Slouching Towards Bedlam
As the news broke, the news that wasn’t news, the news everyone already knew, the news that dog bites man, CNN’s White House correspondent walked up to the camera and delivered it to the nation as gravely as Cronkite announcing Dallas.
“I think, Wolf, what we have to come to grips with, and I almost have to think back to the day we were at Trump Tower, when the President was commenting on Charlottesville, and he was saying that there were very fine people on both sides, saying that there were very fine people among the white supremacists and the Nazis, is that the President of the United States just seems to have a problem here, Wolf, in this area. And we can tiptoe around it, we can dance around it, and not really put our finger on it, but the President seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color. From other parts of the world.”
The flash, apparently official: President Trump is racist.
No shithole, Sherlock.
It’s that struggle to say what everyone has known from Trump’s campaign announcement on, if not decades before, something that was never hidden from view, never dogwhistled for discerning ears, but instead incessantly repeated as one of the primetime game-show host’s many catchphrases, that is the problem, and not the difficulty of actually saying the first of Carlin’s seven dirty words on television. We have known this. We have always known this.
And we have pretended not to.
We have known many other things, and pretended not to know them as well. We have known that Russia breached our borders and attempted to undermine the foundation of our democracy. We have known this for more than a year. We have suspected, with good cause, that high-ranking members of Trump’s campaign, perhaps Trump himself, provided aid and comfort.
And we have known for just as long that one of the two great political parties of These United States has willfully ignored this, deflected and undermined investigations into it, because they also benefited from the attack, and became accessories after the fact. Traitors, all of them, traitors to our democracy, traitors to America.
We have known this as well, and we have pretended not to.
We have, bit by bit, step by step, shithole by shithole, normalized fascism. It comes not with a bang but a whimper, a series of whimpers, issued each morning from the most powerful toilet on the planet. We have grown familiar with this. We have allowed the people who inform our democracy to misinform us, to struggle to state clearly what everyone has long known.
We have normalized fascism by maintaining the pretense that everything is normal, if a little odd, but well within the operating parameters of our robust, messy polity. We must maintain the pretense in the face of reality, because the reality is too horrible to contemplate.
We let this happen. We are continuing to let this happen. And it is leading us, inexorably, to our doom.
All because Americans can’t handle the truth.
1) The “reasonable” people. TV journalism lives in a fucking bubble and filled with people who abuse “reason” to calm us down from picking up a pitchfork and rioting in the streets. They tell us it is okay for companies to fuck us up the ass and that we should like it. Or to drink toxic waste. Or that war is pure, noble and good (but they ain’t going.)
But godforbid if the same should happen to them and now it is beginning as people cut the cord. In some ways I won’t miss Network TV news. In others, I probably will as we see the rise of billionaire sponsored RWNJ “bullshit outlets.”
2) The emotional retards that makes up the RW base. They are retards… fully developed human beings who can’t deal with fucking reality and don’t have the emotional/psychological ability to deal. These shrieking shits want to believe in a world that never was. Look at the entertainment they watch, they cling to and the gods they worship. They use a lot of the same words we use, but they don’t have the emotional/intellectual depth to use them properly or wisely (not that “our” side is sometimes any better at times.)
Look at the difference between how each base handled Roy Moore and Al Franken. “CONSPIRACY! SHE LIED!! A WHORE! BURN HER HOUSE DOWN!!!” compared to “WHAT THE FUCK?! ARE YOU SERIOUS? THIS IS SOME GOPER BULLSH… uh wait whut? Of for fuck’s sake Al. Get the fuck out.”
Yes there was some disbelief, but as the evidence became overwhelming, Al went while the GOPers went deeper into the shit to rally around a teen abusing prevert.
Or how Google is fact checking everyone and it seems (quite shocking I know) that only RWNJ sites are getting flagged as bullshit. Instead asking “Maybe it’s not a good idea to spread bullshit about a pizzeria being a pedo site” they take to flinging their shit at Google.
It’s not strictly an US Amercian phenomena. Look at Russia, the same emotional gimps are trying to rebuild the shattered wasteland of the Soviet Union and are letting it get raped by a greedy psycho. Cough, Putin, cough. Or Japan where RWNJs won’t admit Japan’s culpability in WW2. Want to pretend that China was to blame for being raped by the Japanese and that US Amercia was mean napalming and nuking them.
I hate them both.
Maybe it’s their economic anxiety.
@ManchuCandidate: CNN’s the example here, but you also see it in the NYT and occasionally WaPo, that urge to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, to take the tax bill as a serious piece of legislation, and so on. It’s just politics, and there are two sides to every issue.
And it’s far from new to bitch about this, but the examples keep getting more egregious, bit by bit, and we keep getting nudged toward accepting the latest atrocity because it’s only slightly more atrocious than the previous one.
It’s not the pussy-grabber line that has defined Trump’s presidency. It’s the knowledge that he really could shoot someone down in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and nothing would come of it.
I have no familiarity with German history beyond the broad outlines and major events, but I really have to wonder whether this is how it actually went down day after day, until it was too late to do anything.
Oh, please. Give me a break with all this normalization bullshit. Trump’s just been saying out loud and proud what the rest of them have been whispering behind closed doors all their fucking lives. They don’t do anything because they feel the same way. People really need to stop kidding themselves thinking that the rest of these motherfuckers “tolerate” him so they can get tax cuts. Mother’s husband can sign his name to a bill.
They. Agree. With. Him.
And I’m so fucking sick and tired of white folks acting oh so shocked. You’re not fooling us. We know it’s not just “Trump’s base” that’s racist.
Mr. SFL and I watched Letterman’s Netflix interview with Obama last night. Highly recommend it. But I warn you: we sat on the couch and sobbed (ugly, gross, snot-filled sobbing), just like we did the day the pupster died and the night the shitstain was selected by the Kremlin and the electoral college.
@SanFranLefty: John Lewis is a monument: “We will redeem the soul of America.”
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