“Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them.” Abraham Lincoln, 1858
I find myself distracted and unable to focus on one thing for any length of time, a consequence of living in Donald Trump’s reality TV presidency, but also because the World Cup is irresistible, and because the tower of unread books and periodicals on my table keeps growing. Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran arrived this morning, temporarily knocking American Visions by Edward L. Ayers out of the queue.
Here’s a curious admission that I doubt is unique to me: when I awake in the morning one of my first thoughts is whether or not Trump survived the night. Dumb Donny’s mental and physical health is fading fast, slipping and sliding into his own make believe world. One fine morning, he will be no more. In the meantime, Trump uses all his powers to force the country to go along with his delusions and deny objective reality in favor of magical thinking. If the manifest and numerous failures, incompetence and all around shoddiness of this Regime wasn’t so destructive of democracy and the rule of law, so ruinous of any hope of this country fulfilling its promise, it would be worthy of ridicule and raucous laughter, but Trump is smashing our foundations. At this point, he’s pushed the nation beyond remedial repair; only difficult structural reconstruction will do. The deep rot — corruption, market manipulation, pardons for sale, pay-to-play schemes to enrich the Trump family and its cronies — will require political fixes, meaning they will be time and attention consuming, which almost guarantees the necessary reforms won’t get done at the level of severity required. The political class will weasel out as it usually does by enacting a few cosmetic changes so it can claim the nation reformed.
No. One hundred and fifty times no. We’re beyond cosmetic changes now.
Trump’s Great American State Fair or whatever the fool is calling it, has been a failure, emblematic of the Regime and the moment. Even the DC weather refuses to cooperate, dumping rain on an already dismal and diminished scene. Trump took control of the America 250 committee, approved by Congress in 2016, and created his own production, Freedom 250, sponsored by companies who are making mighty profits from their close ties to the Regime: Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Exxonmobil, Mastercard, Oracle, and United Airlines among many others. Autocracy 101: Reward your friends, punish your enemies.
How to describe America at 250? Unserious. Petty. Racist. Cowardly. Frightened. Ignorant. Addicted to war and fantasy. Confused. Apathetic. This is only a partial bill of indictment. What immediately comes to mind as I compare the America in which I was raised and the America I’m living in is how we’ve stumbled from being a functioning but limited democracy to becoming a democracy in name only. My adolescence was marked by Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate. It was a dour and grim period, but the economy was more forgiving because organized labor hadn’t been castrated yet, and some Great Society programs were still functioning; a home or a college education didn’t cost a fortune and a debt sentence. The bipartisan creation of a rapacious and unaccountable Billionaire Class was in the future. In those bygone years, the government still feared the people. Not so now. We’re watched, recorded and profiled, and our rights to assemble, dissent and speak our minds are more tenuous by the day. As we saw in Minneapolis, government agents can kill citizens with impunity.
That’s America at 250, in the turbulent narrows where the mighty river churns and froths. In Ece Temelkuan’s book I read a line that matches how I feel: “There is a sense of mourning in the air. It is thin still, but it is real.” I’m as politically homeless now as I have been for most of my life, trapped by a failed duopoly that could care less about people like me, but it’s more than that. Since 9/11, this country has abandoned ethics, morality and moderation. With dismay and at times despair, I’ve watched as stupidity and cruelty, overreliance on violent solutions, mass incarceration, criminalization of the poor and less fortunate and debilitating wealth inequality has deformed our politics and society.
We will eventually come through the narrows, but once on the other side will we find a limpid pool or a shallow puddle that won’t survive the afternoon sun?
