Civil Commotion

We live at a time when a porn star displays more credibility and class than a president, his lawyers distinguish themselves through swagger more than legal skill, and we seriously wonder just how thuggish the man in the Oval Office is. It seems like a bad dream.

New York Times editorial

Donald Trump brings fresh relevance to John Steinbeck’s last novel

Before Donald Trump was even inaugurated, I (not very daringly) predicted that the Trump administration would be a hellish place for professionals and urged everybody who could get out to … go. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat and David Leonhardt saw the same looming problem and urged federal workers to stay, arguing that the country would need them more than ever.

I was reminded of that as word came that Trump’s latest two choices to serve on his legal team in connection with the Russia investigation were obliged to withdraw for the reason of ethical conflicts, and word came that virtually every high-powered attorney in Washington had declined an invitation to represent him.

I found myself thinking, too, of John Steinbeck’s famous last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent. The novel’s protagonist, Ethan Hawley, is the descendant of a wealthy sea captain. The family fortune has been dissipated, and he works as a store clerk for an illegal immigrant. He wonders what the older generation of Hawleys had that he lacks, and suffers when his children must do without, cringes at the sight of his wife scrimping by.

He looks around and wonders at what seems a continuing decline of ethical behavior, and wonders if his swaggering, widely-respected ancestors sometimes felt conflicted about the implications of their cargo.

He is conflicted. Should he uphold his increasingly quaint ideals — or join the free-for-all? Hold out, or sell out?

Hawley hatches a plan that exploits the weakness and failings of others and promises to restore his family to prominence. His children will not do without. His wife can hold up her head. Strictly, if he acts, he will be able to claim clean hands; practically, the plan entails a long train of betrayals.

What to do? No spoiler here; if you want to know, you’ll have to read the book.

But as the weekend progressed, the conflict in Steinbeck’s character seemed increasingly relevant to me at this weird moment in our national life. Serious and accomplished lawyers, whom one would ordinarily expect to jump at the opportunity to represent the President, were saying, No.

Donald Trump soils and corrupts everything and everybody he touches, and destroys those he can’t; that’s the real reason the support of self-loathing evangelicals is unshakeable. Before he is gone, we will all be forced to decide whether or not we are willing to put our money where our mouth is.

Granted: Rick Santorum is a Republican, and only people with dysfunctional minds are allowed in the Republican Party nowadays; he can’t realistically be expected to say something intelligent. By even that dismal standard, however, this is affirmatively stupid.

CNN commentator and former Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Rick Santorum on Sunday suggested students protesting for gun control legislation would be better served by taking CPR classes and preparing for active shooter scenarios.

“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” Santorum said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Right: People who insist upon legislative remedies for problems are layabouts who want other people to solve their problems.

Can you think of a legislator — a person employed by the public to enact legislation — who has said something dumber this year?

Patience, goes an old adage, is a virtue. That’s probably true if you’re cooking, but there are a lot more things where patience is a grievous failure.

• It has been almost 19-years since the Columbine school massacre claimed 12-lives, wounded 21 others, and disrupted the lives of thousands more. It has been 11-years since 33-people died at Virginia Tech.

  Today, after more than 2-decades of public massacres, universal background checks and cooling-off periods are a pipedream and village sociopaths wander freely. What good has patience done any of the victims past or, doubtless, future?

• Science accepted evolution as a settled fact more than 100-years ago, and today we have teachers leaving the profession because they can’t take the harassment of pious loonies who insist that Creationism belongs in public schools. We have, too, unethical science teachers who smuggle Creationism into their classes.

  Meantime, American schools have slipped to 37^th globally. That’s no way to prepare for the hyperspeed technological future bearing down on us. What we are preparing the next generation to do is sweep floors on the midnight shift at the Chinese-owned factory — if a robot isn’t doing that, I mean.

  We must stop indulging backward-looking nitwits. Fire the unethical teachers, and make plain to fundamentalist loonies that they are not welcome in polite society.

• The bald fact that Donald Trump was elected president, under the aegis of the Electoral College, points toward two things we need to do — pronto.

  1. Improve citizenship education from grade school onward. Much of the commentary accompanying the 2016 campaign, and subsequent election, made plain that a lot of Americans know next to nothing about their country, either its history or its governance. And, of course, there is the ease with which garish lies by Russian trolls — There are actually Americans who believed that Hilary Clinton and John Podesta were operating a child sex ring out of a Washington-area pizzeria. — influenced people who should have known better. This must be corrected, and the place to do it begins with grade school.

  2. W-a-a-a-y back in the late ’60s, James Michener wrote that the Electoral College was a time bomb just waiting to be triggered, and the national disgrace of Donald Trump — who lost the popular vote by almost 3,000,000-votes, no matter his obscene bellows about illegals — shows that Michener was right. The Constitution must be amended to eliminate the Electoral College.

• In the course of 25-years we have gone from Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress to the televised, overhyped interviews of celebrity porn stars and Playmates.

  Surely it’s time to stop being patient with the unseemly and self-indulgent and demand character in public office?

I can remember when the Internet was made available for public access, how charmed I was. I even got in a public argument with an editor of the Roanoke Times, predicting that the traditional, above-ground media would lose control of both the collection and dissemination of news, and that the consequence would be ruinous for newspapers. That was scarcely any more than 20-years ago.

I track news and technology a lot more closely than most people, so I am not surprised that most people were caught unaware when the ground shifted beneath their feet and they suddenly found themselves living in a Brave New World. That, in combination with the failure of cultural staples like religion, are the locus of much of the world’s instability and reaction against change. Part of me feels some sympathy for them, but only a little; the signs were all there.

No matter. The world has changed, and will continue changing — and with increasing rapidity. Ethical thought is going to change with it, and we need to stop deferring to those who just don’t, can’t, get it.