Crossing the Rubicons

It seems there are more than one

How’s that working out for you?

Shortly after the election, after it became clear to those of us who were not yet entirely convinced that the second Trump administration would be everything he and the architects of Project 2025 told us it would be, we began to hear a lot about the Rubicon that must not be crossed. That was understood to be the dismantling of the rule of law by the Trump regime’s defiance of the rule of law. We would know this happened if, for example, a judge gave an order to Donald’s Department of Justice and the DOJ simply refused to comply.

If we cross that Rubicon, we were told, there is no going back. That is, after all, how crossing the Rubicon works: the rule of law ceases to exist; civil wars start; democracies fall. And none of it can be taken back.

I think we crossed the Rubicon in November of 2016 when a business failure and glorified game show host, with no experience, no discernible positive human qualities, and no decency was elected over the most qualified candidate in American history. And then we crossed another one after January 6th, 2021, and then another, when the corrupt illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court decided that Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone, was not only above the law, but also deserved an imperial presidency, which tens of millions of Americans subsequently granted him. At that point, I think we crossed another because, with the prospect of Donald’s second term in office facing us, we finally figured out that the insurrection he incited on January 6, 2021, was complete—and it had been successful after all.

It is terrible, of course, that we have come to this place where we have every reason to believe our last remaining institutions will not hold. But here we are. Now the question is, since we are heading into our next Constitutional crisis (because I believe we’ve already been in one for a very long time): will anything happen in the next few months or years that will enable us to find our way back?

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I’ve been hearing a lot about the “failure of imagination” lately. It’s become something of a truism that anytime America is in a crisis, our imaginations—individual and collective—fail us.

Last week, Lee Bollinger, a former president of Columbia University, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

We're in the midst of an authoritarian taker of the US government. It's been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing.

Our problem in part, is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold In its most frightening versions, you neutralize the branches of government, you neutralize the media, you neutralize universities, and you're on your way.

Yes, we are well on our way, aren't we? But the idea of “failures of imagination?” That has always bothered me because the seeds for all of this were planted a very long time ago. It is because the white majority in America did absolutely nothing to root out those seeds that we are where we are right now.

Remember after September 11th, when Condoleezza Rice said something like, “Who could have imagined that somebody would intentionally fly a plane into a building?” Well, Stephen King did in his novel Running Man, which was published in 1982. People who were paying attention during George W. Bush’s first term could have imagined such things; people who read the presidential daily brief back then knew that such things were possible.

Many of us who have been paying attention now have known for far too long where all of this has been heading. The question remains, how long will it take for other people to start using their imaginations? Although come to think of it, imagination isn’t even necessary anymore. So, how long will it take before people start to see what's actually happening before their eyes?

Whatever the case, we can’t wait for them to catch up anymore. My hope is in all of you, and those who continue to have the courage to face reality while doing everything to protect what we still have and finding other ways—creative, potentially subversive ways—to protect the future those currently running everything are trying so desperately to take away from us.

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Kate Bush has been on my mind a lot recently. Her first album came out in 1978, but it wasn’t until Hounds of Love (1985), one of the greatest albums ever recorded, that I first heard her music. I was in college at the time, and she, like Joan Armatrading, Aimee Mann, Tori Amos, and a handful of others, became a permanent part of the soundtrack of my life.

This isn’t the song that’s most resonating with me right now (that would be the track immediately following on side two of the second disc), but the atmosphere she paints here is deeply in sync with how I often feel these days.

I get out of my car

Step into the night

And look up at the sky

And there's something bright

Travelling fast

Just look at it go

Just look at it go

Hello, Earth

Hello, Earth

Watching storms start to form

Over America

Can't do anything

Just watch them swing with the wind out to sea