SATURDAY: Bruce Willis didn't know he had died!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2024

A clash of civilizations: On Tuesday evening, Lawrence O'Donnell assured us that the Hegseth nomination was dead.

In the end, it could always turn out that Lawrence was basically right! At any rate, here's what he said, right at the start of Tuesday evening's Last Word:

O'DONNELL (12/3/24): Exactly two weeks ago, at this very hour, I had seen enough of what was happening to Matt Gaetz's nomination for attorney general in the United States Senate to declare, with confidence, right here, that Matt Gaetz would not, could not, be confirmed—wasn't going to happen. And, just two days later, Donald Trump then withdrew Matt Gaetz's nomination for attorney general.

And tonight, Pete Hegseth's confirmation for secretary of defense has now hit the same wall in the United States Senate that blocked the Gaetz nomination. Pete Hegseth is not going to be confirmed for secretary of defense. It's all over.

If we're on the same schedule we were on with the Matt Gaetz nomination, that means Donald Trump will give up on Pete Hegseth on Thursday.

To watch his fuller statement, you can just click here.

It could always turn out that Lawrence was right—that Hegseth won't be confirmed as secretary of defense. It could even turn out that Trump abandons the nomination—that no Senate hearing ever occurs.

That said, Thursday came and Thursday went and Trump didn't abandon the quest. Instead, Hegseth gave a defiant speech that day in defense of the current state of his character, and Donald J. Trump doubled down on the nomination several times the next day.

Senator Joni Ernst even seemed to suggest that the nomination could perhaps go all the way to a Senate hearing. It could turn out that Senator Ernst was backtracking from her earlier apparently negative stance, or it could always turn out that she actually wasn't.

At any rate, as of Tuesday, we Blues were doing a lot of chortling about the drunken Hegseth's plight. As of today, we'd have to say it's a possibility that he could end up being confirmed.

On Tuesday night, Lawrence seemed to be very sure about this state of affairs. That said, it's no longer clear that the Hegseth nomination is dead. This makes us recall the situation of the Bruce Willis character.

We refer to the character Willis played in the 1999 film, The Sixth Sense. The film was a major hit. It earned vast sums at the box office. It received six Oscar nominations, including a nod for Best Picture. 

The story turned on a basic fact the moviegoer only learned at the end of the film: The Bruce Willis character is no longer living—but all through the course of the film, he doesn't yet know that he's been tragically shot and killed by a deranged gunman.

Is it perhaps a bit like that for many of us in Blue America? We recently lost a presidential election. In truth, the nationwide vote was rather close. According to the Cook Report, here's where the numbers currently stand:

Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024
Candidate Trump: 77,289,119 (49.79%)
Candidate Harris: 75,005,605 (48.32%)

For reasons we've seen no one explain, the votes keep rolling in. Given the improbable assignment facing the late-arriving Candidate Harris, the nationwide vote was remarkably close—but Candidate Trump did in fact win, and those of us in Blue America now face the possible consequences.

Do we understand the situation we're in? Quite routinely, it seems to us that we possibly don't. 

We Blues! In many respects, we now stand at the mercy of the incoming President Trump. As we understand it, that's especially true in the internation realm, but there exists a remarkable degree of peril in domestic affairs as well.

Meanwhile, the incoming president has assembled a deeply peculiar team of acolytes to assist him in his future endeavors. Matt Gaetz is gone at this point, but these vast works remain:

Acolytes and assistants, in position or merely proposed:
JD Vance
Tulsi Gabbard
Kash Patel
Robert F. Kennedy, Junior
Elon Musk
Vivek Ramaswamy
Pete Hegseth
Tucker Carlson (attacked in bed by demons)

According to Blue America's lights, that's an assembly of flyweights and crackpots. However nutty Hegseth may seem, he almost surely isn't the nuttiest person on that remarkable list.

That's the way it seems to us here in Blue America. To us, that's a gaggle of flyweights and crackpots—but over there, in much of Red America, that's a collection of visionaries and genius reformers.

(Musk's vast success in the business world lends a sheen to that aggregation. So does Kennedy's name.)

Never the twain shall meet with respect to those dueling assessments or with respect to what those people might do if they all end up in office. 

Those dueling assessments will remain—but those of us in Blue America have no real control over the ship of state at this point. It largely depends on the actions of 53 Republican senators. That includes Senator Ernst, who possibly seems to have possibly backslid a bit.

(Or not! There's no way to know at this time.)

Simply put, we're in a clash of civilizations. It isn't clear to us that some of us in Blue America understand that basic fact at this point in time.

Earlier this year, for several months, we compared this to the clash of civilizations which lay at the heart of the Iliad, the western world's first great "poem of war." 

Eventually, the siege of Troy produced that wealthy city's fall. According to Professor Knox, every citizen in Classical Greece understood what happened when that more civilized society fell before the madness which had spent ten years laying siege to its towering walls. 

The events in question aren't described in the text of the Iliad. But in his lengthy introduction to the 1990 Robert Fagles translation, Professor Knox said that every Greek citizen would have known what happened when sacred Troy finally died:

PROFESSOR KNOX (1990): The whole poem has been moving toward this duel between the two champions [Hector and Achilles], but there has never been any doubt about the outcome. The husband and father, the beloved protector of his people, the man who stands for the civilized values of the rich city, its social and religious institutions, will go down to defeat at the hands of this man who has no family, who in a private quarrel has caused the death of many of his own fellow soldiers, who now in a private quarrel thinks only of revenge...And the death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. 

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

In the Iliad, Troy is the more civilized of the two societies which have come into conflict. In the current situation, that's the way those of us in Blue America tend to think of ourselves.

That isn't the way we're seen or portrayed in the major warrens of Red America. Meanwhile, something else is remarkably true:

To this day, many of us in Blue America seem to have no idea why anyone would ever have voted for Red America's candidate in last month's election. It can only be because all those Others are "deeply racist," our tribunes and our commenters still frequently say and suggest.

Has there ever been a people quite as blind as we Blues seem to be? We seem to be unable to see the possible reasons for the 77.3 million votes which have created a world in a which an assembly of flyweights and nutballs may soon re-order the globe.

We can't understand the apparent absurdity of President Biden's border policy over his first 3.5 years. We can't understand the dereliction of duty involved in the president's failure to offer an explanation for that apparently inexplicable policy.

We Blues! We kept insisting that President Biden was sharp as a tack when it seemed to be fairly clear that he possibly wasn't. And our cable stars kept pursuing our dream—our dream of locking the other guy up.

As they pleasured us with that dream, they steadfastly refused to confront the forces which would inevitably move votes away from Blue America's late-arriving substitute candidate. They refused to discuss the lives of the Others. Who could possibly care about Them?

In our view, there are many aspects of our tribe's performance which likely moved votes the other way over the past many years. Many of us in Blue America seem to be completely unable to see this.

As recently as Tuesday night, we were chortling about the way the Hegseth nomination was going to swirl down the drain. Now, it seems the momentum may have changed—and awaiting us is a possible major change in the existing world order.

The Willis character didn't know he had died. We often get a similar vibe as we watch Blue America flounder. 

There are many reasons which might explain why a voter might have decided to vote against Blue America's candidate this time around. Many of us seem to be completely unable to understand that basic fact—to see ourselves as we actually are, to see ourselves as other people might conceivably see us.

Twenty-five years ago, the Bruce Willis character—a good, decent person—hadn't yet come to terms with a very significant fact. 

Are we Blues in a similar situation? Are we willfully blind concerning the ways we may, conceivably, have managed to earn our way out?