Heed the Prequel; It Can Happen Here

TUCSON – Flying from Paris bound for America, I ended up in a strange land besieged by Gulliver’s Lilliputians, smug and small-minded, who slavishly follow a mad tyrant toward a nightmare beyond even Jonathan Swift’s fertile imagination.

Is that a little over the top?

Donald Trump’s worst crime is not even among 91 indictments involving everything from fraud to a violent coup attempt. He allowed needless Covid-19 deaths – almost certainly well above 200,000 – for his own selfish purposes. American law calls that depraved-heart murder.

Yet so many sensible people do little more than wring hands – or simply tune out. Talking politics is bad form. Democrats cast about for an untested leader to replace one of the most effective presidents since World War II because he is beyond an arbitrary sell-by date.

Trump’s pandering led Putin to invade Ukraine. His support for Netanyahu’s subjugation of Palestine helped incite Hamas terror; the riposte sparks virulent global antisemitism. His assault on truth undercut faith in even reliable news media. And there is so much more.

In another term, he wants something akin to martial law to repress “vermin,” a Nazi catchword, and slashed taxes yet again for a wealthy few. Even if the 14th Amendment bars his return, the Grand Old Party he trashed ignores climate chaos, which is fast making Earth uninhabitable.

Where in the hell am I?

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The good news is that America can alter its course with thoughtful voting next November, followed by a concerted demand for accountability from the White House and state legislatures down to school boards and sheriff’s offices. The bad news is what could happen if not.

It is way past time to go beyond headlines and hearsay to look closely at history.

“It Can’t Happen Here,” that ominous Sinclair Lewis novel from 1935, struck many as a farfetched scenario in 2016. Rachel Maddow’s new book, “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” details how it damned near did happen here in the 1930s and could succeed today.

By now, harsh light reveals much about Hitler’s mindset, but Maddow adds telling detail that is omitted from school curricula. For instance, the Führer lionized Henry Ford, attributing his inspiration to write “Mein Kampf” to the auto magnate’s demonization of Jews.

Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands,” assiduously researched and masterfully written, exposes the possible when fearful nations fall for artful lies and pledge allegiance to a monster. Stalin, like Hitler, prepared the ground carefully, hiding his intentions until it was too late to stop him.

Hitler and Stalin killed 14 million people from 1931 to 1941, not war casualties but rather workaday “vermin” who were shot, gassed or starved for political purposes. Many were Jews; others were just scapegoats blamed for societal ills inconvenient to a tyrant’s master plan.

Big-lie propaganda used terms like fascist and communist, made meaningless by glaring contradictions. The operational words were power and greed. Success was not because of flaws in the German or Russian character. The human condition is a constant we all share.

Stalin’s censorship and Potemkin-village mises-en-scene for visiting statesmen masked reality. Few reporters with access to truth were able to reflect it, either because of editors back home or their own blinders. The New York Times’ Walter Duranty was an earlier-days Tucker Carlson.

Snyder assembled rare eyewitness accounts, including dispatches from Gareth Jones, a Welch journalist for the London Times, who slogged through southern Russia and Soviet Ukraine during Stalin’s induced genocidal famine. Then he dug into surviving records to confirm facts.

He found repeated instances of parents driven to cannibalize a weak child so the family could survive. That was only a few years before I was born, not long after one grandmother’s family escaped pogroms in Odessa, and another’s fled Bolsheviks in Belarus. My wife’s mother is from Poland. All are Bloodlands epicenters where old hatreds still simmer.

Such Old-World extremes hardly apply to today’s America. Still, look around at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a dis-United States. Start with “the China virus.”

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Ari Melber just spent an hour on MSNBC looking back at Trump’s Covid hecatomb. His chief witness was Bob Woodward, who added fresh thoughts on his 20 interviews with the president, beginning in March of 2020 when Covid-19 was already raging across America.

In January, at the first outbreak in China. Robert O’Brien, then national security adviser, alerted Trump. Woodward said it was the most “dramatic, stark warning” of a national emergency that he had heard in interviews with White House aides dating back to Henry Kissinger.

Matt Pottinger, O’Brien’s deputy, had spent seven years in China for the Wall Street Journal. He offered to tap his trusted Wuhan contacts. Without drastic action, he predicted 650,000 Americans would die. Trump listened but did nothing, more worried about his reelection.

Trump threw a fit when a top CDC specialist did her job: warning America of grave danger. Until then, the Atlanta-based research center was the gold standard among global epidemiologists. The angry president muzzled its scientists and limited their scope.

Woodward pushed a reporter’s limits, urging the president to follow World Health Organization guidance: test, trace and isolate. Rapid federal-level action was vital to provide protective gear and medical essentials to all states while helping scientists at home and abroad find a vaccine.

It took Woodward months to document Trump’s inaction while he sidelined Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx to hog the spotlight during those nonsensical self-promoting press briefings.

“I was dumbfounded,” he told Melber. “This idea of, we have it under control. It was never under control. It intentionally was never under control. And the problem with Trump is, I think, he looks at democracy as enemy territory…because that's the people, and he always wants it to be about him.”

Woodward described an eight-hour interview about the deadly virus, which went nowhere. He concluded: “It's all about, ‘Oh, no, no, no, everything is fine, I know what I'm doing.’ And when you lay it all out, he did not know what he was doing, and he didn't care."

Beyond the death toll, those lost years altered the life of every citizen Trump was sworn to protect. Americans’ main gripe against Biden is inflation, the result of supply chain disruption and money spent to get a crippled nation thriving again. And then the Ukraine war.

