pretending not to be fascists
Someone tries to shoot the orange man and misses. On Twitter half the people you follow are condemning political violence and the other half are making jokes, like Condemn all political science. A progressive scientist you follow who’s always angry retweets something along the lines of the problem with political violence is the liberals condemn it and the fascists use it, so it always lends itself to fascism. People are dying (here, there, everywhere). Your brokerage account waddles fatly onward and upward. Privatized power grids flicker in heat waves. US-made bombs split children apart. It’s only political violence when it’s violence against politicians. People are dying and you are scrolling through linen dresses. You are scrolling through silk tops. You are scrolling through body oils and expensive knives. The best knives are German and Japanese. You joke in a letter you send to a friend who wrote to you about birds and becoming bourgeois, Why are the best knives from the Axis powers? Everyone is invoking Hitler. The orange man picks a soft-faced bad man even though the soft-faced bad man called him America’s Hitler, once. Now the soft-faced bad man says his previous remarks were stupid. Everyone makes mistakes in their youth (thirties). Everyone makes mistakes in their youth and goes to Yale Law School. In your youth you played a game called Secret Hitler a lot. In college and then after. In the San Francisco and Brooklyn high-rise apartments of your coder friends, it was a mainstay of TV console shelves, shoved next to Catan and boxes of playing cards. Wasn’t it fun to lie through your teeth? Polite circles of people sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor devolved into shouting, pushing, crying. The fascists pretending not to be fascists in order to pass their policies and get Hitler elected chancellor. The game wouldn’t end for the liberals if a couple of fascist policies got through. Those policies allowed — well, forced — certain excesses of executive power. The president picks somebody to kill. If the president correctly picked Secret Hitler, the liberals won the game. What kind of games will your kids play?
I learned this week: after George “segregation forever” Wallace got shot in the stomach 5x he felt bad about racism and apologized to the Black community (Smithsonian)
image: “The Boxer,” Umberto Boccioni