Thomas S. Harrington writes:
I would love to share,
my liberal friend, in your sense of incredulity about the election of Donald
Trump to the presidency of United States.
I would love to stand with you in the
sense of woundedness that, while certainly painful up front, carries with it the
secondary compensation of a warm and nurturing solidarity.
I would love to sit
with you and fulminate in righteous anger about the unparalleled vulgarity and
cruelty of Trump and his followers.
Why?
Because I know you, perhaps better than
you even dare to know yourself.
I know you well because I have watched you with
great and detailed care over the last three decades and have learned, sadly,
that you are as much if not more about image and self-regard as any of the
laudable values you claim to represent.
I have watched as you accommodated
yourself to most of the retrograde social forces you claim to abhor.
I
have seen you be almost completely silent before the world’s greatest evil,
unprovoked war, going so far as to embrace as your presidential candidate this
year a person who cold-bloodedly carried out the complete destruction of Libya,
a real country with real people who love their children like you and me, in
order—as the Podesta emails make clear—to further her personal political
ambitions.
I watched as you stood silent before
this same person’s perverse on-camera celebration of the murder by way of a
bayonet thrust to the anus of the leader of that once sovereign country, and
before the tens of thousand of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of
refugees, that war provoked.
I watched during the last eight years as
you sought refuge in the evanescent qualities of skin color and smooth
speechmaking so as to not to confront the fact that your “liberal” president
was almost totally lacking in actionable convictions regarding the values you
claim to be about.
I watched as you didn’t say a peep as he
bailed out bankers, pursued whistleblowers and deported desperate and
downtrodden immigrants in heretofore unimaginable numbers.
And I didn’t hear the slightest
complaint (unlike those supposedly stupid and primitive libertarians) as he
arrogated to himself the right to kill American citizens in cold blood as he
and he alone deemed fit.
I monitored you as you not only
completely normalized Israel’s methodical erasure of the Palestinian people and
their culture, but made cheering enthusiastically for this campaign of savagery
the ultimate litmus test for social and political respectability within your
ranks.
I watched as you breezily dispatched the
memories of the millions of innocent people destroyed by U.S. military
aggression around the world and damaged police brutality here at home in order
to slavishly imitate the unceasing orgy of uniform worship set in motion by the
right and its media auxiliaries in the wake of September 11th, 2001.
In short, since 1992, I have watched as
you have transformed a current of social thought once rooted in that most basic
an necessary human sentiment—empathy—into a badge of cultural and educational
superiority.
And because feeling good about yourself was much more
important to you than actually helping the afflicted, you signed off, in
greater or lesser measure to almost all of the life-sapping and dignity-robbing
measures of the authoritarian right.
And now you want me to share in your
sense of shock and incredulity?
No, thanks, I’ll save my tears for all
of the people, ideas and programs you heedlessly abandoned along the road to
this day.
Thomas S. Harrington
is a professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut
and the author of the recently published book, Livin’ la Vida Barroca: American Culture in a Time of Imperial
Orthodoxies.
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