DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY.

Exactly nine months ago today, the U.S. Capitol building experienced an unprecedented siege, spurred by an outgoing president’s antidemocratic attempts to cling to power.

Sorry it’s been a few days since my last post.

Before I proceed, I want to give you all a reading recommendation: do not read any histories about the fall of the Roman Republic. Mark Twain said that history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme. Well, when the rhyme is in the same exact meter and on the same exact line, that’s a whole lot of rhyming.

Delivering an inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews back in 1867, John Stuart Mill stated:

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

(The central line, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” has been wrongly attributed for 150 years to Edmund Burke, even by John F. Kennedy)

Hillary Clinton warned this week: “I'm astonished that more people don't see, or can't face, America's existential crisis.” When Hillary Clinton says something I not only agree with but Strongly And Totally Agree With, I worry.

Stuart Stevens, who I used to dislike politically, until events demonstrated to me that he was one of those Republicans I used to know and respect while disagreeing with them on many things, and had thought were long extinct until the Never-Trumpers stood up, said this recently on MSNBC: “My plea to Democrats would be to just understand what is at stake here. The problem King George had was he couldn’t imagine the creation of an American democracy, and we suffer from the same problem. We can`t imagine the ending of American democracy, but it can happen.”

Robert Kagan, a guy I have *really* disagreed with a lot, wrote a warning in the Washington Post. The most important line was this: “As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.”

How did we get here?

I just read Olivia Nuzzi’s interview with Stephanie Grisham. I’ve been one of those who looked at Grisham and her new book, as have others, as a kind of ultimate Trump Grift from a Trump Grifter. Turns out that’s right... and wrong.

For me, this is the money quote:

“By the time Trump became the Republican nominee, she said, “you’re in it, and you’ve been on this journey for a year with the same people, and, yes, a bunker mentality has set in. For people like me — and I’m not proud of this — you have a sick sense of pride. All the people who told you how terrible he was? You’re like, Oh? He’s the nominee, buddy! I’m not proud of that. And then he wins, and you get into the White House, and you’re in the White House.” She raised her eyebrows in an expression of awe. “I thought that they were the only ones who would ever get me there,” she said. “My lack of confidence in myself as a single mother and someone who has made mistakes in my past, I thought, Well, this is my only shot. Nobody’s gonna ever want me, really, but these people did. So I’ll stick around.”

That, I submit, is a perfect example of what Mill was speaking of back in 1867. And I’ll bet good money that you - like me - can think of events in your life (probably not as consequential as joining the Trump White House) where we did exactly the same thing. Hopefully, if we did, we have taken steps - as it turns out she has done with this book - to say “I’m sorry” and explain exactly what it is that we’re apologizing for. To “make amends.”

Charlie Sykes put his finger on it in this morning’s posting (at least for me): “But there is a pattern here that seems distinctive to our time: the panting after celebrity, the sheer brazenness of the flim-flammery, the dominance of star-bleeping over substance, and the embrace of charlatans by the rich and powerful.” Then he calls where we are not The Gilded Age but The Grifted Age. What he’s writing about is what Cicero was writing about regarding the end of the Roman Republic and how it happened.

Eric Boehlert put it well in his Substack post today (“Press Run,” well worth checking out): “America isn’t guaranteed a happy ending, although most of us grew up with the shared assumption that it was. After more than two-and-a-half centuries as one of the world’s thriving democracies, the United States truly does face an existential crisis, as conservatives, fueled by Trump’s GOP, walk away from democratic rule and embrace the chaos of authoritarianism.”

There’s only two of the “Star Wars” movies I really like - the first two. Episodes 4 and 5 for those who didn’t figure out after the third one that the whole thing was sliding down into the massive puddle of Gloop that is Amurrikin Korporate Kultur.

At the risk of rising laughter from all of you over my attempt at finding profundity in a piece of popular art, to me both those episodes deal with learning the answer to the question “Who am I?” In the first one, Luke learns “Trust the Force.” To me “the Force” is something different (but similar to) from how it’s described in the movies, “what binds everything together,” although that might be right. To me it’s the inner True Self we have to discover in our lives - okay, maybe that’s closer to the original definition than I thought. Whatever. But the journey of life, what Joseph Campbell (who has fallen out of favor recently, but you should definitely read his book) called “The Hero’s Journey,” comes down to learning to be a good and worthwhile human being, at the end. Someone you like meeting in the morning, there in the bathroom mirror.

And that’s hard to do.

Darth Vader says it perfectly to Luke in his invitation to join him: “The Dark Side is easier.”

It is.

The past few days, with all the news one hates reading, and other events in my life I have to respond to, I engaged in analysis of some “personal history” over how I arrived here, here in this week in 2021.

Life is a series of choices, inflection points, which only show up really clearly as what they are in the rearview mirror. Hindsight is 20/10 and all that.

