This is the title of a song by the wonderfully demented genius Tom Lehrer, but it seems to fit
here and you can’t copyright titles anyway. Entirely too many people are beating themselves
up every day by getting outraged at the day’s — well, okay, outrages — being perpetrated by the
MuskRat and his uncomical sidekick, Mr. Tangerine Man. But getting outraged every day will
likely lead to a life that is both shorter and more miserable. The trick, as the Brits noticed in
The Big One, is to keep calm and carry on.
While there is essentially nothing we can do about the President or Vice until ’28, and not much
we can do about the Congress until ’26 except for the odd by-election and trying to scout out
possible winning grownup candidates, there are still several entirely legal and generally
effective ways to advance the cause. They do not work fast, though. It will be a slog.
The first step in getting through the next little while is to conserve energy. One way to do this
is to keep historic perspective. Remember what the Buddha said: “Nothing lasts forever.
Except the hockey playoffs.” The US has been through some very nasty times in the past and
emerged successfully, although not unscathed.
Try as they might, the crooks, cronies and crazies in the Administration can’t turn the clock all
the way back, and certainly not permanently and often not even temporarily. They will not be
able to restore slavery, or undo women’s suffrage, or restore the Good Olde Days when white
guys were completely in charge and their wives and children were regarded in law as property.
They can’t bring back coal, or reverse the death spiral of other fossil fuels. They appear to be
working hard to bring back illiteracy, but that won’t work either.
History doesn’t repeat itself, as Mark Twain is usually credited with saying, but it does rhyme.
Instead of a straight line, it’s an upward spiral, sometimes rapid and sometimes slow. Looking
down or back at any time, it may appear that we haven’t moved, but we have. In short, the
Make America Go Away movement will not succeed for quite a while. So, let’s all work on
remembering that.
In the long term, of course, history points out that no country gets to be the Big Kahuna for
more than a few hundred years anyway, no matter how fervently the leaders and the people
bang on about “forever” or “until the end of time.” The US has had a pretty good run, generally
doing more good than harm, but the writing has been on the wall (no, not that wall) for several
decades now. Within maybe a hundred years it will be somebody else’s turn. Trying to guess
who’s next is roughly as pointless as traveling back in time to ask the Wright Brothers what they
think about frequent flyer miles on Visa cards. So, as the Jefferson Airplane lyric reminds us, all
our angst and outrage “doesn’t mean shit to a tree.”
And that’s just the historical time frame. In the geologic one, it matters quite a lot less--and in
the astronomer’s view, even less than that. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can
while we’re here but it does mean we can relax a bit. Mother Teresa can be helpful in this:
“We are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful.” Taking a short course in
geology or astronomy or both can help to achieve and maintain that perspective.
For most of us, these philosophic ruminations may help a bit in preventing the onset of
madness prompted by the daily headlines, but I’ll bet not much. “What should I do today?” I
hear you cry.
The first thing to do is reduce the stress from the daily newsfeeds. When you’ve finished
reading any news story out of the Administration, tell yourself out loud it’s probably from The
Onion. This will not be a stretch. Even though you’ll know that’s not true, it will highlight the
absurdity of the situation, in the Beckett or Ionesco sense. Just because something is important
is no reason to take it seriously.
For more of a Marx Brothers flavour, check out the programs that allow you to change every
occurrence of a word in a document to a different word. I suggest Dumbo for the Leader Of
The Free World and Bozo (or if you want to go for a Reagan reference, Bonzo) for the MuskRat.
Reading that Dumbo and Bozo have said or done something dreadful will be less disturbing, and
you can read through it more quickly. You can also do this with lunatic cabinet officers,
governors and Supreme Court justices. You’ll find it doesn’t matter if you lose track of who’s
who. Nameless groups of Trump-worshippers can be Oompa-Loompas.
These little exercises will perhaps help you keep your breakfast down. For lasting relief, there
are longer-term solutions, modestly presented below.
A previous exciting episode suggested enrolling in a political party. More specifically now,
register as a Republican. In the US, unlike lots of other countries, this is simple and cost-free.
You don’t have to pay dues or go to meetings, and nobody will ever know how you’ve voted.
The major change in your life is that the election-time junk mail will come from Rs and not Ds.
