Our Divided States: Division #5 - Democrat vs. Democrat

Remember the good old days, when we Democrats scratched our collective chins and mused about what the Republican party was going to do once Trump inevitably lost, and their broken party had to examine what it had just almost done to the country? Well, that totally got flipped on 11/9, when in the aftermath we were suddenly forced to apply all that mental activity into determining what *we* were going to do, now that we had lost.

As the Cabinet proceedings have been going along (at a pretty fast clip, it should be noted), every new Republican win has been met with a chorus of how the Democrats in Congress aren't doing enough to block the Republican amending/invoking of lesser-known laws in order to railroad their way through the process. And as a result, we now have Secretaries of Education and State, to name but two, that are not only stupefyingly unqualified for their jobs, but have done everything except explicitly promise to totally upend the current system, regardless of how many middle-class lives are affected.

I'm torn about this, as I'm sure other liberally-minded people are. First of all, I don't want to see the system I've believed in my entire political life bent into something that changes its very nature to exclude people I support, and that allows the buying of Cabinet chairs. This part of me thinks that the remaining Democratic minority must use any means necessary to prevent us from being pushed slowly back into a fascist oligarchy, where government is literally run by big business. The past eight years have been a clusterdump of Republican obstructionism, laced with the threat of (and actual) government shutdowns, and dereliction of patriotic duty by Republicans in order to get their way. Why shouldn't the Democrats do the same?

On the other hand, I think perhaps the worst thing we can do is take this eye-for-an-eye, free-for-all mentality the Republicans have served us, and use it as justification for continuing to do the same ourselves. Even when I'm not sure what I want, I know that don't want this underhanded bullying to become normalized. In fact, I don't know if I could support a Democratic party that uses these tactics, playing chicken with the fate of middle-class citizens over the future of the Affordable Care Act, or mass deportations, or global industrialization, or a host of other important issues that people who don't live in Washington have to deal with every day. That's not the party I want to be a member of on principle, regardless of whether they manage to push their agenda through or not.

But then I vacillate -- I go back to the other side, acceding that politics has really changed, and is not likely to go back as long as these kinds of tactics turn out to be the ones that "win". What the Democrats are doing now is like practicing non-violent protest against a pack of marauding dogs; regardless of your nobility, you're going to lose, and the only lesson they're going to learn is that their tactics won.

What gives me a little ray of hope is that I'm seeing the progressive wing of the Democratic party starting to marshal its forces. The dissenting voices of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are taking concrete form, and don't sound quite as pie-in-the-sky unrealistic as the rhetoric that kept me from becoming a full-on Bernie supporter. Maybe that's the seed that this election has sown; the idea that a grassroots movement which serves everyone, not just the rich/white/straight/Christian/males, can wrest the power away from where it's been entrenched for decades, and start to get America functioning correctly for everyone.

Until then, the true faces of the Republicans in Congress have now been revealed, and naturally, there are two of them: 1) those who are too scared of what they have to lose to call out the obvious insanity of the presidential administration, and 2) those that are going to play along until they can gather whatever self-serving scraps they can, then scramble to get out of the way of Trump's inevitable downfall. I don't know how anyone could be a proud supporter of either of those kinds of person.

Whitelodge 13.6

-13.6-

If what Bruce was saying hadn't been matching up perfectly with everything he had experienced on this weird night, Carlos would have thrown the author out the door he had come in by, and let the monster out there have its way with its creator. But being the only one in the group who had physically touched the thing, and had also experienced Bruce's rambling, borderline-psychotic -- but equally accurate -- description of its makeup and powers, he had no choice but to believe everything the crazed man was saying.

Bruce's revelations came fast: in the book, the "Qoloni" -- a play on words, because the thing really was a sentient, bipedal "colony" of much smaller things -- was the manifestation of the fears and insecurities of the young woman it was pursuing. The connection with mirrors, then, was a necessary narrative association. Princess Ynarra saw her own imperfections when she looked into the mirrors in what would soon become her bridal suite, if the prince of the castle chose her as the one he wished to marry. Because he was royalty, the reflections were of a quality she had never experienced before, and her own faithful image messed with her head. It was her lack of faith in her own inner power that caused those thoughts to become the creature they had all seen and been chased by.

