Now that the War On Christmas, imagined by Fox News and its premier viewer. Donald Trump, is over for another year; now that their attempt at imagining that a combination of Christianity and Capitalism has turned the nation into one huge department store called Goys R Us; now that a blast of arctic weather has kept many indoors for a while, some of whom might have more time for reflection, it is time to turn our attention once again to figurative blasts of arctic weather that are responsible for much of our nation's current chilly malaise, a self-inflicted case of inner global cooling.
This article assumes that you have long since figured out that Trump is a flaming narcissist; that he is incompetent; unfit for office; a barely literate person (un)leading the most powerful nation on earth during these best and worst of times, a present full of promise, yet fraught with ever-present danger, and that, for our country's sake and for the sake of the world, he should never have left the unreality of Reality TV, the audience of which formed a significant base of his supporters--most of whom alas! continue to think he's the best thing to come their way since Fox News, prayer, and automatic weapons.
Someone recently told me that while the wound Trump has already inflicted on our country and on the free world is deep, there will be a recovery, a time of healing, which, let's hope, begins with the November 2018 mid-term elections. Let's hope that's true, I replied; deep wounds, however, leave deep scars. I am still cautiously optimistic; I believe a lot of healthy tissue will remain. The body politic might limp for a while, but will walk on in reasonable health--provided that we wake up, that is, and see to it that it gets the care that it and we, the people, need.
Two serious threats to our well-being will be discussed here, one of which, let us hope, will not last, the other one, more insidious, has already caused considerable damage. The first is Trump's attempts to weaken the checks and balances, which are mainstays of democracy; the other is unregulated capitalism, which Trump indeed fosters, but has been wreaking its slow havoc for many years.
First Threat: Undermining Checks and Balances
When Americans of my generation (I'm in my eighth decade) studied the American Revolution in high school, we learned the catchphrase, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," just as we had memorized, in another context, "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," doggerel we had committed to memory several grades earlier. The taxation slogan, popular during the Revolutionary War, indicates a major and valid concern of the Founding Fathers. best expressed by a great president four score and seven years later, the hope that "the government of the people, by the people and of the people shall not perish from this earth." It was a new and glorious adventure, since just about the entire world was under autocratic rule at that time. George Washington was to be our president, not our king. In order to help assure that the government of the new country would never devolve into one headed by a tyrant, we elected a paper king, as it were, the Constitution; we would be ruled by laws, not by the unelected; Louis IV's "L'État, c'est moi," ("the State is I"), had become the Founding Fathers' "The State is us,'' "L'État, c'est nous"). A key principle of the Constitution is the establishment of checks and balances as essential safeguards of freedom. Of utmost importance here is the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and the freedom of the press. Tyrants and these two freedoms mix as well as mashed potatoes and motor oil; history provides many examples of figurative versions of this very unsavory dish, which has poisoned the well-being of countless millions. Equally important as the First Amendment is the separation of powers, enshrined in the Constitution as well. The three branches of government, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary each have their essential functions and, as long as their continued function remains a national priority, they will remain alembics through which no despot can hope to pass.
Although I am cautiously optimistic that our institutions will survive Trump, they are indeed under threat, perhaps as never before. In Trump's Orwellian world, real news is called fake news and vice versa. Any report that is critical of him, which is now just about all objective reporting, is deemed mendacious. It's even worse than that. The First Amendment assures that everyone has the right to speak her mind, which means, since we are all human and fallible, every individual she or he can be wrong. The Amendment implies that a free and honest debate should separate the wheat from the chaff. Alas, a lot of chaff passes for wheat these days. The degree of polarization of our society today is very sad indeed; we tend to argue at each other, rather than debate with each other. Worse, many of us get our news from unreliable sources, inaccuracies at best and lies at worst that not only apply no pins to our ignorant bubbles, but provide us with a soapy dopey goo with which we continue to increase them.
The weakening of First Amendment rights is, sad to write, not the only problem. Insidious attacks on the separation of powers have become more overt during the Trump administration as well. It has long since been well known to the more astute observes among us that Trump possesses the traits of a narcissist to an alarming degree. A statement by Michael Wolff, the author of the Trump exposé, Fire and Fury, indicates a severe character flaw in the president. He can't abide playing second fiddle to anyone. It's all about him. This prevents him from surrounding himself with first-rate minds which can guide and challenge him. He is instead advised by relatives, by the callow Hope Hicks, and by that obnoxious young sycophant-bull dog, Stephen Miller. What's worse, he's playing on a toy fiddle without ever having taken lessons. He doesn't read, is only semi-literate, has little political knowledge and almost no desire to learn--and thinks he's "like, really smart"--"a stable genius." If these flaws weren't enough, he also shamelessly and openly displays our national shame, racism.
