On the Eve of Something Awful
A nation divided, armed, and out of time
So what’s our second civil war going to look like, a friend asks.
No prophet, I can’t predict the next word I’ll type. I am, though, a fatalist: whatever happens is doomed to by forces beyond our comprehension or control. This is Hamlet’s final insight to his bosom buddy Horatio, the wisdom to which his anguished history has led. “There’s a special providence,” he says quietly,
in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all
A sparrow’s fall – or a nation’s – must come – because everything falls – if not today, one day – a fate we can resist, but not forestall.
Civil wars don’t end in treaties – one sides get this, the other that, now let’s quit killing – because the differences are irreconcilable. One or the other keeps the kid – which makes the loathing of both intolerant and intolerable. There can be no happy ending in the present grapple for America’s soul, no “amicable divorce” (in my experience, an impossible oxymoron): one side will prevail and the losers will nurse grievances till the end of time. A hundred and sixty years after Appomattox, America is still fighting our first civil war, scrapping over decals and naming rights. Historians may view present hostilities as a continuation of that conflict.
The more balanced the opposing forces, the longer and bloodier the strife. Neither will surrender until the last soldier, for if to lose is to die, might as well go down fighting. The muster of today’s armies is still finalizing. On the side of the pro-tyranny party, you’ve got mobs of aggrieved low-information voters, angry at modernity for their exclusion from its rewards. Aligned with them (weirdly) are plutocrats bent on grasping more wealth by confusing the low-information voters about their best interests. That the leader of the infuriated party is a lifelong money-grubbing kleptomaniac is startling but so it is. The infuriated supply the jackboots and votes, the plutocrats mastermind the schemes and pay the bills. At present the tyrannists seem ascendant, controlling at least two of the three branches of our national government and a majority of states.
Your and my party, the small-d democrats, who believe that self-government is preferable to any alternative and endorse the notions embedded in our Constitution, are just now forming into a fighting force. Caught flat-footed and flabbergasted, we did not realize we’d been at war for a decade or more; we did not believe it possible; it made no sense! Yet here we are with Harvard, science, public health, justice, truth, freedoms, prudence, civility, common sense all gasping on the ropes. With targets on our backs – affixed by our own government – we shudder, naked and scared. But we’re not dead yet – or willing to die – and we’re convinced we’ve got justice and the majority on our side.
The two armies are skidding toward a violent collision, the sooner the better. Lives are being lost now – to assassinations, incarcerations, deportations, preventable disease, malnutrition, economic disruption; soon, perhaps, to foreign war. Each day more victims, hatred, fear. No one can predict the flashpoint – LA riots, “No Kings Day,” some ruling or arrest? – but most are realizing that the climactic moment nears and we must choose sides, for there can be no sitting this one out. I’ve written here why I’m prepared to die in the fight, though I sure don’t want to. The incessant suspense distracts, distresses, exhausts – and enthralls. Did you ever dream humans could be so vile?