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Tuesday
You know that irony has caught the last train to the coast when one of the worst bills in recent memory is officially called “the Big Beautiful Bill.” While many are aware that its tax cuts for the rich will increase the American deficit by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years, even as it cripples food stamp and Medicaid programs, American Prospect has ferreted out some of the less-known but equally noxious provisions. The bill is beautiful in the same way that a rotten apple represents “perfection” in a William Carlos Williams poem by that name.
As Prospect’s Robert Kuttner reports, the bill
–prohibits courts from finding officials in the executive branch in contempt for not following judicial orders;
–adds $45 billion to build immigration jails;
–gives the administration the power to define nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations” and to expedite the ending of their tax status;
–guts the estate tax;
–allots $20 million to school vouchers while slashing Department of Education spending for public education;
–allows tax credits that subsidize ACA premiums to expire at the end of 2025
— repeals the $200 excise tax on the sale of gun silencers.
In short the bill, like Williams’s apple, is perfect in its thorough rottenness:
Perfection
O lovely apple!
beautifully and completely
rotten
hardly a contour marred–
perhaps a little
shriveled at the top but that
aside perfect
in every detail! O lovely
apple! what a
deep and suffusing brown
mantles that
unspoiled surface! No one
has moved you
since I placed you on the porch
rail a month ago
to ripen.
No one. No one!
This mention of rottenness brings to mind a Robinson Jeffers poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic,” about an America that is rotting. “The flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth,” the poet writes of an America that is betraying its republican promise as it “settles in the mold of its vulgarity.”
While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
“Thickening into empire” is a reference to America’s increasing corruption in 1925, when the poem was written. The only silver lining that Jeffers sees is that, if America is going through a seasonal cycle, then perhaps the dark times are only a temporary setback. Although Jeffers didn’t know it at the time, unregulated capitalism would lead to the Great Depression, which in turn would trigger Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and the rise of the American century.
So perhaps Trumpism is only momentary. Perhaps the corruption we are seeing, which makes the 1921 Teapot Dome scandal seem quaint by comparison, will rot into earth that will be the source of new growth. As Percy Shelley once asked, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind.” Or as he imagined in an even more expansive moment,
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
Too hopeful for you? Just keep in mind that America has flirted with authoritarianism before and recovered.
