Damnatio Memoriae

Despite its birth in slavery and genocide, there was always some hope that the United States would one day live up to the aspirations of its founders rather than continue to turn a blind eye to the evils inherent in some of their political compromises. Even when we were certain we wouldn’t live to see that day, we had reasons not to feel like fools when looking forward to its eventual arrival.

Today, as Trump and his sycophants begin gleefully making plans to burn our books and chisel our names off the nation’s monuments, we should take a moment to remind ourselves what will inevitably become of them once their political orgasm has spent itself. Winning won’t magically make them any less ignorant, any more capable of coping with anything more complex than their own appetites for self-aggrandisement. While they’re busy gloating, grifting, and genuflecting to their preposterous version of the Christian god, the Chinese or Russians may very well show up to eat the lunch so cluelessly laid out for them, or what is even more likely, climate change may finally turn Arizona into hell with the fire out, and blow down or drown everything in Florida from Mar-a-Lago to Tallahassee.

In the meantime, we should mind how we go. Remember that they don’t own the future—many of their children will come to hate them soon enough, especially their daughters. Ignore the taunts, save the bullied wherever and whenever we can, and never, ever forego an opportunity to pour a cup of virtual sugar into a coal-roller’s gas tank.

As it is written, so let it be done.

On the Proposed Rehabilitation of Mike Pence

Mike Pence has one of those faces, frozen in malevolence, that are usually pictured standing stoically behind a Franco, or a Stalin, or a Gotti as they deliver their epiphanies to a cowering public. Pence has no soul; he’s replaced it with a clockwork Christanity devoted only to his own self-righteous ambition. Even the Bible would advise us to shun him.

Madness

Twenty years of ill-advised and often vicious U.S. meddling in Vietnamese affairs ended with TV images of overloaded Hueys lifting off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, of Vietnamese who worked for us stumbling down the runway after the C-130s taking off from Tan Son Nhut airbase without them, leaving them behind to face whatever suffering the North Vietnamese government intended to inflict on them.

Twenty years of ill-advised and often vicious U.S. meddling in Afghan affairs are now ending with Internet images of overloaded Chinooks and Blackhawks lifting off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, of Afghanis who worked for us clawing at the sealed doors of a C-17 taking off from Kabul airport without them, leaving them behind to face whatever suffering the Taliban intends to inflict on them.

Have our earnest media news and analysis teams really not understood the pattern at work here? Have the self-appointed custodians of our shriveled Pax Americana really learned nothing since 1975?

Bet on it.

21st Century Institutions: the U.S. Presidency

Donald Trump is not the first U.S. President to be elected in the 21st Century, and the odds are he’s not going to be the last.* He does seem likely, however, to go down in history as the century’s most characteristic one, at least as things look now, twenty years into the accursed opening maneuvers of its history-making engines.

President Trump himself is undeniably one of those engines, a steam-powered anomaly in an era increasingly lit up at night by the output from solar panels, wind turbines, and lithium ion batteries. It would probably be easier, and it would certainly be more pleasant, to write about the American Presidency without mentioning the Donald, but since he does seem to represent some sort of numinous final stage in the rot that’s been eating away at the office since 1945, there’s no credible way to avoid dealing with him in all his radiantly decadent glory.

Back in 2011, in snarking at the dozen or so GOP presidential candidates of the time, I called Newt Gingrich the Dorian Gray of the Republican Party. By the middle of 2016, as candidate Trump’s arsenal of creepy facial expressions began its final assault on our international media landscape, I realized that Newt had been a mere pretender. Not even Oscar Wilde himself could have imagined the world we were now living in, a world in which the real-life equivalent of his fictional character actually preferred having the evolving portrait of his depravity visible to everyone and his dog.

When January, 20, 2017 finally did arrive, it was even weirder than usual for a Presidential Inauguration Day. Most of the political class and its media pilot fish were still hung over from the excesses of the election in November. To their momentarily everlasting astonishment, it seemed, Trump had actually managed somehow to get himself elected President, and was standing there now, live in front of the assembled cameras, taking the oath of office. Oh. My. God. The nuclear football in the possession of a sociopathic, blowhard hotel developer! Sackcloth and ashes! Baskets of deplorables! Facebook and Russians! Blah, blah, blah.

Trump himself was soon to be busy elsewhere in Washington. Once he’d gotten the rug swapped out in the Oval Office, had more Trump-suitable golden drapes hung above its windows, and settled his very stable genius behind the Resolute desk, he got down at last to the real work: redecorating the American political landscape with a stunning array of bagmen, bootlickers, generals and ex-generals, racist Dixie irredentists, religious fanatics, voodoo economists, firearms fetishists, Fox News ressentimentistes, rust belt coal rollers, libertarians looking for a hill to die on, and his own children. In 2020, I continue to wonder: is there really anyone left in the United States who still believes that this was all some sort of diabolical accident?

