Inauguration Day Musings
The Village People are performing at the U.S. president’s inauguration celebrations. Very appropriate. The Village People are a group of campy, unmasculine performers who have built a popular entertainment career that has extended long past its sell-by date by donning the costumes of various “real man” types — the hard hat, the police officer, and so on — and dancing around while laughably singing about how “macho” they are. The only difference is that the Village People were always putting on their tough guy song-and-dance show with a giant wink, which is to say without any pretense of fooling anyone, whereas Trump has intentionally and successfully hoodwinked tens of millions of formerly sensible Americans into thinking he is a hero of manly virtue. Thus, to adapt William F. Buckley’s famous quip about the Boston telephone directory, I would prefer that the United States be governed by the various members of the Village People than that it be governed by one village idiot.
In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, Trump has been displaying his affection for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping by borrowing their diplomatic and rhetorical style, i.e., by attempting to strong-arm non-threatening neighbors, most particularly Canada and Greenland, into ceding land or authority to him, in a bit of manifest destiny showmanship calibrated to move the hearts of the kind of Americans who believe NATO caused the war in Ukraine by threatening “Putin’s legitimate national security concerns.” No, I am not offering a moral equivalency argument to the effect that America’s real security interests are no more defensible than Putin’s fake ones. Rather, I refer to the fact that Greenland and Canada are political and military allies of the U.S., and hence that Trump’s Putinesque bloviating, his “not ruling out military solutions,” and his insistence that America “doesn’t need” its traditional leading trade partner, aside from demonstrating what an ignorant buffoon he is, serves to normalize superpower expansionism in a climate in which the very worst thing an American president could do is provide optics cover for the two greatest threats to world security. Trump is a menace to peace and civilized existence on so many levels that there is no other way to describe a country that could return such a thing to the ever-expanding power of the presidency, after all that he has already damaged, than simply by saying that she is lost. Completely lost. Permanently lost, in all likelihood. We all have to come to terms with this reality, we wandering souls without a true home, now left so unequivocally without any nation on Earth with either the authority or the intellect to speak on behalf the true interests of humanity.
None of the above implies in any way that the Democratic candidate (or party) deserved to win the 2024 election. For the fate of a democracy (which is all the USA is now) rests not only with the winners of elections, but also with the losers who were unable, for whatever reason, to win. That is how governance is defined in such a regime. In other words, the entire electorate is responsible for the current situation, if anyone is. The Democrats abandoned the causes of individual freedom and the dignity of the private family and personal self-determination generations ago, embracing the life-hating and cowardly agenda of international socialism ever more brazenly and recklessly over the decades. This was a disaster in that it invited the rapid corruption of the party perceived as the “only alternative” to the Democrats, which, finally having no viable rival in the political representation of “America as founded,” was able to turn itself into a money-grubbing champion of material excess and nihilistic corporate police state rationalizations without losing any of its core following of desperate anti-progressives in search of a protector. At last, these citizens, such as they are, have been flipped to the populist flipside of progressivism themselves, reduced to the status of personality cultists and true believers in the utterly un-American notion of a single authoritarian figure who alone can lead their country — to where, they either dare not or think not to ask — on the strength of his charisma alone, and who is therefore, due to their weak-souled lack of diligence, able to mask a heart overflowing with anti-American sentiments and desires by merely saying the words “America” and “great” in the same sentence over and over, until seventy million people who have lost their way become hypnotized into compliance with their darkest angels by the sound of a blustering fool’s voice.
Or he is the greatest president since George Washington? For wasn’t it in Washinton’s own Farewell Address, after all, that Americans were urged on to greatness with the immortal words:
It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
They have everything for young men to enjoy
You can hang out with all the boys
It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal
You can do whatever you feel
So true. Good luck, world!