So, I’m working on an article for Blogcritics, see, and man, it’s gonna be great. It’s about some people who make indie music and how they go about promoting it, but it’s got stuff about me in it too, which is always a big plus, right? Plus it’s part travelogue, ’cause I just took a music-related trip to Nashville, and it refers to technology too – it’s kind of all over the place, and man, it’s gonna be one heck of an article.
Problem is, I can’t finish it. I also can’t get to the pile of music CDs and concert DVDs I have lined up ready to be reviewed. All because of what’s going on in that Greatest Dismal Swamp of All, Washington DC, where this country has just formally become a Fascist state.
That’s not hyperbole, folks. Fascism is as Fascism does. At Digby’s blog, Tristero has spelled out what I’d been thinking all along – that Fascism is a matter of quality, not quantity. It doesn’t matter that the tyrannical powers George W. Bush is granting himself, with the blessing of Congress, aren’t being used routinely against the average John or Jane Q. Public. It’s the powers themselves that matter.
My powers of concentration are weakened. I can’t focus on stuff I normally enjoy, or on my work. I can’t look forward with pleasure to the rare free evening ahead of me tonight, or to a party I’m invited to tomorrow, or to my band’s gig on Sunday.
Instead, I’m swatting at chiggers of moral despair, pests that make up an overwhelming swarm: abuse of signing statements, impeachable wiretapping offenses, a spineless opposition, and now John McCain’s (and some Democrats’!) acceptance of a sham compromise that makes the final link in the chain: suspension of habeus corpus.
An election is looming, in which the Democrats can take control of the House and, conceivably, the Senate. The necessity of making this change must be apparent to anyone who cares about the Constitution. It’s the Constitution that made America a great nation in the past, and it could do so again. But even if they manage to win, will Reid and Pelosi suddenly grow spines?
Only if – to mix a metaphor – we hold their feet to the fire. Maybe some of us will have to give up some of our good-timey gallivanting in order to do this. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.