Redefining the calm within the storm . . .
Monday, January 26, 2026 . t's the Moon's day … making its welcome appearance tonight. Forecasts for TulseyTown indicate sunny skies this afternoon, although remaining cold, in the upper 20's. Westerlies are to become Southerlies tonight bringing a brief thaw above freezing until the weekend.
May such calm be mine, so as to meet the force of circumstance.
The Phantom of the Opera, award-winning stage musical by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber began its Broadway run on January 26, 1988. It celebrated its 35th anniversary on Broadway in 2023 and closed later that year, having earned the title of Broadway’s longest-running production.
Irish statesman, co-founder of Amnesty International, and winner of the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize, Seán MacBride, was born on this day in 1904 Paris. His mother was Maude Gonne, Yeats’ unrequited muse.
And its the birthdate of cartoonist, novelist, and playwright Jules Feiffer. He was born in 1929 the Bronx, New York.
The week ahead: even Oklahoma's Governor Stitt is concerned. – Joyce Vance, in Civil Discourse, 1.26.26
What else can we do? – Robert Reich, Mourning in America, 1.26.26
As the nation mourned yesterday, Trump watched a movie. – Heather Cox Richardson, in Letters From An American, posted yesterday.
The following blog entry is a severly edited version of the original Pearcy essay dated yesterday – too long for this space, sad to say.
Immigration Enforcement & The Emerging Dual State by Raymon Pearcey 1.25.2026
In One Battle After Another, the newly released and already award-winning film by Paul Thomas Anderson, a moment of civic terror arrives without warning. Armored vehicles materialize at the edge of a quiet American town. No one knows what rules apply, who is in charge, or what compliance even means. The town doesn’t collapse—it is taken, in real time, by forces that refuse to explain themselves.
Minneapolis crossed a wildly similar threshold this January.
Conclusion: Reclassification, Repeated
What One Battle After Another ultimately depicts is not a coup but a malignant pattern: towns reclassified one by one, citizens unsure when the old rules stopped applying, power moving procedurally rather than ideologically.
Minneapolis now occupies that same narrative space.
The [recent] killings there—of a nurse, of a protestor—are not isolated tragedies. They are signals that the United States is flirting with a system in which constitutional rights remain intact on paper, but apply in practice only to those who remain within an increasingly narrow band of normality.
A government empowered to punish enemies without restraint will eventually redefine who its enemies are. Minneapolis confirms the warning—and sharpens it.
In a dual state, no one is permanently inside the law. Some are simply inside—for now.
Extended Endnotes (Augmented)
1. On the Dual State
Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State (1941) remains the canonical account of how legality and arbitrariness coexist. Its relevance lies not in totalitarian analogy but in structural bifurcation: law for some, discretion for others.
2. On Immigration Law as Exception
U.S. immigration law has long functioned as a “constitutional borderland,” with reduced due-process guarantees justified by sovereignty claims. Interior deployment converts this exception into a governing norm.
3. On “Normal Status”
Authoritarian systems rarely begin with universal repression. They begin by shrinking the category of the normal – rendering others administratively naked without formally naming them enemies.
4. On Protestors as Friction
Contemporary security doctrine increasingly frames protest as disruption rather than speech. Once protest is treated as operational interference, coercion escalates rapidly, even absent criminal intent.
5. On the Second Amendment Paradox
The Minneapolis shootings suggest a future in which lawful gun ownership increases vulnerability during federal operations – undermining the amendment’s foundational claim as a bulwark against state overreach.
6. On Emergency Without Law
Democratic erosion rarely requires formal suspension of rights. It proceeds through stretched statutes, normalized exceptions, and delayed accountability—what some theorists call “permanent emergency.”
7. On Cinema as Early Warning
Films like One Battle After Another function less as prophecy than rehearsal, staging procedural authoritarianism before it becomes socially legible.
Except as we have loved
all news arrives
from a distant land.
– Mary Oliver