What We Are Asked Not to See

  

I start this entry with an older Mike Luckovich political cartoon, as it never really grows old. What I have to say here is indirectly related to that January 6th day that will indeed live in infamy—not only the day itself, but how this country has “moved” past it.

 

In the long, trailing wake of that event lies a kind of flotsam—Pollyannaish sanewashing of Trump’s increasingly chaotic, threatening and sociopathic behavior, including a series of Wall Street Journal opinion articles published this past week. I dare any objective person to read them, with the events of January 6, 2021, and the subsequent pardons of the “patriots” who participated in them in mind, not to mention his ill-conceived Iran war, and come away untroubled.

 

Their titles and subtitles signal the tone: “I Give Up on These Defeatists; From ‘No Kings’ and Iran to data centers, too many Americans are fighting progress” (Andy Kessler, April 5, 2026); “Trump Can Make America Optimistic Again; Put aside grievances and keep reminding us why the U.S. is the envy of the world” (Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, April 7, 2026); and “Trump’s ‘Whole Civilization Will Die’ Tweet Isn’t a War Crime; There’s a big difference between actions in war and words on a website” (Matthew Hennessey, April 8, 2026).

 

A few specific comments, taking the last article first, as it perhaps bothers me the most for its content and condescension. Of the untold thousands of seemingly inane social media posts by this President (as if “Truth Social” were his royal scepter), Hennessey refers to what may be the mother of all such outbursts, written (or authorized) on April 5 by a man his sycophants support no matter what he says, a man who could start a nuclear war on what he believes are his impeccable instincts:

 

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

 

Here is but a small excerpt from Hennessey’s article: “They aren’t illegal orders from the commander-in-chief. They aren’t a genocidal threat. And they aren’t a war crime, for heaven’s sake, no matter what your smart cousin says on Facebook…”

 

That is what I mean about the condescending tone, and about the false equivalencies (e.g., what Iran has done in the past somehow diminishes the seriousness of such rhetoric). Hennessey has the platform of the Wall Street Journal, which lends his opinion credibility.

 

For my own appeal to authority, I turn to Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, who writes “Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — ‘involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.’ The official website goes on to declare that ‘Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.’ If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist. Don’t tell me that his cause is just, that the Iranian regime is evil. That’s what terrorists always say, and even if it’s sometimes true, terrorism is defined by its means rather than its ends — by its attempt to achieve political goals by violently attacking the innocent. And that’s exactly what Trump is doing: he’s threatening to attack civilian infrastructure if he doesn’t get his way. And since Trump is talking about targeting essential services — power plants! — this is a threatened attack on people as well as property.”

 

This is the President of the United States writing such vile, threatening language, and words have consequences when they come from that office. Coming from an unpredictable person with the power to do exactly what he threatens, this crosses from rhetoric into something far more dangerous. If North Korea issued such threats, we would not only take it seriously, but condemn them as a rogue nation. Our credibility as a peace-seeking democracy is tarnished by such rhetoric. It is the threat itself that carries the whiff of criminality—true mobster-speak.

 

I find myself equally angered by “I Give Up on These Defeatists” by Andy Kessler. He was in grade school when we were protesting Vietnam and marching for civil rights. Now he dismisses people like us as defeatists for participating in the “No Kings” rallies, reducing our messaging to what he calls the “spinning Wheel of Defeatist Complaints,” allegedly funded by George Soros–linked groups and “socialist and communist revolutionary organizations, according to Fox News Digital” (emphasis mine).

 

Andy, my wife and I are in our eighties. We marched in the “No Kings” rallies just as we marched in the 1960s—for $free. Indeed, this protest movement is less focused than those of the civil rights and Vietnam eras. There are now so many issues—the corruption of institutions, the rise of cronyism, plutocracy, and American imperialism. Struggling to reclaim our dignity in the world and to stand up for democracy is not defeatism; it is aspirational.

