CSotD: The Way We Live Now
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Sorensen reframes matters in current, rather than traditional, terms, and it’s hard to disagree with her suggestion that we stop pretending things are the same as they’ve always been. It seems time to, as Howard Cosell put it, “Tell it like it is.”
It’s hard to avoid knowing that things have changed, and if for some reason you believed it was a good thing for masked men in military garb to be grabbing people off the street and sending them into anonymous imprisonment without trials, then deporting them to foreign gulags for permanent confinement in crude, violent conditions, you should still, at least, be appalled by the secret police making a sweep of a peaceful Los Angeles park for no reason but intimidation.
Well, maybe you’re not, but that makes Sorensen’s suggestion even more relevant: Stop pretending this is the same country it was before.
And stop pretending that only criminals are being arrested. The administration may preach about rapists, murderers and drug dealers to the public, but they then set quotas for the secret police to round up and deport, the majority of whom are guilty of nothing more than a misdemeanor illegal entry and sometimes not even that: Rounding up people as they dutifully show up for their legal immigration appearances is evidence that the criminals are not the ones wearing handcuffs but those who apply them.
Markstein notes the president’s inconsistent approach to the economy and foreign trade, which raises the question from the start whether he is deliberately lying about how tariffs work and who pays them, or whether he genuinely doesn’t understand it himself.
Trump managed to emit a gob-smacking series of misstatements at his latest cabinet meeting, and there’s no reason for him to lie to his inner circle. But, given his firm place in the driver’s seat, whether he is sincerely ignorant or deliberately dishonest hardly matters.
Aside from his apparent belief that China has no wind farms, which seems foolish but relatively harmless, he also appears to truly belief that when refugees claim “asylum” it means they were previously confined to mental institutions in their own countries.
That’s not only idiotic but explains why ICE is being unleashed on immigrants.
Kal having being forced out of his job by complacently loyalist new ownership at the Baltimore Sun, and knowing how CBS/Paramount and ABC have both made multi-million dollar payoffs to Dear Leader in order to make peace with the administration, suggests that commercial media may not long continue as a source of trustworthy information.
Of course, he’s joking about the notion of violent intimidation. The “commercial” factor in commercial media is likely sufficient.
It seems obvious that there’s no need for violence as long as we all accept a certain necessary level of patriotic sacrifice.
And if the grown-ups remain in the dark, the kids are catching on. Danziger notes the atmosphere of despair and involuntary nihilism it breeds, but you can add to that the issue that, when they do express, for example, an interest in an alternative approach to the mayoralty of New York City, the establishment is quick to slap them down.
And Danziger isn’t kidding about the intimidation they have seen, including having college students hauled away by the secret police for voicing unpopular opinions.
They’re taught about the First Amendment, but once they step out of the classroom, they learn about reality in a nation that speaks out of one face while enforcing laws out of another.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The older generation is going to recognize, at some point, that they’ve been hornswoggled, but many of the effects of the BBB will not hit until after the midterm elections. For the next few years, Medicaid will appear to be functioning and rural hospitals will remain open, so that by the time that voter feels the knife in his back, he will have already voted against his interests yet again.
There is, however, hope that Wexler’s scenario will play out sooner. We’re already seeing shifts in how retailers are anticipating the impact of tariffs, and, between tariffs and the loss of farm workers in the fields, food prices should continue to rise and will likely accelerate.
Meanwhile, in the “I kid you not” view of things, the Secretary of Agriculture has seriously suggested that Medicaid recipients fulfill their work requirement by replacing braceros in back-breaking field work, apparently unaware of how few truly able-bodied recipients are unemployed and how few unemployed recipients could possibly do that work, or who live anywhere near the places it happens.
The White Queen believed a half-dozen impossible things before breakfast, but that makes her over-qualified to serve in Trump’s cabinet. One or two absurdities will do, if they’re chosen carefully.
And if you don’t know what to believe, no problem: The IRS has decided that churches are now permitted to tell their congregants whom to vote for without endangering their tax-exempt status. Churches have long preached about overall topics from a moral perspective, as in civil rights or, at the other end of the spectrum, abortion, but have had to steer clear of specific political endorsements.
It seems a slight change from “Pro-choice people go to Hell” to “Vote for Joe Doaks or burn in eternity,” but it is a change, and perhaps taxation wouldn’t be the worst solution. Honest churches would be able to deduct reasonable operating costs and charitable endeavors, while the others deserve to, well, “pay for their sins.”
Having started the day by modernizing political terminology, I’ll end by recommending a look back at old-fashioned corruption and foolishness from the Gilded Age, in Trollope’s ironically hilarious novel about a mysterious huckster who comes to town and begins rifling the purses of foolish would-be investors.
If you haven’t the patience for reading, there’s a streamable BBC miniseries of the novel, but while it captures the action of the story, it doesn’t offer Trollope’s laugh-til-your-stomach-hurts humor.
As he said of his intentions:
(T)here seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.
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