CSotD: Fact-checking, Decency-Checking
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Garth German makes a good point, though I suspect he’s too late and we can’t reverse the process now.
Here’s a relevant quote from Herman Wouk in the Caine Mutiny:
The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes.
Problem is, the Founders didn’t set up our country that way. The Founders are often condemned as elitists, but, though they shared the prejudices of their time, they were accepting of people from modest backgrounds, .
Still, they created a system best operated not by geniuses, but by capable thinkers. Only then their descendants opened up governance to everybody, and I’m not sure you could design a Ship of State such that the most foolish nitwit aboard could keep it from sinking.
There was a theory that the nobility were the smart people and everyone else was a cog in the machine, but history is full of examples of jackasses in rich robes, while bright serfs have for the most part gone unrecorded.
There’s a thin line between monarchy and oligarchy, and with all due respect to Dave Whamond, if Charles Dickens were alive today, he’d write just what he wrote in 1859, that it was the best of times for the wealthy few and the worst of times for the many poor.
Dickens went on to describe how the poor rose up and started lopping the heads off the wealthy, and we haven’t gotten to that point yet, but perhaps you can see it from here.
There’s another literary quibble in Michael de Adder‘s merger of Animal Farm with our current repression of truth.
The problem is that, when the animals looked in the window at the end of the book, it wasn’t that they saw a group of pigs who they had thought were their benevolent leaders. It’s that they saw the pigs making common cause with the human farmers against whom they had revolted.
Until that moment, they hadn’t noticed how the pigs had gradually become their oppressors, telling them comforting lies while imposing more and more dictatorial and cruel restrictions.
The parallel would be to have an American president shift directions and begin making common cause with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbon, but none of our barnyard animals would be stupid enough to ignore such a blatant betrayal of our national values.
Would they?
A few of the animals were puzzled when “Four legs good, two legs bad” became “Four legs good, two legs better,” but the majority accepted that the slogan had always allowed for pigs who walked upright.
Does anyone here remember when flag-wavers shouted “Go back to Russia!” at civil rights and antiwar demonstrators? Today, it’s a request for Tucker Carlson to tape some more specials.
Anyway, here we are, and I hope Mike Luckovich isn’t being too optimistic in showing the two sides roughly the same size.
But harsh as the current dialogue is, and as much as the billionaires are flocking to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their tainted honor to the New Regime, the vote in the 2024 election was close, and we can hope that seeing the pigs begin to walk upright will inspire people to come out for the midterms in 2026 and try to reverse some of the changes.
Juxtaposition of the Whole World is Watching
Our overseas friends don’t seem to be adjusting to our new look very well.
From Ireland, Martyn Turner gives a lesson on how the word “bully” has changed from meaning “really cool” to a description of a hated person, and while TR did a lot of great and progressive things domestically, he’s remembered, along with his predecessor, McKinley, as having kicked off America’s imperialist expansions.
And Peter Brookes indicates how Elon Musk’s interference in other countries’ politics is making him, and by extension our government, disliked and unwelcome, though I would quibble with his description of Musk as native to North America. He is, of course, an invasive species here, like the rat.
The corrective must not be for the United States to come out on the short end of the next World War, bearing in mind Einstein’s quote, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
So the question before us is how can the gulf Luckovich draws be closed and the unenlightened anger Garth German depicts be disarmed?
The answer may be unfolding. As Walt Handelsman suggests, the response of Dear Leader to the horrors and tragedy unfolding in California has been bizarre and inexplicable.
Much has been made by progressive critics on social media of how Trump sat stony-faced at Jimmy Carter’s funeral while everyone else was laughing at a funny story in the eulogies, and about how he failed to put his hand over his heart when everyone else was doing so.
The man is incapable of empathy, of understanding other people. This goes beyond mere narcissism, and it was why his parents sent him off to military school but let his siblings grow up at home, and perhaps it’s why, for all his attempts to profit off others, his track record is one of repeated failures.
Now it explains why he responds to a massive disaster and tragedy with insults, partisan hackery and — let us not presume — either nonsensical errors or intentional lies.
Lyndon Johnson couldn’t find a way out of Vietnam (though Nixon helped keep us there), and Jimmy Carter was blamed for both OPEC’s limited petroleum exports and failure to release the Iranian hostages (again, there may have been interference).
But as Pat Bagley suggests, there’s little excuse for the cruel, ill-mannered response Trump has shown so far. He risks little politically in Blue California, but the nationwide outpouring of sympathy for fire victims may reveal the Achilles heel of a man who has reached the presidency largely on bluster, empty promises and appealing to the worst instincts of angry, uninformed voters.
The sort of people who don’t like realizing they have been suckered.
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