… because there is nowhere to go back to.
It’s been two years since my last post here, which shocks me. Time doesn’t seem to work right any more. But one of the main reasons was how bit by bit what I sort of thought of as “my beat” stopped making sense. Because it was hope.
That was the point, why else bother to write, really? You have to have meaning in your message, otherwise you’re just “bumbling away like some sort of muzak” (as Rumpole of the Bailey says). And I’m not really satisfied with meaning that serves no purpose, or could make things worse. So in the wake of the last couple of years, with the vices clamping harder on everyone and, just… everything… I haven’t had much to say beyond cynical jokes better delivered in another medium. And then a month ago things went from the frying pan into unmitigated hellfire.
Evil – staunch, fascist, sadistic evil – is winning. The American Experiment has failed. The Paris Accords are failing. And yet… and yet…
What is their endgame? Not the slogans; those rarely mean anything substantive, they’re just team chants. What would have to happen to change ‘winning’ into ‘won’?
Eradication, that’s what. Power and control forever. LGBTQ+ people destroyed. A return to the divine right of kings, and the final erasure of empathy and kindness from society.
But that’s impossible.
Queer people aren’t a political movement. We’re a natural variant of humanity. More than humanity, even; queer creatures are a natural variant of animals in general. It is possible to commit genocide on us, but it is not possible to complete it.
They can kill us in a way that matters, but not in a way that works.
Empathy and kindness are also inherent to humanity. In fact, we are a highly pro-social species. If the hard right’s notions of strong-man social Darwinism as the basis of society were true, we would never have been able to form a society in the first place! There would have been no drive to create medicine, or communities, or even families as we know them. It is not possible to destroy these either.
This is a dire, shriveled hope. But it is still hope. And nobody worth listening to says we should roll over and take it.
Evil is winning. But they cannot win. It’s a double-edged knife, but there’s always tomorrow. Fascism inevitably, eventually, eats itself. There aren’t any pharaohs around any more, are there?
What we do in the meantime… is exactly what they want gone. We survive. We find each other. We survive. We create points of light and joy in the darkness. We survive.
We will laugh and love and create and share and above all, as a people, survive.
They’re really going to hate that.
for Julia Serano’s blogger Day of Action
I keep telling my LGBT+ friends and acquaintances: we’ve been through worse, and survived.
It won’t be easy, but gays, lesbians, and trans people have lived under oppression, and made lives for themselves. (Read Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors) Moreover, enough people have learned that we aren’t space aliens or weird perverts that we’ll get more sympathy and maybe even support from the muggles.
For instance, trans people have gotten hormones even when we couldn’t get prescriptions, we can do it again. Surgery? Places like Thailand.
We will survive. And we will thrive more than we might expect right now.
There is no endgame. Nothing will ever satisfy them. Fascism, like alcoholism or problem gambling, is in the end an insatiable compulsive disorder caused by trying to substitute something else for a keenly felt lack. I suspect that lack is a certain type of social intimacy. Note: being at a rally (or a riot) of political fellow-travelers is not intimate, even if it is social: the relationships are superficial, acquaintance-level. Indeed, such relationships are antithetical to intimacy, as you can’t make such a person a confidante for fear they’re secretly an informer. Why does AA work fairly well? It’s not the twelve step formula, let alone the religious baggage — it’s because the group members are encouraged to share and confess stuff with one another and as a result one derives social intimacy there. Fill that void in someone and they become capable of overcoming a bad habit or even a chemically-potent addiction. Leave it empty and people will latch onto a substitute — a drug, gambling, sex, video games, food, or even hate — and gorge and gorge and gorge themselves without ever being “full”. Until they overdose, or gamble away the shirt off their backs, or drop from dehydration in the middle of a massive Warcraft raid, or worse. Look at the Nazis: the more they “won” the more they went to war, both against their internal “enemies” and their external ones. They ratcheted up the expropriation and incarceration of internal minorities and dissidents until it became the Holocaust, and the external land-grabs until it became a world war, continuing it until, fighting on three fronts, they bit off more than they could chew and got bombed to rubble.
Making matters worse, becoming any kind of an addict makes one much harder to love, so having social intimacy is actively made harder … especially when the thing one is addicted to is hate (or domination, or both). (For that matter, submission seems also to be an option — submission-addicts would explain the “people pleasers” who burn themselves out with their selflessness.)
So the answer is: no amount of “winning” will ever satisfy any of them, until and unless one of them realizes what is really missing in their life and reorients around that. And that only fixes things one Nazi at a time. There’s no known way to solve this problem at scale short of, in the end, overthrowing them. And that usually ends up requiring violence.
This also explains why appeasement is such a disastrous strategy against Nazis. It’s like giving an alcoholic free booze! It only makes their condition worse.
@2
Uh…. okay… but I have to say your examples need some serious work. AA DOESN’T work fairly well, it has a super high rate of recidivism, and “people pleasers” are not “addicted to submission”, they are demonstrating a maladaptive stress coping mechanism caused by trauma, the “fawn” response (as opposed to fight, flight, or freeze).
nothing to say to this but glad to see you here, whether for a moment or longer, in very sound mind. when you see somebody who is normally sharp sounding incoherent, it’s cause for worry. this is well-written enough to be a good show of health, like when an animal’s coat is shiny.