The last day

January 20th, 2017, marks the last day we will see for a long time -- perhaps ever -- when our nation was worthy of respect. In the coming years our leadership in the world, our moral authority, our economic and military power will all decline under this corrupt, incompetent regime.

Nevertheless, I do not despair. We will have new elections in less than 2 years, another presidential election in four. It may be that the collection of pus known as the Republican party is coming to a head so that it can finally be incised and drained.

We live in a system designed to a great extent with corrupt and incompetent leaders and stupid voters in mind. The coming years will be a race between the implosion of the GOP and its efforts to undermine democracy and free elections to the point that that implosion does not matter. If honest people step to the fight and refuse to cower in fear, I think we are likely to win this race.

The prize, I hope, will not merely be the saving of our democracy but the disgrace and dissolution of what is laughably called the conservative movement in this country, which could bring with it the potential for real substantial policy on climate among other things.

The key principle is resistance. Tyrants dissolve democracies not due their minority of passionate supporters, but due to majorities which are frightened into silence and denied the knowledge of their own strength. Do not be silenced. Do not be afraid. It's time for them to be afraid. They've grabbed a job they can't do by making promises they can't keep and the bills will rapidly come due. Then the people are coming for them.

Say not the Struggle nought Availeth

By Arthur Hugh Clough

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

     The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

     And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

     And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

     When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

     But westward, look, the land is bright.

Subjects of the Empire of Denial

Denial has conquered the United States of America. To those of us who have been fighting climate deniers for years, this is a nightmare, a sickeningly familiar nightmare where the personality-disordered trolls and con men have exploded out of the comment threads and seized the reins of a great nation.

To the average citizen, the kind of people who have triumphed in our most recent election seem disturbingly unpredictable. They are by turns abusive and wheedling. They aver a broad range of fringe beliefs, untroubled by the explicit contradictions between them. And Americans are scared. They can sense the sickness of the denier, but do not understand them, and they are all the more frightening for that. But they can be understood, and it is critical to try and understand them, and in particular to understand their relationship to factual truth.

The thing you must grasp about a denier is that they don't care one whit about factual truth. It has no purchase with them. They exist in a world of emotion and spiritualism, in which the group and the cause are all.

They are not ideologues. They are not even fanatics. Fanatics believe in things, and will sacrifice to live out those beliefs. Deniers do not sacrifice, because sacrifice doesn't feel good, and feeling good -- feeling egosyntonic, not egodystonic -- is all.

Deniers are bullies and sycophants, and everything they say and everything they do refers back to that. They talk, and think, and reason in ways that are about tribal allegiance, in-group posturing. That is the only truth they care about -- the truth of "us" and "them."

To decent people, their behavior is baffling. They assert blatant lies, which they will defend passionately, but then suddenly abandon, sneering at the fools that treated those lies as important. Others, less creative but equally performers, will profess to believe those lies, even though in reality if you required them to stake their lives or even a hundred bucks on the factual truth of, say, the notion that the world is cooler than it was in the middle ages or that Mexico will pay tens of billions of dollars to build us a wall, they would never in a million years lay money down.

You may wonder why they lie, if on some level they know they are lying. The answer is that they perform belief in the same way the Japanese would draw and release empty bows, believing the noise drove away menacing spirits. As long as they see themselves as Good and the other as Evil whatever they say that embarrasses, frustrates, distracts, or stymies their Evil opponents (intellectuals, leftists, people of color, foreigners, Jews) serves the cause of Good.

The denier's sense of truth is emotional. What feels good to him is true. What feels bad to him, what provokes guilt or embarrassment, is an evil lie, probably put there by a Jew.

The denier's sense of the world is fundamentally childish, in the way that children identify authority with reality (everything is my parents' fault.) Atavistic, the denier regards facts as an emanation of power, as an expression of his evil enemies' agency. For the denier this is a moral struggle, a conflict between good and evil, and what we term the physical reality must ultimately reflect their wishes, because they are good and God is good. God would never permit the greens, socialists, atheists, women or Jews to be right. Therefore they are not right, whatever the evidence may be in this specific case.

The existence of a cold uncaring universe which will unfold implacably according to its own arbitrary laws, regardless of what we think or believe, is abhorrent to the denier, if he can grasp it at all. Clinging to a religious mindset (the world is divided between the saved and the damned; the saved know the truth and the damned are deceived; the true struggle is the moral struggle of the True Believers to save the world) they pursue religious solutions, professing their "truth," banishing doubt with faith, and seeking out the corrupters who lead honest folks away from the truth.

