![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThis is what makes my head spin: The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture... he has no Republican values ... no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision ...Virginia Heffernan cri de cœur was popular on various social media this week, and it's not hard to see why. It goes on and on, listing all the various moral codes, ethical positions, and philosophical praxis that one way or another anchor most of us to attempts to lead "a good life." Trump, she accurately says, has none of those. She ends:
Am I missing an obscure moral system to which he so much as nods?And I believe the answer is yes. Yes she is. Before I explain what is, I'm going to bring in two stories that share Donald Trump's not-at-all-obscure moral system.
The first is a story flying around the right-wing bloggos about how a lesbian teacher in Florida supposedly banned students from wearing crosses in school. I can't find a mainstream or local news report to back it up. If it's true, it's blatantly illegal. In a conversation with righties, I pointed out
how the ACLU had the best track record with this sort of thing. Righties pushed back, and one cited the Thomas Moore Law Center, which holds itself up as the "anti-ACLU," "protecting Christian students' rights."
The second story was about how Jeff Sessions made some comment about how "some island judge" shouldn't be allowed to block a presidential order. When people protested that Hawaii was a state, and the judge was a respected federal judge, Sessions replied that "people can't take a joke anymore."
What's really happening with Jeff Sessions is that people who used to have to take the joke, who didn't actually have the power to push back, are refusing to stay quiet and pushing back anyway. Indigenes, immigrants, women and GLBTQ folk are no longer putting up with assholes like Jeff Sessions. Instead, they're reacting and saying clearly, they're not inferior in any way, not legally, not morally, not intellectually, and they don't deserve to be treated like crap. They don't deserve to be treated by put-downs that remind them they have less power and that the joke-teller believes the just world fallacy that says they deserve to have less power.
The Thomas Moore Law Center takes the cases the ACLU won't. Why? Because the TMLC fights for Christian students who want to compel non-Christian students into Christian practices, if not beliefs. That if a teacher or coach wants to advocate Christianity, they should be allowed to do so on the school clock and on the taxpayer's dime. The TMLC fights to keep (sectarian) prayers on school loudspeakers, Ten Commandments posters up in schools with administration backing, and Christian beliefs taught as facts.
What do all three of these things have in common? What do Donald Trump's impulses, Jeff Session's "humor," and the TMLC's cases all have in common?
The accumulation and maintenance of power. Donald Trump's only impulse is to accumulate and maintain power. Nothing else matters. TMLC and Sessions may have secondary impulses. It's not a coincidence that the particular Christianity TMLC most often defends is the one with the highest proportion of whites; it's not a coincidence that Jeff Sessions is an unreconstructed racist. Both of them havve impulses that ultimately lead to the maintenance of "Europeans" as howing the most power, the most wealth, the most privilege, regardless of merit.
Donald Trump has no secondary impulses. He's incapable of assimilating messages about beauty, romance, love, valor, honor, or dignity, and applying them to himself. It is about power. It is always about power. It's about nothing else.
