Wash It Clean

Last Friday Donald John Trump proclaimed that today would be a day of remembrance for Dr Martin Luther King Junior. As he left the room a journalist asked him a question in good faith, “Are you a racist?” He obviously ignored that question, as he has ignored virtually every attempt to seek truth. There were people in that room with him, and none of them could bring themselves to definitively refute premise of the question, because it is at this point a forgone conclusion. A man can only show you the absence of his heart so many times before you have to acknowledge that it’s not your eyes that have failed to see anything there. And on this day we are told to remember Dr King.

There is, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, an inconspicuous marker in honor of Dr King. It is stepped on daily by people who simply don’t realize it is there. On a daily basis, the generally malice-less ignorance of sightseers crushes dirt and grit into the inscription that humbly marks the spot where on August 28, 1963, Dr King delivered a speech for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. What more fitting a memorial could there be?

I have often lamented that many people only have a vague understanding of the entirety of Dr King’s struggles, and that for most people it is the case that they would struggle to utter any significant words of Dr King. Of those who can, the vast majority only know a snippet or two from that one speech he delivered in Washington, which are frequently misinterpreted and distorted to become an attack on any who believe that the cause of the Civil Rights Movement is not yet done. Indignity after indignity, lobbed against the very memory of Dr King on a daily basis.

But now here we are. A man who dodged the draft of the Vietnam War multiple times dodges uncomfortable questions on a day he was supposed to consecrate the memory of a man, who I guarantee you he doesn’t know, worked diligently to end the Vietnam War. A man whose father has a checkered history of supporting the KKK, a man who has been sued for discriminating against potential tenants, a man who took out a full page ad calling for the death penalty to be reinstated against five innocent people of color, a man who refers to nations like Haiti in terms I won’t repeat here; that man is the distilled muck that is ground into the memory of Dr King every day from his position of prominence.

In pockets across America, there are still those who refuse to even give this minuscule dignity to the memory of Dr King, who choose instead to commemorate the birthdays of traitors. They are, perhaps without exception, avid supporters of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They are, I expect, quite glad to see that Dr King’s memory has been eroded and tarnished. Perhaps they knowingly grind filth into the inscription on those steps, but I’m here to tell you that intended or not they are joined by the ranks of countless people who choose to not know and to not know better in demeaning the memory of Dr King. Their numbers are amplified and disguised by the countless many of us who choose not to see and choose not to learn and choose not to speak out.

It will not be today and it will not be tomorrow, but there will come a day when the stench that emirates from that odious bigot in chief dissipates. There will be a day when this country can reckon with its crimes, long past and ongoing. There will be a day when we as a people can remember the entirety of Dr King’s message of hope for the despondent poor and neglected; Dr King’s message of disgust at the indifference of the well-meaning, silent masses; Dr King’s message of urgency for the necessity of peace at home and abroad; Dr King’s message of justice for crimes committed against so many. When the sun rises on that day, when the specter of fascism and bigotry and ignorance has permanently vacated positions of prominence, I hope I will be there to go to that inscription with pure water to scrub the muck off. That I might wash away all that has been trod deep into the memory of Dr King. That I might join with all my fellow patriots to wash it clean.

It Could Have Been Worse: On The Normalization Of Fascism

As we move from 2017 to 2018, there’s one position that I see some political analysts taking that I find more repugnant and irresponsible than others. On the one hand there are still literal Nazis who are freely walking about today targeting various racial, ethnic, and religious minorities (among others), and one would certainly conclude that these drecks of humanity represent the absolute worst of who we are. But on the other hand, if the Overton Window could remain fixed far to the Left of literal Nazis, they would be an aberration that could easily be addressed by law enforcement and not by disingenuous discourse that treats all content of speech to be equal simply because the first amendment doesn’t explicitly condemn hate speech and calls for the violent end of pluralistic democracy. So I do find my stomach turns just a little more at the commentator who looks at what happened during approximately the first year of the Trump Administration and says, “2017 could have been a lot worse.”

This is, on one level, strictly speaking true. To the extent that we are not currently living in a dictatorship, wherein the various racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender, etc minorities are sent to death camps, yes it is true that it could be worse. To the extent that my face has not been eaten by a mountain lion in 2017, yes it is true that it could be worse. I frequently use the “could have been worse” mantra on a quotidian basis to try and keep a view of what privileges and blessings I have in my life, but to use that argument in this context is at best irresponsible and ignorant of the vast amount of work that went into keeping it from being worse, and at worst sympathetic to the positions and people who actively are trying to make it worse.

The single greatest asset the American people have, at this time, is the incompetence of Donald Trump as an individual, a businessman, and most importantly as a politician. His inability to form coherent sentences, let alone coherent policy, has limited his ability to enact a Muslim ban, for example. His inability to attract and retain talent has made it difficult for him to effectively get all of his horrendous policies pushed through the much more responsible career civil servants. However, there is a two edged sword to his impotence. His bumbling rhetoric and unhinged habit of lashing out can often do great damage, much like the directionless rage of a flailing animal is indeed still dangerous. What’s more, lurking in the wings are more competent ideologues who are just champing at the bit to pretend to be the adults in the room when Trump is finally vacated, while simply continuing his policies.