Some cretin wrote to the Tucson daily last week calling Biden a deplorable failure because gas costs too much. He said America needs more fossil fuel, not less. I just filled up my car at $2.90 a gallon, the same price I paid in early 2019. In France, it is close to $9 a gallon.

The pandemic touched me early on when Art Rotstein, the Associated Press reporter in Tucson, died as his wife and daughter watched behind glass. In 1987, he wrote a memorable account of his four-month ordeal with a faulty heart valve. Covid killed him in a week.

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Art’s death coincided with another Trump scourge: an all-out assault to slime honest reporters who kept watch over elected officials, oligarchs, corporate executives and other assorted greedheads.

In earlier times, major news organizations functioned like big-league baseball teams. Rookies worked their way up through the minors. Curious about the wider world, I moved on from Tucson just out of school. Art was happy to stay where he was, a pro with a sense of place.

He knew every foot of the border, from both sides, covering it when Mexicans with roots eight generations deep came and went with the seasons, paying taxes on wages for scutwork jobs no one else would do. Today’s “crisis,” he knew, was only a reflection of growing global inequality.

Art recalled the Barry Goldwater days when hard-core conservatives compromised in the national interest. He watched outsiders bring their fortunes to Arizona and declare that Indian tribes, natives for millennia, should be herded off their lands if there was copper to be mined.

Journalism schools that taught ethical techniques to sniff out ground truth now also teach public relations, a far more remunerative trade that does the opposite. They are part of a larger picture of skewed schooling that shortchanges civics, humanities and critical thinking.

The result today is obvious and inevitable. Information crucial to electing competent leaders is too often secondhand guesswork bounced around in social-media circles, if not deliberate lies masquerading as “news.”

People unfamiliar with complex statecraft often react to one aspect of a crisis like invertebrates stuck with a pin. One woman recently commented in the New York Times that Biden repulsed her more than any politician ever had because he was complicit in Netanyahu’s Gaza overkill.

The Hamas onslaught on innocents was reprehensible beyond any words. Given sensibilities among so many American Jews, Biden had no choice but to express full support for a man he loathes. While he hugged Netanyahu in public, he spoke blunt hard words in private.

Along with Antony Blinken’s nonstop shuttle diplomacy, Biden helped open relief corridors and organize exchanges of hostages for prisoners. On every occasion, he rams home the message: lasting peace demands a two-state solution. Without Hamas.

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Gaza reflects the bigger issue. Despite Biden’s successes, polls show him neck-and-neck, if not behind, the worst president in U.S. history. I’ve touted him since 2020 but claim no prescience. I only expected a firm hand on the tiller until some young-comer Democrat emerged for 2024.

But Trump, soundly defeated, would not go away. Smoldering embers he left behind flared up in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And too many inattentive Americans, focused on effect but not cause, blame the incumbent.

In fact, Trump built on Barack Obama’s thriving economy, doping the markets with a $1.9 trillion tax cut that fueled stock buybacks. Covid hit poor people hard. The rich made out like bandits. Simple. Stock prices plummeted at the end of Trump’s term, and they bought more.

Today, America’s economy is roaring back, far stronger than in Europe, with full employment, dropping inflation, brisk consumer spending and travel nearing record levels. Families have come back from poverty, with lower health care costs. Infrastructure is on the mend.

Yet a New York Times/Siena College poll this week reports that 62 percent of Democrats who voted for Biden in six crucial states rate his economy as “poor” or only “fair.” Among Trump voters, the tally was 97 percent. Go figure.

Low presidential ratings damage America abroad. Wary allies that depend on continuity brace for potential renewed lunacy. Adversaries exploit scorched-earth politics and a clown-car Congress as proof that democracy’s time has passed. Biden needs to finish the job.

This is the first of occasional pieces to add nuance in broad context to what Americans face as elections approach. They will zero in on specific cases, some with disguised identities to avoid scorn among peers if not serious harm in a country rife with armed lunatics.

Consider a 22-year-old American I interviewed in France: whip smart, mannerly and eager to make his fortune in some techie enterprise after a post-college ramble in Europe, Asia and Africa. He said he didn’t think he would vote next year.

“I haven’t studied the issues enough to make a choice,” he told me. I worked him over as best I could. He listened and asked questions. Soon after, a nearby TV flashed an urgent BBC update on Gaza. He walked by without a glance as if it were a ho-hum weather report on a calm day.

It is not that he doesn’t care. But with so much else on his mind, he is not clear why he should. That in the end is what scares me most.

My constant mantra is attributed to Edmund Burke, an Irish political theorist in Britain’s Parliament who supported American colonists’ objections to the king: Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

We old guys will likely be gone before the worst – or something better – happens. But young people are shaping new lives with technology and scientific advances yet to be invented. If they don’t learn how and why earlier generations went so wrong, their actuarial odds are grim.

In the end, their future depends on whether the world can make up for lost time after Trump rejected the 2015 Paris accords and otherwise sabotaged international action to stave off climatic endgame.

World leaders are now gathering for COP28, yet another U.N. summit to unite against climate change before humans leave an overheated world to cockroaches and jellyfish. The venue is Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, the world’s fifth largest oil producer.

Biden is skipping the meeting, which is no big deal. John Kerry, his stand-in, knows the issues and the players. Nonetheless, detractors will seize on his absence as yet more proof he is not up to the job. In today’s America, optics rule.

Those little Lilliputians were Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century spoof of human nature in action and a trendy new genre of travel writing. “Gulliver’s Travels” makes for a great read. But like “Mein Kampf” and “Das Kapital,” it is no model for a free, democratic society.