CAPT. AUBREY
Do you see those two weevils, Doctor?
DR. MATURIN
I do.
CAPT. AUBREY
Which would you choose?
DR. MATURIN
Neither. There's not a scrap of difference between them. They're the same species of curculio.
CAPT. AUBREY
If you had to choose. If you were forced to make a choice. If there was no other...
DR. MATURIN
Well then, if you're going to push me...I would choose the right-hand weevil. It has significant advantage in both length and breadth.
CAPT. AUBREY
There, I have you! You're completely dished! Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?
DR. MATURIN
He who would pun would pick a pocket.
*****
Leave it to me, while addressing one of the most serious issues to face our country in its history, to kick things off with a pun. The above exchange occurs in Peter Weir’s 2003 epic seafaring film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Russell Crowe’s Captain Jack Aubrey employs a bit of wordplay to get a laugh out of Dr. Stephen Maturin, Paul Bettany’s battleship surgeon.
I’m publishing this cri de coeur on October the fourth because I’m in Texas. Watching, pondering, and writing about movies from around the globe for the last decade has helped me come closer to the person I want to be: a citizen of the world who thinks hard about the human condition and understanding as many different perspectives within it as possible.
While I try to write for any audience who wants to read me, I enjoy being a Texas-based critic and sharing some of Dallas’s unique and exciting film culture, like my pieces on Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas Theatre, my coverage of the Dallas International Film Festival, and the It Came From Texas Film Fest.
My past and current roots in Texas led me to publish this last plea to get yourself registered to vote for the upcoming US Presidential election. The last day to register to vote in the state of Texas is Monday, October seventh, and you can do so here. If you’re reading this from a different state, you can check the deadline for your state here.
I know that we’re all tired of hearing about how this (and every subsequent) election is the most consequential of our lifetime – that screaming declaration usually comes with a request for money; no need to worry about that here – but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
I won’t sugar coat it. Donald Trump is, if not a fascist, absolutely ready, willing, and able to use fascist ends and collaborators to ensure he never leaves office again should he win in November. He’s tried once already, on January 6, 2021. I covered the damning US House January 6 Select Committee’s hearings of that disgraceful day here. It’s déclassé to quote oneself, but at the time, in mid-2022, I wrote:
“The only thing that every successful coup d'état in human history has in common is that before it succeeded, there was a previous failed attempt. Would-be future coup leaders learn from those failed attempts in order to make the next one a success. We are not free from the specter of tyranny. I deeply believe that Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024, and that this time, he means to take power and never relinquish it.
His idea is to become the Vladimir Putin of America.”
Now, here we are, a month before the election. Donald Trump is running again. After I wrote those words two years ago, Sean Hannity asked Trump to clarify that, if reelected, he would, “never abuse power as retribution against anybody.” Trump’s response: “Except for day one.”
Trump has also since promised that if he loses, it will be “a bloodbath for the country." He’s pontificated on opening camps for a mass deportation effort. He demonizes the people who he wants to deport, which recently, according to Trump, now includes people who are here legally, as animals who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and stealing neighborhood pets to eat. Trump and the disgusting characters he has surrounded himself with are openly trying to incite violence as a strategy to win an election. This sickening, bottom-of-the-barrel rhetoric would be laughable if it weren’t so horrific.
Here's where I get the most vulnerable that I’ve perhaps ever been on this website.
I extol the virtues of empathy, kindness, equal protection under the law, and basic dignity and human rights for every person, period. I’m terrified for the millions of marginalized and oppressed people (people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, non-Christians, immigrants) who will suffer if Donald Trump is reelected.
But I’m also terrified for myself.
I am a straight, white, cis-gender, middle-aged, US male. Except for the uncertainties that come with economic precarity, which can strike at any moment for almost any of us, I should feel safe no matter who wins the election. But I know a (not so) secret bit of information about fascism. It never stops with the first target.
In order to keep their base energized – and, more importantly, to keep that base from looking too closely at the grift, corruption, and incompetence that inevitably accompanies fascist regimes – the strong man leader must unceasingly present new scapegoats to be demonized and destroyed. In the nonsensical, violent fascist quest to get back to a mythical Eden (or to simply make it great again), the only way to make it happen is to get rid of everyone who doesn’t agree with you.
So, while I’m a straight, white, cis-gender, middle-aged, US male, I am also an atheist, Marxist, anti-capitalist (at least the crushingly predatory version of capitalism we currently practice in the US), progressive humanist leftist. I assure you that they will get to me eventually. If Trump wins, I, and many other people I love and care about, will end up in camps.
The most sycophantic and hate-filled of Trump’s followers truly believe that people who hold beliefs like mine aren’t real Americans and that we must be forced into submission or gotten rid of. The Proud Boys, the white-supremacist paramilitary organization who Trump told to, “stand back and stand by” – like he was their fucking gang leader – during a 2020 debate with Joe Biden openly long to kill people like me.
They’ve made a joke out of it in order to desensitize people to murder and violence. During the fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s and ‘80s, Pinochet and his regime sometimes killed people suspected of being leftists by putting them onto a helicopter, flying them out over lakes, rivers, or the ocean, and simply throwing them out of the helicopter to drown.
The Proud Boys, and others in that orbit, have made a meme out of those murders, wearing shirts that say things like, “Pinochet did nothing wrong,” and a fake company logo for, “Pinochet’s Helicopter Tours – Established 1973.” They’re also fond of putting patches on their desperate-to-be-official cosplay military tactical gear that read RWDS, short for Right Wing Death Squad.
These people want to throw me out of a helicopter to drown.
Or to torture and starve me or work me to death in a camp where I can’t cause trouble. I’m sure they have plenty of ideas. I have no doubt that, if he should win, Trump and his followers, in their zeal to round up the millions of people they consider undesirable, will give the signal for the Proud Boys, the Three-Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and any other fascist, paramilitary (read: gang) group to go hog wild in their efforts to make America great again.
