Smithsonian

I'm terribly late with this Saturday post, although it's never too late to observe Trumpism's rapid transformation of the American Experiment into a fresh version of such: the regime's first-year experimentation with converting the U.S. government into a rough lookalike of Germany's first-year of authoritarianism, 1933.

Almost hourly do we see another democratic domino fall. For instance moments ago I received Politico's "breaking news" of what by now is predictable as clockwork: "The White House Correspondents’ Association is canceling comedian Amber Ruffin’s planned headline performance for its annual dinner next month.... The decision comes after White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich attacked the association for planning to spotlight Ruffin, who has been critical of the administration."

The irony is stifling. Here's a professional organization dedicated to honoring America's free press bowing to the censorship of unhappy White House thugs whose skin is thinner than Goebbels' and whose brain operates in only one gear: attack, attack, attack anyone who dares even to make light of their neon-blinking inability to cope with what is perhaps America's greatest tradition: the liberty to poke fun at those in power. Soon, or so I suppose, journalists and writers in all outlets will be engaging in the decrepit Soviet Union's tradition of samizdat for fear of feeling the irons clap shut. (No literary model of resistant steel, I'll nevertheless be one ungenuflecting writer. I doubt the thugs will ever have time to work their way down to my obscure level. But if they do, I shall leave my future cell block's address to which you may send postcards. For now, my principal goal is to squirm my way into your pocketbook and extract your willing contribution to this site.)

[Excuse the interruption, this is important. I loathe writing requests for financial support because a) the point of these things is self-evident, and b) I loathe writing requests for your financial suuport. So imagine this request's usual space fillers are in fact here. That much should suffice: Your help is much needed; I'm able to subsidize this site to an extent that is severely limited. So please help out with any amount that causes you no financial pain — that I do not request. Simply scroll to the bottom of this page to make a contribution. I thank you in advance, —PM] 

Yesterday the also breaking-albeit-inexorable news was that of Trump's effort to mimic Germany's 1933 labors "by moving to curb the independence of the Smithsonian Institution," which history-ignorant Trump said in an executive order has "come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology" — another lollapaloozing irony, given that his historical mentor of fascist Germany promulgated a race-centered ideology.

I expect our homegrown regime of do-as-Hitler's-apes-did to soon formally establish its own Ministry for Popular Enlightenment (strike "and Propaganda"), which the aforementioned Herr Goebbels headed up. With it, in September 1933 he created the Reich Chamber of Culture. It was quite an eclectic organ, overseeing the Reich Press Chamber, the Reich Writing Chamber, the Reich Radio Chamber, the Reich Film Chamber, the Reich Theater Chamber, the Reich Music Chamber and the Reich Chamber for Fine Arts. To the best of my knowledge there was no Reich History Chamber, but America's Smithsonian Institution is, had there been one, getting the message.

Under our modern-day dictatorship, the famed museum and educational complex's historians are to comply with an American past consistent with what's seen by Trumpism's grossly distorted lens — all else, "degenerate." They're to undertake "a more positive view of American history," as the Times reports. Trump calls it "patriotic history," which by definition mirrors a self-satisfied national image bearing not truth in advertising but salutes to a past stripped of all undesirable elements, dressed up instead as an uninterrupted paradigm of collective virtue. In Trumpworld, America's history was always the millennialist utopia of Christ's Second Coming, a heaven on earth made possible only by the exceptional wisdom of dead white guys who happened to hold Trumpian "values" before their time.

In his executive order demanding that the Smithsonian stop being the Smithsonian, Trump denounced its "revisionist" method that "seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light." This of course overlooks the U.S. having overcome some of those founding principles, such as embracing the "peculiar institution" of human slavery — an authentic "remarkably achieved" success which came at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, a past to be honored rather than burying it under an inescapable template of dismissing certain historical forerunners which led to the slaughter. On this earth no success has ever come with 100% perfection, which "black codes" and Jim Crow subsequently demonstrated and otherwise would be advisable for the Smithsonian to note to those countless school groups and tourists taking a walk through the institution's halls of storytelliing.

