Diatribes of Jay: Refusing to Watch the Show

For brief analysis of the House’s censure of the President, click here. For a discussion about reparations for the descendants of slaves, click here. For three things the Dems must do to win, click here. For suggestions on how Dems can improve their multi-candidate debates, click here and here. For an assessment of how bad the first two debates really were, click here for the first debate and here for the second. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

A unified, silent protest is among the most effective kinds.

For example, the president’s opponents might procure tickets to one of his rallies. They might procure almost all the tickets, feigning to be his supporters. Then, when he began to speak, they might all rise in unison, turn their backs on him, and file silently out of the stadium, leaving it nearly empty and him orating to mostly empty space.

What a fine protest that would be! How newsworthy! And how personally devastating to a man with our mad leader’s swollen ego.

Could we do something similar, as a whole nation? Could at least the 57% to 63% of us—almost two-thirds—who can’t abide the man? Read on.

The sum total of Donald Trump is showman. That’s all he is. He makes himself the constant center of attention with Tweets, insults, empty promises, and baseless claims to be “the best,” “the biggest” and “the greatest.” Sometimes he pulls off dark antics, like rudely mimicking women or even people with incurable diseases or infirmities.

The point is not just that, according to the Washington Post, he had made 10,796 false or misleading claims over 869 days (as of June 10). That’s over twelve a day for nearly 2.5 years, undoubtedly a world’s record among top leaders of developed nations.

The point is not even that so many of his statements are lies, inconsistencies, or even 180° turnabouts from what he said or Tweeted mere hours or days before.

The point is much simpler: the vast majority of whatever he says has no consequence but to attract attention. For those of us outside his “base”—around 60%—what he says has no consequence whatsoever, except marginally to increase our sense of depression and foreboding.

Yet many, if not most of us, treat his drooling showmanship as if it had some perceptible consequence. We repeat, republish and reTweet his empty words as if they were scripture. We spend hours and days carefully analyzing and refuting them. We televise panel discussions, debates and reports about them.

The vast majority of this activity also has no consequence because its subject matter has no consequence. It’s a waste of time and effort.

So Trump has not only made us focus on him, alone, most of the time. In so doing, he has gotten more of us to waste more of our time than we as Americans—once a practical, can-do people—have ever wasted before.

By making him the center of our national attention, we have left the huge problems of our day not only unresolved, but unaddressed in any serious way. They include things like dilapidated infrastructure, the coming exhaustion of our energy supplies, the acceleration of global warming, our middle class’ impoverishment, its inarticulate and ineffectual rebellion, the suffering and dying of people without health insurance, and the increasing surge of desperate people seeking asylum and refuge among us, despite all our unresolved problems.

We are all figuratively watching Trump’s show while our nation burns. If you consider the massively destructive wildfires driven by the acceleration of global warming, the metaphor becomes literal. Wasn’t that what Nero did, playing his violin as Rome burned?

Me, I’ve had enough. I’ve not made a scientific, quantitative survey, but I have high confidence that I’ve been wasting 50% to 75% of the time I spend on “news.” I read and think about stuff that has no real consequence, namely, Trump’s perpetual “look at me!” show. It’s like watching a toddler show off his nascent physical skills at the beach on a summer’s day. But this particular toddler I have no relationship with, no affinity to, no interest in, and no sympathy for. He bores and disgusts me.

The Democratic and progressive organizations that I support and follow are not much better. They endlessly repeat Trump’s drivel, not because it has any consequence, but because, if it did, the consequences would be awful. And these organizations, like the media, repeat the drivel just to push my buttons, in the hope of provoking my support. Instead, they mostly increase my revulsion and encourage me to turn away from our entire political system.

How much can an entire nation devote all of its attention to a single man, let alone one of Trump’s dim intellect, nonexistent curiosity, repeatedly demonstrated incompetence, and abysmal character? How much time can 320 million people waste stroking one man’s ego, ignoring real affairs of state? We’ve been answering that question for over two years, and the inquiry continues.

The oligarchs are happy because they got what they wanted. They got massive tax relief for the richest among them and richest and strongest corporations. And they got it in the first major bill to pass under Trump, and the only one whose purpose and effect you can summarize in just a few words: tax cuts mostly for the rich and corporations, financed by heavy borrowing.

Besides the big rollback in regulations (also made for the oligarchs), the rest of Trump’s so-called achievements are as ambiguous and disputed at his Tweets. They include: (1) his partial and maybe total repeal of “Obamacare,” now in the courts; (2) his Wall, now in the courts; (3) his mistreatment of asylum seekers, now in the courts; (4) his constant appointment and frequent firing of Cabinet members; and (5) his promises to deport undocumented immigrants, threatened to begin today but so far paling in comparison with Obama’s own quiet deportations, and now also stymied in the courts.

With this abysmal record of distraction and non-accomplishment in mind, I’ve decided to exert control over things I can manage almost absolutely: my own time and attention. I vow never again to read a Trumpian Tweet, and never to read, view or listen to “news” about what our president merely says. His words are about as consequential as a random gust of wind on the plains of New Mexico.

