The World Series and the Death of Al Baghdadi

There are 63,360 inches in a miles.

For the past three years, Donald Trump, the reality television president, master manipulator of the news cycle, has dominated and controlled the headlines, airwaves and digital ones & zeros like a conductor leading a befuddled orchestra through an unhinged, atonal composition. He does and says outrageous things and before we’ve had time to fully react, he lobs a hand grenade in another direction and we follow like a cat pursuing a pocket laser pointer. With Fox News riding shotgun, the master puppeteer’s unrelenting omnipresence has invaded and occupied American life.

Donald Trump prepared his run for the presidency with his birther charge against Barak Obama, then launched his campaign in 2016 warning of an invasion by criminals from south of the border and Islamic countries. He has subsequently governed by relentlessly pounding wedges into the social structure with a persistent drum beat of us vs. them, “them” being the press, the deep state, the rats and traitors who cooperate with the authorities, the Democrats, the Never-Trump Republicans, or anyone who stands in his way as he moves erratically through the political landscape. “Us” is everyone who supports, enables or acquiesces to him.

Watching Donald Trump deliver a demagogic speech with the sound off evokes Benito Mussolini footage. Every self-aggrandizing, I-me-my boast is inevitably followed by a pause, turning his profile to the microphone, chin up and out, chest inflated, signaling to the crowd it’s time to cheer and applaud. Every only-I-can-solve-the-problem, I’m-rich-I-don’t-need-this-job, I’m smart, I’m a winner, I will clean up this place on your behalf, every shameless I-love-me-and-so-must-you, is an additional brick in the cult of personality wall he has built.

Media dominance, divisiveness and the cult of personality are the three legs that have kept the Donald Trump stool standing. We have now had a three-year torturous diet of this and we are worn out. What was once unthinkable is now routine because we are worn out. Reluctantly, we accept and internalize the new normal because we are worn out. But these same three legs of the stool happen to also be classic symptoms of despotic forms of governance where it is routine to manipulate the news, divide society into factions, imprison political opponents, and cultivate cults of personalities to consolidate and remain in power. 

Listening to the crowd at a World Series game chanting “lock him up” at Donald Trump yesterday, may feel to some like a satisfying payback for the “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton. In fact, it serves Donald Trump’s divisive goals, it’s a victory for his methods. The debate now becomes the liberal Washington D.C. elites vs. the champion of the common man. This debate is not about which policies have more merit, rather who should be imprisoned and who should not. It’s black & white, us vs. them. Imprison the political opponent.

Listening to Donald Trump describe the hunting down and killing of ISIS leader Al Baghdadi, one would think he has learned the rhetorical language of Al Baghdadi himself: “He died like a dog, he died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming, and crying.” That’s the language of despotic leaders, not an American president. No such description of the demise of an enemy leader was ever offered by any Western democracy leader, not about Gaddafi who was sodomized with a wooden stick by his angry captors when he was killed, not Mussolini whose corpse was strung up and stoned and spat upon by an angry mob, not even Adolph Hitler who took his own life in a bunker rather than face the consequences for his horrific reign. After all, this was the death of a human being and a leader of some, as despicable as this leader may have been, and Germany was going to have a tomorrow — the mending needed to begin, and retribution needed to be avoided or limited. Dancing on somebody’s grave is beneath human decency.

Both of these, the World Series chant and the Al Baghdadi press conference, happened yesterday. Both in one day. Had either of these happened prior to 2016 no one would have accepted it, left, right, Democrat, Republican, no one. Not in this advanced western democracy. Yet both happened in one day and neither surprised anyone. Both are indicative of America’s inching away from being a liberal open society and inching toward an authoritarian one. Inch by inch.

There are 63,360 inches in a miles.

If we move one inch every hour, it will take 7.25 years to travel the entire mile. That’s nearly two presidential terms.