The New Normal

It would be funny, the clownish antics and the tantrums on the network news programs if the clown parade was not coupled with a frantic power grab, the erasure of trans people, the disappearance of Mahmoud Khalid and the open desire to create wreckage and confusion. Make no mistake: confusion is one of the desired outcomes of moving fast and breaking things. When we are confused we are open to any narrative that offers us something in the way of re-orientation. Narrative is essential, you see.

Throughout Ta-Nahesi Coates’s “The Message”, and Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”, the necessity of narrative is a through-line, not just the human need for narrative—we tell ourselves stories in order to live—but the power wielded by those who write the narrative, as well. In any time of engineered confusion, someone is always introducing a new narrative, and confusion, which renders us vulnerable, is being used on us deliberately now, as a matter of policy and the unhinged clown ballet is throwing as many narratives at the wall as possible, not caring what sticks—their ring-leader will change the narrative again by dinner time.

Here is a narrative: our country is already in Constitutional Crisis, which has been pursued by dangerous ideologues who desire most of us to live as second class citizens, or, frankly, not at all. The architects of this administration have made their desire to rule as authoritarians and oligarchs known quite publicly and, as promised, they hit their first hundred days with wrecking balls swinging in every direction. The apparatus of authoritarian power usually begins within the framework of parliamentary procedure—within laws and constitutions and assemblies of representatives and within courts—creating new designations for its citizens and residents; creating new classes of aliens; creating official classes of undesirables and using the application of “terrorism” charges to politicise all avenues of dissent; exerting undue influence on universities; redesigning borders and spheres of influence. Deciding what is and is not free and protected speech and assembly.

It is happening now with devastating speed and the “opposition party” seems intent on enabling or ignoring the threat—which has been on the slow walk for decades—which is nothing short of the theft of American democracy. Where are the Democrats who decried fascism on the campaign trail? Where are their voices now, while Mahmoud Khalid sits disappeared in a hell-hole in Louisiana and those who said “STOP THE GENOCIDE” are being branded as “terrorists”?

This is the time for Columbia and Harvard Universities, and for all other colleges and universities—as well as for all news papers and news outlets—to be loudly and assertively defending the First Amendment. This is a time when anyone in elected office should be loudly defending the First Amendment. Capitulation and oppression and the use of state and vigilante violence to attack students calling for an end to genocide did not prevent the far-right lobby from attacking the University in every way that they can wield their out-sized influence, chilling free speech for one and all.

Every unchallenged assault, every time members of Congress or the Universities choose silence or capitulation, another brick goes up in the wall they are building—the one walling us off from the freedoms it had seemed we enjoyed, tyranny—rights and freedoms we have always been told were ours by birthright.

The rights and freedoms disappearing every day before our eyes is going to become the new normal, and how far is too far in this new normal?