Theoretically

I have a love/hate relationship with the Mighty Mighty Bosstones' 'The Impression That I Get'. On the one hand, it's a great tune, full of ska-inflected energy. But on the other, it asks a question, the answer to which finds me wanting.

As Dicky Barrett sings:

I'm not a coward I've just never been tested
I'd like to think that if I was I would pass
Look at the tested and think there but for the grace go I
Might be a coward
I'm afraid of what I might find out



I used to think about physical courage in the context of this song, despite its lyrical exploration of emotional resilience in the face of pain and tragedy. I'm not a big man, so I wonder what would happen if called to protect my loved ones, or a stranger confronted by violence. I'd like to think that my competitive nature and general scrappiness might drive me to do the right thing, but as they say, I'm afraid of what I might find out.

Daniel Ellsberg

Last weekend, though, I had occasion to think about 'The Impression That I Get' in a different light. My wife and I took our daughter to see The Post, which focuses on Katherine Graham's decision to print details from the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s. There's a scene in the movie involving Daniel Ellsberg and Post reporter Ben Bagdikian. Ellsberg was the Rand Corporation military analyst and former Defense and State Department employee and ex-Marine who provided first the New York Times and later the Washington Post and numerous other publications with the classified documents that sparked the furor.

In the scene, Bagdikian wonders if his former colleague Ellsberg realizes that he's certain to be prosecuted, and likely to go to jail. Ellsberg responds, "Don't you think it's worth going to jail to stop this war?"

To which Bagdikian replies, "Theoretically."

Theoretically.

That word does a lot of work.

We live in a time where the border between theoretical and applied resistance to the degradation of our political and societal norms is rapidly blurring if not disappearing. Across the country, people are standing up in the face of consequences as mild as social group ostracism (thinking about the Never Trump Republicans) and as catastrophic as the destruction of families (in the case of immigration activists being targeted for deportation).

I fight a mean rearguard battle on Twitter, and my stances on the issues of the day are well-chronicled there and in this remote corner of the galaxy. I squared off once online against Curt Schilling, man on man, electron versus electron, sane human against rapidly disintegrating Nazi, and lived to tell about it.

There's not a lot at stake, obviously, in anonymous online activism. It's 'theoretically' in real terms.

Despite what I may say in my worst moments, I try not to be alarmist, and I generally believe that the our institutions can (and have) survive(d) a great deal of destabilization. But each day, norms are degraded that much more, and each day we seem to slouch slowly towards some sort of irrevocable breaking point. We have members of Congress behaving for all the world like third-world banana republicans, going well beyond partisan maneuvering into blithe disregard of classified information and active undermining of federal law enforcement, all in service of an objectively defective executive. This way lies madness, and at some point, irreparable damage.

And also at some point, a decision for those of us who would see this nation as more than a kleptocracy, a lesson in the survival of the fittest/richest. I hope this doesn't happen, but there may be an event, a tipping point, a threat to the future so serious that it'll require good people to stand up and risk their comfortable lives to be counted. I don't have the first clue what form that might take - and let me reiterate that it's probably more likely that we don't get to that point - but it's in the realm of the realistic, which is something that would've been impossible to imagine for anyone other than the cabin-dwelling survivalists just two years ago. (Holy Shit! I've become the liberal version of the tinfoil hat people!)

I don't suggest that we'll be taking up arms and marching on Washington. More likely, the grinding assault on the lesser, the darker, the weirder, and the more foreign among us will demand that people of conscience must stand up to protect those who can't protect themselves. As Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller wrote of the moral failing of German intellectuals during the rise of Nazism:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

They've already come for the immigrants, and they've come for the Director of the FBI, and they've come for the uninsured. When they come a little closer to us, what's to be done?

Daniel Ellsburg was aided by a loose network of people committed to the idea that the Vietnam War was a stain on our national morality, and willing to face the consequences for revealing information that proved that point. I pray that I don't have to make any sort of similar choice, and I can't believe I'm writing these words for a public forum, but I'm no longer certain of very much.

I'd like to think that if I'm tested I'll pass.