By Michael McCord
Humor, the instigator of laughter, is hard today and feels temporarily elusive as we awaken each morning in shock and disbelief that dangerous demagogue Donald J. Trump will be the next President of this increasingly disunited country.
Many defensively claim that this racist, carnival-barking buffoon is not our president. After all, as the final vote totals come in, Hillary Clinton will become another historical footnote – winner of the popular vote but not president. Though not discussed in the Federalist Papers, it seems that the founding fathers designed democracy to break our hearts. Racist Trump is president only due to a quaint 18th Century electoral compromise designed to protect the powers of slave states. We will choke on that irony for a long time.
A few years ago, I wrote a political satire that darkly and humorously imagined what might happen if the train of American political normalcy not only went off the rails but careened off a bridge deep into the abyss. My book, The Execution Channel: A Political Fable, was set in 2018 after the country collapses following the tumultuous election of 2016.
Some abridgment: Imagine the shock of a popular incoherent fool taking semi-dictatorial charge of a new Real America (see the new flag above). Real America strives to become a true corporation, a massive privatization scheme with legally corrupt lawmakers (bought sold and traded like professional athletes between corporate overlords) and designed to turn a tidy profit as well. Hence, The Execution Channel, which turns reality TV-style public executions into a revenue generating scheme for bankrupt states and is itself a massive Ponzi scheme to fleece the rubes. A robust voter suppression scheme of execution and harsh, racist laws keeps unruly moochers at bay while private militias offer forced protection schemes to meet any-sized budgets.
I wasn’t alone to sense a game-changing political shift was coming but I wasn’t as hopeful as many progressives that the country was trending bluer. While President Barack Obama emitted a global light of hope and possibility, I felt there was too much madness and paranoia that had built up like a volcano, stoked by years of lies from right-wing media and politicians. Obama hatred was more fever pitch than imagined and though with grace, patience and humor he kept trying, the fever wouldn’t break. I thought the coming political earthquake would be more like 1861 than 1933 and the dawn of the New Deal. Nothing quite so apocalyptic as The Hunger Games or 1984 but something uniquely American. I tried to imagine how Jonathan Swift of A Modest Proposal fame would approach this set of circumstances.
Whatever satirical insight I had, the catastrophic election of Donald J. Trump – a pathological liar, crooked businessman, racist, sexist, proud pussy grabber and sexual assaulter, and the most profoundly ignorant man to become president – dwarfs everything or anything one could have imagined. He represents Real America to tens of millions of his supporters.
*****
But we didn’t get here by an historical freak of nature. And while there will be much post-election analysis about white working class rage, Obama voters deserting the Democratic party, a yearning for change, bad polling, gross mainstream media malpractice, and how we might avoid global destruction with Trump leading the way, it may take some time before we get a big ‘What’s Wrong with Kansas?’ historical perspective. (That is hoping that we make it that far).
Allow me to jump the gun with a little history, personal testimony and humor (even if it hurts). First, for a little context, I am a former political reporter and editor who covered my first presidential campaign in 1980 (George H. W. Bush literally stumbled into my arms before taking a campaign stage at a rally in New Hampshire. Being George H. W. Bush, he politely thanked me). I’ve closely watched the small and big trends, from local school board invasions by right-wing Christians in the 1990s to Tea Party lunacy at the state house two decades later and plenty of presidential primary circuses in between.
Just before my book was released in the spring of 2013, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the New Hampshire Progressive Summit (I think they were desperate for a speaker but were kind enough not to tell me). I told the audience there were three overt ideas driving my narrative and that they would be familiar with all of them – and that they might be amazed by how this was a massive geological plate shift, slowly taking place with profound implications we couldn’t yet measure. Many laughed, nervously.
The first was the Republican Party’s war to delegitimize the very idea of government. The roots of this modern mega trend stretch back directly to Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who set this in motion when he made government an abstract monster and not a vehicle solving societal needs. Or as my book’s main character, Texas Gov. Lawrence “Demon Seed” Bowie, says, “I hate government so much that if you elect me, I promise to give you a government worth hating.” The angry voters who hate the abstract monster of government believe him and he does indeed give them a government worth hating. Alas, it is much to their detriment but these Real Americans learn to take pride in being sacrificed to an economic cause greater than their own.
The second was the relentless right wing attack to demonize those who believe in good governance. The New Deal détente that had held the American political orbit together since the 1930s began to go haywire with the Next Gingrich-led Republican Revolution in 1994. The Contract on America (my interpretation) was a PR push reacting to the horror of President Bill Clinton passing tax increases, an assault weapons ban and, true madness, attempting to craft a universal health care plan. How dare Clinton and the Democrats attempt to socialize America and take away their right to die without health care, raise taxes on the wealthy and undermine their Second Amendment Right to defend themselves with backyard guided missile systems (oh wait, that was in my book).
The Republicans went all Bolshevik: they shut down government a couple of times, impeached a president for his self-destructive sexual promiscuity (as though that didn’t happen else in D.C.), and treated Democrats, liberals, unions, progressive organizations and the very idea of liberalism as toxic waste to be buried underground.
The Bowie in my book promises to vanquish liberals. Before he became governor of the Real American Republic of Texas, Bowie had been the dynamic and incoherent leader of the Congressional Imbecile Caucus (imagine a roomful of Louie Gohmerts). Bowie gained legendary status in right-wing media and his colorful nickname during a famous speech on the House floor when he promised to “destroy the demon seed of liberalism.”
(To give a demon his due, Next Gingrich is having an extended last laugh parade today.)
