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\nFor almost two years now, faithful Democrats have waited for special counsel Robert Mueller to file his report about collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian attempts to interfere in the US election, not to mention Trump’s involvement in obstruction of justice. Whenever Trump’s activity provokes them or a subterranean rumbling within the Justice Department emboldens them, the faithful take to the streets and social media with hand-held cardboard signs and internet memes to proclaim that Mueller Time is close at hand. Yet even if the Mueller investigation concludes with Trump’s impeachment, the spectacle of the investigation has served to immobilize millions who have a stake in systemic social change, ensuring that what comes next in the United States will be politics as usual—not liberation.
\n\n\n\n\nWhen you’ve fallen on the highway
\n\n
\nAnd you’re lying in the rain,
\nAnd they ask you how you’re doing
\nOf course you’ll say you can’t complain
\nIf you’re squeezed for information,
\nThat’s when you’ve got to play it dumb
\nYou just say you’re out there waiting
\nFor the miracle, for the miracle to come-The 20th century’s greatest messianic thinker, Leonard Cohen
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Within weeks of the beginning of the investigation, there were already think pieces and t-shirts proclaiming “It’s Mueller Time.” Let’s take the t-shirts at their word: maybe it’s been Mueller Time all along. Maybe Mueller Time is not a specific date that is about to arrive, but the era we’ve been experiencing these past two years.
\n\nIn that case, Mueller Time is not an hour on the clock, but a way of experiencing time, a kind of time—like crunch time or quality time or go time, but the opposite of all of them. It is not a scale of time, like geologic time, or a time zone, like Eastern Standard Time—Mueller Time is more like the End Times, perpetually anticipated.
\n\n\nTo be precise, Mueller Time is the political suspended animation in which the Democrats have waited for a repeatedly deferred deus ex machina to deliver them from this unbearable pres(id)ent. This condition of waiting, itself, rather than any of the grievous injustices that have taken place during it, is the very essence of hell.
\n\nDante, the Marco Polo of the Abyss, located Limbo, the residence of those who wait, in Inferno, not in Purgatory. Waiting is not transformative or redemptive—it is the sort of sin for which the punishment is the crime. “Limbo” shares a Latin root with liminal—it is homeland of those who tarry on the threshold, those who are on the fence.
\n\nIf you can get people used to waiting, you can get them used to anything.
\n\nTo understand Mueller Time better, we can begin with its namesake. “Miller time” is a time to take a load off, to ease our pain by drugging ourselves into oblivion. It’s a profound expression of despair—“I can only relax in this world by deadening my senses”—disguised not just as relief but as celebration. What is the glee with which Democrats invoke Mueller Time if not an admission of their own abject powerlessness and dependence? “Rejoice,” says the Democrat, “Justice will be done! And thank goodness, as usual, the FBI will take care of everything.”
\n\nMiller Time and Mueller Time are both chronotopes, to use the term popularized by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin: they are specific relationships to time. You cannot understand a group of people without understanding how they experience the passing of time. Peering between chronotopes produces strange refractions, like looking through a glass of water. How different the world appears to a person whose activism consists chiefly of waiting, in contrast to how it appears to those for whom waiting and acting are opposites! It is the difference between spectator and athlete, between the consumer and the inventor, between those who suffer history as if it were weather and those who make history as a side effect of understanding themselves as the protagonists of their time.
\n\nAnd Miller Time and Mueller Time are both marketed chronotopes. Miller Time is the “5 o’clock somewhere” that unites wage labor and intoxication in a mutually reinforcing false opposition—but even more importantly, it is the branded colonization of that time. Likewise, Mueller Time is not just the “he’ll get his” which all people of conscience wish for Trump, but a particular deferral of responsibility. Both are successful advertising campaigns that concentrate capital in certain hands precisely by inducing people not to take their problems into their own hands.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/26/2.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“The politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis,’ and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing.”
\n\n-Walter Benjamin on how Social Democrats permitted the Third Reich to come to power in Germany
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All this is familiar to those who were raised as Adventists, believing that the outrageous sinfulness of the prevailing world order indicates the imminence of the Resurrection and the necessity of repentance before authority. Mueller Time is the redemption, the arrival of the Millennium, when the legitimate authorities will reassert their dominion and the obedient will be rewarded for their patience. Good Christians have awaited this for two thousand years; they have made a religion out of waiting. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
\n\nTo keep people waiting for salvation indefinitely, it helps to shift every once in a while from one source of dramatic tension to another. Some hoped Trump would run the country “like a business.” Now that the signature forms of evil associated with capitalism—nepotism, profiteering, corruption, race baiting, sexual harassment, misinformation—characterize the presidency, Democrats are proposing to return to the good-old-fashioned signature forms of evil previously associated with government: bureaucracy, clientelism, experts deciding the fates of millions behind closed doors. All the things that helped Trump come to office.
