The Civil War is Already Here

My latest trip to the United States is coming to an end. I’ll be headed back to Guatemala just before Thanksgiving to celebrate a wedding of dear friends and to reassume my watch just outside the empire’s crumbling walls. It’s been, in many ways, a wonderful trip home. I saw some great live music, visited people I love intensely, and spent quality time with all my family. Interpersonally, at least from the Tallonian perspective, you’d be shocked to discover that so much is wrong in the nation. Sure, folks are frustrated by the challenges of our wounded republic, but not in a way that seems to motivate much action. Things seem peacefully autumnal all around. Sure, we bitch and moan at the television screen, and I tend to thunder on in your Facebook feed, but day-by-day, moment-by-moment, all seems well.

And yet, by all accounts, the other team is already at war.

By all accounts, there is a fever-pitch of anger and limitless rage directed at folks like me and you, like my mom and dad, like my friends in the moshpits who have the audacity to not believe in MAGA über alles. If you pay attention, there is bloody hatred all around for folks like us, in a way that I imagine is not terribly dissimilar to the anger directed toward socialists in 1920s Berlin, or Tutsis in early 1990s Kigali, or against Rohingya people in Myanmar today.

Of all the whispered, subterranean messages I’ve heard from the world’s bones during these six weeks in the Northlands, that is what chills me most. The good guys are concerned about the state of the world but mostly disengaged. After the election, we reverted to our more natural state of distanced politics, a sort of collectivized group of 80 million Susan Collinses — worried, but inert. Yet, all the while, the bad guys are quite literally cleaning their weapons and sharpening their bayonets for the next time they rise.

Because of that, the feeling I can’t shake after these months at home is that the war we’ve been fearing might one day dawn is already upon us. Whether we know it or not — whether we recognize it or not — the other guys are already engaging as if Fort Sumpter has been shelled.

Worse still, is that the closer an individual is to any actual power, the less nervous most of them seem to be. Take the high-profile commentators and opinion writers of our great Fourth Estate, for example. Though there are notable exceptions from Elie Mystal to Charlie Pierce, the marquee names of opinion-making are as placid as cows in New Delhi traffic. From his scribe’s covey on a gated cul-de-sac in suburban Bethesda, David Brooks of the New York Times presses ‘send,’ on his laptop. He’s just delivered his latest 750 tut-tutting words about the need for a new vision of democracy from President Biden. He’s done so not even recognizing that it’s just recycled crap he wrote ten years ago about Barack Obama. Yet, he’s just so used to being blithe and beige in his opinions that one would imagine he bleeds in the dull tan colors of the Land’s End fall catalogue. Meanwhile, his dog-walking, homeowning, chino-wearing neighbor — the one he sips coffee with at the homeowners’ meeting every month — carefully unpacks a third AR-15 from its box, just in case.

The following morning, his colleague Maureen Dowd lips the foam on her cappuccino. She is curled up in the nook of her tony Upper West Side condo, scoffing at President Biden’s legislative agenda. She’s soooooo proud of herself for coming up with some high-quality snark that will send her equally daft readership into a titter. Meanwhile, young Republican Members of Congress rally their supporters to blood sacrifice if anyone dares to teach children the true causes of the Civil War.

“CRT! CRT! CRT!”

Then in the evening on Fox News, Tucker Carlson will speak very openly about the logic and defensibility of White Replacement Theory. He will rail against the dangers of the rising brown menace as he drags his market share ever further over the Riefenstahl line. As he does so, members of his audience furtively swap dirty text messages through encrypted apps about what they’ll do to AOC’s body once they finally get their hands on her “woke” brown ass.

They are not gentle.

Chuck Todd, for his part over the weekend, will pull together another assemblage of well-heeled, beltway fools. They will again NOT discuss the increasing militarization of the Right, choosing instead to take on the vexing question: “Are Democrats too woke?”

And, ugh, just to break away for a minute into a bit of linguistic parsing. Whenever you hear a moderate or a conservative use the word “woke,” just replace it in your mind with “uppity.” That should clarify their perhaps subconscious intentions.

So, yeah, as I come into the final week of this trip up north — one in which I’ve tried to remain largely silent as these troubling thoughts have fallen into place — I’m more frightened and disheartened about the future of our nation than at any point in my life. I’ve spent far too much time studying history to ignore the signs I see gathering all around — and my prognosis is very, very grim: The war has already begun, and our side is disorganized, divided, and distracted as hell.

I simply don’t see it getting much better.

We have the resources to save ourselves from the abyss, for sure. But the people we most need right now seem more determined than ever to stay comfortably asleep. What we need is an activated, alarmed, and aggressive response from the bourgeois bedrock of our civil society. We need all the journalists, all the lawyers, and all the chamber-of-commerce types to recognize that our society can unzip very, very quickly. We need them to recognize that it has already started to unzip, and if we don’t act now, it could all fall apart in a matter of years. Yet, for the most part, they seem utterly blinded by their practiced inability to perceive the fragility of this world. They are habituated by long practice to believe that America can and will weather all storms. The comfort of their homes — or their yachts, as some Senators prefer — is too anesthetizing to allow them to see the dangers which abound in a nation wherein one political party has completely abandoned their commitment to citizens’ rule. They prefer, instead, to palaver on about those of us on the left who are always so unnecessarily exercised about such things. You know, us “woke” folk.

