When he looks out from the White House’s north windows, Trump can see the layers of fencing that have sealed him in his temporary home. But he can also see the steady progress that workers have been making on the inaugural viewing stand rising up on Pennsylvania Avenue. Fixed to its front is a huge American flag. The edifice is a visual reminder that in a healthy democracy, power is impermanent. Self-government depends on the Constitution, but also on acts of courage by people such as Raffensperger.

*********

What? You want me to put Raffensperger’s first name in brackets up there? No need. He’s like Cher, like Liberace, like Sting, like Pink, like Charo, like (this one’s for my sister) Morrissey. Raffensperger is so famous, so beloved, that everyone knows him by just one name.

This is must-see tv. When you watch Georgia’s Gabriel Sterling, you’re watching the village finally getting back at the village bully. Finally. Not that much of the village; it’s still only a few brave souls. But it’s really happening.

The twisted bully who commands crowds to shriek LOCK HER UP is finally getting what he has so richly deserved. His twisted, violent associates – most recently, bloodthirsty Joe diGenova – are also being called out.

To be sure, millions of people love violence – taking part in it, or watching it – and the last full measure of madmen and madwomen still standing around Trump at the very end will continue to give those millions what they want. But the overwhelming majority of Americans detests viciousness, cruelty, bullying, tormenting, and, like Gabriel Sterling, they are finding their voice.

Today, even William Barr is willing to say no fraud. He will probably welcome the vile attack Trump will level against him; he will probably be grateful to be fired. Maybe he can fashion some sort of respectable future for himself…

Meanwhile, watch out for more Gabriel Sterlings, people willing to call perversion perversion, people willing to be openly decent in an indecent time. Bravo.

Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese WW2 soldier found hiding out in the jungle thirty years after the “end” of the conflict (Hiroo didn’t acknowledge that it had ended), wrote a memoir titled No Surrender: My Thirty-year War. At 74, the current American president is unlikely to enjoy Hiroo’s longevity, so let’s anticipate that his memoir will be titled something like No Surrender: My Ten-year War. And though he’ll be hiding out in the comfortable Greenbrier Bunker (after de-de-commissioning it and throwing the tourists out), and will even sneak upstairs for occasional rounds of golf, the president will be no less a hero than Onoda, both men icons of fidelity to a cause.

Every day, in this final week, more shoes drop. Anonymous outs himself and writes an eloquent plea: VOTE.

I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives…

[When he read my anonymous opinion piece, Trump] became unhinged…

We must reject the culture of political intimidation that’s been cultivated by this president.

[Trump] has waged an all-out assault on reason, preferring to enthrone emotion and impulse in the seat of our government. The consequences have been calamitous…

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Plunge right through that poll.
Run the vote way past predictions, lead us to the goal.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Fight on for your fame,
Fight! Badgers, Fellows! Fight! Fight, fight, we’ll win this game.

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Stand up, Badgers sing!
‘Forward’ is our driving spirit, loyal voices ring.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Raise your glowing flame.
Stand, patriots, let us now salute your name!

The person many consider the nation’s top immunologist resigns in disgust from the government’s politicized anti-covid activity.

Public health and safety have been jeopardized by the administration’s hostility to the truth and by its politicization of the pandemic response, undoubtedly leading to tens of thousands of preventable deaths… More than half of the states in this country are reporting rising covid-19 cases. Nine months into the pandemic, the United States continues to grapple with failed White House leadership. Instead, we get the recent spectacle of the president exploiting his own illness for political purposes and advising the nation, “Don’t be afraid of Covid.”

Other researchers will leave in the same disgust, hoping that their gesture will somehow move the country away from rule by self-serving idiots.

… should be the headline on November 3. Here’s where you can contribute.

I mean, he won it. He fought hard for it and won it for himself: a full life. And he fought to win it for everyone else too.

Opening my copy of Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, I go right to his 1987 speech to the Boston Lesbian and Gay Town Meeting – the beginning of Gay Pride Weekend. You want Larry, that’s where you get Larry.

… I believe this gay community of ours has a death wish and that we are going to die, because we refuse to take responsibility for our own lives… What’s the number of dead friends at which you can decide to stop just sitting quietly like the good little boys and girls we were all brought up to be – and start taking rude, noisy, offensive, political action? One? Ten? One hundred? … If I use gross language – go ahead, be offended – I don’t know how else to reach you, how to reach everybody. I tried starting an organization: I cofounded GMHC, which becomes more timid as it becomes richer day by day. I tried writing a play. I tried writing endless articles in the Native and the New York Times and Newsday and screaming on “Donahue” and at every TV camera put in front of me. I helped start ACT UP, a small bunch of too few very courageous people willing to make rude noises. I don’t know what else to do to wake you up! … “You want to die, Felix? Die!” That’s a line from The Normal Heart. In his immense frustration, Ned Weeks yells it at his dying lover. That’s how I feel about all of you… I am telling you they are killing us and we are letting them! Yes, I am screaming like an hysteric. I know that. I look and sound like an asshole. I told you this was going to be my last tirade and I am going to go out screaming so fucking rudely that you will hear this coarse, crude voice of mine in your nightmares. You are going to die and you are going to die very soon unless you get up off your fucking tushies and fight back! Unless you do – you will forgive me – you deserve to die… [Y]ou are saying that your lives are worth shit, and that we deserve to die, and that the deaths of all of our friends and lovers have amounted to nothing.

… this New York Times editorial. “Prince Harry and Meghan should not be lamented as defectors from the old order, but celebrated as the heroes of the next installment, as modern royals renouncing some level of privilege to seek their fortune in the real world,” the NYT writes; and it’s as Katherine Anne Porter says in her great short story, “Holiday”:

[A]ll my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness. … I learned finally [to] take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. … We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours… and if we don’t run from the others, we are fools.

Whatever becomes of these two, their story so far is about the guts and clarity to free oneself from a destructive life narrative that someone else has laid out for you. But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king, says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as he taps his head. Mind-forg’d manacles are no joke, okay? Imagine how powerful they are when they’re royal. Nothing wrong, UD thinks, with being led to some extent in your life by the title of Graham Greene’s memoir: Ways of Escape.

Polish ingenuity and stout-heartedness.

Best tweet so far:

“Bloody Poles. Coming over here. Taking out our terrorists.”

Excellent choice of weapon.

… who didn’t mind getting it mussed.

1. A guy beat the shit out of the fucker before he could hurt anyone.
2. The fucker is 21 years old; the shit-kicker is 65 years old.

Nail-biting events in Venezuela currently being led by a guy who spent time in UD‘s Foggy Bottom. Very exciting. Very scary.

Crowd scenes.

This blog’s Venezuela posts.

In the city of Solidarity, people come together in an ultimately losing battle for the life of their assassinated mayor.

O powerful western fallen star! 
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! 
O great star disappear’d—

Of course certain things should be illegal, especially as they bear upon the child.  Is there anyone in this hall who thinks that religion justifies the mutilation of a child’s genitals?  Is there?  Good.  Well, wouldn’t you like a law that said that non-elective surgery on the private parts of a child should be [illegal]?  Isn’t it time?