Marj-at-Large: News &Views

1984 Redux

8/29/2022

It’s hard to imagine how all of this, the political miasma that continues to drag us down with the persistence of quicksand, turns out.

As many have claimed, Trump is not the cause, but the result of the long descent of our political system, a system in which the highest court in the land has proclaimed that corporations are people and money is speech; legislators refuse to impose limits on campaign spending or the number of terms a lawmaker may serve, and a massive industry with the sole purpose of buying, one way or another, legislators' votes and presidential favors, thrives.

Even now, with the Biden administration living in a fact-based world, we're tormented by thriving remnants of a Trumpian Fantasyland where not-yet-properly-aged adults purloin sensitive documents and secrete them in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago.

Sometimes life imitates art. The torrent of lies and deception to which we've been exposed over the course and aftermath of the Trump administration was foreshadowed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's predictive dystopian novel published in1949. There, a language called Newspeak, characterized by a limited vocabulary which served to reduce the range of thought, was spoken. The language had been created by the entity called "the Party," which had become, in effect, the government..

During the post-truth Trump administration, we had no need of a language like Newspeak. We already had a leader whose limited vocabulary restricted the range of communication ... and somehow our Trumpian version of Newspeak produced the phenomenon Orwell described as doublethink.

He explained it like this: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions ... knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both ... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again ... consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.”

Remind you of anyone? Think Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell ... and others, wherever they may be.

Sometimes life does imitate art.

0 Comments

Republicans Missed Their Chance

7/28/2022

0 Comments

In the final session of the current series of hearings, the January 6th Committee, now on hiatus, brought us the perfect two-part meme for today’s Republican party:

First, a photo of a grim-faced Josh Hawley, fist raised in solidarity with a mob of insurrectionists temporarily restrained by law enforcement outside the capitol building … followed by
A video of the selfsame guy, the junior senator from Missouri, scurrying away through a corridor a short time later as the horde he had just emboldened swarmed inside.

It’s the perfect encapsulation of the cowardice of the Republican establishment.

We all know, do we not? … that the Republican party had two get-out-of-jail-free cards they could have played that would have allowed them to derail Trump’s political career, free the party and themselves individually from his self-serving domination, and, perhaps, get back to the business of governing … if they can figure out what the business of governing is.

The House of Representatives has the sole power to impeach, i.e., to specify charges, as detailed in Article 1 of the Constitution, but only the Senate can convict an officer (in this case, the president) on the charges brought in the House’s impeachment.

And here’s the most important result of such a conviction: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.” (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 3.)

In other words, if enough Senate Republicans (17, to be exact) had had the courage to vote for Trump’s conviction, the Senate could have barred him from holding office for the rest of his life. Voila! Freedom for all from the self-serving juvenile who has treated this country like his own personal gold-plated playpen.

The Republicans might have done well to remember the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin. Upon signing the Declaration of Independence, he reportedly said, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” A 100-0 vote in the Senate would have been about as clear a message as it’s possible to give. As it turned out, Trump’s still free to pursue what I hope is the impossible dream and, if not Trump, there are plenty of would-be pretenders waiting in the wings.

0 Comments

Big Government Misogyny

7/21/2022

0 Comments

Republicans like to describe themselves as conservatives with a penchant for “small” government in which medical care, social welfare, and protection of the environment are not major concerns. The less spent there, the lower the tax rate and, thus, the more contributions from moneyed constituents flow into campaign coffers. I guess it works pretty well—the campaign coffer part, that is—at least for many corporations and those individuals at the upper end of the income scale where the marginal tax rate tops out at 37%. (In 1945, it was 91%. Just sayin’.) It appears they’re getting a pretty good return on their campaign investments.

Apparently, however, the GOP (that’s a misnomer! there’s nothing “Grand” about it) has decided to pick and choose what constitutes the notion of “small” government. I realized this several years ago when Governor What’s-His-Name* of Virginia mandated that women in his state submit to vaginal ultrasounds before they could have what were then perfectly legal abortions.

What could be more big government than that?

I can’t be the first person to have realized that a woman doesn’t get pregnant all by herself. What shall we do about the other participant? Mandate a vasectomy? Why not? After all, let loose on a population so ill-prepared for life that they can’t make their own health care decisions, the miscreant could impregnate thousands!

