How Respond to a Racist/Fascist?

We live in strange times. Dangerous times. Despite the fact that there are no large-scale shooting wars at present, there still exist several ‘hot spots’ of contention between the United States and its many adversaries, most prominent of which is the Persian Gulf where Iran has recently shot down a US drone and seized a British ship, among other flareups. And of course, there are the residual ‘hot spots’ in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya while others in the south China Sea, India and Pakistan and North Korea percolate merrily. Not to mention the always roiling occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, where the temperature is raised periodically by Israeli air strikes to demonstrate its dominance in the region. 

            But perhaps the strangest and most dangerous sign of our times is the fact that the most powerful nation on earth is headed by a lunatic. I am speaking, obviously, of Donald Trump, who last week sent the political world into spasms with his racist comment (followed up by “doubling down” and then exploding the whole thing at a political rally of rabid supporters in North Carolina) that the “squad” as he calls Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Presley, should ‘go back to where they came from.’ Of course, this ignores the stubborn fact that three of the four are American-born (is Presley supposed to go back to Boston?), and all, including the Somalia-born Omar, are American citizens. But facts have never stopped Trump. What he wants to do, always, is rile up his base (and they are among the most base, i.e. lowly and ignorant, of Americans—though, thanks to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, they think they’re quite smart!) by invoking the basic idea that some people—and those of a darker hue are the most prominent of examples—just don’t belong here. Hitler did this successfully, to the world’s horror. Now Trump is following the same playbook in the United States, having first won the presidency in 2016, and now seeking to win re-election using the same scare-and-scapegoat tactics so dear to all fascists. 

            The punditry in America has reacted more or less predictably, though this time the restraints seem to be put aside, with almost everyone from the PBS Newshour to CNN to the entire press of the left to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling Trump’s words “racist.” And despite the pathetic attempts of Republicans like Mitch McConnell to turn the tables and call those who call out “racism” (or “fascism”) the “real racists,” the alarm has kept building—especially after the Nuremberg-style rally Trump held in North Carolina where his minions took up the chant, “send her back.” Among the commentaries has been this one from Sarah Abramsky in Truthout: 

The most powerful man on Earth is now using his platform to unreservedly preach the gutter politics of the purge, of the pogrom, of the race war. We cannot let Trump and his supporters enact his fascistic gospel. We cannot let history repeat itself. (Truthout.org, 7.19.19) 

Others, though, have tried to moderate the reaction, observing that Trump is notHitler and Trumpism is notNazism. Which is very true. It is also true that history does not repeat itself, though it often rhymes. And so the question becomes, does the current mode of fear-based populism which some have called “illiberalism” rhyme well enough with fascism to set off alarm bells, and more? Are we really entering an age where the fascist leader will be perceived by frightened masses (either racist whites in America terrified that they are becoming a minority, or Europeans fearful of being overrun by refugees from Syria and north Africa, or nationalists everywhere anxious that global warming is making so many places on earth uninhabitable that no nation will be able to accommodate all the refugees streaming from them) as the only safeguard against inundation? It is certainly possible—witness the proto-fascist leaders in India, Hungary, the Philippines, and countless Middle-East nations where leaders like Al Sisi and Mohammad bin Salman are our ‘good friends.’ But what I am concerned with here is the near-term situation in this country. How seriously are we Americans to take the ravings of the lunatic we now have in charge? Is it time to activate the big guns to combat creeping fascism in the United States? Should we on the left be thinking of mass demonstrations and other mass actions that go beyond organizing for the next presidential election? Or has the situation gotten even worse, gotten beyond conventional politics? 

            Years ago, I had a neighbor who was a political scientist, and one of his projects involved looking at the situation in Nazi Germany as Hitler was rising to power. And his question was: at what point does a target population have to conclude that the situation is beyond repair and thus so dangerous that it is time to leave? In short, when should a German Jew have concluded that all hopes for amelioration of the political situation were gone, and that the only means of survival was to get out fast? Though the situation has not reached that point in the United States, and the alternatives are not flight but rather how serious the political fight should become, the question remains. When should one conclude that conventional modes of opposition will no longer work, that the established ruler and his party have too powerful a grip on the electoral reins and the support of a fanatic base, and that the time has come for truly serious counter-measures? 