Of course, all this exposition was densely couched in Bruce's ramblings. Carlos knew the man had been coming to the Deertail for years but had never met him before, and so was unable to tell if what that author had been through had changed his mental state at all; for all Carlos knew, Bruce had always been like this. To be honest, the effect was so off-putting that Carlos kind of zoned out for a little while, even though he knew he shouldn't have. Bruce was trying to explain, by yet another slightly different method, how the fruit he had seen in his dream-orchard had represented the little sub-world that the present group found themselves spun off into. Something about the confluence of coincidences has caused this little area of the world to split off into a looped, bounded mini-universe. Or something like that.

The point was, Bruce seemed positive that they could get themselves back into the main stream of space and time if they could destroy the Qoloni... by his reckoning, once the thing they had created with their collective imaginations was destroyed, normalcy should return. "It's like, the Qoloni is the stem," he was currently blathering, "the stem that holds this poisoned fruit we're in, to the tree! If we sever that connection--" and here, he used his hand as a samurai sword, bringing it straight down to bisect some unseen foe, "--we'll be free!"

Carlos looked uncertainly around at the others, and then said, "What if the fruit just falls from the tree?"

The author whirled around, so fast that he almost lost his balance. "What's that?"

Carlos twisted his neck to crack it, then sighed. "If we're the fruit, then won't separating it from the tree just imprison us here, with it?" He spread his arms out to encompass the tiny universe he believed more and more that they were in.

Bruce didn't seem to be able to track what he was saying. "No, you don't see... We're still a part of the tree, but *it* isn't. It's something else entirely. It's the personification of internal fears, can you not see that? It's... when the..." Bruce's words began to come too fast, piling over themselves in the rush to get out of his mouth.

Suddenly, Manoj spoke. They were the first words of his own that anyone could remember speaking since they re-entered the building. "I think I understand," he said. He waited a long moment while everyone turned to him, and Kelly's grip on his arm visibly tightened. "It has to go back where it came from," Manoj said. "Even if we don't understand exactly what it is or why it does what it does, that part makes sense. It was called forth from a mirror, and must be put back where it was."

No one moved, waiting to see if there was more, and after seeming to think about it for a long time, Manoj continued, "That's what Harmon was saying." He gestured down to Kerren, lying on the floor. "He's talking with... Benny, I think his name is?" He waited for an affirming, if shocked, nod from Carlos, then went on. "They've both read your book, Bruce, and they think they've figured it out. The thing has to be put back into a mirror, apparently."

Bruce looked stupefied. "Figured it out? But that's not what happens in the book. When I wrote it, I never destroyed the creature... the princess escaped, and rescued the prince. It was meant to be a twist on the usual fairy tale ending, although looking back I now have to admit that it's equally as trite. But... putting the Qoloni *back* into a mirror?"

The author began to walk back and forth, hunching forward and clasping his hands behind his back, suddenly seeming to have the clarity of thought you might see in a philosophy professor given a juicy ethical dilemma. Manoj spoke to him as he continued to pace, "They say it's the logical endpoint, if you look past the one you actually wrote. In saving both herself and the prince, Ynarra effectively left her fears behind her..."

Bruce abruptly walking and looked up at the man, thunderstruck. "Instead of putting them back where they came from! Of course..." he gasped. "Their way makes so much more sense. I was so out of my mind when I wrote it, I was just trying to make a resolution to the story that no one would see coming. But the elements were all there. Why didn't I see them?"

"Wait a minute," Carlos said, jumping in and turning to Manoj. "Did you say that *they* figured out what the book's ending should have been? You mean Harmon *and* Benny? Benny's okay?"

A puzzled look crossed Manoj's face. "I don't know. It was Harmon speaking for them both. But there was something strange in the feeling I got when he mentioned Benny, this implied silence..."

