The Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Thanksgiving is the most universal of American holidays. It either transcends or embraces religion, whichever you choose. It brings family together. It invites reflection on the nobility of gratitude. What’s more, in election years, after the people raise their voices to determine how they are to be governed, the celebration can contain an offering of thanks for the precious right of democracy.

                Not quite so this year. Family gatherings have been impeded by a pandemic much worse than it need be. Unbridled pride in the power of the vote has been stolen by invented charges of fraud, a fabrication that has taken root like a malignancy among millions of Americans. President Trump has grouchily damaged America’s faith in its democratic birthright.

This should be a moment of thanksgiving for the system that held the line against a president’s assaults. We should be buoyed by the poll workers, vote counters, election boards, courts, and local officials who maintained a bulwark of honesty against the Republican assaults on the vote. As Tom Friedman wrote today, “It was their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with ‘Team America,’ not either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.”

Yet Trump allows us no delight in our achievement. He drains our pleasure in seeing more citizens vote than ever before. He makes it hard for us to congratulate ourselves for running a free and efficient election amid a devastating pandemic. He doesn’t even permit a bow by his own Department of Homeland Security for repelling foreign hackers and domestic manipulators. He seeds the electorate with cynicism and will surely fertilize that weed of faithlessness in the coming years.

Trump's Winning Strategy

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Donald Trump has been so successful in convincing tens of millions of Americans that he won the election that he plans to market the strategy to sports teams, lawyers, and gamblers, according to remaining sycophants in the White House.

                “He’s very upbeat about this,” a Senior Sycophant disclosed. “He’s already contacted Dan Snyder, who might buy a license to use the Trump Method as early as this season. Snyder considered testing it last Sunday by declaring that Washington beat Detroit—it was so close, decided in the final seconds, just like the stolen election! But Mr. Trump wouldn’t let him do it without a subscription to the service up front. The President is a very canny dealmaker, as you know. He’s created many problems that only he can solve, and he’s actually solved a few. He just wishes that Snyder hadn’t changed his team’s name from the Redskins. What was racist about that? The President’s orange skin makes him look handsome when he smiles—even a Biden voter said so. The Washington Football Team? What a dumb name. But President Trump has made the best of that, too, as he does of everything. He gets a kick out of screwing around with the team’s initials. He calls it the WTF team.”

                The Senior Sycophant descended into peals of laughter so severe that he had to excuse himself to get a glass of Kool-Aid.

                Time is of the essence for the WTF team, whose abysmal 2-7 record, with only seven games left, can be inverted only if it begins to declare victories immediately. “Then, on to win the playoffs and the Super Bowl!” gushed the Senior Sycophant.

With that model, Trump is sure that other teams will subscribe. The Baltimore Orioles come to mind. “Baltimore is not his favorite place,” said a middle-level official, “but he’s a man of principle, as you know, so is willing to put aside race and politics for money.”

 Lawyers ought to be prime customers, but so far Trump’s own attorneys haven’t signed up—except for Rudy Giuliani, according to internal emails intercepted by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and leaked to The Shipler Report. “These lily-livered lawyers can’t see the writing on the cave,” Giuliani told Trump (as translated from English to Russian to English), “so they won’t use the Trump Method, even for free. I suggest that you bypass them and start declaring victories yourself.”

Gamblers constitute a large potential customer base, and Trump is considering a 3-day free trial, enough to get them addicted to winning. Promotional material is already being prepared with the logo, “I WON!” which is presumably the opening gambit once the dice are thrown or the roulette ball clicks into a number. Customers are promised a handbook and an encoded online strategy for demanding that the wheel and dice be tested, the deck of cards be thrown out and replaced, the cries of “Fraud!” be echoed by ringers planted strategically around the casino. Since Trump knows how to go bankrupt repeatedly, he is sure that casinos will just pay up.

So far, his fellow casino owner and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson has been kept in the dark about this plan. If Mr. Adelson reads The Shipler Report, President Trump might be hearing from him by the end of the day. 

This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

In American Politics, the Uses of Soviet Humor

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A man walked into a medical clinic and asked for an eye and ear doctor.

                “We don’t have an eye and ear doctor,” said the nurse. “We have an eye doctor. And we have an ear doctor.”

                “Not good enough,” the man insisted. “I need an eye and ear doctor.”

                “Why?”

                “Because I keep hearing one thing and seeing another.”

                So went one of the myriad jokes that kept Russians mentally afloat under communism in the Soviet Union, where they were bathed in the good-news propaganda of a government adept at concealing problems—except for problems that citizens could see with their own eyes.

                I confess to a limited imagination back then, in the late 1970s: I never conceived of Soviet jokes being applicable to the United States one day. But here we are, with a president who has lied or exaggerated some 22,000 times, according to a running tally by Washington Post fact-checkers. And thousands of his supporters at rallies cheer his fabulations.

                “Just remember,” Trump told an audience last summer, “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.”

What a relief. COVID-19 cases seemed to be spiking until Trump reassured a rally that the country was “turning a corner” in the pandemic and his son, Donald Jr. declared that deaths were down to “almost nothing” the day they hit 1,000. Trump’s White House recently listed “Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic” first among his accomplishments in science and technology.

At rallies last week, Trump covered his failure to get Mexico to pay for his border wall by claiming that it’s happening. In Sanford, Florida on Monday: “And by the way, Mexico is paying. They hate to say it: Mexico is paying for it.” In Johnstown, Pennsylvania on Tuesday: “And Mexico is paying for the wall, by the way. You know that. I've been saying it. They hate to hear that. But they're paying.” In Des Moines, Iowa the next day: “And as I said, Mexico is paying for the wall.” The eye and ear doctors must be doing a booming business.

I keep wishing a reporter would ask Trump whether, when he tells a lie, he realizes that he’s lying or thinks that he’s telling the truth. I wished Biden had asked him that in the last debate.

It doesn’t take much editing to put Trump into some of those old jokes. In one favorite of politically irreverent Russians, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are on the train to communism when it grinds to a halt. When it does not move again, Stalin orders the crew taken out and shot. That done, the train still doesn’t go. So Khrushchev orders the crew rehabilitated posthumously. Still, the train doesn’t move. So Stalin and Khrushchev turn to Brezhnev. He pulls down the shades and says, “Now let’s pretend the train is moving.”

As Peter Baker writes in The New York Times, “Born amid made-up crowd size claims and ‘alternative facts,’ the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy.” The same was true in the Soviet Union, except that in the communist dictatorship, joke-telling needed a sanctuary, often around the kitchen table, secure among trusted family and friends.   

We have not come to that in the United States, mercifully, where the safety valves of humor are very public, and the release of laughter spews out daily from professional comedians and amateur Americans alike. Still, it’s distressing how smoothly Trump’s dissembling can be slid into Russians’ lampoons of their Soviet government’s pompous spins into unreality. Let’s end with this one:

At a medical conference, three doctors compared notes.

“I treated a patient for pneumonia, and he died of cancer,” confessed a physician from France.

“That’s funny,” admitted an American. “I treated a patient for cancer, and he died of pneumonia.”

The two looked expectantly at their Russian colleague, who straightened, puffed out his chest defensively, and declared: “Gentlemen, when we treat a patient for a disease, he dies of that disease!”