November 2020 Archives

Dear America,

There's no viable purpose in discussing Donald Trump anymore.  He said spontaneously recently that there was no point in playing games with regard to accepting the results of the election, so what does he actually do?  He plays games and his cohorts love it.  He insists that he won the election but it was stolen from him by commission of fraud by whatever malefactors he has conjured up in his disturbed little mind.  He has no evidence mind you, but doesn't deter his acolytes; he has convinced them that you don't need reality when you are looking for a lefty conspiracy.  He has prevailed upon his coven of consorts and his "base" that we have "turned the corner" with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic despite the all too obvious reality.  Never mind that morbidity has more than doubled since the first time he made that blatantly false assurance to the non-mask-wearing, true-believing, self-anointed patriots who will follow him anywhere; they still choose to see eschewing mask wearing as a shibboleth of their bizarre cadre of wannabe loyalists, which they are willing to perpetuate even if it kills them.  I guess he has known that he could get away with a statement that was palpably false if his base wants to believe him out of self-interest.  They share his despicable attitudes and sub rosa creed but now don't have to admit to them in order to see them manifested in government action because Trump doesn't admit to them either, but he does act on them on their behalf.  So they get their ill-begotten way with impunity, and that's all they really want.  To put it concisely, there are about 73 million misguided people out their who have arrogated the concept of Americanism to their own use, even though their misuse of the sobriquet "American" actually defiles it in the eyes of virtually everyone else on the planet.  And in service of their contrived claims of virtue, they will claim to believe anything...but what's real.  So what should we talk about this Thanksgiving with our Trumper relatives?

Well, there's the portent of a catastrophe if Donald Trump gets lucky.  I think there's only one chance in a hundred that Trump will be able to flout the election results and hold on to power through a popularly backed act of recalcitrance and legal chicanery, but even one chance is one too many.  Putting that aside though, there is the fact that a nation that harbors a contingent that loves to wave guns around and tell us all what we should believe is going to be hard to subdue, and even harder to extirpate.  That's a problem that will survive Trump and his presidency, and dealing with it is going to be a long, slow slog.  Then there's the fact that we won't get over this pandemic if all of those 73 million people refuse to take the new vaccine that looks to be a remedy for the ubiquity of Covid 19...until they all get personal proof that it was no hoax.  I don't wish that upon them, but speaking of extirpation, that might do it for both the disease and those who insist that it's just a common cold contrary to all of the palpable evidence.  And of course there is the economic cataclysm that the pandemic has wreaked upon the world.  What are we going to do to ensure that everyone can eat and sleep under a roof out of the rain and cold?  Between the deficit created by the tax cut inflicted on all but the rich and its cognate trillion dollar increase in both the deficit and our national debt, the financial pain that millions of us are feeling despite the already enacted $3 trillion relief packages, and the loss of economic vitality our nation is going to experience in consequence of the decline in the number of jobs available, the sequelae of Trump's tenure will be very difficult to overcome.  And of course there's the decline in the mental health of our citizenry in consequence of not just the pandemic but the Trump plague as well.  We can talk about that until both are in the past, but that could be a long time without precipitating any honest contemplation on their part, so why bother.

So, America, I suggest that we just stop talking about "Trumpworld" altogether.  Let's talk about...well, not the present. We've already established that it looks bleak, at least foreseeably.  The pre-Trump past might be alright: the fifties when everyone was sure of what virtue really is, the sixties when everyone rediscovered pleasure only to rediscover decay in its wake, the seventies when hedonism really took off, or the eighties when the reward for the seventies, AIDS, started killing everyone who liked sex without constraints.  Of course we could jus limit ourselves to Clinton's nineties or Bush's two thousands, or even the pre-Trump Obama era, but then we wouldn't have much to talk about.  Not much happened in those three decades if you look back on them...two wars that are still going on, but not much that is heartening in any way, which brings us back to the present.

