Thursday, June 11, 2020

Castles in the Sky


I was reading this, where Dahlia Lithwick and Joshua A. Geltzer once again try to scare the bejeesus out of us all with the boogety-man who occupies the Oval Office:

Indeed, Trump himself has made the Orwellian claim that, among the many entities he insists lie constantly—the media, the FBI, the intelligence community, the entire House of Representatives now that it’s Democrat-led, the nameless and faceless “deep state” conspirators—the lyingest liars out there are our own eyes and ears. In July 2018, Trump, while addressing a Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Kansas City, told those assembled that they shouldn’t trust their eyes and ears at all and should instead get their facts from Trump alone. “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” Trump said. “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” In some ways it’s an old play, presaged by George Orwell in 1984 when he warned that “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It’s a double whammy that demonizes and delegitimizes the media as a whole while also—as Tyler Cowen has argued—wringing loyalty from all those who must then repeat the lie and cover for it. Every repetition of a lie deepens their loyalty.

But casual lies alone are for amateurs; the real authoritarian move is to construct an entire false reality—an unreality—around those lies. That’s what we’re now seeing from Trump and his loyalists. On Wednesday morning, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made just this move on Fox & Friends. Speaking about the peaceful protester pushed to the ground in Buffalo, host Brian Kilmeade asked, “Does the president think that this guy is part of antifa?” McEnany replied that “the president was raising questions based on a report that he saw, questions that need to be asked, and [in] every case we can’t jump on one side without looking at all of the facts at play.” Trump’s press secretary added, “This individual has some very questionable tweets, some profanity-laden tweets about police officers,” going on to suggest darkly, if baselessly, that “there are a lot of questions in that case.”

By later on Wednesday morning, Miami Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola was doubling down. He tweeted: “What part of having a guy who is trying to steal police frequency so he can sabotage them is offensive to you? He flopped better than Michael Jordan trying to get a charge foul. Seriously—be objective. This guy is no angel.” Even gravity itself, it seems, is a deep-state actor now. Asked on television to explain how precisely none of what Arriola described was apparent in the video footage we all laid eyes on, Arriola acknowledged that, “apparently, he was pushed by the police. … That was caught on video, so that’s clear, but what’s not clear is the motivation that the gentleman had in even confronting the police, and so I called into question, ‘What’s the real story?’ ”

See what he did there? Arriola claimed that people who saw what they saw were part of a “rush to judgment” and that “everything that is being videotaped nowadays makes it to social media, and right now, there’s a rush to judgment of the police, and I think that is very dangerous.” The act of recontextualizing that which happens clearly in plain sight is dressed up as subtlety and nuance—or, in McEnany’s parlance, as “asking questions.” But what’s actually happening is an effort to persuade the public that they didn’t see what they themselves have seen—or at least that they didn’t understand what they saw, or thought they saw. And most Senate Republicans, caught between amplifying Trump’s lie or calling it out, opted for door No. 3, pretending they were too busy to have seen Trump’s reprehensible tweet, or at least too busy to care. That may not be loyalty per se, but it is certainly complicity.
Yeah, I see what they did there, and the fact is:  the Emperor is still buck-nekkid.  Besides, I remember the last time this was done:  in the Rodney King trial.

There defense counsel, according to news reports, broke down the beating of Mr. King frame by frame, until the video, far from being damning, became exculpatory.  As I recall the reports on defense counsel's argument, no frame showed Mr. King actually in contact with a baton, or a foot (video framing doesn't work that way; oddly, it's not quite like film frames), or where any particular officer could be identified as the one striking a blow that never landed.  "If they didn't hit, you must acquit," was not the line from the trial, but it could have been.   So aren't I making their argument for them?  Isn't that the same damned thing, only now it's coming from the White House?

We gave up on "gaslighting" because the term never really caught on, and because we all got tired of using it.  It's even tiresome to point out the fact that Trump lies.  You might as well say Trump drew breath today.  Are we so benumbed by the onslaught, the Bannon "flood the zone" strategy, that we are as a nation doomed to be like the King jury, and acquit because we can't see the hit?

No; of course not.

A jury trial is a more rarified experience than most people give it credit for.  A lot of it is incredibly boring, and if a defense lawyer "tricks" the jury, we the on-lookers think we would have been too smart for the legal con.  But a jury has a very specific task, and it gets instructions from a judge that narrows its range of responses, and besides a jury never decides if someone is guilty of violating the law, they only decide the answers to questions about facts.  The jury "finds" that something happened, or it didn't, and what they are asked to "find" often determines what they will find.  They are never tasked with the broad question "Did he do it?"  They are tasked with narrow questions like:  Did officer "B" strike the victim with his baton on the night of....?

So Trump is not doing to the country what the lawyers did to the jury in the King case, because he doesn't have that much control over them.  Neither does he have that much skill in presenting an argument in his favor.  If he did, his staff wouldn't be scared to death of him speaking on race in America right now, or upset everytime his tweet overturns a carefully planned strategy of election campaigning.

More to the point, the American people don't have questions put to them which they must answer in carefully circumscribed terms.  Many didn't vote in 2016, or voted against Hillary rather than for Trump, because they were free to decide to do so.  Now, in a mighty uprising of popular opinion (not to be confused with populism), the people are disgusted by the racist in chief and what racism unchecked has been allowed to do in this country since, well, about 1970, although some memories only go back as far as the early '90's.  Trump may be trying to build an "alternative reality," but all he's really doing is building castles in the air, and making the mistake of trying to move into them.  He really thinks if he says this:

He has made it come true.  He touted unemployment numbers which would have appalled any other public official as if those numbers were the return of American industrial hegemony just after WWII.  Were his numbers even right?  He didn't care!  Saying it as good made it so!  Of course, all those unemployed Americans (at 13% or 16%, what does it matter?) were not fooled into thinking they suddenly had paychecks again.

So Trump may be building those castles in the clouds; but who's buying that real estate?  Even if it's the same number of people as bought it last time, it still won't be enough.  Besides which, outside of political Twitter, how many people know who Kaylieigh McEnany is?  Or Ricky Arriola, for that matter?  We know what we saw (those of us who saw it).  These people don't even have the skill to make a decent argument to dissuade us, much less have our undivided attention.
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