Love at a Reasonable Price

It was morning in New York City and Bartleby, Amble, Kempt, Tun and Arch were in the Brooklyn office.

Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Inevitable and Invincible does not need a Brooklyn office. Their essentially infinite in dimensions and resources Wall Street office is more than sufficient for their finite needs and capabilities (perhaps Thundration “Tun” Whistletown & Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley have infinite capabilities, but — as is all too common with literal publishing Titans who exist prior to and beyond time-space — they are too blessed and eternal to consistently concern themselves with mortal woes and other passing dramas).

Still, somebody said something once kind of off-handed about how it would be nice to have a Brooklyn office and then somebody else kind of absent-mindedly conjured one into being, and — well, here its is: And it’s centerpiece is a nice and spacious room with waterfalls flowing down the walls in a kind of “clearing in the jungle” motif (actually, I think it is actually like five or six desks and a long rectangular conference table in the middle of a clearing in the jungle — judging by the average temperatures, humidity, rainfall, flora and fauna). The office looks out on Brooklyn, mostly set to 2024 these days. Sometimes they’ll spin the dial forward or backward. And somehow the views are that of a brownstone fronting a nondescript street not too far from the museum, the botanical gardens, the library, Prospect Park, downtown Brooklyn, and trains galore! So many trains. Yes, even though inside you’ve jungle on all sides stretching on and on to mountains that you could hike to if you had the time and everything; even though that’s how it is on the inside, still it looks out on one little conveniently located street.

Anyway, Amble comes down from his bedroom (still, one assumes, located in the SAWB Building in Somewhere, Sometime Wall Street) full of ideas:
“You know we were arguing that this test for US American democracy should be a lob ball that any nation could smash out of the stadium into a game-winning home run?”

Tun looks up from a morning paper — it is a sheet of life’s whirl fashioned from this morning sampled from all over the globe and it looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels-in-the-tactile-sense like nothing; but it feels-in-the-whole-conscious-moment-experience-sense like what it is — and shrugs, “Did you guys even finish that essay? It felt, correct me if I’m wrong, but it felt … ”

Amble: “You’re wrong!”

Tun: ” a little abandoned ”

Amble: “Anyway, I woke up wondering what’s to blame for the nation finding itself in this bind and apparently unable to stand reliably against the evil: Is the system, the culture, or the people broken? Obviously, it’s some combination, but I thought maybe, we could look at each strand and then weave them together into a more complete tale of critical failure.”

Anyway, Bartleby comes out of the sea (he’s still, one assumes, been overnighting as a giant whale fish slumbering at the bottom of the darkest deepest sea, “the only place one can get some peace and quiet — the only place far enough from this claptrap city and its infernal never-ending [!?and-yet-it-boasts-of-this?!?] racket!”) in his mild-mannered, scrawny, see-through, and 1950s-business-casual (black dress shoes, khaki slacks, white button-up without a tie and with the optional tweed jacket) form (well, his scrawny … 1950s-business-casual form, anyway) full of ideas:
“Perhaps the most overlooked of the many spiritual tales seething out of this bubbling cauldron of our present catastrophe is how do we save Donald Trump’s soul? For, make no mistake, a man who would gain power in order to corrupt a system designed to keep the rulers from abusing their own people — such a man is begging for spiritual destruction. But this raises many interesting and in print journalism so-oft woefully underreported questions; to name a few of the more obvious examples:

“What is ‘spiritual destruction’?

“How can outside observers assess a politician’s willful devastation of their own soul? And, more importantly, is it possible — and if so, pray God: HOW? — to assess a politician’s spiritual journey without falling prey to the underhanded crime of falsifying the spirit, of — to use a New Testament parlance that will perhaps resonate with my fellows gathered here, iced teas at your lips, in the chaise furniture of our Breukelen ouerwood — sins against the Holy Ghost?

“And, perhaps most importantly: Is there any place for such discussion in a democratic republic? Isn’t asking people to accurately assess each other’s spiritual circumstances exactly the kind of evil that separation of church and state is there to help us avoid? Don’t democratic republics function precisely because the leaders and citizenry alike agree to focus on what honest observers can reliably assess: clarity, openness, honesty, accuracy, fair play, competency, and good judgement in service of the nation as a whole?

