Well, it’s finally here. I said I was staying off social media (and anything resembling live media) today, so if you’re seeing this on Facebook or Twitter it’s only because I have my blog set to squirt my posts over there.¹ You can leave a comment there, but I won’t see it for a few days. Or you can leave one here. Or you can be like me and roil in a pit of despair.  After brunch. And doing some prep for my classes. I’m reasonably certain Monday will still happen. Everything after that is a crapshoot.

Both of my parents died of cancer. I remember what it was like knowing that it was just a matter of time before something awful happened and feeling utterly powerless to do anything about it. Then, when they died, saying to myself over and over “now it’s real” and being unprepared for it.  And I’ll never forget getting to the J-School the morning we started bombing Baghdad in 1991 and meeting Doug Barthlow outside the library. “Things are going to be different for the rest of our lives,” he said “We’re going to be living with this forever. It’s never going to be the same again.” That’s what today feels like. It’s a little before 10AM EST as I write this, so technically the world is still sane, but it’s over. I’m assuming the choreography has begun and the orange-skinned homunculus is strutting and thrusting out his jaw like the two-bit Mussolini wannabe he is. He wanted military units and tanks and missiles in his parade, people.  That’s fucked up.

Gallons of ink have been spilled and gazillions of electrons have been rearranged so people like me can scream. Today we become that dystopian novel we read. Today we lose all the wars we’ve fought in the past. Today Moscow becomes the most important capital in the world, and they didn’t really have to work that hard to do it. All they had to do was give us the fuel and we were perfectly content to burn ourselves down.

We’re really good at that, the burning ourselves down thing, I mean. I remember that tape that came out from Osama bin Laden where him and a couple of the other planners were talking about the 9/11 attacks. They were as surprised as we were that the buildings actually fell down . They knew they were going to kill a lot of people and we’d overreact and weaken ourselves as a result, but they never let themselves hope it would work out that well (from their perspective). We completely lost our shit. A few thousand guys running around in the mountains of Afghanistan managed to make a country of 350 million people with the most powerful military on earth completely lose its shit. 9/11 sucked, but it was alike giving a gorilla a little paper cut. The reaction should have been “Hey, do that another — oh — 200 or 300 times and you might start drawing some blood. Meanwhile we’re going to piss you off by not changing a bit.  Sure, we’ll hunt you down and turn you into a stain that’ll take more than Tide to get out, but we’re going to do it by being exactly the same as we were before. We can make you a footnote and not even break a sweat.” But, of course, we didn’t do that. We chose to become a completely different country.  One where the thing we fear the most is fear itself. That’s why the subtitle to this blog is what it is. The people who wanted to destroy the US in the past went about it the wrong way. We were always the best people for the job.

I don’t think there’s some hotline from Moscow to Washington with Putin issuing orders to his poodle.  Put a complete fucking moron in the top job and suddenly the United States is way down on Vlad’s “Things-I-have-to-worry-about-today” list. The things my parents and grandparents believed in and sacrificed for become irrelevant today. The zombie apocalypse is upon us. Mitch McConnell’s general appearance aside, the zombies aren’t undead people looking for brains to eat. They’re dead-eyed authoritarians looking for money to take. The country is about to be sold for parts. You will not be receiving payment. But the beatings will continue until morale improves.  Or not. It’s pretty much the same to the folks in charge. No one’s asking you to like it. You’re just supposed to comply.

I am, of course, over-reacting. “It’s all going to be fine,” you say,  “it can’t happen here.” Hands start waving around and a blanket of vague descends if I ask you, “Really?  Why not?” A lot of people are going to be in the streets today and tomorrow saying “This is not OK” and that’s the most hopeful thing I’m seeing right now. As bad as things are — and experience has taught me you tend to dread the wrong things too much and the things that really wind up sucking you don’t dread nearly enough — I find hope in that I know I’m not alone in this. I have found there are a lot of people out there who’ve been feeling like Cassandra. We’ve been on the wrong path for a very long time. You see, the deal with the idea of the USA isn’t that we’re especially good or exceptional people.  We’re just regular, flawed,  people who aspire to good and exceptional things for everybody. We’re not unique in that. Wanting good and exceptional things doesn’t make us good and exceptional. It just described how hard we needed to work. We mistook the ends for means. The payments for that mistake is coming due. And it’s going to suck.

It’s not going to be OK. That suggests that things are going to be how things are going to be without intervention and all we have to do is sit back a take the ride. If things wind up working out OK it’s because people will have made it OK and probably hurt some feelings along the way. Euphemisms and platitudes aren’t going to cut it. Civility is a great thing when you agree on ends but not on means. It makes it much more likely you’ll get there. It’s important to not jump to conclusions, though. Really, really important. Be sure you’re not really working for the same ends before you abandon civility. It’s hard to roll that back. If you get that wrong you are, indeed, the asshole. Political party labels are useless now. I know many, many, many self-identified Republicans who are horrified at what’s starting. There are things (guns, abortion, LGBTQ equality) we (stridently) disagree on, but we all fundamentally believe in the underlying framework for how that stuff gets worked out (and that it’s always a temporary solution). This isn’t liberal/conservative. Edmund Burke and Barry Goldwater would look at the current GOP and say “what the fuck is wrong with you people?” They’re not exactly relying on time-tested traditions. They’re about to throw a lot of them out.  There’s nothing conservative about what’s going on.

So today it all changes. In about half an hour  from now we’re through the looking glass. God help us all.

See you on the other side.

¹Paints quite a picture, eh?  You’re welcome.