‘The K***s Are in a Panic’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

[Trigger alert: The following article quotes from antisemitic posts that have been published in recent days. I apologize.]

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Today marks the start of an era of bounty and happiness, although I’ll be honest with y’all and remind you that the road will surely be hard and draining at times.
 
But, at least my unborn son will come into a world ruled by a GREAT MAN that only comes around once every century or so.—columnist “Marcus Cicero,” Infostormer web site, “Victory Is Ours!“

Those who spend life’s precious heartbeats as a way to calculate how many people they hate have until recently tended to keep their communications in the shadows. One had to look for their articles. One needed to know that such hatred existed in order to know where to look for their articles and blog posts. Often, those web sites would turn out to be defunct by the time an amateur like me would look for them.

It was as if those who hate full-time knew that there was something impolite about what they felt, so they kept it behind a locked door and only opened it with a secret handshake.

That day is done. With his campaign for U.S. President and his election yesterday, it no longer matters whether or not Donald Trump himself holds these thoughts in his heart or not: some (many? all?) of his supporters do. I do not think it is all.
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Today in History: Nov. 9

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Us versus them. It was served with our breakfast cereal, our school lunches, and the nightly news watched during dinner. The Cold War was a fact, a background noise, a tinnitus-like hum heard 24/7, sometimes from far away and sometimes next door. Its removal seemed to make us aware that it had always been there, how loud it was, and that it had been driving us all insane.

The Cold War’s end could be said to have started on this date in 1989 as citizens of East Berlin started to spontaneously destroy the Berlin Wall (photo at top), a barrier erected in 1961 to divide that beautiful city.
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It Can’t Happen Here, Can It?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip’s election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend. “All right. Hell with this country, if it’s like that.”—Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

The title begs the question: what is the “It” that can’t happen here? The free, democratic election of a fascist (lowercase F, even though any difference in degree or style of fascism is truly no difference at all)? Or any movement to resist it after it takes power?

Sinclair Lewis gives one succinct answer at the end of the second chapter of his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “The hell it can’t.” In the chapter, several of the leading lights of life in fictional Fort Beulah, Vermont, are conversing and considering the campaign promises of U.S. Senator Buzz Windrip, who is considering a run for the Democratic Party nomination against President Franklin Roosevelt.
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