“Anyway, scratch all that, or [here, Amble, who’d been taking furious notes and was reluctantly about to scratch it all out, holds his pen hovering above the open journal] consider writing a long and ponderous tome analyzing both Donald Trump’s spiritual train wreck and the spiritual confusions (“pretzel land” will be the phrase used the most) of the narrator, culminating in an explosion of both critiqued and critic that rains like confetti from the heavens. [Amble, brow scrunched, jots down a few notes and several large question marks.]

“To return to questions raised by this now-abandoned project:

“What is the dividing line between politics as usual in a functioning democratic republic and the willful march to political evil? Note that in the case of functioning democratic republics I define as working to undo democratic constraints on one’s power with the ultimate aim of committing crimes against the citizens of the government: ending your ability to lose elections, thereby removing the citizens’ ability to serve as a final check on your corruption madness and criminal behavior; silencing dissent with financial punishments, political punishments, detention, jail, even those Putinesque deaths that we ‘know’ could never happen state-side; and so on. Surely Donald Trump has repeatedly crossed that line; why don’t the citizens recognize this and act en masse against him?

Anyway, Kempt comes through the portal to his apartment (out of state, but with spacetime-bending portals, just next door) full of ideas:

“Beethoven’s A Die Freude, Plato’s Republic, the Bible, the Dutch masters — triumphs of the human spirit! But the US constitution; Abraham Lincoln’s speeches in defense of human freedom and the continuation of our democratic republic, the Fifteenth Amendment; almost 250 years of a continuous representative government with fair elections, peaceful transfers of power; the evolution out of slave nation into one where a black man became president and a woman of an Indian mother and a black Jamaican is a major party’s presidential candidate — also great, world-historic human achievements! Not to say, “job well done and everybody can go home now!” But still, set against the backdrop of human history, a government tethered to the people and able to evolve with them and improve them as they improve it: It’s amazing! It’s so neat! It’s a neat thing! A wonderful work of living and breathing art. That can, that should, that must write itself into something more beautiful; must continue to work on itself; must not be tossed aside like some cheap failed flimsy hack job! And yet, here we are; and the other major party’s presidential candidate shows every intention of becoming a dictator while his party selects for people and ideas that would enable this foolish, this evil quest.”

I’m so tired. I got so little done.
I am so disappointed with my day.
And what can we really even say?
Too tired to write the scene where
Arch asks if everybody’s absorbed
all the news of all the papers in the world
And Tun has, and Bartleby could but is worried
elsewhere,
and Amble and Kempt both twist
their lips in contempt of such unfairness —
being but mortals and not even self-writing fictions

And that was to be
who even cares now?
I want to go to bed and forget I was ever born
I want to go to bed and wrap myself up
in that brief respite
from forever falling down
forever failing flailing wailing alone and forlorn
why was I born? And now I’m shorn of everything but the brittle breaking bits
and just like basically
worn

Anyway
that was to be
the segue
(those top-heavy assholes! if they hadn’t stolen the word, we could start spelling segue “segway”, and the language would be a little bit more manageable, and … I don’t know, but they’re assholes … for taking the word)
to our discussion
of
you know

whatever

oh
we were going to talk
about
Ross Douthat’s heartless article
took the wind out of our sails
What is he even talking about?
And yet, there it is, apparently easy to pluck from winds surrounding Ross Douthat — a man who knows that he can’t be both a columnist for The NY Times and an open Trump voter: supporting a deranged would-be demagogue is a step too far for that venerable old chronicler of human systems lives and times

So the task will fall to Bartleby and Amble
the task of winning Ross Douthat and his army (well, a couple squadrons, anyway) undecided voters
and also all the people currently planning on voting for Donald Trump
to the side of
The Good

Yeah, so Bartleby and Amble —
in this frame story that we are giving up on right here in front of the whole world —
are tasked with demonstrating once and for all
that this election
is about Good and Evil,
and choosing to support Donald Trump is choosing to support Evil,
and choosing to support Kamala Harris is choosing to support Good,
and it is better to support Good than to support Evil,
so we should all vote for Kamala Harris.
That’s right!
Everyone!
It’s the way away from Evil and towards Good.

