Back before our main viewscreen went flat with all- digital streaming, we connected our boob tube to cable and a VCR. In those days—way back, 10 years ago and more-- the VCR/television interface was about the last technology I understood, and so in my personal viewing area/den/library/mancave (a word that did not yet exist), I hooked up two VCRs and a TV so I could tape from the TV and from another VCR.
I taped movies and plays, series TV and a lot of PBS, even some C-Span, plus music performances, poets reading, lots of talk show and other interviews, and so on. I had thematic tapes (50s s/f movies, Truffaut films, Obama speeches etc.) and a few tapes of short clips I wanted to preserve for one reason (or one project) or another.
I can’t tape anything anymore from that old cable-cut TV but I can still play those tapes on one of the still working VCRs that connects to it. Recently I thought I’d revisit one of those clips tapes to accompany bedtime snacks—short pieces that wouldn’t keep me up too long.
It didn’t work. That is, the tape worked. But not the sleeping part.
The tape I found had clips from late 2002 to probably 2010. It had pieces of the kind I was seeking—with Julie Taymor on performance, RSC’s John Barton on Shakespeare, novelist Isabel Allende, film director Gregory Nava, John Cage, visionary architect William McDonough, etc.
But there was more.
There was Harper’s editor and writer Lewis Lapham, author Mark Hertsgaard, and that artist of reviewers John Leonard, all talking to Bill Moyers; and reporter/author Chris Hedges talking to Michael Moore.
Lapham and Moyers discussed the 2002 elections, the first congressional election after the selection of George W. Bush for President.
Remember him? For a long time Bush dominated our political frustrations and horror. He brought us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the return of torture, the Katrina debacle and so much more. He was the iconic combination of arrogance, incompetence and evil.
An icon no longer, though. Nobody mentions G.W. Bush anymore, except as this benign and nostalgic figure who paints pictures and jokes around with Michelle Obama at state funerals. Perhaps we’ve mostly forgotten how maddening and painful his presidency was because we had to.
But then came Trump-- it was like taping over a terrible movie in our memory with an even worse one.
Our Bush years amnesia may have been necessary for our mental health and ability to go on. (And after all, they ended with millions on the Washington mall to witness the improbable inauguration of the best President in a generation or more.)
But this Lapham interview, and others on this tape that followed, preserved the moment, at this point less than two years into that slough of despond. And it’s clear that so much of what we’ve suffered for the past four years was a louder repetition or continuation or extension of what was happening then.
In 2002, Republicans defied precedent to win both houses of Congress. “The oligarchy won,” Lapham said. The winners “represent the frightened rich.” For them, “democracy has served its purpose and run its course. We will now protect ourselves.” Partly by being and becoming so much richer than most Americans.
Lapham observed that Republicans “believe in their reactionary ideology with religious passion.” In his commentary, Moyers noted that moderate Republicans of past decades were gone—they were now “united behind a right wing agenda.”
“If you like the Supreme Court that put George Bush in the White House,” Moyers continued, “ you will swoon with what’s coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the rapture.”
It’s a heady mixture of “piety, profits and military might, all joined at the hip with ideology and money. Lots of money.”
Later in the tape, Mark Hertsgaard discussed his first two books reporting on environmental degradation around the world, especially the climate crisis, and how the world views the US. In explaining how world leaders were disappointed with Bush, he reminds me that before Trump dumped the Paris Agreement, Bush took the US out of the Kyoto Treaty, its climate crisis predecessor. Before Trump sanctioned the International Criminal Court, Bush refused to join it. Before Trump blew up the Iran nuclear agreement and other arms control pacts, Bush left an anti-ballistic missile treaty. In general, Hertsgaard said, Bush alienated the world with American arrogance.
Lapham and Hertsgaard both talked about the US sponsorship of commodifying everything, while Julie Taymor spoke of the dangers of commercializing art. These complaints sound quaint—not because they weren’t true, and aren’t even more true now, but because no one bothers to complain about them anymore, it’s all just accepted.
In a clip from a few years later, John Leonard mentioned how good Republicans were getting at “gang tactics” (quoting a noted Republican conservative.) “If everything becomes partisan,” he said, “it’s a “bloodthirsty crusade” akin to the French Revolution. All hail Mitch McConnell.
Leonard added his laments about the deadening effect even on the language of a thoroughly commodified society. “It’s sell, sell, sell’ buy, buy, buy, that’s it...Gone are scruple, gravity or grace.”
Moyers quoted from Leonard’s book, about how celebrity shifts shape “to reflect whatever society at any given time has been taught to value or to fear.” He asked Leonard what this society values as reflected in its celebrities.
“We’re taught to value the Donald Trumps of the world,” Leonard said, “the money-makers. We define success...as money.”
It’s always dismaying to hear the name you’re trying to escape by burrowing into the past. But it happens, because Trump has been around a long time, building this image firmly in the American psyche. It happened to me a few months before, when I was innocently watching an old episode of the classic 90s series that embodies innocence: “Northern Exposure.” Maurice justified evading taxes through a loophole by exclaiming, “I’ll bet Donald Trump doesn’t pay
any taxes!” So I guess when the New York Times confirmed a decade or so later, it wasn't much of a surprise.
Lapham, Hertsggard, Leonard all mentioned the unholy alliance between the oligarchical elites and right wing zealots, as well as money worship and the dominance of celebrity. Can we wonder then where Trump came from in 2016?
Where he took us is much farther down this path of destruction. But that Trump was so prefigured, that he distinguished himself mostly by managing to leapfrog G.W. Bush to become the worst President in modern American history, if not all time—makes this stuff we had to forget completely contemporary.
The tape stops with Michael Moore interviewing author Chris Hedges, probably about the time that his 2009 book came out, titled The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. This idea didn’t just echo those interviewees earlier in the decade. Books with themes like that weren’t new. There were plenty in the 80s (Amusing Ourselves to Death, for one) and 90s.
Like those interviews, Hedges emphasized the role of elites in making money, wealth and celebrity the paramount values--while killing all other values. But it was hearing his forecast of the outcome in this present moment, that further rattled my perspective.
Michael Moore’s question was well put, though it wasn’t exactly the one Hedges answered. “I wondered for a long time if a society that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, is ultimately a country that, if it doesn’t redeem itself for that behavior, just won’t last.”
“I think it’s dying,” Hedges replied. “It’s composed of a giddy intoxication with illusion—that’s what happens when societies die. The worse it gets the more disconnected they often become. And that’s how you end up with demagogues, and tyrants who promise magic.”
And that’s how we did.
Voted out of office, Trump continues to sell delusions for profit—and it’s pretty clear that’s mainly why he’s still doing it. He’s banking $150 million and counting, just in case, but as long as there is demand he will loudly supply. So far he’s left us with a smoldering government, and half a country that apparently believes these delusions so deeply that they can’t even believe in the reality of the virus that is killing them.
So now I wonder: once Trump is gone from the White House, do we go into a well-earned defensive amnesia? Perfectly natural to let the brain and the heart heal. But it didn’t seem to work out so well last time.
