That Was The Year That Was

Here we are again.  We’ve survived another trip around our sun and it‘s time to reflect on the events of 2019 and prognosticate about our future.  If we can be honest with ourselves in this post-truth period of national division, looking in either direction can be disheartening.  We have seen an erosion of our democracy to a level few thought possible just a few short decades ago. 

That Was The Year That Was**

Who could have conceived that we would have a president who was caught stealing from the charity he set up for fire fighter’s widows and veterans, and his supporters would just yawn and look the other way?  Yes, Donald J. Trump has been stealing from this charity since 1989 when he wrote a $7 check to pay for Don Jr.’s Boy Scout initiation fee. 

Think about that minor infraction for just a second and you will get a deeper appreciation of the absolute contempt we should all be feeling.  Here he is, the future president of the United States, with his son embarking on his adventure in scouting where their mission is to “prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Scout Law.”  From the values stated in that Scout Oath we read, “to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”  Yes, Don Jr. got a good life-lesson in morality when his father paid for his entry into this revered organization with money stolen from a charity he operated.  Such moral bankruptcy deserves more than just a yawn of disinterest and an eye roll.

This 20^th year of the new millennium has seen a shift from the New Information Age to the Age of Disinformation.  We have come to a place where political lies are not just innocent whoppers or mere exaggerations of the truth designed to spin a conversation in a particular direction; we have entered a new period where lies and whole cloth fabrications are extolled repeatedly in ALL CAPS in nationally televised tweets and shouted from podiums to hordes of adoring fans.  These lies are designed to further a corrupt intent.  The scale of dishonesty is gargantuan and we must now wade through the quagmire of untruths in order to arrive at any comprehension of current events.  Yes, Rudy Giuliani’s quote from 2018 bears repeating, “Truth isn’t truth.”

Truth Isn't Truth, Rudy Guiliani
 

However, dis-information, negative ads, and shameless hypocrisy are not the only signs of our democratic demise, a complete tectonic shift in the political foundation of the Republican Party may also be considered a harbinger of the forthcoming apocalypse.  Who would have thought that the recent ‘tea party’ revolution of conservatism would be corrupted so easily by a blonde charlatan?  One of the pillars of that conservatism was fiscal responsibility, which seems to be  “Gone With the Wind” much as Rhett Butler walked away from Scarlett and into the embrace of the morning Georgia fog.  Our continuing prosperity has been propped up by a sharp upturn in our national debt; we have borrowed against our future.

Fake Fact

Speaking of financial health, our economy would appear to be going gangbusters.  The Dow is suffering nosebleed in the stratosphere of all-time highs.  Corporate taxes as a percentage of all tax revenue are down to a low of 3.5%.  For reference, they were around 9% in 2010.  The lowering of corporate taxes and the lowering of personal income taxes, particularly for the wealthy, has meant a shortfall that has pushed our national debt to above $23 trillion or even more by some observations.  Now the holders of our national purse strings are sounding the alarm of foreboding shortfalls with a proclaimed need to scale back Medicare ($800B) and Medicaid ($200B), a lowering of Social Security benefits, cutting federal pensions (not for Congress of course), and other belt-tightening with cuts to social programs.  You can’t let Amazon pay $0 in corporate taxes and not have to make up the loss somewhere.  A strong military, a regular Republican talking point, our infrastructure of highways, waterways, electrical grid, etc., are maintained through taxation.  This tax burden has been slowly shifted away from corporations and the wealthy and on to the middle class in various, subtle, and ominous ways.

Meanwhile, the democracy-threatening trend toward an American oligarchy continues.  It has been with us since before the era-of-Trump, but it has gone into Hyperdrive since his inauguration.  America was heretofore a shining example of representative democracy but it has now become a nation controlled by the political and financial influence of the uber-rich and hyper-wealthy.  Trump didn’t start this trend but he is surely not going to do anything to stop it.  In fact, the recent tax cuts, which mostly benefitted large corporations and those wealthy donors, will exacerbate the problem.  Campaign finance reform wasn’t on any docket in 2019 and I will go out on a limb and predict that you won’t see any movement in 2020.

Stanley King

On the religious front, there was a recent crack in the evangelical façade when a single article in an evangelical publication called out Trump’s lack of morality and basically indicated that the benefits to that community were outweighed by the immoral behavior of their unlikely benefactor.  Yes, their womanizing thrice-married and morally bankrupt savior was called out.  It will be interesting to see if others will realize that Donald J. Trump, is not the answer to “what would Jesus do?”

What Would Trump Do?

