Playing With Borrowed Time

“Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts.” Italo Calvino

It’s the hypocrisy that crawls under the skin and burns like acid. If you or I receive a subpoena, we don’t have the option of ignoring it or rejecting it out of hand, nor do we have much latitude to question its legitimacy. We are compelled to comply or face the consequences. Not so the powerful. They have ways, they have means, they can hire brilliantly educated men and women to advance the most absurd arguments and spurious legal theories, to delay, distort, and dilute.

Purportedly, America is a nation of laws, not men; a long time ago we rejected a capricious, tyrannical monarch, then set up a form of government to prevent one from ever rising again. It’s an imperfect system, to be sure, but it has proved durable, serving us through expansion, war, depression, and social upheaval.

Until now. Until the Orange Menace.

Pay attention, America, please. Put your iPhone down, turn the TV off, the latest video from your favorite YouTube influencer can wait, your hot yoga class can wait, your grande Americano can wait.  

Our house, once divided then repaired, is again divided, but now it’s also old, weathered, the foundation is cracked and the floor creaks, the window frames and doors swell when it rains, and the stench of rot is present in every room. Out of the gloom steps one Donald J. Trump, loser businessman, liar, con artist, grifter, philanderer, bigot, and general, all-around, morally-bankrupt asshole, to proclaim that the laws of our land apply to everyone but him, he is untouchable, even by the co-equal legislative branch, explicitly charged in the Constitution with checking his powers. In normal times, maybe. But these aren’t normal times. For Trump, ignorance is like a coat of arms. He hasn’t read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers or the Bible. To every subpoena or demand that a member of his administration testify before Congress, Trump says, fuck you. To every request that he respect the norms of his office and republican government, Trump says, fuck you. Then he winds up his ill-informed followers by claiming that anyone who investigates him is committing treason.

Nobody is allowed to question the king.

This is how a republic dies.

With few exceptions, members of Trump’s party remain resolutely silent. All but a handful have forgotten the oath of office they swore, hand upon a bible; loyalty to party, to rich donors, to ideology is more important to them than upholding the Constitution or serving the people they claim to represent. Like mindless sycophants they line up to prostrate themselves before their lawless leader, betraying the principles of our democracy in exchange for money, power, fame and favor. There’s a fire in the attic, another in the basement, but they could care less because the leader says there is no fire, and he knows what no one else knows, sees what no one else sees, ever omnipotent and infallible. If he says the smoke is really mist, or a heavy cloud of fairy dust, it must be so.

Americans treat democracy like it’s a spectator sport, an event that comes around every few years, like the World Cup or the Olympic games. Into the vacuum step the powerful who ignore our will with ease. If they cut off our access to TV, millions might flood the streets in protest. But about wars that drag on for decades, a tax policy that shifts wealth to the already wealthy, a health insurance system that kills people through indifference, an economy that is blatantly unfair and injurious to working people, women, children, and the elderly, and an accelerator of catastrophic climate change, about epidemic gun violence and a host of other social injustices, we are silent, mute, too busy to pay attention, to care, to get angry, to rise up and say, enough!

It’s so much later than we think. All the time we have left is borrowed.