Heroes and Zeroes

Lots of Zeroes, so few Heroes.

HERO: The late, great congresswoman, Pat Schroeder (D-Reality), knew where she was and what she was dealing with when she famously said, “Please don’t tell my mother I’m in Congress; she thinks I’m a prostitute.”

ZEROES: At the most dangerous inflection point of the post WWII order, we point to the long-leaderless House of Representatives that stalled and was unable to address the nation’s most pressing business. For a moment, it seemed the “squishes,” or moderate Republicans, would hold the line against promoting an election denier, but no dice—they voted unanimously for “MAGA” Mike Johnson, as The Former Guy calls him.

Disruption is less a bug than a feature of the so-called Freedom Caucus, whose members sought election only to grind government to a halt.

The Clown Car Caucus was intent on seating Jim Jordan (R-Combover), not just an election denier, but essential to the Trump plan to overturn the 2020 election (he still won’t say Biden is the legitimate president). They happily sent their Flying Monkeys out to intimidate holdouts with threats of everything from primary challenges to death. Much fun was had by all the bullies, including Sean Hannity, who said his patience was running out.

This, of course, is what you get when extreme gerrymandering renders extremists “safe” in their seats. Seats they have no intention of using to govern, something they never wanted to do in the first place. Given their druthers, they’d shutter government entirely, but will settle for laying waste to everything from regulatory agencies to the Defense Department. Opponents of democracy, they worship the autocratic strongman.

RELUCTANT HEROES: After a successful run of intimidation beginning with the descent of the Golden Escalator to the lobby of Trump Tower in 2015, employing the bully playbook finally backfired, and for a single day, the frightened Republican majority moved meaningfully toward taking back their party. Then they didn’t. Chalk one up for Matt Gaetz.

HERO: Retiring Senator Mitt Romney (R-Decency) gave us a peak into the reality of Senate Republicans. From The Atlantic interview, What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate, we learn that everyone was in on the cowardly-joke, and never failed to put party over country: "Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. 'Almost without exception,' he told me, 'they shared my view of the president.' In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler­like psyche." As if that revelation is not damning enough, here’s the coup d’gras: “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” Mitt Romney is a principled, honorable man. He’s precisely what the Senate (and the Republican Party) needs right now, but he’s had enough. “Authoritarianism,” he said, “is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”

Here, thanks to Dave Pell’s “Next Draft,” is our quietly effective Secretary of State, Antony Blinken: “Inequality grew dramatically between 1980 and 2020, with the richest 0.1% accumulating the same wealth as the poorest 50%…The longer these disparities persist, the more distrust and disillusionment they fuel in people who feel the system is not giving them a fair shake.” Republican leadership and right-wing media are quick to take advantage of this alienation. He concludes, “They exacerbate other drivers of political polarization, amplified by algorithms that reinforce our biases.”

ZERO: Next, we look at the dastardly and cynical Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who, through his Info Wars empire, has gotten rich beyond the dreams of avarice selling hope in the form of weight-loss supplements to his gullible listeners. He’s the scoundrel who pronounced the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre a hoax, denying the fact that twenty 6 year-olds and six adults were murdered in their classrooms.

Grieving parents sued him and won a $1.5 billion award that, to this day, has not been satisfied. The AP reports that he spent $93,000 in July alone on restaurants, his wife/employee, and his various houses, but he can’t bring himself to write the first check to the families whose grief he exacerbated and leveraged for his own personal gain. “It is disturbing that Alex Jones continues to spend money on excessive household expenditures and his extravagant lifestyle when that money rightfully belongs to the families he spent years tormenting,” said Christopher Mattei, a Connecticut lawyer for the families. “The families are increasingly concerned and will continue to contest these matters in court.” It may turn out to be small victory, but the court recently held that declaring bankruptcy won’t allow Jones to avoid paying.

HERO: William Butler Yates who wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

©2023 Jon Sinton