Anastasia & The Republican Party

My daughter, who has quite the Anastasia fixation, was watching the movie Anastasia (1956). I was paying just a little bit of attention to it, but perked up when I heard the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (played by Helen Hayes) say,

"Truth serves only a world that lives by it."

That really sums up our current political situation in the U. S. of A., doesn't it? There is an objective truth, and that seems in large part to be held in the hands of the Democrats these days. (E.g. the reality of climate change, the necessity for precautions to be taken to prevent the dangers of Covid from expanding beyond our capacity to deal with them, the danger of allowing the basis of our democracy--one person, one vote--to become submerged, the recognition that gender is not merely binary, the acknowledgement that racial inequities continue to metastasize in our society...etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And those on that side of all of these issues (and more) are constantly bewildered by those on the other side--and here I mean, for the most part, those who claim to be Republicans. Democrats continue to think that if they can just shove enough Truth down the throats of the Republicans that they will stop in their tracks, give their foreheads a V8 smack, and say, "Oh, NOW I see!"

But truth serves only a world that lives by it. And that is not what our world lives by. Our world lives by selfishness, hatred, and fear. Our world lives by the maxim that when push comes to shove, you look out for number one, and fuck numbers two through ∞.

Which is why it's time to stop trying to convince. 

It's time for something else. I don't know what that is, but I know that if we don't figure it out pretty damned soon that it won't matter anymore...and our lives will be nasty, brutish, and short.