Amy Davidson

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In a New Yorker comment piece, Amy Davidson runs through the myriad conflicts of interest and questionable ethics of the professional controversialist about to become our next President, ultimately speaking to the most important if amorphous concern: The mere fact that a demagogue who undermines democracy at each turn was elected could alter what it means to be American.

The writer maintains hope that both sides of the aisle will work to thwart this Simon Cowell-ish strongman, though I wonder if Trump will take much heat from the GOP as long as he’s useful in advancing a conservative agenda.

My bigger-picture concern, though, is that even before the Administration commences, just the very election of such an illiberal provocateur may have caused America to cease being what it was, a very imperfect place that reliably pulled itself from the brink of disaster because of underlying good intentions. No, November 2016 is certainly not as terrible as the time of slavery or the Jim Crow South or Japanese-American internment, but even during those dark moments we held dearly to our central principles even if we were blind and horrible in our distribution of them. Now it feels like something essential has been sacrificed because we willfully opted for evil at a moment when we should have known better and been better. It announced itself loudly and we ushered it inside.

An excerpt:

More important than all these concerns is the way that a Trump Presidency might change our common conception of what it means to be American. In addition to naming [Jeff] Sessions, Trump has chosen a chief strategist who has retailed alt-right rhetoric, a national-security adviser who tweeted out a video presenting reasons to fear Islam, and a C.I.A. director who has called for the execution of Edward Snowden. And this is in a time of relative peace. Where Trump’s instinct for blame and diversion would take him and the country during an emergency—a terrorist attack, for example—is an unpleasant question to contemplate. This is why many people voted for Clinton rather than for Trump. But he won, so what do they do now?

Trump has a shot at being the century’s worst President, but Americans are not in the worst position they have ever been in from which to confront him. We’ve been more economically desperate; we’ve been, in terms of the breadth of the franchise, less free. In the Trump Presidency, as in all Administrations, there will be political fights that define the course of events. There are constitutional tools available, but only if people in both parties, inside and outside of government, are willing to use them—to sustain a sense of non-Trump possibility.

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It was a year ago today that several of my relatives, in harm’s way of Hurricane Sandy, literally ran for their lives, fanning out from flood zones into the darkness of a city that quickly came to resemble a necropolis. Their homes and many others have not yet been fully repaired, and, worse yet, the toll on their health was even more severe. Two members of my immediate family who were in the storm’s path nearly died in emergency rooms in the ten months after the ferocious storm, suffering from unusual bacterial illnesses that may have been caused by the flood waters or clean-up efforts. No one’s sure. Having spent nearly two months visiting hospitals, I can’t quite count the number of patients and medical personnel who told me they still hadn’t rebuilt their houses, hadn’t yet recovered their health, their wits. The storm doesn’t end when the winds and rains die down–that’s just the beginning. And I will never forget how Paul Ryan and others voted against Sandy relief as people desperately searched for help. How many of these people self-identify as Christians when campaigning?

From Amy Davidson at the New Yorker blog:

“Well over a hundred people were killed by the storm, and the indirect toll, though harder to measure, was greater. The mortality rate in that Coney Island nursing home, according to a new report from NY1, was higher in the weeks and months after Sandy than it had any right to be. Since the storm, evacuation maps have been redrawn, subway tunnels are still being repaired (after a heroic effort to reopen them in those first days), and New York is inching toward a discussion of what a world of climate change, with rising sea levels and more extreme weather, means for a metropolis built on one of the planet’s best natural harbors. But perhaps the greatest mistake would be to reminisce only about the ways that the storm created unity and division, rather than looking critically at how it interacted with the city’s persistent inequalities. There is a reason that the tale of two cities has been one of the motifs of this year’s mayoral campaign—and it has nothing to do with just where the lights went out.”

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I don’t think former NSA employee Edward Snowden did anything particularly heroic in leaking documents that told every American what we should already know: We gave our government the power to spy on us, and it’s exercising that authority. Surprisingly enough, polls show most Americans actually approve of such governmental snooping.

But as Amy Davidson pointed out yesterday at the New Yorker blog, David Brooks’ take on Snowden’s actions in his New York Times column is shockingly tone-deaf. The piece’s soft-headed sociology and demeaning character study are perplexing enough, but what’s really outrageous is the idea that Snowden should have felt too indebted to his employers who improved his life materially to speak out about what he felt was wrongdoing.

This part: “He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.”

Yeah, community college slob, know your place. Be grateful to your betters in the U.S. hierarchy. And, yes, you could just as easily apply Brooks’ logic to Gitmo whistleblowers.

Although this paragraph may be worse: “He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.” 

Does Brooks feel the same way about the rights of solitary gun owners? Free speech is messy and inconvenient, but it’s of paramount importance, regardless if we agree with what’s being said or if personally approve of the education and financial standing of the speaker. Disagree vociferously, sure, but don’t preempt disagreement.•

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