Time for ordinary Americans to come to the aid of their imperiled, yet proud, nation

 There is a flurry of conversation, opining, and general hubbub going on around the simple fact that Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney attributes the January 6 insurrection to Donald trump, and that Joe Biden legitimately won the November election.  Today, the Republican caucus will vote to turf Ms Cheney from her leadership position in her party in the House of Representatives.

Talk about the sound and fury signifying very little!

What if, not only is Ms Cheney on terra firma in her convictions, that hers is a shared truth with those who still believe in facts, shared and demonstrably proven facts, but that those other leaders in the Republican party who insist on clinging to their cult-hero, despite the facts, despite the racism, sexism, and what can also be described as a form of anarchy, in and through his deliberate contempt for the professionals in the civil service, in the military, in the intelligence community, in the national health fraternity, and in and through his deliberate co-dependence and sycophancy with dictators, autocrats and Machiavellian master politicians, are also deliberately and conscientiously and willfully fomenting the breakdown of civil society.

To talk about the erosion of the American democracy, while accurate in a superficial way, is to ignore the far greater danger of the deliberate destruction of the institutions of government, as well as the blowing up of the perceived facts and truths that have formed the foundation of that society and culture for two hundred-plus years. The 74+ millions of voters who committed their vote to trump are far more lethal, dangerous, unprincipled and cancerous than to pose a mere threat to the democracy. And not to talk about how and why those 74+ million have committed themselves to a single person, and to the obviously simplistic, reductionistic, authoritarian and criminal thoughts and behaviours of that one man, is to walk blindly into the dark night that those 74 million people aspire to create.

Not only is the former president obviously complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, through his deliberate and willful negligence in his non-addressing the pandemic, he is also not merely complicit but actually fully responsible for the appointment of individuals to high office who had already demonstrated total submission to his will, but who also had previously expressed their intention to undermine the very offices and institute ions to which they were appointed. Think Post Office, Public Education, Environment, CDC, National Institutes of Health, Social Security, HUD…even the Supreme Court and the lower courts have been abducted from their constitutional foundations, to be filled with presidential puppets, without regard to political ideology, national history and tradition, legal precedents and public trust…and all this while blatantly pandering to the incestuous, narcissistic money-changers who rule the American economy and increasingly the political system, through the blind, naïve and willful complicity of the Republican/trump political edifice.

American trust has been shattered in every world capital worth befriending. American blatant weaponizing not only the very words of the political discourse, but also through gross arms sales, the capitals and governments of any willing buyers, while demonstrating not merely a selfish, narcissistic sycophancy to both North Korea and Russia, through their dangerous czars. The world environment has been placed in jeopardy; the WHO has been emasculated; NATO has suffered considerable damage to its reputation, as has the United Nations, where both China and Russia consistently veto any attempt to take Syrian president Assad to the International Criminal Court, for war crimes against humanity, as he should long ago have been sequestered.

The banning of the former president by twitter and facebook, while useful, perhaps even necessary, is, however, analogous to a band-aid for a scratch, when the American essense is under direct, insidious, persistent and somewhat inconspicuous, secret and deliberate initiatives to blow it up. Let’s never forget that it was Steve Bannon himself, who trumpeted to the world that trump was a transformational president, determined to tear down the established order in the United States. It is not a reach too far to suggest that his forces would also consider destabilizing the world order that it has taken three quarters of a century to birth and sustain, in order presumably so that another dictator, in the form of the trump presidency could be put in place. The Donald himself blatantly suggested that a life-time presidency, as the Chinese leader has arranged for himself, was worthy of consideration in America.

And those 74+ millions who have fallen head-over-heels in infatuation with this one man, are so desperate, despicable and determined in their commitment to what can only be deemed a sociopathic endeavour to destroy, demolish, eradicate and to elevate their hero to rule. There are so many different strands to the insurrection’s demographic: white supremacy, Christian evangelical fundamentalism, male psychosis and its concomitant the bully, ‘real women’ as the counterpart to the alpha male, un-and under-educated and un-and-under-employed men and women whose last quarter century has experienced a decimating form of rejection, denial and carelessness, in favour of those making geo-political, and geo-economic decisions, with their tax write-offs for out-sourcing millions of jobs and the manufacturing infrastructure that supported them.

There is a defiant and demonic literalism, infantilism, a desperate search for and need for a rescuing hero, among not only the insurrectionists, but a vast majority of the 74 millions and the combination of these factors continues to render a real possibility that the former president will attempt to and potentially could re-take power in 2024. These people are not reachable through logic, through empirical facts, through a reasoned and comprehensive analysis of the dangerous waywardness of their blind enthusiasm, even frenzy, that they were “cheated” in and through the “cheating” that was meted out in the voting in November 2020. They are not amenable to either facts or compromise; they are not the best of what America has raised, but they are among the weakest, the least self-sufficient, the least cognizant and the most needy of the nation.

If and when one perceives his/her life as an empty bucket, empty of work, income, healthy relationships, perhaps education, perhaps even achievements of which one is proud, empty of tenderness, love, compassion and even empty of a truth that is worth believing in, especially empty of hope, empty of dreams, empty of trust in what the ‘system’ (the establishment, the power elite, the ‘Harvard-Yale’ cabal) has done “TO” you, you are inevitably angry, sad, depressed, alienated, and somewhat desperate. If also, your world view is empty of traditions and symbols that have long ago lost their relevance (a dominantly white population, a dominantly white picket-fence-two-parent-husband-working-mother-homemaking, two .5 kids, also white and sporting trophies of various kinds and sources), you are more than sceptical; you have become cynical and even perhaps nihilistic, especially toward the future of your family and your community.  Then if your bucket (world view) seems to be filling up with unwanted, unwelcome, desperate refugees, immigrants, members of a religion the violent wing of which actually flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, only to be filled to overflowing with the onset of a global pandemic (and a chief executive who pounds his self-flatulated chest about ‘it’s nothing and will go away like a miracle, left unstated, “which I will perform”) you by now have lost touch with both reality and any lingering vestige of hope from traditional sources.

Only God and trump will save you from your existential threat. (Never mind that trump has, himself along with his acolytes, prophesied carnage in the Inaugural Address, ‘nothing to lose’ to the black community so why not vote for me, debased environmental science, exited the Paris Accord, exited the Iran Nuclear Accord while threatening to “bomb Iran” and in the process painted a somewhat vague yet distinguishable portrait of an Armageddon, thereby only exacerbating your own sense of hopelessness, futility, and the requisite fears that necessarily come along with such a vision. The paradox of trump’s attempting to be both miracle-worker and devil incarnate, by now has been lost from your picture of the world and your place in it, if for no other reason that your former 20/20 vision (literal) has been so eclipsed by your state that has replaced one reality with “alternative facts” and the accompanying choir-masters.

And let’s not be so reductionistic here as to relieve the establishment, the Harvard-Yale crew, the wealthiest one percent, the Republican Party, and those former and current iterations of the Democratic Party over the last three decades who have ‘slip-slided-along’ with the elite  though the acquisition of wealth, power, academic and/or athletic stardom (think big government is dead, three strikes you’re out, privatizing of the prison system. The triumph of intellectual superiority and the conviction that one’s thoughts are absolutely pure, purely ethical, absolutely necessary and walled off from all hints of compromise is no less venal than the triumph of the personal will of a single man or woman.

The difference lies at the core of the moment: democracies have to be fully engaged in the debate, discussion, research, education, and propagation of ideas whether those ideas be in the economic realm, the political, the scientific, the algorithmic, the investment, the foreign policy, or even the individual rights and freedoms….and must never succumb to the highly seductive glitter and glitz of one man’s seemingly iron will, even if that iron will appears to be dedicated to overturning what you believe to be a corrupt system.

Dichotomizing, black-white, either-or, Manichean reductionisms that infest each and every news story, from all outlets, (presumably based on another outdated myth: that readers and listening audience have about a grade six intellectual capacity and thus the media have to simplify things into two neat and opposing compartments, while at the same time, attaching a personal face, reputation, history, character and perceived public value to each of those faces, just to keep everything within the grasp of a ‘dumb-and-dumber’ public. The implicit insults redound, and are now redounding in cacophonous clamour of national self-sabotage.

No issue is as simple or as easily and readily resolved as the media, and the political class would like to have us believe. No person is as heroic or as venal, so long as we have a political culture that respects an evolutionary movement toward what Americans love to say is a movement of history ‘toward a more perfect union’ as the media’s insatiable appetite for sensational pieces of gossip would like to convey.

Even trump, somewhere deep beneath a heinous, seriously depraved, wounded and isolated jelly-core, is more than what he is determined to project as an iron will. Believing that his iron will is the only way he can tolerate his own person, however, is a fact of history that he has to resolve. Such a resolution cannot and must not be, or become the responsibility of a generally and historically generous, kind, welcoming, tolerant and self-critically examining nature and culture.

It is entirely up to the American nation, including both political parties, to excise the person, the history, the influence, the sycophants and the residue of this deeply failed experiment in nihilism, incarnated by a single man in an self-atrophying circle of other desperate mostly men, who have sunk below the worst nightmares of their parents’ worst fears.

Liz Cheney, having raised a whopping $1.5 million in the last quarter, for her denial, not only of the big lie, (another of the big reductionisms in headline form) but also of her steadfast advocacy for the truth, science, the public good, the need for debate not based exclusively on personal ad hominum attacks, but rather on the merits of ideas.

This space is never kind to the right wing, ideologically. However, this space sees the dangers of the American existential threat in terms that go far beyond whether the democracy survives.

Only something as pivotal and the driving out of the money changers from the temple, and nothing short of such a revolution, can and will come close to rescuing America from its potentially tragic fall, one that could eclipse all of the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, military, political and personal that clutter our libraries and now the Cloud.

Seeking their own place in history, America risks achieving such a place of idol only as graven image hollow and empty, at its own demise.