“The calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.” Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Yesterday my nineteen-year-old daughter tested positive for Covid-19, becoming the first person in my immediate family to contract the virus. Fortunately, her case appears mild and she should recover; she’s more upset about having brought it home than she is with how she feels. This morning my wife and I got tested at Sansum Clinic. We’re both waiting for the results to appear in our electronic files.
And now we’re all back in quarantine, canceling hair appointments, and ordering groceries on Instacart.
I never doubted that Covid-19 was real. I’m a liberal native Californian and I believe in science. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and in progress. Even though it’s slow and messy and subject to being corrupted, I believe that democracy offers the best chance for human beings to live together in imperfect harmony. I believe that citizens of civilized countries have a human right to basic retirement security, public education, and medical care. There are some things for which a market solution is ill-suited, and satisfying basic human needs is one of them. If we invested half as much money into these public goods as we flood the Pentagon with decade after decade, millions of American citizens of whatever political persuasion, or none at all, could instantly improve the quality of their lives. We can afford it. Make pragmatic investments in people and you will reap multiple rewards. It’s not much different from planting seeds in rich soil.
Going into the election I knew two things. First, Biden and Harris had to win by a large margin, a margin, in the words of MSNBC’s Glenn Kirschner, too big to steal. Because the second thing I knew was that whether or not Biden’s margin of victory was significant or slender, Trump was going to contest the results with all of his manic energy. This response was entirely predictable to anyone who has watched Trump in action during the past four years -- years which to me have passed like decades.
It was obvious from Day One that Trump was in over his head. The journalist David Cay Johnston has reported on Trump’s business and moral failures for nearly forty years, documented his fraudulent tax and insurance schemes, his habit of ripping off vendors, contractors, and creditors. Johnston knew the Real Donald Trump: the great business wizard who bankrupted a casino, an airline, and a bogus university. The misogynist and racist. The malevolent narcissist. The incompetent man-child. The criminal. None of it was any secret.
It was all out in the open, which, strangely enough, is where Trump likes it because he has adapted schoolyard verbal jujitsu for the digital age. Call him fat, he calls you ugly. Call him racist, he’ll say he’s the least racist person in the room, even if the room he happens to be in is full of hooded KKK members. Call him a liar, he calls you fake news.
With Trump it all comes down to the old schoolyard taunt: what are you going to do about it? A question spoken with a condescending sneer. The “It” can be passing state secrets to our adversaries; it can be funneling public funds into his personal property in violation of the Constitution; it can be thwarting the legitimate authority of the Legislative Branch; it can be withholding congressionally-approved funds in exchange for damaging information on a chief political rival. If you don’t stop Trump out the gate, you’ve already lost. In a functioning democracy, with political parties who now and then pause to recall who they really work for, and from time to time muster the ability to act with the merest courage and honor, Trump would have been gone two years ago, either by impeachment or forced resignation. Disgraced either way, as he should have been.
For the next quarter century, political scientists and sociologists and psychologists and many other learned people will study the reasons Donald J. Trump became, against all the rules of reason and common sense, President of the United States; they will study what it has cost all of us, ponder and investigate why the Republican Party traded its soul to become the Trump Party.
It takes time to see the myriad results a set of human actions produces, just as it takes time for water to wear down rock. The ground was prepared for Trump twenty years ago, after 9/11, when our country lost its senses and responded to the terrorist attacks by launching a never-ending War on Terror on a global scale. Think of what that misguided response produced. The Patriot Act is a big one because of what came after it was passed with bipartisan support. In the name of “security” and without much debate, politicians gave away the keys to our privacy. They gave us the TSA, the Department of Homeland Security, mass surveillance of Americans, the invasion and occupation of Afgahanistan (longest war in Amerian history, still going on to this day), the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the prison at Guantanamo, systematic torture of suspected enemies, Abu Ghraib.
The Executive Branch of our government -- one of supposedly three equal branches -- was ceded enormous powers, the architects blind, or more likely indifferent, to what damage those powers could do to the nation if they fell into the wrong hands. Into corrupt hands.
Into Donald Trump’s small, weak, and dishonest white hands.
The deep tissue damage that Trump and his Trump Party enablers has done to our country isn’t clear yet, and won’t be for some time. That some 73 million voters don’t seem concerned is a matter for pause and reflection, though we have little time for either because Trump and his gang of misfits allowed the pandemic to spiral out of control. 14 million positive cases and 100,000 hospitalizations reported by CNN today; some 2,700 Americans dying each day; nearly 276,000 Americans dead since March. Schools closed. Small businesses suffering, many closing. Life at a standstill, stuck in a holding pattern, or collapsing.
In 2015, Trump’s jones for the spotlight and things he can attach his name to and squeeze money from, brought us the long campaign infomercial called Trump 2016. He expected to lose, he knew he would, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was the attention and the TV ratings. Upon losing he’d declare the whole exercise fraudulent and walk away with a gleaming new persona to hawk. He was all set to become the Legend of Donald Trump, the man who could’ve restored America to its full splendor if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats hadn’t cheated, lied, fabricated, falsified and distributed millions of ballots to illegal immigrants. That was the story.
“I could have been the greatest president of all time, bigger than George Washington, even bigger than Abraham Lincoln.”
But then Trump won. His longshot wager came in and a whole new world ripe for grift came into view. He was like a pirate gazing at an under defended port city. For four years he got to play in the biggest sandbox in the world, and all those federal agencies, but especially the IRS and the Justice Department, worked for him now. All he had to do was tip the applecart upside down, reward people for being loyal to him, even if that meant they were stone incompetent or grostequely compromised, like Wilbur Ross and Betsy DeVos. No pun intended, but in Trump’s world, loyalty trumps competence. In fact, competence is frowned upon.
Covid-19 is raging across the land. We’re a fearful and confused people right now, isolated in our warring camps, tribes, cities, townships, on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On the television and the radio. We never ask who owns those enormous squawk boxes, or question why they are allowed to use their government license to flood the public airwaves with divisive, misleading and false information. We have to put aside our differences for a moment and ask why so much of the underpinning of our lives is sold to us by a very small number of monopolies, like Amazon and Facebook, Google and AT&T, and see that as the wealth of the owners increases dramatically, the wealth of the people who labor and who cannot live on interest and dividends, gets much worse. We devote more time and energy to slinging insults and fists and words at one another -- and I’m guilty of it myself -- than we do trying to recognize the forces and hands that make our lives less full, less secure, less predictable, less physically and mentally healthy, less generous, less tolerant, and less merciful.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you want to understand the tree, you’ve got to study its roots.
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