It follows that the denier is supremely unprepared for victory. While the denier is in rebellion, factual truth is seen as an aspect of the oppressor's authority. By denying reality the denier fights the oppressor. Once he must deliver results requiring navigation of reality that narrative no longer functions.

His reaction to this breakdown, predictably, will be one of denial -- denial, in this case, of his own power and agency.

You may expect him to double down on stories of invisible enemies, of malignant forces which somehow still threaten the Good, despite its apparent victory over all of its rivals. Nothing will be built up, nothing will be reformed or improved, because the denier is fundamentally not creative or inventive, but rather self-absorbed and petulant. As his failures mount, scapegoating -- always a key feature of deniers relationship to the world -- will become more aggressive. The denier's search for new enemies can become a lethal delusion.

If you didn't vote for Clinton: A step-by-step guide

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I imagine there are some people who are already trying to come to grips with the fact that by failing to vote for Hillary Clinton they helped make Donald Trump our president-elect. As it becomes brutally clear what a mistake this was, their numbers will grow. In a spirit of kindness and friendship, I would like to offer some practical suggestions to those nonvoters/third party voters/supporters of write-in candidates who, unlike Trump voters proper, may have some residual capacity for shame, and might even nurse the secret desire of someday doing something for the good of the world that might begin to make up for the death, madness and horror they helped unleash.

1. Lie. No one needs to know the truth about who you voted for. People who know will never look at you the same way again. Every time a journalist is assassinated, every time another hundred thousand jobs are lost, every time the coffins land at Andrews from a war that started due to a Twitter beef, people will remember you helped make it happen.

So lie. As of today, you supported Clinton, you voting for her, despite whatever misgivings you may have had. Learn that story and stick to it. This is not dishonesty but a necessary social fib. Telling people you voted for Jill Stein is the political equivalent of telling your spouse that their ass looks fat. If you want to do something good in this world and maybe start to dab at the dogshit that is smeared across your soul (never to be expunged completely), you will have to cooperate with decent people to achieve anything. Decent people will never trust you if they know what you are. Take the secret to your grave.

2. Don’t try to explain yourself. So maybe you’ve already spilled the beans, and lying is no longer an option. People know what you did. You’ve started to see the little stiffness that comes into your friends’ manner when politics comes up when you’re around. You’ve crossed the point of no return, but there are still things you can do to limit the damage. Chief among them is to keep your rationalizations and excuses to yourself.

3. Seriously, whatever you do, don’t try to explain yourself. Don’t whine about Bernie, don’t complain about Clinton’s e-mails or whatever other non-scandal you used to justify infecting our democracy with the human equivalent of tertiary syphilis. (Hey, remember when he ran a fake charity and used it to buy a $25,000 portrait of himself? That man will be the president. You built that!)

Newsflash: No one cares. No one cares why you enabled a man who talks about American Muslims in 2016 with the same language Nazis used about Jews in 1936.

Remember Star Wars? Remember Darth Vader? What a great character! Remember when George Lucas thought we wanted three movies about how this guy went from an annoying child to a whiny emo bitch to a child-killer? Yeah, how he got that way was never the point. Normal people don’t give a shit why you sided with evil. You did, and nothing you can say will make that better. Just. Stop. Talking.

4. Do not try and play both sides of the street. I would not believed it had I not seen it myself, but there are some people so deranged that they will brag about how terrible Trump will be and the part they played in bringing him to power, and then complain that the democrats did, or didn’t do something or nothing to lose his support and that of others like him (him because let’s be real here, it’s a him.)

Pick a lane. If electing Trump is a bad thing, it is a bad thing you helped bring to pass, and you with direct responsibility for the outcome have no business lecturing the people who voted the right way about what they might have done to gain your support. This is the moral equivalent of a pedophile publishing a guide for six-year-old girls on what not to wear.

5. Do not try to create a moral distinction between you and the people who voted for Trump, based on the fact that you merely did not vote against him. No one cares about the difference between the bank robber who shoots the teller and the one driving the getaway car. If you want to open up a space between you and the people cursing Muslims in the street and assaulting Jews, there is one and only one way to do so;

5. Say you’re sorry. Just that. Say you’re sorry. You were a fool; you made a terrible mistake; now you want to work, humbly, alongside the people who made the right choice, to fight Trump, the GOP, and inbred bigots in general.

I know that some of you are still deep into the process of rationalizing what you’ve done and you may still think you can justify yourselves somehow. Time will ultimately bring many of you to a realization that no justification is possible, only a frank unqualified apology and humble hard work. If that seems unappealing to you, remember #1 and lie for all you're worth. Good luck.