“Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time.” ~Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding, the Shawshank Redemption.
I've been going to write this follow-up to my previous post for awhile now.
But repeatedly, in the last week, things happened to push that deadline back.
First there was the Tariff thing...then the Mueller investigation closing in again...Republicans stalling or watering down anti-child-marriage laws in different states...Richard Spencer's Michigan State appearance...then the Sam Nunberg thing...then the Stormy Daniels thing...and another shooting. Each one of these things could, itself, probably be a blog post of its own.
But, again, my mind goes back to the reason for all this crap. Again, it all comes down to fear.
Take, for example, Tariffs...something that a lot of the business community, a lot of Republicans and even some of Trump's own advisers are very against. While (at least in my lifetime, and that of most of the people who raised me) basically every American President has understood that the United States of America is a nation not defined by the land and its people and founded in antiquity, but instead a modern nation...indeed, the first and for many the ideal of such...both defined by and founded on ideals...ideals we often don't live up to but that we almost always aspire to.
I say almost because, of course, Trump.
Trump has shown that he has a very primitive thought process, I'm not sure if he was always that way or if this is just a result of age and cognitive decline...but it seems pretty evident now. In any case, Trump's conception of America seems to be very much based on some kind of "Blood and Soil" ideal, as if Americans were like the French or the Germans or the Iraqis or the Japanese...an ethnicity defined in many ways by the patch of dirt that they're originally from, rather than an ideal that drew all those people to come here and sign on to it.
That's not how this works, not even close.
People like Trump and his supporters fear and hate the rest of the world.
But even more, they fear you and me, Americans of any color, creed, political philosophy or race who think differently...they fear us because deep down they know there's more of us and we're right.
Ideals are hard, Living up to ideals is hard. Rule of Law is difficult, in that the Law then constrains everybody, not just the people you don't like. So yeah, slogans on hats, cheering crowds and bloodthirsty mobs...that's easy. Crapping all over everything is even easier.
"Conservatism" in the era of Trump isn't conservatism, it's simply Nihilism driven by fear and hate.
In any case, Trump has convinced himself that, rather than being the fulcrum of the current global economy and society...somehow America eats last at the table of nations in his mind, instead of being the super-power that we are. Somehow all those other countries are getting one over on us or something something gazpacho. Trump clearly doesn't understand how NATO, the United Nations, and various international treaties even work.
So fear, and ignorance, combined with incompetence and utter lack of curiosity. The current Republican program could be summed up like this:
I don't want to do anything, and I don't want you to do anything either, and God forbid that anybody else come here and want to do anything.
I don't know, and neither do you...and I don't want you to be able to look stuff up or learn anything so that you do know something because then you might contradict what I want to do.
See, if you don't know anything, then you can believe whatever you want.
And yes, it really is all about Me.
...Ironically, people then wonder why these motherfuckers are a bunch of incompetent, money-grubbing shits who can't get much of anything done and who've formed the most scandal-plagued administration in living memory.
But, of course, These Fucking People put up with it...just like they put up with Congressional corruption, because of cynicism, greed, racism or simply the idea (however half-baked it is) that they'll somehow get something out of it...and because of fear. Fear of change, fear of difference, fear of the Other, you name it and chances are there's a right-winger somewhere out there who is afraid of it.
That's all they've got, really. That's who these people are. They don't have the courage to lead...nor even to take the most basic responsibility for their shitty beliefs. Never mind that if they chose to lead...they would probably find at least some other people who agree with them. It's like I said about Trump, if he'd made a half-ass effort towards even a George W. Bush level of competence and at least gave the appearance of caring what people outside of his core voter base thought...he'd probably be able to hold off the inevitable until at least the second half of his second term, maybe even his last year with some intelligent damage control. With even a small amount of effort and a semi-competent team, Trump could've been regarded as a good President whether he deserved such a title or not.
Kind of like Bush, nowadays, in retrospect.
Of course even Republicans (like myself at the time) who were paying attention saw the problems that were going on well before that, but not very many people listen to people like me.
A lot of people saw the problem with Trump years before he was even elected.
But these people, the older ones of whom idolize the 1950's because they were kids then and life was easier and they didn't have to be afraid or think about much...they see Trump as some kind of ideal, because he's old, rich, and white and true to their Calvinistic beliefs (and many of these people don't actually know anything about those beliefs or even realize they have them) they think Trump is righteous because he's rich and all those Other people must somehow be lying...or something.
I saw something the other night, that said that many Evangelicals are confident that Trump will bring about the End Times. Wouldn't that make Trump the Anti-Christ?
It says in the Bible that no man knows the day or the hour of the coming of Jesus Christ. To believe that your generation (and the Baby Boomers were, so far as I know, the first generation to believe this) will be that "Last Generation" is the height of hubris.
The Truth is...that these people would rather blow up the world than share it with all the people that they don't like...which is pretty much everybody including themselves.
See, this kind of thinking is a trap.
We're effectively talking about people who'd rather implicitly support grown-ass adult men fucking 13-year old girls (because let's face it, who else would want to marry a child besides a pedophile) than risk losing a single vote in Congress or the States. They obviously learned not a damned thing from Roy Moore getting his ass handed to him in Alabama.
We're talking about people who'd rather have Americans slaughtering each other in the streets by gun violence than face up to their own bullshit on that particular subject...and again, I say that as a gun owner.
We're talking about people who'd rather sell this country out to the Russians...who'd rather lose their own country...than lose whatever little bit of control or power or status that they think they individually have or are entitled to. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
These people would rather burn down civilization, democracy, education and our various national institutions one by one because (as they see it) all those things are against them.
These people would rather shoot down their neighbors...even, in many cases, the conservative ones...than live with the rest of us.
It never occurs to them that there's more of the rest of us than there are of them and that we have plenty of guns too.
In point of fact, there's such a failure of imagination going on here that a lot of these people think that everybody else is just as cynical and fucked in the head as they are.
That's where they come up with terms like "Virtue signaling." It never crosses their minds to think that somebody else might actually, legitimately believe something.
You know, sometimes when everybody has a problem with you...it's you that's the problem, not everybody else. Just sayin.'
Hell, these damn fools seem perfectly willing to light themselves on fire for Donald Trump, of all fucking people. But then, these are people who call being decent to other human beings "Crazy" and who call tax cuts for people who already have too much money good government policy.
Do you know what happened in the 1950's which is the last time the United States of America allowed itself to go down the rabbit hole of all this right-wing stupidity? (Also, be aware that in a number of cases the mentors or parents of current Republicans were front and center leading that crap.)
In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite, leading to the Space Race, a major part of the greater Cold War.
We literally spend the next decade catching up, because we had allowed ourselves to be gulled and taken our eye off the ball due to fear. Because of that, we had to face down a major national threat and rediscover the guts, grit and intelligence that we'd let ourselves get sidetracked from.
That is the cost of fear.
Think about that, take all the time that you need.
But there is another way...
We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. ~John F. Kennedy.
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