As Democrats meet, U.S. still in chaotic free fall
On the third night the Democrats gathered in their virtual convention, wildfires were raging across Northern California. Many were caused by what one state official calls “an historic siege of lightning strikes.”
Fire “tornadoes” are tearing through forests. Smoke is keeping people indoors. The heat is stifling, swelling demand for electricity, inducing rolling blackouts.
On the third night the Democrats gathered, there were 5.5 million cases of novel coronavirus recorded in the United States. There were 1,294 deaths on Aug. 19 alone, bringing the national death toll to 173,094.
On the third night the Democrats gathered, a mob in Portland, Ore., lit fires inside a county building. They did little damage, but it marked the 83rd night of protests, some hijacked by anarchists, over racial injustice.
On the third night the Democrats gathered, we learned that there were 1.1 million unemployment insurance claims last week, higher than the week before. The much-trumpeted economic recovery is a mirage. Unemployment is 10.2 per cent.
A country burning, a country protesting, a country struggling, its people dying. It is a biblical picture of America, and perhaps a metaphor, too.
On the third day the Democrats gathered, Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, became the first Black woman to be nominated for the vice-presidency of a major party. She lamented the disorder and issued a warning of her own.
“We’re at an inflection point,” she said. “The constant chaos has left us adrift. The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone.”
A watershed. A crossroads. This is where the United States finds itself in this lost summer of 2020.
At the Democratic convention, speaker after speaker sounded the alarm. But none as stark as Barack Obama.
There he was, a former two-term president who has said he had taken a vow of silence to himself, lacerating the sitting president seeking re-election. Obama sees a house on fire.
Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy, Obama says, and he will win in November if Americans let him. “This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” he warned. “So we have to get busy building it up.”
The assault on democracy, on the country’s values and principles, is as great as the danger to the forests of California and the health and security of Americans.
On the third day the Democrats gathered, Donald Trump praised a pair of Republican nominees who have embraced, without apology, the doctrine of QAnon. They believe that the government is threatened by a Satanist cabal of pedophiles of the Deep State from which only Trump can save the country.
When asked, Trump shrugs and says he doesn’t know what they believe but he likes that they believe in him. He calls one of them “the future of the Republican Party.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s adviser, Stephen Bannon, has been charged with fraud in New York. He joins the grifters, sycophants and remittance men in Trump’s circle whose skulduggery, or criminality, Trump pardons, denies, defends or excuses.
Now, one of his appointees, the postmaster general, is reversing plans to weaken the U.S. Postal Service. Facing protests, he promises to stop removing postal boxes and dismantling sorting machines, which makes it harder for people to vote.
Trump also says that he won’t necessarily respect the outcome of the election. His spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, says “the president will see what happens and make a determination in the aftermath.” Really.
McEnany is to Washington today what “Comical Ali,” the spokesman for Saddam Hussein, was to Baghdad in 2003. Comical Ali kept insisting that American troops were retreating or committing mass suicide during the invasion of Iraq, as they were knocking on his door.
America is in free fall. It has descended into a netherworld of falsehood, conspiracy and official corruption, as the Republicans will confirm when they gather next week for their convention.