What We've Become

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

After posting probably hundreds of "my view out the window" shots to open these posts, I figured I'd start the day with a photo of what I'm looking at right now.

My home office in Corning. Books that I love, and leaf through most days when I need a break from a work project. The Letters of Rupert Brooke. Bill Moyers's Genesis. Round the Clock, a photo gallery of images from the Eighth Air Force bombing campaign. The Book of the Dead, a collection of obituaries from the NYT. All far more interesting that whatever I'm being paid to think about at any given moment.

I'm not being paid to think about yesterday's Slaughter decision, and the decline and fall of the Republic on the eve of its 250th birthday. This was a breathtaking abandonment of precedent, not originalist in the sense that the Court is now simply making things up. And DJT took to Truth Social to gloat over the very fact that the decision guts nearly a century of established law, and further untethers the Mad King from any sort of control, if our spineless Congress were inclined to exercise its constitutional authority.

As for that august gathering, the Speaker a few days ago warned donors that if the Dems win the midterms there will be prosecutions from the top down to the very oligarchs he was shilling for that day. But then he assured them not to worry because that wouldn't happen and the Rs would retain power to finish the job they've started. I'm inclined to believe him, to conclude that it's so hopelessly rigged at this point as to make popular rule impossible. The Dems literally must win the popular vote by several percentage points simply to pull even in an election. And with the recent radical gerrymandering, it's not going to get any better in my lifetime.

I read a couple things in tandem that seemed to foreshadow the path ahead for us. The first involved the largely bipartisan demonization of the Democratic Socialists, using language straight out of the HUAC or maybe the 1920s. The threat that this new, energetic, smiling cadre of populists might continue winning elections and plowing across the political wasteland that is America in 2026 has created a coalition of establishment Ds and the entire Republican apparatus. They both work for the same moneyed interests, after all, and the fact that they all agree this is a threat belies any notion that their silly culture war jostling is anything but a distraction from the fact that there simply is no political left anymore, just very right and sorta right. Bill Clinton's winning legacy.

That got me thinking about the other article i read, as I thought about how this ripple that may turn into a tidal wave probably turns out. One of my favorite bloggers is in South America this summer, and noted that MAGA actually has more in common with Chile under Pinochet and Argentina under the junta than the usual comparisons to Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia. At least the latter two retained competence in some areas of endeavor--the South Americans were tin-pot fascist wannabes, staffed with political hacks whose only animating principle seemed to be a hatred of the left.

Which leads to what may lie in our future. Both Chile and Argentina have now devoted resources to remembering the horrors imposed on the young leftists they pulled off the street and into torture chambers, or regularly dumped out of helicopters over the ocean. The "disappeareds". We're already creating the infrastructure with ICE, and the neo-Confederates have shown they're willing to unleash the apparatus on U.S. citizens. And as in Chile and Argentina, when it all ends and we enter a sanity pause, a third of the population will pine for the days of law and order under the fascists.

Finally, I read a piece by historian Timothy Snyder comparing this administration's approach to war to the legacy of Marcus Aurelius, who wrote the Meditations to himself during his nine years at the front along the Danube. There was nothing triumphalist about Marcus's sense of what he was doing--war is never a good thing, bloodlust and savagery lowers you to the level of your enemy, whatever you thought worth fighting for holds a miniscule place in the universe, and will soon be forgotten. Snyder notes that the Meditations never once mentions the war that Marcus so unwillingly gave a huge chunk of his life, in contrast to the genocidal and murderous rantings of our current leadership.

Marcus actually won his war (whatever that means), and instead of humiliating his foes, a proto-Iranian culture living on the Ukrainian steppes, he hired their cavalry and sent them to keep the peace in the north of England. along Hadrian's Wall. Apparently one of their cavalry commanders was a charismatic leader named Arthur. Kind of funny to think the hero one of our defining myths in the English speaking world might have been a swarthy Persian.

Time to get at it. No fixed appointments today, but an inbox that never gets any shallower.