If a Tree Falls in the Forest...

A decade or so ago, local television news gave extensive coverage to what they described as a Klan event – a rally, a demonstration, a parade, whatever -- being planned for an Illinois suburb of St. Louis. Local media knew it was in the offing, of course, because a participant told them it was. And they, in effect, did his bidding, by dutifully reporting on the plan and thereby drawing attention to and unavoidably magnifying into something of significant import what would have been a universally ignored non-event involving a tiny squadron of mouth-breathers. Just what the doctor ordered, as far as the KKK boys were concerned.

If memory serves, the thing turned out to be a circular walk on a suburban street by half a dozen comically costumed, sign-waving morons, witnessed by a sparse gathering of mildly curious – but neither pro nor con – onlookers who weren’t exactly sure what was going on. Only they and the television cameras witnessed this little confederacy of dunces doing their posturing and chanting.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? If hate-spewing wing-nuts wave their signs and shout their idiot slogans and no one pays them any attention, do they make a sound? The thinking here is no, not so much.

No question, our instinct -- the other 98% of us who actually have a brain – is to fight back, to shout them down, to throw rotten fruit at them, or maybe kick them in the shins or slap some sense into them. And there is nothing wrong with that instinct. In fact, it can be argued that it’s important to do that – to loudly and proudly protest their stupid but dangerous “ideas” and not let them go unchallenged. But, wow – talk about giving these fools what they crave – attention – and talk about risking portraying their ludicrous pity parties as events of vastly greater magnitude than they actually are and focusing vastly more attention on them than they deserve.

So there is also an argument for not engaging – for not showing up at all, or, if folks just can’t resist, for counter-protesting in a totally passive, turn-the-other-cheek mode – signs, sure, but no taunting or shouting, no sticks and stones; and maybe most important, no treating by the media every escape from the home by these zombies as a news event warranting breathless, wall-to-wall coverage. Here’s the thing: When the cameras are rolling and brickbats are being hurled in every direction, it’s impossible to know, unless the bad guys are all wearing black hats and the good guys white, who’s doing what to whom. And it’s precisely that confusion that gives surface plausibility to the preposterous notion that there were two equally-to-blame “sides” at Charlottesville. When that notion is picked up and spread around by a weak-minded but vastly influential figure like the president of the United States, trouble ensues. So maybe the best way is to make sure it's unmistakeably clear who's doing the acting out.

Of course, the president should have been forceful and unequivocal in his condemnation of the jackasses that caused this problem. But maybe the problem could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if they’d been allowed to put their stupidity on display in splendid isolation.

(For an alternative method of handling these events, we can look to a small town in Germany.)

What He Might Have Said

He said this: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides….on many sides.”

Here are just a few things he might have said if he had had an honest heart and had reacted with the spontaneous revulsion most of us felt...

“450,000 American soldiers and sailors died fighting the scourge of Nazism in World War II. People flying Nazi flags and banners and making Nazi salutes on a street in the United States of America is a goddamned outrage. If I could I would round them up myself, throw them in jail, and throw away the key. It makes me so mad I could spit.”

Or…

“What happened in Charlottesville was 100-percent the fault of gibbering morons who took to the streets to put their irrational hatreds on display. None of this would have happened if they had not emerged from the rocks they live under to spew their poison.”

Or...

“These cockroaches who proclaim white supremacy and allegiance to Adolph Hitler, the murderer of six million innocent men, women, and children, need to be horse-whipped, then tarred and feathered and run out of town. There is no place in America for them, and my Justice Department will do everything in its power to shut them the hell up.  What a bunch of weenies.”

Or maybe...

“Members of the KKK are a bunch of semi-conscious mouth-breathers -- pathetic losers who blame everyone but themselves for their chronic failures and take out their total inadequacy on strangers of a different color. We as Americans need to rise up against them and loudly disavow their disgusting poison.”

A few suggestions about what might have been.  Just sayin'.

