Our Pearl Harbor
The day Donald Trump was elected president, November 8, 2016, like December 7, 1941, is a date that will live in infamy.
When the Japanese attacked America in 1941, it was an act of aggression, a de-facto declaration of war. President Roosevelt, mindful of the devastating toll of death and destruction wrought by the Japanese attack on U.S. naval forces in Hawaii on that day eighty years ago immediately called for a declaration of war. That tragedy convinced a reluctant nation and Congress to enter World War II. American men and women stepped forward in droves to risk their lives by enlisting to defend the nation.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,400 Americans, and the people were ready to heed the call of President Roosevelt and fight and sacrifice even their lives. This was the Greatest Generation. Today, more people die every day of the new Coronavirus than died on that fateful day. And people complain about wearing a mask. They revolt, rebel, threaten, and riot to oppose any measure to stop the virus. What kind of generation is this? What kind of degeneration is that?
Unlike Pearl Harbor, the Coronavirus was no surprise attack. There was ample warning. The outbreak of a virus in Wuhan, China was noted in the New York Times in January. U.S. intelligence agencies and American epidemiological watchdogs were on the case early. The information was conveyed to President Trump speedily. Although, unlike all other presidents, Trump plays scant attention to his daily intelligence briefing, this is one he could not have missed. A high-level aide told him Covid-19 would be the worse national security threat he would face in his presidency.
The tragedy of Coronavirus is not as complex as many journalists make it out to be. The story is rather simple. A foreign power didn’t do it. It is not on the Chinese. It is on Trump, who knew early the nature and the extent of the peril—at a time when much could have been done to save hundreds of thousands of lives and decided to dismiss it, do nothing. Decided to let the virus go about its deadly business.
But most of all, this is on the American people, at least the 48 percent who knowingly voted for a racist con man, a sexist ignoramus, a xenophobic demagogue. Knowingly: Trump misled the country about COVID-19 at grave cost, but he did not conceal his abhorrent persona. He reveled in it, made it a selling point, normalized it for people who felt the same but were embarrassed to show it.
Since I entered elementary school and I heard the word spic* directed at me, I realized the Idiocy Quotient and the prejudice quotient was still high in this country. To the people who say about the Maga maniacs that “this not who we [Americans] are” I say, maybe not you, but too many of your fellows are. And I ask, when they express themselves consonant with their prejudices, do you have the balls to get in their faces and call them out?
For former Trump fans who are now retreating from their allegiance, I have this to say. Trump’s main claim to fame before he ran for office was hosting a reality television show, The Apprentice, premised on greed and cruelty. Anybody who imagined that kindness would play any role in a Trump administration wasn’t paying attention or, more likely, didn’t care.
Trump’s actions regarding the pandemic—deceiving the public, spreading delusions about false cures and a quick end by a miracle, actively preventing public health measures to quell the spread, organizing mass political meetings and public events where precautions were not just ignored but scorned and the virus could spread freely—were characteristic of a persona ruled by greed and cruelty.
Greed: Business, the stock market, the economy first: Open everything.
Cruelty: Lives are the last priority. The losers, already with one foot in the grave and both feet out of the labor market, might die. Collateral damage. Not a public lament, not a presidential tear, not even a word about it.
Trump’s and his fanatics are all about grievance and resentment. There is a philosophical term, a variation of resentment, that aptly defines Trump and his ilk.
“Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one’s own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.”
Trump has created innumerable enemies to protect his ego from a whole life of culpability: Immigrants; Black thugs; Muslims; Shithole countries.
Trump, liar, loser, whiner, racist real estate magnate, con man, draft dodger, in a word, all around scumbag, darling of all the many other scumbags that pollute this country by their existence, evidenced by their support of Donald Trump.
I know it is heresy to dump on a substantial percentage of the American people. I could not care less. Honestly, not a bit.
