Pussy Galore

A number of newsworthy events happened yesterday.  Two involved private events that became public.  No doubt you’ve heard of one:  eleven years ago, in a private conversation, Donald Trump made a crude remark and used a foul word pertaining to women.  (Hint:  it looks like “hussy,” but I’d rather not say it outright, and render myself unfit forever for public office, not to mention the company of all progressive mankind.)

Currently the nation is being convulsed by various issues. Cities are burning, policemen are being murdered, our sprawling wars and occupations continue, terrorist incidents burst regularly like pustules, a budget deficit larger than any in human history continues to grow, immigration threatens to swamp the country’s demographic makeup irreversibly, and the increasing likelihood of nuclear confrontation with Russia looms.  These comparatively trivial matters have been confined to page 17, as lead headlines rage thus:

My favorite is one of the saner articles.  It’s satirical, as sanity nowadays would have to be:  Republican Party Could Recover as Early as 2096 (Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker)

One would be wrong to think this pandemonium of pants-wetting horror is restricted to print journalists.  On Youtube, James Carville happily assures us that “Trump Will “Quit” Race”; on TV, Bob Beckel sagely opines, yesterday, that “The 2016 Election, Effectively, as of Tonight, Is Over”).

Needless to say, Trump’s Establishment Republican allies have lost no time getting the boot in:  Paul Ryan refused to appear with The Donald at a scheduled event — only to be booed by the crowd before he made his announcement — and since any Republican notable vilifying Trump is immediately guaranteed air time and national coverage, the list queuing to the cameras has stretched long.

I haven’t linked to the stories above.  There’s no need.  They all say the same thing, and it’s the exact same story they’ve presented before, and before that, and before that.  Why linger over deja vu?  

Yet, is there not something taking place before us that is so blatantly obvious that we cannot ignore it? The story being reported is not the real story.

The media storm is the story.  The real story.  A media storm that time and again has little to no relation to its supposed content.

After all, the latest Trump flap is something we’ve seen before, haven’t we?  It was the Khizr Khan story last month, remember?  Before that it was the Mexican Judge story before that.  Before that?  Take your pick.  The list is long, but the format and outrage, the assessments and performers, are rigidly predictable.

Have you noticed that the curious thing about these stories is that they’re completely vacuous?  They never have a thing to do with the issues before the voting public.  They don’t address in any substantive way any substantive political matter.  They have nothing to do with policy, budget, military preparedness, international relations. They are purely and solely personal attacks on Donald Trump.  And they are universal, all-dominating, blared from most every TV screen, computer monitor, radio, and smartphone, and from every last newspaper.

Why?

I’m assuming that you, the reader of this article, are a reasonably well-informed adult.  You know, therefore, that politicians (and non-politicians) sometimes use rather salty language in private.  Truman was famously foul-mouthed.  Eisenhower was a soldier — enough said there.  Kennedy swore at length, and Johnson at much greater length, wallowing in the “N” word as freely as Nixon did (circumspectly) on the Jewish Question.  Only Jimmy Carter may have been reticent in this regard.  As for Obama, a video of the young President-to-be shows him using the very “P” word that has brought the Fourth Estate to earth-shaking froth and anguish.  All of the above to no effect, and no journalistic notice whatsoever.

I’m assuming too, Reader, that you know that a person can use rather profane language in private without it having any negative impact whatever on their policy preferences, or executive performance.   QED: George Patton.  And If a tape were to surface in which Secretary Clinton privately called Trump a prick, it would not illuminate her stance on immigration, or make it any more or less desirable, or say anything about her ability to implement said policy.  It would be non-news.  It would certainly not get anything like Trumpian coverage or condemnation.  It would very like not appear at all.

Of course those are not the only stories that get swept under the rug as all attention defaults to Trump’s venality.  Hurricane Matthew kills 800 in Haiti and threatens a million Floridians?  Page 2.  Two more policemen assassinated, and a third is beaten in the street by a mob and hospitalized?  Page 7.

