From: januarybaybee@gmail.com   
      
   "Say what you will about Trump, he is not stupid.  He is a smart man with a   
   deep understanding of what stupid people want." - Andy Borowitz   
                                                  _________________________   
      
   How Far America Has Fallen   
      
   The thing with every shocking revelation about Trump is that it's already   
   baked into his image.  I've never met a Trump supporter who did not know   
   exactly who he is.   
      
   RIDGWAY, Colo. — It’s different in the West. It’s easier to feel in   
   touch with some essence of what America is.  The space, so much of it still,   
   so empty, so awe-inspiring, speaks of American possibility.  The boundlessness   
   invites reinvention and    
   prickly individualism.     
      
   Here in Colorado, purple state, split between gun lovers and legal marijuana   
   lovers, the libertarian streak runs strong.   
      
   That’s the bit of the United States the rest of the world finds hardest to   
   fathom. Why the scorn for handouts, the equating of universal health care with   
   socialism, the obsession with self-reliance, the refusal to see that a   
   profusion of guns leads to    
   a profusion of mass shootings?     
      
   Of course a crowded Europe with its wounds seeks solidarity in the name of   
   stability, while America with its wide-open spaces embraces the right to be   
   left alone (at least until you need Medicaid) and the right, whatever its   
   risks, to the next frontier.   
      
   I said it’s different in the West.  It’s not so different in the West,   
   it’s just that you see more clearly what the country stood for in its own   
   mythologized self-image, what it was to be an American, what it was to aspire   
   to some new and exemplary    
   measure of freedom, and how far things have fallen to produce President Donald   
   Trump.   
      
   No part of the country today is immune to American fracture or the squalid   
   Trump wars, to cultural confrontations over identity and gender and race, to   
   the effects of stagnant incomes over decades, or to the narcissism of   
   modernity.   
      
   In a purple state, unlike in Brooklyn, N.Y., or Palo Alto, Calif., these   
   differences press in on each other.  Conversations occur that break through   
   ideological lines. Grand Junction, in western Colorado, voted for Trump at the   
   last election.   
      
   There, I spoke to Robert Babcox, a pastor, who praised the president for   
   sticking to his campaign promises and, “for all the bravado,” getting the   
   economy revved up.   
      
   Babcox called the ban on high-capacity gun magazines that hold more than 15   
   rounds, signed into law by John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor who has   
   presidential aspirations, “a silly law.”  The pastor said he could drive   
   across the nearby    
   border into Utah and buy a high-capacity magazine.   He said the Second   
   Amendment was designed to create a militia “equal to the government to   
   ensure self-reliance,” and that therefore the ban on the magazines should be   
   overturned. He said, “If I    
   can limit somebody on what weapons they can buy, why would I not be able to   
   limit what you can say about me under the First Amendment?  When we endanger   
   one right, we endanger them all.”   
      
   Words don’t kill, I said. Some things are worse than death, he said.  So, I   
   asked, Trump’s great?  No, the pastor said. He only trusted Trump “to a   
   degree.” Someone should take away his cellphone, he said.     
      
   Americans can come together, he said, praising John F. Kennedy.  “I served   
   in the Navy,” he said. “I saw so many taken before their time — white,   
   black, Hispanic. It all hurt me just the same, and they all bled red, and that   
   lesson stayed with me.   
   ”   
      
   The thing about all the shocking Trump revelations — Michael Cohen’s about   
   violating campaign finance laws by paying hush money to two women in   
   coordination with a “candidate for federal office” being the latest — is   
   that they are already baked    
   into Trump’s image.   His supporters, and there are tens of millions of   
   them, never had illusions.     
      
   I’ve not met one, Babcox included, who did not have a pretty clear picture   
   of Trump.  They’ve known all along that he’s a needy narcissist, a   
   womanizer, a lowlife, a liar, a braggart and a generally miserable human   
   being.  That’s why the “   
   Access Hollywood” tape or the I-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue boast   
   did not kill his candidacy.   
      
   It’s also why the itch to believe that the moment has come when everything   
   starts to unravel must be viewed warily.  Sure, Trump sounds more desperate.    
   But who’s the enforcer if Trump has broken the law? It’s Congress — and   
   until things change    
   there (which could happen in November) or Republicans at last abandon a policy   
   of hold-my-nose opportunism, Trump will ride out the storm.   
      
   There’s a deeper question, which comes back to the extraordinary Western   
   landscape and the high American idea enshrined in it.     
      
   Americans elected Trump.  Nobody else did.  They came down to his level.    
   White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d   
   do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality.  They made a   
   bargain with the devil in full    
   knowledge.  So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American   
   today?  Who are we, goddamit?  What have we become?   
      
   Trump was a symptom, not a cause.  The problem is way deeper than him.   
      
   For William Steding, a diplomatic historian living in Colorado, American   
   individualism has morphed into narcissism, perfectibility into entitlement,   
   and exceptionalism into hubris.  Out of that, and more, came the insidious   
   malignancy of Trump.  It will    
   not be extirpated overnight.   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/trump-colorado-purple-state.html   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)