This morning, for the first time in a year, I actually wanted to read the news. For the first time since the darkness dropped again and Comrade Donald Trump slouched back into the White House, I actually looked forward to reading the news.
Because the news was good. Not just because Democrats won, and not just because they won by larder-than-expected margins, and not just because they won from coast to coast. The news is good because of the way they won. The ways they won, I should say, Because the way they won in New York City was different than the way they won in New Jersey and in Virginia. That confuses the pundit class.
Today there will be a LOT of pundits claiming Zohran Mamdani is the new face of the Democratic Party. Nope. He’s the face of the Democratic Party in New York City. Mikie Sherrill is the face of the Democratic Party in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger is the face of the Democratic Party in Virginia. We don’t have–we don’t need or want–a single face to represent the Democratic Party. We want a variety of faces and a medley of different voices all dedicated to civil rights and the needs of working people. This morning, we have more of that.
But we need still more. We want and need Democrats who will not just speak out against MAGA fascism in the US, but who will actively resist it. MAGA should be worried about last night’s electoral results, but the people who should be actually scared are the impotent Old Guard of the Democratic Party. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re helpless and weak against MAGA; they’ve allowed themselves to be cowed by Trump, they’ve been too timid to fight back. These election results are also a warning for them–either stand up and fight for democracy or get the fuck out of the way.
Yes, the news this morning is good. We should celebrate it. We should take as much joy as we possibly can from it. And then tomorrow (or what the hell, next week) we have to get back to work. The results of this one election isn’t going to turn the nation around. The US is still massively fucked up. It will remain massively fucked up for the near future. But this morning we see evidence that, with hard work, we can begin to unfuck the nation. That’s what I call good news.
So, in the words of the philosophers Kool & the Gang, “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.”
A friend recently said she was eager to vote in the coming local election next month, but was a wee bit sad that she wouldn’t be comfortable posting her usual “I Voted” selfie. I asked why she’d be uncomfortable. She said after posting her selfie after the last election, she was accused of virtue signaling.
My first thought was, “Okay, yeah, I get that.” Because saying, “Look how virtuous I am” is pretty cringe (and yeah, I know saying ‘cringe’ is…well, cringeworthy, but c’mon). My second thought, though, was, “Fuck that, go vote and post your selfie.”
This is not me.
Nonverbal signals are important in any culture. You already know that, so I’m not going to natter on about it. There are some virtues that ought to be signaled. Civic virtue is a good thing. Right now, when we’re facing growing authoritarianism, claiming our civic virtues is critically important.
You may be wondering, “Greg, old sock, what is this ‘civic virtue’ of which you speak?” Well, I’m about to tell you…and I’ll warn you up front it’s rather old-fashioned and maybe a tad sappy. Civic virtue is the general belief among the citizenry that the common good of the public should come before special interests of the few. That’s it, that’s all it is. It’s that whole Spock “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” thing.
This is not me.
Voting is good. It’s virtuous. Signal the fuck out of it. I firmly believe in the concept of civic virtue. I’m a good citizen. Most of my life has been spent in some form of public service. I vote in every election. I stay relatively well informed on current events. I pay my taxes. I pay my bills. I follow most of the laws most of the time. If I’m in the market and see some product has fallen off the shelf, well I pick that shit up and put it back where it belongs. This is how civil society is supposed to work.
This is not me.
Civic virtue is the primary distinguishing difference between republican forms of government (note that’s small r republican, not ‘Republican’) and monarchical or tyrannical forms. In a republic, power belongs to the public through their elected representatives. Decisions on governance should reflect values and attitudes that promote the general welfare. It’s the polar opposite of a monarchical society, in which decisions on public matters are made by a monarch and based on the monarch’s interests. (Yeah, I’m talking about Comrade President Donald Trump here.)
The so-called ‘Republican’ Party in the US doesn’t support republican ideals. MAGA is essentially a weird, twisted, mishmash of monarchical and consumerist ideologies. Governmental decisions are based on the wants and needs of one person who believes civic virtue and selflessness are for suckers, and wealth is the only true measure of worth, and scams are the best and easiest way to accumulate wealth.
