The Only Threat

Giuliani is in Ukraine because Republican Senators have irresponsibly signaled an intent to acquit Trump. When people talk about setting a dangerous precedent, they're not posing hypotheticals. Trump's effort to rig the election is ongoing and an imminent threat to democracy. https://t.co/7EO5emVDuf

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) December 5, 2019

...any politician appreciates is a threat to her/his ability to win re-election.  Period.  End of discussion.

"An imminent threat to democracy" is even more inchoate and abstract than "climate change" or the heat death of the universe.  And it has always been that way.  I'd like to think people would vote simple to reject an "imminent threat to democracy," but I don't.  I don't see any evidence they ever have.  Hitler and Hirohito were "imminent threats to democracy," but Americans didn't care UNTIL Pearl Harbor.  When the threat went from imminent to real, they reacted; and damn near reacted too late.  We were almost fortunate in our enemies, and certainly fortunate in our war leaders, that we fought a war on two fronts and won.  It could so easily have gone the other way.

Now the "imminent threat" is so vaporous it's almost impossible to see.  However:

News Analysis: “When President Trump left the NATO gathering early and in a huff on Wednesday, it only reinforced the fear that with America distracted and retreating, the West’s celebrated alliance has lost focus," write @StevenErlanger and @SangerNYT https://t.co/1QJU9oGNDY

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 4, 2019

We're talking about Barron Trump's name being taken in vain and Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert making fools of themselves for the umpteenth time, and this is the problem facing the nation.  Even one more year of Trump may do more damage than we can recover from in a generation.  Putin struck at the tentpole of NATO, and he cracked it.  Is the tent coming down?   Do we understand the world we will be in when it does?

Have we forgotten all the lessons of World War II?  Are we simply going to wait for the next Pearl Harbor while we retreat to our fantasies about how the world works when we don't even understand how a Smart TV works?  We used to support men and women who had visions for the greater good which weren't always so great, or good; but the effort now is to call the venal beneficial, and the foul beautiful, and the autocratic superior because at least they're our autocrats.  That, too, is an old vein of Americanism.  Look around the edges of the World War II movies before John Wayne won the war single handedly; take film noir a bit more seriously, and you see a darker vision of American life.  There's a crank character in "The Best Years of Our Lives" who espouses a conspiracy theory about the war and why we fought it that wasn't made up by the screenwriter, and is the same thinking you hear today, not on the fringes, but from the White House.  At one time lynchings were so common people sent family members post-cards about the ones they attended, and the practice extended from Mississippi to Minnesota.  The children's children of those people are still around, still steeped in the same culture and lessons, just waiting for their turn at the wheel.

The world created after World War II wasn't created by vaporous appeals to abstract ideas like making the world safe for democracy (or democracy safe for the world, as Walt Kelly wisely revised it); but by taking the world as the shambles it was (watch "The Third Man," filmed in the ruins of Vienna; I've seen the grass-covered piles of rubble in Munich, left there as a reminder in an ancient city with hardly an ancient building left in it) and rebuilding it with purpose.  We have lost that purpose, just as we have inherited roads and bridges and pipelines and power lines and think those things all part of a benevolent Mother Nature rather than the work of cities and engineers and labor; and now we are loathe to maintain what our parents and grandparents expected us to steward for our children's children's children.  We are more likely the children ourselves, not wanting to pay for anything but our immediate pleasures, not wanting to build anything but our second homes on coastlines or in forests or on mountains, and then to have the government we pretend to despise insure it for us, and protect us from nature, and rescue us from danger we put ourselves in the way of, because we are childish and irresponsible, and care only for our own desires.

We have run this down to where we can't accept any possibility of change; so we look to one candidate to be like the last President; or another candidate to continue the legacy of that President.  And we fear any change in how we pay for medical care, even as we can't pay for medical care, even as we wait longingly to be old enough to get government-funded medical care, but we fear the future so much the very idea of changing medical care for all of us, now, makes us turn and run away and seek comfort in the past, rather than assurance in the future.

We are a nation of children, telling ourselves scary stories and thinking that makes us brave; refusing to accept any responsibility and clamoring more and more for life to make us comfortable.  And everything rests on a knife's edge, and even just a bad commercial can bring a company down; one slip, we are all sure, and we, too, are gone.  We fear we will be next, so we cling to what is ours, and any change could mean disaster, so we don't trust the future or see any god there securing it.  Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood; alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

It has all been seen before.  It has all been said before.  And now where do we go?