How to make this clear?

How to show what’s what?

Did we succeed with One Reality?
Somehow not quite?

And yet we’ll not write a better essay tomorrow!
How could we?
We feel
empty
not in the enlightened-Buddhist type way
not empty of self
not resting on impermanence and interdependence
not that kind of empty
but the drained and hopeless and succumbing to the give-up type of empty

Okay, alright, ok:

Tomorrow let’s read “One Reality”, and Epic Irony, and Ross Douthat’s disconcerting essay.
And think again.

But today
Today
Tonight
we must turn out to be cardboard in the rain
must crumble sludge-up and melt-down
must slide along with coursing gutter waters
down the drain
out a fat concrete pipe
into the airs above the sea
must fall with the splashing
city junk waters
and
plunge like Fate
into
the North Atlantic,
where we will
float disintegrate
and settle forever
as a piecemeal dust
upon the unconscious —
all along the thoroughly unsouled and unselfed ocean floor
here and there on the sea floor,
where no glow-nose fish
will ever so much as suspect
that particles of this mucky murky ground
were once cardboard were once dry (whatever that means to denizens of the pitch black parts of Old Ocean) were once an author and his editor —
once took their happy, bristling-with-life, bursting-with-hopeful-vigor places
I tell you that at one time and in their day, these bits of unconsidered dust took their places in the sun!!!

Author: Bartleby Willard?
Editor: Amble Whistletown?
Copyright Holder: But that can only be Andy Watson, the legal fiction and coalescing of circumstances physical and mental that passes for “real people” these days — don’t get us started!!!

Destruction of democracy
An emotional and intellectual political evil that is the groundwork for the old fashioned bones and blood and financial and social ruin political evil
And once this preliminary evil is achieved, the willing cogs get to reference the security of their families as why they have “no choice “

I have watched you from the get go and am here to remind you what you already know: what you lack is not choices but excuses

evening thoughts
he says it is very important to vote
does he know what’s going in this election?
is there a way to tell him that would be helpful?