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon runs an open-air insurrection mill called The War Room. Meanwhile, black men and women are kept off a jury in Georgia, while a Judge in Wisconsin plays defense attorney to a Nazi youth. Meanwhile, Madison Cawthorn dreams of Third Antietam, and gun sales go through the roof. Meanwhile, Joe Manchin defends the filibuster over the survival of our republic.

I pick on the columnists and the talking heads because they’ve got the microphones. Yet, it’s their primary audiences that are the problem, too. David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Chuck Todd all act as if Tucker Carlson is a misguided member of their tribe, and so do most of us out here in television land. Rather than being run out of town on a rail, Tucker is given deference as a shocking, but a legitimate journalist. But he’s NOT a legitimate journalist — and he knows that, even if the other fools don’t. Tucker Carlson is a fascist propagandist. Full stop. Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist, racist monster. Full stop. Tucker Carlson would gladly see the world rid of the likes of you and me, and as soon as he gets the chance, he’ll push those positions in prime time, too. He has millions and millions of folks who watch him every night and they are either willing fascist acolytes or ride-along fascist dupes. Either way, they simply do not believe that our nation should be a true, free, open, and multiracial democracy.

Continuing to pretend otherwise is a danger to us all.

Yet, pretend we will. We will, because the truth that one-third of our nation would kill another third while the remaining third watches in fear is too dark and frightening for the op-ed pages of the Times or the Sunday Morning Meet the Press with a banal, pointless Chuck Todd.

Jesus, fuck. Tucker is laughing all the way to the bunker.

As I prepare to head back south, I concede that I don’t know how to stop any of this from proceeding, so I’ve made a personal decision instead. It’s a decision I never thought I’d need to make. For nearly two decades, I’ve been a visitor to Guatemala on a series of temporary visas. For years, I’ve enjoyed keeping one foot in the United States and one foot in Central America. For years, I’ve enjoyed my travels back and forth to see family and friends several times a year and I will continue to do so for as long as possible. I enjoy, very much, a life that bounces between the two locales and allows the constant swapping out of perceptual lenses as I struggle to read the tumultuous cultural seas. But I’ve got to make plans for my own safety as we drift helplessly into the dark and foreboding waters ahead.

On this trip home, I’ve caught a scent on the winds, and it carries the nauseating sweetness of decay. It’s still faint and somewhat distant. It could, perhaps, dissipate with one more good election season, or one more turn of the wheel. But I really don’t think it will. I think, rather, that the situation is going to continue to unravel quite badly. The stench will grow worse, more pungent, and more near. So, I’m making plans to get the hell out.

We could still pull out of this spin, but that will require some incredibly sedentary people to activate quickly against the coming horrors. It will require people who are deeply invested in pretending that everything will be okay in the end if we just keep our heads, to stop pretending that. That’s not likely. The entire raison d’être of politically moderate opinion-makers is to calm the waters. Driven by their need to see no great ado in any of this, they have accepted the usurpation of one whole political party into a blood cult as if a new Barry Goldwater was on the scene. Making such a kerfuffle over the affair, to them, seems untoward, particularly when there’s a Democratic President who might be excoriated endlessly for the sins of lengthy legislative negotiation.

One fundamental truth of all democratic nations that fall into fascist or anarchic disarray is the dumbfounded inability of the old-order bourgeoisie to believe “It could happen here.” One has to think that if Weimar-Republic-Era Parson Niemöller were alive today, Chuck Todd would book him every week for a sermon about how we should all really keep this Nazi movement in perspective.

“Let’s focus on the inflation, instead.”

I can’t figure out how to stop any of it, so, back to my decision. When I return to Guatemala, I’m going to start looking into finding a way to earn my permanent residency. Sad as it is to say, I no longer trust that I’ll be able to safely return to the United States in a few years. Not if Donald and the Magahorde have their way — which they very well might. It will take a while to work out the details, but after many nights of agonizing about the decision, I’ve reached a conclusion. When the militias are this well-armed, when the televised warriors are this sanguine about the need for civil war, finding a safe spot to rally outside the blast zone just makes sense.

I honestly never thought I’d get here. I never thought I’d have to worry this much about the future of my homeland, but when I try to imagine a better, saner United States ten years down the road, my mind draws an absolute blank. Yet, when I think about all the ways it could get worse, my mind fills with ten-million well-armed, red-capped, red-faced, rage-fueled demons. Clear as day, I can see Lindsey Graham happily donning a commandant’s uniform, and Ted Cruz volunteering to run a series of Texas-based workcamps.

I hope I’m wrong, but I fear I’m not.

Meanwhile, every “Democrats in Disarray” storyline brings us one moderate step closer to that terrible abyss. Modern civil wars are very long, very bloody, and almost always genocidal affairs. I hope to God that polite society wakes up to that historical reality in time to avert that rapidly approaching catastrophe — but I no longer trust that they, or we, will.

Sorry for all the darkness, but I’ve got a spare guest room where we can discuss this over a nice banana liquado. Come on down.

Love and hope to you all.