But the thing that struck me was to realize that all the choices I had made that were the ones that really got me here, as I am now, doing what I do now, were the Hard Choices back at the time. Choices where the outcome wasn’t clear at the time the choice was made. Choices that involved some sacrifice of ease and comfort and safety. Some of them, at the time, felt like deciding to jump off a cliff without a parachute and hope for the best.

But those were all Good Choices. I like where I arrived. It was worth the effort.

And all the choices that - in retrospect - took me off the path that got me here? They involved no sacrifice of ease, comfort, or safety. In fact, they were easy, they made me feel comfortable, and according to everyone around me at the time, they were safe. And every last one of them, in the end, put me in a place where the choice to choose the right thing, to get back to getting here - the longer I took to get to that point of admitting I had to make that choice, it was always harder that it would have been had I admitted it needed deciding earlier. And the reason for the delay is usually either flat-out denial that the need for such a decision exists, or fear of losing all the “nice” part of the “easy, comfortable and safe.” Most of us live in fear of losing what we have, what we know - no matter how shitty it might really be - by reaching for something we might even doubt really exists.

Ease, comfort and safety. Those are all nice things. They feel really good. Get “enough” of that - however you define it - and you can convince yourself that all those pangs you feel when you wake up in the middle of the night with Heavy Thoughts aren’t the important things they really are. If that wake-up gets bad enough, take a pill and ask for more of what you’ve been doing in the morning. You can live in the The Grifted Age.

It’s a funny thing, but looking back I see that once I learned to recognize the road I was on, the difficult choices didn’t become any less difficult, but they were easier to deal with. That comes from experience - if I did jump off a cliff along the way, I must have been wearing one of those soaring suits cliff flyers have. I survived that jump - I’ll probably survive this one too.

Our problem today, the problem we’ve been looking at all year, the thing all those folks I quoted above are talking about, is on us because of a long series of nice, easy, comfortable, safe, WRONG choices. The kind of choices Stephanie Grisham is now apologizing for. Society is the sum total of a group of individuals, and social decisions are the sum total of all those individual decisions. “We have met the enemy and they is us,” as Pogo said.

There’s a cartoon I found in the New Yorker several years ago, that I haven’t forgotten. Two guys talking to each other, one an Obvious Intellectual (he’s the one in the corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows), says: “Yes, those who fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it, but those of us who understand are forced to go along!”

All of this is the result of my reaction to watching all the sausage-making in public over the last months. If you’re hoping I came up with some nice One Step Solution, you’re going to be disappointed. All I could come up with was remembering what Dick Best, the Guy Who Changed History at the Battle of Midway, told me when I once asked him how they got through those six months between Pearl Harbor and Midway - a time I think of as one of the worst “bad times” in our history. “We just thought about what was the next thing we had to do, and did it, and hoped for the best.”

There are essentially three alternatives one can opt for when making a choice: do nothing and let things continue as they are; look for “what’s the opportunity here for me?”; or do the right thing - or at least try hard to do that.

I’ve definitely done the first two, many times. And every time, the end result was they didn’t work out. The only one that really works is that one where you take the step off of what appears to be a cliff, and hope.

It’s the only one that lets me like what I see in the bathroom mirror, first thing after waking up.

All we can do is “keep on keeping on” - cliches become cliches because they’re true.

When Darth Vader invites Luke to join the Dark Side, his response is to let go - he falls a loooong way, then goes sliding down the chute, headed toward complete destruction. Except he comes out at the end to find exactly the thing he needs to Get Away Successfully.

So, that’s my advice for us, in the face of what Mr. Boehlert describes so well:

“America’s centuries-old grand experiment is being threatened like never before. It’s a defining crisis our Founding Fathers never could have imagined. It’s how democracy dies. And yes, it can happen here.”

I’ll take Luke’s choice: let go. Do what comes next and hope for the best.

After letting this marinate awhile, I was ready to post it when I read the first of a series of articles Baratunde Thurston is writing about the country. And he wrote this, which just totally sums up what I am on about here, so I’ll close with this:

“For some, the 2016 election was the wake up call. For others it was the January 6 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. For most, it still hasn’t come. That moment when you acknowledge that all of this—the relative stability of a relatively democratic society where we generally resolve conflicts with words and lawsuits—can disappear.

“One of the greatest threats to American democracy is our passive assumption that it is destined to exist. It is not. There is no law, physical or metaphysical, that says there must be such a thing as the United States of America. There is no guarantee that the place we call America will resemble in any way the lofty aspirations of the best interpretations of its founding. Many populations in this land have known this from the beginning. Ask a forcibly displaced indigenous person, and they’ll tell you that America has never been what Brand America has promised. Too many of us are operating under the dangerous assumption that authoritarianism and white supremacist fascism can’t happen here. It can. It’s happening already.”

And with that knowledge, one has to act. As Yoda told Luke: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

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