The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 4

“If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street/’less you wanna draw the heat.” Bob Dylan, Hurricane

America is being taught a hard lesson, one I hope we don’t soon forget. The lesson is that competence in our public institutions matters. As Masha Gessen points out in her excellent book, Surviving Autocracy, Donald J. Trump routinely ridiculed the government while a candidate in 2016, and then continued his assault on competence and expertise when he assumed office. Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, boasted about dismantling the administrative state. Trump filled his Cabinet and federal agencies with unqualified hacks like Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin. Everyone Trump appointed seemed to share one trait: hostility and disdain for the departments they headed.

Is it any wonder that the Trump Administration response to the pandemic has been so disastrous? Not in the least. Incompetence breeds chaos, and as Masha Gessen notes, “Trump’s incompetence is militant.” I still laugh at people like Van Jones and Fareed Zakaria who opined that Trump would grow into the presidency; others said the office would change Trump, but the fact is that the opposite has happened -- Trump changed the office -- and not for good. I can’t think of an America president who has more thoroughly debased and disgraced the office. 

As his reelection hopes crater, Trump draws from a rancid well of division, hatred, and racism. He speaks about Confederate monuments as if he had been born and raised in Georgia, refers to Covid-19 as the “Kung Flu” even though he praised China’s leader Xi Jinping for his handling of the outbreak, and rambles on about real Americans who believe in real values, all while Covid-19 stages a counterattack and the death toll rises to nearly 125,000. Trump practices a politics of grievance, self-pity and revenge.  Add the scandals, the staggering abuse of power, the self-dealing and blatant disregard for the rule of law and it amounts to a deadly confluence of incompetence and venality. 

I still laugh at people like Van Jones and Fareed Zakaria who opined that Trump would grow into the presidency; others said the office would change Trump, but the fact is that the opposite has happened -- Trump changed the office -- and not for good.

Because the potential for voter suppression or foreign meddling in November is high, I’m in no way counting Trump out -- he’s like a vampire who cannot be considered dead until a stake has been driven through his shriveled heart. November is a long way off and Trump’s capacity for destruction isn’t likely to diminish. Even in the midst of a worsening pandemic, Trump wants the Supreme Court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, which would cause millions of people to lose their health insurance coverage. Why now, Donald, just because you have some twisted need to act callous and cruel to fulfill your strongman fantasies? 

Cowardly members of Trump’s party play to him, not the constituents they’re sworn to serve. They fear Trump’s Tweets, name-calling, and other retribution. I can’t remember a time when an entire political party has acted with such cowardice. It’s political malpractice. 

The reckoning must and will come. Trump is far too limited a human being to change that which inflicted him upon us in the first place. He knows one dance step, and one only, and he will perform it until the floor collapses beneath his feet. Overcoming Trumpism will not be easy or quick, it will need to be rooted out. The energy and determination on display during the protests and demonstrations against police brutality must continue and expand outwards, to include other forms of social justice, most important among them, health care for all Americans, followed closely by environmental, economic, housing, and electoral justice. These threads cannot be separated; together they form a rope that can hoist millions of people from the basement of precarity. 

Something Dark and Sinister This Way Comes

“If we cannot respond with swift compassion, this is the beginning of our decline and fall.” I.F. Stone

My wife and I talk about life in TrumpLand, and the strange, vertiginous feeling that although little in our own lives has changed since Trump assumed power, there is something dark and sinister hovering in the background. We know a shock is coming, just not what it will be or when it will hit. It’s like waiting for an earthquake, the Big One.   

It’s difficult to ignore the daily outrages perpetrated by Trump -- his idiotic and juvenile tweets and incoherent statements about serious issues he clearly knows nothing about that send the corporate media into a frenzy -- but it’s far more important to look past Trump at what the people around him are doing, like Scott Pruitt at the EPA, Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department, and Ryan Zinke at the Interior Department. Real damage is in the offing. Long term damage that will be difficult to reverse, damage to the air we breathe, the water we drink, to voting rights, mass incarceration, and on down the line.

