History Provides The Answers

Why Must We Clamor For Expert Affirmation?

My Comment on NYT’s “A Road Map of Trump’s Lawless Presidency, According to 35 Legal Scholars”

One needn’t have tenure as a legal scholar anywhere to offer a retrospective assessment of our stop-by-stop milk train toward authoritarianism.

A majority of Americans are now under-educated, less than literate and are ever increasingly preoccupied with day-to-day survival. Our indoctrination into a White American mythological state is now multi-generational. We watch, we thrill, we dawdle, we doodle. Read? History? It’s ridiculous to presume that the opinions of even the handful of those who merely value scholarship would hold any sway in altering the perverse path onto which our society has veered.

Nevertheless, history holds all the answers here.

For "readers" like those who merely follow mainstream headlines and editorials to glean any insight from accredited experts who eloquently thirty-iterate what has happened and continues to happen is wheel-spinning in more muddy blather and sensationalism.

Either we progress past this era of astonishment and into an era of empowered and BRAVE active reform, or continue wallowing in the woods of "can you believe this?'-ism where we'll become ever more inured to this panoply of constitutional offenses. Any one of these travesties should be immediately unacceptable, legally accountable and punishable.

This pattern of brash capitalism and corruption (aided by a largely mass-ignored amoral foreign policy) began roughly in 1897. The runway upon which the ship of state must land is growing ever shorter.

From Imperialism to Reaganism to Contract with America to Tea Party to Grover Norquist and Citizen's United, we've been capitulating with lazy fealty to the abject nefariousness which we must now fight, and perhaps do so kinetically.

We’ve normalized and now accept domestically (multiple broadcast networks!) the same type of agitprop with which I was, as a teen, aghast and astonished in the night while listening to Radio Moscow out of Cuba on a shortwave set in the 70’s.

We’re not immune. Nor are we exempt by dint of our crudely hammered myth of American exceptionalism.

Surrender is as always an option. Shame on us all, but be damned those festooned and hideously hobbled by graceless greed. There are more of us regular folks who see what’s been happening and now must do what is necessary to stop it.