I'm a couple days behind and trying to catch up. But just absorbing the daily onslaught of fascistic pressures exhausts the soul and withers the mind. Introspectively I repeat the words to myself — merely absorbing the savage assault — so that self-awareness might ease the grind. It doesn't.
A couple days behind and so I just caught up to "The Sound of Fear on Air," David Frum's Atlantic piece on one small fascist offensive that nonetheless portends the immense. I'll not rehash the entirety of his Wednesday morning brutality at the invisible hands of Trump and the conspicuous ones of Mika Brzezinski and MSNBC. Two days old? You've probably read it.
For me, the fresh stench incapacitates my ability to ignore it — "it" being the host and network's reaction to Frum's words spoken on the emasculated "Morning Joe" program. Asked about the two-bit punk who's up for the job of leading the Department of Defense, the Atlantic columnist said "If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed."
Such might be regarded as too sharp-tongued for "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." Outside of that, exceptionally mild. But, writes Frum, "Shortly afterward, co-host Mika Brzezinski [at the prompting of unseen faces in the director's booth] read an apology for my remarks":
A little bit earlier in this block there was a comment made about Fox News, in our coverage about Pete Hegseth and the growing number of allegations about his behavior over the years and possible addiction to alcohol or issues with alcohol. The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in. We just want to make that comment as well. We want to make that clear. We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that’s a good debate that we should have often, but right now I just want to say there’s a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we will want to leave it at that.
Frum properly defends his remark, though that was scarcely the reason for his follow-up column. Which was this: "I do not write to scold anyone; I write because fear is infectious. Let it spread, and it will paralyze us all."
It is spreading, as stunningly demonstrated by the paralyzed Mika and her network, which I suspect will abandon its "liberal" ship in rather short order and devolve into either a permanently quaking milksop or a Fox doppelgänger. This was not the concern of Frum's warning — it was much broader than that — yet within his warning I have a concern.
The word let, in "let it spread. and...." Let a transitive verb whose action passes from the subject to object. In Frum's usage, who or what is the subject? That's concerning. Is the unknown subject to prevent the letting, or are we — whoever we are — to prevent the subject from allowing the letting?
If the former, we have no control. If the latter, how is that to be done? On the former: Two nationally prominent subjects' naked cowardice flashed itself in a canary-coal-mine fashion. On the latter: We can't crawl into the nervous system of every Mika Brzezinski and media executive and buck it up. So from here, where?
Frum finishes with, "The only antidote is courage. And that’s infectious, too." So I hope. But I needn't hope that plenty courageous subjects are out there. You already know them; in print, at least, they're out there, you read them, and David Frum is just one. (The broadcast media, it'll be good for nothing — excepting of course unreality and other frivolous programming.)
If we're to be saved from the pounding assaults of fascistic Trumpism, you'll only read about its labors and, I further hope, help write about them in every way you can and to everyone you know. I won't quote Hillary on what it takes. It just does.