Day 195: Gorky Park on the Potomac

 

At last, the heat broke!  Huzzah! Interestingly, in breaking, it shattered. That is to say, we have been running below normal in terms of temperature, even to the point of nearly sundering an all-time low temperature for August. How wonderful. 😀  Unfortunately, NOAA, or what is left of it, is predicting a well-above normal August through October. Around these parts, that is known as an "Indian Summer", which is to say a summer that refuses to leave. It is what we had last year, too. Sadly.

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Ironically, it is during these not-so-august days of August that I found myself watching a snowy Cold War thriller called Gorky Park. Of late, I have been in a Cold War mindset.  Perhaps it is due to the excellent Underground '80s music channel via soma.fm, but I suspect it really has to do with the raging hot war in central Europe, aka the Russo-Ukrainian War, combined with an American presidency that is historic not for its alleged successes as much as for its Soviet-style top-down autocracy. 

As I wrote in my previous post, America, under Season Two of MAGA, has devolved into a command economy, where one man, which is to say the failed businessman and convicted felon Donald Trump, is trying to micro-manage the most expansive and complex economy in not just the world, but in the history of the world.  The results have been predictable, which is to say a dismal failure:

Arguably the biggest news in Friday’s jobs report wasn’t what it said about July. It was the steep downward revision to estimates of job growth in the previous two months.

U.S. employers added more than a quarter-million fewer jobs in May and June than initially reported, the Labor Department said Friday. What had previously looked like healthy gains of more than 140,000 jobs each month now appears to have been a much more anemic gain of under 20,000 jobs.

Such a big revision is bad news on its own terms, showing much weaker growth than previously understood. But it is also bad for another reason: When hiring is consistently revised down, it often means the economy is in, or headed for, a recession.

Now, back when America wasn't in the early days of authoritarian rot, such disappointing news would have been met with sober reflection and an endeavor to do better. But such days are now behind us. These days, the administration's response is right out of a dictatorship's playbook, which is to say to label the report as thought-crime and fire the official responsible for the audacity of truthfulness.

As per The New Zork Times:

President Trump unleashed his fury about weakness in the labor market on Friday, saying without evidence that the data were “rigged” and that he was firing the Senate-confirmed Department of Labor official responsible for pulling together the numbers each month.

In a long post on social media, Mr. Trump said he had directed his team to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was confirmed on a bipartisan basis in 2024.

This type of reaction to an unfavorable jobs report would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Rather, killing the messenger of bad news was something more reminiscent of authoritarian regimes, such as the old Soviet Union, than it was of the gold standard of free market republics that was the United States of America. 

Such assinine decisions are more than annoying; they are destructive. By firing a professional, impartial commissioner, Trump is signaling to the world that, henceforth, American economic statistics are no longer trustworthy.  As a direct result, anyone looking to invest in America will be given pause as they now know that the American economic picture is thoroughly unknowable. 

As with Trump's dimwitted and largely failed trade war, this partisan commandeering of economic data will serve to add another nail to the coffin of America's financial future.

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Here, Gorky Park becomes relevant. This movie, based on Martin Cruz Smith's bestseller of the same name, explores a common theme of Soviet corruption during the later years of the USSR. Specifically, it concerns a triple murder and the surrounding corruption of senior Soviet ministers. In one pivotal scene, Irina Asanova, a key figure in the murder investigation, explains that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, she will not accept the death of her murdered friends, who, the viewer learns, were trying to escape the Eastern Bloc for the free West. She explains that when trapped in an inescapable totalitarian regime, "It doesn't matter how ridiculous a lie is if it's your only chance of escape." Furthermore, she proclaims that "It doesn't matter how obvious the truth is, if the truth is that you'll never escape."

When I heard those lines, I realized that America is now slipping into such a mindset as well.  America is now living under a regime that tells its citizenry that files concerning a sexual predator, the very files touted by the regime just weeks earlier, suddenly don't exist when those files contain some inconvenient names for the state. Likewise, we now live in a regime where, when economic data reflects poorly upon the regime, that data is invalid and the professional responsible for it is now an unperson and will be removed from her post. 

As has been observed many times before, this is not normal; none of this is normal in a free republic. Rather, it is behavior that, once, back in the Cold War days, would have been expected not from the White House, but rather the Kremlin. As with poor Irina, Americans must now learn to lie to themselves regularly, to accept that truth is now a lie, and the lie is truth precisely because we know it is a lie, which makes it safer than knowing the truth.  

I will close with another line from Gorky Park. Here, the murderer - I will leave details out to preserve the mystery for those who have yet to enjoy this excellent thriller - makes a chilling observation about how we all contribute to the rot. In his defense, he tells the police inspector, "Corruption is part of us. All of us. The very heart of us." 

As I watch a once great country slide into authoritarianism because roughly half the nation decided to give a convicted felon, a corrupt businessman, and a close friend of a notorious pedophile, the keys to the kingdom because of the "price of eggs," I am finding it hard to argue with the logic of the murderer. 

Welcome to Gorky Park on the Potomac.