Hills Like White Supremacists

(With apologies to Papa Hemingway -- whose title I filched and fiddled with.)

Sometimes I just like to write and see what comes out. This time, with great respect to Colorado – my heart’s home – a meandering piece about why encroaching totalitarianism is like a trip to Boulder.

Which one begins to notice as the irrigation machines get more prominent, and the type and frequency of the roadkill changes.

Then comes the line of clouds on the horizon. A sky as cornflower-blue as the eyes of the knockout waitress I had at my favorite hippy niche/enclave/restaurant where I wrote this, and against the rim of the western world, a rind of gray-and-navy clouds.

Or are they clouds?

Have the mountains finally, finally shown themselves?

No. Just clouds.

Like fascism, the mountains don’t leap out of the far-away fully formed. They sneak up on you a little at a time.

Sure, you know they're out there, but the dull routine of the journey gradually lulls you into a light trance, until you suddenly notice the mountains for real this time. Distant, but distinct -- how could you have ever have mistaken clouds for these? Still not there, still a long way to go, but now you see where it will end.

By night, the appearance would be a little different – you’d notice the moonlit horizon being truncated at a point unnaturally above the horizon. Cut too high -- like an old man's pants. Close enough and you may see lights moving in the sky and realize that there's traffic up there.

But even at a cloudy, moonless midnight if you just pay a little attention you'll know when you're close.

The quality of the air changes. Things get brighter as you begin to rise and the atmosphere thins. Humidity falls, but when are you "in the mountains"? The flora is still as scrubby and tough as ever, even if the land has a slight acclivity. The wind is cooler, but what does that mean when you can see -- far away -- such a pronounced granite wall?

And so you’re tell yourself that you’re not really a fascist if you can still see “real” fascism in the distance. If you don’t dress in brown-shirts, march by torchlight or advocate genocide, then you’re still safe, right?

These are such clear points of demarcation, and by your AAA map you are still about 1/2 a state away. So you're not nuts, right? Orwell is still a good bit off.

Stop at a gas station. Stretch. Get a pecan log at the Stuckey's across the way. The accents of the people with which you interact are slightly different that yours, but so what? They're polite and commerce is commerce.

So back in the car and back on the road. The long, unbroken road on which you can – if you were so inclined -- trace your path all the way back across a continent. You did not fall from the sky or materialize here, you got here step-by-step, one unremarkable mile-marker at a time.

So how could this be fascism? It’s so normal. The wars are so small. The stock market is happy. And the infringements on basic rights and protections are so…justifiable.

This did not come on like a storm or a fever; you know how you got here. You are aware of where you are going. And now, even inside the city limits, in the foothills, you can see that there are still mountains in front of you.

Your ears have popped a couple of times, and the signs along the highway have started listing altitude as a regular feature, but ahead of you there is still this sheet of stone rising up to the sky. And even once you have switchbacked up the first range -- still foothills really -- you can see snowcapped peaks stretching out in front of you for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

This is how inexperienced climbers and divers end up dying, and how somnolent citizens end up giving their country away.

The gradualness of the transitions between your starting point and each station along the way are so easy, and the internal adjustment you make to each point so subtle, that you never notice that your brain is starving and hallucinating a little more each minute. You're getting stupider and stupider while your internal monitors are telling you that you're fine.

Or maybe even getting smarter, until you find yourself walking naked through 3-foot drifts of snow, or believing that there really were WMDs in Iraq, or that Saddam really did plan 9/11, or that outing CIA spies during a time of war is acceptable, or that massive warrantless wiretapping of American citizens is a great idea, or that constant and escalating Presidential lying is A-OK…for reasons that seem perfectly valid at the moment.

And by the drunken abuse of Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox,

“Dichotomy paradox: Before a moving object can travel a certain distance, it must travel half that distance. Before it can travel half the distance it must travel 1/4 the distance, etc. This sequence goes on forever. Therefore, it seems that the original distance cannot be traveled, and motion is impossible.”

you believe you can never arrive in the town-square of Naziville -- heiling Hitler and invading Poland -- because you delude yourself into thinking that if there is a further distance you could possibly travel, you're still safe and still have plenty of democratic margin to play with.

Which is why Conservatives almost unanimously demand that we only “look ahead”. On a so-reflexive-it's-almost-cellular level they have a sneering contempt for the past -- specifically their own past -- and live in yammering horror of being forced in the press, at the polls or in Actual Congressional Hearings (which I seem to remember Republicans had in gleeful, self-righteous multitudes when there was a Democratic President) to look back at where we were even mere days or weeks ago.

Because these delicate, cowardly Men of Iron Will, who are so casually profligate with the lives and limbs of others, would then risk catching a glimpse of what the rest of nation and the rest of the world can see all too clearly: Just how treacherously and catastrophically deep into darkness and madness the mindless, Christopathic Right has already dragged this country.