The Doubletake Walk

The 38th day of Childwinter is called The Doubletake Walk, whatever that means. I don't know, but it gave me the opportunity to experiment with double-exposure imagery in AI.

I'm old, but that means I'm afforded a long view of current events, long enough to even border on history. My lifetime, short as it is in the long view of earth processes, evolution, and cultural development, has allowed me to watch the pendulum swing from the classic Great Society liberalism of JFK and LBJ, to the law-and-order conservatism of Nixon and Reagan, to the neo-liberalism of the Clintons and Obama, to the current MAGA neo-fascism of Trump.  I'm sure that the pendulum will swing back again and I'm quite unsure of exactly how, but I see and hear younger people who've only known adult life under the current set of conditions despair that the game is rigged and that things will never change. "We live in capitalism," Ursula K. LeGuin once said, "its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings." 

"Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

The current inequality in wealth distribution makes the moneyed capitalists and their elected stooges seem unstoppable, and that's exactly how they want to appear.  They've got the wealth, they've got the power, and there's nothing you can do about it, they want you to believe - you're better off just accepting it and not trying to change anything. But their folly is in ignoring impermanence, their supposition that things won't change.  It's like trying to ignore the tides. They're building what seems like an unpassable wall at high tide, thinking it will keep the others away forever, to only have the tide go out and the masses able to simply walk around their wall.  

Then those masses build their villages and homes at low tide, only to have the tide roll back up again and submerge everything they've accomplished.

Anyway, I'm already seeing cracks form in the seemingly invincible façade of MAGA neo-fascism. Just yesterday, House Republicans failed in their quixotic campaign to impeach Homeland Security Administrator Alejandro Mayorkas. This week, after loudly complaining for months about a crisis on the border, they effectively torpedoed the very legislation they've been demanding, laying bare their callous cynicism. Monday, an appeals court ruled that no, America doesn't have kings, and that an ex-president isn't above the law and is not immune from criminal prosecution. This week, House Republicans couldn't even pass their own bill to provide aid for Israel. 

None of these embarrassments are the death knell for conservatism, but as I described them above, they're cracks in the wall.  The tide is slowly turning and will eventually burst the cracked, weakened wall apart.

And then the tide will then turn again and leave the sunken edifice high and dry and exposed for all the world - and history - to see.