The End of America?

 A friend from Australia is currently writing a book about America. He refers to our plight as an “Enigma”.

He has both lived and worked here, although not for many years. He lived here when we still seemed a viable Nation, even a reasonable place to call home.  But now, he sees our flaws eating away at our very core, and he fears for the future viability of this place we call America. He is hoping that there are solutions for our problems, although he hasn’t yet reached that section in his book.

I have been thinking of the same subject for some time now, but really ever since Donald Trump appeared within the room we call home.  The trouble is that the problems I detect in our nation now seem so profound and so large that I fear we have passed by any chance of a solution.  What I see and now imagine is a continued fracturing of our society to a point at which recovery is no longer available. And I don’t know what happens at that stage. I suppose the most likely outcome is an autocracy. Someone comes along—think someone of the ilk of Donald Trump, or Greg Abbott, or Ron DeSantis, or even that idiot-malenfant Josh Hawley. That someone doesn’t have to be particularly smart. He only needs to appeal to the very large horde of right wing horror tales we now house in this country, stupid to the core and heavily armed.

The “not very smart thing” is, I think, of recent origin, if we can count Ronald Reagan as being included within the “recent origin” period.  I grew up during the 1930s and 1940s in New York City.  I only remember FDR as our very first US President.  The apparent idiot before him, Herbert Hoover is not really on my memory radar screen. From Wikipedia, “ . . . Hoover is often regarded as a below-average U.S. president, and most polls of historians and political scientists rank him in the bottom third overall.” But I remember Hoover, a Stanford graduate, from the “Hoover Tower” at Stanford, widely known on campus as “Hoover’s Last Erection”.

FDR, after all, was the President who guided the Nation out of that Great Depression, which Hoover largely seemed to have ignored, assuming it would go away all by itself.  FDR, instead, actually took action, to invest in America, helping to arrest that Depression, just prior to ending it for good with our entry into World War II.

But if FDR was my earliest memory of a President, certainly my first memory of an idiot President has to be Ronald Reagan, or St. Ronald of Reagan as I now like to call him.  I worked briefly in the Government during his Presidency, leaving after six years when I feared going braindead.  Reagan really did seem . . . hmm . . .  perhaps of “less than normal intelligence”.  He really did not seem to know what he was doing most of the time. Plus he surrounded himself with people of questionable intellect and dubious ethical standards.  But that’s just my opinion, and what do I know?

But after Reagan, we elected, sort of, George W. Bush. If ever an election was “flawed” it was that one, in which the Supreme Court elevated him to the Presidency. And had the voting in Florida not been so flawed, the Court would never have been able to intervene, and we would have had Al Gore as President.  Bush, or “Shrub” as Molly Ivins crowned him in her book, “Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush”.  Shrub was out of touch most of the time with the effects of his decisions on Americans.  He may have had a diminished intellect, or it might be that he simply didn’t care.

But then we elected Donald J. Trump. And we thereby elected someone who incorporated simultaneously all of the flaws of all of our most deeply flawed presidents into one human, well perhaps one pseudo-human.   I think that Donald Trump could be explained as a reaction by the Stupid People of America to our elevation of Barack Obama to the Presidency. While perhaps normally they don’t bother voting, they came out in droves this time. Think on this a bit. First America elected our first African-American to the Presidency, not once but twice. Now, to be fair, President Obama was born in Hawaii, attended Columbia University as an undergraduate and then received his doctorate in Laws (JD) from Harvard. He did pretty well as a president, even elevating our standing internationally. So, just imagine what that meant to that population of undereducated white dudes who vaguely identified as republican—a Black man as President, and not just for one term, but two.

And then, the Democrats had the nerve to nominate a woman for heaven’s sake, Hillary Clinton, as their candidate for president in 2016. Well, that was just too much, so the undereducated dudes and dudettes came out in large numbers, along with their normal republican voters to elect the perfect opposite as their candidate. Donald J. Trump, a man who hardly seems able to read, speaks like an uneducated six year old, with perhaps the same education level (apologies to all normal six-year olds). In addition to his lack of fluency in intelligent thought, The Donald seems to be a racist, a misogynist,  anti-LGBTQ, and someone who has failed at virtually every endeavor he has ever attempted, from businesses (six bankruptcies) to marriage (three unsuccessful and counting).  And as President, he failed again. He seems to have nearly destroyed our reputation globally, except perhaps with his Russian friends, and, when confronted with perhaps the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu, he ran away and hid, so he could suck his thumb in peace, making believe it was not happening.  Meanwhile people were dying all around him. Happily, our public health folks still had working brains, and our pharmaceutical companies were ready, willing and able to take on the challenge of a new and deadly virus. They came through in amazing fashion, producing effective vaccines in record times, despite the best interests of the Donald in just ignoring the whole thing.

