The Ironic Cherry Reads...

The Sack of Rome

by Alexander Stille

Hitler, Trump,... Berlusconi?  I didn't believe it either.  Italy is such a small place, I hardly pay attention to it, except for the food.  But when we weren't looking, Silvio Berlusconi took over and ran a country already corrupted into the ground.  And when I read about the parallels between Italy's prime minister and our own clown president in the New York Times in December, I decided to learn more.

The Sack of Rome was written in 2006, but rather than feel outdated, it is prescient.  When the author compares Berlusconi's manipulations to those of George W. Bush, the impression is that W. was just a prequel to the Trump reality show.  And that Trump is more Berlusconi than W., albeit even a bit stupider.

From odd bits like both being germophobes and referring to themselves in the third person, there are the more significant details of personal history, like the origination of their wealth in real estate development.  In fact, the lies and obfuscations, the hidden deals behind the schemes, are eerily similar.  Both bolster arguments with false quotes and statistics.  Neither read much.  And both garnered fame and power with the people of their country by virtue of media empire -- Berlusconi's ownership and control over television in Italy and Trump's fame and popularity beginning with Miss Universe pageants and culminating with the image of the successful entrepreneur and business mogul on the reality show, The Apprentice.

We mostly assume Trump is an idiot, because his poor impulse control and anger have led to some really dumb moves.  His attacks on people who might be supporters tend to prove he is not as smart as he thinks.  Or it might just be that the crazy has overridden the smart.

But Berlusconi seems to have a shrewd intellect wherein he has planned his successes with a philosophy that Trump can merely mimic.  As owner of the first private television station in the country, Berlusconi imported popular American TV shows that had been unavailable through the government owned station.  Then he built up commercial advertising in a way that multiplied both power and profit.

Berlusconi was hands on with both programming and personnel of his media empire.  As Stille writes:

"Berlusconi went unabashedly after the lowest common denominator and made the silent majority the protagonist of his television.  'Remember that the audience of our listeners, as they say in America, have an eighth-grade education and were not at the top of their class,' he told his sales force in the late 1980's."

And then there is his involvement with the Mafia, the shady characters that aided and abetted his ambitious plan for power and wealth.  Much as Trump and Russia, it was a mutually beneficial dirty deal.  And supporters of both merely shrugged off the complicity as something that was necessary to bring change.  Both assumed that it would take someone who knew how to deal and had the great wealth to prove it in order to bring order to their lives.

There needs to be a certain level of distrust and cynicism for the people of a nation to hand the reigns of power over to a leader who is known to be corrupt.  And in our country we have grown accustomed to lies, deceits and deals from our politicians.  We have a media that no longer is required to hold to standards of ethics or even pretend to fairness, in spite of claims to the contrary.  Our political leaders spend more time courting the wealthy and powerful and holding meetings to plan how they will control the electorate than actually listening to voters, which has been proved dramatically during the past several months of town hall evasions by legislators.

And after years of lies and innuendo, buttressed by a media that went after the most outrageous news rather than the most credible, we saw our election sabotaged to the point where people who should have known better said they couldn't vote for Hillary because they just couldn't trust her.  Day after day of Chuck Todd inserting in every story that these were the two most unpopular candidates ever, as though he had nothing to do with the perception.

The pressure on the media for ratings and ad dollars wakened and gave life to the hibernating Trump, but it took Russia to know what strings to pull to unravel our democracy.  And the corruption seeped through the system.  The cynicism that had been growing in the American people for decades allowed supporters to cheer when Trump said "crooked Hillary" even though they knew he had scammed Trump University enrollees; it is the kind of cynicism that has Michael Flynn yelling "lock her up" even as his is conspiring with the Russian government.

In fact, in the New Yorker article by John Cassidy cited above, he says,

"It is also worth recalling that, in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, another populist businessman, served as Prime Minister four times despite a list of allegations against him that included bribery, tax evasion, sexual misconduct, and having ties to the mafia."

For an American who isn't much interested in the world outside my own walls, this book was a page turner.  I would like to recommend it, but I realize we all could use a diversion in these dark days.  So let me suggest a drinking game to go along with the book.  Take a shot every time you can substitute "Trump" for "Berlusconi."  And don't plan on driving anywhere for awhile.

 

Another Sleepless Night

It is 5 a.m. and I am lying in bed, and I am crying.  This is not me.  Or, at least, it is not the person I was before November 8.  As I lie in bed, I think, desperately, about my options.  I am tempted to clear my DVR of all the MSNBC and CNN news shows I tape regularly; I listen to them during the day and they haunt me at night.  I think I might try a couple more Tylenol, or a cup of tea.  Then I decide to get up and post.

After a lifetime of being afraid of dying, I find myself relieved that most of my life is past.

I try not to think about my kids.

It is quite amazing, watching our democracy being destroyed.  We have seen the wealthy fighting with their many dollars to take over the whole thing for decades now, since they nearly lost the fight in the middle of the last century.  They won't let that happen again.  Irony is the policy that prevails as Trump lines up an anti-education billionaire to run the department of education, an anti-worker billionaire to head the department of labor, an oil billionaire to run the EPA (into the ground), a billionaire whose life goal is privatizing Medicare to head HHS,  a racist to run the department of justice, and for balance, a couple of idiots for HUD and the UN.

