In real estate it all comes down to location, location, location. In comedy it’s all about timing. Put the two together and that’s all that can be said about one’s own take on the world. From the here and now, from within this moment in history, it looks to me like fill-in-the-blank.
Well then, from the here and now, and from within this moment in history, it looks to me like we’re in for a bout of fascism. How deeply in depends on where I’m standing and on what day. But there’s certainly something going on, don’t you think? And if it looks like a pig, sounds like a pig, and smells like a pig … well, chances are it just is an oncoming bout of fascism.
To be fair, when two things look alike, there’s no guarantee they are. So that the fence surrounding Gaza, and the shelling of those imprisoned within it, looks an awful lot like the Warsaw Ghetto, could be mere coincidence. The devil is always in the details. On the other hand, “Ah, but that’s different!” is precisely the devil’s stock refrain.
Of course this seeing the mark of Satan behind every Trumpish smirk could all just be awfulizing. Maybe, as that schlocky poem we all have on the fridge assures us, the universe is unfolding as it should. Maybe, as Voltaire counsels, we just need to tend our garden.
But if a bout of fascism is upon us, how long it will last is anyone’s guess. Mussolini held it together for twenty-one years. The Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve. Trump has at most another six and a half to go. Will I live to see it crest and then recede? Probably. But in the interim I needn’t worry too much, because I have a garden.
But a goodly number of the other seven and a half billion people in the world don’t. The gardens they once had are scorched by drought. Or civil war. Or just too many hands pulling at too few stalks from the same vegetable patch.
I’m not a political scientist. I’m not qualified to opine on what’s caused the current drift towards fascism in Europe and America. I know it’s not everywhere, any more than it was everywhere in the 30’s. The worry is not that it’ll spill over to where it’s yet to take hold. The worry is that it will consider itself threatened by where it hasn’t, and that it will take measures to ensure that threat is eliminated. Thus as a Canadian I’m beginning to feel the same vulnerability that must have been experienced by the Poles in 1938 living next door to the National Socialist juggernaut. Hitler was as risible then as Trump is now. But a year later no one was laughing.
So I’m caught between the poem on my fridge and Voltaire on the one side, and my knee-jerk post-Shoah paranoia on the other. My problem is there seems to be no way to calculate the probabilities and bet accordingly. In this it’s exactly parallel to the global warming debate. If I join the Chicken Littles and it turns out Trump and Salvini were just comedic interludes in the otherwise perfectly normal story of human folly and redemption, I’m going to squander a lot of intellectual energy. And what’s worse, I’m going to look silly. But if I heed the poem and Voltaire, and it turns out Edmund Burke was right that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” then I’m going to have been no less complicit than was Pius XII in the evil about to be unleashed on the world.
So in the face of this damned-if-I-do and damned-if-I-don’t, here’s my provisional policy:
The walls of our City have many gates and many towers, each of which has to be manned twenty-four seven. Let the gatekeepers beware of Greeks bearing gifts. My own watch, from nine to five Mondays through Fridays, is on one of the towers. What happens on her watch from her tower falls to her, and on his watch from his tower to him. But what happens on my watch from my tower falls to me.
Her watch looks out onto the Libyan Coast Guard vessel turning away from rather than rescuing the dinghy that’s just capsized. His looks out onto the purging from our public institutions those who would speak truth to power. And mine looks out onto Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
For all our vigilance, at the end of the day the City may fall nonetheless. There’s a distinct possibility Trump will be re-elected, that players who take a knee will be banned from the NFL that the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians will be condemned by the Pope, but not too strongly, since he’ll reason as did Pius XII that he doesn’t have the cura for non-Catholics. And so on. In short it’ll be the Nuremberg Laws light. Maybe some of these things are unlikely, but none is impossible.
Fortunately noxious memes replicate until they kill off their hosts. It’s only a matter of time. I realize that’s small consolation for those who don’t have time. God works through history. Injustice doesn’t. It’s very particular, and very personal. I suspect that’s what Voltaire was trying to tell us. Tend to your garden, because that’s where a Jew may be hiding from the Gestapo, or a Salvadorian from ICE.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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