The Maddening Double Standard

 “Once factual truth is no defense in politics, all that remains is spectacle and force.” Timothy Snyder

Does the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice? Perhaps a better question might be: is there a moral universe at all? 

It’s comforting to believe that truth wins out, that justice matters, and that those who commit misdeeds, who lie, cheat and steal their way through this life get punished, but the evidence is scant and spotty. Truth is a leaky rubber raft floating on a choppy sea in a post-truth era like ours, always on the verge of being submerged. 

Donald Trump remains a free man two years to the day after inciting a mob to storm the US Capitol, and having carted off a trove of documents, some highly classified, that belonged to the government. Lesser mortals caught with government secrets have paid harsh penalties, including prison time. For lesser mortals, unauthorized possession of classified stuff brought swift and heavy consequences, unlike the deferential way Trump has been treated. In Trump’s case the wheels of justice are barely turning, as if too encrusted with mud, weeds and rust to turn, with no certainty, even if the wheels do begin to move, that the rule of law will prevail against him or his co-conspirators. We can be reasonably sure that deals will be cut, immunity granted, indictments deferred, perhaps pardons issued. Trump has never been held to account, which is why he treats the law with contempt, as something others are required to follow but from which he is immune and exempt. Like the proverbial playground bully, he’s daring someone in authority to bring the fire and fury. No takers thus far, though there’s plenty of speculation, analysis, opinion and guesswork. I’ll believe it when I see an indictment. From what jurisdiction it emerges I don’t really care. 

Why can’t Trump be exiled to a barren island that is being inundated by the rising sea?

It’s the double-standard that makes it all so maddening. Only rich and powerful people can defer accountability or evade it entirely; most of us have minimal defenses, and some of us have none. 

Will Vladimir Putin ever be held to account or pay any personal cost for his decision to invade Ukraine? Not likely any time soon. Justice for the victims of his aggression -- and it is Putin’s aggression, Putin’s atrocities, Putin’s death and destruction and suffering -- must wait. And wait. Did Stalin suffer any punishment during his lifetime for the millions of his own people that he caused to die? 

What penalty will George Santos pay for lying about every aspect of his professional resume? Santos rode his lies to a seat in Congress. What does that say about his voters, and soon, constituents? I don’t think I’d want to be represented in Congress but a complete phony; the representative I have is not a phony, but he is a politician. Some might argue that it’s the same thing. 

What about Trump’s last Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, will he ever feel the heavy hand of the law for his role in Trump’s attempted coup?

Perhaps the only form of justice we can reasonably expect is the poetic kind. Or the neatly packaged kind found in books and movies and reality TV shows. However, watching Kevin McCarthy, one of the most spineless, craven, mendacious, arrogant, power-hungry, shameless and nakedly ambitious political performers, repeatedly humiliated by members of his own party is deeply satisfying and poetic and deserved. McCarthy mortgaged his soul long ago, trusting it would lead to his being awarded the Speaker’s gavel, which must be the thing in the world he most craves given how much humiliation he’s willing to endure to get it, like Golum and the ring, but his extremist colleagues have other ideas. Probably because he’s burned them so many times before, promising one thing to their face, doing another behind their back, they relish thwarting him and watching him grovel and debase himself; time and again they thrust the knife in McCarthy’s side and giggle as he bleeds. To make the torment stop he will concede away most of his own authority and power. Instead of expanding the prestige of the Speaker’s Chair, McCarthy will shrink and neuter it. He’s no Nancy Pelosi, is he? 

Maybe all the arc of the moral universe does is double back on itself, traveling endlessly but without ever reaching its destination, seeking but never landing on justice. 

Justice in human affairs, like progress, isn’t inevitable. Organized people and institutions bring it about. But what do we do when people corrupt institutions? What have people always done? Protest, riot, wage war? Negotiate? How have human beings settled their differences throughout history? Is it a silly dream that people can solve their mutual problems without violence? A liberal fantasy? The result of smoking too much weed? 

