“This is Not America” official video (1985)

On March 2nd, 2016, during my song-a-day tribute to Bowie, I posted a live version of this song following a big, and at the time virtually unbelievable primary win by Donald Trump. My short blog entry promised to post, “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction as Beauty” if Trump somehow won the nomination. Sadly, I had to keep that promise. Seven years later Trump has been indicted on 38 counts of various violations around retaining serious national defense documents and obstructing justice in relation to doing so. I’m guessing it is impossible for anyone to come across this blog post and be learning about Trump’s indictments here for the first time, so I won’t describe them further.

This development comes a few days after the death of Robert Hanssen, the infamous spy, who died in prison at the age of 79. Hanssen’s horrific story formed the basis of a pretty good movie, Breech, which we watched again on the occasion of his death. Like Breech, the Falcon and the Snowman is a movie based on a true story of espionage, in which two traitors betray the United States by selling secrets to the Russians. In the early days after the news broke of Trump’s indictment (as I write, the news broke less than 48 hours ago), even liberal media seems to have been reluctant to speculate on what possible motivation Trump had to keep and hide documents that have immense military value to other countries, especially our adversaries. Though speculation was more rampant about his motives before the indictments actually hit, I’m guessing that we’re all still digesting the surreal enormity of Trump’s betrayal as described by the indictment itself, with no need for additional speculation yet. Even after all these years of behavior that seems most consistent with the agenda of Vladimir Putin, the Saudis, and other foreign menaces, there still seems to be this residual resistance to the idea that someone elected president could possibly be a realized-threat to the United States.

The posted video is an apparently modified version of the official video, featuring images from the film rather than images of Bowie singing the song. I’m somewhat surprised at myself that I never got around to posting this before. But now seems as good a time as any.

Update: I kind of wrote too soon. Immediately after I wrote the above, I started reading the on line New York Times, which included a story titled, “Unanswered in Indictment’s Details on Trump’s Hoarding of Documents: Why? The charging document offers some possible hints but does not establish that the former president had a goal beyond simply possessing the material.” I’m not altering the above text because my point is this— even this article doesn’t speculate that Trump’s motive might be the most obvious one— that he wanted to use information as currency with foreign powers. The Times story speculates that he wanted to keep the documents as trophies or for the narrow focus of making a case for explaining events of his presidency to writers. But the story doesn’t even raise the question of whether he wanted to sell the documents, or that he was carrying out a mission to deliver documents to Putin, Mohammed bin Salman or however might be his paymasters. As if all his cow-towing to these dictators hasn’t been on full display for years, or, as if the Muller report doesn’t spell out the close connections between Trump’s effort to become president in the first place and Russia’s strong desire that he succeed. I recognize that the facts that we already know are momentous, but we don’t know everything yet.