Ken Ponitale, contributing writer
CAVEATS 1-3:
- The following is just another guy on the internet telling you he thinks he knows what’s going on better than you do. As such, approach this thread with appropriate skepticism and/or eye-rolling.
- I am about to tell you that you are being distracted by the spectacle from paying attention to the horror, while also trying to convince you that this isn’t another piece trying to convince you that you are being distracted from the real horror by paying too much attention to the spectacle.
- I am sorry.
PART ONE
We have lost. Definitively. We lost a long time ago and continue to keep losing. Repeatedly imploring that we can come back next time inhibits our ability to deal with the crisis(es) at hand.
This isn’t a they-are-playing-chess-while-we-are-playing-checkers, or 3-D chess, or bringing-a-gun-to-knife-fight, or vice versa situation. This is instead a case of us playing a game with and against ourselves while they fight a war. Against us.
We’re doing calisthenics. They are digging tunnels under the football field. We’re practicing our three-point shots 24/7. We’ve brought in Stephen Curry and Steve Nash to help correct our form. Kareem Abdul Jabber is coaching. They went and had three point shots banned from the game.
I hate these metaphors.
But it’s true. When Obama had a Supreme Court pick, they didn’t fight it. They instead refused to acknowledge our right to have a pick. They refused to play. We said “but you can’t do that. That’s unfair” and they did it anyway and we said “well that’s not nice, you guys, but we’ll get you next time” but there was no next time.
The next time, they secretly brought the Russians in to defeat us and we knew they had brought them in and we told them we knew they brought them in but they said “so?” So, we didn’t stop them and instead went ahead with the match, and we said “cheaters never win” but they won and we said quietly we’ll get you next time but there was no next time.
When they had their own Supreme Court pick we knew we couldn’t fight it but we pretended to try anyway, because winning is as important as trying. And trying hard is the most important thing of all. More important than winning. We’ve all been taught that, by our fathers. I mean mothers. But if we won there’d be no kids in cages. Anyway, we lost.
And then they had yet another Supreme Court pick, and he was not a very good pick, in fact he was a very bad pick indeed. And we said, we’re gonna fight you on this one. And we did. We fought them. Or rather, we fought him, because against them we never had a chance.
When their pick was put forward the information to review him with was withheld. This had never happened before. They were cheating again! Some tried to say- how can we review him with only a fraction of the information we need to be able to do a normal review? Others said: there’s cameras and I would like to start running for President soon so lets do it anyway.
When they didn’t release all the documents, we could have left the field. When accusations of sexual assault and binge drinking emerged we didn’t say: DISQUALIFIED! We didn’t demand a new candidate. We said, instead, tell us more.
For months and months we heard more. We heard old friends say he was a bad man and new friends say he was a good man. We heard women say he assaulted them and men say that he was being assaulted. In the end we said, “who do you believe?”
When the cameras turned their way the presidential candidates shouted “believe women!” When the cameras turned on the other team they laughed. “Believe women? When have we ever done that?” And they slapped the back of the only woman senator on their team, who agreed it was a funny joke.
And then, when a not very believable woman said that one of our woman-believing presidential candidates had assaulted her, we shouted “believe all women, even this one,” and demanded he quit the team even though we were already at a short a few players.
Anyway. We lost. But, that was ok, because we all knew Robert Mueller was going to save us. When Mueller was forced to stop investigating and turn in his report, they said “we’ve read it, and the president did nothing wrong, which is why we cannot let you see it.”
Which was a super bummer. Because we really thought he was going to help us. But since the other team had read the report and we didn’t, we decided to take them for their word. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi said, “see? All that Russia stuff was overblown. Stupid democrats, you should really get back to purging the neoliberals from your own party.”
But then, weeks later, it turns out that the president did work with the Russians, and all the stories we’d already seen a hundred times on the news were true, because Mueller put them in his report. In fact Mueller put like 30 people working for the president in jail. Those rascals! They tricked us again. Oh we’re gonna get them next time. But there was no next time.
PART TWO:
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. There was a next time. In 2018. And we won. We won the house in 2018. We won it bigly. And it wasn’t meaningless. And it’s a start. But I’m advocating hopelessness here, so let’s fast forward to today.
First yesterday. Yesterday the Senate voted not to play. Again. Their job was to hold a trial, but they knew if they held a real trial and had called real witnesses, some of their bench might be tempted to listen to those last little shriveled bits of tissue still left over from the attempted self-abortions of their souls and put country over party and they absolutely could not allow that to happen.
