Preferential Silence: the way to the White House

“….We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out. We preferred to keep silent….” 1

It’s started to rain. Big straight down drops of rain from a pale grey sky hanging quietly above the still fresh green leaves of poplar and pittosporum. The green-white flowers on the new hydrangeas are starting and there are one or two tiny white balls on those little plants from the nursery. The quails have stayed inside today but the small, and growing, brown rabbit is sitting under the garden hedge. The lines of lavender, rosemary, manuka and alliums are drinking in the rain.  It’s idyllic. A place where you could ignore the world.  

But rather than cleaning out another kitchen cupboard I decided to eat my apple and drink my tea listening to Donald J Trump, President of the United States of America in conversation on Sunday morning November 29^th 2020. with Maria Bartiromo of Fox News.

The Associated Press, and Trump, confirmed what I already know, 73, 923,495 people voted for Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election. That means he “won” 232 electoral college votes. It was apparently the largest number of personal votes ever recorded for a sitting President. Unfortunately for Trump, 80,117,578 people voted for his opponent who “won” 306 electoral college votes.  

The United States of America is what it says it is – a group of independent states joined together as a “country” and like Australia there are levels of government and levels of power and function. So each united state can have its unique rules for the Presidential Election.   Some states don’t allow counting of any pre-election day ballots until the time for voting on “election day” has closed.   It’s a simple explanation for why you might get significant numbers of other than personally cast on the day votes.  Do I personally think there was a huge, multi-state, well orchestrated conspiracy by Trump appointed state officials, electoral officials, Judges, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the wider news media, the thousands of individual vote counters and mailmen all over the country and the Democrats to perpetrate electoral fraud in the staggering number of small counties and districts which make up the independent and individual states – no I don’t.  

So I’ve sat here listening to Trump.   I didn’t hear any thing at all that would be considered a “fact” to support the wide-ranging allegations he made.

I heard “everybody says”; “everyone knows”; “I think most think”; “big problems”; “hundreds and thousands of affidavits”; “not allowed to put in proof”; “backdating of ballots”; “statistically impossible”; “everybody knows”; “fake news”; “fake elections”, “big tech”; “aggrieved people”; “thugs”; “major news – the enemy of the people”; “tainted votes”; “elderly woman told you voted”; “nine dead people”; “votes counted in foreign countries”; “ballots in the river”; “ballots under rocks”; “no way Biden got 80million votes” ; “Antifa”; hundreds – thousands of sworn affidavits”; “lawyers threatened”; “how did he get up to 80milllion”; “media protection”; “Hunter Biden”; “stock market”; “Supreme Court make a real decision”; “won everything”; “the hearing in Gettysburg”. Gettysburg was not hearing, it was a performance piece – I watched that too.

Sitting here at the very old, battered rimu desk that belonged to several other lawyers before it was given to me, what have I learned from the conversation I just heard?

After four years of the Trump administration over 70 million people voted for Donald J Trump and everything he represents. They cannot all be private health insurance owning billionaires or uneducated extreme right wing gun toting hoons.

That the United States of America is fundamentally a very conservative society. A slice of that conservatism may be affronted by Trump but they would be even more affronted by a more progressive and sharing society. The terrifying spectre of “socialism”.

And that perhaps the American poor, the American Blacks, the American Hispanics, the wider American society who make up that 70 million plus get what they deserve and what they are most comfortable with. They can’t say they didn’t know.

Fortunately for the United States of America there remain within the 70million plus a sufficient number of men and women who understand and believe in the rule of law and democracy. For some it has cost them their heads. They have lost their employment, they have been professionally vilified and threatened. But it doesn’t mean that they are individually any less conservative.

And perhaps there are very simple answers to the huge voter turnout and how Biden got 80 million votes. This year people could vote in a manner which was accessible to them. They could vote free from intimidation.   And maybe a whole lot of people just realised what could happen if they didn’t vote.

Trump says the world is laughing at the United States because of the “fraud and corruption”.   The world is not laughing. The world is aghast at Donald J. Trump and his supporters.    The world is still waiting to exhale.

1. “First they came …” is the poetic form of a post-warconfessional proseby the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy—including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself—following the Nazis‘ rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. It deals with themes of persecution, guilt, repentance, and personal responsibility.” Wikipedia

Rosemary Balu. Rosemary Balu is the founding and current Managing Editor of ARTbop. Rosemary has arts and law degrees from the University of Auckland. She has been a working lawyer and has participated in a wide variety of community activities where information gathering, submission writing, community advocacy and education have been involved. Interested in all forms of the arts since childhood Rosemary is focused on further developing and expanding multi-media ARTbop as the magazine for all the creative arts in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand.