Stephen Colbert

 Not much knowledge of the Third Reich is needed to hear the echos of how that regime went after its critics, and the firing of Stephen Colbert as the big corporation bent over for Trump and supplicated. 

Corporations are, of course, not about conscience, as Milton Friedman gleefully told us, but about profit.

But, in  the case of certain public figures, they simply are bigger than the Lilliputians. Bob Dylan was bigger than the Nobel prize, and Steve Colbert is bigger than Paramount. He doesn't need Paramount and will land elsewhere and leave the corporate suits behind him. 

He has exposed the naked emperor mercilessly and effectively and he'll find a new place to reach his nearly 2 million loyal fans. 

But one thing is obvious: This was not a decision driven by profits, dollars from advertising, and decline in late night viewership as other forms of media eclipse the Old Johnny Carson model. This was a sheer cave in by corporate suits intent on keeping a merger on track. Like Columbia University, the suits caved to Trump.  CBS was no Harvard. No guts. 

Colbert may not be a Zelensky, but he is good enough for America's purposes.  When Lincoln first saw Philip Sheridan he remarked to Grant that Sheridan looked very small to be a general. "When the fighting starts, he will be big enough for the purpose," Grant remarked. Sheridan, of course, proved him more than right, and that remark became the understatement of the century.

The relentless scouring of America's resistance, whether it be comedians, police, local government office holders, scientists, teachers is not new in American history--if you look back carefully.

It will take a while to undo the corrosion Trump will cause, but eventually, the mighty pendulum of history will swing back the other way, and we'll laugh at the absurdity that is Trump, as we now laugh at Teddy Roosevelt for buying into the idea of "race suicide" and of all the eugenicists like Davenport who thought fecklessness could be genetically inherited, and Woodrow Wilson who thought women unfit for the vote.

They were all dinosaurs slated for extinction. Well, not extinction actually, because they proved to be zombies: reborn every several generations to re emerge like those cicadas from underground, from under rocks, to claim only White males of the proper heritage can be entrusted to run the world.

Trump likens himself to Andrew Jackson, who was hideous in his own way, but Trump is actually more like Andrew Johnson, who had some instincts in the direction of the common man, but who could not get past the idea there are superior white men who should run the world, and all the others should be ignored or shunted aside.

The 14th amendment, insuring birthright citizenship, voting rights for Black men and which denied the right to hold office or vote to former traitors (i.e. Confederates) was passed to thwart Andrew Johnson's attempts to undo the outcome of the Civil War, to deny Black people real freedom. 

Trump, of course, believes traitors and insurrectionists should be pardoned, especially if they they are invading the Capitol to protest his electoral loss.

Trump, of course, is a simple buffoon, and the real creepy crawly,  slithy toves are those like Steven Miller, who pullulate in the slimy swamps from which they all emanate. 

But, as Lincoln said, "This, too,shall pass."