A few more thoughts about the general question of how the hell are we supposed to handle all this?
At a protest in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti goes to help someone. U.S. Border Patrol goons come after him and with not the remotest cause whatsoever open fire with deadly force. The watching world gasps before turning to the murderous liars who have made this possible to ask How can you possibly defend any of this???
If we imagine this would give them even a moment’s pause, we should think again.
The nasty eyes of Press Secretary Leavitt fix on a journalist who has had the temerity to question what was done. She tells him the assumptions he has made about the murderous lawless goons and their murderous lawless actions make him a biased leftist fake news reporter. She tells him she bets he hasn’t bothered to learn anything about the illegal, innocent children these illegal aliens have murdered, and shame on him for not caring and for doubting the valiant intentions of the noble goons in their non-badged non-uniforms with their faces covered.
This is where this murderous administration has landed in constructing a defense of the indefensible: You’re a biased reporter who doesn’t care about our brave goons trying to protect innocent little white girls.
Just by way of colour, take a look at this example of how an ICE agent behaves when he’s not saving America from evil aliens.
I mention it in order to take a beat to bring my blood back down from boiling because I find this is what these people keep doing to it.
My further instinct is to rebut the absolute falsity of it all, the notion that if we care so much about stopping buildings from burning we should let the firefighters kill kittens or babies because you never know which of those kittens or babies might be an arsonist.
Of course it makes no sense; of course they would try to twist it into a proposition of do you care about innocent children or are you a biased reporter.
One sort of consolation in the midst of all this is the reminder that human nature has always been very much inclined to brazen dishonesty, to lies, to bullshit, to making it so very much over the top that it becomes its whole own thing.
Take a Shakespeare play, any old play.
Richard III limps onto the stage to tell us all that he’s a villain, that he’s deformed and bitter and that for fun he’ll be happy to destroy everyone who gets in his way, and he’s proud of it.
We see him meet Lady Anne, whose husband and father-in-law he’s just murdered, and he proceeds to woo her. He doesn’t even really deny killing her family, he just spins a wild story about how he killed them because he loved her so much that he couldn’t help himself. It’s bullshit on stilts but she goes with it.
When someone lies with enough confidence and shamelessness, we almost can’t process it. Our brains expect liars to seem guilty, nervous, or evasive. It may make us think: Nobody would have the nerve to lie like this to my face... so maybe there’s something to it?
This is what we’re seeing right now with people like Noem and Miller and Vance and Leavitt. Confronted with documented facts including their own past statements, they don’t just deny or deflect, they present their own version of events with such conviction it creates parallel realities.
They’re demanding people choose which reality they want to inhabit.
When the times are sufficiently bent out of shape, you may find a willing audience for this shit. These times are, it is clear, sufficiently bent out of shape. That’s for another day, there’s a lot about that I want to explore.
But just in terms of looking for reassurance, here’s what I’m clinging to: these things go so far and that can be a very long way, but there is always a point where it hits the wall. People buy it and buy it and buy it and then they stop.
Nice to see the boss of border security getting ditched earlier today. That could be a sign they realise this bullshit is not selling, or at least no longer selling enough.
Good.
Richard III ended up forgotten beneath a carpark.
Meanwhile, here in our rain-and-wind-swept little corner of the world, human nature also happily goes on repeating, given even the slightest opportunity.
By this I mean if the slightest opportunity presents itself to express your fondly nourished beliefs that Them Māori are dumb superstitious natives with way too much sayand/or Climate change is bullshit I mean there have always been floods and rain and such, a great many people in the comments section will be in like the proverbial robber’s dog.
A landslide has created such an opportunity, notwithstanding we have nothing like the necessary facts to guide us yet.
It has also created an opportunity for Nicola Willis to assert that Chris Hipkins is playing the wrong kind of politics by making comments about the Government cutting its resilience funding.
She loves a good pearl-clutch, only Ryan Bridge can ever best her.
Let me quote the very good Climate Matters:
The NZ government is knowingly increasing the risk of slips and floods. Make no mistake, the current NZ government has chosen to ignore wide-ranging robust climate advice from numerous sources. In so doing, it is knowingly choosing policies that intensify storms, floods, sea level rise, ocean acidification, heat waves, and much more, in favour of policies they think will make more money.
The full argument is here and well worth your time.
Suffice to say: most of what we humans do that is wrongheaded and stupid, breathtakingly brazen and wrong, has been done many many times before and one may very usefully spend a night at the theatre to learn what needs to be done.
I’m just not sure there’s a play that contemplates delusion so deep that we would imperil human life on earth just because we didn’t want to concede that a lefty tree hugger might be right.
