Trump May Have Put Us All Into The Cornfield

Peeksville, Ohio? Anybody been there? Anybody heard of the place?

What about Anthony Fremont? Maybe we forgot.

I keep seeing articles that remind me of Peeksville and Anthony. For instance the articles telling us how the Wall Street Journal couldn't allow its reporters to report unpleasant stories about Donald Trump, so they delayed them, and shelved them, and quietly sent the writer into the cold. The unpleasant reporting that was never published was in a carefully researched article about Trump's longtime mob connections. But reporting that would have made Donald Trump angry. And making Trump angry is a bad thing. So it wasn't reported or commented on. But the message was received. The staff at the Journal received the message loud and clear.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that employees comprehend the messages their bosses are sending... is it?

New York Magazine is reporting that five staffers at the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (which is already significantly to the right of the more objective news pages) have left in recent weeks, pushing the right wing WSJ voice from Hard Right to the Obedient Right...

But that's a good thing, isn't it? That's a VERY good thing... (Does that ring any distant bells?)

The Obedient Right is the part of the political spectrum that lives in Trump's pocket, who in turn lives in Putin's pocket. Is it safe to discuss who controls whom? Or who is whose puppet? The president has denied it but most people can see the strings if they look carefully at all. Maybe it's safest to just smile and say it's a very good thing.

There was a major tax bill passed by Congress late Wednesday night. Not a lot of Americans know what's in it because Republicans kept it a secret. A lot of them voted for it anyway because they knew what was good for them, and also what would be bad for them. But that too is a good thing, isn't it?

Then on Thursday there was a ceremony on the White House lawn (which these days feels like it is located right in Peeksville, Ohio) where President Trump* bragged about how wonderful the tax bill was, how it was a very good thing to give many billions of dollars of public money to billionaires, and how that holiday generosity would be a very good thing for regular Americans who work for a living.

Then different Republican members of Congress got up and also said it was a very good thing to give billions to billionaires. They didn't say that it was good to take healthcare away from children but they obviously felt good about it, so the atmosphere was very merry all around. Nobody said a discouraging word. They also said Donald Trump was a very good president. Orrin Hatch said Donald Trump was going to be possibly the very very best president America has ever had, and everyone there seemed to agree.

Earlier, inside the White House, there was a meeting of the cabinet. I'd say it was an unusual meeting except it's already happened like this at least once. The agenda of the meeting began with prayers. But they were unusual prayers. The president went around the table and invited his vice president and his cabinet members to take turns offering prayers to him, thanking him for being so wonderful and talking about how his presidency was a very good thing. Saying it out loud to cameras was also a very good thing, wasn't it? (John Cassidy wrote about it in The New Yorker)

Because Good is the opposite of Bad, just as very good is the opposite of very bad, and it's never a good thing to have to send someone into the cornfield, to borrow a phrase they use in Peeksville, Ohio.

Why is it so dangerous to say things about the president that he dislikes? People always say bad things about presidents. Just think of all the really awful things Republicans said about President Obama. But President Obama didn't do bad things to people just because they criticized him or maligned him or lied about him. That's because President Obama wasn't an angry child. Which is one of the reasons I can say "President Obama" without adding an asterisk.

Of course, in the current climate it's probably safest to say it's a very good thing to have an angry child as our president. Actually it's safest to not mention his childishness at all because being childish is irrelevant because he has extraordinary powers, very much like the powers of Anthony Fremont of Peeksville, Ohio. Safest because he seems inclined to use those powers against anyone who makes him angry, which is what Anthony Fremont did when anyone made him uncomfortable. But Anthony Fremont was a little boy and Donald Trump is really a grown up man; he just acts like a little boy. We don't generally give little boys extraordinary powers but what can I say? It's a good thing we did. it's a very good thing.

Anthony Fremont lived in Peeksville, Ohio, which isn't on any maps of the state because it's located in the Twilight Zone.

Anthony Fremont : No kids came over to play with me today, not a single one, and I wanted someone to play with!

Mr. Fremont : Well, Anthony, you remember the last time some kids came over to play. The little Fredricks boy and his sister.

Anthony Fremont : I had a real good time.

