Democracy is a very nice thing. We know – because elemental logic and simple observation readily confirm it – that individual people can and do make horrific mistakes. Horrific mistakes made by an individual serving in the position of the executive of a nation – such as a president, for example – can prove disastrous (as was the case historically in the Confederate effort in the American Civil War, the American participation in Vietnam in the late 1960s, and the American executive leading the way to war in Iraq in early 2003).
But we always think that democracy greatly minimizes the danger, and mistakes come then not from the failure of the political system (liberal democracy), but from the fact that individual human beings are ever flawed and mistake-prone. The leader, whoever she or he may be, cannot escape making mistakes.
Any individual, it is reasoned, can evince the character of a snake or a spider (a dastardliness that seems to have no connection to human welfare generally), but when the entire polity participates in a principled process of popular voting, the risk of electing cravenness and indecency is eliminated… we hope. There is always a small rogue element that may, for whatever freakish, antisocial reasons cast their vote for the snake, but they are vastly outnumbered by the sane and responsible… Or so it is thought.
I have long been in the habit of blaming not the snake, but the citizen voter who approves the snake. (Can a snake be blamed for what he is?) And to impugn the entire voting population – or the instrumental portion therein, who have functioned to effectively elect the incompetent – is a difficult thing, to be sure. Mostly, we think that an “educated” and very large and “modern” nation will generally work to elect regular politicians, albeit some leaning to one sort of ideological reasoning and some to quite another.
But alas, we have entered into highly abnormal, even surreal times! The United States, in 2016, “democratically” elected somebody without political experience of any sort, with a lifelong record of mendacity, insensate usurpation, racism, ignorance and a want of… well, basic decency. And because the United States occupies a peculiar position internationally, this is a sort of disaster for the entire world.
Yesterday was July 16, 2018. I have, since early November 2016, basically for mental health reasons, mostly avoided watching TV news programs for fear that they would be discussing or reporting something head-shaking awful. I do get wind of what is happening from the titles and snippets of news on the Internet and more of the gist of the mess of the day because late night TV comedy shows use it as a mainstay. But on Monday, July 16th, I was shocked at what I saw the current American president saying on live television from Helsinki Finland as he stood only six feet away from Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Normally, as my frequent readers know, I do not write on daily political happenings, preferring to write about matters that are more general, conceptual, and philosophical, but it seems somehow wrong to just sit dumbfounded in the wake of such an outrage and do nothing. Conscience urges me to give my opinions. Isn’t that what blogs are for?
In the 1950s the United States endured what history refers to as “the red scare.” What began as something merely conjectural and “possible” grew in the conservative imagination. People began to believe that Russian communists could infiltrate the American government and conduct a takeover of the federal power. The paranoia and conspiracy theories went on for months and months, and it got worse and worse, with congressional hearing after congressional hearing. The leader of the scare was a Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy wasn’t merely anticommunist, he was vehemently anticommunist… almost pathologically so. One day when there was yet another televised hearing in Washington D.C., and McCarthy was again testifying and McCarthy said something that a senator recognized as a threat against one of his staff. That other senator speaking to McCarthy was well aware of the status of that staff person, that he was tainted by general “association” with somebody who was involved with certifiable communists. That senator said to McCarthy, in defense of his staff person, and defense of basic human dignity, “Have you no shame, Senator? Have you no sense of shame at all?”
McCarthy was momentarily stymied and hesitated to answer.
That was when the tide of paranoia began to turn, and the viewing American public could begin to see that careless slander could irreparably damage anyone’s reputation at any time. They began to understand that innuendo and suspicion cannot count among the habits and protocols we use to give integrity to our government.
In the early 1950s, American president Harry Truman was insulted publicly by a rash and arrogant American general, Douglas McArthur, and Truman decided to “remove” him from his position overseeing the American military in the Korean War conflict. McArthur was more popular with the public than was the president, so the firing was controversial. But congressional hearings revealed something that Americans did not know the way Truman knew: the United States did not want to get into a situation where the answer was to use nuclear weapons, and conventional weapons were not adequate to the task McArthur was promoting to the chagrin of his boss. The people see. And their seeing is a good thing.
But the prospect of a majority always somehow “seeing” in time to correct their misjudgment is naive and foolish. People “see” in an effort to gain, yes, but they main gain truth one minute in one matter and gain self-aggrandizement the next minute in another matter.
When I tuned in to CNN on Monday afternoon and knew that the American president had met with the Russian president that day for almost two hours with nobody there with the two presidents but the two interpreters, I “knew”, being an informed and reasonably intelligent person, that the American president would later, in front of the press, overstate his firmness with the Russian tyrant. He’d be very nice and pleasant in person, but then remark to the press, for example, that he “told President Putin very frankly and very firmly that…,” or something such.