            The problem is always that we don’t know. And what we don’t know, primarily, is how seriously we should take Trump’s increasingly fascist rhetoric. This is always the dilemma that citizens of a democracy face. Are Trump’s tweets just racist bombast from an ignorant narcissist? Or is there a calculating mind whose intentions are leading to actual violence? Or even further, does the expression of such destructive language lead, inevitably and regardless of intent, to violent actions to back it up? This is what we don’t yet know. The record, for Trump at least, is that he often seems to enjoy making threats, but then, when he sees the reaction, backs down. In short, he’s the coward that usually lurks beneath the surface bully. Even with the racist remark about the four Representatives, he has doubled down and backed up, and insisted that he didn’t really like what his minions in North Carolina were shouting and tried to talk over it (until the videotape of the rally showed him preening in the glory of it for at least 15 long seconds while the ugly chant went on), but then came back to saying he really liked it, though it wasn’t that he was a racist (he hadn’t a racist bone in his body, the president insisted), it was that Ihan Omar had criticized Jews and Israel and if she didn’t like them or like it here, she should go back to her own country. And take her hijab-wearing, terrorist-supporting compatriots with her. Which, as anyone could see, was classic racism and xenophobia.

Of course, if it were only racism at issue, we might get by that, since it’s an old story in this country. But we have the international antics and use of intemperate language (some have called those “fascist”) as well. Consider the case of North Korea. There, early on, Trump actually did use very harsh language, talking about raining down ‘fire and fury’ upon the North Koreans, and prompting many people to expect a shooting war very soon. But then he reversed course completely and began a wooing of the North Korean leader that has continued to this very day, to the disgust of many experienced observers who wonder about his apparent affection for absolute dictators like Kim Jong Un. Who could like such guys? Must it not be that Trump sees himself (if only the American system would allow it) as a kindred spirit? someone who could really make some advances in the world if only it weren’t for that pesky thing called democracy, for constitutional separation of powers? One has to think so. Because even after several putative ‘red lines’ were crossed by the North Korean nuclear program, Trump kept insisting that he and Kim had a real personal relationship, and would come to an agreement eventually. And the world could only hope and hold its breath. The same situation holds with Iran. In spite of Trump’s violent rhetoric promising that Iran would soon be regretting its rash action in shooting down a U.S. drone, our Fuhrer is said to have recalled planes that were already in the air on a bombing mission to Iran. And we are left wondering: what prompted him to reverse course and call off the mission everyone expected? Was it a failure of nerve? A reversion to type (i.e. Trump fits the type found in many bullies—being all talk and no action, being, in fact, when confronted by someone of strength, a coward at heart.) And this is not to even mention his groveling before his pal, Vladimir Putin, at Helsinki. 

All of this, then, makes it difficult to decide just how dangerous this faux-president really is, or might be. He loves violent rhetoric, to be sure. A narcissistic braggart, most definitely. Threatener-in-chief: no doubt about it. But does he actually doanything? Will he actuallydo anything? Is he threatening just to uphold some image of himself that he’s been taught to revere and maintains to prop up his always shaky and often collapsing self-image? Or is he threatening to goad an adversary into some rash action that he can then use to justify a punitive and perhaps nuclear strike? We don’t know yet. 

            And so we’re left with this seriously defective man—defective intellectually, defective emotionally, defective psychologically—with a seriously defective base of supporters just dying for something to rescue their ruined and empty lives, and an equally defective Republican party behind him cynically willing, for reasons of maintaining their flimsy grip on power, to either remain silent in the face of his idiocies or provide rationales for their ‘sensible patriotism,’ propped up by a right-wing media juggernaut that maintains that all his rational opponents constitute an empire of “fake news”—all of which empowers this lunatic in the White House, against all odds and reason, to keep up his lunatic antics and drag his country and the world to no one really knows where or how far. 

