What a Revolting Development

When I was a kid, one of the phrases I heard most often from my father was: “What a revoltin’ development this is.”  I only recently found out that he got it from a popular radio program of the 1940s, The Life of Riley, starring William Bendix. Last night, that phrase came to mind when it became clear that the Drumpf of the yellow hair was—beyond all imagining—actually going to be elected president of the United States. It had been brewing all evening, but I kept hoping that sooner or later, a few of the contested states were going to drop for Hillary Clinton, and she would pull out the victory everyone had predicted. It never happened. First Florida went to Trump. Then North Carolina. Then Ohio, and you could almost hear the groan among the commentators. When Pennsylvania, seesawing all night between the two contestants, was called for the Drumpf, it was all over but the shouting. The most revolting development of our time had happened. And I have to confess, when Drumpf reached 269 electoral votes—with Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona still not called, but leaning his way—and the media announced that the presumptive winner had left his hotel and was heading towards his crowd growing more and more ecstatic in anticipation of his victory speech, I turned off the TV set and went to bed. I simply could not bear to see that lecherous grin gloating over the greatest prize a stone-cold narcissist sociopath can garner. I couldn’t bear it, and still may have to turn off the TV whenever it comes on (I did this often when George W. was speaking; similar idiot grin, similar reaction).

            Now it’s the next morning and the feeling of nausea has still not left me. And I’m writing to try to expiate the feeling of horror and depression and despair over the future that hangs over a huge portion of the entire country (more people voted for Hillary, it now appears, than for Drumpf; though once again—think Bush v. Gore and three others, Adams, Hayes and Harrison—that devil’s pact to maintain the slave states in control, the electoral college, has made a mockery of democracy and the idea of one person, one vote). And speaking of slave states in control, the visual of that electoral map displayed on most TV coverage, with the entire center of the country blanketed in red, reminds us again, if we needed reminding, how big a role racism has always played in this nation and played once again in this election. It would not be too much to say that this vote by the mostly white electorate really was the expression of the pent-up hatred that has gripped this nation for the past eight years, hatred of the fact that a Black man occupied the White House. Now the racists (and I love how Drumpf’s defenders always insist his supporters aren’t racists; they’re just Americans who want a “fair shake”) have their revenge—though how long their glee will last is another matter entirely. Because they are going to be confronted by the fact that their chosen savior, Drumpf, will not be able to accomplish even a small portion of what he’s promised—solve immigration? bring back all the lost jobs? make the nation majority white again? tell the corporations and the rest of the world to fuck off? Not going to happen. And then there’s going to be some weeping and gnashing of teeth by the poor boobs who have been conned once again.

            But I digress. What I really want to say is that our worst nightmare has come to pass. Plato, some two thousand years ago, warned that the logical progression in government is the inevitable progress from democracy to tyranny. That is what this feels like to me. I wrote a piece when the primaries were first starting called “Demagogues Rising” in which I referenced a novel predicting that the masses would be inclined, in the dire conditions of massive displacement of people from wars and global warming, to opt for the apparent solutions of dictators and dictatorial governments. At that time, I thought it might be Bernie Sanders versus Drumpf in the election, but the point is the same. In the conditions that are looming—and all people on this planet, whether they can articulate it or not, are feeling the coming era of masses on the move, masses displaced by rising seas and dire climate changes—most people will opt for the (putatively) strong leader over the conventional one every time. Or, as George Lakoff might put it, over the strong father over the nurturing mother. And that  is what has just happened: masses of Americans have chosen a man who has promised to build walls to keep out the wogs, has promised to deport or keep from ever breaching our borders immigrants who appear to be Muslims and/or possible terrorists, and to erect crippling barriers to trade in the attempt to put America first. Shades of the 1930s in Germany; in Italy; in America itself, which had a huge movement, the America Firsters, who lobbied to keep the U.S. out of any more of Europe’s wars. Had it not been for Pearl Harbor, they might have succeeded—at least for a time. Now Drumpf has promised to revive those same sentiments, and has ridden those sentiments straight to the White House. It is terrifying. As is the prospect of his Supreme Court nominations—which will poison the high court for decades. As is the prospect of his Justice Department—which will poison the very idea of ‘justice for all’ for god knows how long (Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General?). As is the prospect of his apparent policy relative to carbon, coal, and global warming, which he seems to think is a hoax (Forrest Lucas, head of Lucas Oil, as Interior Secretary?). The greatest menace ever to threaten the human race, and he, and his whole party, think it’s a hoax. Which means that the entire planet has now taken a step closer to armaggedon with the election of this ignorant huckster and demagogue.

