You reach a point when there is no point. Your heart has no fire left for the struggle. You see them laughing at pain, applauding cruelty, cheering wildly for the ones who’ll soon enough cut them just as violently as the ones they relish seeing cut, and something inside just gives. It doesn’t so much snap as deflate, all the pressure goes out, and all momentum dissipates. They’re resolute, immovable, as unconscious and uncaring as when you started, and you’ve lost.
Tonight, the President of the United States made savage fun of Christine Blasey Ford, dismissing her testimony in the crudest and most ignorant manner imaginable, and the Mississippi masses cheered. They cheered. Their idiotic vulgarian hero plumbed depths to which even he’d seemed reluctant to dive only a few days ago, and it was all smiles and applause from the manipulated monsters of MAGAland. They think he fights for them. They think they have something at stake, that if he wins, they do too, even though his kind has been with them all their lives, they’ve come and they’ve gone, and yet nobody down their way ever wins. Never mind. He hates the ones they also love to hate, and they don’t worry that they hate only the ones his kind has always told them to hate.
Imagine, some regular working class white slobs in dirt poor Mississippi thinking that if Brett Kavanaugh gets to lord it over them for the rest of their lives, they win. The clown does his dance, the carnival barker sells tickets to the rides, and they cheer, and hoot, and yes, that guy up there with the hair and the big mouth and the limited vocabulary, sneering and gesticulating wildly, really is the President, and it’s really a woman who was sexually assaulted that he’s attacking with all the vicious imbecility he can muster, which is, as ever, plenty.
Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?
Watch, if you can bear it. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter anyway. Not anymore.
This is the ancient tragedy, this is the forever blight of our own stupidity, that those who’ll shed the blood always grab eagerly for the hilt of their master’s dagger, happy to plunge it into their own hearts, certain they’re doing themselves a favour. C’mon, everybody. Cheer.
Tomorrow, right? Tomorrow I’ll come charging back.
the needlefish 