Grab ‘em by the pussy. They don’t resist. Well most of them don’t, anyway. Most give in; maybe it seems easier than fighting. Or they think it’s just the cost of doing business. “Here we go…” – they think. “Here we go!” he thinks, closing in for the kill. Will this one yield? Most do, or perhaps it is just many who do. Or maybe just a few (he does exaggerate). Why do they yield? They are polite, conflict avoidant, maybe a bit blinded by celebrity. They are also thrown off, taken aback by his complete abandonment of the usual rules. Why bother with consent when you can get compliance? Just get what you want. Reach over, she is right there, next to you on the plane, in your office, in the dressing room. There! For the TAKING!
Lie, promise things you know you won’t deliver, bluster, tell them how rich you are, say anything, do anything: whatever it takes. What if she says no? she won’t say no! and if she does, so what? Who will know? Just say you tossed her first! Or call her a liar. Or, better: Demand an apology from her! Ha! That’ll teach her. Most of ‘em let you, anyway. But what if later they complain? then what? No problem: throw some money at ‘em. "Here, don’t say I never gave you anything." "What? You think that was rude? I was just JOKING! Can’t you people take a joke?"
If that last paragraph was a bumper sticker, it would read: “Civility is for losers.” That’s us.
The owner of the Red Hen restaurant seems to be everything the President is not: serious, polite, and well-intentioned. She risked her business out of respect for her workers who, like most restaurant workers, are among those on the presidential hit list. The restaurant business, as Anthony Bourdain made plain, is particularly hospitable to non-conforming people. Perhaps it is the melee of the kitchen that provides an environment in which men – it is mostly men -- who don’t fit elsewhere, find a niche and maybe even thrive. Informed that the President’s Press Secretary was dining in her restaurant this week, The Red Hen’s owner consulted her employees, she did not tell them what to do, and then she represented them, she did not betray them. She took the press secretary outside, presumably to save her embarrassment in front of her friends, and to avoid a scene. “I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” the Red Hen’s Stephanie Wilkinson said later. The desire to avoid a scene is often what leads to compliance. Not this time. Out on the porch, Wilkinson explained the press secretary would not be served dinner, then refused her money, and asked her to leave. The Press Secretary left (note: if you refuse, THEY may comply!).
The story came out. The Press Secretary preened her moral superiority and said that when asked, she “politely left.” As for the owner of the Red Hen? “Her actions,” Sanders said, “say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.” This last statement alone beggars all belief given the almost daily barrage of snide prevarication from the podium. But beggaring belief is surely the point. If Sanders and her boss could, they would make beggars of us all.
In a decent world, Stephanie Wilkinson’s decency would shine like a beacon. Sarah Sanders was right (even a broken clock is right twice a day): “Her actions,” Sanders said, “say far more about her than about me.” Wilkinson did not yell “fascist,” she did not tweet out the Press Secretary’s whereabouts and encourage a crowd to come protest her, she did not tape their dinner conversation. These are all tactics others might have employed, and all of them are defensible. But Wilkinson found her own way: she toed the line she could not cross, and she did so with civility. It seems to have done her no good. It has done her a world of good. It has done the world good. Yes, she has now resigned her position as executive director of the downtown business association, part of the fallout of her stumble into public life. And her business is attacked by Trump and his Press Secretary. Their aim is to raise the costs of protest and discourage others from such principled action. If no one is protesting, that must mean there is nothing to protest! Just like when an NDA secures a woman’s silence, and the conclusion we are told to accept is that the assault must have not happened. But Maxine Waters, who has known from Day One who and what we are dealing with here, congratulated Wilkinson, and called for more like her to step up. Waters called on all of us. Take courage from this example, she is saying. Take ‘em out on the porch. Don’t let it be business as usual. Don’t just let it go. And now it is Waters, not the pussy- grabber, but the one who dares to call him what he is, who is told she should apologize.
The audacity of civility. Power loves to police the tone of those who challenge it. To be sure, the tone is not the only thing policed. A man who has always taken what he wants without asking now has at his behest the forces of police, military, and the Supreme Court. With the full power of the US government, his game is to see how far he can go. Our obligation is to stop him. No one tactic will do. (VOTE!) No one else will do it. One at a time and all together is the only way forward.
Stephanie Wilkinson has shone a light. Let us show we know the power of the shining beacon and have faith in the rewards of walking in its path: When Muhammad Ali was asked whether he regretted his draft refusal, given what it cost him (titles and money lost while he was effectively banned from the sport), he said: “I would like to say to those of the press and those of the people who think that I lost so much … I would like to say that I did not lose a thing up until this very moment, I haven’t lost one thing,” he said. “I have gained a lot. Number one, I have gained a peace of mind. I have gained a peace of heart.”