Can there be a moral universe without facts? 

It’s the second anniversary of Trump’s failed coup attempt. The people are still waiting for accountability. 

A Year Too Late

“Well, the good old days may not return/And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn.” Tom Petty, “Learning To Fly.”

Finally, Joe Biden has spoken about the Insurrection that aimed to overturn his victory. The President said the right things and placed the responsibility for what took place that horrible day squarely where it belongs -- on Donald J. Trump. The long silent US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, also made a statement, though by comparison his was tepid and didn’t leave me with the sense that the DOJ will vigorously investigate and prosecute the insurrectionists, including Donald J. Trump. The country needed to hear from Biden and Garland ten months ago, when the wound was fresh and still oozing blood. 

Watching the footage of the attack a year later is no less horrifying. Those were some angry people. Some rage-filled people, most of them men, and most of them white.  

November and December of this year could be a dangerous flash point. The GOP is going all out to retake control of the legislative branch, and if historical trends hold, they will, which would end  Biden’s legislative agenda, such as it is. On the off chance the GOP fails to regain control of the House and Senate, you can be sure there will be accusations of fraud, demands for recounts, independent audits, court challenges, and possibly violence. Trump primed the pump, and now far too many Americans believe that political violence is acceptable. What kind of country will we be if we legitimize political killings? I think Ted Cruz is a dickhead but I do not advocate for him to be assaulted, maimed or executed. Mike Pence is a cowardly cipher and a religious fanatic, but at no time did I want to see him swinging from the gallows. The norm of a peaceful, cooperative transfer of political power has been one of America’s singular strengths, something we all could be proud of, at least until Trump came along and trampled it. Once the people’s votes have been counted, we have always agreed to abide by the outcome. Not anymore. So where does it go from here? Where does this spiral end? Are we just going to contest every electoral outcome, at every level of government? Or simply ignore the outcome by calling it illegitimate? No complex country and society can operate with such a prevailing ethos. Escalating turmoil would result. 

Where are the cooler heads, the good people, the smart and compassionate people, the level-headed, decent, common sense-filled people who accept the fact that Trump lost and Biden won in a legitimate election with a legitimate outcome? There are 81 million of us, give or take, the majority of the country, dispersed across the land, in every city, village, town and hamlet. We’re the fucking majority of Americans, the people who believe we deserve a voice in how the government functions and for whose benefit it functions. We’re living our lives, trying to be decent, tolerant people who raise children to be the same; the kind of people who more times than not do the right thing. The majority of us looked at the four year reign of Donald J. Trump and his sleazy, pathetic, sycophantic entourage, and said, No, enough of this fool is enough. Enough scandal, enough incompetence. We don’t like Trump or the impulses he stands for. We’re smart enough to recognize a conman when we see one. We didn’t vote for him. We, the majority, agree that Trump and his followers are a potential danger to our representative democracy. We wonder why so little is being done, and why so much is being deliberately thwarted. Who benefits? Who pays the cost? 

You know what I want? A society as close to justice as we can get, because that is itself a lofty ambition. Some of us have been poisoned by propaganda and disinformation to act unjustly toward people we do not even know. 

Rules need to be in place to make corruption difficult and wholesale corruption impossible. 

How many Americans honestly believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate President? Is it roughly the same number of Americans who believe Tucker Carlson is a legitimate journalist? 

I’m going to pose the same question I have since November 2020: if the election was fraudulent, how do you explain the strong showing by Republican candidates across the country? If the Democrats rigged the election, why didn’t they rig it to cement control of Congress as well as the White House? Why would they rig it only to secure razor-thin Congressional majorities? At its core the Big Lie makes no sense, it’s a fantasy concocted to protect Trump’s brittle ego. The election was a referendum on Trump, he was at the top of the ticket, and he was rejected by the voters. Down ballot Republican candidates fared just fine, but 81 million voters repudiated Trump and what he stands for. 

