A Social Reformer's Last Gasp - Tesla, Trump, And A Dire, Inconsequential End

Harry Lott had never been an intemperate person, one quick to fly off the handle or given to bouts of uncontrollable anger; but there he was running down the street away from the Tesla dealership where he had just incinerated a Model Y, a stand-in for the White House, home to the most despicable President in the nation's history. 

 

Harry had always been a progressive, a lifelong one in fact, long before the term was even used. In his earlier days there were simply liberal Democrats like LBJ, and Adlai Stevenson and Henry Wallace before them, politicians who embraced the poor, the working class, and the disadvantaged without making a big deal of it, before lionizing the black man and before gender hoopla.  

When liberals became 'progressives', Harry became an activist.  No longer would he just think about social reform, progress, and the path to a more verdant, peaceful, and compassionate world, he would do something about it. 

Now, political ideologues are nothing new to the American political landscape. Union Square in New York seemed to attract the most wildly prophetic of the lot, doomsday-sayers, latter day visionaries who warned of complete economic collapse, who pointed to signs of a nuclear holocaust, a breakdown in moral, ethnical, and spiritual values, on and on ad infinitum, ad nauseam. 

Most Americans pay no attention to this hyper-ventilation and take things as they come, pros and cons, ups and downs, plusses and minuses, good and bad in equal proportion, and sure to come and go; but there are those who find this whooping and hollering validating - a lonely hearts club whose members suddenly have some meaning to their lives.

Harry's life on the margins of political activism had been worthy but unsatisfying.  He had been an observer not a doer, a committed liberal but with nothing to show for it.  At least the old men who had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis bridge, spent airless, stale hours on Freedom Rider busses, and had been beaten by Bull Connor and attacked by his dogs had some blood spattered on their resumes, but Harry had no red badge of courage.  A donor to the right causes, votes for partisans, Hate Has No Home Here signs on his lawns, and humming the Internationale, Harry had done nothing really of note.  

When Donald Trump came to town, Harry felt this was the time, his time, the time to make a difference.  Although he and his progressive colleagues had been unable to defeat Trump at the polls, the reign of the man could not continue.  

 

There was a heady zest to the air among progressives once the dust of defeat had settled and they could see exactly what electoral victory meant.  Trump meant business and so must they.  Harry and his mates would be latter-day freedom riders, Black Panthers, Weathermen, and insurrectionists. 

At first the Left was simply dazed and confused, an inchoate, unassembled lot, but when Elon Musk, an unelected, self-important Rasputin, an evil counsellor who with his fabulous wealth and corporate reach was untouchable and invincible, assumed unheard of power in the White House - they coalesced.  This this fascist thug, this SS Gestapo goon, had to be stopped. 

Finally the Left had a real, palpable villain. Trump might sign disabling executive orders one after the other, but Musk was on the streets with his storm troopers storming into federal offices, rounding up bureaucrats, herding them into boxcars and sending them off to some distant Auschwitz. 

And so it was that the attacks on Tesla, Tesla dealerships, and Tesla owners began - finally Harry and his colleagues could do some damage of their own, show the world that progressive Democrats were not sitting on their hands, and that the Left had chutzpah, motivation, and defiance. 

By the time Harry had sent his Molotov cocktail under the Model Y, the new Attorney General had already set the trap - attacks on Tesla were to be federal crimes, hate crimes, to be punished without recourse; so Harry threw his bomb right under fifty surveillance cameras and was rounded up before he made it to the corner. Federal agents had been waiting for him.  

What a pathetic sight it was to see old Harry Lott, good Democrat, proud progressive, man of principle and moral judgement stripped searched, thrown in the back of a police van, paraded down the concourse of Pennsylvania Avenue like a Hun down the Appian Way, and shackled and chained like a runaway slave. 

What prompted such an unintimidating, armchair liberal to undertake such an insane action?  What corner of his brain had acted up so impulsively, synapses firing away willy-nilly, propelling him to certain doom?

He was a novice, an amateur, a man of limited intelligence but general good will, moved to tears over the plight of the black man but never moved to violence; and here he was behind bars, a common criminal, all higher intents and purposes lost, all previous rectitude and sanctity gone, surrounded by black men.

The prison movies were all true - brutal trusties, slop, rats, roach runs, dim lighting, stench, and black men everywhere - his black men, the black men he worked so hard to keep out of prison, the black men supposed to be at the top of the pyramid, ready to put a knife in his ribs or far worse. 

He waited for the clank of iron keys, the footsteps of authority, but most of all the sounds of protest.  His associates, his comrades, would be right now assembling outside the prison demanding his release, a political prisoner, a slave to autocratic rule, the first of many to be slapped in irons, never again to be seen.

But nothing but silence outside the walls. No demonstrations, no protests, no loud demands.  Life went on as though nothing had happened; but Pam Bondi and her FBI thugs, scary versions of Hitler's Gestapo, had made sure that an attack on a Tesla dealership would be considered an attack on America, and nothing but the harshest punishment would suffice. 

'Who?', asked LaShonda Williams, brassy, outspoken leader of Black Women for Social Justice, but a woman completely unconcerned and unbothered by that white boy's stupidity when Mephistopheles sat in the Oval Office. 

'Firebombing a Tesla?' She laughed at the childishness of it all, the unnecessary diversion from the truth, the real black battle; and so it was that Harry was left to rot in his cell, not even an irritant or a fly in the soup, a loner who had sat so long theorizing that this brained fried, he went crazy and turned into a hopeless insurrectionist wannabee.

Progressivism was on its way on a steep downhill - no cogent policies, all Sturm und Drang.  The whole movement was grasping at straws and so clueless about the radical counter-revolution taking place and the new, conservative zeitgeist that would follow that they turned on each other.  Climate, gays, blacks, women, Cesar Chavez, Jim Crow, transgenders, neo-Marxism all fought for traction, splitting an already inchoate party into a greasy, unappetizing stew. 

Progressivism back in the day of Debs and Lafollette, was a unified movement; but now it is a side show - bearded women competing with dwarves and two-headed babies.  

LaShonda got out while the getting was good and went back to Louisiana boiled shrimp, biding her time but never once fussing.  It was all about opportunity, never philosophy, and while Harry languished in a cell, Lashonda had herself a fine old time.