            Though what we do know is that the behind-the-headlines actions he has already taken could have far more serious consequences than the ones indicated by his surface posturing and rhetoric. And here may be the area of most danger represented by this racist-fascist lunatic. Global warming, for example. He keeps insisting, in the face of scientific and even mounting public opinion, that it’s all a hoax. Opposing his idiocy regarding global warming, in fact, seems to be what he most holds against the “squad”—they’re all heavily promoting the Green New Deal to take climate change seriously and fight vigorously against it. And that would sink all of Trump’s attempts to maintain a carbon-spewing, record-setting economy. So his appointments, to the EPA, for instance, have resulted in the scuttling of most EPA regulations instituted by his hated predecessor, to the joy of his corporate cronies. The damage, if this continues for much longer, will be unimaginable. The countless judges he’s appointed represent a parallel and comparable threat, judges who can be expected to render some of the most destructive decisions this nation has ever seen. Add this to the encouraging of his fanatic and violent minions—many of whom would be happily fascist in their thuggery if they’re given half a chance to at some point break out of chanting and sign waving to become literal stormtroopers breaking the heads of those hated ‘coastal elites.’

            Well, you know the story. So we come back to the original premise. Just how dangerous is the situation we’re in, just how dangerous is this maniac who now lords it over us like some wannabe Mussolini? I mention the latter because for all the damage the Italian leader did to his nation and its people, he seemed basically reluctant to get into a realworld war until Hitler made it impossible for him to avoid it. So the inventor of fascism, a nasty thug to be sure, wasn’t, on his own, fully committed to implementing that viciousness we attribute to fascist rule. For his domestic enemies, in fact, Mussolini instituted the practice of force-feeding them castor oil; but giving one’s enemies debilitating diarrhea is somewhat different from roasting millions of them in specially-built ovens. And when it comes to Trump, though his actions may ultimately cause more damage than all the fascists combined (I’m referring to the planet-destructive consequences of ignoring global warming), it is my guess that he doesn’t really have enough intelligence to understand these consequences. And that’s where we end up, I think. The one saving grace for our fascist moment may be that Donald Trump isn’t smart enough to be an evil genius. Deep down, he actually wants to be liked, adored. And though I think Bandy Lee is correct in pointing out that this makes him quite dangerous, it’s not clear whether he represents the ultimate danger he, or his fanatic, out of control minions, may blunder us into. 

            And therein may lie our best hope. Trump might soon be blundered, or mocked, or voted out of office. Made to endure that which he can least tolerate: mockery, and laughter, and ridicule, and failure. He uses these weapons often, we notice, and the reason is that he knows these are the areas where he himself is most vulnerable. I think the term that applies here is projection: we project onto others that which we fear most in ourselves. And so that is what might be done at the highest levels. Confront this asshole with what he actually is: a fool and a buffoon and a loser who has stumbled into his position by a combination of blunders (he actually expected that he had lost the election as it was happening) and fortuitous interferences by the Russians, and the Republican party’s Machiavellian manipulations and gerrymandering in those swing states, and Hillary Clinton’s blunders and overconfidence, and make him what he (and most dictators) fears most to be—what he actually already is—the failed laughingstock of the world. And, thereby, be rid of him before the damage he does becomes lethal. 

            If we are lucky, this will happen. If we are not, all bets are off. Because as has been pointed out before, even with a lunatic, things can, of their own momentum, get so out of control that we could all be plunged into a conflict or a protracted dissolution of all government safeguards that could take us to Armageddon. And it would be an even bigger shame if the one who leads us there were to be this fraud, this idiot huckster who pollutes and degrades and debauches everything he touches.

