Another Night in Trumpcraft Country

 “Persuading people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.” Gore Vidal

Trump checked himself out of Walter Reed hospital. There’s no way his team of doctors would recommend it, but it comes down to what the patient wants, and Trump wanted images of a triumphant, choreographed return to the White House, like a Roman general returning from the wars. He wanted that moment on the Truman Balcony, all eyes on him as he wheezed and struggled to button his coat, as he defiantly removed his mask, as he puffed out his flabby chest and saluted his chariot corps. Trump was desperate to show what a brave and heroic and virile hunk of man he is, a superhero without weakness or vulnerability. “I’m too strong for Covid-19! My magnificent genes. I’m one tough hombre. I dominated Covid the same way I dominate Nancy Pelosi!”

Trump still has the nuclear codes, right?

A side effect of one of the drugs (Dexamethasone) being pumped into his bloated body messes with cognition and judgment in some people...How do we tell the difference between normal Trump and Trump on drugs? 

Why isn’t Trump popping hydroxychloroquine, the miracle cure he hyped for months? Remember when he said, “What have you got to lose?” 

The winter of our discontent looms. At the beginning of the pandemic, in a time that seems long ago, I wondered how bad it would get. That was almost 210,000 deaths ago. I heard an academic on a podcast say that the Trump gang’s response to the pandemic has been “spectacularly inept.” In the daily media blizzard of outrages, lies, disinformation, and nonsense it’s too easy to forget that Trump knew how Covid-19 was transmitted and how deadly it could be. It’s on tape, his own words, as are his lies to the American people. Months and months of denial. Months and months of blaming others. Months and months of phony and misleading information.“I take no responsibility,” Trump said. And he doesn’t. He still believes Covid will magically disappear. 

The worst economic suffering is yet to come. The chairman of the Federal Reserve warned yesterday that more stimulus is needed to keep the economy from careening off the rails. Trump greeted this news by shutting down negotiations between the House and Senate over another round of relief until after the election. Petty, childish, stupid, a middle finger to all the commoners struggling to hold their lives together. Let the people scramble for crusts of bread. If he can’t win or steal the election Trump will burn the country down. MAGA.

Covid strikes the vampire...chief White House bigot Stephen Miller tests positive. 

Don’t worry about Covid, Trump said. You can beat it, like I did. There are almost no words to describe this degree of callousness and ignorance. Maybe Trump doesn’t understand that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not have immediate access to a private hospital suite, a team of medical professionals, the best diagnostic equipment, experimental drugs, and round the clock monitoring. Maybe Trump imagines that all of us travel in armor-reinforced SUV’s and helicopters, with drivers, pilots, and Secret Service guards. The man is incapable of putting himself in another’s shoes. 

I don’t know. Like millions of Americans I’m fucking exhausted -- by Trump, Covid, the perfidy of the GOP, and the awfulness of this chapter of the American tale. Government by stunt, politics as performance. Trump’s terrible reality show has divided the nation and contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans. And the final episodes remain to be written and acted out. 

We’re stuck in a protracted episode of Trumpcraft Country.  

Thank You For Your Service

“We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors like the war on terrorism, or poverty, or AIDS into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.” Gore Vidal, Dreaming War

Cal never liked Veteran’s Day. Too overhyped. What were we celebrating, after all, but death and destruction? He avoided the parade down State Street, white-haired WWII and Vietnam era vets riding in vintage Army jeeps, waving little flags at the people lining the sidewalk. Everybody clapping. Every year a foursome of old bombers flew over the city, low and lugubrious. Cal thought WWII was righteous, necessary, but every American war since had been dubious, and the so-called War on Terror was a cruel joke, an endless joke, with too many boys coming back maimed or mental. The government had little use for them then, and Cal saw many veterans camping on the steps of the art museum or under the overpass. If I had a son, Cal thought, I’d never let him enlist in the military. 

Cal served eight years in the Air Force. He spent three years in South Korea, one year in Japan, the rest in Texas. He enlisted a few years after Saigon fell, got discharged before the first Gulf War. He remembered the first briefing at the base outside of Wichita Falls, given by a burly Master Sergeant with a flat-top. “I advise you to steer clear of downtown in general, and in particular don’t go down there in uniform. The good ol’ boys around here don’t have much tolerance for military personnel. A couple of airmen got their asses kicked a few weeks back.” 

Times change. Now it was “thank you for your service” everywhere you went, even if, like Cal, you never served in war time. People just assumed he’d been in combat when he told him he was a vet. Since the draft was long gone, most people were clueless. Wars were remote now, out of sight, forgotten. It was hard to believe that young people once flooded the streets to protest the war in Vietnam. The government doesn’t even bother to declare war any more. It’s usually the president who decides that some country or terrorist group is an imminent threat. Once the shooting starts the media loses its mind, oohing and aahing and interviewing retired generals who can’t say enough about America’s ordnance, which is so sophisticated and precise that only enemy forces are targeted. If civilians die it’s never on purpose. You’d think they were talking about Tom Brady’s throwing arm. Dissenting voices are blacked out, so it feels as if the entire country is of one mind. Cal marveled at the effectiveness of the brainwashing; it didn’t take much to convince people that the latest shooting war was justified. It wasn’t like Vietnam when every night on the evening news there were images and casualty figures. Vietnam felt close and real.  

Cal drew the curtains in the living room. Across the street his neighbor Roger had put his American flag out. Roger never served in the military, but he loved the technology of war, especially fighter jets and drones. Roger thought the US had every right to bomb what he called evil nations like North Korea and Iran. Roger got pissed off one time when Cal told him that the US was the biggest threat to peace in the world. Cal had just shrugged and told Roger to check the history, it was all there. A fact is a fact, even if it contradicts what you believe. 

Don’t thank me for my service. Ask me what I did while I served. The closest I ever came to being injured was one day in a dreary little strip mall outside the base in Wichita Falls when a redneck in a Chevy pickup tossed a half-full can of Coors at my head.