Before Carlos could question further, Bruce spoke again. "Do you think... maybe the fact that I didn't see the ending correctly, and that others did... gives potency to the story itself?" He seemed to be starting to ramble to himself again. "That the ability of our combined imaginations to conjure it forth was magnified because I took the story somewhere other than the way it naturally wanted to go?" He took a long look at the woman lying wrapped on the floor. Kerren looked exhausted despite her immobilization, and turned her tired eyes to meet the gaze of the shuffling author.

"What do you think, dear? It was your mother that inspired the story in the first place. Consider this -- there are two people here, myself and Mr. Gough, the Lodge director, who have had dreamworld visions of her. I wrote the story after meeting her, and at least two others here have read my words. Quite a confluence, wouldn't you say? My God, you look so much like her. Is your presence here enough to cause this? Or is it everything, all these elements all at once, that has brought us to this?"

There was no answer that anyone could provide, for one reason or another. Carlos looked to each of them in turn, trying to figure out where he fit into this group. He had never read this book that some of them had, nor did he have any interest in Bruce Casey, or relation to his muse. Was he the only one who had no idea why he had been chosen to stay behind in this place?

Carlos immediately began to look around, breaking the stalemate. "Are there any mirrors in here? Anything we can use?"

This seemed to galvanize the room's occupants, and the ones who were able to started combing the two supply rooms for the Lodge's stash of reflective materials. Carlos called out to Dale, who was simply wandering with Glenda in his arms, casting his eyes over the myriad shelves, "Dale, the mirrors in the rooms must get broken every once in a while. Any idea where they keep the replacements?"

The security guard's voice came back hollow. "I don't know. It's been years. Last time, it was a fight between a couple, something got thrown. I think we had to special order a new mirror at the time. And I remember it took a whole crew to get the old one down and the new one in place. They're fastened down pretty securely."

"So we can't just dash into one of the rooms and grab one," Carlos muttered as he continued his search. "Great." For some reason, when Manoj and Bruce had been discussing the prospect of using a mirror to banish the dark Qoloni, the thought had entered his mind as something that should be easy to accomplish. But why had he thought that? There were no mirrors here, and getting one out of the rooms wasn't something he had considered. So why had he...?

Realization crashed against his mind. "In the hallway!" he blurted out, causing heads in both rooms to turn his way. "The big sunburst mirror at the top of the stairs! It comes off. I almost knocked it down when I grabbed the vases to throw at that thing!"

Our Divided States: Division #4 - The Purpose vs. The Random

Thanks to the upcoming Dark Tower movie (or series of movies, dare I hope?), more and more people are becoming aware of the vast network of connections between Stephen King's written works, and the nature of the multiverse that contains them. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of it comes in a novel from the 90s called Insomnia, which doesn't reveal its connection to the Dark Tower meta-story until late in its 800+ pages. Before that, however, we're treated to a character that outlines some of the philosophical structure behind King's whole mythos. This is kind of a roundabout way to make the political point I came here to make today, but bear with me for just a minute.

The Universe, King suggests, is governed by two forces -- The Purpose and The Random. It's been a few years since I read Insomnia, but I believe the ideology goes like this: the Universe tends toward order, because it is directed by human will. That's The Purpose, a sort of collective upward intent of the entire human race. Of course, there is an external force working against this order, which he called The Random (and is embodied in a character called The Crimson King -- and if you've met him among the pages, that name should be sending a shiver up our spine right now). Anyway, The Random's role is to throw nonsensical obstacles into The Purpose's way, trying to plunge the Universe into chaos simply by preventing Purpose from taking root and establish itself.

As I read Insomnia, I noted how ingenious this was. Most worldviews place Evil as the opposition to Good, but King takes it into a slightly different place. We're all working together for Purpose/Good, essentially, or at least our personal idea of it, but if or enemy in this struggle were Evil, the battle would at least be well-defined. "Evil" at least makes some kind of sense, has logic to it, although it will no doubt be twisted. Fighting against randomness, though? That's something else altogether, even *more* antithetical to The Purpose.

