Natural Law
There’s been an emergence in Trump’s most recent rhetoric of belief in a natural law which states something like the following:
The rich deserve to get more because they have more.
The poor deserve to get less because they have less.
The rich stay rich; the poor stay poor.
This is the way things are supposed to be.
So simple.
But is it true?
Originally written: 7/14/2011
There is much I don’t understand about the world’s economic crisis but what I do get is that everyone owes everyone else and no one has the money to pay it back. That is of course an overstatement, but when you look at it, it does seem that a lot of people are broke — the governments of the world are broke, large swaths of their citizens are broke, non-profits are struggling, and many businesses are hanging by a thread.
Universally, it seems, we are simply out of money. We owe more than we make and we can’t pay our bills. Or at least, not all of them.
The solution to this problem, if the United States Government is any example, is to borrow more money. That’s easy for them to say — they’re the United States Government. Oddly enough, their bond-rating is better if they raise the debt limit and borrow more than if they don’t. I guess being in debt up to your ears to the Chinese is a good thing.
I realize that everything the world over is connected and that if a check bounces in Cinncinnati, it can take out a whole franchise in Taiwan. Or maybe it isn’t that delicate or complicated. Consider this: debt default or no debt default, there will still be 300 million living people in this country, who will still want to get up, breath, eat, work, laugh, and sleep through the night, whether the U.S. raises the debt limit or not.
Which brings me to the solution: universal debt amnesty. Read More
Back in my childhood, paper towels were regarded as an expensive commodity, to be used rarely, if at all, and only on the most spectacular of spills. For a spill to be worthy of a paper towel, a Paper Towel Emergency had to be declared unanimously by all assembled. Otherwise, we were supposed to use the kitchen sponge or a dish cloth to wipe up the offending area.
Over the years, it’s been my opinion that our household has gotten way too lax in our use of both these items. Channeling my dad, I see the paper towels come and I see them go, and I think, how could we use so many paper towels? But we do. Same with kitchen sponges. I was raised in a two sponge household — one for disgusting messes and one for dishes. I am sorry to report that that this rule is not strictly followed in our house. Consequently, we go through more kitchen sponges than I consider appropriate, especially at the new going rate of a buck a sponge.
Well, times have changed. The coronavirus grocery shortages have put an end to the casual use of just about everything. We now have half a roll of paper towels and one, groty kitchen sponge to hold us until we find some more.
This makes things complicated. Just this morning, I was forced to decide whether the little pile of cat vomit that greeted me on waking justified a paper towel. After a brief debate, I decided it was too early for that nonsense, and used a single half sheet of paper towel along with a spatula to scrape up the remains.
Sometimes it’s the little things that bring it home to you — those moments when you realize, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Meanwhile, here at the homestead, not only are we starting to be out of things, we’re afraid to even go to the store to look for them!
For most of my life I’ve been a fan of end-of-the-world movies, but now that the end times are surely upon us, the genre feels particularly apropos. Not that I especially want to watch them right now — these days, I’m preferring old musicals with cheery melodies and lots of tap dancing. But I’m glad I did watch the end of the world flicks when they came out. They’ve given me good preparation for global disasters of all kinds including asteroids, Planet X, aliens, nuclear wars, fascist pod people, smart computers, zombie epidemics, and generic apocalypses from A to Z.
Admittedly, coronavirus would probably make a pretty static end-of-the-world movie given that most of the participants are just locking themselves in their homes trying not to catch coronavirus. Nevertheless, if someone wanted to make a disaster film out of it, they could.
There’s something very unifying about a global crisis — a great inescapable event that affects us all at the same time. Such crises seem rare but in modern times, they happen often. We have world economic crises, a global climate crisis, and a crisis of faith in our leaders that’s led to widespread social uprisings around the world. These sorts of crises affect everyone to some extent, but the effects are hard to gauge. Some people are affected disproportionately, others not at all.
But in the case of coronavirus, it’s different. Coronavirus is affecting everyone — rich and poor, young and old, all races and creeds — at the same time. And while some of us say to ourselves, “It’s just the flu” or “I’m young, it won’t kill me,” our lives are still being majorly impacted by it. For starters, there are social restrictions and they’re getting tighter by the hour. Moreover, the world economy is shutting down, which means that along with toilet paper, money is going to be in short supply..
On Monday afternoon, on the eve of Super Tuesday, I voted for a Democrat for what will likely be the last time. I was never a very strong Democrat, always to the left of party policy. But in the past, I still believed that the Dems were at least marginally on the side of regular people. I no longer believe that. Today’s Democrats seem to be more interested in appealing to a better off clientele — people who really love their health insurance plans! and resent those who need help getting to sufficiency.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they had just sold out their values and left it at that. They didn’t. Instead, they went after their own frontrunner, Bernie Sanders, like he was Public Enemy #1.