I don’t know if America is headed for a social crack-up, but if that’s our shared destination, it will be a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare. All the craven, scheming politicians and media figureheads who precipitated the Rise of Trump to begin with, who didn’t stand up and say NO to Trump’s idiocy, and all the people fooled into cheering for him, who refused to see him for what he is, and will always be, a grifter and conman. Can’t you see that when you are no longer of use to Trump he will discard you like a spent condom? Television is a universe of make-believe and the only industry that Donald J. Trump was successful in. He was shit at the Casino game, which is pretty hard to fuck-up, but Donald John is a rare specimen of elite fuck-up. When it comes to elite failure, my GOAT was George W. Bush, but as I said, Trump is rare. He should be ridiculed and laughed at like a two-headed carnival freak, not revered as a God. America, I ask honestly, what’s wrong with you? Do we really need to do this old dance around the racist maypole? Look, very soon white folk will be a minority of the population. Is that what my fellow white people are afraid of? Why? What’s scary about that? I thought living through Richard Nixon was the low point.  Jesus Christ, compared to Trump, Nixon was a saint.  

Nixon was a twisted fucker, but Trump is many times more dangerous. Trump is a mass media maestro in a mass media age. Reality is what he says it is. Donald needs to go out in the wilderness, naked and alone, and have a refresher course in reality, in the basics of raw survival: food, water, warmth, shelter from the elements. 

Remind me, what is it exactly that we disagree about? What direct harm has been done to you by the government? What harm was done to you by Barack Obama?What’s your beef? 

Trump, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone are the kind of warped people who instigate social unrest and then hightail it to safety on a private jet owned by a real billionaire. Republicans knew what Trump was about from the beginning, yet waited in vain for others of better reasoning ability and morale capacity to step forward to restrain him. Out of nothing but lies, a story of magic and malice was forged. An invention worthy of Hollywood. The King is insane, his wife is a rigid bitch, his children are incorrigible phonies, and yet, some people can’t get enough. I don’t get it. I never will. 

The Right is using all its media power and rhetorical judo to convince enough Americans that what they saw with their own eyes on January 6, 2021 is false. They’re telling us that what we saw wasn’t sedition or a deadly insurrection, but the rational response of Patriots to an epic injustice. Get it? In this rewrite of the script the insurrectionists are the good guys, and the institution they stormed and desecrated is evil. Is this how the idea of America ends?

 

BACKLASH

“Not just in the South but across the country the Klan enjoyed a remarkable resurgence, reaching its all-time peak of an estimated four million members by 1924.” Adam Hochschild, “All-American Vigilantes” The New York Review

It used to be that nations mounted space explorations, now a few Robber Baron billionaires have so much wealth at their disposal that they can foot the bill to shoot themselves into space. Bully for you, Richard Branson. Who will the next contestant in the Billionaire Space Race be? 

I’m reading “The Cruelty Is The Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America” by Adam Serwer. One thing I’ve come to realize is that many of my fellow Americans are happy to enter the tent of Nationalism-Nativism-Racism. The rhetoric of America First, of America-for-Americans, and the superiority of the white race appeals to millions, as evidenced by the 74 million votes cast for Donald Trump in November 2020. That Trump was incompetent, immoral, ignorant, and an imbecile didn’t matter. As Adam Serwer points out in his essays, Trump’s followers adore him because he says out loud, and often, what they think; he hates and demonizes the same people they do, and gives voice to their grievances. A core tenet of Trumpism is that undeserving people are taking from “real” Americans, reaping benefits at the expense of flag-waving, gun-toting, salt-of-the-earth Americans. The takers are black and brown, foreign and devious, the victims are white. Democrats side with the black and brown folks, the queer, women, animals, fish and fowl at the expense of true Americans. Trump’s gift is that he absolves his followers of any shame or guilt. He makes them feel good, justified in their beliefs and opinions. He assures them that they are good people, “tremendous” people, as he called the mob who sacked the US Capitol on January 6. Trump tapped into an old, recurring, and reliable strain of American bigotry. 

