These protests express militancy and an insurrectionist character.
Not everyone is carrying a gun to be sure but there are large numbers of armed
men dressed in military fashion and many are organised, part of paramilitary
organisations. While some people are scared of the state power grab in shutting
down and heavily regulating the economy, others are expressing fears of a
growing fascist movement and the potential for paramilitary violence. They see
a parallel state developing, centered around the leadership and personality of
Trump.
Given that his phony narrative surrounding the economy has
collapsed and he's in fear of losing the November ballot, he's sending signals
that he might try to delay or somehow manipulate the conditions of the election.
This is a dangerous moment and many in Washington realise it – a danger that is
amplified by growing numbers of armed people on the streets who are targeting
their anger toward the Democrats and Democratic governors. Trump is tacitly supporting
them and yet he's playing with fire.
Many of them will say they're simply exercising their '2nd
Amendment Rights' – well, you're standing out in front of government buildings,
shouting and yelling in a threatening manner (or standing sentry for those who
do) and significant numbers of people are dressed and armed like soldiers.
Maybe they don't understand the significance of that but others do and others
understand that American society is starting to edge toward a critical point.
Without thinking too hard one could list off about a dozen scenarios that could
quickly make this situation escalate and turn very ugly.
And clearly these are not people that can be reasoned with
and the Right-wing news pundits deserve a lot of the blame. It's safe to say
that if a civil war were to develop and the 'Left'-faction was able to win, you
can be sure the Limbaugh's, Hannity's and others will pay a price. They have
blood on their hands and if things blow up – they bear no small amount of
guilt. Trump for his part is an unstable and a sociopathic buffoon. No one in
their right mind can take him seriously. Again, no one in their right mind can
take him seriously.
There are those that appreciate him for whatever reason but
they don't take him seriously. Clearly Mitch McConnell and many within the
Trump cabinet do not. They know what he is and have quietly said so – Rex
Tillerson probably summed it up best. In fact it was probably the most accurate
assessment of an American politician I've ever encountered.
And yet the Trumpite Street – the protestors, are virtually
impenetrable. When the media exposes his lies and attempts to simply repeat his
own words, they attack the media. When he stands up on television and suggests
people should inject themselves with cleaning agents, they blame the media for
making it an issue. There's no getting through to these people. The Trump
supporters, especially the embittered folks of the Rust Belt and Appalachia
cannot be reasoned with. I live among them and interact with them and the
conversations are often reminiscent of a broken record, and a bad one at that.
Just the other night while fishing on the river I kept trying
to extract myself from a maddening conversation with a local guy (he'd be
called a redneck by most). His property is a veritable junkyard – he saves
scrap metal and as he waits for the prices to go up his yard gets pretty out of
control, his house is even more dilapidated than my own, he's got free-range
chickens roaming the yard amid the piles of scrap metal, junk and just plain
garbage, one of those scenes from an old National Geographic magazine – you
drive by and see the half-naked kids climbing around on the junk or playing in
the dirt. He has struggled to hold a long-term job. He works on a local hobby
farm for some wealthy out-of-state folks. Last I knew his wife works at one of
the dollar stores. I'm not trying to insult the guy by saying this but let's
just say his grammar and ability to communicate is sub-standard. He's an okay
guy in one sense.
On the one hand his property is an admitted disaster and
eyesore, on the other hand it angers me when outside people move into the area
and then start agitating and making trouble, arguing for code enforcement and
the like. There's nothing wrong with being poor or having a ramshackle house (I
certainly do) but he's got that loud defiant swagger with the earsplitting rusted
out pick-up truck to go along with it. He's the kind of guy that will blow
cigarette smoke in your face and you're left wondering if he's being
confrontational or is just clueless as to how rude and offensive he is at
times. I was fishing with a few of my kids and we ran into him. I kind of
groaned but he was being friendly so I felt the need to do the same and of
course as a Christian I need to always be thinking in those terms.
We engaged in small-talk. He mentioned seeing a bear in my
yard the other day and of course commented (as many do) that my yard and the
fields near my house are teeming with deer. Our area is certainly a treasure in
that regard. It's not unusual to wake up and find a half dozen deer a few feet
from our kitchen window and we see Bald Eagles and other treasures of nature on
an almost daily basis – and yet having lived in Alaska and other places it's
not that unique, at least not in the way some natives talk about it. These are
the kinds of things people talk about around here – although I must confess I
don't always tell everyone about the things I see – the mink, the otters and
other things. All too often folk are just eager to go out and trap it or kill
it. Many I know who profess to love nature seem to equate that with riding
around in a side-by-side or on a four-wheeler and shooting things. That's not
my idea of a good time in the woods. There's nothing wrong with hunting but
nowadays everything seems to involve noise, machines and trophyism in search of
social media accolade. It's a commentary on our culture, but I digress.