Let's hope we'll have more to talk about starting in January.  I'm optimistic...pretty much.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, FDR characterized the day before in a speech: "...a date which will live in infamy..."  Since Donald Trump reneged on his commitment to accept the election results--that was an uncharacteristic moment in his life, lasting but a few days--that phrase, a date which will live in infamy, has been cropping up in my thinking as something a real president said once that has lasting significance.  Donald Trump is a name that "will live in infamy" just as sure as he stands there as an obstacle to the peaceful transition of power in a country that has enjoyed such for more than two centuries.  Trump has thrown our international reputation as a nation of reliable political stability...a paradigm for the rest of the world to emulate...into question, and it may be that the effect of his infamy will never be undone, which evokes my memory of another presidential quote.

As everyone of my generation knows, Richard Nixon inflicted a constitutional crisis on the nation too over his role in the aftermath of the "Watergate break-in" that occurred in 1972.  On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned and moments later his vice president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in as president.  In a speech he gave on that occasion, he said, among other things, "Our long national nightmare is over...Our Constitution works..."  If only we could echo Ford's comments today in our country, America.  But our long national nightmare may just be entering a new, devastating phase.  I can't help imagining Trump being escorted out of the White House in hand cuffs by federal marshals, our then former president ranting unabated about having won the election, and making every despicable effort of which he is capable, and he is capable of enormous despicable effort, to marshal what his allies call "his base" to his side to overthrow a democracy that has been the single brightest beacon of hope for a world in which hope is often a scarce commodity.  To put it concisely, Donald Trump could possibly nullify a couple of centuries of exemplary political stability just on a bizarre whim: that he is king...like Putin.

I say this somewhat ruefully, but I doubt that Joe Biden will say what is apt when he assumes office and Trump is just a nightmarish memory.  Biden is too civilized to slap a phrase on Trump's political heresy such as the two just recounted.  Trump deserves to go down in history with a memorable phrase, but chances are he won't.  He'll just be a pathetic tinhorn-would-be dictator, a miscreant who caused national shame and was the embodiment of the decay of his party into misdirected loyalty to party over nation.  But we will have an emblem of Trump's desperate egotism in the form of the Republican Party that enabled him, it seems now until the very end.  The fact that there are only two or three members of that party who have stepped forward out of the crowd to intimate the peril that Trump represents by congratulating Biden on his electoral victory is a kind of infamy all its own, and my guess is that the Republican Party won't live that down any time soon.  Of course, conservatives who's positivistic sanctimony enables them to assert impunity in advocating their sensibilities regarding both political and moral issues will cleave to the party because there is no other political infrastructure that will comport with their modus operandi. The frayed, if not torn credibility of the Republican Party will be their only possible allegiance as no one else will have them, and my bet is that the Republican Party itself will go the way of all things fairly soon after this whole sad, Trump episode ends.  Embarrassment will ensue, and even those who professed nobility in their dogmatic ideals will have to admit that there is at least an alternative to their moral certainty, rendering it anything but certain.  Trumpers will begin denying to their children that they voted for him, and then they will have to admit their folly, to themselves if to no one else, and a new party will be born, "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..." as Lincoln said at Gettysburg.  And then we will have the security to go on for another two centuries building back what Trump and his followers undermined, if they did not destroy it: the national rectitude that has rendered us the most trusted nation in the world...at least until that unfortunate day in January 2017 when Shakespeare's witches might have said, "something wicked this way comes" as they stirred their cauldron of evil concoction. 

Who knew it could get this bad.  Who knew that the United States, a beacon of stability that all can see, could get so far off track that whether our democracy will endure became an open question.  We should all remember this historical pass and commit ourselves and our nation to "never pass this way again."

