Jacob:

Everybody’s out of ideas, and in the little quiet Keon finally realizes that all these people are fucking crazy and it’s embarrassing. Because surprise, cults and terrorists are not the stable dependable grownups you may have been led to believe. But also because: If the whole point of joining the OTG is because the adults can’t be trusted, then why can’t the STO adults be trusted? You want a cult within the cult, a cult that says, “Our grownups in this cult are corrupt and crazy and megalomaniacs” the same way the cult says about regular grownups. You want a revolution that doesn’t eventually turn to the right, and nobody in humanhistory has ever been brilliant enough to invent that.

Or, as I called it once upon a time, college.

Okay, that’s reductive and mean, the kind of thing I smack on people for saying. Being enrolled in a liberal arts program doesn’t make you self-indulgent any more than being in a garage makes you a car. This is actually a thing about movements generally, but college is where I first encountered them, college and Ken Loach movies which are pretty much all about this very thing.

It is always easier to fix the thing in front of you than the thing that is really wrong. It is always easier to argue about the color of the ribbons on the End Fascism brochure than it is to end fascism, and because we’re human beings and we get tired, we end up fighting about the fucking ribbons. Because we know how to fight about the ribbons and win. We even know how to fight about the ribbons and lose and go on living. In a fight about the ribbons we know what winning and losing looks like, and if we don’t mind being called names that fight costs us very little. What we don’t know how to do is fight to end fascism because, World War II notwithstanding, fascists still exist and it’s so very, very tiring to get nowhere after all these years of work.

Plus, plenty of everybody’s fellow revolutionaries are assholes. There are people who believe everything I believe about everything, who I wouldn’t swerve to avoid if they stepped in front of my car. And you say to yourself as hard and as often as you can that you can separate out if somebody’s an irredeemable fuckhead and if somebody’s good at his job and useful to the cause, but come on, you’ve never been in a meeting with somebody crucial and thought to yourself, it’s a pity ammunition is so expensive because I couldjust, right now? You’re really gonna tell me that’s never happened to you even once?

Meanwhile somebody’s over in the corner yelling that if we’re all done being teenage girls, the earth is caving in so can we please get back to work? Everybody hates that guy, because he shames them with his purity of focus, and pretty soon you end up in this Clarice-Barnabas place where purging the insufficiently devout is what passes for progress. Usually the guy pointing out that this kind of infighting is a waste of time is the first to die.

Jacob’s about full up of this show but to me it’s just getting interesting.

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