There are many of us who awoke
the morning of November 9, the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, to
find that our citizenship, the full citizenship we had worked so hard to
achieve all these years, had been effectively revoked. We had been voted off
the island by a minority of our fellow citizens. And in the process America had
desecrated its own deeply held ideals.
America, as we had known and
loved it, had committed suicide. The darkest nightmares of De Tocqueville and
Madison and their fears of the tyranny of the majority had come to fruition.
There are many of our once
countrymen and women who would now tell us to simply pretend that this disaster
has not come to pass. They tell us to get over it, we lost. They They seek to
normalize the rise of Trumpland as just the latest product of an ordinary electoral
process coming at the end of the costliest election in history. While the
cost of the election could be measured in dollars, it will no doubt prove most
costly in terms of the legitimacy of the nation-state itself.
We need to be very honest with
ourselves here. This was not a normal election. This was a devolution. In the
place of a struggling democratic republic, finally beginning to come to grips
with its cultural and historical failures, some of them fundamental in nature,
a new country has risen. Whether it will prove to be a corporatocracy, an
oligarchy, a theocracy or some other form of tyranny which privileges wealth
at the expense of the populace remains to be seen.
But whatever form it takes, it
is important to take Trumpland seriously on its own terms.
Emerging from Candide’s Garden
Knowing how to respond to a
debacle like this is difficult. Many of us spent the first weeks after the
election in stunned silence, avoiding the news like the plague. In my own case,
I spent a lot of time in my yard, taking Voltaire’s Candide to heart, tending my own garden. My back yard now reflects
the benefits of this unexpected attention.
I have also spent a lot of time
reading articles offering insights into how this could have happened even as I
have largely avoided social media. I’ve focused on my classes and
being present with my students, so many of them who are now frightened and
anxious. My disengagement from the social world has provided me time to cook
and take care of a new puppy.
As the Taoists query, “Good news, bad news, who can tell?”
Now as I begin to emerge from
my self-imposed sequestration, I have a little better sense of how I must
respond to the rise of Trumpland. As I inevitably have done all my life, I see
this as a question of what I am called to be and do at this point in my life.
The answers that have come to me are three-fold: survival, resistance and rebirth.
Preview of Coming Attractions
The first calling, survival, is the prerequisite for the
other two. Truth be told, I do not feel safe in Trumpland and I know I am
hardly alone in this.
Trump was elected by engaging
in unabashed demagoguery rarely seen in American politics. He stoked the fires
of the working class’ resentment for their economic woes while diverting the
blame from the very corporate interests people like himself who cause them onto
the other party, albeit a party whose hands were hardly clean
With the fires of resentment burning
in the bellies of his followers, Trump manipulated all the prejudices known to
the American Shadow. Before it was over, it would be open season on everyone
from coastal urban dwellers constructed as elitists to people with physical
disabilities to women, LBGTQ people, Muslims, immigrants and people of color.
It was the somber realization
that morning of November 9 that America had chosen this monster that said
to me and to many Americans “You are no longer safe in this country.” The
parade of hate incidents since the election in which public attacks on Trump’s
targeted groups have been carried out
with impunity evoking his name has only confirmed that assessment.
On a recent trip to Tallahassee,
my Dad, Aunt and I drove home along US 19, the old coastal route through towns
with names like Shamrock, Cross City and Old Town. This is deep red Trumpland, the
least ethnically diverse counties in Florida inhabited by a resentful, Bible
totin’ white working class. It was their votes that nudged our state from blue over
to red this election. It is also a region where my own family has had deep
roots for the past two centuries.
In Old Town, last stop before
the Suwannee River, we stopped at a Hardees fast food restaurant conjoined with
a convenience store. My Dad needed a restroom and my Aunt wanted some iced tea.
As I stood at the drink dispensers filling our cups with tea, a white woman my
age burst through the front door, marched up to the counter, and before even
looking at the menu ordered the black woman behind the counter “Turn that television
to Fox.” It had been tuned to one of the ESPN stations whose talking heads were
dissecting the upcoming match between two teams most Americans know little
about and care even less.
