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Title: Life in “Mueller Time”
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: February 26, 2019
Language: en
Topics: the spectacle, liberalism, Donald Trump, time
Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2019/02/26/life-in-mueller-time-the-politics-of-waiting-and-the-spectacle-of-investigation

CrimethInc.

Life in “Mueller Time”

For 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.

When you’ve fallen on the highway

And you’re lying in the rain,

And they ask you how you’re doing

Of course you’ll say you can’t complain

If you’re squeezed for information,

That’s when you’ve got to play it dumb

You just say you’re out there waiting

For the miracle, for the miracle to come

-The 20^(th) century’s greatest messianic thinker, Leonard Cohen

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.

In 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.

To 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.

Dante, 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.

If you can get people used to waiting, you can get them used to

anything.

To 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.”

Miller 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.

And 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.

“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.”

-Walter Benjamin on how Social Democrats permitted the Third Reich to

come to power in Germany

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.

To 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.

For 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.

Mueller 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.

“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.”

-Walter Benjamin

---

What will be the fruits of Mueller’s labors?

Rank-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.

In 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.

The wait

-Killing Joke, “The Wait”

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.

In 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.

In this case, the more you clap your hands, the less Tinkerbell exists.

I’m in the waiting room

I don’t want the news—I cannot use it

I don’t want the news—I won’t live by it

But I don’t sit idly by

I’m planning a big surprise

I’m gonna fight for what I wanna be

And I won’t make the same mistakes

Because I know how much time that wastes

-Fugazi “Waiting Room”

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.

---

What would it mean to stop waiting?

It 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.

It 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.

Remember 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.

Let’s stop killing time. Or rather—let’s stop playing along as it kills

us.

“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.”

“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.”

“But if you do not have the freedom to act?” Nunzio said.

“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.”

-Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine