January 26, 2017 by lonbud

Apocalypse Now

A quick look at the IJHTS Archives reveals the vast majority of this blog’s content is dated between 2001 and 2008. That, of course, was the era of the George W. Bush administration, on whose watch occurred the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic devastation wrought by the collapse of American financial institutions between 2007 and 2009.

During the early years of that stretch I was a stay-at-home dad with plenty of time to play pajama pundit; toward the end, as an early casualty in the Great Recession, I had little more than time and invective at hand.

During Barack Obama’s first term as President I tried to keep my mojo working. Our economy and my personal fortunes began to turn around though, and despite dissatisfaction with his approach to many issues and ideas, I just couldn’t find as much grist for the mill as the first decade of the century provided.

I allowed my blogging to whither. Twitter and Facebook were also on the rise. Blogging felt deprecated as a form of expression. And the smartphone camera ushered in platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. I just didn’t have that much to say.

And then came Drumpf.

The American political experiment has seen fit at this juncture of the Bread and Circuses phase of its empire to allow a putative billionaire faux-reality television personality to assume the mantle of “Leader of the Free World.” Less than a week into the role, he’s thrashing about like an angry mackerel in a net off the Florida coast.

Before we get into the actual insanity of what is happening here and now, I think it’s instructive to note we’ve seen this movie too. The great writer James Fallows kept a detailed chronicle of the innumerable ways in which the current occupant’s candidacy was unprecedented in the annals of American political history, but for all of the absolutely bat-shit crazy things we’ve seen from the new POTUS in the past six days, much of the fundamental bureaucratic playbook from which he and his advisors appear to be working has been put in play before, to devastating effect.

This guy is no George W. Bush, though. He’s no Ronald Reagan. He appears capable, even, of exceeding the low bar for heinous criminality and atavistic evil set by Richard M. Nixon. As I’ve struggled with the impulse to get my John Wilkes Booth on these past few days, I’ve come to believe the 45th President of the United States of America actually poses a credible threat to the very social contract that has held (however imperfectly) civilized humanity together for the past five, six, seven hundred years.

The story of the U.S.A., indeed, the story of mankind has been rife with conflict between competing interests from Day One. Adam vs. Eve. Loyalists vs. Revolutionaries. Pastoral utopia vs. Industrial progress. Guns vs. Butter. North vs. South. Men vs. Women. Young vs. Old. God vs. Man. Haves vs. Have-Nots. Labor vs. Capital. All life is a dance between Dark and Light, between Yin and Yang. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau described the terms on which the dance could proceed, set the tempo to which we have managed to permit human beings today the expectation of a lifetime exceeding 100 years in reasonably good health.

Every single bit of that progress is under threat.

Here’s an incomplete list of the first week’s events:

* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the DOJ’s Violence Against Women programs.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Minority Business Development Agency.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Economic Development Administration.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the International Trade Administration.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Legal Services Corporation.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of the DOJ.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Electricity Deliverability and Energy Reliability.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Fossil Energy.
* On January 20th, 2017, DT ordered all regulatory powers of all federal agencies frozen.
* On January 20th, 2017, DT ordered the National Parks Service to stop using social media.
* On January 20th, 2017, roughly 230 protestors were arrested in DC and face unprecedented felony riot charges. Among them were legal observers, journalists, and medics.
* On January 20th, 2017, a member of the International Workers of the World was shot in the stomach at an anti-fascist protest in Seattle. He remains in critical condition.
* On January 21st, 2017, DT brought a group of 40 cheerleaders to a meeting with the CIA to cheer for him during a speech that consisted almost entirely of framing himself as the victim of dishonest press.
* On January 21st, 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a press conference largely to attack the press for accurately reporting the size of attendance at the inaugural festivities, saying that the inauguration had the largest audience of any in history, “period.”
* On January 22nd, 2017, White House advisor Kellyann Conway defended Spicer’s lies as “alternative facts” on national television news.
* On January 22nd, 2017, DT appeared to blow a kiss to director James Comey during a meeting with the FBI, and then opened his arms in a gesture of strange, paternal affection, before hugging him with a pat on the back.
* On January 23rd, 2017, DT reinstated the global gag order, which defunds international organizations that even mention abortion as a medical option.
* On January 23rd, 2017, Spicer said that the US will not tolerate China’s expansion onto islands in the South China Sea, essentially threatening war.
* On January 23rd, 2017, DT repeated the lie that 3-5 million people voted “illegally” thus costing him the popular vote.
* On January 23rd, 2017, it was announced that the man who shot the anti-fascist protester in Seattle was released without charges, despite turning himself in.
* On January 24th, 2017, Spicer reiterated the lie that 3-5 million people voted “illegally” thus costing DT the popular vote.
* On January 24th, 2017, DT tweeted a picture from his personal Twitter account of a photo he says depicts the crowd at his inauguration and will hang in the White House press room. The photo is of the 2009 inauguration of 44th President Barack Obama, and is curiously dated January 21st, 2017, the day AFTER the inauguration and the day of the Women’s March, the largest inauguration-related protest in history.
* On January 24th, 2017, the EPA was ordered to stop communicating with the public through social media or the press and to freeze all grants and contracts.
* On January 24th, 2017, the USDA was ordered to stop communicating with the public through social media or the press and to stop publishing any papers or research. All communication with the press would also have to be authorized and vetted by the White House.
* On January 24th, 2017, HR7, a bill that would prohibit federal funding not only to abortion service providers, but to any insurance coverage, including Medicaid, that provides abortion coverage, went to the floor of the House for a vote.
* On January 24th, 2017, Director of the Department of Health and Human Service nominee Tom Price characterized federal guidelines on transgender equality as “absurd.”
* On January 24th, 2017, DT ordered the resumption of construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, while the North Dakota state congress considers a bill that would legalize hitting and killing protestors with cars if they are on roadways.
* On January 24th, 2017, police officers were reported to have used confiscated cell phones to search the emails and messages of the 230 demonstrators now facing felony riot charges for protesting on January 20th, including lawyers and journalists whose email accounts contain privileged information of clients and sources.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? But what to do? Republicans in Congress who ran against Drumpf in the primaries and others who have repeatedly acknowledged his unfitness for office are going along to get along. Democrats in Congress, who ought to be burning down the house to keep the Republic together, are voting to approve his cabinet choices and those to lead every department in the Executive Branch.

Some journalists and major media outlets are beginning to use clear, simple, single-syllable words like “lie” in their headlines but the public seems long-past inured to media’s function to inform. Everything is just another reality-television event designed to keep the chattering classes chattering and the credulous among the people looking for a number to call before midnight tonight.

George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984 is the #1 seller on amazon.com, which might be a hopeful sign – if there was any reason to believe something nearing half the population might not read it and come away thinking Big Brother is tha bomb and Doublespeak is truth.