With the Big Beautiful Bill, we are facing an ending. Some are anticipating with glee, but most of us are likely wrestling with the central question of what the hell happened?
We are looking at a realignment of national aesthetics and political givens. Among the things that, to me, exemplify the insanity of the present period, I think the whole issue of homelessness is representative. The boneheaded insistence, stated and unstated, that homeless people are somehow responsible for their condition, and that by continuing to treat them as if they have made a choice about their situations seems to perfectly encapsulate the persistent gaslighting we’re being subjected to top to bottom. The drawing of a line and declaring that this is where you must be what you must do who you should become without any recognition of ability, resource, need, or circumstance has gripped our policy-makers by the balls and rendered them blind and savage. The same insistence that people should conform to a standard that takes into account nothing about their reality applies to immigration, trade, speech, choice.
We are seeing government by Gotcha, government as tantrum. The people directing all this are on full display with their longheld resentments, their petty refusals to accept reality, and their asocial aversions to anyone not in their club. There have long been solutions to many of these problems, but any and all such solutions require a clear-eyed acknowledgment that people have rights and needs that do not neatly fit on the form. The people stage-managing this are aware and do not care, because for them it is all about the fantasy. I have suggested before, many times, that one of the chief drivers of right-wing consternation is the simple fact that they do not like how their country looks. Perhaps this sounds too simplistic, but just look at their targets and see what they all have in common. The people being harassed, bullied, castigated, and fired all have one thing in common. They are not white, well-off, heterosexual, or occupy a social configuration that reflects a preferred model. Voters handed the Thought Police the power to determine how each of us fit in with their vision of what America should look like, whether that vision is fair, just, sustainable, or even desirable in any real sense. The dismay of so many who voted for them is telling, because they thought they belonged to the club.
This is difficult to resist because it’s so fluid, so surreal, so “you’ve got to be kidding me.” They are now forcing university administrations to purge and it is all based on loyalty to the leader.
Some keep asking what he has on all those congressmen that they bow to his vision. In some instances, sure, he may have a black book, but I think it’s more pernicious. In their hearts, all these “representatives” want the same thing. They want the ghettoes back, they want more jails into which to put outsiders…outsiders to them, anyway.
And the fuel for all this is a class of very wealthy people who do not give a damn about anyone they will never see within their circles. They want to money, because with the money they think they can shape the future. Their future. But more than that, they simply wish to be free of constraint. They wish to live as they please and to hell with what the rest of us want or deserve.
We’ve done this to ourselves. We’ve allowed them to set the terms of the divisions and then they stepped back and watched us tear each other apart over matters that mean virtually nothing. There have always been solutions. But solutions that do not put more coin in their coffers are the first things to be trampled and discarded and we let them do it. We voted for this. Not just eight months ago but for the last forty years we’ve been voting for this, little by little, swallowing the nonsense disseminated by a cadre of people who just can’t stand for anyone to be different, who believe “success” can only be had through programs of rigid conformity.
Forgive me. I’m angry. It’s hard to decide with whom I’m angrier. But more than that, I’m disappointed. We had the future in our hands and because we couldn’t see past our own fears, we’ve handed it to the wreckers.