Newly Elected County Commissioner, Mariah Parker, Takes Oath of Office on The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Unseats 10 term Democrat On Progressive-Left Platform
With a Reality TV president in office, it should be no surprise to watch, once again, as the revolving door between reality and TV swings round, and we are left unclear which side of it we are on. And yet I am stunned at the usefulness, not for the first time, of the show VEEP, in helping us understand Trump in Washington.
Selina, for those who do not know the show, is an empty, ambitious woman who will do or say anything to get what she wants and is indifferent to, and indeed totally unaware of the impact of her actions on those around her. In Season 6, episode 8 of VEEP, Selina’s devoted assistant, Gary, after 5 ½ seasons of degradation and dependence, gets Selina to go to his hometown, meet his parents, and attend a party he wants to throw. Jessica Goldstein summarizes what happens next. Before the party, "Gary confides in Selina that he has this childhood story, a loving one he has tenderly held all his life...The party has gone in decidedly not Gary’s planned direction ... [and then Selina, who is trying to impress one of the guests with her folksiness] gets up to give a toast … and she steals Gary’s story. It’s a wonder to behold. She does tell it better than he does, fake folksy lines and all,” and she ends with an authentic-sounding line: “’He just wanted to make his little girl as happy as a hound dog with a horse’s Johnson.’ Gary’s face as he sees that Selina is really going to take every last thing about this milestone away from him is wrenching. He is gutted. The betrayal leaves him speechless, and, as usual, Selina is cavalier about the pain her actions have caused." Sound familiar? It should. This, I imagine, is the scene in the Oval Office earlier this week, when General Kelly shared privately his story of his son's death with the President, using language that military men who have earned it use for such things. 'He knew what he signed up for.' 'He understood the mission.' Or, perhaps, as he put it, later after the scandal began to unravel: He “was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed…He knew what he was getting into … He knew what the possibilities were because we were at war.”
I imagine this was all part of Kelly's effort to persuade Trump NOT to call the survivors of those who died in Niger and elsewhere. ‘Sir, there’s nothing you can do to lighten the burden on these families,’” he says he told Trump. I imagine he was suggesting, on the surface, that there is no lightening the burden for the bereaved that anyone can offer, but he was also saying, beneath that, the real truth, which is that there is no comfort this president can offer, given who he is, how he talks, and so on.
As part of this conversation about whether or not to call the bereaved, Kelly also mentioned that he, himself, never got a call from Obama. He said this in the context of a conversation in which his aim was, again, to prevent Trump from getting on the phone, likely knowing that it could not go well. But Kelly misstepped. Undoubtedly thinking that by taking Obama out of the calculus, he frees Trump to not call, Kelly failed to anticipate the infantile one-upmanship that inevitably kicked in. ‘Wait: Obama didn't call?’ I can just see the VEEP-like digestion of this information, the presidential brain processing it clunkily to conclude: 'Then I WILL! I will be better than him! How hard can it be? And think of the press coverage!'
Shortly after, asked in a press conference about why he has not spoken about the 4 dead in Niger, Trump, channeling VEEP’s Selina, tells part of the story that Kelly has told him: Obama didn’t call everyone, but he, Trump, does, or will. Then later, in a phone call with the family of La David Johnson, one of the four American men who died in Niger, Trump uses the words and phrases Kelly used with him. They are manly phrases: 'he knew what he signed up for!' When Kelly said those words, Trump admired them. He was admiring the man who said them. He thought that if he stole the words, he could steal also the character, history, and experience he admires in Kelly. He could do it cavalierly. Why not?
But Trump is no Selina. He couldn't pull it off. And Kelly is left in the role of Gary, whose face, "as he sees that Selina is really going to take every last thing about this milestone away from him, is wrenching." Unlike Gary, however, Kelly is not left speechless. Kelly says things, and now he makes it worse. Because the things he is used to saying in his circles are not now the things to say in the circle into which he is made to step by all of this. The congresswoman is not a political congresswoman, she herself is kin; she is not listening in on a phone call, she is part of the family circle to whom the phone call is made. She is saying things that are true: Trump’s words did not convey to the bereaved the care and comfort he proclaimed as his but rather the callous disregard he has for everything. The words that Trump said were offensive because they are words for men and women in the armed forces to say to each other. They are not the words that a draft-evading, cavalier, military wannabe and serial user of people can say with credibility and they are not the words anyone says to grieving non-military family members, either. They were words said to Kelly by his military friends and colleagues. I doubt very much they were the words he said to his wife Karen when, as he says, he went upstairs to break her heart. And so when Trump stole them for himself, to say them to the wrong people, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, they felt foul. They rang false, and hollow. Of course they did.
