Tag Archives: Donald Trump

In Cheeto We Trust

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Politics, Uncategorized

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Whenever I’m tempted to simply accept the seemingly innocuous gestures of civil religion here in America, someone or something comes along and reminds me that it simply isn’t safe to do so, that the boundary between church and state is worth defending, and that the potential for compromise on this issue is a well-poisoned well.

Case in point?

This bit of Cheeto-driven drivel, right here!

CheetoBreakfastPrayers

This pathetic tweet is an artifact of the National Prayer Breakfast. It’s an occasion when the President bows to the authority of political Christians, and vouchasafes their victories in the early days of the cold war. Whatever else this event is, it’s a good reminder that the cold war was always about internal politics as much as confrontation with external enemies. It’s also proof that little has changed under the sun (except perhaps the ratio of black carbon in the atmosphere, which is of course a heresy to the breakfasting prayer-mongers Trump spoke with today). Seriously, this event is the legacy of people who wanted Jesus to roll back the institutions of the New Deal, people who wanted to take away the social safety net and leave us all with nothing but Jesus and our own boot straps to help us in times of need. “In God we trust?” The subtext of that message is that government isn’t going to help you all.

That was always the point.

…which is why this message may be particularly relevant coming from an administration Hell-bent on tearing up every government agency that Americans rely on to keep us safe and prosperous. When the Manchurian Cheeto is done, we may well have nothing more than Jesus to keep poisons out of our water supply, remove the Russians from our computers, and hold the crooks at bay in the multinational cartels we now call banks. Jesus is already what the Republicans had offer the people of Flint and Puerto Rico. It’s what they offered to Southern Californians as a good chunk of the state burned down. It’s all we’ll be left with when the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast see Donald Trump deliver up the national disaster they’ve been praying for all these decades.

For all their flag-waving and Bible-thumping, those behind the National Prayer Breakfast are neither patriots nor Christians, and they certainly aren’t conservative in any meaningful sense of the word. What they want for this country is a disaster, and Donald Trump is delivering that disaster. He is the answer to their prayers.

The hypocrisy orgy known as the National Prayer Breakfast gives us a lot to gripe about. Donald Trump was fully immersed in the spirit of the occasion. He shared a good number of thoughts about the importance of faith in America, and in the American people. All utter crap of course, but he shared it all just the same.

For purposes of brevity, let’s just stick with the tweet, that portion of the wretched breakfast he chose to put into the only literary form the man and his fan base truly appreciate. He makes three points in this tweet, each of which is supposed to tell us something about the importance of God to the United States of America. Each of these points is damned misleading, which I suppose is a step up from the outright falsehoods we normally fall from this fountain of false facts, fake news, and utter foolishness. Still, a moment on each point will go a long way towards illustrating why Donald Trump is wrong about the role of God in America, and why the political Christians who eat this message up are wrong as well.

The first thing to notice is what is not mentioned in this vapid tweet, and that is the U.S. Constitution. It is the U.S. Constitution, and religion clauses of the First Amendment, that make the role of religion in our government such a hotly debated topic. One of the most fascinating things about those who want us to think of America as a Christian nation is just how hard they work to leave the Constitution out of the discussion. That document doesn’t help them, so they have to work around it. They have just one problem. Simply failing to mention the U.S. Constitution is too obvious. It sets up a great big red flag and invites those of us on the secular end too many obvious entry points to push our own point of view. They can’t just not say anything. That won’t work. So, they typically do what Trump does here. They cite the Declaration instead.

Like Jesus sent to atone for the sins the humanity, The Declaration of Independence serves to atone for the silence of the Constitution on the subject of God. (Yes, the Constitution mentions God in the date. If that impresses, you then I have an acre of arctic ice-pack to sell you.) The Constitution simply doesn’t say what Evangelical Christians want it to say. It does not invoke God as the authority for creation of the U.S. Government. (It locates that authority in the people.) It doesn’t say that you have to be Christian to hold office. (In fact, it expressly forbids such a standard.) And of course it contains a clause holding religion at bay right there alongside the right to practice religion. We can debate the proper interpretation of the establishment clause, but its mere existence is an annoyance to those who would clearly rather live in a theocracy. You can read the Constitution all day, but it won’t give you the license to tie Jesus to our politics that Evangelical Christians want out of the document. So, they typically talk about the Declaration of Independence instead.

Just like the Cheeto-in-Chief did today.

Of course those pushing the America-as-a-Christian-nation theme typically misread the Declaration itself, often confusing this reference to a Creator (written by a man widely regarded as a Deist) with a direct reference to Jesus himself and nearly always confusing this piece of propaganda with a clear plan of government. They ignore the clear parallels to logic of Hobbesian thought and other connections to Enlightenment philosophy in order to cast the language of the Declaration in terms closer to those of scripture. Most importantly, they reverse the point of the argument. Jefferson wasn’t using rights to prove the existence of a creator. He was using a reference to the Creator to explain the existence of rights, and no, there is nothing in the relevant passage of the Declaration that suggests the rights will cease to exist if we take the Creator out of the picture. All of this is lost on those consuming messages like that Trump delivered today at the National Prayer Breakfast. When they reference the Declaration, they see it as an argument for belief in God (which they assume means Jesus), but they are dead wrong in more ways than they could possibly count.

Simply put, the Declaration doesn’t mean what Donald Trump pretends it means. Neither does it mean what the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast want it to mean.

I doubt there is much in the Bible that means what they want it to mean either.

Or the Constitution that matter.

The whole shell game is crap!  People ought to stop talking about the Declaration when they mean to address questions about the Constitution, and they ought to stop reading either one as though it was the script for the youth pastor in a particularly uneducated part of the country. Most of us are smarter than that, but that doesn’t stop some people from recycling the same old garbage, which is what Trump did today. The whole con has been painfully obvious for decades. That should be as obvious to Christians as it is to the rest of us.

But not to the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast!

As to ‘In God We Trust’? That motto was adopted by the nation in 1956. It was part of the same movement that led to things like the National Prayer Breakfast, which makes it an interesting point for Trump to make. In doing so, he is simultaneously invoking a principle many assume to be a timeless part of American history and also giving a nod to the faithful who know the history of the prayer breakfast, people who understand the aggressiveness of their own political agenda, people who understand how divisive that phrase was always meant to be. It may sound like a nice an unifying message, if that is, you don’t give a damn about those who don’t trust god after all. In effect, the motto says of the rest of us that we aren’t really part of America. We don’t really count.

That is of course precisely the point. Always was.

“One nation, under God?”

Same story. This too was also added in those days shortly after Ike had been reluctantly cajoled into making public professions of faith in the official service of the nation. It too has always served as a clear reminder to the rest of us that we do not really belong. One nation under God? If you don’t believe in God, that little utterance, that bit of prayer stuck into the middle of an oath, gives the lie to the whole charade, it drops you right out of the narrative in the very moment the thoughtless celebrate unity at your expense.

Again, that is the point of the ritual.

So, there we have it, one twisted effort to dodge the Constitution on the subject of church and state, and two tokens of divisiveness wrapped in a cloak of unity. Whether he means it or not, whether Donald Trump is capable of ‘meaning’ anything in the conventional sense of the word, this is the message he offered America’s political Christians today. He endorsed their most aggressive agenda and made a point to isolate their enemies. Small wonder that these folks love him despite his obvious insincerity. Today Donald Trump offered the religious right the power to which they feel entitled, and he did it in precisely the same deceitful tones they have always known and loved. That’s our President; completely without substance, and utterly disingenuous.

The religious right wouldn’t have him any other way!

Beatriz Spoilers for Supper

27 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in Movies, Politics

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Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a selfless healer barely making ends meet. When her vehicle breaks down at the home of a wealthy client, Kathy (Connie Britton), she is invited to stay the evening. Kathy and her husband, Grant (David Warshofsky), are holding a dinner party with several rich associates. One of the guests, Douglas Strutt (John Lithgow) turns out to be as insensitive as he is wealthy, which is to say a lot. The plot thickens when Beatriz begins to suspect Strutt may have been the developer who wrecked her home town back in Mexico, thus scattering her family and ultimately triggering her own immigration into the United States. Is she right about Strutt? And if so, what will she do about it?

…especially after she’s had another glass of wine?

I’m supposed to like Beatriz at Dinner. This film has liberal politics written all over it. It expresses views much like my own, and it raises concerns I take very seriously. So, why don’ I Like it?

First and foremost, I don’t like being pandered to. Beatriz might be good politics (which is debatable), but it’s terrible story-telling. The film contains one and only one sympathetic character, Beatriz. The rest of the central characters in this film are there to be despised. Virtually every line they utter is offered, not to help us understand their point of view, but to give us another reason to hate them. Even Kathy’s kind invitation is riddled with hypocrisy. It is less an expression of generosity or friendship than a kind of pretense, one soon blown apart by events unfolding over the course of the evening. Her feigned friendship notwithstanding, Kathy isn’t really prepared to treat Beatriz as an equal, a fact driven home time and again during the film. The other characters never even come that far. They are simply aweful, from beginning to end.

It’s not just that the characters in this film are one dimensional. The entire story is one-dimensional, showing us only enough of the rich white characters to know that they are contemptible. I don’t need to think of capitalists as terrible people to oppose their impact on the global economy. My concerns over the issue do not depend on moral caricatures, and I’m not at all interested in promoting such caricatures, not even in the furtherance of a liberal agenda.

It’s not that I find anything implausible in the notion that an immigrant woman struggling to pay her own bills could be more thoughtful and interesting than a group of rich white people. I just don’t need to be reminded that that is how I am supposed to feel about these characters with virtually every line of the film. Good characters have depth, even those we might regard as villains. They surprise us. They present us with novel thoughts and feelings. This just doesn’t happen at the dinner Beatriz attends. She is decent, perhaps even a little odd at times. The rest are uniformly terrible people, a fact driven home with virtually everything they do.

It would have been nice if Lithgow’s character actually had an insight or two, perhaps even a trace of moral character however flawed it might have been. Instead, he is relentlessly crass, unfeeling, and utterly incapable of compassion. I want to think of this character as over-the-top and completely unrealistic. But of course, the current President of the United States appears to have been written with same pen. So, I guess we can’t dismiss him as completely unrealistic.

