This is America

This is America

This morning, as I prepare to spend the day going into the airport zone, my suspended animation state I adopt when traveling, I am affronted by two things I see on the news. The first is the back and forth that took place yesterday in the Supreme Court over the issue of presidential immunity in the case of Donald Trump v. The United States of America. While I still have a good degree of faith that SCOTUS will get itself more or less to the right place with the overall issue of presidential immunity, the Q&A gave us all great pause about the impartiality of the court at a moment when we have needed a neutral arbiter of the acts which have been perpetrated over the last eight years in support of and by Donald Trump. It was particularly clear that Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch have a view of the world that is not concerned about the numerous breaches of law and norms by Trump and is willing to push the here and now aside for the theoretical benefit of a strong (dare I suggest, autocratic) chief executive of the future. This overt effort goes so far as to suggest that the president can order the assassination of his political rival if, in his sole opinion, it is an official act in service of the best interests of the country. That sounds an awful lot like Russia or China and how they allow their leaders to act.

Even if SCOTUS does severely limit the immunity of the president from criminal prosecution, there is very clearly a move afoot, as interpreted by the questions from the most conservative justices, to delay the existing prosecutions of Donald Trump such that they are prepared to let the fate of the upcoming election be that arbiter since we all know that those litigations will go away if Trump is to retake the presidency. I am in the group of people who believe that the country will come to its senses and the election will go in favor of Joe Biden and not Donald Trump, but that does not completely ease my mind about what I see happening. The rhetorical question that comes to my mind is that the belief that such issues should only be decided by an election and not by an impartial judicial process is still to effectively say that Donald Trump is, indeed, above the law and that only a waning of his popularity, something that gets determined by proven extreme flows of misinformation, can bring the man to justice. This is not the vision of America that I have been raised to believe in.

The other big news story this morning was about the NFL Draft, which took place yesterday in Detroit. This annual event is designed for broadcast and yet it was physically attended by 300,000 inebriated and screaming crowds of football fans, each one with more war paint on their body to mimic their favorite team colors than the next. This is tribal America at its worst in my opinion and it troubles me when I see it with such fervor. With such good TV coverage for this event, there was absolutely no valid informational reason for people to gather in such numbers for this event other than as an excuse to party and party hard. This event tells us a lot about what we value in America. We value these warriors of the collegiate gridiron in total amounts that have gone beyond ridiculous. I am prepared to say that a top performing athlete is worth the price paid for him (or, God forbid, her) due to the revenue that can clearly be attached to that performance in the surrealistic world of the NFL. There is, of course, imbedded in that my amazement in general about the popularity of a sport based on bone-crushing brutality and testosterone. Look at who the testosterone supplement ads hire to promote their products…ex-NFL stars. But when it comes to the draft specifically, these top draft picks are much more akin to chips placed on a roulette wheel since there is absolutely no correlation between draft pick status and performance on the field. The examples of Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, both of whom were NOT top draft picks seems to prove this point. In addition, this year’s draft was noteworthy in that some top draft picks from last year that were rewarded with huge guaranteed contracts to outperform and have yet to prove their metal, were backstopped by this years draft selections in a manner that highlights the crapshoot nature of the draft selection process and the amount of money out there to chase headlines and success.

What I fear most is that America as we know it today is more about this NFL Draft in all aspects than anything else we see going on around us. We seem to have become a people that care less about our fellow man and more about our debauchery and adrenaline rush of the moment. I have written about the quandary I have that football remains such a popular blood sport despite all the evidence about the health hazards to the gladiators and those youngsters that aspire or are caused to aspire by their parents to get into the NFL. That ambivalence, both by the combatants and the fans, is bad enough. But what seems worse to me is the bacchanal that surrounds NFL football. It is literally the closest thing we can see to the rot which eventually infected Imperial Rome, where conquest and games were prized more than enlightenment and egalitarian prosperity. When you combine that vision of the American dream with the perverse interpretation being taken by the right wing of the Supreme Court, it does not bode well for America and what it has stood for for two hundred and fifty years.

Last night we went to the Dollywood Stampede, which is a Tennessee version of the old Medieval Times with the spectators being fed in hearty but basic manner while competing sides of a joust perform for the crowd, in this case a crowd arbitrarily divided into North and South in good Dixie fashion. It was actually a very good show of both horsemanship and acrobatic skills and was both fun and sparkly. The North/South division was not overplayed and the contest was very purposefully kept close to keep the audiences interest. Encouraging either side to boo their opponents was perhaps unnecessary, but otherwise it was all in good healthy family fun. The grand finale of the show had all of the riders decked out in LED red, white and blue outfits and riding around the ring in synchronization regardless of whether they were on the red or blue teams. They play patriotic songs that stir the hearts of us Americans and make patriotic statements about our strengths as a nation. I suspect that a majority of this sort of audience is filled with Trump voters and that makes me wonder. Like the recent movie, Civil War, makes clear, these days we are forced to ask “what type of American are you?” We sing the same songs, we salute the same flag, we are moved by the same images of patriotism and our history, but we seem to feel the threats to that life come from different places depending on which side of the political spectrum you lean toward. People are always trying to say these days that we are not so very different, but that is less and less clear to me. In the absence of a seismic external threat, not just possible threats, since we are seeing even these things differently these days, but a real and present danger to our way of life it is simply too difficult to say, “THIS is America.”