morning thoughts
in a house that for the purposes of the dream is your parents’
people filing in, bringing food to share, almost none of them you know
your Aunt and Uncle from the nearby state are both round and blond when they used to be thin and gray
they are headed into the kitchen that sprawls into the dining room where everyone is assembling
who is this strange couple off to one side you thought the wife shaped kind of rectangular and somehow slavic with breasts leaning too far down, she is not old, and her man has tidy black hair in a small square head, who are they and you thought she was rude for muttering something you couldn’t understand when you asked her who she was, but then you think she’s maybe really shy and then you decide that no she just doesn’t speak English
who are all these people?
There are two Uncles but one is only heard and you are cross with the one who is only a voice and maybe he’s not there because actually the voices are jumbled and bouncing like in a ravine
You turn to your brother who is seated on a chair that is very wide and with a very flat seat — a kind of L that two people could cozy into, but that only your lank brother occupies next to your father in some other undescribed chair. You turn to your brother and say, “I don’t understand any of this.” He wrinkles his brow and eyes to tell you that that is not the thing to say here at this gathering. He does it so your father doesn’t have to, and your father merely looks a little astonished, although you would think everyone would be used to it by now.
And that’s when you are somehow past where they were seated by where the dining area flows into a hall that flows into the living room (I guess they were in that hall, it must be a wide hall; and they are on the side closest to the kitchen and the strange woman who mutters in intelligible languages as her worried- and fitter-looking husband sidles behind the table along the cushioned bench towards her)
I mean, it’s at that moment that your brother scrunches his face to tell you to pull it together that you are away from that area and are sliding past your Aunt and Uncle as they enter through a narrower hall that leads right into the kitchen where people are cooking and talking or maybe no they are just assembling dishes and talking
And you think you’ll go upstairs since this is no kind of a place
But then it seems you are in a wide hall that is partially underground, or no on like a the top of a little mountain or just a hill made mostly of stone and the hall is cut into the hill? No, I don’t know. Anyway, you are walking around inside this big square hall with one end open to the sunlit world but still the whole thing feels kind of claustrophobic
And that’s when it occurs to you that before lots of people in the US would have their crazy conspiracy theories and half-baked notions pawned off as realities, but the politicians wouldn’t go in for that stuff, and that’s what changed with Trump: he repeated the kind of crazy, unfounded, half-baked, implausible and unverified narratives that had always been the purview of the common people, and they loved that: Here is a man who gets it! Finally, a politician who tells the truth! Finally someone who doesn’t pretend he knows better than me! Someone who isn’t afraid to admit what we all know!
Then you’re awake and are thinking that the problem is that our media splintered into conservative and liberal and the conservative has skewed less and less fair and more and more willing to lie, and that without decades of cherry picked and biased news reporting and without the conservative internet more and more outright lying (repeating hearsay you’ve not fact checked as if you know it to be true = lying), Trump could never have happened. And you think — maybe not for the first time, but more forcefully here in the groggy beginnings of another day of clanging construction on several sides and endless-work yet again looming in the foreground — that what has happened in the US is that enough of the conservative media became the media source for a state-run autocracy. That was the first step in the autocratic takeover! That made Trump possible and it also made it possible for the GOP to choose to oust those members of the GOP who spoke out against Trump’s lying-based political strategy, and out against some of his more egregious and democracy-threatening ideas. And so the willingly autocratic media — the post-shared-reality, everything-is-perspective and all-perspectives-are-political and politics-reduces-to-power noise machine in service of the conservative agenda easily became a tool for a post-democratic conservative politician to remake his base and his party in his own image.
Oh but so then maybe they weren’t so much autocratic as merely post-shared-reality, and with them the GOP base, and then all together they followed the pied piper off the cliff into the abyss of a post-facts Reality and an ends-justify-means manipulation of the tools of democratic government toward anti-democratic ends — the abyss of self-justifying top-down crime covered in layers of lies and cynicism, so that those more “in the know” can be more cynical and less honestly duped, and those “who just know they can trust the leader” can be more honestly (but still at some level clearly willingly) duped.
And so the 2024 Republican Party wears political evil like a cloak.
Where will it end?
The rot should’ve been stopped in Donald Trump’s conscious moment, but he never understood the beauty of representative government.
So then the rot should’ve been stopped by the GOP’s process for selecting candidates, but in the primaries the most extreme voices rule and in the Republican Party those voices had been long marinating in a post-objective-facts media landscape.
(Not that there’s such a thing as “objectively true” news; but the conservative media took the inevitability of bias in news reporting as grounds not for trying to be more careful with fact-checking and fair analysis, but as an excuse for being more and more completely bias; and this is where the evil began; well, here and in K-street and in the democrats’ decision to also be the party of big money, oh, and then there’s the undemocratic advantage the smaller states enjoy coupled with the extreme-selecting primary process and the gerrymandering of so many safe seats; anyway, the evil finds itself, it coalesces, it rubs itself right.)
Anyway, the rot should’ve been stopped here and there and there and here and … and now we are where we are.
Let’s say No to Donald Trump and his GOP enablers
Let’s stop the rot
Gently but firmly
Let’s remember that the citizens of a democratic republic are the final and most important branch of government
And there first and most important duty is not to win partisan victories, but to keep the playing field fair: to protect the rules, norms, values, and institutions of democracy — so that we can share with one another and our nation those values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us: aware, clear, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing.
Come on!
We’re not supposed to be political and economic geniuses like the talking heads would seduce us into pretending they and we are
We’re supposed to be the referees of a game where everyone wins because it is played for fun and fairly and with good intentions — played aware, clear, honest, accurate, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing.
Played at the fun and joyous level of ideas and feelings rather than the cold cruel boring oppressive level of top-down crime, state-sanctioned crime, governments for by and of the thug who for that moment happens to have the gears and levers of state

It is this time
And that’s not Kamala Harris’s fault
It’s not the democrats
It is Donald Trump’s fault
It is Mike Johnson’s fault
It is this GOP’s fault

A vote for democracy is anyway a joyous one — it is a vote for honesty, clarity, competency, fair play, and the kind of loving everybody-wins tussle that only one whose heart is bent on crime would find oppressive.

