It's Time to Call Out Political Cowards
CLASH OF THE TITANS
It’s Time to Call Out Political Cowards
The story of the first days of the Trump administration will be one of politicians and Americans who showed up to fight for the future—and those who made themselves small and hid.
ERIN GLORIA RYAN
02.03.17 12:00 AM ET
At the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, before the meteor hit, mammals were squirrely beasts that lived in caves and crevices and holes. Because they were so small, our first warm-blooded ancestors were able to survive the impact that killed the scaly predators that had driven them underground to begin with. They stayed alive by being quiet enough to go unnoticed, small enough to escape. A great strategy for a warm-blooded vertebrate, a spineless one for a politician.
It’s easy to hide from the fight for survival if the fight is mythic in scale. And at this particular moment in history, things feel apocalyptic. For Trump foes, the heroes of the Trump period have been cartoonishly good Good Guys like Sally Yates, the associate attorney general who Trump fired for standing up to his Muslim ban—a principled, brilliant woman with a small-town haircut. They’ve been young Obama-appointed district judges with first names like “Ann” and Judith,” or a telegenic trio of diverse women organizing a march that ended up being one of the largest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history. Two female Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have thrown the confirmation of Trump’s would-be Education Secretary Betsy DeVos into question. DeVos, a billionaire megadonor who never attended public school—and maybe plagiarized some of the answers she submitted in response to a Senate questionnaire—really flunked her Senate committee hearing, thanks in part to a grilling from Elizabeth Warren, who is no stranger to yelling at people on C-SPAN.
The villains in this fight have been as cartoonishly bad as its heroes have been good. Jared Kushner, slumlord. Donald Trump’s large adult sons Eric and Don Jr., either of whom could have adequately played a body double in the Christian Bale film adaptation of American Psycho, provided they’re far enough in the background that the camera doesn’t fully capture the weakness of their Trump chins. Reince Priebus, a sniveling, shifty-eyed schemer. Steves Bannon and Miller, who, if literally drawn as cartoons, would be represented as a drunken bear demanding to see the manager at Applebee’s and a weasel issuing a foreclosure notice. Trump’s almost entirely male cabinet of developers and climate deniers and fact-ignorerers hellbent on advancing their own financial interests over the interests of the country. Reports on just who has the president’s ear change by the day, because the White House is all infighting and chaos that spills out into the world, like shock waves from an interstellar impact centered on Washington.
America wants to be entertained, which is why an entertainer is the President. America wants heroes and villains, which is why it’s searching for narratives about rightness and wrongness to slap on a messy, complicated reality. America wants the news to be broken down into a cover-song version of a song it already knows. It’s hard to resist a good battle of the sexes narrative, especially when the gender breakdown of Team Trump versus The Resistance seems so lopsided.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/03/it-s-time-to-call-out-political-cowards.html
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