“Yes, ma’am,” the woman behind
the counter said and promptly changed the channel to Fox.
This is a preview of
Trumpland. It is a land animated by racial bigotry and resentment, an angry
people who feel they have been given permission to celebrate the Shadow. And
for those of us who have always called America to live into its most noble
ideals, it is the very antithesis of those ideals, a dangerous place, indeed.
Over my lifetime I have
learned the hard way, through confronting injustice from my time in public
schools to my time as a juvenile public defender to my time as a public
university instructor, that beating one’s head against immovable brick walls is
not profitable. The wall does get bloody - along with your head - but it rarely
moves.
But walls do crumble,
sometimes under their own weight. Ask Hadrian about his wall across the
Scottish border. Or the Song Dynasty of China watching Mongol hordes pour
across its Great Wall. Or the German Democratic Republic about its eternal Berlin
Wall.
For those of us who mourn the
death of the America we loved and must now endure the rise of a Trumpland in which
we are essentially resident aliens confined to islands of blue which serve as
reservations, it is important to be very strategic in our response to these
changes. While there is no other choice in the face of tyranny but to resist,
how we resist may well determine how long that tyranny survives, how deeply it
will manifest itself and whether we will live to be part of the rebirth of a
New America.
America’s Vichy Republic
The historical analogue I find
compelling in watching the rise of Trumpland is the death of the Third Republic
in France with the invasion of the Nazis and occupation of Paris and the rise
of the Vichy Republic in the south. The Republic retained the name of the
former country but the character of the new regime evident in its operations
clearly revealed a different story. The Third Republic was dead and in its
place a vicious, fascist regime had come to power.
The analogy of Trumpland to
Vichy is limited thus far. Trumpland has identified its targeted scapegoats
like Vichy. It does appear headed in a direction of curtailing civil liberties
and hollowing out democratic self-governance so that only a façade remains to
hide an authoritarian regime. And it is headed by a narcissistic, disingenuous
leader.
How far Trumpland will proceed
down the road to tyranny is unclear. Personally, I fear that we could be one
terrorist attack or major natural disaster away from martial law. After that,
who knows how far down the slippery slope of tyranny we might slide. While
Trump is a loose cannon with a big ego, should something happen to him, his
Vice-President, a fundamentalist Torquemada with a steely heart and a soul of ice would assume
the reins of the world’s most powerful military and its national guard.
Then all bets are off.
For those of us in targeted scapegoat
groups, the ultimate survival
question we must ask ourselves is when it may be time to leave. Truth be told,
should the nation with the world’s most powerful army degenerate into its own
brand of fascism, it’s not clear where in the world one might go to escape its
grasp. But even temporary shelter may be the difference in surviving or not.
My husband and I have talked
about leaving. We would have to leave everyone and everything we love behind. Today
that would seem virtually impossible. But I am determined that we will not be
in the last group of Jews walking the hallway to the showers at Auschwitz,
reciting Kaddish, desperately reassuring
ourselves, “No one would ever do something this unthinkable.”
The trick will be knowing when
to leave before the window of opportunity to do so closes.
Resistance in the Face of Depravity
It is important to recognize
that while Vichy France did lend itself to incredible depravity, it also
generated a resistance whose cooperation with the Allies would eventually
succeed in retaking France from the fascists. The leader of the Free French
resistance, Charles De Gaulle, would ultimately lead post-war France in forming
the new Fourth Republic.
However, it is also important
to recognize that many, many Frenchmen and women were more than happy to go
along with the Vichy regime. Erich Fromm’s study of this phenomenon led to the
publication of his post WWII work, Escape
from Freedom, in which Fromm observed the willingness of otherwise decent
human beings to abdicate their privilege of making decisions for a nation-state
(and the responsibility for those decisions) to a powerful leader promising to
make them great again. The cost for that greatness? All their civil liberties,
rights and ultimately their very human dignity. That and 12 million human
beings systematically annihilated.
The siren call of Trumpland to
“Make America Great Again” readily demonstrates that the invitation to escape
from freedom is alive and well today. More troubling, given the history that
Fromm is pointing toward, the willingness of so many Americans to be
manipulated by the demagoguery of Trumpland and to dissemble about their
willingness to support a monster are portents of alarm indeed.
