The title comes from Stephen Vincent Benet’s mid-1930s poem “Litany for Dictatorships,” a grim assessment that humanity was not living up to its potential:
“We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.”
Living in the oh-so-red-state Florida Panhandle and through the Reagan Years, I’ve never been under the delusion that the light was guaranteed to increase. Letters to the local paper back in the 1980s made it quite obvious lots of people stewed with resentment that women had life choices other than “stay at home mom.” They hated that Christianity — their brand, of course — wasn’t allowed to dictate the law of the land.People weren’t as open about being antisemites or racists but I saw some of that too. Homophobia reared its head later, as did Islamophobia.
Despite all that, it’s horrifying how quickly how many people embrace old hatreds now that the Republican Party leaders are saying its okay. Case in point, a lawsuit from multiple Republican AGs fighting against the Biden administration classifying gender dysphoria as a disability ended when the Toddler undid the rule. Some of the AGs turned it into a different suit, demanding the federal government drop a requirement that states have to provide disabled individuals with services in the community whenever possible, rather than institutionalizing them.
The AGs are staying silent about the reasons for this suit, probably because “I want to lock those stinking freaks away” isn’t a popular position. I’m sure if pressed they’ll eventually spout some bullshit about states’ rights, federal overreach, blahblahblah. They’re lying; nobody pushes a lawsuit like this unless they want disabled people locked away.
Republicans are also pushing to eliminate a federal program that pays family members to care for a loved one at home. Here they offer an argument there’s too much fraud, but rather than investigate (or offer examples) they simply want the program gone. Which could lead to more disabled being institutionalized.
I know people who are only alive because they’re on antidepressants but RFK Jr. opposes them too. And wants to ban them. He’s not unique in this: when Obama said people with mental illness should seek treatment and not be stigmatized, right-winger Neil Munro said, yes they should be stigmatized — people who seek therapy instead of just working through it are weak! Which fits with RFK Jr.’s conviction that a healthy, pure body won’t get sick or the ideas of other Toddler officials that covid would only cull the weaker members of our society, herd immunity would save the rest.
It’s not just about making bigotry against the disabled fashionable again. The religious right has grumbled for years that “freedom of religion” means freedom of their religion and they’re still at it: disbarred Toddler lawyer Jenna Ellis says “We have a civil government that protects the right of Christians to be able to live and work” and does not protect anyone else. Which is wrong, and also evil: nobody making this argument is advocating “even though we could shut down Islam in America, we’ll tolerate them” (some good discussion of all this on Baptist News). They want Muslims gone. This is particularly about Muslims right now but trust me, the Jews and the “wrong” Christians will get it eventually if the Religious Right’s dream of a Christian state becomes a reality. As witness one New Hampshire Republican wants to teach Holocaust denial in schools.
And, of course, there’s racism. The Biden administration wanted to help poor blacks in Alabama who desperately needed new septic systems. The Toddler killed the project. Red states are jumping on gerrymandering black Americans out of political power now that the Supreme Court has given them the A-OK. And when black state legislators in Tennessee objected, the Republicans retaliated. How dare they speak up to the master race? And Republicans continue calling for an end to the Fourteenth Amendment — which as Kevin Leman says at the link means they’re either ignorant or white supremacist. As others have observed, stripping black Americans of legal rights isn’t about the rationale, it’s about stripping them of legal rights. And then there’s the racist alleged murderer who’s getting thousands in donations since allegedly gunning down a black man in a hate crime. Or that the one type of refugee Republicans believe in bringing to this country — even spending money on it — is white South Africans.
And there’s homophobia and transphobia (e.g., here and here) too, and some Republicans declaring that no matter how bad the Toddler is, they still support him as the alternative to Biden daring to declare Transgender Visibility Day. As Rick Pidcock says, “nobody dies from Transgender Visibility Day.”
Benet ends his poem with the lines “our fathers and ourselves sewed dragon’s teeth/our children know and suffer the armed men.” The dragon’s teeth in this case being the rights blacks, women, gays and the disabled won for themselves in the last century, which then spawned the opposition of pissed-off, resentful people who can’t stand to share “their” country. That works both ways, though. Just as hatred didn’t die with the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the ADA and Obergefell, the push for equality and the knowledge that it’s possible won’t die either. We can be dragon’s teeth. We can give birth to a better America. Women, blacks and gays fought for their rights when they had none, when the law actively denied them rights. It will be a very long struggle and many people will suffer unjustly and die before it ends but we can eventually bend the arc of the universe back towards justice.
