Letters from an American, October 16, 2022
… Republicans doubling down on Voter Fraud and willingness to accept the results of any election they don’t win…
In an interview this morning with _CNN’s_ Dana Bash, Arizona Republican nominee for governor Kari Lake refused to say that she would accept the results of the upcoming election– unless she wins. Former president Trump said the same in 2020, and now more than half of the Republican nominees in the midterm elections have refused to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election because, they allege, there was voter fraud. This position is an astonishing rejection of the whole premise on which this nation was founded: that voters have the right to choose their leaders.
… i have a copy of this book on my Kindle… i haven’t read it yet, but i may cue it up next… i could do with a little uplifting… i love Nick Cave, though a recent entry on The Read Hand Files, claiming Blonde as his all time favorite movie shook me a little… still… there is so much that seems good in him…
Anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is simply living an unconsidered life. Not only that, but by doing so they are denying themselves the obvious benefits of self-forgiveness. Though, of course, the hardest thing of all is to forgive oneself… One sure path to self-forgiveness is to arrive at a place where you can see that your day-to-day actions are making the world a measurably better place, rather than a worse place — that is pretty simple stuff, available to all — and to arrive at this place with a certain amount of humility.
Nick Cave, Via Maria Popova
!Ay! by Lucrecia Dalt gets an 8.6 as best new music… i will have to listen to this one when i get home as the internet is so abysmal out here…
The Colombian musician sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with. It’s philosophically daring, technically ambitious, and a joy to experience.
The Unheeded Warning… Walter Rosenberg/Rudolf Vrba escapes Auschwitz and tries to tell the world what is going on… several hundred thousand jews are saved, but many more could have been if the world had believed what he and his fellow escapee were saying… we humans have a tendency to doubt reports of the horrific and then turning away when the truth of it becomes hard to escape… i know this feeling… it’s the “I do’t want to get involved feeling,” a kind of security that whatever evil it may be is not going to reach into my life… but if i do something, it might…
Information, Vrba learned, is not knowledge. Before humans will act, they not only have to have the facts; they must also believe them. “I knew, but I didn’t believe it,” said the French Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, when asked about the Holocaust. “And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”
… and, in shades of “Facts don’t matter, what people belive matters”…
Rudolf Vrba fought that impulse, with only partial success. Today, his story has something profound to tell us: The first line of defense against evil and catastrophe is truth, but the truth alone is not enough. It needs believers who will not look away.
A tribute to Robbie Coltrane… we named our cat after Rubeus Hagrid… our cat is a gentle giant channeling Hagrid in so many ways… Ruby, as we call him is constantly mistaken to be a girl cat when people hear his name, until we explain… i had suspected that would be a problem when my wife hit upon the name… but the name fit, once you understood it, so it stuck…
The End of the Good Republicans
Just look at the Good Republican governors (several of whom I’ve been championing for years): Chris Sununu, Doug Ducey, Brian Kemp, and Glenn Youngkin. None of them were overtly opposed to Donald Trump. But they didn’t jump on the election denial bandwagon and, for the most part, still sounded like the decent conservatives of yore—just with an extra side of red meat.
But now every single one of them is campaigning either for or with an election-denying lunatic. Ducey, along with the Republican Governors Association, has thrown in with Kari Lake. Sununu has embraced election conspiracist Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. Kemp is campaigning with the pro-coup GOP nominee for lieutenant governor and supporting the supremely unqualified and scandal-ridden Herschel Walker.
… this has strange echos with the Auschwitz escapee link above… i feel the gloom descending and not enough alarm bells going off…
Over time, the whole mutually reinforcing, mutually radicalizing process creates the conditions necessary for 70 percent of the Republican party to sincerely believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president due to a rigged election. It’s hard to blame voters for believing a lie when every politician they see and media personality they trust is repeating it.
But The Republican Triangle of Doom™ runs in the other direction. And the reality is that these supposedly Good Republicans aren’t going to drag the party toward them. They’re the ones who are going to move. After all, the hard-right MAGA types aren’t the ones compromising.
… the article at the end laments, “The Good Republicans are gone. Probably for good.”… and, so, what is the answer… current Republicans who can’t stomach it have to move to the independent lane and campaign to get Democrats elected and possibly to build a new party free of the rancid ideas and behaviors of the far right…