Sunshine Soldiers, Sometime Patriots

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The Republican Party in recent decades has trafficked in a gaudy, but selective, patriotism; gung-ho in regard to military adventures, dissing dictators abroad and traitorous Democrats at home, defending the second amendment above all others, and sponsoring red, white and blue displays, including Fourth of July readings of the Declaration of Independence, with its bill of particulars against a safely dead 18th century tyrant.

Now, however, a 21st century domestic autocrat has arisen from their own ranks, and they have gone AWOL. Instead of drafting a bill of particulars against King Donald I, they cravenly bend a knee at best, aid and abet his transgressions at worst. They risk becoming the Benedict Arnold party. Loyal to the crown, not patriots to their country.

What particulars, you ask? It is, as the drafters said, “a long train of abuses and usurpations” tending toward despotism.

He has declared himself above the law and not subject to its requirements – including testimony on civil and criminal cases and a claim of immunity to indictment, prosecution or conviction.

He has sought to make the administration of justice subject not to the laws of the land but to his personal whims, prejudices or interests.

He has sought to use the apparatus of government to serve he and his friends and to disadvantage his personal foes.

He has sought to define what speech is permitted to whom and to muzzle or limit a free press.

He has unilaterally chosen to abrogate international agreements, treaties and trade arrangements.

He has demanded that judges rule not in a fair and impartial manner in accord with the law, but in a way obedient to his will. And has selected for the bench those willing to conform.

He has refused to assent to laws not to his liking and has insisted executive departments refuse to enforce those laws or regulations he opposes.

He has chosen not to staff government offices responsible for the protection of the environment, civil rights, consumer rights, and many other legally mandated tasks.

He has promoted in word and deed discrimination against American citizens who are African-American, Hispanic, Muslim, female and any other minority that he fails to favor.

He has selectively chosen to fund government investment and emergency recovery aid in those jurisdictions he perceives as friendly toward him and his rule and has neglected those he does not favor.

He has catered to the desires of special interests that contributed to his election, in the process using government power to pick economic winners and losers – notably the coal, nuclear power, steel and aluminum industries – through tariffs, land use policy, drilling rights, regulatory and tax policies.

He has also used tax policy to provide huge benefits to the advantage of the wealthy, including he and his family, and to the detriment of the poor and working class.

He has “reformed” entitlements to deprive millions of the poor and working class to access to affordable healthcare, to medicine, to food aid.

He and his family have used the presidency to enrich themselves in contravention of the emoluments clause, profiting from his office through payments in kind, bribes in the form of revenues for his businesses, and trademarks, sales of real estate and loans for his daughter and son-in law.

He has been prepared to befriend murderous tyrants for a photo op and to ignore threats to our physical and economic security in exchange for favorable treatment for his business dealings.

He has permitted corrupt practices to continue unchecked on the part of cabinet officers and other high officials.

He has enabled insider trading by leaking embargoed government data early and has leaked classified secrets to a hostile foreign power.

He has refused to acknowledge a years-long Russian plot to influence American elections and has failed to retaliate for this act of cyberwar or to take steps to prevent worse assaults from occurring in the future.

He has failed to cooperate in efforts to get to the bottom of this attack or to bring to justice those Americans in his campaign and ancillary to it who were involved in aiding and abetting this immense, anti-democratic plot. And in the process has undermined the arms of government on whose protection we rely, including the Justice Department, FBI, and CIA. And, in collaboration with pliant members of his party, he has rendered impotent the oversight function of Congress.

Internationally, he has alienated and scorned long-time friendships with allied democratic governments and weakened a web of protective alliances that span 70 years, instead befriending and ignoring the malign behavior of despots around the globe.

This list could be extended endlessly since every new day brings a new trespass that endangers the institutions that we rely on for our safety, prosperity and survial. Yet, few Republicans have had the courage to acknowledge, in the words of Jefferson 243 years ago, that “a Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Summer Reads

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Since man does not live by decline-of-the-west angst alone, here are a few recommendations of diverting reads to take your mind off eh quotidian scene and its garish dysfunction. There’s only so much “How Democracies Die” and “Fascism” you can bear, after all.

I often fall back for amusement on jolly old England whose literature really is jolly. From Chaucer till today, the comic muse is ever present. Alan Bennett, most famous for such bittersweet plays as “The Madness of King George,” “The History Boys,” and “People,” keeps a diary that is excerpted annually in the Times Literary Supplement.

