Assassins

     We have used many monikers of late to describe the current Administration and the collaborators enabling them. The term Nazi is invoked but it has no real sting. There are vanishingly few remaining of the Greatest Generation who lived through and saw the first-hand effects of that particular version of horror. For most people living today WWII is nothing more than a history lesson. A chapter in a textbook, a few jerky old black-and-white newsreels a, distant horizon of eight plus decades ago, old news (or fake news depending on who you believe), noted in passing while moving on to the more important minutiae of the day. It may as well be ancient Rome.

    We've tested out a few others terms; autocrats, authoritarians, oligarchs, plutocrats, kleptocrats,  bulldozers, hatchet men, wrecking balls, even theocrats; it's a pretty comprehensive list deployed in opposition, but none of these really hit the mark in the visceral way we need. They are distant in effect, esoteric even, and while accurate not particularly useful. They're the sort of words that put intellectual distance between the speaker and the listener. It's part of the elitism for which we on the left are so often chastised. 

    A better term is needed that explains what is happening. Let's not beat around the cliché' any longer and look at reality. First, we need to take Trump out of the equation; aside from being a punching bag for the left, he is a rallying point for the right. The more vigorously we demonize a clearly incoherent, doddering old man the less on point we are and the more useful he becomes to his handlers. Deep down we know that the current occupant of the Office of the President of the United States has neither the intellectual capacity nor desire to comprehend what is being done in his name. The authors of Project 2025 are running the show. They know they have two years of mostly unfettered control of the levers of power and they intend to strain them beyond the breaking point.

    This has been a systematic and damn well coordinated effort with seeds planted with the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt. Generations have been carefully trained, grievances nurtured in the fertile humus of racism and tribalism patiently awaiting the precise moment to strike a blow for white nationalism. They have rightly judged that their time is now, a compliant--indeed, cognitively compromised--cypher is at hand, the concentration of money, media and mockery, a cowering Congress afraid of its own shadow and a Supreme Court hand-picked to tip the scales of justice their way even if the Constitution must be tortured to do so.

    Without reiterating all that P-2025 has in mind for reshaping America into the pre-Civil War model, suffice it to say that to achieve their goal nothing less than the systematic disassembly of diversified federal authority must occur, to be replaced with Executive fiat. The shock and awe of the first hundred days is the bureaucratic equivalent of the blitzkrieg. Arrive with overwhelming force, crush anything that gets in the way, decimate the structures that citizens have taken for granted and instill fear everywhere. While citizens scramble to protect their own interests any coordinated response is blunted and the chaos that ensues buys time, compliance and ultimately the keys to the city. With an eviscerated and enfeebled government the halcyon days of the Gilded Age can be resurrected and all those aforementioned 'crats' can effectively do whatever they please without fear of repercussion. We'll call it the Age of Extractive Indulgence.

    So, what to do? What new nomenclature should we apply that carries within a single word not only the intention but the manner in which their ends are to be achieved. What describes the systematic disassembly of our small L liberal democracy; the flaying of civil rights, the flaunting of abhorrent illegal authority under the color of law, the dissolution of the arts and sciences and the scrubbing of the history of accomplishments and challenges by historically mistreated citizens? Is there a sole descriptor that embodies the plunder of our nation's resources to the benefit of the few, the militarization of the cop on the beat in small town America and the revocation of a Constitutional right of basic citizenship?

    Yes, there is a word that embodies the cruelty, intent, and result of the times at hand. Assassins. Assassins have breached the wall of Fortress Democracy. Assassins are about to murder America. We must call them what they are; Assassins.

Fifty two words

 One sentence. It took the Founders a single sentence of fifty two words to define what this new country they were building should be, and by inference, what it should not be.

These new United States will be just, peaceful, well defended, kind in looking out for our neighbors and will seek to offer the future these same ideals and circumstances. Fifty two words, the foundation for all that followed for nearly two hundred fifty years, until January 20th, 2025.

In these intervening years we have, as a nation, grown corpulent with success, complacent about citizenship both at home and abroad, truculent in new tribalism and tolerant-even supportive-of behavior that is antithetical to everything those fifty two words represent. We have lost our way, again, as we did one hundred sixty five years ago during our last existential crisis; the Civil War. In many ways the issues haven't changed. It is still about money, power, racism, sexism and other-ism. All those pent-up grievances carefully stoked and handed down generation to generation waiting for a tinder spark to light the wildfire consuming us now.

America has never really come to terms with it's original sin. Most assign it to slavery-which was horrific-but miss the real culprit; unfettered mercantilism. With no practical restraints on commerce slavery was just doing business. The least effort for the best return. Familiar even today. It was only when the human rights abuse became so egregious and half the country was set against the other half that a war was fought. Not for states rights, the scant cover the Confederate States used as justification, but for sake of the Union. Even the Great Emancipator declared that if he could win the war without freeing the slaves he would do so. In the end the conflict was as much about the culture of profit as anything else.

The straits in which we now find ourselves are every bit as harrowing as the lead up to the Civil War, with significantly more dangerous circumstances; an Executive branch unbound from the restraints of the Constitution is exploiting a callow Supreme Court bent on its own methodical deconstruction of the wise, time honored principal of stare decisis. A President, freed from the constraints of a fearful Congress, not just willing-but anxious-to seek revenge on enemies he conjures in his fevered dreams. The strategy is simple, set the least among us against one another for the benefit of those with the most. Pay to play at the most rudimentary level. We are set upon a course of destroying the very fabric of the words that welded us together so long ago. Nothing short of Imperial coronation will suffice, even if he must tread upon the bloody corpses of those who defend the normal order of the law. The Apostolic warning from Paul, imprisoned in Rome, to Timothy rings true across millennia, 'we live in perilous times'.

We live in times where the phrase written on so many police cars, to protect and serve, have become cruelly ironic for all, as they have been for people of color forever. We live in a time when the very notion of being stopped by people acting under the color of authority to demand our papers was beyond the pale. An intrusion upon our right to be left alone not to be tolerated. Now communications channels are crowded with what to do when masked men with guns hijack you on a street, in a factory or school, or invade your home. We have become that which the Founders worked so diligently to prevent. We have lost the battle. We must not lose the war. Fifty two words. The rallying cry for 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 defense, 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."

Look who is now an award winning author!

 Rising Son wins Hemingway Wartime Fiction First Place!! I am honored to be the recipient of first place at the 2025 CIBAs announced April 6. The international event recognized writing excellence from around the world so it is humbling that my debut novel was so well regarded.

I'm not resting on my laurels, however, I am hard at work on my next novel, a detective novel set in 1963 Seattle. The working title is Regular Joe and I hope to be finished in time to compete in the 2026 Chanticleer International Book Awards event. Stay tuned for further developments.