It's not surprising then to discover that he doesn't know how politics works and tends toward authoritarian rule, a government of Trump, by Trump and for Trump. He doesn't understand, or at least refuses to abide by, the separation of powers doctrine. Our Kiddie King Louie actually said this: "I have an absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department." He was furious when Jeffrey Sessions recused himself for having lied to Congress about meetings with Russians. Trump, I think, really believes that the primary duty of the Attorney General is to protect him, and not to serve the American people. Currently, a group of politicians who are putting their own need for power above country, are doing their best to undermine the independence and integrity of Robert Mueller, who is in charge of the investigation into Russian collusion and into Trump-family financial shenanigans.
Second Threat: No Checks and Skewed Balances
The Constitution protects individual freedoms but does not assure freedoms from want. The Constitution predates the rise of industrial capitalism; threats to inequality hardly kept Thomas Jefferson up at night, who, like so many of the elite of his day, "owned" slaves. The underside of capitalism, immortalized by Dickens, was yet to come. A good analogy is the exposure of Northern Hemisphere songbirds to cats. These birds did not co-evolve with cats, who were brought over from Europe; the former possess little defenses against the latter. Everyone who lets his cat out should place a bell around its neck as a little minatory tocsin; if birds and cats had evolved together, Northern Hemisphere birds wouldn't need such a warning; with the help of visual, aural, and olfactory clues, they would naturally be as leery of cats as antelope are of lions.
Great Britain has come a long way from Dickensonian sqaulor, the United States not so much. What are some of the checks and balances to the inequality which are inevitable byproducts of unregulated capitalism? I suggest a few: the right to work at a living wage when work is available, adequate social support when it is not; the right to affordable health care; the right to adequate housing, the right to a safe environment and access to affordable education. Most Western countries have come a long way to realizing these goals; why do we, the richest country in the world, continue to be outliers?
Capitalism is the engine of wealth. fuel by expertise and innovation. It tends to view workers as things, however, and people are not things.
The threats to democracy by the increasing inequality fostered by the current regime is truly alarming. Trump promised to "drain the swamp"; he lied, of course, and packed the swamp with ribbeting oligarchs.
I am cautiously optimistic that we can heal our serious Trumpian wounds, bear our deep Trumpian scars, and get back on a straighter and narrower path, but only if enough citizens resist and become politically active. If we are unable to defeat the kleptocrats in next yea'rs mid-term elections, for instance, we will continue to be exploited by the government we deserve.
This article assumes that you have long since figured out that Trump is a flaming narcissist; that he is incompetent; unfit for office; a barely literate person (un)leading the most powerful nation on earth during these best and worst of times, a present full of promise, yet fraught with ever-present danger, and that, for our country's sake and for the sake of the world, he should never have left the unreality of Reality TV, the audience of which formed a significant base of his supporters--most of whom alas! continue to think he's the best thing to come their way since Fox News, prayer, and automatic weapons.
Someone recently told me that while the wound Trump has already inflicted on our country and on the free world is deep, there will be a recovery, a time of healing, which, let's hope, begins with the November 2018 mid-term elections. Let's hope that's true, I replied; deep wounds, however, leave deep scars. I am still cautiously optimistic; I believe a lot of healthy tissue will remain. The body politic might limp for a while, but will walk on in reasonable health--provided that we wake up, that is, and see to it that it gets the care that it and we, the people, need.
Two serious threats to our well-being will be discussed here, one of which, let us hope, will not last, the other one, more insidious, has already caused considerable damage. The first is Trump's attempts to weaken the checks and balances, which are mainstays of democracy; the other is unregulated capitalism, which Trump indeed fosters, but has been wreaking its slow havoc for many years.
First Threat: Undermining Checks and Balances
When Americans of my generation (I'm in my eighth decade) studied the American Revolution in high school, we learned the catchphrase, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," just as we had memorized, in another context, "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," doggerel we had committed to memory several grades earlier. The taxation slogan, popular during the Revolutionary War, indicates a major and valid concern of the Founding Fathers. best expressed by a great president four score and seven years later, the hope that "the government of the people, by the people and of the people shall not perish from this earth." It was a new and glorious adventure, since just about the entire world was under autocratic rule at that time. George Washington was to be our president, not our king. In order to help assure that the government of the new country would never devolve into one headed by a tyrant, we elected a paper king, as it were, the Constitution; we would be ruled by laws, not by the unelected; Louis IV's "L'État, c'est moi," ("the State is I"), had become the Founding Fathers' "The State is us,'' "L'État, c'est nous"). A key principle of the Constitution is the establishment of checks and balances as essential safeguards of freedom. Of utmost importance here is the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and the freedom of the press. Tyrants and these two freedoms mix as well as mashed potatoes and motor oil; history provides many examples of figurative versions of this very unsavory dish, which has poisoned the well-being of countless millions. Equally important as the First Amendment is the separation of powers, enshrined in the Constitution as well. The three branches of government, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary each have their essential functions and, as long as their continued function remains a national priority, they will remain alembics through which no despot can hope to pass.
