The Speech

 Okay, I just finished watching Trump's inauguration speech. Once again, he benefitted from low expectations. He didn't immediately ignite a civil war, after all. Indeed, by his usual rally standards (and this should tell you a lot about his usual standards) this came across as almost normal. 

To be sure, there was some right-wing bomb-throwing sprinkled throughout. He promised to end diversity and inclusion efforts in the federal workforce—on Martin Luther King Day, of all times. He declared that there were only two genders (I guess intersex people also don't exist, by MAGA's lights?)

Perhaps most troubling of all, he also doubled down on his threats to seize the Panama Canal by force. What's worse: he started to outline the beginnings of a pretext that would rationalize the invasion. (In outline, it appeared to amount to the false claim that Panama broke the agreement first.)

One is all too reminded of the way American politicians and adventurers sought to set up "incidents" that would justify military interventions in Mexico and Latin America in prior centuries—thereby enabling the nation to "harry" our neighbors "with rifle and with knife," as Emerson put it. 

But in between these rocky shoals of far-right menace, there was a gentler sweep of milquetoast political rhetoric. For every piece of red meat flung to the MAGA base, there was a sop as well to normie America. Trump, even as he threatened war and invasion, also promised to be a "peacemaker."

And indeed, one's expectations are so low—and the power of wishful thinking so strong—that, for a moment, one almost believed it. Maybe—I caught myself thinking—he will actually be normal, after all of this. Maybe he will change tack and be a "unifier" all of a sudden. 

One could almost forget—in that moment—that he is actively pursuing a frivolous retaliatory lawsuit to silence a pollster for reporting results he didn't like. That he tried to overthrow our democracy four years ago. That he called the Georgia Secretary of State and urged him to "find" fake votes. 

One could almost forget the Muslim ban and the racist rhetoric and family separation and calls for police brutality and the endorsement of torture and the endless threats of arbitrary rule and everything else we have come to know about this man over the last eight years. 

And indeed, that is exactly what Trump was going for. He was inviting us all to forget. He was inviting us to join him in papering over what we know to be true about his record. Because "the past is just the same—and war's a bloody game" as the English poet Siegfried Sassoon once wrote. 

After all, Sassoon said: it's easy to forget the lessons of the past: "For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days." But the danger is, that if we forget too soon, nothing will prevent its recurrence. "Do you ever stop and ask,"—he wrote in the same poem—"'Is it all going to happen again?'"

Indeed—however convenient it would be to forget January 6 or family separation or the Muslim Ban—we should all be asking: "Is it all going to happen again?" That is why Sassoon, at the end of his poem (about the aftermath of World War I), bid us: "Look up, and swear [...] you'll never forget."

The same should be true of us. We should never forget. We should never forget all the misery Trump has wrought. To the contrary, we should—as Carl Sandburg bid us—"learn to remember." In particular: to remember "who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool." (Ahem, Trump's memecoin, anyone?)

Indeed. Remember that, America.