That's what I've been thinking about since our current President's recent flurry of executive-order-writing. There are things about them that make me believe that they are not actually there to enact policy. Instead, they seem designed to create confusion and make us unsure of what or how we should be fighting against. Let's take his (unofficially-Muslim) travel (")ban("), for example:

First of all, look at the wording on this thing. It points blame at our immigration vetting process as the reason terrorists were able to enter the country and commit the atrocity of 9/11. Fair enough, but it then uses this same example as the reason we should enact this travel ban, acting as if literally nothing has been added to our national security or immigrant vetting processes since then.

It then imposes a ban on *all* people entering the country from seven nations, each of which seem to have been selected by using precisely three criteria: 1) They are at least 80% populated by Muslims, 2) the President has no business interests there, and 3) exactly *zero* successful terrorists have come from them... Remember, most of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, a country that notably goes unmentioned in the order. The fact that this ban was originally on *all* people coming from those countries is another thing to look at. The White House went back and clarified that certain people actually could re-enter the country (green card holders and full American citizens, for example), but it did so without the oversight or input of anyone in the State or Immigration departments. It is a proclamation that is both grandiosely sweeping and bizarrely specific, issued with no oversight by people of experience who actually know how world politics work, and with no specific instructions on how government agencies should implement it. It essentially dropped a bunch of harsh-but-vague rules on government workers and then sat back to see how they would deal with it.

There's only one reason for such an abomination to be issued; to create confusion and fear. Answer truthfully now... if you are a practicer of Islam in this country, even after all this order's addenda and clarifications, are you going to leave the country for any reason, no matter how much documentation of your American citizenship and good intentions you have? This is no more than the start of a crackdown, ensuring that people from Africa and the Middle East don't know where they really stand in this country.

*That's* Random. Evil at least would be clear-cut, well-defined, if immoral, rules. This is not that. This is a statement to induce the following response: "I don't know what to expect, so I'm going to keep my head down for now." That's far too close to "Don't make waves and maybe we'll be okay" -- the repeated mantra of the oppressed people of the world -- for my taste.

Whitelodge 13.5

-13.5-

Harmon didn't know if he was getting through at all. He had to devote so much energy to translating his message into coherent speech through Kerren's compromised system that he couldn't also try to look out to see if anyone was listening. The only indication he had that he was being heard was the way his host's brain lit up when he mentioned her mother's name.

All he could do was continue to speak through her, hoping beyond hope that there was someone on the outside to hear him trying to verbally piece together the various ways the long-ago Sarah had impacted people at the Deertail Lodge. The visual similarity between her and Kerren really was uncanny, so much so that when he had seen the daughter earlier that evening, he had almost been forced to rethink his views on immortality.

As he spoke what he had since come to know and believe, he was delighted as new sections of Kerren's young brain sparked to life. It took a little while for him to realize that he was actually watching her fitting the puzzle together, and he hoped that there was someone else doing the same on the other side of her lips. Even if there were, it would have given him no extra satisfaction; when he spoke what he and Benny had discovered about the role of mirrors in the story, being inside Kerren's head had been like flying around inside a firework show.

It began to occur to him that maybe all his invasive activity was doing Kerren some good. All his mucking about with her neurons might actually be helping them mend from the shock of her injuries, or at least he was going to allow himself to rationalize it that way. As he told her about her mother, and the positive role she had played in the lives of people at the Deertail, he had begun to feel a slowly increasing sense of welcome. Either Kerren was getting used to the idea of someone being inside her mind, or he was becoming inoculated against feeling of intrusion. It still a minor rebellion against his sense of decency to do it, but it took away the moral sting a little bit. If Kerren's increased capacity started to show signs that she didn't want him in there anymore, he would gladly retreat.

She didn't, however. It compelled him to keep talking until he was done, in a way; he felt like he was getting Kerren better by doing it, and that in turn made his effort seem worthwhile. Not only this, but the strength of their connection made him even more aware of his physical proximity to her. The thought of them actually meeting again in the physical world was starting to become something he found he wanted.

