Once more into the ash heap of history
Reports of spontaneous human combustion have always been among my favorite urban myths. People sit around minding their own business, when— poof!—they suddenly ignite into flames and burn down to their loafers.
Disappointingly for readers of supermarket tabloids, people aren’t as combustible in the literal sense as they used to be, although they are in every other sense. Today only people’s brains catch fire. Worse yet, these people don’t notice the smoke curling around their ears. They go on living in what now passes as a normal way.
Crazy, of course, is the new normal in the Trump administration. Every week brings a ridiculous episode that defies belief. Brain cells are ablaze everywhere you look.
Consider the emergence of Nazis and their ilk as respectable figures. When I say respectable, I mean out of their rat holes and given undue deference by President Donald Trump, who apparently dares not offend his base, no matter how base they are.
Oh, the president will say a few rehearsed criticisms when pressed but we know—and the basest of the base know— that he is not sincere. At his infamous press conference, he wouldn’t flat out call the guy who killed an innocent woman in Charlottsville, Va., a domestic terrorist, even though the faux storm trooper ran her down in his vehicle in the ISIS style.
The Charlottsville bigots were defended by some as guardians of history for trying to keep Confederate statues safe. A part of me understands that argument. Removing historical statues can seem a bit Taliban-like. In a perfect world, it might be preferable for passing pigeons to paint the alleged great men white with classic bird bombs delivered from on high.
But I did not begrudge the Russians for tearing down statues of Lenin or the Iraqis for pulling down the figure of Saddam Hussein. Most of us thought history was made whole by these demolitions, not rendered forgotten. So it is with other historical characters whose greatness has become dubious.
There is another history that the defenders of the indefensible need to remember: Hitler started a war that killed more than 60 million people, including at least 405,000 American servicemen. What sort of American thinks Hitler was a swell guy? One with the brain stem of a charred stick.
Our latter-day Nazis, or white supremacists or nationalists, or whatever the alt-stupid call themselves these days, might as well go into Arlington National Cemetery and other resting places of America’s honored dead and trample the graves. Such is the moral offense they present to the rest of us, liberal or conservative.
In case of the Nazis, the tiki torches they carry in their pretend Nuremberg rallies may be responsible for setting fire to their brains. If only Hitler could see those tiki torches—even he would laugh at them, and he wasn’t much for mirth.
As for the president, I am not sure what excuse he has for being so obtuse. I can only assume his brain was previously torched, which explains why he wears that yellow asbestos helmet on his head for protection.
Hot on the heels of the Nazi nonsense, Trump went on national television to make a fanciful promise concerning Afghanistan. The veneer of patriotism couldn’t quite camouflage his preposterous plan.
To be fair, the speech was more adult than usual and part of it was true: Americans have become weary of a war without victory. To remedy that, Trump will give them a victory. Really? Why didn’t anybody else think of that over the last 16 years? The idea of winning in Afghanistan is illusionary. A president who promises anything more than a long slog is delivering fake news.
The British couldn’t win in Afghanistan, the Russians couldn’t win in Afghanistan and we couldn’t win in Afghanistan in the longest war in the nation’s history. This is a dismal swamp and Trump’s admitted that his first instinct was to get out.
But all his instincts are fueled by testosterone and so here we go again with more troops and a new strategy, one patched together from political talking points but with less of a moral varnish. We are there to kill, not promote democracy or human rights, and our killing will have fewer restraints, so innocents will also surely die. It sounds very much like we are going to wage war like the Nazis would have done it.
As burned skulls nod in agreement, I fear spontaneous presidential combustion has brought us full circle.