Anyway at some point the conversation invariably turned to
the pandemic and then everything changed. It was like a repeat of the
conversation with my auto mechanic but worse.
I kept wincing at the language as my kids were also fishing nearby. He
made it absolutely clear he hated Nancy Pelosi – although to be honest I'm not
sure if he would be able to tell me who she actually is and what position she
holds – let alone tell me in cogent terms why he hates her. I told him that I
wasn't a fan either but quickly added that I don't really think much of any of
them. Of course he didn't either (he assured me) but he does like Trump. He
then wanted to extol him but I kept struggling to deflect the conversation and
cast both sides as blameworthy. I was trying to get to a moral angle but
couldn't get there. He wasn't biting, no pun intended.
Eventually I gave up and just tried to change the subject
altogether. It was a tug-of-war – he kept trying to pull the conversation back
to Trump – someone he clearly admires, his champion as it were. It was
frustrating. Finally another fisherman showed up and had some bait that
attracted the Trump fan's attention and he began to talk to the newcomer. I
used the opportunity to slip a little distance away. There is just no getting
through to these people. To be honest I'm not sure what to do anymore as it
literally takes an act of the Spirit to stir these people from what can only be
described as a kind of semi-religious stupor. The world has wronged them and
yet they cannot see that the people they continually are fooled into supporting
(Left or Right) are the very people wronging and exploiting them and
representative of the very forces that have brought them to their desperate and
angry point.
It's one thing to be poor, disenfranchised and cut off from
mainstream life but it's something else to be poor, angry about it and defiant
and foolish in both word and deed. And then to have that defiance channeled by
and utilised by the very forces that have broken you and the society in which
you live – it's just sad. The truth is stranger than fiction. These folks are
being played. I'm not saying that the Anti-Trump camp is to be commended or
that the Democrats are a viable or better alternative. Not at all. But it's sad
to see people so manipulated and fooled, kicked back and forth by the
power-brokers, their very wills broken even as they long to cry out and
proclaim in strutting fashion just how free they are. They're not free. In fact
they're slaves and yet their desperation, brokenness and search for meaning is
starting to drive them to a kind of fanaticism.
A few months ago I was down in Wheeling, West Virginia
walking amid the literal wreckage of the downtown, dodging the blowing garbage
and taking in the sad spectacle of a once prosperous town. It's the same
everywhere in the Rust Belt and its connected region of Appalachia. Where I
live they overlap and so we get some interesting dual-phenomena. But even for
us Wheeling was a bit of a shock. The
Capitol Theatre, once the Grand Ole Opry of the north is but a shadow of its
former self. The McClure Hotel, site of McCarthy's famous 1950 speech that
launched his inquisition and made him a national figure now sits in the midst
of urban decay and it's hard to imagine anyone important wanting to visit
Wheeling anymore – though Trump did in 2018. The casino out on the island is
about the only 'happening' place in the downtown area. The region's dwindling
middle class, outsiders and retirees flock to its tacky ambiance even while
druggies and (what looked to be) prostitutes wander the broken and decayed
streets and parking lots just a few blocks way.
And yet there are Trump signs everywhere. Standing at the end
of the famous suspension bridge I was studying a seedy run-down hotel that
looks to be the site of unsavory activities when my wife pointed to a broken
and abandoned storefront window. Someone had written 'Trump' in the grime.
Trump was everywhere. Standing on the bridge we watched one of the massive coal
barges making its way up the Ohio River, probably headed for Pittsburgh. A Trump
banner flew from its bow.
Driving south through the panhandle, past Bellaire and
Moundsville we headed in the direction of Morgantown winding our way through
the undulating countryside and the many broken towns and shattered communities.
There are gas fields, processing plants and pump stations all over the place, probably
the only decent jobs in the area. The old regional coal mines are mostly closed
up, some of the seams have been played out, other towns are victims of the changing
times, the gas boom, technology and yes, government policy too. Some closed
decades ago and it looks as if the towns never recovered. And yet were they to
reopen, the mines that used to employ half the town would at best support a
couple of dozen workers. The large numbers aren't needed anymore and yet the
once solidly Democratic area has drunk the Trump Kool-aid. It was Trump
country, far more so than even where I live – an area that's long been solidly Republican.
It was strange to drive through towns that in some cases
looked like they had been literally bombed and yet find Trump signs everywhere.
The dilapidation and poverty are palpable and yet one property owner mowed a
massive 'TRUMP' in the grass of his hillside in a stunt meant to be seen from
the road. The idea that Trump cares anything about these people or that he
wouldn't sell them out in a heartbeat for a few bucks is laughable. Their devotion
to him is tragic. And yet they've fallen in with a Trump-friendly narrative
about how the world works. And even though the voices they're listening to are
proven wrong time and time again, they won't listen. In the case of the folks
in Northern West Virginia, they've been lied to and manipulated for
generations. They're trying to ally themselves with a new faction – ironically
the faction that's tight with the Coal industry and the Charleston
Establishment, the people that have (for years, even generations) been
exploiting them – and yet they are going to be fooled again.
