My daughter, her boyfriend and I went shopping for a Christmas tree this year.
At our first stop, the pickings were slim.
The "farm" to which we ventured had pretty much run out. Some
threadbare remainders scattered the lot, orphans in a strange year that the
season itself seemed unable to make right. Up the road, a small field of
uncut pines in another farm seemed promising. But those were not being
cut or sold. Unlike their orphaned companions, they were not desperate.
Just determined. Refusing to celebrate a year in which so much could not
be celebrated, they were more or less . . .
Un-Christmas trees.
They would not be unearthed.
It was hard to blame them.
Optimism and pessimism are generally considered dispositions. One of my best friends is the proverbial boy in the room full of you-know-what furiously shoveling because he knows there's a pony in there somewhere. We tease him mercilessly but envy his ability to stare down adversity. Some of history's greatest leaders had a similar bent. FDR's nothing-to-fear-but-fear itself kept the nation afloat in the Depression, as did Churchill's steely unwillingness to bend in any way to Hitler as Great Britain marched alone through its "finest hour" in 1940.
Both were indispensable.
The Depression emasculated America as it unemployed a whole
generation of middle-aged men, and the German Blitz killed 43,000 Londoners in
eight months while making another 1 in 6 homeless as it destroyed 1.1 million
British flats.
Neither, however, was sufficient.
It took more than Roosevelt's or Churchill's
rhetoric to end the Depression or survive the Blitz and ultimately win the war.
And both men knew this.
The New Deal was a program, not a
personality. In the eight years before World War II, it entailed enormous
amounts of domestic spending in the form of direct relief, price supports and
unemployment and old age insurance to support and increase economic demand; a
relaxed gold standard that increased the money supply (which also enhanced
demand); labor laws that allowed workers to compete more equally with their
employers to bid up wages; and structural reforms to the banking and securities
industries to end the speculative abuses that had facilitated the economic
crisis in the first place.
As for Britain and the war, Churchillian rhetoric
became actual success for two reasons, neither of which depended on the
great man's words alone. The first was the Royal Air Force (RAF) which
won the Battle of Britain and thus torpedoed Germany's invasion plans.
When Churchill told the British in the Summer of 1940 that "Never in the
history of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so
few," he was paying tribute to the Spitfire pilots who almost single
handedly had kept Germany at bay. And when, on December 7, 1941, he knew
Britain had been delivered and would ultimately prevail, it was because America
was entering the war. He had hoped for it, argued for it, and begged for
it. In contemplating the possibility that the British Isles might be overrun,
he had even predicted it. But in the end, it was the Japanese and Hitler who
made it happen.
Though today's challenges are eerily similar, the
cumulative response has been anything but.
As Covid marches on, America's death toll has
reached 320,000. Over 2,500 Americans are dying on average every day.
Though vaccines are becoming available, they will not be administered to the
vast majority of us until sometime next summer. For herd immunity to
occur, at least 70% of Americans will have to get vaccinated. Though a
September poll found that only about 60% said they would do so, that level
of support had reached 70% by December. In the meantime, social
distancing, masks and intermittent quarantines -- all of which have
unfortunately been turned into political statements -- remain the only
effective antidotes.
The absence of leadership is and has been
striking.
On Covid these days, Donald Trump is AWOL.
Other than claiming credit for the vaccines, he has literally said nothing
about the crisis since the November election. His White House arranged a
host of holiday parties, disregarding scientific advice to the contrary and
generating additional super spreader possibilities. At those events,
masks were more in evidence than in the past but distancing -- a casualty of
indoor events -- was not.
Trump himself has avoided many of these holiday
events, instead hunkering down is his residential bunker where he avoids public
exposure, and on the rare occasions when he does show up, he simply touts his
phony claims of election fraud. Those claims, repeatedly rejected by the
courts and for which literally no credible evidence has emerged, never die in
his White House, even as they become more outlandish. Over the past few
days, a coterie of crazies -- Giuliani, sometimes Trump-lawyer Sidney Powell
and the pardoned former National Security Adviser (and ex-General) Michael
Flynn -- even discussed the possibility of Trump imposing martial law to stop
Biden from being sworn in on January 20.
