lazenby:

Ok, ok. 

I said this:

and then you said what you said. And inasmuch as a tweet means anything, now I’m saying this:

Hillary is guilty of being,

• a white woman who, like all white people, was born blind and raised deaf to her complicity in America’s titanic system of domestic racism; 
  
• an ambitious person who, like all ambitious people, is fundamentally indifferent to those who have not chosen to enter the arena of combat with her;
  
• a politician who, like all of them, says whatever is momentarily popular and maintains the most perfect silence on what everyone knows to be true;
  
• and a Clinton who, like all Clintons, believes in nothing and is therefore capable of saying and doing whatever the given moment requires of them. 
  

Now, I would argue this makes her barely more than a human person to begin with but, in addition to these qualities, she is also running for president. And a president is, 

• a three-dimensional hologram projected by bond traders, the military-industrial complex, the Constitution, the collective fears of white people older than 45, and, to the smallest possible degree, the idealism of the Declaration of Independence;
  
• a golem summoned from the silt of international trade and this trade’s requirement that violence be restricted to economically unimportant branches of the human family;
• a ghost who patrols the planet Earth, who maintains its status quo with prophecies of material wealth or else by spooky threats of ejection from the global order & exposure to the wolves that wait beyond its firelight.
  

This is what anybody who wants to become president is going to be. This fact is the ultimate tragedy of power, ambition, and civic virtue in America. No matter how idealistic you are, and Barack Obama was pretty idealistic as far as politicians go, if you become the President of the United States you’re gonna spend years being crushed in the most exacting mill of souls ever devised. 

This is why ambitious people are pathetic and why presidents are pitiable above everyone else. It’s why power is a curse and how those who wield power are punished in exact proportion to their desire for it.

So it oughta be clear that I don’t have any great respect for Hillary in particular or for the presidency in general; but, because I’m a human being who needs the planet Earth in order to live, I have to pay a certain amount of attention to who wants the job. 

And I also want revenge.

I want the evil cocklords in the Republican party to pay. I want every last one of them to feel the political norms they’ve betrayed return as glowing brands that burn both cheeks of their ass. I want Mitch McConnell to spend a long and pointless life screaming himself hoarse at a Supreme Court stocked with nine black pussyhaving, pussyloving justices. I want Paul Ryan to realize that Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ was an endless rope of sand, and that his attempt to attain power by climbing it was one big, life-long jerk-off. I want Reince Priebus to feel the hook punch through his cheek and feel its line drag him down to the eternal abyss of shame, disgrace and oblivion as it follows the sinking corpse of Donald Trump. I want Roger Ailes to see a woman in the presidency.

But in the end, I hate Hillary for what she’s going to do as much as I hate myself for knowing she needs to do it. This is because, in the end, the concentration of carbon dioxide as measured in parts per million is more important than whether Hillary is woke, whether she gratifies my desire to punish, or whether she makes your skin crawl when she speaks. She is precisely the person who can successfully perform the revolting calculus of international power politics. And this is what has to be done if we’re going to hold the global temperature anomaly to one and a half degrees Celsius. 

And make no mistake: she is going to kill people to do this. Whether this means protecting the Saudis as they wage their criminal war against Yemeni civilians so their insane royal family does not obstruct a post-petroleum world-order. Or whether this means fomenting a bloody coup against Filipino psychopath-in-chief Rodrigo Duterte to prevent him from becoming China’s boy in the South China Sea, hence preventing him from breaking up the precarious balance of peace American hegemony has maintained on the Pacific rim. Or whether it’s any of the hundred thousand other horrible things the United States will have to do to orchestrate a relatively peaceful transition from fossil fuels to whatever follows them. Because, and you should be under no illusions as to this point, global peace is presently maintained by the imminent threat of death from above as delivered by the U.S. Air Force. And preventing the worst excesses of climate change from killing millions of people as it also wipes away much of human civilization will require a certain level of global peace. Because if you think the Syrian refugee crisis was bad remember that it is the result of a single, smallish country disintegrating because agriculture was no longer possible there. Now imagine that everything south of the Himalayas has become unfarmable. Imagine the instability, war and genocide that a billion refugees would trigger. 

Humanity will be relying for its survival on the most delicate of all the threads by which global politics is suspended: the absence of war. We have a global order capable of producing this, and Hillary is the person capable of pouring a great deal of innocent blood on the altar of its maintenance. Our existence on this planet is too tenuous, and the requirements for fixing climate change much too stringent to wait around for a global order that better pleases our sensibilities. 

Regretfully yours,