Lords of the Earth

Earlier this week, Politico ran a piece pooling the thoughts of various thinkers and commentators on the American scene, collectively responding to the question of what Donald Trump's presidency says about us as a group—that is, the people of this country. While a multitude of explanations were offered for the Trump phenomenon, my mom—when she read the article—thought that there was an even more fundamental factor at work to which no one had given due credit: she argued that Trump's raging, vengeance-fueled base—seemingly so unaccountable in light of the fact that they are not actually among the worst off, that they enjoy many relative advantages in American society—is motivated most of all by a sense of disappointed expectations. 

The generation that makes up the hardest kernel of the Trump movement, my mom observed, is neither the oldest nor the youngest of those still among us. They are the great middle—those born too late to inherit the memory of the Great Depression and the sense of relief in its aftermath; and born too early to understand the pervading sense of impending crisis that many people in their thirties, twenties and younger take for granted. Instead, they were raised on the expectations set off by an unprecedented and perhaps unrepeatable epoch of economic growth and transformative social change: the American mid-twentieth century. 

"I think better of our legal system"

 So... the sitting U.S. president is actively trying to subvert the outcome of a free and fair election, just because he lost. We all know this. Yet, in my circles at least, we aren't really talking about it. A conspiracy of silence is maintained, though it sometimes—as this morning—breaks down, when Trump and his goons send up some particularly alarming trial balloon of authoritarianism, and we can't help but mention it to one another.

Why the hesitation to speak? We tell ourselves, it is because silence is the best strategic choice. To acknowledge Trump's bogus assertions, by contrast—even for purposes of refuting them—only gives them more oxygen. It lends credence to the idea that there is some real controversy as to the outcome of the election still, or that Trump has some realistic path to hold onto power. 

About that NYT UFO Story...

Over the last three years, the New York Times has published a series of embarrassingly credulous accounts of a U.S. government program investigating U.F.O. activity. The fact that such a program exists within the Defense Department is beyond dispute—it has received Congressionally-appropriated funds with a six-month reporting requirement—and the Times cannot be faulted for thinking this fact odd enough in itself to merit a write-up. But when the reporters start to describe what their sources have told them about the program's alleged findings, and to present these assertions as credible—that is where the eyebrows rise.

One of the more recent entries in the Times series, for instance—published over the summer—asserts that "[n]umerous associates of th[is] Pentagon program" believe not only that the military has encountered unexplained aerial phenomena that appear to perform feats that far exceed the current technological capacity of human societies: but even that the U.S. government has retrieved material from mysterious downed aircraft (at least some of it extraterrestrial in origin). Further, they claim that these materials contain technology and metallic alloys our scientists are not currently able to explain. 

Death in Venice/Death in America

Well! That passage certainly has taken on new resonance in light of current events. We are looking at a paragraph from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (in the 2004 Michael Henry Heim translation). Mann's protagonist, Aschenbach, is here learning the truth about a rampant cholera epidemic in the city, which Venetian authorities have conspired to hush up out of fear it might disrupt the tourist trade—and all the enterprises that depend upon it. They are like Ron DeSantis telling people to get back in the bars and the Orlando theme parks in the middle of COVID-19 because he has an eye on the tax revenue. 

Back to Normal?

During the two years I worked in a church in the north Boston suburbs, I became close with two aged congregants who shared a remarkable past. Political refugees from the earliest waves of fascist persecution in central Europe, one of them had stories to tell of the shelling of Red Vienna's tenement blocks by the repressive Dollfuss; the other had braved the path of secret migration and exile to reach the United States. 

Lifelong left-wing intellectuals, they remained committed democratic socialists, and when the 2016 election happened, they were some of the few people in my life who were neither emotionally crushed nor particularly surprised. "You have to remember," one of them told me, "a large percentage of the people in any given society are absolute bastards."

Election Week 2020

Okay, one more...

... Brecht-elicited reflection on Trump before we break to go harvest some election results this evening.... So, you may recall a moment in the final debate when Trump was asked about his administration's family separation policy. He offered a lot of misleading information in response, testing out a number of possible lies to see how each looked after it landed. 

The kids weren't really traveling with their parents, he said; the Democrats are just as bad; we're trying to reunite them, etc. But then, after Biden had delivered his reply, Trump seemed to remember the crowning bleat of dishonesty that he had meant to deliver from the start: "They did it!" said Trump—meaning the Democrats; "We changed the policy. They did it. We changed." 

Another Resistible Rise

 In the closing days of such a high-stakes, world-historical election as this, one is wracked by fears that one has somehow still not done enough. One has not said enough to persuade one's compatriots; one has not written enough or marched enough. Even if one has spent four years filling a personal blog with rants against Trump, it still seems there are unappreciated dimensions of his terribleness. 

This, more than anything, accounts for the sudden spate of activity on this blog as we gallop across the finish line of the 2020 vote. I keep realizing that there are aspects of the Trump phenomenon that I have still left unexamined, and that this may be the last chance to do so when it can still make a difference to the outcome.