Likely, the comparison with Trump is the real point of Lithgow’s character, but if he is Trump, then this is why the movie fails. It fails because its villain isn’t really at all interesting. Just like Trump, Strutt isn’t impressive in any way. He doesn’t have any style. He’s just an ass with more power than he deserves or really knows what to do with. Such people may exist in real life (and apparently they do), but they don’t make particularly good stories. Whether Strutt is an straw man or an accurate portrayal of mindset we can encounter in real life, he is a consistent disappointment. We engage him through Beatriz only to find that there is nothing to him, that there is no there there in his personality. The man has power and wealth and little else to say for himself or his life choices. He’s a bit like the weather, something to be survived, not reasoned with.

But can one survive Strutt? If a men with that kind of power cannot be reasoned with, then how are we to survive them? This I think is the question trying to make its way through the film to its audience. It is an interesting question. Suffice to say that I am not impressed with the film’s own answer to this question.

Strutt poses a threat to humanity itself, at least in the abstract, and more immediately to Beatriz. It isn’t just that his development projects wreck communities and threaten endangered species. Rather, he represents the worst in modern capitalism, complete with all its current threats to the environment and life as we know it. This is clearly how Beatriz sees him. Strutt himself seems aware enough that his actions create hardship for others, but he also regards the decline of life on this planet as a natural process, one which will occur with or without him. Everything is dying, or so he tells Beatriz. There is nothing to be done about it, so one ought to enjoy himself so long as he can. This, he suggests, is precisely what Beatriz herself should do. With that, Strutt reveals the depths of his own depravity and the conflict between Strutt and Beatriz comes to symbolize a conflict between nihilism and the value of life itself.

It’s in this last twist that Beatriz at Dinner nearly becomes interesting. It is established early on that she has a tremendous sense of empathy. She can feel others’ pain. So Strutt’s complete disregard for every living thing thus poses a kind of existential threat to her. She can feel the harm he causes in others, and if there is nothing she can do about it, then what use are her own efforts? She cannot accept Strutt’s crass hedonism as a way of life, but if he and others like him are setting the course of history, then her own values demand a confrontation.

To heal the world, must Beatriz not defeat people like Strutt, and if he (and others like him) cannot be persuaded, is there any alternative but violence? To fall short of that, as the film seems to suggest, is to accept the end of life as we know it. It is to give up on life itself. At least that seems to be the conclusion Beatriz draws from her encounter with Strutt.

Thus we are left with an ending every bit as dismal as the central villain of the film.

 

 

Climate Change and Cthulhu

27 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Politics

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What could be more evil than working to end all life as we know it? It’s a tough question for me, because I’m not in the habit of using the term ‘evil’ in direct reference to anything that happens in the real world. Mostly, I think of that reluctance as healthy restraint, but perhaps restraint isn’t always that healthy after all. Skepticism sometimes acts as the hand servant to kind of inertia. No need to think or do anything drastic. Let’s wait for the evidence! You can keep saying that until it’s too late. All of which brings me back to the notion of evil, because normal human cognitive bias is one thing and a focused political agenda is quite another. Uncertainty is one thing. When such an agenda imperils life as we know it, it would be a mistake to think of that as just another opinion. It would be a mistake to think of it as anything less than a threat, or to think of that threat in moderate terms.

Don’t get me wrong. Global warming is not the fault of denialists. We in the industrialized world are all contributing to global warming, but some folks are working damned hard to make sure we keep right on doing it, to keep questions about global warming and an effective response off the table, and toprevent all of us from addressing our collective responsibility as we ought to.

We are not supposed to demonize folks we disagree with, right? But there are times when the actual context of real world events finds its parallels in mythology and fiction. I can’t help thinking the issue of global warming has presented us one of those times.

Global warming sounds a lot like the Great Old One sleeping deep in the South Pacific. It’s hard to believe that such a threat could exist, hard to grasp the full significance of the prospect. It’s much more easy to dismiss it as yet another myth, a false god worshiped by fools and primitive peoples. If taken seriously, on the other hand, the thought is maddening. Like Cthulhu waiting in the deep, global warming threatens to devour everything we do and everything we care about. How does one grasp that and then go on about his life? How do you build a bridge knowing it will one day rest unused under a harsh sun? How do you write a book, conscious of the day there will be no-one left to read it? How does anyone look at a child knowing what’s coming without feeling a terrible urge to tears?

What to do about this threat? That’s a damned hard question. For myself, I couldn’t count the number of changes that must happen to combat the coming terror. I couldn’t even count the number of plastics in the room around me, starting with the computer keys I am tapping away at to write this blog post. I certainly couldn’t imagine my travels or my place of residence in the wake of the changes necessary to halt global warming. How would I eat? How would food find its way to me, let alone the millions living in the cities? It’s all way too much. The change is simply not possible!

If the world as we know it must change immediately (more like yesterday) in order to save the world as we know it… well that is a maddening thought indeed! It’s more than a little like saying the end of the world is a virtual certainty.

…and Cthulhu lies waiting beneath the waves.

As maddening as the prospect of doing something about climate change is for me, I think it must be all that much more difficult for those whose world view is entirely defined by the free market. Global warming is not merely a challenge to our future. It is a challenge to our present and repudiation of our past. Global warming refutes the cost/benefit analysis of every single transaction carried out since the fossil fuel revolution. (They all have externalities not yet settled.) It denies the value of progress. It turns the angels of manifest destiny into the harbingers of doom, a prospect once real only to those unfortunate enough to stand in the way of that destiny. Global warming changes everything. It transforms the meaning if history even as it demands a new social order. If we are to ever have a future, that future will not be reckoned as we have reckoned the past. For those deeply committed to a world as a function of supply and demand, it is not merely a daunting call for change; it’s a claim that their own world is an illusion. Faced with such a prospect, I can well understand why some people might think it better to deny the whole thing.

…but toward what end?

If Cthulhu is really sleeping there in the ocean, it won’t help much to pretend he is merely plankton. So what is the end game for climate change denial? You cannot build a better world on the present world order. You cannot even maintain this one. That is the terrible prospect which confronts us all. So, what will actually be accomplished by the billions of dollars poured into the effort to confound the issue and keep serious discussions of climate change off the table? What is to be gained by dismissing the whole thing as a Chinese conspiracy.

The thought that keeps creeping into my skull is this. We won’t experience climate change as a natural disaster. Hell, we aren’t experiencing it that way now. By ‘we’ I mean those of us in the developed world. Sure there are farmers whose crops no longer grow in certain places, and there are people whose homes are washing away, but these are lives lived on the margins of the modern global order, and for most of humanity these are stories about far away people and places. The narratives taking shape in modern media (even those reflecting a ‘liberal’ view on the subject) will reflect global warming in countless subtle forms. It will take the form of stories about rising prices, changes in consumer behavior, shifts in population, perhaps even a wave of refugees here and there. …and of course there will be political disputes over the consequences of all of this.

This is all broad sketches, I know, but my point is that most of us will experience climate change as social upheaval. There will always be a person or a policy between us and the natural phenomenon driving our new hardships. We will always be able to respond to climate change as though it were this or that bastard making our lives more difficult. We may never get a moment where Cthulhu shows his ugly face. It will always be possible to see his terror in the form of someone acting in a way we probably don’t like, maybe even one we are willing to fight about.

…all of which falls well short of dealing with the real issues.

So again, what is the end-game for denialists? I’m not talking about the every day Joe or Jane who isn’t convinced. I am talking about those financing the maze of think tanks and professional pundits, those who long ago transformed climate change from a scientific question to a partizan politics. I am talking about a President who won’t say whether or not he believes in global warming but tells us by his very actions that he does not. For these people, I suspect the payoff is very much what they get out of all their other political activities; it’s a chance to maintain their own status at the top of the current social order. In the context of climate change, this can mean little more than a chance to keep their privilege as long as possible while the rest of society unravels. There is no riding this disaster out of course, but the progeny of the wealthy may well feel its results long after others have died of it.

I keep writing this as though I am talking about future events, but of course the process has already begun. It will get worse, to be sure, hence the relevance of the future tense. But some are already feeling the effects even as others pretend there is no new disaster under the sun. In any event, I can’t help thinking the real benefit to the financiers of climate change denial will be little other than the hope that their children will be among the last to suffer the full effects of climate change.

This too is a Lovecraftian theme.

In effect, the financiers of climate change denial are hoping Cthulhu will eat them last.

GVXZTFi8

 

(P.S. Thanks to Milady DeBennet for producing the meme for me.)

Kathy Griffin and the Meta-hypocrisy Shuffle

09 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Politics

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170530144046-kathy-griffin-tyler-shields-exlarge-169

Nope! Not reproducing the actual image.

Just when you thought the whole damned controversy was in your rear-view mirror, along comes some damned blogger to put all the ick right back on the table. Well suck it up, dear reader, cause I got a bloggitation to bloggitize over this.

…okay, please?

We all know the story, right? A little while back, the comedian, Kathy Griffin, posted a picture  of herself holding up the severed head of Donald Trump. Don’t worry, it was fake. Donald survived the whole ordeal, but suffice to say, it was a rather controversial image. Naturally, a great deal of outrage was soon to follow. I have no doubt that a good number of those complaining about her stunt were simply using it as grist for the mill. I also have no doubt that a number of her critics were genuinely appalled by Griffin’s stunt. Which critics fit into which category is another question, and not a very interesting one at that.

What I find especially interesting about this story is the role hypocrisy as a theme in this particular kerfuffle. It’s hardly surprising to see that theme pop up here. Really, it’s just the sort of story that begs for accusations of hypocrisy, and those accusations soon made an appearance. Various parties on the right wing accused ‘lefties’ or ‘liberals’ of hypocrisy for making such a big deal of violence and violent rhetoric on the part of the Trump campaign when we produce violent rhetoric such as that of Griffin. Those of us on the left (myself among them) complained that the right makes hay out of Griffin’s image while condoning the actual violence of people like Montana’s Greg Gianforte or for that matter supporting Donald Trump’s flirtations with mob violence. Of course each side is fully capable of responding to accusations of support for violence (whether tacit or overt) by pointing at still more support for violence on the other side.

