As 2019 draws its last breath it seems the entire world is beset by tyrants, ravening wolves feeding at the souls and bodies of their people. (Cartoon by Michael de Adder, fired in 2019 for telling too much truth in his cartoons.
Lovers of democracy and of liberty look upon the world map and despair. Everywhere we see retreat, destruction and death. Even in our country, which should be the torchbearer of freedom, the Trump darkness grows ever darker. Every effort, by anyone, to rein him in is met with ever-greater outrage. The center, despite its best efforts, cannot hold.
I have been banging my brain to find an analogy for this year in American history. It’s the summer of hate, against 1967’s Summer of Love. It’s 1939, the beginning of the war. It’s 1859, the eve of the war.
Of course, it’s none of these things. But 2019 has things in common with all past climax states in our history.
I’ve read a lot of American history this year. Until recently America’s history is an almost nonstop string of white racist provocation. The only kindness we’ve shown has been to our European “brothers,” and then mainly with our own interests at heart. Trump is not as out of bounds as he sounds.
We’re not the good guys.
We revere Abraham Lincoln. But it was Lincoln’s Homestead Act that put the genocide of our American Indians into overdrive.
We put Theodore Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore. But Teddy was an imperialist who stole Panama from Columbia, who made a war of conquest on Filipinos who had been our allies, and whose writings are filled with racist tropes about the superiority of “Nordic” peoples.
Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t complain about the coming German Holocaust, because Hitler could point to lynching of black men and women happening among Roosevelt’s own Democratic Party followers. The raw violence of those acts makes what he was doing at the time to his Jews pale in comparison. Like Lebensraum and eugenics, the violence began here.
Our racial progress, our support for human rights, these are exceptions in our national story. You may have been taught that they were the rule, but they weren’t. Texas children, even today, are being told that the Texas War for Independence was done on behalf of “freedom.” It was the freedom to hold black people as property that was at issue, nothing more and nothing less.
That said, we’re not the bad guys, either.
No nation, no people, no group in this world doesn’t have blood on its hands. Often, its own blood. Mark Twain ended his life early in the 20th century as a pronounced cynic about humanity. He couldn’t publish much of what he wrote, it was so dark. This during the one time in his life when he had some measure of financial security. He self-censored so as not to risk it.
The Trump coalition, like the wolfish coalitions around the world, consists of three parts.
- There are mullahs, religious leaders whose view of God is so narrow that not even their own followers can enter the gates of heaven without condemning others.
- There is moolah, the oligarchs on Wall Street, and around the world, whose desire for wealth is unlimited, and who have no more care for their fellow creatures than most of us do for the rats in our attics.
- There are the militarists, cops and soldiers, their commanders and paymasters, who do the work of the other two and demand adherence to their own violent code as the price of their support.
The rest, the deplorables, the NRA members, the dancing dunces parading at every Trump rally, these are just window dressing. They’re the chumps, the clowns, the dullards, the fools who justify the leaders in their depredations, because to Trump these really are the people. His people. His people are idiots. Why not kick them like dogs every time their backs are turned?
We look kindly toward our past because we know how it turned out. The Revolution succeeded. We won the Civil War. We won World War II. We won the Civil Rights cause. Nixon resigned. This gives us faith that things will turn out OK, that the current crisis is not only survivable but not that big a deal. We’re not making farm towns into battlefields. We’re not threatened as we were by Hitler, and Tojo, by Stalin and by Mussolini. Our past generations saw worse than we do, they fought longer odds, and they overcame it.
But we don’t know how the present struggle will play out. We don’t yet know if this generation of Americans has the stuff to look treason in the eye, to say no, and to mean it. As 2019 ends Trump is at the height of his power. He knows the House impeachment will fail in the Senate. The Mullahs are in delight, ready to throw women and their doctors into jail if they dare try to save themselves from the preachers’ ravening pricks. Trump knows no law, he has no challengers within his own party, and Wall Street considers him a favorite for re-election. After all, look at the stock market. That’s all Moolah cares about, higher and higher piles of the stuff.
These are the best of times for me as well as the worst of times for my country. I fear to open my web browser, feeling guilt over the death of immigrant children, the destruction of our planet, the hatred rising to a crest everywhere. On the other hand, there is that stock market. My IRA looks flush. I am literally a millionaire as I write this, and it surprises me.
But I’d trade it all in a minute if I knew my children could live to their own old age and help reverse the present trends that threaten to throw them in the fire as well as everyone else.
It’s not a Merry Christmas.
Bravo!
Bravo!