The roiling, stultifying, criminal, strangling momentum of US fascism, as it consolidates, murders, pilfers and extorts, saves its worst for the brain. If fascism crashes down on every institution, every moment, it especially hones in on the human nervous system. Some suffer complete paralysis, while others dread the numb, static sensation of being submerged in a dense atmosphere that allows only a few effortful steps until the victim must pause to catch her breath. The enormous wave of misery will leave a few names for a hypothetical future story - the Sophie Scholls of our moment, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Rumeysa Ozturk, even Luigi Mangione - the pinprick of courage punctuating the lines of the walking dead. Heather Heyer or George Floyd come to mind, although neither chose to represent resistance. Did Sophie Scholl bravely choose her guillotine, or did the whole nightmare congeal around her?

The courage of anonymous people, trapped in the onrushing poison of government violence will be hidden. I saw a video today from LA - a man put himself in front of a car driven by ICE agents and back-peddled while some ten other unidentified heroes ran alongside. People were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets. The fascist goons measure the level of violence like so many chemists weighing a milligram of each element as they are added to a test tube. As violence goes through an experimental phase, the uncertainty drives people to suicide. People kill themselves over Trump in increasing numbers.

Fascism melds fear and boredom - the imagination lapses into a long hibernation - all agency resides in the elite inner circle of imbeciles with guns. The subconscious recognizes that the mere act of creative dreaming is a crime against the state. The whole society slumbers and avoids gazing into the awful mirror where pure cowardice peers back. Things happen all around you that mock your intentions, your decision to either not act at all, or to act in ways that will neither change the trajectory of fascism or put yourself at risk.

I protest at local arms manufacturer L3Harris with only one other protester - a man as close to 90 as I am to 80. The powers look down on us with a shake of the head. My companion talks about doing more himself - putting a chair in the middle of downtown Main Street, marching in protest naked. Is courageous resistance still an option? I believe it must be, but my own will sags. Is writing enough? Which words capture the outrage? I have long run out of ideas but persist in a sort of Samuel Beckettesque stubbornness - writing as involuntary reflex, the rhetoric of Tourette's. People blame themselves for not doing enough. Fascism is my fault.

The psychology of protest now confronts the fear of invisibility. Fascism presents every non-victim (I speak loosely here, we are nearly all victims) with the choice between invisibility and summoning the state’s violent retribution. We know that Trump has called the National Guard into LA where he tinkers along the edge of civil war. The agony of the bystander is to straddle a line, to make a choice - do you allow the state to torment and murder (as a means of entertainment) so long as you are ignored, or do you signal your existence by standing between ICE and innocent targets. In Tiananmen Square a lone man stood in front of a tank, and the Chinese state unleashed death upon hundreds or even thousands.

There are no individuals in a fascist world, only the interim between the walking dead and the sad, unwritten history. Most of what we do will be forgotten, we will impotently gaze at terrible things - like an Australian journalist shot in the back with a rubber police bullet at point blank range during a TV interview in LA today. The history, whatever survives, will be about the morally mutilated, barely sentient fools who will butcher and bungle until some court cleans the slate and hangs them. That will happen to Trump - his fat, hideous, soulless remains will drop and sway, but that will offer no relief. Historical karma is a trivial after-thought - who cares that Pol Pot escaped justice? If Trump is punished or not, it changes nothing. Trump is the essence of America, the distilled, perfect symbol - the encapsulated, pared down, uncomplicated realization of two and a half brutal centuries.

Trump is us - our rotten, shameless, empty greed homogenized, our drooling, stupefied national shit eating grin beneath a made-in-China red cap. When Thomas Jefferson took a break from raping his slaves and wrote The Declaration of Independence, he might have had a mystical dream about the future he signed into being - he possibly pictured Trump in all of his gloriously hateful stupidity, and maybe Thomas Jefferson trembled and paused....Nah, he mumbled to himself, that will never fucking happen.