…and the internet becomes an angry infinity mirror.

So, what’s interesting about that? It’s the role that accusations of hypocrisy can play in facilitating, …well, hypocrisy. Think of it this way: You see somebody do something outrageous (and by outrageous, I mean something likely to rouse disapproval in the public sphere), and you want to criticize them for it. The problem is, you’ve done something like that yourself in the past, or at least you’ve supported other people who did. This creates a problem in that your own condemnation is likely to come across as an inconsistency. One potential solution to that is to conjure the image of critics who have condemned this behavior before and castigate them for supporting the behavior now. That way, you don’t have to actually put your own cards on the table. You don’t have to actually say that you are now condemning the behavior your once supported. Instead, you just say; “look at the guy who is now supporting behavior he once condemned!”  If you do this right, you can effectively play both sides of the game without anyone noticing. All they see is that you are commenting on someone else who is playing both sides of the field. It’s an exercise in projection of course, and a remarkably effective one at that.  It’s what I like to call the meta-hypocrisy shuffle.

I should add that it isn’t really necessary to point out any actual instances of hypocrisy on the part of any particular person to make this stratagem work. It is often enough to talk about ‘liberals’ or ‘conservatives’ (or any other group) and simply tell the story of how the other side is full of hypocrites. The ploy can be just as effective in this abstract form as it can be with real life examples. Plus, it avoids the inconvenience of having to address the details of anyone’s actual behavior, much less to deal with their own response to your criticism.

So, what am I saying here? I am saying that a lot of people on the right used Kathy Griffin to field an argument about liberal hypocrisy all the while hiding their own hypocrisy on the very same subject. That’s the argument I want to make anyway, but reflexivity being what it is, I must also concede that a lot of liberals did the same. What I don’t have to concede is that all parties involved in the controversy are equally guilty of this vice. Quite a few people on the left really did condemn Griffin’s behavior, and I certainly have known a number of Republicans who have condemned Donald Trump’s more violent rhetoric. (I’d say that’s one of the differences between a ‘conservative’ and a ‘deplorable’.) Griffin did in the end, lose at least one gig (actually several, it seems) over the whole matter. I could only wish the same was true of Donald Trump. Be that as it may, the point is that this trick (and the criticism I make of it) can indeed cut both ways, but that possibility does not mean the cut is equally warranted.

I don’t know how productive a debate would be over which political groups are more consistent on this (or any other) issue, but I do think some individuals at least have managed to show some consistency on the issue. Sadly, they are often tarred with the same hypocritical brush as their flip-flopping allies have been. Again, the story of hypocrisy alone is often sufficient to make the argument stick, sufficient even to the degree that those who are rigorously consistent on an issue may well be accused of hypocrisy by someone who is himself or herself simply doing the meta-hypocrisy shuffle.

It’s worth bearing in mind here that there is at least one angle on such issues that the whole question of hypocrisy doesn’t seem to address, and by this I mean the integrity of a committed partisan. You could take a relentless commitment to one side of a debate as a kind of integrity in itself. You could see the willingness to field arguments in direct contradiction to one’s own personal record as an instance of taking one for the team. Perhaps it is even a kind of courage. If so, that’s a courage I hope never to have, but so be it, the ethic is out there. Some clearly ascribe to it. Most of us, I think, prefer to field arguments that we find personally plausible, and most of us at least try to accomplish some level of consistency in our moral judgements.

Some try harder than others.

One thing worth considering here is the medium that delivers this message. In person, I suspect we are more likely to forgive each other’s inconsistencies, if for no other reason than because we are likely to see them coming from people whose shifting patterns parallel our own. If I contradict myself in the process of complaining verbally about some damned Republican, odds are rather likely that I am talking to somebody who is just as pissed about that damned Republican as I am. Confirmation bias being what it is, they are just as likely to grab the nearest rhetorical hammer, and just as likely to think it oughtta be used to smash him as I am. Likewise, a Republican jabbering on about a liberal is likely to be doing so in the company of other Republicans who also think rathe rpoorly of the bastard. It could be, that I’m missing something here, but I tend to think verbal exchanges make it a bit easier to skate by on this issue, to shift around one’s values without anyone noticing, and more particularly to avoid becoming the target of someone who seeks to hide his own inconsistencies in a story about ours.

Not so, the net.

All sorts of different people read controversial statements on social media, and that includes the guy who likes to complain about your kinda people even as you’re trying to vent spleen about his kind. In some places, like Facebook, I think, folks may make an effort to set aside their grievances and remember that the guy who just posted the outrageous meme will be sitting across from them at Christmas dinner. In other places, like Twitter, each and every comment expressing a different point of view seems to be fair game. What’s worse, the 140 character limit on tweets thins out the context of any statement a great deal, so it’s tough to tell how people generally approach these things. If someone criticizes Kathy Griffin (or doesn’t) only those who follow him carefully will notice whether or not that criticism squares with his general approach to the issues. The temptation is of course to assume the worst, not for the least of reasons being that the worst often seems to be driving the public debate on such media platforms. So, if a given Twitter-Republican really is just as hard on right wingers who make use of violent rhetoric, few of his more liberal readers will ever know. Likewise, a Twitter-Democrat who doesn’t support images like those produced by Kathy Griffin is as easily accused of liberal hypocrisy as any of those who simply laughed and retweeted her without the slightest thought about the matter.

The way Twitter (among others) thins out the context of political rhetoric facilitates a degree of hypocrisy. That same thinness also makes it easier to substitute general stories about this side or that side of a given debate for genuine comments on actual behavior, stories which fill in the details of people’s political orientation without checking those details against their personal history. This I think, makes the meta-hypocrisy shuffle just a little bit easier. You can always pretend the other side flipped first.

…and that makes it a little easier to flip yourself.

What Donald Trump Can Teach Us About Political Correctness

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Politics

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I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard the phrase “political correctness” used approvingly and without irony. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve heard it used derisively. I regard it as one of the central ironies of modern politics that it hasn’t been politically correct to be politically correct since the notion first became a household term. This hasn’t stopped people from proudly proclaiming (often to great applause) the brave mantle of ‘Political Incorrectness’. Indeed, countless courageous souls have made sure we all know how little regard they have for political correctness. The near universal disregard for political correctness, as such doesn’t seem to faze its detractors. It pretty well goes without saying that if the subject is political correctness, the correct thing to say is that you’re against it. Do that, and you earn all kinds of points for being a independent minded maverick of sorts.

Just like all other independent mavericky people.

In fact, that story-line is so damned pat, you’d think even the dimmest among us would have second thoughts about it, but I guess not. The narrative is just too damned strong, and the benefits to plotting your politics inside it too great to resist. So, it pretty well goes without saying that anyone worth his salt would proclaim himself to be politically incorrect.

It’s the American thing to do!

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve heard the stories too, the PC-horror stories, I mean. Some of them piss me off too, and some of them are utter bullshit. It’s a big topic, and I could type out a lot of things about it, but for now I want to explore just one particular part of it.

That would be the part where a Presidential candidate and then a President (Donald Trump) would proudly proclaim his own political incorrectness. Among all the many absurdities that fly under the banner of the politically incorrect, there is at least one that is fairly unique to Donald Trump’s use of it. Because if there was anyone that we might expect to be politically correct, that we might actually want to be politically correct, you would think it would be the President of the United States.

Yes, I’m serious.

I realize that in most circles ‘Political correctness’ simply means whatever lefty political agenda people feel like dismissing at the moment, but if you stop and think about the phrase itself for just a minute, you might see some trace of a meaning that isn’t quite confined to that sort of canned polemic. Indeed, there is no particular reason respect for Christian values, honoring the troops, or celebrating a conventional American family would count as any less politically correct than support for gay marriage, celebration of black history month, or avoidance of any number of racial epithets. In principle, right wing causes could as easily count as political correctness as those of the left, and make no mistake about it; they are as likely to produce the sort of toxic pettiness that fill so many of those PC-horror stories people tell sometime between their second and third beers on a Friday night. We seem only use the word for left-wing causes, but there are numerous comparable cause in right wing circles. And if there is any trace of a positive meaning in that phrase, it’s this; that political correctness can mean thinking about the consequences of what you are about to say before you say it, taking into account the feelings of others and their likely reactions to your words before you decide what to say and do. That same notion may produce all sorts of stories about censorship, professional victimhood, and fake outrage. It also produces countless stories generally left untold, those in which someone finds just the right words, shows respect to people she might easily have slighted, or simply handles a tough topic with grace and dignity. We don’t seem to have a label for such stories. That label could as easily be ‘political correctness’ as any of those now provoking outrage in countless gossip circles all across the land.

To be sure, there are distinctions to be made between respect and dignity on the one hand and the pointless pettiness generally associated with stories of political correctness, but those distinctions don’t really fall along a left-right axis, and the phrase itself has never helped anyone to draw those distinctions with any care. Indeed sneering ‘political correctness’ at an issue is little other than an effort to avoid drawing those distinctions with anything approaching thoughtfulness and precision.

If there are those who have used the phrase with more care than i suggest, our current President is not among them. Think back to the infamous moment in which Megan Kelly (perhaps accidentally) separated herself from the right wing faithful, and you can see the character of Donald’s own use of ‘political correctness’. Asked about his frequent use of abusive words against any women who crossed him, Trump responded by saying that he didn’t have time to be politically correct. Of course that was after first trying to pass off the notion that he only denigrates Rosie O’Donnell, but when forced off that gambit, Trump settled on the notion that his lifetime of vicious personal attacks against myriad women was simply failure to obey the dictates of political correctness. Trump wasn’t asking us to reject some far left political agenda; he was asking the American public to accept his own personal vice on grounds that failure to do so would be an instance of political correctness. He was asking us to accept that the most flagrant contempt for common decency was somehow little other than a rejection of left-wing excess.

