It is one thing to be banal, mean-spirited and insipid. It’s another to see it all captured on your television screen — and have to endure it for two hours.
And nothing epitomized banality, meanness and insipidness more than the Republican presidential debate last Tuesday that was actually less a debate than a feeding frenzy among the rival candidates over who is better qualified, if elected president, to go down like a ton of bricks on “Islamic terrorism,” a term used by literally all the presidential aspirants, as they addressed the nation from behind their podiums.
Republicans are in an ugly mood, and America, after the Bernardino, California, massacre, is on edge. Not since the one-million member Know Nothing Party in the 1850s — a party whose entire raison d'etre was to block the immigration — or the Joe MacArthy communist witch hunts in the 1950s — that destroyed the lives of thousands of screenwriters, intellectuals, social critics, academics, journalists and others — has there been anything like it. What’s even more troubling is that these Republicans, with demagogues like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz leading the pack, appear to have hit a chord among a substantial number of Americans with their toxic brew of ideas.
The bombastic Trump, as happened in previous debates, was dominant. The man, noted for his notorious fabrications — dancing Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks in Jersey City, New Jersey and President Obama planning to let in something like 250,000 Syrian refugees into the country — proclaimed that, once elected, he would target not only Daesh in Syria and Iraq but the group’s “family members in the US, in order to avoid a repeat of what happened after 9/11 when the hijackers were smart enough to send their wives and children to Saudi Arabia before the attacks.”
Of course, a quick Google search, not to mention an equally quick search of the 9/11 Commission Report, would’ve revealed that only two of the hijackers were married and there was no evidence that their family members ever entered the US.
The candidates, without exception, used terms like Islamic terrorism, Islamic radicalism, Islamic violence and the rest of it, glibly, interchangeably and with impressive ease. If you began counting, as I did, the number of times these terms were used from the outset of the debate at 7.30 p.m. central time in Las Vegas, where the event took place, you would’ve tired at the count, say, of fifty. It was incessant. At times, the terms were used three, four or even five times in one sentence.
And clearly Daesh (ISIS to the candidates and the moderator) was equally repeated to the point of litany. Chris Christie told the audience — and by definition the nation — that President Obama “betrayed” the American people by not adopting a more muscular policy to defeat the group. Jeb Bush said that “we have to protect our civilized way of life by destroying Daesh before it destroys us.”
Ted Cruz was convinced that “America is at war with Islamic terrorism” and thus it was America’s duty to “utterly destroy Daesh,” meanwhile berating President Obama because “he doesn’t call radical Islam by its real name.” Ben Carson, a lifeless figure on the stage, who seemed to mumble rather than speak, was sure that the enemy was “radical Islamic Jihad.”
Donald Trump, justifying his call to prevent Muslims from entering the US, said that “radical Islamic terrorism opened up a discussion that needed to be opened and if Obama brought Muslims into the country, they’re out when I become president.”
Bush, who had days earlier called Trump “unhinged,” retorted, in one of his 30-second rebuttals, that the celebrity mogul was a “chaos candidate.” And Carly Fiorina, shunning bombast, but evincing no less Republican zeal, confined herself to talking about how “we should take our country back from the liberal elite,” and, when it came to Daesh, to relying on the National Security Agency to use “algorisms” in order to crack encrypted Daesh data.”
Was that all for real? Were Americans, or at least Republican Americans, watching all this on their television screens without wincing? Are politicians, of the Republican variety, that intellectually vacuous? And was H.L. Mencken right after all when he opined that “you can’t go wrong underestimating the intelligence of the American people?”
I watched the debate at a coffee shop in Washington called Angles, known as a hangout for writers, journalists, poets and other progressive souls, in a city known for its commitment to two causes: The Red Skins and liberal ideas. As the debate was about to begin and the candidates strolled onto the stage, a cynical patron hollered at the screen: “Here come the clowns!”
See, not all — repeat, not all — Americans are bigoted, Islamophobic supporters of the likes of Trump and Cruze, a disgrace to the memory of Emma Lazarrus, whose sonnet “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...” is inscribed on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the statue of liberty.