But I feel I’ve been rather vague, at this point. What is, after all, so bad about the Trump Administration in 2017? First off we’ve seen the ascendancy of the euphemistically labeled “Alt-Right.” These fascists have already taken the lives of people whose only crime is being opposed to fascism. Worse, the police sympathetically look the other way at fascist protesters while coming down hard on anti-fascists. Worse still, legislators in several states have attempted to pass laws in the last year to explicitly condone running over protesters with cars. The shift of the Overton Window to the Far-Right has been a steady effort for decades, but now we see what happens when a major political party feels comfortable openly embracing the worst of the worst of American society as a treasured foundation for their base. All of this is succinctly demonstrated when in the wake of the death of Heather Heyer, the president of the United States claimed that there were fine people on both sides, that there was violence on many sides, that opposition to fascism is morally equivalent to fascism, etc. Of course, it could be worse, we could have Brown Shirts marching the street, but for the moment all we have are Red Hats marching the streets.

CHIP has been left unfunded for months now, and most state programs will be lucky to get by on the funding they have through January. The Children’s Health Insurance Program should be the easiest thing to pass in the world, who could possibly oppose it? To be blunt, Republicans. Old guard Republicans like Orrin Hatch as well as the so called young guns like Paul Ryan assure us that we cannot afford such luxuries as keeping children from dying of preventable disease, because we need to inflate the military budget more and slash revenue by giving corporations massive tax breaks. Even charlatans like Marco Rubio see the benefit in at least pretending to be shocked at how crass the GOP has become at throwing the poor under the bus to give handouts to the rich because it’s gone so far. But hey, it could be worse right? At least they left in the charitable giving deduction in the tax bill… as far as anyone can tell.

The private prison industry has been booming under Trump as he funnels various DREAMers and DACA/DAPA recipients into de facto concentration camps. And before I hear people claim this is one Godwin’s Law too far, let me remind you Trump used his first pardon on Joseph Arpaio a man who bragged about what he called concentration camps, used to lock up undocumented immigrants. The window is fast closing to fix what Trump broke with the callous termination of programs that protect productive, law-abiding residents of this country, at which point we will get to see first hand how 2017 could have been worse.

Let’s next discuss judicial appointments. Trump supporters love to mention how many appointments Trump has successfully made over this first year, in part because it is one of the few metrics he hasn’t insecurely inflated. By blocking President Obama’s nominations for years, the GOP made a huge back log. You might recall that was the whole point of Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” in the first place. They weren’t blocked because Obama’s nominees were unfit, but because they had President Obama’s taint on them. But Trump, by virtue of not being Obama, has been allowed to put forward ideologically pure, young nominees, with little or no experience and the Republican Congress looks the other way only unless it becomes a televised embarrassment just how unfit the nominees are. We will get to see just how much it will be over the next decades to have judges who are ignorant of the law, rule on important issues that just don’t sit right in their gut.

On the topic of nominations, Trump’s indifference to doing his job has the upshot of leaving vacant hundreds of positions that are necessary to the competent management of government programs. It’s never quite clear if this is intentional or not. Certainly the appointments he has made seem intentionally designed to be nihilistic sledgehammers, poised to undo the basic functions of government that go unnoticed until they go unfulfilled. One can’t look at Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, and Scott Pruitt and imagine that these are the best our country can offer to manage our nuclear material, provide affordable housing, defend the right to quality education for all students, and prevent environmental abuse. However, Trump’s ignorance of even the most basic details of how government works is a plausible argument for why he’s incidentally destroying the various programs that everyone depends on, even if they aren’t immediately faced with that reality on a daily basis. But it could be worse I suppose, I don’t know how necessarily but I’m sure someone will inform me eventually.

I could go on like this, but even I have my limits when it comes to pedantry, so I’ll begin to wrap up by pointing out that what has kept things from being worse is the persistent resistance to Trump’s attempts to make things even worse. Trump and the Republicans tried to kill the Affordable Care Act several times, and only the dogged resistance to those callous bills kept things from being worse. Trump’s ban on military service by trans individuals seems to be overturned for the moment, and that’s because of the repeated efforts of patriotic Americans to uphold the rule of law against an administration that has open contempt for the legal process. Robert Mueller has thus far been successful in avoiding the unhinged and unfounded attacks made to try and stop the Russia Investigation, but only by repeated reporting on the facts and the dedicated effort of the people to remain informed in spite of cynical attempts to propagate “Alternative Facts.”

Look, it could be worse, and it likely will be worse in the next year. And that is because at every level the Republicans are in positions of power. All three branches of the federal government, the majority of governorships and state legislatures, and the judiciary all over the country are infected by a political party that has gone off the Far-Right cliff. The only way we will be able to make things better is to draw out this poison at the ballot box. The only way we could make it worse is to try and rationalize away all the huge threats posed by the Trump Administration by trivializing it, by shifting the rhetoric ever further to the fringes of the Right.