Can the power of the people thwart the people in power?
I borrowed the chiasmus from Senator Cory Booker’s epic address – on your feet speaking for twenty-five hours without a bathroom break? Man, o man! – but the rhetoric hits its mark, bingo!, as rhetoric sometimes does if it’s lucky. (The device is also called antimetabole, if you’re feeling peacock-y. Such six-syllable terms should be deployed with extreme care in a nation where monosyllables are preferred, especially if they rhyme with rump, and four-syllable expostulations an indictable offense, at least at Harvard.)
The results of the Wisconsin supreme court election and Florida’s two special elections for Congress suggest that we the people may be waking to our risk at long last. In his two months in office, the Nameless One seems to have lost more than twenty percent of his fans as a result of problems of his own making. And there’s no hint of a recovery strategy. Social disruption, economic pain and political dysfunction are promised, not to mention a continuing gush of hush money payments to the boss-man and pardons for well-heeled felons. Word has it the White House will be listed for sale in May, though other rumors point to a private-party transaction with a Russian oligarch, looking to park his cash. (It’s the occupant’s house, right? If it wasn’t, he’d be paying rent, duh.)
There’s good news and bad about we-the-people’s dilatory awakening from our ursine snooze. The good news is it’s happening, we are not (as some supposed) irretrievably comatose. The bad news is our stupidity, which verges on lunacy. We paddled the ship of state over the cataract and said oops.
The Nameless One knows from his TV days if your ratings tank your show gets pulled. Nothing personal, just business. If he keeps shedding support, he’ll have to call out the military to keep him in place, which is what he’s planning at this moment. How do I know? No, I am not on Mike Waltz’s autodial – lucky Jeffrey Goldberg! – but there’s an inexorable logic that drives events as it does Shakespeare’s tragedies. Neither the Nameless One nor Macbeth can arrest their decline because they’re possessed by mania. They must rule or die. A recent bug from the Presidential bedroom recorded the following (Mar-a-Lago is bug-ridden):
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
So get ready, folks. If you’re not for them, you’re against them. Anti-Tesla is anti-American – treason! And all the king’s men echo his inanities because if you don’t, you’re toast. There’s no plan to his petulance, only this pathetic whining insatiable need to be admired. Psychopaths do not compromise or temporize. Ask Macbeth.
How to defend ourselves? A beloved irenic highly educated neighbor has purchased a pistol. That’s not my response but I understand the impulse. My mechanical incompetence and/or emotional instability would make gun-ownership perilous. I’m even skittish of kitchen knives.
But morally, intellectually, practically we must arm ourselves. Join the brigades – greater safety in numbers. Encourage the heroes – Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, Jamie Raskin, Paul Krugman, Liz Cheney, Heather Cox Richardson, et al. Buck each other up. Eke out a smile, even if you don’t feel like it.
It’s impossible to predict the instant of spontaneous combustion but not that the flame will erupt. It will because it must.