Lawrence DiStasi

Over the Moon

Last night, and for the last three nights, I’ve watched Chasing the Moon, the PBS/American Experience documentary that traces the lunar landing of 1969 from its inception with Pres. John F. Kennedy’s pledge to reach the moon by the end of the Sixties, through all the trials and difficulties of putting such an enormous project together, to the culmination on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped from his spacecraft and onto the moon’s surface and declaimed: 

            That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

For a breast-beating project like this, I found myself, surprisingly, riveted by most of the documentary. Robert Stone put together both ample quantities of rare footage, both of the rocket launches and public appearances, and also of more private footage such as showing the agony experienced by the wife of Astronaut Frank Gorman when he (and Lovell and Anders) were on the first shot to leave earth’s orbit to circle the moon, and make it back. Indeed, it was this first moon shot, Apollo 8, that, to me, conveyed the greatest emotional and intellectual impact. This was partly because of the clear difficulty of the maneuver: making sure to inject the space capsule at the very right moment to get it free of earth’s gravity and simultaneously into the moon’s gravitational sphere where it could circle the moon a couple of times, and then return to earth’s orbit for the return trip. Partly it was also due to the fact that, along the way, the orbit vehicle was hidden behind the moon and thus completely out of contact with the control center in Houston for several hours. Watching the faces of the ground crew in Houston (and the faces of the wives in Borman’s home), every one lined with worry about whether the astronauts and their little capsule would reappear, was high drama in the best sense of that word. This was made even more dramatic by what had been shown just before: the lightning-like fire in the capsule that killed the astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee as they awaited the ignition for Apollo 1, almost ending the Apollo mission on its first try. If anyone needed it, this initial tragedy made achingly clear the dangers inherent in riding an atomic blast into space—though the fire’s cause had nothing to do with rockets, but rather with oxygen in the cockpit set ablaze by a faulty wire. In addition to one’s consciousness of the ever-present peril in these early launches, though, the most iconic image ever captured—for me—took place on this trip: the image of Earth-rise, the blue and white half-globe of Earth rising up from the surface of the Moon. That is the image that reverses and upends the image of ourselves that humans have had since forever: we are the ground, and the moon is this magical, heavenly disc that rises regularly in the east, always changing shape, and dominating both our night sky, our mythologies, and our imaginations. Here, by contrast, the Moon is the ground, and the earth is what science had been telling us it is, but which we had never really beheld before: a fragile, lovely blue-and-white marble floating in black space—one that contains a homing appeal that we can never truly express, but that strikes us deeply, cosmically in heart and mind when we see it. 

            The other thing that Robert Stone did surprisingly well was to make us aware of the parallel political dramas that were going on at this time. In fact, one of the reasons this documentary proved so revelatory for me—even though I was quite alive and active when it was all happening—was that my attention, and that of most of my contemporaries, was focused on the high-energy politics of the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the protests against it were getting hotter and more deadly by the minute; the Civil Rights movement was accelerating with each piece of legislation and with each urban riot; and the cultural upheaval known as The Sixties was moving toward what seemed an apotheosis. All this aside from the deadly series of assassinations that took the lives of a President, a civil rights leader, and the President’s brother seeking to be president himself. In light of all this, the Apollo program to reach the moon seemed like an ironic sideshow, not to mention a colossal waste of money that could have been better used for social betterment. Stone shows this in several ways. He focuses on the only black candidate for the program, Edward Dwight, who somehow never gets selected. To make this understandable, Stone tells us that the head of Astronaut training, Chuck Yeager, simply told the other astronauts, all white, to ignore (i.e. ostracize) Captain Dwight, both professionally and socially, and within a short time, he would quit. When Dwight failed to be selected by NASA to be an astronaut, he rightly attributed it to “racial politics” and, proving Yeager right, resigned from the program and the Airforce in 1966. Stone also shows how surprised the Apollo 8 crew members were when, on their publicity tour of college campuses after their success, they were either ignored or booed by college students outraged at all programs having to do with a government that had come to seem the enemy. And he shows us Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who came to the launch of Apollo 11 to protest what he called the misuse of government funds, but was then appeased by the invitation of a NASA big-wig to enjoy a front-row seat to observe the launch. Finally, he points up the irony of having the climax of a program set in motion by the Democratic visionary John F. Kennedy and pushed and continued by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, being celebrated by the most mawkish and hawkish of all presidents (until recently, that is), Richard Nixon. Indeed, he lets us know that far from wanting to focus attention on the accomplishment as one not of a single nation or single human being, but rather of humankind as a whole, Nixon pushed to play up the cheap chauvinism even more: he urged that The Star-Spangled Banner be played when the astronauts took their first steps on the moon and planted the U.S. flag. We find ourselves thanking god that such a ham-handed display of “we’re number one” was suppressed by wiser minds. 

