The Voice of America

UPDATE: On November 8^th 2016 Donald J. Trump won the presidential election and will be the 45^th president of the U.S. Contrary to all predictions, pundits, and even his own expectations he became the president elect that evening. There are multiple reasons for such outcome and the election campaign and results will be fodder for writers for years to come. Points for further analysis include:

• Overreliance on negative campaigning by Secretary Clinton: she tried to convince people not to vote for Trump, instead of to vote for her.
• Low turnout in swing states. In some cases potentially by voter suppression, notably North Carolina, in others on account of the “Comey Letter,” the FBI Director’s untimely letter to Congress suggesting additional (and eventually unsubstantiated) wrongdoing charges against Secretary Clinton.
• Third Party votes.
• Influence of polling and the narrative of an inevitable “Clinton Coronation” on supporters who did not think their vote was needed for her to win.

A combination of these factors resulted in an election in which all expectations were trumped.

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Donald Trump is not going to be the 45^th president of the United States. That is what most polls and forecasters predict. Electoral Vote, FiveThirtyEight, RealClear Politics and many others would make us believe that is the case. Hillary Clinton only needs 270 electoral votes and the ElectoralMap does not look good for Republicans no matter who the candidates are. So Democrats, progressives, moderates, many Republicans and rational people of all stripes and colors can breathe easy: Trump will be defeated by the Blue Wall. Right?



Clinton: 347 / Trump: 191

Yet, disregarding the fact that complacency seeds defeat, while Trumpism may not elect Donald Trump its legacy may survive him.  Just as the Tea Party before it, Trumpism is a movement rooted in a mish mash of social grievances addressed by populist politicians. Its leading figure, Donald Trump, has galvanized a sector of society that is willing to give him wide latitude with the facts as long as he embodies the frustration they feel. And that wide latitude makes for a big bandwagon in which frustration mixes with dark emotions.

Trumpism is beholden to Trump, a figure that voices a grievance and vows he alone has the truth, the solution and the will to carry it out. His solution is to take: take back from usurpers; take away from enemies; take down those who would question him. Trumpism seeks to ensure that the strong will prevail and the weak annihilated. Trumpism seeks to lead the country to a future new paradise where life will be so much better, just like it was in the old paradise. The tenets of Trumpism are the same ones of totalitarian rule, which thrives on the anxious frustrated seeking someone who will protect them from usurpers, enemies and questioners—and lead them to a promised land.

Donald Trump urges his followers to:

• Regard truth and facts as malleable – the art of “truthfulhyperbole” he calls it.
• Regard as valid policydiscourse stereotypes, caricatures and stigmatizing .
• Regard democracy with contempt, calling it rigged and a wasteof time if he doesn’t win.
• Regard physicalviolence as a legitimate form of dialogue between adversaries.
• Regard international relationships and policy in transactionalbusiness terms.
• Regard zero-sum as the best way to do business (winners& losers)

With these tools and techniques he presents himself as the spokesman of truths up until now purposely hid by politicians and “the mass media.” He paints a picture to his audience of an America and the world centered on visions of fear and violence. An America where the only valid optimism is to believe and trust in him as a strong leader that will do an undetailed “whatever it takes” to fight against those dark forces he presents in hyperbolic rhetoric and lead the country back to a paradise lost.

That is the essence of Trumpism, a distortion of what America is. That is not America. America is the Promised Land, the land of opportunity. A place where the daughter of a teenage housemaid or the biracial son of a single mother can become president of the United States. A place where new industries are born, a place where new ideas are bred and tested, a place that prides itself in having the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right for its people, thus believing that the best is yet to come.

Nonetheless, when Trump loses he will have left the legacy of Trumpism with all its tenets as described: a moral black hole. That is why Americans need to stand up for what our country is about and demonstrate to the world that such legacy is repudiated. In this election it is not only votes that count, it is the voice that must be heard. Trump must not only lose. His ideas on how to change America from a bright land of opportunity for all to a dark divisive territory of suspicion of each other must be rejected soundly.

In this election Red and Blue states don’t matter. Even if electoral college votes of any state remain in their historical trend, people in “red states” have to vote against Trumpism, as many as can do. People in “blue states” have to vote against Trumpism, as many as can do. New York and California must not only be in the blue electoral column, they must overwhelmingly reject Trumpism. Mississippi and Georgia can be in the red electoral column, but by the smallest margins ever. 

The voters of America, the popular vote has to say it loudly: Trumpism does not represent America.  Every vote counts as a voice against Trumpism. We owe it to the world to contain Trump and his ideas within a wall of their own.

 Wall Object created by LA street artist Plastic Jesus (AFP Photo/Mark Ralston)

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Tear Down That Wall.

 

Drip, drip. Drip, drip. Eroding the stones. Drip, drip. Altering the mind. Little by little.

 

We keep getting signals, messages, dog-whistles from mainstream and fringestream media, from right wing echo chambers, from leftie universes, from Washington’s bubble… all speaking to, no, stoking the Aggrieved Mind. And then we wonder (not really) why Dallas happens, why Orlando happens, why Tucson happens, why Colorado Springs happens, even why San Bernardino happens. All them shooters with a grievance in search of a ready-made cause, a social excuse for their mayhem. Drip, drip, talking heads drip poison into the foundation, stain, ultimately rip the fabric of our nation, our world, separating the parts and building walls between all.

 

Build that wall is the rally cry. Unfriend, delete, ban, keep us all separate and (un)equal. A tribal and ghettoized state of mind that makes sure no common ground is allowed, because it compromises the purity of ideals, be they an interpretation of the constitution or of class or social or political identity. Purity is what matters. It is always the other one at fault, rarely a glance inwards allowing a broader view based on a crazy notion that everyone is created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights.

 

I write these lines of apparent despair and hopelessness after a week of tragedies and head spinning events. Independence Day weekend was eventful in its own right. While the world was reeling from mass murders of Westerners in Dhaka, Shia in Baghdad and a (probable) response to that last one by multiple bombings in Sunni Saudi Arabia we all were tense, thinking of the unthinkable during America’s party.

 

Amidst the tension, Secretary Clinton was interviewed by the FBI on Saturday 7/2 to culminate their probe into those (damned) emails. On Tuesday 7/5, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI had not found sufficient evidence to prove a crime had been committed. He characterized Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless” but not “gross misconduct” which could have been indictable. To be so, her (110 out of nearly 40,000) emails would have to have been shared with people who had no security clearance, and she would have had to willfully and knowingly lie and obstruct the investigation (like, for instance, Gen. Petreus did). Unfortunately we have no true judicial comparables because the server maintained by the RNC in the White House --and from which twenty two million emails by Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and others were deleted when the inquiries into CIA agent Valerie Plame’s outing were being carried out -- was never subject to a public scrutiny such as the one on Clinton’s server.

 

Director Comey also mentioned that there was a possibility that the server installed by a former President in his fortified house and guarded by the Secret Service theoretically could have been hacked, but there was no indication or proof regarding such hacking (as there was for the White House, the State Department the FBI and the DoD – even the NSA). She also used her blackberry in foreign countries and that can be dangerous to National Security.

 

Director Comey got promptly hauled in by Republicans to testify before the House Oversight Committee of Congress, where this man, a career prosecutor involved in investigating Whitewater under Kenneth Starr, who as Acting Attorney General stood up to President Bush’s acolytes against illegal wiretapping under the Patriot Act (and had to eventually leave the Bush government because of it), and a well-known Republican, had his ethics, methods, thoroughness and motives questioned.

 

The same day as Director Comey read his statement asserting there was no criminal case to be made against Secretary Clinton was the last day in the life of Alton Sterling. This was a brutal killing of a black man while being held to the ground by two police officers and shot four or five times point blank. No congressional action, investigation or statement on this one.

 

The next day, Wednesday, the day Comey testified before congress and the Attorney General decided to follow his recommendation, another gruesome video was posted on social media: a young black man, Philando Castile, bleeds to death next to his fiancée, with his four year old step daughter-to-be strapped in the back seat, as a police officer points a gun at him. Again to Congress this life, and so, so many others not caught on tape, does not seem to matter.

 

With Clinton Derangement Syndrome (and here) fully in bloom both within the Republican right and the Democratic left, and with Trumpism firing up passions from all sides of the spectrum and everyone ignoring large portions of alienated America, the aggrieved mind finds itself ready to hit the destroy button. This time it was in Dallas.

 

“This is not just a black issue. This is not just a Hispanic issue. This is an American issue,” said President Obama referring to the factual gross disparities in incidents involving African-Americans and police stops with unpredictable consequences under the same circumstances as white people. “Would this have happened if those passengers would have been white? I don’t think it would have.” That was Governor Mark Dayton from Minnesota. “I’m going to be talking to white people. I think we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries that are coming from our African-American fellow citizens.” That was Secretary Clinton (full speech), maybe referring to Congress? They have hearings all the time, but do not listen.

 

“Our nation has become too divided. Too many Americans feel like they’ve lost hope. Crime is harming too many citizens. Racial tensions have gotten worse, not better. This isn’t the American Dream we all want for our children.” That was Donald Trump, reaching out to our better instincts for a change, but not calling for any other action except “We must restore law and order. We must restore the confidence of our people to be safe and secure in their homes and on the street.” Another wall; this time, a Blue Wall.

 

We are in a ghettoized nation with factions demanding bigger walls to contain themselves in and keep the Others out, lashing out to those on the other side. The poison drip coming from all sides needs to stop; a stop to the endless water torture affecting minds, even artificially intelligent ones. Partisan politics does not seem to get it -- not even to hold a (probably pointless) hearing.

 

America’s original sin of slavery still has not been washed away. We are not living in a post racial America, despite unquestionable strides by African-Americans and other minorities in our society. There are still remnants, throwbacks, back steps in the process of building a nation for all its citizens. Our country and the world needs leadership with a vision that recognizes the tribal instincts, that recognizes the disruption of a world filled with Others and recognizes the need to reach out to that Aggrieved Mind behind the wall, beyond the bubble, in the other universe. A vision to lead towards building a future, not looking backwards. Not stoking petty divisiveness, not inciting hateful acrimony, not building bigger walls. Are we not better than that?