Far East Cynic

Behind the facade

During a recent conversation with a former squadron mate, the talk turned to the dismal state of American politics. He is of the conservative bent, but not of the wild-eyed MAGA hat variety. He made the assertion that Trump is an aberration, a unique creation of the times and the particular circumstances of the 2016 election. He then went on to believe that he believes that Americans are “basically good, decent, people.”

I simply responded, “All factual evidence to the contrary”.

Trump is an aberration all right, but he did not come out of nowhere. The sickness that is Trumpism has been in the American bloodstream for a long time. Trump is simply the end conclusion to a process that began many years beforehand, begun by a group of cold-hearted individuals who made a deliberate calculation that their own selfish, narrow-minded economic goals were more important than working to improve the condition of the nation as a whole. Rather than being a change of personality, the evil tendencies that Trump has manifested have always been present in the American soul.

The belief in America as a “shining city on a hill’ is a fiction we Americans have told ourselves to allow us to come to terms with who really are. The truth is, it is a veneer that hides a very ugly reality.

Garrett Epps, a constitutional scholar at the University of Baltimore, very eloquently wrote an article in The Atlantic which goes into this phenomenon in more detail. He notes that “as Trumpism took hold in the nation in 2015, it was regarded as a kind of temporary madness. But time has revealed that this vulgar spirit is no aberration. It was there all along; the goodly veneer was the lie.”

I agree. The current dysfunction that we are seeing is not a short-lived, isolated phenomenon. Rather as Epps notes it is part of a deliberate effort to create a one-party state in the United States of America:

Consider the devolution of Bill Barr, from an “institutionalist” who would protect the Department of Justice to a servant of Donald Trump. Consider the two dozen House Republicans who used physical force to disrupt their own body rather than allow government officials to testify to what they know about President Trump—because to follow the rules of the House, and the strictures of national security, would threaten their party’s grasp on power. Consider the white evangelical leaders who prated to the nation for a generation about character and chastity and “Judeo-Christian morality,” but who now bless Trump as a leader. Consider, if more evidence is needed, the unforgettable moment at the Capitol on September 27, 2018, when Brett Kavanaugh dropped forever the mask of the “independent judge” to stand proudly forth as a partisan figure promising vengeance against his enemies.

The last incident, I think, sums up the horror of what the nation has learned about many of its leaders. It seems likely that Kavanaugh’s self-abasement was not the impulse of a desperate man, but a conscious choice made because, unless he showed himself willing to fight back viciously, he risked losing the support of the president. That choice had the desired effect. Trump embraced Kavanaugh, and used his tirade to move supporters to the polls that November.

This is the point. These are not victims crazed by “polarization” or “partisanship” or “gridlock” but cool-headed political actors who see the chance to win long-sought goals—dictatorial power in the White House, partisan control of the federal bench, an end to legal abortion and the re-subordination of women, destruction of the government’s regulatory apparatus, an end to voting rights that might threaten minority-party control, a return to pre-civil-rights racial norms. The historical moment finds them on a mountaintop; all the kingdoms they have sought are laid out before them, and a voice says, “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

If asked to their faces, the people behind this effort will deny it, or at the least attribute noble motives to their efforts. They will defend gutting regulations as a move to grant more jobs and prosperity even as it comes at a horrible cost to our quality of life and damage and injury to innocent people.  When it comes to abortion, the ends justify the means as far as they are concerned and the failure of others to accept their definition of morality is not their problem. They want their judges, who will vote their way, every time and principles are damned. One should be particularly concerned by the rise to power of people who are immersed in the Dominionist Movement. For those of you who have not been paying attention at home, Dominion Theology seeks to advance the concept that Christians are Biblically mandated to ‘occupy’ all secular institutions and to run the government along “Christian” law and understanding. Recently both Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo have given speeches where they let the mask slip – and stopped speaking in dog whistles-but out rightly proclaimed their desire for an American Theocracy. To anyone who values the separation of church and state, both Barr and Pompeo have been walking on a troublesome path.

