Broken nations, like broken families, are the devil to repair. Hatreds run hot for generations. The Capulets and Montagues, we sense, would be fighting still, if the senseless deaths of Juliet and Romeo hadn’t knocked Verona into its senses. How can Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus, Aunt Janet and Uncle Hugh, the Yanks and Johnny Reb ever kiss and make up?
Have you wondered at the persistence of the Confederacy’s and Third Reich’s flags, often pasted side by side on the same bumper? What can these folks be so mad about generations after the original combatants have mingled in the dust? Why can’t they let bygones be bygones? It’s almost as if they clung to their grievances like shipwrecks to a broken spar.
What we fight about is rarely what we fight about, rather a casus belli to justify our bile. We hate first, then find reasons why. We may never forgive a sibling’s inveigling a parent’s regard, for example.
America’s Second Civil War will subside as stubbornly as its First. We may never get over it. Why?
That we’re in a war, make no mistake. The acrimony has been simmering for decades, we’ve had violent skirmishes. The division this time is not principally geographic or economic, but egotistical. A big chunk of America feels dissed, bypassed, left out and behind, condescended to by their purported betters, these hoity-toity elites with their Harvards and thinktanks and polysyllables! The elites, in response, decry the boorish, brutal, anti-science, anti-literacy, anti-logic thuggery of their baboonish brethren. The lexicon and grammar of the foregoing paragraph may suggest to which party I pledge allegiance.
(That the anti-privilege party is led by the preposterously privileged is among the bitterest ironies of our embittered era.)
Just now, the baboons have the upper hand, the elite having been hogtied by respect for American traditions. Our party reveres our Founding Fathers and what they left us; the Nameless One considers himself our Founding Father, if not God. The war is entering its killing phase, November Fifth the equivalent of April 12, 1861.
Family feuds can’t be settled by armistice because the prize is respect, which cannot be coerced. The Nameless One may oppress but he will never impress me. He will always be repugnant, evil, a misfortune for mankind, no matter his title. I don’t doubt he thinks the same of me and mine.
Our Second Civil War can only end with the unconditional surrender of one or the other party. Too much damage will have been inflicted to forgive. I look forward to stomping on my enemy’s neck while readying myself for the reverse. Those who counsel conciliation mistake the stakes in this contest. Those who pin their hopes on the midterm elections are indulging in wishful thinking. If those elections occur, with votes freely cast and truly counted, the war will be going badly for our enemy. Dictators dislike free elections, for the obvious reason.
Some friends urge me to pipe down. Philippics can only increase the body count – and the likelihood that one of those bodies may be mine.
My regret is my rhetoric has been too temperate. While I predicted this calamity, I never believed in my prediction. I figured we’d win the battle on November Fifth and that would be that, at least for now. Was I ever wrong! My poor addle-pated nation has not come to its senses yet and may never. The job of observers is not to sugarcoat with hope but say what we see, waking with our shouts like Paul Revere.