The View from Oz
- Mike Dickey
- 23 minutes ago
- 4 min read
“But are there not many fascists in your country?"
"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”
"But you cannot destroy them until they rebel?"
"No," Robert Jordan said. "We cannot destroy them. But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it.”
―Ernest Hemingway,For Whom the Bell Tolls
Another sub-freezing day, maybe the tenth or so in a row. It makes from some gray, nasty snow along the shoulders of Houston Street.
What you can't see from up here is how the snow and ice piles are pocked every few feet with a yellow splash, where someone's fur baby relieved himself and left a mark that will remain until we finally experience a thaw. There's also puke, frozen snot, and random piles of birdseed and shredded stale bread left for the pigeons.
More uplifting was the view last night from the rooftop lounge, looking north toward the remarkable Midtown skyline.
I have to say I've reached an age where wonder and awe are hard to find in my life, but this . . . this . . . is breathtaking. And I'm getting to know the buildings in the foreground, learning the neighborhood with its sights and smells.
I can see now how one whose life is spent here could develop a parochial view of the rest of the country, as so memorably illustrated by the iconic New Yorker cover art of a half-century ago.
Folks who've never spent time here have often expressed disdain for that image, for the notion New Yorkers have of living in the only place that matters, the rest being "flyover America." I get that too, have been one of those people dwelling in the void between the Hudson and LA, but I have to say there's a certain comfort these days in spending a few weeks in this anthill ICE can't touch.
The news cycle has worn smooth one's ability to feel shock and indignation, as a small plurality of mostly white, undereducated Protestants stand complicit in the end of the republican experiment. Today's headlines include a piece about the use of administrative warrants to intimidate folks who speak up online in protest against the administration's brutish lawlessness.
Another catalogues the fact that the administration now uses AI to create fake images meant to humiliate their opponents to the gleeful onanistic roar of the MAGA base.
A political movement built entirely on grievance and lies can now simply manufacture its own reality, with a ready audience eager to republish the slop.
Most unnerving was this week's suggestion by Trump, fresh from sending Tulsi and the goon squad to raid the election offices in Fulton County, that the Republicans (note the stories talk about him "nationalizing" our elections, but in fact he referred to the One Legitimate Party policing the process) run the midterm elections in fifteen states he declined to name.
Paul Krugman and my friends at the LGM blog consider the consequences of this latest threat.
Anyone who's been paying attention had to see this coming. They're losing in the court of public opinion, lost the moderates and the Latinos misguided enough to vote for him before he started deporting their parents. And yet they can't let this happen, not only because "losing" in their mind is an impossibility and an affront to their feeble self-image, but also because, well, a blue wave in November probably means a chance to wear orange and eat prison food for some, and perhaps even an eight foot drop at the end of a six foot rope for the worst of the treasonous cabal.
I used to think there was no way a group of Americans would plot to install a dictatorship, but it's happening in plain sight. Worst of all, the harder they work to undermine democratic processes and the rule of law, the more likely it is that they will use any means necessary to prevent an adverse election result. They're building the dossier for their own convictions every day, in Atlanta and Minneapolis, in our courtrooms and schools. They're not backing down, and they're not going gentle into that good night when election day rolls around.
But I'll end on a positive note--although the planet's never seen a moment like this, because the technical means of autocratic control brought by information technology and AI were only some dictator's wet dream a few decades ago, I'm putting my money on an outcome for my country more akin to Britain's after Cromwell than China's after Tiananmen Square. We do have stubborn democratic bones that go all the way back to the Magna Carta, after all, like our cousins across the Atlantic. The Brits endured a few years of theocracy and genocide (that would be my Irish ancestors on the receiving end), but in the end there was a Restoration, and the Lord Protector's head exhumed and displayed on a pike at Westminster for a full twenty-three years before they finally took the moldering old melon down for a proper burial. And anyone walking the streets of London today barely sees the shadows of those dark days.
Maybe we'll get lucky like that. I don't see the MAGA movement surviving what I observe happening outside my window right now on the streets of Oz.
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