Meditations on a Sentence

I have heard it said that many people enjoy an activity known as "apple picking".  

Never done it myself, although I have picked other kinds of produce, from the cherries that grew wild on a tree in our front yard in Iowa to the beans and corn and carrots from my grandma's gardens.  Then there were the years that raspberry plants really took over the hedge bed here in Springfield.  Also, back when I lived in Chicago, I used to make the trip to Long Grove from time to time because the people I hung out with were into that sort of thing.  And while there I would shop the various apple-based products they have at the Long Grove Confectionery Co & Apple Haus.   I'd pick out an apple pie, or some apple tarts, and definitely some apple cider, but no actual apples have I ever picked from a tree.

(You know, now that I think of it, I did technically do some apple picking in my youth.  We had a few wild crabapple trees growing in the field next to our home in the Chicago suburbs, and those suckers made excellent projectiles, either hand-thrown or as slingshot ammunition.)

Anyway...my own, apple picking-adjacent hobby is the much less well known.  It is the art of razor-in-the-apple picking.  Scanning a legacy media pundit's atrocious take on politics or culture, and spotting the central lie on which they'd built 800 words of contractually-obligated nonsense.  

Old hands at this sport know that the lie is almost never to be found in the first or second paragraph, but is usually found somewhere between a third of the way and halfway through the column.  For example, this week, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times planted his lie in the fifth paragraph of nine paragraphs of bafflegab entitled, "The Cultural Contradictions of Trumpism."

Right off the bat, let us remind ourselves that it's not fucking 'Trumpism'.  As my wife wrote all the way back in August of 2016:

Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'

The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump. Who voted for him again?

This is why, for every rare appearance of Stuart Stevens in the legacy media talking about the long, deep roots of the rot at the heart of the Republican party --

-- you'll find dozens of pissy deflection and denial pieces by goofs like Tom Nichols and Joe Scarborough and Charlie Sykes and Adam Kinzinger and David French (and a host of others with whom you are probably familiar thanks to their near-continuous presence in the legacy media), all of whom, in their own ways and for their own reasons, do not want to talk about the trajectory which the Republican party has been on for decades that led, inexorably, to a monster like Trump.  

The entire Brooks column is the usual, tepid Brooks piffle: the dreary "meh" shrugs of a lifetime  member of legacy media royalty who has a place high enough above the mob that he is sure that no rising tide of madness and fascism will ever touch him personally.  Sure, the MAGA goons would love to see the heads of RINOs like Brooks on a pike and Brooks knows it...

It’s normal for people like me to have contempt for the reactionaries.

On the other hand...

But the reactionaries have a point...

No surprise there.  In all circumstances and under all conditions, Brooks' go-to move has always been groping around until he can latch onto what feels like a middle place from which he can scowl disappointedly at Both Sides of ... whatever, plant himself there and immediately begin extolling the virtues of Centrism.  

So, where is the razor-in-the-apple today?

It's right here.

This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy.

First, there is the lie that the GOP was "a dynamic, free-market capitalist party".  It wasn't.  It's true that tax cuts and gutting regulations were the top priorities of a tiny clique of aristocrats who occupied the commanding heights of high-tone Conservative media and think tanks.  Like Brooks, those people were the respectable, legacy-media-friendly, outward-facing front men of the Republican party, but they were never the Republican party.  

So who constituted the the actual Republican party?

This is me in 2005, just a nobody Liberal blogger out here in the middle of Middle America -- damn near 20 years ago -- diagnosing what was plainly and obviously going on inside the GOP:

Run the racists off the ranch, and who would stuff all the envelopes and staff the phone banks? Write all those lovely checks and boom down from the pulpit at the chittering inbreeders, that if they vote for a Democrat, they’ll burn in Hell with the Fags and the Feminazis?

Face it, without the Segregationists, the Dominionists, the Neocon Imperialists and the rest of nutjobs that pack the extreme Right Wing of Bedlam, the GOP could no more win an election than Michael Jackson could lose a celebrity trial.

For all of their posturing, every day they become more and more nothing but the Party Of Jefferson Davis…in bad drag.

And this is David Brooks, the senior Conservative writer of the most prestigious newspaper in America, just seven moths before Donald Trump oozed down the escalator to claim the hearts and minds of the Republican party, peering deeply into the soul of the Party of Lincoln and reassuring the nation that the GOP was definitely doing just great!

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase.

-- David Brooks, November 5, 2014.

As a pundit, David Brooks doesn't merely miss what's going on inside his recently-former political party.  For decades, Brooks has made a very profitable cottage industry out of emphatically refusing to see what was going on right in front of him, even as his various employers touted him as a man with supposedly savvy, insider knowledge of what was really going on behind closed doors and in the corridors of power.  

And so the second lie that composes this week's razor-in-the-apple is the word "infused".  That the autor del crimen was Donald Trump, in the Billiard Room with a Candlestick and an Infuser, who somehow, single-handedly and almost overnight, turned Mr. Brooks' super-awesome party of Edmund Burke-quoting noblemen into a mob of reactionary, mouth-breathing bigots and imbeciles.

Except, of course, that's not what happened at all.

But apropos of nothing, do you know what can happen if you improperly dispose of rags that you've used to stain wood with boiled linseed oil?

After a few hours in a confined space, the exothermic reaction from the drying component of the stain can cause the rags to spontaneously combust.  It's true.

Also, do you know what happens when, in order to win elections, you stuff your political party full of bigots and imbeciles and xenophobes and homophobes and misogynists and gun nuts and Conservative fundamentalists, and then feed them a steady diet of lies, demonizations and rage-inducing imaginary conspiracies for 30 or 40 years?

After a few decades they manifest a monster like Trump.  

Take a step back and, from the perspective of the long, ugly and well-documented history of the modern Republican party, look at that sentence again:

This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy.

This is the same author who assessed the Fake Tea Party as decent, salt-of-the-earth patriots literally based on jogging past a few of them one day.

Who dismissed any notion that there was racism in the GOP, or that their fanatical opposition and hysterical reaction to Barack Obama had anything to do with the color of his skin.

Who laughed off the idea that George W. Bush could possibly piss away the Clinton budget surplus, or that there would ever be deficits again.  

Whom in 2003, declared the Iraq war to be over and entirely successful, that Bush was a genius, and that Liberal would now have to slink away into the shadows because of how wrong, wrong, wrong we had been.

Who swore, in 2016, that it was gonna be Rubio!

Who has dismissed virtually every crime against democracy committed by the GOP for the past 30 years as something something  Both Sides.  

And on and on and on.

This country has a sickness.  That sickness is Republicanism.  Specifically the belligerent ignorance and bigotry of the base of the Republican party, aided and abetted by Conservative media parasites who exist to feed the rage and paranoid of that base and a complicit legacy media that enables the spread of the contagion by ignoring its root cause.  

What happened to the GOP has been the labor of decades and of thousands of terrible people.  And fixing it begins with speaking the painful truth about what really happened to the Party of Lincoln.  

Because until that is clearly and universally accepted as the correct diagnosis for what ails us -- and not Donald Trump performing some hoodoo that magically transformed a party of boy scouts into a political Manson family  -- we will never be able to cure ourselves of what has poisoned our country.

Burn The Lifeboats