Here I must say, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of sorrow, sorrow for the death of conservatism as I once knew it. Oh, I don’t count myself as a conservative, not since I was about 18 years old, but I’ve known many conservatives I have admired and respected over the years. They generally vote Republican and I rarely agree with them on much of anything, but if there is one thing that separates the old school conservatives I recall from my youth from the right wing politics of today, it is precisely the effectiveness of Trump’s ploy. There is simply nothing in cultural conservatism that is amenable to the kind of crass treatment Trump has dished out to women over the years. Not his personal attacks on female adversaries, and not asinine talk of sexual conquest. Time was, when conservatives would have been the first to object to such things, and perhaps some still do, but the bulk of the voting base for the Republican party seems to have shifted. Thus conventional respect for human beings in general, and conventional respect for women in particular became a sort of lefty, feminist, oppression, one gloriously vanquished with the promise of a President who couldn’t be pressured to treat a woman with dignity, at least not one marked for conquest, or one who had the audacity to get in his way.

I look back at Trump’s response to Kelly and marvel that anyone could find their way to a rationalization sufficient to support that guy. I also think about the time he stalked Hillary around the debate stage after threatening to lock her up and think the same thing. How did this kind of abuse become acceptable? In particular, how did it become acceptable to cultural conservatives? Near as I can tell, the answer lies in the narrative about political correctness. It recasts common crudeness, even cruelty, as a rejection of a obscure and nefarious political agenda, one no decent American would accept. That narrative alone was sufficient to lure millions of seemingly decent Americans to overlook some of the most brazenly abusive behavior to be displayed in public by a national politician.

It was a defining moment, and one that certainly doesn’t speak well of Trump’s character, or that of anyone who could defend it. It is objectionable in more ways that I could count, even with my shoes off, but the one objection that keeps haunting me is this simple thought; shouldn’t the President of the United States have time for political correctness? Isn’t that part of his job? When he enters into diplomatic negotiations, do we not want the President to be capable of choosing his words carefully? If you set aside the obvious angle of outright lefty-bashing, this is a job which requires all manner of careful judgements about what to say and what not to say, about who will be angry and what will they will do about it.

Only the stakes are much higher!

This is the thing that bothers me most about conventional PC-bashing. It makes a very convenient posture for many who, like Trump, seem think with their tongues. All too often, the notion that one is politically incorrect provides a ready-made excuse for all manner of perfectly conventional indiscretions. Sure, It’s the left wing that asks us to reconsider every day vocabulary for things like race, gender, and sexual orientation (among other things), but it’s not as though we are the only ones with any social sensitivities, and somehow the PC-bashing has became a sort of all-purpose excuse for the generally crass among us, the ones who just can’t be bothered to think before they talk.

People who cannot be bothered to consider how others will feel about their words seldom put much more thought into questions about the truth of those words. It’s one of the reasons why such people can be so damned sensitive themselves to any critical feedback they get. These folks can’t answer the criticisms and they know it, so they’d rather tell a story about the over-sensitivity of others, one which makes their first reflex into an unquestioned truth and the careful consideration of other just so much hogwash. PC-bashing ties this conventionally idiotic behavior to a broad range of set issues and it provides a blank check of sorts to anyone willing to play the role of the tough talking straight shooter.

It may seem that I am stretching the bounds of the concept. Political correctness doesn’t really cover that much of the issue, does it? Yet, I think it’s Trump who stretched the boundaries of the concept so broadly in this election, and not just in characterizing his contempt for women to political incorrectness. He also likened the expectation that people shouldn’t beat up protesters to political correctness. Trump himself has likened countless policy considerations regarding immigration, foreign diplomacy, and criminal law as instances of mere political correctness. And of course, it was Trump’s many sweeping attacks on Mexicans and Muslims that earned him the reputation as a ‘straight shooter’ back in the early days of his campaign. I never understood that. There was nothing straight or honest about Trump’s rhetoric, but so many seemed happy to equate rudeness with honesty that it became the standard media spin for awhile at least. Even Megan Kelly granted him that as she asked her infamous question. She too was willing to grant that Trump’s foolishness and cruelty should count as a kind of honesty. It’s the kind of equation best suited to the narratives of the politically incorrect.

…and it is doublespeak at its most deplorable!

It’s not just that Donald Trump expressed prejudice in his campaign rhetoric. He led with it. Prejudice was literally his first sales pitch. No, he didn’t say that all Mexicans were rapists, as his defenders often remind us, but he did say that Mexico was ‘sending’ its rapists. That wild accusation was not a call for immigration reform then, and it isn’t now. It was a clear and unmistakable signal to the racists in America that he would go after those they hated. How and when, and even why? All that would be made up later, …and so now we now get to see the GOP fiddle with token gestures at wall building. The physical wall that still haunts our policy discussions is merely the obligatory excretion of a rhetorical wall Trump built in that very first moment of his campaign. Through talk of a wall, Trump separated his supporters from the rest of us and polarized the nation as no American politician has done in my own life-time.

Why do we think of Trump’s various immigration restrictions as a ban on Muslims? Because he led with a call to ban entry of Muslims. It was only afterwards that Trump began walking the notion back to the various token policies now trotted before the courts. Ironically, folks now defend these policies by telling us Obama did the same thing (which is a stretch). This after Trump spent his entire campaign telling us how Obama wasn’t doing anything to protect us from terrorists. In any event, the point isn’t that Trump expressed a prejudice or three in the course of a campaign, or even in his Presidency. That would make him a run of the mill politician, perhaps even merely human. Prejudice was the centerpiece of his appeal from the beginning. It still is.

The result has been a non-stop clown show, a constant reminder that Trump doesn’t think before he speaks, writes, or even executive orders. We’ve all watched as his staff struggle to form policies around thoughtless statements and his surrogates have fought to rationalize the completely irrational utterances of the Ego-in-Chief. And this week we learn both that Trump sought to jail his critics in the press and that he shared intelligence secrets with Russian figures all in the space of a couple days. Whatever else this is, it is also the behavior of a man who doesn’t think before he does anything.

…and I can’t help but think all of this brings us right back to Trump’s response to Megan Kelly. He said he didn’t have time to be completely politically correct? In that very statement, Trump effectively told the entire nation that wasn’t then prepared to perform the duties of the President.

He isn’t now either.

Eye, You, and Donald Trump

26 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by in Childhood, Politics

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U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump listens to a question from the audience at one of the New England Council’s “Politics and Eggs” breakfasts in Manchester, New Hampshire November 11, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder – RTS6IWM

I think I found the source for Donald Trump’s approach to public speaking. There is a clear precedent for his technique.

It’s Jane Elliot!

Jane Elliot is of course the Ohio grade-school teacher made famous for a classroom exercise in which she taught her students to discriminate against each other on the basis of eye-color. If you watch her in action, you can see the elements of Donald Trump’s rhetoric style unfolding before you.

It’s funny, because I’ve been thinking for some time that I have never seen anyone lie so readily, so easily, and in the face of such clear counter-evidence. Never have I seen anyone whose praise or whose censure was so obviously a function of his own self-interest. It is as if facts have no bearing on his evaluation of anything or anyone, and the only thing that registers significance in his evaluation of the world around him is what he wants to happen. Those who support his goals are terrific, and those who oppose him are failures, sad. I keep thinking, no-one I know of has ever been so obvious about it. But no. The man has a clear role model. If you watch Elliot teaching her students to mistreat each other, it’s all there. She may have meant her exercise to warn people against this sort of thing, but I can’t help wondering of Trump didn’t watch her at some point and say to himself; “Yep! That’s exactly what I want to be.”

Elliot set out to instill prejudice in her third graders in the space of a single day, and then to reverse that prejudice the following day, before debriefing the lot of them and ending the lesson. She didn’t have a lot of time and she wasn’t the least bit subtle about it.She employed all manner of tactics to communicate contempt for the wrong-eyed children in her classroom.

You might think Elliot’s lessons less relevant to real-world politics, because, well third graders, right? But of course, Donald Trump’s own rhetoric has all the features of grade school communication. Far from a detriment, it turns out childish vocabulary and simplistic arguments are actually one of the keys to his success. With his simple words and constant repetition of basic themes, Trump leaves a very clear impression. It is the single-mindedness of Trump’s presentation that seems to resonate with his supporters, and in that respect, his approach is very much like that of Elliot.

But does the nature of the message matter?

You bet it does.

It’s not just any simplistic message that Trump offers supporters; it is a simplistic message about who is a better person; them or someone else? In this respect, his approach mirrors that of Elliot. It isn’t merely that Trump advances a message of hatred; it is that he presents that hatred in terms of a clear pay-off. You are are better than they are! That is what Trump keeps telling people (whoever you are and whoever they might be). It’s an invitation to enter a world with a clear hierarchy of value, and to enter that world on the value-laden side of that hierarchy. You don’t even need to do anything. You are already better than the many scapegoats he offers you (Muslims, Mexicans, the Media, minority activists, etc.) Trump really doesn’t call on supporters to do much more than vote for him. Their role in his his America is to be the real Americans while the rest of us take our lumps. It’s this message that survives all the messy details. It is a message not the least bit undermined by questions of fact, reason, or even the evidence of the senses. In this respect, Trump is very much like Elliot teaching half of her classroom to think of the other half as lesser people.

When I watch Elliot tell a child (at about 5:20) that a blue-eyed parent would never kick his son while using the apparent claim that a brown-eyed parent had done that very thing, I can’t help but think of Trump’s many anecdotal attacks on immigrants. It shouldn’t take much critical thinking to see past the argument, but is that more important than the invitation to be better than someone else?

Apparently not for a lot of people.

When Elliot begins telling the Brown-eyed children they can’t use the drinking fountain (at around 6:10), and when she restricts their playground privileges, she is effectively telling the blue-eyed children they are special. The things they all used to take for granted now belong only to the blue-eyed children (at least for a day). The pay-off is not substantially different from that enjoyed by an audience assure more of their kind of jobs will be created while watching others threatened by cuts, told their own health-care will be taken care of (somehow) by cutting others loose, and of course their citizenship will not be sullied by the presence of certain kinds of people. (And no legality was NEVER the issue in Trump’s new-fangled Know-nothingism) We on the left haggle over the details of these policies as if they matter. To the average Trump supporter, I do not think they do. He may be right about this or wrong about that, but what matters most to those who support them is that he keeps elevating them above someone else. He does it free of charge. They don’t have to understand anything difficult; they don’t have to work harder (at least he doesn’t say they will); they don’t even have to listen very carefully. Being better in Trump’s world is as simple as saying yes to him and his gold gilded message. In scapegoating enemies domestic and foreign, Trump is telling anyone who cares to accept him that they are special. They get to drink at the fountain. Others don’t.

