Sidebar: The Irony Board: Free Speech

In Thursday's Irony Board post, we heard from Mitch McConnell that even the esteemed author Salman Rushdie is uncomfortable with the silencing of speech in America. According to McConnell, 

Rushdie recently signed an open letter with other intellectuals, many liberals, sounding the alarm on this cultural poison. 

It might surprise McConnell to learn that Rushdie is uncomfortable about several other things, too. In an op-ed last month in the Washington Post, he spoke of seeing "several dictators rise and fall" and, and defined for us the 'dictatorial cast of mind."

Extreme narcissism, detachment from reality, a fondness for sycophants and a distrust of truth-tellers, an obsession with how one is publicly portrayed, a hatred of journalists and the temperament of an out-of-control bulldozer: These are some of the characteristics.

Hmm... sound familiar? There's a reason for that.

President Trump is, temperamentally, a tinpot despot of this type. But he finds himself in charge of a country that has historically thought of itself — by no means always correctly — as being on the side of liberty. So far, with the collusion of the Republican Party, he has ruled more or less unchecked. Now an election looms, and he is unpopular, and flails about looking for a winning strategy. And if that means trampling over American freedoms, then so be it.

A tinpot despot? Ruling with the collusion of his party? Trampling on our freedoms? Who knew?

Rushdie also spoke of that infamous Bible photo op,  pointing out that the man "... whose inflammatory language full of racist dog whistles has played a significant role in unleashing white-supremacist bigotry upon us all," stood in the Rose Garden expressing a desire to protect peaceful protesters, while "just down the street, his security forces, some of them on horseback, are attacking a peaceful protest with tear gas and rubber bullets." I'm sure the protesters felt safe, wrapped in the protective arms of tinpot despotism that day, wouldn't you agree?

And, Rushdie noted,

We are so inured to the behavior of this man, so used to his lies, his inexhaustible self-regard, his stupidity, that maybe we are tempted to think of this as just another day in Trumpistan. But this time, something different is happening. The uprising that began with the killing of George Floyd is not fizzling but growing. The man in the White House is scared, and even, for a time, takes refuge in the basement and turns out the lights... 

If left to his own worst instincts, unchecked by his party, what comes next?

If he is allowed to use the actions of a tiny minority of criminals and white extremist infiltrators to invalidate the honorable protest of the vast majority against the murder of Floyd, the violence of the police toward the black community and the entrenched power of American racism, he will be on his way to despotism. He has threatened to use the Army against American citizens, a threat one might have expected from a leader of the former Soviet Union, but not of the United States. 

Rushdie, the intellectual, the freedom-loving American citizen, closed his op-ed with a warning.

In my most recent novel, “Quichotte,” I characterized the present moment as the “Age of Anything-Can-Happen.” Today I say, beware, America. Don’t believe that it can’t happen here.

Do you hear him now, Senator McConnell?  Are you listening, America?