But what I beheld was beyond description! I began to lose my mind in anguished disbelief and began to forget what I had always reminded reminded myself: that it was not the [American president] imbecile’s fault that he is what he is! How does one rightly blame the dog for doing what dogs do? Can a snake be faulted for slithering? If a person behaves in a base, indecent way, it shall be identified by a conscious public – is this not correct? Democracy was supposed to remedy the failing of individual humans. When we voted for a certain person in a democracy, it was essentially to avoid this calamity that befalls monarchy and inflexible rightist governments, because that person being considered was especially informed and well qualified, surely enough to be given the nod by especially large and viable numbers. But through the passage of centuries, especially with so much real-time TV media coverage of celebrities and politicians, the people we were to select from were really more famous than they were virtuous, informed or qualified; fame eventually, unfortunately, became the measure of political viability. And I guess Americans got a taste of this fact by Arnold Schwarzenegger somehow becoming governor of California in 2003.
What Americans got in their president-elect in 2016 was a strange bird that tweets more than anything else, it seems. And these “tweets” are not exactly the modern equivalent of the reassuring and almost spiritual fireside chats of old. They are more like the things people whisper to each other between sips at the bar, or, more likely even, what we might hear shouted between combatants at a professional wrestling match on TV.
It was obvious enough that this bird was also a scoundrel and a thorough coward… in a word, a poltroon. This was made obvious early in the 2016 presidential campaign when the casino builder said that he did not recognize Vietnam War veteran and Vietcong torture victim John McCain as a war hero. He said he liked “people who didn’t get caught.” It is a remarkable commentary on human psychology that so many American veterans and enlisted persons still supported the casino builder after such a despicable statement. A child’s intellect could have easily deduced that this disrespectful comment about McCain meant that this craven imbecile had no ability to respect those hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died in unspeakable horror on battlefields in North America and Europe: he obviously likes only people who didn’t get shot.
Americans knew more about this candidate than this. His closest associates told of how he so frequently lied that he did not seem to realize that lying is considered wrong or unflattering. The actor Charlie Sheen told the story of receiving “diamond” cufflinks from the casino man as a gift, and Sheen thought it a remarkably generous gift. But then many months later while he was getting other things appraised for insurance purposes he discovered that the “diamonds” were worthless paste that had almost no value at all. The casino man gambled that he could just pawn them off that way and make people believe he was super-generous. Many, many fell for his antics.
But how could they miss that remark about McCain? And, how could they miss the man saying right in front of the cameras, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find those other thirty thousand e-mails,” inviting a foreign government to engage in illegal activity? How could they miss his saying that he would consider using a nuclear bomb against the dirt army that was ISIS in western Iraq? How could they miss his saying that he would authorize torture? (A president authorizing torture is against international law, but apparently the casino man lost his gamble that nobody else knew that it was illegal.) How could people miss the casino man’s assertion that he believed it was probably a good idea for South Korea and Japan to become nuclear-armed nations? What the American people ‘missed’ was not some particular news story or other, but the opportunity to carry on a recognizable democracy.
Lastly, how could they miss the significance of a violent incident that happened at one of the casino man’s campaign rallies? A young African-American man was protesting with signs and was in the process of being ‘escorted out’ when a 74 year old punched him directly in the face. The punch the old man threw was caught on camera, so it could not be construed as any sort of defense. Afterward, the casino man was asked about this, and the casino man actually said he might offer to pay the assailant’s legal bills if he were sued for the assault. Incredibly, the man is running for a political office which has as its most pithily expressed job description enforce the law, and he offers for an unarguable assailant to get his help in skirting it! Did Americans not see what that meant? Incredibly, did they not see it? For the benefit of my “younger” readers, I will fully explain here what it meant. That offer to (possibly) financially assist the assailant meant that the casino man had no remotely objective sense of morality. Anything that assaults, kills, maims, rapes, injures, or otherwise harms, but does it for his cause is judged good and creditable. No misdeed is understood or treated by the poltroon as as such when it is a genuine supporter who is guilty of its commission. The kind of individual that arranges his moral universe that way is indistinguishable from the mobster who has no morality at all!
I have for many months wondered how far this craven, consternating immorality extended. I have pondered how it is possible for a person that so many claimants to citizenship and patriotism admire and think highly of can really be so sociopathic in personality. How far does the profligacy go?
