Those that neglect history are doomed to repeat it. Those that suppress or distort history are hell-bent on repeating it.

My take on George Santayana’s 1905 quip.

Most Wisconsinite’s are hiding indoors these days as one of those dreaded polar vortexes casts us into another bone-chilling deep freeze. The wind chills are expected to fall to minus 35 degrees F today. Now that is freaking cold.

But salvation soon beckons. In less that two weeks, I’ll be headed to South America where it is Summer right now. In the meantime, I’m using an enforced hibernation to noodle on the insanity about me.

………………………..

Our National Twilight Zone…

If Rod Serling, the imaginative  creator of the 1960’s TV show, The Twilight Zone, came up with a screenplay based on the antics of our current President, he would have been scorned for going over the top merely to attract viewers. Few would accept a script where an American President would send goon squads into American cities to violate basic human rights merely to pursue some perverted vision of ethnic cleansing, then kidnap the leader of a sovereign nation to steal their oil (for reasons not yet clear), then  threaten to take a semi-independent jurisdiction (Greenland) by force while disabusing both a NATO ally (Denmark) and the Western alliance as a whole (NATO) with tariffs (or worse) if they don’t succumb to his fantastical wishes, before finally suggesting that our once friendly northern neighbor be forced to become our 51st state. At the same time, he refuses to comply with a lawful act of Congress to release the names of those likely guilty of sexual crimes against children. As the old saying goes, you can’t make this shit up.

If all that were not bad enough, our esteemed leader then stands before the leaders of the world at the World Economic Conference in Davos ranting incoherently for more than an hour. His insensible verbal exercise in venom and self-delusion, speckled with  gratuitous self-praise, managed to stun the esteemed audience into embarrassed silence.

There were moments of clarity among his endless threats and boasts. At one point, he did admit to being a wanna-be dictator. Tom Nichols (writer for the esteemed Atlantic) wrote the following: “No one can be watching [Trump’s] Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.“

In short order, our titular leader of the free world has presided over the dismantling of democracy at home, a systemic attack abroad on those rules governing international relations since World War II, and has expressed opinions and beliefs that defy all logic and which hardly possess even a tenuous link to a fact- grounded perspective on the world. He actually said he had contributed more to NATO than any leader in history. OMG!

And yet, he still retains the support of about 40 percent of the American populace. In the last free elections just before Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor in January of 1933, the Nazi party never exceeded 37 percent of the popular vote. To put Trump’s continuing popularity into historical perspective, Harry Truman served as the President who ended WWII, who successfully steered the post- war economy toward prosperity, who developed a containment policy that eventually stymied Communist dreams of global expansion, and who arguably initiated the civil rights movement by desegregating the military despite rigorous objections. Yet, he saw his approval rating fall to just 26 percent at one point. Only one-in-four Americans supported a humble leader now regarded as one of our historical best while our current international joke retains broad appeal, if not cult-like worship by many.

Strikingly, the Republican Party establishment maintains a position of unqualified support behind a so-called leader whose cognitive capacities and behavioral dispositions seldom rise above that of a third grade schoolyard bully. Remember that the Republican leaders some five decades ago abandoned Richard Nixon once it became clear that he had violated Constitutional norms. Where is such leadership today?

Trump should be medicated before being allowed in public, not showered with egregious praise by cult-like sycophants. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, praised Trump’s Davos rant as a home run. Not a single significant member of the GOP establishment has stepped up to the plate to stop our current national nightmare.

If that were not enough, the day before Trump’s venture into the theater of the absurd, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech that brought the assembled international audience to its feet. He started off as follows: “Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable … the natural order of international relations reasserting itself.” But then Carney subtly argued that such traditional forms of hegemony by the powerful is not inevitable, not by any means.

He pointed out the words and actions of Victor Havel, the poet who led the Czech people out of an authoritarian Communist dystopia into a democratic rebirth. In a 1978 work titled The Power of the Powerless, Havel wrote that tyranny begins to fade when ordinary people stop living the lie, when each person stands up and says enough is enough. Havel, and other heroes, initiated a revolution of hope for those trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Has that time arrived in America?

Ordinary citizens are beginning to stand up to the thugs from ICE on the streets of Minnesota. Globally, civilized nations are finally standing up to our own, sadly home-grown, version of an international thug … one who believes he has unlimited power and no constraints upon his dystopian aspirations.

Europe merely suggested that, should Trump move to take over Greenland, a united Continent might divest itself of U.S. bonds. That alone changed the game. Trump’s tax giveaways to the Uber-wealthy, it appears, depends on the rest of the world buying our treasury notes. If they decide to stop, we cannot finance the national debt on which Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy depend. Our economy would immediately go into the crapper. The mere suggestion of that happening recently sent the markets into a one day equities sell-off.

That is all it took to push our emperor with no clothes to reverse course. Not quite all, Europe did recognize some American rights in Greenland that the U.S. already possessed. This permitted our chief rooster to strut about the barnyard as if he had won something. He is, after all, simply the classic school yard bully. You stand up to him and he folds. And once again, Trump backed off his latest tariff threats.

I am reminded of Ralphie in the seasonal classic called A Christmas Story. Meek Ralphie wanted a BB gun from Santa as he dreamt of being a local hero. In truth, he was daily bullied by a local tough named Farkus or something similarly sinister. Pushed too far one day, Ralphie fought back, wailing away at his tormentor. His long-time nemesis immediately folded into a whimpering mess. [Alas, too bad England’s Chamberlain hadn’t stood up to the bully Hitler in the late 1930s.]

If spineless Republican office holders finally begin to stand up to Trump, perhaps he might run off to the Phillipines and soon be known as the Manila Folder. That would prove a fitting end to his delusions that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for dismantling the very understandings and mechanisms that ensure global well-being. Under Trump’s leadership, for instance, the U.S. has just completed America’s total separation from the World Health Organization (WHO).

We likely will know the outcome of our national, more like international, drama this year. Perhaps our political embarrassment will finally be held accountable for his childish behaviors. Or, heaven forbid, Trump may initiate extra-constitutional tactics to remain free as he plays with the world as his personal sandbox. But even if he is brought to account for his actions, what has been learned, if anything? A nation so lacking in historical understanding could easily fall under the spell of the next con-man to strut across our stage. Preserving democracy demands a minimal level of wisdom as well as an appreciation of history’s critical lessons.

For that very reason, Republicans are trying to rewrite our history with self-serving propaganda. They wish to replace hard truths with convenient myths. That would be a perversion, and a sin, from which ultimate recovery might prove unlikely if not  impossible.