I’ve heard it called “the Paul Revere moment” — the tipping point, the final straw, the instant of shock and recognition when any clearheaded citizen who gives a damn about his country will jump on his horse and race through the streets to spread the alarm. Paul Revere wasn’t always a hero. Research the disastrous Penobscot Expedition of 1779, a low point in his career as a Continental officer that resulted in his court-martial, though he was not convicted. But that mythic night in the Boston suburbs, when the British army marched to extinguish the first vulnerable sparks of the American Revolution, Revere saw his duty clearly and executed it heroically.
In this year of constant provocations and civic indignities, suffered at the hands of a legally elected but foul and alien government, our patriotic duty may not seem as clear as Paul Revere’s. But I believe we’ve reached that Revere moment, a moment when even the mildest patriot, pressed beyond endurance, knows it’s time to saddle up.
Try to imagine me reaching for my saddle. The lead local story in this morning’s paper is a grim item from neighboring Durham, N.C., where the sheriff has turned a Honduran immigrant over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers — in defiance of a judge’s order to hold him for a hearing in court. Jose Hernandez, a 35-year-old window installer and father of three, has lived in the United States since he was a teenager. Like many Hondurans, he came here to escape violence in his homeland. His offense? He was using the ATM at his bank when an agent confronted him and asked for his ID. He was arrested when a computer check showed that he had not appeared in court to answer a DWI charge in 2013 (guess why?). Now he’s in the clutches of ICE and probably on his way to deportation.
In North Carolina and across the country these same spooky agents have staked out malls, courthouses, even churches. Mexican friends of mine report that agents lurk outside our local Walmart, stopping shoppers and asking for their green cards. Sometimes they confiscate the green cards, and now the word on the street is that no one should carry his card in public, in this free country led by Donald Trump. What do these harassed individuals have in common with Jose Hernandez? They look Hispanic. Or they speak Spanish, or English with an accent. And there were no criminal warrants to justify bothering them at all.
Legal or illegal, these Americans are now afraid to leave their homes because they look like themselves. This is like nothing we ever associated with the United States of America. This is hardcore Gestapo, KGB, Iron Curtain stuff. This is where the police state, where the totalitarian experience begins. Remember the famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller, who spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps: “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew …”
You remember how it ends. I am deadly serious, never more so. Every time you think “because I am not a Honduran” or “because I am not a Muslim,” the iron door comes an inch closer to slamming shut. Multiplying the irony of police-state justice in the Land of the Free, I’m reading this story about Jose Hernandez on Memorial Day. Printed on the other side of the page with his picture was a tribute to local servicemen who had made “the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of liberty.”
The defense of whose liberty? I’m not poking fun at Memorial Day. In the little hill town where I grew up, the Memorial Day parade was one of the major events of the calendar year. I’m old enough to remember World War I veterans marching in ancient uniforms, alongside World War II vets who were still in their 30s. My brother — later a Vietnam vet — was one of the high school trumpeters who played taps in the cemetery at parade’s end, one trumpet stationed behind the honor guard of veterans and the other over the hill a quarter of a mile away, creating an echo. Tears were shed, even mine. But who would sacrifice his life, or even risk an infected hangnail, for a country where people with Hispanic faces or complexions are afraid to shop at Walmart? Or where the children of undocumented immigrants are routinely separated from their parents at the Mexican border and placed in foster care — the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance policy” — a practice so heartless and heedless that hundreds of small children are rumored to have been “lost” in the system. Remember when Lady Liberty used to lift her lamp beside the Golden Door?
I thought that the part of America I will never understand had reached its all-time low when pro-Trump, pro-NRA internet trolls —- and the nastiest rightwing media — -launched personal attacks on activist survivors of the Parkland high school massacre, survivors who had witnessed friends bleeding to death on the classroom floor. (One who mocked them was the egregious, felonious rightwing “intellectual” Dinesh D’Souza, recently pardoned by his White House soul brother.) This proved conclusively what few liberal observers would have dared to suggest, that there are crazy people who actually value their right to own assault rifles more than they value the lives of other people’s children. This seemed so incomprehensibly loathsome and insane that I thought a large segment of Middle America would finally turn its back on the gun lobby and its captive regiments of cowering, castrated legislators. I’m still waiting for a sign that this is happening. But the post-Parkland trolls and monsters are private citizens. The architects of the immigration nightmare are representatives of our current federal government, a devil’s dream team of liars, bullies and clawing, groveling opportunists that bears little resemblance to any government we’ve suffered before.
There’s no precedent, either, for this president. Pathetic, ridiculous, mindless — terrifying. We’ve used up all our adjectives—-“we” in this case the working press, including journalists from straitlaced “respectable” media who would never, never have unsheathed these words against any other president. The editorial page of the New York Times, when Trump is its target, now routinely uses language once reserved for Ramparts or Rolling Stone. How, finally, do sober observers sum up a congenital liar who wouldn’t recognize The Truth if it grabbed his shorts and gave him an atomic wedgie? (We dream that someday it will.)
