“The Truly Scary Part of the $1.6 Billion Conservative Donation”
Thoughts in response to Rick Hasen & Dahlia Lithwick, from John Keats, via FDR
“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain”
Behold the handiwork and shadow puppetry
That penned ten thousand books —
and flushed democracy down a drain.
No, I may never live to trace, erase
The darkling pools of frothing malice.
Meagre words, whispered and displaced
Cannot make pass the bitter chalice
From which we all may have to drink
In this wide world we share: we rise together,
or sink.
© 2022, Tom Tordillo
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s immortal words — “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” — tend to be quoted out of context. Roosevelt followed that momentous phrase with the words, “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
These days, the terror has names. It’s meticulously reasoned and generated for very clear purposes.
Culture Wars. CRT. LGBTQ. War on Christmas. War on Drugs. War on Crime. War on Terror. Wokeness. The steal. Deep state. Immense industries manufacture and disseminate fear into the brains of billions of people.
John Keats, to whom my poem is intended as an homage, would never have conceived such extravagance. Life is so short! Why squander it passing off garbage when we have brief moments to witness “the faery power of unreflecting love”?
FDR’s answer to Keats’ rhetorical question: we squander much that is beautiful because we are afraid. We should be afraid of fear, because fear sends us backward in retreat even as we should advance forward.
Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick point out several aspects about a $1.6 billion donation to fund conservative judiciaries in America, and the subhead gets at the basic point: “It’s not about the legality. It’s about the loop.”
The loop here is one by which donors influence elections which enables the appointment of judges who further enrich the donors. The public’s eyes glue onto one or two Supreme Court decisions, forgetting tens of thousands of other decisions that influence every where people live, eat, drink, sleep, breathe…and how judges mobilized by forces focused on promoting a certain form of greed do so by also exploiting a certain kind of fear.
…the mission of his new Marble Freedom Trust [is] “to maintain and expand human freedom consistent with the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.” The freedoms…here have primarily served to make the wealthy more wealthy, and efforts at vote suppression more robust.
Hasen, Richard and Dahlia Lithwick. 2022. “The Truly Scary Part of the $1.6 Billion Conservative Donation.” Slate Magazine, August 23, 2022.
We should be afraid of such fears. Fears such as these create loops that feed upon themselves — the same way a zombie horde spreads, eating one living person, converting that person into another zombie, and then spreading even further. A zombie apocalypse cannot happen in a biological reality — but in a world of trusts, corporations, and algorithmic realities…they can.
Keats feared that he might never have the chance to write his best works. The driving force behind this donation — and the attack upon democracy it has launched — is a sense that our best works are all behind us, and we must be beholden to one soon-to-be-dead-man’s concept of those ancient texts, rather than our own present needs (or rather, we must be beholden to the present uses of old texts to enrich the rich).
It is proper to fear such things. But it is better to overcome those fears by holding together, to the purposes of the law, and to the needs of those others sharing this world with us. Somewhere out there among the billions of strangers, there’s a young person crafting sonnets as magnificent as those of John Keats: I hope they live as long as Leonard Leo has lived, and I hope they write something more memorable.
