Ball goes up. Ball comes down.

Gravity wins, every time.

A commentator over on Gilliard asks a fair question:

“I share everyone's frustration, but what can individuals like us do? We speak out. Write Congress. Put bumperstickers on the car. Go to anti-war marches. But what's left? Should we stop posting on Kos and Gilly? What good would that do?”

IMHO, what is left is to persist.

See, I believe in reality. In objective reality: I have too many friends and family members who have passed, and have seen too many kids brought in to the world to believe – like the Fundies do – that the world is God’s Pinata, and that we can just keep beating on it and beating on it until it breaks…

…and then the Rapture comes and all the yummy-yummy Apocalyptic candy comes pouring out and all of the Good Evangelical Toe-Counters go to Heaven, and all the Cool Kids burn in Hell.

Fuck that. I do believe that there is more going on in our big, ol’ Universe than we can even begin to comprehend, and if we survive a few more millennia then we’ll have scraped together enough maturity and hard-earned wisdom to get a chip in that game.

But for now, this by the late Richard P. Feynman, a smarter man than me and thee will ever be:

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”

So that, for me, is the Big Strategery. Fine, but what are the, y’know, “tactics.” I want to DO something. I want to WIN something. Like Churchill’s motto: “Action this day.”

Alright, I’ll tell you, but it’s a Big Liberal Secret, so for God’s sake don’t go yapping it all over.

Reality is an objective thing; you throw the rock up, the rock comes back down and I don’t care how much praying and harp-twanging you do…that sleek bitch Gravity will always have her way with us. And Thermodynamic. And Evolution. And Human Nature.

Ahhh, human nature. See, this is not a fight between us and the Right Wing of the GOP…this is a fight between Moderates and Ultras that we keep letting ourselves get dragged into.

Every time some White House Press Rodent shoves a mike into a Progressive’s face and asks about Pat Robertsons’ or Tom DeLay’s or Jerry Falwell’s latest Death Cult Projectile Vomiting, our answer should to be, “Look, obviously Tom-N-Jerry are out of their fucking minds. They’re as dangerous as barrel of rabid wolverines set loose in a kindergarten classroom, which is why we Progressives want nothing to do them. However the only reason these lunatic demagogues are allowed to run cancerously wild through our country is that people like Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snow and Dick Lugar and George Bush could never be elected Assistant County Highway Stripe Painter without them. So why don’t we go over to their offices now and ask them what they think of, say, threatening judges.”

This is not a fight between the Liberal Media and the Pretty Hate Machine of Fox/CNN/Bile Radio, because there is no fucking Liberal Media. This is a game of beanbag between the Animatronic Haircuts of the MSM who have a little corral of gelded ex-progressives that they trot out to Minstrel Show for them, and the Axis Of Limbaugh.

And that’s where the persistence of Human Nature intersects with the persistence of Causality. Because the Thurson Howell III’s of the GOP believe the Doctrine of Zero Government and the Jim Jones wing of the party believe in a Theocratic Big Government Shining Path that leads from the White House to Paradise.

Both ideas are patently insane, and both are starting to run up on the rocks of cruel Causality, which is why the Fundies hate Science with such a passion.

So for example, we are fucked in Iraq for a hundred different reasons.
Because the whole rancid mess was built on lies.
Because Bush and his junta took cruel, calculated advantage of people’s honest patriotism and darkest fears to pimp a Global Neocon Empire by tarting up to look like a war on terrorism.
Because Bush thought we could get in and out over a long weekend, fast enough and with enough Shock and Awe (and man, you sure don’t hear that phrase a lot any more do you?) to flashblind the world to the crime he was committing right in front of six billion witnesses.
Because the Administration never bothered to think past pulling down a statue for a teevee camera, and landing President Flight-suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

We are fucked because they were stupid and arrogant, but we’re pandimensionally clusterfucked simply because of the persistence of Human Nature. What we are doing in Iraq will come back to haunt us for generations because the Neocons thought Dogma could trump human nature, and it never, ever does.

Ditto Social Security.
Ditto judicial nominations.
Ditto Bolton.
Ditto “energy policy”.
Ditto our Brobdingnagian debt.
Ditto Terry Schiavo.
Ditto torture becoming as American as Apple Pie.
Ditto Tony Blair for that matter.

Iraq was a fire burning at a neighbor’s house, set by one group of dogmatists in the Republican Party. The Moderates could look out the window at the blaze, cluck their tongues and go back to reading David Brooks’ and William Kristol’s latest experiments in explosive diarrhea.

But the conflagration wasn’t started by a particular policy: it was started by the hubristic fantasy that somehow if you can just put Reality in a bag and hammersack it with a crowbar long enough, eventually Reality itself with change and you can get away with anything.

It is the “reasoning” of a child or a drunk or the feeble-minded. Of an immature culture that doesn’t want to clean up after the party. It’s Homer Simpson running for chief sanitation guy under the slogan, “Can’t Someone Else Do It?”

But now the fire has reached the Moderate's house. Now their clothes are smoking, and their kids are in danger and their grandmother on a pension is upstairs asleep. It’s not just poor people, or ay-rabs or uppity Negroes or feminazis or tree-huggers.

Shit! Now it’s me!

And our job is to name for them the True Rumplestiltskin Name of the arsonist that’s burning their world down. Show them that the serial killers stalking the night and strangling their dreams are none other than the leaders of their own party.

Our job is to shove their faces right in to that grotesque reality that they are so hysterically desperate to avoid – rub their pink little truffle-hog snouts right on the run-amok tumor that they have allowed to take over their party – and keep asking, over and over again, “Why is this OK with you?”

Make them explain. Force them to take a position.

And I know that we don’t control Giant Media, but every bit of this Secret Plan can be scaled down to the local level. To your local paper. To the handful of moderate conservatives you know. Because as I’ve said before, this is not a game of millions. This is about 100,00 votes.

This is about pushing and pushing and getting discouraged, and getting drunk saying fuck it, and taking a break and like Rick Blaine, getting back into the fight. About visiting your favorite writers and thinkers when your battery goes a little dead and you need a jump-start. Go ahead and get discouraged every now and then, because everyone does, but don’t stay discouraged, because we need every able body in this fight, and because we really can win.

Really.

This isn’t a sprint. This is a marathon, and one that we’re running behind only by inches. And it’s one we can win because our policies are better, our ethos is better, our women are waaaay hotter and because Reality, Human Nature and Causality are all our natural allies.

So what is left is to persist. To get up in the faces of the Moderates and the Media at any and every opportunity and loudly say:

It’s your Party.
It’s your disaster.
So, Mr. Personal Responsibility, what are you going to do about it?