I'm reading--in parts; I leave it open for breakfast each morning--a book called Lessons on the Road to Peace, written by an interesting traveler, John Noltner, who doubles as a professional photographer. He'd decided to travel the country, with his wife, to find positive influences. There's one that particularly caught my interest, though.
This fellow, Neal Moore, decided to travel the country, too, but by kayak. He reckoned to start one year before the 2024 elections, and return one year afterward. He should be done about now.
I want to talk to him and find out that he's learned. He had high hopes starting out: "The idea was to paddle the year leading into national elections and then the full year after, no matter how it would have turned out. What would we look like as a nation the year after national elections?"
In a kayak, by oneself, though, figuring out what the country would look like seems to me the wrong way to do it. In fact, he probably was better off traveling that way, along quiet, unobtrusive waters, taking oneself away from the tempest, rather than take on the head-banging ferocity we continued. Because here's what happened:
- About two years ago, it looked as if Joe Biden was going to edge The Monster for another presidential term. Things seemed upbeat, the inflation was easing, and government, chugging along as it does, seemed accessible and trustworthy once again. There was no name-calling being thrown around, at least not by his adherents. We knew that his opponent was going to insert all kinds of gloom and doom and trashing, but since he had proven his incompetence during a previous four years, it would be folly to suggest that he would once again buffalo the public into accepting another four.
- As Moore began, the Middle East became awash with the Palestinian ambush of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Whether Hamas was expecting Iran and/or Hezbollah to join them actively we might never know. But they were left hanging on that limb. Israel responded as it always has--it sought to grind the perpetrator into sawdust. And so it has. Hamas has dreamed of killing every single Israeli; It has had the tables turned. Two years hence, Gaza is now a wasteland; over 60,000 have died. No one knows what to do with it. The Palestinian cause became attached to Biden and the Democrats; they didn't know what to do with it, either. Both sides took hostages and these became the major pawns in the growing devastation. Just now, two years later, most of them have been exchanged--or, rather, their dead bodies have.
- Then, disaster at our end: last June, Biden wandered into a presidential debate that would, if he once again wielded the panache and brush-off disdain he showed in the State of the Union speech of 2023, prove decisive and stonewalling to The Monster. Instead, the opposite happened. Biden, for the first time demonstrating his fading mental acuity--which, understandably, came and went as staffers constantly scrambled to hide it; read Jake Tapper's book on it if you want details--made himself look like someone who had no grasp of situations, and if so, couldn't tell you if he tried; The Monster kept putting the ball on a tee, and he kept missing it. The Monster was his normal ridiculous, lying, insulting, egomaniac self; clearly, he hadn't learned a thing in his four years. He was ripe for the taking, but his preposterousness faded in comparison to the severely damaged Biden revealed for the first time. Biden not only didn't take advantage, he managed, in one terrible moment, to turn the campaign against him. His backers panicked.
- The Democrats spent a month both denying the obvious and slowly accepting it. Biden, for his part, came around and withdrew from the race, but that month proved decisive. His vice-president and anointed successor, Kamala Harris, came out of the gates like a ball of fire, and it looked for a while like she, now oddly the underdog, would overcome the situation and we would be perhaps free from The Monster forever. In the debate between the two of them, she completely dominated him and for once displayed the dismissal of his nonsense that all Democrats should have been displaying for eight years. Her performance was masterful.
- Then, as Democrats are great at doing, she managed to bring her growing momentum to a screeching halt. She did what sports teams sometimes do despite the obvious need not to: She sat on her lead. Someone told her not to tempt fate; she followed instructions and in doing so she succumbed to it.
- When Republican money poured into making a much bigger deal out of trans-people and gays than needed to have attention, young adults turned on the Democrats. The Democrats did not have an answer for that; they felt that, with the election coming in with its usual closeness, they couldn't afford to clarify their attitudes towards trans-people in any way. The Republicans scare tactics flourished, people ignored the Democrats' warnings about the end of democracy, and with it the election was sealed.
- Now, we have a big, beautiful mess. Quoting Jamelle Boule in The New York Times: "In 2024, the Americans who decided the election voted for lower prices and a lower cost of living. What they got instead were soldiers on the streets, masked agents leading violent immigration raids, arbitrary tariffs, new conflicts abroad, dictatorial aspirations, endless chaos and a president more interested in taking a wrecking ball to the White House to build his garish ballroom than delivering anything of value to the public."
- The first opportunity for Americans to vote on these horrible changes came Tuesday, just as Moore was pulling his kayak out of the water for the last time. Virginia and New Jersey elected Democratic women to governorships; California decisively passed its redistricting answer to Texas' attempt to use a back door method to add more Republicans to the House of Representatives; Pennsylvania decisively voted down an effort to flip its state Supreme Court. All responses to a president who has been constantly trying to steal power from the Congress, and mostly succeeding. People are starting to get pretty tired of it. But we will see, in another year, whether this is a blip on the screen or a real electoral unrest: the whole House is up for election then.
- That should pretty much catch him up. Oh, and this--the latest issue of The Atlantic outlines in detail the illegal and unconstitutional efforts 47 will probably try to steal a Republican majority in the House. Read it and think about it. This is truly a person who will stop at nothing, who is driven by rage and a craving to dominate, who sees democracy only as something in the way. I think of The Who's song "Behind Blue Eyes":
No one knows what it's like to be the bad man,
To be the sad man, behind blue eyes.
No one know what it's like to be hated,
To be fated, to telling only lies.
But my dreams, they aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be:
I have hours, only lonely--
My love is vengeance that's never free.
No one knows what it's like to feel these feelings
Like I do--and I blame you:
No one bites back as hard on their anger;
None of my pain and woe can show through
"I think our greatest strength is empathy," he wrote, and that may be. But a great deal now thwarts that, and our elected leader has none. That is becoming dangerous beyond measure. Moore wanted to see our common humanity, and I'm sure he found some out there. But 47 respects none of that. He is a white supremacist, and sees nothing remotely close.
"Around the bend, we're going to be okay," he said. Only if this is stopped somehow. Only if this need for domination does not become our fallback position. And it will not take care of itself.
Ever the victim, ever the bully, acting in pure spite: Nothing can satisfy him. He is the singular danger to our future. We must stop him. Moore, in his kayak, took a hiatus from the fray. But now that the pushback has begun, it is here in full electrical force. The showdown is coming. 47 will fight back desperately.
What do we look like as a nation, Moore asked? If he sees clearly, he now knows that we hang by a thread.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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