            And it is making me sick just thinking about it. Boobus Americanus indeed.

            So I don’t know folks. I have nothing comforting or palliative to offer. It’s as bad as it looks, and may be much worse. We’ll only know as the sick drama we seem to be trapped in plays out in the coming months. Meantime, all each of us can do is work locally while we think globally, work together when we can, and try to limit the damage. Because the way it looks the morning after, there sure as hell is going to be damage, and the only questions now are how much? and how long, o lord?

Lawrence DiStasi

The Creep Factor

After watching the second presidential debate last night—and it wasn’t easy to stay tuned—it occurred to me that almost aside from everything that was said, the real takeaway from this insult fest was the singular creepiness on display. And here I am referring not to the sometime creepiness of Hillary, though there is something of that in her, but the unparalleled creepiness of Donald Trump. The Drumpf is a really creepy human being—if, in fact, he even qualifies as human. This is what sticks in mind from last night’s debate: The Donald prowling the stage in his overly large blue suit and red power tie, flaunting his straw hair and paunchy gut and floridly pockmarked face, sniffing repeatedly as if with a stuffy nose, and generally creeping out everyone nearby; with Hillary trying to get as far from him as she possibly could, and even the moderators, Martha Radatz and Anderson Cooper, indicating from their body language and constant frowns that they too hoped he wouldn’t get any closer. The man is a walking disease—though I am quite happy to admit that the latest bombshell to hit his campaign, the release of his obscene gloating with one of the little Bushies about his ability to molest all the beauties he encounters because as a star he is allowed to even grab their pussies—may have had its influence. I mean, who would want to be within even hearing distance of such a creep?

            And yet, he is the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties. And yet, his popularity ratings continue no matter what he says or does. How is one to understand this? To what can it be compared?

            In a way, to make any reasonable comparison to the possibility of such a creep becoming president, one has to go back to the Romans. I mean the Roman emperors like Tiberius and Caligula and Nero. To be sure, it was Augustus who initiated the damage; or perhaps it was Caesar before him; the damage being the discarding of the ancient Republic in favor of an empire ruled by an Emperor. Absolute rule, in other words, with the Senate as simply a rubber stamp. But Augustus more or less tempered his dictatorship with the democratic traditions he grew up with. Not so his successors. With increasing savagery, Tiberius and Nero and Caligula introduced a barbarism, a licentiousness, a cruelty and perversion that mass audiences became familiar with in the PBS dramatization of Robert Graves’ hit, I Claudius. I don’t know, perhaps Donald Trump himself watched and was inspired by the show (perhaps that’s where he got the idea of prosecuting Hillary once he’s elected, something dictators do routinely to their political opponents). Or perhaps he’s just naturally a megalomaniac, a homegrown, dyed-in-the-wool creep. However it happened, Trump’s creepiness, on full display last night, can only be compared to those ancient Roman creeps who cemented the full and total abandonment of democracy in ancient Rome and ushered in the imperial debauchery that has since become our standard for the unbridled government power that corrupts absolutely.

