Apocalypse now

The Republican Party convened. I know they did because I caught some of it in the media. But the snippets of it I had the stomach to watch live made me question whether this orgy of lawbreaking, lies, distortion, hate and sheer nastiness was happening on this planet. For if the Republican meeting was a television show, it broke new ground as the first entry in the genre of unreality TV.

Fear was the leitmotif of the convention—that is the word the literati use to describe a recurring theme in a work of music or literature. But it was not fear of the apocalyptic things happening in this Earth and this country right now (under the watch of a regime of a Republican president and Senate) but what might happen on a different planet if the Klingons* took over. The Klingons, according to the blabbers and blusterers who talked at the convention—orators would be too big a word—will bring pestilence, hellfire, out of control violence, racial strife, and the trampling of American values.

But wait, that is already happening, right here, right now. From sea to shining sea. We see fire but, unlike in the James Taylor song**, we don’t see rain. Not in California, where fire is consuming everything in its path not unrelated to the GOP’s denial of global warming.

North, South, East and West pestilence is here, the Coronavirus pandemic has killed about 175,000 according to official figures and 220,000 according to real figures.

Racial strife is here, not only in Mitch McConnel’s old Kentucky home where cops served a no-knock warrant and killed Breonna Taylor in her own house, but also in Kenosha, Wisconsin, nowhere near Dixie, halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. That is where a police officer shot a black man not rushing him but trying to get into his own car. Shot him in the back 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 times, paralyzing him permanently. Surely, the cop was in fear of his life. That is what the lawyer and the union will say, anyway. And the jury might even agree. That’s because the average citizen of this country is overwhelmingly and a-priori more sympathetic to blue than to black when it comes to justice.

The sequence used to be: racist murder by cop, a trail impeded by the thick blue line, acquittal, a community explosion in protest and blind violence in the face of impunity. Today, the community, anticipating impunity, explodes before the echoes of the shots have faded away.

The Republicans accurately described the United States today as a dystopia, the reverse of a Utopia. But it is a dystopia not of the Klingons’ creation but of their own. Promoting global warming. Opening wide the doors of meatpacking plants, bars, massage parlors, the whole thing, letting the viruses fly in freely like ghosts. Encouraging police to be as violent as they want to be.

You make the troubles, Donald Trump, that’s what you do; you and your wholly owned subsidiary the political group formerly known as the Republican Party.

But there were no princes at this convention, only toads and toadies, and Rod Stewart*** didn’t make an appearance. It has been a deadly boring affair, a funeral with speeches full of insults rather than praises for the departed, the departed being a party the GOP fiercely hopes will never rise again.

There was nothing fun and nothing funny, except some unintended humor. Senator Tim Scott, the only Black among Republican Senators, said Democrats wanted to turn the country into a “socialist Utopia.” Living as we do in a hyper-capitalist dystopia which is the root cause of the lethally ineffective U.S. response to the pandemic, a democratic socialist Utopia like, say, Iceland, which quickly crushed the Coronavirus because the politicians stayed out of it and let the scientists and their socialized medical system run things and save lives, would be a really good thing.

The Republican convention reinforced just how prophetic one of the writers I highlighted last week, Sinclair Lewis, was when he wrote that an American tyrant would run the country like “his domain.” Trump used as his domain, illegally and against precedent, every government resource—from the White House to the Immigration and Naturalization Service—and weaponized it in the service of his campaign. That’s one of the minor examples of the trampling of American values that took place during this convention.

There was a little of the sum of all evils that this president, this administration, and this party represent. The zenith of cynicism was conducting a naturalization ceremony as part of the coronation of the most xenophobic president in a century. But the convention was rife with cynicism, notably the trotting out of black faces to disguise the reality that the GOP is the party of racism. The Republicans remind the country of that every day for the consumption of that fact.

Two recent examples: One, the president has been trying to scare what he calls “suburban housewives” with the big black wolf that Biden and his buddy, the Black Senator Cory Booker, would bring to their doorstep to gobble up the white children and their mom too. Kill the suburbs and the suburbanized too. This is such crap, such a lie, so Richard Nixon, it would be funny if the case was not that the Republicans are turning the clock back to before Richard Nixon.

Example two: Moments before Day 2 of the convention, the Republicans rushed to yank a speaker they wanted to portray as the grieving mother of a policeman slain through the kind of violence the Klingons would bring, except that it is already here because of the hundreds of millions of guns thanks to the NRA and the GOP.

Mary Ann Mendoza, the withdrawn speaker, is only slightly more unhinged than the average MAGA fanatic. The day she was to speak she tweeted this: “Do yourself a favor and read this thread,” retweeting a string containing a bogus 100-year-old conspiracy theory about a mythical Jewish plot to run the world, managing to add some new bizarre and false Q’Anon conspiracy theories and touching on everything from the Titanic to Hillary Clinton.

It speaks volumes about Mendoza and about the GOP that this woman thought she could get away with this at the RNC. A good question would be what would have happened if organizers had missed it and the anti-Semitic libel par excellence would have gone on the air the same day Mike Pompeo addressed the convention from Israel. You hang with racist scoundrels, and some they will exceed even your high tolerance of racism.

The Republican convention was about trying to demonize the Democrats, casting them as Klingons, shining a harsh light on the party. Like by inviting an anti-Semitic speaker to address the convention on the day the Secretary of State was in Israel, they made a small technical mistake. I write technical because I believe what Trump’s own sister has said about him and extend it to the Republican Party: “He has no principles. None.”

The Republicans’ mistake was that they thought they were shining a spotlight on Democrats revealing every ugly feature but instead used a mirror that reflected upon them the face of a Klingon.

* The Klingons are a fictional species in the science fiction franchise Star Trek…Klingons were swarthy humanoids characterized by prideful ruthlessness and brutality

** Alluding to Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” 

*** Alluding to lines sung by Rod Stewart: “You take away my troubles, that’s what you do.”