Update On Winning, American Style
The government of Ukraine is entering an inevitable phase of resignation and surrender. Her leaders are beginning to admit to themselves, it appears, that in today’s world, if your sovereignty and your freedom depend on the friendship of the United States of America, you will soon lose both. America, for the better part of the past seventy-five years, has consistently been both the world’s loudest talker with the world’s greatest military equipment and a cowardly kowtow artist for every tyrant on Earth. Tie your future to America’s support and you might as well sign the surrender papers on day one and spare yourself a lot of blood spilled on vain hopes and empty promises. That Donald Trump is the single most obvious and embarrassing coward among all U. S. presidents — her “historic” biggest sissy, in today’s fashionable lingo — changes the basic condition of the world only with regard to the rapidity with which ultimate defeat and international collapse will arrive. Unlike his post-WWII predecessors (Reagan excepted, of course), for whom snatching defeat from the jaws of victory was always an incremental game of keeping up defender-of-freedom appearances while doing just enough to lose, the current occupier of the Oval Office (I chose that noun carefully) plays a simpler and more straightforwardly nauseating game: Speak in the voice of American real man bravado, but use that voice in the service of promoting moral equivalency logic and the most repugnant extremes of moral relativism, in order to rationalize conceding principles and territory to any and all tyrants, while simultaneously spewing disrespect and vague threats at unthreatening allies. In short, make the case for the legitimacy of oppressors and the unworthiness of the oppressed, thereby worming one’s way out of any problem that might entail real risk or courage, but make this case in the intonation of a tough hombre who will stand up to anyone.
For what it’s worth, Trump himself does this unconsciously, because he is an ignorant actor and instinctive self-protector through and through. That so many people who are less ignorant than he, or at least lack his excuse, are fully on board with his moral equivalency masquerade of unfreedom, and willing to stand with him against America’s rational good and former goodness, is the most damning reality of this moment. Another way to say this is that of all the people who sold their souls for power by joining Trump’s first administration, it is Mike Pence alone who has managed to restore some of whatever dignity and decency he had before the sale — and we all know the crucible he had to be put through to finally achieve his spiritual renewal. I suspect, however, that Pence’s restoration to reasonable adulthood post-Trump will remain the exception. The more purely self-promoting of his entourage, not to mention the more purely acolyte, will achieve no rebirth.
