What If He's Just a ... Humbug?

Hello.

The first rule of resisting tyranny: “Do not obey in advance.”

This was written by a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder. It’s from his 2017 book “On Tyranny.”

We’re already blowing Rule Number One, according to Snyder. The scary thing is, at the rate we’re going, by the time we hit the vital Rule Number Ten, we may well be beyond the point of caring.

Rule Number Ten: Believe in Truth.

The failure to follow Rule Number One is not just about the actions of the spineless, morally compromised Washington Post, or the gutless, ethically emasculated and oophorectomized Los Angeles Times — both papers failed to endorse a presidential candidate for fear of Trumpian retribution if he won. It is also not just about the pusillanimous, chickenhearted ABC Network, which just last week decided to pay Donald Trump $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit they almost certainly would have won in court, so as to ingratiate themselves with the vindictive, extortionist new president. It’s not just about the craven, weak-kneed actions of our elected representatives, specifically the ass-kissing Republican officeholders, that clinking clanking clattering collection of calliginous junk who are fearful of losing their jobs. It has trickled down even further. It is also very likely about the actions of … you and me.

I am sorry to be the bearer of such dolorous, demoralizing news. Before I continue (it’s going to get worse) I will tell you a good joke, just to keep you aboard through all of the ensuing despair. And I promise, at least one more joke will follow, if you stay with me.

Here is the first joke. It is about dumb Kentuckians.

The Louisville Courier Journal has an advertisement for a river cruise to the Gulf of Mexico for $100. A Kentuckian goes to the lister’s office located on the Ohio River. He gives them $100 in cash, they take him into the back room, knock him out with a blackjack, tie him to a large inner tube and cast him into the Ohio River. When he awakens he sees another man on an inner tube and yells over "Hey, I'm starting to think this is a scam, and there's not going to be the buffet they promised." The other fellow yells back "There wasn't last year."

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Get it? It’s about stupid people being conned and cowed into submission!

I received a communique the other day from Gene Pool reader Amy Cohen. It was on today’s very subject. Cohen is a child psychiatrist, an expert on trauma. She’s been thinking about this whole issue — the preventive submissiveness of public officials to a man who has yet to take office — and she had an observation:

“With Trump, the fear is the thing. It’s such an interesting situation. The less that people of power feared and capitulated to him, the less power he’d have (not, as seems intuitive, the other way round.) One would have thought that Republicans would have been energized by the little burst of testosterone demonstrated in their opposition to Matt Gaetz. And that this would have given them an appetite for more. Instead, all of these people of power are like little children who scared themselves with their bravado. They’ve cringing back into themselves. With every heart and soul and vestige of integrity that Trump devours, the bigger and stronger a monster he becomes. It’s like a Roald Dahl story. These weak bastards are betraying us all.”

I’d argue it’s more like the Wizard of Oz. Trump is like The Great and Powerful Oz, who in the end is humbled and has to admit he is just a humbug.

Professor Snyder seemed like a smart guy, and I wanted to interview him about all this, but he is traveling and unreachable. It turns out that it didn’t matter, because he can be found in online videos, recent videos, speaking brilliantly on this subject, assuming you can find him. He’s definitely on his own modest youtube channel. Here he is, and he agrees with Dr. Cohen:

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

“Some of us do have responsibility, and perhaps, the wealthy and the powerful just a little bit more. Those who [study] the period of the Nazi takeover, 1933 to 1934, know that much of Hitler’s rise to power had to do with people making adjustments, people anticipating what he’d want from them, and then going half way.

“A very similar lesson was drawn by the anti-communist dissidents of the 1970s, who [had learned that] every little thing that we do has consequences for those around us. They counseled not to obey in advance, but instead to live as if we were free.”

As it happens, this made all the difference. Communism withered from within. Nazism required foreign interference, and global war.

Snyder, from a video:

“I have all this in mind because of decisions by newspapers owned by very wealthy Americans not to endorse a presidential candidate. I gotta say this strikes me as ignoring the essential thing we were supposed to have learned from the 20th Century, which is in circumstances like these do not obey in advance. If what you do is based on this anticipation, that an authoritarian might be about to come to power, then what you are doing is making it more likely that an authoritarian is going to come to power. And since you have already made concessions before he came to power, you are preparing yourself for making more concessions after he comes to power. And what’s worse, if you are in a position of wealth or power yourself, you’re discouraging all the other people who are less wealthy and less powerful. Aside from being politically wrong and morally outrageous, this is just simply… unfair. Of course what it really means when someone who is wealthy and powerful makes adjustments in advance, what it really means is they think, “Well, I’m gonna be fine. When Democracy dies in Darkness, I’m gonna enjoy the shadows.”

— October 25, 2024

Resist them, Snyder advises. Resist all of them. Resist.