Trump’s critics have used up all the ballistic nouns, as well: creep, thug, fraud, con man, demagogue, boor, sociopath, megalomaniac. The kindest thing that can be said about this train wreck of a president is that he’s the result, not the cause, of a dramatic devaluation of the American democracy. For several decades now the Republican Party has been recruiting extremist voters — white nationalists, gun goons, science-scorning fundamentalists — and encouraging a host of unappetizing candidates for public office. Accelerated by racist backlash against the Obama presidency, the GOP’s dark crusade triumphed in the shocking election of 2016 and left us with a preposterous caricature of a national leader, a boasting, braying, tweeting fool with a 55-inch waist, a 60-inch necktie, and hair-sprayed orange taxidermy on his forehead. The fool has failed at everything except getting beautiful if somewhat anaesthetized-looking women to marry him — at staggering expense — and convincing 60 million misguided white people that he was an appropriate candidate for President of the United States.
And in spite of compelling evidence for his illicit affairs with the porn actress and the Russian president, in spite of slapstick turnover at his revolving-door White House, in spite of his key appointees who call him an idiot and a moron, in spite of over 3,200 documented lies and 10,000 verbal gaffes and excruciating Twitter bursts, polls show that most of the people who voted for Trump would do it again. This is a mystery that confounds the political community, from political scientists to pundits to party operatives. How, at this point, could he retain 40 followers, far less 40% of the electorate? I’m not convinced by most of what I read, and I’m not confident in my own theorizing, either. To even approach the Trump cult you have to cast aside a lifetime’s worth of optimism and idealism. You have to take a painful look at the so-called Republican “base” and accept it for what it is. I’m fed up with liberals and journalists who scourge themselves for missing or ignoring the deeper truth, the hidden hunger that elected Donald Trump.
I realize that economic recovery is invisible in many parts of white America, and that voters on the losing end of the all-or-nothing economy make easy prey for the mock populism of grifters like Trump — promise them anything and let them feast on false hope. The Big Sting is especially effective when its victims feed solely on the “alternative facts” of the Republican propaganda machine, beginning with Fox News.
You didn’t have to be a closet Klansman to vote for Donald Trump. But I never thought Hillary Clinton needed to apologize for “deplorables.” We knew who she meant. “Deplorable” is a soft adjective if we’re talking about a White-Right “base” that mocks the Parkland survivors, dismisses Black Lives Matter as a radical scam, and embraces ICE agents who practice ethnic cleansing at Walmart and destroy helpless families of Latin American refugees at the Mexican border. “Detestable,” “despicable,” “unspeakable” or “heinous” might serve to start a conversation about these ugliest Americans. They’re the same people —- bitter, frightened, unreflective us-and-them people — -who made the Third Reich possible.
When two out of five Americans identify with Trump’s basest of bases, we might make a strong argument that we’re losing America to a gathering wave of anger and ignorance. And by “we” I don’t mean liberals or Democrats. I mean every citizen who makes an honest effort to be fair, and generous and reasonable. Those are words no one will ever apply to the current incarnation of the Republican Party, which strives transparently to make life as easy as possible for the few at the top of the socio-economic pyramid and as miserable as possible for the people at the bottom — immigrants, indigents and minorities.
In America we’ve almost grown passive about reckless greed; even the activists identified with the Far Left seem more interested in identity politics and policing public language than in attacking the most extravagant, obscene income inequality in the civilized world. But reckless disregard for human rights, human dignity and even human life represents another, deeper level of neo-fascist decadence. And that’s what we’re facing at the Rio Grande and at Walmart.
More than ever, with the immigration pogrom and the several constitutional crises President Trump seems to be forcing, we hear the word “legal.” But in the kind of authoritarian state Putin rules and Trump prefers, “legal” means anything the Big Man can get away with. Responsible journalists, sucker-punched into general confusion by Trump’s Feb. 17, 2017, Twitter charge that they were “the enemy of the American people,” have begun to wake up to the possibility that this simple-minded bully, with the help of a Republican Congress and 5-4 Supreme Court majority, could quickly turn the United States into an Orwellian dystopia. Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, no radical, recently issued a “Code Red” warning in the New York Times: Whatever you may think of the Democratic Party, Friedman warns his readers, this is the year when it’s imperative to vote for all of its candidates, because American democracy may not survive an empowered, vindicated Trump. “Get power,” Friedman urges, in Code Red mode. “Get a lever of power that can curb Trump. Nothing else matters now.”
Jon Meacham, once editor-in-chief of a national newsmagazine where I labored more obscurely, has published a book titled The Soul of America, essentially agreeing with Friedman that Trumpocalypse is a real and imminent threat but concluding on a more hopeful note. “It feels dark and insuperable,” Meacham admits, “but it’s felt that way before.” Reading this, unable to stifle a grin, I remember thinking that the guy who can see the light at the end of the tunnel is the one who ends up editor-in-chief.
At the other extreme there was David Buckel, a civil rights lawyer and environmental activist, who immolated himself in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as an ultimate protest against the Trump Administration’s criminal assault on the environment. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” was his final email message.
At least Buckel died before Scott Pruitt announced his plan to deregulate auto emissions. Even in the most desperate Paul Revere moment, it’s possible to over-react. But I hope Buckel’s fatal seriousness sent a message that’s audible, even in a dehumanized mediasphere where monsters taunt children with bullet wounds. The brutish are coming. They’re coming. They take no prisoners. It’s time to saddle up. There’s a whole lot more at stake than getting out the vote in November.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose essays have been awarded the H.L. Mencken, Lillian Smith and American Association of Newsweeklies prizes for commentary and the 2014 Pushcart Prize for non-fiction. His new book is Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners, coming out in October from Blair Press. Email delennis1@gmail.com
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2018
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