That is not the end of the story. So far it is all just tawdry, VEEP-level tawdry. The real irony is in what happens next, as Kelly begins to sound more and more like Trump. The revolving door turns once more and suddenly Kelly, who has never spoken publicly about these things, is speaking in public, about his loss and about who gets to speak about loss: only people with a direct experience of or relationship to life and death in the military.
But wait, that criterion leaves out the current President and includes the Congresswoman the administration is currently out to discredit. That is Congresswoman Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.), who shared with the press how Trump’s bereavement call aggravated rather than alleviated the Johnson family’s suffering. She is in the Gold Star circle by virtue of her years-long involvement with the Johnson family and others. What to do? Kelly unspeakably steps into the racist waters of the White House, referring to Wilson, who is black, as an “empty barrel” that sounds loudest as a drum, meaning she was, as he also said: “grandstanding.” It is false, as so many of Trump’s Fox-news type claims are. This time there really is a tape, and it vindicates the Congresswoman. Remember when Trump called Comey a “showboat?” Who’s speaking whose words now? But Kelly is not stealing from Trump as Trump stole from him. No, the General on stage is now, himself, an emptied barrel, speaking the empty words of an empty man whose Midas touch turns everything not to gold, as he clearly wishes to persuade us, but to Whiteness. And this is a step even Selina’s Veep has not taken. That is how we know VEEP is fiction. And how the calumnious verities of Fox News are made real.
*This Article First Appeared at Politics Letters Live http://politicsslashletters.live/features/unreality-tv-trump-kelly-and-the-revolving-door-of-whiteness/
Author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics.
While democracy is no stranger to violence, the Republican Party and Donald Trump have escalated and exacerbated democracy’s violence problems. Among other things, violence has achieved a new level of viciousness, bordering on murderous. This change could be seen during Trump’s campaign when the candidate himself called on his supporters to attack fellow citizens in his audiences who were there to voice their political disagreement and disapproval. It could be seen when Trump, on more than one occasion, effectively solicited his followers to assassinate his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump also threatened to unleash the forces of the state on Clinton after the campaign (lock her up) if he won. Violence is also inherent in Trump’s (and the GOP’s) domestic and foreign policies—from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to the elimination of women’s reproductive rights, from an embrace of the fossil fuel industry and the denial of climate change to torturing and bombing America’s enemies in the so-called War on Terror. The material harm these policies portend range from serious injury to death. This reactionary agenda constitutes Trump’s impotent vision of American greatness. It is a vision shared by Republican America and its fellow travelers.
The GOP’s, not just Trump’s, resort to violence poses an existential threat to American democracy, especially in combination with another age-old political debility: illegitimacy. Trump’s November 8 victory reeks. He defeated Clinton in the Electoral College, which gave him the formal win, but he lost the popular vote by over 2.6 million ballots cast. This translates to a 2% defeat. Given the undemocratic character of the Electoral College, Trump, at best, enjoys an illegitimate legitimacy. From a democratic perspective, Hillary Clinton deserves to be president of the United States. American democracy earned a Clinton victory. If the principle of electoral equality (one person, one vote) means anything, the Electoral College cannot be defended as a democratic political institution or practice. It enables, even invites illegitimacy. Trump’s presidency is the illegitimate offspring of this antiquated institution. Wyoming voters, for example, exercise nearly four times the voting power as California voters. This is not just unacceptable but intolerable. When American citizens claim that Trump is not their president, this is more than a rhetorical ploy. It is a valid, even compelling democratic political argument. (Tom Dumm’s December 5 post brilliantly recounts and dissects the Electoral College’s fatal defects.)
Candidate Trump also received illegitimate assistance from another source, one not as well-known for its distortions in American politics as the Electoral College. There is convincing evidence, Donald’s refusal to believe notwithstanding, that Russia tampered with the American election in an effort to secure Trump’s victory. Republicans led by Mitch McConnell refused to publicly denounce the interference when they had the chance prior to November 8 and when it might have made a difference. They preferred to effectively collude with a foreign dictatorship rather than protect the integrity of American elections, as long as their candidate potentially benefited. The Trump Administration will assume power indebted to Vladimir Putin and tainted by the specter of treason. Someday, and that day may never come, he’ll call on Trump to do a service for him. What payment will Putin demand in return for his assistance? Is a Secretary of State enough? Trump’s white nationalist regime can now claim Russian ancestry.