This is me.
MAGA wants us to be embarrassed by expressions of civic virtue. Go vote. Take a selfie with your “I Voted” sticker. Post it on social media. Tell MAGA to go fuck itself with a chainsaw.
As you may recall, recently Comrade Donald Trump, as Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, made this claim on national television:
“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Yeah, no. Didn’t happen. Just another in the endless series of Trump’s self-aggrandizing lies. The Defense Intelligence Agency conducted a preliminary Bomb Damage Assessment of the US attack (that’s right, the DIA did a BDA) and assessed that the damage at the primary Fordo site was “not extensive.” Certainly, the site was not obliterated like Trump claimed. But that’s not the real problem.
This morning the Unlikeliest Secretary of Defense Ever, Pete Hegseth, complained about the news coverage of Comrade Trump’s pointless attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hegseth claimed that reports detailing the limited damage done by the bombing was, in effect, an attack on the integrity and honor of the pilots and air crew who flew the mission. Which, obv. is total bullshit. Which, again, is in keeping with almost everything Hegseth says. But that’s not the real problem.
GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator
It’s been reliably reported that at the primary uraniam enrichment site at Fordo, two of the so-called ‘bunker buster’ bombs (okay, technically they’re called ‘Massive Ordnance Penetrators’ or MOPs) were dropped on the entry point to the facility and on a ventilation shaft, one after the other, to increase the level of destruction. The destruction that, you’ll recall, the DIA described as “not extensive.” Which means the MOPs didn’t do what they were intended to do. But that’s not the real problem.
Here’s the real problem: for a couple of decades, the threat of the ‘bunker buster’ gave the US leverage. Hostile nations, fearful of the power of that specific bomb, were reluctant to test the US resolve. If a nation started to build a highly secure underground facility against the wishes of the US, the US would dangle the ‘bunker buster’ and that was generally enough to dissuade them. The threat of the ‘bunker busters’ was enough to cow most of our adversaries.
They were incredibly effective as a deterrent…as long as we didn’t actually USE them.
Not anymore. Now everybody knows the most fearsome conventional high explosive bomb in the US arsenal can’t do what it was designed to do. You know North Korea is digging deep today.
Trump has once again made the US weaker. Nothing he can say or do—nothing Hegseth or any of Trump’s other sock puppets can say or do—can change the reality. Oh, the ‘bunker buster’ is still a formidable conventional weapon. But now the world knows it’s just another really big bomb, and if you dig deep enough it won’t hurt you.
Like a few million other folks, I showed up at the local No Kings protest. We were all there for the same fundamental reason: because Comrade Donald Trump and his cadre of Nazgûl have been merrily shitting on…well, everything that’s good and promising and hopeful and decent about the US.
Fuck Trump.
People are pissed off about SO MANY things Trump has done (and intends to do). The attacks on immigration, science, trans rights, healthcare, civil liberties, the environment, due process, Gaza (and Israel and Iran and and and), veteran’s benefits, free speech, the national debt, the January 6th pardons, everything about January 6th, the assault on education, the assault on libraries, the assault on the very concept of Truth.
No, really, fuck Trump.
But one thread tied all the anger and frustration and resentment together. A deep, abiding rage against Donald Trump as a person. Not only for the horrors he’s inflicted on the United States, but a profound loathing for him as an individual. As I wandered through the No Kings crowd, I kept seeing this same sentiment. Fuck Trump.
Also? Fuck Trump.
People really hate this motherfucker and they hate him personally. They hate him for what he’s done, they hate him for what he wants to do, and they hate for him who he is. Which, I suppose, is only fair, considering how many people he hates for who they are. Trump has a singular talent for both hating others and being hated.
Seriously, fuck that guy.
