Stating the Obvious

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

-Hannah Arendt

A very pretty Friday morning out there.

It's weird, isn't it? How normal everything looks on the surface. It's shaping up to be a beautiful fall Friday in the Southern Tier. Five years ago today we arrived here in the beat up old Cardinal, like a couple Okies with the cabin packed full of clothes and coffee makers and whatever random stuff we thought we might need on this brief little trip to Corning for Peg's assignment at Guthrie.

Here we are five years later, with me sitting in a home office maybe four blocks from the one I occupied back then.

And as I said, it all looks so normal on the surface. P and I will head up to the lake after she gets off work, and likely stop by for supper at the Canandaigua Yacht Club in a dining room filled with families and retirees. The shops down the hill are bustling. Tomorrow promises a slate of mediocre college football games, while the MLB playoffs feature some really interesting pairings--I began the baseball year in the spring listening to the Braves play the Jays on the Toronto sports network, and was taken aback at the ads extolling the virtues of buying Canadian products rather than sending money to the predator state to the south. I'll likely be rooting for the Jays tomorrow--what could be a more fitting end to this horrible year than a Canadian team winning the World Series and securing the crown in our national pastime?

What a ramble this post has been.

I sat down to write and ponder on why the republic founded 250 years ago has now officially ceased to exist. No really, it's over. They're attacking whole apartment buildings with flash-bang grenades, dragging children out bound and naked and throwing them into the backs of U-Hauls. The federal government is closed, and its official channels, from press spokesmen to automated answering machines, blame the Democrats. The military is still at work, murdering unarmed people on the high seas on the pretext that we're in some sort of undeclared war. The more principled flag officers have begun retiring in droves, leaving slots to be filled by talentless hacks selected for their personal loyalty to the Spray On Sun King.

All of this is, by all accounts, very unpopular on the ground in Main Street America. But don't think for a minute our hallowed democratic processes will right the ship in a year, or three.

For one thing, polling shows that fully 90% of Republican voters approve of what's happening.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/polls/trump-approval-poll.html

Ponder on that: If you're a Southerner, pretty much every person who hugs your neck at church, the work colleague who waves from the next table at supper at the yacht club, the doctor who writes your prescriptions, actively support the treason we're enduring. This is why his approval rating sits steady at 40%--in a country that's more-or-less evenly split by party affiliation, the numbers don't lie.

So don't think you'll see a blue wave sweeping the varmints out of office. Even if our elections weren't rigged by gerrymandering, your quisling neighbors aren't going to pull the lever to save democracy in America.

But there's another reason this isn't going to end with a democratic transition of power. Besides the garden variety violation of their oaths of office, the denizens of the executive branch have now committed enough war crimes and due process violations, taken enough bribes and entered flagrantly illegal executive orders, that the court system will need two lifetimes to prosecute them all. And we're now getting into territory where some of these seem like Nuremburg level crimes against humanity, and Stephen Miller's never going to willingly stick his head through the noose and step onto the trap door. They have to know that leaving power puts their fortunes and very lives at risk, and so of course they're not going anywhere.

For the balance of my life, this is how it's going to be, politically. A sad end to the last, best hope for humanity, at least until something better emerges from the ashes, assuming people are capable of learning from catastrophe. Our own Civil War doesn't bode favorably in that regard.

But it's a beautiful day, P and I are living our best life together right now, and we can't let abstractions on my computer screen spoil all of that. We'll spend the weekend smoking a roast in the Traeger, wandering the hills below Rochester on some new adventure, watching a little football and baseball, and maybe even floating around on our inflatable down on the lake, if the weather man is correct and the afternoon highs touch the low 80s. Then we'll curl up on the couch with a movie and a glass of wine, and doze off under a blanket. I have it all figured out. And it's all very good.