As the Orange Oaf in the White House continues to prevaricate and blather nonsense about the coronavirus epidemic while doing little or nothing to stem it, and the Senate Republicans under Mitch (“Mister Bluster”) McConnell continue to refuse to remove him from office for fear of antagonizing the racist, misogynistic knuckle-walkers who shoehorned Drumpf into the Presidency, minimally sane, intelligent people holed up in their homes rationing their toilet paper need some explanation of the epidemic of insanity which is infecting the body politic
I turn to the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who wrote a savage satire of dunderheaded American foreign policy at the height of the Cold War, when the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction was supposed to keep the missiles in their silos and the bombers on the ground. “Cat’s Cradle,” first published in 1963, features an old Afro-Tobagan fool-saint named Bokonon who lives on a fictional island in the Caribbean and has come up with an existential religion based on acknowledging humanity’s profound stupidity and poking fun at it.
He wrote a calypso song to explain why he invented the faith he named after himself:
“So I said goodbye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason.”
I won’t attempt a full explanation of Bokononism; anyone interested should get a copy of “Cat’s Cradle,” because Vonnegut lines it out better than I ever could. Suffice it to say that the lyrics of calypso songs are usually satirical, written to poke holes in the pompous, praise the underdogs, and disrupt the plans of stupid oligarchs. Calypsonians even poke fun at themselves. When asked his opinion of his own cosmology, Bokonon laughed and said, “Lies! A pack of lies!”
So I’ll restrict myself to a list of Bokononist words and their definitions, a lexicon which describes our own era’s situation and the kinds of ideas and people who are making it worse. Vonnegut was a World War Two veteran who spent several months in a Nazi prison camp (his novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” was about that imprisonment), and he knew quite a bit about mindless, vicious brutality.
Karass: “A team of people that does God’s will without ever discovering what they are doing.”
Granfalloon: “A false karass; a political party whose slogans are full of hot air.”
“If you wish to study a granfalloon,
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.”
Duffle: “The destiny of thousands and thousands of people when placed in the hands of a stupa.”
Pool-pah: “A shit-storm; the wrath of God.”
Vin-dit: “A sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism.”
To saroon: “To acquiesce to the seeming demands of one’s vin-dit.
Sin-wat: “A man who wants all of somebody’s love. That’s very bad.”
Wampeter: “The pivot of a karass, around which the members of the karass revolve.”
Wrang-wrang: “A person who steers people way from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang’s own life, to an absurdity.”
Zah-mah-ki-bo: “Fate; inevitable destiny.”
Stupa: “A fogbound child.”
Bokonon on God: “God never wrote a good play in his life.”
On Caesar: “Don’t render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.”
On history: “Read it and weep!”
At the moment, the destiny of the United States is a duffle, and the stupa who controls it is the worst President in American history. Trump is also a sin-wat: he wants all of everyone’s love, despite the fact that he is entirely unlovable, and when that love is withheld from him, he has a tantrum and does something mindless, vicious, and destructive, like issuing an executive order that cuts the funding necessary to implement the Affordable Care Act, in the middle of a pandemic, or trying to close the U.S. Postal System because he knows that allowing people to vote by mail, because of the disease, would cost him the 2020 election.
As a result, the karass made up of selfless doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians, and other health workers who must do their best to care for the victims of Covid-19 without sufficient equipment, as the virus spreads wider and wider. The wampeter of the medical karass is the Hippocratic Oath, and although there are plenty of unscrupulous doctors in this country who entered the profession just to get rich, and are beholden to the deep pockets of Big Pharma, none of these greedy quacks are on the front lines of the struggle against the current plague. Indeed, a number of them have left their practices in beleaguered cities like New York for vacation homes far from the epicenters of the disease, leaving their nurses and staffers to try to cope with the pool-pah.
Vice-President Pence is a perfect wrang-wrang. He preaches Christian values, but when he’s not in church, he foments racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and totalitarianism. And of course he spouts as much foma as his pathological liar of a boss.
We’re certainly in a shit-storm these days, but the pool-pah isn’t just caused by Covid-19. An even more dangerous pathogen has infected the Republican Party. Like the coronavirus, it appeared in a relatively harmless form, but kept mutating until it became deadly. We can trace its first manifestation back to the Reagan Administration, whose slogan, “Morning In America,” meant midnight for minorities, gay men and women, anti-war activists, and anyone else who thought human welfare was more important than corporate balance-sheets and military muscle.
Old Ronnie wasn’t much of an actor during his movie career, but he became president of the Screen Actors Guild. In that capacity, he was ordered to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Unamerican Activities Committee, where he ratted out many distinguished actors, directors, and screenwriters in the film industry, accusing them of being either Communists or “fellow travelers.” Having destroyed the careers of his colleagues, he decided to see what havoc he could wreak in politics. He used his leading-man looks and fatherly demeanor to win the California Governorship, and eventually, two terms in the White House.
