Shooting on 5th Avenue

In his inaugural address to the nation, the newly-minted president of the United States said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” No, wait. He didn’t say that in his inaugural address. He said it a year ago in a campaign speech in Sioux City, Iowa.

But he might as well have. Nothing more accurately captures the contempt Trump has for his supporters – their gullibility, their unreasoning adoration of him, their willingness to accept words from his mouth that range from the inaccurate to the untrue to the utterly fantastical, than that sentence.

Except for possibly this one, which was in the inaugural address: Washington. he said, has “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.” In fact, as the New York Times pointed out in an editorial entitled What Trump doesn’t get About America, the United States leads the world in military spending, allocating more than the next seven nations combined, including China and Russia. Current spending, in fact, is far higher than it was before the 9/11 attacks.” But the idea that the U.S. military is in disarray and needs to be rescued by him, though not true, plays better with his audience.

Or this, in which he used the quickly-becoming-immortalized phrase “American carnage” to perpetuate his characterization – always a crowd-pleaser at his rallies -- of U.S. cities as crime-ridden hellholes aching to be pulled back from the brink by him. In fact, crime is far lower than in past decades. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. But his followers believe otherwise because he tells them to and they want to. Of course crime is a problem. It’s always a problem. And now, more than ever, it’s related to the easy availability of guns which he and his folks are so fond of. But Trump’s depiction of U.S. cities as being on the verge of incineration and collapse because of crime is just theater.

Or this, always a reliable entry in the Republican hit parade: that government spending is all about taking money away from the decent and hard-working and handing it over to the lazy and stupid. And so, in his address, he pandered to this mythology by identifying as a top priority his intention to “get our people off welfare and back to work.” This is exactly what his people want to hear – that their hard-earned dollars are being taken away from them by “big government” and handed over to losers, and that’s why they’re not as prosperous as they would otherwise be. 

What they don’t want to hear, and what it’s therefore not in Trump’s interest to tell them, is that “welfare” is and always has been a miniscule part of government expenditures. “The number of people receiving federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits fell by more than 70 percent, to 1.2 million, between 1996 and 2016,” the Times editorial said. “As Mr. Trump spoke about the disappearance of jobs…the unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent in 2009, the height of the recession, to less than 5 percent.” So getting people off welfare and back to work, though generally a laudable idea, is not a major priority because it’s not a major problem. But saying otherwise, in the certainty that his true believers will unquestioningly accept everything he says, is what works best for Mr. Trump.

Same with his “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” another fan favorite because they believe what he has told them – that thieving foreigners have stolen away our manufacturing jobs and that he intends to put a stop to that right now. What he doesn’t tell them, because it wouldn’t help him to do so and because they don’t want to hear it, is that he can’t put a stop to the real culprit in the loss of manufacturing jobs, automation. Nor does he mention the millions of American jobs that are dependent on commercial interaction with all these villainous countries.

The big question with regard to this speech is…why. It was, as many people have observed, much more like a campaign speech than an inaugural address. Our 5th Avenue shooter was still firing away even though there was no longer any reason to do so. Why waste time and energy, and political capital, in another sermon to the converted when he could have used it to bring at least a few members of the unconverted into the fold? Flyover’s opinion: Donald Trump’s run for the presidency was never about serving the people, improving their lot, striving for a more perfect union, or persuading people to embrace a vision of how things ought to be. This was Donald’s Excellent Adventure – his fun and exciting new career. It was another source of food for his insatiable ego, and the feeding required an endless supply of narratives, invented if necessary, for him to be the hero of, an endless supply of dragons of which he will be the slayer. Those narratives, and the ego gratification that goes with getting people to believe them, are the fun of it for him, and that’s why he pounded away at them again. He doesn’t give a hoot about converting the unconverted. He just wants to hear, again and again, the roar of the crowd  And so he tells that crowd whatever will make the roaring happen. knowing they will believe whatever he says. 

If he thinks so little of his followers, imagine what he thinks about the rest of us.

From Russia Without Love

It was recently reported that Trump supporters, no longer able to logically deny that Russia launched a cyber attack against America, have switched their argument to this: Yeah, okay, Russia did it, but what’s the big deal? Russia’s okay, Putin’s okay, we just don’t see it as anything to get worked up about.

Well, anyone who thinks Russia’s meddling with our election -- and, by inference, our entire cyber infrastructure -- is not a big deal, simply doesn’t understand Russia – what its place in the world is and has been. So, a few facts of life regarding no-big-deal Russia: and its dictator Vladimir Putin:

The KGB

The KGB, in which Putin was a high-level player, was a Soviet secret police organization whose specialty was the suppression of internal dissent, in the service of which it imprisoned and/or exiled and/or murdered thousands and thousands of people within Russia itself and in the many “satellite” countries Russia had taken over by force after World War II. Internal dissent was defined by, among many other things, the practice of religion, which was forbidden in the Soviet Union and brutally suppressed, and by any criticism of communism or the government. The organization was the embodiment of Orwell’s “Big Brother,” with operatives and informants everywhere, in a closed-off, paranoid society in which the only “news” was government propaganda and in which it was necessary to be extremely careful about whom you were talking to and who might overhear, lest you be grabbed up in the night, held incommunicado, and sent to the Gulag for the rest of your life. The KGB was a merciless and brutal force, not unlike the reviled Gestapo and SS of Nazi Germany. No big deal if this former secret police operative directs a computer hack of U.S. elections?

