Live through this and you won't look back
Nov 10, 2024 · 3 minute readStars’ third album, Set Yourself on Fire, is now twenty years old. I remember listening to it, on the streets of Chapel Hill in 2004. The day after. The day before, we started out at the infamous 112 N Graham St shared house, watching the returns come in and laughing along with Jon Stewart. Indecision 2004. And then the night turned. The laughter and chatter stopped and the party broke up and we slithered away.
I took a picture of this sign as I walked down Franklin Street the next day, every single person on the street looking shell-shocked and ruined. How could the country re-elect this person, this administration, given all the disasters of the previous four years?
What I didn’t know is that one day, I’d look back on that walk with something approaching nostalgia. That I’d watch returns coming in and see the country vote for an insurrectionist and mass internment camps. And not just in the places you’d expect. The entire country covered with red shift arrows, that they’d taken a long hard look at the two candidates and decided they wanted the one that gleefully talks about the execution of his enemies. This Is What They Want And By God Take Away Our Healthcare While You’re Dragging People Off The Streets.
Maybe it won’t be so bad; after all, 2004 gave way to 2006 and 2008. But I then read about the coming attempts to completely wipe out what’s left of the 14th Amendment and I start wishing for Robert L. Booth.
Meanwhile, all of my social media feeds have turned into the standard Democratic circular firing squad, although my ire is most reserved for the people shitting on the Democrats for the past year now telling people to get their passports renewed before the coming further assault on trans rights1.
God, that was strange to see you again
Introduced by a friend of a friend
Smiled and said, "Yes, I think we've met before"
In that instant, it started to pour
Captured a taxi despite all the rain
We drove in silence across Pont Champlain
And all of that time you thought I was sad
I was trying to remember your name
Back in 2004, I could not wrap my head around this lyric. How could you not remember? How could you not remember that name? A feeling made more acute by never having had a name to remember. Twenty years on…and I understand a lot better now. Some names stay, but many do not. That’s okay, because there will be names that last forever.
I’ve also been thinking about this speech again.
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I don’t think progressives really understand the trouble they’re in concerning the direction of the party. Biden, to everybody’s surprise, actually governed closer to what a hypothetical Sanders administration would look like, given the makeup of the Senate and the Courts: stimulus and massive amounts of infrastructure spending, reducing inflation without the crushing unemployment of the 1980s, protectionism, kickstarting manufacturing builds, reducing the amount of Americans paid under $15 from 31% of the population to 13%, cancelling billions of dollars of debt, and the only reason he didn’t do more was because of the Supreme Court, saving union pension funds, and being the first President in the history of the USA to walk a picket line. And none of it helped. Do you honestly think the centrists in the party are going to look at that and suggest Medicare-for-all? When it turns out that people actually don’t care about soaring unemployment compared to the prices they confront weekly at the supermarket, how do you think they’re going to react to ‘we’re going to take away your health insurance’ even if the new thing is technically better? ↩︎