In furtherance of officially overseeing the writing of the nation's "true" history, Trump's newly founded Reich History Chamber — again, somehow never founded by Goebbels —rereleased its Biden-retired "1776 Commission" report on American history, which the Times characterized as "a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism" in the telling of it. The 43-page exercise in the bizarrest historical revisionism imaginable was birthed by an 18-member body which included not even one professional historian of the United States. Sitting on the commision's panel were such folks as a former governor of Mississippi, a law professor, "conservative" activists and a former domestic policy adviser to Trump. Unbelievably dumb yet laughable were the members' findings of historical truths which had never dawned on those who research, teach and write about history for a living.

My favorite truthful reality, long supressed by the academy's "liberal thought and activism," was the commission's comparison of America's Progressive movement to Benito Mussolini-like fascism. They kidded us not, and for damn sure this was news to me. In a bit more truthful reality, fin de siècle Progressivism was a middle-class movement focused on democratic reforms (such as the direct election of U.S. senators and a primary system, which, sad to say, has become anti-democratic), referendums and women's suffrage, establishment of an income tax, the regulation of increasingly monopolistic, price-fixing capitalism (initially, that of railroad titans) and urgings for government action to improve Americans' working conditions and relieve the living conditions of impoverished Americans huddled in the squalid urbanization of a burgeoning industrial society.

Though I possess the necessary credentials I have never "professed" American history in a classrom — I've always much preferred being a writer and student of it — but had I been doing so when Trump's 1776 Commision report came out I would have empathized with New York University historian Thomas Sugrue, who reflected on yet-Muskian-fascist Twitter, "Time to rewrite my lectures to say that ending child labor and regulating meatpacking = Hitlerism."

The Times noted upon the report's 2021 release that Trump was "not previously known for his interest in American history." Unbeknownst to us is what he'd have us believe: that he became an overnight prodigy in its rectification. But another reality drenched in truthful truth is that Trump's only interest has always been in Trump and his glorification. Having returned to the Wolf's Lair, he now sounds and dictates daily very much like the historical lair's original inhabitant. Substitute "Jews" for "American universities" and you can hear Adolf and Joe decrying in 1933 the enemy within and their "hotbeds of ... libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country." This was said by Trump through the filter of the commision's report — which one historian said was "a clear example of the weaponization of language" and another as "something they call history to stoke culture wars." The report, added the latter, "weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences, and both blatant and subtle misreading[s] of evidence to create a narrative" of ...

I'll complete his sentence with my own words — a narrative of Trump's glory having arrived in the nick of time to save America from its internal foes of assorted ideological sicknesses which to-date have poisoned its youth and twisted the memory of too many adults. Trump's message: All that ails us and all those who seek to destroy us emanate from America-hating expertise, elitism and intellectualism. Trump's bundle of lies and distortions are but repackaged doppelgängers of seething Hitlerian hatrfeds and Nazi Germany's larger patholgy of same — both of which decent Anericans fought and gave their lives to defeat, only for us to see resurrected by a historicus ignoramus out to refashion the United States into a Nazified Germany redux.

Trump's Reich History Chamber was preceded by his Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, introduced last month by his bloodless seizure of the Kennedy Center, promptly purged of its bipartisan board and led now by its fǔhrer chairman.

Bloodless is the key and most unsettling description, a poltroonish development repeated today by the White House Correspondents’ Association and, before that, powerhouse law firms that have shown their truer colors of astonishing weakness via surrender to mere intimidation. Hitler subjected his opponents to incarceration in concentration and death camps; Trump is learning that no such whacking brutality is needed when confronting many of his opponents. They just lie down and take it, belching "Thank you, Sir, may we have another."

You bet. There's far worse to come.