\n\nFor the purposes of relegitimizing government, it is ideal that Robert Mueller is not just a “good” authority figure, but specifically, a white male Republican—an FBI director who first made a name for himself overseeing the killing of Vietnamese people. He is everything the average Democrat would oppose if Trump had not moved the goal posts by pursuing the same Republican agenda by potentially extra-legal means. Mueller represents the same FBI that attempted to make Martin Luther King, Jr. commit suicide, that set out to destroy the Occupy movement. Under Mueller’s leadership, the FBI determined that the number one domestic terror threat in the United States was environmental activism.
\n\nMueller Time is a way of inhabiting the eternally renewed amnesia that is America. This is the real “deep state”—the part of each Democrat’s heart that will accept any amount of senseless violence and murder and oppression, as long as it adheres to the letter of the law.
\n\n\n\n\n“Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment—the status quo threatens to preserve itself. Progress—the first revolutionary measure taken.”
\n\n-Walter Benjamin
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What will be the fruits of Mueller’s labors?
\n\nRank-and-file Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right. It means abdicating the responsibility to do what is ethical regardless of what the laws happen to be.
\n\nIn the struggle to control the law-making and law-enforcing apparatus of the US government, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have secured a solid majority. They remain at an impasse. The most likely explanation for Mueller’s delays is that he has been biding his time, waiting to see if the balance of power in the US government would shift enough that there could be some consequences to his report.
\n\n\n\n\nThe wait
\n\n
\nThe wait
\nThe wait
\nThe waitThe wait
\n\n
\nThe wait
\nThe wait
\nThe wait-Killing Joke, “The Wait”
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Ironically, the only thing that could guarantee that Mueller’s report will have an effect would be if this impasse were disturbed by forces outside the halls of power—for example, by a real social movement utilizing direct action. If millions of people were in the streets preventing the Trump administration from accomplishing its agenda, then the power brokers in Washington would consider sacrificing Donald Trump to preserve business as usual.
\n\nIn standing back and waiting, affirming the authority of the FBI and Congress to take care of matters, Mueller’s fans make it less likely that his investigation will pose a serious threat to the administration. The rank-and-file Democrats are left gazing at their screens, watching the bureaucratic equivalent of the spinning wheel of death.
\n\nIn this case, the more you clap your hands, the less Tinkerbell exists.
\n\n\n\n\nI’m in the waiting room
\n\n
\nI don’t want the news—I cannot use it
\nI don’t want the news—I won’t live by itBut I don’t sit idly by
\n\n
\nI’m planning a big surprise
\nI’m gonna fight for what I wanna be
\nAnd I won’t make the same mistakes
\nBecause I know how much time that wastes-Fugazi “Waiting Room”
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The arc of history is long, but it curves towards—death. There is no excuse to delay. Tomorrow will use you the way we use today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/26/3.jpg\")
\nWhat would it mean to stop waiting?
\n\nIt would mean to stop looking to others to solve our problems, no longer permitting a series of presidents, Speakers of the House, FBI directors, presidential candidates, and other bullies and hucksters to play good cop/bad cop with us.
\n\nIt would mean figuring out how to deal with the catastrophes that Trump’s presidency is causing directly, rather than through the mediation of other authority figures. It would mean building up social movements powerful enough to block the construction of a border wall, to liberate children from migrant detention facilities and reunite them with their families, to feed the hungry and care for the sick without waiting for legislators to give us permission to make use of the resources that we and others like us maintain on a daily basis.
\n\nRemember when we shut down the airports immediately after Trump took office? It would mean doing more of that, and less sitting around waiting on politicians and bureaucrats. That was our proudest moment. Since then, we have only grown weaker, distracted by the array of champions competing to represent us—the various media outlets and Democratic presidential candidates—all surrogates for our own agency.
\n\nLet’s stop killing time. Or rather—let’s stop playing along as it kills us.
\n\n\n\n\n“We live the whole of our lives provisionally,” he said. “We think that for the time being things are bad, that for the time being we must make the best of them and adapt or humiliate ourselves, but that it’s all only provisional and that one day real life will begin. We prepare for death complaining that we have never lived. Of all the people I know, not one lives in the present. No one gets any pleasure from what he does every day. No one is in a condition to say On that day, at that moment, my life began. Believe me, even those who have power and take advantage of it are plagued with anxieties and disgusted at the dominant stupidity. They too live provisionally and spend their whole lives waiting.”
