August 21, 2017 — America in eclipse
The Jourmudgeon has been unable to cobble together a coherent response to Charlottesville, perhaps because a) The Jourmudgeon’s two sons and their loved ones live there, and b) it is hard to respond sanely to insanity. The Jourmudgeon has been able to manage only what might charitably called notes toward an essay:
- In a nation of 325 million, the odds are you’re going to have a small percentage of drooling inbreeders and the seriously unhinged. But even if just 1 percent of Americans is a nut bucket, that’s 3.25 million people. That’s a lot of nut buckets.
- The other problem is that we decided to elect one of them President of the United States. With him egging them on, we can no longer pretend that the nut buckets are talking only to each other. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/opinion/sunday/white-nationalism-american-history-statues.html?emc=edit_th_20170820&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=27174500
- There’s an old saying that our elected officials campaign in poetry but must govern in prose. Donald Trump governs in obscenity.
- Military leaders, business executives, Republican luminaries, even his closest White House advisors are suddenly expressing shock that Trump turned out to be Trump. What were these supposedly smart, plugged-in people paying attention to the past several years?
- Sometimes the line between free speech and expression and other forms of behavior is fuzzy, and The Jourmudgeon and others have often walked fearfully through the ugly neighborhood where rights and harm live side by side. Not in this case. Charlottesville wasn’t free expression, it was criminal behavior. To paraphrase the late cartoonist Al Capp, if running a woman down with a car was free expression, then sticking up a gas station is a financial transaction.
- Republican expressions of outrage are genuine – those who have spoken out — but they are enabled by either willful ignorance or a short memory. Republicans own the Lost Cause nonsense as much as they own this president. They have owned it since Richard Nixon’s post-Civil Rights Southern Strategy, welcoming white voters outraged over enfranchisement of blacks https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/republicans-white-supremacy-charlottesville.html?emc=edit_th_20170817&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=27174500, since Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, more recently with the Trump-led birther attacks on Barack Obama, with coordinated state-by-state efforts by Republican-dominated legislatures to disenfranchise black voters with the equivalent of a new poll tax, with a fresh attack on Affirmative Action, with the refusal of Republican Congressional leaders to condemn Trump himself for his statements about Charlottesville. The neo-Nazis, racists and white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville were 21st-century carpetbaggers, but the Republican Party gave them the bandwagon to ride into town on. Trump’s approval rating among people who consider themselves strongly Republican is still near 80 percent. Nearly seven in 10 Republicans say they agree with his response to Charlottesville. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/us/politics/trump-supporters.html?emc=edit_th_20170820&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=27174500&_r=0
- As the former capital of the Confederacy, Virginia is still exorcising demons. But state officials’ responses to Charlottesville across the political spectrum have provided leadership that the White House has not. We should also remember that more than 40 years ago a newly emergent Republican Party in Virginia repudiated its own president’s Southern Strategy. Linwood Holton, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, put his kids in recently integrated public schools in Richmond. And he and state Republican Chair Warren French began to systematically dismantle the Democrat-engineered massive resistance to integration.
- News media have been criticized once again for not taking Trump seriously, for giving him a free ride during the campaign. There is abundant evidence that neither is true, particularly since the latter stages of the Republican primaries. But the media did not take Trump’s constituents seriously. Before the election, The Jourmudgeon worried that, even if Hillary Clinton beat Trump, he might still garner forty million votes, and about what that said for our country and its deep divisions and boiling frustrations. In the end, he got sixty million.
- If Republicans own Trump, who or what do Democrats own? It’s obvious that they themselves have no idea. Beyond earnest, way-out-on-a-limb avowals that they do not like racism, Nazis or Trump, they can point to no consensus on issues or serious effort to occupy any public office but the presidency. They had nothing to offer the sixty million Trump voters but sneering derision. Until they do, the response to Charlottesville will be heartwarming, self-affirming, and essentially meaningless.
Thank you Brian for again putting difficult news in perspective. It has been an interesting time to be even a temporary Virginian.
Thanks Bri, in a world where I increasingly don’t know what to think or do, other than rail like a Tourettes afflicted Lear against Brexit, Trump and mean people. it’s always good to read what you have to say and try and force my brain into some sort of meagre rationality, being furious all the time is disabling and useless. Interesting times indeed. I would that they were less so . Good to nod across the Atlantic. The eclipse did look great though – could the Democrats perhaps claim credit?