When Elliot tells her children that the brown-eyed people are slow or stupid, she creates the very facts she purports to describe. Elliot noted (at 13:15) how the student performance rose or fell with the changes in their status during the course of her exercise. There is little to distinguish this from the effects of social stigma and/or poverty on groups for whom prejudice is not simply an exercise. When Trump promotes such distinctions, he generates real harm.

(At about 12:10) “Do blue-eyed people know how to sit in a chair? Very sad. Very very sad.” …this one speaks for itself.

One might think that folks would see past such a thinly disguised gambit. Elliot is working with third graders. Surely, adults would know better!

Evidently not!

In the end, this may not be a question of what people actually think. It’s a question of what narratives they circulate. We keep hearing that Steve Bannon isn’t really an antisemite or even that Donald Trump isn’t personally against homosexuals, Mexicans, women, etc., but the Trump camp and its supporters keeps producing stories denigrating to these groups and anyone who gets in their way. Like Elliot, they may know better, but like Elliot, they do it anyway.

Except for one thing.

There will be no debriefing at the end of Trump’s Presidency. There will be no great learning moment, no sudden transformation of the whole situation into a great learning lesson. Whatever cynical reasons he and his supporters may have for throwing the rest of humanity under the bus, there is little reason to believe it will stop any time soon. The only credible promise this man ever made is that he would hurt people in their name, and for whatever reason, that was reason enough for a number of people last November. We can only hope that enough people come to their senses, and that if and when they do, something can be done about it.

In the interim, the Trump administration continues its own experiment in social control. The continue teaching us to humor this man’s fantasies, and to think of ourselves as better for doing so.

Let us hope the nation as a whole can respond a little more appropriately than Jane Elliot’s third graders!

A Milagro Bagpipe War?

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Movies, Politics

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mv5bmjizmje3mdcwm15bml5banbnxkftztcwmjk0mjg4ng-_v1_sy1000_cr007071000_al_John Nichols, the author of Milagro Beanfield War once gave the keynote speech at a conference I attended in Colorado. If I recall correctly the name of his presentation was; “Everything I know about the West I Learned in New York.”

…something like that.

Anyway, the point of the speech was that the sort of problems he wrote about in work like Milagro Beanfield War simply weren’t really unique to the western states. They were much the  same as they were anywhere else. Big money can be a terrible danger to small communities. That is as true of an inner city neighborhood facing gentrification as it is a small town in northern New Mexico facing a major development project.

I thought about this last night as I watched You’ve Been Trumped (2011), the story of Donald Trump’s efforts to develop a golf course in the community of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Conflict between Trump and his team, on the one hand, and a small group of locals who want to hold onto their own homes and their own community provide the central theme of the film. At least one Youtube channel describes this film as a David and Goliath story, which seems fair enough to me. Perhaps, that’s Milagro Beanfield War was too, a David and Goliath Story. The same could be said of Local Hero (a film referenced in You’ve Been Trumped). We could certainly find other such stories if we looked, but whats most striking about this one is that it’s real. Watching the movie, I couldn’t help thinking it was as if someone had taken Nichols book and reworked into a movie script based in Scotland. That someone would have to be Donald Trump himself. It’s almost as if he took that former story of a heartless developer stomping all over a local community and said; “Yep! That villain is what I want to be.” The rest of the plot seems to flow smoothly from there.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not the most balanced documentary I’ve ever seen. If there are arguments in favor of Trump’s development, this film makes little effort to present them. The story-line focuses squarely on the conflicts with those living near Trump’s development project.I do wonder just how representative those individuals may be, and just what the overall balance of support and opposition to Trump may have been in the local community. The movie leaves a definite impression  regarding such matters, but it doesn’t answer them squarely. That said, what this film does show is damning enough in its own terms. Within the narrow scope of Trump’s relationship to those resisting his project, the film reveals enough to condemn the man. Whatever might be said in favor of Trump’s development, the actions covered in this film are truly abysmal in their own right.

It’s fascinating to see how much of the ugliness we’ve seen from this man during his presidential campaign appears in this film from 2011. His abusiveness is on full display as Trump repeatedly describes one hold out (Michael Forbes) as a filthy man living a disgusting life amidst his own trash. His penchant for simply telling the most convenient story regardless of the facts at hand can easily be seen as Trump brags about his wonderful contributions to the environment by stabilizing local dunes even as the film repeatedly shows construction tearing up the land, diverting waterways, and disrupting the natural cycles of the local ecosystem. It’s also present in Trump’s claims to be serving the people of Scotland even as he wages a heavy-handed campaign of harassment against those Scots interfering with his plans for a business clearly aimed at tourists. And of course his easy dismissal of journalism can be seen in his demands for questions from ‘real journalists’ at a press conference, effectively dismissing those who might not support his business. We here in America have seen all this time and again over the last year. The people of Aberdeen had already seen plenty of it by 2011.

Of course others have seen similar treatment in countless places where Donald Trump has done business. This is just one of many instances in which one of Donald Trump’s grand schemes for development fell like a boot-stomp of a local community.

…which brings me to another interesting feature of this film. It helps to illustrate some of the foibles of popular right wing theories about the power-relations between government and big business. As with other populist candidates, much of Donald Trump’s appeal seems to be rooted popular resentment about elites. How such resentment could lead to support for a man who so clearly asserts aristocratic privilege over the mere peasantry is something of a mystery to me. Still, he does draw a great deal of his appeal from messages systematically distorting  the modern political economy all across the media. At least a portion of this can be seen in the movie.

Let us start with libertarianism! This school of thought generally counsels us to avoid government entanglement with business, and with people’s personal lives. In principle this applies to any number of things, but in practice, the message is more likely to carry the day when the issues at stake are progressive taxation, welfare programs, or any number of government regulations tying the hands of big business. It’s a school of thought that consistently tells us we should not look to government to resolve questions of economic inequality. Central to the force of this message is a vision of equity in which government officials treat all people with equal regard and government programs afford equal rights to all of us. You’ve Been Trumped presents us with countless situations in which the Trump organization uses  official power to defeat the mere peasants who stand in his plans. Those people suffer loss of electricity, water, and destruction of their property, to say nothing of a deliberate effort to block their view of the sea for the sake of doing just that. At each stage in this process officials are slow to listen to complains or respond to requests for assistance and quick to enforce rights claimed by Trump. It might be that particular disputes can be sorted out in the courts, but Trump’s organization clearly has the upper hand at stage in this process. The notion that this system is consistent with any formal sense of fairness is at best a laughable proposition.

Libertarians might object that they too wouldn’t support Trump’s use of municipal authorities to abuse local enemies, assuming of course that the abuses shown in this film stand up to critical scrutiny, but that hardly addresses the problem. What this film shows is the leverage that monied interests do get over every level of government authority in existence. It isn’t enough to moralize the issue, to stand on the sidelines and shout; “Hey stop, don’t do that.” The point is that this is exactly what happens when we allow substantial disparities in the distribution of economic resources. Those with more at their disposal WILL use those resources to skew government authority (something Donald Trump appears to have done throughout his long career as a public menace). Despite this fact, libertarian narratives continue to focus on the problems of aid to the poor. They offer no solution whatsoever to the sorts of problems shown in this film, but libertarians continually present themselves as underdogs hard at work fighting against ‘statist’ power. In practice that fight is virtually always a fight to take away what little help and what little protections those in need may have.When an actual aristocrat takes it upon himself to destroy the life of a man he deems to filthy to accord even the most minimal respect, libertarians are simply silent on the matter.

Anti-globalists provide one of the more consistent sources of support for Donald Trump in this election campaign. Alex Jones of Info Wars would have to be counted among his most visible supporters.  He and his own fans often speak of Trump’s detractors as globalists, thus framing the whole election in terms of support for, or opposition globalism. Trump’s support for Brexit, combined with promise to build a wall on the southern U.S. border would seem to have earned him a great deal of points with this crowd. But of course this only counts if you have a really myopic view of globalism. It is one thing to stop people at your borders, which is what Trump is happy to offer the anti-globalist crowd, but of course money and power can easily flow right over those same borders. Yes, Trump has also declared his opposition to a number of international trade deals, but this is a man who has also taken advantage of opportunities on the other side of the border throughout his career. Simply put, big money doesn’t need a special trade deal to take advantage of foreign workers and foreign markets, and this movie illustrates that very clearly. It is Donald Trump’s wealth that enables him to go to a foreign country and simply have his way with a small local community. Nothing in Trump’s political agenda suggest that he intends to stop such things, and a good deal suggests that he intends to continue them.

Trump is happy to control borders, precisely because restricting the movement of workers is critical to optimizing profits under global market conditions. A world in which cheep labor can be found to the left and rich buyers are over to the right is not a bad deal for people like Donald Trump. In this respect, he is the perfect candidate for the anti-globalists. He will make a show of national boundaries, one they can be proud of, but he will never actually challenge the power relations at stake in the global economy. Neither Donald Trump nor Alex Jones really want to see anything truly revolutionary happen there. That might disrupt Jones’ sale of dietary supplements or keep Donald from demolishing coastal communities for his jet-set customers.

In the end, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that Donald Trump could run as a populist candidate. He isn’t the first pampered elitist to pose as the hope of the common man. Still, he does seem to be one of the most clueless, and it does scare me that he could easily become our President. I’m not a fan of Hillary either, to be honest, but I worry that the whole nation may soon hand the keys to a problem child with a history of wrecking most everything he touches. More than that, his candidacy helps to illustrate precisely why the underdog themes of those on the right always ring so hollow for me. Time and again, they consistently seem David for Goliath, or perhaps the David of later years, the one who steals another man’s wife at the height of his own wealth and power for the David of David and Goliath, the one who actually does face down a more powerful opponent. Time and again, the right wing plays the underdog to government power, all the while ignoring real questions about who is really putting one over on whom. It’s a bad habit that some have fallen into. It’s a habit that may soon cost us all.

