When I ask people from foreign countries about their nation’s feelings on Trump, they commonly say, “We just feel sorry for you. We never thought this could happen in the United States.”
The words at left of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes on the subject of demagoguery tell the story here: “ignoramus and rogue.”
The website A Word a Day features “A Thought for Today,” normally from a notable author born on this date.
Here’s one from writer Ann Patchett (pictured), born 2 Dec 1963: The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
Patchett uses the word “disturb” in the sense of interfering with the normal arrangement or functioning of something. And Lord knows there are plenty of things in the world around us that need to be disturbed.
To take the two most obvious examples:
If left to proceed in a business-as-usual manner, we’ll soon live on a planet that is greatly compromised in its ability to support life, and
we Americans will live in an authoritarian state.
I’d like to have a conversation with the product packaging guy who thought he needed to provide instructions as to the use of coffee stirrers.
I’m surprised to see so much chatter to the effect that Trump is losing his grip on reality. He doesn’t seem any worse today than he did when he retook office almost a year ago. Yes, he’s criminally insane, but that’s nothing new; his antics are identical to the Trump we’ve come to know:
• Takes actions (legal or blatantly illegal — it doesn’t seem to matter) that are calculated purely to build his personal wealth and power.
• Accuses others of committing the crimes that he himself has committed.
• Surrounds himself with loyalists in key governmental positions, regardless of how dangerously unqualified they are.
• Dismantles all aspects of government that provides value for the common American.
• Pardons convicted felons, regardless of how atrocious their crimes, if they’re supporters of him.
• Deploys economic policies that are universally deemed as folly by professional economists.
• Pressures the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies and political opponents.
Seems like business as usual.
When I was a boy, I believed that humanism would replace the theistic religions in a fairly short period of time, perhaps within my lifetime. I based this largely on the growing presence of science in our lives.
We now know, I reasoned, that thunder, disease, and the multiplicity of languages are not the result of God’s displeasure with us.
We’ve figured out that there are approximately 5.5 million species of insects alone, and that penguins did not live in the part of the known world in biblical times, making the story of Noah’s ark highly improbable.
To my dismay, none of this seems to have cut much ice.
My mom was an avid Fox News acolyte and Trump supporter, but our family didn’t “cut her off.”
We were both amazed and saddened that a Bryn Mawr graduate and voracious reader could have the same political sensibilities as the folks from Alabama, but no one took it any further.
We may think that it is uniquely American to discard science as the tool to determine the truth in subjects like the environment, vaccinations, the shape of the Earth, etc. After all, we re-elected Donald Trump to lead our country, which requires some heavy-duty ignorance.
Yet there are right-wing extremist groups all around the globe, like Germany’s AfD (alternative for Germany). From this article in “Le Monde,” France has a similar problem.
I’m afraid we need to come to terms with the fact that we live in a post-truth world, or, to put it more accurately, science is now viewed as one of several alternatives for getting at the truth.
In an earlier post I wrote:
Monotheistic religion is built around fear. There is no other reason to believe that an omnipotent being is tuned into everything you think and do, and, if He doesn’t like what He sees, He’ll happily sentence you to an eternity of torture.
Yet we need to take this in context. In the early, pre-scientific days of the human species, we had people, very much like ourselves, who stood in stark terror of storms, disease, eclipses, and, most certainly, death itself.
We all sympathize with the earliest days of Homo sapiens, yet we’re less sympathetic of today’s radical fundamentalist Muslims and Christians.
As I wrote in the previous post, if we still have an organized society here in 100 years, we will have long since disposed of this stupidity.
What American writer Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time) said at left rings true to most educated people around the world.
Monotheistic religion is built around fear. There is no other reason to believe that an omnipotent being is tuned into everything you think and do, and, if He doesn’t like what He sees, He’ll happily sentence you to an eternity of torture.
I seldom criticize others’ beliefs, but this is a concept unworthy of an intelligent species.
More to the point, we’re at a watershed point in human civilization. So many of our planetary woes are built on the idea that “my God in the sky is better than yours.”
Let it be purged from humankind. If we still have an organized society here in 100 years, we will have long since disposed of this stupidity.
On social media, there are thousands of comments on Trump’s statement here, at least 95% say: “It’s about time!” or “Trump is saving our democracy from the liberals!”
There’s a catch, however, though it’s not one that Trump supporters are likely to understand: This will require re-writing the U.S. Constitution, in particular, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1, referred to as the Elections Clause.
(It) contemplates that state legislatures will establish the times, places, and manner of holding elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate, subject to Congress making or altering such state regulations (except as to the place of choosing Senators). The Supreme Court has interpreted the Elections Clause expansively, enabling states to provide a complete code for congressional elections, not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes, duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making and publication of election returns.
