{"id":29970,"date":"2016-11-10T19:47:53","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T00:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=29970"},"modified":"2016-11-10T19:48:35","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T00:48:35","slug":"farewell-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=29970","title":{"rendered":"“Farewell, America”"},"content":{"rendered":"

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity \u2014 all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country. Continue reading<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source Farewell, America – BillMoyers.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Impassioned, intelligent, despairing, angry and clear, from Neil Gabler.<\/p>\n

Read it. You won’t feel better but you’ll feel confirmed and wise. Because yes, we’re right and this is awful.<\/p>\n

A few excerpts that I found especially trenchant:<\/p>\n

This generally has been called the \u201chate election\u201d because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let\u2019s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.<\/em><\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

To me, the paragraph below cuts into all the namby-pamby phony equivalence (both parties are to blame) crapola of a lot of current writing about what the hell happened.<\/p>\n

This<\/em> is the hell that happened, and this is why<\/em> it happened:<\/p>\n

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: \u201cHe says the things I\u2019m thinking.\u201d That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool\u2019s paradise. Now we aren\u2019t.<\/em><\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn\u2019t care. It was a dictator\u2019s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the \u201cright path\/wrong path,\u201d or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn\u2019t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won\u2019t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump\u2019s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.<\/em><\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

With the mainstream media so delegitimized \u2014 a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies \u2014 they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism \u2014 if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.<\/em><\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC\u2019s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right. For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who \u201csays what I\u2019m thinking.\u201d It will be open season.<\/em><\/p>\n

Virtually never in my life have I been the victim of anti-Semitism. Since I spend time on Twitter nowadays, I have seen what’s out there and it is horrible. I don’t feel personally threatened–although a number of the worst tweets are flung at women journalists–but I’m appalled at how specific the anti-Semitism is. I’m not sure what to do about it, if anything is to be done.<\/p>\n

Gabler follows the above with a couple of comments sort of praising David Brooks (New York Times columnist). I don’t agree with Gabler. I feel him grasping at anything, something with which to soothe himself and to find value in journalists. I think Brooks is lost, wandering in a land foreign to his disingenuously self-imposed ideology.<\/p>\n

But then Gabler returns to end his essay this way:<\/p>\n

But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.<\/em><\/p>\n

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.<\/em><\/p>\n

Which was the reason those who managed to survive the Third Reich gave when asked how they did. They were imbued with a higher cause than their own lives. They survived to bear witness.<\/p>\n

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America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1095],"tags":[1096,1173,1172],"class_list":["post-29970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-politics","tag-the-election","tag-trump"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t