A worrying week of weirdness
Future historians, looking back on the times in which we live, might well identify this astonishing week as the point at which we passed through the wardrobe into a strange, new world worthy of the Narnia Chronicles.
Thanks chiefly to the bellicose president of the United States, a lot has been turned upside-down, inside-out and backside-over-tea-kettle.
Longstanding alliances have been dishonoured beyond understanding.
Longstanding rogue regimes and a dictator leader have been exalted beyond reason.
Longstanding principles of democratic societies and the place of a free press in seeking accountability have been scorned. Language has been debased. Notions of decency trashed. As Yeats once said, all changed, changed utterly. If the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un can be called historic, it was historic for many egregious reasons.
What has flowed from it is a torrent of nonsense — a series of comments and outbursts that put the lie to much of what America has purported throughout its history to stand for.
In his behaviour and comments last weekend at the G7 summit in Quebec, then after his meeting with Kim in Singapore, the president has corrupted and made mockery of the cherished values of friendship, of freedom, of honour, of love itself.
The president has spoken of Kim – whose nation has been a virtual prison camp for legions of its people — as if he were the very symbol of the American Dream, a young man who inherited from his humble, hard-working father the family shop and, by dint of rare wit and diligence, built it into an admirable enterprise.
The president has had the cheek and audacity to declare that Kim “loves his people” – people the United Nations has identified as starved, imprisoned, tortured, murdered.
The president’s assessment insults the sacrifice and memory of every American, or soldier from anywhere in the world, who gave their life for the high human value of freedom.
When reminded of North Korea’s record of human rights outrages, the president resorted to that most childish of responses, saying that other nations had done bad things, too.
On returning to Washington from his session with Kim, the president told his own people to take on faith – and on his dubious word — what is nowhere to be found in the flimsy document signed by the two leaders.
He declared that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” Yet he was unwilling or unable to explain in any meaningful way why this might be so.
“This is truly delusional,” Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen wrote on Twitter. “(North Korea) has the same arsenal today as 48 hours ago. Does he really think his big photo-op ended the DPRK’s nuclear program? Hope does not equal reality.”
To be sure, the beleaguered entity that is “reality” seemed under greater attack than ever this week.
When the American media properly pressed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for elaboration on what had been agreed to with North Korea, the profession of journalism itself was demeaned and debased in ways to make any tyrant proud.
Pompeo called it ludicrous and insulting that he was asked to justify the claims his boss was making about the agreement signed, even though the document itself was silent on specifics or binding commitments.
The president called the news media “our country’s biggest enemy.”
It is perhaps worth recalling a comment ascribed, as the 20th century dawned, to Missouri Congressman Willard Vandiver.
“Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me,” he said. “I’m from Missouri, and you have got to show me.”
Missouri promptly became known as the Show-Me State. “I’m from Missouri,” became the comment of every shrewd customer demanding to see evidence substantiating claims with which they were presented. That discipline of verification is the very heart of journalism, a field in which practitioners are advised to be so habitually inquisitive that “if you’re mother says she loves you, check it out.”
The idea, promulgated by a U.S. president and his top advisers, that journalists are enemies of the state or somehow insulting for seeking evidence is either ignorant or malign. Neither proposition is good for America or the world. This week, Donald Trump behaved as someone to whom friends mean nothing, values mean nothing, track records mean nothing, words mean nothing. It is important not to accept any of this as the new normal. As Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland, told an audience in Washington this week, the idea that democracy could fail might at first blush seem outlandish.
“But other great civilizations have risen and then fallen. It is hubris to think we will inevitably be different.”
It is vital that those appalled by a haunted-house world of distorting mirrors and shifting walls remain vigilant, she said. “Facts matter. Truth matters. Competence and honesty, among elected leaders and in our public service, matter.”
If this week made anything clear, it is that every departure from those values, every attack on democracy and the institutions that sustain it, should be met with loud voices speaking truth to power.