Fascism: The Ultimate HIGH!

America wants the fasces? America will get the fasces!

Tomorrow belongs to…well, not YOU. (Photo by Lola Robinson)

“Anarchy…great in the streets,” Greg Davis, OXBOW drummer intoned on the occasion of a mini-club riot activated by an OXBOW show at an anarchist club in Bradford, England. “Not so great in your living room.” The assemblage of red, tear-stained faces, and people pleading for us to go away was a welcome tableaux of politics in theory versus politics in actual practice.

More than welcome even, almost, well, beautiful. Because the human imagination never sees itself through to understand that the pictures of food on the menu always look better than the food on your plate.

So it is that Americans find themselves faced with a future that they’ve been flirting with, in one way or another, since the 1960s. Certainly, at the very least, when there’s talk about Making America Great Again, no one who is seriously invested in this… “idea”…is imagining that things were that great in 1966. Though if you’re James Ellroy 1963 was a pretty great year given that it saw the first burble of what’s flowered into what we have in 2023 with the extra-judicial killing of President John F. Kennedy.

His systematic denial of the reality of experience is stunning enough that evangelicals support a multiply divorced, accused sexual assaulter who believes that they are “pieces of shit.”

No, it’s pre-Civil Rights, pre-Jackie Robinson even, no matter how exciting he was. It was for the time that noted TV anti-progressive Archie Bunker proclaimed “guys like us we had it made.” Post-World War 2, a war fought against fascism, that saw America’s industrial might, infused with a population that happily did what it was told, delivering dreams to America at large. Empty freeways in the West where you could cruise your Caddy to a Lockheed factory gig to East Coast moves to Long Island (or New Jersey) for the newly upwardly mobile.

The unemployment rate back then? Well, it was 1.2 percent in 1944, even before the war was over. Was that great? Yeah, that was pretty great. And even if the American unemployment rate is 3.9 percent in 2023, no one thinks that is great. Largely, and to his credit for making a silk purse look like a sow’s ear, on account of former US President Donald Trump saying it is not so.

Much like the Steve Jobs-ian reality distortion field, the name given to Jobs’ ability to convince others to do the impossible, in his refusal to believe that limitations and/or challenges were even real, what Trump has wrought is a culture that features him as the sole arbiter of what’s up, down, right, wrong, real or not. His systematic denial of the reality of experience is stunning enough that evangelicals support a multiply divorced, accused sexual assaulter who believes that they are “pieces of shit.”

The fact that it was the Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post that ran this? Immaterial. It’s Trump against the establishment because who else would be positioning themselves to aid and abet this great man’s fall?

And once you cleave words from deeds and deeds from consequences, you have a field of play for any sort of flim-flam man of which Trump is a once in a generation champion. So when Devo sang “Freedom of choice/Is what you got/Freedom from choice/Is what you want” American can finally cheer as we stand on the edge of getting exactly that.

“The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left and it's growing every day, every single day.” — Senator Joseph McCarthy Donald Trump

That, which is not chosen blindly, but openly and freely. Trump promises, as part of his second presidential term, deportation raids, mass firings in the Justice Department, Muslim bans, anti-trans legislation that states that there are only two genders, termination of the Department of Education, and “freedom cities” for the homeless where they can be concentrated, in like…camps. For starters.

“Today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Trump recently said in a speech. Vermin “that lie and steal and cheat on elections. The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left and it's growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

And so it goes that the United States of America, grows even less so as the social media that we, ourselves, are presently participating in, breeds this kind of us vs. them-ism that has you framing your strongly worded counter to what I’ve written just now. Moreover the “freedom of the streets” that the Nazis once spoken of is being activated on our streets, brought to us by the self-same social media, and into our airplanes, freeways, and grocery stores.

America is fevered and losing its mind and it’s the vertigo of a Trump Reality Distortion Field that while possibly not totally the cause is most definitely a symptom. Because, and this is something that historians sometimes fail to note, it gives us pleasure, this idea of things being made “OK”. But the question always remains: OK for whom?

While I get that the answer is OK for us, that’s both an answer and not an answer at all. Also, it should be noted, none of this is shocking. That’s not where the shock value comes in. The shock value is in how many Americans are buying into this. Credit the zero sum game that Trump trades in.

“I do not know all the ins and outs of the legal arguments as most media coverage is about generating the story that Trump has been indicted, and for many people, that’s all they want to hear and don't seem to mind that this may be an unethical and dangerous precedent for use of governmental power in the United States,” says Martin Galinski, part of the MAGA mind and long time Trump supporter. So none of the charges that would disqualify Trump from enacting a large scale power grab hold any water for the truest and bluest of his fan base. And, in the end, justifies Trump’s reactive use of that same governmental power.

Interestingly enough, in professor Roger Eatwell’s book on fascism, he lays out how populations have, initially, freely chosen fascism by running down some of the “good” things fascism has given us. The 40-hour work week, women in the work place (this despite the prevailing belief that women should be at home), and workman’s comp were purportedly part of Mussolini’s program. This and what everyone choses to ignore until it’s too late: a strongly held belief in the transformative power of violence. Part and parcel of every single fascist effort.

However, after decades of conditioning, most Americans are, when all is said and done, much more than fine with this. Like January 6th. Like Charlottesville. Like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and QAnon. And because I know “they” will mention it, like BLM. Like Occupy. Like Antifa.

Years earlier, while looking down into an audience at an OXBOW show, I see a fight break out. Black Flag used to play through fights, heedless of this having anything at all to do with the art that they were creating. Fugazi would stop the show to correct the combatants, refusing to play until they stopped. On the occasion of an actual fight in the audience, I claim it and rush over to where two men are trying to kill each other, for reasons unknown to me.

Now if you remember Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival, the one where he had set his guitar on fire and was kneeling in front of it, his hands summoning the flames, this was the posture I adopted. Along with the soundtrack in my head that ran, “Kill. Each. Other.” Because if you’re killing each other? My work here is done.

Or, like Nick Cave sang in “Up Jumped the Devil”:

“Who's that dancing on the jailhouse roof?
Stamping on the ramping with a cloven hoof
Who's that dancing on the jailhouse roof?
Up jumped the Devil and said "Here is your man, I got proof"

This is where we are. This is where we’re going. And what keeps me alive these days? The anticipation of the future days when, through the rubble and the smoke, I can say: I told you so.

And oh, yeah: Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

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