358 - Making the World Better: Living up to Our Founding Ideals

Musk's Mayhem

For all of his segregationist impulses, Woodrow Wilson was among the first American presidents who genuinely wanted to create a better world, not just a better America for ever more prosperous Americans. He helped to establish the League of Nations as an instrument of world peace and favored the mandates that transferred future trust territories and states from German colonial hegemony to a supposedly tutelary status controlled by Britain, France, Belgium, and -- to Wilson's dismay -- South Africa.

The U. S. was a unique nation established on a solid bedrock of striking universal principle. Foremost, of which the Trump administration must be reminded daily, is that all men and women are created equally. They are endowed, our founding fathers established, with inalienable rights (including habeas corpus). John Adams and his ilk agreed that the best form of rule was democracy because it enshrined human dignity and recognized how the burden of rule is best shared. Trump and his acolytes adhere to different goals: profiteering, exploitation, retribution, and equivalences that are neither moral nor just.

Wilson believed in exporting those ideals and thereby making peoples everywhere beneficiaries of America's more perfect union. He preferred to transfer American exceptionalism to Europeans and the inhabitants of European colonies in an attempt not so much to gain friends and allies as to allow peoples across the waters to transform themselves from warring antagonists into more spiritually enlightened beings who could uplift themselves within an atmosphere of freedom.

Presidents McKinley and the first Roosevelt had focused on expanding the United States and on manifesting a territorial destiny. McKinley went to war and gathered colonies. So did Wilson in Haiti in 1915, before he involved our nation in helping to save Europe from German domination. But, after the war he realized that America had a value system that built upon profound revolutionary beliefs that were as far from transactionist and the bullying of others as could be imagined. Had Wilson lived, he might have succeeded in more thoroughly influencing the ways in which the rest of the world embraced American ideals -- the creed of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, and a host of other earnest believers in republicanism. They feared renewed autocracy. They wanted power to reside in a Congress composed of representatives who argued heatedly but were bound together to agitate for a common good.

Those early good men, like Wilson and many of his esteemed successors, were tied together by mutual respect, by tolerance of differences, by what attorney Joseph Welch famously called a sense of "decency" (in the McCarthy Army hearings), and by an underlying belief that the executive would rarely exceed his rights, would be honest, would neither exaggerate nor lie, and would respect every word of the constitution and its hallowed amendments, including the two emolument clauses.

Fast forward from idealism to self-serving transactionalism, the practice of politics by punishment, the overriding of the criminal justice system by personalized doses of bizarre clemency, and the defiance of the truly long-respected obedience to judges and the judicial system. Internationally, there is abuse of allies, denigration of whole peoples, the distinct privileging of whites over blacks and browns, and the favoring of the very type of authoritarians that would have made John Adams' hair bristle.

But as far as Trump & Co. have strayed from the better impulses of our national soul, and destroyed the very integrity of this nation, so he and his minions (including Musk) have made almost every corner of the world, and millions of overseas inhabitants, unnecessarily miserable. They have endangered whole populations by unleashing the horsemen of pestilence and acutehunger. They have enabled the killing fields of Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They have facilitated the spread of deadly diseases and deprived the poorest of our brothers and sisters of medical attention. These are excessively bad times, and they are not nearly over.

Moreover, the retractors have done it all in the name of exterminating supposed "wokeness." But that wokeness has no application to some desperate village in South Sudan where citizens have long relied for their health on resources provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and other arms of the U. S. government. Adding to a tragedy that was never meant to be, the attack on USAID and PEPFAR has been primed by conspiracy theorists who peddle immense degrees of misinformation about what USAID and PEPFAR did and who their agents and employees were. Musk's entire chain sawing off of good institutions, domestic and international, is based on profound measures of falsehood, garbled and distorted in transmission. USAID and PEPFAR are certainly not the "most gigantic global terror organizations in history" as extreme conspiracists claim. Indeed, PEPFAR alone is credited with saving 26 million lives over twenty years. USAID may have protected hundreds of millions of the world's poor since its founding in the early 1960s.

The wanton destruction of USAID -- a Kennedyesque creation that Wilson would have welcomed -- has turned Trump (for condoning it) and Musk for extolling and presiding over its evisceration -- into killers. Not only have an estimated more than 300,000 former recipients of USAID assistance now died this year, but at least an equal number will have died --absent USAID grants, monitoring, and visible assistance -- by the end of the year. And at least half of that number are children. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of Trump's puppets, claims that no one has died as a result of pulling USAID assistance. But that is at best wishful thinking and, essentially a big fat lie. Nor has wholesale cutting of USAID and other agencies saved much money, if any.

“No children are dying on my watch,” Rubio asserted in a Congressional hearing last week." No adults either, he said: “No one has died because of U.S.A.I.D.”

There have been major increases in HIV/AIDS, and more fatalities because USAID was providing access to supplies of vital anti-retroviral medications. In desperate places like South Sudan, especially in refugee camps there and elsewhere in Africa, food assistance once supplied by USAID has been removed or restricted so severely that people are starving. They no longer are able to access calories once given to them in such emergency critical food sources as Plumpy'Nut. Musk directly, and Trump indirectly, are responsible for the waves of severe nutrition deficiency that is sweeping into Africa. This was not how Woodrow Wilson wanted the United States to project itself.

Contrast that with Musk: "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." Indeed!

Has the essence of America -- its belief in equality, fairness, decency, and sharing across borders -- totally been superseded by crass grasps for illicit gain in high places? Is a corrupt White House capable of upending two and a half centuries of honest dealings, especially since World War II? Let us resist every attempt to make us less great than we were -- and immediately.