100 Days of Greatness Made!

To civil humanity, a middle-finger salute

The reigning US president has, within his first 100 days in office, committed repeated impeachable offenses. As an example, the president has not only defied a Supreme Court order to facilitate the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadorian penal hell-hole, he has declared that he has the capacity, but no intention, of doing so. This is, pretty much, the president’s own hand-picked Supreme Court that he is saluting with his middle finger.

But we are not talking about common human courtesy here; we are talking about a declared rejection of a constitutional mandate. Although this same Supreme Court has incomprehensibly granted the president broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office, it does not immunize him from impeachment in Congress. Such an action is unlikely ever to occur, but it could ... and it should.

I recall, when I was young and foolish,* naively believing that the depredations of fascist rule could never take hold in the United States. I felt that America's anchoring in the citizen rights and privileges of our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were so strong that a would-be autocrat could never amass sufficient public support to enable a dictatorship here.

We, the People would never allow this. Somehow I believed that our political traditions immunized us from the collapse of democratic governance such as what happened in Italy, Japan and to the Weimar Republic in the early 20th Century. I felt that our institutional strength made us better than other countries that had turned autocratic at that time.

Of course, we had been warned about our own vulnerabilities to autocracy as far back as the 1930s by American novelist Sinclair Lewis, among others. But it is clear that no culture is immune from the relentless drive of a few individuals to wield cruel, dictatorial power over the rest of us.

We Americans are as vulnerable as any other culture populated by human beings whose nature inevitably harbors the dark stain of oppressive control against which the struggle for self-governance must perpetually be sustained. This is the test we are facing today, and I fear that we are facing it badly.

Is it possible that the Land of the Free is not really the Home of the Brave?

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* Now I am old and foolish but less foolish than before.

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