Fight The Future?

If you are looking to host a pity party, you got the wrong guy. I spent 29 years in courtrooms representing people at the lowest point in their lives, battling to help them turn things around. That’s what I’m going to do with this. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of fight left.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 7, 2024

Lots of chest thumping among the usual suspects: roaring defiance into an empty room; sympathetic magic adherents among the “rational” (“you gotta still believe and fight the good fight!”). People who honestly sound as unhinged as MAGA, offering no real plan to do anything except to insist everyone smoke the same cigarettes as me (“(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”). And fight! On…Twitter, or someplace….

The Lovely Wife kindly pointed out (because I was complaining again of being a stranger in a strange land, “With an alien people clutching their gods,” an attitude quite frankly selfish and self-indulgent), that the race was a close one in the popular vote. Which meant we were hardly alone in our convictions. Reason enough to keep calm and carry on.

But “fight”? Fight what? Fight whom? Bludgeon my metaphorical foes until I can lock them up? I don’t know who noticed, but Jack Smith is resigning for the same reason Robert Mueller didn’t indict Trump: the DOJ won’t prosecute a sitting President. This is pretty much why the states elect AG’s and DA’s, but we don’t have that system at the federal level. At best we have post-Watergate “reforms,” apparently. How much of that is law and how much “tradition” I’m not clear on. But when the POTUS appoints the AG, and can fire that person at will, a DOJ prosecution of the POTUS is pretty much a null set. Not to mention the obvious lack of public support for such a thing evidenced by this election. 

Majority rules, after all; and it is a representative government, as Molly Ivins liked to remind us. Public support for prosecutions is still an important part of prosecutions.

All the critics of Trump who warned he’d fire Smith the moment his hand came off the Bible didn’t stop for a moment to consider this possibility. Which tells you the quality of the opposition to MAGA. I.e., it’s not that different from MAGA. Which is where I check out.

American politics is, and always has been, a fistfight. I love to cite Phineas Fogg traveling the world and crossing the American west in the 19th century, only to find himself in a town engulfed in a riot. Except it isn’t a riot, but a political campaign; for who is be the town’s fig catcher.  Call it a metaphor. Same as it ever was.

I’m not going to quit voting. I’ve been voting for Democrats in Texas since 1973, when the default setting in Texas was still yellow dog Democrats. LBJ said he’d given the South away for a generation when he did the right thing. He just didn’t specify which generation, because mine was just seeing its last members born that year, and the newest ones since aren’t really showing too many signs of a political shift from before the Civil Rights Act. I suspect more than enough voters still didn’t want to elect a “n——-,” and even more couldn’t yet elect a woman.

How they could elect Trump is still a mystery I can’t fathom. But Republican presidents after Ike have yet to impress me as anything but creatures of the Id. And my experiences as a lawyer and a pastor (and even a teacher) have convinced me that Freud was on to something there, and it shows up again and again in the national character. We like to imagine it’s the aberration. My experience and, more and more My Calvinism, persuade me it’s the norm. Or at least a damned powerful motivator of Vox Populi.

Am I going to fight on? I’m going to vote on, to my last ability to do so (why stop now?) Maybe I’ll win the lottery someday. Probably not, but the ticket doesn’t cost me anything. In the meantime, I could read Twitter and complain impotently about what Trump is doing (Ukraine is screwed unless Europe steps into the breach; NATO is a treaty organization, Trump can’t end that unilaterally. Tariffs? Even a GOP senate is not that MAGA). And if it all goes to smash, what can I do, besides hold true to my democratic (small “d”) values by voting again and again for what I hold good and true in governance?

But fight? What, get upset about things I can’t change any more than I can change the weather? Why? To feel powerful in my impotence?

Please.

Don’t get me completely wrong. Elizabeth Warren makes sense. But she makes more sense than the people mindlessly spewing the word “fight!” As if that was enough of a direction. Me, I’m going to urge thoughtfulness, the kind that drove the followers of Dr. King. He specifically taught them not to fight. He taught them to resist, to be moral examples, to concretely embody the justice they demanded.

I’m not going to fight. I’m going to resist. And I’m gonna start with Jeremiah. That guy knew what real problems are.