Against the Trumpian Wall of Ignorance

AGAINST THE TRUMPIAN WALL OF IGNORANCE

July has been another watershed month in the tension between reality and the Presidential and White House spin and misdirection machine. Nothing precisely new in that; such months keep piling on, end-to-end. But with each, the stakes mount.

The Trump southern border wall topic isn’t of so much prominence as July closes. But there’s one hell of a metaphor there. In that the Administration wants to wall itself off from veracity, objective inquiry, collective decision-making, and broad-based exercise of experience-driven judgment. In short, the attributes of collective open government processes and policy formulation.

John Rawls (in “A Theory of Justice”) spoke of a “veil of ignorance” as a hypothetical situation in which if a group were unaware of of potential rewards for action, the members would make choices for the common good.

What we have here is an intentional “Wall of Ignorance” in the evolving. We are pressured on a daily basis to look at the sloganeering projected on the wall as a mask of supposed sanity for what goes on behind. As well as what faction or factions stand to lose or win. Common cause doesn’t figure in the matrix behind the wall.

So while you look at the tweets and pronouncements coming forth, always consider what events and actions have taken shape at the same time. Test context against the script, verify, validate for probity, integrity.

The week of July 22nd saw the late Sunday threat tweet issued by Trump shouted in caps to the president of Iran. More or less the classic tactic of the browbeater, picking another target to antagonize when he has estimable losses on other fronts.

This, while in July:
* Court proceedings with respect to cited operatives for Russian interests, Paul Manafort and Maria Butina, go forward.
* The realization that Michael Cohen has at least a baker’s dozen of tapes of conversations with Trump
* The negative backwash of the Putin Helsinki “summit” continues—while the US security community is left to guess on critical content.
* The White House tweets an autumn invitation to Putin to visit.
* Earlier in the month, Trump pardoned Dwight and Steven Hammond, two convicted arsonists, Oregonian ranchers who set fire to federal land; they have been a cause célèbre for the right wing militia movement for some time.
* Trump’s Justice Department released Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court documentation for warrants on Carter Page because of Russian ties; although heavily redacted, the 400 some pages demonstrate a) probable cause presence and b) that the Steele Dossier was not the origin point for the Russian inquiry.
* Trump, the White House, with preliminary “advice” from Rand Paul, floated the prospect of revoking the security clearances of several former members of the American security community critical of Administration policy—an obvious ploy to muffle the intelligence sector’s assessment of Russian election tampering. And a public rendering in lieu of Nixon’s personal “enemies list.”
* The Administration remains recalcitrant complying with Federal court mandate that the separated families of recent asylum seekers be reunited. The Administration’s wish to dispose of due process for specific at-risk refugees blunders on, to huge public resentment, as well.

As with any review of ploy, practice and fact in the Trump, spox and and sympathizer realm, such a list could run for pages.

We may indeed get depressed, frustrated, weary of the twittering, barking, and contrarian mess coming from the 45 chaos machine… But that doesn’t discount our individual responsibility not to be obliging. Some day this darkening era will run its course. Every move, every vote will count, in the end, whether we are people of means, or modest.

—Test context against the script, verify, validate for probity, integrity.

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“Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are, but that cannot be anything except bullshit.”

—Harry G. Frankfurt. “On Bullshit.”