Five Iron Frenzy has a new album out, and it's full of antifascist anthems. It's great. It's also got me listening to their back catalog, including this song that comes to mind often when I need to rev myself up for something.

Five Iron's a funny band. They're a "Christian band," often writing overtly about or to god. I was still a christian in my interior when I learned about them, so they're one of like three bands still grandparented in to my despicably-godless present taste. }:) I don't have time to go into it, but the thing I want to say is: more than maybe any other band, they've managed to achieve feelings in some of their songs that approach whatever the material sensation of the "sacred" might be. Their songs can still lift my heart in a specific way; a feeling of aspiration, of there being something special about being alive, and that it's nice to remember.

Some of their songs are just silly. Some of them are solid rock songs. The singer's voice is one of my favorites. They've always opposed the abuse of power ("Riot Gear") and conservative interpretations of christian doctrine (too many songs to list). For their new album to consist almost entirely of songs clearly and directly criticizing the modern right wing in all its guises... I'm grateful for it. I hope there are christians listening.

And today, as I discuss moving into my own apartment for the first time in years, I feel the terror of instability yawn beneath me. Can I really maintain a life of day-to-day productivity? Well, I've been doing it for quite a while now; I reckon I'll just have to keep doing it. And as overwrought as it is, as far away as I feel from this sentiment, this is how I want to feel:

"Hulking, smashing, I come crashing, nothing like when I was small. That feeble coward that you knew has undergone an overhaul. I am unstoppable. I am the cannonball."

I do wish that most of my favorite songs weren't about regret and loss,

but,

well

"Never define yourself by choices others make.
If no one said it yet, it would be a shame. That ends right now.
You're not alone in pain.
Never alone in pain."

They're playing this whole album on a ticketed livestream this Friday. I think it's gonna be good!

Succession is incredible. Clearly made by people with deep, personal experience of abuse. And no patience for the pathways of excess. One of the few current shows I've truly enjoyed.

"Ken, he loves the broken you. That's what he loves."

I remember my mom explaining to a very young me that my dad yelled at me because he loved me. That they hit me because they loved me. This scene drilled directly into a sparking nerve. Shitty people will make you go a long way to defend them because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't.

My parents only loved the broken me. To appease them, to earn their love, I broke and stayed broken for many years. I've had to do so, so much to recover myself, and I'm nowhere near healed. I still live every day remembering what it was like to not be broken in these particular ways.

It's of the utmost importance that you believe yourself about yourself, with all the work that entails. I think to myself a lot lately, "I don't even know who I am." I walk around doing the things I've learned to do, can enjoy myself in honest-feeling ways, but when I look for my identity... it isn't there. Like I'm in orbit around myself, describing the terrain from outside the atmosphere. I used to know what it was like to be me, to want the things I wanted, to feel strongly that certain things mattered to me. I'm mostly not sure about any of those things now. And it takes a lot of patience and pain to try to reconnect the sparking nerves, on top of everything else.

Let's try our best to only have right kind of love expressions.

honestly if I could choose my singing voice, I might choose Petal's. her powerful harmonies sound so good

You remember in Adventure Time, when something really troubling happens to Finn, he gets a certain look in his eyes and says, "That's going in the vault!" And he locks away certain memories, suppresses them, so that he won't have to disturb the appearance of peace?

Four years ago, I had to cut my parents out of my life. It wasn't just because they voted for Trump, even though I had explained why they couldn't, and my mom had said she wouldn't, and then she did, and then she scolded me for being a bad loser. It was the other things she said that proved she didn't give a shit about me, or any of the people I cared about; asked me, "when did the gay thing become such a big deal for you anyway?" when almost every person close to me fits somewhere into the lgbtqia+ spectrum, and she knew that... I realized she didn't have my well-being at heart, nor the well-being of anyone I cared about, and then in a sinking moment I realized that I didn't love my mother anymore. That I couldn't even choose to, which is what I had been doing, despite the way she treated me and others for years.

I was walking around an unfamiliar yard, a place Caleb was house sitting, a week before christmas 2016. I paced around and tried, for the last time, to explain my values to my mom, and why I thought she was not just mistaken, but dangerously wrong in her politics. From the high ground of the recent election, she scolded and sniped at me, unable to hear me over the rumble of propaganda. I remember this conversation and its physical setting vividly, and I remember the rapid hardening of my heart. I'd forced it to be soft and pliant toward my parents for so many years, despite knowing they were full of shit, manipulative, and so often unkind in ensuring that I always did what they wanted me to, or else do nothing at all. I put my life, my sense of self, on hold repeatedly for years, because when I would discuss a big change with my parents, they'd talk me down from it, and I couldn't reconcile the possibility that they could always be wrong about what was best for me. But they were.

