A Turbulent and Troubled Land
“America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Very little in America is what it appears to be; especially in politics. The ether is filled with lies and misrepresentations and even those who make their living parsing language and facts struggle to find what is true and real. Voters must rely on a cascade of commercials for information that is usually profoundly false and damaging to the electoral process. Our republic has arrived at a place where there are “alternative facts” that give comfort to people seeking reinforcement of belief systems founded on tortured rhetoric and conspiracy theories. In the next few weeks, this situation might just become untenable.
Millions of Americans that are voting age toss in their sleep with recurrent nightmares of what might unfold in the days after the election. They see the date as the arrival time of a dark dichotomy, a crossroads that leads to a liberal government of the people or down a sinister road to authoritarianism where the military can strike down dissenting voices under a president’s purview and loyalty oaths to the strongman are necessary to be a part of his government. The rule of law comes only out of his mouth. Commentators no longer get accused of hyperbole when they describe such scenarios because they have become real possibilities. Too many still retain a faith in our electoral process and that its strictures and protocols will hold, and there will be an historic and peaceful transfer of power.
Maybe not.
We did not get to our place on this precipice by accident. Each concession made regarding what is fair or just, moral or unacceptable, has edged us ever closer to the fall. The man who would be dictator is only a symptom, not the primary cause of Americans screaming across their divides. Our failure to pay attention, even to exercise our most basic responsibility of voting, our lack of vigilance as citizens, are just a few dynamics that have enabled the fractures spreading through our country’s political and governmental institutions. We refuse to own our history, to learn from it, and cannot know who we truly are as a people, what binds us as a nation, because we have been hiding from ourselves for too long.
If our dissolution comes as a country, we will be able to look over our collective shoulders and see the long row of ignored mileposts in our past. Maybe it began with Richard Nixon. The Watergate burglary of Democratic offices, which likely involved CIA operatives, went largely unpunished. The president who ordered it got on a helicopter and flew home to California, freed on what was almost certainly a deal with his Vice President, Gerald Ford, who agreed to a pardon if Nixon would resign. This was a seminal moment when power was unabashedly revealed to be more valuable than the law or matters of fact. The lesson did not go ignored by political practitioners and even the wider public.
Although it happened almost a decade earlier, the lies that launched the Vietnam War were not yet known. What was reported to be a second attack on the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, off the coast of Vietnam by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, was used by President Lyndon Johnson to call for a military response with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Congress agreed to let LBJ escalate US presence in Vietnam without its approval. The attack probably never happened, though. Declassified NSA documents and other government materials revealed that the Johnson administration likely exaggerated or misrepresented the incident to gain support for expanding U.S. military involvement in that part of Southeast Asia.
Johnson’s own presidency, in fact, might have been a lie, regardless of the significant achievements of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and his Great Society. There is increasing scholarship and research pointing to LBJ’s involvement in a plot to kill JFK. More than 60 percent of the population holds the idea of a conspiracy to be true, according to Gallup Polls, which makes the Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination one of the greatest lies of human history. The list of witnesses and forensic evidence ignored, the nonsensical “magic bullet” theory dreamed up to explain injuries to JFK and the Governor of Texas, were the cornerstones of original skepticism. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded Kennedy was “most likely killed by a conspiracy.” The American psyche, though, has been conditioned to think a crazed, lone gunman is a probable and consequential risk of our freedoms while most of us originally believed it was an impossibility for a well-planned coup to be executed by elements of our own government.
Lying for political effect and without accountability was also the primary outcome of Ronald Reagan’s 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. The 1949 law required broadcasters, who were using public airwaves provided by the government, to present controversial issues of public importance in a fair, balanced, and equitable manner. The core principles aimed to ensure that the public had access to diverse viewpoints on significant issues, promoting an informed electorate in a democratic society. Balanced coverage was assured under the law and broadcasters were prevented from dominating airwaves with one-sided coverage of issues like politics, civil rights, and social justice. Misinformation and propaganda were constrained.
Reagan argued that the media landscape was changing, cable TV was proliferating, and new forms of outlets were emerging. The belief was that sources of information were accessible on any topic and consumers could seek their own balance of data. Instead, hyper-partisan media emerged and launched single perspective practitioners and personalities. Rush Limbaugh flourished with his conservative yakking and the environment began to develop that in less than a decade facilitated the launch and success of Fox News and its purely conservative agenda, which had little to do with actual news. The network has demonstrably ignored information that does not fit its right wing perspective, and has convinced millions that matters provably false, are, instead, true. On a nightly basis, “anchors” like Sean Hannity stare into the camera with a sincere fervor to persuade viewers that they ought not believe their eyes or trust their government.
There can, of course, be too much faith placed in government. Policies and politics in the U.S. tend to be products of historical events more than they are of principles and important ideas. Our culture tends to be more reactive than proactive, which meant that when the Twin Towers in New York were felled by terrorists, we went to war. There was sufficient intelligence in advance that warned leadership there might be a deadly threat in coming months, but it was largely ignored. Instead, led by George W. Bush, we decided to invade Iraq, even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Afghanistan, where the perpetrator Osama bin Laden was hiding, was a secondary consideration. The Bush administration cooked up data to sell a lie that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. It was not; its truest sin was that it was in possession of an underground sea of oil, and Hussein had embarrassed Bush’s father when he was president. Never mind that Donald Rumsfeld, who was Defense Secretary and managed the U.S. invasion, had once cut a deal with Hussein to provide him with poison Sarin gas to shoot in rockets at our enemies in Iran. Hypocrisy is as important a currency of the American political realm as is lying for effect.
And how did Iran become our enemies? Only a few years after Israel was founded, the CIA and British MI6 executed a coup in Iran and overthrew a recently democratically- elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Led by Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, insurgents installed Reza Pahlavi, an American flunky, as the country’s new monarch. During his 27 year dictatorship, political opposition was imprisoned and tortured by a cadre of secret police called SAVAK, who were trained in the U.S. In return, the Shah did as his American benefactors wanted by buying millions of dollars in American military equipment and opening up the vast Parabas Oil Fields in the south to multi-national energy brands. Eventually, Iran fell into an Islamic revolution and now operates a government based on the theology of Islam.
Lying and deception is part of the necrotic tissue of American diplomacy and politics. In fact, it has become a useful tactic for campaigns. Getting caught at a lie used to be the end of election hopes for candidates, but today denial works to mitigate any damage. Keep selling the lie, and voters will believe. Trump has taken this de-evolution of electoral politics down to its next subterranean level by sharing his pathology with supporters. Very little that he talks about is real or can be substantiated. The candidate rambles and dissembles and stutters while flopping from topic to non sequiturs and falsehoods to ornate confabulations, and he suffers not, even from his public fascination with a movie character Hannibal Lecter. His MAGAts appear to believe he has tapped into a universal truth that is sent to him by god, who has made their bronze idol his very instrument. Instead, the evidence would indicate that, at a minimum, the GOP’s nominee has suffered from a partial psychotic break. Reality generally eludes him.
The idea that Trump won the 2020 election, however, is not just a product of his broken brain. Challenging election results, even when the tallies proclaim a resounding defeat, has become as utilitarian a tactic as lying. Push the lie that you won and you might become the winner. In the modern era, Karl Rove deployed a plan to challenge the results of a 1994 State Supreme Court race in Alabama. He made a likely specious claim that certain absentee ballots were not legitimate because they had been improperly processed when counting and should be disqualified from vote totals. Rove was providing advice for Perry Hooper Sr., a staunch conservative, who ran as part of a broader Republican strategy to reshape the judiciary, particularly in Southern states like Alabama, which had long been dominated by Democrats.