Is it worse when a leader does openly what other leaders only do quietly or with more gravitas? I think we would say yes to that and point to Donald Trump. But are leaders who do bad things but obfuscate them necessarily better?
It makes me wonder if a lot of our problem with Trump is a matter of style. He comes across like a cheap casino owner but acts like he’s the boss of everyone. His manner, such as it is, offends many. He does bad things and they seem worse because he admits that he does them and doesn’t even think they’re bad. Then again, most presidents do bad things, or at least things that are later regarded to have been, and more often than not, we barely notice them. Take immigration, for example.
When Trump is mean to immigrants at the border, he crows about it like it’s a good thing. Obama was arguably mean to unaccompanied minors at the same border, but he made rational, measured statements about them, usually through spokespeople, so we gave him a pass. Our beloved FDR imprisoned Japanese-Americans for the duration of World War II, but we forgive him that.
Many other presidents have passed tax bills that favored the wealthy, but most impressively under Ronald Reagan and George Bush. People aren’t big on Bush, because, for one thing, by the time he took office, Reagonomics had resulted in an economic downturn that was affecting everyone; Reagan, on the other hand, is revered.
Border walls are bipartisan, or they were in the past. Bush I started with a modest 14 miles of fencing, Clinton added a few miles as well, but it was George W. Bush who truly “built the wall.” His legislation to construct 700 miles of barriers along the Mexico border passed by supermajorities in both the House and the Senate. Bush succeeded in having 580 miles of wall built, before passing the project on to Obama, who got us up to just about 650 miles before calling the wall complete.
Trade deals are bipartisan too. The corporation-friendly NAFTA trade deal was enacted under Clinton, while Obama initiated the European and Pacific trade deals although neither was ratified. Now in comes Trump, and what does he do? Does he throw out NAFTA, which he promised to eliminate and which lots of people hate? No, he pretends to throw it out, and then he renegotiates it. What’s in the new NAFTA? Pretty much the same stuff that was in the old NAFTA, last tweaked under Obama.
As for foreign affairs, Trump hasn’t started any new unnecessary wars yet, unlike Reagan, Bush, Bush II, and Obama. On the other hand, he’s shown an unsavory interest in meddling in other countries internal affairs, particularly in South and Central America. This has posed no problem for him since American meddling in places like Venezuela has bipartisan support, as long as you can produce an evil dictator to castigate. Is the story true? Does it matter? Only to the Venezuelans.
So far, Donald Trump has threatened a lot but compared to the massive harm he’s capable of doing, his major initiatives haven’t differed all that much from those of past presidents. On the other hand, his style of doing them has been a thing to behold since he follows no accepted rules of protocol.
All that said, the scariest thing by far about Donald Trump is his appeal to fascist impulses in his supporters. This is where he differs from just about every president we’ve ever had.
Fascism is historically anti-Left, anti-immigrant, anti-globalist, strongly nationalist, united behind a strong male leader, and willing to use violence when deemed necessary. Trump’s movement mirrors this description, making concerns about fascism realistic in his case. All the precursors are there, including a susceptible subsection of the populace.
The chance that he could really pull off a Mussolini-style fascist take-over of America seems very unlikely, but there he is, and if you want to be sure, it would be better to vote him out of office. Now, all the Democrats have to decide is who they hate more: Donald Trump, proto fascist republican or Bernie Sanders, New Deal democratic socialist. Let us hope they don’t choose “none of the above.”
Coronavirus is a bit like the Airborne Toxic Event in DeLillo’s White Noise. It’s out there, it’s a threat, there’s nothing we can do about it, so it just lurks there in the back of our minds, occasionally reinforced by headlines and half-heard news broadcasts. Another thing that might get us.
The trouble is, there are so many of these things already, that if we let ourselves think about them, we might become hysterical. Coronavirus — a murky danger that could and likely will happen to at least some of us, eventually.
This is how the Terrible Twenties begin, ushering in a time of rumor and fear, as well as genuine peril…
Human beings have grand aspirations and great ideals but limited life spans. Every 100 years of so, all new people are on the planet. Each person born on Earth starts from scratch, knowing nothing of themselves or the world. More than any other species, human beings need to be taught how to be our species, or rather, how to be civilized versions of it. We invented civilization; we didn’t evolve it. But because it’s invented and not evolved, we have to teach it to our kids. Don’t eat with your fingers. Don’t hit your brother with a block. Take a bath and brush your teeth.
Inspired by the day’s world headlines:
spinning toward election
lawmakers reject proposal
fighters have left
forces captured
crisis turns violent
protesters pack square
so much damage
crisis despite slowdown
election blow
successor killed
dangerous situation
markets jumpy
police fire teargas
hopes resignation
won’t undermine stability
what do parties want to do?
police hunt for brothers
party appeals result
struggling to reform
rubble remains
hash cake accidentally served!
landslide kills dozens
wife held in london
child rapist released
racist abuse
amid protests
defy curfew
unfolding…
Special thanks to BBC and Reuters.
