Waymarks of the Otherland, 22nd Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): "If it sounds to you like I am an alarmist," Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said, "that is because I am ringing an alarm."

I catch myself sometimes thinking that maybe I'm overreacting. I've lived 70-plus years on this blue marble and despite all sorts of dire warnings and breathless political hyperbole, the nation hasn't turned communist, or fascist, or fallen into sinful decadence like some Babylonian empire. Every election, we're told, is the most important of our lifetime. People say a lot of shit, I say a lot of shit, but the next day the sun always rises in the east, people get up and go to work, and the world is an awful lot like it was the day before.

So am I really witness to the end of the amerikan democratic republic? Is the Stable Genius really a wannabe fascist dictator? Does it matter that he says he isn't? Will future elections be either cancelled or rendered meaningless by voter suppression like in some tin-pot foreign autocracy?

After deep consideration and carefully looking at the available data, I have to say the answer is "yes." This really may be the end of our republic. My skepticism is only based on my conditioned reflex that "Everything will be alright." But like cancer or a heart attack, everything is alright until suddenly it isn't.

Congratulations readers, we've lived long enough to witness the end of amerika. We're watching, as Burroughs once said, "The last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams."

Despite Pritzker's explicit statement to stay away, the Stable Genius still plans to send more than 200 Homeland Security officers to a Navy base outside Chicago to begin a sustained immigration crackdown there. He fired a member of the Federal Reserve Board, despite the fact that he has no constitutional right to do so and jeopardizes the Reserve’s independence, and hence credibility. RFK, Jr., the Stable Genius' Secretary of Health and Human Services, fired the Stable Genius' newly appointed head of the CDC for not going along with recommendations to restrict access to proven vaccines, despite the fact that a Secretary has no right to fire a Presidential appointee. Each of these items are bad, but individually, none of them are end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it bad. And when is the news ever not all bad?

But Pritzker really put it all into perspective. Regarding the Chicago occupancy, be said what the Stable Genius is doing is "unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American." Then he really got to the point. "This is not about fighting crime," or the Fed's interest rates or vaccine safety, for that matter. "This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections."

"This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story," Pritzker said. "This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse-race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab."

"Mr. President, do not come to Chicago," he insisted. "You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy. Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power."

Pritzker conceded, "This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year."  But then he added an explicit warning to the Stable Genius, "You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' Humbly I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go." 

"This is one of those times."