Welcome To The Nation Of NOTUS

The Apocalypse by Hieronymus Bosch

Three years ago, while still writing my Huffington Post column, I made reference to an April, 2015 article in the Washington Post, by Michael Gerson, “If our heroism is hopeless.” Gerson asked us to consider the long-term prospects for humanity in light of the creeping expansion of nuclear proliferation, the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), globally-devastating asteroids as written in the fossil record, the Sun’s pre-ordained world-cindering expansion far beyond Earth’s orbit, the possibility of artificially-intelligent systems deciding humans are simply not worth keeping around and the ultimate hopelessness of heroism.

In his article, Gerson delivers a dour sermon, with just a bit of light at the end of his otherwise dark tunnel, when he concludes,

“Perhaps, it has been said, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience. It is an unlikely, even outlandish, hope. But it reaches, on good authority, “even unto the end of the world.”

Gerson had me at entropy, a word I’ve mulled over since my earliest days as a junior scientist, mixing chemicals from my little Christmas gift laboratory, learning about the equality of energy and mass in my physics books and diving deeply (as deep as any amateur can dive) into the Big Bang literature to try to understand why things run down, and why, no matter how hard you try, you will never get the toothpaste back into the tube, or the broken egg back into its shell. So it is true in the macro sense for the world at large: we are not getting out of it alive, either as a species or as a globe.

In my own Huffington column, I wrote, “But there is a more present death awaiting Americans, and it, too, involves entropy and ultimate hopelessness.”

I noted that, when America was a true melting pot of people and cultures, we were a relatively small cooking kettle, geographically and demographically speaking. At the start of the 18th century, we were a loosely-linked collection of colonies spread along the Atlantic shoreline with our backs to the Adirondacks, the Alleghenies, the Blue Ridge, the Appalachians and the Smoky Mountains. A political fire fueled by outrage over taxes, unjust import and export laws and a distant royal governance heated our little pot of civilization and it did not take long to bring our blood to a boil. And boil we did.

The steam from that roiling cauldron of conflict distilled into clouds of freedom, and as the fires of revolution were banked, the cool rain of independence fell from those clouds and began to wash over the mountains and across the continent. It was not, however, a soothing, healing flood of righteousness.

We were a nation on the move, growing and exploring, building, advancing relentlessly with a selfish sense of divine destiny driving our wheels along ever-lengthening tracks. In the process, we overwhelmed and nearly obliterated another culture—the First Americans—and we abused millions of newcomers—Chinese, Italians, the Irish, Slavs and, slaves—who were nothing more to the sons and daughters of the Founders and their descendants than cheap labor, good for little more than cotton-picking and pick-and-shovel duty. Their discarded bodies enriched the soil along every railroad track, and in every plantation field. The feet of the grandchildren of those men and women who stepped off the Mayflower, were destined to press down on the necks of the unfortunate millions who arrived on lesser vessels.

Some say the Civil War was about slavery, others say it was all politics and still others say it was about economics. There are solid cases to be made for all three—and more. But in the end, the Civil War was about brute force and which side could bring it to bear first, fastest, and with finality. The goal of that war was punishment, pure and simple. And out of the acrid smoke of victory, the North sought to castigate the South by the worst possible punishment: abandonment. You lost; you are shunned. You will wither on your twisted vines of discontent and treachery, and we will pick over what is left of your vision until even that is gone.

I don’t believe America ever recovered from the Civil War; the conflict continues to this day in forms not always recognizable to those who wear blinders of political narrow-mindedness, but they are forms with patterns that cannot be denied. The secessionist family of states that was left to die at Appomattox 153 years ago managed to bear new generations whose ignorance-fueled hate and bitterness bubble up among us like the flame-fed roiling waters in that first pot of revolution.

When I first wrote the Huffington piece three years ago, I said the Congress was a sadly divided, no-compromise, winner-take-all body of some of the most selfish politicians this nation has ever raised. I said, “With every bill that is fought over partisan ties, America slips further and further away from the fixes we so desperately need.” I was sickened to see the trio of McConnell, Ryan, and Pence—who rarely, if ever, had a genuinely kind word to say about Senator McCain—mouthing pure hypocrisy beneath the Capitol dome under which rested McCain’s casket, elevated on Lincoln’s catafalque, no less. So much for our 16th President’s “better angels.”

In this, the 21st century, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published a century-and-a-half ago, is still unacceptable to the White House and a staggering percent of members of Congress, many of whom are proud deniers not only of climate change, but of the basic sciences that underpin the functioning of everything. 

Bible-thumping adherence to the strict interpretation of your god’s word is fine in its place, but not in the halls of Congress, not where reason and open-minded inquiry are in such desperate need. If that is how you truly feel, take to the pulpit, don’t take to the floor of the House or Senate.

At the small hands of our illegitimate president, our national budget is a farce; our debt is deplorable; some of the most basic institutions set in place to help the poor, sick and homeless are held hostage by Trump tweets and Capitol Hill hysterics and shut-down threats. Our national leadership no longer enjoys the trust of our allies—though I believe Americans, apart from their government, are still welcome beyond our shores. And, of course, the men and women who wear our nation’s uniform are still fighting and dying in a war that seems eternal, unwinnable, and always deadly.

The White House is being held hostage by a no-nothing, do-nothing president who is openly or tacitly supported by Republicans and Democrats incapable, apparently, of recognizing the real threats to our national security: a failing education system and racial and economic divides that are tearing us apart faster and faster each day. When I think of the money that was wasted in creating the Department of Homeland Security, I weep.

