Friday, October 26, 2018

Has anyone ever known such bliss?


What heaven it is when reverberations
from Twain and Liebling echo down our
aural canal, with tirades against dem-
ocracy such as emerged from the post-
sovereign State of Georgia this week.





How wrong, how unjust, how beneath a
demagogue's dignity it would be, for
any of us to deny what hilarity must
be credited to Republican efforts to
suppress the vote with mechanisms so
indebted to torches and little hoods
as to make us gasp with raptest awe.

Pricelessly, yet exuberantly stuffed
with tomfoolery of halcyon days, the
torrent of fraud now pours from that
Party's gubernatorial candidate, who
labors at his day job to supervise a
fair election. Oh, children! All who
mourned, they missed the theft of an
election in Florida in the same mode
in 2000, must rise from their torpor
to applaud the most perfect thievery
of the ballot since Scalia rescued a
Bush to bring us the surveillance of
our patriotism. And to think, a wom-
an of slave ancestry is his nemesis!




But now, so shrewd is this luminary,
not to deride her gender or her race
for pitching the State into a pit of
universal enfranchisement, but rath-
er to blame the Real Malefactors, an
axis of San Francisco socialists and
New York billionaires. What, off the
top of your head, sounds more Jewish
than that, but the President's warn-
ing of malevolent international fin-
anciers when he gained his election?

Aren't they clever, our kindly ones?




















ii  Eudora Welty, photography
    Home Before Dark
    Blacks expelled before sundown,
    every day of their lives, Jackson, MS
    1935


Jonathan Littell
The Kindly Ones
Harper Collins, 2006, 2009©


Victor Klemperer
I Will Bear Witness
  A diary of the Nazi years
  1933 - 1941
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998©








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