Something wicked this way comes

In the first act of “Macbeth,” one of the witches senses the approach of Macbeth by a tingling in her hands and remarks, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” The tingling I feel is not in my thumbs but rather in my psyche as I realize that with Trump’s becoming president again, something wicked has indeed come.

Wicked nails it. Trump is evil. He is a poster child of despicability. He is an amoral sociopath, an ignorant, tinpot totalitarian, a man whose loyalty is only to himself and not to the country or its citizens. Even worse, his election has encouraged and abetted the bigots and haters in our society, including white supremacists and Christian nationalists. His supporters are bullies who try to intimidate those with whom they disagree. His enablers in Congress are lickspittles as are business and religious leaders who voice support for him, and his appointees are a petting zoo of incompetence and venality.

My criticism is not only with Trump and his truckling sycophants. I fault my fellow citizens who voted for him. The evidence of his loathsome character is overwhelming. Everyone knows what’s on his rap sheet—at least anyone knows whose moral compass is aligned toward good and not skewed 180 degrees by his bloviating bullshit, abetted by a propaganda machine of fifth column media outlets like Fox News. Obviously, some people voted for him out of blind partisanship because he claims to be a Republican and others because he speaks to and emboldens their own fears, biases, and hatreds. What is particularly scary, however, is that a sizeable proportion of Americans believe the country needs an authoritarian leader like him to deal with the challenges we face. They have lost faith in the democratic process, in part due to Trump’s calling into question the 2020 election.

I compare his reelection to Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933. Trump supporters must be completely ignorant about the rise of the Third Reich, about Mussolini’s ascension to power in Italy in 1922, about what Franco did to his opponents in Spain. Trump has the same totalitarian nature as those three. Sinclair Lewis wrote a dystopian novel in the 1930s about the potential for a fascist government taking power in this country. The title is “It Can’t Happen Here.” It is a prescient book, but the title is wrong, though. Instead of “It Can’t Happen Here,” it should be “It Is Happening Here.”

What Trump and his enablers have done is leverage the resentment and anxiety that have been building in this country for at least the last forty years into divisive tribal issues like DEI, transgender rights, abortion policy, and Bibles in the schools. We end up in bitter fights among ourselves while he and his Reich thugs and cronies loot the treasury, destroy public education, and irremediably corrupt the judicial system. Trump is a marionette of his enablers. They flatter him and encourage his wingnut schemes like stealing Greenland, repossessing the Panama Canal, annexing Canada, and taking over Gaza and throwing the poor Palestinians out of their homeland.

We are in a crisis unprecedented since the Civil War, and in some ways the current situation reflects and is a legacy of a dark pathology baked into our national psyche. It is as American as apple pie. The sort of hate-mongering rhetoric that contributed to Trump’s election and dominates the news today has been present in our country since its founding, but now it has metastasized and threatens the nation’s survival. Our history shows that the myths drummed into us since elementary school about being the chosen people are just so much bullshit. As waves of our European ancestors arrived on these shores, they raped, pillaged, killed, clear cut, strip mined, stole land, and enslaved their way across the continent. We still have that mindset, and now it seems as though we are trying to do it to each other.

There are many examples. In the mid-1800s anti-Irish and ant-German sentiment was a factor in elections, and in the early 20th century it was anti-Italian and anti-Catholic sentiment (a big reason Al Smith, the Democratic nominee and a Catholic, lost the 1928 Presidential election). Likewise, from soon after the Civil War until the 1920s, the right of women to vote was divisive. More recently, racial integration has been an issue that the Republicans first began using as a political wedge when Truman integrated the military after WWII and the Brown decision in 1954. The GOP amplified their version of racism in the mid-60s after Congress in the Johnson Administration passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, laws which changed the South from solid Democratic to solid Republican in a half a generation and led to the election of Richard Nixon (I highly recommend the book, “Nixonland”). Remember the South Boston busing riots in the 60s, the hateful comments of Spiro Agnew, the sniggering commercials of Jesse Helms? As far as current Trumpian message about a mass invasion of immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation,” Pat Buchanan used that trope beginning in the late 80s and 90s and adopted it as part of his rhetoric during his failed run for president in the 90s, I think.

Jim Harrison sums it up well: “Way back when, I envisioned that one could spend a thin cotton sheet over our country and its living history and then stand back and watch the locations where the blood soaked through.” The blood is still soaking through, and many more stains will appear. The dogs of hatred have been loosed.

What to do? The actions of Trump, his enablers, and his followers are pushing the populace further toward tribalism. It certainly has done that to me. If the MAGA crowd (whom I call Maggots) wants to try to shove their beliefs down my throat and to take over the government, I say, “Fuck you.” This is my country as much as it is theirs. Actually it is more mine than theirs because my vision of patriotism is not a silly slogan like Make America Great Again because it never was. Rather, real patriotism is working toward an ideal of what this country could be if we support one another and follow its original motto, E Pluribus Unum, All Together One.

Given my age and the current political climate, I have little chance of seeing my vision come to fruition. But, by God, I can speak out. It is time to reclaim patriotism, to rescue this country from the haters.