Bad money drives out good.

When Donald J. Trump emerged as a viable candidate during the 2018 election cycle, many of us thought it was a joke, a marketing ploy. The Republican primary had been turned into a clown show, a circus that ultimately would only serve to promote the Trump brand. Not a particularly fun circus to watch, mind you, but a freak show nonetheless, fascinating in the way that a serious auto accident draws the attention of every driver in every lane. We did not grasp how someone so verbally inept, so angrily narcissistic, so vehemently artificial and addicted to falsehood, could actually win the nomination of the party.

And when he did win the nomination, and faced off against a rational, well-spoken woman — a well-mannered woman with supreme qualifications, a clear reality-based program, and demonstrated leadership ability — too many of us assumed that there was no way that this Impostor could garner enough votes to win. Anyone looking objectively at the facts could see that one of these candidates was actually qualified for the job, and the other patently was not, neither in terms of accomplishments nor in character. Surely, we thought, when the chips are down a majority of the population will run away from this ugliness, this thinly-veiled racism, this crassness, these lies. Or at least, stay home.

I will leave a postmortem of the 2016 election for another time. Suffice it to say that, in fact, enough people did opt for baloney over a proper meal, fabrication over fact, rage rather than rational thought. Too few of us ever expected that actual electoral malfeasance† would be able to turn a loser into a winner and  put the Baron of Bullshit in office. 

We should have seen this coming.

A fried baloney sandwich from Amazon

Not just because it was time for the legitimate rage of the economically disenfranchised to be heard. Not just because he might be addled, but it is a very clever brand of addled. Not even because the fascist Right will stop at nothing less than Complete Control of the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet.

No, above all the tempest and cacophony of the collapse of reason, we should have seen this coming because, as Gresham's Law will have it, bad money drives out good.

Some examples of bad money.

If you dilute currency, the corrupted coin will eventually become the standard and no one will expect you to trade in the real thing. This is a truism that time and again has shown its value and applicability to many other aspects of social relations, beyond the “merely economic.”

It is time we all paid attention to this axiom, because the US has reached a point where the coin of the land has become so debased, so fundamentally cheapened and degraded, that tens of millions of people — fully a third of the country and nearly half of those who actually bother to vote — literally are unable to discern what is valuable from what is simply showy. Their rage at having been systematically fleeced for generations has given them a hunger for distraction that cannot be sated with bracing doses of truth. Television ruined my country, I have long maintained.

More examples.

This is true on “both sides of the aisle,” as we say, though perhaps somewhat less so on the Left at the moment. But consider how many otherwise “liberal” folks absolutely abandoned rational thought simply because their candidate did not win the primary. In a strange, mirror-universe reaction to the rejection of Bernie Sanders, a shocking number of “liberals” took leave of their senses and began treating HRC as if she was simply a female DJT. The good coin of clear-headed, rational decision making was driven out by the bad coin of ideologically-driven false equivalence.

(Yes, I mean you, all you Bernie Bros and Never-Clintoners and Jill-Stein-voting ideologues — I am calling all y’all out, because you bear a share of the blame for what is happening now!)  

DJT ≠ HRC

In the years since that election, I have heard many, many voices crying, “This is not who we are!” People are justifiably shocked at the depth of the current president’s depraved indifference even to the people who voted for him. They just want it all to go away. They want to think that we, as a nation, are somehow better than Donald J. Trump and his crude, fumbling, fuming White hostility. And sure, I would like to think that, too.

But I know we are not. If the Trump presidency serves any higher purpose at all, it is to show us just how debased we actually are as a culture and a society. Trump’s callous indifference to the suffering of others has always been there, dyed into the wool of our national psyche. How else do you explain the mass extermination of the Native Peoples that our nation carried out for well over a century, right under our noses, with mostly cheering from the crowds of onlookers…and with barely a whisper of it in school textbooks? 

How else can you account for, not just the two and a half centuries of chattel slavery, but the subsequent century and a half of enforced subservience of Brown to White, socially, economically, politically…in virtually every area? Subservience that continues to this day, currently disguised within a bogus system called “equal opportunity.” Occasional exceptions notwithstanding, how is it that, except for the entertainment industry (which includes sports, by the way), African Americans as a group continue to swim upstream against a torrent of economic tides and public-health failures?

