this reign of terror fade and we go back to "both sides are equally bad and corrupt" because the next wannabe dictator won't be as stupid or lazy as doughfacedonny.