On certain occasions, it’s important for the reader to know exactly when something was written, and in what state of mind the writer may have been when he wrote it. What you are reading was written the morning after the Aug. 3 massacres in El Paso and Dayton. My state of mind, as I read about them, was somewhere between blind rage and debilitating nausea, a helpless, choking sensation that could only have been worse if someone I loved had been among the victims. Apoplexy?
Decades ago when I was a cub in New York, and the news from Vietnam seemed to be triggering a similar meltdown, an old TV newsman named Harry Reasoner warned me that we should never write — type — “with trembling fingers.” Sage advice that we can’t always follow. The fingers are a little shaky this morning. As the massacres pile up, some observers predict that most Americans will be too jaded to react to the next one, that mass murders will turn to old news as quickly as snowstorms or football scores. It’s the opposite for me. It’s as if I’m already face down in something that’s suffocating me, and each slaughter is like another foot on the back of my head, pressing harder.
How many more? How many before the families of victims, alone, represent a vengeful mob big enough to storm the headquarters of the NRA and lynch every bastard they find inside? Make Wayne LaPierre an authentic martyr for the Second Amendment? Because that’s the first issue, before we turn to the politics of the young white men who do most of the killing, and how much they may have been encouraged by the senile racist in the White House. There’s no sane, civilized nation in the world that would allow private citizens to purchase the assault rifles and the 100-round magazines that create the high body counts we suffered on Aug. 3. While the gun lobby owns and operates so many emasculated legislators that we can’t even ban military-style weapons — a Step One, like background checks, that even most gun owners endorse — America will remain a Killing Field, a grisly abattoir of a failed republic where “ignorant armies clash by night.”
The gun cult is a uniquely American piece of lunacy, one most Europeans find ridiculous — and equally frightening. They laugh at us and fear us, which pretty well sums up their reaction to the huge orange cylinder of solid waste that is Donald Trump. I was in Ireland in June, just a few days after Trump’s state visit. The Irish were bewildered.
“They call his supporters a personality cult,” observed one Irish scholar, who had studied and taught in the United States. “But there is no personality, no gravitas. A bit of empty swagger. Trump has all the charisma of a restroom attendant.”
You said it, my friend. But at least the guy in the men’s room will tell you the truth if you ask him why the soap dispenser is broken. Trump’s mendacity and hypocrisy are as relentless as his vanity. Fox News reported his official response to the Aug. 3 tragedies: “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hatred has no place in America.”
Wait — he said that, knowing full well that everyone who embraces these “sinister ideologies” will vote for him? Yes, he said it, he read it off the teleprompter, though we’ll probably never know who wrote it. Here was the same fool who, three weeks and at least three massacres previously, told four non-white congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested countries from which they came.” Three of them, of course, were native-born Americans and the fourth a naturalized citizen, like Trump’s wife. This is the same fool who beamed as a crowd of rabid racists in North Carolina chanted “Send her back.” The same fool, in the same news cycle, who virtually declared war on the city of Baltimore and its black congressman Elijah Cummings. If you could credit Trump with any coherent intentions, with being able to think at all, you might think he was trying to start a race war.
The popular euphemism is “stirring up the base.” But this time, with these words — issued before the El Paso massacre and the white nationalist assassin whose online ravings echoed Trump’s declaration of an immigrant “invasion” — this time our dreadful president has crossed the Rubicon for good. Like Julius Caesar in January, 49 B.C., launching the Roman Civil War by defying the Senate and marching his legions across the Rubicon River, Trump has crossed a line and made a statement from which there is no retreat. In his celestial ignorance, I doubt that Trump could find Italy on a map of Europe, and he probably thinks Caesar invented salad. But like the great Roman general, like the Confederates who fired on Fort Sumter, this Donald of ours will not be turning back.
The first thing to recognize is that no elected official in his right mind would have attacked those black legislators the way Trump did. Not since the Sixties, at least. The key, of course, is “in his right mind.” He, and any Republicans who don’t immediately disown him, are simply saying to hell with the votes of rational, tolerant citizens. (Or un-white ones, of course) “We don’t need you,” they’re telling us, “and we can win without you.”
Only voters unburdened with conscience or self-respect could possibly support Trump now —- and those are the voters the GOP is counting on. I used to listen respectfully to arguments that not all Trump supporters are racist. But that media dithering and speculation is behind us now. Arguing that Trump is a racist is like arguing that Moby Dick is a whale. Arguing that he’s not a racist is like climbing Mt. Everest on roller skates. “The die is cast,” as Caesar said. We are two nations, apparently split right down the middle. Donald Trump got his Wall, after all. It’s a mile thick and a mile high, and on one side it says “Whites Only.”
Does it help us, at last, to know exactly where we stand? It’s unquestionably frightening. Even this new rhetoric about “socialism,” directed at Democratic presidential candidates, is a chilling throwback to the anti-communist purges of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his mouthpiece Roy Cohn —- Trump’s mentor and idol. Most Americans don’t realize that “socialism” isn’t actually a dirty word, except in countries ruled by capitalist plutocrats. But for me the attacks on Cummings and the black women were a critical turning point —- strictly in terms of symbolism —- very much like the Nazi edict that German Jews had to wear a Star of David on their clothing. At that point no one doubted where the Third Reich was headed.
Once Donald Trump was just a sleazy, self-infatuated buffoon, harmful only to porn actresses, beauty-pageant contestants and subcontractors. He had money and a high profile, so cynics and sycophants would use him and laugh at him behind his back. Now he’s the most powerful man in the world, at least potentially, and there are no laughs left. He is and always has been an ugly racist. He’s not in his right mind, either, and it wasn’t much of a mind to begin with. In any sane world — remember sanity, and Obama? — the chief justice might pay a respectful call on the White House and ask the president to please resign and go somewhere to get the help he needs. And that seems about as likely as a crusade against assault rifles led by Mitch McConnell.
My (white, paleo-Republican) parents raised me to believe that racists occupy the lowest rung on the ladder of human nature, and nothing in my subsequent experience has changed my mind about that. Everything depends on how many million white Americans want to live on the Whites Only side of that mile-high wall Trump is building. We learn the answer in 2020. If it turns out to be 60 or 70 million, roughly the number of voters Donald Trump attracted in 2016, the dis-United States are in the worst trouble they’ve seen since Fort Sumter. Who in the world would want to join, or even visit, the sort of country these white nationalists might create? Who would dare?
I won’t be showing a lot of interest in the Democratic debates or primaries. I don’t like to watch their ambition on display, or hear them abuse and discredit each other. There are plenty of good candidates to replace Mr. Trump, and to displace Mr. McConnell — results that might finally dislodge the omnipotent NRA, as well. If you have any loyalty at all to the country you live in, please do anything you can to elect anyone but Donald Trump. It might be the most important commitment you ever make.
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 books include “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners,” published in October 2018 from Blair Press. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2019
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