Toward the end of 2019, emails surfaced that would indicate that Stephen Miller, a top advisor to President Trump, is a white nationalist.  Twenty-five Jewish members of Congress sent a letter to President Donald Trump calling on White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller to be dismissed after the release of a series of emails in which Miller allegedly shared white supremacist views.  The White House has been dismissive of such previous claims, stating that this would be impossible since Mr. Miller is Jewish.  They must be confusing white supremacists with white nationalists.  While most of us would identify as nationalists, i.e., expressing a love of country, adding the adjective “white” in front of that label would indicate someone who believes the white race to be inherently superior to other races and would include those who would advocate racial segregation.

While white supremacists can also be white nationalists, most in the former category would exclude Jews.  A quick review of the topics listed in the many Miller emails posted at the Southern Poverty Law Center would indicate strong feelings and support of much if not all of the objectives expressed by white nationalists.  President Trump’s past predilections along these lines, his father’s racist associations and actions, Trump’s ties to Breitbart, and his ties to Steve Bannon, would all seem to be sympathetic to a white nationalist agenda.

This, boys and girls, brings us to Impeachment.  The president has been impeached.  He was impeached for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress.  He was only found at fault for those two narrow articles.  The House ran out of time or perhaps there could have been more.  In late December more emails surfaced that gave further credence to the abuse of power charges as they provided a direct timeline 90 minutes after the phone call where the DOD was notified to suspend further Ukrainian support and to keep it a secret on a need-to-know basis.  It would seem that impeachment is difficult, as it should be.  The framers of our constitution were intentionally vague, as they perhaps believed that cool heads would prevail and figure out a just method to proceed.  Boy, were they shortsighted. 

I feel that the America that I knew in the middle of the last century is just a curiosity of a bygone era.  Morality has gone the way of the hula-hoop, Slinky, Play-dough, Lincoln logs, erector sets, Gilbert chemistry sets, cap pistols, plastic model airplanes, water-rockets, Viewmaster 3D viewers, Mr. Potato Head, balsa-wood airplanes, Tinker Toys, transistor radios, rubber army men, Legos, and American Flyer trains.  I don’t long for black and white television and being restricted to an outdated set of Encyclopedia Britannica for research.  I do long for the days of civility, cooperation, negotiation, and compromise in our political leaders.

Tinker Toys

Our nation’s shift to the right comes at a time when world politics seems to be at a crossroads.  In the United Kingdom, Trump’s fellow New Yorker and brother from another mother, Boris Johnson (born Upper East Side, New York, June 19, 1964), has taken their Conservative Party down the road of isolation with a move to leave the European Union.  (Trump was born June 14, 1946, in Queens, NY.)  I guess we could start a rumor that Boris Johnson is Trump’s illegitimate son.  Boris looks a bit like Trump and he has been described as an “unprecedented blend of comedian, conman, faux subversive, showman, and populist media confection.”  With the exception of “comedian,” I’ve heard most of those terms used to describe The Donald.

Boris (left)                            Trump (right)

Early in 2020, I predict that the impeachment charges will be forwarded to the Senate for trial.  This trial will be an un-funny joke where the president will be exonerated of all charges.  I further believe that more information will come forward during the year that will add more weight to the crimes already committed, but none of this will matter.  If stealing money from a charity for widows of firefighters and veterans doesn’t raise an eyebrow among his supporters, his requesting assistance from a foreign power to help with his reelection and ignoring congressional subpoenas is but a minor distraction.

I further predict with relative certainty, that the GOP will purge more voter rolls, make gerrymandering more of an art, and keep the function of counting votes a mystery wrapped in a riddle based on 19^th century technology.  This upcoming election will be as assailable and vague as the GOP needs it to be in order to assure a win for their party.  The Democrats, on the other hand, will be sitting on both hands.  They have not yet come up with a strong candidate who can challenge this morally vulnerable “leader of the free world.”

Barring a major downturn in the economy, or a Jeffrey Epstein videotape showing Trump in a minor role, I fear the 2020 election will provide us with four more years of Trump Unchained and even Quentin Tarantino couldn’t imagine this script.

**  The title, That Was The Year That Was, gives a tip of the hat to Tom Lehrer who wrote and sang the political satire album of that same name in 1965.  It is available on Spotify and Amazon Music and its lyrics are apropos today.

TWTYTW

That Was the Year That Was (1965) is a live album recorded at the hungry i in San Francisco, containing performances by Tom Lehrer of satiric topical songs he originally wrote for the NBC television series That Was The Week That Was, known informally as TW3 (1964–65). All of the songs related to items then in the news.^[2] The album peaked at #18 on Billboard's Top 200 Albums on January 8, 1966, and was on the chart for 51 weeks.