Susan B. Glasser, writing in The New Yorker, has provided readers with a "2024 In Review" piece that she titled, "The Weird New Normal of Donald Trump in 2024." Here is how Glasser frames her effort:
Every year since 2018, I have written a version of this year-end Letter from Washington. What’s striking reading back through them now, on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House, is not so much his continued dominance of our politics as it is the consistency of how he has accomplished it—the manic governing by social-media pronouncement, the bizarro news cycles, and the normalizing of what would have previously been considered the politically un-normalizable. Even his targets are remarkably similar year in and year out—the Radical Left Lunatics, windmills, Justin Trudeau. In Trump’s 2023 Christmas social-media post, he wished the nation a happy holiday while praying that his enemies “ROT IN HELL.” What we have managed to forget about Trump in these past few years would fill entire books about other Presidents. This year-end exercise has been a small effort in trying to remember (emphasis added).
As Glasser pursues her exercise in "trying to remember," she makes what I think is a notable point:
A new Associated Press / norc poll, released Thursday, says sixty-five per cent of American adults now feel the need to limit their consumption of news about politics and the government—the Great Tune-Out is real.
In other words, Glasser is telling us, she is not the only one who has "managed to forget" about Trump - and Glasser's characterization suggests that it actually takes some considerable effort to do that. Unlike Glasser, however, who is, after all, paid both to remember and to comment, ordinary Americans apparently would rather forget. At least, they don't want to be reminded.
The "Great Tune-Out" that Glasser has brought to our attention may help many of us feel better. It does seem, if Glasser's statistics are right, that people may be "tuning out" because it's so painful to accept the fact that Donald J. Trump is now going to be, once again, our national "representative." That "Tune-Out" seems to mean, the way I'm interpreting it, that most of us would like to forget about how our next president will be "representing" us to the world at large. Sixty-five percent of us, apparently, don't want to be reminded that we have elected a self-promoting, pontificating, blowhard, who has no significant respect for other nations, or the law.
If I am interpreting those poll results correctly, I can well understand where they come from. Trump's conduct is often so cringeworthy that it's embarassing to have to face the fact that he is now our number one national spokesperson. Take over Greenland? Comandeer the Panama Canal? Annex Canada? Oh, sure! I would rather not hear about it!
My own thought, however, is that we had darn well better keep paying attention, painful though it may be. Trump works for the nation - for all of us - not vice versa (which is one of the things that Trump doesn't seem to understand). To make self-government work, we need to keep in mind that we are the "governors," not the "governed." In other words, we are "in charge."
If we don't pay attention to what our "representatives" are doing in our name (because it's too painful to contemplate, or for any other reason), we can pretty quickly end up finding that our interests will be sacrificed and forgotten. We need to pay attention, in other words, to what our "representatives" are doing in our names. If we don't, this nation and the world at large will likely soon find themselves in a world of hurt!
Image Credit:
newyorker@newsletter.newyorker.com
https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/
ReplyDeleteNot all techies think like Elon Musk.
This is something I've been struggling with recently, now even more with the election of a totalitarian Fascist as the Present of the United States of (North) America.
ReplyDeleteMy first response is to hunker down and focus on building bioregional governance here in the Santa Cruz Bioregion, as a means of protecting ourselves and the Natural World hereabouts.
However, the points you make are well taken, that we must, somehow, work to oppose the excesses of a representative republic taken over by a fascist central government.
I'm not sure how to do that, as our economic system is dominated by corporate capitalism and our political system is dominated by two corporate funded political parties. I don't feel comfortable joining either party, and the political system is skewed to eliminate any effective third parties.
That leaves me attempting to organize, something, locally to at least defend and protect the natural world in our bioregion, and promote bioregionalism regionally and nationally.
What to do, what to do?