The Now Famous Hindsight of 2020

The year 2020 was sure to disappoint. A psychic gazing into a crystal ball, or even tracing Trump’s palm, would have said that. However, one was not necessary for the common citizen in the non-conspiratorial world to draw that conclusion. Things were only bound to get worse, any scientist and human living in the real world dourly assured us. Dr. Fauci tells us to prepare not to expect any state of normalcy, like going to a theater where others can actually see your facial expressions, until 2022. This year, the year known for its excellent vision of its past, is a joke. It has embedded itself in the current vernacular as the hyperbolic chamber of bad years, full of death, fire, misfortune, hunger, violent protest, disease, and seemingly unprecedented scandal. It is a year many will try to forget, or the year too many will be forced to remember as that in which a loved one’ death occurred. All I hear and see on Facebook are people saying that they are sick of 2020, how awful this year has been, and it is only September. Who is president? Who’s responsible for most of the havoc that blights this year, makes it a dumpster fire, possibly the worst year since 1968. That would near the violence in the street, the racial unrest, brutality, the cities on fire. In quantity of death, in terms of a president who downplayed a virus (or in the end decided not to play at all) one would have to visit 1918. No one can ever categorically say with sufficient credibility that “2020 is a year that will live in infamy!”

Idiocy

The best jape I heard at the tribulations of this year had to do with the end of daylight saving time on November first. This beleaguered soul did not want to get back even another hour of 2020. I doubt the sincerity of the yearly japes. I say it is hyperbole because (no one is that dense) a vote for Trump, or even no vote at all, will set the stage for only worsening years. Is there any reason to expect that Trump will get better, more presidential, more of any perception of him serving anyone but his truly? No. The last three years have demonstrated that only as a witlessly transparent huckster could. The current year, which could easily be Trumps last one in office, what could signal the beginning of better years, is kind of like the climax, the apex, in the arc of, well, years and how history records them. If there is a gradient, a metric on how years are ranked, and their potential to decline, to rapidly deteriorate in all areas; social, economic, climactic, 2020 proudly submits itself to the lowest ranking so far in the 21st century. However its dissidents, those tired of it, devastated by its events and daily calculations of loss, will, in a few cases, nonetheless vote for Trump. In somewhat practiced Republican tenor they will do the same thing, cast the same vote, and expect different results. There is a word for this type of blind duplication of actions that have caused, in this case, tragic results to America and the world.

Two Tales of Devastation

During the Third Reich (1933–1945) Der Fuhrer menaced and ran most of Europe, instilling fear and hopelessness among Jews, Roma, gays, the disabled, blacks, anyone who veered from the Aryan race. For them, as well as those sympathetic to their plight who had to watch, those years were bad. They were incrementally worse until 1940, when the Reich had a plan, an answer to the “Judenfrage” (Jewish question). All of the aforementioned groups began to disappear in even greater quantities, rounded up and taken to concentration camps from which the vast majority never returned. Bystanders, those who saw the detainees, or smelled the air and black ash on window sills, said nothing was happening. They were either sympathetic to the Nazis, feared getting involved, or could not let their mind cognate that such a calculated genocide was going on right under their nose. The event in history in that 12-year period that is known as the Holocaust was downplayed. Its egregious inhumanity was minimized by President Roosevelt, while Hitler (like Trump) really made little effort to hide his acts from the whole of Germany. It was just the rest of the world that had little idea of the magnitude of his genocidal intentions.

Woodward relates to us in his book Rage how Trump deliberately minimized the severity of the novel coronavirus, saying it would disappear and is like the common flu. He knew of its communicative potency. Still he pressed on with these disqualifying sophistries, and more, because he did not want to “cause a panic.” This is the same guy who two years ago was warning us of the caravan coming from Central America, the man who campaigned in 2016 on the assurance that Mexico was sending bad hombres, sending murderers and rapists, that MS13 gangs would come in from Long Island. Trump’s staying power, his unwavering 38% red-meat base, is predicated on sowing fear and the occasional full fledged panic. The country has been panicked before and lived to tell about it in some histrionics.

• The Panic of 1837 deal with the economic polices of Andrew Jackson. He made the order for “Specie Circular” which required payments for government lands to be in silver or gold.
• The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis, the brewing of an economic depression in North America and Europe. In America it brought Reconstruction to a somewhat premature end. Businesses failed, unemployment rose (particularly in the South) creating an alchemy for class and racial tension.
• The Panic of 1893 marks a three-year period of severe economic depression. Affecting every sector of the economy, it produced a political realignment in 1896 which led to the election of William McKinley (and subsequent assassination).
• The Panic of 1901 involved the first market crash of the NYSE. It concerned the struggles amongst some of America’s wealthy financiers (E. H. Harriman, J.P. Morgan) for control of Northern Pacific Railways.

Then there were the events in America’s history that remain unregulated, their potential severity downplayed by the lack of name recognition. They were the fateful or politically motivated events that did not go down in history as “Panic” (s) to be remembered by name. They were what they were then, and are revered for what they were now. That is not to say presidents, most of all Trump, won’t let the country revisit them. On October 24, 1929 signs trickled down to the wealthy class, investors of great fortune, that a great crash was coming. They panicked, and on “Black Thursday” a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. Billion of dollars were lost, and those wealthy class were suddenly the working class, if not unemployed in numbers that will soon not exceed those of today.

So, America is used to upset, even panic that moves individuals to jump to their death. People jumped out of windows in October 1929. In another disparate mistaken incident five decades later, at least eight suicides were recorded when Ronald Reagan cut Social Security benefits to 200, 000 disabled in 1984. Reagan however had no compunction about causing a panic, taking away abruptly a life-sustaining staple of many.

So much for the panic button. It has been pushed too often and is now mostly hyperbole from which we will emerge stronger, but maybe not in this case. Panic is code for “I have my own designs,” “I want to be reelected and I don’t need the heat,” or simply, “I want to cover my ass.” Trump is incapable of seeing thing as they are for America, all of America, and wields a myopic view finder focused on himself, maybe a few billionaire cronies who get caught in the frays of the lens. He downplays everything that can damage him to his loyal red hatted base (whose stupidity he winds like a watch so they never see the fraud behind the curtain), from pandemics to fires, to hurricanes. He’ll distort or comport the path, the very nature of disasters, all of which are rooted in hi blatant dismissal of climate change as a hoax. It is a diabolical course for motives presidents choose in telling Americans the nature of their actions. In Vietnam the motive for lying was soon apparent. Here was an illegal and immoral war, rapidly losing support, so minimizing its toll, or just hiding the knowledge of its futile nature, was the obvious answer. In 1968, after the Christian Science Monitor confirmed the dealings of candidate Nixon with South Vietnam to hold off on a peace deal, Lyndon Johnson did not go public with information that was basically treason that could have cost Nixon the presidency because it would have shocked the nation. He might have had a motive though, a reason that was not so “considerate” of the collective fragile mental state of the American people. Going public could also have jeopardized him, revealing the nature of how the information was acquired, which at the time was illegal. Panic, with the possible exception of the nuclear one, is the easiest button for presidents to push. Then there was Franklin Roosevelt. His “fireside chats” are the stuff that mold great presidents. Roosevelt told it straight from the hip, on the radio, in a firm candid way that left no room for distortion or ambiguity. He did not play it up or down, giving the attack on an isolationist nation the vigor for an adequate sense of revenge, a level sense of defensive course. He talked people down from ledges after three years of “Hoovervilles.” Many historians blame Herbert Hoover as chief mitigatory purveyor of the stock market crash. Only he didn’t mitigate. In December of 1941 Roosevelt told Americans of the Japanese invasion at Pearl Harbor. He summoned the insulting nature of it, how it was incumbent upon everyone now to pitch in as a formal declaration of war was made. No one panicked, maybe one or two, but Roosevelt’s cool, straight-forward approach made Americans feel like they were on a team, and he their coach. He instilled confidence, and, unlike today, there was no apparent motive.

Medieval Machinations

The years between 1347 and 1351 also were not good. They were the times of the Pestilence during which 75–200 million people across Eurasia and North Africa died. Before the Black Death, there was the Great Famine of 1315–1317. King Edward III of England had been at war with France since 1337 and took a break when the plague hit in 1347. Masks and quarantine were used as weapons to avoid the death, but generally people were on their own and kings’ were mainly concerned about not becoming infected themselves. Sounds like Trump. Humanity has adapted the safe response to “panics” over time. Also, disturbingly, they have adapted their politics to those responses. If President Wilson had broken from WWI for the Spanish flu as Edward had broken from his war with France for the Plague, thousands of American lives are likely to have been saved.

From very early in the history of the world, people have, with differing stage of governmental reliance, or even acceptance of responsibility, been infused with the DNA to cognitively, if not practically, mitigate panic. They have, over the course of centuries, dealt with natural, social, biological, agricultural, and economic disasters, devastations, natural and man-made, that have encompassed Some of the worst years in history. Barely into the 21st century, America finds itself in the tutelage of a man who lack the cunning, the ability or desire to suppress all his subjects, that a modern authoritarian should possess. I’d say the years (since 2017) went from bad to better, to worse, to much worse. Keep in mind that when this controlled panic of America began, the Republicans had the trifecta; the White House, both houses of congress, and two conservative, if undeserving, appointments to the SCOTUS. Our only recourse lay in the federal circuit courts, and they stopped Trump from many unjust acts. In 2018 we gained power in the House of Representatives and Chuck & Nancy became reflective foils to Trump & Barr. We had part of a branch of government, a leg to stand on, and for a while the years of 2018 and 19, for Trump’s impeachment (for what that was worth) were better. As Uncle Joe might say, the fact of the matter is that the despair, the judgment of a year’s tenor, is conditioned. Panics, pandemics, wildfires, dumpster fires, certainly unlawfully mitigated protests, and hurricanes are nothing new. The response to them differs, mostly because of who is charged with, and expected to, govern a body of dependent people through it. It should have been abundantly clear from the beginning the no one could count on Trump for anything. Too many of that body of people did, and continued to do so. That, my fellow Americans, is why 2020 is the most miserable year to date for many generations.