Bill Barr:

“Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.” These forces, he argued, pose a fundamental threat to religious liberty and to people of faith in general—one that he pledges to fight as attorney general.

And Pompeo recently gave a speech in Nashville and later promoted on the State Department Web site his view of his role as a “Christian leader”.

“I keep a Bible open on my desk, and I try every morning to try and get in a little bit of time with the Book,” Pompeo said, describing how the texts sacred to Christians influence his disposition, engagement with others and decisions. “We should all remember that we are imperfect servants serving a perfect God who constantly forgives us each and every day.”

A complete transcript of Pompeo’s speech has been posted to the front page of State.gov, including notation indicating the audience’s reaction to specific lines. While politicians often speak at events sponsored by religious groups, explicit promotion of “Being a Christian Leader” is widely seen as crossing a line.

Now a polite interpretation of Pompeo’s words would be that he is simply a devout believer. His actions, however, belie that assertion. In the case of both Barr and Pompeo they are bluntly stating that they covet power and are going to do what it takes – Constitutional or no – to achieve it. James Madison recognized how dangerous religious zealots could become and for that reason fought to ensure separation of church and state was embedded in the US Constitution.

Well before the advent of Trump, politicians used to understand the need to couch their religious visions in secular terms lest they run afoul of popular American sentiment which supports keeping the churches in their place. Go back and read my attack on the owner of Hobby Lobby for a good deal of supporting documentation on this. Trump, however, stripped away the need for tact and discretion. A man who likes to grab porn star pussies has no need for such refined methods of communication.

And that brings us back to Epps and his main conclusion. There is no going back. The great experiment with stupidity brought about by lazy people who could not be bothered to vote has permanently soiled us a nation. Epps has harsh words for the Pollyanna’s in the Democratic Party who think that simply getting rid of Trump, by whatever means, will bring us back to an era of bipartisanship.

Uh, excuse me, have you MET Mitch McConnell?

Some Democratic leaders are proclaiming that we can go back to the world before Trump—and before Brett Kavanaugh and Mitch McConnell, before Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani, before an invasion of a secure facility at the Capitol, before babies were torn from their mothers and caged, before racist rhetoric from the White House and massacres at a synagogue and an El Paso Walmart—to a world of political cooperation, respect for norms, and nonpolitical courts.

How?

Assume new national leadership in 2021. What leader worth voting for would negotiate with Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy and believe either will keep his word; what sane president would turn over sensitive documents to Republican-led committees; what Democratic president would simply accept that the federal courts are now the property of the opposition, and submit issues of national policy to them, in the confidence of receiving a fair shake? After this night in the forest, can I, or any sane person, ever believe in these people and institutions again?

The shroud is off on the inherent ugliness that has always been at the soul of the American character. The same people who went to the moon, slaughtered 1000’s in the Indian Wars. Those who invented great vaccines are still part of a nationality that fostered slavery for almost a 100 years. And then turned a blind eye and/or fought for Jim Crow for the second hundred.

And more recently, those who liberated Paris in World War II, allowed thousands to die inside by spasms of violence and disease in Africa and Asia, are also those who take pleasure in attacking and threatening the S.O. because of my opposition to Trump. The worthless scum who post vile political nonsense here, think it’s perfectly acceptable to threaten me and mine as they did two years ago. The “good people” who thought they had a right to launch attacks on this web site are part of that nation-state. Trump going away will not change their inherent selfishness or refusal to understand the world as it is.

This, by the way, is the world that I and my classmates would never have imagined some 40 years ago when we threw our caps into the air and move forward into our lives. Back then we dreamed of a greater and better future. Now, older and grayer, we are confronted with fact that the country we gave service to is a far worse place to live than it was in the mid to late 70’s – even with our improved technology and the internet. And we lived through the Carter years.

Epps is telling us a hard truth. “Our republic may not be in its dying hour, but if it awakes from its nightmare, the knowledge Americans will have gleaned from these years is gloomy indeed.

The future failed us. And my fellow citizens are to blame.

