Day 338 – Do the Wrong Thing

Thursday December 23, 2021

Okay, first off I’m not sure about the count. Look, I’m a busy man. I got no time for that counting stuff.

Secondly, and the point of this screed is to ask the question, “What if people do the wrong thing? Intentionally?”

This is a riff on the Spike Lee movie title “Do the Right Thing.” His title suggests that people know what to do and all they need to do is do it. That is have the courage to do it. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has a similar idea. The thought that people will rise up and cause the right thing to be done. But…but, what if they don’t? What if people intentionally do the wrong thing? What if their followers are so misguided that the wrong thing they are doing they believe is, in fact, the right thing? 

There’s this idea that at some point an adult, or person of authority, will enter the room and call it off, i.e. they will, “do the right thing.” What if, like Godot, that person never shows up? Or worse, what if the person you expect to be that authority is actually a saboteur? What happens? 

We are about to find out. Our democracy has been attacked, repeatedly, for decades by saboteurs big and small. With little acts at first, hidden and acting in the shadows. Now, it’s out in the open and we seem unable to stop it. 

Take Georgia, they’ve passed a sweeping new election law. It allows them to take over an election board and kick off people they don’t want and fill the board with cronies. They’ve done that in Fulton County. A poor county with no public transportation just north of Atlanta. What has the new board done? Announced they are closing all the polling places but one. Some people will have to travel 23 miles to vote. They don’t have cars. There is no public transportation. What will happen?

In Texas, they got two more congressional seats based on increased population. That population increase is due to more Latino voters. What happened? The state redistricted. The Latino community didn’t get two extra seats; they lost one, due to gerrymandering. 

In Wisconsin, the Republican legislature is forcing the state to go through a sham audit of the previous election, costing the state millions. They know the result, but they don’t care. 

Trump has pulled off a coup. He has done this all his life. When he had a casino and half the slot machines weren’t working on opening day, he didn’t say there was a problem, which there was. Instead, he said they were so heavily used that they broke. Total fabrication. He has lied his whole life. He doesn’t know the truth and doesn’t care to know. This has rubbed off on others, but it was there long before Trump. It was ingrained in the DNA of the so-called conservatives. Let’s be clear, these people aren’t conservative. They are pawns being manipulated by very rich people and corporations whose only objective is to stay rich.

We have seen this play out time and again. The Koch brothers and their cronies have played this game for generations. Remember the Spanish Civil War? Yeah, Texaco used it’s influence to prop up Franco and his dictatorship. it survived for decades. Franco let Hitler try out some of his blitzkrieg tactics on the citizens of Guernica. For three days Hitler’s bombers and machine guns strafed and bombed the city, shooting women and children in the back with 50 caliber machine gun bullets as they tried to escape the carnage. Why? Guernica was the center of the Catalan people who wanted to be independent of Spanish rule. Franco denied the event for years. The truth finally came out. Thank the Koch brothers’ dad for helping Franco obtain and keep power.  

A friend of mine said his grandparents were living in Germany in the 1930s. They told him that they all knew Hitler was crazy, but it was too late when they started to act. Of course, the situation  the German people was dire after WWI and Hitler gave them hope, false hope and racism. Has much changed? What if the politicians after WWI had done a Marshall Plan instead of exacting tribute from Germany? (What if our students who were saddled with huge debts were allowed to renegotiate their debts instead of being forced like the “conservatives” want to pay off their debts multiple times over for most of their working lives?)

It’s kind of like my old pastor who once asked the question, “Can you think of a new sin?”

No. It’s the same old stuff. New faces, new tactics, new lies, but it’s the same old stuff.

Will an adult enter the room and call it off?

As Pogo said, “We have seen the enemy and they is us.”

Orson Welles in his radio broadcast “War of The Worlds” on April Fools Day 1938 terrorized the nation (well, at least New Jersey) with his adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel of the same name. In the later adaptation with Morgan Freeman as narrator, had the Martian invaders defeated by microbes. It seems Wells got it right, except like Pogo, the enemy is us. There is no “them.” But we got microbes! Well, viruses.

The chilling thing is how much politicians are willing to go along with a lie, for the sake of their careers, their own self-interest. We now have a whole party devoted to lies. “They know better” is often said. Well, yes, some do, but now we have true believers. They believe these lies. It’s no longer a fringe group. It has become central and this I am afraid is where democracy dies.

Democracy depends on people knowing the truth. Unfortunately, there is a sophisticated and multi-pronged gaslighting operation that has been going on for years, decades. The proponents now drink their own urine along with the lies they swallow. They Believe! And that my friends is when it gets really scary.

PS The kid in Mexico. Note everyone is wearing a mask. They don’t have the stupid – unmasked. Everyone wears a mask.