Being “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth,” as our new president described journalists, although himself a master at telling whoppers, I have grown a fairly thick skin regarding insults. In fact, I want to thank the president for including me among the human beings, which doesn’t always happen.
But one criticism does irritate me — being dubbed a communist by certain readers who are Donald Trump fans. They take the primitive view that all liberals are communists, so I suppose I should not feel special.
My first reaction to my communist-calling critics is to call them fascists in return, but I have been reluctant — mostly because it would be equally absurd. George W. Bush was sometimes called a fascist when he was president. While I am no admirer of Bush, he is no more a fascist than I am a communist. The idea is ridiculous, even to those of us in the planet’s most dishonest community.
But now President Donald Grump is in the White House and everything has changed. We are liberated from former restraint. He has empowered us to call the kettle by its name as it lets off steam.
Of course, his proto-fascism is a tawdry, low-grade affair, made up as he goes along. There will be no concentration camps, but there will be scapegoats to blame, religious faith invoked from the pits of hypocrisy, bullying of those who don’t conform to the state interest, grandiose promises and the usual rampant nationalism. It waddles like a duck, quacks old hatreds like a duck, even if it doesn’t goosestep like a goose.
As the novelist Sinclair Lewis was supposed to have said, although he apparently didn’t, “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross.”
Apparently, it has begun. Take the president’s inauguration address, which ended with an unwitting parody of the fascist salute — half arm, clenched fist. His many alt-right pals, in this country and abroad, surely swooned.
It was a terrific speech in the sense of being terrifying to anyone with a sense of history. It dared to strike the America First theme, a phrase that up until now no serious leader would touch with a bargepole. To most nostrils, the term still has the whiff of Nazism and anti-Semitism from the 1930s.
But enough of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread: The people needed to move on, and the day after the inauguration they did. More precisely, they marched on, women, children and men in their many thousands in cities across the country and the world. (Full disclosure: Some of my friends and relatives took part. I know some of you are shocked.)
These women’s marches were a much-needed, positive antidote to the presidential negativity posing as patriotism. But what are we to call them, these true patriots reviving democracy? It’s important that the movement has a permanent name, something that evokes a moment in history.
Perhaps the movement’s name could include the word snowflakes, which right-wingers have gleefully seized upon lately as an insult to describe anyone with fragile sensitivities, which by extension is all of us who fear that Mussolini has been reborn in America. Lots of snowflakes can make an avalanche to bury all obstacles.
Unfortunately, the Snowflake Avalanche may be a bit too cute. Maybe we could keep the name Women’s March. If the emerging faux fascism is the result of too much testosterone, as I suspect, maybe only estrogen can save us.
But I think the movement should be simply called the Resistance, which conjures up the heroic French Resistance to fascism during World War II after the conventional battles were lost. Anything that reminds right-wingers of the French is bound to drive them to distraction. With any luck, they will be reminded of the Black Panthers, too, and go totally around the bend.
I do not suggest that any foe should be shot or blown up, which was the way of the original Resistance, but instead be subject to democratically inspired satire and scorn, delivered perhaps with the help of mimes. Everybody in the movement should start wearing berets in protest solidarity. I still have mine from military service, but you can buy a raspberry one from a secondhand store — and thank you, Prince.
Mes amis, fascism nouveau must be opposed. If we fail in this noble task, at least we will have drunk some good red wine.
• Reg Henry is a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist.
