On Willie Sutton, Liberty Valance and Donald Trump.

Posted by Pointman on June 29, 2018 · 16 Comments 

A longtime contributor to this blog and a good friend, Blackswan, asked me a question recently. Why did I mainly blog about American politics when I live in Europe? As usual, a trenchant thought from that source. My answer came down to something similar to what the American bank robber Willie Sutton allegedly replied to the question “why do you only rob banks?” when the police finally caught up with him. “Because that’s where the money is”. That simple reply is now called Sutton’s law and in a similar sense, I blog mainly on American politics because that’s where all the real action is.

In passing, he denied or couldn’t recall ever having said it in the autobiography he eventually wrote when he was let out of prison on compassionate grounds, but it’s now passed into legend, and to quote that movie the man who shot Liberty Valance – when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. He did say something about his 25 year career robbing banks all across America without ever killing anyone and getting away with an estimated two million dollars – “Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.”

You could see why the cops who took him in didn’t just shoot him down in cold blood like they did with John Dillinger and the other desperadoes of those times. He may have been a robber, but he was a decent one as far as they were concerned. He also made three successful prison escapes without injuring a corrections officer, which put him in that extremely rare Tommy Crown zone of being a very classy kind of criminal.

Why do I think American politics is where the action is? Because the election of Trump and by any measure his scintillating performance as president thereafter, has energised politics in Europe and around the world. People yearned for a return to basics, to pride in their country and culture and were totally fed up of a sort of sick, diseased and almost omnipresent grafted on culture of political correctness that not only seemed to paralyze the exercise of any common sense but also seemed to be handing the keys to their country to frankly deranged minorities who actually believed in things like there are 65 genders of human beings, and were getting government support for such idiocy.

What was worse was that the current crop of politicians around the world had the political smarts of middle management filing clerks, no real bollocks and the last thing they could ever be trusted to do was create a successful economy. In short, they were dumb, dire and totally out of ideas.

The average person was just terminally fed up and ready for some leadership that would stand up and denounce all that incompetence and insanity for what it was. The fuse that was lit initially was Brexit, followed a year later by the election of Trump. They were both events that proved to the average citizen that the paralysing grip of an elitist but essentially jaded establishment on their futures was not something which couldn’t be broken.

Across Europe, new parties are forming modelled on the belief that you don’t have to accept irrational theories and ideas, which are both offensive and quite frankly at times degenerate. It’s pushback by the common person and that is growing steadily. The first one of those parties to gain power happened just recently in Italy, but my feeling is they’re just the tip of the spear. Bavaria, for instance, has all but nearly seceded from the federal republic of Germany over the issue of mass migration, and that might ultimately prove to be the unseating of Queen Merkel of Europe.

Even in Sweden, which I’d written off completely, there are stirrings of a new political awareness with the anti-EU, anti-mass migration Swedish Democrats party coming from nowhere and powering into the lead ahead of a September general election.

North of the border in Ontario Canada, Doug Ford, by my reading a traditional conservative irrespective of what the fake news vendors have branded him, recently crushed the local liberal opposition so badly that they no longer even enjoy the perks of a major party.

That is the real danger presented by Trump to both the liberal elite and the deep state. If they can stop or destroy him, then they can prevent the dominoes starting to fall in other countries. So far they haven’t, and it’s a reflection of their frustration at both his success and his growing popularity with middle America that the attacks on both him and his family have grown increasingly puerile, if not just plain outright vile.

It’s okay to call his daughter a “feckless cunt”, it’s okay to show his bloody severed head in a promo, it’s okay for Hollywood celluloid heroes like Robert De Nero to shout “fuck Trump” to great applause while handing out awards at a theatrical luvvie ceremony, it’s okay to call his elegant wife, who speaks five languages, a brainless cow, it’s okay to say he has an incestuous relationship with his children, it’s okay to wish his 12-year-old son dies of cancer and probably most disgustingly, to wish that same child was kidnapped and then placed in a cage with a gang of pedophiles.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) recently called on people to mob any members of the Trump administration seen in public. The rather obvious subtext is she’s encouraging physical attacks on people who work for the administration. Sarah Sanders and her family are refused service in a restaurant because she’s Trump’s press secretary, and the only comment the mainstream media can make is that she should be grateful she and her family weren’t served with a meal that the chef hadn’t ejaculated into.

