Known by the Company You Keep

You voted for a known con man awaiting sentencing for 34 felonies. You knowingly ignored the fact that those convictions were decided by 12 citizens who risked their lives to ensure that no American is above the rule of law. You have no integrity, no decency, and no values that can make up for your flaws. You voted for a man who was convicted for raping a woman, again ignoring the courage of a jury of whom half were selected by Trump’s lawyers. That is a clear statement of who you are, man or woman, and how little you care for a woman’s safety and her right to exist as an equal. Russia, especially Vladimir Putin, obviously exerts significant influence with Trump and every investigation by both the House, Senate, FBI, and CIA confirmed that. But you have no interest in US national security, do you? That certainly defines who you are in many ways. Trump is a known conman and incompetent “business man,” but his flaws and failures are just yours inflated to an international level, aren’t they? Robert Reich has cataloged “The 101 worst things about Trump’s shambolic presidency,” saving me the trouble of making a similar list. None of that is hard to find or verify, but you don’t care do you?

When I was a kid, when the sun was tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet, a common parental warning was “You are known by your friends” or ““You are known by the company you keep.” Supposedly the origin of that saying came from Don Quixote, “Here, quoth Sancho, the proverb hits right, Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are. If your worship keeps company with those who fast and watch, what wonder is it that you neither eat nor sleep while you are with them?” You are known by the politics you follow, too. For the last dozen years Trumpers have been given slack with a collection of lazy, unobservant excuses: they don’t know better, “they are hurting,” the education system failed them, liberal elites don’t pay attention to their problems, and the list is inexhaustible. And it’s bullshit. I’ve lived among the people who voted for Trump for all of my 76 years and they are, as Hillary said, deplorable. They are lazy, uneducated by choice, emotional and anti-intellectual, timid and terrified, selfish, greedy, violent, and will be just as happy marching in uniforms toward any target they are aimed at as they are sitting in their living rooms cowering from the blue glow of their televisions. You can always identify them by their deep-set scowls and angry fear.

Another author did a fine job of pointing out the error in imagining there is some kind of thin shell of evil over mostly-decent Trump voters, “If Donald Trump happened because a significant percentage of our fellow citizens wanted him, and all his works, and all his empty promises, then there was nothing to be done. If 47 percent of the country wants fascism, then eventually it will get fascism. You can’t simply dissolve the people and elect another.”

Back in 2012, another Republican Trump-enabler, Rick Santorum, admitted, “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Santorum was talking about intelligent, decent people in the media, but he was also right in the broader category of who fascists will never have on their side. Smart people rarely tend to also be treasonous, self-serving, uneducated, and gullible. Don’t get distracted by professions or degrees, as the 2nd of the Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity clearly warns us, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” For example, 2022 Minnesota Republican Governor Candidate Scott M. Jensen is a Chaska, MN family physician. A “doctor,” right? But a really bad doctor whose own patients and other Minnesota physicians warned Minnesota voters that Jensen was a nutjob. Not only was Jensen an anti-vax nutjob, but he also over-prescribed opioids to his patients while pretending to be outraged at other physicians’ use of their “prescription pads.” Doctor, yes, “smart person,” not so much.

In my Rat’s Eye View blog, I have pointed out the many flaws in considering a collection of so-called professionals “smart” since 2007 and much of that early material came from my initial attempt to create a business management consulting website in 1999. From engineers in every profession to medical doctors to every sort of executive (government or business) to scientists and the arts, stupid people abound.

But even if they are a small minority of humans, there are 8 billion of us littering the planet and some of those humans are very smart. So smart, in fact, that I have often suspected our species is about to snap off another evolutionary branch. Those people have now witnessed inconvertible evidence that Trump voters are deplorable, unredeemable, dangerous fascists. Those very smart, very talented people are out there running every complicated aspect of modern life. They are the physicians, scientists, engineers, and public servants who once thought they were working for some “greater good” who now know the greater good would be to let nature take its course more often than not.

The deplorables will be unable to contain their glee at this most recent victory. They will self-identify without fear, loudly and proudly. When they need the services of the intelligent minority, I hope they see increasingly overwhelming obstacles. One million medical professionals left the field during the Trump covid massacre, either through death, retirement, or career change. There are few replacements in the supply chain and, regardless of Trumps delusions, far fewer foreign physicians from his designated “nice countries” will be interested in immigrating to fascist America. “Smart” doctors will gravitate to decent communities and rural America will continue to be abandoned. Trump will accelerate that by demeaning the sacrifice necessary to become a medical professional and directing even more resources to “unearned income” such as his tax breaks for the rich and vulture capitalism. More and more clinics are facing doctors nearing retirement and insisting on “no new patients” while new doctors quickly reaching patient capacity and being unwilling to accept a work load that demeans their profession and endangers the patients they have. It turns out that no matter how much you pay an equity capital anointed hospital executive, nitwits who majored in “business management” don’t know anything about healthcare and are nothing more than a grossly overweight albatross dangling from the neck of doctors and nurses. Medical professionals have less trouble immigrating to “nice countries” than any other group.

When Trump and his nepo-imbeciles are done privatizing NOAA, US climate scientists will largely be out of the business of formulating climate models so that a few of Trump’s corporate buddies can use the fragile remains of that agency to sell weather predictions to other corporate interests. You can safely assume that climate-impacted areas will continue to see insurance companies divest from home owner insurance and other government-regulated obligations, while Wall Street gamblers use that same data to short those same areas based on insider weather information. We saw a surprising number of US “smart people” move across the border to Canada in the first Trump regime. Vancouver is a hotbed or US techie immigrants and Toronto is the “New New York” for tech immigrants from all over the world.

So, revel in the fact that you “broke the system” for as long as that euphoria lasts. The problem with breaking something as complicated and intertwined as the very fragile United States of America is that you will never see anything like the country you broke again. A surprising portion of every state in the nation wants their state to leave the union. Trump’s election may mollify the non-productive, dependent red states, but if they leave the country won’t be nearly as effected as if the blue states jumped ship. Most of us wouldn’t miss Alabama-Mississippi-Arkansas-Louisiana-etc if those sad pieces of real estate disappeared into the earth’s core. Economically, they are all nothing more than a burden. Be careful what you wish for. There is no coming back from this sad victory. You have made it clear who you are, both by your actions and the company you keep. You will never again have the “fellow Americans” trust of the people you desperately depend upon. Once that bond is broken, it can’t be repaired and you are totally unprepared for the consequences. And there will be consequences.