I didn’t fully appreciate the backlash against Barack Obama until Trump was in office and actively trying to efface everything Obama had accomplished. Obama’s ethnicity never bothered me. What bothered me were his centrist policies, his caution, his expansion of our unwinnable wars, and his harsh treatment of illegal immigrants. In hindsight, I better understand what Obama was up against: it wasn’t just Mitch McConnell and the entire GOP that tried to thwart him, it was a sizable chunk of the white electorate who despised him because he was a black man who embodied the great fear of white people. The response to Barack Obama was tribal, and had far less to do with jobs and wages and material well-being, and more to do with bigotry -- and the fear of losing control, status, and privilege that white skin has always bestowed. As Adam Serwer writes, tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism. 

What happens next? I have no idea, but the portends are dark. The energy of resurgent white nationalism has to go somewhere. We’ve witnessed what Trump’s followers are capable of and it would be a mistake to believe they will fade quietly away. At this point it’s obvious that Trump’s core supporters will not desert him no matter what. Donald J. Trump satisfies the darkest impulses in the American soul. 

One Step Ahead Of The Sheriff

 

“If that happens, if the Democrats cannot prevail over Republican obstructionism and find the political voice to care for working-class Americans, the only question that remains is what these modern-day Hoovervilles will be called: Trumptowns or Bidenvilles?” Dale Maharidge, “How America Chose Homelessness,” in the Nation. 

By all that is righteous, Donald J. Trump should be convicted and barred from holding ANY public office ever again. But the odds of this happening are long because the Senate of the United States is a strange place operated under arcane rules known only to a select few. It’s like something out of the Ministry of Magic from Harry Potter. The senators should wear black robes like Professor Snape. They could be adorned with colorful stripes, corporate emblems, or maybe TRUMP OWNS MY SOUL in gold letters on the back. Lindsey Graham would love that look. Can you see Ted Cruz in a dark robe? Josh Hawley? Marco Rubio? In my youth the United States Senate was referred to as the world’s greatest deliberative body, where men like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern, and George Mitchell argued big questions and made difficult compromises that allowed meaningful legislation to be made. It never was as high brow as that, I know, but nor was it completely gone over to the dark arts like today’s splintered and unhinged GOP. Cruz and Hawley and Ron Johnson and Lindsey Graham could sit through 72 hours of footage of the January 6 Insurrection and still vote to acquit. These men are full of ambition and lust after power, but none have any honor. The same can be said of most of their colleagues.

He was always a very small man playing the very biggest man in the land, a coward pretending to be a fearless and unapologetic Big Boss. 

If Trump is acquitted as many are predicting, it surely proves that an American president cannot be held accountable. If inciting a mob to attack the legislative branch isn’t enough to convict, what is? Trump’s second-string legal team will contort logic like a giraffe trying to mate with a chihuahua when their turn comes. 

The American constitutional system is broken, that’s all there is to it. If the instigators of the January 6 Insurrection go unpunished, I honestly think America is done. There will be a next time. 

Trump’s enforced radio silence has helped millions of people (I am definitely one) settle down and breathe easier. The Orange Menace knows how to rile people up and pit them against each other. It’s a peculiar skill. A social media platform in Trump’s tiny hands is a deadly weapon; it came close to tearing our country apart. Social media spread Trump’s Big Lie faster than Coronavirus in a nursing home. 74 million Americans will disagree with me, but Donald J. Trump is a mentally-ill man, a sociopath with no regard for anyone but himself. He was always a very small man playing the very biggest man in the land, a coward pretending to be a fearless and unapologetic Big Boss. I watched the House managers lay out the evidence, the footage, the graphs, the words spoken by Trump himself over many months, and it’s obvious that Trump knew what some of his most devoted followers were capable of. January 6 was his last shot at monkeywrenching the election outcome. His black soul and white hands are splattered with blood. 

