A PARADOX

Paradoxically, the events that have happened since Trump rode down his golden escalator in June 2015 have been the best thing that could happen to the United States. We’ve been forced to rediscover who we really are.

Thirty years ago, when the Soviet Union fell apart and the Cold War that had dominated everything for the previous forty years came to an end, pundits celebrated the “end of history” and the “final triumph of the West.” And when it started to become obvious if you looked, that it really wasn’t like that at all, people turned away and said, “Oh, no, that’s not right.” We celebrated that “It really can’t happen here.”

Except it did.

The first moment when it was shoved in our face that the Far Right was serious came with the Brooks Brothers Riot in Florida over counting the votes in the election of 2000. Then the Supreme Court stepped in, saying that what they were doing was not to be taken as a precedent or anything, but they were stopping the counting and now let’s have some stability and get on with Life As It Should Be. And so the guy who actually lost the election was declared the winner, and we all told ourselves, “Shit happens...” and of course it would all be set right the next round.

Except a year later I got woke up at 0545 by a ringing telephone on Monday, September 11, and when I picked up the phone this guy whose voice I didn’t recognize at first was yelling “We’re at war!” To which I said “Huh?” To which he said “We’re at war!” To which I said “Who is this?” To which he said “It’s Stephen! In New York! We’re at war!” To which I said “Huh?” and he said “Turn on the TV!” and hung up. So I stumbled down the hall to the living room and turned on the TV.

Just as an airplane hit the World Trade Center.

And we did go to war. And then we decided to have an even dumber war than the one I fought in, and I didn’t have any trouble seeing this one for the crock of shit it was, having learned the hard way to recognize crocks of shit when I saw them.

And then the political divisions I had noticed starting to happen back during the Clinton Administration, that had become more divisive at the end of that era with the election of George W. Bush, got really divisive after little Georgie led us into the invasion of Poland, er, I mean Iraq, and for a couple of years I really didn’t like opening my e-mail app, for all the hate mail I was getting. But I outlived those people (Literally! Most of them are dead and gone.)

And then in 2008, it looked like we finally won the election of 1968 that we’d lost when Bobby Kennedy was killed. I personally managed to raise half a million dollars $200-$2,500 at a time, for the victory. Only we didn’t really. And the divisions got worse.

And then Trump came down his golden escalator. And the impossible happened: he won even though he lost worse than Bush did 16 years earlier.

And this got people’s attention. It certainly got mine.

Over those four years, I ended up learning that a lot of the verities I had taken for granted in this country I lived in weren’t necessarily verities. Or they weren’t verities to everyone. I ended up becoming a patriot - again - in the sense my sixth great grandfather had become a patriot when he crossed the Delaware with General Washington, or when my great-great grandfather celebrated his sixteenth birthday on Little Round Top, or when my father survived being sunk by a Kamikaze and then survived three days with the sharks. Like how I had felt when I took the oath of enlistment and joined the Navy when I was 18. Before my participation in Tonkin Gulf; before My Lai; before Nixon; before Watergate. Before everything that made me think I’d given that oath to something that maybe didn’t deserve it.

I got to remember what I had said to my father in 1968, when he asked me why I was working to destroy the country. “Destroy it! I’m doing everything I do now because I love this country, goddamnit!!”

And while all that was going on, we as a country, as a planet, continued thinking the worst was behind us, that all the nightmares we’d had about the end of the world were just that - nightmares. Things that would never happen.

And even though I paid attention to those things; even though I wrote about them, talked about them, saw Vladimir Putin being elected President of Russia and knew that “Once KGB, always KGB,” that there was no soul for George Bush to see when he looked in the man’s eyes. But I also didn’t like finding myself agreeing so much with people I had disagreed with for so long.

And then Donald Trump came riding down that escalator, and all of a sudden, many of those people I had been disagreeing with for so long suddenly agreed with me that this was A Very Bad Thing Indeed.

Now I say to those people I disagreed with before he came down the escalator: “We can disagree about policies later. Right now we’re on the same page about saving the system that lets us have the disagreements.”

I’m not the only one who discovered that.

And then, in the past 12 days, an era has ended and several decades have happened that no one would have foreseen.

All of a sudden, we’ve rediscovered things people discovered back in 1949. All the talk about there being a struggle between democracy and autocracy is very, very real. Lots of people thought September 11, 2001 was “the new Pearl harbor.” It turns out that February 23, 2022 is the new Pearl Harbor day.

September 11, 2001 saw us decide to squander what the country should be about, jumping into unworthy wars that made it easy to see the United States as the great sinner, operating torture chambers around the world in the name of “freedom.”

Given his experience of the past 20 years, it wasn’t irrational for Putin to decide he could invade Ukraine because he wanted to, and to expect to get away with it. He’d gotten away with bombing apartment buildings in Moscow to start the Chechen War. The world had looked at photos of Grozny and said collectively “Meh.” Ten years of destruction in Syria was just “a problem over there” for most of us. Each time, we stood back and approved leaders who said nothing had happened that was enough to risk upsetting him. Just as it had been said 80 years ago about another man who had some “border disputes” to settle. We applauded President Obama for having the mantra, “Don’t do stupid shit.” High on the list of “stupid shit” was the things we had done between 1949 and 1989.

I even managed to think that the anti-Putin government in Kyiv was subverted by Nazis. Until I met some Ukrainians who also built models, and started learning otherwise six years ago. A lot of us believed a lot of things that let us go “Meh,” until they didn’t.

Shadi Hamid wrote today in The Atlantic:

“The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle?

“In any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored why Biden was right and why authoritarians - and the authoritarian idea itself - are such a threat to peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.”

Around noon on December 7, 1941, newly-commissioned Ensign John Bridgers, who had just graduated from flight school in Pensacola the previous Wednesday and returned on two weeks’ leave to his home in North Carolina before reporting to the fleet to fly as a dive bomber pilot, tired of playing “catch” in the front yard with his little brother and went inside to listen to the football game with his father. Ten minutes into the broadcast, the announcer said “This just in: Japanese airplanes have attacked our naval base at Pearl Harbor.”

Up to that moment, Bridgers had known exactly what he was going to be doing for the next four years: flying for the Navy so he could take a $4,000 bonus at the end when he left, and go to medical school. As he later wrote in his memoir, “I knew my plans had changed.”

Like John Bridgers and everyone else alive at that time, our plans have now changed, too.

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