I know, I know… I have no one to blame but myself. I listened to a bit of Right Wing talk radio Sunday night.
It’s not something I’d normally do, inasmuch as I’ve assiduously minimized my news media intake for at least the last 30 years. Just listening to, watching, or reading the mainstream daily news, I discovered, is unhealthy for me. It makes me edgy, almost paranoiac. Every new cancer, every slip in the latest jobs report, every hair’s breadth wiggle in every measurement of public safety, nutrition, nuclear arms, the weather — you name it — is reason for news anchors, editorialists, and opinionators to imply that the sky is falling. No news report has ever begun, “Nothing much happened today….”
And, as I say, that’s just the regular old mainstream news. Imagine what Right Wing talkers shriek about. That side of the fence loves — wallows in — grievance and cataclysm. Were I to listen to Right Wing talk radio for more than the two or three minutes I got Sunday I’d be a juddering wreck, armed to the teeth, looking over my shoulder so much that, to borrow a line from Woody Allen, I’d be doing pirouettes walking down the street.
The reason I fell into the Right Wing rabbit hole was I was looking for a baseball game to listen to. Here in South Central Indiana, I can get at least two reasonably clear radio stations from Major League Baseball cities: Chicago and Cincinnati. Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh occasionally come in and even, sometimes, Atlanta flits down from the ionosphere in dribs and drabs. (For all you non-radio geeks, signals from locales well beyond the horizon must bounce off the ionosphere in the far upper atmosphere for them to be heard hereabouts.)
Turns out all the games were finished by the time I started fiddling with the dial in my car. I landed on Cincy’s WLW, the flagship for the Reds (who, damn them, are doing better than my beloved Cubs this year). WLW is a news/talker that bills itself The Big One. It leans Right — very Right. It used to air a show aimed at long-haul truckers hosted by a guy who called himself Bubba-Bo until his death a few months ago.
Here’s what I learned when I descended into that snake pit last night: the fact that former president Donald J. Trump has been indicted on federal charges has made the United States the laughing stock of the world. The show host, a fellow named Mike Allen who, I’ve gleaned, is outraged that the Los Angeles Dodgers are staging an LBGTQ celebration this month and, apparently, can’t have enough “right-to-lifers” on his show, was furious. No country, he roared, has any respect anymore for this once-great nation now that Trump has been hauled up on charges.
Allen went on on this vein about the indictment for several long minutes. Then he took a call from a listener. This person informed Allen and his radio audience that Donald Trump promised to “clear the swamp” when he ran for president in 2015 and ’16. “Now I know some rich people, and I’ll bet you do too,” the caller said. The rich, the caller stated confidently, turned on Trump like the jackals they are and did everything in their power to stop him from the aforementioned swamp clearing. Now they’ve got the Justice Dept. to do their bidding and are persecuting this honorable man.
Natch, I yelled at the radio: “Trumps rich, you idiot!” The man has spent his entire life rubbing shoulders with other rich people. He decorates his homes and offices like a sultan. For chrissakes, his old New York City apartment was decorated in 24-carat gold and diamonds, intentionally in the manner of the Palace at Versailles!
Trump, acc’d’g to one British design critic who’s studied the former president’s oeuvre, possesses decor tastes reminiscent of tinpot dictators like Saddam Hussein, Ferdinand Marcos, and Nicolae Ceausescu.
Even if the caller could hear my screed, it wouldn’t have moved him him a single millimeter.
Truth is, Trump’s net worth is irrelevant to people like the caller. To them, he’s as down-to-earth as they are. Most importantly, he’s fighting for them.To hell with those liberal, progressive Democrats who say they’re all for the poor and the working class. Only Donald J. Trump has everyday folks in his heart.
Just A Regular Guy’s Living Room.
That’s why, among many, many, many other reasons, I find the people who say, If only we listen to each other, all our national snarling, our polarization, our continent-wide incompatibility will melt away like magic, to be jaw-droppingly naive.
It ain’t gonna happen for the simple reason we are not only speaking different languages, we’re living in completely different worlds. When a defender of Trump is certain the once and (he hopes) future president and the rich are at odds, then what common ground can be obtained?
It’d be like me saying I once won the Nobel Prize in Literature but, those damned Norwegians, they hushed it up and have erased my victory from the record. You could offer me your ear. You could ask me how I felt about this miscarriage of justice. But the truth will always remain: you’ll come away convinced I’m mad as a hatter and you’ll do your best to cross the street when you see me coming your way.
That’s a pretty good analogy for the Big Lie, that Trump won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him, evidence be damned.
So now Trump will appear in court tomorrow to answer those federal charges. People on my side of the fence are rubbing their hands together in glee. He’s going to jail, they holler.
But he won’t. Even if he’s found guilty in the upcoming trial, he’ll appeal at least twice. The whole thing will take years to play out. Trump is 76 years old and he’s no greyhound. He’ll cash in his gold-plated chips long before this legal drama wraps up.
He won’t spend a single night in jail. You won’t get your revenge, folks.