            Beyond just the nausea, though, what also occurred to me is that, like Claudius, we may be witnessing the ‘hatching out’ of all the imperial poisons that have been growing in our own alleged democracy in recent years. Trump may be the emblem, the representative, the payback for all the sins of our fathers, in other words; sins that, though long denied by the national myth, have become increasingly apparent. Far from being conceived innocently as the great “shining city on a hill,” that is, the United States of America was founded on slaughter and slavery. The slaughter of the native Americans encountered by those intrepid colonists at Plymouth Rock and Boston seems every day more clear and irredeemable (see the recent book by Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America). Nor did it end with the New England wars, King Philip’s War and the Pequot War, both of which ended with the few surviving Indians enslaved and shipped to Caribbean sugar plantations. The wars against native Americans lasted well into recent history, culminating only a few years ago with the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier. As to the slavery, that has not ended either—even with the Emancipation Proclamation—but only shifted emphasis, first to the horrors of Jim Crow in the South, and then morphing into the Drug Wars of the 1980s that solved the ‘problem’ of black men by putting most of them in prison. But instead of solving the problem, the endless cultural disease spawned by slavery has only come back to haunt us again and again. Not even a black president has made a difference; on the contrary, the Obama presidency seems only to have stoked the fires of white racist resentment to burn even hotter in recent years. And in response to accusations that unresolved racism is behind the commonplace police killings of black men, we get even more resentment and racism, now openly expressed on the internet, which is itself sanctioned by the thinly veiled racism of a major presidential candidate and his openly racist followers. And it is truly creepy.

            So this is what last night’s debate left me—and, I gather, many others around the nation—with: the need to take a long, hot, disinfecting shower. The need to distance myself and those I love from this creep who is pretending to the presidency. I’m not sure if some of the citizens of Rome or those in the Weimar Republic had this same feeling. But I would guess they did. What alarms me is that neither their numbers, in either case, nor their revulsion and disgust were enough. The creeps in ancient Rome and the little creep in Germany were able to con sufficient numbers (by redirecting the wrath of the masses at convenient scapegoats) to reach the heights of power, at least for a time. Trump, even wounded as he is, may be able to do the same—especially if large numbers of us respond to the creepiness by casting a pox on both their houses and refusing to vote at all. That would be the fulfillment of Republican hopes and strategy, and the great mistake of all time, but I fear in this season of amazing improbables, it may be possible. And that is a truly terrifying thought.

Lawrence DiStasi

           

Dispirited

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As the presidential election season enters its last two months, my mood and the mood of the country grow ever more dispirited. The reason is simple: the two major-party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are the least-liked, least-admired, least-trusted presidential candidates in recent history. And everyone is feeling the depression that comes with facing a voting booth to select a candidate you would prefer were not even running, a candidate that you’re feeling compelled to vote for primarily in order to prevent the other even-more-hated choice from winning. We all feel that and more. There’s desperation mixed in too—the desperation of those who are convinced that a President Trump (or a President Clinton) will be a disaster for the nation. And for me, personally, there is the desperation that comes from contemplating a United States of America that is so impoverished of leadership, so cynical about elected officials at every level, that it has offered up two people out of the 300 million in this vast country who are more repulsive on almost every level than even the recent idiots who’ve run for the office. It is as if we were suddenly back in ancient Rome and the imperial line had thrust upon us a Caligula or a Nero or a Tiberius. But Rome by that time was no longer a republic; it had become an empire ruled by the imperial line beginning with Augustus. The state and its rulers were corrupted by absolute power and the license and perversion that often accompanies inbreeding. The United States, by contrast, is still nominally a democracy, a representative democracy promoting the myth that the people rule and the rulers are obliged to follow. And for a while, with the election of Barack Obama as the first black president, it almost seemed as if this really were the case. No more. Clinton comes from a presidential dynasty via her husband, who was president twenty years ago and first kowtowed to the oligarchs. And Donald Trump comes from a line of inherited wealth that allows him to trumpet himself as beyond the corruption of money.

