What is a Banana Republic? Hint: Fox News has no idea.
Retro Review: Newsletter #3 - 6/10/2024
I have a message for Fox News and that message is:
Reviewing the Fox News coverage of Trump being found guilty of all 34 counts in the hush money case was like watching a fever dream.
Which is almost always the case with watching any Fox News coverage of anything these days, but I got substantially more schadenfreude from this than I usually do.
I did notice one thing though…
Fox News hosts have not one fucking clue what a Banana Republic is and it shows. Take a look at this recap from Kat Abu on tiktok.
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Before we get into all the ways they are wrong, let me explain what a Banana Republic is.
The term seems* to date back to the novel Cabbages and Kings by author O. Henry (you’ll recognize him if you had a decent English teacher in high school, The Gift of the Magi and The Last Leaf still make me cry).
In the novel (which is really a set of connected short stories) he named the fictional Latin American country of Anchuria to be a banana republic.
In the constitution of this small, maritime banana republic was a forgotten section that provided for the maintenance of a navy. This provision — with many other wiser ones — had lain inert since the establishment of the republic. Anchuria had no navy and had no use for one.
…
At that time we had a treaty with about every foreign country except Belgium and that banana republic, Anchuria.
In a 1916 report from Chester Lloyd Jones, professor of political science, writes that “Costa Rica is developing into a typical “banana” republic, as Salvador is a “coffee” republic.”
In simpler terms, when talking about political science, a banana republic is a politically and economically unstable country whose economy is essentially entirely dependent on the export of a single natural resource. In the case of Costa Rica in 1916, bananas.
Costa Rica’s economy didn’t naturally become dependent on bananas. In 1873, as they recognized the profitability of bananas in America, two railroad tycoons from America began to capitalize on that by establishing banana plantations along the railroads that they built in Costa Rica.
Not a bit of which has anything to do with Trump being found guilty, obviously. America is not a poor country depending on agricultural exports to keep our fragile economy afloat.
It is of course possible that what the Fox News hosts are referring to is the corruption that is often a major part of these nations (that said, it’s a bold move to refer to corruption in banana republics when America has traditionally been the one to encourage and import that corruption).
However, there’s another problem with that. Because if this was a banana republic, the person found guilty by the courts wouldn’t be the “wealthy” businessman.
Banana republics are run by the oligarchs (or the dictators put in place by America). They are characterized by highly stratified socioeconomic structures and extremely unequal distribution of wealth.
In a banana republic there is a two-tiered system of justice and the rich are never held accountable. The fact that a former president and self-declared “billionaire” can be held accountable in a court of law and found guilty for his actions is precisely the opposite of a banana republic.
However, if Trump is elected in November, you can bet we are going to see America transformed into a banana republic before our very eyes.
Jesse Water’s did get one thing right though (and that’s not a sentence I ever believe I’ll have to type again). Donald Trump’s life IS a Greek Tragedy, if by Greek Tragedy Jesse Water’s meant that Trump’s life is the result of his own flaws of character and poor decisions.
To put it in a simplistic way, hamartia means "no matter where you go, there you are"; you cannot escape your own personality; there are elements of our selves from which we simply cannot escape, and, for the Greeks, these elements are "inherited" and will sometimes determine the course of our lives.
Trump slept with a porn star. Trump paid the hush money to cover it up for the sake of winning an election. Trump stole classified documents. Trump put them in his bathroom and showed them off to everyone he wanted to impress. Trump organized a coup and watched as it happened on the news.
No one twisted his arm and forced him to tell the Proud Boys to “Stand Back and Stand By,” no one forced the documents into his hands as he left the White House, and no one forced him to fuck around on his wife and then pay people to hide it for him.
So, yes, Jesse, Trump’s life is a Greek tragedy. In that it can teach us what not to do by showing us the results when some idiot does it.
*there may well be older usages of the term, but this is by far the most well-known early reference.