Anybody See Any Bright Sides?

 

I feel a little silly using italics to introduce italics, but I need to repeat myself this week, so I had to find a piece that seemed worthy of a retrospective look. I found this one, from five days after the election, and while I wrote it quite recently, it feels like several years ago. I am most struck by how angry I sound, which is the part I like best. If you’d rather not relive that time, I can hardly blame you — I went there only reluctantly myself. Nonetheless I do feel it’s worth another read, even if just for the opening quote from a really good writer — a Canadian journalist who was going through the same holy-shit moment we all were.

Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

—   Andrew Coyne, Globe and Mail

 

Leave it to a Canadian columnist to give voice to my utter disgust. Canadians, of course, had no say in our election, but they’ll be hugely affected by it, and not in a good way. The same goes for Mexico, most of Europe, Ukraine, and — come to think of it — just about every country in the world. We just told most of them to go to hell. Shame on us.

Bright sides to look on are not much in evidence. If this “retinue of crooks, ideologues, and lunatics” can achieve even a fraction of what they openly want, there will be few humans — and even fewer animals — left untouched by their depravity. Only their innate incompetence can stop them.

I was quite surprised to discover that so many of my readers bothered to read last Tuesday’s post, even once they knew how spectacularly wrong I’d been, and how the whole world had suddenly been swung in a very dark direction. As I can only tell how many people click on my posts, not how many actually read them, I’m guessing many of you didn’t venture past the first paragraph. I wouldn’t have either.

Writing does not come easily this week, mostly because I’m still speechless. So for now I’m just throwing out — or throwing up — random impressions. By next week I hope to be more coherent.

It seems to me that the big winner of the night was Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and the rest of the right-wing media complex. Trump’s election was the ultimate return on their thirty-year investment in the dumbing-down of our population.

Rupert Murdoch must be gratified to know that he lived long enough to see his warped worldview realized. He can now die having proved, once and for all, that if you put enough time and money into a media empire that broadcasts nothing but propaganda, character assassination, and outright lies, you can succeed in turning ignorant people into reprogrammable dumbshits who will internalize anything you want them to believe.

As for the mainstream media, they are eager to lay the blame anywhere but themselves. We are now being bombarded by reams of overheated prose — a veritable orgy of reporters and pundits pointing fingers, covering asses, and looking for new asses to kiss.

We’re treated to endless pontification about how those feckless Democrats blew it, how Kamala Harris was a bad candidate, how she foolishly focused on things that matter, while ignoring voters’ “real” concerns: inflation, crime, post-birth abortions, transgender athletes, and the “crisis at the border.”

This is, of course, total bullshit. Every one of those “issues” was manufactured by the Murdoch machine, and injected into weak minds, minds that turned out to be far more numerous than we thought. Neither Trump nor a single Republican ever uttered a word about anything that might be called a policy.

All of their actual policies — abortion bans, tax cuts, deregulation, tariff abuse, etc. — were things they spent the entire election cycle not talking about. We’ll be hearing a lot about them soon.

If Democrats did anything wrong, it was in wildly underestimating the extent to which they’d been demonized by the 24/7 onslaught of propaganda. To most of us, the peculiar obsession with abortion after birth — an event that happens exactly never — was too absurd to even contemplate. Yet right-wing media managed to convince at least half the electorate that killing newborns was a plank in the party platform.

Likewise for so-called transgender “issues.” Apparently, Harris’s entire campaign was about her personal determination to surgically turn Jack into Jill on the first day of school. Most of the Trump commercials I saw focused on some aspect of transphobia, and while these spots were overtly nuts, it never occurred to me that they might be effective. Silly me, I thought they were wasting their money.

But for me, the biggest mistake Democrats made was not making sure Trump went to prison two years ago. I’m afraid that’s on Joe Biden, and it might well cost him his otherwise exemplary legacy.

With hindsight, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Biden never really grasped the nature of the threat. From the time of the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, it was totally obvious that Trump was a dangerous traitor who had no qualms about selling out anyone and anything if the price was right.  

We’ll never know how a more aggressive Attorney General might have handled this, but we can now be sure Merrick Garland was not the right person for the job. If the justice system had only treated Trump like the common criminal he continues to be, we might not be in this mess. Instead, it gave him every break possible, and now he’s sure to skate. Just as he’s done his whole life.

What else did we learn? I think we can safely say that racism and misogyny are alive and well. How much of this debacle can be attributed to the fact that Harris is both female and Black is unknowable, but there’s little doubt that it played a significant role. That white men voted so heavily for Trump is depressing, but hardly surprising. That so many Black and Hispanic men went there — ignorant of their own interests — is a staggering testament to toxic masculinity.

Then there’s our poor planet. I’m not sure it can survive another four years of Trump, assuming that four years is all we’ll be getting. As climate disasters get more and more frequent, the resources devoted to recovery and remediation will continue to dwindle. Trump is completely indifferent to hardship and death — indeed, he seems to revel in it — so we know that many lives will be lost, once again, on his watch. And yes, he will surely deny disaster funding to any state he didn’t carry, or whose governor was mean to him.

We’ve all been going through our own stages of grief, and I’m probably not the only one stuck on anger. While I’m fairly sure life will eventually return to some new sort of normal — especially for white Christian straight men — I’m not sure I will ever get over the contempt I’m now feeling for my fellow Americans.

It’s one thing to know that their inability to see what’s in front of their eyes might just kill them. It’s another to know that it might kill me.