A Few Thousand Idiots Can’t Topple the Most Powerful Government on Earth…

… which may be the Chinese Government, at this point.

Back in 2010, I wrote a tragic-comic novel that centered on the rise of a white supremacist fascist movement which sought to overthrow the US Government by, among other things, comically besieging the US Capitol. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a particularly good place at the time and ended up burning that draft, and it took me a number of years to write a second. With any luck though, today’s events will speed the passage of Ellipsis to publication.

In the meantime, for your reading pleasure, I’m paraphrasing a tweetstorm here:

Obviously, a few thousand lightly-armed idiots can’t topple the most powerful government on Earth. At least not alone. Maybe we shouldn’t have filled our police and armed forces with avowed white supremacists though? Ahh, but that was half the point.

We’re living in a Debordian spectacle. I went for a walk before sunset and every shop and window I passed showed a television screen tuned to cable or network news. The seriousness of this event and the coverage of it are co-creative of each other.

Ali Abunimah may have said it best, though: “Reminder that when right-wing, US-backed and funded mobs try to overthrow the governments of other sovereign countries, they are cheered by Democrats and Republicans alike as “pro-democracy” protesters. This would even be dubbed the “American Spring.”

This coup attempt must be stopped, but so must the Lincoln Project, if you follow my drift, and without historical memory about the so-called War on Terror, the PATRIOT Act, etc., etc., and all the people (now masquerading as patriots) who brought us those horrors, it will be hard to pull out of this tailspin (one of the many military metaphors that have so suffused our English), or perhaps better, awake from this nightmare (a Joyce-ism with which I’m perfectly comfortable), and so rise to the occasion of the singular historical moment in which we’re living.