Et tu, iPod?

Just got back from grocery shopping. On the way there, I had my iPod on shuffle for my Road Music playlist, as usual. This playlist has, no shit, 3861 tracks (and growing), about ten continuous days of music. What can I say? I like variety.

What does it play me, out of that massive lineup?

"Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult, and Chris de Burgh's "Don't Pay the Ferryman".

Seriously -- I like a little bit of random synchronistic editorializing now and then. (That's why the buttons.) But that's a little on the nose, doncha think?

As my "covid-19" and "wartime thoughts" tags finally cross...

(NB: hot take here. This needs more analysis as things evolve over the next couple of months. But I'm now officially worried.)

I was pretty sure that this one was coming, although I wasn't quite sure how quickly.

This article in Rolling Stone is both terrifying and 100% unsurprising. What happens when an administration with an outspoken bent towards authoritarianism realizes that a crisis is real? It starts trying to figure out how to use that as an excuse to mount a coup.

As the article says, the House isn't going to let this one happen voluntarily. But expect Trump to start making a lot of noise about how he needs All the Power -- that if he is given All the Power, it will make the virus go away, because he will finally be able to do what he needs to. He will point to China, and the fact that dictatorial powers make it easier to manage things like this. And because there's a seed of truth there, it's going to be a seductive message to many people.

Yes, we're all focused on survival right now. Today's survival threat is covid-19. But tomorrow's is going to be the very real chance that Trump decides that suspending elections in the name of national security (because elections involve People, and we can't have People anywhere near each other) is easier than trying to win those elections, and at that point we're pretty much on the brink of civil war.

I don't think there's much to be done about this quite yet. But pay attention, and be prepared to get very loud, very fast, if they start making noises in this direction. What is needed, in order to manage this crisis, is alert communities, members of the public doing the right things, and competent government at all levels. That last is his Achilles heel, and we're going to need to go after it.

If he starts saying that him getting more power is the fix, we will need to completely overwhelm that message with the point that things are as bad as they are, in substantial part, because of the damage he did by gutting the agencies that were supposed to be in charge of things like this, and the way that he minimized the problem back when it was still manageable, so that it got much worse very quickly. It's not hard to pin the severity of the rising damage squarely on him, and it may come to that. A more competent administration would have addressed this much faster, and a lot of lives would have been saved.

And no, messaging isn't going to stop a coup in and of itself. But a coup is only plausible if enough people in Washington decide that the public are behind it, and allow it to happen. (Indeed, Trump is basically a coward, and is only likely to try if he thinks he's going to succeed.) We will need to make loudly clear that the people are not only not behind it, we're angry as hell at Trump for his failings.

Hopefully it won't come to that. But I'm not optimistic, and recommend watchful waiting.

(I am reminded far too much of the days after 9/11, when one of my earliest reactions was, "How soon is Bush going to pin this on Iraq, and use it as an excuse to invade?")