Warning: political snark.
I’ve been admonished for being too political in my art & writing. I have also been accused of not being political enough.
To be clear, I have been political since at least 1986. Sometimes it didn’t show as much.
All that socially liberal SFF I’d read since 1977 ran up against my admittedly surface rural conservative background. I’d been lucky: both parents were nonreligious and very pro-science. Our social conservatism was more a way to blend into red-county rural New Mexico.
The AIDS crisis made sure I was too cautious to be as sexually adventurous in college as many Gen X peers (decades before I learned words like ‘ace’ and ‘demi’). It also showed me how gay, bi, and lesbian folks were just as deserving of peace, justice, and freedom as anyone else.
I realized the Ronald Reagan I’d cast my first Presidential vote for in 1984 was a carefully crafted lie, a hypocrite, and the puppet of political scum who’d been thirsting for conservative vengeance since Watergate.
I saw firsthand the utter hypocrisy of the ‘Moral Majority’.
I had to learn about the ‘Southern Strategy’ in fucking college. Not from my parents who lived it first-hand in 1950s Texas.
I learned that abortion hadn’t even been a major Christian target until it was picked as a useful wedge issue. (My conservative ranching & oilfield county *thought nothing* about ‘twilight sleep abortion’ ads run in local newspapers in the late 70s!)
At the same time I saw a Democratic Party seeming doomed to sabotage its real successes in a never-ending circular firing squad, torn between appeasing conservatives in the name of bipartisanship, and being scolded by far-left members.
I saw the 2000 election and 9-11. By then I was just peripheral enough to InfoSec to grasp how the 2nd Bush Administration failed to notice & act on very real threats. I saw what the Patriot Act could become, and how we were likely to be mired in Middle Eastern wars for decades.
I saw Enron come and go in a society & financial system that didn’t learn from previous crashes, burst bubbles, and lost opportunities.
Goddammit, I saw the same anti-science machinery trotted out against the warnings of climate change, from the same people who’d earlier tried to conceal the dangers of nicotine.
I saw what Carl Sagan saw in 1996: how anti-science and pseudoscience platforms would be weapons turned on unquestioning, low-information societies by cynical and greedy ruling classes.
When the Soviet Union collapsed I knew Imperial Russia would resurrect in some form, and I spotted Vladimir Putin very early as its potential dictator.
I saw Fox News evolve into a seething meld of Nazi-emulation, KKK propaganda, proud anti-intellectualism, and festering white resentment.
Why? I grew up with that shit all around me. I work alongside it now.
A decade ago, like the FBI, I saw where that intersection could propagate into white Christian domestic terrorism. Ruby Ridge, the Oklahoma bombing, and Waco were distant but ominously tolling bells.
At every point, I’ve seen these puzzle pieces fall into place almost exactly as I predicted. I warned people around me. I was told that since I wasn’t a National Security analyst in DC, I didn’t know what I was talking about. Though I read widely and could see patterns, I wasn’t qualified to actually worry about them.
I’m not Cassandra, and I have a nihilistic streak I’m my humanist outlook. A person can only make so many warnings before she says ‘Fuck it all’.
I left the Republican Party and became an Independent voter. I concentrated my art on making beautiful things with maybe subtle touches of protest and commentary. I resented being dragged into overtly socially-conscious art, while being cynically aware that only my social privileges allowed me the luxury of ‘pure beauty’.
Then Trump happened. I knew about Trump in the 90s. He showed his colors early to people paying attention.
Liberals wringing their hands now exclaim, ‘Why does the right not see his cruelty, indifference, and greed?’
My dear liberal friends, lower and middle-class rightwingers see it. They like it. The cruelty is the point. The resentment is the point.
Faced with losing the privilege they hold (or aspire to), they either self-destruct on drugs and alcohol…or try to ensure no one has a chance.
Qanon and other fringe conspiracies are a looming scorched-earth murder-suicide plot on a vast scale, telegraphed in vivid psychological projection onto their perceived enemies.
And they claim we’re the hateful ones?
Even so, they’re only pawns being moved by the real powers: the extremely rich “conservative’ families and blocs who publicly claim nationalistic patriotism while gathering so much wealth they have no real loyalty to their countries. (The worst of them want to nation-build a Christian Dominionist paradise, a mirror image of the fundamentalist Islamic Caliphate).
These folks will stop at nothing to keep and grow their power. Their motto is: ‘Screw you, we got ours’.
Covid19 happened. Our US borders were shut *by other countries* because (surprise!) propaganda and spin don’t work on a virus. Our economic, healthcare, and political flaws are laid bare for the entire world to see.
We are dying by the thousands and our government doesn’t care.
This disease isn’t a matter of either dying or getting better. Complications in survivors seem chronic, and could lead to massive future healthcare costs and a ‘lost generation’ similar to last century’s polio victims.
Between Covid19, the disastrous US response, and Trump’s anti-immigration pogroms, we run the serious risk of losing technological and intellectual property advantages…of becoming a large Third-World country or its Balkanized remnants.
Folks, if anyone in the US says they’re ‘not political’ by now, they’re lying or too stupid to live.
It’s all political now. And as your reluctant armchair Cassandra, I warn you again. We have a terrifyingly narrow window to stop or at least mitigate some really bad shit in our near and longterm futures.
Register to vote. Guard your right to vote. Vote!
Vote out the corrupt GOP until its members learn to be good citizens.
March together, and check your weapons.