OPINION

The monkey and the machine gun

"It is up to Arkansas to stop the Donald Trump show. The next generation of conservatives cannot allow Donald Trump to take everything we stand for and throw it away."

--Asa Hutchinson, February 2016

There is a video on the Internet that went viral about six years ago. In it a group of "West African" soldiers are joking around, apparently during a lull in the fighting of some splendid little war. They have a chimpanzee with them, maybe a company mascot, maybe just an overly curious animal who's wandered into their camp from the bush. One of the soldiers playfully hands the ape an AK-47.

And bullets fly everywhere as the soldiers scramble for cover. What did they think would happen?

I feel the same way as of Thursday morning about the current occupant of the White House. I don't so much blame Donald Trump for being Donald Trump. He's been Donald Trump for a long time, and while there's speculation that maybe at 70 he's experiencing a little cognitive impairment, I don't think anybody realistically expected him to change. He has never been a serious person; he wasn't going to become one because he won an election. Donald Trump was always what they call a "colorful character."

And thank God for colorful characters. They alleviate boredom. They troll the conventional, demonstrating the arbitrary nature of most of the rules society imposes. Some are genius provocateurs; some would probably make good presidents.

But not Mr. Trump. His talents are of a different order. He was never suited for serious work, and anyone who applies honest scrutiny to his business career must come to the conclusion he is an unorthodox person whose chief occupation has been the proliferation of his celebrity. He is more brand than builder, a hustler who curates and trades on his Dickensian name. He is very good at making himself famous and exploiting that fame. While he might, as a lot of serious people have suggested, done much better financially had he been cautious and allowed compound interest to do its work, I doubt he would have had as much fun.

Donald Trump made himself a reality show before there was any such thing as a reality show. He likes attention and lives out loud. And some of us find some things he did distasteful, while other people are amused by his bluster and shamelessness. For some reason, a lot of Americans think behaving in vulgar ways and exploiting every advantage available makes you more authentic and relatable. Others consider it a sign of not being raised right.

I don't think Donald Trump was raised right. I think there has always been something very wrong with him. I still have trouble believing that he managed to con so many Americans.

My problem with Trump is not his politics, which are opportunistic and malleable. I don't believe he cares about anything that doesn't directly impinge on his gilded existence. I don't believe other people really exist for him in any meaningful way. He could have run as a Democrat had that path offered less resistance. My problem is with the people who gave the monkey the AK-47.

What did you expect?

I don't believe Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell or Tom Cotton or any prominent Republican leader has ever had any regard for Trump. I don't think any of them gave him a chance to win, and their accommodation and enabling of him-- their attempted normalization of this administration--is a political mistake that could cripple them. They know, yet they cynically let this deal go down because they think they have a better chance of rolling back the Obama years with a useful idiot--rather than a Nixonian Democrat--in the White House.

These party luminaries provide cover for down-the-chain party functionaries--such as our governor--to assure us regular folks that this narcissistic Trump guy, despite his rough and rowdy style, is actually OK. Even though his campaign kicked off with a racist lie. Even though he adopted the tactics and rhetoric of fascist dictators. Even though he mocked disabled people and boasted of being a serial sexual batterer.

These are the people we ought to be disgusted with, the people who for the rest of their lives should have to answer questions about why they support a man they know is unfit to be president.

They're not the only ones to blame. You can also blame the Democrats, who really wanted to run against Trump, and the Democratic nominee, who took far too much for granted, and the former president who is married to the Democratic nominee who, while serving, behaved in unseemly ways that diminished the dignity of the office.

You can blame Roger Ailes, who died last week. He knew how to exploit us.

"Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication," he wrote in a 300-page memo he prepared for Richard Nixon in 1970. "The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit--watch--listen. The thinking is done for you."

I agree with Ailes; the American vice is a profound and durable unseriousness, an ingrained anti-intellectualism that refuses to accept the rules of the universe. We want to believe that we can be elevated by proud talk and swagger. We like bullies when they're on our side. We like rich folks, especially when they don't seem to be especially talented or thoughtful. We like to believe in wishful myths that flatter us as the best and the brightest--the most persecuted and held back.

What did we think would happen? We gave a machine gun to a monkey.

That video is a hoax, by the way, ginned up by Rupert Murdoch's folks to promote a movie. Somehow, that makes the metaphor more apt.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Editorial on 05/21/2017

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