Le Fin de l’Enfant

Or as Kurt, friend of the blog, recently put it, “Tweety est mort”.

Leaving

Today, it was the best of times. The perpetually aggrieved man-baby skulked off the presidential stage in a fog of fury, resentment, choler, and confusion. His Twitter, the bullhorn-sized baby-monitor from which there has been no escape or peace for over four years, had finally been disconnected. If only this had been done when we first called for it here three and a half years ago, perhaps the country would be a bit less inclined towards self-immolation now.

Biden managed to remain standing until inauguration day. Sadly, there were times when I wondered if he could or would.

His team is assembled and ready for work, chock-a-block with highly visible (and competent) LGBQT* folks, People of Color, and myriad others from the various veins and factions of political identity that have been flailing helplessly against the constant insults and mockery of the Trump “administration”.

Signals have been sent that many of Trump’s most misguided policy initiatives will be reversed on day one of the new administration. We will rejoin the Paris climate accords, rescind Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and so on. These “policies” achieved nothing of substance, yet somehow burnished Trump’s credentials among his huge cult as a heroic force, fighting against the feminization of all aspects of culture and for the reclamation of America’s lost freedoms. They were the refutation of Obama-era inclusiveness, one-worldism and concomitant loss of American Exceptionalism that had ruined the country from their point of view. Trump had “corrected” this for them, at least temporarily.

The incoming administration is setting the table anew for the accusations that the country has been stolen from its “rightful owners”, those middle-aged white men who, in a long lost and mostly-imaginary Eden, could feed their families with a single blue-collar paycheck without any needless back-talk or sass from the little woman, and without being called deplorable or racist or homophobic or anything else by people who never built anything with their own hands in their miserable, liberal lives. Only Trump understood them, they thought, though they never understood what he thought of them.

And it was the worst of times.

Gone, but not forgotten. Gone, but not gone. Trump is now more than ever the undisputed God of his mesmerized minions. Where he goes, they go. What he says he wants, they are commanded to do.

He leaves the stage with 400,000 already dead from Covid-19, clearly another media hoax meant to take him down, and one that he both scrupulously and unscrupulously ignored in the months after his election loss. Of course, he pretty much ignored it before then as well, apart from inciting violence against those who tried to fight the epidemic as best they could. Hard to remember now, but it was only one year ago that he confidently and condescendingly asserted that we had it under control, and that it was only one person coming from China. “It’s going to be just fine” he said then and many, many more times since.

Very early on, even before his 2016 election victory, we agonized here that the advent of Trump was the end of the thing that was America’s most important contribution to worldwide democracy and the rule of law: the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. He asserted that the election was rigged and would not accept the results (if he lost). When he won the electoral college vote but lost the popular vote by three million, he asserted that all those three million votes and many more had been illegally cast and that he actually won the popular vote as well. He launched an election fraud investigation to prove it all, which, two years later, of course yielded nothing. Remember, I’m talking now about the election he WON.

This time, he lost by over seven million votes and lost the electoral college vote as well by the same margin he called a “landslide” and a “shellacking” when it was in his favor. So the same fantasies and lies and poison from 2016 were amplified and refined, and injected into the bloodstream of not only the MAGA crazies, but also more than 75% of all previously “normal” voters who identify as “Republican”, not to mention their elected representatives in congress and their favorite infotainment outlets.

The handshakes, well-wishes, hopeful words, and many other traditions of continuity between administrations, large and small, have been trashed by Trump. In his final days, he did as much to impede the new administration and set it up for failure as he could think of to do, even sending the White House staff home so that there was no one to unlock the door when the Bidens arrived there. Trump remained true to himself, petty and vindictive until the last second.

There is no longer any reason for a foreign power to negotiate any sort of treaty with the U.S., as they now understand that what is agreed to by one administration is readily tossed out by the next. Same as in every war-torn kleptocracy around the world.

Russia has succeeded beyond its wildest imaginings in its project to discredit the idea that the U.S. is a shining example of democracy and that democracy is a system preferable or superior to any other.

Need some visual proof that the peaceful transfer of power is no more? On inauguration day, D.C. is an armed camp with more of our uniformed forces keeping people away from the “celebration” than are deployed around the world trying to keep peace in all the countries previously thought to be irredeemably hopeless and backward. Seven people are already dead from the rioting called for by Trump just two weeks ago while his own vice-president, absurdly loyal, obsequious and subservient to the end, was presiding over a ceremony to record the already-finalized electoral votes. That loyalty was rewarded by chants of “Hang Mike Pence” from the Trump-fueled mob, while the pathetic Pence cowered near by. His crime? He tried vainly to point out to Trump that he did not, in fact, have the authority to disenfranchise 150 million voters with the dropping of his gavel. Not good enough.

What now, now that the conspirators, instigators and enablers have been pardoned? What’s the next act in the ongoing tragicomedy that is Donald John Trump? I’m almost afraid to hit the “Post” button when I’m done writing this because of the strong possibility that, by the time you read it, something so much worse than what we’ve already seen will have rendered my words quaint and dated.

All I can tell you is that two things are certain. The first is that we will have no permanent relief from Trump and his incitement, with or without social media. The second is that the motto that Trump has lived by and cherished all his life and the one that really should be emblazoned on his family coat-of-arms will be shown to be true once more: “Often caught, never punished”.

I’ll leave you with this today. When Kurt said, “Tweety est Mort”, my first thought was what Eddie (Walter Brennan) asks Slim (Lauren Bacall) in “To Have and Have Not”:

“Was you ever bit by a dead bee?  You know, you got to be careful of dead bees if you’re goin’ around barefooted, ’cause if you step on them they can sting you just as bad as if they was alive, especially if they was kind of mad when they got killed.”

We need to be careful where we step.