April 22, 2013

Sank into the covers last night like a tree falling in the forest.

It was Youth Sunday, and a girl from the church gave an excellent sermon. You always expect something embarrassing on such days, and you always get something wonderful.

DD wrote me a poem. It’s been so long since anybody wrote me a poem. I must study it.

Raymond visits from DC and asks, practically the first thing, what he can do from that distance to help defeat the insidious Republicans in Raleigh. Two of us say in chorus to pray for tornadoes to level the city while all the legislators are in it, I do give thought to the savagery of the state legislature. It is almost parody. If it were in a comedy skit it would be funny, in a way, but so darkly extreme that one might not laugh. They are so ludicrously destructive and inhumane, so much the bombastic backwoods fascists  that I think there must be some kind of code or test I’m not divining, but what the end game can be I can’t figure. The last time the Republicans held such a hand was Reconstruction, and both times their policies were based on vengeance against a supposed enemy, against those who, they thought, got for free what was came to them through much labor. They hate the poor because the poor demand to be allowed to live with dignity, and they do not see that such a right exists. They hate immigrants because only they themselves can be true Americans. They hate education because reason and critical thought take about two seconds to undermine their voodoo pieties.  If I look for rationale that only thing I can find is a bitter privileged class seeking retribution for others’ having, or getting, or aspiring to, what they imagine they have earned for themselves, and underclasses going along so as to imagine themselves part of this real and redblooded Americana. That families in trailers vote for Republicans is like Jews voting for Hitler. Hitler had the courtesy to spell out his contempt. That is the difference. Worse than all is what the Republican Party has done to public discourse, which is to have made truth and fact irrelevant, and set up the wildest and most ignorant speculation as somehow equal to them. Preference for the truth has been painted as a shibboleth of elitism, and we’d rather have dinosaurs walking with Adam than confess we have gotten something wrong. That Governor McCrory is an ignorant vandal cannot be questioned, yet he must have been so when he was elected, and it must have been known that he was. Nothing he does takes he cronies by surprise; they saw it coming, and rejoiced. It’s only the rest of us who are astonished, and that’s because we expected balance and reason, at some point, even from people whom we mistrusted. Balance and reason are not part of the Republican program. They know they cannot last– Raymond described the current state administration as the “death throes” of the party-- so their plan must be to do as much damage as they can before sinking into the cesspool of history. We must find a way to lessen that damage. We must find a way to hand some legacy beyond envy and hate to the generation behind us.