Thread by @TomLevenson

1/n I'm rereading basically the whole @GreatDismal corpus. I'm on Spook Country. There, on page 138-9, I found myself once again marveling again at how Gibson isn't writing fiction, but non-fiction a few years soon:

"A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws...

@GreatDismal 2/ A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals.* If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation."

*This, in the Blue Ant books, is Bigend's epitaph.

@GreatDismal 3/...
"What did you say?"
"Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it it is?" Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder
...
"If you are, you let the terrorist win...

@GreatDismal 4/ "Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why the call him 'terrorist.' He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society."

Move from the age of 9/11 to that of Trump, and...

@GreatDismal Trump seeks to make cowards of us all; the Republicans for years have traded on the fears of their base and our Russian-backed usurper has dialed that learned fearfulness to eleven.

Gibson nailed this fifteen years ago; it's been going for longer still...

@GreatDismal 6/ And thatto me, suggests to me an overarching theme for the Democratic Party: we are bigger, braver, and much more powerful than the Republicans would have us believe. They say we aren't strong enough to lead, to make a better world for our children than the one we inherited...

@GreatDismal 7/ They're wrong.

And yeah: @GreatDismal can both really write and really think, and the anticipation of events that emerges from that combination can be f**king frightening.