WTF HAPPENED?

     I grew up in the postwar years. Our fathers fought fascists, they did not defend them. A Republican president's campaign slogan was "I like Ike" and we did. Most of us who lived at that time were younger members of families who could purchase a car and own a mortgage with a single breadwinner and stay-at-home mom, because 30% of the workforce was union. We were beginning to make progressive changes. Maybe not easily, but steadily. We, white people, were learning to see civil rights differently, most of us too slowly for many who experienced racism. Congress was still investigating Hollywood writers and actors for their student involvement in socialism... in the 1920's. They would have been young idealists at a time when socialism was gaining currency, and capitalism was showing its weakness, but the aggressive investigators did not much care and carried on until the steam ran out, they were unsurprisingly Republicans. By the middle of the next decade, one of the chief "commie hunters", Senator Joseph McCarthy, had drunk himself to death a decade earlier. The history of that time was being taught in school, there wasn't a Praeger University that lacked the accreditation to be a university. Hollywood movies and literary offerings were covering the history of that time, sometimes by metaphore, sometimes openy and directly. The classic film, High Noon was one of them. By the end of that decade, the 60s, writers and actors who had been blacklisted by Sen McCarthy and his lot, had returned to their occupations, in some cases using a nome de plume, in other cases openly. In the next decade women would have achieved something closer to the liberation they sought. Gay and lesbian people who had been persecuted a few years earlier were now gaining some breathing room if not acceptance, thanks to a bar in New York City named Stonewall. And during all of this time our political structure was preserving the New Deal from the attacks of a few, and the Supreme Court was handing down judgements that are now, and will forever be celebrated as advancing human rights. The Justices at that time were not openly being bribed by rightwing billionaires. We had more trust in government and media in those days. 

     Too soon the gears of progress were slowed, then stopped. Today we are spinning those gears in reverse. What happened? Technological progress continues apace, following Moores Law, which states that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every year. The author of that law which the Supreme Court can't overturn, no matter how many wealthy people might wish to bribe them, posited in 1965, was Gordon Moore. Most of us had no idea of a desk-top computer until the mid 1980's. We can now have in our hip pocket all of the knowledge in the Library of Congress, an institution where a significant number of men and women holding office now vilify as being "woke", or "fake news", or Critical Race Theory, or some other epithet that republicans prefer to toss out like sour milk. How did this happen? 

     It took time. It took billions of dollars invested in rightwing think tanks (a term that was not seen as irony until too late). And it took access to elected officials who were too easily purchased. Later on Supreme Court Justices were courted to grease the skids of rightwing ideology. By the time we figured out what was going on, the deed had been done. The media that had opened our eyes to the Vietnam War, that we relied on to expose the Pentagon Papers, who introduced us to a fellow named Deep Throat, who advised Woodward and Bernstein to, "follow the money" in the Watergate probe, were now being labeled fake news by people who were later ordered by a court to pay nearly $800 million to Dominion voting machine company who Fox News had claimed were rigging the voting machines in Joe Bidens favor. In short the real "fake news" was spread by the company who claimed the mainstream media was fake news. The "Fairness Doctrine", that had kept misleading news sources from proliferating had been removed in 1988 and misleading news proliferated on talk radio, partisan television news, and in the new  online media outlets. 

    I grew up in a working-class union family. My parents subscribed to the morning, business newspaper and the evening labor newspaper. In my early teens i delivered one of those morning papers. I was able to buy a spanking new Schwinn one-speed medium-weight bike. I watched the Mercury and Gemini blast-offs on TV while folding  newspapers to be delivered to my customers. We recieved Time magazine and Newsweek every week, the Woodburn Indepentdent local paper each week, Look magazine and Sports Illustrated every month. And we read them. And every night we got our news from either, Walter Cronkite, Edwin Newman, or Huntley-Brinkley from the three television News channels. In addition we had investigative reporters to dig deeper into the 5-minute story's on TV. The business people in towns and cities were members of the Jaycee's, the Jr. Chamber of Commerce. They were people we knew, that our parents knew and we trusted them. I think we were better informed back then, if we chose to be. There were still those who wished to mislead us, or censor what we read. Books would print the famous, BANNED IN BOSTON on the front cover and we purchased those books like they were Ballpark Frank's. Okay, some of us thought at first that we might receive some sought-for adolescent titilation. I was at this time a conservative approaching my teens, and grew to what approached liberal by the close of the 1960s. One book I remember quite clearly, was labeled with that Banned in Boston label. It was about the Vietnam War, titled The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. This was the crucible of my changing thinking. We also lost a president and a presidential candidate during this time, both brothers.  The culprits are still unknown. The point I wish to make is that we listened to people with credentials. We were offered lots of credentialed information with more of those credentialed people seeking excellence in journalism awards and not viewer ratings. Sometimes we questioned the message they were conveying, but our questions seldom went farther than the Letters to the Editor page of the newspaper, and often those letters were written by the people who had no regard for credentials.

     The introduction to Social Media in the mid aughts changed things. People who had no credibility to opine on the things they opined on were making YouTube videos. The hapless viewer/reader of their posts wanted to get in on the game, so they reposted, or retweeted stuff they new little about from people who had no credibility to post/Tweet.  They were people who we did not know even remotely. We watched the daily newspapers in our towns and cities become just one newspaper, the business paper. Later we would stop subscribing to that paper for many reasons, for one because the paper was now owned by somebody we didn't know in some eastern city that we didn't know. That paper would become a shell of its former self with the Sunday paper shrinking to the size of the Friday paper in previous times. The magazines hung on by their broken fingernails, also much thinner than before. Later they would be digitized behind a pay wall, but we found life more expensive than the old days. We would listen to people we didn't know who would tell us what we used to read written by someone who's name and qualifications was familiar. Sometimes they were giving us up-to-date news as a public service, other times they gave us the news the way they wanted us to know. And we got that news from news aggregators such as  Smartnews, or Huffpost. Not all of us were in the know. 

The local Jaycees became the Chamber of Congress that became part of the Republican underworld. They were names that no one in our big cities knew. They wrote big checques to key political leaders, and they did not want to deal with reporters penetrating the veil. They set up pressure groups like The Federalist Society to allow their wishes to get accepted and signed into law, and not to inform in any conventional definition of the word. We had had until 1991, a cold war with Russia and its satellites, with both definitions of satellite at play. We now have elected officeholders and their pressure groups endorsing an invasion of Ukraine by Russia and its president, Vladimir the defenistrator. It's not as catchy as Vlad the Impaler, but tyrants evolve too, just not the cult beneath them. Another authoritarian leader whom the rightwing has welcomed into their hearts is Ukraines president-by-force, Victor Orban. Seriously, the RNC invited him to speak at their annual meeting of the conservative caucus. And this was just fine with the MAGA world. On July 4 2018, a group of Republican Senators spent Our Independence day in Moscow, ostensibly to warn Putin, in his capital, not to interfere in our 2018 election. Among this group was Senator Ron Johnson a strong trump ally. They did not meat with opposition or civil society figures not yet imprisoned or killed by Putin. They were mocked by Russian press as supplicants. Because, why not? 

     This is the state of American democracy today. What's left of it. Led by a crime lord who made his fortune laundering money for oligarchs. His gang made up of sycophants and supplicants who think proudly of their membership in a crime family they perceive as the Sopranos, but who are more correctly seen as members of The Gang Who couldn't Shoot Staight, a humorous novel by Jimmie Breslyn. And they are supported by a party that celebrates gun culture and can only pray when a mass shooting takes place.