Casual Cruelty and the American Dream

 "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

- Macbeth, briefly King of Scotland 

As the manacles of the police state lock ever more tightly into place –

  • Active-duty military members patrolling our city streets

  • The dehumanization of immigrants

  • The criminalization of political opponents

  • The rewriting of history, both old and recent

  • The replacement of the arts with propaganda

  • The attacks on an independent press and academic freedom

  • The politicization of our armed forces

  • The defunding of public agencies and the extortion of private entities

  • The elevation of “toughness” as the most ennobling of virtues

  • The erosion of guardrails between public service and private enrichment

  • The building of concentration camps

  • The forced exportation of undesirables

  • The expulsion of the homeless

  • The attacks on voters and voting processes

  • Masked and armed agents making unannounced arrests

  • The suffocation of dissent

  • The replacement of competence with zealotry

  • The international realignment from democracies to dictatorships

  • Demonizing the most vulnerable among us

  • The disappearance of due process

  • The cult of violence

  • Extreme gerrymandering at the command of the White House

  • The emphasis on division at the expense of unity

  • The breakdown of civic decency

  • The replacement of science by ideology

  • The priority of order over law

  • The perversion of language

  • The ascendance of fear over hope

  • The aggrandizement of power

  • The cult of personality

  • The denial of reality and the triumph of the big lie

  • Casual cruelty

– it is time to stop looking away in the hope that four years will quickly pass and our own lives will be untouched.

This list, however incomplete you may find it, does not represent the principles with which you and I grew up. Has America lived up to those principles? No, we have not. But neither has America abandoned them. And we must not do so now.

I have written about some of these issues in earlier postings on this blog, I believe it’s worth going more deeply into what we are in danger of losing – and what we may already have lost. To that end I am planning to offer a discussion class this fall called “The Soul of America” – if America or any other country can be said to have a soul, particularly one that might be worth reclaiming. The course will be in much the same format as “Huck and James,” which I offered in the spring: 4 or 5 zoom sessions of 45 minutes, built around some short, seminal documents from American history, with plenty of opportunities for give and take and for thinking out loud together. We will focus on documents proclaiming what we aspire to be and on the reality of who we have been and are now. And we will see if we can come to some agreement about the soul of America, whether it is something worth saving or reclaiming, and how we can go about doing so.

If you are interested or want to learn more, please let me know at jamesgblaine2@gmail.com.

* A note from a reader in response to my August 5th post, Sleight of Hand:

“I am surprised you did not touch upon the character aspects of cheating at golf. The reason cheating cannot be tolerated is because it is too easy. Absent the “moral prohibition“ there would essentially be no game at all. Cheating at golf . . . is a serious character flaw. Ask a Trump voter if he would like to have the president in his [golf] club and watch the laughter begin. Nobody would.”