Imagine where we’d be today if GOP senators had placed the country and the Constitution over power and party in 2020 and removed Trump then. How many lives might have been saved if we had entered the pandemic with Trump exiled at Mar-A-Lago? January 6 wouldn’t have happened. Brian Sicknick would still be alive. 

No matter how compelling and conclusive the House case, Trump’s going to skate. It’s not a court of law, it’s the Senate, a place where powerful people, mostly men, make rules that let them evade responsibility and accountability. 

All who vote to step on the Constitution with a bloody boot and allow Trump another pass should suffer the fires of Hell and the ridicule of history. 

The Great Forgetting

 “How hard will the Democrats fight for the majority that elected them, and how hard will the Republicans fight to enshrine minority rule in our institutions?” Waleed Shahid, The Nation

He’s gone. The blessed day finally arrived. Trump lumbered away, disgraced, deflated, and defanged.  The people’s house is under new management; Joe Biden is now president. No riots broke out, the hallowed steps of the Capitol weren’t stormed by heavily-armed Trump supporters. It seems those malign forces went back to ground. 

But no sooner did Biden sit down in the Oval Office -- after it had been thoroughly disinfected, fumigated, saged, and exorcised -- than did the Great Forgetting begin. Republican halfwits like Lindsey Graham called for unity and warned of angering millions of people if Trump is tried by the Senate. Cries of “Putting a former president on trial is unconstitutional!”were heard on the cable networks. One piece I read on Politico or The Hill even argued that in the name of national unity Biden should pardon Trump as Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. The argument didn’t sway me. There can be no unity unless there are consequences for Trump and all connected with the January 6th Insurrection. We must call it what it was: a brazen attempt to seize political power by force, and by terror. Some of the folks who stormed the Capitol at Trump’s instigation believed they had license to rampage and immunity from consequences. Where did that notion come from, who planted the seed? 

America has to look under its bed and find out who gave aid, comfort and money to Trump’s foot soldiers, but I fear the January 6 Insurrection will slip out of focus, lose purchase as time passes and Congress gets distracted by shiny political objects. We need to immediately establish a commission invested with broad authority to investigate, hold public hearings, and out the enablers on the inside, the ones with badges and government-issued ID, and possibly even a few who sport Congressional lapel pins. 

In our investigation of the Insurrection, we must determine what Trump was doing and who he communicated with while the insurgents ransacked the Capitol and chanted for Mike Pence to be hung. Phone records, text messages, emails -- we need to see it all. 

Donald Trump will not enjoy his final years on this earth. Too many arms of the law encircle the worst president in modern American history, twice loser of the popular vote, twice impeached, and let’s hope once convicted. 

I repeat what I have written before -- it will take a few years to gauge the full effects of Trump’s single disastrous term. He drove the country blindfolded at full speed, convinced that only he knew the way, and millions of people took his word for it and went along for the ride. Biden’s crew has just begun to sort through the slag left by Trump’s people, and will no doubt be stunned and horrified by the incompetence and stupidity they discover. 

Like millions of my fellow citizens, I felt a sense of relief when Inauguration Day came off without a hitch. It was a good day for the country, a great day for women as Kamala Harris assumed the vice presidency. I see America too clearly to get weepy about the performative rituals of American democracy, but I do not dismiss their value. The spectacle surrounding the peaceful transfer of power was all the more remarkable and meaningful after four long years trapped beneath Trump’s oppressive ego. It was solemn and serious and steadying, a measure of comfort for a weary nation. The Trump years were hard, marked by cruelty and stupidity on a stunning scale. When the helicopter carrying Trump cleared DC’s airspace the tone of the country immediately changed. Biden gave a heartfelt speech full of platitudes about unity and American ingenuity and our essential, enduring decency, but along with the words themselves, it was the sound of a reassuring voice that many needed to hear. 

