Into The Third Month
The open secret of farce is that nobody gets hurt. There are sound effects accompanyingTthe Three Stooges hitting or twerking one another but none seem the worse for where. So it could be said that the clown car is in charge of the Trump Administration, one another falling over one another in firing nuclear experts and then rehiring them after having done the same with avian flu experts. But the clown car runs into being a horror show when real damage gets done, as when a footballer is sent to a notorious El Salvador prison because his tattoo was misidentified as a gang tattoo rather than, as the ACLU claims, a tattoo of the soccer theme Real Madrid. That mistake could have been clarified if even minimal due process had been filled. A nm habeas corpus hearing would have revealed that and avoiding that suggests that the administration is deliberately acting to be cruel and capricious and so terrify anyone who they come across in their searchlights. Arbitrary arrest is the goal rather than a mistake and I wonder how far it will go, Social Security recipients without their checks because their names are similar to those who have died and law firms deprived of security clearance because the law firms are Liberal. Oh, the second of those events have already taken place.
Incompetence mostly seems a joke, just a clown car activity, just like The Three Stooges. Ordinary people fumble at doing their ordinary activities and so lapses are forgiven or perhaps for other reasons thought malicious. You forget your driver’s license but that’s important ikf your car is stolen. People get onto chat chains and there is no worse for wear unless they are communicating state secrets and lying that they are doing that to cover up the embarrassment of saying “oops”. Then it is worse to sound stupid than to lie because there is something at stake and so no longer a farce.And errors of incompetence add up to an evil if they destroy any institution through inadvertence even if not by design by culling the workforce sol that Social Security is inoperable or USAID stops operations and people die, or maybe it has been very clever that it is possible to circumvent getting Social Security and USAID without legislation to eliminate these programs by simply throwing monkey wrenches into tube organizational machinery. The public has to decide if stupidity or malice is the prime emotion, and what difference does that make, if anything at all.
We have gone a long way from Milton’s idea that evil is so powerful that it must result from a fallen angel whose power resides in his tarnished glory. In the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt discovered the banality of evil, which did not mean that the consequences were banal but that the perpetrators were trivial people only concerned with running the trains on time, that very different from Iago, who we still try to understand for the depths of his m alice. Buty now, in the twenty first century, there is another aspect of evil, where it is uncertain whether it resides in malice managed to achieve evil ends or, the same thing, evil ends thought of as good ones, as when Commerce Secretary says only cheaters complain of having lost their Social Security, or is just the fumblings of inadequate people set in high office because the President does not screen people for competence and only cares for loyalty, and anyway what difference does it make if appointees are incompetent father than malicious if the consequences are the same? The clown car is inn charge and people have to realize it isn't funny to want to make Canada the fifty-first state.