Shows of Weakness

The world's biggest spoiled child threw himself a special-boy birthday party in the nation's capital yesterday: A tank parade showing off all the toys of death he now controls, and a demonstration that he now controls them. So the tanks rolled down the streets, possibly damaging them on the way, past an assemblage so diminished you could hear the squeak of the wheels. Soldiers marched in what appeared to be rather desultory fashion down Constitution Avenue, lined by crowds that stood one (or in some places none) deep.

The birthday boy watched from his special viewing stand and made his strong-boy scowl. All his favorite TV people were with him, mostly because he had appointed them to his cabinet. Secretary Gin-For-Breakfast, the war criminal and blow-dried TV propaganda ghoul who now controls the armed forces he someday hopes to use to murder U.S. citizens, sat right next to the birthday boy, which was nice of him. The Secretary's appointment stood against the public good and all common sense, but it did what it was supposed to do, which is prove that the birthday boy gets his way in all things. Proving this same thing appears to also have been the main reason for the tank parade. He got to say a few words, the birthday boy, and it must be admitted that he does still know a few. He's been wanting this parade for year, the birthday boy. Perhaps he thought it would fill the hole in himself where a human soul normally is. Maybe for a few minutes it did. Who knows?

It was apropos to drive tanks over something named for the Constitution. It's a perfect metaphor for what the birthday boy and his gang of thugs do every day. They're kidnapping a lot of our friends and family and shipping them off to slave gulags and places unknown, and doing many other things that are even more against the public good and all common sense than his cabinet appointees, and against laws both codified and moral, and against the Constitution itself. And the birthday boy is able to do it, because he controls not only the tanks but to a large degree our highest court, and most of the billionaires have kowtowed and offered the services of the platforms of influence that they own, and his party enjoys majorities in both branches of the legislature, two allegedly august bodies that now serve at his pleasure like two tamed apes who huddle by his feet and wait to dance for pennies when he whistles.

This is why the people were elsewhere yesterday. They gathered, millions of them, in the nation's many cities, to convey the very clear message "fuck the birthday boy, and fuck all his evil works." There they were, the people, by the tens of thousands, in Philly and San Francisco, in Chicago, in San Diego, and Boston and New York, and Los Angeles, and hundreds of other cities, towns, and municipalities. The police were there too, very uniform and precise, conveying the message "we will control you, and we will be extremely deadly to you if you won't be controlled." The other day a sheriff offered to kill the people "graveyard dead" if he was given the slightest pretext for doing so, which is against the law and the constitution, but appears to be something he feels perfectly justified in saying and doing.

The people meanwhile are great. They aren't uniform and precise. They aren't trying to control people, or be deadly to people who won't be controlled. They're just being themselves, and that is an extraordinarily diverse and powerful thing. It's all sorts of things. Millions and millions of different things. It's everything.

The people are the country, by the way. I mention this in case you didn't know.

Some don't know.

Or don't subscribe. I'm not the boss of you. But if you do subscribe, my gosh the splendors that await you.

I mentioned that the birthday boy is kidnapping our friends and family—people who the birthday boy and his supporters have decided don't deserve to be treated like human beings, because they came here in recent years and their skin's pigment isn't the right color. In the eyes of these empowered fascists, this makes them not human beings but illegals, which is a rich moniker for a man found guilty of rape and many other crimes to append to anyone else.

I also mentioned the birthday boy belongs to a party that presently enjoys a majorities in the houses of the legislature. Well one of the bodies—the House—hauled a few governors from the occasionally opposing party in front of one of their committees to make a show of berating and blaming them for all the made-up unrest used as a pretext for all the kidnapping. The point being the unrest is the fault of the governors, for treating our friends and family like the friends and family they are instead of like enemies who want to kill us, and for treating human beings like human beings and defying those who would break laws both codified and moral in order to degrade them and hurt them and enslave them and murder them. Like the tank parade, this was another nonsensical demonstration that the birthday boy gets every cruel and pointless thing that he wants.

An interesting moment happened during this little show. There's this awful woman named Nancy Mace who serves in the House on behalf of the unfortunate people of South Carolina, and I'm sorry to make you aware of her if you weren't already. She used her time to grill one of the governors—Tim Walz of Minnesota—with the following question, which left Walz momentarily nonplussed.

What is a woman?

This is a pretty standard question from the type of bigot that Nancy Mace is. It's meant to erase the existence of trans women, who are being especially targeted for cruelty and exclusion by the birthday boy and all his little minions. The question is asked to attempt to enforce the asker's own narrow definitions, and then to accuse anyone who refuses to accept those restrictions of sexism and bigotry. This is what the sexist bigot Nancy Mace did, at which point, her job done, she yielded her time, leaving Walz blinking.

