What we’re supposed to do right now
Or: why the actual goal is the goal
OK friends. It kind of feels like break-glass-in-case-of-emergency time. Like, junk was gross before and it's about to become open season on…anybody, let’s be real. The message I’m leaning on hasn’t changed, though. Because the truth of it hasn’t changed. Keep dreaming of things that are better than this. Not yesterday or last year. Nobody’s dreaming of leftovers. We’re dreaming of what we can turn leftovers into.
I named this newsletter after a video I watched months ago about fascism’s favorite propaganda technique. They argue in it that propaganda isn’t trying to convince you, it is trying to bore you into submission. The point, as we all now know, is to flood the zone and overwhelm our senses, keep us from resisting, and ultimately making the whole thing feel pointless.
The thing about the thing is that it isn’t always the thing. Sometimes it is what the thing is actually keeping us from.
The video used a simple illustration. Stalin made statues of himself and put them in city centers. And it wasn’t so that people would see them and go “gee, that dictator has a real point!” Statues aren’t rhetorical devices to convince us anything about the quality of the arguments or the sincerity of their political beliefs. The point of the statue is to constantly draw your attention so that every time you walk out your front door, you see his face and you can’t imagine a world without him in it.
That latter part is the central point. The statue fills the statue-sized imagination to keep us from dreaming of a better world than the fascist offers us.
Fascism is about keeping people from dreaming. So what is the most anti-fascist thing we can do but dream anyway.
It isn’t easy.
There is so much. And we know this already. All of the advice people give about maintaining humanity is good. Read poetry. Listen to music. Go to a comedy club. Leave the damn house. Make art with friends. Or strangers. Do yoga.
The thing about this advice is that it is only half-clear about why we must do it. We do get it intuitively, I suspect. That, in spite of the inhumanity coming out of the White House, there is a need to keep our own humanity. That tracks. But it is more than this. Resistance to fascism starts, not in the fight of the moment, but in the dream that is being obscured. The dream of justice and equity and decency and humanity.
We hold onto what we’re fighting for. Not just one regulation or a budget priority in particular. Nor for the simple partisan vagaries that supplant genuine thought for so much of our political debate. For the dream. A dream articulated by prophets like King, Romero, and Day. Who held us to a much higher standard than we hold one another.
Be well,
Drew
There are a lot of takes on the moment right now
I don’t know about you, but I find a lot of them are true enough right? Like, we read them and go “yeah, that sounds right.” They’re all vaguely believable. Yet we don’t necessarily feel any closer to getting anything worth getting, if that makes any sense. Like we know why a thing happens and we still say to our BFF, “I don’t understand how they can do this!” Like the popular question for years since What’s the Matter with Kansas? — “why do they vote against their own interests?” We hear why and still don’t get it. Anyway, here’s another take about why we keep doing this.
Has it occurred to you that the Supreme Court sucks?
Back in 2016, we heard people say, “don’t worry, the courts will protect us.” How foolish. There was no evidence that they would, other than they ask us to believe in the rule of law — even as the Supreme Court undermines it, degrades the law’s power to order us by increasing the power of individuals to order us. The problem isn’t the Court as an institution, but how a broken ideology about the law has compromised democracy throughout our entire legal structure. [IOW — there’s a hermeneutical flaw in how we all approach the law itself now.]
An unseen pioneer
My dear friend, Rebecca retired from professional ministry last week and hers is a story that is familiar and hidden — the abused pioneer who followed after the women who broke the glass ceiling. You know the script. A woman is elevated to the top, some scared people behave incredibly ugly about it, and the institution doesn’t know what to do about it. So they pretend it doesn’t happen. She endures the abuse and the institution keeps moving. Nothing to see here. And the pioneer finds her way in the wilderness. It isn’t a story of justice. But there is righteousness.
I’m on sabbatical and I’m not that good at it
What am I supposed to do with my time? How am I supposed to feel about it? Damn, there is no “supposed to” is there? That’s my problem…
dreaming is a newsletter about the brave act of dreaming in a culture of now. Join in the revolution.