4 comments

  1. Ah, look on the bright side Skippy! There is no future. We’re all dead now. Al Gore and all the stupid morons who believe in global warming told us we we’re not just doomed, but all dead ten years ago. Look on the bright side and whistle.

    The alternative to Trump was Hillary and I’ll be frank, she’s evil.

    What you call the sickness of Trumpism is simply the taste of real America. You would have thought a grad of whatever military school you went to in the south would have been steeped in the ideals of America as laid out by the founders and the original documents. Oh, but of course, you think they’re all worthless and obsolete. You’ll be voting for Bernie or Warren because they’re better and more pure than orangeman.

    I’ll let you in on the secret. Don’t tell anybody. When you talk about the shining city, you invoke Reagan and to be honest, he won 49 of the 50 states in his last election. You should really think about that. That shining city was his and he knew it as I knew it back when Herb Caen still wrote for the San Francisco paper with his Bagdhad on the Bay columns. It once was a shining city and I knew it all the way over in Emeryville and Berkeley.

    Does that ‘disfunction’ that you see include the highest black employment numbers since 1950s? Does it include the highest black approval ratings since who knows how long ago. Let’s not forget, it is the Republicans that led the Civil Rights movement and the scumbag southern Democrats that fought it tooth and nail. What comes around seems to come around again and again.

    I remember from a sociology class long ago. Humans packed too densely go mad, just like rats. If you look at the wide open spaces in America, they’re all red. It’s when you pack people together that they go mad and believe in electric cars as nonpolluting even though the electricity that powers them comes from coal fired plants not that far away. They believe in their right to tell other people how to live and they universally believe in killing. It’s kind of strange how they all go mad from urban density.

    Oh, and Epstein didn’t kill himself.

  2. Curtis,

    Spare me the talk about the “real America”, I know it very well and I have learned to despise it as the lie that it is. Real America is where the people live and those people in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Pittsburgh are “real Americans” – more so than some fat Walmart shopping piece of shit in Arkansas. Land doesn’t vote, people do and all of those so called “red maps” represent empty land. ( And teabagger scum).

    And as for the things that I learned at the military college so long ago? Life proved many of those lessons to be a lie, in some cases a hideous one. Furthermore, attending that institution did not stop some of my classmates from evolving into worthless, selfish, despicable people. You know, those “real Americans” you love so much. It took 20+ years for me to learn that fact and seeing a lot of the rest of the world reinforced for me why I am right. I’m grateful to have broken the shackles of that myth and moved out into the light.

    While we are at it- don’t spew Trump lies at me like the one about black unemployment. It does not tell the whole story nor does the stock market. ( Fuck Trump up the ass).

    “Here’s what I think. American never joined the modern world. It’s the modern world’s first failed state. It became something like a weird, bizarre dystopia, replete with falling life expectancy, hand-to-mouth living, relentless and legendary cruelty, instead of a truly modern society instead. But why? Why did America never join the modern world? The answer goes something like this. Americans never learned the greatest lesson history taught. That poverty causes ruin. You see, in America, poverty was seen — and still is — as a kind of just dessert. A form of deserved punishment, for being lazy, for being foolish, for being slow. For being, above all, weak — because only the strong should survive. So Americans devised a very different kind of society. It didn’t have a social contract — a set of public institutions which manage public goods for people, healthcare and transport and finance and childcare and so on — it’s thinkers supposed it didn’t need one. It only had markets. If markets rewarded the rich — while crushing the middle class and poor — so much the better. Markets were the truest judges of the worth of a person. And if a market thought a person was worth a billion dollars, and another one nothing, that was because the first person must be a billion times better a person than the second.”

    And someone like you who can’t distinguish between a competent, but an unlikable female politician and a truly dangerous anti-democratic demagogue – actually cheers on this sick vision of our country. Well, not me. I’m through being nice about it too. I want the MAGA’s to suffer a massive shock to their collective systems. Trumpism has to be destroyed.

    1. Yes, I am still here – just have not felt like writing and I have been in the middle of a major project. I will return after I come out of shock from having observed the last three months of insanity.

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