I felt my heart close up. I felt anger rush in, anger that kept me awake long into the night, and woke me with a start, for most of the next two years. Anger emerging from unaddressed hurt, at realizing I'd diminished myself to please these very small people, and that in the end it could never be enough.

Tonight I'm thinking about this because I can recognize that this wasn't without further-reaching effects. It's become harder for me to... be there for other people, in the intervening years. Harder for me to remember that other people really can care about me. Easier for me to take smaller perceived slights, get hurt and angry, and then not be able to address it. Harder for me to apologize; not because I'm not sorry for times I let people down, but because I worry, needlessly, that my apologies will be received with venom instead of forgiveness.

In a way it's like all of the anxiety I had about the ways my parents did treat me for so many years, but which was concentrated on them, is still rolling around inside me but points in other directions now. There's plenty else to be anxious about, too; many atrocities and indignities have been suffered on the world by the hideous dipshits my parents have been convinced to identify with. I've been on the verge of bankruptcy for most of the last three years. Everything goes increasingly to shit.

And the thing about the vault... things go in the vault, now. But I don't choose to put them there. They just vanish. I forget for weeks or months at a time about... all kinds of things. But mostly conversations or appointments with the people closest to me. And I'm not aware that it's happening. It's almost like... I still can't believe or fully trust that anyone really wants to talk to me; the effort of beginning a conversation feels so fraught with the possibility of being attacked or having to apologize for something, that it's so hard to start. And then I do have to apologize, because some ridiculous amount of time has passed with me frozen in anxiety, or tottering around in oblivious effort just struggling daily to do the work required to survive, plus whatever other other bullshit I'm embroiled in.

I can't even say exactly what the problem here is. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the emotional fallout of having watched my mother's petty cruelty sever what was left of my connection to my entire family, and most of my past. Nobody in my extended family has tried to talk to me since January of 2017. I have to assume they, conservatives all, have written me off as a maniac. And I'm not saying I'm not a maniac!!! But I don't think I am. I think I'm a sensitive person who has had a deeply difficult time enduring life in this very bad country.

My sensitivity is what's finally been diminished somewhat. It feels very strange to realize I just don't feel as strongly about most things anymore. I think some of that is from my antidepressants, but this was true even before that. I just can't keep feeling bad about every little thing that I used to. There's enough ambient hurt.

As I'm typing I feel myself spinning out into a dozen tangents, so this isn't a coherent essay. I sort of just wanted to capture a description of this non-deliberate vaulting that occurs, but also to note that recently... the vault has been opening periodically. People and events that I haven't thought of for many years have been springing to mind, and without the hurt that accompanied them for various reasons over the last 15 years. I can look back on things with fondness, rather than resentment or despair. Or, with less of the latter. It's kind of nice. Feeling sentimental about the past, instead of like I'm being run through with a horse-propelled lance.

Anyway. It used to be that anytime one of Trump's horrid attendants did anything public, I'd immediately feeling boiling rage toward my parents. I'd be explaining it to them, chastising them, screaming at them in my head, and ultimately getting nowhere. I was finally able to let go of that, after I embarrassed myself about it in front of Sara as we drove her new car back from New York, before I let her down as just another emotionally-unavailable man-appearing person, despite her only ever being kind and caring to me. And this week, as we see the fruits of unchecked disinformation finally reaching the calcified heart of our government, the one thing I take comfort in is not thinking automatically of my parents. There are more present specters to deal with.

Chase This Light is such a great album, but these songs from the back half are just so goooood

"I'll say it straight and plain: I know I've made mistakes. I've always been afraid."
"You say that love goes anywhere. In your darkest time, it's just enough to know it's there."

Nathan J. Robinson, in Current Affairs:

In 1923, hundreds of Nazis attempted to seize control over the regional government in Bavaria. Their attempt was farcical. They surrounded a beer hall where local leaders were speaking and tried to take them hostage and seize government buildings. They were swiftly repelled by police and their leader, Adolf Hitler, was put on trial for treason. He was essentially given a slap on the wrist, writing his memoirs in prison and being released after nine months. It would be another decade before he unleashed the most hideous and systematic act of mass extermination in human history.

