The oldest play in the book
Soon they will tell you we've always been at war with Iran. Also, I probably retract yesterday's praise for Newsom.
This timeline is a rehash of stuff we’ve seen a thousand times before. It’s boring, and what is even more boring is how many people pretend it is new and interesting.
How many people call it chaos, call it overwhelming, call it shocking and surprising.
It is none of those things.
The right is executing the plan, doing what they said they would do, sometimes for forty years. (1)
When journalists call this “surprising,” they are saying “I am an idiot, a corporate stooge and a shill for capitalism.”
When they call it shocking, they are saying “I have not been paying attention.”
When they call it overwhelming, they are saying, “I have been in fatal denial.”
When they call it chaos, they are saying, “I did not do my homework. They said what was coming and now I’m confused because I didn’t pay attention.”
Republicans are using the oldest plays in the book. Soon they will tell us we’ve always been at war with Iran. When we say, but what about the failed forever wars, the wasted zillions, all the children and families burned and tortured to death in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will, like Obi-wan Kenobi, wave their hands and say “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”
And, if history is anything to go by, enough people may believe them that they can get away with it.
Octavia Butler may be right. The human combination of a kind of intelligence with a kind of stupidity - the love of hierarchy, the belief that some people are better than others - might cause the human experiment to stumble badly. (2)
Trump is surrounded by people who have long wanted war with Iran. He has been obsessed with nuclear weapons for decades - which Sarah Kendzior, the scholar of autocracy, documents copiously, especially in They Knew and Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America.
He’s working hard to engineer what he’s always wanted.
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Also, Sarah Kendzior points out that Newsom is deeply entwined with Trump and the oligarchs’ agendas, and that his supposedly strong language against ICE may just be part of the plan to provoke a civil war so it’s easier to break up the US and strip it for parts, which is the oligarchs’ end game.
(1) And Democrats, if they can even be called the left, seem to have no plan to stop them.
(2) I get tired, though, of the constant wailing about how humans are going to kill ourselves off. First, yes, we are eventually going to die out. Everything does; the sun is going to die; extraplanetary humans are probably an oxymoron; already more than half our cells aren’t human. The Enlightenment is dying in may ways, not least in that it’s crystal clear now that in some ways there’s no such thing as an individual. We are our neighbors, bacteria, and the sun.
We and our ancestors have come through a number of genetic bottlenecks, when there were as few as only about 1,280 fertile humans.
Apocalyptic thinking is counterproductive and self-fulfilling. Republicans since at least James Watt have been obsessed with mass-death porn, using the excuse of Biblical apocalypse stories to justify attempts to bring them about. The idea of a final annihilation has always been used by the powerful to bring about the ends they seek, generally to the detriment of women and people of color. As Catherine Keller so beautifully demonstrates in Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, the world is always ending for some; apocalyptic narratives ensure it ends more often and worse for the least of these.
And don’t get me started on those who claim that humans could “wipe out all life on earth.” This is stupid, delusional hubris. As if. There are bacteria two miles underground. There are bacteria in the cores of nuclear reactors. There are bacteria miles underground at high pressure, dark, acidic hydrothermal vents. I don’t see any evidence we could kill off all life on earth if we dedicated the rest of our existence to the task.