Who's Bad?

When I saw the second plane hit, my first thought was, They’re coming out of the woodwork. Masks off. They want us to know.

This is why they lied about how it happened, instead of just lying about who did it. They want thinking people to know it was an inside job.

This delivers the unspoken threat: If we’re willing to do this, do you dare think anything you can do will even slow us down? This is chilling to free thought, free speech, and free action. It’s a direct threat to shut up or else.

Then they covered up the physical evidence as quickly as possible, to foment doubt. Not probable, nor even feasible doubt, but a species of doubt propagandists know well.

It’s the anxiety of having to choose between going along with an absurdity endorsed by the dominant group, or risking being ostracized by trusting reason, logic, and observation.

The Emperor Has No Clothes, but only the naive little boy, alone in the crowd, dares say it, because social pressure forces everyone to go along with the absurdity.

This is how religion works, and why propagandists choose this method. If they can force you into believing an absurdity, they know you’ll fight to the bone to keep hold of it. Once they have you suckered, you stay suckered unless and until there is a major social change, or some other compelling reason, forcing you to shake off the illusion.

Who is angrier than a letdown former believer? Is not a true believer unshakable and, once shaken, shattered?

We need to understand the process we’ve been put through. They did something so outrageous, few could credit it. They covered up the physical evidence and lied about who did it and how it was done. They scapegoated a marginalized targeted enemy, demonizing Others. People Not Like Us did this, they claimed.

Despots all do this.

Pick a scapegoat and pick on that scapegoat unrelentingly. Blame everything on a marginalized, demonized minority. Persecution focuses hatred. It excites bigots to action and rallies mobs to act on false beliefs.

Once that happens, it locks in the lies.

That is why they did it so sloppily, so badly, and so baldly.

After all, they can’t be that incompetent, can they?

Because if they really are as bungling as they seem, and we have responded as flatfootedly, gullibly, and stupidly as we have, what does that make us?

Ahem.


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What Can You Do?

Vonnegut died. What can you do?

He was old, famous, and rich. He was talented, depressive, and cynical. He was amazing, predictable, and prone to repeat himself. I love many of his books. Reading his work never fails to make me want to go write something of my own.

If we think hard, maybe we can think of another writer who meant as much to us. Who influenced us as much. Who inspired us to do better. Hemingway, for older people, did much the same. Vonnegut was our Hemingway.

Now we’re without either. What can you do?

As I wrote the paragraphs above, iTunes played a digital version of an old recording of Glenn Miller and his band performing “Tuxedo Junction”. This fit, somehow.

Much was made of Vonnegut’s resemblance to Mark Twain, both in writing and looks. Attitude played a big part of the writing resemblance. Wild hair, a hook nose, and a big mustache explains the physical echo.

There are many worse writers to resemble, in any way.

To the extent we’re blunt, focused on big issues that matter to individuals, and piss against the wind of control, fascism, and death and destruction, we writers left alive resemble Vonnegut.

He was famously liberal. Eugene V. Debs was a hero of his. Standing up for the common person mattered to Kurt. Not being pushed around by bullies with money, power, and connections. Speaking up for the ones whose voices could not be heard from under the layers of shit they’d been buried in by the propaganda machines of the right.

If we writers left alive learn one thing from Vonnegut, it should be kindness.

That, he figured, was all that mattered, in the end.

Kindness to each other, he meant. Individuals, taken one at a time, and given the respect each deserves simply by being alive, were Vonnegut’s champions. He wasn’t much for collective singulars like The Nazi Party, the Mafia, or the GOP.

Everybody mentions how Vonnegut survived the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945. Few mention that his mother had committed suicide just before he’d shipped out for the European theater. He was tough in ways few can ever understand.

Now he’s dead. What can you do?



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