There was something familiar about her brain; at times he felt like he knew its contours, recognizing the way information would flow from one place to another. He thought it must be some remnant of her mother; Sarah and Harmon had shared a few late-night talk sessions, and he had been entranced by the woman's thought processes, not quite like anyone else's he had ever encountered. That must have been the origin of the familiarity he was sensing in this vast, internal space.

If Sarah had shown anything other than cursory interest in him, he knew, he could have fallen for her. But he had learned that relationships cultivated while leaning against a bar never grow into anything more, and she had been the source of this realization for him. Like everyone else, she had spent her time at the Deertail, and then disappeared into the world beyond the foot of the mountain. He had never caught the same spark she had brought to his life again, and never expected to.

Before he had seen Kerren, if someone had told him that the closest possible copy of Sarah was about to walk into his life again, he would have assumed that he would immediately transfer some -- if not all -- of his years of romantic disappointment into feelings for her, but for some reason that hadn't happened. He had approached her and her wife at dinner the previous night out of a sheer fascination at seeing someone who his fiction-addled brain might have mistaken for his old love. Maybe it was because her romantic predilections were clear, or the fact that he was keenly aware of how much he himself had aged over the intervening years, but the kind of emotions he was experiencing were more like those that a teacher might feel for a promising young student.

Now he was speaking with no other impetus than to see Kerren's brain illuminating in new patterns, feeding off its own renewed energy. He couldn't entirely feel that he was personally responsible for the growth by adding his energy to the system; the only thing he could think of was that it felt like he was *inspiring* her. He had yet to see whether this new vitality would last, but for now he could feel its light, see its warmth, and it made his resolve even stronger.

With this in mind, he peeked at the world outside Kerren's skull. He didn't withdraw from her mind, only expanded his sphere of awareness. It was an aspect of his power that he hadn't really mastered yet, and was surprised to find how easily he could control it. It came with a strange sense of vertigo, however, a collision between perceptions of largeness and smallness. It was something like using a magnifying glass to examine a miniscule drop of water, and finding that there was an immense, bustling city inside it.

The group around Kerren were barely recognizable in their immensity and distance. They seemed to be segregated into two groups; on one side of his host's still-bound body were two women and a man. He immediately recognized Kerren's wife crouched nearby, but the others Harmon hadn't seen before. They were a blonde woman and a dark-skinned man, clearly a couple from the way they were standing close to each other. On the other side of Kerren's apparently miles-long body, Dale stood like a Titan, with Glenda in his arms. Harmon didn't quite like the way she was lying limply, or the way that Dale's arms minutely trembled, as if he had been holding her that way for a very long time.

Next to them was Carlos (whom he shouldn't have been surprised to see, since his known cohort Benny was currently sitting with Harmon's body in his small room under the stairs). Between the two men, also not too surprisingly, was Bruce Casey. He was talking a mile a minute -- thankfully, the sound was too far away for Harmon to actually make any of it out -- and gesticulating his arms wildly; first, they raised as if to mimic climbing a ladder, then reaching out for something, and then gesturing to other members of the small crowd. They all seemed to bear the same expression on their faces: dismayed indulgence. The author clearly had the floor, but no one seemed to be happy about it.

When it was clear that no one was listening to Kerren (and he wasn't even sure that she was still speaking for him), he let his words trail off. The flashes of disappointment that cascaded like a blazing Niagara through Kerren's brain made him want to go on, until forever if she would let him. But there was something more important going on in the outer world at the moment, and so he turned his full attention to it.

Our Divided States: Division #3 - "America First" vs. The World

I noted a comment recently by a Trump supporter (yeah, I guess there are a few who slipped in through the cracks of my social media bubble) who said that they "don't support globalism". To be honest, my first reaction was a slightly more profane version of "Holy cow, why do you think that is that even an *option*???"

