2024 - 309 DAYS THAT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD

309 days from now, the most important election since that of 1860 will take place here in the world’s oldest democratic constitutional republic.

Tonight, my friend James Fallows wrote:

“Three hundred and nine days from now, America’s prospects will look very different than they do as we begin this year—different one way or another. The results will depend on an electorate whose downcast mood contrasts with the strongest economic growth in decades. In the starkest way since Bush v. Gore in 2000, the outcome may be in the hands of a Supreme Court that is less trusted and more politicized than in that era, and far more visibly corrupt. Public information will depend on a mainstream press still struggling to cope with a movement like Trump’s, and social media companies that barely try.

“The years after 2024 will depend on what happens to us in these upcoming days, and on what we do in response.”

Tonight, I celebrated New Year’s Eve 2024 by watching the restored director’s 3 hour and 30 minute version of “Spartacus,” the story of the first fight for freedom.

The thing that got me, watching it, was the extended bits about the slave army: the men, women, and children, each participating, each part of the community that was the army, each doing what they could, whether it was gladiatorial warrior or the one who herded the cattle. They were all together. In freedom and community.

That’s how we’re going to have to be in these coming 309 days.

I have no doubt that the “professional Democrats” of the campaign will be mostly like the “professional Democrats” I knew 45 years ago, who pissed me off so much I left that trade.

Forget what the Biden Campaign is going to do, which shows every indication of getting off its dead ass and onto its dying feet too late. We don’t need to start the campaign in March. We need to start it TODAY.

This is OUR FIGHT.

If they won’t do it, we need to. After all, it’s our country and our lives we’re trying to save.

Forget the Biden Campaign. Worry about the People’s Campaign. We all know what we can do, and we know what the stakes are in our personal lives. The lofty ideals are what this campaign is about. But it’s about us being able to live the lives with our families that we want, in accordance with those lofty ideals.

And nobody is going to save those ideals but us.

2024 is guaranteed to be the most difficult year any of us have ever lived through. The outcome is existential for the country and the life we have grown up in.

When I think of what’s to come, I think back to the six months between Pearl Harbor and Midway. Yes, there was a lot of defeat and the time is remembered rightly as being dark. But in all that darkness, the people facing those battles gave every last drop they had. The enemy was slowed, then surprised, and in the end stopped.

Dick Best, the truest American Hero in the best sense of those words I was ever privileged to know, told me that when he was awakened at 0200 hours on June 4, the day he would fly into history, he pulled out his copy of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, and turned to “Henry V,” and read The St. Crispin’s Day Speech in which Henry the king declares that every man who stands with him that day is his brother. And then my friend went and did his duty, and all of us have grown up and lived all our lives enjoying the benefits that came from what Dick Best and his band of brothers did that day.

I think the St. Crispin’s Day Speech is a good way to start 2024, and the best version of that was given by Kenneth Branagh in his version of the play. It’s spoken in the dirt and the mud of the battlefield, when Henry’s army has good reason to fear the outcome of what is about to happen. I think it’s probably as close to how it was really spoken as any version has been.

Henry V - St. Crispin's Day Speech

The next 309 days are going to be days we cannot foretell.

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

I personally look forward to this year, standing with the band of brothers and sisters that exists here, at That’s Another Fine Mess.

Happy New Year to us all.

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