The last 20 years or so are collected in “Keeping On, Keeping On,” along wth other occasional writing. It’s unfailingly human, amusing, touching, acerbic. His persona is of an aging. decent, shy, kindly, exasperated man vexed by life. In these pages, by such atrocities as the neglect of institutions such as the Public Health Service, historic buildings that are allowed to decay, and libraries that helped a butcher’s son make his way to Oxford.

He also chronicles his aging, the funerals he attends, the trips he takes, and the strolls in his native Yorkshire countryside. With rue his heart is often laden, but his wit is intact and sharp. I like this book so much I’m working my way through an earlier volume of diaries from the 1980s and ‘90s, “Writing Home.” Just as charming.

Bill Bryson, an Iowan who married an English girl, has spent years living there and is the author of many amusing books on his travels, his house, Shakespeare, grammar, and whatever else strikes his fancy. In “The Road to Little Dribbling,” the now 60ish Bryson goes for a ramble around Great Britain that mirrors one described twenty years earlier, in “Notes from a Small Island.”

He takes the reader to many off-the-beaten-path places that you immediately want to visit, but also writes with delightful, curmudgeonly pique about surly shopkeepers, officious National Trust docents, unhelpful ferrymen, and other impediments to the intrepid traveler.

He indulges in some heartfelt rants about issues that are similar, if more boisterously expressed, to those that annoy Bennett— littering, the decline of British rail travel, schemes to make a pound by ruining the landscape he admires, and the assaults on tradition by short-sighted and careless custodians of his adopted country’s national treasures. All while making you laugh out loud every few pages.

“Golden Hill” is an historical novel by Francis Spufford set in New York City in 1746 where a young man, Richard Smith, arrives from England and enacts the innocent abroad themes of American writers in reverse. The author, a London professor, admits he took the comic novels of 18th century writers like Fielding as an inspiration.

The New York our hero finds if filled with flinty-eyed Dutch and American merchants, political chicanery by various competing factions, the vices of a bustling port with its sailors and stevedores, and the toilsome misery of slaves and indentured servants.

Only after numerous twists and turns, love won, love lost, friendship, betrayal, duels, imprisonment, do we discover what secret mission brought Smith to the colonies in the first place.

One more book from the British Isles is “Greeks Bearing Gifts” by the Scottish author Philip Kerr. It’s the latest in his saga of Bernie Gunther who began as a Berlin homicide detective in Weimar Germany.The coming to power of the Nazis exposed him to one tricky situation after another as he tried to stay alive while maintaining his integrity.

The first three books about pre-war Gunther are wonderfully evocative and collected in “Berlin Noir.” The more recent books have treated Gunther’s wartime troubles and his attempts to navigate a postwar world where he is living under an assumed name and can no longer return to his home, now in East Germany. This episode finds him using his investigative skills as an insurance fraud gumshoe, but the past is never far away.

Finally, my favorite actress of the Golden Age of Hollywood is Barbara Stanwyck, and I finally got around to a voluminous life by Victorian Wilson that appeared in 2013. It was lavishly praised at the time, but at $40 and 850 pages, I balked.

When I was recently found it available used for $6, I bit. It was well worth the wait, though now I am impatient for more. This is just the first volume, following Stanwyck only so far as 1940 with much of her most memorable work still ahead — “The Lady Eve,” “Meet John Doe,” “Ball of Fire,” “Double Indemnity,” and many more.

You might suppose that almost a thousand pages to cover half of a film star’s life would be cuckoo overkill, but this is not just the definitive life of Stanwyck (nee Ruby Stevens) but a deep dive into the mean streets of her orphaned start in Brooklyn, her scuffling beginnings in dance halls and soon on Broadway in the Roaring 20s, and a chronicle of Los Angles and Hollywood from 1930 onward.

Stanwyck arrived there at about the same time as sound and traversed the entire period. Along the way, you meet the writers, directors, moguls, costars, agents, publicists and bit players that surrounded her. We even learn that it was the great theatrical impresario David Belasco who chose her stage name for Ruby.

It’s a big book because it’s a sweeping saga of an era. I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who loves the movies of the 1930s and 1940s as my mother did. She passed the passion on to me.

However, her favorite actresses of the era were Joan Blondell, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, rather than Stanwyck. That never made sense to me until this book caused the penny to drop. Mom’s favorite Hollywood heartthrob of that period was Robert Taylor. She may never have forgiven Stanwyck for marrying him and forcing her to settle for my father.

