Up from the Rubble, Up from the Rabble
There is some truth to the cliché holding that liars think everybody lies, that cheaters think everybody cheats, that thieves think everybody else steals, etc. Understood as an emotional self-defense strategy, that has a great deal of explanatory power: We may talk about having the “fear of God” in us, but what people actually fear is social rejection, which is why people with a paralyzing fear of public speaking are considered entirely normal while people with an insistent terror of eternal damnation are judged fanatics and crackpots. We tell our children that there is nowhere to hide in “But everybody else is doing it!” when that isn’t quite true. A vice is not a problem — an unusual vice is a problem. An unusual virtue, or an unusual practice of personal discipline, can be an even bigger problem — ask someone who doesn’t drink how often some interested party inquires, politely or not: “What’s wrong with you? Are you an alcoholic in recovery? A Mormon? A moral scold? On a diet?” Subtext: “Are you implying that there’s something wrong with me?”
Rugged individualists — that’s us.
Beyond the social consideration, the phenomenon that old fraud Sigmund Freud called “projection,” a term and concept popularized by his followers, offers a degree of moral exculpation as well. Business swindlers and political hucksters are particularly prone to it, usually affecting a jaded, man-of-the-world attitude: “I didn’t make the rules!” or “That’s just how business is done!” or “Politics ain’t beanbag!” You know the type: They like to repeat a phony Sun Tzu quote they read on Facebook and pretend to be a character from Glengarry Glen Ross, never having actually read Sun Tzu or seen a David Mamet play. (They don’t know Mamet — they know Alec Baldwin’s performance in a movie based on one of Mamet’s plays.) Or maybe they’ll quote the lawyer from whom the president draws so much inspiration, Roy Cohn: “I don’t care what the law is — tell me who the judge is.”
This is the usual empty-headed law-of-the-jungle stuff: familiar, tedious — and abandoned with a whimper the second a bigger dog comes along.
And so it is no great surprise to find President Donald Trump and cronies complaining about election fraud even as President Donald Trump and his cronies were recorded in a telephone call attempting to suborn election fraud, threatening the Georgia secretary of state — a Republican, note — with criminal prosecution unless he should “find,” discovering by some black art, enough votes to swing the state’s election Trump’s way.
I have on many occasions criticized the abuse of the word coup in our politics, but that is what this is: an attempted coup d’état under color of law. It would be entirely appropriate today to impeach Trump a second time and remove him from office before his term ends.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
