Would Louis Sing 'What A Wonderful World' Today?
 
 
Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
6/10/16
 
 
 
Angst abounds in our national life and, really, across the globe as uncertainty seems to be at a new high. Among the worries are the potential breakup of the European Economic community, the utter strangeness of what Vladimir Putin is up to, existential concern about what will happen in the Middle East and elsewhere with ISIS and the Taliban and how the United States of America will survive the presidential election of 2016.
 
It is said that the Sphinx stands at the foot of the pyramids brooding over the silence of the dead. Were she to be placed facing the U.S. Capitol, she would be accosted by the brainless glossolalia emanating from the Congress. She would have no surcease within earshot of the collective two-digit IQ legislatures of the several states, never mind the Tower of Babel that is the United Nations headquarters -- all adding to the uncertainty that is giving us ulcers.
 
What ails life on Earth these days? It's not that other times have not been worse or better or different. But now there are an abundance of nuclear weapons and various world leaders who from time to time seem tempted to unleash their ruinous power on enemies, real and perceived.
 
Driving home the other afternoon, I happened to hear the Louis Armstrong rendition of "What A Wonderful World." I found myself with tears rolling out of my eyes and down my cheeks, saying to myself, "Yes, perhaps once it was. Now it is a dangerous planet, what with terrorists ready, able and anxious to blow themselves up and anybody else into the bargain. Their partners in terror are those who have turned our streets into a cheap Western with guns ablaze just for the hell of it."
 
Politics are strife-ridden just about everywhere. Britain bids fair to depart the European community, never mind the political and economic tsunami it could breed. Many nations on that continent are working overtime to deny Syrian refugees entrance at their borders.
 
A major party's de facto nominee for the U.S. presidency, once thought to be at best the driver of a clown car, could well be elected. He treats facts as if they were fiction and fiction as if it were fact. He is an eerie reminder of a despot who demonized Jews rather than Mexicans and who fabricated his own truth to suit his warped view of the world.
 
We've got a half-wit who runs North Korea like a medieval tyrant, Putin making trouble in Russia, Turkey going rogue, China building islands of sand in the Pacific and claiming them as land they own, Japan wanting to rearm, all the while polar ice is melting and raising sea levels in the very places where they will do this most damage to the lives of those who can stand it least -- the recent Paris accords notwithstanding.
 
But what's on TV tonight?
 
My editor is even now cringing. "Oh God, not another negative hand-wringer." I concede that she has a point, and I would like nothing better than to join in song with Louis about what a wonderful world in the same way that I would want nothing more precious than to spend eternity with my editor, who happens to be the love of my life.
 
However, it does no good to muffle one's ears or shade one's eyes against reality. Or to make up fairy tales about things turning out all right, or, as one saccharine Sunday school hymn puts it, "Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged, just take it to the Lord in prayer."
 
What we need to take is the bit in our teeth and accept as fact that we are engaged in the ideological version of trench warfare. Among our enemies are, I am sorry to say, right-wing Republicans who have somehow come to believe that there is no such thing as global warming and climate change; that low to no taxes are God's will; that robust support of public works, public schools, public transportation and general public welfare constitutes political heresy.
 
Our enemies in the ideological struggle include such nations as Saudi Arabia, whose various kings and princes have run a billion-dollar game of Monopoly under the cover of strained, paper-thin royal manners whilst enabling various cells of religiously devout murderers. Our enemies include all those in power who would sacrifice the individual lives of their subjects merely to maintain their power (e.g. Bashar al-Assad).
 
Therefore, one of our goals must be to guarantee the election of a U.S. president who has experience both broad and deep in foreign policy with worthy aims of achieving and maintaining peace, one who actually knows how government works and can and should work and, finally, one who will bring wholesome aspirations to the office rather than hash to settle and blades of resentment to hone.
 
Another goal must be to unseat such members of Congress and state legislatures who have no evident conscience about doing what is right and even righteous on behalf of their constituents. They mill about following Big Money like a flock of dumb, hungry sheep.
 
And while we're at it, we cannot forget that America is just a short century and a half past the condoning of involuntary servitude even as Jim Crow still -- still -- bares his ugly countenance here and there in the treatment of people of color. The slights visited upon the LGBT community, the campaign to undo Roe v. Wade so as to deny women their reproductive rights, the economic low-tax redoubts of the rapacious 1% -- all need to come within the purview of our ideological struggle to make the singing of "What A Wonderful World" less like a dirge and more like Louis sang it so, well, wonderfully.
 
Bottom line: Bernie Sanders' enthusiasts will have to put aside their disappointment that he will not be the Democratic nominee. They will have to turn out in record numbers for the person who will be because, unless the other party changes its tune, its presumptive candidate could well move his appalling self into the White House shortly after noon on January 20, 2017 -- a date that surely would live in infamy.

Copyright 2016 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 


Readers Write
Re essay of 6/3/16 Crudity and Defamation: The New Normal in Politics

 
Jamieson Spencer, St. Louis, Missouri:
My second of your weekly essays and good points as usual. No need to answer this, ut I think you may be unfair to Bernie. I wouldn't call him crude and he has explicitly refused to mention "those damned emails." He may be shrill or repetitive (like that crazy uncle he's been compared to) but he speaks to the socialist in me. And indeed to me the truest form of Christianity, if practiced on daily basis, is commun-istic!
 