Just ask the people of Aberdeenshire.

 

When Trolling Douchebags

01 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by in Politics, Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

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trumpcrop5“When trolling douchebags, take care not to become a douche yourself.”

I’m pretty sure that’s a direct quote from Friedrich Nietzsche. I’m almost certain my man Friedrich was talking about Trump when he wrote that. He was trying to tell us to be careful how we criticize Trump, because Trump is full of idiot and when you argue with idiot, you get idiot sauce all over you.

Make a note of that Hillary!

“Cereal?” You may be asking, but I can assure you that Nietzsche was totally cereal with all of this stuff, cause the man was a totally cereal kind of guy.

…at least about how you should argue with Trump. Or with the idiots who support his Trumpery badness.

Nietzsche’s point of course was that you really should watch what you say about Melania Trump. I know this, because I asked him. I asked Nietzsche straight up. I said; “what do you mean dude?” And he told me I shouldn’t really call him dude. He said Zarathustra would not approve. He then told me the whole damned quote was actually about Melania Trump. He wanted us to know that people should watch what they say about her.

“Surely, you don’t mean,” I said to Nietzsche, “that we can’t criticize her for plagiarizing Michelle Obama in her speech at the GOP convention.”

“No, that’s fair game,” he said. “You can totally criticize her for plagiarism. You can even take a few extra digs for saying she wrote it herself just before blaming the fact that she didn’t write it herself on the ghost who didn’t write it herself either. Damned ghosts anyhow! You just can’t trust a ghost to write new stuff you can take credit for these days. Rich folks ought to be able to take credit for the work of others. It’s the American way!”

I thought he had a point.

Nietzsche added, that you could probably criticize Malania and the whole Trump camp for pretending Obamas are the Devil himself when they actually seem to find some merit in what at least one of them does.

I asked Nietzsche if the devil has multiple personalities. He said only when he’s from Kenya. That’s all Nietzsche was wiling to say about that subject, so we moved on.

I asked the old philosopher if we could criticize Melania for saying she graduated from a place that never spat a degree her direction. He said, surely we could. I also asked Nietzsche if we could raise questions about her immigration status when she came to the country. He told me that was probably okay, but it would really depend on the questions. Did we really want to encourage Trumpery people to think of immigration as a bad thing? I agreed that might not be wise.

“So what’s the big deal anyway?” I asked the old curmudgeon. “What is it we are not supposed to say about Melania?”

“Oh, you can say anything you want.” Nietzsche assured me. “Without gods, everything is totally cool.”

“So then what’s the problem?” I asked again. “Can we go after Mrs. Douchebag or not?”

“Of course you can, but if you go about it wrong, you will become a douche yourself. You’ll be talking along, or tapping away at your keyboard and suddenly your mouth and your fingers will be the mouth and fingers of a douchebag. If you’re cool with that, then it’s all good. But if you don’t want to become a douchebag, then you should watch what you type about Melania.”

I told Nietzsche that I really didn’t want the mouth and fingers of a douchebag.

“Well, then take care of what you type!”

“Okay!” I was getting a little exasperated at this point. I mean, Nietzsche may not be a systematic philosopher, but this was a little cryptic even for the proto-gonz himself. “What exactly is it that I might not want to type about Malania.”

“Don’t slut-shame!” he said. “That way lies douchetude.”

“Cereal?”

“Totally cereal!”

I have to admit, I was a little taken aback by this whole thing. I mean, I really didn’t expect a conversation with Nietzsche in the first place, but nobody really expects that. What I really didn’t expect was that slut-shaming would be his biggest concern about election politics in the U.S. Maybe that wasn’t his biggest concern, but that’s what he chose to tell me at any rate. It really seemed to be the main point of the conversation.

“Why?” Nietzsche asked, “Why would you go after her anyway? Hasn’t the man himself given you enough cause for complaint to fill countless servers with perfectly sound criticisms? Does the image of Trump himself not make you want to claw your own eyes away from your face? Does his voice not make traitors of any ears foolish enough to pass along the sound of it? When you have Trump University, why would you bother about Melania’s degree? When you have Trump saying stupid things on a daily basis, why would you care if Melania chooses to channel Michelle like some drunken psychic who mistakes a radio for a ghost? Sure, you can make some good points about Melania, but the real story is always going to be the festering bloodfart beside her. Why on earth would anyone take the time to score a little field-goal against Melania, when you could score a game-winning touch-down against Trump himself? He’s the candidate for POTUS, and he is way worse than his wife will ever be? He’s worse than anyone’s wife will ever be. Hell, the Donald is worse than worse. He’s a singularity of worsitude? There is absolutely no reason to cap on Melania when her husband himself is such a bundle of dumbfuckery that the heavens themselves have been screaming “you’re fired” ever since his campaign announcement. Seriously, you have to ask yourself, why anyone with that much material on the Donald would instead choose to go after his wife? That just smacks of misogyny.  I’m saying that, and I’m a notorious misogynist.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Your writing about women is pretty bad. And when did you start using football metaphors?”

“When you decided to write me into this damned blog post.”

He had a point.

I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation. Nietzsche was getting a little belligerent at that point. Also his Superbowl predictions seem a little far-fetched to me. Really, you just don’t want to know.

My main point, Nietzsche main point, is that one ought to think twice about attacking Trump through the use of Melania’s nudie pics. It’s become a rather common game on certain social media circles. Some people like to circulate racy photos of Melania Trump along with a comment or two about how she could be our First lady. Yesterday the hashtag #TrumpsMexicoTripSayings even had someone suggesting a donkey show for Melania, thus mixing racism with misogyny. It’s an ugly argument, and one that doesn’t do a damned thing to show just how bad Trump would be as a President.

The problem here isn’t really fairness to Trump, or even Melania. Neither Melania nor Donald will suffer much as a result of such idiocy, and these memes aren’t going to cost him the election, but the notion that a woman deserves punishment for her own sexuality is toxic as Hell. It does hurt people. Maybe not the wives of billionaires, but it hurts people just the same. An objection to commercial nudity is also pretty damned hypocritical when coming from people who consume such images themselves, all the more so for those spreading such images while criticizing Mrs. Trump for appearing in them.

With enough mental gymnastics, you could probably concoct a respectable-sounding argument about the topic, but at the end of the day, you are still using a woman’s body to attack her man. That way does lie douchebaggery. Nietzsche is right about that.

So, anyway, that’s what Friedrich Nietzsche has to say about this election. I asked him if I could share his thoughts on the subject. He said I could, but only if I did so by means of a completely ridiculous literary device.

A Tyrant On Either Side of the Gun Sights

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Politics

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Meguns&JudPriestshirt

Budding Young Amo-sexual (Embarrassing, I know)

I was about 15 or 16 when my father cancelled our membership in the National Rifle Association (NRA). Money was tight back then, but Dad said that wasn’t entirely the issue. He was also fed up with their politics.

I was mortified.

The old “If guns are outlawed” sticker was then sitting on the bumper of my first car (which wasn’t yet running), and a stack of hunting and shooting magazines rested on a shelf in my bedroom. My private arsenal had already outgrown the gun-case. At the time, there just wasn’t much about the NRA that I didn’t like. Oh sure I’d noticed a myopic one-sidedness to some of the articles in those magazines, but for the most part, I was down for the main agenda. Dad never did explain to me what had bothered him about the NRA back then (the early 80s). I reckon he was just hoping I would grow a dose of moderation at some point. This was hardly the only obsession that could have given him cause for such concerns.

I guess Dad got his way on this one at least. My views on guns and gun control are complex. ‘Ambivalent’ may be a better word. My take on the legal issues doesn’t map well onto either the left or the right on the actual issue of gun ownership. I’m open to gun control, but skeptical of its impact (at least one any scale that’s practically possible in the present political climate). It hasn’t escaped my notice that I live in a region where firearms can be damned useful. (By way of illustration, one of my students took a job collecting plant samples this summer. Part of her training including a day or so learning how to handle a firearm. In the land of polar bears, a gun can be an essential part of scientific research.) I’ve also got a lot of friends and neighbors who feed themselves by use of firearms, and I’m not in the habit of turning down a good bowl of tutu (caribou) stew. The bottom line is that I won’t be campaigning for full disarmament anytime soon. Few do, really, but if complete disarmament is your bandwagon, then I am definitely not on board.

There is one other bandwagon I’m not climbing aboard any time soon, and that is the one run by the NRA. Any latent interest I might have had in that organization slipped away during the Clinton administration. The television ads from that era telling us that every honest gun owner ought to be a member didn’t exactly inspire me to get out my checkbook. Hearing countless people spouting their fears about ‘thuh guvment’ was enough to send shivers up my spine and put a large dose of queazy in the pit of my stomach. I recall “Impeach Clinton” bumper stickers within the first few months of his first administration. In time his critics would find reasons. In the interim, suddenly Bill Clinton was the source of the New World Order, notwithstanding Bush Senior’s use of the  phrase to sell Desert Storm. Within the space of a single election, Clinton became the source of all that was wrong with the world. Seeing the same people who had supported centralization of power throughout the Reagan and Bush administrations suddenly play underdog against government authority was more than a little disconcerting.

It got a lot more disconcerting after the Oklahoma City bombing.

You can’t run a direct line of reasoning from Charlton Heston’s “take my gun from my cold dead hands” speech to that bombing, no, but these two notes fit in the same damned tune. The right wing now sings a constant chorus of ‘don’t tread on me’ messages, and most of them serve simultaneously to valorize the weekend warrior games of countless over-gown boys and to demonize the best efforts of anyone involved in pretty much any kind public service. Hating the government is a popular sport in what passes for ‘conservative’ circles these days. The problem is you can’t shoot at the government and you can’t bomb the government. Hell, you can’t even shout at the government. You can only do these things to real people, people who work for the government, and the trouble with demonizing that government is its a damned effective way to demonize real people. It’s a damned effective way to justify hurting real people. An awful lot of people died in Oklahoma City because someone decided to strike a blow against the government, and his ideas about that government had an awful lot in common with those pushed by the NRA for a couple decades now. Is the one the cause of the other? Maybe not, but it’s a damned reckless message just the same.