Why do believe that Donald Trump’s project is essentially an evil one?
And how is it that this is so obvious to me and not to everyone?
How can it be, for example, that sincere religious believers can imagine Donald Trump is on God’s side and his opponents are aiding the forces of evil?
What makes Donald Trump’s political career fundamentally different from the normal arguing, tussling, biased, truth-bending US American politician?
It comes down to agreeing to be constrained by democratic standards, rules, and norms.
Before it was taken for granted that our politicians would submit to the fair fight of fair elections.
It had seemed impossible that the nation would let them not, so they weren’t really tested, but the politicians who thrived understood and embraced the concept of representative government: I will do my best to govern well for the entire nation, and then when my term is up, I will take my case to my constituents, and if I did a good job and had a little luck, I will win again. And if I lose: Well, who cares? It’s not like we live in a dictatorship, where only people who are actively ruling don’t have to worry about the rulers using the power of the state to intimidate, punish, and destroy their political enemies.
Trump was not comfortable with the checks on his power and worked against press freedoms and the independence of congress and the judiciary in his first term. Also, lying has always been a core part of his political strategy, and his reliance on this fundamentally anti-democratic tactic has increased as his political career has matured. In a healthy representative government where the people have the final say and everyone is protected with fundamental rights like the freedom to speak without government retribution, the free press calls you out on dishonesty and eventually your lies catch up with you. Well, at least that was the old idea; but in the fracturing of the nation into separate realities, the Republican Party had already become the party of rampant disinformation (Fox News has long relentlessly cherry picked and spun the news to suit conservatives, Breitbart repeats false narratives they I guess heard somewhere; and in the case of the Domino voting machines, Fox News let their hosts repeat conspiracy theories that Fox News knew to be false, was sued and lost — in which catastrophe Rupert Murdoch learned not that you shouldn’t let your hosts spread stories you know are false, but that you shouldn’t ever put anything in an email). And so lying worked amazingly well for Trump, and then, and then came the corruption of the Republican Party.
When did the Republican Party embrace political evil?
They did this when they silenced the voices who spoke out against Trump’s lie about the 2020 election and elevated those voices who echoed, or at least corroborated his lies.
At this point, they became a party of political evil — a party willing to use the tools of the state to commit crimes against their own citizens.
Why do I say this? Because we have hours and hours of testimony from members of Donald Trump’s own administration explaining how they thwarted his month-long crusade to overturn the 2020 election. And those people were not celebrated by the GOP, but sidelined. And who has risen to the top? People like Mike Johnson who first repeated one unfounded conspiracy theory after another before settling on a specious constitutional argument to call the entire 2020 election into questions, and who used that nonsense to justify Trump’s behavior, even though Trump was clearly not thinking in legal intricacies, but was merely attempting to find any way, legal or illegal and with morality not even a topic, to stay in power, to not lose, to not be a “loser”. [For more on this argument of Mike Johnson’s, please see What we Know, an essay maybe thirty entries back in this lonely blog.]
With the embrace of Donald Trump’s lies, the GOP has become the Russia of my youth. I remember Dad shaking his head in disbelief and saying, “The Russians just say anything, and then they repeat it, or maybe they change it, they just lie all the time.” Yes, they did then and they today. Why? Because then and now the government of Russia was an autocratic regime where the government uses its power to suppress dissent and force itself on the people, who cannot remove it, and who must live under it and can therefore chose to either acquiesce to a leadership that routinely and as a matter of policy commits crimes against its citizens, or they can risk their livelihoods, the safety of themselves and their loved ones. In Russia fear makes true. And in Trump’s GOP, the same upside logic holds. Truth is on its head; those who would stand up for truth are drummed out; those who embrace any ridiculous lie to support Donald Trump are raised up, are the “future”. This is evil. This is so clearly evil.

We will have to continue this essay later.