Why do people hate him so? Because he’s a liar, because he buried one of his many wives on a goddamn golf course, because he’s betrayed the United States, because he’s got truly godawful taste in everything, because he’s cheated on every wife he’s had, because he’s massively ignorant and unaware of it, because he’s a liar, because he’s fucked over every person and contractor he’s ever worked with, because he’s an unrepentant racist, because he hates women, because he loves autocrats, because he’s a liar, because he’s a coward, because he’s never owned a pet, because he’s a narcissist, because he pretends to support the military but believes they’re losers, because he’s a liar, because of his stupid fucking red hats, because he’s a phony, because he’s put incompetent people in positions of power, because he insults everybody who disagrees with him, because he’s a vindictive prick, because he’s a liar, because he’s rude, because of his stupid fucking hair, because he encourages his followers to be violent, because he hates immigrants but hires them to work for his resorts, because he’s shit all over the Arts, because he’s a liar, because he’s cruel and enjoys inflicting harm on others, because he pretends to be a Christian without having an inkling of Christian charity, because he’s a sex pest, because he’s committed many many crimes but has never been held accountable for any of them, because the people who like him are all massive assholes, because he’s a fucking liar.
And the horse he rode in on.
I’m sure I’ve skipped a few dozen other reasons why people hate him. But I think you get the point. People sincerely hate Trump.
But there was another guy at the No Kings event. Bearded guy, dressed all in black, sitting on a granite railing. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Hate Will Never Win.” I hope he’s right. I genuinely hope hate won’t win. But I also hope the hatred against Donald Trump will get people to stand up for themselves and for others. I hope it will get people to push back against his authoritarianism. I hope it will get people to vote. I hope it will get people to hold Trump accountable for all (or at least some) of the horrible things he’s done to this country.
Like a million other concerned people, I attended the local Hands Off! protest yesterday. I wasn’t sure how many people would show up, considering it was a cold, blustery day (about 42F with steady 14mph winds and gusts about twice that). I thought we might still get a thousand people. Maybe.
The local news estimated the attendance to be around 7,500, and they tend to be conservative in their estimates. It was an eclectic crowd with a variety of concerns. Climate change, veteran’s benefits, social security, health care, education, trans rights, social justice, the court system, immigrant’s rights, Ukraine, and more. But there was absolutely universal condemnation of Comrade Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE.
The protest began, as all protests do, with speeches. I confess, I paid little attention to the actual speeches, though I was pleased to hear the crowd cheering and applauding. During the speeches, I left the main crowd and moved around the fringes. Why? Because there are folks who want to protest and make their voices heard BUT for any of a thousand reasons may be uncomfortable with crowds.
The folks on the fringe of the protest were pretty much the same people who made up the rest of the crowd. They were mostly white (this IS Iowa, after all) but beyond that they seemed to be a fairly representative sample of the protesters. There were young kids (some in strollers), and working class folks, and church-goers, and goths, and office workers, and trans folk, and wine moms, and college students, and old folks (some using walkers), and union members, and passers-by who just wanted to know what the hell was going on.
One of the things I found most interesting about the event was that everybody was 1) happy and 2) pissed off. They were pissed off enough to give up their Saturday to carry signs and listen to speeches and shout for Elon Musk to be deported and for Donald Trump to be impeached and to take over one of the main city streets and march a mile or so in cold, blustery weather to the state capitol building, where they listened to still more speeches. But they were also happy and laughing and clearly delighted to be with others who agreed with them. There was a tremendous sense of relief, and a sense of urgency, and a sense of something approaching hope and optimism. That all seems contradictory, but it didn’t feel like it.
Nobody there thought this march–or any of the hundreds of other marches–was going to change anything. Nobody there was that innocent. But it felt like there was a shared commitment to changing the way we govern ourselves. There was a very clear feeling of joy at the chance to express themselves, to carry signs and chant slogans and shout out their frustration and rage and hope.
