It’s time to come back to reality. Fear and loathing and ridiculous conspiracy theories that have no proof are not how we’ll meet the challenges facing our democratic societies. These will only lead to (more) dissension, illness, death and ultimately war, which, depressingly enough, is one of the most logical reality checks for a society gone haywire.
The last time a Republican president left office after losing to a Democrat, the economy was shedding 750,000 jobs a month and American soldiers (and Iraqi civilians) were dying in a war in Iraq launched using a totally fictitious casum belli, and in Afghanistan. Collectively, we should have learned then what history has been teaching us repeatedly (oh, but “don’t care much about history…” as the song goes): Beware the demagogue…
The Republicans in particular should have learned as well. Fiction and reality don’t mix. In their struggle to generate enthusiasm in the midst of the crashing economy and save the election in 2008, they tapped the Know-Nothing, nativist, lunatic fringe as represented by Sarah Palin. The electorate, thankfully, went for Obama and Biden, a good ticket for a country in the grips of a major financial meltdown. In 2012, Romney did not stand a chance, the economy was in good shape, and the country was well led, essentially, even though today, the revisionists have 20/20 blindsight.
Fast forward 12 years—-A Republican president is leaving office again after losing to a Democrat. But now, he’s a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe, a kind of latter-day Joe McCarthy, screaming at and about hallucinations, a Sarah Palin on steroids, but with a difference: He’s a practiced con man, one of those synthetic TV personalities, a failed businessman, a crude and boisterous dandy, who has learned to bluster and flatter and somehow exude a sense of power while not actually doing anything. His entire presidency has been marked by scorched earth. And it has had a terrible impact even beyond US borders, where more and more people have been jumping on the anti-science, post-truth (“my truth is good enough”), anti-Enlightenment bandwagon.
Back to the USA: Trump has a fawning base that he despises, because he is, at heart, a terrible snob, and they seem to have the same personal specifation. He’s jealous of people who are simply better than him, be that a skinny Black president, or scientists, experts, or artists, or the many people who put aside their ego, don a uniform, and go do service for a cause or their country or for their community. But he has gotten a taste for ultimate power, thanks to millions of enablers, including the GOP, who have one and all abdicated all sense of decency, all honesty.
In the process, he has forged a sick alliance with religious groups, televangelists, extremist militias, and conspiracy theorists who are often just on his coattails as a way to get money out of very gullible people. He is, and was always, incompetent, he had no plans, he just improvised badly, depending on his moods and what his twitter feed or some extreme right-wing pundit channel churned up. His rhetorical method was transparent: Generate a lot of outrage by lying or simply saying rude things. He does this to cover up more outrage, to cover up more outrage. And ultimately to disguise the fact that his time in the White House has been one long game of golf and watching TV on the taxpayer’s dime.
Trump has exhausted everyone, because the news media, pro and con, has become addicted to his antics. It’s cheap, too: No need to do much research, the raw material comes by way of the information highway delivered straight to everyone’s telephone. He drove wedges into society, and has thus so confused his base, that many are driven to repeat verbatim his most obnoxious and absurd claims, or the claims of the outlets that support him. Their nefarious influence is even felt in Europe, a continent that has always contributed to the advance of thought, and where people tend to be more critical. Too many people I know are falling for transparent conspiracy tales and marching along with neo-Fascists. Backing out of this system will be tough.
The worst part is this: Donald J. Trump has the full backing of the Republican Party and a cult of millions of followers that refuse to take a serious reality check, because they have willfully let themselves be brainwashed and indoctrinated by agitprop on social media and broadcasts by certain news organizations.
Only now, we have massive unemployment again, and we have shed upward of 270,000 American lives —not jobs, lives—, and the number is rising steeply. These are human beings who died suffocated or from massive septic shock. They are the real victims, not the navel-gazer in the White House. They were thrown under the pandemic bus, discarded by a venal, boring man, a con man, and his nodding and bobbing administration of yes-sayers.
Mismanagement would have been better option, because at least it allows for a course correction. What Trump did — and by extension all those who refused to contradict him — is criminally negligent. And the Republicans have gone along with it and dragged the base into the hecatomb with it.
There lies the problem, and why the “base” cannot seem to relinquish its murdering guru and his repulsive family.
I understand when people are upset that their candidate has lost an election. Happens to everyone…. But this? This total callousness on the part of ordinary citizens? This rejoicing in the death of their fellow human beings? Do these people remember the eight hearings about Benghazi and the strident rantings emitted by Fox News when Obama wore a tan suit? Do you remember the name Terry Schiavo, 12 years in a coma, shrunken brain, and the oh-so-religious GOP going haywire when she was taken off life support?
270,000 Americans dead, the number growing daily, hospitals doing triage to see who can be saved, and mealy-mouthed Republican governors like Ms. Noem standing like a hare in the headlights, not mandating masks, because she is terrified of what a fifth-rate con man and lame-duck cult leader in the White House will say to his base, and how that base will react … Shameless cowardice. And when at war, cowardice leads to death.
I even get the satisfaction at triggering librul tears. It was fun for a while, I’m sure. (As an adult, I think that is pretty infantile, sort of sand-box gloating. In fact, when voting, I actually seek the candidate that is offering policy and unity, and concrete solutions, not just bluster)… The hyarhyarhyars must stop. The tears you are seeing are those of families grieving for their members who died, they are those of the exhausted medical personnel, they are not and never were “librul tears.”
I get it, though. It’s a sunk-cost problem. In for a penny, in for a pound…. The gambler’s dilemma: When on a losing streak, when do you stop? When has the cost gotten too high? When have you mortgaged everything, your conscience, your feelings, your capacity for rational thought, yes, even your swift exit from the game of mass-murdering your fellow citizens?
But the murder is real. The failed economy is real. The total degrading of our nation is real. Forget the problems you have with intellectuals, college kids, the woke crowd, the non-existent Hollywood or other elites, or TV and Cable News, with their endless parades of talking heads and fake “debates” aimed at either creating outrage or false equivalencies.
It’s time to leave this disgraceful period as the tail-end of a failed economic and political system and start a conversation based on reality and facts. The first being: Trump lost and refuses to leave the White house, i.e., he wants a dictatorship. Where is that revolutionary spirit of the T-Party? I thought the Bostonians back then were rejecting the king. Time to do it again, especially such a lousy monarch.
That time is now.