I don’t have any doubts about Biden’s basic decency, honesty, and sense of honor. It’s his policies on the economy, the use of military force, mass surveillance, climate change, and racial justice where I worry about Biden. Policy and time. Let’s not forget that Biden is a 78-year-old man faced with multiple challenges. 

After only a couple of days’ time the rose began to wilt. The usual political fuckery began with Mitch McConnell reverting to his obstructionist role. Biden’s doing as much as he can by Executive Order, but sooner or later he will need to pass legislation and that still entails striking deals with McConnell.  

Unity and reconciliation will come through accountability for Trump, as well as his enablers and collaborators. 

No Forgetting, No Forgiveness

 “Our tribune, gentlemen of the jury, must be a school of truth and plain concepts.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The news is depressing. Insurrection. Pandemic. Life disrupted, upset, fucked up and fucked over. I can’t get the horror of the images from the January 6 Insurrection, and the deeper meanings they represent out of my head. When large numbers of people buy into the notion that elected officials deserve to be attacked, beaten, kidnapped, or murdered for taking a political stand or voting on principle, when we get to that point, a border has been crossed and we’re in a different country. Collective fury from a mob, armed and prepared to exact mortal vengeance on their fellow citizens, police officers, and democratically-elected political representatives over political disagreements, is the hallmark of countries on the brink of collapse. 

Consider this strange tableau -- 20,000 National Guard troops protecting the presidential inauguration from attack from American citizens. Not the Germans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians, not Cubans or Vietnamese, not evil members of Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Americans. This is the kind of shit I saw on black-and-white TV when I was a child, Walter Cronkite reporting while images from somewhere in far away South America rolled behind him. We looked with scorn or pity on unstable banana republics ruled by dictators, believing ourselves to be different, better, permanent residents of Reagan’s shining city on a hill, bathed in George H.W. Bush’s thousand points of light and Barack Obama’s American indispensability.  

What happened on January 6 cannot be forgotten or forgiven, swept under the carpet as if it wasn’t a heinous blow against democracy. Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for protecting the country from right-wing domestic terror organizations. We should name them as such, and shut them down using every tool in the Federal statutes. They crossed the line on January 6. As a society, we have to demand the insurrectionists get a straight red card, and if convicted in a court of law, a penalty commensurate with their crime.  

That’s the hard task ahead of Biden. He must do nothing less than back America away from the abyss. It’s a tall order for any political leader, let alone one of Biden’s age and conciliatory disposition.

I have only one question for Joe Biden: Will you hold those people responsible for the Insurrection, whoever they are, by investigating, indicting and convicting them? Or will you exhort us to “forgive & forget, look forward, not back, to the hopeful future rather than the dark past…” The usual political flimflam, in other words, a tiger with no teeth. This is not the time for pardons, amnesty, or forgiveness. There must be penalties, accountability, expulsion, sanction, and incarceration. 

Will the Democrats finally seize the narrative, the story, and make voters understand who bears responsibility for the past four years? It’s not a sexy idea, but it has to be part of the narrative: Trump and his GOP enablers and collaborators forced the nation to the brink of violent overthrow, and Joe Biden is attempting nothing less than a rescue mission from a three-headed monster: seething political unrest, a broken economy, and a wicked pandemic that has killed more than 350,000 Americans, the largest death toll in the world. America is number one -- in Covid deaths. A price must be paid by Republicans for years of calamitous misrule. This isn’t a matter of fixing or replacing some broken furniture -- the house has been torched from inside and the rafters are still smoking. Renovation and restoration are needed. Cosmetic improvements will not do. That’s the hard task ahead of Biden.  He must do nothing less than back America away from the abyss. It’s a tall order for any political leader, let alone one of Biden’s age and conciliatory disposition.  

I saw one hopeful piece of news glimmering in the darkness: the National Rifle Association has filed Chapter 11. Perhaps this is a sign that the arc of the moral universe that Dr. King talked about is still functioning.