UNCLE SAM PLAYS THE
TRUMP CARD
by Justin Desmangles
“'Tis dangerous to take a cold, to
sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we
pluck this flower, safety. The purpose you undertake is dangerous, the friends
you have named uncertain, the time itself unsorted, and your whole plot too
light for the counterpoise of so great an opposition.” – Hotspur, Henry IV, Act 2 Scene 3, William Shakespeare
“This is NOT a time for
penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill.” – White House economic advisor Peter Navarro,
February 23, 2020, memo to the President warning of an impending 2 million
deaths in the U.S. from corona virus.
I had been
wondering what they dug out of Reinhard Heydrich’s grave last December; I guess
this virus may have been it! Having just read The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi
masterpiece in which the Nazis emerge as victors of World War II, the name
sounded familiar. In the novel, set in the Bay Area, Dick places Heydrich quite
high in the order of things, as well he would have been had he not been
assassinated by Czech Resistance fighters. The real Reinhard Heydrich was the
principal designer of the proposed “final solution” as well as the organizer of
Kristallnacht. A man whose infamous cruelty was so severe it was both feared
and admired by his Nazi peers, he was also rumored to have Jewish ancestry.
Contemporary admiration for his ideas led his followers to resort to grave
robbing at the end of last year. Who is to say towards what ritual purpose
these actions may have been put? Among certain secret societies, fraternal
orders, even wealthy occultists, there would be a great demand for such a
substance as previously contained in that grave. Haven’t heard a lot from Skull
and Bones at Yale lately. Maybe some of the folks in the Federalist Society
could find some Johnnie Walker for a round of congratulations? They can send
the bill to A.L.E.C., Americans for Prosperity, or maybe Freedom Works. I am
sure Dick Armey’s pension can handle it.
Nazi
intellectuals and law makers had great admiration for American domestic
policies concerning race and ideas of racial hygiene and were not shy about
saying so prior to the U.S. entering the war (see Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race
Law, James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press, 2017). They, too, looked
out at the world and saw “shithole countries,” to quote Donald Trump, rather
than places where people lived. Forced sterilization of undesirables was especially
attractive to them, a policy which remained active in the United States well
into the 1970s. The factory-like settings in which Germany would implement
their version of these strategies resemble nothing so much as their American
cousins in the prison system. Replete with often lethal, illegal medical
experimentation on prisoners. Had Heydrich lived to ascend to Germany’s Chancellorship,
as many believed he would, I am sure he would have approved of the Trump-Pence
junta and its handling of the coronavirus thus far. Particularly the lines of
class, race, ethnicity, education and income levels so clearly demarcated by
its lethality. To put it country-simple, the right people are dying.
Dean Baquet
would probably be the last to admit it, right after David Remnick, but a great
many of their wealthiest readers scan headlines like “BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE
BRUNT AS VIRUS SPREADS” (lead story, front page, The New York Times, April 8, 2020) and breathe a quiet hallelujah. The
impulse leading toward the genocide of non-white people in the Americas is not
only alive and well, it is thriving and growing in strength. Though that
impulse began many centuries ago, too many of its key features are with us
today in stark and undeniable ways. The elaborate construction of concentration
camps along the southern border, tens of thousands of children being held at
subsistence level, barely alive, the violent breaking apart of their families as
public spectacle. All of these details would show themselves as familiar to any
serious student of the history of these continents north and south, going back
to the earliest settlements by Spanish, French, Portuguese and English
colonists. Their mirror images in the present become obscured only by the fact
that collectively we put those events in a sentimental, seductive past, rather
than accepting their hideous, grotesque reflection of now. Our greatest
palliative in the process of this un-remembering, dismembering today has been
access to the narcotizing excesses of so-called media. As the poet Bob Kaufman
accurately reported in his now classic “Heavy Water Blues”, “Television,
america’s ultimate relief, from the indian disturbance.” Can the Navajo draw
such a distinction with its near past? Can any indigenous tribe that has
survived unto the 21st century? Surely the rampantly rising
infection rates among immigrant workers in Wisconsin’s meat processing plants
reveal the centuries old motive for this violence.
Cut to commercial. Real Uncle Tom
scene, Ben Carson singing Water Boy on a small riser at the end of dark room
under a single spotlight, a tiny scrim behind him on which is projected a
waving confederate flag.