The Cold War

After World War II, Russia joined the United States as a nuclear power, and the two countries developed and deployed enough nuclear firepower, targeted at each other, to destroy the world many times over. Over time, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of a nuclear apocalypse under which people of my generation were brought up died back and much of the back-and-forth saber rattling ended. But Russia still has hundreds of missiles pointed at U.S. population centers, and the implicit threat of Armageddon remains. Russia may not be the enemy of the U.S. it once was, but it is no friend. The term “hostile power” pretty much captures it. No big deal if this nuclear-armed adversary attacks our cyber infrastructure?

No big deal to Europe?

U.S. allies in Europe, countries we have solemnly promised to defend and who have promised to defend us as members of NATO, are deathly afraid of Russia. And Russia gave a vivid and bloody demonstration of just how justified that fear is by its ruthless theft of Crimea from Ukraine, one of the former Soviet satellites ruled over by the Kremlin with an iron fist.

“…few stand to lose more than the pro-American leaders of countries in Central and Eastern Europe,” wrote Josh Rogin recently in the Washington Post. “Those leaders, fighting on the front line of the battle against Putin’s drive to upend the democratic world order, are asking Trump to think twice before choosing the wrong side.”

A letter, quoted by Rogin, from 17 current and former officials of these countries, , said this: “Putin does not seek American greatness. As your allies, we do.” They went on to caution against any weakening of sanctions against Russia for its Ukraine adventure. “The rules-based international order on which Western security has depended for decades would be weakened. The alliances that are the true source of American greatness would erode: countries that have expended blood, treasure and political capital in support of transatlantic security will wonder if America is now no longer a dependable friend.” In short, millions of people in the vicinity of Russia are terrified that Russia will (again) take over their countries by force and subjugate them to the rule of the Kremlin. No big deal if our leadership defends Russia and its leadership and questions the viability of NATO?

Putin’s Leadership

Under Putin, so admired in certain quarters in the U.S., the Russian economy as measured by GDP is about 1/12th the size of America’s. America’s is the largest in the world; Russia’s is 13th. It has a robust and predatory mafia, endemic and rampant corruption at every level of government, and an oligarchy/kleptocracy that puts vast wealth in the hands of a miniscule minority, the connected, and precious little in the hands of everybody else. It produces little else but oil, military hardware, government bureaucrats, and spies. Putin’s leadership consists of persuading his countrymen that life would be good if they could only return to their chest-thumping ways of old when they strutted on the world stage and enslaved most of Eastern Europe. No big deal that this second-rate operation is so admired by some Americans?

Are we clear?

America can live in the same world as Russia – interact with it, trade with it, have economic ties to it, and, hopefully, avoid ever going to war with it But that doesn’t mean that Russia is just some big, friendly bear on the other side of the world – a country whose leader is worthy of our admiration because of his decisiveness and whose intentions are nothing but benign. Russia is large and dangerous and not a friend of America, This is the country your leader apparently wishes to make nice with, and who either denies or sees nothing untoward in its vigorous attempts to attack the core of our democracy, the electoral process. He is wrong. Russia and its cyber attacks are a very big deal. Those who kiss them off as a minor distraction are flirting with the end of democracy in the United States.

Or worse. If Russia, or anyone else, should hack its way into our power grid and/or our financial system? Well, good night and good luck. And let’s be clear: This is not theoretical. It happened. Russia hacked its way into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. So it has the intention and it has the means.

It’s a very big deal.  Trump, as president, needs to stand up like a man, and like a commander-in-chief, and defend his country against the depredations of this aggressor, instead of defending the aggressor.

Ordinary People

When I was a copy boy at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a thousand years ago, the reporters and editors I worked around were definitely a mixed bag – old and young, grouchy and cheerful, industrious and lazy, zealous and jaded, introverted and loud – but they were for the most part ordinary folk. Newspaper pay was poor then, so they were firmly ensconced in the middle class, if that. They had spouses, they raised children and doted on grandchildren, they went to church, they kvetched about low pay and high taxes, they barbecued in the back yard, and some of them sometimes drank too much.

Editorially, the P-D had a liberal tilt, characterized in the main by the belief that government could be a force for good – could improve people’s lives and serve the common weal – and also by skepticism about the motives of the financially and politically powerful. Most of the staffers at the paper were probably on board with this in a general sort of way, but they were nothing like evangelists for it. I think many were not all that opinionated or political; they did their job of reporting on fires and crimes, of editing wire copy, of covering sports and city hall, of chasing commas, and didn’t worry too much about what the big bosses or the editorial page philosophers thought. If pressed, most of them, but by no means all, would probably come down very slightly to the left of center politically. There are idealogues in every group, but the idea that this motley collection of the good, bad, and ugly was ideologically hawkish or inclined to see themselves as intellectually superior to the working classes is laughable. They were the working classes.

