‘Fathoming the unfathomable as Washington turns into the Wild West’

The most enduring images I will carry with me from the recent United States presidential election were those captured by an ABC cameraman trawling the American heartland in pursuit of rusted-on Trump supporters. The intention of the ABC team, so we were informed, was to discover whether the man’s outrageous lying and general performance in office had altered their voting intentions from 2016 to any degree.

“No, certainly not,” one woman replied emphatically to the Australian interviewer, when questioned as to whether she saw a valid role model for her children in ‘The Donald’. But she went on to say that it was irrelevant to her voting intentions, emphasising that regardless of the (godless) man himself, he was ensuring that God-fearing Americans would continue to be appointed to high judicial office under his presidency. And that was all that mattered to her. To some, this reply might suggest the delusional state of the American mind, or to others, the intractable divide that now makes the US – once the benchmark for democratic government in the world – virtually ungovernable.

I had cause to think about this exchange while watching the unfolding crisis engulfing Washington on Wednesday morning. Commentator after commentator, both Australian and American, repeatedly made the point that the hundreds of thousands (let me repeat, hundreds of thousands) who amassed in Washington to prevent the legal transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden, genuinely believed the bleat from the White House that “we wuz robbed”.

And this belief was unshakeable, despite the fact more than 60 lawsuits initiated by Trump loyalists designed to question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory had already been thrown out, most of them by Republican judges who, invariably, had been appointed by Trump himself. Now, you truly have to inhabit a parallel universe to cling to beliefs that have not a scintilla of evidence as a viable foundation for your actions.

Yet, the inescapable truth is that hundreds of thousands of Americans did flood into Washington bent on protesting the election result whereupon they were virtually incited by the departing president to take the law into their own hands. The US Capitol building was invaded and trashed, with one person already dead as I write this, and Trump’s only comment being a mealy-mouthed suggestion that they “stand down” in the interests of  “peace” from their “sacred” rallying in Washington. Can you believe such cynicism?

(It’s worth noting that the expression “to stand down” is one given to legally-constituted armies that have been called up for an emergency but are then directed to stand down when that emergency had passed. Which, in Trump-bubble-land, means that the gun-toting rabble he incited to invade official Washington has the same standing as the legally-constituted bodies he was sworn to defend and uphold.)

Without doubt this man, who should have stuck to bit parts in “family” movies, is an unscrupulous scoundrel. (Not a tautology, I might add, because I’d describe Richard Milhous Nixon as a “scrupulous scoundrel” if only because he knew when the jig was up and left office fairly quietly.)

This leaves us with the dilemma of what Trump is likely to do in the next 13 days, as he is most certainly not going to leave office quietly, accept his defeat gracefully or calm his agitated supporters. But that is for the next 13 days to reveal. At this moment, while appalled at what is spewing from my television screen, I can only reflect on 50 years’ close study of American politics and ponder how this could have happened.

Just a few days ago, I watched a DVD that one of my sons gave me as a Christmas present. It was a film-noir movie set in mid-’50s New York called Motherless Brooklyn, written, directed and starring American actor Edward Norton. In it, one of the characters reflects on the
wasteland of American life in 1957 by saying that the US only got through the Great Depression by pulling together, but unfortunately the subsequent lesson they learnt from World War II was that there were greater rewards to be gained by throwing your weight around and bullying other people rather than working respectfully with them.

These thoughts certainly fit in with my perception of why the US is so different from other countries of European origin, and that is, the dominance of fundamentalist religion in convincing ordinary people that what they believe is more to be trusted as truth than what they can actually see and hear, and the illusionary power of the Hollywood celluloid culture that transfers those same delusions from the world of theology to that of everyday life.

The US may well have rushed blindly into Vietnam (against the best advice of the French, who knew something about South-east Asian quagmires), inevitably suffered a humiliating defeat, yet recovered and, though the medium of countless Rambo-style movies, convinced themselves that it never really happened. Which brought us to 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

While it might be comforting for a non-American to settle back self-righteously and say, “what did you expect?” it is not really comforting at all. Because if Trump’s America is to be the linear opposite of Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China then we are all in deep trouble.

Biden will emerge from this chaos, I have no doubt. And Trump will slink off into his bolt-hole of whining self-pity. But that can hardly be the end of the matter. The fact that hundreds of thousands of armed vigilantes could invade Washington on the whim of a discredited mountebank, knowing there are millions more like them back in angry, alienated America, is an existential problem that Biden is going to have to find answers to.

Like the character in Motherless Brooklyn, I think America forgot that its first duty was to all Americans, not just the greedy victors in a winner-takes-all rumble in the jungle. And, I have no doubt, its passage through a troubled world could have been as relatively smooth as it was under the wartime guidance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, if they had just listened to calmer voices instead of the clamour of the conga-line of messiahs and charlatans who followed.

Let there be no mistake: deplorable though Trump’s supporters may be, their marginalisation in contemporary American life – whether true or another illusion – is a fact that cannot be swept under the carpet of amnesia. If anything, today’s appalling events in Washington prove that you cannot ignore your problems – it’s just not sustainable.