Finally, behind Door Number 3, there was a confluence of more recent events since President Obama was elected in 2008: lock-step GOP obstructionism which included an all-out war on Obamacare and the stimulus package; the racist birther movement to treat Obama as an illegitimate brother from another planet; the Tea Party eruption and an accelerated revival of Confederate Civil War romanticism; the right-wing media explosion; the GOP conservative war on women, reason and science; Citizens United which transformed greedy corporations into warm-blooded human units worthy of first-amendment protections; and my personal favorite, an Ayn Rand revival.
You would think that an Ayn Rand fetish would be on the outs in the aftermath after the worst economic collapse since 1929 – after all, even devotee Alan Greenspan admitted that unfettered freedom for business hadn’t quite worked out as outlined by Rand’s triumphalist vision. But disaster only makes ideological true believers (like Bolsheviks and Maoists for a little irony insert) even more fanatical. Atlas Shrugged was the trendy fad du jour among the aspiring John Galt tribe. They saw Obama as a socialist communist or collectivist in disguise. He was determined to strangle their individuality and drown their liberty. Just like he was going to take away their guns.
Now we face the dark reality of Granny-Starving Paul Ryan (thank you Charlie Pierce) seizing the heroic Randian mantel. Despite his Beltway-created reputation as a cool policy wonk, Rand is a true believer, a fanatic, and a legislative Robespierre dreaming of taking apart the country’s social safety net one guillotine chop at a time. The elderly should not get Medicare and Social Security should be privatized: after all, who needs security in Paul Ryan’s brave new world. In my book, an economic religion called the Galtian Imperatives is the supreme law of Real America. But no one understands the “prosperity for all” alchemy of combining total tax relief for the rich, a War on the Poor campaign to get moochers to pay their fair share, and extreme austerity to build character. It can’t be explained, only embraced as religious faith. Ryan would understand.
*****
It’s worth mentioning another piece of the creative pie that informed my tale of political insanity – an Obama visit to New Hampshire in that delightful, screaming loud Tea Party summer of 2009. He came to talk about health care reform and to dispel nonsense such as Death Panels and the like. I talked to an elderly female protester who accused Obama of treason (“because ACORN elected him”), being a secret Muslim, and rounding up political opponents to put away at FEMA concentration camps – and of course because she thought government was bad, she was terrified that Obama was going to take away her Social Security and Medicare.
All of this was nonsense but she believed it was all true and verifiable and no amount of patient ‘fact checking’ could persuade her. Her sources – Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck & Fox News – were impeccable (and this was before the Social Media flood of misinformation and partisan warfare via Twitter). My sources were untrustworthy, soaked with liberal media poison. It was a bridge of logic too far. Sound familiar? Each side is dealing from a completely different set of facts: one has nothing to do with reality. What could be more telling than a major political party that denies science (climate change, evolution, etc.) and strives to snuggle up to the late 19th Century when men were men, apes were apes, environmental destruction was embraced as progress, and women couldn’t vote much less dare to take control of their bodies, and most important of all, the rich ruled as feudal overlords? Who wouldn’t worship that utopia?
My book mixed all the above ingredients into a satirical stew. Many Mad Hatter Republicans, safe from accountability due to gerrymandering and protected by a right-wing bubble of reality, came complete with infinite self-parody. The loony tunes and hypocrisy overflow was taking place in many states (including my own New Hampshire), not just in Washington D.C.
Yes, I imagined a USA crack up, a secession along ideological lines, because I thought that the GOP was becoming a death cult, its runaway nihilism had nowhere else to go but anarchy and fascism. I feared the cumulative corrosive effect of all I mentioned above would reach a critical mass rupture. But I envisioned in my book a more localized, spreading plague and much destructive hilarity would ensue.
The accession to the throne of Trump’s peculiar and frightening madness has jolted liberals, progressives, conservatives and anyone with a conscience who thinks rationally. If history has the capacity to teach us anything, it is this simple rule – take fascists at their word. Trump has said time and again that he alone will fix what ails us and that’s not a promising ode to democracy or the Constitution. Trump tapped into a deep hatred for the diverse, multi-cultural and progressive vision the majority wanted.
I try to slow down my historical panic. Is this Weimar Germany 1932 or the Roman Republic giving way to an empire of dictators, Nero and horses appointed to the Senate? Who knows. Many rationally hedge their bets daily: perhaps the next four years (and we hope it will only be four years) will only be truly horrible and not apocalyptic. The country has never faced this level of combined vengeful narcissism and outright incompetence in a president who has willing demolition derby partners in both houses of Congress and soon, the Supreme Court.
In this crisis atmosphere, we need humor, satire and a firm grasp of the absurd more than ever. But it is hard. It will be hard. Satire should enlighten, entertain and irritate in equal doses but the late-night talk show jokes may become weaker and even masters like Andy Borowtiz of The New Yorker may find their satiric barbs falling flat. This is an existential crisis at DEFCON 1 level and balance seems uncertain. We even wonder a little if the First Amendment will protect serious and frivolous minds, crowds of protesters or journalists doing their jobs.
“We live in the best of all possible worlds,” Dr. Pangloss opined in Candide, Volataire’s masterpiece of social and ideological mockery. Pangloss strides through one horrible 18th Century disaster to another with sublime optimism, trusting in a rational universe.
Perhaps a small daily dose of Panglossian foolishness will be a good prescription to help us face the crucible ahead as we recover from the shock and psychic pain of the unthinkable.
Michael McCord, the former political editor and columnist of the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald, is an award-winning journalist and writer. He is the author of The Execution Channel: A Political Fable (2013). You can follow him on Twitter @mmgolfer