It was also clear that this was the first time a lot of these people had attended a protest. At the beginning, there was a tentativeness to the crowd. A lot of looking around to see if anybody was watching, if anybody was upset or offended by what they were doing. This was especially clear when the organizers asked them to take to the street and march up to the capitol, where we’d join up with a second protest. We are a car-brained culture, and these people were unsure about the propriety of taking over a street without permission.
But they did it. And when cars approached the head of the march, they had to stop and make a U-turn. At the back of the march, a lone police officer in a squad car followed to insure no drivers disrupted the march from behind. Within a few hundred yards, this crowd of normal Iowans were chanting, “Whose street? OUR STREET!” There was a palpable sense of released anger and resentment and liberation. It really was OUR street.
When the crowd took to the street, these two women with their “We the People” sign led the way. It seemed appropriate. Because it’s true. We, the people, are massively pissed off. And yesterday, we let those malignant fuckwits of the Trump administration know it.
I took a lot more photos of (and in) the crowd itself. But here I wanted to show the people who, at least at the beginning of the day, hovered around the fringe of the protest. The people who usually get overlooked. The people who don’t make the highlight reels or the news reports. As so many protest signs said, you know things are grim when even the introverts show up.
You’ll notice that most of these photographs are of women. You’ll notice they’re not drawing attention to themselves. They’re drawing attention to the signs they’re carrying. Signs they mostly made themselves. There’s a song from the 1950s resistance movement in South Africa that goes, “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo.” This translates as:
When you strike the women, you strike stone.
We’ve been striking stone for decades. Centuries. Eventually, it’s going to spark a fire that will incinerate the patriarchy. It may still be a long time coming, but it’ll happen. And when it does, women like the ones in these photos–the ones quietly occupying space at the fringe–they’ll have helped light that spark.
Yeah, I don’t want to include a screenshot of this (because I don’t want it to show up in the link), but last night Comrade Donald Trump posted this astonishing and delusional comment on his Truth Social network:
The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. The day of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!
Trump is claiming he ordered the US military (all of it? some branch of it? maybe a special secret water control operations unit?) to slip into California undetected, after which they flipped the Master Toggle Switch that controls the flow of water from the Pacific Northwest (or ‘beyond,’ whatever the fuck that is). Remember, this jamoke is the duly elected President of These United States. I don’t know if he actually believes this (which would make him actively delusional), or if he’s under the impression the citizenry of the US is stupid enough to believe a lie this blatant (and maybe they are, since they voted for him), or if he’s just bragging in order to feel good about himself (which is entirely possible). In any case, this is seriously fucked up.
Here’s the reality: The US Bureau of Reclamation (which is a federal bureau utterly lacking in troops) had shut down a few water pumps in Northern California for maintenance. The maintenance was completed yesterday and the pumps were restarted. End of.
This wildly bizarre episode is just one of dozens of equally disturbing things Trump has done in his first week as POTUS. It’s maybe the least damaging thing he’s done. The response of MAGA Republicans to all this bullshit? They’ve climbed up a tree and are hoping Trump’s wolves will find somebody else to eat first.
Republican Members of Congress addressing MAGA voters.
And the Democratic response? It’s almost as bad. The leadership seems to be attempting to sort out WHICH of Trump’s outrages they should address first, and how to craft the appropriate messaging to address that particular outrage in order to assuage the wolves.
What (in my opinion) they should be doing is standing up on their own hind legs and howling at the top of their lungs. They should be objecting LOUDLY to every single illegal command Trump has given. Hell, they should be objecting loudly to most of the legal commands he’s given, since most of those are cruel and intended to hurt people. They should be chasing MAGA up the tree.
The Democrats need to get angry and really loud and obnoxious; it’s the only way they can cut through the Trump Cascade of Bullshit. Otherwise, they’re just joining the GOP in the tree.
I’ve been away for a while. Not away away. Not ‘away’ as in a different location. I’ve been away from this blog. The last thing I posted was on 16 December, almost three weeks ago. I’ve been writing this blog since 2011, and this is the longest I’ve been away from it.