Walz might be forgiven for being taken aback; the question seems like a complete non sequitur in the context, which was a House Oversight Committee session on immigration policy. However, as I say, it's a very standard question among the birthday boy's crowd, so I think it would be good if everyone who might be asked questions by such types had an answer prepared.

I'd like to furnish an answer to the question.

Question: What is a woman?

Answer: A woman is not a what. A woman is a who.

I'd observe that once you ask who is a woman, you get billions of different wonderful and extraordinary answers, but you no longer get to police which women get to keep their humanity, and to what degree.

Who is a woman? I'd say it's always somebody who knows they are a women. Wouldn't you?

I have noticed that what the birthday boy and his hateful crew do as almost an instinct is reduce a who to a what, and they do it to women in just the same way as they do it to immigrants and anybody else they want to target, and for the same reason, which is to exclude them from their full humanity so that they can be more easily abused. What is a woman? is meant to convey "we will control your gender, and we will be extremely deadly to you if you won't be controlled." This control is being established for all women, by the way, not just trans ones. If you want to establish women as lesser than men, you're going to need to hold a secure border between who is and who is not a full person, so that you can operationalize the inequality with precision.

Walz was confused by the question because he lives in a world of human beings, which has a diversity of people and allows for a diversity of topics, and which generally tries to stay on topic. Mace's question was about her right to own and control and dominate and most of all to define other people, which for fascists is the only topic.

Look at that. From a fascist point of view, Mace was talking immigration after all.

Once you ask who is an immigrant, or who is a part of our American communities, you get hundreds of millions of answers but you no longer get to police who belongs here. Once you ask who is an immigrant, you're forced to confront that almost all of us are immigrants, and you're compelled to look at the different circumstances—some hopeful, some fearful, some fleeing, some forced— of those migrations, and what responsibilities might still attend those differences, and what those responsibilities might cost some of us. Once you ask who is an immigrant, you realize that to not allow every immigrant to be a part of us is to deny your own identity, your own story, your own history as an immigrant in a land of immigrants, and to exchange it for the only other identity that is available in our story's history, which is that of the enslaver, the murderer, the genocidaire.

Either you think this country is for everybody, in which case you're part of a human spirit that seeks to redeem this country's supremacist history of atrocities, or you think this country is only for those who deserve to own it, in which case you are a part of the inhuman spirit that forged that supremacist history and its atrocities.

Nancy Mace has made her choice there. She thinks she is the country—her and the birthday boy and anyone who fits her exacting definitions of what, not who, is a human being. To Mace, they and only they are the country, and she sees advantages enough that she is willing to become whatever the supremacist spirit says she must and never depart those borders. The question she asked Walz was no non sequitur to her.

But we are the country, because we are the people, and we are here.

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Here's what it all means to me: What the birthday boy and all his sycophants and toadies and accomplices and normalizers and enablers are doing to show their strength actually reveals extraordinary weakness.

I want to be careful, because to say such things is to risk underestimating the danger that these fascists pose in their deadly weakness. They have the tanks and the guns and the cops and their bribed supreme court justices and the legislature, and now that they have them they have done untold damage and harm, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and will cause hundreds of thousands more. Not everybody is going to survive their show of weakness, and it feels as if few will emerge unscathed.

But they are weak. They seek to control what cannot be controlled. And, because they don't value what they control, they don't ever seek to understand it.

The power from all these things comes not from the things themselves, but from the actual country—the people. To a large extent, the power of the cops comes from a false belief that it is cops that make a community safe, rather than the stability that arises from a firm resolve to care for the needs of everyone in every community. To a large extent the power of the military, or the power inherent in a threat of a border invasion comes from the false belief that border security and military might makes you safe, rather than good relations with one's global neighbors. To a large extent the power of billionaires comes from our false belief that wealth's accumulation creates plenty, rather than its distribution.

We can stop believing those things. Demonstrations give us hope that we might actually get there.

The birthday boy and all his sycophants and toadies and accomplices and normalizers and enablers treat power the ability to deal death, and treat as enemies the true source of all their power, which is the people of the country, who are the country, and who we might dare hope might not be controlled.

This to me appears to be the point of the demonstrations across the country, to say: "We are not a what, we are hundreds of millions of who. We will not be controlled or dominated or defined by you, and if you seek to do so, we will take your deadly power away."

Who is an immigrant? An immigrant is somebody who feels they belong here, so much that they actually paid the extraordinary price to come here, leaving what they knew for what they did not. And now they are here, and they enrich our lives by being themselves; they are a part of us, and because of this they are the country.

Who is an immigrant? Few aren't.

Who belongs in this country?

Who doesn't?

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. Oh, sweet nothin', he ain't got nothin' at all.