Between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow.
– T.S. Eliot

Hurricane blimp Donald

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sitting here in the woods between Annapolis, Maryland and the Trump White House this week I had the distinct feeling of hunkering down in the eye of a category 5 hurricane, waiting on the wall of the storm named Donald to come screaming back into view only to slam into what’s left of American democracy, reducing it to rubble like Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.

People all over the world talk about the phenomenon of the “quiet before the storm,” but most people have never actually experienced it. Having spent a fair amount of my life on the Gulf Coast and covered my share of hurricanes, I know what it feels like. It’s an eery feeling.

One minute the sky is as dark as night. The wind is howling. The waves are lashing at the dunes, blowing sand across the road. Metal and wooden debris flies through the air, airborne flotsam and jetsam.

Then all of a sudden the sky clears and the clouds turn greenish-purple. There is no wind. The waves calm down, lapping at the sand like they do on a calm summer day. For a few minutes it’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. You think: Maybe this storm won’t turn out so bad after all.

But it doesn’t last long. The next thing you know the sky goes dark again. The wind comes back and the waves starting lashing at the beach, eroding the land in both directions. Some of the sand gets blown north of the road. Some disappears out to sea.

That’s how it felt this week when after a week of howling and gnashing of teeth over the Trump-Sessions policy of separating children from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border was rescinded with the stroke of a pen. Everything got calm for a few minutes. Then the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that made the earth shake. Trump’s Muslim travel ban is constitutional after all. Workers can’t be forced to pay their union dues.

Then Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, changing the news debate over night and granting President Donald Trump a golden opportunity to change the court for a generation, sending Democrats reeling into the streets.

Jarrod Ramos

Then an angry, white male named Jarrod Ramos blockaded the back door to a newspaper office in the Maryland state capital city and opened fire on the offices of the Capital Gazette with a 12-gauge pump action shotgun, killing 5 of the 20 employees left in a newsroom that once employed 250 reporters, writers, editors and photographers. The story from here was covered as an isolated incident by every other newspaper online and television news station from Arlington, Virginia to Washington, D.C. to Baltimore.

But how can it be viewed as just another police-crime story when the president of the United States and many of the members of his cabinet, including the attorney general, have called members of the press in America “the enemy of the people?” Just days before Ramos opened fire in Annapolis, former Breitbart News editor and colleague of white nationalist Steve Bannon, who helped Trump win the election in the final months of 2016, Milo Yiannopoulos was going around telling journalists: “I can’t wait for vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.”

Milo Yiannopoulos

In retrospect, you know what they say about hindsight being 20/20. The incident seemed inevitable. It was bound to happen somewhere, like the church shootings in Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee, the school shootings in Florida and Colorado and all the other crazy incidents where nuts with hordes of guns and bullets suffer various forms of political road rage, psychological imbalance and become unhinged — lashing out like sleeper zombies programmed to kill on command when the reaper beeps out the signal.

A writer for The Nation news magazine recently published a column talking about how Hunter S. Thompson sort of predicted the rise of the Trump voter, so-called “left-behind people” motivated only by “an ethic of total retaliation,” in his book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

Ralph Steadman illustration from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Back during the Vietnam war in the 1960s and ’70s, and even in the wars in Central America in the 1980s, reporters felt safer plastering PRESS signs all over their vehicles in a war zone. Not anymore. After 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, reporters are routinely captured and beheaded, in some cases (accurately) accused of being tools of the CIA.

When I purchased a camper van a few years ago, I considered air brushing a news website domain name all over it. But something told me not to do it. In this crazy world, it’s better to operate with some modicum of stealth.

As I watch the softball TV magazine host Jane Pauley talk about the shootings on CBS “Sunday Morning” and offer a moment of silence, immediately followed by the bells of Wall Street and a commercial for Honda cars, I am almost at a loss for words of wisdom. Almost.

But I’m reminded of this McDonald’s ad allegedly discovered by Thompson while he was working on his book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Since Trump loves the McDonald’s Big Mac so much, I figure this is the perfect advice for the one-third of Americans who still think we can overcome the evil of the other third of Americans who appear to just be total assholes who don’t care if the world comes to an end tomorrow.

“Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not: The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

So keep trying Democrats. Never give up. Hurricane Donald may swamp us all in the end, global warming denial being what it is. But we can’t let him turn America into Russia without a fight.