Constitution will endure
Pearl Harbor Sunday in 1941, I was 9 years old. Confused by the sudden urgent talk, the clamorous excitement in the adults around me, the competing voices in the room, on the radio, in the phone calls that rang and rang I knew to be afraid but had no real understanding of what had happened and why.
Lives were changed, priorities altered. Shortly gas rationing curtailed Sunday trips to the country. Sugar and shortening almost disappeared. Young men fresh out of high school were being drafted and hastily sent away. Many left new wives. Bewildered boys were issued a rifle and sent off to war.
There was weeping all around. You could feel the anxious air. There was worry, for at times in those early days, our enemies — on the far side of both oceans — were way too near. But what I remember most was my foreboding sense of the dictators who’d turned our world to chaos. Remote men, in countries I knew only as outlines in the geography book, had collected vast armies, warships, tanks, airplanes and bombs and were coming to seize us and our way of life.
It was a long hard-fought bloody war. But we won. And thereafter, for a decent interval, we set our sights on restoring the damage, both here and abroad.
But for me those dictators and what they’d managed to murder and destroy with impunity lingered. It was possible to upend peace, prosperity, and moral values, and unleash wanton murder if you seized and kept a heavy hand upon the rudder of an elected government. And Stalin, Hitler, the Japanese — with control of each country’s military machine, and the loyalty of key players in key offices — had turned the world upside down for four years of bloody war. They did this with the military, with the fear of secret police, and most of all with propaganda. During Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency in 2016, each time I heard “Lock her up,” I’d cringe. How could this man be allowed to publicly slander this woman over and over until it became a chant, seconded by the crowd without public shame? How could he crowd Ms. Clinton’s physical space on stage during their debate without one of the moderators asking him to back away? And in my ears the rallies themselves sounded too much like George Wallace cheering Alabama on towards more fear and segregation. They were reminiscent of Munich as Hitler ranted , rousing the citizens of Germany to wild frenzy, priming them to welcome the Holocaust that was soon to follow?
Trump is a failed tyrant but not for the lack of trying. His handicap is his personal vanity. His distinct advantage is Attorney General William Barr. It is the addition of Barr to the Trump cohort that most fills me with dread. Barr the apologist, who sees nothing sinister in his parsing of the law to exempt our president from culpability by virtue of the extent and power of his office. Barr has attempted to immunize the president from the law, saying that the president has the power to shut down an unwarranted investigation. And whether an investigation is warranted or not is the president’s decision.
To hear Trump spray bold claims without truth, court grievances and urge violence as he is cheered on by his chaotic rallies, is to return to my childhood foreboding anew. I hear Hitler raging, Mussolini raving, Castro’s nearly endless harangues, and Joseph Mccarthy is not far off, scattering the seeds of suspicion everywhere. And it troubles me.
But lately, I have also been reassured by our military who have resisted calls for force and absolute power, who have refused to use their weapons against peaceful or not so peaceful citizens.
And most of all I am sustained by the continued steadfastness of our rule of law, by the morality and ethics of judges who continue to strike down Trump’s attempts at absolute control and by the ingrained common sense of citizens long accustomed to the freedoms of our democracy and their conviction that no one has a free pass by virtue of an elected title. And no one is above the law.
If we go back to those forward-thinking colonists who crafted our constitution with its deliberate distribution of powers among the executive, legislative and judiciary branches, maintaining the balance necessary for thought and actions that keep our freedoms functioning, we find we have much to thank them for. They have pulled us through an attempt at dictatorship. And we are grateful. Probably more grateful than some of us like to admit.
Barbara Demille lives in Rensselaerville.