\n\n“Those who flee the country also spend their lives waiting,” Pietro said. “That’s the trouble. But one mustn’t wait, one must act. One must say Enough, from this very day.”
\n\n“But if you do not have the freedom to act?” Nunzio said.
\n\n“Freedom is not a thing you can receive as a gift,” Pietro said. “You can be free even under a dictatorship on the simple condition that you struggle against it. A person who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is free. A person who struggles for what she believes to be right is free. You might live in the most democratic country in the world, but if you are lazy, callous, and servile, you are not free—in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that can be begged from others. You must take it for yourself, in whatever share you can.”
\n\n-Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine
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Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom
\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/02/14/injury-against-erasure-damage-against-time-two-stories-about-love-and-death", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/02/14/injury-against-erasure-damage-against-time-two-stories-about-love-and-death", "title": "Injury against Erasure, Damage against Time : Two Stories about Love and Death", "summary": "Two retellings of the classic story about the lovers who secure a single night together before one of them is to be executed. ", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/14/header1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/14/header1.jpg", "date_published": "2019-02-14T22:17:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:38Z", "tags": [ "love", "damage", "time", "literature", "fiction" ], "content_html": "For Valentine’s Day 2019, we offer two retellings of a classic story—the tale of the lovers who secure a single night together before one of them is to be executed. The one who is to go free urges her partner to leave marks on her body by which she might remember him, yet try as they might, she comes away bare.
\n\nLying beside him in the guest bedroom at his mother’s house on the night he was released from custody, she remembered the first time they had undressed together, many summers before. She had been trying to teach him how to give her a hickey. Those had been wild years for her, free years, before everyone had terrorism charges.
\n\nThat first innocent morning, when he lifted her shirt, the clefts where M— had raked his nails still marked the small of her back like the f-holes of a violin. A great crushed plum on the left side of her chest testified to R—’s vigor and carelessness. But she could hardly bring him to so much as nip her.
\n\n“You can’t just touch your teeth to my skin,” she had protested, finally, after a pleasant but fruitless hour. “You have to bite down.”
\n\n“Like this?”
\n\n“Yes, that’s… better, but you also have to suck on the skin—and sort of move your teeth around, break up the capillaries.”
\n\nHe complied, tentative as a fawn. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
\n\n“No—I mean yes, it hurts, but my idea of a good time is somebody scraping a brillo pad all over my body.”
\n\n“A brillo pad? Is that something you’ve done?”
\n\n“No, silly,” she giggled, rolling her eyes up to reconsider, “—or yes, once, but it was electrified.”
\n\n“Electrified?” He shuddered.
\n\nShe teased him about that for years afterwards. He never did manage to give her a hickey.
\n\nSo there they lay, on the night he was released, entwined and reminiscing. The tracking device on his leg scuffed her ankle every time one of them moved.
\n\n“There’s no way to take this off?”
\n\n“My lawyer’s appealing it. But you might have to put up with it until trial. I’m sorry, honey.”
\n\n“Oh, I’m sorry, my darling!”
\n\n“When all this is finished, we’ll go back to the park by your old place, where we first hooked up outdoors.”
\n\n“And we’ll do it again on that bench! Even though they have security guards now.”
\n\n“Then we’ll go back to the old library…”
\n\n“Where I went down on you in the stairwell! Now that it’s shut down, we can break in and do it on the ground floor.”
\n\n“And we could go to the beach…”
\n\n“And I’ll ride you in the surf! The Coast Guard will crash their helicopters in envy.”
\n\nIt all felt like a lark, a dramatic backdrop for their love. Why would the court have released him to house arrest if they really considered him dangerous? And yet when they made love again that night, she felt the transience of the moment, as if this meeting of their bodies were simply a sketch in pencil that could be erased, washed away in the torrent of days.
\n\n“Mark me, my darling,” she urged him, pulling his mouth to her throat, to her shoulders, to her chest. “Mark me.” He sank his teeth into her, as fearless as he had once been timid, seizing and shaking her flesh around in his teeth like a wolf with its kill. “Harder,” she entreated him, arching her back, offering herself, demanding proof, permanence.
\n\nYet in the morning, when they woke to the sound of the police van pulling into the driveway, her body was bare, as bare as if she had slept alone.
\n\nA year later, standing before the gates of the prison in a black veil, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe any of it was real. She felt a world away from the protesters holding up their little candles behind her, from his mother and father and younger brother—a world away from the prison, from her own body, from herself.
