In September 1968, there were 1,053 United States combat deaths in a country called Vietnam. The dead were part of a 12-month total of 16,899 killed in a war that rattled the foundation of our country, dominated our politics, divided us day in and day out along lines of race and class during a long calamitous climb across a calendar year that seemed to scar the soul and change the culture of America along racial and class lines.
History still weeps over 1968 but history never witnessed anything like America is experiencing today: a corrupt, lying president who is intent on setting our divided country on fire, who violates his oath of office on a daily basis, and who keeps telling us that he might not go along with a peaceful transfer of presidential power if he loses in November. In short, welcome to Venezuela.
For a long time I thought nothing could be worse than 1968 and still the republic survived. Wow, was I wrong.
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Right now we’re staggering through an often hourly assault on the 244-year-old idea called the United States of America. The assault has a leader too, a president who is a predator. He seeks out the vulnerable, the weak, those without much of a defense. He is an expert in using tools that come quite naturally to him: cruelty, racism, resentment, fear. He has a voracious appetite for deceit and fame and has mixed both in a volatile cocktail that has been devastating to America.
While Richard Nixon ran in 1968 as the solution to American chaos on a Democratic president’s watch, Donald Trump is the cause of the chaos he’s absurdly vowing to fix in a second term; he is the 2020 version of the Army major who said about the battle of Ben Tre in South Vietnam that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” That’s Trump’s theory about how he can succeed in America today: Burn it down with a Zippo in one hand, the Constitution in the other.
He is a man of no history, a man purely of the moment, a damaged man. He has destroyed so much in so little time that it is a legitimate question whether any or all of it can be repaired by anyone who succeeds him.
Everything and everyone he touches is left with a stain. And everything he does turns into a fight and always—always—he reverts to poking the fear felt by those who lean forward to hear him at rallies, who feel left out and left behind, abandoned, by a culture and an economy that has brutalized so many.
So today we live in a nation where more than 200,000 people are dead because of a virus he tried to lie into submission. A nation where perhaps as many as 30 million are without jobs, without income and a Republican party more intent on cementing conservative ideology on the Supreme Court than providing an economic lifeline to families drowning in debt, losing homes, cars and the ability to feed their children who are home instead of in school.
The loss is incalculable: wages, jobs that might never return, fundamentals of a child’s education that might never be recovered, health care that disappeared with a lay-off leaving the spectre of playing economic catch-up the rest of your life due to one unforeseen illness. All of that and more has changed who we are.
But maybe the most stunning and damaging element of this presidency is that it has managed to diminish memory. It has wounded an already limited national attention span that has been limping along in the shadow of tools like Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat and Tik Tok.
Last Friday night Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Within hours of her death, the story was Mitch McConnell and Amy Coney Barrett and quickly his cloakroom cowards lined up to genuflect at a warped distortion of our democracy.
And this diminishment of memory is now an everyday occurrence. Presidential lies on tape become skywriting in a matter of three or four news cycles. The failure of the GOP Senate and House to agree to a deal to provide checks to the barely surviving? A Republican plan to replace Obamacare if the Supreme Court finally kills it? Russia’s war on America? Move along... nothing to see here.
The Republican Party has collapsed in fear of a man who pays more attention to his hair than he does to the country. It has surrendered whatever character or courage it may have had because clinging to office is a higher priority than saving the epublic from a slow but sure alteration of a land my parents and millions of others thought was a guarantee of a life where optimism and opportunity accompanied each sunrise. No more.
1968 was tragic. 2020 is a public horror.
