We are now at the point in our national life that nervous school administrators are removing potentially “controversial” books from the shelves of school libraries, before anyone asks or demands they do so. Largely, this is a question of accommodation to the Farce-Fascist MAGA movement’s “culture war” dictates, which means that anything that so much as hints at the existence of homosexuality, say, or America’s four hundred year history of racism, must be hidden away from the view of curious little eyes. This, ladies and gentlemen and gender-queers, is how totalitarianism really works: the ordinary citizen does the work of the secret police for them, leaving those worthies free to deal with the really dangerous freethinkers or to hone their grasp of the delicate arts of blackmail and semi-official corruption. Such cowards are your ordinary everyday Americans, in fact, that they are taking the initiative before the fascisti complete their takeover and before the secret police even exist for anybody except the undocumented.
For more evidence of the timidity that abounds in the “home of the brave,” look no further than our wee little gun problem. Something like six out of seven Americans, a number that includes plenty of ordinary Republicans, recognize that our gun laws are much too weak. Yet somehow, we are much too weak to force the quivering politicians who claim to represent us to do anything about the ongoing slaughter except offer empty thoughts and blasphemous prayers. “Many crime experts define a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people are shot,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt reports. “Last weekend, there were a shocking number of them — at least nine — across the U.S.” Well, David, but is it so shocking anymore? Perhaps it was shocking way back in 1966, when a gunman murdered his wife and mother, and then shot dead fourteen strangers at the University of Texas-Austin. Hey, we could still have done something about it then, with JFK less than three years in the grave to which Oswald’s mail-order rifle had sent him, and his brother Robert and Dr. King still very much alive. But apparently, our grandparents were a bunch of yellowbellies too, and the white ones wanted guns to protect themselves against Black Americans who were starting to riot in their rage about—but who knows what they were and are still angry about? We ain’t allowed to learn about such things in our “schools.” Must be them Black folks is just a bunch of savages.
You see, ladies and gentlemen and gender-queers, totalitarianism is not only a matter of the relatively small number of foaming-at-the-mouth haters, or the much larger number of weak-minded fools whom the haters can recruit into their lynch mobs and MAGA rallies (but I repeat myself). Just as much, or more, it is a matter of the guilty bystanders, who could speak up but are too busy and tired and indifferent to bother, until it is too late and their freedom is gone. And for far too many of them, the loss of freedom won’t be such a bad thing by any means. It’ll be rather a relief for your typical trembling nonthinker not to hear such a racket of discordant voices, some of which keep saying stuff that makes them feel uncomfortable and bad about themselves. How soothing to salute the flag and the Leader and listen to that familiar old anthem telling you that you live in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Emanuel Goldstein 