When Words Fail

By HAL CROWTHER

My friend Dwane Powell, a distinguished member of America’s vanishing tribe of editorial cartoonists, died just a couple of days before the Attorney General released the (redacted) Mueller report to Congress and the press. Like all of us in the beleaguered profession the president has designated as “the enemy of the people,” Dwane would have been very curious to see what the special counsel discovered about the multifarious connections between the Trump campaign and the trolls in Moscow and St. Petersburg. If he hadn’t been so sick, he would have gone to his drawing board and created something trenchant and funny for the Sunday edition of the Raleigh News and Observer. Knowing his cartoons as well as I do, I tried to imagine what this one might have looked like, maybe with Donald Trump as Little Red Riding Hood about to be devoured by the big Russian bear. Powell was great at animals — his woolly mammoths, representing the Republican Party, and his giant hogs representing North Carolina’s noisome pork industry were recurring classics.

But if he had been easy to predict, he wouldn’t have been so successful at what he did. His last published cartoon, which he sent to me before it was published, depicted our idiot president executing that salacious, physical embrace of the American flag we recently saw in news photographs. The artist has anthropomorphized Old Glory as another horrified Me Too victim.

Powell’s death means the loss of yet another valuable dissenter, at a moment when articulate dissent is so critically important. One of his obituaries reported that there are fewer than 50 full-time editorial cartoonists now employed in the newspaper industry, which very recently employed hundreds. The grand tradition of political cartooning that goes back to James Gillray, Honore Daumier and Thomas Nast appears to be dying out in this country, along with the vigorous free press that supported it. One of any democracy’s most challenging and useful careers — subjecting power to ridicule with lacerating caricatures of the mighty and the pompous — will no longer be an option for bright kids who can draw. I hate to think of the Nasts, the Herblocks and the Powells of the future lined up with the other street artists outside Manhattan’s Central Park Zoo, drawing tourists’ caricatures for a few dollars each.

But it isn’t just the declining influence of traditional journalism, in the era of the Internet and social media, that frustrates reasonable Americans in our efforts — often desperate — to rid ourselves of the most inappropriate and embarrassing president who was ever legally elected. More than half the population was praying that the Mueller Report would reveal Donald Trump as a literal Manchurian Candidate, a Kremlin puppet whose rise to power was conceived and orchestrated by Vladimir Putin and the KGB. It didn’t even seem so far-fetched, considering the multiple indictments of Trump’s associates and the very strange Ukraine-tainted rap sheet of Paul Manafort, who was once the president’s campaign manager. But it was way too much to ask for, and I for one never expected it. And what would have happened, if Trump’s guilt was so manifest that even the Trumpacked Supreme Court could never have defended him? A quiet resignation and a secret flight to political asylum in Kiev? A trial for treason? A merciful commitment to a mental institution?

More likely, an absolute stonewall from the White House, a cry for help to the armed “base” that finds no fault with this man with no virtues, and something close to a civil war. Because even photographs of Trump French-kissing Putin or wearing the uniform of a Red Army general — cartoonists’ visions? — would have made no difference to the legions of the faithful.

Conventional wisdom, when Trump first appeared on the scene, was that a satirist’s heyday was at hand. Newspaper columnists and cartoonists salivated over such an easy target, a man who looked and talked like a fool, whose public life had been so crammed with buffoonery and scandal that mere words and drawings could never capture half his folly. Whose candidacy must explode, of course, before the sages of the newsroom had even warmed up their wit.

Conventional wisdom was in error, in chief because Donald Trump is so mind-bendingly worse than our conventionally-conditioned minds could comprehend. “Trump’s wrongdoing is not private,” wrote Lili Loofbourow on Slate. “Seeking an expose’ is kind of a weird response to an emperor with no clothes.” Disappointment with the Mueller report is mild compared to journalists’ disappointment when Trump proved impervious to the finest, sharpest satirical weapons in our arsenal. Political cartoons, no matter how skilled and pointed, drew little of the blood we anticipated. The most extreme caricatures of the president were no match, on a scale of the grotesque, for his news photos with that sphincteresque mouth twisted into theatrical scowls and smirks. Good political cartoons rely on irony, and the possibility that their targets might experience shame and remorse. Or at least get the joke. (They say that even Jesse Helms, the Senate’s last antediluvian segregationist, saved some of Dwane Powell’s most unflattering cartoons and hung them on his office wall.) This president is stone deaf to irony, incapable of humor and, according to close observers, unable even to laugh. And of course shame, like empathy, is a thing he has never encountered. I hesitate to call Trump subhuman, but nearly all humans show some trace of self-knowledge, some sense of how they appear to other people.

A president who cannot be shamed is a president who cannot be reached, or tamed or remodeled in any significant way. How do we stop him? It’s wishful thinking, most recently suggested by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, that some stern, respected figure like Joseph Welch, who derailed Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt, will say to Trump, “Have you no decency, sir, at long last?” In these latter days of gross polarization, which public figure has the bipartisan stature to play Welch’s role — Chief Justice Roberts? And “decency,” if he has ever used the word, means something very different to Donald Trump than it might mean to you or me.

