Sometime during the years of our country’s seemingly endless “Cold” War, President Richard Nixon and his minions developed a strategy they hoped would bring our enemies in North Vietnam to the negotiating table. Nixon wanted them to believe that he was so unstable, so reckless, that he might actually press the big red button and unleash a nuclear war. He called it The Madman Theory. The ploy assumed that, facing a deranged president, the North Vietnamese would enter into negotiations for a peace agreement out of fear of a nuclear attack by an irrational president.
Fast forward to today, when people ask me “Why do all those people just do whatever the current oval office resident asks of them? What are they afraid of?”. I’m certain they expect me to opine that they’re afraid of losing their power or of facing sudden well-financed opposition in their next race.
Actually, however, I believe they are righteously fearful that the certifiably insane white house squatter has nothing holding him back from the most extreme and crazy actions. They have good reason. He is already carrying out threats of retribution and punishment, without a twinge of conscience. He demonstrates complete irrationality with every statement, which makes it easy to believe that he has no personal guardrails left and will do anything to keep and exert maximum power. No outrageous act is off the table. That madness is greatly amplified when it gives both trigger and permission for a complete lack of boundaries among his sycophants and followers.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her sister, for instance, received bomb threats and other hostile messages after the Justice sided with the majority in a ruling (rare for her) against the Trump administration. Members of Congress have indicated that they were afraid for their own safety after the oval office decorator spewed words encouraging violence and hate toward them. For a host of others, including former executive branch appointees, he has been clear that he will use the full panoply of his falsely claimed executive powers to harass, sue, investigate, and arrest his political enemies.
His insanity, feigned or real, has real world consequences. Never again will we be able to say, “He wouldn’t really do that, would he?” Be assured. He would. The Madman Theory, as it turns out, is a very effective tool for exacting obedience and submission.
But, as we used to say, in the pre-feminist days, “If you’re a bad girl, you get punished. If you’re a good girl, you get punished anyway. Might as well be a bad girl.”
Sign All The Pledges
When the current white house resident was elected the first time, I encouraged my colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, and elsewhere, to “lie, cheat and steal” in order to be ready to counter the dark storms that were coming. It’s the only way, I argued, to meet, and try to check, the behavior of a man who is a liar, a cheater, and a thief. They thought I was joking, the unfortunate result of my earlier life as a comedienne. But, no. I believed we needed to meet the moment with intelligence and flexibility.
Recently, in this disastrous second term, the toadies at the Pentagon indicated that they would require journalists to sign a pledge, promising never to gather and publish unauthorized material. That is, material that is unauthorized because the white house says is not to be published, no matter the source. Ha!
Throughout history, journalists have come by information that a government entity wanted kept secret in various ways, and have gone on to publish the information and use a bit of sunshine to disinfect the secrecy swamp. Did I mention Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers? Just one example in the long sweep of history.
My suggestion? Sign the pledge. Gather everything you can. Publish it with a splash and expect to lose your white house credentials, which gained you nothing but pap and garbage in the first place.
I don’t know if it’s possible these days, when universities are trying to comply with all the requests for information from the current anti-knowledge, Hades-serving regime, but, I would love to see them maliciously over-comply by throwing in every scrap of detailed information they can find. In law firms we called it “papering them to death”.
For our esteemed academies, this might involve sending reams and reams (electronically speaking) of numbers and more numbers and official memos on standards that are so general they say nothing about what the universities are really doing with their own admissions, hiring, etc. And then send more, perhaps even contradictory ones. Yes, it may be a risk, but everyone’s being punished anyway just for trying to comply. It’s certainly a lot more fun than spinelessness.