\n\nMidnight was approaching. Surely a call would come in from the governor, or the lawyers would force a stay, or the power would go out. Then this would be over, and the gate would open and he would step out into her arms and they would walk away from this place together, fingers entwined.
\n\nAnd then she knew that he had been executed—not from the messages arriving on her phone, not by the hush that descended upon the crowd, but because she could feel every place on her body that he had touched her come to life, electrified, from the nibbles of the first morning to the savagery of the final night. A thousand wounds breaking out all over her body, like flowers opening in the darkness.
\n\nShe dropped her veil from her face and shoulders and stood there before everyone, purple bruises blossoming on her neck, the imprints of his teeth on her cheeks. She turned to the crowd, drawing their eyes, calm and cold and powerful. She raised her arms, displaying the contusions, flaunting them against the lethal world, injury against erasure, damage against time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/14/11.jpg\")
\nShall I write to you of love?
\n\nThere is a trail of flowers that weaves through the city. You have not followed it from beginning to end, but you may have stopped to admire one of the many tendrils that together comprise the trail. Lilac rushes through a chasm in the brick wall. Honeysuckle climbs in spirals up a splintering pole. Lavender shoots through a sharp crack in the cobblestone. A graffitied violet rose transforms a rusting spiked gate. Year after year, the path is reborn, for there are always new crevices to fill, new (old) grounds for beauty to occupy, as the investors of today revitalize the past with concrete and plastic (and here is the first secret—these façades too will fall in time, but the path will remain).
\n\nI have heard many stories of the path’s origin, but only this one is true (this is the only true thing).
\n\nOnce upon a time, the night before his execution, she makes her way to the prison to see him. Her delicate slippers (my steel-toed boots) are muddied by the long walk through the torrential rain, her hair is wild, her skirts are torn. She skillfully picks the locks, evading the guards (or do I stab them, shoot them?) until she reaches the last, looming impenetrable door, buried in the deepest cellar, drugging the guard (with laughter, poison, a kiss), relieving the guard of the single bijou key. He is reading by candlelight.
\n\nShe unlocks (I unlock) the cage that holds him (the cage that holds you), the last enclosure (I am excited by cages myself, but only when you hold the key, my darling). She goes in to see him. He looks up from his book. He knew she would arrive, the way she does in the story.
\n\nOur time is so short and I cannot save you. I can barely hope to escape with my own life, my own life without you, the life I have promised you I will not sacrifice. While you may desire tender embraces before our lovers’ tragic end, I have promised you the truth, and the truth is that true love is written in blood (it is through blood—this is the second secret—that we may arrive at the deepest tenderness, the most exquisite tears, the cleansing fire).
\n\nAs their lips, tongues, teeth touch, he pulls the wet tangles of her hair back, exposing her delicate throat, biting into the center like a plum, penetrating the most delicate, the strongest parts of her, destroying all that separates, even skin. (We are transported to a place where we bound together through the woods, senses heightened, you carrying me away from danger by the scruff of my neck, then rolling wrestling licking on the forest floor until our fur is matted, covered in briars and thorns, we release inside each other, the deepest soundest sleep.)
\n\nAs I revel in your bites and blows, I ask that you mark me, consume me, so that I might live inside you and you inside me as you mount the scaffold in the ever-nearing sunrise. But though you tear more and more harshly into my flesh, the wounds seem to close, the excited capillaries settle, leaving only drops of blood resting against my unblemished skin.
\n\nThis is when the tears come—not from the pain, not at the sight of blood, but with the knowledge that I cannot take you with me. Are you real, am I real, my dearest dream? Is this indeed only a story?
\n\nAt dawn, as the crowd gathers, they notice a woman, her shoes and skirts muddy, her hair wild, but her skin radiant and pure and unmarked. As he walks to the gallows, she stands there like the hawthorn in spring (I am tied, I am rooted, you are gone, one, none, my nightmare, my angel). And this is what the people will tell their grandchildren, and all those who possess the innocence to recognize truth: as he falls, her perfect skin blooms with a thousand bruises and wounds, and from this carnage flowers begin to grow. Soon she is entirely abloom, transfigured, a garden, a tree that some insist was there already, has always been there.
\n\nThe path starts at this tree, but where does it end? Some say it ends at his grave. It crosses his gravesite, that much is certain, but others claim to have followed it further—to the cave, the ocean, the stars. There are also those who claim there is no path, no lovers, no marks. There are those who wish to tidy away these stories for which the only evidence is folktales, flowers, and blood. To this I have but one answer, the final secret: This is the only true thing, my love. My love is the only true thing.
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