Re: Campaign 2016 Part XV: Before & After: Dancing in the Streets of Philadelphia!
Re: Campaign 2016 Part XV: Before & After: Dancing in the Streets of Philadelphia!
Apparently Trump yesterday says that the general election is rigged.
Democracy may be over as we know it.
Extended quote
here. No major party candidate in American history has tried to de-legitimize democracy itself. We got a very slight taste of this from the surrogates in 2000 with "stop the count" and 2012 with "unskew the polls," but this is the candidate himself, and he's saying it directly: "if I lose the result is illegitimate and there will be bloodshed."
This is the closest we have ever come before.
Murrow asks:
whose fault is this? Thirty years of dancing around this stuff as it came pouring out of Hate Radio, and never calling it out for fear of the baying of the beasts -- that is the fault.
Hopefully the wave is breaking and the tide will roll back. Maybe we have finally reached the counterpoise of 1968:
"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullsh-t, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." -- Hunter S. Thompson
Hopefully this is the high water mark. The place when a 22-year wave of hate breaks and rolls back.