Aside from his indecent relationships with the Kremlin, the butcher prince of Arabia and nearly every bottom-feeding scumbag in the American menagerie — sample from Roy Cohn, Roger Stone, David J. Pecker, Jeffrey Epstein, Howard Stern, et al.—Trump is a psychotically dishonest and self-exalting thug who almost certainly suffers from some form of dementia. I realize that these strong words qualify me as a victim of what Fox News calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But I’m not and never was a Bernie Sanders enthusiast, an advocate of the Clinton Restoration (though I certainly voted for Hillary), or even a registered Democrat. I’m not even, in any sense I can recognize, an enemy of Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t have enemies — he has pathologists, frightened witnesses to his behavior who try to gauge the toxicity of his psyche and the long-term damage it may inflict on the entire American experiment. Opposing Trump is like opposing global warming, pedophilia or human trafficking. It should have nothing to do with party politics, or personal anger either. He lacks the stature to attract a self-respecting personal enemy. He’s something disgusting that Uncle Sam stepped in, and cannot get off his shoe.

How do we clean our shoe? Words and pictures seem to fail us in the Age of Trump. Facts, too. Facts especially. There’s meticulous documentation for more than 10,000 lies told or tweeted by The Huge Orange One since his inauguration. That’s 10 or more lies every day, certified by the fact-checkers at the Washington Post. In his new book of polemical essays (“Beautiful Country, Burn Again”), novelist Ben Fountain more bluntly deplores Trump’s verbiage as “a nonstop ream of pure and abject bulls**t such as has never transpired in presidential politics,” But besides a president who shrinks from the truth like a vampire shrinks from a crucifix, America is cursed with a terrifying minority that could care less if he lies, that rewards his prevarication, bigot-pandering and ludicrous boasting with a reliable 40% of every approval poll.

There are many theories about the demographics of that fact-resistant 40%, and how this country came to breed such a large tribe of Trump-addicted incurables. None of those theories make perfect sense to me. But I could argue that there are only three kinds of voters who continue to defend this presidency. The most despicable and predictable group are the cynics — which must include two-thirds of the Senate majority that keeps Trump in office — who know perfectly well that the president is crazy but cling to him for political and personal advantage. Those cynics include the oligarchs, the billionaire one-percenters and predatory corporations whose largesse keeps the Republican Party on the playing field. A second group might be hereditary Republicans who after decades of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have totally absorbed the Manichean narrative of warring, irreconcilable tribes, and detest any Democrat as the devil’s spawn.

A third group — possible only in an age of splintered media and “alternative facts” — dines on a ghastly smorgasbord of propaganda and conspiracy and has shut itself off from any reality that might contradict its prejudices or compromise its ignorance. In other words, the hardcore morons, never a negligible factor in American politics. See H.L. Mencken, whose dark judgment was that our democracy was never other than the gullible mob falling prey to the likes of Donald Trump. See a video of a Trump “rally,” which will drive any sensitive witness to strong drink. Incredibly, you’ll see women there, some of them waving banners and jumping up and down.

Who else? If half the revelations and implications of the Mueller report are taken seriously, there’s no place on Trump’s bandwagon for a well-meaning, well-informed American of any demographic description. Not one. For the long-range salvation of this foundering republic, the most effective step would be the immediate disenfranchisement of anyone stupid enough to attend a Trump rally or go trolling on social media. But that isn’t going to happen, the madman in the White House isn’t going to resign in shame, and impeachment is a risky long shot at best. We can’t place all our hopes on a rising mortality rate among the ugly old white men who have turned the Republican Party into something just short of a racist militia. Third-party candidates, however virtuous, have always done more harm than good.

That leaves us with the Democrats, and the usual sinking feeling. The party of hope, of tolerance and equality, of women and unions and minorities——the party of liberal cannibals who compulsively feast on their own. Already the two dozen candidates who hope to unseat Trump have begun the intramural warfare that has sabotaged their prospects so many times before. To see the Women’s March splinter between angry African Americans and Jews was profoundly disheartening. Preaching unity to Democrats may be like preaching chastity to rabbits. But the 2020 presidential election is the one where their failure would represent system failure, and calamity. The 2016 disaster was a freak one in many ways — Russian interference, racist backlash against Barack Obama, the obsolete Electoral College cheating us again, a Democratic candidate who could not easily win hearts and minds. But as a result we have no functioning president, no competent or rational people running our foreign relations or any of the critical branches of our government. We’re a ship without a rudder, drifting toward a reef.

Mayday. Mayday. Ignore all the horse-race nonsense the media will generate for the next 18 months while the Democrats choose their candidate. Whoever it is, whatever you think of him or her, embrace that candidate like Captain America come to save us from Satan Himself. If any of my friends stay home or vote for a third-party candidate in 2020, whether or not Trump is re-elected, I’ll never speak to them again.

Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose essays have been awarded the H.L. Mencken, Lillian Smith and American Association of Newsweeklies prizes for commentary and the 2014 Pushcart Prize for non-fiction. His latest book is “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners,” published in October 2018 from Blair Press. Email delennis1@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2019

Populist.com