Every time I think about doing another post at the Times of Israel and attempt #10047 at polemical journalism, I get a little queasy. It's not the continued lack of success I mind. We all reap what we sow. If by some miracle it took off this time I'd really rather not expose myself to 50,000 pieces of invective directed at me. No one would have so much invective directed at him so richly deserved, but what purpose would it serve? Would it cause my hopes for the world closer to fruition, or farther away? Better to abuse my friends I guess....
No, what bothers is the futility of it. The futility of knowing that even the smallest parts of what you'd advocate for would never come to pass; that you do not respect most people's points of view and that they obviously don't respect yours in kind. What could possibly be the point of retread #1003 about why it's important that the Democratic Party get its house in order when you know that even if we ever did get it in order, it would be with people who worship gods you find Satanic at the top? Every side of the party, the party that should know better, has betrayed hundreds of millions - moderates have of course betrayed women, racial and sexual minorities, and the poor... All that goes without saying. Like the Republican Party, what's bad about them is not news to anybody but them, and why hammer them yet again when the entire internet does?
But progressives have betrayed all those same people everywhere that isn't within our borders and think the world will somehow take care of itself if America leaves it to its own devices. They've even managed to betray people at home by somehow turning their beliefs into a religion, complete with an invisible system which determines favor and disfavor, ongoing auditions for a messiah who inevitably disappoints them, and since the Obama era doing a 180 from the belief that with enough conversation everyone in the world can learn to respect each other, to somehow believing that the whole world can be shamed into compliance with their view of it, and being completely blind to the fact that everything about their beliefs are unrecognizable from what they espoused just five years ago. In five years, they'll be unrecognizable yet again, embracing a completely different kit of snake oil.
And meanwhile, like the devil, social 'democrats' conjure images of a transformation of society that will never, ever, ever happen, and when it doesn't, yet again, they'll be shocked, shocked(!), when much more militant fringe groups within them demand revolution through mass violence, and enact their demands. There's nothing more to say than that, I've exhausted all my Bernie invective over the years....
And in the meantime, everyone will have accomplished in fantasy what can't be accomplished in reality, while the grip of the Republican Party becomes ever tighter, selfishness turning into corruption, corruption turning into authoritarianism, authoritarianism turning into a cult of personality, a cult of personality turning into....
And old-school liberal Democrats like me, guilty of perhaps most drastic betrayal of all for for being too broadminded to take our own side in a quarrel and ever allowing these offshoots to grow like cancers that had to be irradiated or simply cut off before they metastasized. For letting the difficulty of the challenge get in the way of what we knew would eventually become issues of life and death for billions, and even if we were always going to be terribly unworthy messengers at the best of times, letting each wing of the party subtract a little, bit by bit, from the full equation, knowing what was happening, and letting it go on anyway, because it was too personally difficult for each of us to tell people we know 'what you believe is a dangerous pile of shit.'
Not necessarily betrayal by compromise, but betrayal by compromising the conceptual core, the foundational vision, of everything we were working for. It's one thing to compromise on tactics and budgets and alliances, if you don't compromise on that, you've never done anything in your life; but to compromise on core beliefs, to say, for the millionth time, 'maybe they have do a point.' Of course they have a point! They sometimes agree with us! Sometimes they even have a point we've completely overlooked, but we evolve, they stay put. The only change they ever experience is a complete conversion, and somehow everything they once knew was wrong and everything they now believe is right. How many millions of them grew up in the Church and the military; they once were blind, but they awoke, and now they see. How many of their parents once supported Students for a Democratic Society and then became Reagan Democrats, and sometimes even Bush Republicans? Did 10 million of them vote for Reagan? 15 million? Whichever side, their level of belief doesn't allow for hypocrisy, so once they sell out a little bit, they can sell out the whole fucking thing. One of these days, millions of these lemmings are going to find a whole new set of beliefs yet again, and whether it's some perversion of social justice or some pervesion of Jesus, they're not gonna find another soft version of it, they're gonna find the fire and brimstone, and they're gonna use it. They always eventually do, and we let our own fears of how miserable they can make us now let us absolve them of what every history book says some of them will eventually do.
This is life I guess, and maybe it's all inevitable. Life is disappointment, life is failure. If you're lucky enough to live a long life, you get to watch as everything you value, everything you believe in, everything you love, eventually disappears, and so eventually you disappear, and I do too, and all of us, and everyone we ever knew.
At this point, I don't believe in progress, certainly not in any linear sort of progress. Life is a series of moving rocks we all try to keep our balance upon so that they don't crush us. The more problems we solve, the bigger the problems get, and the more the rocks lurch, until one day there is nothing again but the rock....
All that remains is the inner experience, the moments of grace or khen that stand between us and the rock's face. Maybe what we perceive as God is just the face of the rock who inevitably comes to bludgeon us. For better or worse, politics is always necessary, but it only makes life worth living if it's being used to improve people's lives. No Republican has improved a net positive of lives since Eisenhower, and the current Democratic Party has only a couple of used up husks with a bunch of promises that everybody who hasn't drank the kool-aid knows can never be fulfilled.
What makes life worth living is not the religion of politics, it is not the certainty that we're right and they're wrong. Politics will break the hearts of everyone who believes in it. What makes it worth living is those moments between life's heartbreak when, whether through love, or children, or sports, or games, or knowledge and art for its own sake and no other, we find ourselves connected with the miracles of more hopeful worlds than this one. Perhaps that hope is an illusion, but if it's an illusion, it's the illusion we're all hard-wired to need. If we're all quarantined in a week-or-three, do yourselves a favor. You'll be tempted to use extra time to consume more news. For the love of God, don't do it. Be there for your children, read, listen to music, play games, fall in love again with your spouse. The best hope we have for a better political situation is to do whatever it takes to not think about the situation.
So back to music and books I at least try to go, hopefully there'll still be a planet on which people can appreciate whatever I come up with.
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