Wednesday
I turn to film rather than literature today because I think that Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant black comedy has something to teach us about the GOP’s wholesale capitulation to the most corrupt and mendacious president in the country’s history. One can either spend all one’s energies worrying about how to defend Trump’s actions or one can simply embrace the whole package.
With regard to the president’s attempts at bribery and extortion, it doesn’t matter that the Ukraine phone call indicts the president, that his chief of staff admits he did it, that his E.U. ambassador says he did it, that various witnesses heard him do it, and that the president all but confirmed he did it by publicly calling, on the White House lawn, for Ukraine and for China as well to investigate Biden. (And let’s not forgot that he asked Russia to release hacked e-mails during the 2016 campaign, which they did.) Worried? Just embrace the Trumpian playbook and contend that none of this happened. It’s so much easier that way.
The Washington Post editorial page, which bends over backward to be balanced in such instances, is unsparing in its criticism:
Democrats arguing for the president’s impeachment repeatedly cited evidence that Mr. Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting with its president on an announcement by Ukraine that it would investigate former vice president Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory about the 2016 U.S. election. Most Republicans responded with the diversions they have offered since the impeachment process began: spurious complaints about the process, coupled with claims that Democrats were interested only in reversing the results of the 2016 election.
Remarkably, not one GOP member of the Judiciary Committee was ready to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with Mr. Trump’s demand that a foreign government pursue false charges against one of his most likely Democratic opponents in the 2020 election. They could have followed the example of the several Republican legislators who have said Mr. Trump’s actions were improper but not impeachable. Instead, they offered a display of blind fealty, portraying Mr. Trump as a victim of Democratic persecution while ignoring or misrepresenting the evidence against him.
In Dr. Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the United States and the Soviet Union are engaged in complicated diplomacy to keep from blowing each other up. Such diplomacy, in the minds of certain rabid military officers, is for wimps, which is how they regard President Merkin Muffley. Better to embrace wholesale destruction, especially if you can wipe out the Soviet Union while losing “no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.” General Jack Ripper takes matters into his own hands and launches an attack, not knowing that the USSR has invented a doomsday machine that will destroy the entire world.
But choosing to attack rather than negotiate is not the only way to stop worrying. Why not just embrace the apocalypse as one final joy ride, blowing everything up with no worry for the future? This, of course, is how bombardier pilot Major Kong goes out, riding a nuclear warhead as though it’s a bronco. Kubrick gives us a masturbation image, with King slapping his cowboy hat at the projectile between in legs in anticipation of the ultimate explosion. All of his worries are about to end.
I’m talking about politics here, but why not extend this to climate change as well? Devour fossil fuels as though there’s no tomorrow. National Parks? Grab all you can while the getting is good. Tax breaks for the rich? Let future generations worry about the deficit. Government regulations: Gut them and see how much you can get away with. Our reality television president is giving his fans the ultimate high.
Atlantic recently profiled Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson and found a Strangelovian shift underway. Years ago, Carlson ran a somewhat balanced program on National Public Television, but no longer. “I’ve made a complete break mentally with the world I used to live in,” Carlson says, and one can see the effect. It’s much easier to say that America is being overrun by dirty immigrants (as Carlson does in the interview) than to work out a nuanced immigration policy. As the article’s author points out, there is no moral self-reflection in Carlson’s world:
But when it comes to the Tucker Carlson of the Trump era, don’t expect any sort of personal reckoning in the near future. “It’s very hard when you’re succeeding to see your own flaws. It’s very hard,” he said. “Because everything about the experience reinforces what you’re doing.”
Yes, that’s what life looks like when you abandon all moral principles and give yourself over to Trumpism. You stop worrying.
Or as George Orwell would put it, you learn to love Big Brother.