If he doesn’t actually do something, I won’t pay attention. Period. If the “news” doesn’t include something of real substance—for example, a signed executive order, troop movements, a bill signed, or a real person actually pardoned—I will not waste my time or attention on it.

If the rest of us did the same, including Congress and the voters, we might keep our minds and our attention from being dragged around like tiny poodles on leashes. We might actually figure out how to pull our nation from the ditch it’s been driven into, and how to get our resident mad narcissist out of the driver’s seat. We might do what computer programmers do when a program crashes and they can’t find the bug: they work around it.

We have a vast nation to run, to improve and to analyze. Trump’s reality show is gone from TV because too few wanted to watch it. Let’s do the same thing for his reality show as president: let’s drive it off the air with inattention. If our commercial media did more of this, and less lazy parroting of drivel, they might become enablers of democracy, rather than co-conspirators in its destruction.

Only Five
On Tuesday night, the House of Representatives voted to censure the President for telling four of its members to go “back” to their ancestors’ countries. Only five members who were not Democrats voted for censure. Only four of them are Republicans; the fifth was Justin Amash (I., Mich.), who left the GOP this month to become independent.

Of all the many horrible things that have happened since November 8, 2016, this is the one that most troubles me.

The four House members told to pack up and leave are all American citizens, as the Constitution commands. All but one were born in the United States. All are so-called “women of color.”

So what the President said was fundamentally wrong on many levels. But the failure of so many Republican House members to recognize that wrongness was wrong on even more. Here they are, in the form of rhetorical questions whose right answers should be obvious to every educated and patriotic American:

1. Members of the House, unlike Senators, come from districts of equal size. So they are equal not just in rank, but in political and social power. Is their equality a partisan issue?

2. Respect and courtesy among members are fundamental to any legislative body and a practical prerequisite to getting anything done. Is letting a catcall like “go back where you come from!” go by without objection consistent with that respect and courtesy? if it comes from the nation’s highest executive officer? Is that a partisan issue?

3. We are a nation of immigrants. Except for Native Americans, we all have ancestors that came from somewhere else. Is telling some of us to “go back where your ancestors came from” American? Does it matter whether some came earlier or later or some are “women of color”? Is this a partisan issue?

4. Don’t members of the House, who were duly elected to their positions in congressional districts of about 747,000 people, deserve more, not less, respect and accommodation than the average citizen? Is that respect a partisan issue?

5. Can the House work as a legislative body if a substantial fraction of its members think that some (besides committee officers) are, in George Orwell’s chilling words, “more equal than others”? Can democracy itself work that way?

6. Isn’t the separate power of members of Congress—who are elected, just like the president—a fundamental principle of our Constitution? Can that separate power exist, as a practical matter, if the president can belittle and diminish members of the House by pointing our their ancestry?

7. Should it matter that the whole country elects a president, while less than a million people elect each member of the House? If it should, and if that difference matters, isn’t our president something like a king? But isn’t that the last thing our Founders wanted our president to be?

8. Although he kept 300 slaves himself, Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in our Declaration of Independence. We fought our most terrible war, against each other, to make that credo real. Isn’t belittling House members based on their ancestry backsliding on that fundamental American value just a bit?

9. If some House members won’t stand up for their elected colleagues, will they stand up for you?

I know, I know. The House’s debates over censure got bogged down in irrelevancies like the definition of “racism” and the kind of personal defensiveness of which Archie Bunker would be ashamed. But shouldn’t our elected representatives serve higher goals and meet higher standards than most of us, let alone Archie Bunker?

For the life of me, I can think of only two reasons why any member of the House could vote not to censure the President for such an un-American and fundamentally wrong remark. Either the member agrees with that remark, or he/she is a coward.

Either way, the reason does not bode well for the future, or even the survival, of our Republic. Sleep tight, my fellow Americans, and for God’s sake don’t dream about your ancestry!

Footnote: “No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.” U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 2 (in part).

Links to Popular Recent Posts

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For an assessment of how the second debate propels the Dems toward losing, click here.
For suggestions on how to improve multi-candidate debates, click here.
For a more general discussion of how to improve debates, click here.
For a review of the first Democratic Debate, click here.
For a third, simpler look at why Trump won in 2016, click here.
For seven reasons not to make war on Iran, click here.
For discussion of Warren’s ability to defend science, and why it matters, click here.
For comment on the quality of Elizabeth Warren’s mind and its relevance to our current circumstances, click here.
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For brief comment on China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre and its significance for our species, click here.
For reasons why the Democratic House should pass a big infrastructure bill ASAP, click here.
For an analysis why Nancy Pelosi is right on impeachment, click here.
For an explanation how demagoguing the issue of abortion has ruined our national politics and brought us our two worst presidents, and how we could recover, click here.
For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
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For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
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For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
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For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
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For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
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For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
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For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Diatribes of Jay

14 July 2019

Refusing to Watch the Show

Only Five

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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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