Thread by @mcjulie

Long article that touches on a bunch of true, frightening things not always acknowledged in mainstream political reporting

https://twitter.com/ronmarz/status/1441263455487414278

Trumpism is a crisis in American democracy on par with the Civil War, but we tend to underestimate the threat because of things like survivorship bias and normalcy bias.

Same reasons we’re slouching toward the climate disaster, really.

There’s another problem I’m going to call the “absolute apocalypse fallacy”

Christian apocalyptic narratives have gotten rolled into secular apocalyptic narratives that have the same flaw: anticipating THE apocalypse rather than AN apocalypse.

That is, we think “the end of the world” is something that happens ONE time, literally everybody knows it’s happening, and afterward, the old world just isn’t there anymore, NONE of it.

No life on earth afterward, or no HUMAN life anyway.

This absolute apocalypse, this “clean” apocalypse is the one Christian & other nihilists are longing for, this ONE thing that happens ONE time and sort of… rescues them from their messy lives in the messy world.

There’s a purity to that kind of apocalypse, which is why you see the people you do, the fascist-minded, openly longing for it.

What they picture after THE apocalypse is a new world, less messy, less chaotic, and, oh yeah, one where they get to be universally acknowledged as correct. Where everybody goes “oh no! you were right the whole time and we were wrong!”

I was raised in the 1970s & 80s, so I got raised to expect this kind of one-time apocalypse: nuclear war, or the Christian apocalypse of the Late Great Planet Earth style.

I probably took it for granted, until I visited Rome for the first time. I was in my early 20s, a recent college graduate, doing that “see Europe” thing like you do.

Rome, like London, has been a great city unto itself for a very long time and its landscape is visually layered with many different eras, some of them very old & in ruins, some of them built yesterday.

But unlike London, Rome looms very large in Christian apocalyptic mythology. There’s a whole thing about “the fall of Rome” and assuming the US is Rome. “We’re the Roman Empire and we’re headed for a fall!”

But as I was looking around at the ruined Colosseum (0070), having earlier that day visited the very un-ruined St. Peter’s (1626), having taken a city bus to get there (1955?) something occurred to me —

When the Roman Empire fell, there were probably people living in Rome who didn’t even know it had happened. People who were like “wow, things kind of suck right now, they aren’t reliably picking up the garbage and it’s hard to get some things in the market” but they didn’t KNOW

I realized that we actually have apocalypses ALL THE TIME. One system breaks down, another system evolves. One country dies, two countries are born. Every war is an apocalypse. The old system breaks down and eventually a new one is formed.

But you might not even know the old system HAS broken down, until long after it already happened. The apocalypse doesn’t always LOOK like an apocalypse, it might look like… a bad couple of years that we think are an aberration & then things never get any better.

But we don’t think it’s the apocalypse because most of us still live in houses with indoor plumbing & stuff.

We still have electricity (sometimes), how can it be the apocalypse?

My stupid life is even MESSIER and more pathetic than before, how can THIS be the apocalypse?

And then, eventually, maybe, things start to get better. And the people in the future talking about the people of our time will talk about the “Decline and fall of the American Empire” as they live in the North American Republic or whatever it is —

And the great cities unto themselves will probably still be there, some of the artifacts of our time sitting in ruins, others repurposed, others just — still intact, somehow.

That time when the apocalypse makes everything simple (& makes everyone tell you that you were right all along) never comes.

It never gets any less messy.

Anyway, I guess that’s the end of the thought. My stupid brain had to get up at 4 am one day this week and now apparently it thinks 4 am is waking-up time, very annoying.