We are left with a common heartache of ideals betrayed

I hadn’t realized the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan had matinee performances. I took advantage of that this afternoon to see their current production Human Error. Yeah, the audience was other retired people, a good size crowd. The story opens with Madelyn and Keenan, a mixed race couple and quite liberal, meeting their fertility doctor. He has bad news – their embryo was implanted in the wrong uterus. That uterus belongs to Heather, who is married to Jim. She can’t imagine how anyone can be unchurched. He appears onstage in a bright read Ohio State sweatshirt and insists on showing Keenan his guns. Keenan works as a comedy analyst at rival University of Michigan. Can the two couples tolerate each other long enough for the baby to be born? The most important argument is over abortion, quite important to the story. Heather declares she is carrying the baby to term for Madelyn because she is pro-life. She is sure Madelyn, who must be pro-choice (and is), would have aborted the baby the moment the error was explained. Madelyn, even though she is pro-choice, denies she would have aborted. Heather doesn’t believe her. All five actors – the two couples and the doofus doctor – do a fine job. See a review here. The show is only 85 minutes and runs for one more week. And the ending is quite satisfying and not at all what I expected. I listened to the latest Gaslit Nation episode this evening. Nearly all of the 35 minutes is Sarah Kendzior playing the audiobook of her reading one chapter of her latest book They Knew. A transcript of the episode is here. When she wrote it in 2021 there was some talk of a national divorce. Kendzior is frustrated that now that chapter looks like prophesy as the talk gets louder. Recently I had written about Marjorie Taylor Greene spouting off splitting red states from blue states. MTG isn’t the only voice. Kendzior starts by saying she is against a national divorce. She explains why. The call is a conspiracy for kleptocracts to exploit us for political and financial gain. Yeah, I could stop right there. On one side are those who believe they deserve more and that Democrats are keeping them from what’s rightfully theirs. On the other are those who believe people living under Republican legislatures deserve what they get. Neither is true. Both sides are attempts to create monocultures out of a multifaceted nation. No state is all red or all blue. And in many red states the citizens are suffering under a Republican Party that has created one party minority rule in defiance of the wishes of the majority. That was done through gerrymandering and voter suppression (given fresh power when some of the Voting Rights Act was gutted). It is difficult to regain rights when the mechanism to protect them – voting – is harmed. The lie that any state is deeply red or deeply blue is repeated enough that people believe it true – and believe it has always been true. They push the lie that the differences are ancient and the conflict is destiny, that differences cannot be reconciled. This is why there is a push to demonize Critical Race Theory. It has been divorced from its original meaning (I probably wrote about it two years ago) and is now a blanket term to hold whatever concepts they want to demonize. The goal is to carve up America into oligarch fiefdoms. Liberals may enjoy that – for a while. But there is still an oligarch in charge. And conservative fiefdoms will not not tolerate letting liberal ones exist for very long and will want to exploit the resources. This is happening because the US government is corrupt. Both Republicans and Democrats are being funded by foreign agents. Some may be American citizens, but their loyalties are elsewhere. And citizenship no longer matters since in November 2021 the Federal Election Commission said foreigners may fund US referendum campaigns.

There are a multitude of Americas, as one would expect in a country this large and diverse. But we are no longer unified by ideals. Instead, we are left with a common heartache of ideals betrayed. We share that pain and take it out on each other while disregarding each other's humanity, and being acclimatized by algorithms to do so. The new Civil War is fought on the internet where lies and memes spur exhausted people to hate each other; where troll farms can make AstroTurf rallies; where threats have been normalized and kindness is labeled virtue signaling.

These kleptocrats gain power because when they tested their limits no one who is supposed to have power intervened. Civic obligation crumbles. If oligarchs partition America what happens to St. Louis? This is where Kendzior lives. The city is politically blue, demographically black. It will be declared the enemy of whoever takes over Missouri. Illinois won’t want it because of its poverty and crime. Secession means friends and family will live in other countries where we may not be allowed to visit. The military will be replaced by mercenaries who will act with brutal impunity on who used to be fellow citizens. Basic infrastructure will be privatized by the most corrupt actors (a process already underway, but will accelerate under the shock of partition). Everything will go to the highest bidders. The most vulnerable people will suffer even more. Necessities will become luxuries. The American dream becomes the American ghost. People say that other people get what they deserve. But we don’t deserve this. And our younger generations certainly don’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger – the Governator – has been using his celebrity and tough guy image to try to influence his conservative fans through a series of videos where he talks to the camera. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos discussed the latest and (so far) longest at 12 minutes. First Arnold talks about his recent visit to Auschwitz, describing what went on there. Then he says this is where fascism ends. This is what happens when people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs. He talks about growing up in Austria where his parents’ generation were all traumatized and broken by WWII, some of them suffering because they fell for a horrible loser ideology. Then he said:

Some of them joined the Nazis because they were filled with hate. Some of them joined because they thought they deserved more out of life. And they bought into the idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse. Some of them joined because they were frustrated with the government, and some of them just joined because everyone else was doing it. In the end, it didn't really matter why they joined. They were all broken in the same way. That's the bottom line here. I mean, if you find yourself at the crossroads, wondering if that path of hate might make sense to you for one reason or the other, or even wrapping yourself with the flag of hate, I want you to know where that path ends. I want you to see very clearly in front of you, in your minds. Because throughout history, hate is always been the easy path, the path of least resistance. It's easy to find a scapegoat for a problem than to try to make things better ourselves. Right? But let me be clear. You will not find success in the end of this rope. You will not find fulfillment or happiness because hate burns fast and bright. It might make you feel empowered for a while, but eventually consumes whatever vessel it fuels. It breaks you. It's the path of the weak. And that's why there has never been a successful movement based on hate.

I had concluded that a great deal of what is going on in the world is people needing to show they are superior to others and doing that by “mak[ing] other lives worse.” That drives all of Republican policy. I am glad someone else has come to the same conclusion. Arnold says pulling away from fascism is hard work. One must give up old ways of thinking and maybe even friends. These are weak beliefs one is getting rid of. But doing that work makes one strong.