These are not the only problems with Trump’s ascension. For years the GOP has been engaged in deliberate voter suppression efforts to deny the franchise to people they deem political enemies (people of color, the poor, the elderly, college students, etc.) and prevail in elections they assume they would otherwise lose. Many of these legislative efforts successfully took place in battleground states such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin. No one can say with exactitude what kind of effect they had on turnout and thus the election’s outcome, but the fact that a decisive influence cannot be categorically ruled out in a tight contest is damning. The Republican Party invented the problems of voter fraud in order to commit voter fraud. Donald Trump, resentful of Hillary Clinton’s decisive numerical triumph, has perpetrated new lies about illegal voting, part of new efforts to further suppress voting. Not surprisingly, the Trump campaign and the GOP oppose recount efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, even though it is a standard aspect of the political process, and even though it is unlikely to alter the election’s result. Since Republicans have secured total power at the federal level, it does not matter to them that they won by hook or by crook. Only the outcome matters since they understand themselves to be the only party entitled to rule America. For them democracy and (permanent) one-party rule (theirs) are tailor-made for each other.
Mass political deceit is not a phenomenon limited to presidential politics. Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country have gerrymandered congressional districts to guarantee themselves a national superiority unwarranted by the total number of votes they receive in each election. Republicans have thus legislated their way into a nonrepresentative—and therefore illegitimate—position of power. With the election of Trump, Paul Ryan’s House will be able to introduce and impose ideologically-driven legislation that should never see the light of day, thus making American citizens subjects rather than authors of the laws that govern them. This is a traditional definition of domination. The Republicans Party is the ugly embodiment of authoritarian minority rule in 21st century America. The pushback on many fronts thus far has been minimal, though on November 21 the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin ruled that the Wisconsin legislature’s 2011 reconfiguration of State Assembly districts to ensure Republican Party control violated the 1st and 14th amendment rights of its Democratic voters.
Republicans at the state level have recently expanded their power ambitions. In North Carolina, following the defeat of incumbent Republican Governor Pat McCrory, Republicans called a last-minute special session to pass legislation to cripple the governor’s office and limit its power, perhaps especially including ways that will make it difficult to reverse successful Republican voter suppression efforts, now that a Democrat has been elected to it. Republicans will do anything to prevent Democrats from winning electoral office. Failing that, they will sabotage any office they do not control—until they hold that office again. Republicans seek a form of democratic totalitarianism where they—and they alone—can rule. They have not yet acquired a monopoly on power nationwide, but this is what they are after. It is a kind of political psychosis with them and there is no effective response to it other than raw power in one form or another.
GOP subversion of democracy is not restricted to electoral domains. The Republican-controlled Senate led by Mitch McConnell, for example, refused to consider, let alone approve Merrick Garland as Supreme Court justice following the death of Antonin Scalia. Chief Justice John Roberts stood by and said nothing on behalf of the judicial branch as the Republican Party converted the court into an instrument of its conservative ambition. This constitutional coup delegitimizes the court itself, especially any 5-4 decision issued if and when Trump’s appointee rules with the majority. The GOP cannot simply arrogate to itself a monopoly on Supreme Court appointments and thus control of the final decision-making power of the court regarding the law of the land.
Each one of these democratic assaults is corrupt. Taken together they undermine the credentials of the very system that enacts them. This, of course, is the point. Republicans do not pursue these measures ignorant of or indifferent to their consequences for American democracy. They implement them precisely because of the political consequences they generate. Just as Republicans did not think Bill Clinton or Barack Obama legitimate office holders and did everything they could to obstruct and destroy their presidencies, they do not think those who would vote Democratic (or anywhere on the political “left”) are anything other than voices to be suppressed or silenced, however possible. Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they cannot (and do not want to) share a democratic polity with anyone unlike themselves, which makes it impossible for others to live with them as democratic equals. This is a recipe for not just resistance but upheaval.
(Metaphor)
The United States is always quick to condemn any violence that the state does not authorize and impose itself. The story the country tells itself is that violence is unjust insofar as political institutions exist where differences and disagreements can be resolved peacefully because all parties accept the inevitability of winning and losing, where political office and power are open to genuine contestation and results reflect the democratic will of the people, and where opposing voices are not only listened to and respected but also protected from the exercise of arbitrary power by majority coalitions or minority tyranny.
Yet the Republican Party has systematically subverted these institutions and understandings, which means that American citizens have been deprived of their most basic political right, the right to self-determination. If anything, American citizens today have greater cause for complaint than British colonists, who took up arms in opposition, did in the 18th century. American citizens have been disenfranchised in a system where there is no longer agreement on and loyalty to its fundamental terms. Republicans use democracy to game the system and destroy it just enough to empower themselves and retain a democratic veneer. It could thus be argued that the Republican Party has effectively forced the question of violence back onto the American political agenda. In this kind of hegemonic context, do the people have a right to resist those who successfully manipulate, mutilate, and render meaningless the democratic process to control and dominate their perceived enemies? If so, what forms might resistance take, especially when the state is likely to attack those who oppose, protest, and disrupt illegitimate minority rule?