 

Finally, “Trump Can Make America Optimistic Again” (MAOA?) by Mark Penn and Andrew Stein puts on rose-colored glasses and declares that “we are still the envy of the world.” They suggest Trump’s greatest challenge will be to set aside grievances and unify the country.

 

Seriously, have they been living here this past year? Putting aside grievances is not in Trump’s DNA. And do they know any informed person in another developed country who genuinely wants to live here now? Does anyone seriously believe it will not take generations to repair the damage to our alliances and the world order we helped create—and have so abruptly abandoned?

 

It reminds me of Republican friends who say they dislike the man but support his policies.

 

Taken as a whole, this trifecta is less about argument than reframing. Across all three, the same theme emerges: America is fundamentally strong, but we have fallen into unwarranted pessimism. The problem, we are told, is not what has happened, but how we feel about it. And the solution, improbably enough, is that Trump might lead us back to renewed national optimism.

 

We once had such a sense of hopefulness.

 

Today, government makes its case in inane “press conferences” (or, as I would call them, indoctrination cheer-leading sessions), offering a litany of achievements: the moon mission, military strength, a stock market that briefly exceeded Dow 50,000, and the “landslide” election victory of Donald Trump. These are offered as answers but they are diversions in place of accountability, as though prosperity and innovation can offset democratic erosion.

 

By this logic, any powerful nation may excuse rogue behavior so long as it continues to thrive.

 

What unites these reality distorting opinion pieces is not their optimism, but their insistence that our problem is merely one of mood management. Public concern is treated as a kind of collective misunderstanding rather than a rational response to events that have unfolded in plain sight—beginning, as I keep returning to, with January 6, 2021. We see what is happening.

 

And so I come to a second image: Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

 

It feels as though he reached out from the late 19th century to capture the present Zeitgeist—a pervasive anxiety that stands in stark contrast to these columns’ casual insistence that nothing of lasting consequence has occurred.

Alacrity of Autocracy

 We are at a symbolic tipping point: Trump firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he believed Friday’s jobs report was manipulated “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” as he wrote on social media.

A classic autocratic (and Pavlovian) response—no evidence, no careful review of the data, just his self-proclaimed genius “gut” instinct.

The report followed closely on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady. No doubt Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will be blamed, although he has repeatedly stated that the Fed’s decisions are driven by data. A rate cut is reportedly likely next month -- whether Powell can endure the constant onslaught from Trump and his acolytes until then remains to be seen. (It is evidence of dear leader’s lack of understanding that lowering short term rates – the only rate over which the Fed has direct control – would have little immediate impact on the national debt, which his One Big Beautiful Bill exacerbates.) 

Powell has also been waiting for the chaos surrounding tariffs to settle—if it ever will. These tariffs are designed to feed the narrative that the U.S. has been treated unfairly by its trading partners. Facts don’t matter. Only the story—and Trump’s self-imagined Superman persona rectifying it.

There is no opposition from Congress, and the glacial pace of a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in deciding the legality of those tariffs—imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—only adds to the chaos. Even if the court ultimately agrees with the lower courts that Trump lacked authority under the IEEPA, the case will likely land before the Supreme Court—already stacked in his favor.

The point of this brief entry is captured in a quote from 1984 by George Orwell:

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” The Party’s slogan was: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In summarily firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Party has spoken.  Our Four Freedoms further fade, as captured above by the award-winning editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mike Luckovich  

 

Baking the Cake

 

It’s a multilayered apocalyptic confection, suitable for a world addicted to dystopian hedonism.   Irreconcilable political ideologies, the plutocracy and the new class of “influencers,” have found the perfect recipe for destroying democracy.  And yet we go on, one step in front of the other, as if life can continue like this.  I’ve avoided these issues in my blog, but not in my mind, so time for a polemic catharsis.

To borrow from Dickens, the human race, like Joseph Marley, now wears the chain it forged in these times, having “made it link by link, and yard by yard; [and] girded it on of [our] own free will, and of [our] own free will [wear] it.”  I am now mixing metaphors (chains and cake), flailing for understanding.

