“Like sands through the hourglass”
As the muskies began jostling their way past Federal building security last weekend, and began pillaging and futzing with the code underlying entire digital government financial infrastructures, the dominant mood on liberal-leaning social media seemed to boil down to: “if only the opposition party would do X, which we for sure know they won’t, all could be saved.”
Well, some things are undoubtedly already irreparably broken, and the shameful situation of migrants being sent to Guantanamo is as much a “five alarm fire” as these illegal forays into governmental digital infrastructure, but when some prominent Democrats and one Independent did actually get out there and raise a small ruckus, there was actually no magic realignment, because fixing things is harder than breaking them, and the feckless and supine GOP have the majority now. Nonetheless, Jasmine Crockett, LaMonica McIver, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Brian Schatz, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy and notably Angus King have certainly not yet given up on Congress as a co-equal branch of government. Jeffries doesn’t seem to see the stakes of this moment, but at least we’re not seeing blanket acquiescence.
The mainstream coverage of this public facing “resistance” has been tepid so far, but anyone thinking they definitively know what tomorrow might bring right now is lying to themselves. Judges are still blocking MAGA directives and the inevitability of an American Reich is already foundering. They’ve more or less screwed the putsch. At the same time, the proverbial fortune cookie prediction/curse has definitely come to pass, and we are certainly “living in interesting times…”
As I’ve noted previously, the notion of “progress” writ large, whether that is scientific progress, racial progress and certainly social progress in general, is in the crosshairs in this moment, but more broadly, expertise and excellence are also being marked as suspect.
The senescent goofball’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center Board, because they “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” (ROFL!) is perhaps the only action he’s taken independently, and it is absolutely because the typical honorees, beyond often not being white or male, shame his shabby mediocrity and mendacity by their very existence. On the other hand, this could finally be Kevin Sorbo’s year!
I realize Musk thinks he’s sunk enough money into the insatiable Trump coffers to usher in American Apartheid, the loss of which in South Africa he’s publicly lamented, but D.E.I isn’t just about bringing non-white, non-male people to the table, it’s an agenda that is meant to provide support within professional spaces to the undeniably excellent non-white, non-male workers already there, who had to work twice as hard, and/or “backwards and in heels” to get to those tables in the first place. If you have to set up even more obstacles to keep women and minorities out of power, you are tacitly admitting they are competent and deserve a seat at the table, and a big, tacky sharpie signature on Heritage claptrap doesn’t change that.
Because things are so fluid right now, I am not a trained political historian, and I am so very sick of following this foolishness, I will offer no further observations on this fast-developing train wreck for the moment.
I acknowledge that some people voted for Trump because they thought his return would be “good for the economy.” If the current state of American aviation is any indicator, with Musk trying to replicate his gutting of Twitter on governmental scale, that is probably not going to be the case very much longer. I would be happier to be wrong about this, but the Boer Youth are not operating with surgical precision, and the Federal Bureaucracy is not an epigram engine.