Whatever moral ascendancy the West held was lost here today.
Thus spoke American reporter Vince Walker about the Salt March and the British response on one particular day in one location, in the superb 1982 film Gandhi. The Salt March was an act of civil disobedience, rooted in non-violence, that created the momentum and fervor that ultimately led to Indian independence. Vince Walker, portrayed by actor Martin Sheen, was a fictionalized version of an American journalist named Webb Miller. Miller didn’t utter those exact words, to the best of my knowledge, but his dispatch from the fateful day at the Dharasana Salt Works carries the same weight.
The quoted phrase came to mind as I read stories regarding a current adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” wherein Caesar is portrayed in modern day as a Donald Trump doppelgänger that gets, well, what Caesar got on the Ides of March. The play has generated substantial controversy, and prompted at least three major sponsors to withdraw.
Many have chosen to defend the adaptation, asserting that all the dialogue is Shakespeare’s own and that the play is about the fragility of democracy, but lets put aside the equivocations and observe the plain truth: the play is quite obviously meant to mock and deride the President. Doing so is perfectly fine. Mockery, derision, and the like are superb means of challenging those in power, and, indeed, kings of yore kept “fools” in their courts to point out unpleasant truths that many dared not speak. Trump certainly has done little to make mockery and derision seem unfair or unjust, although one might ask what revelations may be found in imitating his wife’s accent.
The problem lies not in the attempts to conflate Caesar and Trump. Rather, the problem lies in the fetishizing of assassination by people who were (rightly) angered when stories about some Obama hater wishing death on our previous President. It’s become OK, or even PC to some degree, to make jokes about this, and it speaks volumes about the breakdown in respect for the institutions and basic structure of the nation.
The corollary is that it’s the very people who claim to have a greater moral authority, by dint of their self-declared greater care for the poor, weak, needy and oppressed and by their (unjust) assertion that those not on their side of the aisle do not care for others, who are exhibiting the most grotesque, immoral behavior. The Left has long claimed the mantle as the more caring, moral party, but its ugly underbelly, exhibited in part during the Reagan and GWBush years, has now become fully exposed, and the raw, palpable hatred for their fellow Americans is no longer even remotely deniable. Nor is it justifiable via tu quoque or moral equivalence arguments. As has often been observed, the Right may think the Left is stupid, but the Left thinks the Right is evil, and that latter opinion is fostering the worst sorts of behaviors and ugliness.
The Julius Caesar story is only the latest in a long string of mainstream assassination porn directed at Trump. We recently witnessed Kathy Griffin holding a bloody, decapitated Trump head, Don Cheadle wished that Trump would die in a grease fire, Charlie Sheen hoped that Trump would be the next celebrity to die, and thousands of assassination tweets on Twitter.
This has been the real story of the Trump Era to date. More than the “we’ve had enough” message from the Trump voters, more than MAGA or “drain the swamp,” more than the shock of Hillary Clinton’s loss, more than the allegations of everything from racism and homophobia to Russian hacking and obstruction of justice, the true tale of today is the Left’s utter abandonment of any sense of propriety, morality, or respect for the rest of America. It’s as if they don’t care the damage their non-compos-mentis desire to destroy Trump’s presidency inflicts on the nation.
And, in a story that’s just breaking, a gunman who, by early reports, deliberately and specifically targeted Republicans, shot several people, including the House Minority Whip Steve Scalise in Washington DC. Many will be quick to dismiss the shooter as a fringe lunatic, even if it does prove out that he deliberately targeted Republicans due to anti-Trump rage, but when anti-Trump rage is an accepted norm, even among supposedly sober and responsible mainstream journalists and pundits, fringe assholes are more likely to act out.
Already, some on the Right are conceding victory to the Democrats and their disruptive, destructive tactics. Already, they are validating the heckler’s veto. Already, many are saying that the Dems have scored a victory in the appointment of a special prosecutor, that they have effectively stalled Trump’s agenda, and that the Dems may very well take over the House in 2018 and impeach Trump on whatever charges they can concoct between now and then.
This may serve to validate the Left’s atrocious behavior in their own eyes, but it’s nothing but poison for the nation as a whole.
In the movie The Hunt For Red October, Admiral Painter observed that “this business will get out of control. It’ll get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.” It’s already out of control, and I fear that today’s violence in DC is only a foreshadowing of bad, bad things to come.
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