However, just to keep the system fair, perhaps we should set up a nation-wide accounting department responsible for collecting monthly payments from the sperm contributor to ensure he does his part to support the resulting child for the coming 18 years. I know; he may be married to the woman who will bear the child, but you can’t be sure this is a forever relationship, can you? And clearly, we need some way to level the playing field when it comes to feeding, clothing, and housing a child for the 18 years that parents (notice the plural) are responsible for a child’s welfare.

Given all that, we’ll need to expand government even more, not only to track down and persecute those wild women, but to hold to account the other half of the equation, the guys.

Of course, this presupposes that those alleged “pro-lifers” care about the quality of life of that child and that mother, and I’m not sure that’s the case. Remember, some of these people now say they’d like to outlaw contraception. Contraception! What are they thinking?

Apparently, this is what they’re thinking… as Melinda Gates, philanthropist and author, has said, “Contraceptives are the greatest lifesaving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created.” Uh-oh! Those dangerous women again!

The anti-abortionist stance is misogyny run amuck. I don’t know how the females in that camp explain themselves. There’s a “Readers Write” page for that. Please … if you’re so inclined, be my guest.

*Editor's Note: His name was Bob McDonnell

0 Comments

The Unprotected Class

6/8/2022

0 Comments

One evening during the holiday season back in my teaching days, I boarded an elevator in a nearby shopping mall. Just before the door closed, a couple of teen-agers, one of whom was a student of mine, raced aboard.

"Mrs. Lacey!" he exclaimed, obviously shocked to see me there. Speechless for a moment, he finally managed, "I didn't know teachers ever went shopping!"

I told him it was actually quite common. The point is that kids who, in their logical brain, know better sometimes find it hard to believe their teachers have a life outside the classroom. To them, teachers are a breed apart.

By the time they become adults most have given up these childish ways.

Not some of our legislators, however. If they were fully formed adults, we wouldn't be seeing banners like the one in the photo above. Either they cling to childish beliefs (teachers are in charge and all-powerful) ... or they've never been in a classroom ... or they're dangerously untethered from reality.

Arming teachers is what a former colleague of mine, a psychologist charged with diagnosing learning disabilities, would have whimsically designated JPD: Just Plain Dumb.

Think about what's involved when you arm a front-line teacher. First, there's this thorny issue: where are classroom teachers to keep their weapons? Mass murderers don't announce in advance the time and place of an impending attack. Teachers teach on their feet. They move around the room. To pretend that teachers can be the first line of defense means they must spend the day with a gun holstered on a hip.

Never mind the unfriendliness of greeting your students looking like one half of Bonnie and Clyde. Never mind the annoyance of having to strap on and wear all day a lethal accouterment you hope you never need, barely know how to use, and that makes you feel like an imposter. Never mind that armed instructors make the school look like a war zone. Even if competent with the pistol (and how likely is that?), a teacher can be disarmed, too inexperienced to shoot straight, or shocked into paralysis in a crisis.

If you're not wearing a holster ... what then? Do you put the gun in a locked desk drawer? An unreachable shelf in a cupboard? A secret compartment in an innocuous looking dictionary?

You can see where we're going with this. A gun that's hidden away is not only useless in an armed attack; finding, seizing and using it is a temptation for an upset student short on self control. Arming teachers, no matter the location of the gun, is about as effective as spitting on forest fire.

And where's the body armor for the teacher and, for that matter, for the kids? Finally, what's a lowly pistol going to do in a short-lived gunfight with an AR-15?

I know politicians of all political stripes like to think that baby steps--background checks, raising the age at which an aspiring gunman can purchase an assault weapon, red flag laws--are "progress." I suppose they are ... but not much.

The fact remains: An assault rifle is a weapon of war. Its only purpose is to kill large numbers of people in a short period of time. Allowing civilians to purchase them is lunacy. There's a term often used when referring to groups that are discriminated against due to innate characteristics. Age is one such characteristic. In this country, we now have one very large unprotected class. They're called school children.

0 Comments

Another School Shooting; How Many More?

5/25/2022

1 Comment

The pending reversal of Roe v Wade doesn’t personally affect me, long past child-bearing age, but it affects others near and dear. Over the years, I had come to believe that young women who came along behind me were living in a kinder, more welcoming world than the one I grew up in. The “kinder” hope dissipated over the last five years, but I continued to believe women would enjoy the bodily autonomy recognized in the Roe v Wade decision of 1973.

