The view of an octogenarian Canadian looking south over the border…. January 25, 2025
A Facebook message with the question: ‘Do you agree that Trump has effectively staged a ‘political coup’ in the United States?’ evokes this response from Ian Bremmer of Gzero, ‘Hi, no I don’t.’
I wonder
about the difference in perception between an American geopolitical scholar,
researcher, executive and prophetic voice in international affairs (Bremner)
and this octogenarian Canadian English teacher, free-lance journalist,
clergy….the short answer to the difference is ‘Bremner knows’ and this scribe
‘doesn’t’!
As I posed
the question, I have been moving toward the word ‘coup’ for several years, as I
surveyed the various public, political, scholarly and ethical/legal responses
on both news and social media platforms. The phrase, ‘the whole is greater than
the sum of the parts’ rumbles through the corridors of this cranium, not in
derision of the many accurate, detailed, specific and literal reports of the
Trump decade. The obvious, indisputable, intractable and also deflected and
disavowed plethora of injustices, abrogation of laws, defiance of human rights,
commandeering and seducing of loyalists from the Republican establishment to
the Proud Boys, the Oak Boys and the succumbing of highly respected,
credentialed and legitimate voices on cable news, not to mention the complete
‘take-over’ of Fox whatever it is, all of it covered over in a highly toxic,
sugar-coated veneer or sauce of deception, propaganda, seduction and
manipulation paints a picture that, for this non-scholar, of an intended
political and gestating political coup. Britannica defines a coup d’etat this
way:
a
sudden, violent overthrow of an existing government by a small group. The chief
prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the
police, and other military elements. Unlike a revolution which is usually
achieved by large numbers of people
working for basic social, economic and political change, a coup is a change in
power from the top that merely results in the abrupt replacement of leading
government personnel. A coup rarely alters a nation’s fundamental social and
economic policies, nor does it significantly redistribute power among competing
political groups.
Hybrids are
a sign of the times, in cars, and perhaps in government take-overs. Hybrids
conventionally bring together different traits, or features to generate a model
of Hegel’s synthesis (out of thesis, anti-thesis)…examples such as
gas/electric, and genetic hybrids such as hinny, a cross between a female
donkey and a male horse. Paradoxically, in the U.S. at least viewed from a
perch on the 49th parallel, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence,
a hybrid (coup/revolution) has evoked a contrarian ‘rush to the edges of the
extremes. Perhaps, (read, it surely might be!), we have lost the intellectual
capacity or willingness in our public discourse and debate, to recognize,
respect and accept perceptions that embrace paradox, irony, and metaphor.
Locked as we are in a literal, empirical, scientific universe of binary
opposites, Trump’s cult (coup?) may have bested the American electorate on our
own petard….blindness to a complex, complicated even irreconcilable
juxtaposition of opposites. It is just such an ever-spiraling, unpredictable, green-broke
horse that has taken over the pasture, not merely a fox in the hen-house.
Literalisms,
legalisms, medical diagnoses, and empirical data are not either amenable to
imaginative metaphors, nor do they embrace what James Hillman dubs a ‘soul
history’ as compared with a ‘case history.’ The case history details the
events, degrees, marriages, divorces, titles, awards, rewards etc. of the
individual. When applied to a nation, a similar catalogue spills over into the
annals of the history books and the nationalists’ ceremonies of celebration,
remembrance and honouring. A soul focuses on the
inner/interior/emotional/shame-filled/crisis moments of that chronological
history. As applied to a nation, it identifies the most difficult and painful,
pivotal perhaps unresolved episodes of the soul of the nation. And while it may
differ from a case history, it is not necessarily completely different from it.
Politicians
have always coloured the facts with their ‘spin’ on them. Serious divisive and
even irreconcilable and perhaps existential crises, including the many
interpretations and iterations that observers, both professional and lay, have
cast over those ‘soul’ moments, help to tease out some of the more penetrating
and indelible and inescapable, if hidden or unconscious, or denied or even
defied truths of that soul. A nation that has succumbed to the ‘salesmanship’
(or as Donny Deutsch puts it, ‘marketing’) template as the method of achieving
whatever it considers success, stands inevitably to see that template triumph
in that history.
Hillman’s
The Soul’s Code, (p.225) contains these words penned in 1996:
Our
republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into
power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educated our children to
believe the information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to
psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then
an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically
or religiously correct ‘values’ rather than critical judgement may produce a
nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.
Psychiatric
Times says this about psychopathy:
(It) is characterized by diagnostic features such as superficial
charm, high intelligence, poor judgement and failure to learn from experience,
pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love, lack of remorse, or shame,
impulsivity, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, manipulative
behavior, poor self-control, promiscuous sexual behavior, juvenile delinquency,
and criminal versatility, among others. As a consequence of these criteria, the
image of the psychopath is that of a cold, heartless, inhuman being…Like
healthy people, many psychopaths love their parents, spouse children and pets
in their own way, but they have difficulty in loving and trusting the rest of
the world. Furthermore psychopaths suffer emotionally as a consequence of
separation, divorce, death of a beloved person or dissatisfaction with their
own deviant behavior.
And while I
despise throwing around psychiatric diagnoses as if to say we all have the
credentials, training and privilege of using those labels, and their complexity
is rarely contained in their vernacular use, it might be appropriate to borrow
from one observer:
Lloyd
Farrel (on, Facebook Group Posts under the title, James Hillman-Archetypal
Psychology) writes:
The successful psychopath pleases the crowd and wins
elections. The thick glass of the TV tube and its chameleon-like versatility in
displaying whatever is wanted favors distance, coldness, and the front of
charm, as do many of the sleek accoutrements of high station in the political,
legal, religious and corporate structures. Anyone who rises in a world that
worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy. The
psychopath today no longer slinks like a dirty rat through the dark alleys of
black-and-white 1930’s crime films, but parades through the boulevards in a
bullet-proof limo on state visits, runs entire nations, and sends delegates to
the U.N.
Neither a
coup nor a revolution, in the traditional terms, perhaps. Nevertheless, in a
world metaphorically dystopian, disorienting and dangerous, in so many ways, we
might want to listen to Michael Wolff, from two occasions. First, from 1918, as
part of a School of Public Policy & Governance public event at the
University of Toronto. Quoting Noreen Ahmed-Ullah, U of T News, on March 9,
2018:
Speaking
to a packed crowd at Convocation Hall, Wolff recalled a moment when Donald
Trump was still on the campaign trail. ‘I asked him, what’s your goal here?’
Wolff said. ‘He said in a very straightforward way, to be the most famous man
on Earth.’
Wolff
appearing on the BBC shortly after the inauguration in 2025, in a memorable and
insightful moment, said, ‘We have to be much more imaginative when looking at
President Trump!’
Imagination,
however, to a schooled reporter, is anathema to the work, Accuracy,
verifiability, and second-and-third-sourced and validated facts are the stuff
of the reporter’s oxygen. The image of accuracy and timeliness flows in his or
her veins. From a little distance, we may be getting lost in the literal,
empirical technical, verifiable details of hourly, if not instantly recorded
X-quips, while the “X-quipper” skips merrily along laughing at us in our blind,
yet honorable and ethical diligence of fact-checking, word-parsing, and
political and professional anxiety of the most self-sabotaging sort.
Governments
(especially Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama for now) and corporations,
mayors, and even foreign governments like those in the U.K. and in Germany are
fending off slanderous insults from the most high-profile Trump marionette
(Musk) as the knights of the psychopathic ‘round table continue to wreak havoc
with our individual and our collective lives.
Are we
becoming impaled on the horns of our own determination to look down the
telescope backwards?