The initial vote count showed that the incumbent Democrat, Sonny Hornsby had won by a slim margin. Rove, though, launched his legal challenge on how absentee ballots had been counted, claiming they had not been properly signed by voters or witnessed as required by Alabama law. Eventually, the state court agreed and Hooper was declared the winner more than ten months after the election and Republicans got control of the Alabama Supreme Court for the first time in over a century. Rove demonstrated how Republicans could leverage legal challenges in close races, a tactic that was later used in the 2000 presidential election, and led to the U.S. Supreme Court concluding George W. Bush, Rove’s client, had won the presidency after a controversial vote count in Florida. In the jungle where Rove planted his seeds of corruption, there grows a plant called Trump, and he will never accept electoral results unless they elect him with a landslide. Dumb as the man is, he must have paid attention a few times.
The proliferation of political bullshit was accelerated in the land of the deceived when the U.S. Supreme Court made an erroneous judgment regarding campaign contributions. In a case known widely as Citizens United, the court made law by enabling corporations and dark money groups to contribute to political campaigns, including presidential, a decision that has turned American elections into a product for sale to the highest bidder. Trump, without hesitation, asked a roomful of oil men to give him a billion dollars and told them he would make sure there would be no restrictions on their efforts to drill and recover fossil fuels. There is, of course, for every quid, a quo, and the corporate givers are not motivated by altruism and what is good for America. They want something in return, less regulation, lower taxes, and a president who will take their calls whenever they want to bitch. Presidential politics have become a transactional business in the U.S.
“Everything’s been sold American” - Kinky Friedman
Citizens United has had a profound impact on elections in this country. Not just corporations, but labor unions, any type of organizations, and political action committees can raise and spend any amount of money for any cause or candidate as long as they do not coordinate their efforts with the campaigns. Super PACs were spawned by the court’s decision and have become a dominant force by allowing wealthy individuals, corporations, and interest groups to spend vast sums on political advocacy. They often engage in producing and running television ads, digital content, and other forms of outreach to promote their favored candidates or causes. And they are not shy about using their power. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) proudly and publicly claimed they were spending $100 million dollars to defeat congressional candidates who did not unilaterally support Israel. They defeated two in primary races, more will go down in a few weeks.
So, here we are, an angry and befuddled people, wondering how our country got this way even as it all transpired right under our schnozes. Women have lost their rights, minorities are intimidated and feel the ground moving backwards beneath them as overt racism rises anew from its place of rot, a former president wants to be a dictator and his backers are not running away from him even though he tried to overthrow the government he hopes to lead and has been convicted of felonies 34 times. At public appearances, he babbles, showing signs of dementia while Republican election officials in the states and members of the House of Representatives are less than subtly suggesting they may not certify the election results if they do not like the final numbers, which would spawn a certain constitutional crisis. Misinformation is filling social media and TV and radio broadcasts and reality seems to be slipping into the mists. Americans are afraid of their own presidential election.
On September 17, 1787, as the founders of this country were wrapping up another Constitutional Convention meeting in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin, aged 81, was too ill to deliver a speech he had written for the occasion. He had given the task to another delegate, and said the message was intended for General George Washington. His true goal, however, was to convince three other delegates to sign the document when he wrote, “Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government.”
We seem oblivious, also, to Franklin’s admonitions. After its final passage, as Franklin was leaving the building, he was asked by a woman named Elizabeth Billings Powell, a prominent Philadelphia socialite, “ Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy.”
His answer has echoed through the almost 250 years the United States of America have existed. “A republic,” Franklin said, “If you can keep it.”
Sadly, many of us are no longer confident that is possible
Many have tried but none, that I've read, have stated it better.
People say, "This is all Trump's fault." I say, "This started long before Trump." Now I'll just point them here and say, "Read this. JBM explains the situation best."
Thank you, I don't think it was an easy thing to do to revisit these horrors of our recent past.
LBJ, despite his domestic achievements, was a snake (apologies to rat-eating reptiles). But could you point us to some of the" increasing scholarship and research pointing to LBJ’s involvement in a plot to kill JFK?" It's hard to separate the credible from the fake anymore, and we'd appreciate a leg up in finding it.