My father, Dickson Terry, was a P-D features writer there for many years, and I knew him to be a liberal thinker in that he deplored racism and believed government could and should play a role in helping the downtrodden. But he was pretty conservative in his general deportment, the sort of person who believes a real man supports his family and his community, pays his taxes and his debts, wears a necktie to the office, and is loyal to the United States of America. I know that he – and I assume the great majority of his co-workers – took some pride in their craft, wished to do it right and well, and believed that accuracy – the facts, zealously pursued, carefully verified, and devoid of supposition or opinion – was a newspaperman’s highest calling. They liked the idea of a free press playing a role in making democracy work by holding politicians accountable, but didn’t take themselves too seriously

It is these people, in a thousand newsrooms in a thousand cities and towns across America, that Donald Trump, with the enthusiastic approval of his worshipers, characterizes as crooked, dishonest, and the lowest form of life. I offer the above actual description of them by way of reassuring the delusional – or the merely lazy who casually and without a moment’s reflection accept stereotyping -- that they were not, and are not, engaged in a grand conspiracy to conceal the truth and advance an agenda. The ordinary folk who populate the country’s newsrooms are not members of a secret cabal that has clandestine meetings to plot out how to slant the news and suppress stories about political murders, child sex slavery, or contacts with alien life forms, nor are they forced by their bosses to do these things. Try to imagine a scenario in which a reporter digs up evidence of massive voter fraud or the existence of a child sex ring in a pizza parlor, and having the story buried by the boss for political or ideological reasons, and all of his co-workers, hundreds of ordinary citizens – like my father, for example --, keeping quiet about it.

Bottom line: What these people do is find and report news as accurately and thoroughly as they are able. They don’t withhold or slant what they find in the service of a political position or ideology. They just don’t. It doesn’t work that way. Reporting facts that are contrary to someone’s beliefs or expectations is not slanting the news. Reporting what Donald Trump says – his actual words – is not negative coverage. That these parents and grandparents, these little league coaches and bake-sale organizers, these charity volunteers and football fans, these friends and neighbors are sitting on information that Sandy Hook was a government conspiracy, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that plans are afoot to take away people’s guns and imprison them in closed Wal-Marts is beyond ludicrous

All of the above is really about daily newspapers, which, for purposes of this discussion, are not the same thing as that which has come to be known as “the media,” a term without any actual meaning. Media is the plural form of medium, a word which when paired with the word “news” refers to a way by which news is disseminated. So, daily newspapers are a news medium. Magazines are another. So are radio, television; and now, the Internet. Within each of these there are multiple distinctions having to do with political viewpoint, size and resources, talent/knowledge/experience, and commitment to thoroughness and accuracy. They are not interchangeable. There is no “the media,” notwithstanding the vilification heaped upon “it” by Trump and his hot-eyed devotees.

No question, though, there is a widespread willingness, among people in general, and among people in “the media” who should know better, to lump them all together. Broadcast news – television, in particular – has brought much of this on itself (and, unfortunately, on everyone else) by relentlessly intermixing news and entertainment and by making matinee idols of its news readers. By making a Kardashian divorce or a network sitcom plot development part of the news, they inevitably make all their news suspect, and no amount of news spending and staffing or solemn intonations about what serious and professional journalists they all are can fix that. And, sure, journalists in even the most sophisticated outlets come up short occasionally with regard to the accuracy and thoroughness of their reporting.

But to be absolutely clear: None of that is the same thing as fake news, which is “news” that is literally made up – invented out of thin air – for fun and profit. Fake news is not new; Enquirer-like publications running stories about Elvis sightings, UFO encounters, and women giving birth to bowling balls have been around for a long time. But because they were tinged with humor by their very ridiculousness, they were taken seriously by a tiny minority of mouth-breathers.

Now, because of the internet and cable television, there’s much more of it, it has largely lost its comedic edge even though the stories are no less silly than they’ve always been, and many more people take it seriously; which is to say, they take it as seriously as carefully sourced, fact-checked, and provable stories in real news outlets. The unfortunate and potentially calamitous result of this mélange of real news, fake news, opinion-based news, and plain gossip: In the eyes of a sizeable segment of the American public, news reporting is one big mish-mash of interchangeable parts, all saying whatever they need to say to make money and none saying anything true. Or, worse, real news consists only of content that confirms one’s pre-conceived ideas and prejudices. That’s not reality – there is a real and true distinction to be made between those organizations that take the work of news reporting seriously and those that do not, but it’s how many people see it.

This is dangerous territory. When people generally disregard what is true in favor of what they wish to be true, they are easy prey for cynical politicians, purveyors of rumor and innuendo, and conspiracy theorists. When that takes hold, democracy ends and chaos follows.