The Persistence Of Memory

Cindy Yang poses with President Donald Trump at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago on March 2, 2018. Photo Via Rob Tornoe

President Trump’s weekend tweets are being condemned as racist not just by Democrats, but by U.S. allies throughout the world. Theresa May’s official spokesperson addressed the tweets:

“The language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable.”

Washington Times

The tweets – and the obvious racism associated – are being addressed in Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany and many other large nations throughout the world.

It’s not being addressed in Brazil, where the talk of the day regarding the U.S. is how Bolsonaro is going to nominate his son as Ambassador to the U.S. and President Trump is expected to nominate Eric Trump as Ambassador to Brazil.

The defense produced for the tweets has, so far, been weak. One example states that President Trump did not directly identify the Congresswomen, therefore he cannot have attacked them. That defense, like all of them, fails on even the most cursory analysis; there simply aren’t that many Congresswomen who are self-identified Progressives, and there is one group which consistently describes itself thus; moreover, even if he were not interpreted as attacking them with his racist rant… he would still be attacking someone. Attacking non-existent people with racist attacks would, in theory, be even worse for Trump because it would conclusively demonstrate a lack of even basic mental stability and should immediately trigger a removal from office. Another states that the tweets aren’t racist because he simply told people to go back to their own countries, which would be nationalist at best; the problem with that is the people targeted, with one exception, are all Americans. The “go back home” is a racist taunt with a history that goes back more than a century and has been used to excuse attacks of violence and even murder.

We have not seen much in the way of defenses offered by prominent Republicans. We have not seen much in the way of condemnation of it, either. The best option they have at the moment is distraction. Pretend the attacks didn’t happen, accept the denial of reality when Trump’s spokespeople simply say that white is black, and move forward.

There are plenty of distractions out there. The U.K. is in the middle of climate change protests which are crippling some city transit today. Italy has seized combat-ready missiles from a neo-Nazi group operating near an airport in its northern region. New Zealand has initiated their nationwide buyback of semiautomatic weapons after passing their legislation outlawing many types following the Christchurch mosque attacks. All of these, and the national political back-and-forth, will be used by pro-Trump forces to push past the charges of blatant racism.

This is the standard under which we operate today. It is the same defense mechanism employed by the Obama Presidency… whenever a scandal arises, push forward at another point of contention and put the scandal behind you.

These efforts work for one reason: people aren’t bothering to remember the past.

Everyone is so focused on being kept abreast of every minor thing in their circle of interest and being perceived as the next great Twitter humorist that they aren’t attempting to retain and build on information received in the past. First in, first out, keep things streaming with no work toward retention.

It’s a drain to continually remind people of what has happened before. So many people are fed up with politics in general that they tune out whenever something new happens.

Don’t give up.

I present you with an experience I had on the day Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. One of my associates sought me out to ensure I knew. He wanted to tell me because “I’d been talking about him for years.”

This man is what I would term a “reluctant Trumper”. He doesn’t like what Trump is doing, but he trusts his talk radio swamis and he believes there’s some grand scheme that he doesn’t fully understand. He has had that faith chipped away regularly by me, but he’s still loosely in the Trump camp, he just doesn’t say so publicly anymore. The shirts are gone, the hats are gone, and he’s listening. He doesn’t implicitly trust me, because I speak against the sages. I also condemn the same thing his talk leaders used to condemn, though, so he’s been listening… first, by paying attention to what I was telling others, and in recent months by conversing with me directly.

The Epstein thing was an example that, even though he’d been conditioned to move forward on all things by the pro-Trump media, he had retained just a little bit of knowledge, albeit at my continued prompting. I don’t know if he’s a Trumper anymore, even reluctant. I just know he’s still not pro-Democrat.

People are being pressured to move past this latest racist attack, even as the world notices and the reputation of the US takes yet one more blow. We must, in fact, move to the next outrage… but it is upon every patriot to recall and remind people of this and the other outrages from months and years past as well. People still believe in their own basic decency. They justify their association with terrible people because they allow themselves to forget the offenses. We must be ready to remind them.

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About AlienMotives 1991 Articles
Ex-Navy Reactor Operator turned bookseller. Father of an amazing girl and husband to an amazing wife. Tired of willful political blindness, but never tired of politics. Hopeful for the future.