While the New York Times, the Pod Save America guys, and your friends on social media freak out about the debate, don’t forget to freak out about Friday morning’s SCOTUS decision, in which the bought members of the court took a Missouri GOP statewide office campaign spot-style flamethrower to the Deep State, or the entire institutional structure of how things actually get done to keep the country from food and waterborne illness, environmental destruction, and Other Things Rich People Don’t Want Getting in the Way of More Riches. I have some thoughts about the debate, the Democratic reaction to which has been understandable but completely out of hand and somewhere outside the confines of what a Bush Sr official once called the reality-based community, and they include a call to maybe focus a little bit on the man at the other podium lying to our faces.
They also include focusing on the damage that has just been done, damage the Leo/Koch/Bannon/Stone/Moloch right wants to continue to do to the boring, troublesome offices and officials that have until now worked to keep corporations from trampling the entire country underfoot. Half the country thinks The Other Guy and the armies of flunkies and toadies eager to be seen supporting him and eager to pursue the same cynical populism are in this for them, and a big chunk of them will feel the brunt of the effects an effectively deregulated economy will have outside of gated communities (and, eventually inside them, of course, but who can think that far ahead, am I right?). Maybe they’ll be surprised.
You want Freedom? How about the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat clean food? Sorry but this decision, brought to you by the few very rich white men who bought the deciders, makes that a lot less likely. The government hasn’t actually gotten smaller, as these people have always said they wanted, but it certainly won’t be able to help much. As Reagan put it a long time ago, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help. “
I’ve been thinking this morning of something that happened nearly twenty years ago, and I’m trying to figure out why. It has something to do with the presidential debate that took place last night, which I had the good sense to almost entirely miss but caught enough of, and read enough about, to be disturbed. What that connection is is what I’m trying to figure out.
In 2006 I gave a talk at a conference on 9/11 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Before the conference, I’d seen the names of a well-known pair of 9/11 Truthers on the online program and emailed the organizers to ask that my name be removed from it so that I wouldn’t be associated with their brand of “found the one engineer in the entire world who will argue that Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to bring down a skyscraper, plus nobody saw the plane hit the Pentagon, so 9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theorizing. I had no plans to call them out at the conference until one of them (I’m not naming them because, honestly, fuck them) approached the microphone at a lunchtime open forum/general meeting to share the good word of 9/11 Trutherism, which was met by Canadian politeness, American apathy, and maybe some agreement, I don’t know.
I stepped up to the microphone and addressed myself to the graduate students in the room while ignoring the man who’d just spoken. I said some things about how there was plenty of reason for suspicion of the American government, including the failure of the Bush administration to heed intelligence warnings about such an attack, but that giving time and attention to people like the man who just spoke is a bad idea, as trying to approach the truth with intellectual integrity is a big part of the business we were in. I sat down vibrating with an anger that came not just from an abstract defense of intellectual values but also from my experience of living in downtown Manhattan in September 2001, trekking home from work in the Bronx when the trains started to shut down, emerging to see military vehicles in the middle of 42nd Street, running from hospital to hospital looking for my brother-in-law, who worked in the towers and was not to be found, seeing and smelling the Towers’ smoke from my apartment window for weeks. After I sat down, I was thanked by a few people and ignored by the subjects of my remarks, as I expected.
Reliving this memory at my desk eighteen years later, my body is telling me that the feeling of wanting to confront people who say untrue things is the connection between this remembered moment and last night. While a lot of the chatter this morning is from rightfully anxious people on the left responding to Biden’s performance by saying he needs to let someone else run, what I’m sitting with right now is the feeling of having someone lie to your face. Whether the liar in this kind of situation knows that they’re lies or has convinced himself that they’re true may be of interest, but it’s less important in the end than the fact that he’s saying them as if they’re trueand that nobody is saying anything. This isn’t an intellectual realization for me, and I suspect for many–it’s a feeling in your chest. It’s like that feeling you had when you were a kid and somebody cheated in a game, or stole your toy, or said something you knew wasn’t true and nobody challenged them. It’s the feeling that something obviously wrong is happening and that people are letting it happen. It makes you wonder if people care or if the world is a place where wrong things just happen.
Fifty-seven-year-old me knows that the world is a place where wrong things just happen, but he also believes that it is also a place where something can sometimes be done about them if people pay attention to them, if people point them out, call out their wrongness, ask others to notice and address the wrong things. Many of us believe this. What we think is wrong, and right, is what divides us, and arguments over what’s right and what’s wrong are what politics is. But it’s also people who don’t seem to care about right and wrong and just want to be in charge. We’ve all known those people since we were kids. Standing up to them, to the kids who did wrong things and didn’t care because they wanted to be in charge–we called them bullies then and should do so now–can make you unpopular. It doesn’t make you feel better. But you do it out of self-defense and you do it because someone has to or the world is only a place where wrong things happen.
I understand that people are anxious, and they absolutely have a right to be, about the health of the president and about the danger of his opponent winning in November. But what I’m feeling this morning is the wrongness of Trump’s lies, as baldfaced as they’ve ever been, things that everybody knows arelies. And I’m wishing people would talk about that, would stand up to the bully who lied to us last night and to all the second-tier bullies in his gang, standing next to him on the playground, defending his lies. Otherwise what kind of world is this?
Samuel Cohen 