Where do you come in? Right here, says Snyder, speaking of Trump’s cabinet choices:

“Nothing is unclear here. These appointments are not just poor choices, in a traditional sense. Each of them, individually, is historically bad — but taken together, these are not people who are going to be bad at their jobs in some sort of normal sense … It’s not just that these people are not qualified enough. It’s not just that they are totally unqualified, it’s that they are anti-qualified. They’re qualified to do the opposite of what they are supposed to do. … Taken together these appointments suggest an attempt to make the American government dysfunctional, to make it fall apart. To pervert it, to have it do things it’s not supposed to do. until it is not capable of doing anything at all.

“You have to remember you are the same people you were before the election… The whole idea of this is to shock you into a different world. But you have to take your sense of shock and say okay, shock doesn’t license my adapting myself to the new thing. Shock means that something very wrong has happened, and I have to remember what I think is right, and start from there.”

So, confront the Wizard. Lift the curtain, and expose the con man buffoon behind it. Don’t cringe. Fight in any way you have the ability to.

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Finally, we come back to Prof. Snyder’s Rule Number Ten, the one we must arrive at, at all costs: Believe in Truth:

“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant but the result is your demise as an individual — and thus the collapse of any political system that relies on individualism.”

And this brings us, inevitably, to today’s 3 Gene Pool Gene Polls.

The course of the next two years will depend in large measure on whether enough Republicans will show enough courage to stand up to the Wizard on essential issues, to stop him, or slow him, from dismantling democracy. Please consider these questions judiciously. We are almost all anti-Trumpers here. Resist the impulse for the knee jerk answer. What do you think the truth is?

Poll One:

Poll Two:

Poll Three:

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Whew.

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Okay, the second joke I pledged to deliver. Alert: Not safe for work unless you have earbuds:

@brentterhuneIM TIRED OF IT #woke #fyp

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Now we descend into the segment for Questions and Answers and Observations, where you will submit Q’s and A’s and O’s right here and I will respond to them with snark, cynicism, and the Wisdom of the Ages. For the second straight week of an ongoing experiment, we will not be doing this in real time: Anything you send in today will be dealt with on Thursday, but with additional thought and care. WE NEED YOUR Q, A, and O’s here:

HOWEVER

We will be publishing many Responses to excellent QAOs we received before 11 p.m. Monday night. We do it right below. They seem to be heavily weighted towards my call for problems you encounter, or encountered, with technology, and also — kind of coincidentally — on the very subject discussed so far today.

And Finally, that pathetic, unavoidable, inevitable plea.

According to figures on shmoop.com, my current yearly pay from The Gene Pool is roughly what the average professional embalmer makes. If it is within your means — it’s $4.15 a month — please consider upgrading your free subscription:

Q: I agree that speaking truth to power is critical, AND I remember the outcome for the cyclist whose picture was taken giving the finger to the presidential motorcade during the last Trump administration. So, It is not just Trump and his actions that can impact many of your readers. In this area, many are employed in roles that mean attempting to work effectively with government agencies regardless of the administration in control. I, for one, am hopeful that this administration is a blip, not a budding dictatorship, and would like to maintain my ability to help our government mitigate the damage during the next 4 years and recover from this blip effectively. I don’t agree with the actions taken against the cyclist, but I can’t say I would be surprised if they were taken by my company regardless of the administration on the receiving end. It’s a fine line and a hard one to walk - and it may very well empower the behavior we hope to mitigate. Thoughts and advice welcome here. I don’t have a good answer.

A: I have a good answer! I have a good answer! That f.u. femme fatale? She did lose her job, but got another, better one.

She is doing GREAT. Check out this headline:

The Woman Who Flipped Off Trump Has Won an Election in Virginia

Juli Briskman gave the middle finger to President Trump’s motorcade and lost her job. Now she has won local office in a district that includes one of his golf courses.

To reiterate, RESIST.

Q: The WaPo story on the ABC settlement did go on to note, or at least imply, that ABC isn't flush enough either to pay what it would have required to defend the suit or to risk a loss (or maybe both). It's still a sad state of affairs, but it might not be the snivelling in fear of Trump that you are suggesting. More like snivelling in fear of a Trumpy jury.

A: Uh, no.

Do you think Trump would have let it get to the jury? This was a nuisance suit, like so many of his, intended to disrupt and then be dropped or thrown out, as most Trump-initiated lawsuits are. You think Donald wants to re-litigate charges that he inserted a finger into her accuser’s vagina against her will? Do you think he wants her on the stand again? And her friends, with corroborating testimony? (Also Stephanopoulos is kinda beloved. He’s cute.)

