Love at a Reasonable Price

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

Per Jesus Christ, the most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Therefore, if one uses Christianity in a way that does not further one’s love for God and everyone, one is — per the founder of Christianity — misusing Christianity.

Per the Constitution of the United States of America,

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Therefore, if one uses the Constitution of the United States of America in a way that does not further these goals, one is — per the writers of that document — misusing the constitution.

But all these goods require that We the People keep our shared government out of the hands of would-be tyrants.

There you have it, Mike Johnson: You’re own wisdom meme. I’m sorry, but you can’t unhear it. I’m sorry, but it seeps in and spreads out through your conscious space, lining the back of you. I’m sorry, but it will hunt you down and undo the truths you thought were yours until you remember who you were before you started needing to win.

Picture this:
It’s Saturday. You spent the morning writing another triumphant essay and doing a great shoulders and legs work out. Then you watch the last one and a half episodes of a series you’ve really enjoyed and are even calling “art”. You have one giant beer (nut brown ale) with a few nuts and head out to take in a salsa class, dropping your laundry on the way; after salsa you go shopping at the co-op, where you buy a lot delicious organic produce, some nuts and seeds, a Swiss cheese made in Switzerland with raw milk, and a few other essentials.

You are walking to the train and feeling sore. Your legs are sore and your shoulders are too, and so is upper back, and you’ve got a bookbag and two giant canvas bags — all laden down with groceries.

You see them, a man a woman and a child, standing in front of a bank. It’s night time on a Saturday, so the bank is of course closed. They have a sign. A sign on cardboard. You look away. You guess it says that they are from Ecuador and need help. Lately that’s what you’ve been seeing around Brooklyn: Young families with signs saying they are from Ecuador and they are stranded and they need help. You look away because it is embarrassing to walk past them with all these expensive groceries on your shoulders.

The essay that you’d worked on all morning and that you thought was good, but that you’d been tweaking a little in your mind as you made your way to and from your salsa lesson, made good use of Jesus’s most important commandment. And so, as you look away you can’t help but note that this is not what the Good Samaritan would do. It just isn’t. It isn’t at all the radical selfless love that Jesus preached.

When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, he didn’t go for any part of the Ten Commandments or other clear cut rules. He gave a mystical formulation: Love God with everything you are and love yourself and everyone else equally. That’s not a rule, or a rule of thumb, it is a poetic pointing-towards a way of being that is deeper and wider than human feelings, ideas, and words.

But when asked to clarify a point — who exactly counts as my neighbor? — Jesus gave a very concrete, real-life example and a very clear, albeit impossible to fulfill, command.

Maybe sometimes a person can stop what they are doing and fully attend to someone in need, but you can’t walk anywhere in Brooklyn very long without seeing people with signs, people asking for help who look like they could use a lot of help. You could give them a dollar or a few dollars. You could look away to save yourself the embarrassment of walking past them with lots of groceries that you bought specifically to satisfy your own habits, notions, and schedules. You could stop and talk to them and hear their story — your Spanish is pretty good. What would Jesus actually do? He didn’t stop and help everybody all the time. And sometimes he only seemed to give out miracles begrudgingly. And anyway it’s a big and pretty unfair advantage to be able to do miracles — although now that I think about it, he never magically wished away anyone’s poverty.

Strictly speaking, the commandment is to have 100% love for God shining through everything, including your conscious moment and the conscious moments of everyone else, and to love yourself and everyone else with that God-directed and God-grounded loving. So the commandment is mostly and inward one. So, strictly speaking, you can tell yourself you’re following the commandment pretty well even if you aren’t. But the story of the Good Samaritan is harder to fudge. And we’re tested every day over and over and we come up wanting. We even sometimes explain to ourselves that the most important commandment has value as a poem and a type of koan and a meditation and an important point, but of course you can’t really do it because there’s things you have to do and if you open up your heart to everyone all the time in this busy world: why, you’ll just get sucked into everybody else’s problems all the time, and never get anything done! Right? The experiment seems too dangerous to take. And, anyway, it’s clearly impossible; so pretending you can do it is just a lie you tell yourself.

This is a problem for the mystically-minded seeker who finds Jesus’s formulation of the path convincing. It is a problem, also, for the practical-minded Christian who has decided to make following Jesus Christ a fundamental part of their own life. What do we do? We agree here, but our agreement is about the necessity of adopting a path that neither of us quite understands and that seems to conflict with both our needs to take care of ourselves, our loved ones, do our tasks, live in the world.

I think it is worth pointing out that our agreement here is part of the general agreement of humanity to be first and foremost mystical believers in Love, and to also not let any dogmas keep us from abiding by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing). For we all know that either Love is True or we have no path towards being meaningful to ourselves. And we all know that we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we think/feel aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully-sharing. But we all also know that our ideas about spiritual Love are not the same as spiritual Love, and that confusing one’s ideas and feelings about the True Good with the True Good account for a good part of human evil. Hence we all know — at some level — that we can only be meaningful to ourselves by centering our feeling/thinking/acting around spiritual Love and attempting to interpret that Love in our feeling/thinking/acting, but always remembering that that Love is wider and deeper than our feeling/thinking/acting, so we cannot pretend any of our ideas or feelings are the Truth, but must always keep working to better follow Pure Love — always self-critiquing -analyzing, and -adjusting, always starting over again, always pushing out from within and praying again for the wisdom to be gentle with ourselves and others.

It is for this reason that I argue that a liberal democratic republican form of government is a spiritual good: It allows us to keep our government from corruption and from committing crimes against us and others, and in this way we together safeguard those universal values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us; and we also keep the world safe for spiritual Love: after all, the great evil of tyrannical governments is that they require people to choose between (A) accepting, being complicit in, pretending not to see, and to some degree participating in large-scale evil, or (B) telling the truth, doing the right thing, sticking up for your neighbor, saying No to dishonesty, unfairness, corruption, and cruelty. It’s not that you cannot follow a holy path in a tyranny, but forcing those kinds of hopeless my-family-versus-your-family choices onto people does everyone a great disservice. In a healthy democracy, the aims of the government line up well with the universal values: Tell the truth, be accurate and competent, govern well, seek win-wins for the good of all, and then, when you are up for reelection, with a pure heart, make your case to the people and let them decide how well you did. And if you lose: Okay, because it is better to lose power in a liberal democratic republic than it is to have to spend your life desperately handing onto power in a tyranny, when to stay in charge you’ve committed crimes against your own citizens, and so if you ever lose power: uh oh!, so that’s not an option.

Donald Trump wants to be dictator. And that means he wants to imprison himself in a life of crimes committed against this nation. For everyone’s sake — including his — we must together tell him and his would-be lackeys: NO.

But I digress.

The point is, Jesus is much more radical than any of his followers. If regular people get as radical as him, they end up becoming evil. Because they don’t have the fingers for it; they can get his zeal, but they can’t get the compassion that makes that zeal a spiritual good. Well, that’s not entirely true: There are saints, there are holy people, there are people who put Love first. But they are not most people, and they are not the person we imagined you to be today as you walked past the family on the street with the cardboard sign that you didn’t even read. So what right do you have to essays that invoke the most important commandment? And yet, what right do preachers have to preach the Gospel when most preachers are also not getting very close to the spiritual Love that Jesus said was the whole point of the religious life?

Where does that leave us? One hypocrite scolding another?