Random grumbling

• The pardon of that terrible old man Joe Arpaio should have been no surprise to anybody: one racist authoritarian narcissist pardoning another.  More upsetting is the fact that the people of Maricopa County, Arizona, kept reelecting him for twenty-four years.

• We can be certain that a great many Texans sincerely believe Hurricane Harvey was Divine Retribution for something or another; and equally certain that they'll find a way to blame it on Obama.

• As one more example of Republican through-the-looking-glass vindictiveness, Ronald Reagan will be joining John L. Lewis, Cesar Chavez, Mother Jones, and Bayard Rustin in the Department of Labor's Hall of Honor.

About that "base"

Don't bother setting that cross on fire: it will serve well enough as-is.

There is a segment of America that fiercely supports Tr*mp no matter how badly or insanely he behaves.  That "base" is estimated to be about 30% of the population.  Who are they?  Some are Klansmen or Neo-nazis, but those are relatively tiny splinter groups.  The noisily Ayn-Randian "alt-right" internet trolls are even fewer in number.

The bulk of Tr*mp's base consists of white Evangelical Christians — the people who used to be called "fundamentalists."  Best known for their reactionary stance on social issues and disdain for science, their  loyalty to a lying, self-serving, egomaniacal sexual predator certainly seems misplaced — but Tr*mp embodies their desires and ambitions better than any conventional politician ever could.  (If he turns out to be the Antichrist, that's fine too.)

Basic to Tr*mp's appeal is his promise to restore an imagined "golden age" of America — that mythical time before rationality beat so hard at the bulwarks of ideology, before their God-given right to define the parameters of truth was challenged.  Tr*mp is waging a holy war on the political and intellectual "elites" who either belittle or ignore them.  It's all about self-esteem — economics doesn't even come into the picture.

While black Evangelicals and more mainstream Christians reject the President for his moral bankruptcy, white Evangelicals seem to be taken with what theologians call antinomianism — the idea that those who have been "saved" by faith are no longer bound by earthly moral codes.  Tr*mp really could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, and they would be unfazed.

Democrats can stop worrying about "winning back the white working class" — the Evangelicals won't budge, and the rest of the white working class will come home once the Republicans are finished screwing them.  To win elections, Democrats have to mobilize their own base voters by generating some excitement.  They did that with Obama in 2008.  Can they do it again?

Monumental Errors

My favorite public monument is on the east side of Columbus Circle, commemorating the sailors lost in the sinking of the battleship Maine.  It is enormous, and enormously busy, jumbled with classical figures in tragic or heroic postures, dripping with gilt and allegory.  It is an extraordinary representation of American grandiosity and self-satisfaction at the end of the nineteenth century.

The sinking of the Maine, you may recall, was America's excuse for making war on Spain and stealing a bunch of its colonies.  Both the monument and the Spanish-American War came about due to the efforts of William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day.  Spain's defeat left the US nominally in control of the Philippines, which came with several ongoing anti-colonial revolutions.  One of those was the Moro Rebellion, the setting for Our President's racist lie about General Pershing and bullets dipped in pig's blood.  The Moros have been in rebellion against Spain, the United States, Japan, the Philippine government, and anybody else who tried to control them for about four hundred years now, most recently in a loose partnership with ISIS.  They never quit.

New Yorkers rarely even notice the Maine monument, including the Puerto Ricans, the Filipinos, the Cubans, and the occasional transplant from Guam (yes! Guam!) whose peoples suffered the adverse effects of American imperialism.  On the other hand, a plaque honoring Robert E. Lee on a tree in a Brooklyn churchyard will be coming down.  Some memories from the nineteenth century remain distressingly fresh.

I'd have less problem with Confederate monuments if the likes of Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson were portrayed not as heroes, but as the losers they were.  I also have a problem with the numerous Confederate traitors on display in the US Capitol, sponsored by a gaggle of southern states.  The State of New York could sponsor statues of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the Capitol, but I guess New Yorkers don't have the same sense of "heritage."

As for the monument pictured above, sponsors hope to locate a suitable site in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Object Permanence

Did you happen to notice how quickly that gathering of neo-fascists in Charlottesville VA diverted public attention from the threat of nuclear annihilation?  America appears to have an ongoing problem with object permanence: the difficulty infants have in grasping the continued existence of an item after they stop looking at it.

