The playwright Peter Weiss is best known for “Marat/Sade,” and yet it is his play “The Investigation” that equally deserves to be staged again and again. Weiss makes use of trial transcripts of Nazi war criminals for his script, and documentary theater often proves far more compelling as drama than one might expect (cf: “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial”).
Suzanne Lummis and Jim Natal understand how a recitation of an indictment is in and of itself a moment of undeniable deduction. What happened on January 6, 2021, must remain a prominent part of this nation’s meta narrative. If possible, I urge you to attend and ratify the indictment’s relevance to how we will cast our vote in a little over seven months.
*****
As for how the two major candidates for President rank in terms of their performance in office, here are the results of a poll that included both Republican and Democratic-leaning historians:
http://www.brandonrottinghaus.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/108798321/presidential_greatness_white_paper_2024.pdf
On a scale of zero to one hundred, DJT barely broke double digits.
Does D.T. have any idea of how bad a score this is?
It’s one thing to score a 10 in ice skating or gymnastics; it’s quite another to take a test and only get one out of ten questions correct.
It seems unfathomable that the worst ever president in the United States (currently facing a plethora of criminal indictments) should have a chance of being reelected to another term in office. And yet…..
And yet let us review the results of all the presidential elections since I was eligible to vote in 1968, the year I turned 21.
1968: Nixon was elected.
1972: Nixon was re-elected in a landslide; then resigns in disgrace two years later.
1976: Jimmy Carter was elected (and then deposed by a deliberately manufactured surge of INFLATION
1980: Ronald Reagan elected. “Are you better off than four years ago?”
1984: Ronald Reagan selected in a massive landslide.
1988: George Herbert Walker Bush elected.
(Note that at this point five of six national elections have resulted in a set of presidents in which a professional war criminal such as Henry Kissinger can thrive.
1992: Bill Clinton is elected. He proves to be the most competent Republican president of the 20th century, a “bait and switch” expert who is unrivaled by any politician of his era.
1996: Bill Clinton is reelected.
2000: George W. Bush is elected.
2004: GWB is re-elected.
2008: The economy collapses. Barack Obama proves to be even more nimble than Clinton in selling out the working class. The failure to create a national jobs program in the spring of 2009 leaves hundreds of thousands of American simmering in economic misery. Where is the change they were promised?
2012: Obama is reelected, and the banks recover their pre-collapse prosperity. Aging workers discarded by the system between 2008 and 2012 struggle to make ends end.
2016: Stephano J. Trinculo, a notorious blowhard, and the supreme incarnation of all the fascist policies of previous GOP presidents, is elected. by the Electoral College, even though he loses the popular vote by several million.
2020: Joseph Biden is elected, winning the popular vote by several million as well as the Electoral College. His mediocrity is exemplified with his choice of a vice-president. Trump was still popular, but his non-stop excessive claims about his self-importance finally wear thin with the majority of voters, and over 75,000,000 people vote for a candidate who is not much better than saying “None of the Above.”
TRUMP ATTEMPTS TO LEAD THIS FIRST COUP D’ETAT.
2024: Trump re-elected, even though he loses the popular vote for the third time in a row. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Eight presidential elections from 1968 to 2020 were won by very conservative, racist warmongers. Only five were won by so-called liberals, such as Carter, who signed off on giving weapons to a country that engaged in a mass slaughter.
With that pattern, 8 for one side, and five on the other, why would you expect any other outcome?
The most important thing to note is the playbook of the very wealthy and even more conservative factions of those who understand how to destabilize any movement toward government accountability. The plan that has successfully eroded support for Joseph Biden is not a new one. When Jimmy Carter’s administration seemed too “liberal” for the tastes of the ruling class in the United States, the way that his reelection chances were undermined is through the instigation of rampant inflation.
Finally, it’s not as though those of us who are appalled by Trump and his neo-authoritarian goon squad don’t have those who speak up. The part that personally chagrins me is how wrong I was back in 1995 about the youngest of Trump’s future critics. I remember teaching at an elementary school in the San Fernando Valley back then and hearing a fifth grader say that his favorite band was Green Day. “Sure,” I thought, “and how many people ten or twenty years from now will ever remember anything this band does?” Just as I was right about the Beatles and the Stones when I was young (though not quite that young!), so too was that young man. By coincidence, I recently went into Fingerprints, a used record store in Long Beach, and met a clerk who was in the fifth grade the same year I met that very young fan of Green Day. The store had recently had an event honoring Green Day, and I told the clerk about my experience with that fifth grader. It turned out that he, too, was in the fifth grade that year, and he, too, had been an early fan of Green Day. There was a generational shift going on in 1995, right in front of my eyes, and as is too often the case, the old guy (nearing 50 years of age) didn’t have a clue.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/01/01/elon-musk-defends-maga-after-green-days-slap-on-new-years-eve-broadcast/?sh=2a246015334d
*************
“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”
“Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics” — Stephen Greenblatt
About Bill Mohr