Mr. Fremont : Oh, sure you did, you had a real good time, and it's good that you had a good time, it's real good. It's, uh, just that...

Anthony Fremont : Just that what?

Mr. Fremont : Well, Anthony, you, uh, you wished them away into the cornfield. Their mommy and daddy were real upset.

I remember watching that episode on our old black and white TV. It scared the hell out of me to watch grown men and women behaving like this. Lying cravenly. Catering to this child's evil whims like sorry, pathetic cowards, which most Americans didn't feel like in that decade. As if this little boy was a god or something. But he was a god. The evil sort. He had extraordinary powers.

It creeped me out watching the grown ups smile falsely and talk so carefully and fearfully around this malevolent little boy, flattering him, praising him even when he'd murdered his playmates or one of the adults. Because I was a kid myself it was disturbing to watch the framework of what is right and what is wrong twisted so violently by the adults who lived with Anthony, always with a smile and a soft, kind voice because they all hoped to go on living.

Why didn't they fix this? Why didn't they assert their moral authority? They outnumbered him. They were bigger than he was.

The scariest moment came when one of the adults got fed up and told the truth...

Dan Hollis : You monster, you. You dirty little monster. You murderer. You think about me. Go ahead, Anthony. You think bad thoughts about me. And maybe some man in this room, some man with guts, somebody who's so sick to death of living in a place like this, and is willing to take a chance, will sneak up behind you and lay something heavy across your skull, and end this once and for all...

Anthony Fremont : You're a bad man! You're a very bad man!

Dan Hollis : You think that. Go ahead, Anthony. I'm a very bad man! Keep thinking that! Somebody sneak up behind him! Somebody end this now while he's thinking about me! Won't somebody take a lamp or a bottle or something and END THIS?

Anthony didn't send him into the cornfield immediately; first he tortured him, and us, and the adults all around him. He turned this "bad man" into a jack-in-the-box with his head stuck on the end of the bouncing spring. Then the other adults begged him to send the deceased adult into the cornfield. Then they all told him what a good thing it was that he had done.

We are being terrorized by a malevolent child with extraordinary powers. Which is an evil thing. It's not a good thing, it is the opposite. Why doesn't someone do something? It doesn't need to be something violent. We have legal remedies. At least we still did last time I looked. Is it too late for that? I don't think so, but maybe.

Because it isn't just Trump. Sometimes I see Anthony Fremont's smug evil in the smiling face of Paul Ryan. I see enraged faces on FoxNews that suggest the president isn't alone wishing the rest of us into the cornfield.

And I know that Mike Pence would be the first to declare that it was a very good thing if Donald Trump actually acted out one of his fantasies and shot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue or Pennsylvania Avenue. Other members of the house are egging Trump on and threatening his critics. Jim Jordan, the congressman who doesn't own a suit coat, is one. He's from Ohio; is Peeksville located in his district? None of the adults in this episode of Twilight Zone were actively on Anthony's side, they were simply craven and afraid, afraid of evil and the evil that would happen to them if they acted like adults. That is its own kind of evil and we see it in Congress today, but we see a worse kind, a less passive kind, the kind that doesn't just close its eyes to atrocities but puts on the uniform and carries them out.

I see various kinds of evil in the smiling faces of the Republicans who praise Trump. Passive and overt, cowardly and bold, calculating and hypnotized. I see a genuine evil in the Republicans who every week, every day, turn on the rest of us who count on a moral authority, and on the moral rightness of things, to praise what he is doing and threatening to do and abandoning the innocent Americans he is doing these things to. The Republicans who are working every day to take Robert Mueller and the professionals at the FBI, and our security services who keep us safe from foreign enemies, and the professionals who work in areas of science and healthcare and justice, who regulate industry to keep poisons out of the water and the air, and teachers and university professors and social workers and people of color and abused women and wish them into the cornfield.

The Twilight Zone episode titled "It's a Good Life" was terrifying to watch because it was more real than Orwell's 1984 or Animal Farm. It was real people in a real place. It was familiar. The idea was to shiver and enjoy the momentary fear of it, knowing it would never happen here. But now it has.