The "We're All Fucked Anyway" Chorus Never Changes Its Tune

 

This is a post I wrote in April.

April of 2005.  During the depths of the Dubya Regime.  

For those of you doing the math, that's +17 years ago.  Longer than the entire time I spent in primary and secondary education (I skipped a year.)   Longer than any job I have ever had lasted.  Nearly twice as long as my first marriage lasted.

So, y'know, a long time ago.

See if any of it still rings true to you.  And go read the original comments if you want to see what a genuine 2005 spam swarm looked like.

No, this will not save us.

Loser-talk from the “We’re all fucking” crew tends to pop up on the internets like recurrent herpes every now and then. KennyBabes (among others) in the comment's over at Gilliard put the rebuttal to such to pretty succinctly:

“Dont talk to me, show me. Stand next to me at the protest, help your progressive city council candidate, or dogcatcher beat the asshole incumbent.”

Amen.

I mean seriously, why do these people bother? 

They shamble from blog to blog like that one-trick-pony cartoon character Glum, from the terrible and long-forgotten "Adventures of Gulliver", moaning “We’re all doooomed! We’ll never make it out of here alive!” Why are you expending all that energy to butt-scoot your idiot meme around anyway? Why are you so bent on evangelizing hopelessness? If it's that bad, shit, go quietly eat a bullet -- or another dozen couch-potato Doritos-and-Dove-Bars MRIs -- and quit annoying the grown-ups.

Churchill said, “For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else.” So why not listen to the man actually understood what it was like to be backed up against the wall by real Nazis?  The guy who “marshaled the English language to save Western Civilization” and…

…go to a local beat meeting.
…or volunteer to be an election judge.
…or help your local food pantry or shelter organization, especially when they lobby pols.
…you alderman (or whatever you have) probably has periodic ward meetings, open to all. So does your reps: state and federal.
…during budget time, your CLEO (Chief Local Elected Official) probably has to have public hearings and commentary. Go. Speak.
…city council. It’s free and can be more fun than watching the geek eat a rat at a low-rent circus freak show.
…your local school council decides whether or not kids are going to be taught Science or rank superstition. Should probably look in to that.
…if you are reading this, you have a keyboard and an attitude. Write to your elected officials, and remember not to fucking swear.
…hold a meet-up in your Very Own House!

And when you get sick of the petty infighting of some of these groups, run to become an officer and make them get it right. Or quit for awhile, and watch porn, or go to the beach, or fling shurikens at cardboard cutouts of Jerry Falwell, or go to Casablanca and open a saloon, or whatever.

Then get rested and tag back in to the ring at some other point, ‘cause we need you.

And if you are waiting for the Great Socialist Uprising or The Green Revolution to catch on like a prairie-fire before you get involved, then you might as well wait for Nikola Tesla to leap from the grave and be declared the King of Magnetism and use his amazing powers to reformat the hard drive of Basic Human Nature.

It ain’t gonna happen.

If you are hold your skirts above all the mud and tears and imperfection of real politics, well, good luck with that because you are letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, or the sufficient, and ceding the field of battle to actual Bad Guys by default.

Or you are just too fucking lazy to be bothered and are rationalizing away your civic sloth, in which case, STFU.

Or you’re new to the game. I was too, once. Everybody was. Post-pubescence snapped me right out of my own particular, utopian Randite rapture, but I managed to keep my humor and my killer pecs. And some considerable portion of my passion.

Or you’re just fucking tired. I hear you, friend. I hear you loud and clear. Only you know how much you can carry and when it gets too much so I guess, like the song says, “Lean on me.” Go rest for awhile. Find somebody nice and do something naughty. Take a little vacation and don’t worry so much. Come back a Happy Warrior, sword honed, ready to take heads.

We’ll still be here.

It 17 years later, and much has changed.  

Glenn Greenwald is Tucker Carlson's wacky sidekick on Carlson's White Power Hour.  Matt Taibbi has fallen down a substack rabbit hole and is never coming back.  Bill Maher is a Liberal-hating libertarian crank.  Andrew Sullivan is back to being a Liberal-hating libertarian crank.   MSNBC has anointed a bunch of unreconstructed Bush Regime dead-enders as the official spokesmodels for the Resistance.  David Brooks is still cranking out the same Both Siderist dreck for The New York Times that he was cranking out for them 17 years ago.

And there is more.  So much more that this post would have to be 100 times longer just to cover the lowlights.

And yet you and I are still here.  

Still shouting as loud as our tiny platforms will permit.  

Still pushing as hard as our aging bones will allow

Well how about that?

Still Crazy After All These Years