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Goines reached out to three people whose opinions he trusted. The first was unreservedly supportive and thought the analogy seemed fair: She said that Trump was manifestly “evil.”
And the second also endorsed the suggestion. He expressed his view by sending Goines an email with the subject line “Fascism is just around the corner” and containing links to two recent articles about Trump:
- “A Navy Veteran Had a Question for the Feds in Portland. They Beat Him in Response” (a news report by John Ismay, a NY Times “At War” reporter)
- “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun” (an op-ed by Michelle Goldberg, a columnist Goines admired).
Concerned about their divergence on the issue, this respondent raised a question that troubled Goines the more he thought about it: Was it possible for him and Goines to “agree to disagree” on this?
Goines had been asked the same question only a week earlier by a nephew who had publicly approved (on Facebook) a satirical image of the faces of four non-white Congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”), Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, Rashida Harbi Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley – adorning Mt. Rushmore. The image was tauntingly labeled “Mount Moron,” which deeply offended Goines’ values.
Goines reflected anew on his realization that his nephew’s Facebook posting (which had been reported to Goines by someone still on Facebook) must have been what inspired the night-time epiphany. A beloved nephew had approved the image, seemed to have values that Goines could not condone.
“Agree to disagree?” Goines had to look it up, and Wikipedia reliably supplied a gloss:
“Agree to disagree” or “agreeing to disagree” is a phrase in English referring to the resolution of a conflict (usually a debate or quarrel) whereby all parties tolerate but do not accept the opposing position(s). It generally occurs when all sides recognise that further conflict would be unnecessary, ineffective or otherwise undesirable. They may also remain on amicable terms while continuing to disagree about the unresolved issues.In the conflict here involved, Goines couldn’t go along with the “tolerating the opposing position” part of Wikipedia’s statement, but as he loved and cared about his nephew, he thought he could go along with tolerating that his nephew held the position. He couldn’t respect the position itself, any more than he could respect the way the third respondent had demeaned good people like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff, whom Goines considered a sort of American hero, having led the House’s impeachment argument against Donald Trump.
How could someone justify to himself trying to counter an attack on the likes of Donald Trump by pointing to Schiff and Pelosi and Clinton, as though that balanced things? Schiff was leading a crucial fight to rid us of Trump, who menaced the U.S. Constitution and trampled on its provisions for checks and balances. If Clinton had become President, as a popular majority of 3 million had voted, America wouldn’t be in this mire today, but further along toward freedom and justice and opportunity for all.
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| ”A recent cover of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel portrays Trump in the Oval Office holding a lighted match, with a country ablaze visible through his window. The headline: ‘Der Feuerteufel,’ or, literally, ‘the Fire Devil’.” –“American Catastrophe Through German Eyes,” by Roger Cohen |
| Copyright © 2020 by Moristotle |
Just in: “ Trump's Secret Police: Coming To a City Near You,” by Eric Lutz, July 21, NY Times. Excerpt:
ReplyDeleteFor weeks now, federal law enforcement has patrolled the streets of Portland, engaging in violence against demonstrators and in some cases seizing protesters in unmarked vans, in what seems a clear violation of their constitutional rights. Local leaders have called for the feds to withdraw, arguing the forces have done more harm than good. But the administration has waved off their concerns. Chad Wolf, the acting Homeland Security secretary, has claimed the agents are necessary to fight off “violent extremists” in the city, and on Sunday said that federal law enforcement needs no “invitations” from governors and mayors to move in. “We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not,” Wolf told Fox News. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has vowed to expand the operation, telling a law enforcement roundtable last week that his government will “take over” left-leaning cities he claims have spiraled out of control because of Democratic leadership.
“We can’t let that happen,” he said. “We’re not going to let it go on.”
Trump is about to make good on his threats. The administration is preparing to deploy its secret police to Chicago, which the president has singled out over its gun violence. The Chicago Tribune reported Monday that about 150 federal agents will be sent to the city this week, under orders to quell the violence, though the exact size of the deployment and the particulars of their mandate remained unclear. Trump last week suggested the move was necessary to combat shootings in the city, which he said was “worse than any war zone that we’re in, by a lot.” “It’s not even conceivable,” he said at the roundtable after a weekend of shootings in the city. “That’s worse than Afghanistan.” John Catanzara, president of one of Chicago’s biggest and most powerful police unions, encouraged the move in a letter, describing Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “unwilling or unable to maintain order.” But Lightfoot, other local leaders, and activists in the city are not welcoming the federal agents, concerned that what’s happening in Portland could soon happen in Chicago. “Our democracy is at stake,” Lightfoot told Joy Reid in an MSNBC interview Monday, vowing to fight to prevent troops from occupying Chicago. “We’re not going to have tyranny in the city of Chicago.”
The problem is Trump's base is so infatuated with him, they cannot see the trees in the forest. One of my associates is keeping his letter from the stimulus check because he tells me Trump personally signed it. There is nothing I can do to change his mind. We're sort of friends, but we never talk politics. None the less, we do have a problem here. It's called a lack of real leadership. Trump outright lies and his base believes him, he boasts and brags and his base gives him an ovation, he passes an easy to pass cognitive test to show he is not senile and his base uses that to show how intelligent he is. Hitler claimed the big lie always works. Trump understands this. His lies are so outrageous, you can either be disgusted, alarmed, die laughing or actually believe what he has just now said. He is not Hitler, but he has taken on some of his methods of reaching his base. Always remember: If you repeat a lie often enough, a base of serious fools will come to believe all of it.
