Poor me.
I have fallen into a wormhole. I fell asleep one night in the 21st Century and awoke in Joe McCarthy’s America circa 1950 double plus George Orwell’s surveillance state of 1984.
Or have I have always been there? Have I been so thoroughly trained, miseducated and misinformed that I wouldn’t -- that I couldn’t -- recognize reality as it is?
It took the present administration - steeped as it is in Marvel Comic Book plot lines, cinematic fantasy and gangsta culture - to strip away the gentile veneer of two party politics and reveal the United States for what it has always been. Which is to say, the difference between America’s two major political parties is, and always has been, more a matter of style than substance.
How horrible the realization that what I see and hear and read today is what we are; perhaps what we always have been!
Just saying so, apparently, makes me an Enemy of the People. And you, too, I guess, for reading these words whether you agree or not.
But the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, you say!
And I say so, too.
In fact, the usual trappings of patriotism and nationalism are meaningless.
Every country in the world has a flag.
Everywhere there are startlingly beautiful mountains, plains and seas, bountiful resources and a history that makes its inhabitants proud (usually for the wrong reasons, of course).
But the true distinguishing features of the United States are just a few pieces of paper: The Declaration of Independence (most of it, at least, except for the parts that aren’t so nice); the Constitution (or, rather, its preamble, for the bulk of the Constitution is simply a governing framework for a collaboration of states); the Bill of Rights (which was largely ignored by our courts until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s); and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (which is still a stirring, TikTok length read, even if delivered on the cusp of the dissolution of the Union). I have hyperlinked these documents for those who haven’t read them in a long while... or who, perhaps, cite them blithely without ever having read them at all.
“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” wrote Samuel Johnson in 1774. Or, as Mark Twain observed:
I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning -- knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.
Letter to William Dean Howells, 1899
Did the President of the United States really say just weeks ago that this country is “under invasion from within” by an invisible enemy that doesn’t wear uniforms?
Has the President really said that he wants to train a “quick reaction force” to help put down internal “civil disturbances?”
Did he actually say that he wants to use America’s cities as a “training ground” for the military to hone its skills?
Is he really sending the National Guard to Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and, ultimately, Seattle, under the pretext of cleaning up crime?
Is he trying to provoke another bloodbath like what happened 50+ years ago on the Kent State University Campus which left Four Dead in Ohio?
Has he, indeed, issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” that conflates certain “common threads” of “anti-Americanism” with “anti-capitalism,” and those who oppose “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality?”
Has the President declared war on a supposedly domestic terrorist organization called “Antifa,” which, if it exists at all (it does not) most likely shares the same parentage of terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda qua ISIL qua ISIS and so many other curiously well-funded organizations of questionable pedigree.
Did he really say he intends for the U.S. to build a fleet of World War II era battleships clad in steel, bristling with obsolete big guns, crewed by lean “warriors” (without beards, fat bellies or skirts!) because battleships look mean and mighty, and he knows that from watching the 1952 movie “Victory at Sea?”
Yes he did say all of that. And more.
Is he pointing the finger at me for thinking this is ridiculous? And at you for having read what I think? Most likely, yes and yes.
Does the President mean it?
It’s unclear. Politics throughout the western world - not just in the United States - seems everywhere to be so much theater of the absurd, performed by half-wits, directed by lunatics before an easily entertained audience of uberpatriotic, flag-waving sports fans. Have the leaders of the so-called “Free World” gone completely gaga? Or have I? Were they... and I... always crazy and I just didn’t know it.
The President and his acolytes call for the conviction and execution of those they accuse of criminality even before trial. They are very close to denouncing “thought crime“ as depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and “precrime“ as described in Phillip Dick’s sci-fi novel Minority Report. The media, in lock step, bay for blood like a pack of hunting dogs.
I have seen this movie before. Sacco and Vanzetti. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Emmett Till. The Salem Witch Trials.
Are we about to return to the dark McCarthyite days of black lists, purges, Congressional inquisitions into “creeping communism,” loyalty oaths and investigations into the Enemy Within? Most likely we are.
Is the wholesale censorship of social media - and eventually Substack as well - just around the corner now that ALL media outlets… mainstream, social and alternative alike… are owned by just a few wealthy people with similar Weltanschauungs and autocratic intentions? Most likely, yes, such wholesale censorship is just around the corner.
I note that however boorish and heavy-handed Mr. Trump might be, his perspectives on power, empire and control are common to his class. This class constitutes his true constituency, not the MAGAs who cheer him on like citizens rooting for gladiators at the Roman Coliseum (the Mixed Martial Arts fighters of that day) or whooping for charioteers careening around the Hippodrome (the NASCAR races of Constantinople).