            All this being said, this viewer looked with great anticipation at the third episode of the program, the actual moon landing of Apollo 11. Strangely, it turned out to be anti-climactic. It is not fully evident why this should have been so—except in the long run. But in the short run, the drama of the big launch had already been demonstrated in previous missions. So had the real fear attendant on a major accident (the wife of Astronaut Ed White, we were told, actually committed suicide after her husband’s fiery death). So we were left with the technical feat—which was, it must be said, impressive if not amazing. The huge hurdle, that is, was what had to happen after the mother ship left earth’s orbit. That is, the mother ship—a rocket on its own—had to get into orbit around the moon, but not just by itself; it had to carry the lunar landing craft, equipped with its own power. Once in orbit around the moon, ship and lander had to separate and the spidery lander had to drop miles from space onto the moon’s surface, making sure that it did not (as the Russian lander, at about this same time, apparently did) descend too rapidly and crash into the moon’s surface. If this happened (and several newspapers had already prepared headlines announcing that the astronauts were stranded), the outcome was certain, and very public death. As the lander descended, in fact, we were told how much fuel was left: I think it made it with 19 seconds of fuel to spare. Drama. Then—and this strikes me as the most amazing technical accomplishment of all—the lander had to use its own mini-rocket power (apparently a source separate from the one that had braked it down to the surface) to fire itself off the moon and back up into an orbit precise enough to then link once more with the mother ship manned by the third astronaut, Michael Collins, for the home journey. This is truly ‘rocket science,’ physical calculation, and engineering of the highest order. Even the slightest error could have doomed the whole project. 

            Mirabile dictu, and against all inside expectations (Houston engineers truly thought that the first landing would not work and they’d have to try again), the whole thing worked flawlessly. Armstrong and Aldrin made it to the moon’s surface, planted their flag, cavorted a little for the cameras, and climbed back into the lander and rocketed back into orbit and connection with their mother ship. Then the three astronauts rode home unscathed to the cheers of an entire world—the TV broadcast seen worldwide was said to be the biggest ever up till that time. And well it should have been. The entire feat was stupendous. As for this writer, I and my then-wife had taken LSD that day, and what I remember most is the acid-driven strangeness (it would have been strange in any case) of seeing shadowy men cavorting on the moon in a way no one could ever have predicted, and at the same time running outside and looking at the moon in reality—and trying to comprehend the incomprehensible fact that two Americans, human beings, were at that very moment walking on its surface. Nothing prepares us for putting those two images together. It is simply too surreal. 

            And yet. The documentary ends on a rather disappointing note. It is hard to say exactly why, but that is the fact. And aside from easy answers such as—the first time is always the most anxious and therefore thrilling; after that, everything becomes routine—one can only speculate. For me, the answer is close to what we in the sixties thought at the time: once you’ve gotten to the moon, there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nothing to gain (aside from Tang, the astronauts orange drink) from getting there, or even getting to Mars, for that matter. We are products of our earth, our atmosphere, and thus, inescapably linked to this planet and its air we breathe and its nourishment we depend on. No other planet that we know of, indeed no other planet in other star systems or other galaxies, has yet proven to harbor life, plants, oxygen. Without those basics of existence, we might visit other planets like Mars, but could not survive there without enormous constructions of artificial environments, the cost to maintain which would be stupendous, if not stupid. 

So what is the outcome of the moon landing? What is the next step to develop from it? We still, despite the enormous outlay of time, money and lives, have not answered those questions. And meantime, we have to answer the far more urgent question of how to survive our own foolish depredations on this planet, our apparent determination to poison the only living planet we know for sure exists. Until we do that, indeed, until we prove we can do that—beginning of course with climate change—space journeys might provide little blips of excitement and satisfaction and wonder, but little else. And documentaries about them must end with an unexpected letdown, and the inevitable question: OK Humans, What Now?

Lawrence DiStasi