Why? Family crisis. I’m not going to go into any detail (partly because it’s not my story to tell, partly because it’s nobody’s business, and partly because I dislike folks who whinge online…or anywhere else, for that matter). I’m only tangentially involved in the FamCrisis (not my monkeys, not my circus); my normally calm, quiet, incredibly happy life is collateral domestic damage, so to speak. Life here has been wildly disrupted; everything is now crowded, noisy, busy, and chaotic. It’s this way, in large part, because it was calm, quiet, and happy. I mean, where else are you going to go to escape, right?
In any event, the situation hasn’t been conducive to writing. But so what? People have written under worse circumstances. And while everything is still ridiculously chaotic and rather grim (and likely to stay this way for some time), I’m starting to acclimate to it.
Even before the FamCrisis, I’d shifted away somewhat from my usual blog posting. Most of my posts over the last several years have been political. But the 2024 election left me in an absolute funk. Since the election, I’ve written more about photography than politics.
‘Annie’ was wrong; the sun ain’t coming out tomorrow. But someday…
But in a short time Comrade Donald Trump will once again infest the White House as an expression of the will of the people (the bastards). It seems pretty obvious that we’re entering into a grimdark era. Truth, decency, logic, kindness…that shit is out. Lies, grifting, loopiness, and willful cruelty will be featured in US ‘governance’ for the foreseeable future.
Ain’t no way I’m going to shut up about that. I’ll still write about photography and other stuff, of course, but I think it’s going to be necessary to call bullshit frequently and loudly in the coming months and years. So I’m back.
Editorial Note: Many/most of the problems we face are either due to or exacerbated by patriarchy. So we need to burn that shit. Burn it to the ground. Burn it, gather the ashes, douse them in oil, and burn them again. Piss on whatever is left, then salt the earth where the burning took place. Then burn the salt. Burn it and keep burning it, over and over. Burn it for generations. Then have tea and biscuits.
There it is. We lost. I’m not talking about Democrats, or progressives, or any particular political ideology. I’m not talking about the fact that the US has deliberately and with malice aforethought re-elected the most corrupt, ignorant, vindictive, cruel asshole who’s ever held high political office. That’s awful and horrific and it means this nation will suffer mightily and may never fully recover.
But I’m not talking about politics here. The 2024 election is, I think, just a symptom of a far greater defeat. When I say ‘we lost,’ I’m talking about thoughtful people. People who believe in science, in facts, in rationality. People who believe in critical thinking, who are capable of clear-headed skepticism. We lost.
We lost the fight against superstition and pseudo-science. We lost the war between reality and belief. We lost the war between law and disorder. We lost the war between awareness and ignorance. We lost the war between magical fantasy and empirical evidence.
Objective reality lost. Bullshit won.
Fox News won. Alternative facts won. Thoughts and prayers won. Ivermectin won. UFOs won. Crop circles won. Oak Island won. Bigfoot won. The Templars won. Magical thinking won. Apophenia won. The White Queen won (“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”).
It’s not just that science is under attack–you can fight back against an attack; it’s that science had been summarily dismissed as unworthy of consideration. People would rather invest themselves in exploring how Rosicrucians worked with Mayan shamans to bury Viking gold in a South Carolina swamp where ley lines between pyramids in Egypt, Mexico, and the Cahokia Mounds in Collinsville, Illinois meet than try to understand the scientific method.
The very notion of verifiable Truth has collapsed in on itself. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Nope, not anymore. Who are you going to believe, the Bible or Donald Trump? Keep your Truth; we have opinions. Sure, our opinions may be based on the momentary whim of a malignant narcissist, but we have the right to hold fast to our opinions.
We lost and we are seriously fucked. Donald Trump and his Nazgûl Collective will do catastrophic damage to the US and the world at large. But sadly, he could just be the worst symptom of a larger problem. Are we on the brink of a new Dark Age? I don’t know. Maybe. We could ask the question and shake the Magic 8 Ball, but I’m afraid the answer will likely be, “Reply hazy, try again.”
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