No, there isn’t. And no, it definitely wasn’t. Most of the electorate understands very well that this train wreck of an election was no accident, whether they voted for Donald Trump or not. And yet, amazing as it is to contemplate, our luck has held once again. Despite the best efforts of Trump and his merry band of magatrumpistas, the United States seems unlikely to become a failed state during his reign, no matter how diligent its political class is at helping him carve one out of the complex patrimony of the U.S. Constitution.

If we can somehow manage to ignore all the present din and idiocy, what is undeniable about the history which has led us to Trump in the White House is that already by the latter half of the 1970s, the international economic order set up by the western allies following the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was becoming alarmingly unstable. Contrary to the arrogant predictions of our so-called foreign policy experts, the economic restoration of our defeated enemies had not, in fact, bound them in perpetuity to political alliances dominated by the United States. China was not, in fact, going to be permanently denied the economic and political deference due it as a society which embraced more than 18% of the world’s population. Even the lesser nations of the world would not, in fact, continue to fear being denied a place at the trough of American largesse, especially as there came to be less and less in it for them.

The election of Donald Trump is far more, I think, than a macabre trick that the rubes in the MAGA hats have played on themselves. It’s also the clearest demonstration we’re ever likely to get that prominent members of the American political class are not as savvy as they make themselves out to be. Simply put, they’ve failed to prepare the American people for the historical metamorphosis which has brought the postwar Pax Americana to an end. Even more simply put, bearing humiliating witness to a Trump in the White House is the price they’re paying for that failure. Whether they realize it or not, the longer they keep propping up the status quo, the higher that price will be. After four years of the Trump administration, let alone eight years, I’m pretty sure the vig alone will wind up bankrupting them.

While it may be true that even in the hands of a Donald Trump the U.S. Presidency remains as remarkable an institution as it ever has been, it’s definitely true that it’s never been a less transparent one, especially with respect to the exact nature of its formal and informal powers. To give just one example, there are 17 agencies in the so-called United States Intelligence Community, which, according to the latest figures available to the public, have granted top secret security clearances to a total of over 900,000 people. Meanwhile, President Trump is reported to have restricted his daily security briefing to two pages, while supposedly watching four hours of Fox News a day. What reason is there for anyone to believe that he’s actually in charge of what is going on in these agencies? Who can predict the impact that such calculated ignorance will have on our national security, or our foreign policy in general? Certainly someone is in charge — many someones more likely — but I doubt that any of them are significantly more accountable to the President, at least on a day-to-day basis, than they are to the public at large.

Admittedly it’s hard enough to run an effective federal administration with a full complement of politically competent policy experts, and a chain of responsibility that extends to the lowest level of the executive branch. You certainly can’t run one effectively with a staff consisting of your daughter, your son-in-law, Sean Hannity, Sheldon Adelson, a rota of retired generals, lobbyists and golf partners, and an assortment of idiot yes-people whose only significant achievement is the byzantine complexity of their self-abasement. The country is too large, its political and economic infrastructure too complex, to be managed entirely from the top down; the responsibilities of the Federal Government are too extensive, and its interlocking bureaucracies too encrusted with decades of turf wars, interagency rivalries, and deviant ideological agendas to respond competently to even the most intelligently conceived policy directives.

The bottom line, I’m afraid, is that the U.S. Constitution is showing its age, and so is the U.S. Presidency. I think it’s significant that both President Trump and three of his Democratic Party challengers for the office in 2020 are over 70 years old. I remember when we used to laugh at the infirmities of the gerontocracy under Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, and Mao in China. These days, it looks as though the laugh is on us.

*YMMV. I have to say, though, that if I were a bookie, I’d be reluctant to offer the current Vegas line on that bet, especially if I had to lay off any significant amount of it. That’s the kind of move that might just wind up getting you your legs broken — or worse — even when most of your ordinary day-to-day tormentors would be running around shrieking and waving their hands, looking for a window to jump out of.

Spectator Sport

Watching President Trump try to beat the Congress into submission has been a uniquely gruesome experience, but also an edifying one. For decades now, the dysfunction of the federal government has been something sensed rather than seen, partly because it was in the interest of the political class to keep it hidden, and partly because the media, ever conscious of which side their bread was buttered on, shared that interest.

Today we’re told by Marc Short, the President’s director of legislative affairs, that the White House is simply “asking that the Congress do its job.” I wonder if he, or his boss, for that matter, has any idea just how big an ask that is. If the experience of the past 40 years or so is anything to go by, the problem isn’t that the Congress won’t do its job, it’s that it can’t. Our tolerance for venality, it seems, has drawn the veil over an alarmingly complete incompetence as well. What happens when you bully a moron? Nothing good, I’m thinking, but with the two-minute warning already being signaled, it looks as though we’re about to find out.