Harvey H. Guthrie, Fillmore, California:
To equate Sanders' quite correct criticisms of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment in either degree or kind with the rantings of Donald Trump is to operate Trumpianly. Shame.
 
Donald Worrell, Troy, Michigan:
[or you could call it] Year of the Shameless.
 
Albert Haynes, Cincinnati, Ohio:
You are, I think, a tad hard on Bernie Sanders, but you are right in saying that it is more than doubtful he could win in November. The problem is that he is pushing Hillary and she is having none of it. If they don't make peace before, say, October, it will be Donald Trump in the driver's seat. What do we do then?
 
Robert B. Hetler, Suttons Bay, Michigan:
Well thought and written, Harry.  Even Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff have ceased to make listening to the news tolerable.
 
Aurelia MacDonald, Halifax, Nova Scotia:
What you've got in the States is a nightmare and I see no way out of it. I can tell you that we Canadian liberals will be very nervous about a President Trump. His "fellow" Republicans have turned pusillanimous in their resigned and meek endorsement of his candidacy. Are they frightened, too? And to they not perceive the history of Europe at the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s? We do.
 
Joan Cook, Grand Haven, Michigan:
Just reading your outrage over the distortion of our American political climate breaks my heart. I know that politics draws those who are greedy for power.  I assume that any person who declares that he/she can lead the United States as president must have an enormous ego; it's only logical that such an ego would be necessary. It's just that in my short 72 years I have always assumed that the people would automatically reject shallow, vicious egotists before they even reached the second primary. I fear for my grandchildren's future.  Where are the "grownups" in the Republican Party?
 
Cynthia Chase, Laurel, Maryland:
Trump lost any claim to being a decent human being, let alone a "Presidential" candidate, when he mocked the disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski.  Shame on him.
 
David R. Cook, Onalaska, Wisconsin:
Like myself, you can't help writing something about the near unprecedented idiocy and nastiness of Trump's idea of a campaign for President. I have a softer take on Bernie and the hordes of young people who resonate with his economic message need to be brought out in force to vote in November. If Bernie turns his energy fully after the convention into electing Hillary, as I hope and believe he will, we can forgive him and maybe thank him for getting into this campaign. It was a nice gift for you to transcribe all of the Second Inaugural [in last week's essay]. It brought memories of my standing in the Lincoln Memorial and reading it from the wall.
 
Caroline Martin, Sunnyvale, California:  
I will be voting in the Democratic primary in a few days for Bernie Sanders even as I think you are right about his not being able to be elected in November. I am not one of those women who will necessarily vote for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman as I am. I want her to be pushed to adopt in real language some of the good things which Sanders is for. I do worry about the FBI investigating her computer server thing and coming up with damaging evidence. I want to be able to vote for her in November, and I will do so with more enthusiasm if she smooths things over with Sanders and is not indicted. God help us if that happens. I couldn't live in peace with Trump as president and Ryan as House speaker and Chris Christie or Newt Gingrich as vice-president. How could that happen?
 
Blayney Colmore, Jacksonville, Vermont:  
I, too, am having a visceral, stomach wrenching response to this year's campaign. And we have four months yet to go. Though it is hardly solace, Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow, which I began because of my fascination with the hip hop musical that has captured Broadway, reminds me that nasty politics in our nation go back all the way to the very beginning. I hadn't known the personal vitriol that marked the rivalries between Hamilton, Jefferson and Hamilton, that Washington was called on to referee. All of them wrote horrendous attacks on each other, many anonymously or under pseudonym. And the issues even then were between those who wanted a strong federal government (Hamilton), and those who mistrusted government (Jefferson, Madison). So this is our legacy. To my mind the road that leads to Donald Trump began with Nixon's southern strategy, appealing to the most base, racist prejudices.
 
Peter Lawson, Petaluma, California:
Let's be blunt about it. Donald Trump is a narcissistic, arrogant, misogynist poseur who embodies white male dominance threatened by the increasing influence and power of women in our culture. Everything Trump claims to have done, accumulated and dominated are all those things that middle-aged and older white men thought they had (or potentially had) and are now losing. His self-proclaimed sexual attractiveness and prowess with woman signify that he has big hands, a big prick and big balls. He is the consummate manly man, a successful brute who could (if he so chose) sire a host of kids by an endless parade of suppliant women. He is the iconic, domineering, capitalistic male; the caricature of a hero that appeals to middle- aged and older white man. Why he is so popular among them? Patriarchal hierarchy is collapsing as women around the world are reclaiming their rightful place in society as equal to men in very field. Increasingly women are becoming heads of state, chief executives of large corporations, presidents of large universities, members of parliaments, leading scientists and academics, and successful heads of single parent families.As women ascend, men who have relied not so much on their intellectual and emotional superiority as on their 'God-given' rights are feeling threatened and cast aside. Donald Trump represents the last gasp of white male dominance and his political ascendancy is a sign that humanity is in a fast-moving process of radical social change from patriarchy to gender equality. Hopefully that will not be the end of the game and that people will come to see that the well being of children should be our foremost concern. In a less crude analysis, Trump represents the last gasp of conservative political morality and family structure.
 
 

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