Anniversaries

 

January 6, 2022

On this evening in 1969 I began writing this journal, and did not let off from that time to this. 

Every year (for 7 or 8 years now) former student RC makes me a mix CD for Christmas. I’m playing this year’s right now. Trying to find him in it, but perhaps too much time has passed. He was big, handsome, athletic, smart, mordant. Listening for that in the cheery (and to me unfamiliar) tunes. 

Anniversary of the Trump Insurrection. Only the foot soldiers have faced any consequences. The generals, the Emperor proudly flaunt their impunity before the world. America is founded on spasms of mistaken cooperation, beginning with the Northern States’ accepting a Federalist compromise with the slave owning South at the very formation of the nation, continuing through Reconstruction, when fellowship with our defeated white brethren was more important to us than justice or the Constitution. Compromise is of itself neither evil or good: it depends on with whom. Compromise with error is always error, no matter how it smooths the road. Democrats today are not exactly gutless, but so convinced by the universality of reason that they are duped every time by people who are not reasonable, not just, not fully human. None of us are sure enough of this to strike the first blow. But the blow must be struck. If the news is to be trusted, full a third of us will to believe a lie fully debunked a dozen times, for which there was never a shred of evidence but the outcry of the toppled Emperor. The tantrumof an infant has unmade our Republic.