Through The Looking Glass
Preparing for the Trip
Here it comes. We’re about to start four years of government that’s upside down and backwards, animated by lies, not truth, and run by officials lacking a serious grip on reality.
Of course, a lot of people don’t have a problem with that.
As the increasingly essential Peter Baker writes in The New York Times under the headline, As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency1,
“I’ll do my little thing tomorrow,” a busy President-elect Donald J. Trump mentioned the other night.
That little thing was the first criminal sentencing of an American president. That little thing was confirmation that Mr. Trump, just 10 days later, would become the first president to move into the White House with a rap sheet. That little thing is the latest shift in standards that once governed high office.
When politics looks more like a WWE Smackdown than a Jimmy Stewart movie, politics is in trouble. But that’s where we are, and as we get ready for our own journey through the looking glass, it’s useful to remember that throughout Lewis Carroll’s “modern fairy tale,” as it was called in this review from the Guardian in 1871 (you’re welcome!) Alice was able to recognize that everything was topsy turvy, and that she eventually did make it back. The Mad Hatter did not give up tea to start a political party.
″’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.‘”
Our job now is to take back what the words are supposed to mean, stand up for things like facts and science, and keep shouting, “this is not normal!” when Donald Trump behaves like a madman and tyrant.
And,as I wrote here, we also need to add “and he’s stupid!” to the news coverage from journalists whose own ethical standards don’t yet permit them to say the obvious.
In his usual understated manner, Peter Baker calls voters’ acceptance of a president like Donald Trump a “shift in standards,” but it scares the hell out of me.
Talk about going through the looking glass! What can I say to the high-school version of myself, who memorized Robert Kennedy lines and stayed up to watch political conventions, finding political heroes to follow, volunteer for and believe in?
Take another look at Robert Kennedy’s historic speech to an integrated audience in apartheid South Africa in 1966:
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Declaim those words in a crowded bar today and…well, even I wouldn't do that, but standing up to defend anything resembling such possibility within our present political system would get you laughed out of that hypothetical tavern.2
A lot of people voted for Trump because they think he’s funny, or because he annoys the same people that annoy them. (See Doonesbury).
They’re not looking to bring about the change they need—they have zero belief that voting has anything to do with that!
Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats are turned off by politics because they’re tired of having their hearts broken. They’re talking about politics less, about Trump less, and not spending as much time watching the news.
Speaking of which—it’s just been announced that Rachel Maddow is returning to MSNBC five nights a week for Trump’s first 100 days. We’ll see if that’s enough to save the network from grumps like me.
That post, and the one before it, generated responses from readers who still tune into Rachel, and other hosts like Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Hayes. I admit to having spent more time watching during the hours when pundits say things I agree with about news I already know, but Rachel Maddow is different. (Plus, she shares my fascination with Watergate and Spiro Agnew).
I’m still not watching Morning Joe, but I am still reading my beloved print edition of The New York Times, where today I came across this:
Fed-Up Voters in Louisiana Wanted a Change. They Drafted an ‘Old Ball Coach.’
Sid Edwards was a high school football coach who had never run for office. Now, he’s the mayor of Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s second-largest city.
Here’s the way Rick Rojas’ story begins:
As Sid Edwards tells it, he was driving through a gusty storm, with lightning streaking the sky, when he reached a fateful crossroads.
He could turn right — proceed as usual, opening up the weight room at Istrouma High School in Baton Rouge, La., where he was the head football coach. But on this July day, he said, divine intervention steered him in the other direction.
Shoving his doubts aside, he headed toward City Hall, where he handed in paperwork to enter the race to lead Baton Rouge, the state’s capital and second-largest city. He had no money, no staff, no real shot at success — or so it seemed to nearly everyone, including him.
Before getting to the comparison of this political outsider to anyone else…do you recognize what you hear in that opening sentence?
It’s good writing, the kind that can make you hear thunder, and see lightning.
(AI can’t do that).
(Here’s another gem from today’s front page)3
Later in the story we learn:
He had never run for office before, nor did he have experience working in government. Before this election, he went more than eight years without casting a ballot.
And also:
His supporters had bet that government experience only counts for so much. That’s now being put to the test.
Critics have needled Mr. Edwards over his lack of experience and civic engagement. They say his vision amounts to a vague, unsurprising wish list (bolstering local law enforcement, cleaning up the city, tackling homelessness) with little in the way of concrete proposals.
They’re only “vague proposals” in Baton Rouge, but at Mar-a-Lago and soon, in the White House, they are threats to buy Greenland, occupy the Panama Canal and annex Canada. This is politics through the looking glass.
In the meantime, the same edition of the New York Times tells me about North Carolina Republicans who are trying to nullify more than 60,000 votes to reverse a Democratic win of a Supreme Court election. Conservative “election integrity” advocates in the state claim voter fraud, as they do elsewhere (nonsensically, according to the Brennan Center).
Anne Tindall, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a government watchdog group, said that “you can’t allow people to vote with certain rules in place, and then after the election say, ‘Oops! Now we’re going to throw out your ballot.’” She added that it did not make sense to delegitimize voters’ ballots for only one race, but allow them to stand for other races.
When you don’t have issues on your side, you can’t count on the electorate choosing you. The only to win then is to choose your electorate.
Will Trump’s turnout stay out? Or will the next election be a referendum on the looking-glass world that Donald Trump thinks he can shape with a post on social media, or a deal with a dictator. (He might be right about that last part).
I am encouraged to see the new House of Representatives gear up for battle, with leaders like Hakeem Jeffries, Jamie Raskin and younger members like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Maxwell Frost forming an American version of the British “shadow Cabinet,” where the differences between the two parties are put in sharp contrast, for all to see and judge for themselves.
We’ll see hearings—beginning with this week’s interrogation of Trump’s appointees from hell—that not only restore logic to Looking Glass land but present serious alternatives.
That’s the only way back. It may take two years, or until the next election, but to stay where we’re about to go would be madness.
That word, “upends,” does a lot of work
Note to self: Open mic for politics nerds. Quote great speeches. Soapbox included.
A perfect example of why I love the Times:
Hams in the Belfry: How a Cash-Poor French Cathedral Fixed Its Organ
Struggling to raise funds for the restoration of his cathedral’s antique organ, a priest from St.-Flour, a small town in France’s heartland, came up with a creative solution. He turned one of the bell towers into a curing workshop where farmers could hang their hams to dry.
The project was called “Florus Solatium,” a tribute to the town’s supposed founder, a fifth-century saint called Florus whose relics are kept in the cathedral. According to legend, the saint miraculously escaped bandits by reaching the top of the cliff, where residents welcomed him with a traditional local ham. “Quid solatium!” he was said to have exclaimed. “What a solace!”