FOCUS: If Trump Goes Even Lower, We'd Better Be Prepared
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
Thursday, 04 June 2020 12:03
McKibben writes: "Events are now moving at high speed in this country - every day, President Trump and his crew gallop past new lines, so that the morning's flagrant usurpation is legitimized by the evening's even more outrageous improvisation."
Studies of resistance under authoritarian regimes has shown that nonviolence is far more powerful than violent revolution, and it doesn't take everyone's participation to make it effective. (photo: Getty)
If Trump Goes Even Lower, We'd Better Be Prepared
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
04 June 20
vents are now moving at high speed in this country—every day, President Trump and his crew gallop past new lines, so that the morning’s flagrant usurpation is legitimized by the evening’s even more outrageous improvisation. (Firing tear gas at a crowd in order to be able to stand menacingly in front of a church holding a Bible is hard to top, but I wouldn’t bet against it.) A danger of this is that we’re always reacting to what came before. So perhaps it’s worth skipping a few steps ahead, to places where we haven’t gone yet but very well may.
What I’d like to talk about is civil disobedience, and its uses in authoritarian states. I’m not talking about what’s going on in this country this week—I have no more interest in telling people currently in the streets that they shouldn’t be destroying property than they have in listening to me. If you live a life, as black Americans clearly do, in which a police officer could kill you for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, or if you live a life in which the incompetence of the nation’s leaders has helped precipitate an economic crisis that has left you with no job and no prospect of one—well, I’ve been impressed with how peaceful the vast majority of the people in the streets have been. In fact, Tuesday night may turn out to have been significant. Unintimidated by Trump’s heavy-handedness and local curfews, lots of people once again took to the streets, and a frequent chant—“Why you got your riot gear? We don’t see no riot here”—was both a powerful taunt and accurate reporting.
What I’m talking about is what happens if Trump, indeed, goes further still, and manages to make himself a full-on tyrant. It wouldn’t take much. The Justice Department seems to have become his Justice Department. Congressional Republicans seem unwilling to stand up to him about anything; and, at the moment, some of them, such as Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Matt Gaetz, are egging him on. The courts are ever more packed, and the Pentagon seemed willing to funnel troops and materiel to D.C., then participate in Trump’s political stunt on Monday, which is a bad sign. The President’s constant shout-outs to “the Second Amendment people” are not a dog whistle—they’re a clarion call. Even as Trump keeps escalating, one keeps hoping that he’s merely trying to impress his base—but as we near an election in which he trails in the polls, the danger seems to mount. It’s hard to know what, precisely, a coup looks like if the leader is already the President. Try to imagine troops ordered to use live rounds rather than rubber bullets, no social media on which to talk about it, and Fox News as the only sanctioned TV channel.
It seems a stretch, but such things are commonplace in many parts of the world. (Indeed, if you’re black, facing live ammunition is already an outsize reality here.) If they came to pass, Americans would be in a difficult predicament: whether to submit to that rule or stand up to it. And that’s where civil resistance comes in. I’ve spent much of my adult life organizing a certain kind of nonviolent action—I’ve been in handcuffs more times than I might have imagined—and it’s had some real effect on the paths of pipelines and the flow of money. (As it happens, the first big civil-disobedience actions I helped organize were staged from Lafayette Park, the same place that Trump cleared for his photo-op stroll.) But the kind of civil disobedience that I know how to practice happens in the relatively open society that we’ve been living in (and is much harder for people of color). Other people in other places have worked with far less freedom, and accomplished far more—and their faithful chronicler was a man named Gene Sharp, who died two winters ago, at the age of ninety. I first wrote about him for this magazine thirty-six years ago, when he was already well into his life’s work of cataloguing and explaining all the “methods of nonviolent action” that people had used to stand up to authority.
