Tuesday's postcard, and striking the match on the culture wars

June 18, 2024

Dune-like paleosoils at the Painted Hills unit of the John Day Fossil Bed National Monument near Mitchell, Oregon

Bringing bad

Donald Trump and his MAGA followers don’t have a policy for global warming because, in their world view, it’s all hoax—something concocted by physicists and climatologists to prime the flow of research grants so as to line their pockets and pocket protectors. Journalists, at our peril, still cover this as though it were a game of beach volleyball, because this is what we’re trained and expected to do. We quote both sides, we report their sets and spikes, we poll to take the score of the match. Then we report the election results and depart for a favorite libation, or two.

That won’t work this year. The balance between Democrats and Republicans is what military analysts would term “asymmetric”—with Democrats trying to argue the truth, and MAGA Republicans arguing the culture. Facts are too “woke” to be the currency of exchange. What matters most is emotion, the volume of indignation, the rhetoric of Armageddon. First you own the libs. Then you round them up and put them in jail, or execute them. No need for trials or due process because we all know the “vermin” are guilty, guilty of opposing the righteous.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, try this on—former Trump campaign manager and MAGA barker Steve Bannon, a few days ago, wrapping up his speech at a national conservative conference with a bellicose “Victory or Death!” Or this longer examination via Rachel Maddow from yesterday.

Again, we have drifted into the era of Republicanism where homage to Donald Trump is a requirement and fanning the fake umbrage of a “stolen” 2020 election wins you bonus points. In full flight, Trumpism means framing this year’s election as a mass purging—not just of Joe Biden but of any government official who is unwilling to show or pledge allegiance to Trump. Just because the policies are crude (as are Trump’s whims) doesn’t mean that the plan for a wholesale purge is speculative. It’s real.

A central, non-negotiable demand is that we all forget what we witnessed with our own eyes on Jan. 6, 2021—the assault on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. One of the point persons for this experiment in mass hypnosis is the notorious Congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. As Talking Point Memo’s David Kurtz emphasizes in his dispatch this morning, it’s not as though there’s a less deceitful Plan B here. There’s no fallback position. The party is all in on re-casting the riot as a valid and commendable response to a mythical “stolen election”—the evidence for which Trump’s former Attorney General summarized as “bullshit.”

“Republicans aren’t just minimizing Jan. 6 as a tourist incident or a legal assault on hapless MAGA adherents ushered into the Capitol by complicit police,” Kurtz writes. “They’re baldly using it as a rallying cry now. Yeah, we did it. So what? What are you going to do about it?”

In the meantime, we’re only 21 weeks away from the 2024 election and it’s not at all clear that the as-yet undecided voters who will determine the outcome are paying much attention. Again, the Trump/Republican mantra (at least at the national level) is “heads I win, tails you cheated.” If Trump wins he will transform American government in ways that will be powerfully disruptive, both here and abroad. If he loses, it will feed right into Bannon’s “Victory or Death!” rally cry, an appeal for havoc that Trump is by no means discouraging. It’s hard to imagine that the cult-like Trump movement and its fomenters in right-wing media will accept defeat without stoking the flames of another insurrection, and that’s what makes this year’s election so volatile.

Of bombs and words

I haven’t written in weeks about the humanitarian nightmare in Gaza because I didn’t think I had anything more to say. That Joe Biden has a moral blind spot is clear to me, and, sadly, it’s not new, and it’s not responsive to the human suffering he has abetted.

Since I wrote last, more than one commentator has invoked Hiroshima, in defense of Israel, to try to put the carnage in Gaza in perspective—clearly implying that the killing of innocents in Gaza is tolerable by the standards of the near 80 year-old atomic bombings of Japan. Hearing this made me sick to my stomach. I thought about the horror of it but also about how that this cynical formulation would be received by my children, both of whom are deeply disturbed by the killing of innocents in Gaza, many of them torn apart by powerful, U.S.-made bombs. I also couldn’t help but wonder if these studio apologists would ever be brave enough to explain the exonerating math directly to the parents of the innocents whose deaths are rationalized in this gruesome and hopeless equation.

Without directly saying so, both my children (my daughter is 30, my son 25) have weighed in with what I understand as a vital parameter for the world they expected to grow up in—no more genocide. That has been their expectation and whether anyone else may think it fanciful or naive matters little to me. It was something they acquired through their lives and their study and their earnest hope for a future, not just for them, but for generations to come.

Stacy Gilbert, sharing her experience on the PBS News Hour

A week ago I wrote a name on a used envelope next to my desk. Stacy Gilbert. Her’s is the latest name of a high level U.S. government official who felt compelled to resign over our government’s complicity in the death and suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

Gilbert’s resignation was prompted by a document—the so-called NSM-20 report that had been built up for weeks as a crucial answer to charges that U.S. weapons had been used by Israel to commit war crimes, and that Israelis had purposely obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aide to the battered and hungry Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The expectation was that the report—had it concluded that Israel was culpable of violating international law— would provide the basis for withholding future military assistance to Israel. Instead, the NSM-20 only mildly acknowledged that it was “reasonable” to conclude that U.S. bombs had been used in a way that was “inconsistent” with international law. The document flatly denied Israel had obstructed humanitarian assistance. There would be no consequences.

Gilbert was especially critical of the latter finding, describing it as “patently false” against the evidence that she and several other state department and intelligence officials had gathered. You can watch Gilbert’s appearance on the PBS News Hour here.

The reason I wrote her name down is I wanted to underscore a deeper point about the damage this atrocity-filled conflict is doing, not just to Israel and Gaza but to America. When politics prevails and puts devoted public servants like Stacy Gilbert in a position where they have to resign to assuage their consciences, we all lose. We don’t just lose their talents—we lose their vital hearts and minds, because they can only be replaced by people who won’t speak up for the truth. When we force conscientious, honest people to resign because their truth is unwelcome, we’re the ones who lose. The truth does not belong to their censors, it belongs to us.

Lastly, on this subject: I’ve never been a big fan of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. But Friedman’s column this morning—American Leaders Should Stop Debasing Themselves on Israel—is the bravest I can remember. He goes right at the teeth of Biden’s folly, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption, and calls out the political theatrics behind the invitation to have Netanyahu address the U.S. Congress a month from now. I recommend it.

The Guy at the Fracas

A quick followup to my June 13th post on the Molly Marshall press event (Marshall is challenging incumbent County Commissioner Al French in the fall’s elections) at the County Courthouse. The young man who interrupted Marshall demanding answers to questions about taxes and police was identified by the Spokesman-Review and two other media outlets as a former campaign manager for U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers. The S-R described Estey as a “provocateur” which gets it about right. As I reported, he did not answer my questions about whether he was presenting himself as a journalist, and what his name is. But now we know. How anybody, including him, was helped by his clear intent to disrupt Marshall’s event is a mystery to me.

A few days with the prodigious son

I’ll be taking some time off later this week because my son, Devin, is coming to town to attend a friend’s wedding and probably carry my tripod on an outing or two. I don’t know how he got so much taller than I am. What I can answer for is he’s the living glue of the family, with his humor and very presence. Plus, he plays a mean saxophone, which I may have mentioned.

I’m adding a video from what turned out to be Dev’s most recent performance with Spokane’s Master Class Big Band (summer 2021) which is just a brilliant project, one that was instrumental to his growth as a person and a musician during his teens in Spokane. The trumpet player in the pink t-shirt joining the jam about midway through is Duncan Lang, another prodigy from Lewis & Clark who lives not far from Devin in Denver, where the two of them still jam and occasionally perform together.

—tjc