French girls, gotta love ’em. That could even be a pussy hat, though I suspect it’s really a garrison cap (or piss-cutter, as they used to be called, for some reason). You know, one of those fore-and-aft affairs that look like an overturned lifeboat. I always thought the US version, in plain khaki, looked rather snazzy. Certainly a lot better than those stupid floppy berets that all the US soldier-boys and -girls wear nowadays.
Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has given us one more turn of the screw, or perhaps a turn and a half, in our great nation’s decades-long screwing away from social democracy — what little we ever had of it — and toward downright fascism. All the people who were telling us that Trump was a fascist were right, of course — only they neglected to mention that his predecessors and his opponent were fascists too.
Still, Trump’s election does seem to have roused a certain sense of alarm. Long overdue, in my opinion, but gift horses and all that.
One has been hearing a lot of bold talk about ‘resistance’, mostly on facebook, but it unfortunately seems to be confined to facebook. There were a few marches — permitted, of course, the worst kind, and dominated by establishment Democratic Party careerists. Then tumbleweeds, except for the Russophobe mania.
Thank God that seems to be dying down. My liberal friends are starting to look a bit sheepish when I tease them about that bad ole Putin. Two weeks ago they would have called Homeland Security and dropped a dime on me. See something, say something, even if the something is an ignis fatuus.
But then everything else seems to have died down too. We’re exhorted to join the ACLU and send yet more money to the odious Morris Dees, of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ridiculing Trump and his brummagem Versailles taste and his oafish manners is of course fun, and there’s ample material to work with. Though it has become something of a cliche.
But resistance? Don’t make me laugh. There’s nothing at all worthy of the name.
Of course, as the Psalmist perceptively inquires, מֵאַיִן יָבֹא עֶזְרִֽי — from whence is our help to come? What social formations, institutions, organizations, might incubate some real resistance?
There’s nothing. They’re all gone. The leadership of the labor movement climbed into bed with management decades ago, and was promptly smothered under a pillow, without even thrashing around very much. There’s essentially no labor movement in the US now, except for a wizened, vestigial vermiform appendix to the Democratic party.
There’s never really been any anti-war or anti-imperialist movement in the US, and certainly none since Nixon, that ingenious fiend, did away with the draft. What, after all, would it be based on? Whose ox, in the US, is gored by our wars — except the poor devils who sign up to fight them?
White guys like me are always hoping for something from black folks, and I for one haven’t completely given up. In my experience that’s the milieu where you find the clearest, least muddled view of our situation. But the hegemon is good at mowing the lawn. Real resisters (like the Panthers) get killed or imprisoned, and other potential leaders, or even actual leaders, get co-opted. The sad decline of John Lewis is paradigmatic, as is the whole career of Corey Booker, the smooth, glossy sweetheart of Big Pharma.
It makes me wonder whether real resistance is even possible from inside the global hegemon. I know, this was much discussed a long time ago, and third-worldism dismissed as a heresy. Correctly so, no doubt. Whatever we can do from inside, we ought to do, and shouldn’t be discouraged.
And of course one knows not the day nor the hour; the old mole pops up unexpectedly like a thief in the night, if one may mash up a few of one’s favorite texts. So perhaps what I am doing here is apotropaic contrarianism: every time I make a prediction, subsequent events make a fool of me, so let’s predict something bad and be delighted when we’re proved wrong.
Okay, Old Mole. Over to you. Bring it on.