What I specifically object to is the scorched earth tactics that the NRA keeps producing. Talking of Second Amendment solutions and other confrontations with the government may sound like the words of brave people put-upon by dark forces and powerful institutions, but they are also clear and obvious efforts to intimidate the rest of us. While other interest groups go to the voting booths, hire lawyers to plead their case, or sometimes take to the streets with a sign or three, elements of the gun rights crowd keep threatening to use their guns under some unspecified conditions. It’s easy enough to imagine the scenario without its details. They will fight back against tyranny, of course; that’s what these people keep telling us. The problem of course is that tyranny may very well be a few unwelcome regulations and the tyrant may well be (as it was in Oklahoma City) ordinary people just trying to do their damned jobs.

Don’t get me wrong. For better or for worse, the Second Amendment is part of American government. There are certainly arguments to be made about its proper scope, and still other arguments to be made about the effectiveness of various gun control measures, but there is no excuse for the constant litany of violent fantasies surrounding firearms ownership. An awful lot of people keep telling us they and their guns are the best protection from government overreach, and every time I see or hear this message I find myself hoping for protection from precisely the folks producing it. I realize echos of this message come to us from the days of America’s founding fathers, but those echos have been twisted by ideology, augmented by fraudulent representations, and generally milked for everything they could possibly be worth. In the end, it isn’t America’s founders that keep this threat of violence alive in America’s politics today. It is the words and deeds of shameless people.

…which of course brings us to the latest twist in Donald Trump’s campaign. These are his words on the subject:

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the second amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks, although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.

To say these remarks have sparked outrage is putting it mildly, but let’s be clear. This is not an obvious call for gun owners to assassinate Hillary Clinton. It isn’t even a clear call for armed rebellion in the case that Hillary wins the election. There isn’t really anything clear about this message at all, but then again there wouldn’t be.

It’s Trump, remember?

He and clarity have never really been on speaking terms.

What this rhetoric ALSO isn’t is a responsible case for the Second Amendment. To begin with, the claim that Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment is hardly supported by the evidence. She favors a variety of gun control measures, yes. This does not mean she wishes to abolish the Second Amendment after all. It’s a straw Hillary that Trump is talking about, not the real one.

It’s really not clear how the straw Hillary who wants to abolish the Second Amendment altogether would even go about it, but it actually is clear that she couldn’t do it just by appointing a few judges. That move is neither sufficient nor necessary to do away with the Second Amendment (in principle or practice).

Hillary may well support gun control measures that many gun owners wouldn’t want to see passed. She may even advocate measures that ought not to be passed by any objective measure of their merits. Gun control measures, perfectly sound or bat-shit crazy, do NOT add up to the abolition of the Second Amendment. And let’s be clear, even Scalia, in the infamous Heller decision suggested that some regulations could be consistent with the existence of the Second Amendment, a Second Amendment he construed explicitly (and quite controversially as an individual right).

Simply put, regulations are on the table with or without Hillary as POTUS. Also the Second Amendment remains on the table with or without Hillary as POTUS. Far from the dooms-day scenario Trump trots out in this speech, another Presidential Clinton is at best/worst just another twist in the long case history of the Aecond Amendment. It’s not the end of the Second Amendment or civilization itself. So, yes, Trump is exaggerating, which is putting it mildly.

That exaggeration is not simply a mistake. Realizing just how badly Trump is exaggerating the prospect of a Presidential Hillary helps us understand how to take the comment that Second Amendment people might be able to do something about her after all. These Second Amendment people would be acting in a fantasy world in which a President, and a President alone is enough to render the legal landscape hopeless. If Trump is really suggesting something as mild as voting or rallying to his cause, then there is no need to raise the specter of a gun-grabbing apocalypse in preparation for it. His wording is ambiguous of course, but it’s the ambiguity of plausible deniability. And when speaking to millions, some of whom are clearly quite excitable, Trump’s message will take on many meanings. He knows that. The man is not THAT stupid. Many, perhaps most will take his words to mean something as radical as it takes to say something really rude to a cotton-picking liberal, but some will take them far worse. Some folks are quite prepared to kick their John Wayne fantasies into high gear. A responsible candidate knows this, and a responsible candidate doesn’t rouse his support base, or any subsection of it to the brink of violence.

Trump does.

He has been doing this throughout his campaign. I know of no other candidate in recent memory who has deliberately provoked violence at his own rallies, always falling short of directly calling for it, but often coming as close as one might without explicitly endorsing it.

During the primary season, the actual violence at campaign rallies clearly worked in Trump’s favor. What began as a series of news stories about Trump’s own supporters beating various protestors transitioned seamlessly into a series of stories about protestors engaged in all manner of violence against Trump’s own supporters.

Trump’s fighting words couldn’t help but fall on angry ears for his critics. Many of us have responded with such radical actions as a contemptuous tweet or a few minutes of outraged gripetude, but some took it further. Some engaged in genuine violence. The pay-off for Trump was obvious enough as he and his supporters played the victim and cast his critics as those with no respect for civil society.

What better context for Trump to present himself as the law-and order candidate!?!

A responsible candidate would have asked his supporters to step back and let security handle matters. If Trump said such things on some occasions, on others he talked about how those beaten deserved it, suggested he would pay for the lawyers of those beating protesters, and otherwise said a number of things encouraging the violence in his own supporters. and to provoke violence against his opponents.

Simply put, violence has worked well for Trump. He provoked it to his benefit in the primaries, and it should come as no surprise that he continues to do so in the present general election cycle. He started the general election by fantasizing about hitting his critics at the Democratic National Convention. You can see it in this passage. It isn’t until the very end that we come to realize he is talking about something other than outright violence, and you come to that only after indulging in a long violent fantasy.

The things that were said about me, I mean, should I go through some of the names? I, You know what I wanted to, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard, I would have hit them, no-no, I was gonna hit them so, I was all set, and then I got a call from a highly respected governor, ‘how’s it going Donald?’ I said; “well it’s going good, but they are really saying bad things about me. I’m gonna hit them so hard, I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so hard his head would spin, he wouldn’t know what the Hell happened, and, he came out of nowhere, he came out of nowhere; they made deals with me, ‘would you help me this; would you make this deal and solve the problem.?’ I solved the problem. I do a great job. I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard their heads would spin. They’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a a lot of, that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered.

It could be an accident of course. And elves could bake chocolate cookies under a full moon. This is a conscious effort on Trump’s part. Just as above, this is a message calculated to stimulate violence. It is ambiguous enough to evade responsibility for that violence, but it’s evocative enough to encourage it just the same.

And so here we are, at a new low point in American politics, at least in my own memory, a Presidential candidate stirring up violence in the service of his own campaign. It says a lot about Trump’s character that he is willing to do this to get the position. It says a lot about how he plans to run the country, and what it says about those plans is damned frightening. We can add his penchant for promoting violence to Trump’s sustained and very deliberate courtship of white nationalists throughout his campaign. This man has already done irreparable harm to the nation, and it’s hard to imagine what good things he could possibly do as President to overcome the harm he is clearly willing to do in the service of becoming President. More likely, he will just go on hurting people and encouraging his supporters to do the same.

Today’s message is distinctive insofar as it’s a clear and definitive marriage of two trends within the current GOP. On the one hand, we have Trump’s general efforts to wind up the nation to state of hysteria, to create the sense that America rests on the brink of social breakdown. On the other we have the long-standing right-wing message of violent opposition to government authority, one rooted in a myopic devotion to a single civil right. It’s marriage made in Hell, or at least a cheesy overpriced hotel equivalent thereof. Donald Trump is a huckster. That much should be clear to pretty much anyone this side of a mental ward. But he’s a huckster with a heart full of bile.

Of Trumps and Truth, and Another Look at that Megyn Kelly Incident

15 Sunday May 2016

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Cersei-and-Joffrey-Baratheon-cersei-lannister-29431496-800-450When I think of Donald Trump and his campaign for President, it always takes me back to one of the early scenes in Game of Thrones. It’s one of the few moments in that series where Geofrey Lannister proved himself almost human. In the scene, he and his mother Cercei were discussing a fight he’d had a young commoner. He’d come off rather badly, but still Geoffrey’s mother, Cercei, praised him for bravery that he didn’t show and recounted heroic deeds that he didn’t perform. Just this once (it’s the only time that I can recall), the little monster displayed a trace of honesty and corrected her on the facts of the matter. For just a moment, it seemed to matter to Geoffrey that he hadn’t actually lived up to the narratives his family were spinning about him.

Cercei’s reply?

Some day you’ll sit on the throne and the truth will be what you make it.

I always imagine Donald Trump as a man who learned that very lesson somewhere in the course of his life and took it very much to heart.

***

One of the most fascinating (and infuriating) things about Trump is the way he approaches questions of veracity. More fascinating still, the question of just why his fans support that approach. It’s easy enough to call the man a liar (and he’s certainly given plenty of cause), but it’s closer to the case to suggest that he keeps turning questions of truth on their head (perhaps in part by ignoring them). What is truth to this man? The answer to that question certainly isn’t what it is to the rest of us. And I still think Cercei’s quote is a good start on an answer.

One of the most frustrating things about Trump, for me at least, is his penchant for resolving complex problems and answering serious criticisms by simply declaring the case to be whatever he needs (or simply wants) it to be. Are there substantial reasons to believe he disrespects women? He simply tells us he always treats women with respect. Do his comments about Mexicans or Muslims reflect hatred and promote bigotry? He simply tells us he loves them and treats them well. Time and again, Trump answers serious questions simply by telling us the most convenient thing necessary to promote his own interests. Time and again, his claims are clearly counterfactual.

…and time and again, I hear Cercei telling us that truth is what a prince makes of it.

So many things about this quote seems so relevant, not the least of them being the image of a pampered aristocrat assuming the reins of power. It isn’t merely that Trump seems immune to basic fact checking or clear cases of debunkitation; he seems almost consciously to expect that the grounds of veracity itself will shift right along with his narratives. He has enough power to simply make some narratives stick, and he knows it. In time, his narratives (however disingenuous) may well become the standard by which other facts are assessed. So, he just presses onward. What counts as true is what he will make of it.

