Wearing my feelings on my shirt. By Hal M. Brown

I feel that the United States has been in a long interregnum between the Civil War and another civil war.

Unfortunately I couldn’t use image I wanted to use, shown below:

I found the image on the top of the page. It is out of copyright protection. Zazzle let me order two Dali images on name badges but wouldn’t let me order this one. I found one in the public domain that expressed what I wanted to convey about my feelings.

This drawing depicts The Deadly Sins Dominated by Death. Trump can be said to embody all of the so-called seven deadly sins in varying degrees. Lust or lechery, gluttony, greed, sloth (at least intellectual), wrath, envy, and pride.

I live in a continuing care retirement community in Portland, Oregon where almost every resident is progressive. They are terrifed over what Trump & Co. is turning the country into.

Last year many residents started to order simple names badges so other residents would easily be able to know their names. These are icebreakers and they often help residents with memory impairments be reminded of each other’s names.

I decided to use Zazzle to design my own and make one for my partner, Ann, who teaches yoga here. Her tag has two people doing yoga on it. (Credit where it is due: she also proofreads my Substacks to correct my many typos and msspelled words.)

My favorite artist is Salvador Dali. I have a large calender with his paintings hanging in my kitchen.

These are the name badges I made up until now.

I ordered the two on the bottom before Trump won. They have Dali images which relate to the themes of memory and aging. I made the one of the top with the face from the famous painting by Evard Munch, “The Scream,” after Trump won. It was meant to convey the horror which I felt.

I don’t think I need to elaborate on why I feel the way Dali did when, in 1940, he painted his premonitions of war between the end of the Spanish American War and World War II. That war had only had just begun in Sept. 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. It had not yet become a world war.

I feel that the United States has been in a long interregnum between the Civil War and another possible civil war. In the Civil War approximately 620,000 to 850,000 people died. This was about 2% of the population which was about 31 millin at that time. That made it the deadliest conflict in American history.

With 334 million people living in the United States today, if 2% of them were killed in another civil war that would be 6-8 million people killed for no reason.

I know this is all hyperbole. It is the stuff of dystopian fiction. My having this kind of imagination is both a blessing and a curse. If I was an accomplished novelist or screenwriter it could be a blessing. It was a blessing for George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, and Phillip K. Dick who wrote The Man in the High Castle (made into a TV series). Not being one, because it causes me anxiety, it is a curse.

To a far lesser extent than a hot civil war I see it as possible that Americans could turn against Americans in violent clashes whether these are armed civilians or against other civilians or federal troops firing on peacefully protesting civiling.

I’ve used this collage from the Kent State Masacre several times because it is so relevant a reminder as to what could happened again.

Addendum:

I was inspired to write this after reading my friend Sabrina Haake’s Substack this morning: “Thejackbooks came for Khalil” (Khalil is the Columbia University student who was picked up by ICE). The photo she used to illustrate her Substack made me know what I wanted to write about before I even read her essay.

Heee’s an excerpt:

The principal reason dictators control speech is to consolidate power. Silencing critics means that the state controls the narrative, and is free to create, spin and disseminate “alternative facts” to ensure that those in power stay there.

Taking his cues from Russia’s Putin, known for arresting his critics in the night, Trump took to his rancid propaganda website to breast-beat, posting falsely that Khalil was a threat:

• “This is the first arrest of many to come… We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

No credible, legal claim can be made that Trump’s actions are justifiable under the First Amendment. But Instead of acknowledging the obvious, Fox News and the rightwing echo chamber are parroting Trump’s unfact-checked claim that Khalil is a terrorist, repeating Trump’s King Kong declaration that, "If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply."

This was my comment there:

I have only question I have about whether or not we are a police state. Is it a nascent police state that that may or may not become a full-blown Putin or Hitler police state? I see incidents like the one with the Columbia student as Trump testing the waters to see what he can get away with. This was clearly personal with him. He knew of the case and like a Mafia boss issued the order. Others, like Homan's ICE thugs unnecessarily using flash bang grenade to terrorize in the arrest of an immigrant family may have been just the psychoathology ot the ICE Gestapo.

I see all the other noise about what Trump and Co. are doing to upend democracy as effort to create chaos and stick the short fingered barbarian's thumb in the eye of everyone he considers his enemy. Even his ridiculus promotion of Tesla with cars on the White House lawn shows he is just puking out his poison at everyone he can think of from Ukraine and his embrace of Putin, to making Canada and Mexico in enemies.

Once he has established a true police state it won't matter how many of the mildly-MAGA decide he's gone to far. The enforcers have a lot of guns. They have the power to use them. The only part of the Federal government that has more is the military. The state governments have guns too with their police and National Guards. In addition 46% of American households own at least one firearm according to a study by the University of Chicago How Many Americans Own Guns? In a 2024 survey, 32% of Americans (107 million people) reported that they personally owned a firearm.

That's a lot of guns. There was a time not long ago when talk of a second civil war was the rhetoric of far right militia and anti-Trumpers considering how bad it could be if Trump became the ruthless dictator they saw signs of him becoming. Now some realists like me are seeing as a possiblity and hoping that it is just a remote possibility.

Here's my thoughts on America becoming a police state and the only way I see as it being stopped. https://halbrown.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-a-police-state-look

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I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.