Tough week.

Mostly just posting political stuff now.  I got other places to talk about music, place more read than this.

Kind of a tough week.  Theoretically this was a "good" week, what happened this week is "good", but I'm not really experiencing it that way.  I'm seeing a lot of downsides.

It's taken me this far to even get to this point, of course, because when things happen everything gets overwhelmed by noise.  Punditry kicks into overdrive.  We're flooded by bullshit.  I want somebody to tell me what it all means, but I'm left figuring it out myself, with my own crazy brain.

Here's what I know.  Impeachment is a political trial and the only way to get rid of the President.  For it to succeed supporting the President has to be a greater liability than it is an asset.  I can't blame the Republican party for supporting the President, because in doing so they're only listening to the will of their constituents.  And that will has remained rock-solid steady.  Preternaturally so.  You know, Nixon, his approval rating went up, it went down.  Every other President, that's happened.  Every other President, their support degrades over time.  Not Trump.  He's been at 40% and nothing has shaken that for more than a week.  As time goes on it gets less and less shakable, it seems.  Even the death rate ought to provide more attrition than we've seen.

40% is not a mandate for governance.  It's also too high to remove a President from office through impeachment.

The President doesn't have a base.  He has a cult.  I persist on thinking of what's happening as a wave, and waves break.  But when?  How?

The events of this week... the Manafort jurors.  I can relate to that personally.  A lot of that 40% are people who are being lied to.  People who are broken, people who make mistakes, serious ones at times.  Not evil.  I know some people like that.  Good people?  I don't know.  But I could see them in the place of the MAGA-hat juror who voted to convict on all counts.  They try to be open to their environment, but it's a bad environment and it's opened them up to some terrible things.  Sympathy?  Sure.  I can't condemn 40% of America as "evil" in one stroke.  I think of the poor white Southerners who supported the confederacy.  We can think of them as evil but they weren't even profiting from it, is the fucked up thing.  They were dupes, dupes of a small and unprincipled minority.

People like the lone holdout on the jury.  I don't know him, but I know enough people to say that a certain percentage of them have strongly divergent moral values from the rest of us.  Which is to say that a certain percentage of people are, in fact, evil.  8 percent?  Sure.  It's not even remotely statistically valid, we could refine it more later, but it's a start.

We're in a unique position.  As agonizing as the uncertainty is, people look back at Watergate and they try to imagine how it could have gone differently.  We don't know how it'll go, so it's easy to imagine all sorts of possibilities.  Most of them bad, admittedly, but not equally so, and with different sorts of good coming in their wake.

There's a double bind here.  There are enough genuinely malevolent people to make any jury trial a risk.  That's what the holdout juror proved.  At the same time, those genuinely malevolent people are holding an additional 30-32% of the nation in their thrall.  Human shields, basically.  Until and unless those people can be deprogrammed, or turned, or whatever language you want to put it... the only possible resolution to this ongoing crisis will, necessarily, be extremely ugly.  It's agonizing.