My interest in politics -- the work of the People -- began in 1948 with the Dewey-Truman election. I spent summer vacations hanging around the town railroad depot trying to make myself useful to the kindly station agent and was thereby a silent auditor of many a political discussion. A lot of people came and went from the depot in a day's time. Many of them hated Harry Truman on general principles.
More than once did I hear Truman characterized as a thuggish, corrupt haberdasher who owed his office to the similarly corrupt and thuggish Missouri political boss Tom Pendergast. One complainant insisted that Truman was a warmonger once he involved the U.S. military in the "police action" in Korea in June 1950.
He also accused Truman of being unforgivably soft on Communism, apparently ignorant of the plain fact that the so-called "action" was taken against North Korean invaders who were puppets of Communist China. But never mind.
When Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for what was blatant insubordination, hell was to pay. The kindest thing I heard that summer at the depot was that Truman was "a nincompoop." The worst I heard was that he and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson were surely Communists and forthwith should be impeached.
Yet compared to today's political defamation, what was said about Harry Truman is mild by comparison. Thomas Dewey was no Donald Trump. Not for nothing did Alice Roosevelt Longworth once characterize him as the "little man on the wedding cake."
A high tide of putrid water at present is inundating the current American electoral process. Cynical half-truths and out-and-out lies are now considered acceptable, especially those that are directed at Hillary Rodham Clinton: "Crooked Hillary," as Mr. Trump puts it. Or as one bumper sticker proclaims: "Killary."
Unfortunately there is a Hitlerian perversity in the repetition of slander that gives it a deceptive glint of truth. For example, it is said blithely that Mrs. Clinton might as well have pulled the trigger herself in the Benghazi killings of U.S. personnel, that she persecuted the women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct, that she somehow was complicit in Vincent Foster's "supposed" suicide, that she deliberately ignored the law rather than having followed the example of Colin Powell and other State Department officials before her time in the use of a private server. All parts of a large and convenient lie.
The demand is that she essentially disrobe in public while the seething mob of the Trump putsch would seem to care less if he doesn't release his tax records, which has become de rigueur in high-end politics. An unacceptable double standard.
As my friend and mentor Harvey H. Guthrie, Sometime Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, writes: "There's a really deep thing in the American psyche that assumes humanity is really white and male. It has bubbled down there all through Obama's presidency, and it is the deepest source of the dislike of Hillary Clinton."
In offering that observation, I assure you that Dr. Guthrie does not mean to excuse, but rather to explain the phenomenon about which I am writing in this essay. Donald Trump has become the permission for men -- white men in particular -- to speak and act like the lout he himself is. What's more, he has become the agent of inchoate fear and resentment that possess the American ignoramus whose behavior becomes ever more outrageous. I hear it and see it in my neighborhood barbershop. I have heard it and seen it at parties. It has become "the thing to do."
Am I imaging it, or am I seeing more and more representations of the Confederate flag, often paired with disgustingly crude references to Hillary Clinton on bumper stickers? Where, one must ask, do such creatures as traffic in such trash talk get their ideas? I'll bet not from The New York Times or even from far less distinguished local newspapers that, while inferior in most respects, seem to honor what remains of journalistic ethics.
The Trumpists are getting the message and the permission via the TV set. A reporter for The New York Times opined recently that Trump "is indisputably great television." One hopes the reporter meant that Trump is low-life entertainment that costs the networks and stations nothing but the hourly rate of camera operators and sound engineers.
However, since the industry gorges itself on income from commercials that appear with rapid frequency between Trumpian tantrums, one can see what that's all about. If Trump takes a break, there is always Bernie Sanders hacking and hewing his way down the path of vilification as he directs his hyper rhetoric at Hillary Clinton hoping for . . . Hoping for what? The election of Trump? Does Sanders not realize that U.S. voters by and large will not vote for a self-identified Socialist?
I do not accuse Sanders of crudity, but of repeating unproven allegations against Clinton. He cleverly leaves the crudity to Trump in the false hope that the electorate will tire of it, and, once the Clinton candidacy has been destroyed, turn to Sanders. Who will tell him that will never happen? Who will tell him that crudity and outright lies have become the currency of Election 2016? Who will tell him that his improbable campaign eventually will come to be viewed as tainted by that very currency?
Surely doctoral candidates in history and political science already are beginning research for dissertations on Election 2016. Some few of those dissertations will become books. I have a suggestion for the title of one of them: YEAR OF SHAME.
