Dear America,
Now that we have seen and heard Donald Trump's post-presidential bombast delivered at CPAC, the bombasts' convention for the ultra-conservative segment of the Republican Party, we know that Trump "[will] not go gently into that good night" of presidential emeritus status. He will continue to be the cynosure of what Hillary Clinton christened "a basket of deplorables," and to hold court with his retinue of peremptory, arrogant sycophants, many of whom repudiated Trump at the beginning of his official political career just six years ago. I will never understand how such practitioners of political expediency as Lyndsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz could be co-opted so thoroughly and reliably as to become members of Trump's retinue...as to be regular invitees to the golf course and relied- upon mouthpieces for a moral bankrupt like The Fat Man. But teasing out of recent history how Trump could even emerge as a significant factor in our politics--and if you look back at news clips you will see more than once that even he was surprised--you will only find sub-rosa, presumptive-but-cogent evidence to go by.
Over the course of our history, conspiracies have continually played roles in our society, some recent examples being those surrounding the assassination of JFK, the first moon landing, the attacks of 9/11, and most recent of all, the "stolen election" fabrication that seems to have started as a figment of Trump's ego-driven, polluted imagination that needed only his imprimatur to gain acceptance among a certain element of our polity. It seems evident to many that Trump's popularity is hinged on racism and xenophobia, and by events like the siege of our capital on January 6, whereat overt pronouncements by people wearing camouflage uniforms in the middle of a city and horned helmets with faces painted as if this most serious of things they were doing were tantamount to attending a home game in person, presided. If someone conjured up the images of these people and their words and deeds as well, it would be seen as nothing more probable than a satire by most rational people. But it was genuine lunacy, not a parody of it. We all saw it on the news and we have all followed the efforts to bring those who, on that occasion actually precipitated deaths, to justice. And now we have witnessed an organized political event to which Trump was invited as the star attraction. Even in the wake of the debunking of his mountebank's effort to retain power and the cognate impeachment trial at which the overwhelming evidence of his scheming was played before the American public and our senators, who by a fourteen vote majority voted to convict, this group that professes to be the embodiment of a legitimate electoral constituency of reactionaries and closet bigots is shamelessly oblivious.
This Conservative Political Action Convention is no less than evidence of a trend in our electorate toward confirmation bias that I cannot help believing is attached to a lack of either sound mind or intelligence, and in many cases both. The problem is that either way, these people may dictate the future for us, America, and I have no idea how we should cope with this menace. It is anti-democratic as evidenced by the newly energized Republican effort to curtail the voting rights of those who are not them, and by the consequent "gerrymandering" we will witness in at least 23 states in which Republicans control both the legislatures and the governors' offices simultaneously. It is without moral constraint as demonstrated by both it's leader's contumacious lack of probity and the zeal of they who inexplicably claim to be the moral voice of our ethos even as they almost beatify, if not deify the most overtly amoral person to ever hold national office in our history. And they now comprise the vast majority of the members of one of our only two national political parties, within which an estimated 80% are true believers in their false idol's message.
As I have written before, my fear is that we are on the same path toward a culture of personality Germany was before the Nazi movement that supplanted German democracy and led to the persecution and murder of not just 6 million Jews, but also somewhere between 6 and 9 million members of other designated pariah groups like the handicapped, the mentally impaired, political adversaries of the authorities in power, people of color and so on. The worry is this: that all of us Americans who are not them will be the "so on" this time. Time to get my passport renewed.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment