WHERE EVERYTHING IS BOUGHT AND SOLD
We have elected only a few presidents who were heroes in the classic sense. Certainly, George Washington and his early successors were heroes in that sense, as were Lincoln and FDR. The story of the hero is contained in the legends of Beowulf, and the Odyssey, and in the journeys of the Buddha, Moses, and Jesus. Joseph Campbell describes the hero’s journey as a story when one… “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man”. Campbell writes: “Heroes are the models of a civilized world”.
Most of our presidents were not heroes but, instead, politicians of varying degrees of virtue. So, in this context, where should we place Donald Trump? Is he simply our worst president on a sliding scale from heroic to pernicious? Or is he the symbol of the loss of a cherished providence that will lead to the demise of 243 years of liberal democracy? Does Donald Trump fit the bill of a hero, or does he represent the apotheosis of our decline? And do his misdeeds of varying exigence require that, in order to preserve our democracy, we extirpate him and his shameful enablers from government altogether?
Donald Trump’s presidency is a story without a hero. There is no majesty in Donald Trump – only the grandiosity and ostentation of a spectacularly corrupt showman. While it is almost too easy to satirize a farcical figure like Trump, when he is impeached, he will instantly become an unforgettable figure in American history. He will not sit next to Abraham Lincoln or FDR as the transformative leader he fantasizes he will be remembered as. His misdeeds are the stuff of stupefying criminality. Instead of Lincoln’s: “… a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” during the Civil War, or Pericles’s description of Athens: “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing,…”, Donald Trump’s legacy will be remembered as Fraud Guarantee, LLC.
Trump’s strongman administration continues the tradition of turning democratic values on its head with a rotating cabinet of widely recognized specialists in questionable ethics, specialists such as Wilbur Ross, Mick Mulvaney, Steve Mnuchin, and Mike Pompeo. And Trump’s cast of useful idiots – luminaries such as Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, Betsy DeVos, and William Barr – rival only Fredo Corleone in their ludicrous incompetence, in their lack of virtue.
But finally, we arrive at the center of this masterpiece: The Republican Senate. They of the worldview that criminal acts committed by this President must be dismissed by his countrymen in light of the fact that we are in the midst of a good economy, and that, therefore, the state of the nation is not merely good, it’s “perfect”. They are the perfect reflection of a perfectly contemptible president, so greedy, so shallow, that 243 years of struggle can be snuffed out as we accede to Mick Mulvaney’s prescription to “Get Over It”.
I ask, get over what? Get over “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”? Get over “One person; one vote”? Get over “all men are created equal”? Get over the last line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”?
The House of Representatives has now delivered us the Impeachment of Donald Trump. During the impeachment debate on the floor of the House, we were treated to an historic contrast in worldviews. One party delivered moving soliloquys describing what has always made America great – our founding values, the laws inscribed in the Constitution that prohibit Donald Trump’s criminal behavior, and the logic that predicts a possible collapse of American democracy should we not remove this Individual I immediately to prevent him from corrupting our elections in 2020 with the aid of foreign powers. The other party, unartfully countered with one particular argument that should put a chill in the hearts of all Americans. They argued that Trump’s crimes were not crimes at all, and that what really should inspire Americans to keep this entire den of thieves in power are the paychecks that our economy is delivering. It is the argument domestic abusers use to justify their exploitation; it is the argument that sought to justify fascism in Italy: “Mussolini may have done many brutal and tyrannical things; he may have destroyed human freedom in Italy; he may have murdered and tortured citizens whose only crime was to oppose him; but ‘one had to admit’ one thing about the dictator: he ‘made the trains run on time.'”
Yes, for the moment, our economy is good; our trains do run on time. But our Republican conductors in the Senate are leading us to the collapse of liberal democracy in America. This party, entirely devoid of heroes and patriotism, should “vex us to nightmare” as it slouches toward Washington to be born on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020.
Note to readers: Vanity Fair is a place cited in John Bunyan’s 1678, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” – where everything is bought and sold.
image: Wikimedia
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, provocative, or controversial, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit, charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, you can follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs