“DO THE THING, ZHU LI!” –Iknik Varrick
I begin the composition of this post on the ninth of February, my first day back to work after an unprecedented disruption of life of literally historic proportions caused, obliquely, by the same forces that corrode the quality of our lives, assault the expression of our liberties, and are antagonistic to our self-expression, a prerequisite for true happiness.
Some time ago, I wrote something along the lines of “Fascism never cedes power except at the point of a bayonet.” I cannot find the exact post because social media generates content to be consumed, not archived.
It’s unlikely, but always possible that Zuck’s ever-thirsty army of bots simply memory-hole’d it. Increasingly, the ability to elevate or bury the communication of this-or-that idea, this-or-that message, will define our spiraling civic life. From the top-down, it is not only the influence of this new, freakish class of Robber Barons that blights the roots that connect our leaders to their constituents, as well as those that bind neighbors to one another. In server rooms powered by dark nationalist interests, powerful and cagey state-funded intelligence services seed our civil discourse with salt through these same channels.
So, since I can’t find that post, I’ll instead point back to a BlueSky post from a year ago:
Folks need to abandon as soon as possible the mental framework that processes and laws and norms and pointing out hypocrisy is going to do a tinker’s damn about this coup-in-progress.
We’re in a Pompey the Great era: “Will you never cease prating of laws to us that have swords by our sides?”
( https://bsky.app/profile/detarame.bsky.social/post/3lj263ifxok2i )
I was wrong. We are not in a Pompey the Great era: that might as well be eons from now. Julius Caesar is our optimistic future. It is presently “Marius Season”: a time where singular actors – men of hubristic greed and cynical arrogance – trample over long-established traditions. For most of my living memory I’ve watched as society forgets the cost of letting wealth and power trickle into a singular well: a dark, reservoir whose small aperture is now overflowing, breeding elites who are, at best, alien and aloof and the worst of whom are documented psychopaths and pedophiles.
Presently, we find ourselves ruled over by the sick, cynical, and most depraved of the entire, hopeless patrician class.
One month ago, and exactly two months shy of the ides of March, Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya wrote a letter from a detention cell in southwest Texas.
( https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/02/09/children-of-dilley-propublica-report-conditions-inside-dilley-immigration-detention-center)
( https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-dilley-children-letters )
The (delightfully named) I_may_have_weed from Reddit offers a translation:
Name: Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya
Country: I am colombian
age: 9
time spent in custody: 113 days
My name is Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya and i have been in jail for 113 days. I miss my friends and i am afraid they may forget me. I am so bored in here. I miss my country and my home. We came here for vacation for 10 days. ICE took me into an interrogation room and questioned me for 2 hours without my mom. I was traverling bymyself with the help of a stewardess because my mom lives in NY. They only cared about arresting my mom. I was traveling with a tourist paper but ICE used me to grab my mom. Now i am in a jail that is making me depressed. I have even fainted 2 times from the conditions. Every night i cry. I dont sleep. I feel like this is my fault. All i wanted was vacation with my family.
If we do manage to accidentally stumble our way into Gibson’s Jackpot Trilogy future (which we will not), it does not make our present milieu any less a cataclysm and catastrophe. For every family gassed in the Holocaust, for every young French beauty assaulted and hanged for being part of La Résistance, for every person starved in the artificial famines caused by imperialist policies — Stalinist and Capitalist — the twentieth century was the end of the world.
And so, too, for all of recorded history. And so, too, for us.
The ancient Greeks of the pre-Homeric Aegean — the “Great White Hype” of History — lost two whole-ass languages before Helen of Troy’s famous meet cute with Paris. Therein lies the lie of the whiggish siren’s song that “everything always, eventually, gets better.” The so-called “Bronze Age Collapse” was a functional end of the world to those who endured it. It’s was no less an apocalypse because the heirs of the Mycenaeans reinvented literacy seven hundred years later.
The stakes of the first decades of the twenty-first century are no less extreme. It’s hard to imagine that now, perhaps, even as masked Praetorians bully, harass, and torture with impunity. The very way we think about and are taught history encourages into this worldview, usually until it’s too late.
Even if we manage to come out of this clear-and-present crisis, and should our great-grandchildren still hold the craft of writing, or even possess a livable ecosystem to inhabit, they will look back on this era with the same disgust that we presently reserve for history’s most heinous and wicked crimes. They will marvel at the reckless and ever-growing cruelty of the twenty-first century American government, presently at a new, monstrous apex. They will hate who we were, and rightfully so.
What possible cause could justify such gleeful callousness?
What possible piety could a people who consumed their own progeny ever credibly profess?
“This too shall pass,” says the old wisdom. Maybe, but that’s cold comfort to children whose lives have been upended for no other reason than to appease the least and worst among us, an incurious and bigoted constituency of consumers informationally nourished from a fetid stream of bullshit and hysteria.
Even should our future exceed the wildest optimistim of Roddenberry’s 23rd century, which it clearly will not, ours is the century of xenophobia, reactionary populism, and the rise of demagogues, to say nothing of widespread want and deprivation. We’re the challenge to overcome if our stupid, funny, wonderful species is going to continue making friends and families and art and messes, one of the first steps is to understand the future isn’t coming to save us. Vulcans are not coming to sort out our shit out for us, nor is a bold protagonist from the future. It’s now or nobody.
It’s only going to get darker, in the near term, and quite possibly beyond. There’s nothing we can do about the former, but still have a say in the latter. If we’re lucky, we might see light again before we leave this Earth. But, not all of us will, and everyone should start adjusting their mindsets — and their behaviors — on this understanding. Not to compel hopelessness, but to steel resolve. The only hope for the future is to act in the present.
Here, again, the misinformation and rhetorical lawlessness of corporate social media does us great harm by accelerating this historical misapprehension. The maladaptive habits it encourages among its users, in many ways, pushes us to simply believe history does not exist. As ICE laces up Orwell’s boots, the very ones that attempt to begin the march that ends with “a boot stamping on a human face forever,” it shapes us to believe “this moment is what normal is.”
Through tirelessly engineered feedback loops, it encourages you to exist in the present moment only and always, forgetting the context of all that has come before. Additionally, through the clever manipulations of these same algorithmic social engineers, the “normal” you are exposed to is a carefully crafted product, which we consume and, in turn, transforms us into products ourselves.
After the First World War, before he captained an administration whose corruption would once be considered legendary and now is merely unambitious, Warren Harding promised a “return to normalcy.” There is no normalcy to return to, then or now. Normalcy is a product to sell you on the impossibility of transformation.
These regressive forces have only begun to release their fury upon the rest of us, unequally dividing their misery but unceasing in their disdain and cruelty for the very concept of pluralistic society, the very rhetorical — and aspirational — foundation of the United States.
Should we as a species, much less a nation, manage to ever stumble ourselves back to the levels of technological power and creature comfort we presently possess , it should not be thought of as progress. Because, for us, there is no glorious future. Reserve your hope for the future and deploy
What I want from you for my birthday is to find, for you, what it means to fight.
I don’t want to hear about it.
I want you you do it,
and tell no one,
not even me.
acta non verba