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?

 

Coal Man

“What a completely wild idea, that leadership -- absent any chest pounding -- could also include a thoughtful discussion of humility and not be seen as somehow weak or trivial.” Alexis Grenell, The Nation

Well, as anticipated, Joe Manchin killed Joe Biden’s Build Back Better program. Manchin went to great pains to portray himself as having wrestled his conscience and his core political beliefs as far as he could, before telling Biden it was no go. Manchin played his role very well, he had a big hand in whittling BBB down, throwing objections around like daggers, until the bill’s ambitions were just a fraction of what was initially proposed. Manchin carried water for energy extractors and wealthy donors, as he always does. Manchin is firm in his corruption. He voted against a bill that could have provided real help to some of the neediest citizens in his own state. He stood with his backers. And then, at the end of the calendar year, Manchin lowers the boom. Happy Christmas, Biden. I’m still a coal man! 

Manchin is also a wealthy man, owns a yacht and a very fancy automobile, has a daughter who hit gold in the pharmaceutical industry, and family ties to the coal industry, which should have died a needed death thirty or forty years ago. (That death might have been phased in over the course of a generation to give those dependent on coal for their daily bread time to transition to something else. No, not in America. It has never worked that way. We live and die by profit! Someone’s profit.) Manchin’s not even a Democrat, but the Dems couldn’t afford to push him too hard lest he jump ship and Mitch McConnell resume his job as Majority Leader. That made it much easier for Manchin to play his spoiler role. Bravo Mr. Coal Mine, you just prevented your “constituents” from having to cough up more in taxes to pay for all those goodies to all those undeserving, lazy people. You did it! Your prize will no doubt be great. May I suggest a second yacht or a fleet of gleaming black Tesla’s equipped with bullet-proof glass. 

I watch this faux drama play out, try not to get cynical and angry, fail, as usual, and come back for more. The Dems are not as futile as they appear, their task on even minor issues is hard because of the numbers, and the filibuster, and FOX News with its 24/7 disinformation campaign. And Zuckerberg over at Facebook. The injustices we see almost every day, the slow pace of reform attempts, the drowning of damn near everything in money. It’s fucking nuts, and enormously frustrating. We have two major parties, itself an impediment to doing anything to meet the legitimate, universal needs of its citizens, and one of them attempted to overturn an election that their standard bearer, their great king, their icon -- Donald J. Trump -- lost. By a wide margin in both popular votes and the Electoral College. The coup was a multi-pronged and coordinated effort, no question about it. Despite the obstacles in its path, the January 6 House Committee has done a good job of amassing evidence that will prove what most people assume: that Trump, with the help of others, tried to steal the election. He told us he would a year in advance, but at that point people were numb, depleted by Covid and the tidal wave of lies Trump spewed every day he was in office. Trump told us, not in these exact words, but with the same intent: If I win, it was fair; if I lose, it was rigged. 

I think the one thing Donald Trump fears more than anything else is the humiliation of being outed as who and what he is: A business disaster. A conman. A fraud and a coward. Daddy Trump warped Donald, twisted his psyche like a pretzel, put him on a path to being loutish, cruel, corrupt, lazy, mean-spirited, petty, vain, spoiled and hopelessly narcissistic.  Trump is the greatest con man in American history, no doubt about it. Bernie Madoff conned hundreds, maybe thousands of people into giving him money, Trump conned almost half the citizens of this insane country,  and damn near succeeded in taking it over. All while making the shit up as he went along.