For his part, Flynn reportedly endorsed and
advocated the idea.
Whether Trump himself endorsed the idea is not
clear, and this kind of opacity is typical of both him and his
administration. A bully and pathological liar, Trump's signature
rhetorical move generally takes the form of "people are
saying". It allows him to traffic in lies while denying
responsibility for them. Flynn's suggestion creates a slight variation on this
move. This time, there actually is a person -- an ex-General, no less --
saying something. So, Trump gets to hide behind Flynn's ostensible
credentials while further stoking the (false) fires of illegitimacy designed to
destroy Biden's coming Presidency.
And we all get to marvel at another new low.
At the end of the day, there will be no martial
law. Indeed, were this morally bankrupt President to give any such order,
the military would not follow it and the courts would promptly kill it.
It is unclear who among the cowards' caucus of Congressional Republicans would
join in this repudiation, and sadly, the number would be far short of all of
them. Since the election, one of the principal cowards -- Sen. Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina -- has taken to painting the political future as a
contest between better manners and poor policies. According to him,
"Our problem is tone, their problem is policy." Graham likes
the GOP's "chances better because we can act better [but] it's harder for
them to legislate differently."
Seriously?
The four years of lies, successful Russian cyber-attacks,
320,000 Covid deaths, assaults on Obamacare with no credible alternative,
weakened alliances, continued climate crisis, ongoing racial unrest and newly
active militias and "some fine people" white supremacists are all a consequence
of . . .
Tone?
What Graham refuses to recognize is the rot that lies at the foundation of his political party. He won re-election and his party survived the past four years not in spite of Trump but because of him. Anywhere from a quarter to a third of the GOP vote is now comprised of inveterate Trumpists, those who actually thought the Supreme Court should have discarded the ballots of over 20 million Americans and now believe martial law would be a good thing.
Pundits think Trump drove up turnout among
Democrats, which is true, and that once he leaves, that will abate, which may
be true as well. But Trump himself also drove up turnout among
Republicans and succeeded in so dividing the country that the GOP cannot win
these days without all of his voters, even the crazy ones. If those
voters stay home, as may be the case in the coming Senate run-off races in Georgia, Republicans will lose. But if they show up, they will
drive "tone" into the same ditch Trump has driven it for the past
four years. For them, like Trump, "act[ing] better" is for losers and being better is not really possible.
Today, there are two political parties in America.
The Democratic Party.
And the Anti-Democratic Party.
The first counts votes. The second suppresses them.
The first respects elections. The second tries to overturn them.
The first follows the law. The second breaks it. The first has won
the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. The second
has won it once. The first wins in spite of a federal structure that
tilts the electoral playing field against it. The second wins because of that
structure. The first needs to maintain its coalition and policy sanity to
succeed going forward. The second needs to get rid of its rot if it has
the same goal.
If I were betting, it would be on the Democrats. There are lots of Joe Bidens -- decent more or less centrist pols -- in the Democratic Party. But there aren't a lot of Mitt Romneys in the Republican Party. And there are way too many Donald Trumps.
Graham and his friends will discover how many once Trump leaves.
In search of a Christmas tree, our final stop was
a nursery three towns away. When we arrived, the only other customer was
on his way out. Christmas tree shopping in the world of Covid is like all
shopping in the world of Covid. Socially distant at best, solitary and
lonely at worst. A couple of employees, no doubt seasonal and brought in for
the (un)expected rush, lingered over a chain saw as we inspected the selection.
This nursery had plenty of trees. Erect,
they bent ever so slightly because they were real. Though full, the
branches were alive. They darted in and
out. And up and down. They avoided artificial
symmetry and were thus appropriate reminders, perhaps more so this year than
any other, of us -- Kant's veritable "crooked timber of humanity"
from which "no straight thing was ever made".
We bought one, took it home and put it up.
It stands in front of a mountain of books,
antidotes to ignorance for any crooked timbers to pursue.
It is the perfect Christmas tree.
In the perfect place.
For this imperfect year.
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