And so, we return to the idea of the lesser of two evils, but I want to complicate it with another idea, theory of change. As a committed adherent to the ideals of nonviolence and anti-war, I am sickened and disgusted by the ongoing genocide taking place against the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli government and military. (It should go without saying, but to be clear, I will: the terrorist attacks committed on Oct. 7, 2023 by Hamas were also war crimes and I condemn that violence as well.) I am well aware that the Biden administration – and the Kamala Harris administration, should she win – will continue to support this horror by sending more weapons to Israel.
That is unacceptable. The US government must place a weapons embargo on Isreal to end the violence. The killing must stop, period.
Those who find the current system irredeemable make the argument that evil is evil, no matter the amount, and that voting for evil is still evil. But we also get something else with a Harris win. If we elect Kamala Harris, we also get the possibility that we can actually move her to the left on things we care about, like ending the genocide in Gaza.
Does any reasonable human being on planet earth believe that the situation in Gaza will improve if Trump is reelected? It is true that we have no guarantee that it won’t get worse under Harris, but I do not believe that the answer is to turn our backs and walk away.
That’s because I have one guiding principle when it comes to political philosophy: Reduce suffering. (Obviously this stance contains nuance, as well. There are plenty of billionaires who think they are suffering under our current tax code, but I would (not so) humbly disagree.) Reelecting Trump to office will not reduce suffering. Electing Harris won’t end it, but that’s a straw man argument, anyway.
So, what’s your theory of change to reduce suffering as much as possible? Mine is to elect the most progressive candidates available, because we have the best chance of pushing those officials in the right direction. Clearly, I don’t think electing Trump will reduce suffering, and I strongly believe that if we opt out of the system, if we call it too broken to bother with, suffering will increase exponentially. Not participating in the system (not voting) leaves a vacuum to be filled by people who actively want to increase suffering.
Rae and I have had an ongoing conversation about the best course of action. She is increasingly of the view that the system has been rotten to the core since the very beginning (and in MANY ways, she’s not wrong!), and that we need some sort of revolution to set things right. She recently finished Howard Zinn’s seminal work A People’s History of the United States (as of this writing, I’m about 100 pages in), and it is hard to argue that the sole organizing principle of Western society is anything other than might (usually meaning wealth) making right.
Everything else flows from the haves keeping as much as they can and neutralizing any power that the have-nots consolidate. Protecting private property was at the heart of the reason the wealthy land owners of the British colonial aristocracy wanted to form a new nation.
But, as I read the chapter of People’s History that covers the American Revolution, I had an epiphany. Zinn goes into extraordinary detail supporting his argument that the colonial aristocracy had to work to find common cause with the proletariat, because tenant farmers with no wealth had no skin in the game to fight in a war. Zinn’s explanation of the complexities of building a consensus to rebel against England is fascinating.
The book makes it clear that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and most of the other founding fathers were more preoccupied with protecting their private wealth and status in society than they were in creating a land of the free and the home of the brave.
Orthodox conservative and reactionary thinking on the founding fathers is that they were practically holy figures with nothing but noble and pure intentions. Obviously, this is laughable on its face. Washington and Jefferson were both slave owners who had a vested interest in keeping other human beings in chains in order to build even more wealth for themselves. The earliest years of the new nation known as the United States of America was desperately concerned with making sure poor people didn’t upend the new system with demands for their own needs.
Here's the epiphany. I don’t give a fuck about what Washington, Jefferson, and the others THOUGHT they were doing. They achieved most of their goals, as is evidenced by our current state of affairs. They also, however, did something else. It was something that they had no intention of doing.
This experiment in self-governance led to – in no small part because of the tireless work of the masses! – a society where everyone believed their voice mattered. As standards of living began to rise, people wanted their voices heard. To anyone who says we should give up, that it’s useless because power and money win every time, I offer these statements: Women couldn’t vote before they won the right to vote. Enslaved people were enslaved before they were free.
As the wise Dory once said, “Just keep swimming.”
My dad’s dad went to work in the West Virginia coal mines when he was 12 years old. There are likely countless members of people in “better” classes who think that’s exactly where people like me belong. As far as they’re concerned, I, and people like me, are mindless drudges put here to help the elite and ruling class in their quest for total domination. (Check out mudsill theory, if you doubt me.)
But because of this system (and, yes, in some ways, in spite of it) I have thrived. Instead of an existence in a lightless, dank existence extracting poison from the ground in order to make rich people richer, I went to college to study the one thing I cared about more than anything else. Manual labor is almost a memory in my current employment. I have never seriously had to worry about where my next meal was coming from or where I was going to sleep on any given night. I own a wonderful home, have a beautiful family, and I live a life of comfort that 99.99% of all humans who have ever existed would consider a paradise.
The only other thing I want is for every single human being on planet earth to have the same opportunity, help (because I’ve been the recipient of a lot of privilege!), and dignity. The best way I can see that happening is by electing Kamala Harris for president (and as many other Democrats to office as possible) and flushing the dead-end, braindead MAGA movement down the toilet.
If you’re still on the fence about registering to vote or getting involved, please seek out information on Project 2025, and the plans of those who want to use Trump to transform the US into a Christian theocracy white ethnostate where patriarchy and wealth rule. It’s time for us to rise up and demand an end to this garbage. It’s like Robert De Niro’s Harry Tuttle tells Jonathan Pryce’s Sam Lowry in the great Brazil: “Listen, kid, we’re all in it together!”
PS: One last plea to all the Texas voters out there. At the VERY least, can we please kick Ted Cruz out of the Senate? I’m desperate for that fascism barnacle to no longer represent me in any way.