Granted, the threat of American fascism is considerably greater than any threat from Kim Jong-un.  Historically, fascism has been one of the more disagreeable outgrowths of plutocracy — and our widening wealth gap, failure to enforce antitrust restrictions, and antidemocratic actions like the Citizens United decision all have broadened the powers of the megawealthy over the rest of us.

The fascist penchant for militarism has been characteristically American for at least a century, along with the propensity to demonize foreigners and scapegoat minorities.  True fascism in the United States has been countervailed more by cultural and regional disunity than by democratic institutions, but the growth of information technologies has broken down those barriers.  All that remains is a stubborn affection for civil liberties — and those are under systematic attack.

Next week, something new will happen: a venereal disease will be traced to avocados, or Tr*mp will declare war on the Moon.  Will America forget the threat of fascism?

Probably.

North Korea

How do you deal with a leader who is unstable, immoral, and incompetent?  For starters, you can do your best to keep him from being reelected in 2020.  In the meanwhile, you can hope that the people around him won't let him do anything too stupid.

As for Kim Jong-un, he certainly is immoral, but he is neither unstable nor incompetent — and even a far less competent Dear Leader would recognize that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only real guarantee of national survival given the regime-changing proclivities of the world's foremost military superpower.  Kim saw what became of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

A nuclear deterrent works only if your adversaries know you have it; hence, the bomb and missile tests, and the pictures of Kim with that rocket-ready nuclear warhead.  When American experts conceded that the threat was real, our own Dear Leader and National Id reacted predictably.  Kim countered Tr*mp's dire warnings with a specific threat against the air base on Guam, demonstrating his superiority at the freak-em-out rhetoric game.

Having lived through decades of Mutually Assured Destruction, beginning with the times I hid from atom bombs under my elementary school desk, I find it hard to take the current situation all that seriously.  Rex Tillerson has been downplaying Tr*mp's bellicose pronouncements for all he's worth, and I'd like to think that even if Tr*mp did have a psychotic break and ordered a preemptive attack, "his" generals would not comply.  (You don't think they'd have given him the real nuclear suitcase, do you?)

Over the next couple of months, the world will settle down to a nuclear-armed North Korea, China will be ignoring the economic sanctions it approved last week, and the USofA will move on to its next crisis.  We all can put our old classroom desks back in storage.

The Mess in Venezuela

Back in the early Seventies, I met a Venezuelan general named Felix at a bar overlooking the Orinoco River.  Hearing I was from New York, he wondered if I knew his friend Nelson.  Nelson?  Sí.  Nelson Rockefeller.

Now, Venezuela is falling back into militaristic authoritarianism, but this time without the domination of the USofA.  The American news media are presenting a simplistic, Manichean model of a socialistic "dictator" versus a "democratic opposition."  The situation is not nearly so simple.

President Nicolás Maduro is heir to the "Bolivarian Revolution" of Hugo Chávez, a program that nationalized Venezuela's oil fields and used the profits to better the lives of Venezuela's poor.  The program was understandably popular, and worked fairly well until oil prices collapsed.  Maduro's efforts to maintain benefits to satisfy his base voters made the inevitable economic disruption much worse that it would have been otherwise, multiplying government debt and stoking triple-digit inflation.  There was no money to pay for imports of food, medicine, and other essentials.

As beleaguered leaders are wont to do, Maduro makes sure that whatever goods are available go to his security forces.  Those forces, along with substantial numbers of poor Venezuelans still fiercely loyal to the memory of Chávez, have kept Maduro in power — but the Presidente has another important advantage: there is no unified opposition.

The two former mayors recently moved from house arrest to prison agree with each other on almost nothing.  Another opposition "leader" is Venezuela's Attorney General, a pro-democracy Bolivarian who is a member of Maduro's political party.  Then there are the business interests calling for libertarian free markets, allies of the multinational oil companies that want their oil fields back (including remnants of the failed US backed coup attempt of 2002), a vast splintering of student groups, and more.

Typical of such situations, the largest group consists of people who really don't care who is in charge so long as their families have access to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.

The US sanctions against Maduro and his close associates will accomplish nothing: it appears that the Bolivarians, unlike most political leaders, failed to enrich themselves personally while in power.  An embargo on Venezuelan oil would make the lives of ordinary Venezuelans much worse (and elevate gasoline prices in the US.)  At this time, there's nothing to do but "wait and see."