Voice over: Stop the war of northern
aggression, give generously to the Strom Thurmond Foundation to End
Miscegenation.
Fade-to-black
Camera zooms out to reveal a Heidi–type
character, smiling, arms extended a la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music,
twirling atop green rolling hills.
Voice over: Yearning
to return to her regular pogroming, Erica bought futures in pork bellies last
week. She has faith in Tyson Foods and so can you.
Next we see the fat winking face of
Mitch McConnell fill the screen like so much pink gelatin, “With so many
channels to choose from, why have one point of view?”
And now back to our regular pogroming
. . .
The American
presidency has always existed in moral twilight. Presidents lie, it is
important that they do so in order to keep their job. Even those who audition
for the role often start by telling a lot of lies in public to see how much
traction they can gain coming into the race. No president as far as we know has
lied as much as Donald Trump. His bilious regurgitation of insults, exaggerations,
half-truths and outright deceptions is unparalleled by any measure, save for
his heroes in professional wrestling. Rowdy Roddy Piper, indeed. But I’ll tell
one thing he is not lying about, the number of Federal judges he has appointed
to the bench. Other than Ronald Reagan, no president has seated more of these
immeasurably powerful lifetime appointments. This extraordinary ordinary fact
is a vivid example of what can go wrong when a country stops paying attention.
A lot of America’s self-appointed intelligentsia at the papers-of-record and
the jibber-jabber-jaws of cable news have taken porn stars, errant penises, and
illicit payoffs to be more worthy of their commentary than federal judges. Charismatic
advertising, you know. Because as long the news-gathering model for reporting
is based on advertising revenue, they will continue to do so. Beguiling and
bewildering their audiences for the cheap thrill of pretending they are the
monsters they so despise. The desire for power among those who don’t have it
and the misconceptions that brings is more haunting than the Ghost of Christmas
Past but with much less conscience.
We interrupt this pogrom with a
special news bulletin. Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a presumed death by
suicide, was discovered impersonating Elvis as a contestant in a south Florida
karaoke bar. Claiming to be the winner of the contest when detained by local
officials, Mr. Epstein reportedly said that he was without an agent and willing
to work at scale.
Next on Fox, Kitten on a Hot Mic,
Becky Misandric spews mutilated Marxism before uncorking wine bottles with her
teeth, a trick she learned at Socialist summer camp in the hills of Berkeley,
California.
The Confederacy
was a declared enemy of the United States. Maybe that is the message from these
crowds flying Stars and Bars, carrying big guns and screaming that the country
be re-opened. They remind me of the religious flagellants from an earlier
plague, some even have the same taste in headgear (see Francisco de Goya’s
painting A Procession of Flagellants.)
These masochistic zealots were famously portrayed by Ingmar Bergman in his icy
tour-de-force The Seventh Seal, a
meditation on God’s silence in the face of atrocities. Like the new breed of
flagellants, they believed if they got the whipping over with, inflicting
violence on themselves and others, their God might show them some mercy. Last I
checked, God don’t let you pick your switch, but that’s them. People who laugh
at the malapropisms and misspellings of these new flagellants do so at their
own peril. It’s not funny. Fascist authoritarian governments have always had a
tenuous relation with these kind of rabble-rousing provocateurs, they are as
necessary to white supremacist terror as clean sheets are to the Klan. It can
all go to Hell of course when these people mess-up, kill, or intimidate the
wrong person. They’re largely bunglers who have been known to bite the hand
that feeds off at the elbow, sometimes even turning their former leaders upside
down with entrails hanging out. The trouble in dealing with these death cult
ecstatics is tell-them-off too well and they may like you just too much. As has
been seen at these demonstrations, they’re just getting riled up, spoiling for
the fight and terrorism that comes later. But why would a country allow people
carrying guns to fly the flag of its declared enemy in front of state houses
and government buildings?
The only good __________ is a dead
___________. You’re an American, so you can fill in the blanks with live
ammunition.
Advertising psychology
plays its experienced role as dramaturge, the golden rule being that of
tricking the customer about the product. Why not be Jekyll when you can play
Hyde and seek on the weekend? Political theater? The governor of California, a
thespian by choice, has communicated far more effectively for having partnered
with a professional actress. Don Jr.’s main squeeze is the governor’s ex-wife,
also trained in the theater arts. Her beaux has been performing much better on
camera since she stepped in the picture, he even passes as an author on Amazon.
