Lists for the bad times
As people move through the various stages of grief, over what the U.S. did to itself this week, and speculation as to what it will do to the world next, there is no shortage of advice out there on how to do that.
"Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement." — Albert Camus
I may have chosen a good time for a blog rebrand. I got this domain years ago for a writing experiment that never happened. I do that every so often, let the caffeine enthusiasm take over and see where the journey goes. Using it for my daily driver blog only dawned on me a few weeks ago, perhaps the result of some gremlin in the subconscious who paid more attention to the bookies predictions than the poll takers. This may not be the last election post-mortem, but it will be the final pity party post.
As we enter Friday of The Bad Week, the dissapointed and despondent are gasping for new models of being and there's no shortage of advice givers out there offering it. A lot of people have rediscovered Timothy Snyder's classic from the last Trump term, On Tyranny. Published in 2017, it hasn't aged a day. I was re-reading parts on Wednesday as the results hit my American-living-in-GMT ears throughout the suitably dark and cloudy day, in the back garden over coffee, later on a buy, and then at a suitably under-populated SE London pub around dusk. It was the book for the day, and possibly the one for our times. But you've got to read the whole thing, people. Each short chapter starts with a rule for the new world and there are 20 of them in the thin volume, he calls it a pamphlet instead of a book, invoking the early pamphleteers of various revolutions past. When I was keen on this kind of manifesto self-publishing back between the mid '90s and early aughts, we would have called them 'zines. But people need to read the whole thing. So many people on the socials I still pay attention to are sharing screenshots of the first rule: "Do not obey in advance." We need to fast forward, we are beyond that now. You should be readying yourself for Rule 6: "Be wary of paramilitaries."
“Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” ― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
There is a proliferation of post-election advice for the distraught among us on how to process the new reality. A lot of it is rubbish, but I'm just not going to get into those, I'm not trying to start a fight here. Instead, here's some material that may or may not be worth your while, but is generally not bad, along with or followed by my own dubious takes...
