This is the culture we live in now and one of the frustrations is trying apply logic to a system designed to make logic immaterial. If you have impunity, you can say or do what you want. For the outsider it's like trying to tell an Australian forest fire to disintegrate.
In a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the powerful rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition. The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, and at best practices only titular democracy. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself.
In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught.
The roots of this madness are varied and go back about 40 years to the Reagan era. Signs were the collapse of labor unions, the surge of MBAs, the increasing role of show business and corporate money in politics, the rise of evangelical intrusion into social norms, the replacement of rational arguments with public relations, and politicians like Reagan, Clinton and eventually Trump.
We keep trying to impose at least a sense of logic, if not the actual thing, as we talk, write and report on what's happening. But, for example, the hours of pointless analysis of an impeachment process sullied by lies and other misbehavior, fills our time yet leads us nowhere. We try to find answers to things that, in the end, will provide no answers.
The thing that should really occupy us is how do we create countercultures of decency, progress and logic? It was just such countercultures that played a major role in creating the 1960s, but today we have a much greater tendency to stay in our own cultural niche, rather than sharing with others the creation of a new system. We fail to note and act upon the fact that decency, logic, and healthy planning easily cuts across the apparent borders of gender, ethnicity, or geography.
The fact is that decency and logic have not disappeared; they have simply been replaced by the power of the culture of impunity. We are not helpless to fight back, and there are those who already doing so, witness state attorneys general coming together to push an issue, the true American traditions of older communities, and groups like the Poor People's Campaign that lists among its goals
I live in a small town in Maine where every despicable value and practice of Trump would damage your standing here because real American values survive instead. This is not something debated, It just exists. Similarly, in the middle ages there was a huge disparity between the elites and common folks, with the former having to hide in castles behind huge walls and moats. One senses in the Trump regime a similar mixture of power and fear.
- We rise to change the moral narrative and demand that the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy/militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism all be ended.
- We rise not as left or right, Democrat or Republican, but as a moral fusion movement to build power, build moral activism, build voter participation, and we won’t be silent any more.
So as you try to muddle your way through the unprecedented madness, cruelty, illegality, and illogic of the Trump regime, put time and effort into strengthening or starting movements that are in sharp contrast by their decency and rationality.
Press the media not to report lies as news, not to obsess over Washington at the expense of the rest of the nation, and find stories about what real Americans are doing, not just the frauds at the top.
The good folk could come together more often - such as governors and mayors meeting monthly or quarterly to speak for the real America. Neighborhoods, towns, and states could emphasize improvements in contrast to what the Trump mob would do. And we need music and symbols for the better America that we are starting to forget about.
And we need to join together in unexpected and unprecedented coalitions that will scare those at the top and remind the rest of us what true America is about.