We have embraced the kleptocratic emperor who wears no clothes, so transparent in his horrific iniquity and ignorance, but so in sync with popular culture, bolstered by social media.  We have become vassals to the very technology we now can no longer live without (somehow we managed before the ubiquity of the smart phone).  An agnotological oven has baked the cake and forged the chains.

It’s become a topsy-turvy world where an indoctrinated post-truth minority has turned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on its ear.  The archaic Electoral College was almost toppled by its vulnerability to manipulation in the last election and state Republican bodies are now arranging for the members of the College to become their marionettes. 

The ideals of the Democratic Republic are under siege.  The Supreme Court was the first to topple.  The imagined rights of individuals hijacked those that the social compact of the Constitution was supposed to ensure.  One only has to consider the endless jousting over vaccines and mask mandates in a pandemic that has killed one million in the U.S.  Or the “rights” of military-style weapon owners transcending the right of society to live safely.  Only a morally bankrupt society would tolerate more guns than there are citizens.

The previous administration laid the long-term groundwork for January 6, and its execution on that fateful day using mob psychology.  Sedition, an act of a third world country was perpetrated in front of our own eyes, and yet here we are more than a year later still waiting for justice to prevail. 

The pandemic hastened supply side issues, labor shortages, the flooding of the financial markets with liquidity, and now, the consequence, inflation.  This will be borne on the backs of those who can least afford it with increases in transportation, housing, and food outweighing other inflation measures.  Not discussed much is the elephant in the room: as the Federal Reserve increases interest rates, the current National Debt of $30 Trillion will have to be financed at higher interest rates, a self-fulfilling prophesy (in the absence of higher taxes on the rapidly growing uber-wealthy class) of either default or still higher inflation in the future so debt can be retired with depreciated dollars.  One only has to look at the US Debt Clock which is a real time pulse of our economy and debt.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine assaults our senses daily, accompanied by a feeling of helplessness without risking a nuclear war.  It is far beyond my understanding to discuss this horror in any kind of detail.  Finger pointing can be found for whatever position one wants to take.  Putin very quickly referred to slaughtered Ukrainians as “fake news.”  Doesn’t this resonate?  We have forged the chains of gaslighting over years of social media.  Four years of the prior administration made “fake news” the centerpiece of how to manage its citizens where truth/lies are fungible according to one’s own belief and feelings.  In fact, feelings are as valid as scientific evidence. 

How all this will end is anyone’s guess; nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, including a civil war or a nuclear war between East and West.  Civil war is “easier” to imagine than the latter, but the April 30 Wall Street Journal carries an opinion article by Peggy Noonan, Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo in Ukraine which goes to that very place.  She makes a persuasive argument:  “It seems unthinkable, but American leaders’ failure to think about it heightens the risk it will happen.”

Indeed, we have forged the chains, link by link. By weakening democracy here we have emboldened Putin’s actions with heretofore unimaginable consequences.

 

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan

The Alternative Reality

It's easy to be cynical in this presidential election year, the rhetoric and posturing of the scripted, agnotological "debates," the Super PAC ads, the robo-calls, the deluge of direct mail, sending out those sound bites to "the undecided."  But what would this election cycle be like if McCain had won in 2008?  Ironically, it would have been the Democrats finger pointing about the economy because we'd probably be in a similar situation, or worse, who knows -- it's impossible to prove an alternative reality, but we can speculate.

The debt Romney carps about was first ramped up by the Treasury Department of the previous administration, not by Obama, with the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008 to stabilize the financial system and it was quite necessary at the time.  Jobs were falling off the cliff before Obama took office. Our financial system was in melt down.  And what would have been a McCain administration response as that crisis just continued to deepen?  Go into an austerity spending mode?  Cut taxes?  No, that would have been impossible.  The time for government to reign in its spending is when the economy is NOT falling off the cliff and even a Republican administration would have had to take similar action (and the Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke was an appointee of the Republican administration as well).