He eventually came up with a list of a hundred and ninety-eight, and could describe in great detail how they had been used, singly or in combination. Some of them are dated—skywriting as a form of resistance—and his list doesn’t stretch to cover the myriad possibilities that the Internet presents. But most of them suggest things that could be tried now: walkouts, silence, selective boycotts, student strikes, wildcat strikes. Some have been made harder by the pandemic (it’s hard to stay away from sports and cultural events if there aren’t any taking place), and some have been made easier (people are already experimenting with rent strikes in many cities). Sit-ins are on the list (and stand-ins, wade-ins, mill-ins, pray-ins); so are alternative markets and transportation systems, the “overloading of administrative systems,” and fasts.
There are remarkable new additions to this list coming from places such as Hong Kong; there is recent learned history from places such as Standing Rock; and, if there are not quite leaders on the scale of a Gandhi or a King, there are nonetheless powerful examples and teachers: Greta Thunberg, the Reverend William Barber. And there are plenty of largely leaderless movements that have stood up and succeeded: Otpor, which brought down Slobodan Miloševi?, in Serbia, for instance. Indeed, a whole new area of scholarship has followed Sharp’s lead, and, in recent years, studies of nonviolent civil resistance have made a couple of things very clear: nonviolence is far more effective than violent revolution, and it doesn’t take everyone’s participation to make it effective. As the Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth has shown, less than five per cent of a population engaged in resistance is often enough to cause huge shifts in the zeitgeist and make it much harder for illegitimate authority to rule.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy for that five per cent who take part. Even in the more benign recent American past, getting arrested and sent to jail was physically and psychologically hard; this would be much harder. The fact that one acts nonviolently does not guarantee a nonviolent response—in fact, history indicates that it often guarantees the opposite. (Though the strange alchemy of nonviolence, the moral power of unearned suffering, can bend some hearts; the images from this week of cops taking a knee with protesters tell a story, even if it’s nowhere near the whole story.) But the calculation should be figuring out ways to fight—and to live to fight another day.
It’s tragic that black Americans have had to think in such terms throughout our history; it’s the definition of both privilege and our current insanity that white Americans now think in them, too. (And it’s certainly a useful education for many about the realities of race.) But, by now, the illusion that something somehow will stop Trump and his cronies from devolving should have been shattered. So spend some time with Sharp’s list. It could come in handy—soon.
FOCUS: Donald Trump Is an Autocrat. It's Up to All of Us to Stop Him.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47190"><span class="small">James Risen, The Intercept</span></a>
Thursday, 04 June 2020 10:39
James Risen writes: "I have a question for American leftists: Do you finally see the difference between the Democrats and Donald Trump?"
President Donald Trump meets with Colorado gov. Jared Polis and North Dakota gov. Doug Burgum on May 13, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Doug Mills/Getty)
Donald Trump Is an Autocrat. It's Up to All of Us to Stop Him.
By James Risen, The Intercept
04 June 20
have a question for American leftists: Do you finally see the difference between the Democrats and Donald Trump?
I have a question for American right-wingers: Do you finally see that it is Trump who will take your guns?
I have a question for American evangelicals: Do you finally see that Trump is the one who will close your churches?
I have a question for Republican members of Congress: Do you finally see that you will be in the camps too?
Dictatorships are built on denial. Dictators take over gradually; each incremental step that erodes civil liberties and the rule of law can be justified and explained away. Sometimes a would-be dictator is laughed off as a political buffoon who shouldn’t be taken seriously. While it is happening, no one can quite believe that they are on the road to serfdom.
Autocrats often enjoy broad public support for their crackdowns. Initially, they target the “others,” while the majority cheers. The public doesn’t recognize the threat until it is too late. The supporters who cheered the loudest are often caught up in ideological purges and become some of the regime’s earliest victims.
After nearly four years in office, it is impossible to miss what Trump truly is. He is a psychopath who lusts for dictatorial powers. He has jettisoned everyone from the government who might get in his way. He is now surrounded by enablers in jackboots like Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Gen. Mark Milley, a lickspittle who claims to be an American military officer, strolled through the streets of Washington, D.C. on Monday night with Trump and Barr while U.S. military personnel were illegally being used to attack protesters and shove them out of the way so that Trump could pose for a photo holding a Bible in front of graffiti-covered St. John’s Episcopal Church. The men had the look of coup plotters bent on seizing the government in the dark of night.
