A Chaotic Country

 

A Chaotic Country        Gerry OShea

Sean O’Casey’s most accomplished play, “Juno and the Paycock,” was set in the Dublin tenements during the Irish Civil War. The country was in disarray, with reports of internecine atrocities dominating the daily news stories. The play includes a major work strike involving the livelihood of a family member, Mary, who also is pregnant without a partner, and her brother, Johnny, a freedom fighter, is marked for execution for informing on a comrade.

The world that O’Casey portrays is a miasma of sadness and negativity. Shakespeare’s words in “Hamlet” come to mind: “When sorrows come, they come not in single spies but in battalions.”

 No wonder that Captain Boyle, the ineffective paterfamilias in the play, seeing the desolation all around, utters the oft-quoted line just before the curtain comes down: “The whole world is in a state of chassis” (chaos)

I think of Captain Boyle’s pronouncement when I survey the current political scene in America. The country seems to be suffering through an upside-down period where the previously accepted beliefs that grounded the culture have been set aside.

 For example, over one-third of the members of the Democratic party would oppose someone in their family marrying a Republican, and the numbers are even worse in reverse.

We just elected a man as president who refuses to accept the result of the 2020 contest, which he lost to Joe Biden. Showing his seriousness about this unfounded claim, he prompted a revolution among his followers, who still believe that the election was riddled with fraud and the official results were spurious.

 Four years ago, they were fully entitled to lodge complaints and present evidence to substantiate their grievances in various courts. They did so at dozens of hearings in different states, and in all cases, the judge dismissed their claims out of hand due to lack of evidence.

The hooligans who smashed their way into the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021, assaulting the police who tried to protect the place, were tried for their offenses, and over a thousand were sentenced to jail for their violent behavior after jury trials.

Amazingly, Mr. Trump describes them as heroes and has announced that he plans to commute all their sentences the day he is inaugurated next month. Furthermore, his appointees to cabinet and other top positions have to assert that Trump won in 2020 and was cheated of the spoils of victory. This poisonous talk has corrupted the body politic in America.

In the middle of all this chicanery, it is vital to state categorically that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, which President Joe Biden won. This is not a matter of conjecture, open to debate, but the fact that nearly half of the American people do not believe it reveals how out-of-kilter American society has become.

America is expected to continue as a democracy, provided we agree on basic constitutional affirmations. Up to the present, we had a clear consensus about the rules that ensured fair elections, but in the new topsy-turvy thinking pervading the United States, many want to equate winning with losing. The recently elected president accepts results only when he wins – an astonishing statement about a supposedly mature democracy.

This cleavage was very evident in 2020 when then-President Trump wanted to physically confront loud but peaceful protesters near the White House. “Beat the f--- out of them” he told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. “Just shoot them” was his solution. Both Milley and Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, talked their boss out of opening fire on American citizens.

How contradictory is it for the President of the United States who, for instance, as part of his work obligations, looked around Arlington Cemetery, one of the country’s most sacred places honoring dead heroes, and said, “I don’t get it? What was in it for them?”

A year ago, Trump suggested that Milley should be executed for actions he had taken in uniform. Esper believes that he, Milley, and other senior officers could be arrested and imprisoned when his former boss returns to the White House next month.

The point here has nothing to do with the usual fierce legitimate political disagreements between Democrats and Republicans. We are traversing a very different terrain where court decisions are suspect if they don’t please the boss, and political opponents are openly threatened with jail.

The troubling dramatic decline in a sense of national alignment has sent shockwaves throughout the community. A new Gallup poll found that public confidence in the American legal system has plunged.

 Between 2020 and 2024, respect for the judicial system in America dropped by a massive 24 percentage points, to 35 percent from 59 percent. This collapse in the American rating of the judiciary, unmatched in any previous era, indicates a serious erosion of institutional confidence.

Among the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where median confidence in national judiciaries stands at 55 percent, and where countries like Denmark and Switzerland score in the high 80s, America’s relegation to a place below Russia, Iran, and Hungary points to perilous times ahead.

William Butler Yeats, writing around the same time as Sean O’Casey, captured this nihilistic mood of disarray in his famous poem “The Second Coming,” and his words are apropos in this time of crisis in America.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com