Civil Commotion

Last Thanksgiving — almost a year ago, now — I set out four reasons why I felt optimistic overall about America’s future, even as I anticipated epochal ugliness during the Trump administration.

First, I pointed out, a majority of voters had rejected Trump. I figured the number of Americans opposed to him could only go up as it became plain to even nitwits that he is incompetent and has bad character. Since his approval rating hovers around 35%, and support amongst even Evangelicals — who aren’t famous, after all, for high standards of reason and character — has dropped 18%, I’m calling that prediction a win.

Second, I predicted that he would find the courthouses chilly because of his plain attempt to bully a host of judges into submission. I’m slightly ahead on that one, too.

I said the media would never surrender to Trump and — Hoo-Boy! — I nailed that one. CNN has even produced a couple of advertisements that plainly mock the Buffoon-in-Chief.

Last, I predicted that the close association of Trump and the Evangelical Right would finish them as a political movement.

Third, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and that will eventually sink into public consciousness, as in, Wait a minute! What are you saying? The church people gave us that piece of sh*t p***y-grabber?! Yep, they did — and that will be the tale of how the Evangelical Right and so-called ‘movement conservatism’ committed political suicide. They might make some noise, occasionally score a small victory … but they are done. The Trump administration, with its inevitable serial indecencies and corruptions, is their achievement, and they will never live it down.

Now that the entire world is shaking its head at the breathtakingly stupid rationalizations offered in defense of Roy Moore’s interest in pubescent girls — Joseph was interested in teenies, too, and that gave us Jesus — there is hardly anyone, anywhere, who hasn’t recoiled from the Godly with frank disgust. See Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, for instance:

And business reporter Kurt Eichenwald leaves no doubt that he has had a bellyful of the Godly, too:

With centuries of pogroms, public executions, blasphemy laws, general preening and cult-ish underhandedness since the rise of the secular states, the Pious made it unseemly to criticize or doubt their preposterous narrative. And now, though it has been almost 4-decades since Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority and they set out to recreate society in their own cracked and damaged image, they have managed in the course of just the past 2-years to make it unseemly to have anything to do with them.

Nobody with two eyeballs and a properly functioning mind should feel any confusion: These cataracts of squalor is the truth about the Evangelical Right; this is who they really are. And they are finished.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

I’ve been waiting for this day for years — the day when the squalor of the Evangelical Right would be obvious to all but the willfully blind. That day is here … right here, right now.

The Department of Justice has imposed upon the proposed AT&T/Time-Warner merger an unexpected condition: Sell DirecTV or Turner Broadcasting, the parent of CNN — The Donald’s bete noire. If Turner Broadcasting is sold, CNN will almost certainly become a hot-potato orphan without the deep-pockets corporate parentage it needs to do the sort of serious-minded journalism that has so distinguished it during this execrable first year of Trump.

So the widespread suspicion is that’s deliberate, an attempt to cripple CNN by an administration whose head hates the network.

The latter news sparked concerns that President Trump, who has long berated CNN as “fake news,” was punishing the company for its critical coverage of his administration. Indeed, for any president to use the Department of Justice to punish enemies—either individuals or companies—would be the stuff of authoritarians.

There are two fishy details about the DOJ’s objections. First, Makan Delrahim, Trump’s handpicked head of antitrust at the Justice Department, had previously announced that this merger would be acceptable. The fact that he has changed his mind while working for this White House suggests to some that the administration may have inspired the policy change. Peter Kafka, a media reporter at Recode, called the possibility “chilling.” Second, it’s doubly startling for a Republican administration to suddenly reverse several decades of party leniency on just these sort of mergers, particularly with the president’s favorite target, CNN, hanging in the balance.

Well … who knows? Certainly, there are a lot of people in the Trump administration who would like for that particular nuisance to go away. What is more, DirecTV and Turner are different types of companies, and it’s difficult to understand the either/or point of the condition. On the other hand, there are plain problems with the broadcasting/publishing/creator media consolidations of the past decade, and there are sound reasons to question whether AT&T ought to own a journalism operation.

Back in the mid-90’s, I publicly hazarded a small prediction: Newspapers and local newscasters, I said, were going to lose control of both the collection and dissemination of news as the Internet grew. That won me a public rebuke from an editor from the Roanoke Times and, curiously, I got no more book review assignments from them. What do you know? It was clear more than a decade ago that I’d called that one rightly. Some newspapers with reportorial muscle — unlike, say, the Roanoke Times — have successfully migrated to a pay model for their content; the New York Times and Washington Post are conspicuous examples (I subscribe to both via the NOOK e-reader). There are reports that CNN will be going to a pay model for Web content by the middle of next year.

They should. If they do I’ll happily pay for their content, and everybody else should, too. Good journalism costs money and — as an authoritarian proto-fascist wears-down the opposition and frustrates our free press using the subterranean mechanisms of government — is more important than at any time in our history.