Back in 2015, I wrote, “The Supreme Court, in its Citizens United vs. FEC ruling dealt the coup de grâce to any hope of fairly-financed elections, and virtually ran the average American out of democracy’s picture. I have not changed my opinion on that. Now, we are but a page-turn away from becoming an oligarchy financed by a heartless fraction-of-a-percent of alleged Americans who have little use for the little guy.

• Witness the Congressional silence over the border child-detention scandal; witness the Congressional silence over the lies, prevarications, schemes, and thuggish-plots that ooze out of the White House almost minute-by-minute. 
• Witness the bizarre (and never possible), Kim-Trump deal, or the Putin-Trump behind-closed-doors confab. 
• Witness the now-well-trodden road of Cabinet departures due to blatant mismanagement, greed, corruption, and hubris. 
• Witness the spur-of-the-moment decision to cancel the 2019 cost-of-living pay increase for millions of federal workers, none of whom live the stratospheric heights of the one-percent of Americans who don’t give a rat’s ass about federal employees and the bills they must pay. 
• Witness the countless golf trips and government-paid journeys to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, New Jersey that are transparent attempts to flee responsibility in a town and from a White House the president relieves himself on every day. 
• Witness a man who gets his daily intelligence briefings from Fox News. 
• Witness the pathetic audiences of “supporters” who turn out in airport hangars and small arenas to hear the bombasts and lies of a would-be-Mussolini whose petulant sneers and tightly-crossed arms are the tells of a man who could not care less for the crowds around him or the nation beneath his feet. 
• And witness the attempts by the president and his toadying party—abetted by the silence of too many Democrats—to convince the public that the media is “the enemy of the people.” 

In his image, Trump, the POTUS, has created the anti-Constitutional nation of NOTUS. Its motto, “You are Not Us.” If you are not white, affluent, and comfortable, you are NOTUS. If you are Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Asian, and poor, you are NOTUS. If you are fleeing oppression, you are NOTUS. If you choose your partner out of love, not gender, you are NOTUS. If you care for the future of the planet, you are NOTUS. If you speak truth to power, you are NOTUS. If you believe in the rights of humanity, you are NOTUS. If you do not worship the golden calf of Trump, you are most certainly NOTUS.

Down the road of NOTUS lies the end of our Republic.

What has happened over the years since the Civil War is a dilution of the original spirit of the Revolution—national entropy has set in and all our institutions are slowly winding down, no longer able to address the needs of a burgeoning, racist, dumbed-down society. There were the occasional glimmers of our prior greatness—but I cannot name one right now because the last one, Senator John S. McCain, is no longer with us.

In his stirring tribute to John McCain, Joe Biden said, 

“John's story is an American story. It's not hyperbole. it's the American story. grounded in respect and decency. basic fairness. the intolerance through the abuse of power. Many of you travel the world, look how the rest of the world looks at us. They look at us a little naive, so fair, so decent. We are the naive Americans. that's who we are. That's who John was. He could not stand the abuse of power. wherever he saw it, in whatever form, in whatever ways. He loved basic values, fairness, honesty, dignity, respect, giving hate no safe harbor, leaving no one behind and understanding Americans were part of something much bigger than ourselves.”

And then, a bit later, he said, reflecting on the 1990s in the Senate, 

“That's when things began to change for the worse in America in the Senate. That's when it changed. What happened was, at those times, it was always appropriate to challenge another Senator's judgment, but never appropriate to challenge their motive. When you challenge their motive, it's impossible to get to go. If I say you are doing this because you are being paid off or you are doing it because you are not a good Christian or this, that, or the other thing, it's impossible to reach consensus. Think about in your personal lives. All we do today is attack the oppositions of both parties, their motives, not the substance of their argument. This is the mid-'90s. it began to go downhill from there. The last day John was on the Senate floor, what was he fighting to do? He was fighting to restore what you call regular order, just start to treat one another again, like we used to.”

“…it began to go downhill from there.” Yes, it did. I was on the Hill in the 70s and 80s. I remember what it was like to hear Republican and Democrat members of the House and Senate laugh together. I saw them have lunches and dinners together. I watched in the House and Senate galleries as they debated with passion underpinned by comity, compromise, and courage. It was not perfect, but it was not vile. It was not without some pain, but it was not vicious. It was not without some losses, but it was not spiteful.

Now, it is all unrecognizable to me. The White House, the Congress, even the Supreme Court. We are led by a tyrant who deals in fear, who stalks and abuses women, who imprisons children and banishes their parents, who lies to the poor and vulnerable, who gifts his loyalists and gaffs his enemies, who would sell our nation out to the highest bidder if he could figure out how to do it, a history-ignorant cretin who does not see how he is being played by despots and tin-pot dictators and murderers.

The Congress is incapable of acting to right the ship of state that is fast approaching a list to starboard from which we will not recover. No Republican is willing to wrest the tiller away from Trump and give commands to rig our ship for the storm that is bearing down on us with ever-increasing winds of economic and humanitarian destruction. And no Democrat capable of changing our course away from the headland of Hell is either on deck, down below, or in some yet-to-be-reached harbor.

Michael Gerson’s 2015 column almost got it right: we are in peril. But not from without, but from within. When I first wrote my Huffington piece, I said I’d give America 75 years...maybe 100 if we’re lucky. Today, I doubt we have 25.