In Ten Years and
Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota a trail of breadcrumbs is
left for abrogations. It leads to the house that was a closer-to-home
replica of our clear and present danger. Our times mime the past,
they mine it for its chutzpah, for its sense of morality. My book
pictures a time, like now, when politics crossed the line at which
humanity lies. Back then it was the troop train in front of which
political dissidents lay. Today they are the angry mobs that die in
senate offices, the citizens that rushed to the airports to welcome
their Islamic friends, the people jamming WH phone lines
Trump is riding on
a electoral win. His popular vote count was eclipsed by his opponent,
but he squeaked by in the electoral clause. The 12th
amendment provides that elector cast votes for president. The idea of
the college is not to leave the election of a president ultimately in
the hands of the perhaps uneducated masses. Now, let's face it, how
well did this idea work when the winner is not well educated himself.
(This is not bias, theory or fake news. It is fact that tweets have
proven time after time. Trump and Mrs. Palin need a world history
class.)
In 1964 Lyndon
Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide. LBJ easily won both
the popular and electoral vote. He won 61.1 percent of the
popular vote, the highest since James Monroe's re-election in 1820.
Trump's concept of reality and his ignorance of the consequences of
things as epic as nuclear weapons have been compared to Goldwater.
Both were conservative extremists. In the wake of Kennedy's
assassination, a wave of despair fractioned America. By the end of
1963, when Johnson was sworn in as the 36th POTUS. He
executed landmark legislation, pushed his Great Society program that
benefited many minority groups, but his policies on Vietnam quickly
vitiated his popularity. In February of 1965 Johnson used the
provisions of 1964's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to justify and
authorize dropping bombs on North Vietnam in a sustained offensive
strike named Operation Rolling Thunder. In a Gallup Poll taken that
year 61 percent of Americans thought that our involvement in
Southeast Asia was a good idea. By 1971 that number was reduced to
28.
Trump was widely
unpopular from day one. He created his own reality, and for months
after the alternative fact he insisted that his inaugural exceeded
his predecessor's in crowd size. I would not be surprised if he
brought this up today with Putin. And the press foolishly indulges
his fantasy. How come every majority that mattered saw that Goldwater
was a bit farshimmelt, delusive, ausgespielt? No one, enough to
concern a plurality, saw that this real estate huckster, who made a
name for himself on “Reality” TV, as a threat to democracy. No
one saw, from the debate stage, from the campaign trail, his
disrespect for anything and everyone without a TRUMP label on it.
Enough people overlooked his outright refusal to play by the rules,
his genuine lack of attention needed to learn or desire to learn U.S.
and world history most high school graduates should know. Oligarchy,
monarchy, autocracy, kleptochracy and, anarchy push the decent word
from my mind today. Those forms of government are what we have
steered clear of for 241 years. They are what our founders wrote a
very certain constitution to avoid being. Democracy, the equitable
way of life America has known all its relatively short life, is what
all the veterans say they were defending. What would have happened
when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? They didn't, but Mr. Blutowsky
(Animal House) creates an interesting scenario. Had FDR not
committed troops to beat Hitler back, we would be under what—well
something like I imagine if the current administration is allowed to
go on for seven more years.
In my book the
“change” is the ten years, 1965 to 1975. It is the few years
before, when the Vietnam conflict, the Second Indo-China War, was
already creating a cult following of protesters. It is ten year of
trying to work things out in a democracy, trying to hold a nation, or
even a political party, together. A book written by a Trump child, a
child that grew up in this web of lies, a child for whom there is
literally no example of democracy at its best, after the alternative
fact, would be different but similar. A child raised by parents, like
mine, who were so political that their action were felt at the top
(if rooted in grass). Parents, one or both, who went to the 2020 DNC,
or protested at the RNC. Say the poor kid had parents who marched in
every march, from the pink pussy to the tax day. Forty years after
the facts he or she writes a memoir akin to Ten Years and Change:
A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota. In 2057 a generation Z looks back
in their PTSD. They'll write about what their parents did for them
when they came out of the womb. They'll write about the evil Mitch
McConnell who, as I hear, is losing his gumption, discovering what
Bernie said a year ago. How Mitch, the victor in a battle of
childhood polio, tried to rob millions of their health care. I doubt
they'll have the halcyon memories of Apple Jacks and hearing that
Watergate song, of Casey Jones and Gopher Gulch Indians or
politicians reading poetry like I did. But they'd be good. And they
should dedicate it to their parents, to all the millions of
milennials who never relented, who comprised an abrogation more than
231 million strong, conspirators of a theory to shake out the fake
news of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment