Civil Commotion

You may have thought this morning as you brewed your coffee, “Wow … what a bad week for the Buffoon-in-Chief. Between publication of that book, and then the shithole remark, his approval ratings must be way down. Maybe,” cross your fingers here, “the Republicans in Congress will start showing some guts.” That’s what an educated, decent-minded adult would think and hope for, allright — if the perversity of his base weren’t taken into account. They’re loving the news that all the educated professionals around him think Trump is crass and a moron, and they’re just fine with his racism.

Yep — Trump’s approval rating has gone up.

Evangelicals know their comfortable little club is dying; many, surely, understand that it’s dying because the Christian narrative is a gaudy and preposterous fiction and they’ve been played for fools. But it’s easier to stick a finger in the eye of the people who are laughing at them than to admit they’ve wasted their lives on nonsense, and so they double-down on their support of Trump and the danger he poses to the country writ large.

They’re going to get worse, a lot worse, before things get better. The world has become a strange place that they don’t — can’t — understand, either technologically or socially,and they now see what most of us regard as progress as an existential threat.

The great irony is that Friedrich Nietzsche, whom they piously hate, saw exactly this coming and his philosophical project was to head-off the nihilism that is now Republican policy.

Everybody in the universe has heard by now that Donald Trump, the Very Stable Genius-in-Chief, described Haiti as a ‘shithole’ yesterday: “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?”

The way to begin thinking about this, I suppose, is to agree upon our meaning when we speak of ‘shitholes,’ which is sometimes used as an adjective and sometimes used as a noun.

Suppose someone says, “Mom’s Home Cooking is a real shithole.” That would be ‘shithole’ used as a noun, and we would all understand it to mean that the food is no good, the restaurant is dirty, Mom has a surly temperament, and the Health Department may be trying to close the place. If a co-worker ate at Mom’s and ended-up with ptomaine poisoning, we’d probably say something like “Oh, yeah, I heard that place is a real shithole.”

Suppose, on the other hand, you spend the day golfing, and when you get home you tell your spouse, “I’ve never in my life even seen such a shithole country club.” That is shithole used as an adjective, and you probably mean the greens were poorly tended, some of your CDs went missing after the valet parked your car, the drinks were watered down, and the greens fees were too expensive for the condition of the course.

You would never pay a second visit to a shithole country club, and you may not be able to pay a second visit to Mom’s if you eat the meatloaf. Clearly, we’re using the word shithole with entirely different magnitudes of consequence.

So: What do we mean when we speak of a shithole country? Ironically, most people would probably agree out-of-hand that Haiti is a shithole country, and define a shithole country by enumerating Haiti’s deficiencies: the utilities come and go, just like its governments; the infrastructure is crumbling; sewage runs in the ditches; education is spotty; poverty and violence and public-sector corruption are rampant.

Nobody emigrates to a shithole country, and we admire people with the courage and enterprise to pack-up and leave shithole countries, taking their chances in a strange place with a different culture and a different language. They are the people with gumption that America has always welcomed, not least because they are the people who force America to live up to its ideals.

What do we mean by ‘shithole,’ then? Broadly, I think, we mean that things consistently fail to meet reasonable expectations or, worse, operate contrary to reasonable expectations. You shouldn’t be in danger of being poisoned when you eat at Mome’s. There should not be wild carrot sprouting on the greens at the country club. A government should create a safe, stable environment where one can plan for the future because actions have predictable consequences.

This seems to me a serviceable definition — but still not quite right. After all, if by shithole we mean “things consistently fail to meet reasonable expectations,” then the White House has been turned into a shithole by Donald Trump — and I’m certain the Buffoon-in-Chief couldn’t have meant that. So: What distinguishes the White House from those places that we can all agree are shitholes?

There is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who tells gross and embarrassing lies every day with a straight face; so, too, Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks. Since they are contemporary Washington analogs of Baghdad Bob, and Iraq was and still is a shithole, I don’t think we can credit them for rescuing the White House from shithole-ness. Some people would point to the Evangelical Advisory Board, I imagine, but that’s such an egregious pack of cynical hucksters that I”m disinclined to give them credit for sparing the White House from shithole-ness either; besides, the Evangelical Advisory Board is a Trump innovation, and the implication of that is the White House used to be a shithole in the days before Trump’s election. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Donald thinks that, but I just can’t go there; I think we need to keep looking.

What about Trump? Is he the reason the White House is not a shithole? No. After all, Russia is definitely a shithole, and it is run by a wealthy, white, irremediably corrupt autocrat, too.

If the White House is not a shithole — and I don’t think it is — the reason does not lie within Donald Trump or his government. What is left, then, but the long train of immigrants who invested the White House with their hopes and gave flesh-and-blood meaning to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence? The White House is not a shithole, in spite of Trump’s usage of the word and the implications of the meaning it gives, because the American people are better than Donald Trump and invest the White House with high-mindedness and ideals.

This gets it about right, I think.

Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?

Very Stable Genius-in-Chief

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Emma Lazarus

It would be hard to overstate the importance of understanding something: Love Jesus more than your family, your life, the work you do, et cetera, et cetera, is the teaching of a cult. The 1^st-century church was a despised cult, and the New Testament is the literature of a despised cult.

I recently visited the North Carolina History Museum for the first time, and encountered an exhibit which presents the aboriginal inhabitants of America’s mid-Atlantic. They lived in this area at least as long ago as 12,000 B.C., and at some time they traded with the copper miners of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, who were active at least as far back as 5,000 B.C.

I went to college in Michigan’s mining district and knew of the prehistoric miners and that their output got around; Michigan copper has been found in prehistoric jewelry from Central America. But, maybe, it got there because some guy had some copper in his kit and wandered south? Evidence of Michigan copper in the mid-Atlantic, also, suggests organized trade.

This interests me because we know almost nothing of pre-Columbian North America. We know in painful detail what happened to the civilization that was here when Europeans arrived; by any sane reckoning, it should be counted a crime against humanity.

It was the Ojibwe, a subdivision of the Chippewa, who lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from about 1,000 B.C. onward. They were not miners, and have no oral tradition of the people who preceded them. By all accounts, the Ojibwe were peaceful and especially indulgent toward children. Why not? The winters were fearsome, but the forests and waters were generous; there was plenty of room and chow for everyone. They created a religion that met their needs and explained the world they inhabited and made up tales about the Northern Lights — worshiping at the rock outcrop now known as Miner’s Castle.

They did not write, and they did not do significant metalwork; there are few artifacts to tell us about the early Ojibwe, and there is little oral tradition to consult.

And virtually nothing is known of the people who preceded them — the copper miners of 5000 B.C., who apparently traded with tribes from Central America and the mid-Atlantic.

Copper in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula is encountered in its native state, bright as a fresh-minted penny. It was separated from the rock by heating the rock till it cracked and could be pried from the copper. Carbon-14 dating of the ash enables us to know when the miners were active. We know almost nothing else about them, because everything they used was perishable. Their shelters were probably made of animal hide and wood — and 7000-years later, it’s gone. Whatever tools they used were wood that has disintegrated or stone that is weathered and buried by millennia of sediment.

They are gone, and so is almost every trace of them, and there is little interest or academic reward in studying an obscure and abandoned non-European culture. We probably will never know any more about them except that they once existed.

Geography shapes culture. The harsh environment of the Middle East birthed the Abrahamic faiths, all of them violent, predatory, and imperialistic, and the generally beneficent environment of North America’s upper Midwest led to the creation of mild and peaceful cultures. The Chippewa must have been baffled and appalled by the first Europeans they encountered, and stunned by the cruelty of the imposition upon them of a Middle Eastern belief system having no analog in their experience.

Now, as science and engineering overtake them, the imperialistic Abrahamic faiths are declining as well; not all, certainly, but most of the turmoil in the world arises out of reaction against that fact. Undoubtedly, they will disappear and someday be as obscure and curious as the beliefs of the prehistoric miners. Though it’s an ugly-sounding word that I dislike, the future probably belongs to some flavor of non-ideological Deweyan ‘humanism’ that emphasizes the application of reason to observation in order to know the world and shape public policy. And I incline to think humankind will be better-off when that happens and humanity unites to create a better world rather than dispersing into vengeance-cults bent upon pleasing an Invisible Wizard.

But we’ll be poorer, too, when the Northern Lights lose the romance of the heavens opening to greet the soul of a leader of a peaceful people, as the Ojibwe believed.