            That’s not all. The mood of the country is more than dispirited; it’s ugly, it’s threatening, it’s beginning to seem akin to what pertained in 1930s Europe. Both sides—but especially conservatives—have retreated to a kind of unbridled rhetoric that has abandoned all sense of restraint or decency or balance. “Incendiary” only begins to describe it, and it begins with what Trump started out with: nasty, snarling attacks on immigrants, on Muslims, on the President, on his primary rivals, and now on his opponent. It’s as if we’re in some schoolyard brawl. And unfortunately, this type of rhetoric matters. It inflames supporters and encourages them to violent actions to match the violent rhetoric (several protesters have been beaten up at Trump rallies). While some Republicans feign outrage over Trump’s lack of restraint, its source can be traced back to the basic stance of the entire party in Congress which, from the moment Barack Obama took office, made no secret of its overriding strategy: to block anything that might make the first black president look effective. The disrespect for a sitting president (and the disrespect was a thinly disguised ‘dog whistle’ meant to signify contempt for the Black man in the White House) thereafter was built in. To get to Trump and his nasty, gutter-spawned generalizations was only a short leap. The point is that this stuff is contagious: and so we have had Hillary Clinton recently generalizing about Trump supporters as “deplorables”—racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, and basically ‘white trash.’ Which they in large part are, of course. But it is not the kind of general condemnation that is likely to win over those voters with doubts about their candidate, or to calm the election waters.

            Now we have candidates actually making overt references to violence and bloodshed. First Donald Trump said that if Hillary Clinton is elected and gets to appoint federal judges, “there’s nothing you can do folks,” and then added this veiled appeal to rifle owners and assassination: “Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.” More recently we have had the governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, going even further to predict the dire effects if Hillary Clinton becomes president. In a speech to the Value Voters Summit on September 10 in Washington DC, Bevin’s answer to whether the country could recover from a Clinton presidency raised the specter of real bloodshed:

            “I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something that we through our apathy and indifference have given away” (Associated Press: Sept. 13).

            What the hell is going on here? This is not Germany after World War I. This is not Italy in the 1920s. But clearly, some people in these once-United States are feeling the kind of desperation that leads them to think in terms of problems so intractable, of marginalization so extreme, that American blood may have to be shed. Revolutionary blood? Civil War blood? Some further remarks by this alleged governor, Bevin, provide further clues to this perceived alienation: 

“Look at the atrocity of abortion, so many have remained silent. It’s a slippery slope. First we’re killing children, then it’s ‘don't ask, don't tell.’ Now it’s this gender-bending, don’t ask, don’t be a bigot, don’t be unreasonable, don’t be unenlightened, heaven forbid..” (Ibid.)

In other words, the rhetoric used for abortion—“we’re killing children”—has segued easily into the rhetoric of killing, of battle, of armed resistance, of revolution. People whose values have been violated by modern society—which provides choice for women to control their reproduction, and for gays to marry, and for transgender people to use public restrooms—are being encouraged to think only violence can be used to restore their dreamed-of place at the top of a society that used to deny such rights. That is really what’s at the core of this dispiriting mess. There are whole areas of the country, primarily in the South and the Midwest, populated by people who feel that their country is being stolen from them. Stolen primarily by people who should be at the bottom of the social ladder but whom government has given a helping and unfair hand to ascend. And their ascension seems to threaten the position of the mostly white populations who had long taken their social primacy for granted. The government that helps these ‘outsiders,’ these darker races, is therefore cast as the enemy. Its rules and regulations, its aid to ‘slackers’ and ‘illegals,’ its promotion of equal rights to those who by ‘inherited right’ should have no rights at all—all of these inflame a corrosive bile in the hearts of those who see themselves vanishing. And so they flock to the candidate whose posture seems to represent them, the candidates who use the violent rhetoric that they themselves use in private to curse those who are ‘stealing’ what they consider is rightly theirs: their place, their government, their country, their birthright as the ‘right’ kind and color of people.

            Where this will end is not clear yet. If the demographics are allowed to take their natural course, the people of color will in fact shortly outnumber the malcontents, and there will be no need for contests or debates. But it is not at all certain that demographics will be allowed to proceed unhindered, or without some blood being shed. And that is what is dispiriting in the end. As positions continue to harden, as the rhetoric gets more and more inflammatory, it becomes difficult to see how saner heads, as most often in the past, can prevail. And though to this observer, it is impossible to see how whole populations can be persuaded by the simple-minded lies of the demagogues, clearly large numbers can. The only question becomes, how far will the crazies go? How angry and belittled are these interior masses? How willing to water their personal tree of ‘liberty’ with blood?

            I have to tell you that at this moment, it doesn’t feel hopeful—not least because the only viable alternative is the other ‘hold-your-nose’ candidate.

Lawrence DiStasi