That same evening, military helicopters hovered low over Washington, just over the heads of demonstrators who were protesting the May 25 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. The noise and downward air blasts from the helicopters were used to disperse crowds. (Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said that the Pentagon asked Maryland and Virginia for troops without the knowledge of the D.C. government.) It was one of the most shameful episodes involving the use of the U.S. military in the nation’s capital since 1932, when the Army infamously used tanks and tear gas to attack protesters known as the “Bonus Army,” World War I veterans camped out to demand long-promised bonuses.
Trump gave away his game Monday night. A scheming man of no moral convictions, he figured that holding a Bible would be enough to rally his white evangelical base.
He said nothing as he stood, Bible in hand, for the photographers in front of the church, but it was easy to guess what he was thinking. He was probably thinking that evangelicals are chumps, morons who always fall for his cheap tricks. It’s not hard to discern that Trump looks down on evangelicals, resents them for how easy it is to manipulate them, and will turn on them as soon as he no longer needs them.
Washington Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde readily saw through Trump after his photo-op in front at St. John’s. “The president just used the Bible, our sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” she said.
The next day, Trump stood for photos at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, doubling down on his shabby game of exploiting religious iconography. This time, he was going for conservative Catholics, rather than evangelicals, but the act was the same. The Catholic archbishop of Washington quickly attacked Trump’s visit to the shrine, just as Budde had attacked his photo-op in front of St. John’s the day before.
Meanwhile, in the White House Rose Garden on Monday, the president vowed to protect “Second Amendment rights.” Once again, Trump proved that he thinks his supporters are idiots who can be exploited with simple, coded phrases. The gun rights activists who rave enthusiastically about giving Trump expansive powers may soon have troops knocking at their doors as helicopters hover overhead. When that happens, they may feel, too late, an unexpected kinship with the protesters they now disparage.
Trump bared his authoritarian intentions in a conference call with state governors Monday, in which he berated them for being weak in the face of protests, demanding that they “dominate” the demonstrators, while threatening to send troops to their states if they didn’t accede to his demands. Trump also talked that day by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin; maybe he was getting pointers on how to crush dissent.
Trump is speeding down the path toward dictatorship because what remains of the Republican Party is eager for him to grab power. It is now a white identity party, filled with aging white people who fear the demographic trends of increasing diversity. They don’t like America as it now exists, and they want Trump to destroy the rules and laws that protect minorities, the poor, and the disadvantaged.
On Monday, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and Trump acolyte, offered a typical Republican response to the protests when he called for all the lethal tools of the global war on terror to be brought home and turned on American protesters. “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” Gaetz tweeted Monday. Twitter restricted access to the Gaetz tweet, labeling it a glorification of violence.
By advocating for an end to the rule of law, Republicans like Gaetz will find themselves surviving at the whim of Trump. That’s when the jokes about drones and Gitmo won’t seem so funny to them.
Finally, for American leftists who don’t see any difference between the Democrats and Trump — and who might even prefer Trump because he is destroying the centrist status quo, thus creating an opening for the left — it is time to face the cold facts of history.
Consider the case of Ernst Thälmann.
Thälmann was the leader of the German Communist Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s and saw the center-left German Social Democratic Party, rather than Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, as his main political enemy. Thälmann did everything he could to undermine the Social Democrats, who he called “social fascists,” in order to destroy the liberal status quo in the Weimar Republic and set the conditions for a communist revolution. The deep political divide between the center-left and the left in Germany in the early 1930s helped enable Hitler’s rise.
After Hitler came to power, Thälmann was arrested and imprisoned. He was later transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was shot by the SS on Hitler’s orders.
RSN: Who Will Confront Trump's KKK/Gestapo at the Polls This Fall?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Thursday, 04 June 2020 08:30
Wasserman writes: "Now that Trump is sending actual troops into our streets, the shape of his planned coup d'état is becoming ever clearer."
Members of the KKK hold flags in Charlottesville, Virginia. (photo: Chet Strange/Getty)
Who Will Confront Trump's KKK/Gestapo at the Polls This Fall?