In Bokononist terms, he was a sin-wat, but a charming one; his gullible supporters really did love and trust him. The fact that he was showing early signs of Alzheimer’s Disease during his first term didn’t even make a dent in his popularity among conservatives. And whenever he got in over his muddled head in debates with his Democratic rivals he’d just grin and say, “There you go again!” as if being passionate about serious policy issues was silly.
His first Presidential opponent was Jimmy Carter, who had an easy charm of his own. Unfortunately, the country was in an economic recession, and Carter made the fatal error of telling the truth about its severity and the difficulty of recovering from it. Canny politicians never announce bad news without reassuring the electorate that things are actually better than they seem. But Carter was honest to a fault, which made him a terrible politician. Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign reassured a frightened electorate, and he beat Carter easily.
Walter Mondale, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota, faced Reagan in 1984, His campaign platform included reducing Federal budget deficits, a freeze on nuclear weapons, and passing the Equal Rights Amendment. But he was perceived by conservatives as supporting the poor (read black) at the expense of the (white) middle-class, and being weak on national security. Southern Democrats and Democratic northern blue-collar workers switched parties, and Reagan won at a walk.
During his second term, his mental lapses worsened, and his handlers made him read prepared statements off the teleprompter at press conferences, cut off further questions, thank the reporters warmly, and leave the room. By the time he left office, he even had trouble reading the teleprompter. He had become a stupa. I believe it was the sardonic social commentator Bill Maher who said, when the ex-President’s condition was finally made public, “So Reagan has Alzheimer’s. Who knew?”
George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s Vice President, was an Ivy League WASP born in Connecticut who grew up in Texas. He became an oilman whose company did business with the family of Osama bin Laden. He promised what he called “compassionate conservatism,” which turned out to mean polluting land, water and sky in order to extract fossil fuels, beefing up the military, fostering clandestine military involvement in the volatile countries of the global south, but being benevolent toward American minorities. His fondness for Hispanics was the result of a vin-dit: he spoke Spanish and had many Mexican-American friends. But he never sarooned entirely. He was too entangled with power and money to join a karass.
Then came Bill Clinton. Slick Willie, the liberal Democrat from Arkansas was another sin-wat, and another charming one. He loved his wife Hillary, who was smarter than he was. He loved the American people – all of them – and the majority of them loved him back. But that wasn’t enough for a President with an appetite as large as his. He sought comfort in food, and ate too much of it. He also sought comfort with his intern, Monika Lewinsky, and when Pentagon staffer Linda Tripp, a Republican operative, released the recordings she had made of phone calls with her friend Monica, Clinton was impeached, but he was never convicted of a crime, and served out his second term. Tripp wasn’t really a wrang-wrang, although she betrayed her friend’s confidence, because she was sincerely outraged that the President had demanded sexual favors from a young woman who either had to grant them or lose her position. The #MeToo movement wouldn’t come along for another generation, and meanwhile, powerful men in government, business, and the arts assumed that attractive female assistants came with their jobs the way drinks in a bar come with salted peanuts.
The G.O.P. benefited by Middle America’s prudish horror over Clinton’s sexual shenanigans, and Poppy Bush’s son George Dubbya became President in 2000, Dubbya beat Al Gore in the general election by a very narrow margin, but the Electoral College was deadlocked, until the Republican-dominated Supreme Court, dominated by Republicans, awarded the Presidency to him. The Court’s decision, in Bush v. Gore, outraged Democrats (and a few moderate Republicans), who protested the blatant partisanship of the Supremes, and called for the abolishment of the College, an institution established by the Founders, all educated, wealthy aristocrats, to prevent direct representation by popular vote, which they regarded as mob rule. Of course that call fell on deaf ears; it was, and remains, to the Republicans’ advantage that there be a way to check or even overturn the will of the people.
Dubbya was and remains a dolt. He got into Yale only because his father had gone there, and the legacy system was still in place. He barely graduated, because he spent more time partying with his DKE frat bros than he did in class. He avoided being drafted into the Army – which at the time would probably have meant service in Vietnam – by enlisting in the Texas Air National Guard, and he learned to fly F-102 fighter jets. He was a competent pilot, but he skipped several of his required flight evaluation examinations, and he failed to serve out his term in the Air Guard, Instead, he wangled an early discharge with help from his Poppy, and got involved with Texas politics. His own mother, Barbara Bush, said “he is the way he is because I smoked and drank while I was pregnant with him.” She preferred Jeb, and said so in interviews. One can almost feel sorry for Dubbya, who developed an Oedipus complex about his mother and father, and tried, disastrously, to out-do Poppy in order to win his mother’s love. He was a sin-wat, but he was also a stupa, and the combination made him the fourth-worst President of the United States, (after Trump, Richard Nixon, and Andrew Johnson).