And so, his performance was so awful that even his racist, thoughtless white dudes could not bring home a second victory, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took over the reins of government, despite the best intentions of The Donald and his tribe of ne’er-do-wells on January 6^th. We are still working through the gigantic mess they all created in their attack on America that day. That they failed we can applaud. That they are all traitors to a person we can only sigh and say, “Thank God those traitors failed”.

But, though they failed on that day, they have not gone away.  In fact, they now seem perhaps better organized, by virtue of having taken over the entire Republican Party. Yes, the party of Dwight Eisenhower, and even St. Ronald of Reagan, has now been taken over by the forces of Donald Trump.

And there we are. Yes, Joe Biden is still our president. And he and Kamala are trying their hardest to at least address, if not resolve the many problems facing our nation. The pandemic keeps interfering, but mainly the now defunct republican party (we really need a new name for that party), assisted by some errant democrats (think Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) are managing to get in the way of making any serious progress on the President’s very large agenda.  And his agenda really is quite large. It includes:

·         Voting rights: Americans on the right, i.e., republicans, really hate it when folks actually vote. So, they are busily working away on gerrymandering every voting district they control, and passing laws and regulations that inhibit people of color from voting. Biden is trying to fix that via his voting bill that seems to be going nowhere.

·         Climate change: Joe joined the most recent Climate Summit, but his America seems barely concerned. Despite all the evidence that our planet is burning down and engulfed in catastrophic rainstorms, the US and, really, other industrialized nations, seem barely aware, but not yet ready to move aggressively to repair the damage, even if it is still repairable.

·         Infrastructure renewal: years of neglect has placed our basic infrastructure at risk of failing—Roads, bridges, even buildings seem ready to fall down around us. Biden’s infrastructure bill is aimed at making a healthy start on correcting some of our problems.

·         Health care for all Americans: this one is, to me, beyond any rational understanding. America now has perhaps the worst health care system on the planet. It is hugely expensive, and manages to miss many of the people who most need care. Yet, large numbers of people are oblivious, or outright oppose large scale government intervention. Biden is trying to move in the direction of some improvements, but really we need to have a single payer, government operated system like most of the rest of the civilized world.

·         Supreme Court Restoration: Donald Trump managed to get three appointments to this hugely important part of our government. Of the 816 active judges serving across the three main tiers of the federal court system: the Supreme Court, 13 regional appeals courts and 91 district courts governed by Article III of the U.S. Constitution, Trump appointed 28% of those judges. That includes three of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices, 30% of the nation’s active appeals court judges and 27% of active district court judges. It remains unclear what it is Biden can do to correct the current right wing bias on the highest court, although there has been talk of widening the bench by adding three additional justices.  But Trump may have destroyed the utility of our Supreme Court.

·         Defeating the Pandemic: Hard to know what Biden can do here, since we have vaccines that seem to work. Mainly, some segment of the American public is intent on allowing the virus and its variants to continue to spread, by virtue of their unwillingness to become vaccinated. See, vaccinations make you part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.  We’re old, so this pandemic may never go away in our now limited lifetimes.

·         Restoring our role in the world: This feat is not subject to devising clever legislation. Mainly, it is acting in such a way that the rest of the world does not think you are a complete idiot (see Donald Trump). Trump helped to destroy much of our reputation. Biden is trying to rebuild our relationships, but they are always difficult, fragile, and subject to change from both within and without.

·         Defeating racism by electing anti-racists: it is unclear how Biden can go about dealing with our Nation’s fundamental racism.  Basically, from what I am able to understand, Trump let all of our racists out of their respective closets, and now they are armed and dangerous.  I assume the same people who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th are also within the racist camp. But as long as the opposition party, whatever we decide to call it, remains firmly in the racist camp, I fail to see what Biden can do legally. But these folks can basically continue disrupting our Nation, through their armed demonstrations to the point that another Civil War becomes likely.  Electing more folks who are basically anti-racist seems the most likely course of action, but that requires the American people to recognize the dangers of racism and the fragile nature of our republic at present.