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
04 June 20
ow that Trump is sending actual troops into our streets, the shape of his planned coup d’état is becoming ever clearer.
A critical piece will be an outright armed assault on the polling places during this fall’s election.
Trump’s GOP has already raised $20 million for anti-democracy lawsuits. While claiming the fall election will be “rigged,” Trump’s minions say they’ll raise a 50,000-strong vigilante army to terrorize “suspicious” (i.e., young, non-white, non-millionaire) voters at the polls.
Here’s the premise:
On November 3, thousands of KKK/Gestapo-style “Trump volunteers” will swarm over the usual long lines in critical swing state/minority-heavy precincts. We’ve seen their neo-Nazi ilk in Charlottesville, among the Proud Boys, etc.
Many will be armed and dressed in military garb. Lacking legal credentials, but likely at gunpoint, they’ll demand ID and other “proof” of voter qualifications.
Their purpose will be to drive away potential anti-Trump voters and turn the election into chaos.
This country has a long history of organized, violent assault at the polls. In the 1800s, countless black citizens were murdered on election day or just prior because they intended to vote. They were routinely shot or lynched by the Ku Klux Klan and other White Supremacist terrorists.
Historians often portray the slaughter as random racism. But KKK terror/lynching has been very political, primarily aimed to undermine the black community’s potential power.
Team Trump clearly intends to do it again this fall.
There’s been an early warning. Last year the gerrymandered Ohio Legislature passed a $1 billion bailout for two dying nuke reactors on Lake Erie. Outraged opponents petitioned for a statewide referendum to overturn the hated rip-off.
Polls showed a popular vote would bury the bailout while arousing a strong left constituency for the 2020 election.
But signature gatherers working to get the issue on the ballot were physically assaulted by “blockers” – Trump terrorists. With no police protection, the campaign failed.
In Ohio 2004, Republican operatives, with state approval, invaded African-American precincts to terrorize voters.
This year, expect much worse. Trump’s GOP will deploy trained, highly-paid professionals to turn the election to chaos. Except where there may be students, they will NOT be assaulting white precincts.
Trump screams at Vote by Mail (except in red states, and when he and his family themselves vote). Any ballot cast by anyone who is not a white-millionaire-Republican is considered “fraudulent.”
GOP operatives are now denying mail-in ballots to citizens of youth and color. Where election-day lines develop, Trump’s thugs (along with the Coronavirus) will prey. It will be a very public lynching.
To fight back, we must restore to the voter rolls the 16 million citizens Trump has already purged. They must be reached, restored, and made ready to vote.
All eligible voters must get a ballot well before election day. They should be mailed or walked into election centers far before November 3rd. Election monitors must see that the ballots are properly checked in and protected.
For voters coming in person to the polls, there must be sufficient numbers of paper ballots available. Election protectors must be there to guard both the voters and the vote counters.
Trained in nonviolence, election protectors need to seriously outnumber Trump’s KKK/Gestapo and be willing to stare down the barrels of their guns.
Throughout history, in the US and world, countless citizens have been assaulted and murdered for far less than the nonviolent eviction of a demented dictator.
There are barely five months until election day. There is nothing Trump won’t do to become president for life.
Troops are already in the streets. The coup is in progress. The fall election must be protected.
What will you do about it?
The conclusion to Harvey Wasserman’s People’s Spiral of US History awaits Trump’s departure. Wasserman convenes the National COVID-19 Emergency Election Protection Zoom every Monday; contact him via www.solartopia.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
How American Cities Were Reduced to Esper's "Battlespace": From Fallujah to Minneapolis
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51519"><span class="small">Juan Cole, Informed Comment</span></a>
Wednesday, 03 June 2020 13:17
Cole writes: "Bush's war of aggression contained within itself the accumulated evil of the whole, and now that evil is spreading out to turn us all into Fallujans."
