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War Plan Orange |
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| Today, one half of America
is left speechless and so emotionally spent that it feels as if
the United States will be attending its own funeral on January
20th. |
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By
Debby Long |
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 “War Plan Orange was a series of United
States Joint Army and Navy Board war plans for dealing with a
possible war with Imperial Japan during the years between the
First and Second World Wars. It failed to foresee the
significance of the technological changes to naval warfare,
including the submarine, air support and aircraft carriers, …" –
Wikipedia
Today, one half of America is left speechless and so emotionally
spent that it feels as if the United States will be attending
its own funeral on January 20th. Perhaps it will.
At today’s press conference, Donald Trump’s blathering stream of
consciousness included a dilettante’s interpretation of Hitler’s
“Lebensraum”, as he threatened to spend his newly acquired
“political capital” to annex both Canada and Mexico and to force
Denmark to sell Greenland to the US. Upon hearing this, I was
immediately swooshed into the Wayback Machine and transported to
the year 2004 - and to the post-campaign posturing of the
perpetually juvenile, G.W. Bush. At that press conference, Bush
boasted about spending his post campaign “political capital” to
justify his desire to invade the Middle East again – this time
to finish off Saddam Hussein in Iraq – his father’s Napoleon of
Crime in the Middle East. His father, H. W. Bush, thought better
of setting that vast region of the world on fire and withdrew
after the First Gulf War, but his inexperienced scion apparently
knew better. Lacking any geopolitical logic associated with
invading a country that hadn’t attacked the United States, W
declared that his high-minded mission was to "spread freedom" in
the Middle East… and, of course, decades of destabilization
ensued. To say that Bush Jr. didn’t know his ass from a hole in
the ground was somewhat belied when the Napoleon of Crime,
Saddam Hussein, was unearthed by American troops from a literal
hole in the ground.
In 2004, W looked and sounded like a teenager who had finally
passed his driver’s license test and wanted to take the country
out for a spin. Donald Trump, on the other hand, looks and
sounds like an ancient and evil Macaulay Culkin, unsupervised
and up to no good. Watching Donald Trump deliver his fatuous
musings today, it dawned on me that for the next four years, we
will be living in the mind of a pubescent 13 year old boy who
was catapulted at the tip of his father’s boot into a military
school due to his uncontrollable oppositional behavior, and then
finally managed to catapult himself into the White House on the
bulging shoulders of America’s macho Ignorati.
And due to this sizeable constituency of Ignorati, we will
either be engaged in the violent theft of much of the lands to
our north and south in the name of a new Trumpian Manifest
Destiny – or, America will become Donald Trump’s 7th bankruptcy
as he loots and pillages our treasury while crashing our economy
with unfunded wars and tax cuts for wealthy - much like W,
himself.
My personal take - which is subject to modification should more
accurate information become available - is that the Ignorati
have taken over. And further, because democracy is notorious for
having a tenuous hold on its electorate and an extremely delayed
long-term payout (see: Benjamin Franklin "A republic, if you can
keep it" .), this cultural regression toward the mean will most
likely continue to characterize the early decades of this new
millennium. Contemporary Americans will simply have to wait
patiently for the next Petrarch to usher in a Renaissance - or
at least until the future enlightened re-conceive and redesign a
new social contract for America that is more sensitive to the
impacts of technological innovation.
The Ignorati of America embrace Donald Trump and “…mistake his
cackle for charm, his insults for intellect, his foul-mouthed
waggery for wit”, as Dave Hannigan of The Irish Times writes.
Donald Trump is their guy precisely because he’s so
unexceptional – not special, just lazy, boorish, and a bit below
average. What’s so galling, aside from the dictator for a day
thing, is that somehow we have all been simultaneously swept
into Donald Trump’s own pubescent fantasies as well - replete
with balloon breasted middle aged blonde bombshells who crawl
the halls of his Florida mansion and heroized toy soldiers like
Pete Hegseth playing wargames with his toy soldiers on its
carpets in the study. Otherwise, America’s decline would be
easily recognizable as the same old cultural regression that
brought humanity the Middle Ages, the Plague, and Book Burning.
In fact, after 6 centuries, it is somewhat shocking to recognize
the same cluster of maladies emerge in today’s America that were
the hallmarks of the Middle Ages. Only the names of the players
have changed: The Bubonic Plague is now Covid-19, Book Burning
as conducted by Savonarola in 1497 on behalf of the Catholic
Church is now conducted by the angrily devout, Governor Ronald
DeSantis of the Great State of Florida. And the Middle Ages,
itself, characterized by superstition and fear, is written and
directed by modern-day conspiracy theorists, most of whom reside
comfortably in America’s Republican Party of today.
The Moon Landing was faked, Sandy Hook was staged by actors, and
Haitian immigrants are eating the dogs!
There is no longer a genuine ideological dispute emanating from
the GOP concerning strategy, tactics, or even desired outcome on
behalf of the American people because nihilism relies upon none
of these. The response to climate change is “drill, baby drill”;
the response to progressive taxation is loot, baby, loot.
“Nobody is above the law”. This is now the mindless catechism
recited by every Democratic spokesman, notwithstanding the fact
that Donald Trump is demonstrably above the law. That phrase
currently ranks number one, above the egregious, “thoughts and
prayers” that is piously intoned after every school shooting in
every corner of America. Our Democratic slogans are nothing, if
not a combination of wishful thinking and expressions of
helplessness.
“Trumpism,… is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an
entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing
audiences.” - George Will
And we have become inmates in our own asylum.
The Democratic Party is at a loss for words, and perhaps that is
because, in our genuinely heroic efforts to “Grow Our Economy
from the Bottom Up and the Middle Out”, we stopped explaining
how and why one must participate in order to make it happen.
Democracy relies upon an educated electorate, and that feature
of American culture is vanishing before our eyes. Americans
increasingly lack the critical thinking skills to differentiate
between fact and conspiracy theories. And we’re afraid of
offending anyone in any constituency that we rely upon for
votes. Where are our Democratic luminaries? I can’t name one
current party leader who is even mildly charismatic. They are,
to a person, color coded to the Democratic cause that they claim
to personally exemplify. No soaring rhetoric, no ability to
galvanize a crowd behind an idea. We are not demanding
excellence; we’re demanding support – much like the contemptible
Republican Party, itself. We can do better.
image: Brad Holland |
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