But here’s something that’s achieved by this simple and painless device, and it works better the
more people we can recruit to do it: It will increase the percentage of enrolled Republicans in
the precinct or county, so over time the press will notice that the vote share of Rs is declining
even as their registered-voter share is increasing. Over time, if this happens in enough places,
the story can become that registered Rs are voting for Democrats. Grownup Rs, of which there
are still pockets practically everywhere although they’ve mostly gone underground, will begin
to wonder why, and the national party leadership will sooner or later decide to mend at least
some of their ways. This will take time, but should have noticeable effects.
For folks who live in a closed-primary state, only registered party members can vote in the
primary. That means they can vote for sane persons at that stage in the process. Some of these
will get the nomination and perhaps win in the general election. Even if those candidates don’t win, they will lose by smaller margins. One of the things big political donors watch is re-
election vote margins for winners. As margins start to go down, money eventually gets harder
to harvest. It’s erosion and not cataclysm, but erosion worked fine for the Grand Canyon.
By way of lagniappe, when we write letters about public issues we get to lead with “I’m a
registered Republican” and then proceed to eviscerate that party’s position on whatever the
issue is. This is emotionally satisfying, and it also makes grownup Rs realize they’re not alone,
while causing Democrats and others to suspect that not all Republicans are knuckle-draggers
and mouth-breathers. Opponents do not need to be enemies.
Registered members can also attend the party meetings in your precinct or county—what the
hell, even run for a precinct or county or state committee member slot--and try gently to inject
a note of sanity into the proceedings. The life of a mole can be interesting and occasionally
exciting, but in this arena, not dangerous. So sign up with the Devil’s spawn.
Meantime, we can help ourselves not to be paralyzed by the extensive array of casualties so
that we feel like there’s nothing we can do. The first instinct is to get on our horses and ride off
in all directions at once. However, it’s possible to keep busy with a utilitarian approach rather
than, shall we say, a futilitarian one. Instead of getting into a lather and feeling helpless, rank-
order the recent outrages you’ve heard about, with the top ranks going to those that will do the
most actual damage to the most people, and on down to those that will do relatively little
damage to fewer folks.
Develop and use your own criteria for this exercise; you can rank economic damage higher or
lower than psychic damage, and you can decide how deep to go into those suffering secondary
or indirect damage. But make a rank-ordered list, at whatever time interval you can stand.
Then periodically — daily or weekly or at whatever interval works for you — do something specific to help those affected by the two or three worst outrages. This may involve donating money or writing letters of support or of protest, or doing a Jimmy Carter and volunteering to do physical or other labour. But do something for those you deem most in need of immediate help.
If you’re going the Carter route, this is not a good time to announce that you are a registered
Republican, but it is appropriate to mention that you are working to mitigate the damage the
Republicans are doing. A lot of those victims, after all, voted R and might wish to switch next
time if reminded gently who caused their plight. Don’t dwell on the point or appear to blame
the victims, of course—a passing mention will assist the erosion.
Watch your language. Don’t refer to the incumbents as fascists, although that is palpably true,
or as conservatives, because that is palpably false. “Reactionaries” is accurate and effective,
because most people don’t know quite what it means but it sounds bad. “Plutocrats” and “fat
cats” also work for the officeholders but not mostly for their voters. The idea is to coax them
loose from the officeholders without accusing the voters themselves of doing anything wrong,
although they palpably have.
Ask questions, but don’t argue. “What did you think was going to happen?” “Why are eggs
getting more expensive instead of less?” “What’s your source for that belief?” The idea is not
to change anybody’s mind in a single conversation, but to help them begin to suspect that they
made a mistake.
Keep it concrete. If there is one thing we learned from this election — and there may not
Be — It’s that amurricans don’t care about abstractions like democracy and fairness and freedom and even common decency. They care about rents and egg prices and sales tax rates and job insecurity. These are not crazy or irresponsible things to care about, and people have personal knowledge about the immediate real-life effects of them. So we need to concentrate on that stuff — remember “It’s the economy, stupid”? Failure to do this is probably the worst single
strategic mistake the national Ds made last year. Let’s not keep it up.
However, the most important consideration in avoiding the Masochism Tango is indeed to keep
calm and carry on. If this situation gets reversed, it will not happen in the next election and
maybe not in the next generation. The battlefront is wide and deep, and progress will come in
inches and years, not in miles and days.
The story goes that once upon a time a Chinese emperor wanted some trees planted and one of
his minions said, “Well, they won’t be full-grown for two hundred years.”
“In that case,” said the emperor, “we’d better start immediately.”
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