Military police stand guard outside the White House as people gather to protest the death of George Floyd, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Olivier Douliery/Getty)
How American Cities Were Reduced to Esper's "Battlespace": From Fallujah to Minneapolis
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
03 June 20
he Bush administration’s war of aggression on and military occupation of Iraq that began in 2003 shifted the United States to a militaristic society. Some 2.7 million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, an astonishing number. The Bush administration began the practice of sending to civilian police departments military equipment no longer needed in Iraq– everything from Kevlar vests to armored vehicles. Community policing in some towns and cities gave way to the spectacle of militarized police, heavily armed and armored, and inevitably separated from the public they were supposed to serve and protect.
The Bush administration spent trillions on the unprovoked and worthless Iraq War, money that could have been used to train and finance minority university students and entrepreneurs. At the same time, it cut taxes on the wealthy, which is a way of saying that it cut government services for the middle and working classes.
I grew up in a military family, had uncles who fought in WW II, and have nothing but respect for Veterans and active duty service personnel. When I’ve been privileged to address US military audiences, I’ve felt honored to do so. So in this column I am not putting them down in any way. I am, however, putting down their civilian bosses.
The Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, was a civilian bureaucrat during those wars (though he had served with distinction as an infantry officer in the Gulf War). As a Bush administration official (deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy), he breathed in the atmosphere of illegality created by the 2003 war of aggression. On Monday, he told the nation’s governors that “I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was present on the call with the governors, during which Trump threatened to violate Posse Comitatus by sending in the US army to the states to do law enforcement over the heads of the governors. Milley has a duty to say that he will not obey such an illegal order. Actually in 1958 Congress specified a two-year prison term for anyone who acted as Trump said he would act.
Then Esper and Milley accompanied Trump on his Great March from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church after Bill Barr ordered military police illegally to attack peacefully assembled protesters from Lafayette Square.
Esper had no business being involved in the march on on St. John’s church, where Trump had had military police tear-gas clergymen.
James Miller, himself a former undersecretary of defense for policy, resigned from the Defense Advisory Board in protest over Esper’s involvement, which he called a violation of Esper’s oath of office.
But above all Gen. Milley should resign for having been present during an unconstitutional act of repression. Milley gives evidence of being what is called in the trade a “weasel,” of giving his superior whatever he wants. We may well have a constitutional crisis in the beginning of November, and citizens of the American Republic have a right to know that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is above the partisan fray and loyal to the Constitution. After Monday’s events, I don’t think we have that assurance.
Where did this way of thinking even come from?
In 2003 when Bush aggressively made war on Iraq and militarily occupied the city, initially a lot of Iraqis were on the fence. In the city of Fallujah, then about the population of Miami, Fl., people gradually turned against the Occupation. The US military took over a school as a base, and parents complained that it would ever after make their children a target. The US colonels wouldn’t listen. There were crowd protests. Someone used the demonstration as a pretext and opportunity to fire on US service personnel. They fired back. From that incident things spiraled out of control. People in Fallujah were Sunni Arabs and were religiously conservative. They sympathized with Palestinians and knew that US was backing Ariel Sharon in his efforts to repress them. People became increasingly radicalized. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid terrorist organization gained a foothold. In spring of 2004 4 contractors were killed, infuriating George W. Bush.
After his reelection, Bush was determined to make Fallujah safe for patrolling US soldiers. I am not sure it ever really was.
He launched a major invasion of the city. We are told that the US Air Force played an important role through “precision bombing.” Rebecca Grant writes, “For several weeks before the main assault, air strikes and artillery fire targeted key sites in the city as they were identified. The hunt for insurgents evolved into battlespace shaping.”
What isn’t said is that most of Fallujah’s residents ended up being displaced, many living in tents in the desert, and much of the city was reduced to rubble. That is “battlespace shaping” for you.
Esper clearly thinks of Cleveland and Oakland as “Fallujahs,” as “battlespaces” departing from the “right kind of normal.” People in Fallujah had resented being invaded and ruled by foreigners who reduced them to 65% unemployment. Some 40 million Americans just lost their jobs, in part because of the ineptitude of the administration of which Esper forms a part (South Korea is better governed and did not close down, using large scale testing, contact tracing, and mask-wearing instead).