Although I am cautiously optimistic that our institutions will survive Trump, they are indeed under threat, perhaps as never before. In Trump's Orwellian world, real news is called fake news and vice versa. Any report that is critical of him, which is now just about all objective reporting, is deemed mendacious. It's even worse than that. The First Amendment assures that everyone has the right to speak her mind, which means, since we are all human and fallible, every individual she or he can be wrong. The Amendment implies that a free and honest debate should separate the wheat from the chaff. Alas, a lot of chaff passes for wheat these days. The degree of polarization of our society today is very sad indeed; we tend to argue at each other, rather than debate with each other. Worse, many of us get our news from unreliable sources, inaccuracies at best and lies at worst that not only apply no pins to our ignorant bubbles, but provide us with a soapy dopey goo with which we continue to increase them.
The weakening of First Amendment rights is, sad to write, not the only problem. Insidious attacks on the separation of powers have become more overt during the Trump administration as well. It has long since been well known to the more astute observes among us that Trump possesses the traits of a narcissist to an alarming degree. A statement by Michael Wolff, the author of the Trump exposé, Fire and Fury, indicates a severe character flaw in the president. He can't abide playing second fiddle to anyone. It's all about him. This prevents him from surrounding himself with first-rate minds which can guide and challenge him. He is instead advised by relatives, by the callow Hope Hicks, and by that obnoxious young sycophant-bull dog, Stephen Miller. What's worse, he's playing on a toy fiddle without ever having taken lessons. He doesn't read, is only semi-literate, has little political knowledge and almost no desire to learn--and thinks he's "like, really smart"--"a stable genius." If these flaws weren't enough, he also shamelessly and openly displays our national shame, racism.
It's not surprising then to discover that he doesn't know how politics works and tends toward authoritarian rule, a government of Trump, by Trump and for Trump. He doesn't understand, or at least refuses to abide by, the separation of powers doctrine. Our Kiddie King Louie actually said this: "I have an absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department." He was furious when Jeffrey Sessions recused himself for having lied to Congress about meetings with Russians. Trump, I think, really believes that the primary duty of the Attorney General is to protect him, and not to serve the American people. Currently, a group of politicians who are putting their own need for power above country, are doing their best to undermine the independence and integrity of Robert Mueller, who is in charge of the investigation into Russian collusion and into Trump-family financial shenanigans.
Second Threat: No Checks and Skewed Balances
The Constitution protects individual freedoms but does not assure freedoms from want. The Constitution predates the rise of industrial capitalism; threats to inequality hardly kept Thomas Jefferson up at night, who, like so many of the elite of his day, "owned" slaves. The underside of capitalism, immortalized by Dickens, was yet to come. A good analogy is the exposure of Northern Hemisphere songbirds to cats. These birds did not co-evolve with cats, who were brought over from Europe; the former possess little defenses against the latter. Everyone who lets his cat out should place a bell around its neck as a little minatory tocsin; if birds and cats had evolved together, Northern Hemisphere birds wouldn't need such a warning; with the help of visual, aural, and olfactory clues, they would naturally be as leery of cats as antelope are of lions.
Great Britain has come a long way from Dickensonian sqaulor, the United States not so much. What are some of the checks and balances to the inequality which are inevitable byproducts of unregulated capitalism? I suggest a few: the right to work at a living wage when work is available, adequate social support when it is not; the right to affordable health care; the right to adequate housing, the right to a safe environment and access to affordable education. Most Western countries have come a long way to realizing these goals; why do we, the richest country in the world, continue to be outliers?
Capitalism is the engine of wealth. fuel by expertise and innovation. It tends to view workers as things, however, and people are not things.
The threats to democracy by the increasing inequality fostered by the current regime is truly alarming. Trump promised to "drain the swamp"; he lied, of course, and packed the swamp with ribbeting oligarchs.
I am cautiously optimistic that we can heal our serious Trumpian wounds, bear our deep Trumpian scars, and get back on a straighter and narrower path, but only if enough citizens resist and become politically active. If we are unable to defeat the kleptocrats in next yea'rs mid-term elections, for instance, we will continue to be exploited by the government we deserve.
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