In the many rings that make up the Trump circus, it can be difficult for Americans to know where to focus their attention.
Gasp at the hypocrisy of Vice President Mike Pence invoking JFK’s “Profiles in Courage” in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed to urge Democrats to abandon impeachment and you miss the administration’s proposed rollback of healthy requirements for school lunches, offered on the birthday of Michelle Obama, who made school nutrition a priority.
Pay attention to the neutering of environmental protections and the president’s disavowal of climate change and you overlook his attempts to “reinstate” prayer in public schools. (“Reinstate” is in quotation marks because students have always had the right to pray in public schools, despite the president’s ridiculous statement about “a growing totalitarian impulse on the far left that seeks to punish, restrict and even prohibit religious expression,” a line that was almost certainly written for him, as it is a complete, albeit inaccurate, thought with words of more than one syllable each.)
This whipsawing of public attention is intentional. By keeping Americans off-kilter and continually amazed, by sowing discord and disbelief through every public utterance, Trump is able to induce, ultimately, a sense of torpor in many Americans, making it easier to go along to get along with their pro-Trump neighbors, to keep their heads down and avoid risking the wrath of what daily feels more like a cult founded on cruelty, isolationism and ignorance.
Ultimately, whatever happens with the Senate impeachment trial and at the ballot box in November, Trump will have left his crude, barbarous stamp on America for years to come, in ways obvious and subtle.
One example of the latter: The recent revelation that the National Archives has edited an exhibit that celebrates 100 years of women’s voting.
At least one image in the exhibit has been altered, the Washington Post reported last week, to blur the name of Trump on signs held by protesters at the 2017 Women’s March along Pennsylvania Avenue, one day after the president’s inauguration.
A sign that read “God Hates Trump” has had Trump’s name blurred, the newspaper reports. Other signs have had words for female anatomy blurred.
A spokeswoman for the Archives says the agency is attempting to stay out of “current political controversy” by these edits. This is a ludicrous statement.
The National Archives is dedicated to the preservation of history and the people who make it, in all its messy, ugly, beautiful manifestations.
Protests are part of history. They are controversial by design because they attempt to disrupt the status quo. In the years leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment on Aug. 18, 1920, women activists riled many conservatives by advocating for economic and political equality. Many people fought diligently to silence these voices, and many others, by looking the other way, supported attempts to suppress women’s rights.
Now, 100 years later, the National Archives is attempting to silence voices of the descendants of those early suffragists.
On the one hand, this disappointing bowdlerization makes sense. Minor bureaucrats, with families to feed and problems of their own, do not want to rankle the president or become the target of his next defamatory tweetstorm.
It’s much easier to stay quiet, to blur an image and history, to pretend the real reason is concern over schoolchildren who will visit the exhibit and see “nasty” words — including one that is medically appropriate — for female genitalia. (How sad that women’s body parts are still seen as “dirty,” which is, after all, another means of denigration and control.)
In the Trump era, the only women who are worthy of approval are the ones who support the president and support their husbands, who always know best, provided the husbands support the president, too. It also helps if these women and their husbands are not brown and speak English as their native language.
These are the unspoken, and sometimes spoken, tenets of Trump, and minor functionaries seeking not to be ground up in the cogs of the great machine will do what they must to avoid being called out. They don’t need direct orders. The last three years have made the “right” course of action painfully obvious. This is how totalitarianism advances.
So while the big spectacles of current politics call out for our attention, we should also be mindful of what occurs in the shadows. For it is there the real changes are taking effect, little ones that will continue to reverberate long after the Trump circus has pulled up stakes and left town.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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