There is this twenty-first century problem with a Russian government and Russian psychology that seems exceedingly corrupt and dissolute in Western eyes. Just a few years ago, details of the Russian Olympic team doping scandal were made public. The entire team was required to participate. It is impossible to conceive that such a deceitful enterprise could have been undertaken without the knowledge of President Putin, just as it is inconceivable that the annexation of Crimea was done without his knowledge. Additionally, journalists and human rights investigators in Russia have been murdered in recent years. Is Russia a criminal country? Experts on modern Russia have estimated that at least 40% of the Russian economy is dirty; that is, forty percent is being operated in ways that are not consistent with modern standards of transparency and accountability. There are many unarguably true (and detailed and verifiable) episodes of government corruption in its dealings with capitalist enterprises (the Russian government sometimes grabs what it can conveniently take, passing some “law” that enables the taking). And, on Friday, July 13th, three days before the American president’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki, twelve Russians were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for illegally trying to interfere with the American political election of 2016. Why does the American president not see the Russian government the way so many millions of American conservatives and Republicans have seen them – as sly, deceitful instigators, as back-alley double-dealers, as atheists of the highest order and definitional oblivious attitude (believing with utmost certitude that all misdeeds are not seen by anything mysterious or conceptual that somehow sees, and judges) and people who believe that cheating is commonplace everywhere and only an idiot does not cheat on the assumption that others are to be trusted? It is likely that most Republicans rationalize all these “shortcomings”. Maybe he just didn’t know something. Maybe he is “just saying things, but not really believing them.” And maybe he is just so very clever and talented that the rest of us can’t keep up with his “genius”. When an informed, discerning mind is put to the task of determining why the American president has so much difficulty viewing the Russian government as a genuine enemy of the United States, that same mind cannot avoid factoring in the “unusual” psychology of the American president and the great likelihood that he (the American president) is exceedingly concerned that to the same extent that the Russian meddling in the 2016 American election was real and widespread (the most informed analysts estimated that as many as 69 million Americans were exposed to deliberately false “news” stories planted as integrals of the Russian scheme) his own election victory is invalid.
But that same casino guy with no recognizable morality, the guy who sees anyone who supports and helps and compliments him as good and right in all things, was the same guy who stood next to President Putin (a known supporter) and denied that Putin’s government was involved in actively sabotaging the American election of 2016. Is this really a person of such freakishly absent morality that he would find it impossible to say anything critical about such a strong supporter? TV news reporters and pundits Monday night went on and on with all sorts of speculations between the shaking of their heads in incredulity. And a few saw what I saw: that this possibly was the American president in reality, in that famous moment of infamy, overstating his firmness in private one-on-one conversation with his Russian counterpart. Overstating? Yup. It is possible that this is true.
Tuesday, July 17th, 2018 had the news media reporting that the president had chosen to “clarify” the remarks of the day previous. In an action too weird and incredible to even be remotely plausible, this president said that in the middle of his response to a reporter’s question, he’d said the word “would” where he meant to say “wouldn’t”. That might have achieved some remote credibility if that comment were that “would” remark origininally made (the previous day) not in a context of many sentences, but alone by itself. Maybe then the negative form of a particular word would reverse the whole meaning. But the “would” came in the middle of many sentences, which together jibed precisely with the “would” statement: referring to vast American-intelligence-gathered evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election by saying, “I don’t see why they [the Russians] would.”
But the (mendacious) reversing of a word cannot undo the whole. It did not, and it could not. And it is such a thing that bewilders the viewer fluent in the English language and its uses. What fantastical faith in the lie is there evidenced when it is not even approached in such a way as to come near to anything sensible! And what does the obvious and continuing faith in lying tell of the character of that thing that occupies the office of the American presidency?
It was not a single snake or spider that installed the American president, but over sixty millions of vertical-standing anthropoids. Democracy was never sacrosanct, and it was never perfect. Now it is gone. The absurdity, embarrassment, and scandal of July 16 did not really originate that day. Political eventualities have their causal antecedents; the mendacity, poltroon indecency and idiocy were elevated to the presidency by sixty millions. And those sixty millions cannot admit to something so vulgar in their own personality as to not object to a depraved idiot attaining to the presidency.
The full meaning of this American president’s election of 2016 must be appreciated. It cannot be dismissed by pointing to misfortunes, singular or several: the function of the Electoral College overturning an overwhelming popular vote, Russian interference in the election, the Democratic Party nominating a tainted candidate, low total voter turnout, a disgruntled Rust Belt, a “whitelash”. These cannot suffice to excuse the disaster because ordinary self-respect and simple intelligence would have and should have yielded the casino builder only two millions of lunatic fringe votes at most. Such was the unusualness and incompetence of the political dilettante.
Some of the TV pundits Monday night closed their remarks by asking and then answering their own question: What can be made of the political mess of Helsinki? And they answered with a kind of “Nobody knows.”
We know some things. The chances of America being made “great again” by incompetence, lying, deception, freakish naiveté, and ignorance is as likely as a billionaire businessman who dodged serving in Vietnam five times and has no direct experience with want or disadvantage and is in the habit of discounting decency, heroism, virtue and human rights gaining to the presidency as a champion of the people and then delivering on that “common man” identification and commitment. How could Americans elect somebody who both admitted he had done virtually no studying of history and military matters and also claimed that he knew more about how to handle strategy than “all the generals?” That remark alone should have cut the number of his radical supporters into a tenth!
Snakes will do what snakes are known to do. It cannot be otherwise. But truth will attest that the last remnants of whatever remained of supposed American greatness was lost not on July 16th of 2018 – however memorable that date may be. Those last remnants were swept away in early November of 2016! And they were swept away by sixty million advocates of greatness, patriots with zealous love for zuh fazuhland.
Forget greatness. For Americans, there is no attaining anything but elemental self-respect now. And that will take decades and lots of practice at forgetting.
And so much for that imperative of lasting democracy (education!) when our foremost task is forgetting.
Pardon me, reader, but I must now, with my own good health aforethought, get diligently back to not watching the news.