Summary: Right now, reading the Republican platform and contemplating Donald Trump’s selection Of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate, I’m not happy. The Republican platform, the Republican convention, and the performance of Melania Trump have all got me wondering whether I should expedite the process of applying for an Irish passport.
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Watching the obscenity that is the Republican national convention in Cleveland has got me more than a little worried. I watched last night a bunch of seriously pissed off people, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly straight, overwhelmingly conservative, have a collective temper tantrum on national television about all the things they were convinced were wrong with America, not least of which the fact that in the last eight years that black man in the White House has been able to turn around the Bush recession, take long steps toward liquidating our military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to create millions of new jobs, and, in an incidental way, to oversee advances in civil rights for queerfolk I would not have thought possible just five years ago.
The Republicans inveighed at great and angry length against all these changes, letting us know in no uncertain terms that they were against all of them, and that in the view of the Republican Party, it was time to declare war upon uppity women, uppity black folk, uppity Mexicans (who are all presumed to be illegal, freeloading moochers) uppity seniors concerned about Social Security and Medicare, and uppity queers concerned about marriage and basic human rights. For all of us Uppities, the Republican message could not be simpler or more unambiguous: shut the fuck up, get the fuck to the back of the bus, and fuck off.
The pissed off Republicans were, in short, campaigning against everything that has been accomplished in America since the 1960s. And in watching the Republicans having their chimpanzee-like, feces-throwing, shit-fit, hate-filled, NSDAP Reichsparteiwoche von Nürnberg obscenity of a convention, my response was, to borrow the line from Ghostbusters, to be terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.
I’m terrified for a number of not altogether contemptible reasons.
First of all, I’m terrified because Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Though I don’t much care for Cornel West, brother West and I agree that Donald Trump represents the modern incarnation of fascism. I see in the ascent of Donald Trump frightening echoes to the ascent of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. I also see in the astonishing quiescence of the American public deeply disturbing echoes to Germany’s Weimarzeit, that brief, glimmering period of Weimar democracy that came in with the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy and ended on that dreadful January 30, 1933, when Reichspräsident Paul v. Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Reichskanzler.
In the run-up to the orchestrated coronation of Donald Trump, in an extravaganza that could have been designed and staged by none other than Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the Republican Party has produced a platform that breathes more hostility toward queerfolk than any other platform in the 162 years that the GOP has been in existence.
Not since Pat Buchanan postulated in 1992 at the Republican convention in Houston the existence of a cultural and religious war for the soul of America have I been so concerned about what one of the major parties in my country thinks of queerfolk.
Because I happen to be queer.
I don’t apologize for it; I don’t make excuses for it; and I hadn’t thought that I would need to make it so much a part of my political identity as it has become.
But Republican antipathy toward queerfolk is beginning to call forth the same kind of agita among the queer nation that Germany’s more perspicacious Jews began to feel in the fall of 1932, during the short, ill-fated, chancellorships of Heinrich Brüning and Kurt v. Schleicher. These perspicacious Jews took one look at the flatulent Nazi who was their new leader and made tracks over the water to the U.K. or the New World. For Albert Einstein’s presence in Princeton, we can thank Adolf Hitler. For Sigmund Freud’s final sojourn in London, we can also thank Adolf Hitler. Where, if Donald Trump bamboozles the American public into giving him a lease on a 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Northwest, will America’s queerfolk be able to go? Where will our Thomas Manns, our Lion Feuchtwangers, our Albert Einsteins, our Arnold Schönbergs, our queer émigrés, find a congenial foreign lodgment away from the horrors of a Trump administration?
For if the indications coming out of the RNC are at all reflective of what we can expect from the GOP this year, the omens are not good. As an article in the Los Angeles Times put it a few days ago: “The Log Cabin Republicans, a wing of the party that pushes for gay rights, called the party’s stance the ‘most anti-LGBT platform in the Party’s 162-year history,’ and said that opposition to same-sex marriage, support for conversion therapy, and stances on other issues are out of step with the public at large.”
Unfortunately, while the Republican convention and platform have demonstrated a disturbing fondness and predilection for trying to reestablish in their fullest form the baleful social dispensations of the 19th century, a great many of the Republican base are virtually salivating at the opportunity to march queerfolk back into the closet, to send American womanhood back into the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, to bundle black folk to the back of the national bus, to send Asians packing either to the Hawaiian Islands where they can be quarantined, or back to Asia where they can be ignored.
Moreover, the Republican party, which is been the subject of a brilliantly, frighteningly successful hostile takeover bid by Donald Trump, seems to have lost whatever moral compass it once had. Last night, Melania Trump delivered an introduction speech for her husband at the Republican convention in Cleveland. Mrs. Trump apparently did not realize that in 2016 there are legions of social media entrepreneurs and fact checkers who discovered, almost before she had stopped speaking, that material portions of her speech had been lifted almost word for word from Michelle Obama’s introduction speech for Barack Obama in 2008.
