The late Quentin Crisp once said, “Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.” A lot of people these days seem to have taken his advice.
The turmoil surrounding us is a mix of the farcical and the frightening. The social fabric frays. Vigilantism is on the rise. A US senator openly embraces white extremists. Cat and dog torture videos spread on Twitter.
A day after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a federal civil suit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, Donald Trump defamed her again. He also repeated his lies about a stolen 2020 election, called for Congress to default on our national debt, and suggested he would pardon many of the January 6 insurrectionists if he regained the White House. No serious person could have been surprised.
What do you do with someone who is dishonest, vindictive, terminally self-centered, and bent on pulling apart our democracy? The very least you can do is not help him. But power has a gravitational pull that is hard for many to resist, even when malignant.
The decision by CNN boss Chris Licht to give Trump an hour of prime time to spew his lies has been roundly criticized, including from within. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote that it was “hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN.”
Darcy’s colleague Anderson Cooper, however, said we mustn’t ignore Trump’s threat by hiding in our silos. I don’t think we need a lecture on being out of touch from the ultra-privileged son of Gloria Vanderbilt.
Aside from the town hall being packed with Trump supporters rather than a more diverse audience, it was impossible to keep up with Trump’s “firehose of disinformation,” as journalist John Heilemann told Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC on May 12. Trump bulldozed over interviewer Kaitlan Collins to the delight of his partisans.
Former congressman Joe Walsh says, “CNN performed a public service” because Trump “needs to be exposed.” Excuse me, but he has been exposing himself since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to launch a racist presidential campaign. He earned a lot of free media in 2016, and some are all too eager to help him again.
The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe have soured on Trump. But in 2016, Joe and Mika happily acted as fluffers for him. So they can spare us the sanctimony now.
Most of us know better than to buy the goods being sold. Trump claims America has given so much equipment to Ukraine that we don’t have any ammunition left for ourselves. Sen. Tommy Tuberville says Joe Biden has so decimated our military that we need to fill it with white nationalists. In fact, America has by far the most powerful military on earth.
I am reminded of a photo on Twitter of the back of someone’s car festooned with decals including, “Suck on it snowflake,” “Love it or leave it,” “Liberalism is a mental disorder,” and “Step aside, girls, the Alpha Males are back.” Can you say “overcompensate?” That guy probably goes to the 7-Eleven with an AR-15 slung over his shoulder.
For years we have been told that more guns will reduce crime, which only encourages trigger-happy paranoiacs to turn more and more patches of American ground into war zones. Republicans try to distract us from this by calling liberal cities crime-infested hellholes, even when their own cities have higher crime rates.
There are glimmers of hope. Though some people lionized subway vigilante Daniel Penny for his fatal chokehold on disturbed homeless man Jordan Neely, Penny was finally charged with manslaughter.
A year ago, the mass murderer in Buffalo wrote that he was striking a blow for the “white race.” There is no white race. There is only the human race, which he betrayed.
We live amid a tumult of the uplifting and the abhorrent. There is more evil than we can defeat, more suffering than we can assuage. We can only do our best. On Sunday, a trans refugee in Kenya was able to buy food thanks to a donation I got from a friend. She sent me a virtual Mother’s Day card in thanks. I’d never received one of those, and it made me smile.
Simple acts of kindness show that hate has not conquered us. Add to that a sober understanding of the threat facing us, and we may have our victory over the dark.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at [email protected].