How else would you account for our addiction to a prosperity built by standing on the necks of millions of people in this hemisphere and beyond? If we truly are as magnanimous and so on as we imagine ourselves to be, how do we account for the invasion of Mexico in the 1840s (the “halls of Montezuma” in the Marine anthem) and the many, many subsequent incursions, interferences, terrorisms and economic pillagings of Latin America throughout our history even up to today? Again, largely celebrated (or conveniently ignored) by the majority of Americans.

How else do you explain our collective willingness to bomb other countries into oblivion for profit, on the flimsiest of pretenses and completely against our own alleged values? From Hiroshima to Hanoi to Iraq, our victims have been silenced and stashed off camera. Only the economic consequences stop us from obliterating Iran right now. There are millions upon millions in this country who would do it without a second thought…just to try to feel better. ‘Cause killing people on the other side of the world, while you yourself are being robbed by your own, is strangely satisfying. It’s like a video game.

Some clearer minds.

(Again, even if “clearer minds have prevailed” this does not erase the urge, the passion, for violence and destruction that permeates so much of the American collective psyche.)

Some delicious frozen vegetables.

Do you know who picked the frozen vegetables you bought yesterday in the supermarket? The odds are overwhelming that it was a Brown migrant worker who can barely support a family, who lacks basic healthcare protections and is exposed to god-knows-what toxic herbicides and pesticides, and whose children go wanting for education. How does that happen, if we are the kind and gracious nation we imagine ourselves to be — how does that happen if we are not, in some measure, Donald J. Trump?

These days, as the coronavirus pandemic scorches a path through our society, sickening and killing the elderly, the infirm and the healthcare worker alike, we have people nevertheless protesting the measures that will save lives — shouting nasty, meanspirited insults at healthcare workers and blocking routes to hospitals, and killing people outright who try to enforce the simplest of public health measures. How does that happen in a society that is, allegedly, generous and concerned for humanity?

The irony is almost beautiful

These same people who are screaming about their rights to control their bodies have and will continue to turn out by the millions to vote against women having full control of their bodies…based upon a religious belief. How does that happen in a country allegedly separating religion from governance for the good of all?

Rage against the despoiling of Middle America is bubbling and boiling over. It is about time. But where is it turned — against the perpetrators of this epic thievery? Nope. Instead they attack the foreigner, the Other, the Liberal, anybody and everybody but the actual criminals. That there are millions of Americans who deplore all this does not change the fact that millions upon millions of others are prepared to completely abandon every last high ideal they claim to espouse in order to lay blame, rather than take responsibility for knowing and changing. 

Perps, all.

Willful, ignorant hatred. It is as American as apple pie. Always has been. 

An unindicted co-conspirator and an accessory after the fact.

And now we have the latest incarnation of the “this-is-not-who-we-are” canard: The appeal to us not to go back to “business as usual” after the pandemic has passed. I applaud the sentiment, I really do. I, too, wish that somehow we could forget who we are and become a different people after we “restart the economy.”

But I do not think that is realistic, because it assumes that underneath it all we are “better than that.” And we are not. Not as far as I have seen in my 58 years as an American.

“Not going back to business as usual” would require a complete overhaul of American culture, one so thorough and counter to the powerful stream of the very cultural and economic interests we love, that I simply cannot imagine how it will happen. We have to start wanting things that are so utterly foreign to our way of life and thought that it seems impossible to hope for:

☞ We will have to want to trust people we do not know.

☞ We will have to seek out facts, rather than float along on comfortable fictions.

☞ We will have to take responsibility — real, biting responsibility — for all that we do and all that we have done to the world and to the planet…and then change those things

☞ We will have to totally overhaul our economic system so that it really does reward effort and simplicity and punishes greed and acquisitiveness.

☞ We will have to celebrate taking delight in being, rather than in things.

☞ We will have to start yearning for commonality rather than individuality, for community rather than dispersion. 

☞ We will have to quell our fascination with screens and images and entertainment, because a) screens are unhealthy to produce and unhealthy to use, and b) they promote bogus intimacy and debased companionship.

☞ Perhaps most important of all: We will have to reorganize our economy so that we stop killing the planet. We have to turn away from technological solutions that bring new and more complicated problems with them. Among other things, this means we have to refocus our attention on basic industries, beginning with sustainable, chemical-free agriculture. 

All these things are of a piece, really, because together they point to a fundamental reality that people in the US as a group are steadfastly trying not to see. 

We are out of balance. The false coin has long ago driven out the real thing. Apart from those who are truly economically disadvantaged in our society (a growing number, to be sure), people have no idea just how bad, how crass and ugly and heartless, our society has become, and indeed, how it has always in some measure been. Certainly in my lifetime. If they traveled to other countries, where people live better in real communities and so on, they might come to understand this. But they don’t.

This is, of course, not a new refrain. There have been back-to-simplicity, back-to-community critiques of our society before. From the hippies, to the beats, to the labor movement of the early 20^th century, to the social reformers of the Progressive Era, to the utopian communities of the 19^th century, such ideas have a robust and noble heritage in our country. What is notable is how little impact they have had on our society as a whole.* 

Yes, labor unions have made working life better for millions, unionized and not…until Americans allowed themselves to be convinced by Capital that unions were no longer needed. And look where we are. Back in a world that worships Capital and the God of the Market, a world where workers survive at the whim of their employers, whose margins are constructed by relying on the nation's meagre social safety net...even while Americans celebrate the achievements of greed.

Yes, the Progressive Era did produce some lasting changes in the way poor people and immigrants are treated in the US. But it did not stop the march of Capital toward the utter domination and thorough marketing of everything. Ironically, the Great Depression produced far more progress in limiting the power of Capital in our country. And yet, we have seen in the decades since the gradual grinding down of all that progress and the inexorable shift of the Commons out of public hands and into the voracious maw of a “private sector” that is deeply jealous of its own grotesque success.

Yes, the beat generation and the youth rebellion of the 1960s and 70s did produce some measurable changes in social norms. People dress more freely, people speak more freely, people consume more freely than they did in, say, 1955. Rock and roll, blue jeans, and marijuana, are here to stay. We have “more choices,” as if Choice were the point. 

A happy penguin baby.

Yet the various cultural movements exemplified by beat poetry, be-bop, rock music, punk/new wave, rap and hip-hop only managed to move the needle enough to attract the attention of Capital, which then chewed it all up and regurgitated it like a meal for a baby penguin. Be-bop became a drug-laced cop-out. The youth rebellion settled into a comfortable, consumable middle age. Punk became a hairstyle, and hip-hop has been completely defanged. All of them are big money these days.

Like jousting at a marshmallow, each successive movement, each successive rebellion, gets absorbed. And whatever is interesting, challenging, dangerous, anything subversive of money-making freedom, gets leached out. Things get better…a little bit…for some…but no one ever, ever takes up the reason for the rebellion in the first place.

We let it happen, collectively, because, underneath it all, Americans do not care. We don’t. If we cared, if we really cared, we would attend to the facts. If we cared, we would do the hard work of understanding not just the what, but the why. If we cared we would shout NO in our loudest collective voices to the plundering of our environment, the looting of foreign countries, and the abuse of strangers at our doors. 

But we don’t. We squeak and try not to sabotage our wonderful system. This is who we are: drunk on our prosperity (and worse, drunk on the illusion that we can achieve the prosperity of our 1%). Insensitive to the murders committed in our name, we are prepared to blame anyone and everyone (even little children) for our own failings as members of humanity.

A very good use of a pitchfork, just now.

So no, I don’t buy it: DJT and all he represents is who we are. He is the apotheosis of our ugliest dreams, trotted out and given the actual power to loot anything and everything, while shouting insults at anyone who gainsays us. All in our name. The knuckleheads who actually voted for him should, by all logic, be sharpening their pitchforks.

But they’re not. 


Because this is who we are.

Don’t believe me? 


Don’t agree? 

Show me, America!

† It can and it did. Greg Palast's work has been both trenchant and prescient, and I highly recommend you read what he has uncovered about Interstate Crosscheck and its impact on the 2016 election.
* For an outstanding expression of this sentiment from one of my forebears, go read Howl by Alan Ginsberg. He said much the same thing more than half a century ago...and said it better.

Picture credits: National Review, Biography.com, The Wall Street Journal the White House, Britannica.com, BBC.co.uk, Amazon.com, Wikipedia.com, YouTube.com, magic.wizards.com, sciencephoto.com.