Neither Form Nor Substance

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In public life, as in much else, there’s a difference between form and substance. When looking into this I discovered the distinction goes back as far as Aristotle’s physics, but also pops up everywhere from law to accounting where it isn’t enough to follow the proper form if it is used to disguise errors or omissions in substance.

This came to mind when considering recent examples of Donald Trump’s behavior. In addressing the NFL’s requirement that players stand for the national anthem and dissenters remain out of sight and therefore out of mind, Trump suggested those refusing to conform should leave the county. Presumably because the expression of views he doesn’t want to hear is unAmerican.

This confusing of form with substance is common. Saluting the flag is an outward formal display of patriotism, but is hollow if just for show. The substance of patriotism is understanding and embracing the founding principles that govern our country, one of which is to be free from thought control or coercion.

Similarly we are all familiar with vigorously genuflecting churchgoers or religious leaders who observe the form of their faith but who do not actually practice the substance. Jesus could be rather harsh when it came to these whited sepulchers.

Politicians are famous for, and often scorned because of, their saying one thing and doing another, for mouthing the words of the democracy while trying to enact a program that undermines that form of government. Some politicians are certainly weasels, but others are simply operating in the sausage factory where delivering a deliciously democratic product may entail some pretty gruesome steps.

The amazing thing about Trump that appalls his detractors and delights his acolytes is that in both the substance and the form of his behavior he pays no attention to the ordinary norms of manners, morality, and legality.

From the moment he began his campaign by promising to protect good Americans from Mexican rapists and murderers crossing the border, each day has brought a new transgression of established norms. For Memorial Day, he turned the most solemn of national observances, commemorating blood spilled in defense of liberty, topsy turvy.

He chose to tweet a list of his supposed accomplishments in office and to suggest they made the sacrifice of generations of patriots all worthwhile. Instead of thanking the fallen dead for the last full measure of devotion, he implied they owed him a round of applause.

Often his aides try to get Trump to observe the established forms, but he can’t be bothered. So, he recently read a boilerplate speech urging Republicans to turn out for the 2018 midterms because they are just as important as the 2016 presidential election. But he stopped in mid-pitch to say, obviously this wasn’t true, his election was a much bigger deal, and to ask who wrote this crap he was given to say.

When it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of governing, he is equally uninterested in substance. He riffs on those themes that got him elected and says he is accomplishing his goals even when they are unachievable.

And he has a complete disinterest in the complexity of drafting legislation or conducting foreign policy. If it can’t be reduced to pictures or a soundbite, forget it. So, he recently promised yet again that Mexican would pay for the border wall that he claims is being built, even though they won’t and no actual wall-building has taken place.

His fans love him for talking tough and claiming he will bring back jobs, build infrastructure, fix healthcare and cut taxes, but the substance is often the opposite. He says nobody is tougher on Russia, but he profited from Russian efforts to throw the election his way, and has done nothing to punish Russia for it or to prevent more of the same in 2018. The tax cut that was supposed to help the working man not the fat cats went 80% to the latter. The healthcare fix is nowhere to be seen, and millions of people have lost protection since his election.

He guaranteed he’d separate himself from his business interests to avoid conflicts, yet his presidency has been a festival of profiteering, nepotism, self-dealing and emoluments. His vow to stop China from stealing jobs has turned into the lifting of sanctions on a Chinese company that is not just an intellectual property thief, but a security threat. This just so happened to coincide with the granting of lucrative trademarks to his daughter Ivanka and a $500 million Chinese investment in Indonesian development that will benefit Trump properties.

There have been plenty of people in American government before who have been closet racists, nativists, profiteers, but they have kept it out of sight and been punished when exposed by their own party or by voters at the ballot box.

In Trump’s case, the corruption is out in the open and celebrated. Shamelessness is in vogue. His followers and his own party see, hear, and speak no evil, motivated out of either fear of the next mean tweet from the head of their party or a decision to put power and party ahead of country.

At his inaugural, President Kennedy made stirring use of that formal occasion to express a classic, if worryingly grandiose, formulation of an American credo. He promised, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

In the age of Trump, this would have to be revised to read, “we will tell any lie, slander any person, undermine any institution, break any promise, corrupt any ideal in order to assure the survival and the success of me.”