At the same time that Trump’s — eleven-year-old, private — crack hit the press, Wikileaks released the first 1% of of Hillary Clinton related emails covering material from Clinton Campaign leader John Podesta.  Among other things, it included the content of the near-million dollar speeches given by Clinton to Goldman Sachs and others, content that she’s refused to make public.  Understandably so.

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” notes the Secretary in her secret speech.  “You just have to sort of figure out how to — getting back to that word, ‘balance’ — how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today,” notes Clinton. “It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

One needs to say one thing in public and another in private?  Trump is pretty aware of this at the moment.  But then Trump is not telling the public that he’s in favor of open borders and open trade, while privately telling Wall Street bankers something else.  With a month to go before the election, might some call this “news”?   Not in comparison with Trump’s decade-old case of potty mouth, judging by the Times, the Post, CNN, etcetera, etcetera. 

One wishes even the Trump story got better coverage.  Does it strike no one as odd that the other person on the links, Billy Bush (cousin to Dubya and Jeb, nephew to Herbert Walker, and presumable — though not confessed — recording artist) made this recording surreptitiously and kept it around the house for eleven years?  Rather a long time to keep a recording of a foul-mouthed real estate developer, don’t you think?  And it surfaces the day before the second Presidential debate?  Since making such a private recording public is illegal, that makes promulgating it a crime, doesn’t it?  Is Mr. Bush being investigated and charged?  Or has it gone to James Comey for pre-stamped dismissal?  It’s also illegal to make a person’s personal tax returns public.  Yet when it comes to smearing Trump, these things just mysteriously show up in the Times’ mail slot, and no one knows how, and prosecution is not even considered.  What, the Times can’t review its security cameras and see who places documents in its mail?  It seems we have a story here.  One you will never read about in the Times.

Our leading mainstream journalists have high standards — high double standards.  Are we surprised?  Not really.  Most journalists are Democrats, Trump is not, and they would like their candidate to win.  Fair enough, but where is even the veneer of even-handedness?  The sense of limit to the relentless assault?  Why, because of a private crack made eleven years ago, is Trump declared across the board to be unfit to lead, unfit for polite company, indeed unfit to live, according to the occasional calls for his assassination coming from the likes of Bill Maher, Jonathan Chait and even the Times’ Ross Douthat?  This goes beyond mere partisanship.  It approaches social psychosis.

Consider.  Every major newspaper has either endorsed Hillary or, in odd cases, Johnson or Stein.  Every single one.  Out of 1,398 functioning newspapers in the United States, only two have so far come out for Trump.  One of those is owned by Trump’s son-in-law.  The other is the NY Daily Post, whose “support” of Trump has been demonstrated by publishing front-page nude photos of his wife from her modeling days after their endorsement. 

All the rest have come out against Trump.  Pause a moment and think about that: out of all the newspapers in the United States, only two (and those are iffy) support Trump.  That’s 99.99% — monolithic, uniform opposition.  This, in the face of declining readership, declining subscriptions, and a readership base that is close to 50% pro-Trump, and evidence that subscriptions are being cancelled, complaints are being received, and readership is declining directly owing to the relentless stream of the papers’ anti-Trump positions and articles.

Now I am not a conspiracy theorist.  But even were this a conspiracy, the Elders Of Zion, much less Rupert Murdoch or Katherine Graham, couldn’t pull everyone’s strings to this degree.  93% of journalists may identify as Democrats, fine; that still leaves 7% ostensibly contrarian.  Why aren’t 7% of the nation’s papers pro-Trump?  What, in non-totalitarian circumstances, can possibly account for this total shut-out across an entire, ostensibly democratic, nation?

It simply is not statistically possible for there to be complete uniformity on this subject.  Simple financial self-preservation would compel some papers to reflect some measure of their readership’s views.  Yet we see total uniformity across the board. 