As an attorney who has practiced law for more than 45 years, I find our national relapse into lynch mobs deeply abhorrent. Because I haven’t watched television in 25 years, I might be the only one in this hemisphere who had never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was assassinated. It appears to have been a professional hit job. By whom is not yet clear. But as horrible as his murder was, I cannot condone the rush to judgment. Nor do I appreciate Mr. Kirk’s canonization. The catechism of Christian Nationalism makes no more sense to me than Zionism, Pan-Islamism, Turkic irredentism, German nationalism, the British Empire, la Francophonie, or some of the goofier “woke” mantra of the previous administration.
Apparently, however, my failure to get with the program further marks me as “An Enemy of the People.” Perhaps you, too.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, (commonly called the DSM-5) is available online. If you have the time to browse its 1,000 plus pages, you will discover that the DSM-5 doesn’t quite catalog all the complexes and psychoses needed to describe our august political, business, tech, media and military leaders. Reminiscent of the fascist times of the late 1930s, in North America and in Europe and the Western wannabes of Israel and Japan, our political-economic leaders exhibit imperial, bombastic behavior that, for anyone else, would subject them to medical treatment, psychotherapy or even involuntary commitment.
But, more than likely, only I will be seized, involuntarily medicated, rehabilitated or committed for thinking, writing and posting such thoughts.
Or, perhaps, you for reading them.
* * * * *
Reality Postscript. I received an email from my neighbor the very morning that I was putting the finishing touches on this article. While pushing her baby’s stroller and walking her dog, my neighbor’s miniature Labradoodle sniffed out and flushed a man sleeping on my property underneath the laurel bushes. My neighbor, startled, screamed and ran home with the dog and baby.
In response to her email alarm, I want out to investigate.
To my surprise, I found the guy.
He was now sitting cross-legged underneath our mulberry tree reading a book. He looked somewhat like the John Tenniel drawing for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: the caterpillar sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah. Apropos of his mental state, he might have been reading his book upside-down.
The gentleman was sitting deep in the undergrowth, in the shadows, and he looked distinctly “abnormal.” Was he a nut case, intoxicated or high on drugs? I have no idea. He was in his late 20s to early 30s, a thin white male with some facial hair, wearing a hoodie pulled over his head, shorts on top of sports pants and carrying a small backpack or fanny-pack. Assassin or arsonist? Homeless man looking for someplace to squat or a burglar opportunist? A tripped out voyager or a simple lost soul?
I was not feeling amused or particularly hospitable. I immediately puffed myself up to my full height (this is funny for those of you who know me!) and barked at him in my loudest, deepest baritone voice to bleep bleep bleep bleep and that he had two seconds to bleep bleep bleep bleep off! Was I channeling the behavior of Mr. Trump? Was I acting territorially? Had I succumbed to a primitive, testosterone-driven instinct to defend home and hearth from an intruder? What would I have done if the man had challenged my authority and charged me? Grappled with him beneath the mulberry tree? Engaged with sticks, rocks and fisticuffs?
Unknown, unknown and unknown.
In any event, the gentleman slowly obeyed the command to exit the scene.
But he only went so far as the parking strip where he again sat down cross-legged and opened his book. Upside down. I gave him more friendly encouragement to bleep bleep bleep bleep, to which the gentleman replied that he had “the right” to sit in the parking strip. I contacted the local security service (which, of course, neither responded nor appeared). By the time I returned to investigate the pilgrim’s progress, he had disappeared. Probably into some other neighbor’s bushes. Perhaps into yours.
Would I, in that moment, have wanted the city constabulary to arrive, arrest and remove the strange man? Short of a more violent undertaking, yes, I would have. But was this evidence of a crime wave of such enormity, proof of the City burning down with lawlessness, that the National Guard should be sent in to occupy my neighborhood at the point of the bayonet to maintain Ruhe und Ordnung?
Absolutely not.
Reality having barged into my Substack world, this contemporary incident did not change anything that I think or had written above.
But.
If I see this guy again hanging around in the underbrush, I might have to sound the klaxon. And then all bets are off!
* * * * *
Hoo, boy, we’re in the same thought bubble. 👍🏻 The concern, of course, is that someone will pop the bubble … probably sooner rather than later. Will we all be enemies eventually? Enemies of the whim of the moment?
I’ve been wondering if there will even be a United States of America for the remainder of our lives. We’re definitely not “united;” but, then again, it doesn’t seem that we ever have been. There have been leaders who strove for that unity — just not the current one whose dementia becomes more apparent every day. He needs to be diagnosed, or at least reined in.
I have much more that could be said, while we still supposedly have freedom of speech, but discretion prevails.