https://medium.com/@philgarber/blog
0926blog
Trump Will Lose
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler, who was rather prone to outrageous and utterly false self-aggrandizement, often said that Nazi Germany had built a “beautiful democracy.”
Donald Trump, another would-be dictator, also has often used false superlatives to describe his actions, which have been anything but super. That goes from his boasts that “Nobody has done anything like we’ve been able to do,” to stem the spread of COVID-19 to his “perfect” conversation with the president of Ukraine in which Trump tried blackmail to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s son.
But if you fear that Trump will succeed in burying Democracy, he won’t. Take some solace in the words of Jimmy Stewart ‘s character, Jefferson Smith, in speaking to Congress in the 1939 film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
“It’s not too late. Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light,” said Stewart, in battling against corruption after he was elected to the Senate.
Trump is clearly the greatest threat to democracy that any of us have seen but the nation and world has made it through much worse threats, both political and natural, and have come out of the fire even stronger. British historian Arnold Toynbee’s words in 1931 could have been written today. He said that “men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of society might break down and cease to work.”
The majority of Americans have believed in the system and fought for it and most understand that the attacks only make democracy stronger through dissent and protest.
Throughout history, the poets, writers and artists have expressed the will of the people, whether it involves injustice like racism or efforts at destroying democracy or even natural disasters like pandemics.
A poet and former slave, Phillis Wheatley, wrote about her expectations that good would eventually overtake the evils of slavery in “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Darthmouth.”
“No more, America, in mournful strain,
Of wrongs and grievance unredressed complain;
No longer shall thou dread the iron chain
Which wanton Tyranny, with lawless hand,
Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.”
Walt Whitman attested to the timeless and persistent strength of the American identity in “Song of Myself.”
“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.”
Gwendolyn Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 1950, wrote about resistance and keeping up with the good fight in “Speech to the Young.”
“Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.”
Poets also have long expressed rage over injustice, perhaps no stronger than in “The Blacker the Berry,” by poet and artist Kendrick Lamar.
“Been feeling this way since I was 16, came to my senses
You never liked us anyway, fuck your friendship, I meant it
I’m African-American, I’m African
I’m black as the moon, heritage of a small village
Pardon my residence
Came from the bottom of mankind
My hair is nappy, my dick is big, my nose is round and wide
You hate me don’t you?
You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture
You’re fuckin’ evil I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey
You vandalize my perception but can’t take style from me
And this is more than confession
I mean I might press the button just so you know my discretion
I’m guardin’ my feelings, I know that you feel it
You sabotage my community, makin’ a killin’
You made me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga.”
So I do have faith that the Democratic system will endure, despite Trump’s best efforts to the contrary. And I believe that his grisly efforts will one day be part of a timeless tradition where rulers and disasters have been mocked and reflected in children’s nursery rhymes.
Remember that the popular children’s song and game, “Ring Around the Rosie,” was actually a gruesome song about the Black Death in Europe that killed more than 20 million.
“Ring around the rosy
A pocketful of posies
“Ashes, Ashes”
We all fall down!”
The rosy is the telltale ring that developed as evidence of the bubonic plague. The “pocketful of posies” are the herbs people carried to cover the smell of the sickness and “we all fall down” is about how most everybody died and ended up as “ashes” after cremation.
And “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” asks innocently enough:
“How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.”
That little ditty was about Mary Tudor, the 16th Century queen of England who fought to reverse the English Reformation, which had begun during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. Mary also was known as “Bloody Mary,” the garden is a cemetery, silver bells and cockle shells are torture devices and the pretty maids is a reference to the guillotine, which was nicknamed “The Maiden.”
“Jack and Jill” sounds so innocuous but its roots were anything but and were a reference to the reign of terror by the royalty in France.
“Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down,
And broke his crown;
And Jill came tumbling after.”
Jack was King Louis XVI who was beheaded as in “fell down and broke his crown” in 1793 during the French Reign of Terror. His wife, Marie Antoinette, or “Jill,” came “tumbling after” as she suffered the same fate as the king.
One day, I am certain, Trump will be mocked and remembered in the same way and become part of our lore about the evils that men and women have overcome.