Reviewing some of the more distant past, Clinton enacted tax increases in 1994, mostly on high income earners. Eventually, those, as well as a booming economy (note, no loss of jobs due to raising taxes on the upper 1%), turned around President George Bush Sr.'s deficits into surpluses. After three consecutive years of national debt reduction under Clinton, the surplus in 2000 amounted to $230 billion. 

The first fiscal year impacted by George W. Bush's tax cuts was 2002 when the surplus swung to a $159 billion deficit, a $286 billion negative change from the previous year.  True, we were now embroiled in the war on terror, but the administration persisted on raising the stakes with tax cuts.  Bush said while campaigning for a local Alabama congressman. “In order to make sure that our economy grows, in order to make sure the job base is strong, you need to have a congressman who will join me in making sure that tax relief plan we passed is permanent and doesn’t go away.”  Where were the jobs after nine years of this "temporary" but massive tax cut, mostly benefiting the upper 1%?

When Paul O'Neill, Bush's Treasury Secretary, argued against a second round of tax cuts, VP Cheney purportedly said "You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due."   This was Cheney speaking, not some liberal Democrat. O'Neill said in an interview "It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society. And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."  For that view, O'Neill was eventually fired.

Obama clearly underestimated how long it would take to reverse years of deficit spending, not only his administration's (necessary as the private sector was not spending), but his predecessor's as well. (He also didn't anticipate being stonewalled by Congress.)   But if McCain had defeated Obama in 2008, he would have inherited the same mess and today we might have Hillary Clinton running against McCain (or Palin or Romney) making some of the same arguments about fiscal responsibility being spun by Romney. 

As I said, it is hard not to be cynical about this particular election, but I respect Paul O'Neill's admonishment:  "It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society." That is why I support President Obama and hopefully in a second term he would have Congress' cooperation to achieve some fundamental tax reform and make inroads in controlling the growth of entitlements. 

And last night, as I was preparing to post this, a bit of serendipity led me to watch the 1957 classic A Face in the Crowd on Turner Classic Movies. Directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, it depicts Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a drifter who is found in a jail by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), who she enlists to sing and talk on a local Arkansas radio station, he ultimately rising to the pinnacle of media demagoguery.  He is nicknamed "Lonesome" Rhodes by Marcia, and she goes on the journey with him from obscurity to fame to fall.  

The relevancy of this film, made more than fifty years ago, to today is striking.  Lonesome is drawn into the political arena, and is brought in to help transform the film's Senator Worthington Fuller into a Presidential candidate.  Lonesome instinctively and sardonically understands the manipulative power of language and media. 

When he first meets the Senator, he advises him to abandon his stiff personality and give himself over to Lonesome's control:  "...Your problem is getting the voters to listen to you. Getting them to like you enough to listen to you. We've got to face it, politics have entered a new stage, television. Instead of long-winded debates, the people want slogans. 'Time for a change' 'The mess in Washington' 'More bang for a buck'. Punch-lines and glamour....We've got to find  a  million buyers for the product 'Worthington Fuller'....Respect? Did you ever hear of anyone buying any product beer, hair rinse, tissue, because they respect it? You've got to be loved, man. Loved....Senator, I'm a professional. I look at the image on that screen same as at a performer on my show. And I have to say...you'll never get over to my audience not to the millions of people who welcome me into their living rooms each week. And if I wouldn't buy him, do you realize what that means? If I wouldn't buy him, the people of this country aren't ready to buy him for that big job on Pennsylvania Avenue....I'm an influence, a wielder of opinion...a force. A force."

To Marcia he says :"This whole country's just like my flock of sheep!....Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president - and you'll be the power behind me."

An actor on Rhodes' show asks him about Senator Fuller: "You really sell that stiff as a man among men?" Lonesome Rhodes replies: "Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got 'em like this... You know what the public's like? A cage of Guinea Pigs. Good Night you stupid idiots. Good Night, you miserable slobs. They're a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they'll flap their flippers."

'Nuff said before next Monday's "debate" after which the "undecided" can flap their flippers.