The End

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

-Antonio Gramsci

So, I guess today's bombshell was the Supreme Court's expected gutting of the Voting Rights Act yesterday. The central holding, as I understand it, was that the Act wasn't necessary because we've achieved racial harmony in the U.S., while reiterating that partisan gerrymandering is more or less immune from judicial scrutiny. As one might expect, the political leadership of the neo-Confederacy is scrambling to redraw their congressional maps ahead of the midterms. Free America may do the same. If they don't, the Blue Wave will have been averted and the fascists running the executive branch can continue arresting their political opponents, cleansing the Volk of immigrant blood, and suppressing medical and climate research.

But what if they do? What if, in fact, we end up equally divided, the South and a chunk of the Midwest and Rocky Mountain West run by fire-breathing Christian nationalist authoritarians, and the Northeast and the Pacific West trying to run themselves as if the America of even twenty years ago still existed? At that point, it's hard to see why the wealthy, more educated Blues would want to find themselves in confederation with folks they loathe, and who openly loathe them right back. The case for a "United" States dies for lack of facts to support it.

Of course, as Peg's pointed out, this is as much about rural versus urban as anything else. Greater Nashville or Atlanta bend more progressive than any of the farming communities in New York state. It's easier to take a more sentimental view of those small town folks in Cohocton or Romulus than the MAGA fire breathers who've taken over Bay County. But if you sit down and listen to their worldview, there's no space between the two groups.

So what to do? I guess in a way Peg and I voted with our feet years ago. She's not seen the inside of an operating room in Florida in a long while, and may never again--I'm told the experience entails blaring Fox News on the televisions in the doctors' lounge, and unvarnished MAGA hate spewing out from beneath the masks in the OR. Not great.

I'm still professionally tied to Florida, but the ties grow more attenuated by the day, and as I drift deeper into my 60s I am more and more satisfied doing less and less. It leaves time for other ventures that might make money, and more importantly to spend more time with P while we're still healthy.

That's where we are right now, and I would expect more like us who have the means of escaping and the will not to play the role of the frog in the pot on its way to full boil. The time to leave MAGA America is now. Come live with the nice people. It's better for your soul.

But what a sense of loss we both feel. On Facebook my thread now periodically includes paintings by the Highwaymen, a group of black landscape artists in Florida from the middle of the last century whose work has become very popular these days. I pause, gaze at the landscapes, and mourn.