The Monday Lament: Glorifying Insanity

And accepting it as a criterion of leadership

Once, we all seemed to believe in an American ideal of secular democracy. It was a belief we were educated to hold, a belief that was shattered by the reality of a racist oligarchy carefully structured to avoid democracy.

In my childhood, this was taught in elementary school and believed by most people who lived in what would become flyover country and those who had avoided education beyond high school. Black, Brown, and Native Americans knew better, but there were jobs to be had and, like everyone else, loans to buy things, sports to watch, and beer to drink.

Perhaps we should have tried harder instead of assuming it was a done deal with annual repeats of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. By the end of WWII, that movie was already old. Maybe we would have been better off with flag-draped yearly reruns of Catch-22.

This very tattered stuff disappeared at the end of the last century, and we all knew it was gone, but the rule was to pretend it wasn’t. Obama refined that rule for us, whose youth in Hawaii and Indonesia led him to study constitutional law and, incidentally, believe it was still real.

That was a tragedy. It should not have been, but it was. Obama laid the groundwork by failing to act at the imposition of authoritarian criminality blocking his Supreme Court appointments. That allowed the corruption of the Court by the neofascist Republican Party, long committed…