Thursday's postcard, and The crocodile in the recliner

October 24, 2024

Autumn in the Huckleberry range, southwest of Chewelah, WA

More than a bad dream

I woke up yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, trying to make sense out of how we got here. By here I mean the tenuous, calm-before-the-storm of the impending election, now less than two weeks away.

Yesterday, I confided to one of my dear mentors how—as a kid growing up in a hyper-patriotic community (literally an American enclave)—I couldn’t fathom how Hitler and fascism took hold in Germany, leading to the holocaust, the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Gypsy (Roma and Sinti), homosexuals and other minorities, including the disabled. It hurt my young brain to even imagine such cruelty. How could so many people, so recently, have been complicit in something so hideous? But now I get it. It can happen here an—because a racist, Hitler-admirer is in a tight race to determine our next President—there’s a part of me that wakes up aghast, as if I’m trying to escape a nightmare in which a crocodile has taken over the recliner in the living room. An essence of the nightmare—converted to real life—is how many of my fellow Americans don’t really care all that much. By social osmosis, I was raised to believe we were generally committed to all be in this together. It turns out that generally we’re not. At least not in this phase of our republic. Trumpism is a cynical, grievance culture where there is more applause for pledges to punish and banish scapegoats than there is for the idea of working together to fix what ails us. The MAGA movement is a self-inflicted cancer.

Trump supporters outside the Capitol during the seige on January 6, 2021 (photo courtesy Wikimedia images).

Our craft, journalism, has been too slow to recognize and react to this. Part of this is our conditioning (for good reason) to be formally neutral when it comes to politics. Hence the prevalence of the ‘one side says this, the other says that’ model for balance and fairness. We’re free to talk to our editors, colleagues, and family about being appalled, but it’s unprofessional to explicitly convey that to readers and viewers. These constraints are well-intentioned but they’ve left us vulnerable to aggressive and crass manipulation. Trump’s media guru Steve Bannon (who is slated to be released from prison in a few days) recognized that and bluntly admitted to writer Michael Lewis that the media was the main opposition to Trumpism and that the way to deal with the press is to “flood the zone with shit.”

It turns out that it’s hard to avoid purposeful shit-flooding, especially when the lies come in herds and get such a head start out of the gate. So floods there are, on all sorts of problems or topics (some real, but many cynically concocted) that may affect the outcome of the election. Inflation is one of the real stories and, honestly, I’m one of those people whose grocery list has changed quite a bit in the past couple years as prices have risen. Gas costs more too. Both are legit stories; legit factors in our elections. But what really ignites Trump’s crowds and his movement is a lethal mixture of phony machismo, racism, misogyny and relentless bullshit.

Republican consultant Âna Navarro passionately denouncing Trump in response to new reports of Trump’s fascist and racist behavior while in office

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Germany had to reckon with the evils of Nazism, and regardless of how the looming election comes out, Americans will have to deal with, and effectively confront, the evils of Trumpism, beginning with the cynical, systematic use of fabrication —e.g. the bogus Springfield, Ohio story, that Trump and JD Vance shamelessly promoted, accusing Haitian immigrants of eating their neighbors pets. Justice requires it, and so much of our future depends upon it. The stakes are so much higher than most Americans realize. -tjc

One last note, regarding Tuesday’s feature, Al French in the PFAS corn maze. A vigilant reader noticed a mistake I made in the initial post about the order of the county commissioner’s meetings on July 19, 2022. It doesn’t effect the substance of the story but, obviously, I wanted to correct the error. Thus, if you wish to share the piece with others, please use this link to the corrected version.