I’ve been woefully AWOL recently, renovating the family Fish Camp up on the marsh in Darien, Georgia. It’s been terribly hot but rewarding except for the nagging guilt about being absent from these pages. Though my morning reading has been cut short, I still get enough news about the continuing atrocities of American public life to make me sad and sometimes damn mad. I feel compelled to do my bit and speak out, to try to make a contribution that just might help restore our sanity and decency as citizens. Besides, my writing helps me live with myself and cope with the reality that the United States is not immune to fascism.
As I’ve mentioned before, there has not been nor will there be a letup on the outrageous with Trump in office. It’s a steady cacophony of noise brought on by the latest crisis, real or fabricated, day after day. Today’s headlines are about the sex offender Epstein and the reopening of Alcatraz as a prison; tomorrow there could be new revelations about immigrants eating neighborhood pets, the need to purge libraries of offensive books and, who knows, maybe renaming the Middle West the “American Prairie” or more bashing of our neighbors to the north.
I have several friends who are reveling in the brouhaha about the Epstein files, hoping that this latest scandal might bring Trump down. I really don’t think so, but I am intrigued with the story’s potency given all the other salacious revelations about the president’s private life.
What does it say about us that we are concerned about the crimes of a sexual offender and ignore the president’s role in far more critical issues from his handling of the covid crisis where countless Americans needlessly died to his constant selling the power of his office for personal gain? Further, what does it say when we don’t get exercised about his blatant disregard for due process of law and his abuse of immigrants and citizens who have been rounded up by his masked thugs, thrown in jail and flown off to foreign detention camps? However sordid and perverted the Epstein story might be, it pales
in importance with Trump’s unconstitutional actions going back to 2016.
This is what I think about. At my age, I remember every president since Harry Truman, and never did I once think that they would betray us and our constitutional republic regardless of their politics or personalities. Not so anymore, I’m afraid.