The notion that truth could be constituted in the exercise of power might seem a grad school cliché, but seldom do we see it in such a crass form, so naked, so obvious, and so orange.

***

Early in the campaign, Trump acquired a reputation as a ‘straight shooter’. Fans described him as a no nonsense guy who tells it like it is. All the tropes of tough love and brutal honesty were conferred on the gilded prince of kitch, which is of course at least as maddening as Trump’s antics themselves. Despite all the prevarication and notwithstanding countless instances of demonstrable falsehoods, one of Trump’s best qualities, according to his many fans, would seem to be honesty.

Does Cercei have an evil laugh? She must, because I could swear that I hear it right now.

She had to be laughing during Trump’s infamous exchange with Megyn Kelly. That’s worth a second look. Here it is, as taken from a transcript provided by Time Magazine.

KELLY: Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women.

You’ve called women you don’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”

(LAUGHTER)

Your Twitter account…

TRUMP: Only Rosie O’Donnell.

(LAUGHTER)

KELLY: No, it wasn’t.

(APPLAUSE)

Your Twitter account…

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: Thank you.

KELLY: For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell.

TRUMP: Yes, I’m sure it was.

KELLY: Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

TRUMP: I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.

(APPLAUSE)

I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.

And frankly, what I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding. We have a good time. What I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.

(APPLAUSE)

This exchange is fascinating, not because it’s intrinsically interesting, but because the narratives it spawned seem so very implausible on the face of it. Trump was insulted, and on his behalf Trump’s followers were also insulted. And thus Megyn Kelly became a right wing pariah for some time, which is hilarious, even if it is only a temporary problem. She became a traitor to countless right wing faithful, most of whom had sung her praises right up until that very moment. Yet, she was absolutely right? Trump himself bungled his answer, and that too seemed to count against Kelly. She had been the source of a genuine mistake on Trump’s part, and that was unforgivable. Like the Stark girls witnessing Geoffrey Lannister’s cowardice, Kelly had borne witness to something common men and women are not supposed to see.

Fire the witch!

What always fascinated me about this, is the fact that Kelly doesn’t appear to have set out for Trump’s blood in the outset. I find myself wondering if she couldn’t possibly have more to help Trump out with this question? First, she began by repeating the straight-shooter theme, thus paying the man a rather undeserved compliment and all-but answering the question for him. And then of course there is the whole ‘war on women’ theme, as if Trump’s personal rudeness had anything to do with the GOP’s campaign to restrict the rights of women in both the workplace and the field of health-care. It was a straw-man of course, and one Kelly skillfully placed in the mouth of Hillary Clinton. As tough questions go, this was a slow pitch straight up the middle, but it was too much for Trump.

And thus Kelly became a Pariah.

It doesn’t get much sillier than that. I can’t help wondering at her own internal monologue as she proceeded to spank Trump for his initial response. I can’t help but wonder if the word ‘child’ flashed through her mind as it did for so many others. And of course with Trump’s knee-jerk response he proved himself unworthy of her initial praise. His first reaction in this (as with so many other instances) had been to lie, and thus he was caught like a child with his hand in the cookie jar, telling us all it was just Rosie O’Donnell.

Did this shake the faith of Trump fans? Far from it! Well, it did shake their faith in Megyn Kelly and Fox News. They had stood for a moment as witnesses to the foibles of Prince Trump. Whatever facts or reasons Kelly might have had, they pointed only to her own disloyalty. The truth would be what Donald made of it, and it simply wasn’t Kelly’s role to stand against that.

***

donald-trump-mug_5fea106e0eb494469a75e60d8f2b18ea.nbcnews-fp-320-320For months after this dust-up, Trump, his campaign, and his fans simply kept telling us what a straight-foreword kinda guy he is. After awhile, you have to realize this isn’t simply a mistake, but it’s a damned odd epistemology. What counts as truth in this narrative is a willingness to tell someone something they don’t want to hear. It’s a common yarn that the “politically correct” left simply cannot handle the truth, as they say, and that the many epithets and racial slurs of right wing politics are a just brutal truth shouted in the face of milquetoast morons well deserving of any discomfort the whole affair may bring about.

The problem of course is that all this begs the question; is the source of discomfort really anything like truth? I for one can think of a few instances in which left wingers (or anyone for that matter) have thrown their weight behind some falsehood I wouldn’t mind seeing burst like a bubble cuddling up to a nice sharp needle. I can also think of a few times the left wing viewed seemed damned accurate to me, and all the cries of ‘political correctness” never did a damned thing to demonstrate otherwise. More to the point, the rhetoric of PC-bashing makes the particulars quite irrelevant, especially wielded as Trump does in his encounter with Kelly. PC-bashing makes of the entire range of left-wing politics nothing but a white lie, one just begging for that damned needle.

…and of course in Trump’s case ‘political correctness’ would eventually come to include things like not beating protesters. That might seem a novel use of the phrase, but of course making truth is hard, and sometimes it must be made at the expense of someone else’s nose.

Brutal honesty is understandable, but all-too-often brutal honesty is all brutal and no honesty. In support of this, Trump’s comments about women would be ‘exhibit A’ as far as I’m concerned. And yet countless Trump supporters seem not only to accept his deceits; they actually seem to count these deceits as evidence of his honesty. Honesty is functionally equivalent for rudeness in this story-line. What counts as truth is the ability to make liberals uncomfortable. If our discomfort is caused by counterfactual claims or clear errors in reasoning, well then those too seem to count as victories in the service of a higher truth. For truth is what Trump will make of it, and that truth is meant to make some of us miserable.

***

…which brings me to another feature of Trump’s relationship to honesty, that which makes his product irresistible, a sense of shared guilt. If you are like me, you can’t really bring yourself to believe that Trump’s fans actually believe the nonsense he spouts. Time and again, his reflex is to make a claim so obviously false it seeming doesn’t even seem count as a lie. Whatever else it is, is anybody’s guess. (We would need John Miller to explain it to us.) Time and again it seems painfully clear that anyone past preschool should see clearly that Trump is lying. But his fans still support him. It boggles the mind.

But only if you take the whole charade at face value.

They key to understanding Trump’s appeal, I think, is to understand that his supporters don’t really believe his crap anymore than the rest of us do. They simply see themselves as in on the con. If Trump is deceiving anyone it isn’t his followers, so the thinking goes. It’s someone else, someone square enough to take him seriously, to ask if his claims are actually true.

…someone like Megyn Kelly, who was, if only for a moment, foolish enough to think that when Trump said that he only insults Rosie O’Donnell, he actually meant that he only insults Rosie O’Donnell. Anyone with half an ounce of wit would have simply laughed and accepted this answer, knowing full well that it wasn’t literally true. After all, Trump had offered Kelly a perfectly standard whipping girl in place of an honest answer. Conservatives everywhere know that Rosie O’Donnell is fair game for any kind of abuse they care to heap on her, and the abuse of Rosie O’Donnell is a perfectly acceptable substitute for any answer to any more serious question, at least in front of the cameras.

That’s just how the game is played!

A moment of Rosie-bashing should have been enough. It would have been enough, except that for just that particular moment in recent history Kelly wasn’t hip to the con. No-one really expected Kelly, the audience, or anyone else to actually believe that Trump reserves all his misogyny for Rosie O’Donnell, but if Kelly is going to blow the con like that, she can’t really be in the fold.

This, I think is the key to understanding Trump’s reputation for honesty. It resides in a sense of truth as shared conspiracy. Those in the know cannot be expected to describe it accurately. That’s not what people in the know actually do. To speak the truth in itself would be an act of betrayal. And those who balk at the claims of Trump and his camp demonstrate only their own ignorance with every refutation they produce. Only a square would think it mattered that Trump’s claims were false, and only a complete square would make the effort to demonstrate this.

All of which brings us back to that wall Trump keeps telling us about. Is it important? Yes, but not because he actually means to build it. Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. It really doesn’t matter, because as an immigration policy, a wall isn’t much. But it’s a damned important symbol, and Trump supporters know this. Trump’s wall is the ultimate in us versus them politics. This is what makes it a powerful symbol. With his wall, Trump demonstrated an absolute willingness to separate the people who count from those that don’t, which is what garnered him the support of so many who count as conservative in Today’s politics.

…all of which is kind of standard.

But what escaped my notice at first is just how much that wall suggests a kind of epistemology. It isn’t just the benefits of being American that will be locked up behind that wall. It is the truth itself. One might think that one of the hallmarks of truth would be it’s capacity to overcome boundaries, to enable people who disagree to check each others’ claims and arrive at a common sense of what is and what isn’t the case. This at least is what sometimes happens in the course of a reasonable argument. But that isn’t the vision of truth driving the Trump camp. No, their Truth is not shared. It too is locked up behind that wall, and it isn’t shared with the rest of us.

First rule of fight club and all that.

Truth in the Trump machine reside in the boldness of his lies. In the cockiness of claims that couldn’t possibly be accurate. Every time the rest of us struggle to decide where to begin with Trump’s latest round of hogwash, his fans see only a knowing wink, another reassurance that he knows what they know, and that we never will.

Which raises the question of just who really is in on the con? So many of Trump’s supporters count him as a hero for the common man. What counts as a common man? Well it isn’t a liberal. It isn’t a Mexican. It isn’t a Muslim. It may or may not include other minorities, but certainly not any rude enough to stand up for their own rights. Join Black Lives Matter and you are definitely out of the club. Trump himself may make personal exceptions for certain folks (like the London Mayor), but that is the privilege of a Prince, to make exceptions to his own rules. But the real question is whether or not the working class will get a share of whatever benefits Trump hopes to hoard behind his walls. He keeps promising more jobs, and that promise may seem empty, but in the interim he has plenty of scapegoats to offer. And of course those scapegoats remain in the dark. It’s one of the most tangible signs of Trump’s loyalty to his own followers, his honesty, so to speak, his willingness to lie to (and about) the rest of us.

Truth is what Trump will make of it, and that Truth will come at the expense of a lot of people.

I expect some will be very surprised to find themselves on the wrong side of that wall.