If America actually manages to work through its current insanity and at the same time manages to remain one country instead of two, it may require a small miracle.
It used to be said that God protects drunks, small children and the United States of America, and if there were always serious political differences, somehow we managed to get past them. People on both sides believed that even if this country wasn’t exactly what they wanted, it was better than the alternative.
The only time it didn’t work, it resulted in a four-year war between regions that has never really been settled.
It is somehow obscene that so many people in southern states take pride in displaying the Confederate battle flag. Imagine if a large minority of Germans who survived the fall of the Third Reich had kept displaying the Nazi flag after 1945.
Two things about that:
First, Germany outlawed displays that evoked Naziism.
Second, many of the same Americans who love the Stars & Bars also display the Hitler flag. They abdicate the right to spout the lie about a noble “Lost Cause” of Southern glory. Displaying swastikas makes you at best naive and at worst a vicious racist.
Or in the words of Donald Trump, a very fine person.
I used to wonder how a cultured, educated nation like Germany could slide into Hitlerism in the 1930s.
After six years of watching Trump first pursue, then execute and lose office, I no longer wonder. It’s a relatively small leap from Make America Great Again to Deutschland Uber Alles.
And Hitler actually had to overcome an intelligent, educated electorate. Trump only had to agitate people who were dumber than stumps.
Trump and his minions, among them Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have learned a secret that is standing them in good stead so far. When you say something that backfires on you, even if there is proof in audio and/or video, just keep denying and denying.
It’s a little like the great comedian Richard Pryor said, deny deny deny. Even if your wife catches you in bed with another woman, even if you’re right in the middle of illicit sex, deny deny deny.
Greene is doing that right now and saying that she never said Jewish space lasers caused the California wildfires.
She says it’s the media lying about her and trying to make her look stupid.
I could take a really cheap shot here but I won’t.
The problem is that there is so much that can be done on computers these days to manipulate, distort or out-and-out change audio and video clips these days, it’s difficult to trust much. Trump himself has become the king of denial, even to the point of once denying the infamous “grad ’em by the pussy” quote that surfaced in 2016.
This actually verges on something much worse, though. Particularly among the MAGA crowd, many people don’t care what is true or not, and they don’t care how much of a scumbag Trump is. He drives liberals crazy and that’s enough.
And even if he only serves the one term and never runs for president again, they got what they wanted most — a far-right Supreme Court.
A final disposition of Roe v Wade alone might split the country in two, but even if all that does is send it back to the states, do you really think antiabortion folks will allow it to continue in California? Do you really think the pro-choice crowd will write off Texas?
E pluribus unum might be on its last legs.
We many end up with e pluribus two-num.