The second part of my calling
- and I believe that of all of us who now must endure the hardships that
Trumpland will pose - is resistance. How that resistance will
occur is unclear. I believe each of us must find our own way to resist from the
subtle to the blatant.
Calling the Trump regime on
every move they make is critical. Deeds conceived in the darkness of shuttered
corporate boardrooms and their subsidiaries in the Trump government must be
exposed to the light of day. We must demand our media once again become
responsible to their duties to report the news critically and hold them
accountable with our subscriptions and refusal to view their programming when
they do not. Our remaining senators must be willing to filibuster bills and
delay confirmations in the US Senate. And we must jam the court systems with
legal actions designed to slow or halt the advance of tyranny.
Keeping ongoing pressure on
the regime through protests and civil disobedience is another must. Here we must
be very careful not to present the opportunities for the regime to crack down
in the name of national security. A martial law state once entered might well
prove intractable once in place. As Machiavelli reminds us, it’s a lot easier
for the Prince to be feared than loved.
Voting with our dollars is
another aspect of resistance that could prove quite powerful. Whatever else
Trumpland is, it is the miscarriage of a free market fundamentalist culture
whose bottom line is always profit. Identifying the corporate and moneyed
interests who supported Trump and refusing to provide them with any more of our
cash to be used in dominating us is a powerful tool of resistance.
Some of the most powerful
forms of resistance are less direct. Our artists must create the images, our
musicians the songs and our writers the literature that will speak to our
broken hearts and wounded souls. Our artists must provide us with the means of
confronting the unjust regime in which we now find ourselves and articulating
the hopes of a New America when it falls.
It will be an uphill struggle
in a superficial culture addicted to tweets and memes. But consider how
powerful the image of the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm and the young
college student mourning the slain Kent State student proved to be in ending an
unjust war in Southeast Asia. Consider the hopefulness inspired by a stylized
poster of Barack Obama just eight years ago, a poster which still hangs above
my head in my office as I type these words. Consider the salve to our wounded
souls in Orlando that the images of a mile long row of candles encircling Lake
Eola Park in the heart of Orlando provided after the Pulse massacre.
Humor is an important means of
resisting. Our comedians must not hesitate in using humor to lampoon the empty promises of Trumpland and the disingenuity and hypocrisy
of their makers. And G_d knows, the Trumpsters will provide them a wealth of
very rich material for satire. That starts with a president who would love to
deliver mercifully short State of the Union addresses via Twitter.
Silent Symbolic Resistance
Symbolic resistance is
critical to the ultimate goal of rebirthing a New America. Standing silently
but not participating in the pledge of allegiance is a powerful form of
resistance already underway in our country before the election.
While Trumpland
has appropriated the language of the former America, in fact we are no longer
“one nation,” we are highly polarized islands of frightened blue surrounded by
a sea of angry red. We are deeply divided, thus hardly “indivisible.” And the
notion that a Trumpland that rose to power by demonizing whole segments of its
population could ever be a place “with liberty and justice for all” is an
incredibly bad joke.
So long as our pledge is meaningless, we should treat it accordingly.
When I am in foreign countries
and their national anthem is played, I stand silently and respectfully. I plan
to do the same in Trumpland even as my heart will break knowing what that
anthem once stood for.
Resistance requires grounding.
It is important that those of us who would confront Trumpland in all of its
forms find ways to ground ourselves spiritually. We must begin by finding time
alone in silence, turning off the frantic chattering of our social media and
cell phones.
We also must find community in
which we can find support and guidance. This should not be merely congregations
of the like-minded. We need people to call us on our own shit but always in a
context in which our value as human beings and our belonging to that community
is never in question. Most of all, we must find diverse but kindred souls with
whom we can dream of the New America we wish to come into existence and begin
to plan how that can be accomplished.
I believe that New America is
surely coming. But an awful lot of turmoil must be endured before that can
happen.
[Continued with Part XI]
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando,
Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come
in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to
do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston 2017
© Harry Coverston 2017
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