Commentary

PHILIP MARTIN: We have to do better

I am fairly certain we will have a new president on Friday. It is all right to be anxious, but maybe we ought to try to be optimistic too. I don't think he'll succeed in dismantling the republic--only we can do that, and it will probably take us decades--and no one should be more worried about the new administration than those Republicans who allowed themselves to be co-opted by an obvious con artist.

Maybe Donald Trump will grow into the job; maybe having a shabby man as our chief executive won't do our nation any material harm. I don't make predictions, but I do look at history, and I'm aware that every advancement America has ever made in terms of civil rights has been met with blowback. This is a retrenchment, maybe the last-chance power drive of white male hegemony. Just because we've taken a step back doesn't mean our progress is forever halted.

Trump is a symptom of our intellectual lassitude, a reminder of what happens when we take our eye off the ball. In many ways he is America embodied, full of swagger and inarticulate rage and incurious. He doesn't interrogate his own privilege; he takes it for granted that he is smarter and more able than anyone else. He knows more than the generals and the scientists. He is his own best counsel. And, though we may never know whether there's any substance backing the bluster, he is by some measure rich and certainly very famous.

One thing that might amuse you, if you have a sardonic streak, is the notion that Trump is a liberal creation. For after all, the very idea that personal experience trumps applied study was incubated in our left-leaning academic laboratories. (And it is not an entirely meritless idea, for nobody knows the trouble you've seen.)

Yet this is where it leads us, isn't it? To a place where no expertise is trusted, where feelings matter more than facts because facts can always be invented. So why not inaugurate a man who dreams of an empty greatness into which we can pump our hope? We need some of his vagueness now, some of that football hyperbole. We are the champions of the world.

Is there a past America to which we should want to return? Not one that I remember, though I guess if you consider the world through the gray-toned static of the nostalgia channel you might find plenty that's quaint and G-rated. If you like your neighborhoods tidy and your moms in aprons, your fathers calm and knowing best. But I never lived on a street like that, with picket fences and domesticated sots who'd lock themselves away to sleep it off.

There are things that have gotten worse. I wish we had more respect for things, for ourselves and our neighbors and our jobs. But I understand the casualization of America goes hand in hand with the infantilization of her people, and it's not like I don't find myself dressed like a 14-year-old on the weekend in a baseball cap and running shoes. Part of me honestly believes that we could improve our nation by improving ourselves, by paying more attention and having more discipline, by taking our citizenship seriously and not devoting ourselves to cable news and reality TV.

But there I go being elitist, suggesting that the pre-digested and easy to swallow mightn't provide you with the essential nutrients to build strong minds. There I go suggesting that maybe you might want to take some personal responsibility for the circumstances in which you find yourself, that you should have read the fine print on the contract, that you should have paid more attention when the dull people were saying unexciting things. You should know about compound interest and how revolving credit works. You shouldn't get so annoyed when you encounter a difficult word.

The truth is, I don't think you get any special dispensation for being an American. If you were born here, you were lucky. But luck dissipates after a while; just ask any gambler. We had a real good run but it wasn't perfect. You can argue that other countries have done a lot better in some areas.

However you want to define it, we've got a gun problem. We shoot each other, a lot. Some people think that's the price you pay for being free. They think it's a God-bestowed right. There are people who make a lot of money selling guns and bullets and they're going to keep churning out propaganda that the gun-bit can wave around. They're going to keep selling the Orwellian notion that more guns make us safer.

Why do people believe that? Because they want to. Because there's some guy in a suit who will talk that talk. Because they like to have guns. Because guns soothe something in them.

I understand that. I also doubt that there are good reasons to prohibit sane people who obey the law from owning guns. I just want gun owners to indemnify society from the harm those guns will cause.

But we can't have a conversation about that because a small but vocal minority of absolutists controls the discourse. (I already know the calls and letters I'll receive, I know the cut-and-pasted arguments.)

Anyway, I don't have a clue about what our new president might do. I am not entirely discouraged by his cabinet choices. There are a few clunkers but I suspect I would have been horrified by as many of Hillary Clinton's appointees as I am by Trump's, and I don't think those who think they can control him do either. For how do you blackmail a man immune to shame who believes himself above the law?

Anyway, we have what we have. We are who we are. Whatever our rhetoric, we are no better than our actions. None of us, not even our president-elect, can make America great. But if we try, maybe we could personally do a little better.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 01/17/2017

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