That’s the level, the gutter, to which political discourse has fallen to on the left-wing of American politics, and it’s one massive self-inflicted wound, though they’re so blinded by hate, they can’t see that. Listening to them and the progressively more extreme threats coming from them, they remind me in an uncanny way of the KKK leaders of the 1960s who saw the civil rights revolution threatening their hegemony over all blacks.

Just swap nigger for conservative, and it’s the same tired old tune but with a new lyric. No niggers in our restaurant, niggers drink at a different tap, niggers at the back of the bus and of course it’s alright to attack a nigger on sight, beat the shit out of them and then set the dogs on them. The liberals of a 1960s vintage would look at that level of hate and intolerance and recognise the enemy they fought against.

The ordinary person, of no particularly strong political persuasion, finds such statements totally abhorrent and in a readily understandable human instinct to protect anybody who’s being so viciously abused, will feel in all common decency they must have sympathy for the victim rather than the abusers. The bit that will guarantee that impulse is that the people hurling all the abuse which just bounces off Trump, have decided to shift their attentions to his children.

That’s a big no no. You can fight the parents of a family all you want, but if getting nowhere with them, then taking the fight to their children breaks all the hard-wired family protectiveness taboos, even if you are some Hollywood/fake news head honcho. It smacks of a low-born cowardice that nobody likes. Your career will die and anyone you do the celebrity endorsement of will look at you as if you’d just given them a dose of the clap.

There’s a phrase I first heard used by Jack Kennedy and then nearly twenty years later by Ronald Reagan that comes from the bible, Matthew I think. It’s a rather fanciful comparison of America to a shining “city on a hill” whose light cannot be hidden. I think it was in both their inauguration speeches and its inclusion gave a vivid imagery to the notion that a great nation was about to flex its muscles once again and provide not just leadership for America, but an optimism for the world in the face of uncertain times.

For a lot of people in other countries watching political events unfold in America, Trump is the latest manifestation of that distant shining “city on a hill”. He waved his magic wand, and brought back jobs that Americans were confidently assured had gone forever, putting the economy back on its feet. Coal miners in Kentucky are going back to mines that’ve reopened and a record number of working men are bringing in a family paycheck once again. Black, Hispanic and female unemployment have plunged to lows not seen for decades. That’s just the domestic turnaround he did, and will be more than enough to slam the mid-terms as well as ensure a landslide re-election in 2020.

On the foreign policy side, he let the military off Obama’s leash and they promptly destroyed ISIS within six months flat, he relieved North Korea’s dictator of his nukes and my feeling is he’ll do the same with Iran. Putin has prudently decided he doesn’t have any more territorial ambitions just as long as Trump is around. Trump’s busy battling for a levelling of the foreign trade playing field and looks like he’ll succeed. He’s hard at work steadily draining the Washington swamp, and the deep state operatives are in full panic mode and scurrying in all directions towards plea bargains.

These are all good things for America, which is what you’d expect as he’s the type of America first, middle and last president the country has so desperately needed for about the last four decades. Where it gets interesting and why I say it’s where the action is, is in watching, analysing and picking apart the pure dogfight that’s happening between him and the deep state swamp in Washington.

In essence, it’s the same battle being fought in all the Western democracies around the world, and with the same two groups in contention. On one side an unholy combination of deep state, fake news providers and the entertainment industry versus the ordinary person who sees Trump as their champion who’s beating the shite out of the lot of them. He’s a scrapper, and he loves a good fight, but he always leads with his head, unlike them, who always appear to favour leading with their faces.

It’s hard to get excited about, never mind blog about, the mindless day-to-day displacement activity of what passes as government policy from a doomed Theresa May, Angela Merkel’s low but obvious East German cunning as she suborns yet another obscure EU committee of faceless bureaucrats, Macron poodling along behind Merkel like a rentboy on her leash, and the rest of the politicians in W. Europe are fairly anodyne, to say the least.

However, I do finally see the beginning of some stirrings of political discontent in Europe that are resulting in changes of policy, if not administrations, but in my opinion it’s being inspired and the template is being set by events occurring on a far distant “city on a hill” on the other side of the Atlantic and the battle occurring there. If Trump loses, it’ll probably have a stifling effect on the nascent return to traditional conservative politics that’s starting to reawaken around the world.

If he wins, it will almost certainly be the second great extinction of the liberal dream, and not only in America.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The second great extinction of the liberal dream.

Europe in crisis and the new politics.

The loss of faith in the political class.

Click for a list of other articles.

 

 

 

 

 

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