Not going back!

Erudite Partner's latest essay for TomDispatch looks back on "a low dishonest decade." It's her 99th piece for this lively opinion site which brings experts to attempt “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” She first came on as someone equipped to write engagingly and informatively about torture and abuse by the American government. What a vocation!

Her title comes from a phrase in the poem by W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939. Given that analogy, her reflections on the last 20 years of American hubris are pretty dire.

But she's still kicking. 

... A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”

I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me — or any of us — back in that bottle.”

I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle. ...

You can read it all here.