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, he told Michael Brown, the incompetent Director of FEMA, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” while most of the city’s predominately black Ninth Ward was still underwater. He authorized a big increase in FEMA’s funding so that the city could be rebuilt. But Ray Nagin, the corrupt Mayor of New Orleans, allocated only part of the money to the restoration of the city, and none of it went to the Ninth Ward. The residents who had lost their homes had to leave town. Nagin pocketed the remainder, and the only good to come out of the sorry mess was that he was finally convicted of embezzlement and sent to jail.
Unfortunately for New York City and the United States, Dubbya was President on 9/11/2001 when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by two commercial airliners hijacked by Islamic extremists recruited by Osama bin Laden, the renegade member of the oil family that had once done lucrative business with the senior Bush. In daily briefings, the CIA had warned Dubbya repeatedly that an attack on New York was in the works, and if he had heeded the warning, it’s possible that the attack might have been forestalled. But he didn’t take the warning seriously.
There were already Afghani troops, aided by an American Special Forces team, in place near Tora Bora, a complex of caves in which bin Laden and top members of the Taliban were thought to be hiding. But the Afghanis abruptly announced that bin Laden was no longer there, and the Special Forces were ordered to stand down. The Taliban had cut a deal with the Afghani tribal militias: get rid of the American commandoes and we won’t harm you. It developed further that many of the militiamen had relatives in the Taliban, and as the British Army learned in the 1890s, in Afghanistan, family comes before religion or politics.
Bin Laden was eventually found in Pakistan, living more or less openly in a house in Abbotabad, a suburb of Islamabad. A Special Forces A Team, transported by helicopter, broke into the house, and killed him. They bundled his corpse aboard the chopper, took off, and tossed it into the sea, so that no physical trace of the holy warrior could ever be found, and no shrine could be built to house his remains.
But there was still the Taliban to deal with. George H. W. Bush had dispatched U. S. troops to Kuwait after Iraqi forces invaded the country, and his Operation Desert Storm, in 1991, was successful. Seeking to one-up his father, Dubbya launched what his speechwriters called a “War On Terror,” which, when you reflect a moment, is gibberish: you can’t go to war against an emotion. “Operation Enduring Freedom” was launched in October, 2001, and all these years later, the United States still has troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban appears to be thriving. So much for Jeb Bush’s stupider brother’s Presidential legacy. I wonder if “The Pet Goat,” the children’s story Dubbya was reading to a group of second-graders when the news of the 9/11 attack stunned him into complete idiocy, is included in his presidential archives. He might not even have been reading the book, because a photograph shows him holding it upside down.
The Republicans launched a massive smear campaign against Barack Obama when he became the Democratic candidate for President. The lies told about him ranged from the absurd to the ridiculous: he was not an American citizen, but a Kenyan (his father was Kenyan, but of course he was born in the United States to an American mother); his last name sounded like Osama, so he had to be a secret terrorist; his community outreach work in Chicago before he was elected to the Senate was socialistic; and there was a dog-whistle to white supremacists about his race. But that last attack backfired; black folks flocked to the polls throughout the South, despite Republican attempts to deter them, and only three southern states, Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana, voted against him. He won in a walk, and did even better in the election of 2012.
Obama set up a number of progressive programs, but he didn’t fight very hard for them. His strength as a community organizer and Senator lay in his ability to reach mutually beneficial compromises with his opponents, but the Republicans rejected his attempts, which is why I call them Repulsivans. My wife Patsy and I cried with joy on Election Night, 2008, but four years later our happiness was shadowed by apprehension. The Tea Party, composed of white anti-government extremists, racist to the core, had openly proclaimed that they didn’t want a black man in “their” White House, and their sentiments were shared by many members of Congress and Senators. Obama got even less done during his second term. In Bokononist terms, he sarooned to his vin-dit but zah-mah-ki-bo had a nasty surprise for America and the world: an ex-game show host, pathological liar, and failed businessman with hair as fake as his tan decided to cast his MAGA hat into the ring.
Hillary Clinton beat Der Drumpfenfuerer in the popular vote of 2016, but as it did with Gore’s win over Bush, the Electoral College reversed her victory. Until we get rid of an institution that can undo the will of the people, we cannot call ourselves a democracy. And the Marmalade Mussolini has no use for democracy. He’s trying to postpone or even cancel the 2020 election by invoking Presidential war powers, as if Covid-19 were an enemy nation instead of a disease, and he has already declared himself President For Life. We can only hope his life won’t last much longer. He’s already basically brain-dead, and his body is bloated with gas, as if it’s beginning to rot from the inside out. The only thing that seems to be keeping him going is rage against anyone who disagrees with him.
He’s no longer a human being. He’s become a granfalloon. And it’s time to pop him.