Ironically, democratic citizens under violent assault from an illegitimate Republican regime might take a lesson from the testosterone-driven, gun-toting antics of the Bundy family, a gang of welfare-system deadbeats determined to open public lands to private exploitation and extraction, and its followers. They invoke the cause of freedom, but this rhetoric is mere cover for their know-nothing anti-statist libertarianism. At the same time, they embody a defiant, oppositional disposition uncowed by the state that democratic actors with actual grievances would do well to channel productively.
Republican subversion of American democracy is nothing new. Much of the country, however, has fooled itself regarding Republican identity and intentions. America regularly tells itself reassuring stories to maintain and stabilize the order in the face of incursions against it. After the Rehnquist Court shamelessly installed George W. Bush in the Oval Office in 2000, for example, Vice President Al Gore came to the rescue with a stoic concession speech that honored the allegedly final decision of an institution that had just delegitimized itself by its blatant ideological intervention in and usurpation of the electoral process. The Court stole an election, but the country preferred to congratulate itself about and revel in the peaceful transition of power. In similar fashion, mainstream acquiescence to the Trump regime-to-be is now under way.
According to American political lore, what happens when government tyrannizes its people and denies them the possibility of effective participation in the political process where the collective future is decided? American citizens from the Revolution in the 18th century to the Labor and Civil Rights Movements in the 20th century have, when necessary, turned to the possibilities of democratic violence to counter state and state-sponsored domination to exercise and take (back) their rights. The GOP envisions something other than benevolent, white nationalist, free market despotism. The program it plans to implement is beset by violence. The state does not need to resort to guns, truncheons, gas, and water cannons (though we are likely to witness an upsurge in the use of force by police at all levels under Trump) to perpetrate violence against citizens. Flint, Michigan, is one example. People there have been poisoned by a Republican-controlled political machine that deemed political ideology more important than the health and well-being of those in its charge. Paul Ryan’s plans to privatize and thus gut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, to cite but one post-election example, would also constitute violent assaults on human well-being.
As the (now Trump-led) Republicans make social, economic, environmental, and political war against American democracy and many of its people, what are they supposed to do? Sit and take it? As Rousseau, hardly an advocate of violence, wrote in pre-revolutionary Europe: “I would say that as long as a people is constrained to obey and does so, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does so, it does even better.” What might shake off the yoke mean here and now? It’s not just a question of the indispensability of everyday resistance that is called for. The Republican Party needs to be put on notice: the United States of America is a political fiction the continued existence of which is unnecessary. Perhaps it’s time to deconstruct it, as some anti-Federalists imagined in the 18th century, for the people of the United States no longer share a commitment to, let alone practice, a democratic way of life. A United States split into two (or more) separate and distinct political entities would not only trigger a new birth of freedom on the North American continent; it would also be a boon to peace across the planet.
Brown University, Antigone Interrupted We have not lately – not until this election season -- seen or heard the dog whistle politics of racism, sexism, Nativism, and homophobia so eagerly thrust aside by a Presidential candidate and, with such glee: traded for openly racist invective, division, misogyny, nativism, and more… It is no accident, as the historians love to say, that this past television season, the breakout show was Stranger Things, which I watched and loved, along with many of you, I am sure. Stranger Things is a romp through 80’s nostalgia, from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. to Alien and more. Aspects of the 80’s for which I myself am less nostalgic were also peddled by the show – in particular the Reaganist antipathy to government, as such. Reagan was famous for his witticisms, which he kept on index cards in his desk, piles of them. One of his most famous lines was this: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’" This sentiment, also a piece of 80’s nostalgia, is central to the show, Stranger Things.