What Melania could and should have done was to offer an immediate, heartfelt, introspective apology. She should have owned what she did wrong, offered an explanation, not an excuse, and used it as a teachable moment on the importance of honesty and coming clean. Had she done so, it would have had the same kind of devastating effect as a 100 division armored thrust at the heart of NATO. Instead, the Trump campaign and the Republican party did what they always do when confronted with their harlotries. Melania herself has gone silent and of the Trump/Republican organization has tried to push back, blaming Hillary Clinton, blaming Barack and Michelle Obama, and putting just about every conceivable bizarre, tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theory conceivable out there. It would seriously not surprise me to find the Republican/Trump organization floating a psycho-guano, batshit theory that Obama campaign operatives had time traveled from 2008 forward to 2016, stolen Melania’s notes, and then traveled backward in time and given the notes to Michelle Obama so she could deliver them as part of her speech in 2008.
Because, apparently, the Republican Party and the Trump campaign are too deranged to understand either the importance of presenting original work, not taking credit for others’ work as one’s own, or of the importance of telling the truth when you get caught in obvious plagiarism. This failure of moral compass causes me to wonder even more what we can expect, God forbid, from a Trump presidency. An administration willing to push back in the face of obvious plagiarism is an administration with absolutely no moral compass at all. It is an administration that would be willing to shred the Constitution and to engage in the same kind of false flag activities that we saw Turkish President Recep Teyyip Erdoğan engage in with the phony coup intended to give Erdoğan an excuse to conduct a thoroughgoing purge of the Turkish military.
The response of the Republican/Trump organization and of individual Trump supporters to the Melania plagiarism incident is nothing more and nothing less than a moral litmus test, to which there can be only one correct answer. Anything less than a full throated denunciation of Melania Trump, the Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and all their fellow travelers constitutes complicity. It also constitutes an open admission that Melania herself, The Donald, and all of their enablers are functioning in a moral vacuum. At the risk of sounding somewhat pharisaical, these are not people who are fit to associate with morally grounded human beings.
And because there is a risk that such profoundly amoral people might come to power in America on January 20 of next year, many of us are beginning to make plans to bolt for the exits. Fortunately for me, coming as I do from the Irish diaspora, I can take advantage of what amounts to Ireland’s Law of Return: if you happen to be descended from at least one grandparent who was born in Ireland, as I am, you can apply for Irish citizenship and an Irish passport. Though Ireland is not in the Schengen zone, it is still a member of the European Union, and that makes it a not uncongenial place of exile. Moreover, marriage equality is a blackletter part of the Irish Constitution now, so I know that if I were to return to the ancestral island, and if I were to meet a congenial Irish fellow, we could tie the knot and enjoy the full civil rights that the Irish and EU constitutions guarantee to Irish and EU citizens.
The thought of having to go across the water, to make in reverse the journey my Irish grandmother made aboard RMS Oceanic in 1913, fills me with trepidation. Like her and her family, if I make the crossing, I necessarily make a leap into the unknown. If I make the crossing, I’m not sure whether it’s an act of courage, pulling up stakes to seek opportunity in a new country, or the cowardly act of a man who is terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought at what Donald Trump represents. I understand now, even as through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12), the existential truth of what so many of my European Jewish friends and neighbors had used to talk about, 40-plus years ago in the Hollywood Hills. I understand, even if through that glass darkly, the fear that gripped the Jewish community in those closing years of the Weimarzeit, during the brief chancellorships of Brüning and Schleicher, before Hindenburg tapped Hitler to form a new government and pounded the last nails into the coffin of the Weimar Republic.
Because it can happen here.
When Herr Drumpf
bloviates on about Muslims, or about Latinos, or about black folk, or
when he gives his imprimatur to the most sweeping the anti-queer
platform in the history of the Republican Party, I know that we are dealing with the coming of fascism to America in its truest form.
Yes, it can happen here.
If American fascism does happen, I would like to see Donald Trump meet the same bad end as Benito Mussolini himself. I would like to see a new Walter Audisio administer to Donald Trump the same kind of condign punishment the original partisan Walter Audisio administered to Benito Mussolini when he executed the Duce on April 28, 1945. For Mussolini had betrayed and sold out in the Italian people who he had once seduced and off of whom he had grown rich. After being executed, the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci were taken down from the foothills of the Alps where they had been shot to Milan and hung up from the rafters in a gas station for their bodies to be abused by the Italian people whom they had ripped off, betrayed, and given over to war and desolation. But before Mussolini could be executed, he had put Italy through 22 years of fascist Calvary and cost Italy half a million lives, all in the service of his ego and his narcissism. Death was a proper punishment for Il Duce. Caesar had his Brutus; Charles I had his Cromwell; Louis XVI had his Robespierre; Nicholas II had his Yacob Sverdlov; Mussolini, as aforesaid, had his Walter Audisio, and Donald Trump... may profit by their example.
I don’t want to live through a flesh and blood version of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Not now, not ever.
I don’t want to be part of a fascist America.
#Nevertrump
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