The Good News

Monrovia, California

April 8, 2018

Safely through the first year plus of the Trump presidency.  I say safely because he hasn't done much physical damage--only to the truth as a general ideal.  There he has done much harm, redefining truth in an eerily Orwellian way, so consistently and often that we now accept as givens that there are such things as "fake news" and "alternative facts," rather than simply lies.  Most rational people see this with a firm sense of the irony of it all, while his true believers have gained a couple of catchphrases with which to dress up and rationalize their adherence to his ultimately pedestrian and transparent brand of jingoism and white supremacy.  The rest of us have been given permission by the mainstream media to call Trump a liar, an idiot, and a hatemonger quite openly.  Some might call that a win-win situation.

It is now perfectly acceptable to wish for and expect the impeachment of the president (whether or not that will ever happen) and to assume that whatever he says will be not only self-serving, but also the opposite of factual.  It's as if Pinocchio is in the Oval Office and his nose is getting longer every day--either an amusing state of affairs or a sad one, depending on your disposition.  In fact, Trump has effectively cut himself and Fox News off from everybody else, so that it's easier, even for well-meaning but dimwitted people (a large part of the electorate), to see the line between falsehood and propaganda, on the one hand, and news on the other.

Those of us who are hunkered down to weather out the storm that is Trump are teaching ourselves to look at the relative severity of the waves of buffoonery that regularly crash down on the decks of the ship of state, and to gauge their force in terms of how much permanent damage has really been caused.  How much?  Well, not much.  So far nothing his Attorney General, or his Education Secretary, or his hapless and now departed Secretary of State have done has effected any permanent or even major temporary change in things.  Even the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court did nothing except to resurrect his predecessor, Antonin Scalia, and give him a new lease on life.  The ship of state is vast and turns only by small degrees, no matter who is at the helm.  And thank God for that.  Just imagine if Trump was a prime minister capable of instituting his harebrained ideas more or less at will, instead of a comparatively feckless president of a massive bureaucratic corporation, whose board of directors (Congress and the Supreme Court) do not answer to him but to the shareholders and our venerable corporate culture.  True, he and his allies in the Congress have altered the tax code in ways that will not be fair to all, but then the previous version wasn't fair to all either, and these things can be tweaked and changed and even undone.  It happens regularly.

To read this may come as a shock to some of you whose personal angst and disgust have been so strong that you cannot separate your feelings from what actually has, and has not, taken place.  After all, you think, hasn't the precious reputation of the country on the world stage been forever besmirched?  Aren't we a half minute closer to doomsday?  Haven't we abandoned our symbolic commitment to the laudable, if chimerical, goal of doing something about global warming?  Isn't the executive branch of the government now filled with cruel rogues and incompetent hacks?  Well, turn off Facebook and take a deep breath.  That's my advice to everyone, including myself. 

Because I'm here to give you the Good News.  And sorry, the Good News is not that Jesus died for your sins or that God is watching over us all with some kind of ineffable plan.  No, better than that, my friends.  The Good News is that all this is transitory, and not in a slow way, like the melting of the glaciers.  In less than three years it will be time for another presidential election, if we haven't all been nuked by then.  What if, at any other time in your living memory, someone had told you that in three years things will almost certainly be better.  Would you have believed it?

So relax.