By the way, regarding that Popula piece about His Muskness:
"What if there were a rapidly accumulating body of evidence that Elon Musk is an utter boob who has bluffed his way into a position of world-changing wealth and influence?"
Nailed it!
There really should be a satirical movie about all this. I'm imagining a cross between "Citizen Kane" and "Being there". I suspect Armando Iannucci could do it justice.
I wonder how much the Republicans are paying this clown.
Just kidding. (Probably.) Presumably, Von Drehle is just another high-status idiot (as Stephen Colbert described the character he played on "The Colbert report"), a person who has spent his life cocooned in money and status (I note he's a graduate of Oxford*) and thus has never been forced to face the fact that he understands very little about how the world actually works. As George Orwell quipped of such absurdities, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
In the real world, failure to punish blatant criminality, particularly political criminality, has baleful, long-term consequences. Ironically, establishment organs like the WaPo frequently wring their hands about Americans' "loss of faith in government"; here, for example, is such a WaPo piece from 2018 (which I'm citing merely because it's the first such piece to which DuckDuckGo referred me - there's plenty more where it came from):
That piece is about the impact of the American war in Vietnam and the mendacity of the American government regarding it on Americans' faith in government. Yet it never seems to occur to the WaPo and its ilk that the abject failure of the American government to punish blatant criminality by powerful men (they are, of course, men, and rich white ones, too) may well have contributed at least as much to Americans' lack of faith in government as the Vietnam war and other such fiascos.
The USA has an appalling history of this kind of corruption. For example, it let Jefferson Davis, Robert Lee, and other ringleaders of the confederacy - men who were as guilty of treason as it is possible to be - walk away free. More recently, and highly relevant to what has happened since, it let Richard Nixon retire in wealth and comfort, never suffering anything like what an ordinary American would suffer for orchestrating a burglary, and suffering nothing at all for his much worse crimes, such as sabotaging the 1968 Paris peace talks. Basically, Tricky Dick got away with it all, as did many of his henchmen, some of whom (e.g., Roger Stone) have continued shitting on the country to this day. Likewise Ronald Reagan and his henchmen got away with waging an illegal proxy war in Central America. Likewise George Bush Jr. and his henchmen got away with waging a war under flagrantly false pretenses in Iraq. Etc. Ad nauseam, with emphasis on "nauseam".
This kind of thing makes it as obvious as obvious can be that "equality under the law" is a polite fiction or just a lie used to keep all us little people in line. It is potently corrosive of faith in government. To be sure, many Americans, particularly brown Americans, have many other reasons to scoff at the notion that the American government is worthy of trust or respect. However, for many others, this corruption looms large. For me personally, the impunity of Dick Nixon was the beginning of the end of whatever faith in government I ever had. I was a child at the time, being raised by Republicans, but it was clear to me that there was one set of laws for mere hoi polloi like us and quite another for Dick Nixon.
Beyond the corrosion of faith in government, of course, there's also the fact that criminals who get away with it have a tendency to do it again. As I've remarked here before, the current situation of the USA bears a striking resemblance to that of the Weimar Republic after the "beer hall putsch" of 1923. The leader of that failed insurrection, a widely ridiculed fellow named Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to five years in prison but released after about eight months, for good behavior and for the sake of "healing" and "unity". A person with a name like "Von Drehle" really should have at least an inkling of how well that turned out. I won't be surprised if the impunity of Donald Trump turns out equally well.
*By the way, I have a master's degree from Cambridge. Cambridge and Oxford are weird little worlds.
By the way, regarding that Popula piece about His Muskness:
"What if there were a rapidly accumulating body of evidence that Elon Musk is an utter boob who has bluffed his way into a position of world-changing wealth and influence?"
Nailed it!
There really should be a satirical movie about all this. I'm imagining a cross between "Citizen Kane" and "Being there". I suspect Armando Iannucci could do it justice.
I wonder how much the Republicans are paying this clown.
Just kidding. (Probably.) Presumably, Von Drehle is just another high-status idiot (as Stephen Colbert described the character he played on "The Colbert report"), a person who has spent his life cocooned in money and status (I note he's a graduate of Oxford*) and thus has never been forced to face the fact that he understands very little about how the world actually works. As George Orwell quipped of such absurdities, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
In the real world, failure to punish blatant criminality, particularly political criminality, has baleful, long-term consequences. Ironically, establishment organs like the WaPo frequently wring their hands about Americans' "loss of faith in government"; here, for example, is such a WaPo piece from 2018 (which I'm citing merely because it's the first such piece to which DuckDuckGo referred me - there's plenty more where it came from):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/30/how-americans-lost-faith-in-government/
That piece is about the impact of the American war in Vietnam and the mendacity of the American government regarding it on Americans' faith in government. Yet it never seems to occur to the WaPo and its ilk that the abject failure of the American government to punish blatant criminality by powerful men (they are, of course, men, and rich white ones, too) may well have contributed at least as much to Americans' lack of faith in government as the Vietnam war and other such fiascos.
The USA has an appalling history of this kind of corruption. For example, it let Jefferson Davis, Robert Lee, and other ringleaders of the confederacy - men who were as guilty of treason as it is possible to be - walk away free. More recently, and highly relevant to what has happened since, it let Richard Nixon retire in wealth and comfort, never suffering anything like what an ordinary American would suffer for orchestrating a burglary, and suffering nothing at all for his much worse crimes, such as sabotaging the 1968 Paris peace talks. Basically, Tricky Dick got away with it all, as did many of his henchmen, some of whom (e.g., Roger Stone) have continued shitting on the country to this day. Likewise Ronald Reagan and his henchmen got away with waging an illegal proxy war in Central America. Likewise George Bush Jr. and his henchmen got away with waging a war under flagrantly false pretenses in Iraq. Etc. Ad nauseam, with emphasis on "nauseam".
This kind of thing makes it as obvious as obvious can be that "equality under the law" is a polite fiction or just a lie used to keep all us little people in line. It is potently corrosive of faith in government. To be sure, many Americans, particularly brown Americans, have many other reasons to scoff at the notion that the American government is worthy of trust or respect. However, for many others, this corruption looms large. For me personally, the impunity of Dick Nixon was the beginning of the end of whatever faith in government I ever had. I was a child at the time, being raised by Republicans, but it was clear to me that there was one set of laws for mere hoi polloi like us and quite another for Dick Nixon.
Beyond the corrosion of faith in government, of course, there's also the fact that criminals who get away with it have a tendency to do it again. As I've remarked here before, the current situation of the USA bears a striking resemblance to that of the Weimar Republic after the "beer hall putsch" of 1923. The leader of that failed insurrection, a widely ridiculed fellow named Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to five years in prison but released after about eight months, for good behavior and for the sake of "healing" and "unity". A person with a name like "Von Drehle" really should have at least an inkling of how well that turned out. I won't be surprised if the impunity of Donald Trump turns out equally well.
*By the way, I have a master's degree from Cambridge. Cambridge and Oxford are weird little worlds.