The “Beer Hall Putsch” was probably never going to succeed, because it was disorganized and the Nazi Party was weak in 1923. But it was a terrifying sign that a far-right element was gathering strength, one that did not respect the existing liberal regime’s right to rule and would use whatever means were at its disposal to take power. Not everyone recognized that sign at the time. The New York Times ran the headline “Hitler Virtually Eliminated” and suggesting that with Hitler’s jail sentence, the courts had put the far right out of commission once and for all.

On January 6, 2021, members of the far right, seeking to overturn the result of the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in power as an unelected ruler, stormed the United States Capitol building, breaking in by force, successfully halting the certification of the 2020 election results, and forcing politicians to grab the Electoral College ballots and flee through underground tunnels.

[…]

The New York Times quickly published an article calling the events the “end of the Trump era” and “a last-ditch act of desperation from a camp facing political eviction.” I am not so sure about this. Their tone reminds me too much of the one they took in 1923 when they wrote that “any prospect of Hitler playing a leading part in Bavarian politics appears to have vanished…” I think it is fully possible that Trump will be back. Nothing prohibits him from running again in 2024, more aggrieved and deranged than ever. If the Biden administration is weak and unpopular, and Trump’s colossal COVID-19 failure has receded in the collective memory (we forget everything in five minutes these days, even crimes against humanity), I think it’s perfectly possible that we will yet see a second Trump term, and I am not excited to find out how it would go. (Impeachment and removal could disqualify him from running in 2024, but seems unlikely.)

Not everyone thinks that what happened at the Capitol should be described as an attempted “coup” (or, to use the more apt term for one by the far right, putsch). It was not completely clear what the rioters intended to do in the Capitol building, and I didn’t expect the man dressed in horns and a pelt, with face painted red, white, and blue, to begin issuing legislative proclamations and emergency orders from the Senate dais. But the Beer Hall Putsch, too, was a failure and an absurdity. It would be another decade until the Nazis actually took power. During that decade, though, many people would make the same mistake that the New York Times did, and assume that because the putsch had failed, the movement it represented was not a threat. This was an absolutely fatal mistake, and if we make it again we have missed one of the most crucial lessons of the 20th century.

Authoritarians can be clowns, which makes it easy to laugh them off. I am sure that Biden will be inaugurated and that there will be the superficial appearance of a “return to normalcy” in this country. It will be tempting to think that those who stormed the Capitol did so out of desperation and no longer need to be worried about. Resist this temptation. To me, the only thing that keeps the far right from seizing power in this country is that they have not got an effective and charismatic leader. Donald Trump is lazy and a bungler, rather than a committed ideologue like Hitler.
One should be careful about making too many close comparisons between 1920s-’40s fascism and the situation of the present day. What we can do is draw lessons about how power works. In 1930s Germany, a creaking liberal government that could not solve basic social problems was vulnerable to an organized far-right movement, which never commanded a majority of the vote but was nevertheless able to run rings around politicians who assumed that their constitution and laws would save them. Today, we need to make sure not to think that because the right has suffered a serious electoral setback, it will not come back with even greater force. (And we have learned that the police and military just might not be dependable allies of democracy at critical moments.)

The best protection against this is for Joe Biden to deliver the American people the kinds of gains that will make them unlikely to fall for the right’s pitch. Franklin Roosevelt, by giving people things like the G.I. Bill, Social Security, and the Works Progress Administration, ensured that huge numbers of ordinary people would think positively about their government, because it had put money in their pocket, given them a free college education, or given them a job. If the Democrats deliver the hugely popular $2,000 checks, and follow it up with a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, free college, student debt forgiveness, Medicare For All, and a Green New Deal—which there are no excuses not to do now that they control the executive and legislative branches—then every person in the country will have gotten something tangible from the administration. These will include the ability to go to school without worrying about debt, the ability to go to the doctor without having to think about the bill, the ability to have a child without worrying you’ll need to go back to work the day after, and the knowledge that one’s grandchildren might live on a habitable planet with a sustainable civilization. A government that delivers for people inoculates them against the appeals of fascist demagogues.

I am of course not at all confident that Joe Biden will make any serious attempt to deliver these policies.