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Q: I hate that pitchers don't pour well. They have pour spouts, but the water, or whatever, practically always runs back down the side of the pitcher and splashes on table, floors, feet, etc. Wait staff at restaurants have a solution, which is to ignore the pour spout and pour over the side of the pitcher, which works well and avoids the water-down-the-side problem. Obviously, this anarchy cannot be permitted, and so Big Restaurant has acquired pitchers that have a side spout, which works about as well as the front spout. Badly, in case that is not clear.

It's not like this is a recent invention whose bugs have not yet been worked out. We have had ceramic containers that held liquid that had to be poured, for something like 9000 years. The solution seems primarily to be choosing to ignore that this happens, Every damn time. How come there has not been 9000 years of test and experimentation to make a pour spout that is actually useful? – T. Livengood

A: Well, that is a novel definition for “technology,” But you are right. I know exactly what you are talking about: Those cheaper mid-size pitchers, usually plastic, that serve beer and / or iced tea.

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Q: A narrow question was presented in the libel complaint: Did the jury find, as reported by the network, that Trump was held civilly liable for raping Ms. Carroll? The jury did not so find. The jury apparently was instructed to use the applicable definition of rape under NY law. The judge's comments about general public views on the meaning of "rape" do not change the situation. While there is very wide latitude in speaking about a public official, a direct incorrect allegation that anyone, famous or not, committed a specific heinous crime is outside of that latitude. George Stephanopoulos' statement was reckless and he and the network should have known better. The facts that Trump is a sexual predator, amoral, a misogynist, a congenital liar, an ignorant oaf, a conman, and contemptuous of the rule of law do not change the analysis. This is asymmetric lawfare. If people who are actually invested in our justice system are willing to ignore the law because the person prevailing in a case is a scumbag who has no such concerns, we ultimately lose. –L. Miller.

A: It was not reckless. Trump is nitpicking: It was a matter of parsing semantics. The judge’s testimony that it was rape as virtually everyone defines rape would have been devastating to the plaintiff.

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Q: I am absolutely terrified of the ramifications of this unwarranted settlement by ABC. I can't imagine how Mr. Stephanopoulos is feeling today. He's the only real journalist IMHO on GMA, which I religiously have watched because I think his news delivery and interviews are spot on. Between this and Jeff Bezos' "selling out" of The Washington Post, which I also read religiously, we're on a dangerous path. I'm a lifelong journalist and journalism educator. These are not examples I would hold up to my class as fine journalistic acts. They are shameful and put us on a terrible slippery slope. Thank you for this post.-- Kate M.

A: And thank you for being scared. I am, too.

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Q: The "technology" that drives me crazy is the voice interface that many organizations force a caller to navigate to get to a human agent. The voice prompts seem designed to offer you a multitude of choices, all of which are wrong. If all choices are wrong, and you ask for "customer service representative," the voice interface does one of the following: (1) it ignores you and repeats the same choices as before, and, as before, all of them are wrong; (2) it claims not to understand what you said, and asks you to repeat your request, which results in you being cycled into alternative (1); or (3) it tells you to use the organization's website, something which you have already tried in a futile attempt to resolve your issue, AND WHICH IS WHY YOU CALLED THE CUSTOMER SERVICE PHONE NUMBER IN THE FIRST PLACE. – John Kupiec.

Q: Yeah. My pharmacy voicemail gives you prompts wanting to know if you want to renew a prescription or find out the status of a prescription. I wanted to know if they had filled a new prescription yet. So I tried that option. They would not advance my call until I told them the prescription number, which of course I didn’t have yet. They didn’t have a prompt for that. I had to speak to a pharmacist, after waiting on hold for another ten minutes.

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Q: I think critics on the left should go gentler on the kowtowers than they have been. These people stand to lose billions, and even more, if they don’t cozy up to Trump. In Bezos’s case his space company could be destroyed, and I expect most billionaires could be prosecuted for tax code violations. I would still like them to stand up to Trump and take him to court if he seeks to harm them, but I recognize that with this Supreme Court the odds might be against prevailing. While we might like billionaires to be saints, we cannot demand this, and I wonder how many of their critics would act differently if it was their skin that was in the game. – R. Lempert

A: This is either logical thinking or magical thinking. Either way, it stinks of surrender. No?

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Q: It's not my technophobia that I find funny, but my mother's. She was employed by Ma Bell way back in the day. She started as an operator, and worked her way up into management before accepting early retirement during divestiture. Her phobia? She did not trust "touch tone" phone technology. Even when the system converted to the "beep boop bing" tones from the clicks of the dial. She kept that damn dial phone until she passed in 1994. And it was hard wired in! Can you believe it? She worked for the phone company but didn't believe in touch tone phones!

A: Very nice.

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This is Gene. We’re down. Please keep sending in Questions / Observations. They will be inspected, dissected, resected, and responded to on Thursday.