“Politically speaking, all roads
to hell lead to Richard Nixon and, I fear, will end with Caesar Disgustus”.
----From
“The Quotations of Chairman Joe”.
It is a
mistake to treat Caesar Disgustus as an aberration. A cry has gone up across the land that we
must not treat the national obscenity that is Donald J. tRUMP as the ‘new
normal’. About this the critics are
entirely wrong; for the current manifestation of the malignancy that is the
conservative movement is neither new nor is it an aberration from the
norm. Donald J. tRUMP,
our very own Caesar Disgustus is, in fact, the culmination of political trends
more than half century in the making, now in the process of accelerating the
decline of the late, great, United States of America.
It began
with Barry Goldwater and his headlong assault on the New Deal. Goldwater, however, suffered a crushing
defeat and his movement would have found its natural place in the dustbin of
history had it not been for Richard Nixon.
Nixon not only rescued conservatism but began a series of behaviors that
not only disgraced his office but transcended his presidency; establishing
precedents and laying down markers that others would follow on the path to
power.
First
was his willingness to gain power and hold power by any means necessary. I am referring to the “backchannel” message
sent to the South Vietnamese government to not reach any agreement at the Paris
Peace Conference and promising a better deal with a future Nixon
administration. This sedition set the
precedent for all future Rescumlican seditions from the Reagan campaign
negotiating with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after election day
1980, to the tRUMP campaign secretly meeting and coordinating with the Russians
to win the last election we have seen a modern major political party not
blanche at the prospect of committing sedition and evidencing a willingness to
dance on the very front line of treason in order to win. Then, of course, there were the ‘dirty
tricks’ of Donald Segretti and company, called “Rat-Fucking” by the initiate
who polished these skills as students at the University of Southern California,
establishing a precedent that would produce in turn the likes of Lee Atwater,
Karl Rove, and a host of other swine; an approach to the political process that
would not simply damage the reputations of political opponents but, in the
process, erode the legitimacy of the political process itself. And, let us not
forget the “Southern Strategy”, a political stratagem that embraced the
country’s racist traditions precisely at the time that the Democratic Party was
working feverishly to marginalize them.
By giving racism a new lease on legitimacy, the Republican Party
embraced a form of ‘divide and rule’ based on first racism later adding other
so-called “social issues”, wedge issues used to set one group of Americans
against another in order to further enable them to climb the “greasy pole.” “By
any means necessary” became their modus operandi in order to gain power in
service of villains.
Secondly,
beginning with Nixon we as a nation began this long and tortuous path of
disparaging the press. Here was Nixon,
recipient of editorial endorsements of ¾ of the nation’s newspapers complaining
bitterly about how the press was out to get him.
Third,
and on a related point, is this business of whining about which one easily
conjures up Nixon’s infamous “last press conference” when he promised that “you
won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”; a promise that, much to the
misfortune of his country, he famously failed to keep. Always playing the victim, a core stratagem
of modern conservatism, but here reinforced with the introduction of the
Christian Evangelical movement bringing its own paranoia and deep sense of
persecution and victimization.
Then
there is, fourth, Nixon’s striking incompetence best demonstrated by his
administration of wage and price controls, an effort that introduced not only
Donald Rumsfeld to national attention but set the precedent that one can win by
failing; that through failure one can discredit governance, leading in due
course to the pathologies of Bush the Lesser and the complete embrace of
failure by the entire conservative movement as they transformed themselves into
the modern No-Nothing as well as the Know-Nothing Party of the twenty first
century.
Fifth
there began with Nixon a trend favoring politicians that seek office not to
accomplish anything but to become someone.
Nixon sought the presidency to validate Richard Nixon; to become, in his
mother’s eyes, that son who would make up by reaching such heights the loss of
his brother. The result has been a
string of self-serving chief executives who reached for the golden ring to
thereby validate themselves. This was
certainly true of Nixon, both Bush’s and the present mud on the throne.
Sixth,
we see in Richard Nixon the precedent that has largely gone ignored until the
current occupant assumed the office and that is that if there were any
governing principle at all it is to use the office as a means of getting
revenge upon enemy’s real and imagined.
Reading the White House
Transcripts one immediately encounters between the “expletive deleted” s,
the fact that this president spent an inordinate amount of time not thinking
about the public’s business but in scheming about how he could “stick it” to
his ‘enemy’s’. This is a precedent now
retrieved from the annals of history with a vengeance by Disgustus.
Then
there is this business of entitlement.
Beginning with the Conservative’s ideological dictum that the wealthy
are, by divine right, justified in stealing the wealth produced by labor and
are entitled to the fruits of the planet; add the Evangelical Christian, and
especially those espousing the so-called ‘prosperity’ doctrine, in which it is
held that the fruits of the planet belong to the Christian, indeed the
capitalist Christian, and one is confronted with a deep psychosis in which layer upon layer of imagined persecutions
fuel a very strong but wholly imagined victimization. It is into this morass that the politician
best voicing resentment emerges.
Victimization born of imagined persecutions identify with those who feel
that they have been denied their entitlement; who are seen as persecuted albeit
for different reasons. Justice, always a
concept involving more than a little revenge, demands retribution. Hence the ugliness that is Caesar Disgustus
is not of recent mint; he is simply the latest and the most virulent
manifestation of it. It has been more than half century in the making, for
Nixon, the Bush’s, the Clintons have all evidenced a deep sense of entitlement
as they sought public acclaim. Now we reap the whirlwind.
Lastly,
what began with Nixon has come home with a vengeance with our present Caesar
Disgustus. I am here referring to the
damage that Nixon did to the office of the presidency by vandalizing the
institution in a scandal known as “Watergate”; a precedent that had set the
stage for later vandals such as Reagan in his embroilments with Iran and the
Contras, Bush the Lesser with his handling of the Iraq War and Hurricane
Katrina, and now with Disgustus who has seized upon these examples and has set
about vandalizing virtually everything within reach…the electoral process, the
intelligence communities, the congress, the press, the courts, the presidency. When it comes to vandalism all who came
before were rank amateurs.
Paranoia,
suspicion, the overweening need for both acceptance and revenge. A willingness
to “suspend the rules”, to see the president as ‘sovereign’. A willingness to employ any means necessary
in order to accomplish one’s ends but whine when the ends go
unaccomplished. All this and more began
with Richard Nixon.
But
Caesar Disgustus presents us with all this and more. He is Nixon on Steroids for sure but, in
adopting the “scorched earth” economic agenda of literary fiction he manifests
an even greater threat to both the country and the planet. His willful embrace of ignorance has more
recent antecedents, for this we must turn to ‘Ol Two-Cows’ Bush and his
celebration of the guttural as opposed to the cerebral as a means of addressing
the nation’s problems, manifest itself in a veritable celebration of ignorance
and nowhere is this more evident and more dangerous than on the issue of
climate change or global warming.
In
sum. Disgustus stands as the
quintessential ‘Boomer’, the distillation of these trends and many others that
have been coursing through the veins of the body politic for now over half
century. He cannot, therefore, be seen
as merely an aberration. It is
abundantly clear that simply removing from office this ignorant, incompetent
and corrupt dolt is not going to solve the problem; it is merely the necessary
but not the sufficient condition. The problem runs much deeper than Disgustus,
for the cancer that is the modern conservative movement has been allowed to run
its course for all too long. The body politic will not survive until the entire
movement is eradicated root and branch. Impeachment
is only the beginning.
Impeach and Imprison.
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