ReplyDeleteI don't know the age of your nephew, but he will come around when he is allowed to think for himself.
My nephew, Michael? Goines’ nephew is nearly 60. And Goines’ third respondent is around 70. It may be too late for them?
DeleteAs my thinking has evolved to wonder seriously whether such views as Trumpzis hold might be on account of their having been infected with a malignant memetic virus (“Covid-ByMeme” – to sort of rhyme with Covid-19?), I am beginning to suspect that if something like that is actually going on – as real in brain as Covid-19 in body – then dealing with their condition may be even more difficult than we supposed....
DeleteIn Trumpland, there is a saying:
ReplyDeleteIf I want you to have an opinion, I'll give you one.
I first heard this from Deborah Wymbs more than three decades ago.
About Agent Orange and Nazis:
ReplyDeleteHow many of you saw the 4th of July show at Mt. Rushmore? I thought "Speer would be proud."
I just added the Der Spiegel cover image from Roger Cohen’s column yesterday in the NY Times. Lead: “Trump says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens. In 1933, Hitler issued his ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State’.”
ReplyDeleteMore:
Germans have a particular relationship to fire. The Reichstag fire of 1933 enabled Hitler and the Nazis to scrap the fragile Weimar democracy that had brought them to power. Hitler’s murderous fantasies could now become reality. War, Auschwitz and the German catastrophe followed.
I have known many thoughtful German diplomats over the years, including Michael Steiner, who labored to stop the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to the United States. It always seemed to me that their particular passion for freedom, democracy and openness stemmed from the knowledge of how easily these are lost.
Michael Steinberg, a professor of history at Brown University and the former president of the American Academy in Berlin, wrote to me this week:
“The American catastrophe seems to get worse every day, but the events in Portland have particularly alarmed me as a kind of strategic experiment for fascism. The playbook from the German fall of democracy in 1933 seems well in place, including rogue military factions, the destabilization of cities, etc.”
Steinberg continued, “The basic comparison involves racism as a political strategy: a racist imaginary of a pure homeland, with cities demonized as places of decadence.”
Trump provokes outrage in a cascade designed to blunt alarm. He deadens reactions through volume and repetition. But something about the recent use of unmarked cars and camouflage-clad federal agents without clear identifying insignia detaining protesters shattered any inclination to shrug.
Cohen goes on:
ReplyDeletePerhaps the years I spent covering Argentina in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the military junta, made me particularly sensitive to the use of unmarked cars — in the Argentine case, Ford Falcons — to grab left-wing political opponents off the street. They were “disappeared,” a word whose lingering psychological devastation I measured in countless tear-filled rooms. Later I went to Berlin, where there was only one story: totalitarian tragedy and the labors of democratic salvation.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection confirmed this week that it has deployed officers from three paramilitary-style units to join the federal crackdown in Portland. The Trump administration, facing lawsuits, has cited post-9/11 legislation establishing the department to justify its action. Chicago is now among several cities being targeted as Trump seeks to foment confrontation.
As Tom Ridge, a Republican who was the first head of the Department of Homeland Security, noted in an interview with the Sirius XM host Michael Smerconish, the department was “not established to be the president’s personal militia.”
In wartime, the Third Geneva Convention, to which the United States is a party, requires even irregular forces to wear “a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance.” This is critical not only to protecting civilians but also to ensuring accountability for misconduct.
When paramilitary-style units have no identifying insignia, there is no transparency, no accountability — and that means impunity. Democracy dies. Think of all this as setting the scene for Trump’s own “state of emergency” if he does not like the November election result. Social media is combustible enough for a physical fire to be unnecessary.
This is a frightening time. Just don't understand why everyone can't see what Trump is doing to this country. 4 more years and we will be destroyed!
ReplyDeleteFrom “Who Gets to Be a ‘Naked Athena’?,” by Mitchell S. Jackson, NY Times, July 25:
ReplyDeleteLet’s be clear: Oregon was intended as a white man’s Zion. And since its admission into the union, it has remained one. That isn’t intended to distract from, or in any way excuse, the ongoing state violence there; it’s just that there should be no serious discussion of my home state or what’s happening in my home city that excludes or forgets its founding ethos.
Oregon Country’s provisional government passed a law excluding Blacks from the territory and, though it voted against slavery, thanks to a member of its first provisional government — a former slave holder from Missouri — it amended this law to disallow Blacks from remaining within its borders beyond a three-year residence. You wouldn’t know unless you Sherlocked that Oregon once boasted the largest KKK chapter west of the Mississippi, that it waited over 100 years after the Civil War to ratify the 14th Amendment; it took almost 90 years to ratify the 15th.
In the years since, Oregon’s largest city has done a bang-up job of marketing itself as a bastion of lefty quirkiness as well as a place for great food, beautiful landscapes, formidable cultural scenes and, of course, Just Doing It. But the laws keeping black people out? Oregonians didn’t vote to scrub them from the state’s books ’til 2002.
Per the latest U.S. census statistics, Oregon is 86.7 percent white, and 2.2 percent Black. Portland itself is 77.1 percent white and 5.8 percent Black. That’s why the Black Lives Matter protests there look like they do — white. They have to; that’s who lives there.