And these are not the scary appointments.  They are the ones that can take down our programs, but it is the military arm of our new cabinet that will take down our democracy.

Our furor enjoys his Victory Rallies (He wanted to call them "Thank You" rallies, but KellyAnne advised him to tone it down.).  He especially likes the cheers he gets when he proclaims General "Mad Dog" Mattis as his choice for secretary of defense.  His voice gets all funny when he says, "Mad Dog" and as much as I fight it, I can imagine him lying on his side of the bed getting hot over the thought of the Mad Dog.  "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet," is a quote for which Mad Dog Mattis is famous.  He has a lot of them.

On our own shores, Trump has picked paranoia and son, General Michael Flynn and Jr., for national security adviser, the latter more in an advisory role.  He was pursuing a security clearance for junior, who came close to blowing it by having his crazy tweets implicated in the incident of the nutcase who "self-investigated" the satanic cult hiding in a pizza parlor.  I say, came close to blowing it, because we all know that Trump sees the word "no" as only a temporary barrier, a challenge, one that money and influence can easily remove, and these days he has ever more of both.

National security adviser.  If you can continue reading after that, there is indeed more.  On the foreign front is Mike Pompeo, proposed head of the CIA, who can now continue to investigate Hillary with new purpose and energy.  Here on the home front, to head the already creepily named Department of Homeland Security, will be another retired general, John Kelly.  He will be in charge of rounding people up:  Hispanics, Muslims, and I imagine anybody that gets in the way of his round-up.  Maybe journalists and, I don't know, bloggers.  There will certainly be investigations of commie groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  And Kelly is the moderate of the bunch.

Also lined up to militarize these United States is David Petraeus, maybe for the big enchilada, Secretary of State.  But first they have to figure out what to do about his guilty charge for mishandling classified materials, leaking secrets to his lover.  Wonder where Jason Chaffetz and Trey Gowdy are these days?  I would think that after all the Sturm und Drang (yeah, I know how appropriate that is) over Hillary's emails, they would at least wake up long enough to make a statement of concern.

Here is the thing.  Trump is an insecure, obsessive narcissist who we know is motivated by revenge.  And he has -- oh, I haven't mentioned it yet? -- Steve Bannon as his Trump-whisperer.  This is how bad Bannon is -- Karl Rove and Glenn Beck have spoken out against him.  Bannon is the secular evil to Mike Pence's religious evil.  Bannon is Hitler's adviser, and Trump adores Bannon.  Bannon knows just the right way to flatter the leader of the once-free world.  He also knows how to rile the crowd.  Breitbart.com was his trial run for taking over the country.

I know where in Trump's brain the billionaires came from.  Helped along by the right-wing GOP and huge donations, those picks were no-brainers.  But the military, the military came from the kind of evil that is Steve Bannon.

I am thinking in phrases of 140 characters these days.  And hashtags.  When I wake up in the middle of the night I find myself thinking of tweets that I could send out like alarms to people who could save us.  To the Democrats, who at this point can't even get it together to fight for the one Senate seat up for grabs in Louisiana, much less fight for our democracy.  And who continue to want to prove that they aren't obstructionists.  To the media, who mostly I think we should give daily, "Most Inane Question" awards to.  Just how many times can you ask various Trump minions whether Mitt Romney is still being considered for Secretary of State?

My heart goes out to the Democrats who are smart and courageous enough to see this threat for what it is, and who plan on fighting.  And journalists who will in the days to come be risking their careers (maybe even their freedom; remember Judith Miller).  I hold great hope for Obama to come forward and fight to maintain the democracy he has already saved from the brink of economic failure.  And after a time, Hillary will join the fight.  But there may be a day, with all those generals and all those police forces that Trump courted with his vows of "law and order," when imprisoning political enemies in the United States of America becomes a reality.

No, I am not paranoid.  I know just enough history to see the signs.  Thinking that we are above the fray because we have a strong democracy means that our leaders, from the spineless Paul Ryan to the West Virginia "Democrat" Joe Manchin, would have to fight the abhorrent and extremely telling staff choices Trump has made.  And they won't.  Biden and Harry Reid have both made conciliatory noises pretending to like some of Trump's picks.  Will Dems run scared and choose someone safe to lead their party over progressive black Muslim-American Keith Ellison?  Boy, now is not the time to cower, folks.  (Note to media:  the most pressing issue about Ellison's bid is NOT whether he stays in Congress while he serves as DNC chair.)

Well, the sun is coming up.  I had an emergency piece of medicinal chocolate that I smuggled home from Denver before I began my blog, and I am hoping I will be able to escape through sleep for a couple of hours.  But we all have to keep returning to the reality of a Trump oligarchy.  We have to stop trying to find the good in the turd.  We have to keep trying things we've never done before, like appeal to the Electors to dump Trump.  We can't use ignorance as an excuse.  We can't let Democrats compromise us out of our democracy.

We can't let the generals take over.  And we have to #StopBannon.

Trump is an idiot.  But he is a rich and powerful idiot, and he knows how to buy smart and powerful people.