Hail Cassidy!
Has a junior aide's stunning testimony broken Trump's spell on Red America? Don't hold your breath.
WIZARD: There was I, floating through space — a man without a continent!
DOROTHY: Weren’t you frightened?
WIZARD: Frightened? Child, you're talking to a man who's laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom and chuckled at catastrophe ... I was petrified.
Back in the olde days, those halcyon days of both yore and only three TV channels, one annual family television event was The Wizard of Oz. The Judy Garland classic was made in 1939, but in a Netflixless world held up really well year after cathode ray year. I probably saw it 18 times and it made a big impression on me. Very big.
Flying purple monkeys will do that to a child.
But it wasn’t just the garish winged simians. There was also, famously, the blowhard wizard behind the curtain. There was “Surrender Dorothy” skywritten in smoke. The poppy field. The yellow brick road. This is vivid imagery, and so it’s no surprise that these iconic scenes not only stayed with me, but over the years found their way into my writing as metaphors for one contemporary political episode or another. Most pointedly, I’ve invoked the climactic castle scene, when the wicked witch vindictively ignites the straw-stuffed Scarecrow. Dorothy, in distress, grabs a pail of water to douse the flames … and incidentally soaks the witch, too.
“You cursed brat!” the witch shrieks. “Look what you’ve done! I’m melting! O, my world, my world! How could a little girl like you destroy my beautiful wickedness?”
Oops. Fatally overhydrated, the witch indeed melts into oblivion. Dorothy then tries to explain to the evil, green-complected Winkie Guards that it was an accident. But no worries; they aren’t vengeful. Au contraire. They’ve been liberated from the witch’s spell. “Hail Dorothy!” they proclaim. What an unexpected and triumphant turn of events.
As I say, this is highly memorable cinema that lingers deep in the roots of the Baby Boom psyche. So when a similar narrative plays out IRL — such as Cassidy, small and meek, testifying to the January 6 Committee and throwing water on Donald Trump’s lies and sociopathic conduct — naturally there’s a tendency among people like me to conflate myth with grim reality.
Such as the New Yorker: Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony Should be the End of Donald Trump
Marketwatch: June 2022 Will be Remembered as the Month that “Finished Off Donald Trump”
Salon: Did “surprise witness” Cassidy Hutchinson save America from Trump's comeback?
And this editorial in the Chicago Tribune: Cassidy Hutchinson’s courageous testimony should finally sever GOP fealty to Trump.
Republican voters, in particular, must absorb the mounting evidence and decide what their party stands for. Is it still anchored by blind loyalty to a reckless leader who actively worked to undermine the peaceful transition of power? Or are Republicans recommitted to the kind of patriotism and allegiance to American ideals that Hutchinson displayed on Tuesday?
Yeah, no. It’s important to remember, iconic or not, that The Wizard of Oz was make-believe. A week after Cassidy Hutchinson spilled the sickening secrets of the Trump White House, the MAGA Winkie Guard is in no hurry whatsoever to switch sides. Never mind the reflexive dismissal by Republican officials of the committee’s work. In the past year (Jan. 6 was 18 months ago) 1.1 million Americans have switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP — and 60% of the GOP subscribes to the Big Lie about 2020’s presidential election outcome. Republicans in Congress are so unified in election denial that anyone who dares speak truth is castigated and ostracized, en route to a primary challenge by some zealot from the Trump Taliban.
Which is just fine in MAGA world. Red states continue to nominate and elect some of the worst human beings American politics has to offer. On the very day Cassidy Hutchinson had her John Dean moment, US Rep. Mary “Hitler was right about one thing” Miller won the Republican renomination for her House seat in the 15th District of Illinois. Yet another 2020 election denier-cum-Christian nationalist theocrat, she last week praised the overturning of Roe v. Wade as “a victory for white life.” Miller won easily with 57% of the vote.
Both Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) — bomb-throwing reactionary freaks and imbeciles both — easily won renomination. Meanwhile, Andrew Clyde (POS-Ga.) — the moron who said Jan. 6 resembled a “normal tourist visit” — won his primary with 77% of the vote. Elsewhere, “Stop the Steal” agitator and QAnon groupie Doug Mastriano cruised to the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Not in Alabama. Not in Oklahoma. In Pennsylvania.
At GOP debates for nominations in Arizona and Wyoming in the past few days, seven of nine candidates claimed the 2020 election was stolen and/or Jan. 6 was much ado about nothing. The Wyoming event was particularly compelling, as it featured US Rep. Liz Cheney in fierce debate with four talking garden slugs.
The point being, Donald Trump could dissolve into a molten puddle of Big Mac sauce, and the American political scene would change not much at all. This is not about Trump. He is but one of five strands woven into the nation’s ugly lurch toward theo-fascism.
The Council for National Policy. Its confederation of slow-motion revolutionaries mounted a 50-year crusade, funded and populated by Big Energy and the religious right, to systematically take control of state legislatures with reactionary Christian nationalists, and along with that painstaking electoral work mounted the endless, inflammatory culture wars. As the recent anti-democratic rulings by their patiently assembled Supreme Court demonstrate, the war is over and the bad guys have won.
Backlash. Those Culture Wars, especially in the past decade, were not mere propaganda pandering to prejudice and ignorance. They were an extraordinary display of jiu-jitsu — confronting the force of leftwing reform and grievance (i.e., the movement that propelled the advance of liberal democracy in the Western World) and using that momentum to flip the adversary. As the left propounded ever narrower categories of injustice, the right converted that energy to conservative grievance, tapping into a vast wellstream of racism, nativism and homophobia. Thus did they liberate underground bigotry as a unifying political force.
Mark Zuckerberg, et al. Facebook and YouTube operate on algorithms that detect the content that gets you riled up — true or not — and feeds you ever more of it. In search of profits and deaf to the damage they were causing, they turned tech utilities into a global Hate-and-Lies machine. In the bargain, they sucked up almost all the advertising dollars that once underwrote news media. That industry, with the sacred role of watchdogging government and society, has shrunken in all 50 states to nearly nothing.
Trump. The simpleton man-child, soulless and corrupt enough to prey on the worst human impulses, shrewd enough to understand their inherent power, became the animating force for a Zombieland of dormant reactionary ignorance and rage.
And the most horrible element of all …
Us. America. Forget all that Frank Capra bullshit. Forget “exceptionalism.” Forget “it can’t happen here.” There is no brainwashing. There is no wicked spell. There is only the unleashing of sentiments long suppressed. Until 10 years ago, the outlets for native fascism were the cult of guns, the cult of police, the cult of the military, the cult of oil, the paranoiac fear of globalism and the politicization of Christianity. Now it has merged into a grotesque political ideology. It’s a minority. But thanks to the work of the Koch brothers and the Christian right, it controls the levers of democracy in enough states to control state legislatures, the courts, the electoral college, Congress and the future of the failed American experiment. Trump and his cabal may wind up in jail, but that will not somehow let the air out of Christian nationalism. He will be deemed a holy martyr. His prosecution — already seen as persecution — will be a bellows to the flames.
So, no. “Hail Cassidy” will be on the lips of nobody in red ball caps. MAGA aren’t the Winkie Guards. They are slave to no witch’s spell. They are a vast mob of 100 million deplorables, blinded by bigotry, resentment, fear, suspicion, superstition, religious claptrap, incalculable ignorance and deep stupidity — precisely as their uneducated and gullible counterparts in the shithole countries they feel so superior to. Along the way they have forsaken all that is civilizing: facts, honesty, empathy, fairness, common sense, the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule. The Bible Belt and the heartland, like mainly rural regions the world over, are vast cauldrons of retrograde traditions and values. As are rural pockets in the bluest of blue states. Trump activated them; he didn’t invent them. This is something I’ve observed before, but it is notable that police who investigate grifters tend to evince little sympathy for the grifted — because they’d never have been suckered if they had honest hearts. And neither the literature of psychology nor the law of the land recognize the notion of being hypnotized to do something awful against your will. Rallying behind Trump is an act of volition, which the MAGA faithful do — as the world’s oldest punchline goes — because they can.
They are destroying us, day by day. And just as there is no real Wicked Witch of the West, there is no Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, to intervene.
Spot on as usual, Bob. Perhaps, periodically, you could do a fairy tale call it “Bed Time in America” in which we could momentarily suspend belief and envision a happy ending.
Well put, Bob - depressing as hell (as is all truth these days), but very well stated. Like the apocryphal frog in the slowly warming pot, we've finally awakened to find that common sense and decency will soon be relics of the past, and iron hand of theocracy shall rule the future ... or what's left of it. The bright side of this tarnished coin is that the rise of the morons will only hasten the end of human rule on earth, as that suddenly very real climate pot boils over to cook us all. Maybe the surviving sentient cockroaches and crows will build a new civilization in a million years or so -- they certainly can't do a worse job of it than we did.
Happy Independence Day, the last we're likely to enjoy in a semi-functioning democracy. So long George Washington and the Founding Fathers -- it was good run while it lasted, but the experiment ultimately failed -- and hello to the new Ayatollahs of Christo-Fascism. The inmates will soon be running the asylum, and the rest of us may be running for our lives.