Our New Ethic, As Mastered by the President
By A Lidden
Those core values we Americans have believed in throughout most of our history? Let’s be frank about them and where we presently are:
The America we have loved and believed in is no longer. Our nation has changed value-wise and consequently, we now have an urgently serious problem with respect to our sometime “bedrock” values. We can no longer define them with clarity. And even if we could, we are no longer able to understand them, much less live by them.
The bedrock values foundational in our history have been trampled upon and pushed down without mercy. Presently they lie underground, beneath our feet; and our ethical compass has been turned upside-down, or topsy-turvy to the way it was.
Take, for example, our once presumed “bedrock” admiration for the person “who is as good as his or her word.” In the past, we have declared over and over that we love that person. We have said time and again that we’d like to be that person. But where, pray tell, in 2019 can we find such a person, one so broadly admired in our community? In our state? In our nation?
Seems like every time we think we’ve found the Mr. or Mrs. Integrity so richly treasured in our national memory, a serious flaw in the chink of their moral armor is embarrassingly exposed. An advocate of family sanctity is found to have cheated on his wife. It is learned that a holy man has committed unholy acts toward children; and “Christian ladies” are revealed to be artists in “sex for success.” On and on. Daily the radicalness of our ethical regression is made blatantly known among us, and throughout the world.
Donald J. Trump is not the creator of this New Ethic. He is, however, its chief practitioner, its finest artist. Want to know our New Ethic well? See Trump. Read Trump. Follow Trump. And you will learn it abundantly well.
Donald J. Trump is, you see, a situational liar, meaning he lies in every situation in which he finds himself. When one lie fails him, or is no longer useful, he lies about the first and, if necessary, about all other lies related to his new one. The lying progression Mr. Trump has mastered is endless and meant to be so.
Donald J Trump has never met a “man who’s as good as his word.” Indeed, he has shown no desire whatsoever to meet or be associated with that man; for to him, that man is weak for a simple reason: he doesn’t know the art of situational lying.
Donald Trump has never met a lie he doesn’t like. And he has never met a successful cheater or tyrant he doesn’t respect.
For you see, in Trump’s world, his values are non-values or, perhaps better said, they are anti-values.
In this new Ethic, the Old Ethic has a place only where old folks, has beens and do-gooders still cling to the bedrocks. They are voters too, you know, who must be courted and told the lies they wish to be true.
Convinced yet that everything value-wise has become truncated?
Well, it has. Our pledge of allegiance has become “to this nation down with which we sink.”
Can we dig our way back up? You tell me. Then Us can tell everybody.
