Suddenly, the corona virus pandemic has so upstaged and overshadowed what we will now remember as normal life that last month’s anguish seems like trivial aggravation. In this genuine, once-in-a-lifetime national crisis, wouldn’t it be comforting to have an elected leader as intelligent and mature as Barack Obama? Or even as intelligent and unreliably mature as Bill Clinton. Or even as capable of performing or simulating maturity as Ronald Reagan and G.W. Bush. Or even as intelligent, if perhaps twisted and corrupt, as Richard M. Nixon.
Instead, God help us, we have what we have, its face spray-painted the ochre color of old Spanish walls, its angry mouth puckered like a blowfish poised to swallow minnows. There’s no doubt that its initial refusal to acknowledge the threat from this virus delayed our response and will result in the deaths of any number of American citizens. This is a grave charge, and I’m in accord with the journalists and Democrats who hope it might destroy the strange career of Donald Trump. But in all fairness, it may be too harsh to blame the whole metastasizing mess on one great fool in the White House. Remember that this is an old man (my age), notoriously stupid and no doubt cognitively challenged, who had been encouraged to believe that this year, 2020, would be his year of final triumph and vindication. He would be re-elected and set up court in Mar-a-Lago as the true King of America, a destiny beyond his most addled dreams.
And then came COVID-19, a microscopic life form he couldn’t see if it sat on his thumb, yet a thousand times more potent and more toxic than Donald Trump himself. Surrounded as he is by enabling sycophants and incompetents, is it any wonder that his first response to the pandemic was a firewall of denial? As long as the federal government is our first line of defense against the virus, it’s irresponsible to wish its representatives anything but rapid success in the weeks to come. I’d sacrifice nearly anything to get rid of this terrible president — but probably not my life, or even my neighbor’s.
It’s true that he called the pandemic “a new hoax,” as recently as Feb. 28, and now says “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” His tiny brain is where all facts go to die. If he elects to “re-open” the nation prematurely against all the best medical advice, tens of thousands will die and history will remember him as the most lethal American psycho since Jim Jones spiked the Kool-Aid in Guyana. Yet far more important than pinning the blame on Trump, at least at this stage, is deciding how to proceed when and if this deadly microbe has finally lost its battle with our medical scientists. Once out of quarantine, where should America’s weary survivors, creeping up out of their basements and root cellars, place their most urgent priorities? It would be a great relief to see Trump defeated in the November election, and to see Democrats regain control of the Senate. But neither of those victories would come close to curing the deeper sickness, this infection not viral but … systemic, spiritual?...that has served to place such power in the hands of reprehensible grifters like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.
Of course Joe Biden, somewhat past his prime, would make a much better, safer, saner president — though the only individuals who would not are in asylums and maximum security prisons. The sickness that preceded and may long outlast COVID-19 is one that will, unchecked, produce far worse things than one psychopathic realtor with a drowned orange mammal clutching his head. Trump’s outrageous lies and venomous tweetstorms distract us from the rest of the Republican Party, where racism, xenophobia and prehistoric stupidity are all epidemic. If you wanted to interview the most simple-minded public figure in the United States, this summer’s Republican convention might be the first place to look. I even have a candidate. His name is Tommy Tuberville and he’s famous, at least in Alabama, as a successful football coach at Auburn University.
Tuberville, a Republican candidate for one of Alabama’s US Senate seats, is a Christian who believes that Donald Trump was sent by God to save white people. Muslim terrorists control America’s cities, he tells Alabama voters. “Sharia law has taken over,” he said in March. “We have more Middle Easterners coming across that border at times than we do people from Latin America. They’re coming over here to tear this country down.” Really. And it’s been over four decades since Coach Tuberville suffered his last concussion at the line of scrimmage. Another southerner, evangelist Rick Wiles of the TruNews website the White House has honored with press credentials, is offering his parishioners the same warning about Jews. The impeachment of Donald Trump was an attempted “Jew coup,” according to Wiles. I assume he means Jewish-Americans, since the Far Right tends to find common cause with Likudist Israelis.
Wiles commonly referred to Barack Obama as “a demon from hell.” My home state of North Carolina can claim preacher/legislator Larry Pittman, one of the authors of the infamous “bathroom” bill, who once equated Abraham Lincoln with Adolf Hitler. Another Tar Heel treasure is Christian Klan leader Christopher Barker, who became unhinged when the Spanish-language Univision network sent a black Colombian reporter to interview him. On videotape, he called Ilia Calderon a “nigger” and threatened to kill her. The recent New York Times obituary for Barbara Harris, the first woman (and black woman) ordained as an Episcopal bishop, quoted her response to the hate mail and death threats that followed her election: “Nobody can hate like Christians.”
That’s an arresting statement, one that appears to be true, and increasingly so in polarized, pandemic-haunted America. What do these rabid hatemongers have in common, besides professing Christianity? They’re all white, they’re all Republican, they all voted for Donald Trump and they’ll vote for him again. They’re all part of “the base” that Hillary Clinton unwisely but accurately dubbed “the deplorables.”
I’m hardly the kind of Christian who would ever proselytize, or vote to make Christianity a state religion. But there ought to be a way to take Christ back from false “Christians” who make a malignant mockery of the Gospels. In a Higher Court, their punishment for spreading hate and bearing false witness would be to listen to the Sermon on the Mount read by someone like Barbara Harris — hour after hour, for months on end.