In the show, the bad guys are from the government and their “help” is a nightmare. The local sheriff, by contrast, is a flawed hero whose intelligence and courage will save the day, more or less. Himself presumably on the public payroll, he does not code “government” because he is local. Government means Washington in 1980’s Reaganism. It is notably only for white communities that the local sheriff is the better representative of justice by contrast with the federal government. Noticeably there are very few minorities in Stranger Things. Stranger Things is importantly prescient in this moment, our moment, because it explores the distinction, newly permeable, between what is out in the open, and the secretly subterranean crap that underwrites it and lies beneath it. In Stranger Things, the world we know and love is underwritten by a place called “the upside down” – in which what is normally unseen – the repugnant --is regnant. In the Upside Down, a yucky carnivorous gelatinous monster feasts on people and impregnates them with its own progeny. What is that yucky gelatinous stuff? It could be anything; or many things …
Racism? Sexism? Homophobia? What opens the door to it? What lets it in? In the show, the monster gains access to the normal world by dint of the rogue and irresponsible science of government technocrats whose ambition knows no bounds and who do not hesitate to engage in torture to get what they want. And then of course they get more than what they want. Things go awry, as Mary Shelley could have told them they would. The gelatinous monster lives down below the earth on which we walk, lurking there, normally unseen and unsuspected. But the divide between our world and the monster’s is breached, and the gelatinous monster breaks in, grabbing people, eating and impregnating them. This keeps happening because of technocrats who think they know what they are doing and, confident they are right, are arrogant in their use of power and surveillance, willing even to torture to achieve their aims. They use a water tank that references water boarding. The screams of the child whose telekinetic powers they want to harness will not be easily forgotten by those who watch the show. These people – scientists, technocrats, lawless, self-proclaimed knowing representatives of the public’s good – let’s call them for a moment the Democratic Party – open the door to forces that are unspeakable and are normally more contained. Because of their actions, the gross evils of the world can now get in. As the Observer reported on Nov 10, 2016: the Clinton campaign decided early on that “it was in the best interest of Clinton, and therefore the Democratic Party, that Trump was the Republican presidential nominee. Polls indicated Sen. Rubio, Gov. Kasich, or almost any other establishment Republican would likely beat Clinton in a general election. Even Cruz, who is reviled by most Republicans, would still maintain the ability to rally the Republican Party—especially its wealthy donors—around his candidacy. Clinton and Democrats expected the FBI investigation into her private email server would serve as a major obstacle to Clinton’s candidacy, and the public’s familiarity with her scandals and flip-flopping political record put her at a disadvantage against a newcomer. Donald Trump solved these problems.”[1]
But, in fairness, the villains of Stranger Things, the people – scientists, technocrats, lawless, and self-proclaimed knowing representatives of the public’s good who open the door to forces that are unspeakable and are normally more contained -- could also be called the Republican Party: the government scientists are clearly interested in awakening, fostering and then nurturing and maintaining the terrible forces of the Upside Down. (think: Tea Party). The government agents clearly think there is here a powerful weapon they can leash to their politics. They clearly hope to control and instrumentalize it, just as they believe they can control and instrumentalize a girl, named 11, whose telekinetic powers prove forceful enough finally to break through.
In other words, the Upside Down and our regular world are finally connected through the unwitting agency of an innocent child whose body is taken by others as a vehicle for their own projects; what the government agents do, then, is not that different from how the monster makes some people’s bodies into the vehicles of its own wants and desires. Forced impregnation codes Republican (pro-life). The liberty-abrogating enlistment of some for the purposes of others? That codes Democratic, from a Republican perspective. Call it taxation.
How then do we code the young girl’s rage at the takeover of her body and her life by others for purposes that are not her own? It is her explosive rage (think Carrie), that punctures the firewall between our world and the Upside Down. Perhaps this is anarchy or populism, raw, emotional REFUSAL.
Thus the argument for federal oversight on human rights, voting rights, redistribution, social welfare, environmental protection, has no language, no traction, no reality in the world of Stranger Things – which I now recognize as an even guiltier pleasure than I thought it was while I was watching it. Others will tell the story of how the US media – which made MILLIONS of dollars on this election, what a windfall -- made Trump possible: the free airtime, the legitimating coverage (“they are both flawed”…), and so on. But, it is notable that print media was better, sometimes MASSIVELY better. The Washington Post in particular wrote expose after expose. But in the world of the Upside Down all that matters are the appetites, not facts. There is no traction for truth in that gelatinous world.
Which brings me to what happens after the breach, in our world, what we are seeing now: The media cannot legitimate this Presidency quickly enough. It is as if, if we were living in the world of Stranger Things, the media have decided the monster is not THAT gelatinous, and people are having its babies, so we may not like it, but he is the President-elect, after all, and he deserves a certain deference.
The material result of that deference could be seen in People Magazine, whose own reporter was groped by the man they quickly moved to coronate: “starting the morning of November 9, the first morning Trump became the President-elect, [there was] a definitive shift: People began to cover Trump and his family in a noticeably more positive light. Their first tweeted-out story cheekily exclaimed “He’s hired!,” a reference to Trump’s “you’re fired” Apprentice catchphrase. … and then the magazine featured pictures of his family, noted the fashion savvy of his wife, and speculated about whether he would turn the White House to gold with his new decorating plans (watch out subcontractors …. better get big up front deposits for that job). No mention was made of what happened to Midas. On the same day, that very evening, thousands, tens of thousands of people, hit the streets in cities across the country, protesting the election of this man and rejecting everything he has stood for, has legitimated, and will now mainstream. The front page of the New York Times reported on all this, but – like People magazine – the New York Times made a choice. It covered the protests, but put the protest stories below the fold. Above the fold was their lead story: about Trump and his victory.
