Neal Gabler of Moyers and Company laments, at Raw Story, what America has already lost with the election of Donald Trump and wonders how much of what is lost can be recovered - even while acknowledging the good work of millions of citizens that has beaten back some of the worst depredations of The Menace and his followers.
It is a disturbing read starting with a plaintive question Louis C.K. asked Stephen Colbert on his show a couple of weeks ago:
“Don’t you want God to show up and say He’s kidding?”
Of course we do, Gabler answers, before noting that whatever powers that be haven’t quite gotten to the punch line. Though Drumpf has scant legislative success to show for his first 100 days, Gabler contends he has made significant progress on goal 1 — a disruption he calls “The Great Inversion”.
”We used to be bolted to certain verities. We used to agree on the idea of truth, the verifiability of facts, even if we disagreed on what constituted each. We used to agree on the basis of morality, even when we disagreed about particulars. We knew that groping women, leering at little girls, lying, stealing, bullying, hurting people whose only crime was powerlessness — we knew these things were wrong, and we gave them our opprobrium. Our society could not have existed without this general consensus.
Now Donald Trump has blown the bolts off the verities that anchored us. And in doing so, he performed his inversion, elevating lies over facts and bluster over moral values. That is a lot to accomplish in 100 days — to shatter not only what made us proud Americans, but what also made us human.”