A significant part of the American elite was shaped by Bush’s wars to think about dissidence as the equivalent of insurgency and to see challenges to the status quo as illegitimate.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg concluded, “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Bush’s war of aggression contained within itself the accumulated evil of the whole, and now that evil is spreading out to turn us all into Fallujans.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Wednesday, 03 June 2020 12:07
Boardman writes: "With the country in a prolonged and deepening state of psychic numbing, Trumpian distractionism appears to be at its most effective."
Blue Angels conduct a flyover to honor the first responders. (photo: AP)
Failing to take control of the public health situation, what were they thinking in the White House? Maybe something like: OK, let’s see, what would be a really good distraction from everyone pointing their fingers at us – how about a deeply meaningful way to honor medical personnel who have risked their lives and suffered higher mortality than the rest of us for the past three months and, probably, well into the future?
How about a whole bunch of flyovers across the nation by military warplanes designed to kill millions in moments? Perfect! And no chance of infection of the pilots! As President Trump put it on April 22:
I'm excited to announce that in the coming weeks, the Air Force Thunderbirds – are incredible – and the Navy Blue Angels, equally incredible, will be performing air shows over America's major cities. What we're doing is we're paying tribute to our front line health care workers confronting COVID. And it's really a signal to all Americans to remain vigilant during the outbreak. This is a tribute to them, to our warriors. Because they are equal warriors to those incredible pilots and all of the fighters that we have for the more traditional fights that we win and we win.
The next day the Thunderbirds and Blue angels combined for a joint flyover in Pensacola, Florida, where the Blue Angels are based. A dozen warplanes performed in the Pensacola flyover, at an estimated cost of $40,000 per hour, per plane. In all, the event cost more than half a million dollars.
Although Trump was taking credit for this display of American military might as a gesture to life-threatening health care, the whole project was planned, packaged, and promoted by the American military for its own purposes.
On April 11, almost two weeks before Trump announced the idea, the Pentagon put on a prototype in Las Vegas. The U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron Thunderbirds performed an eight-plane flyover in Las Vegas, near the Nellis Air Force Base. “It is an honor to fly for the Americans at the forefront of our nation’s fight against the coronavirus,” said Lt. Col. John Caldwell, Thunderbirds commander and leader, in the official Air Force announcement, which also urged spectators not to gather together to watch the airshow but to view it from the safety of their backyards. The event cost an estimated $320,000.
Two days after Trump’s announcement, the Pentagon had already managed to schedule the Blue Angles, the Thunderbirds, and other units (including the Goodyear Blimp) for more than 100 events almost daily through May 25 in at least 41 states.
Looking forward to the April 30 Utah flyover, a rare dissent came from Seth Jarvis, retired director of the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City. Jarvis wrote to the Deseret News:
I love aviation. Chuck Yeager signed my private pilot log book. To me, the National Air and Space Museum is a holy place. But when I read that on the afternoon of April 30 a trio of F-35 fighters from Hill Air Force Base will be flying up and down Utah in an effort to cheer us up, I cannot help but think about the insanity of it all….
I will stand in my driveway Thursday afternoon, wearing a home-sewn face mask, and admire the planes as they fly down the Salt Lake Valley. But as I watch them, I will be thinking about our nation’s deeply irrational and dysfunctional priorities.
In Arizona on May 1, at least 15 U.S. Air Force and National Guard warplanes conducted an hour or more of flyovers around Phoenix. The planes included seven F-35s, seven F-16s, and a KC-135 tanker. Air Force Times predictably reported that “Air Force Brig. Gen. Todd Canterbury said the participating military personnel are honored to extend heartfelt gratitude to health care workers and others fighting the outbreak.” The 15-plane air show cost an estimated $600,000.
Media coverage of these flyovers was largely local and fawning. Like most American politicians, reporters and editors chose to take the story at the face value presented by the White House, without asking awkward questions about the obvious absurdities of flyovers honoring people who were underpaid, under-protected, and short of vital supplies. One exception was Reason magazine on May 5: “Empty displays of ritual militarism are always a waste of time, money, and goodwill, but especially during a pandemic.” However the typical media tone was more like this coverage from Mass Live on May 4:
Two military demonstration teams, the Air Force Thunderbirds and Navy Blue Angels, have been making flyovers of American cities over the past few weeks in an effort to thank frontline workers and first responders. Those teams flew over New York and New Jersey last week and Baltimore, Washington and Atlanta over the weekend.