This division is not what democracy looks like. But it is what the US looks like, always hasty to sweep things under the proverbial rug and get on with legitimate business, or the business of legitimation. So, as citizens, we will all have a choice to make going forward: Do we allow ourselves to be absorbed in to the gelatinous normalization of a Trump presidency? Or do we hold on to our moral compasses? Notably, in Stranger Things, compasses go haywire near the openings to the Upside Down. Do we find ways to give the truth some traction? Howdo we hold on to our outrage and give it purpose?
For starters, we have to turn the NYTIMES Upside Down. Read below the fold, not above. Reverse their priorities. To do this, you need to nurture your moral compass. Hold on to what you KNOW. Don’t be talked out of what you heard in the Access Hollywood tape and do not forget what you saw at the rallies. You know what you know.
We also have to volunteer to work for organizations that will be under pressure, not only for the do-gooding (though, why not?) but also and even more importantly for the membership. Victims taken to the Upside Down by the ravenous gelatinous monster are – so far in the show – always alone, caught in solitude. Action in concert is the only protection against the gelatinous monster.
“The world turned upside down” is the refrain of a song from Hamilton, the words are said to come from a British drinking song of the time. English soldiers, processing the end of Empire, use the phrase that connotes revolution and, for them, loss. The phrase is sung mournfully by the English in the show, while those – like Hamilton -- who are working for the American Revolution rap it out by it’s name. We are now in the Upside Down. And it is up to us what to make of it. I note that the kidnapped boy in Stranger Things, is a little bit gay, cast as a Mama’s boy, a darling child, who is – of course -- bullied at school. He is finally (SPOILER ALERT) rescued by his mother and the sheriff. They risk everything to go to the Upside Down and kidnap him back. He is almost dead when they get to him. He has managed to survive, barely to survive, alone with all his fears, by doing what needed doing. He found his way to a little clubhouse, a kind of holding environment, and he hung on. His mother and the sheriff get to him in time. Barely. And then they go home. They repair the breach that allowed the monster to get in. Will we have a happy ending?
It won’t surprise many of us that, as he returns to health, the boy coughs up what seems to be a residue of the Upside Down, some sort of gelatinous thing, that washes down the drain. Within him, it seems, occupying his body, is the stuff against which he was trying to defend himself, and to which we are all vulnerable. The young boy – innocent and fey – is a Trojan Horse. What are we?
Author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign presents a distinctive
set of problems for American democracy. The very substance of his campaign should
have disqualified him from office long ago. The number of his positions—from
building a giant wall on the Mexican border to banning Muslims from entering
the country, from his attacks on Planned Parenthood to his determinationto appoint to the Supreme Court more
hate-filled bigots like Antonin Scalia—that are morally and politically repellant
shocks the conscience. What’s more, Trump is manifestly unfit, psychologically
speaking, to hold any elected office. Trump is a racist, a xenophobe, a
misogynist, a thug, an ignoramus, a narcissist, a pathological liar, and a
crooked, incompetent businessman of monumental proportions. He has encouraged
his supporters to commit violence against opponents at his campaign events and
has effectively called on second amendment fanatics to kill the rival candidate
in defense of their gun rights. He also threatens to jail Hillary Clinton if
elected.
Despite the recent revelation involving Billy Bush, which reflected
and reinforced his basic modus operandi in the world, Trump may still become
the next president of the United States (or, failing that, found a neofascist
movement that menaces and scrambles American politics for the foreseeable
future): the latest polls indicate Trump declining, but he retains a core of
steadfast supporters who wallow in the resentment he channels and many remain
opposed to a Hillary Clinton presidency under any circumstances.
Citizens that plan to vote for Trump, should he win, ought
to prepare themselves for the unique problems he will pose for the United
States. If and when he turns out to be a man of his reckless, belligerent, criminal
word, and there is every reason to believe that Trump means what he says and
says what he means, in all likelihood he will induce a series of constitutional
crises in the United States. Trump will so conduct himself in office that he
will have to be impeached, put on trial, and removed. Citizens that plan to
vote for him must be ready for this result. In part, they will be responsible
for bringing it about. If Washington has suffered from undue paralysis for the
past eight years because of fanatical racist opposition to Obama’s presidency,
it will worsen under Trump.
Candidate Trump has made it clear that he has no regard for
the Constitution or international law, or law of any kind. If elected, he has
declared his intent to commit high crimes and misdemeanors, including war
crimes, such as torturing human beings and murdering family members of alleged terrorists
to prosecute the war on terrorism. He has also indicated that he will
indiscriminately deploy American firepower to “bomb
the shit” out of the Islamic State in utter disregard for civilian
casualties. President Donald Trump will have much blood on his hands. And he
will force it on ours.
Trump would not be the first American president to commit
crimes while in office. The list of presidential criminality in the post-World
War II era alone is depressingly impressive, including LBJ, Richard Nixon,
Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. These men did
not enter office, however, boasting of the crimes, especially war crimes, which
they planned to commit. Barack Obama notoriously refused to prosecute Bush
Administration officials for their gross infringements, insisting that the
country, given the many critical problems facing it, needed to look forward
rather than back. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has effectively put his party
and its loyalists on notice. He is forcing them to look forward to his villainous
potential presidency. Since they claim to hold the Constitution sacrosanct as democratic
citizens must, to vote for Donald Trump means that they must be prepared to see
him, ultimately, tried, convicted, and removed from office for his felonious conduct
within it. The Constitution is the legal
and political foundation of American democracy. Without it, America cannot
stand. A Trump victory would amount to a first in American history for those
who voted for him: the election of a candidate they know plans to commit, among
other things, murder and treason.
If Trump delivers on his promises, those responsible for
putting him in office will have no (ethical) choice but to press for his removal
from office and his subsequent prosecution to the fullest extent the law allows—this
according to their own principles. Consider what it would take to deport every
immigrant without papers in the United States. The infrastructure of violence
(armed roundups of human beings, forced marches, prison trains, concentrations
camps, etc.) necessary to implement this malevolent ambition would make a
shambles of due process rights, both procedural and substantive, afforded
persons under the Constitution and render the United States a global pariah.
Trump has other people of color in his sights as well. As
the self-styled law and order candidate, he would pacify American cities and
give police free rein. Local authorities would have nothing to fear from a
Trump Justice Department, which would effectively unleash the violence of the
state at all levels against black Americans should they resist police brutality
and killings. America’s incarceration rate, already among the highest in the
world, will accelerate and intensify the country’s pace on a destructive path. Black
Lives Matter could easily be designated a hate group or terrorist organization.
Trump, of course, would need assistance to successfully criminalize democratic
politics. For such a project he could turn to no one more fitting than his most
loyal pimp, Rudy Giuliani. With Giuliani at the helm of the F.B.I. an American
police state becomes thinkable.
Internationally, Trump’s vile pronouncements have already
provided the Islamic State with vital recruiting
propaganda. Imagine the assistance he could render them if he matches his
bigoted words with murderous deeds, as promised, by indiscriminately using
America’s military might. How many more American lives would he jeopardize with
every innocent casualty his policies produced? This could meet the definition
of treason under United
States Code, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Even if Trump knew in
advance that his plan would backfire, he would do it anyway. That’s how his
politics of revenge operates. It creates endless enemies.
What’s more, Trump would not tolerate any criticism of his
presidency. Hypersensitive to negative appraisal of any kind, what would he do when
faced with serious, sustained opposition and dissent? He’s already indicated
that he would attempt to change libel laws to silence political critics (The
New York Times and The Washington Post reside at the top of his hit list). Like
Nixon, a disgraced criminal figure he admires, he would be in position to
deploy the power of the federal government against those he identifies as
enemies. As he proudly boasted in the
second debate, if he’s elected president he will order his attorney general to appoint
a special prosecutor whose task is to put Hillary Clinton behind bars. Nothing
short of a cult of personality would satisfy this totalitarian once in office.
American citizens would be expected to behave as mere subjects.
In the immediate aftermath of the Access Hollywood
disclosure, there has been fevered talk of forcing Trump to quit the race, if
only to save the GOP from electoral disaster in the House and Senate. Democrats
need to oppose this possibility loudly and often. Not one of the things that Trump
said about or admitted doing to women is new. The confession (to crimes) does
not constitute legitimate grounds for those who have remained loyal to him to
date to change their minds. Opposition to his candidacy should have been a
moral and political imperative from the get-go regardless of party (or
ideological) affiliation. It was not such an imperative for one simple but
terrible reason: Trump is a creation of conservative republicans and the
political culture they have been fostering for decades. And they know it. Despite
a few policy differences, Trump is one of them and they are of a piece with
him. Some Republicans seem to think they can redeem or rehabilitate themselves
by opposing or replacing Trump at the eleventh hour, but they created a party
all too amenable to Trump’s seizure, which means they can’t take it back from
him now because he has become the party. Perhaps this explains Paul Ryan’s
tortured stance of not campaigning with or defending Trump but still
“endorsing” him.
Perpetual constitutional crisis is what those citizens who
plan to vote for Trump need to think about and prepare for as November 8
approaches. What the GOP must do is destroy Trump at the polls—even if it
destroys them, too. He is a political monster they have created in their own
image. It’s their responsibility to kill it. But I am not holding my breath
while I wait for them to do it.
