Perhaps you remember the jacket that Melania Trump wore when she was boarding a flight to see for herself the inhumane treatment of immigrants and their children at the southern border. It said on its back: “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” She shouted out her indifference to suffering.
Masha Gessen says that the defining characteristic of Trump too is indifference. His vanity, his ego, his golfing, his self matters very much. The rest of us? Not so much. She says that life under an autocracy is always dull. Here I disagree with her. Life under Trump was never dull. Every day there was another threat to our safety, our sense of confidence in the competence of our government, our fear of what Trump might do next to destroy the future of the planet. Chaos was the rule, and chaos is very discomforting.
She writes in The New Yorker:
We have come to expect this President to fail Americans, catastrophically, and we have become accustomed to understanding these failures through two traits of his Administration: cruelty and militant incompetence. But there is a third one, characteristic of many, if not all, autocracies: indifference...
From what we know about Donald Trump, he will remember 2020 as a year when he was unfairly treated by the voters, the courts, and the media, and also a year when he golfed. In this year of the coronavirus, Trump has oscillated between holding briefings and acting like the pandemic was over, while recommending bleach and bragging about his own tremendous recovery. But what he has demonstrated consistently, while three hundred thousand people in this country have died and millions became sick, is that he couldn’t be bothered. Memorable news stories have focussed on the cruel and self-serving ways in which the Administration has addressed the pandemic, as when the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly found it to be politically advantageous that the virus was disproportionately affecting states with Democratic governments, or when Trump withheld resources from states whose governors had criticized him...
I have written a lot of articles and several books about Russia’s transformation under Vladimir Putin, but the experience I’ve always found hardest to describe is one of feeling as if creativity and imagination were sucked out of society after he came to power. The reason is not so much censorship or even intimidation as it is indifference. When the state took over television, for example, it wasn’t just that the news was censored: it was that the new bosses didn’t care about the quality of the visuals or the writing. The same thing happened in other media, in architecture, in filmmaking. Life in an autocracy is, among other things, dull.
Nothing has reminded me of Russia quite so much as the Trump Administration’s belated effort to encourage Americans to vaccinate. It will build on an earlier effort to “defeat despair” about the pandemic, which either wasted or simply failed to spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars, because the officials involved tried to ideologically vet two hundred and seventy-four celebrities who may or may not have been asked to take part. Many, according to documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, appeared to have been disqualified because they had been critical of Trump. Several said no, and only a handful, Dennis Quaid among them, accepted; Quaid then apparently backed out, and the campaign went dormant. Had it all been a scam? A particularly dumb version of a Hollywood witch-hunt? Probably not. It was probably another story about a President and an Administration that cares about slights but not about people.
Defining characteristic: Vindictive
He will turn on and attack any one – family included – who does not kiss his ring; or worse, criticizes him; does not agree with him; does not acknowledge he knows more than scientists, doctors, and military generals…
He’s mean, arrogant, ignorant, soulless… the list goes on and on – but those are just the triggers. After the result of acting those out, then he’s vindictive.
Historians will reveal how “on the brink” our Democracy was and is.
Psychiatrists will be writing books for years about him. Other people get bridges or schools named after them; his name will be attached to a SYNDROME.
. . . revealing the contrast between living in an open and vibrant democracy and in the dullness of an autocracy . . . where indifference is that sucking sound we hear when those in power are, in fact, anti-leaders . . . false gods with emptied-out spirits. On a smaller scale, it’s the same sound that good teachers hear when they get a new administrator who counts beans, or when we sit on a park bench and watch our controllers look the other way, pretending we are not there.
. . . OR it’s the same sucking sound real entrepreneurial spirits hear when they try to compete in a world already owned and totally controlled by some big corporation with even more powerful bean counters . . . but where, of course, everyone at the top heartily hails “entrepreneurship” and a “bootstrap economy” . . . where creative thinkers, and those among us with a true sense of integrity, neither want nor require help from those who, in fact, have set the conditions for either creative collaboration (which they will not be involved in) OR for systematic neediness on the part of everyone else . . . and so who have drained the culture, such as it is, of any possibility of anyone actually making a living off of their bootstraps, whatever THAT has come to mean.
They seem to wish the entrepreneurial spirit well, as long as there is no skin off their noses, but of course, not TOO well and, in fact, not at all. “Let’s all play golf.” CBK
Unrelated, but thought I’d stop by to drop this story:
ELLs and their families have a very hard time during this pandemic. Most of the families lack the resources, language skills and sometimes education to help their children. Almost all of the parents are frontline workers doing some of the dirtiest jobs of all. My heart goes out to all the ELLs trying to cope without any assistance.
retired teacher . . . and for a certain age learning to read is so very important whereas, later, NOT having done so creates a whole ‘nuther’ problem. I fear for a whole generation of kids who are of that age, and who are suffering through this pandemic.
Also, one hidden point that emerges here is the huge difference in the experience of education between (1) parental teaching and (2) teaching experienced from another person. BIG difference. CBK
75M of us voted for Trump, are we in the Twilight of Democracy? How many of you who read this ever engage w/ Trump voters? Can Biden re-ignite a respect for Democratic institutions?
Not quite right, but close:
Trump received 74.222 million votes
Biden received 81.281 million votes
https://cookpolitical.com/2020-national-popular-vote-tracker
Members of my family voted for Trump. We can’t talk about the election. The two are extremely low-information voters. They rely on government programs that Trump wants to eliminate. But they hang on his every word. In his eyes, they are white trash. He would speak to them if they were in the audience, but never have a conversation with them. They are marks.
Posted this absolute truth by Gessen at OPE https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/The-Overlooked-Hallmark-of-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Incompetence_Indifference_Suffering_Trump-Cruelty-201230-289.html
At OEN OPED News… I wish more folks would go to OPED News, becasue it has such great writing about what we are facing right now. https://www.opednews.com/populum/membership.php?t=signup
And perpetuating and feeding this man’s inane inactions are people like the junior Senator from Missouri. Last week he claimed he talked to 30 people in Missouri who sounded normal and they concurred the election was fraudulent. That’s all the evidence he needs.
On behalf of the sane folks in our ultra-Red state, apologies for this man who thinks the “Show Me” does not include showing evidence.
WAPO
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced Wednesday that he would object next week when Congress convenes to certify the electoral college vote, a move that will force a contentious floor debate that top Senate Republicans had hoped to avoid before President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is cemented.
In a statement, Hawley said he feels compelled to highlight purported election irregularities. “At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections. But Congress has so far failed to act,” Hawley said.
Hawley is a fake populist.
He is a graduate of the elite Stanford University and Yale Law School.
Yet he seems never to have read the U.S. Constitution.
Diane “Yet he seems never to have read the U.S. Constitution.”
I have often found myself thinking that same thought . . . another example of Flynn, who came up under and remained with the military. The same thought: How did that happen?
I know human beings are not by nature “lockstep,” and that we ARE involved in a political and cultural experiment. And yet . . . . CBK