Donald Trump for his part continues the traditions of Vaudeville. Still visible
in the popular culture are the techniques of the traveling tent shows of the
19th century. There’s Skip Gates swabbing celebrity DNA and telling them they
were Cleopatra. Trump’s rebarbative motifs are borrowed from the top-ten hits
of European fascism. Vituperative, cruel, heartless, the words come easy. Venom
lolls off the tongue, joining a river of bile. His imperious gaze reflecting
fits of pique that his authority be questioned at all. Standing at the lectern
with the world chomping at the bit, ready to restore ratings with the latest
bilge. Having sewn chaos in the garden of democracy, he now reaps a harvest in
the Electoral College. Women vote for him, their sons admire him, even
grandpa’s got his blood up again. “Dad called a man he didn’t know a nigger at
the grocery store in front of a security guard and the security guard laughed!”
Much in the
style of Don Rickles, Trump performs the politics of the 19th century too, an
era of obsession among his underwriters at the corporate level. “Those damn
Civil War amendments, 13 and 14, you heard of them, well get rid of them!”
Mass
incarceration of African-Americans is re-enslavement, a process beginning in
the immediate wake of the emancipation provided by the 13th
amendment (see Douglas Blackmon, Slavery
by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to
World War II Anchor Books, 2008). As I have written elsewhere in this
magazine (“Just Us and Jeff Sessions”, Konch,
Spring Issue 2018) the elimination of the 14th amendment’s
guarantees of citizenship and voting rights is the center piece of the agenda
promoted by the Trump administration’s first Attorney General Jeff Sessions and
his former aide, now presidential advisor, Stephen Miller. Lee Atwater would
have been proud of these guys. American liberal and progressive political
thinkers often begin with the premise that the state and its authority have a
moral and ethical right to exist. The murder of innocent blacks at the hands of
police is viewed with the ironic distance of a malfunction in an otherwise
purring engine that works for everybody. Drive it long enough and it will take
you where you want to go, local and express. But the murder and destruction of non-white
people by state authority is not an accident that calls for a tune-up, it is an
essential constituent of American life. A set of religious rites and rituals
that inform long standing traditions of Western domination. As Susan Sontag has
famously written, “The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra,
Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the
emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what
this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the
cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and
inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which
has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence
of life itself.” (“What's Happening to America?” Partisan Review, 1967).
Front page,
above the fold, a lead item, two of the four journalists who published the
aforementioned New York Times piece
followed up on May 11, 2020 with “Questions of Bias in Virus Care Haunt
Mourning Black Families.” Above the headline is an image of the empty hall of a
high school in northern Germany, its doors flung open to better circulate the
air free of viruses. The article details the impact of anti-black racism on
American public and private health care systems and their long history of
abuse, neglect, illegal experimentation, and premature death contextualizing
our moment of genocide. The acceleration of African American deaths due to
coronavirus infection has been reported on in the European press as well,
“African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared
with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans. More than
20,000 African Americans – about one in 2,000 of the entire black population in
the U.S. have died of the disease,” (“Black Americans Dying of Covid-19 at
Three Times the Rate of White People”, The
Guardian, May 20, 2020).
Can we talk
about those concentration camps now?
Of course collecting
data is a problem, some would say the problem. As Althea Maybank, chief equity
officer at the American Medical Association, has made clear, “We’re not
collecting the stats on race and ethnicity we desperately need,” reminding us
that “Fewer than a dozen states have published data on the race and ethnic
patterns of the pandemic,”(“The Pandemic’s Missing Data”, New York Times, April 8, 2020). In other words the numbers reported
above by The Guardian are likely much
higher.
More on that
missing data question. In January of this year the National Archives announced
that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was free to destroy
documents related to the sexual abuse and death of undocumented immigrants.
Included also are detainee’s complaints detailing violations of their human
rights. This maneuver on the part of the National Archives also extends itself
to the destruction of records by the Department of the Interior, dealing with
such subjects as endangered species, unsafe drinking water, even domestic oil
exploration.
Heydrich and
his admirers have done themselves proud. As Upton Sinclair would say, it’s a jungle
out there.
This essay was composed on May 24, 2020 and first published June 10, 2020 in Konch