And unsurprisingly, no amount of our shouting “not fair, and your’e cheating” could stop them. Because it turns out, it is fair, and has been fair all along. And they haven’t been cheating. They’ve been playing by the rules this whole time. Because they put themselves in charge of the rules. And it turns out a lot of what we thought were rules, or laws, were just precedents. Were merely the way we had been doing things, and not at all the only way that things could be done.
So he won, and they won, and we lost, again. And Today I am seeing the same members of my team saying “we’ll get him November.” “We’ll beat him at the polls, which is where it really matters. Not in the court of law. All we have to do is win! Bigger than we have ever won before. If we stay positive we can’t help but win.”
But we can’t win. We can’t. And we need to stop pretending we can. As long as we keep trying to play the same old game, we will keep losing. We keep trying to kick the ball and they keep pulling it away at the last minute. We are not the resistance. We are the loyal opposition. We will always try and kick the ball. What else are we supposed to do?
Well, I don’t know about you, but my takeaway from watching Peanuts cartoons is that Lucy is a fucking asshole, and instead of always trying to kick the ball, Charlie Brown needs to go up and kick Lucy right in the fucking face.
Elizabeth Warren needs to stop releasing 500 page plans about how we might fix America and instead start fixing America by walking up to Mitch McConnell on the Senate Floor and slapping him right in the face. Or better yet, slap him in the neck so we can all watch that saggy bag of pale turtle flesh redden and jiggle and flap on endless gifs and instant replays for the rest of the campaign season.
Headlines should read “Warren takes lead by slapping McConnell. Biden falls in polls after giving Megan McCain a titty twister. Buttigieg and Tom Cotton to duel at dawn. Bernie nursing broken hand after punching Nazis in Nevada. Klobuchar stops beating her own staff, instead smacks several members of the Freedom Caucus with a hairbrush.”
We can’t just fight them at the ballot box. We have to fight them in the streets.
We have put off direct action over Republican misdeeds for too long. We didn’t try them for war crimes after they falsified the failed war in Iraq. We didn’t try them for wrecking the global economy. No charges were brought against a single big banker or Bush Appointee. Barack Obama should have shut the entire government down until Merrick Garland was seated (or at least voted upon). The Senate Democrats should have walked out of the Kavanaugh hearings exposing them for a fraud instead of agreeing to participate.
The house should have impeached Trump on a hundred counts, not one or two, and when the Republicans voted to deny witnesses, the senators should have gone on hunger strike and Barack Obama should have held a live town hall warning about the danger to democracy.
Our failure to fight at every juncture has only emboldened the right. Our civility is killing democracy. Thomas Jefferson said a revolution would be needed every 100 years. We are due.
One of these times, the left of this country and its leaders need to get out into the streets and stay there. Trump and McConnell need to go. And all their cronies after them. But they won’t go peacefully. We have to make them leave.
CAVEAT 4-5:
4. If we fight we will lose. If we fight in the streets, we will be shot in the streets. We will lose our lives. We will be beaten, and jailed and murdered.
5. But we will also be taking a stand. We will be showing strength. We will demonstrate our ability to sacrifice. And maybe in doing so, and in dying, we will elicit sympathy, or disgust. Enough sympathetic disgust for the oligarchs who value diversity to step in and help put an end to the struggle.
PART THREE
I can hardly watch the primaries. I don’t care who wins. I don’t care who has the best debate performance and I don’t care who‘s leading in the polls or who parrots back to me exactly what I think I already believe. It’s a just a game, and it’s not even our game, it’s the game of the television companies and the newspaper companies and the social media companies and its designed to engender conflict and controversy where none is necessary.
Climate Change doesn’t matter. Women’s rights, reparations, healthcare, inequality, guns, none of it matters. I don’t want to even hear anyone’s opinion on any issue at all. We can’t pass Medicare for all, or Medicare for all who want it, or merely preserve the last vestiges of Obamacare, unless we can defeat Trump and retake the Senate and keep the house, and retake the Senate by large enough numbers to pass a packing of the Supreme Court and the implementation of term limits.
I want every candidate to shut up about how much woker or less woke their plans are and instead say that they will work with ever other candidate, woke or not, to end our national drift into authoritarianism, white supremacy, and kleptocracy. Its no longer about what’s best for America, it’s about preventing what’s worst in America.
We can’t play the same game and win. Time goes on and Einstein only gets more right, not less. We gotta Steve Jobs this motherfucker and think different: be cold as ice one day and a hot emotional mess the next, but either way 100% fucking focussed on doing what we need to do and not letting any minor thing like paternity or Bill Gates get in the way.
We are up against a resurgence of intolerance, a last gasp grasp at power by a desperate group of fearful folks who imagine themselves backed into a corner and are willing to do whatever it takes to hang on to what they’ve got.
Until we are willing to do the same they will keep wining. And we will continue to lose.