This is where I start to question whether this whole concept of the "social bubble" -- which I admittedly just referenced as real in the first paragraph -- is even a valid one at all. One of the first attempts at honest analysis after the Democratic loss in November was typically-liberal self-reflection... Are we only talking to other like-minded individuals, and not even noticing what's going on in the world around us? I've taken time to think about this thoroughly, and my answer is simple... only sort of. It's actually dumbass comments like the one above that helped me come to that conclusion. Have I only been talking to people who support across-the-board sexual, racial, and religious equality, environmentally conscious politics and industry, and the forward progress of the entire human race? Well, if you can manage to fit all that into a bubble, then yes. The other side, the one where that sort of stuff isn't quite as important as racial/national/religious identity and regression into a xenophobic, paranoid, nostalgic, never-was past, is even more of a bubble, and one that is doomed to destroy itself to boot. By this token, "globalism" isn't a concept that we have the luxury of either supporting or not.

Let me illustrate my point with extremes: Let's say that you're about as right-leaning as a person can get. Let's say that you're way past leaning -- you've entirely fallen over and gotten red state all over yourself, and maybe even rolled around in it some. All you care about is forcibly combatting the dissolution of your concept of an idealized "America" tailored to fit you, in the face of all the immigrants and foreign terrorists that have come to take over everything "real" Americans have built, and to slake their thirst with the blood of infidels. Your focus, then, necessarily, has to be global. You can't build an impermeable dome over America (as much as you may want to) so you have to deal with your opponents on the world stage. This, by definition, is globalism.

Now, conversely, let's say that you're the opposite of the right-winger you just were, and have gone all the way over to the left. You're so busy appreciating the unique snowflake that is each and every human being and growing your own self-sustaining solar-powered whale farm that you barely have any time to stand in front of pipeline construction crews. All that matters to you is the benefit, equality, and well-being of everyone. Well, then congratulations to you too, because you have to deal with the world outside the borders of America.

There's literally nowhere on the spectrum between these endpoints where a person can afford to be -- or even truthfully say that they are -- "anti-globalism". It's the difference between being an active participant in the world as a whole, or pretending that you don't have to be. You might have been able to pull off that illusion before the Industrial Revolution, but I'm pretty sure that we neither can nor want to go back to the way things were then.

I've adopted a new personal motto lately, but I've been having trouble putting it into a form where it can be bumper-sticker ready. It goes something like "We can raise all the boats". The wording is kind of obscure, but my point is this: there is a way to run a country -- and a world -- so that everyone prospers. When you do this, it creates a positive feedback loop. There's nothing being given away when you eradicate inequality. The only reason to not want to divest yourself of unfair privilege is if you're sure that's the only reason you've gotten to where you are.

We've been conditioned to believe, through various forms of mass media, that situations are always us vs. them, and the "them" are usually motivated by nothing other than sheer stupidity or malice, evil for the sake of being evil. There's probably another essay waiting to dissect that particular idea, but for now let me stay on track...

Improving the lives of those around you isn't just beneficial for you, it's essential to your survival. This is true not just in your house, or in your community, but the world in general. We can't pretend that our country is a closed system anymore. It never was, in fact. The reason we've become one of the world's biggest powers is that we attract the best and brightest from around the world. I think one of the missteps in logic people sometimes fall into here is the belief that we assimilate newcomers and make them American; in truth, America alters itself to accommodate its ever-shifting influx of people and their particular influences. Resistance against this is self-defeating.

No one person's America is the *definitive* America. Make whatever outrageous claims you want to about the Founding Fathers and their motives, but the one thing that's fundamentally clear is that they didn't want too much power in the hands of the few. By cracky, that's how things have run so far, and it's worked well enough that both our general population and those they elect have had the luxury of temporarily forgetting it.

Well, here's our wake-up call. America isn't some kind of entity that exists outside the rest of the world. It's an integral part of it. So let's govern with logic and reason, and raise *all* the boats. Putting some people first, before others, is how we've gotten to this horrific tipping point. Globalism is the only way to survive, not to mention achieve the meritocracy that both sides of the political fence agree we should strive for.