The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.
And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.
It's our moral duty not to.
Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.
Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.
We've seen our nation's face.
And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.
They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.
Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.
We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.
They don't care about truth, and never did.
We should care about truth, and speak it plain.
This is us.
We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.
Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.
Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.
We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.
We know our police forces are infected with white supremacists and wage constant war against our most marginalized citizens.
We know just how much tolerance for brutality there is among. Not just tolerance—but enthusiasm.
Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.
We know that open white supremacy can run for high office and win, and receive the unwavering support of its political establishment.
We know our Evangelical Christian churches can be counted on to be the enthusiastic, loyal, sustaining energizing force behind that movement.
We know that nothing can shake that support to supremacy—no scandal no matter how unsavory, no betrayal of national security no matter how dire, no incompetency no matter how embarrassing, not even a deliberately and systemically orchestrated pile of a half-million corpses.
And now, we are going to be asked to forget—chided, at first, for remembering; mocked, eventually, as "clinging to the past" for the crime of understanding our present.
But we know now, and we can't unknow.
We can't become what we hope to be if we won't admit what we are.
And Donald Trump didn't create any of this.
It was already there. It's been there the whole time. He just picked it up.
To some degree at least, he's putting it down now.
It's still there.
We'll be asked to put all this horror on a single grotesque and cruel man, for the purpose of exonerating those who cheered for him louder the more grotesque and cruel he got, and the systems of power that seemed optimized for him, were unable to stop him, and rarely even tried.
And then we'll be asked to never mention him again, to forget the lessons he taught us.
To look forward, not back—not for sake of forward-thinking, but so that needed changes to our malicious priorities, which might prevent the next him, might be kept always in the vague future.
And we'll hear that this is not who we are, and that we're better than that, and we'll be asked to believe it.
But we can't become what we hope to be if we won't admit what we are.
Never forget.
Five months later, and the Great American Forgetting Project is in full swing.
One thing that can easily get lost during the Great American Forgetting Project is that the January 6 coup attempt was in no way a surprise. It was being discussed openly in the months prior to inauguration.
My book is about the tradition of American supremacy & the ways it shapes all of our lives, sabotages our natural shared society in order to steal all value from it for a few, makes others pay its unnaturally high costs ... and what we can do about it. armoxon.com/books/very-fin…
I find it useful to begin with art—with the idea that humans are art. The idea that to be a human is to be a unique expression of unsurpassable worth, whose worth is natural and inherent.
Focusing on this truth makes it easier to spot supremacy's anti-human lies.
These laws are *foundational*—literally, present at our founding. Our founding lies are: 1. We are not related to one another; a rejection of society 2. Life must be earned; a rejection of the humanity of others 3. Violence redeems; a rejection of one's own humanity
Well I'm given to understand that today & for a VERY limited time, our nation's political violence party is shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame.
(link to essay in thread)
I'm kidding, of course. They've already decided who is to blame. It's the same culprit they hold at fault for every other real and imaginary problem in their lives: Everybody except them.
I think we all know the news by now. Yesterday in Pennsylvania, a gunman took some shots in the direction of the former president—the adjudicated rapist, 34-time convicted felon, insurrectionist, and daily fomenter of political violence, Donald Trump.
LOST is streaming on Netflix—an excellent time to revisit the show, using the viewing guide I'm publishing in my newsletter (link in thread).
Many think the story isn't coherent. I think it was. My lens is the one the show itself suggests: a dialectic of observation and belief.
This dialectic isn’t too tough to detect. There’s even an episode called “Man of Science, Man of Faith.” In a dialectic, the opposing ideas operate in concert with one another. While these ideas are oppositional within the artistic work, they aren’t opposites.
The main reason I want to do this is as an investigation of story—particularly an investigation the way I look at story. LOST is story that lends itself very well to investigation of how story does and doesn’t work.
I've been thinking of American conservatism—which has proved itself irreducible from American fascism—in terms of burdens.
I find burdens an apt metaphor, because christian fascists claim to worship a Jewish rabbi from antiquity named Yeshu ben Yosef (Mr. Jesus if you're nasty).
Interesting thing about young Mr. Jesus: He was very sharp-tongued with the politically influential religious hypocrites of his day. There's a whole chapter of him reading them the riot act, calling them whitewashed tombs and broods of vipers and blind guides etc etc.
It's a real hum-dinger that ends with Mr. Jesus saying he doesn't really see how any of them are going to escape being condemned to hell, and you should check out the whole thing, but today I just want to think about his open salvo, which is an amazing tee-shot.
I want to dig into this, since my book VERY FINE PEOPLE comes out tomorrow, and it's in large part about precisely this sort of polemic trickery in service of bullshit apologia of supremacy.
There's a slight of hand at the start that catapults us into the massive lie.
Let's do the slight of hand, first. The article presupposes to answer the question "Did Trump call Neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'?
This is savvy if what you want to exonerate the comments, because it answers the wrong question, and dismisses the right one.
What Trump said is that there are "very fine people on both sides."
That would be the side counter protesting against the Nazis who organized a pro-Confederacy protest.
And then the side full of Nazis and those who found common cause with Nazis.
THE HUMAN PROBLEM
Last week an image went viral online. It was generated by a computer from the classic movie 12 Angry Men. It added no value, and it was being used for no good reason.
It's a perfect encapsulation of where our dominant cultural narrative has brought us.
It's my belief that things that provide positive value to humans are good, and that those who make good things should be compensated for it.
I also believe that people should have access to good things whether or not they can pay. It's the reason I love libraries, for example.
This strikes me as an appropriate way to organize society, provided that we believe society is meant to benefit humans rather than money, and that humans—being inherent generators of value and of limitless potential value—deserve the fruits of society even if they can't pay.