Making America Grate Again: For the past week the world has watched with growing horror the fevered phantasmagoria of far-Right lunacy that the Republican Party is attempting to pass off as a political convention. Does the rise of Trump mark the fall of the American Republic?
WATCHING THE OPENING HOURS of the Republican National
Convention was like encountering Bob Dylan’s prophetic visions made flesh.
There were the ghosts of Belle Starr – resplendent in their blinding white
Stetsons – all lustily cheering-on a procession of Trumped-up heroes, while the
heads of chambers of commerce from across America looked on in ill-disguised
embarrassment.
Even so, for sheer implausibility the opening day’s speakers
would have taxed even Dylan’s surreal imagination.
Scott Baio – all grown up from his stint as “Chachi” on the
television sit-com “Happy Days” – warmed-up the crowd. Speaking movingly to the
teleprompter, he soaked up the startled audience’s applause like a parched
field in the rain.
Bizarre enough for you? Well, you just wait, there’s more.
David A. Clarke is the Sheriff of Milwaukee County,
Wisconsin. Marching up to the podium, the gaudily decorated sheriff snapped out
a brittle salute and almost immediately brought the Convention to its feet by
declaring that “Blue Lives Matter!”
He was black.
The opening day’s theme was “Making America Safe Again” –
making it just possible to discern the faintest outline of a rationale behind
the Trump team’s extraordinary choices. If your slogan features a word as
loaded as “again” where better to begin than with the Eisenhower-era
certainties of “Happy Days”. And who better than a second-rate actor to sing
their praises?
The same applies to the Convention’s response to the
groundswell of anger and bigotry that has been whipped up by the recent attacks
on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Who better than a sheriff to make
the pitch for law and order?
Not as good as Sheriff Andy Taylor from Mayberry, North
Carolina, would have been, but Uncle Tom Clarke from Wisconsin was a more than
adequate substitute. Better, perhaps, since having a white police officer poor
scorn on the Black Lives Matter movement could very easily have been
misinterpreted by the “liberal media”.
Not that was ever any fear of that.
The air of surrealism pervading the Convention’s agenda may
have been disconcerting, but it was no more unsettling than the mainstream news
media’s live coverage of the event. Veteran CNN broadcasters like Wolf Blitzer
never batted an eyelid as the procession of freaks and fakes that had been
billed as Republican movers-and-shakers made their way across the stage.
What’s been unfolding this presidential election year has
been called “Post-Truth Politics”, and watching CNN’s coverage it’s easy to see
why. The most mendacious misrepresentations of events; glaring sins of
omission; outright lies: all are weighed carefully and analysed with the same ponderous
gravitas of the seasoned news anchor. So determined are the big networks to
escape the dreaded accusation of bias (in favour of what – the truth?) that all
of them have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the blow-waved emperor’s
nudity.
They justify this refusal to speak truth to power by citing
their journalistic duty to remain “fair and balanced”. As if their failure to
acknowledge the fevered phantasmagoria that the Republican Party is passing off
as a political convention is somehow a noble gesture. That they will have to
“balance” this week’s moral capitulation by presenting the Democratic Party’s
Convention as a collection of equally freakish flakes and fakes only highlights
the extraordinary damage “Post-Truth Politics” is inflicting upon the American
electorate.
The Convention venue, Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, is
billed as the home of the “Cavaliers, Monsters and Gladiators”. That these are
all the names of Ohio sports teams in no way detracts from the thoroughly
Dylanesque symbolism. Cavalier in his treatment of Republican Party tradition, and
the fabricator of the most monstrous political expectations, Donald Trump has,
predictably, turned his party’s convention into a four-day television mini-series
for gladiatorial poseurs.
The noted American blogger, Richard Escrow, describes the
man who would be crowned America’s king as “a bloated bleached-blond Narcissus
transfixed by his own silhouette” – and it is hard to disagree. Who else would
subject his party to night after night of saccharine tributes to his own
greatness from his own family?
No stranger to Post-Truth Politics himself, Britain’s new
foreign secretary will have little difficulty in making sense of the Cleveland
spectacle. Boris Johnson has made a special study of Rome’s imperial dynasties.
His classical historian’s eye will recognise the apotheosis of Donald Trump for
what it is: the death of the American Republic.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 July 2016.