I stopped in one town at a convenience store – there aren't
many in that neck of the woods – and took in the scene. It was filled with
people that reminded me of where I live and yet it was like everything was knocked
down another peg. The smelly people in pajamas, the obvious drug users, the
broken people who in many cases are clearly semi-literate and incapable of
finding jobs that make much more than minimum wage, the hillbilly-lesbian
cashier covered in tattoos and piercings even while retaining the region's
traditional brogue. The region enchants me but at the same time is
heartbreaking.*
Did the liberals do this to the region? Did they destroy its
families, its values? Did they wreck its buildings and leave a legacy of rubble,
drug addiction and broken communities? Did they drive the people into apathetic
poverty and the embrace of values that are the repudiation of their pioneer and
culturally Christian heritage? No, as I drove through West Virginia I wasn't
thinking about Clinton, RFK, LBJ or Pelosi and their failures. I was thinking
about Wall Street and men like Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. Did the War on
Poverty fail? Obviously in some respects it has but in other respects its costs
(despite the criticism) were a bargain. The programmes prevented the people in
places like West Virginia from taking their guns and standing at the capitol
steps. Many of them are too broken at this point to do anything other than get
by.
Did the War on Poverty break these families and break the
society of Appalachia? No, as with all things it's complex but Wall Street –
avarice, is primarily to blame. Many critics of anti-poverty programmes point
to the destruction of the Black family in the inner city but what about
Appalachia? How did the War on Poverty destroy this society? I think these
people have forgotten just how poor and desperate the region was and (though
improved) still is and once again fail to understand what would have happened
in these societies if something hadn't been done. Additionally, they refuse to
discuss the failures of these programmes in light of the fact that they've been
constantly reduced and under attack – Bill Clinton (ironically) being one of
the presidents most to blame for gutting the system – but 1990's prosperity
under NAFTA and globalisation put the proverbial nail in the coffin for the
folks of Appalachia.
The markets may have boomed but Appalachia and the Rust Belt
were being decimated. Despite the contrary narratives flowing from Right-wing
mouthpieces, the Clinton and Post-Clinton Democrats turned to the economic Right
even while embracing Identity Politics – a paradigm that the ideological Left
actually disowns. They shifted their posture and left the plain working folk –
once the backbone of the party behind. From the Iron Range of Minnesota to the decayed
cities around the Great Lakes, to Southern Appalachia and the Anthracite Coal
Region of Eastern Pennsylvania, there is a feeling of betrayal. These traditionally
Democratic folks are broken, have become angry are growing radicalised and many
are now zealous Trump supporters. There's no Russian plot here. It's a story
the Democrats don't want to talk about.
In a stranger-than-fiction turn, Trump who in all his crude
bombast represents the avaricious forces that have exploited and destroyed them
– they have now turned into a veritable messiah. It's tragic but lost in an
angry miasma of rage and despair – you can't even dialog with these people. And
now their minds are turned off and they've opened themselves up to the likes of
Hannity and FOX news. What will it take to get through to some of these folks?
For me, it took the Holy Spirit.
Thirty years ago in many respects I was one of them and I
know the kinds of passions the prophets of the Right can stir. I remember being
on fire about Bill Clinton's election. In 1992 I was an unbeliever and a
Limbaugh devotee and I can honestly say I could have very easily got caught up
into the whole militia movement. I praise God that I wasn't and instead was
saved and came to repudiate it all. And that brings me to the Christian angle.
---------
*Instead of Vance's Right-friendly 'Hillbilly Elegy', I
recommend 'At Home in the Heart of Appalachia' by John O'Brien. Set in West
Virginia it's told in the popular memoir fashion that was so in vogue a few
years back. It nevertheless does an excellent job in communicating some of the
tensions and flavours of small town Appalachia life and capturing something of
its history. He helps the reader to understand its struggles, its exploitation,
misconceptions and tragedies. For O'Brien it was story of personal struggle,
familial memory and deep bitterness and yet he clearly loved the place. As
someone who has lived in a similar area for over twenty years I could easily
resonate with his narrative. Though we're located in rural Pennsylvania, the
narratives and themes are all too familiar – for my wife a native of the area,
hauntingly so at times.
Vance reminds me of Minnesotan Garrison Keillor, someone who
both loves his regional heritage and yet at the same time hates and despises it
and in many respects doesn't quite understand it. And yet like Keillor he's
chosen to profit from it – by presenting himself as sympathetic even while he
more or less excoriates the culture and values of the region.