·         Oh there’s more, but that would do for a while.

Here again, as in the past, the best we can do as a people is to vote. Something we tend to ignore is voting for state and local offices, but we need to understand that great damage is being done to our republic at those levels.  We tend often to pay more attention to elections when they are big, and more glamorous national events.  But we should understand that gerrymandering takes place because of state and local office holders from one party bending the rules so as to enhance their own power.  So, we need to pay attention and to vote at every election, but especially at the state and local affairs. It is at those levels that grievous damage has been done to our nation.

We should be clear. Republicans at every level seem to have given up all ethical and moral principles. We should understand that politics in general is not especially ethical or moral by definition. But republicans have taken this to a new level of depravity.  I do not understand why this has happened. It is as though Donald Trump allowed all the awful people in our Land out of their closets and now they are yelling to be heard, and waving their guns in case we don’t listen. There are enough of them to bring down our entire Nation, or to cause it to fracture into parts no longer capable of being reassembled.

So, we need to vote.

We need to pass new legislation controlling guns in this country. Fewer guns delivers greater safety.

We need to pass new legislation to move our nation away from carbon fuels. If we don’t destroy ourselves, our climate may well destroy our planet. Climate change is happening and our climate does not care about republican or Democratic politics.

We need to elect more anti-racists, because racism is a highly destructive plague in our Land.

We need to begin scaling back our military, and reducing the number of military engagements. Basically, the greater the number of military engagements, the greater is the chance that one will go awry and the big weapons will be let loose. Then all is lost.

Organized religion, while rejected by large numbers of Americans, is also embraced by equally large numbers. And organized religion can and does do great harm, even while also doing some good. Religion is mainly about power and power in the hands of humans generally (not merely Americans) produces many evils.  It is not clear to me how we resolve the problems caused by religious forces. They are dangerous and must be controlled, but the means is by no means clear to me.

Money remains the source of great evils in our world and America is not exempt. We pursue money and those pursuits lead often to great evils. Unequal distribution of America’s money is now so extreme that, by itself, it threatens to destroy our entire systems of government and social structures.  We need to devise tax structures to reduce basic income inequalities, and to reduce the amount of tax cheating that is now practiced within our country. 

Politics is perhaps little more than a reflection of the divisions created in our Land by the issues mentioned above. That we are fractured, as perhaps never before as great since perhaps the Civil War, is a frightening prospect. We could indeed come undone and revert to shooting at one another as we did in the 1860s.  How we fix this problem through politics is entirely unclear to me, except perhaps by electing people to power who are basically ethical creatures. 

Social Media now promotes divisions and fosters the hatreds that are such a prominent part of our landscape. Social media, we must remember, is not simply the availability of technology as a means of communicating globally with one another. Social media is a set of technology systems that are all owned by individuals or corporations, e.g., Rupert Murdoch. Too many of those individuals are now actively deploying their social media technologies to forge and then control power sources—collections of peoples and institutions that can manipulate large population groups in America, but also globally.  The New York Times, and The Daily News never had the same power as these media. Social media seems bent on destroying America from within. It needs to be regulated, much the way we regulate banks and other potentially destructive institutions. 

Sadly, we are a fractured country, which matters only because we are also a very large, wealthy and heavily armed country. So, our demise affects the entire globe and could lead to the ultimate destruction of this globe, the only one we current have. Unless we, the People,  can regain control of our own systems of communication and governance, and begin to shed the wholly destructive influences of both religion and amoral business owners (think Rupert Murdoch) both America and perhaps the world at large may be at risk of dissolving into a world of chaos.

Again, voting is our most productive course of action. But we now need to think beyond ourselves to a larger vision. We can no longer ignore the garbage spewing from the mouths of ignoramuses like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley or that Boebert creature.  They are bent on destruction. We need to rid our land of their influence, but through peaceful means. If we are to remain a country in which we can raise our children and grandchildren in peace and love, we need to act accordingly. Shooting people is simply not the answer. That is why they make voting booths.

So, folks, it’s our country. Let’s act like we wish to continue.