Maxwell's Silver Hammer

The fatal error of fresh surprise.

The pedestrian crossing outside the Abbey Road Studios in London, made famous by the Beatles.

Imagine the cover of Abbey Road: four Beatles walking through an intersection astride the familiar British zebra crossing outside then-named EMI Recording Studios, where the most famous band in history recorded its last album. John, Paul, George and Ringo crossed six lines 56 years ago to create one of the most iconic images of the rock-and-roll era.

Six lines. Big deal. Trump crosses more lines than that every day before breakfast. That’s why I was so struck a week ago with a New York Times column by W.J. Hennigan, titled “Trump Crossed the Line at Fort Bragg.” Oh, did he now? Of fucking course he did. In other news, cows produce milk and the sun will come out tomorrow.

I mean, Hennigan wasn’t wrong:

While past commanders in chief might have chosen to deliver an address that celebrated the U.S. Army’s history ahead of the service’s 250th anniversary this weekend, Mr. Trump opted instead for a rambling speech that ridiculed “radical left lunatic” politicians, threatened flag-burning protesters and falsely claimed the 2020 election was “rigged.” He also announced his plan to reverse a Biden administration decision and restore the names of Fort Robert E. Lee and six other military bases commemorating Confederate officers.

Yep. That’s insane. But to suggest that particular vile outrage somehow edged POSUS over the border of human decency into evil sociopathy is profoundly stupid — not to mention dismissive of the years of line crossing, norm smashing, dead-soldier disparaging, Constitution flouting, hate-spewing, lives-destroying, sex-abusing, democracy-dismantling, foreign-government extorting, race-baiting and world-class grifting he has gotten away with in turning the United States Government into a right-wing, Christian-nationalist mafia constructed to mirror the Third Reich.

The Justice Department, ICE and other law-enforcement agencies are the Gestapo, tasked with rooting out political adversaries and immigrants. The Department of Health & Human Services is in charge of reversing the Enlightenment and taking us back centuries to superstition, not science, as the crux of medicine. And the Department of Education, in the process of turning out the lights on itself, is making sure to replace history with revisionist “patriotic” narratives about the nation’s ugliest episodes. Like the enslavement of human beings and the genocide of Native Americans, just to cite two. The military and the intelligence infrastructure are being depopulated of expertise to create a MAGA SS. DOGE is not a money saver. It hasn’t cut even close to 1% of the federal budget. It is a political purge. Period. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars in tax breaks are being redirected to rich political donors.

He even made time to separate and imprison immigrant children from their parents, make fun of a spasm-disabled reporter and mused about someday fucking a little girl passing him on an escalator. And, as if there weren’t already enough icing on top, he is ridding the Kennedy Center of “depraved” liberal art and vilifying the free-press exactly according to the Nazi template. The Senate GOP would have confirmed Goebbels. Although that would be redundant. We already have Stephen Miller.

Yet we read in the Times that finally Trump has crossed the line.

The comedian Sarah Silverman has a very dark and very funny joke about ourtage and perspective. Her niece says, “Aunt Sarah, did you know the Germans killed 60 million Jews during World War II?” Silverman says, “No, sweetie, it was 6 million.” The niece, recognizing the unimaginable scale of the Holocaust asks, “What’s the difference?” Silverman replies: “Because 60 million would be unforgivable.”

How is it possible for the news media, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, to be serially shocked, shocked at the crimes unfolding before them?

One answer, true even before the Trump Administration began illegally using the Justice Department and other agencies to extort money and silence from large media corporations, is simple cowardice hiding behind simplistic notions of “objectivity.” For 10 years, I’ve been using the example of an approaching Category Five hurricane in the south Atlantic. When the media warn people to evacuate from the storm’s path, they aren’t accused of anti-weather bias. It is a basic function of journalism to observe and inform, especially in crisis. Journalistic organizations have no difficulty calling out other menaces. Politico dubbed China’s Xi as an aspiring “dictator for life.” Well, based on facts and history and actual statements and events, obviously yes. The National Review can call Putin “a tyrant,” because, duh. Likewise Newsweek — without craven qualification — can write: “For over two decades, President Vladimir Putin has squeezed dissent in Russia. Critics, journalists, and defectors have faced dire consequences after opposing him. From poisonings to shootings, mysterious falls from windows, and even plane crashes, there is a long trail of silenced voices.”

On Facebook and Instagram, you’re free to post “Death to Khamenei.” Were you to say “Death to Mike Huckabee,” another theocrat who openly says God’s will should reign, you would be kicked off the site and visited by the Secret Service. (If you are swarthy, you will be taken into custody by ICE.) But for some reason, when it comes to actual news and proclamations and events in the United States, it is forbidden to state the obvious. ABC just fired Terry Moran for calling Stephen Miller a “hater” — too opinionated, despite the unimpeachable fact that hatred is that lunatic’s brand. So fearful are media outlets of validating the sickening “fake news” canard (the Nazi phrase was lugenpresse, “lying press”), they contort themselves into pretzels trying to appear non-judgmental, politically unbiased and “objective.” They won’t even call Trump a liar, which is like declining to call a lion a flesh-eater.

Meet the Press: “Mr. Lion, what do you say to critics who have accused you of being a carnivore?”

This pattern has persisted throughout POSUS’s reign of terror and abandonment of the rule of law. It’s as if the “perfect phone call” attempted shakedown of Volodymyr Zelenskyy to get dirt on Joe Biden or the sexual assaults or the pay-to-play meetings with rich donors or the racist deportations had never happened. In such an environment, institutional memory is surrendered, along with the press’s 1st Amendment responsibility. Oddly, coverage of, say, the economy comes with obsessive contextualization including current and historical data. I mean, so far. Any day now, the Great Depression will be called the “alleged Great Depression.” Along with “what critics call Pentagon lies about the Vietnam War” and “so-called ‘slavery.’”

The other reason for media amnesia of Trump depredations is that news organizations have let each successive outrage, like a fresh wave in the surf, wipe out memory of the infinite previous waves. This has long been Trump’s strategy — they call it “flooding the zone” — and it has worked like a charm.

Do you remember the horror when you saw the first video of the Twin Towers, punctured by passenger planes and burning like fireworks? You could barely peek at it, so traumatic was the image. Now it might as well be the Golden Arches. Time and endless repetition have left you inured. The same phenomenon happens in every American war. On day one, the fatalities are given a face, or at least a name, on the front page of every US newspaper. Within two weeks, the casualties of war are on page A 24 (or its online equivalent). Within six months, they no longer appear. The psyche is easily distracted by fresh horrors.

It is journalism’s role to stymie that process. The biggest story in the history of the world is the climate crisis, because earth is well on its way to destruction, but the public is bored with it. There should be a daily RED ALERT in every newspaper on earth, but no. Old news. As if you had terminal cancer for two years and your family and friends and co-workers were sick of hearing about it. “Again with the cancer? Really? What a drama queen.”

Perhaps W.J. Hennigan and The New York Times felt righteous in declaring POSUS’s Fort Bragg comments as crossing some rubicon, but in fact, it is the opposite of righteous. It is complicit, literally inviting readers to lose track of all that preceded it. It animates the process of inurement. It is effectively an act of clemency.

One song on the Abbey Road album was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” about a medical student who continued to bludgeon people to death but constantly escaped accountability. Even in court, he attacked the judge.

Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer
Came down upon his head.
Clang! Clang! Maxwell’s silver hammer
Made sure that he was dead.

Amnesia and rationalization have long since erased the Abbey Road zebra stripes of safety. Now they are pushing us, irretrievably, right off the cliff.