As I said, I don’t think think every last American newspaper has gotten official sealed instructions from the Illuminati to destroy Trump.  So we are left facing one of the many uncanny things about this election:  not the cynicism of the assault on Trump but its irrational herd passion.  I have little doubt that every last one of the writers cursing Trump above genuinely believes what they’re writing.  But how can they?  Do they really not know that other politicians brag, swear, say things privately that they don’t say in public?  Aren’t they puzzled at the fact that Bill Clinton’s serial rapes, his confessed insertion of a cigar into the “P” word of his 22-year-old intern in the Oval Office, raises no ire whatever in the purportedly feminist Fourth Estate, whereas they rush in a stampeding herd weekly to star Trump in their recurrent Salem Witch Trials spectaculars.

I find myself thinking that the country in general, and the press in particular, is not in the grip not of some willful conspiracy but rather of some undiscovered psychological pattern, some as-yet-undiscovered law of historical materialism.  When some group organisms are threatened, all their members draw in to protect it, and lash out at whatever threatens in in all possible ways.  Something about Trump challenges some core element of the liberal psyche in the same evocative way.

Is it simple envy of his wealth, his success, his unabashed wallowing in those things his detractors don’t have and will never have?  After all, by common standards, Trump is a success, and there is nothing like the flamboyant success of others to remind some of their own comparative failure.

Is it his sheer indifference to them, the Randian indifference of a completely independent individual to the hive?  Used to controlling or silencing all who embrace its groupthink through public shaming, the group now founders against a figure who neither embraces their views nor feels shame.  But, like a fortress whose cannons are fixed, it can only fire the same rounds the same way, doubling, re-doubling, tripling the volleys even as they miss.

Or is it simply a frantic attempt to extinguish the growing suspicion that, after a half-century of bureaucratic and educational social engineering, the entire liberal project, like the Communist project before it, is not working, and may be untenable; that the puritanical public exaltation of private decadence into which the left has evolved is inherently contradictory, and foredoomed?

Whatever the explanation, Trump clearly exacerbates something not in the liberal mind, for he is no Conservative but closer to Bernie in his policies than any other candidate in the 2016 race; no, he abrades something in the emotions operating underneath that mind.  The puritans who burned witches were not in disagreement with the witches: something about the witches drove puritans over some internal edge, and very likely it was the witches’ freedom and enjoyment of those things the puritans would not allow themselves to have or acknowledge or even imagine.   

Resentissiment?  To some degree.  But this is not a such a cold and reasoned hatred as resentissiment.  Rather it has the destabilizing edge of warmer hatred, self-hatred.  What these critics of Trump dread is not Trump’s blasé indifference and fiscal invulnerability but their own instability, the instability of their accustomed roles and associated values.  Trump has inspired not a war of the worldviews, left and right, but a sense of the inadequacy of both.  On the Alt Right, surprisingly, wanderings in the paleoconservative wilderness have left them a notable inheritance:  a sense of independence and renewal.  But there is no equivalent Alt Left, only lengthening shadows of the Soviet collapse, a Blairish New Labour embrace of globalist neoliberalism that satisfies neither mind nor heart, and a Scandinavian descent into the heart of migrant darkness.  What fissures then are fracturing in the heads of this latter-day left?  I have a sense — as do they, I suspect — no longer of the strength of liberal rectitude and liberal shaming, but rather of the liberal mind collapsing, veering toward shipwreck, as it recognizes its own impotence.  The volume of the howls no longer testifies to strength, but madness.

None of this makes any difference when it comes to the business of casting one’s vote.  One votes for the person with the better policies, and the better track record.  Trump’s are novel and his political track record is nil — there is no question but that he is a gamble.  Hillary’s are a continuation of Obama’s failed policies, and her own track record is no less abysmal: militarily disastrous, subservient to corporate rather than public interests, and corrupt.  As the voting public tends to gamble in its own self-interest, I imagine they will gamble on a possible win with Trump rather than a sure loss with Clinton.

And yet… larger patterns remain in the dark, furtive and unexcavated.  We are on the verge of a great mystery