Incredible Progress

“The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line.” Matt Taibbi

Life goes on in Trumpland. Babies are born, elderly people die, children have birthday parties, people get married, divorced, kids go to school. One can almost forget that a con artist slipped through the barriers erected by the oligarchy and became president. Forgetting is easier if one maintains a total media blackout.

But if one is any kind of citizen, a media blackout is next to impossible. My inbox is jammed every day with appeals for action and money to block this and fight that; I’ve given money to Truthout, Truthdig, the ACLU, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Common Cause. I remind myself that there are more good-hearted people than bigoted people. Trump and his band of kleptocrats and Christian zealots, I also remind myself, are symptoms of a diseased system. Even if Trump goes, forced out by scandal or because he is clearly unfit to be president, the system remains; another servant of the oligarchy will either step or be pushed forward. At the moment, Mike Pence is next in line.

It took a long time to get to this place. A lot of dominoes had to fall to make Donald Trump possible. If you watched Trump’s press conference on February 16 you know the man is insane, not within a country mile of contact with reality. “Incredible progress,” said Trump about his first month in office, and all the assembled reporters could do was gasp or text “WTF” to their colleagues. Trump resides in his own hermetically sealed universe, where he is the all-knowing, virile, and infallible leader.

If Trump is still in office a year from now I will be shocked. Another batshit performance like he turned in on the 16th and it’s likely the GOP will turn on him with the ferocity of a cornered wolverine. Trump is ill-mannered and ill-tempered, and so stupid that he makes George W. Bush look intelligent.  

The impact of the Trump regime hasn’t plopped on my doorstep yet, but these are early days and Trump’s fine-tuned machine (try not to burst out laughing) of an administration isn’t firing on all its diabolical cylinders yet. Once the Trump gang figures out how to turn the lights in the White House on, order a sandwich and a glass of milk, and get an extra blanket from the housekeeping staff, the insane ideas and stupid policy proposals will really start to flow, and the ugliness will begin in earnest.

I haven’t seen any evidence that the Democratic Party learned anything from its humiliation on November 8, 2016. As yet no mea culpa for abandoning working people 40-odd years ago in favor of corporate and professional class interests; no public rejection of Clintonism; no honest appraisal of how badly the DNC fucked up. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are still in positions of authority, which isn’t saying much in a party that only operates on the margins. What this shows me is how out of touch Democrats are with the needs, fears, and concerns of ordinary citizens. They don’t listen to us and they sure as hell don’t speak a language we understand.

Eerie Echoes from 1984

I just finished re-reading George Orwell’s 1984. As my son is introduced to literature like All Quiet on the Western Front and 1984 in his sophomore English class, I am re-introduced to these books. We don’t talk about them too much, my son and I (he’s deep in that uncommunicative teenage phase), but I see the books lying around and pick them up, remember where I was when I first read them. Times change, cultural tools change, governments fall or reinvent themselves, world leaders enter and exit the stage, but these enduring books remind us that regardless of era or place or circumstance, people largely remain the same.

As I was reading 1984 I was reminded of how necessary it is for a nation to have an enemy. For four decades or so America feared the Soviet Union and Soviet-style communism, that grey, humorless KGB-Gulag-police state that lay like a heavy blanket across Eastern Europe, and we devoted economic, political and military resources to contain the Soviet threat wherever in the world it reared its head. Our spies shadowed their spies; our nuclear arsenal kept pace with theirs, warhead for warhead and tank for tank; our proxy states matched up against theirs. Tensions rose, tensions fell, but during the Cold War we always knew where to find our nemesis.

And then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and got bogged down for nearly a decade in a hostile land that would not bend to their will, their centrally planned economy failed to expand as promised, Gorbachev began to loosen the reins of State control, the Soviet edifice creaked and cracked, the Iron Curtain went up in flames and the Berlin Wall crumbled.

Our primary global adversary had morphed into a free market opportunity.

But as if to prove that nature abhors a vacuum, a new bogeyman arose to take Communism’s place: radical Islam, represented by bearded men in flowing robes, with sandals on their feet and ammunition belts draped across their chests, AK-47’s held at port arms, and defiance in their eyes. Jihad, they cried. God is great and Death To America. Our new enemy, everywhere and nowhere, moving in the shadows and on the margins, until they brought the Twin Towers down and instigated the worldwide, never-ending War on Terror, which -- to bring this back to 1984 -- is reminiscent of Oceania’s ceaseless war against its enemies.

The other eerie echo of 1984 lies in the grotesquely oversized American surveillance state, much of it contracted out to private companies with minimal accountability. By now, most Americans grasp that our government routinely eavesdrops on domestic phone conversations, e-mail messages, tweets, Facebook posts, and other on-line activity, though little public protest has resulted from this massive assault against personal privacy. Posters of Big Brother may not be everywhere in contemporary America, but Big Brother is definitely watching and listening, ever alert for allusions, hints, associations or phrases that might be a harbinger of another attack. In a war without end, the threat never abates, and the citizenry is exhorted to exchange constitutionally protected freedoms for the illusion of security; thus it becomes permissible for the President of the United States to authorize the killing of American citizens on foreign ground, without bringing formal charges in a court of law; or authorize the military to indefinitely detain American citizens suspected of subversion or alliance with our enemies, right here on home soil. The current occupant of the White House assures us that he will never abuse these extraordinary powers, but once the genie escapes the bottle, there’s no telling what might happen two or four or six years from now.

Fanatics are always dangerous, and it makes little difference whether those fanatics are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Capitalist or Communist, wild-eyed oil drillers or tree huggers; fanatics become blind to any cause but their own, and in the fanatical mind, the means always justifies the ends.

I fear America has passed a dangerous marker in its history as a functioning democracy, but outside of the ACLU and writers like Christopher Hedges, few people recognize the peril we are doing to ourselves. True liberty and total security from external threats are antithetical. Rights once relinquished don’t return. It’s worth quoting Christopher Hedges here:

“Totalitarian systems always begin by rewriting the law. They make legal what was once illegal. Crimes become patriotic acts. The defense of freedom and truth becomes a crime. Foreign and domestic subjugation merges into the same brutal mechanism. Citizens are colonized. And it is always done in the name of national security.”

I want to believe that Hedges is overstating his case, but I don’t think he is. Orwell described a dystopian country engaged in perpetual wars, constant surveillance of its people, and total control of information; citizens only knew what the Party wanted them to know. As I said before, all of this seems eerily familiar in contemporary America; we are at perpetual war with Muslim fanatics, under watch by our own government, and subjected to a corporate-owned media that filters, distorts and misinforms.

Very eerie indeed.