Mainstream Media Hatred: Time to Get Over It

Donald Trump said to the president of Mexico, in effect: You know you’re not going to pay for the wall and I know you’re not going to pay for the wall, and, really, we both know there was never going to be any wall. But will you please pipe down about it?  This remarkably revealing conversation once again underscored Trump’s total contempt for his most devoted acolytes – the contempt he first unveiled in his remarks about shooting people on a New York street. This time, we learn – if we didn’t already suspect as much – that their most cherished and emblematic political talisman and the thing that most endeared Trump to them, The Great Wall, was always, in his mind, a crock of you know what – nothing more than a way to harvest votes from the politics of resentment.

Bizarrely, so unswerving is the devotion of the cult of personality known as “The Base” to Trump that this revelation probably won’t change anything for them. But for the rest of us, it is, among other things, a reminder of just how critical the free flow of information is to our way of government. We in America operate in a democracy and that has many meanings and ramifications, but one that can’t be emphasized too strongly is this: Every single person who works for the government, elected or appointed, from the town dog-catcher to the president of the United States, is an employee of us, the people. And for that reason, we are entitled to know what every single one of them is up to. Full stop.

There are exceptions having to do with national security – the date, time and troop strength of the D-Day invasion was not something we all needed to know – but the default position with regard to the words and deeds of government “officials” must be total transparency. What our employees in government are doing and saying is what tells us who to vote for. And knowing who to vote for (or against) and then doing so is the very meaning of democracy.

Certain species of politician are forever telling us they’re going to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse by running the government like a business, but the difference between for-profit businesses and government entities is instructive. The former are mechanisms for turning money into more money – for making a profit on invested dollars. The people charged with making that happen – management -- are accountable only to the people who employ them – the business’s owners, aka the shareholders. How do the shareholders know if their hired-hand managers are doing their jobs properly? Pretty simple: They look at the bottom line to see if their profit expectations are being met.

We who employ dog catchers and senators and presidents, on the other hand, don’t have such a convenient and obvious metric for deciding if those folks are doing what we want them to do. What do we have? This and only this: Information. And where do we get that information? Hold on to your hats, mainstream media haters: We get it from a free press. That’s why press freedom is protected in the constitution – because it was clearly understood by the framers (and by everyone now who doesn’t dislike and/or distrust the press for telling them facts as opposed to what they want to hear), that information regarding what our employees are doing, documented and conveyed to the citizenry in the press, is essential to the operation of a democracy. In a system of checks and balances, it’s the most important check there is.

Which brings us to the subject of leaks, on its way to becoming the least understood and most over-used perjorative in the language. The clandestine release of national-security-sensitive information to the press – the “leaking” of it – is a bad thing. Such leakage shouldn’t be done by the leaker nor accepted and/or used by its recipient, and most major news organizations are much more sensitive to this than their detractors would like to believe. But the overwhelming majority of so-called leaks are nothing more than information about goings-on in government that have nothing whatever to do with national security but that someone doesn’t want the world to know about because it would be politically embarrassing to them. There is nothing illegal about them.  Hence, the tendency to “classify” information – to put under lock and key information the public has a perfect right to by invoking national security and then branding its release – it’s leak – as felonious.

That’s exactly what Attorney General Sessions is up to now. This is, of course, an attempt to persuade the world that the problem isn’t the content of the leaks – the lies, abuses, and general foolishness revealed in them – but the existence of the leaks themselves. Or, to put it another way, the problem isn’t that this government is overrun with stupidity and miscalculation, but that the public is finding out about all of it. Trump understands that perfectly, and that’s why he constantly tries to de-legitimize the media, going so far as to brand it the enemy of the people. Well, “the people” need to get over their childish resentment of the mainstream press and their baseless dismissal of it as hopelessly biased, and understand that in this democracy, it is not their enemy. In a world where politicians will tell you to look at the shiny thing they hold in one hand while they steal your money and your freedom with the other, a free press may be the only friend you have.