Your friend

Mike

Dear America,

In the aftermath of the presidential election, Donald Trump showed his true colors.  Prior to election day, Trump said he wouldn't claim victory until there actually was victory.  No need for games, he said.  Then, after the polls were closed he reiterated that sentiment, looking weary and sounding hoarse he said that winning was easy, but losing was hard, especially for him, his words reflecting a sober, and for him uncharacteristic, humility.  That humility lasted a matter of no more than a few hours after which he claimed victory, contrary to what he had said in his most sane and noble moment just moments earlier.  It was quintessential Trump, and for that matter, the response of those in the room when he spoke those ignominious words, quintessential Trumpism.  His obsequious fans cheered when he made his peremptory claim, and they continued to do so as he paradoxically admitted that he would marshal his legal team to challenge the results in court...an admission that he actually hadn't won given all the evidence of the moment.  The votes counted to that point put his opponent ahead in total electoral college votes and popular votes nation-wide, but Trump was undeterred by reality...as usual.  His brief lapse into integrity was over, and the blight that has been Trump for seventy-four years was back before you could say the word "psychotic."  

True, Biden is far from assured the victory as well.  He leads overall, but there are still millions of votes to be counted and reported.  But Biden said just before Trump spoke that no conclusions should be reached because there were still votes to be counted.  He made no reference to the fact that the votes on the record already showed him in the lead.  He was the embodiment cautious optimism, showing the voters and the world what rationality looks like, and this is what bothers me.  Even after the two men spoke, if the election were held again, Trump's voters would still vote for him.  His egomania, megalomania, hypocrisy, deviousness, duplicity...the full panoply of his vicious qualities in full evidence, his supporters would still support him, which is ominous for our future as a nation.  No matter what the end result of our election, nearly half our citizenry discounts the inexpiable lack of character Trump openly...evenly proudly...exhibits.  They seem to revere the qualities in him that would precipitate an answer of "no" from anyone of whom one asked the question, "Would you buy a used car from this man?"   Trump has said it best: he regards all of his tax cheating and his evasions of financial responsibility in the form of bankruptcies and various frauds as indicia of how smart he is: a stable genius indeed.

The fact is that Trump's appeal to people who characterize themselves as conservatives isn't a matter of policy, and thus Trump's amorality is no deterrent to their allegiance.  People cleave to Trump because the things he implies without saying so about matters like race, social programs, liberality, immigration, and for that matter honor, are all racing about in the minds of his acolytes and "his base."  They are things they would never admit openly.  Trump is their surrogate, which allows them to silently disavow the things that they too believe in.  And now, as he openly threatens to claim the presidency regardless of the outcome of the election process on the totally unsupported and insupportable pretext that mail-in ballots are inherently illegitimate, conservatives cheer him on.  What kind of a people have we become?

My father was born in Vienna in 1910, and was raised there until he left for Paris in March of 1938 as the Nazi's marched into the city to the cheers of the Viennese crowds who welcomed them.  As Nixon whipped his "silent majority" into a frenzy in opposition to the protests against the Vietnam war in the early 70's, my father said that the United States looked just like Nazi Germany before Hitler's attempt at arrogation of world power.  I bring that anecdote up because I wonder what he would say about America today.  Trump famously said in 2016 that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and wouldn't lose a single vote, and apparently he was right...and still is.  That is no revelation about Trump.  It is a revelation about the United States of America.  The fact that someone could say things as subversive of our democracy so openly and even proudly  without an iota of repudiation from his supporters, who number in the tens of millions, seems very pre-war-Germany to me.  And as to Hitler, I wouldn't be surprised if in his heart of hearts, Trump admires the way in which he ascended to unquestioning fealty from his countrymen.  I wouldn't be surprised if Hitler was Trump's role model.

All that being said, we are free, at least at the moment, to reject Trumpianism, even though we may ultimately be ineffectual in preventing the contamination of our nation with his sinister ethos.  As for me, I will continue to sequester my family behind tall shrubs and woodlands to keep us from being exposed to what is becoming an increasingly insane world.  Even if Biden wins the election, it will not be Trump I fear.  It will be us, America.

Your friend,

Mike