On May 6, the Colorado Air National Guard took almost two hours to perform a statewide flyover. The Denver Post joined in the standard cheerleading in reporting the event: “The flyover is part of a national effort to boost morale as the pandemic causes severe health and economic impacts.” Colorado went on having flyovers on May 14 (30 planes over Denver) and May 15 (Air National Guard over the western Rockies), as boosted by Colorado Public Radio: “Flyovers have emerged as a way to boost morale and honor front line health workers during the coronavirus pandemic.”
That’s public radio-style lying by omission. Yes, the flyovers “emerged,” but not out of nowhere. The Air Force designed them as self-promotion exercises. Then Trump co-opted them as stealth commercials for his re-election. Media collusion takes the form of pretending these flyovers are all about boosting morale, without asking any medical people if their morale was boosted. The Colorado air extravaganza, featuring close to 40 planes cost in all about $1.6 million.
Also on May 6, the Massachusetts Air National Guard performed statewide flyovers with a team of four F-15C Eagles at an estimated cost of $160,000. Mass Live reported the story slightly off-script, but with proper obeisance: “The flyover, which took place on National Nurses Day, was a part of Operation American Resolve, a nationwide salute to those supporting COVID-19 response efforts. Air Force units around the country took part in similar events.” The report included pictures showing mostly women, wearing masks, but not social distancing as they pointed their cameras skyward.
One might think that flyover tributes to medical workers were so ridiculous on their face that the public outcry – or better, laughter – would have stopped them in their tracks. No such thing has happened. It’s all but impossible to find any objection from any Senator, Representative, Governor, or anyone else with the authority to spend tax dollars where they’re most needed. This is a national demonstration of quisling leadership.
I do not share the enthusiasm of some people for the flyover "salute" to Vermont hospital workers by the new F-35 fighter bombers yesterday. While I am no longer affiliated with the local hospital I am certain that not everyone employed there felt supported by the militaristic display that took place. By coincidence I saw them roaring over Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, VT as I was driving past. These bombers are designed to kill people and are a prime example of poor federal budget priorities. At a time when Personal Protective Equipment is being hoarded by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and allocated according to who kisses the butts of the fascist Trump administration the most even the money spent on fuel to fly these money wasting devil machines around could be much wiser spent to pay for ventilators or PPEs, or to keep the United States Postal Service operating. People are being drawn into this ultra-nationalistic frenzy by Trump and his cronies as a distraction from their bumbling incompetence, corruption and perverse decision making in a full range of areas.
Vermont’s May 22 flyover involved four F-35s taking about an hour to pass over 16 hospitals around the state. Contrary to state health guidelines, the air show drew crowds in several locations. According to the Vermont Air National Guard, the air show cost about $166,000.
In typical fawning fashion by officials and media, the Burlington Free Press reported with no hint of irony: “The Air Force — and not Vermont — paid for an airborne, statewide salute to coronavirus front-line workers Friday, Gov. Phil Scott said.” He made no mention of the homeless Vermonters, or the hungry Vermonters, or the unemployed Vermonters, or even the sick Vermonters the U.S. nuclear bombers passed over in their “tribute.”
On May 25, Memorial Day, California’s flyover consisted of a single HC-130J Combat King II over northern California. The state has had several previous, multi-plane flyovers. The aggregate cost of California flyovers is more than $2 million.
With the country in a prolonged and deepening state of psychic numbing, Trumpian distractionism appears to be at its most effective. The message seems to be: Look up at the sky, pay no attention to what happens on the ground. Or in Trump’s words: “I want to see those shows. I’ve seen it many times and I can’t get enough.”
William Boardman has been writing for Reader Supported News since 2012. A collection of his essays, EXCEPTIONAL: American Exceptionalism Takes Its Toll, was published in September 2019 and is available from Yorkland Publishing of Toronto. He is a former Vermont assistant judge.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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