Not here to defeat Donald Trump
Here to rally the nation to see clearly enough to stop the evil that has corrupted him and his party
emotional violence paired with intellectual haze
A will towards might makes right and fear as proof of truth
The ends justify the means and the co-opting of spirituality in the service of justifying evil
What is it?
How has it happened?
It is political evil
It has happened because the people have forgotten their most important job
Our first priority is to safeguard the structure of a government by for and of the people — that they might protect themselves and their fellows from top-down crime and the topsy-turvey morality it engenders
Getting our way in xyz policy detail is a secondary concern
After all, if we hand our shared government over to tyranny, we all lose — victory in such settings comes at the price of soul

I need your help
You need my help
We need our help
This game is still being played on the level of ideas and feelings
Trump wills and his GOP enables an adjustment of the rules into violence and state sanctioned crime
That is what is going on here
That is what we must make this election about
That is why we must speak as one clear gentle but firm
No Donald and Co, No: this country is not your weapon and show piece
It is our home and we have a right and a duty to stop you here and now
You have shown your cards
And they are evil

This man embodies the fears of the founders of our democratic republic
You know this
So please help us find the voice to do our collective duty —- not to bitch and moan but to actively stop this evil

where?
Into a sinkhole?
Down the drain?
Into your hills and valley?
It has to go somewhere
I have to be allowed to be both through and beyond it
Otherwise
its lie grows
and
its truth shrinks
and I have nowhere any good to put so much of what would be both me and good
in the right
fishbowl

I can’t do this anymore
Please, no more
Tired
Don’t want to keep pretending
Pretending I don’t feel the hurt and what it implies
Pretending some lonely stressful-boring slowly-drowning-while-desperately-treading ritual is my metier
Pretending I don’t taste smell and feel political evil dripping off the gears of the city waterworks
Pretending this lonely life is some kind of a home
Pretending frustration is just a background noise
Waking up with the unresolved wounded seething threads once again writhing through
Please no more

what you are doing is evil
at some point choosing conspiracy theories and disinformation over a readily available adequate-accuracy is choosing evil.
You are choosing evil.
That is evil.
I cannot wake you up in time.
You have let me down.
You have crushed my spirit.
You have told me that I am so worthless that my voice should no longer count.
Not just me — but pretty much everyone I’m close to.
We’re all so worthless that democracy should be taken from us.
And given to, well, actually, you must realize: it will be given to no one, it will just be killed.
What you’re doing is evil.
You don’t know it, but people rarely do.
What would you have me do?
And when we die, am I to be reconciled to your evil?
Am I to know you again as if you were just a victim of circumstances?
I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in you, in my country.
Everything I’d known was true and trustworthy has been proven to be a lie.
You were just pretending all along.
Just pretending to want to share this nation with me.
Just waiting for the chance to force yourself on everyone else.
I call it abuse.
It feels like abuse.
I call it crime.
I call it evil.
It smells, tastes, feels like the same boring old evil that always wins in the end, because people always betray each other sooner or later.
I didn’t betray you.
You betrayed me.
And I have no response.
I sit here and wait to die.
I give up.
What you are doing is evil.
You should stop.

You have really hurt me.
I did not think you would do this to me.

I wish I had never been born
I don’t want to live through this
What you are doing is world-historically evil
You have a clean conscious
But that does not mean it doesn’t count
It just means you are lying to yourself

Am I crazy?
I feel like I am in outer space
When I was a kid I remember my father saying that the Russians just say anything, just lie and then repeat it, and that works there
Not here of course
Oh?
Not here?
A man corrupts himself; he then corrupts the party he leads; what happens when that man and that party are given power over the nation?
You are serving political evil
It’s called political “evil” because when it rules, sooner or later it becomes the old-fashioned evil (people lose their all their money and security for telling the truth; people disappear for disagreeing; people’s bodies are squished for saying No to a criminal government)

We were supposed to be on the same team
We were supposed to say No to evil together — to at least have each other’s backs that much
But evil is learning that we’re not going to say No to evil; that it’s too much to ask of us
We are failures
We are jokes
We are evil

Well, friends, I have failed
That’s all
I thought I could help
But I was wrong

Now I will move to Spain, or maybe Portugal
Actually, how am I going to pay for that?
So I’m stuck here, waiting for the evil with the rest of you
But the evil is already here — we failed to say No to the evil; that was itself an evil
Why was I born?
To watch this vapid fool waltz in and commandeer the gears and levers of the most powerful nation in the world, while it’s so-called free citizens get chips on their laps and beer on their chins
To live through this
For what?
I remember being a kid and being told I lived in the greatest country in the world because here we were free to tell the truth and make our own way, we didn’t have to fear our government, and we all had refrigerators and access to libraries
Hmmm