Editor,
Former State Department Advisor Eliot Cohen recently gave a blunt, but frank assessment of the current White House Occupant. His words are a warning for worse things to come. Cohen sees in the so-called President “a reprehensible human being” whose “rotten character...plays to the worst instincts,” which makes the man “extremely erratic” in a stunningly predictable fashion. Given the (inter)national predicament, the country is extremely lucky to have “a benign junta” that keeps the “somewhat crazy President” in relative check. Yet even the generals in the administration cannot contain the dangerous “ignorance” of “his (adolescent) ego” which keeps lashing out at anyone who dares to question his impulsive narcissism. A lifelong addictive self-obsession has made the so-called President chronically sick with himself. Hence, Cohen concludes, “He’s a liar, a bully, an ignoramus and a demagogue.”
It does not take a questionable personality to question the personality of another. But it can help emphasize the point. To this day, Cohen does not regret his own reprehensible push for a catastrophic war that was itself based on fabricated lies. Like the “reborn Christian” George W. Bush, the neoconservative chicken-hawk Cohen is proud to be responsible for the destruction of a country, the hanging of its leaders, the torture of countless innocent, millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of deaths. He would never phrase his guilt in the language of the unspeakable truth. Yet, like an imperial impotent man, the professor and intellectual finds vindication in the fact that one day he could safely walk the streets of Baghdad.
In the dark light of the bloody legacy of this country and the “moron” currently misleading it (again), the world can no longer put its trust in the myth of American exceptionalism. In the dire state of today’s “Realpolitik” that would mean the ability to save itself from its capacity to destroy itself morally, politically and existentially — and the rest of the world along with it. To save himself, which is Mr. Trump’s primal and primitive concern, he instinctively knows that war will be the last straw. Everything he says and does is headed toward — in the language of Nazi demagogue Joseph Goebbels — “total war.” Translated into the language of American mythology Bush’s “Shock and Awe” has now become “Fire and Fury” with which the current dictatorship threatens — or as the Commander in Chief (Führer) prefers to say — “promises” “to totally destroy” a whole country.
Mr. Trump loves the language of hyperbole. Everything concerning him suddenly becomes something “the world has never seen before.” Everything he does is simply “amazing,” “fantastic” and “phenomenal.” Given the absurd uniqueness of his psycho-political personality this may indeed be true. In his first and perhaps final U.N. address last month the menacing clown managed to declare war on three countries and insult the intelligence and dignity of the rest of the world. As we now witness whole cities being flooded and incinerated by unprecedented hurricanes and fierce fires we must hear and see in the bloated bodies and charred corpses the gruesome images and catastrophic echo through which the perverse Republican mantra — that the “Chinese invention” of “climate change is a hoax” — resonates apocalyptically.
The sooner this nemesis to reality is forced out of the delusional state of his alternative reality — the Facebook fake news tweets that poison the world — the more lives will be saved. Like Harvey Weinstein — finally — this man needs to be faced with the rule of law. He is the ultimate tip of the peak of the infamous iceberg of decades of sexual assault.
Unfortunately, this kind of American exceptionalism is not exceptional at all, but indicative of a glamorous rape and war culture that condones, protects and promotes the abuse of power behind the hypocritical veil of America’s Dollar-democracy.
As long as to its victims this country is known as the U$$A, the United States of Military and Sexual Assault, the call for revolutionary reform will continue to plague every inch of its corrupt structure.
Joachim L. Oberst
UNM Faculty
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