The Interregnum

There is so much going on, while at the same time it seems ‘quiet’; the interregnum between the almost-dead but not quite king, and the usurper waiting for the body to be declared cold.

The party of the king knows full well that its time is up, for now. They also do not expect the king to survive exile. So the ‘game’ being played now is to continue to demonstrate ‘loyalty’ to the king so that he does not have a reason to disown any individual. That is happening, to those that he thought were either disloyal or inadequately obsequies.

The sons (and daughter) of the king can be disposed of later, and that is lurking in the minds of those that are positioning themselves to take the mantle. None know how long it will take, but the king is finished. Armies are gathering that will sweep him away, and their own RINOs are deserting the flag in droves. Exile awaits. But where? And how soon? How to manage the process of going into exile without appearing to be routed.

But the king retains a huge following in the peasantry. They will be loyal. As long as you tell them that they are better than the other peasants, they will follow. As long as you protect anyone who kills those that are (God’s own preachers reinforce this) lesser people, then all is good. Those non-white, those educated, those working, those simply not like them but wanting to build better lives; they are the threat. And the under-educated whites will rally to the cause of anyone who will ‘protect’ them. If everyone’s life become marginally better, or even a little worse, as long as it is the others that suffer more, all is good. And if the others progress in any way, then it was not through work, not through education, and not through any effort, they succeeded only because the ‘system’ supported them, smoothed their path, gave to them.

And the peasantry is easy to lead. Just keep reminding them that God loves them alone, and therefore all sins are forgiven. All. That includes the (not-sin) of arming themselves to the teeth to protect the constitution, a document 95% of them have never read, do not understand, and couldn’t really care less about – except that part that says that a black man counts as only 2/3 of a white man.

The other side is gathering, and are simply waiting for the coronation. That will come, but for now, it is important to appear as the king-in-waiting, and not to like another wanna-be princeling. And it is working. The unasked, and unanswered question is what retribution will be visited upon those who stayed loyal to the old king (not that the new king is a young man, so exactly the same games are being played on that side).

Some, like me, hope there will be public beheadings, and that the king’s children will be stripped of everything, loaded into an oxcart, and paraded to the guillotine. They deserve it. That won’t happen of course, because only the mob can actually convict the children. Regicide is one thing, murder of the entire family is Ottoman.

But the incoming king’s party is looking at how much they can extract from the current king’s adherents, and how they can break his party fully.

Of the remaining loyalists, the toadies such as Cruz and Jordan, and the newcomers like Getz, are all continuing their spouting of loyalties, rallying the fodder for one last battle. Lindsey Graham is playing the dog who knows just how hard he will be kicked if he doesn’t play the game, bark in the right direction, and lick his master’s boot. All see it. All are revolted by it. All, that is, except for his own limited power base. He is someone upon whom history will not look favourably, if he is more than a footnote as the demonstration of the pandering sycophant that he is.

Meanwhile, plague ravishes the land, and the king and the king’s men ignore it, blame the opposition. No compassion, no national grieving, no acknowledgement at all. They will pay for that also. A year from now, when there is a national memorial service, I want them excluded. Let them stand in the rain, just as they happily are allowing the virus to rain on their followers. They are evil people.

And that is the core of Amerika today. A land possessed by evil, in the middle of an interregnum in which the evil king is looking for a safe exile from which to plot a return. Meanwhile, his toadies and sycophants manoeuvre to avoid any appearance of being ready to do a deal with the king-in-waiting, and hoping for one more flicker of approbation from the king. They also know that the king, while plotting a return, will die in exile. How to handle that?

Loyalty, of course. Because only one of his minions will be able to claim the mantle of the True-Trumpist. So watch them fight each other, tearing the Trumpist party apart, slandering each other. All but one, of course. Graham will not join the fight. He is not a leader. He has the power of a Hugh Despenser, able while being rogered by the king, to still whisper to the king who should go to the gallows. But he will never be king. He is waiting to see who the king hands the file containing all that he has been blackmailed with. And he will then transfer his loyalty, and his troops, to that person.

The problem is the kingdom. It is still divided between the overthrown king and the new king. And civil war remains highly possible. It would be short-lived. The Army, the real one, is transferring its loyalty to the new king already, or at least preparing to do so smoothly. And the Army will crush anyone silly enough to declare a real rebellion. Peasants do not perform very well against mounted knights. And while too many of the old king’s mob might know how to pull a longbow, not one of them has the discipline to stand up an army that can even begin to match the real one.

The question still remains, however, what will the incoming king’s party do, and how will they undo the damage done to the kingdom.

International relations have been destroyed. No one trusts Amerika any longer. An alliance with them is good for four, maybe six, maybe 50 years. Or maybe only four. Can they be trusted to play their part in the world? That remains to be seen. What has become very clear is that almost half of Amerika truly does not care about anything or anyone outside of Amerika. And their God, speaking through their preachers, tells them that they do not need to care about others.

Amerika will re-join the Paris Climate Accord, but will not have a real seat at the head table. They will be invited to the table, and leaders will look approvingly on the words of the new king or his emissaries. But this time they will wait to see action and money, not words. Amerika’s word is no longer worth the noise its utterance makes.

The real question is how much pain is the new party willing to impose in order to stamp out the Trumpists? Too little I fear. And this will allow the Trumpists to work in the shadows to rebuild, and in two years, they will roar back, emasculating the new king, and plunging Amerika back into a period of a failed government unable to make any real progress.

To actually fix Amerika will require the parking of mercy at the door for a while. QAnon must be hunted down, exposed. There are already murmurs that QAnon is a Russian operation. If so, then that should also be exposed and people brought to court.

The “Proud Boys” and other neo-fascist groups need to be disbanded, and their guns taken from them. Their acts of intimidation should be tried in court for what they are, acts of intimidation. Push them back underground where they belong. Let former membership (and certainly current membership) be a mark that makes them unemployable.

Black Lives Matter. And the police must have their “Qualified Immunity” removed. This can only be done by the central government, and that will require strong action. Unpalatable action. Police must not be allowed to kill black people with impunity. I’ve seen calls for the turning off of a body-cam being a sackable offence. I support that. But that is only the beginning. Don’t “defund” the police, but force them to allocate their funding differently. If the police have taken over as the social workers of last resort, then make them fulfil that role. They are funded certainly.

There is so much to fix, and I fear that Amerika, or the Amerika of the new king’s party, does not have the stomach for what it must do. Mercy can be a weakness, and in Amerika today, I fear that weakness will be turned against the rest.

But we are in the interregnum. There is much yet to do. Positions are begin taken. The old king’s loyalists are playing survival games. They all know that their game now is to survive exile and either take the mantle from the dying hands of Trump (fuck his family, they will be crucified and used as martyrs for the newly anointed) or to identify who will seize the mantle and demonstrate alliance to that new Trumpist.

It is going to be much less messy than it could be, or that it should be.