But It's Getting There

The year is but two days old and the news that I had unsuccessfully sworn to avoid knowing has exacerbated my already depressed spirit. Some numbers: almost three-quarters of Republicans still believe Trump’s Lie that the presidency was lost due to voter fraud; 80% of Republicans want Trump to run again in 2024; and a majority of Republicans think that too much time is being spent on investigating the insurrection. Trump plans to spew his viles lies all over us again on 2022 January 6 the one year anniversary of the insurrection that was meant to overturn the election and install the dictator a head of the government accompanied by his horde of sycophants. It has become gospel that complete loyalty to Trump defines a Republican and any deviance from that 100% devotion threatens the apostate with the label RINO, or Republican In Name Only. Sticks and stones, sticks and stones . . . The cowardice of the Republican congressional representatives is appalling. Those who would govern us daily speak to us untruths; those who would serve the government act to pull it down; democracy does not enter their thoughts nor emanate from their mouths. Montaigne says “Only lying, and a little below it obstinacy, seem to me to be the actions whose birth and progress one should combat insistently.” Republican legislators are guilty of lying and obstinacy, and what are we left to think of their ethical characters. Montaigne again: “At all events, if there should be such gross and apparent ignorance or cowardice as to surpass all ordinary examples, it would be right to take it as sufficient of wickedness and malice and to punish it as such.” Despite absolutely no evidence of voter fraud Republicans and Republican congress men and women continue to promulgate the Big Lie. And what about the punishment for their wickedness and malice.

I’ve returned recently to Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet, an historical narrative that novelistically traces the struggle between democracy and power that extends from the English Civil War in the 17^th century (Prisons) to West Virginia coal country in the 20^th century (The Killing Ground). I remember reading at least the first three novels in the 1970s and early 1980s when I was fascinated by the Puritans who eventually settled North America and especially Virginia in search of freedom from tyranny. I was so much older then . . . more idealistic then and I was desirous to understand the development of democracy in the colonies as it led to the Revolution, and I recall my discomfort in her portrayal of Oliver Cromwell as a demagogue disguising himself in the cloak of religion. I am so much younger than that now.

            What happens to democratic longings when the questers actually achieve a semblance of power. And what happens to the citizenry that follows these leaders when the latter turn to demagoguery and crude populism laced with ugly prejudice and hate. Trump’s minions despite all evidence to the contrary and the decisions of the courts denying his claim, attach themselves unthinkingly to his lies. Onto what do they continue to hold? I am thinking of Byron’s poem “The Prisoner of Chillon.” I believe that I read it originally in a survey of English literature in my second year at college,  As I learn from Wikipedia, the poem concerns the political imprisonment of the 16th-century Swiss patriot François Bonivard in the dungeon of the château of Chillon on Lake Geneva. Bonivard is chained to a post next to his brothers, whom he watches die one by one. But this is how it ends: “My very chains and I grew friends,/ So much a long communion tends/ To make us what we are:—even I Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.” The prisoner in his imprisonment has learned to love his chains. And that is how I understand the Republicans who at one point kept their political and personal distance from Trump and now have come to love their chains with which he holds them servile to his whims and lies and demagogic appetites.

Now there is yet another and more sinister explanation for the behaviors and beliefs of Republican citizenry and especially those of that party who sit in Congress and who have taken an oath to protect the Constitution but who now have seen how allegiance to Trump might actually secure for them absolute power. There is a cartoon by Mitra Farmand: in it four wolves stand about disguised in sheep’s clothing, and one wolf says to the others, “Now what?” Perhaps it is that Republicans didn’t know what to do with themselves when they pretended to act with a democratic agenda and a civil conscience, but now that Trump has unleashed them they feel free in recent years to act like the wolves they have in the past 100 years have been, at least since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. Party of Lincoln? I hate how they defame that great man.

There is another cartoon I have kept since it was first published in the Village Voice in 1995. It is from Matt Groening. In it a guard looks through a slot in the prison door looking towards a prisoner sitting in a prison cell. The guard says, “I hope you realize that the more you call Republicans hateful and uncaring, the longer you’ll have to stay in the orphanage.”

Alas, I read the news today and I despair that the wolves will come out from their disguises and be again the dangerous predators I have long suspected they are. Alas, I think we will long remain trapped in the orphanage.