For Tommy Tuberville and his like, it might not penetrate. But we have a much better chance of reclaiming Jesus than reclaiming the Republican Party. The recent deaths of two old-school Republican congressmen from upstate New York reminded me painfully of the dignity and decency that vanished when the GOP, executing Nixon’s satanic “Southern strategy,” reshaped itself as a white people’s party anchored by the segregationist Dixiecrats of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. Republicans who found racism repugnant were left behind, and only a few moderates continued to win elections on the Republican ticket. One of them was Amory Houghton, my mother’s congressman in a rural district of western New York.
Houghton, who died at 93 in early March, was a wealthy, Harvard-educated aristocrat whose father and grandfather were both ambassadors. Prior to his nine terms in Congress he was the CEO of Corning Glass, a venerable international corporation founded by his family in 1851. He also supported civil rights, abortion rights, increases in the minimum wage, campaign-funding reforms and an assault-weapon ban, and opposed the war in Iraq, Christian-mandated school prayer and Bill Clinton’s impeachment—-all in defiance of his party’s leadership. In his 90s he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump. Check, check, check. Everything you could ask from a thoughtful, progressive congressman, and entirely in line with the New York Republicanism that formed his philosophy. My father, a similar Republican, was scandalized by FDR’s fiscal policies, but would have cut off his own right hand before shaking Donald Trump’s.
But the thing about Houghton that most endeared him to me was his personal response to letters from my mother. His were not the kind of letters from politicians you get today— usually emails begging for money — with your first name inserted at the top and all the rest canned. “Dear Dorothy,” he would begin, and proceed to address each of the questions and concerns in her letter. And she would proudly show me her latest reply from “Amo,” which is what everyone called him. My mother, a widowed, retired English teacher, was not a major contributor to Houghton’s campaigns or a person with any influence outside her village of 800 souls.
Did he personally answer every constituent letter? How could he? But “Now that’s a congressman!” is what I thought when I saw their correspondence. Once upon a time that was a Republican congressman. Another upstate Republican of the same stripe — and even more of a rebel liberal — was Richard Hanna of New York’s 22nd district, who died in March of cancer, at 69. Hanna, often alone on his side of the aisle, supported gay marriage, Planned Parenthood and the Equal Rights Amendment. He despised Donald Trump so intensely (“a national embarrassment”) that he bolted his party in 2016 and endorsed Hillary Clinton.
“I never left the Republican Party that I originally joined,” Rep. Hanna told an interviewer. “I can only say that they’ve left me.”
Under the celebrity birthday column in the local paper I was reading this morning, I found a relevant note: “On this day in 1854, the Republican Party was founded by abolitionists at a school in Wisconsin.” That was the actual Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln that somehow became the party of Donald Trump and Jim Crow. In reality, only the name is the same. The party’s traditional fiscal caution devolved into ruthless contempt for the unfortunate and virtual piracy of the nation’s wealth. Everything else Republican ancestors believed in — tolerance, equality, human rights, even free speech — is long gone from the party platform, traded away for racists’ votes.
Party affiliation can become almost hereditary, and sometimes I’m not sure that these middle-class, educated Republicans, the country-club and Chamber of Commerce crowd, fully understand who they’re sleeping with when they vote Republican in the 21st century. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. But the USA, compromised at its very roots by slavery and Native American genocide, has always had a dark side. A very dark side, one which has required vigilant denial. John Adams — the abolitionist New England Founder, not one of the Southern slave-owning Founders — appreciated Shakespeare’s “Othello” but wrote to a friend that Desdemona probably got what she deserved for sleeping with a black man. Cringe? Then don’t read the private letters of Adams’ great grandson Henry Brooks Adams, one of the 19th century’s most gifted and respected historians, whose impassioned anti-Semitism will curl your hair. In 1939, two years before Pearl Harbor, pro-Nazi Americans inspired by national icons Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh held a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Twenty thousand native fascists attended, wildly cheering speeches that praised Hitler and warned of the Jewish menace.
That dark side has always been there, but it’s rarely so obvious who’s feeding it and profiting from it. I’ve heard enough nonsense about the “populism” of the Right. The modern Republican Party is defined by bigotry and religious hypocrisy. It’s a rank sty crowded with blind pigs, and what they’re eating you don’t want to step in. Since Trump joined the anti-Obama Birther cult, his personal racism has never been in doubt; hate crimes against all minorities have more than doubled since he was elected. On the alt-Right color chart, “White” does not include Jews, Muslims, or Latin Americans. Roman Catholics (Sean Hannity?) were never white enough for the KKK, which once recruited Trump’s father. If anything positive can come from a terrifying pandemic, a shared national ordeal, might it be a modest upsurge in altruism and fraternal feeling, a sense among lukewarm white Republicans and independents that not all politics are about us and “Them”?
Is that too much to hope for, that a nation ravaged by a killer virus could re-learn enough about compassion to recognize that the GOP has none? Since 2016, it has been spinning toward the dark side, the black hole of fascism, at warp speed. To fuel your worst fears, keep your eye on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which under Trump has adopted tactics the Gestapo would have applauded.
This is not a recruiting poster for the Democrats, who at least half the time will break your heart. They occupy the moral high ground that was thrust upon them, rather than earned, when their Solid South defected to the enemy. A reduced but still solid South, Jim Crow’s evil empire, is the concrete that holds Trump’s baleful base together. A party defined by Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, “Bathroom Bill” Pittman and Tommy Tuberville is no longer an option for people of ordinary good will and good sense. White nationalists have no place in the enlightened democracy the United States of America has sometimes aspired and always pretended to be. Either they fail or we all fail. If you survive the virus and find yourself still thinking Republican, think twice while your conscience still shows a pulse.
Hal Crowther’s latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards in New York in June, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. His essays were awarded Pushcart Prizes in 2014, 2018 and 2019. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2020
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