I’m astonished, as I have been since it became law, at the GOP’s hatred of the Affordable Care Act, and not because I think the ACA is wonderful, I don’t, but because the Republicans  know that the framework for the ACA was a product of a conservative think tank, and that the law maintained the profit-making position of the private insurance industry. If a Republican president had been the one to sign the ACA into law do you think the GOP would be clamoring for its repeal? The actions of the detestable Paul “Wonder Boy” Ryan in the House, and the callous machinations of Mitch “Turtle” McConnell in the Senate merely expose the pathology of the GOP. All the sound and fury coming from Washington has little to do with health insurance, next to nothing with health care, and everything to do with delivering a gigantic tax cut to people who already have more money than they know what to do with. It’s immoral, obscene, cruel, heartless, and stupid. In short, it’s America, right here, right now.

The only sensible, sane, and moral system of medical care in a complex society is Single Payer. Start with the premise that access to health care is a basic human right, realize that every last human being will, at some time, become sick or injured or disabled and require medical care. Not insurance coverage -- medical care. Give up the perverted fantasy that medical care must be a capitalist enterprise. As anyone with medical insurance who goes for treatment and then receives a bill knows, insurance is one thing and actual care another. Too many people with medical insurance still find themselves saddled with enormous bills, with co-pays, with procedures or drugs that either aren’t covered at all or only partially covered. Insurance companies add zero value to medical care; they are blood-sucking parasites who make money by denying care.

I’m re-reading Moby Dick. It seems appropriate for the times; America is the Pequod.

Back Where We Began

“But the truth is that no one is exempt -- the system that crushes one will crush all.” Emily Temple, review of Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery.”

Disturbing days in TrumpLand. My anger isn’t burning as hot as it was a few days back when I wrote and posted “Poet in a Bad Mood,” but I am plenty mad about all the shit going down in this failing nation. The cop who killed Philando Castile will stroll, free, as if he had gunned down a coyote or a rabid dog. Castile, like all the other unarmed black men murdered by state agents, doesn’t matter enough to warrant the prosecution of his killer. What does it take for a police officer to be held accountable for killing a black person in America? Video evidence brings the crime into the light but rarely seems helpful in securing an indictment, let alone a conviction. As Ronnie Dunn noted on Counterspin, all a cop has to do to walk away unscathed from one of these fatal shootings is claim he feared for his life. For a cop who guns down a black man, them’s the magic words.

I was reminded of the racist reality of America by a segment Bill Moyers did on the Big Lie that got Donald Trump on the national stage and then into the White House: the Birther Lie. The birther lie, in case you’ve forgotten, was the proposition put forth in 2009 by right-wing cranks, and then Trump, that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Trump was all over the corporate media back then, spouting this bullshit that our first African-American president was not actually an American, that he was born in Kenya, educated in a madrassa, raised a Muslim, in other words, foreign, suspect, illegitimate. On and on this went. It was a minor story that should have flashed across our TV screens and vanished, but Trump and his ilk kept it alive for several years. Bill Moyers interviewed four distinguished historians, three of them African-American, one white, about how the Big Lie placed Donald Trump in a perfect position to benefit from the white electorate’s pent up hatred of our African-American president. If not for Obama, it’s unlikely Trump would today be in the White House doing everything in his power to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, from undermining the nuclear agreement with Iran, to sabotaging the Paris Climate Accord, to replacing the Affordable Care Act with an even less effective, and far crueler, alternative. Trump is in many things ignorant, lazy, unhinged, idiotic, and bigoted, but, like every demagogue, he senses what a particular group of people want to hear, need to hear, either to give them hope that their power and privilege isn’t waning, or to give them a scapegoat for their own failure. The problem isn’t you, white America, it’s the liberals, it’s political correctness, it’s multicultural studies, it’s Affirmative Action, it’s feminism, it’s the LGBT people, it’s Muslims, it’s Mexicans. It’s the destruction from within of “American Values” by all these other, non-white undesirables.

It’s all the fault of the black man in the White House who doesn’t deserve to sit at the apex of power in White America.  

Racism is the stain on the American soul that cannot be erased, whitewashed, painted over or scrubbed away. It was present at the beginning of our history, present during and after Reconstruction and during the long struggle for civil rights, through lynchings, beatings, fire-bombings, terror campaigns, sit-ins and marches and boycotts. Every time we get to thinking of how far we have come, we turn around to find we are back where we began.