Just the other day ago or so we were composing an admittedly angry yet sincerely jocular essay about the most recent Democratic presidential debate, and with some literary license we described a fantastical world where the candidates frankly admitted their plans to guillotine the handful of nefarious and unnamed billionaires who are standing in the way of their otherwise easily obtainable utopia of social justice. We thought it an amusingly Swiftian exaggeration of the sore and sorry state of modern liberalism, but once again the more humorless and literal reality of the fact-based press has overtaken our most ambitious attempts at satire. The latest news from The National Review, which is still considered a far-right publication by the left but is now regarded as a stuffily establishment press by the even angrier further-right, and is still as always a reliable factual source, finds a Missouri Democrat who is a happy to be quoted that he’s “OK” with “bringing back the guillotine” for the benefit of a few billionaires, and that he also doesn’t mind naming which ones he has in mind.
That’s just one cherry-picked quotation, to be sure, but we don’t doubt that even in this cold and barren winter there are plenty of cherries on the trees to be picked if that’s what it takes to convey how very angry these liberals are these days. That Missouri Democrat was weighing on behalf of the embattled University of Missouri “professor” of “communications” who was caught on video “rounding up some muscle” to evict a student journalist from public space that had been illegally seized by a “Black Lives Matter” protest on her campus, which is understandably angry about the black lives lost to wrongful police conduct but somehow sanguine about the far greater number of black lives lost to the un-policed rampant in too many black neighborhoods, and which has spawned similarly acrimonious protests over Halloween costumes and ethnically incorrect Asian cuisine on the cafeteria menu and various other “micro-aggressions” among the most prestigious and pampered student bodies, not to mention all the angriness about that “culture of rape” that has has somehow spread from the church-going redneck jurisdictions to the liberal domain of academia, and there’s been plenty of quotable angriness to go around. That’s just the college kids, too, and you should hear what the more hard-strapped high-school-drop-out wing of the Democratic party and its post-graduate Starbucks baristas are muttering about these days. We hear them all too often, given the sorts of dives where we go to watch ‘Shocker games and hear rock ‘n’ roll shows and to catch up on the latest events with a gray-ponytailed hipster but more or less conservative friend of ours, and it somehow exceeds even the angriness we find when in the relative comfort of our right-wing extremist friends.
It’s mere anecdotal evidence, of course, and we further concede we run in some atypical circles, but in our experience the talk of revolution and even guillotines is not uncommon and often seems more than rhetorical among liberals. We still recall the lithe and comely young hipsterette at a local dive who expressed her eagerness to fight it out in the streets with such nasty Republicans as ourselves, the countless comments by politically correct guests at locally swank cocktail parties about how certain Republican women weren’t really women at all, and all the threateningly indignant comments by the most unexpected people about how Bruce Jenner really is a woman, although maybe not because he or she might be a Republican, and all the things confessed in in honesty before the speaker realized when we were one Them, not to mention that a self-described socialist’s call for “revolution” is currently threatening the liberal “establishment” candidate at a time when that label is as odious to the left as it is to the right.
This seems peculiar from our geographical and ideological perspective, where our grievances are stated from a long-fixed position and can thus be objectively measured by the dangerous distance our country has been dragged leftward over the past seven years, but even in our anger we try to be empathetic. Those angry folks on the left are judging events by the distance of their ever leftward-drifting hopes against the evermore elusive reality of the socially just Utopia of their dreams, and they’re still so infatuated with the hopes of the change that the past seven years would bring they can’t help look for scapegoats and demagogues, and as always there are plenty available on both the left and right, so we try to be understanding enough to avoid any thoughts of guillotines.
We caught the first half of an important conference ‘Shocker game at a notorious dive just across the street from the local university and on the edge of a very rough part of town, and were reminded of the times when one of the more annoying regulars the was disappointed to learn that we don’t want Donald Trump executed or, at the very least, tortured, and further surprised to learn that we didn’t even wish execution or torture on President Barak Obama, and that we merely wished them both happy lives outside the sphere of public influence. Given the current rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum, we’ll give that psychopath some benefit of the doubt. We were somewhat hearted by a brief conversation with an old friend of ours, a delightful woman and locally legendary hard-rock drummer who is currently featured in an all girl punk trio with of her longtime best friends’ daughters, and although that single and hard-working and hard-rock drumming woman was coming from the Democratic side of the demographic divide she seemed to share our hope that some sort of center will hold. She agreed with us that the Democrat’s “establishment” candidate should probably be jailed in some humane prison, and that our party’s “anti-establishment” front-runner should be banished to real estate investments and reality television, and we both admitted that our hopes aren’t high even for our necessarily angriest anti-establishment candidates.
Although we hold out faint hope that the future of our Republic will be favorably decided at the ballot box by an informed public choosing between red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism and the compassionate Judeo-Christian tradition and a stifling socialistic bureaucracy and all that insistent post sexual-revolution social justice stuff, we acknowledge it will likely come down to which side can best harness all the anger that is clearly brewing out there. We’re not at all certain how that might work out, and at this point we’ll settle for the center holding.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 
Rather than the political spectrum moving, I’m more concerned about the rising level of anger itself on both sides. Like opposite electrical charges, I think it could result in a very large, sudden discharge. Actually, it seems increasingly unavoidable as the anger mounts higher and higher. Maybe we need a lightning rod to safely equalize everything.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Sort of describes the situation The Center created in all innocence and hope. Going along, getting along, lacking conviction, means that eventually you hope the people who are constructing guillotines in the basement are not too numerous. Someone once said that hope is not a plan. Let us hope that God hears our prayer. In the words of Solomon on the dedication of the temple:
“When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because your people have sinned against you, and when they pray toward this place and give praise to your name and turn from their sin because you have afflicted them, then hear from heaven and forgive the sin of your servants, your people Israel. Teach them the right way to live, and send rain on the land you gave your people for an inheritance.”