A little history: My first impressions of what the world thought of me and everyone else of my gender were formed in the 1950’s. In the heart of the Midwest, girls wore dresses to school, boys wore blue jeans; girls played violins, boys played trumpets; middle school girls took cooking and sewing, boys took woodworking and “shop;” boys played Little League on grassy fields, girls were relegated to playing ball (often with the neighborhood boys) in the streets. In the world created by adults, we were pigeon-holed by gender. It seems like another lifetime now—or it did until I realized one of the most powerful institutions in our country is bent on dragging us back to those dim days.

With the reversal of Roe v Wade on the horizon, we’ve already had more than a glimpse of what many states, seeking to deny women the right to make their own decisions in the most intimate arena of their lives, have in store for their hapless inhabitants.

Basically, Roe v Wade guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion prior to the viability of the fetus. During the first trimester, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is the woman’s alone. During the second trimester, states can impose regulations, but cannot completely outlaw the procedure. During the third trimester, the fetus being viable, states can regulate or outlaw abortion except when it’s necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.

If the court overturns Roe, states will be free to regulate access to abortions without federal guidelines. Five or six justices (John Roberts’ vote is uncertain as of now) will unleash states to do as they see fit. If you’ve followed developments at all, you’ve seen the extremes to which some are prepared to go, at the extreme, banning abortion with no exceptions, even in cases of rape, incest or threats to the life of the mother.

Why?

Most of the folks who call for those extreme restrictions are not “pro-life,” as they claim. If they were, they would support life-affirming programs in the fields of childcare, health care, education, and nutrition. They would have long since passed measures banning assault weapons, extended magazines, ghost guns and more. As I write—on Tuesday, May 24, 2022—19 children and two teachers are mowed down in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Republicans aren’t pro-life at all. They’re pro-birth. They care about children until they’re born; after that, those kids are on their own.

1 Comment

Oh, Florida

4/26/2022

0 Comments

Voter Beat was created in 2017 as I plunged into disbelief and outrage at the election of Donald Trump. Once he was turned out of office (oh, what a relief that was) spirits, my own and those of others, rose. The joy was short-lived, however. It lasted only until we all realized what a petri dish the Republican Party had become for the incubation of immorality and disdain for our once-stable democracy.

As many have said, Trump was the symptom, not the cause of our dysfunction, but his bizarre descent down the golden escalator ushered in a hostile take-over of a once viable political party. It’s dead now.

Today some call it a cult, but that understates the case. Cults are characterized by uncritical devotion to a singular leader who proclaims--from on high, so to speak—the beliefs and expected action of the hapless devotees. Cults can cause people to behave in ways that are clearly not in their own self interest. (Remember Jonestown*?)

The Republican party, on the other hand, is not only hostage; it’s self-motivated perpetrator. It goes beyond what Trump, the group’s intellectually challenged “leader,” can envision. In several states, the party has branched out from the Trumpish chaos they so enjoyed at school board meetings to attempts to control in gritty detail some of what happens in the classroom. Their concerns have gone from mask mandates to curriculum decisions, the details of which are generally left to school administrators and classroom teachers.

Florida appears to be leading the pack in this adventure, although I’m not sure they really are. This infamous home of Disney World gets the most attention, I think, because of some of its politicians’ bizarre paranoia regarding LGBTQ and sexual issues in general. At first blush, one element of the Florida legislation seems to be such a no-brainer that I can’t help but wonder why it’s necessary in the first place. It reads as follows:

“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

That makes sense, you might say, but does it?

First it says that such instruction “may not occur.” But in the same sentence we have “or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” Which is it? What’s the or doing in there? Is such instruction completely prohibited? Or is it only prohibited if it is not age or developmentally appropriate?

Truly, it looks like a solution in search of a problem. How many cases of inappropriate instruction in K-3 grades has Florida experienced? And have they ever considered developing what they would consider an “appropriate” curriculum for the early grades? (See National Sex Education Standards, pp. 18-19, for instance.)

Actually, the infamous sentence quoted above comprises only five lines in the 163-line bill, much of which is concerned with mandating that school personnel communicate with parents regarding their children’s “mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.” At first blush, that makes sense, but as usual, the devil’s in the details. There are enough “prohibits” in this bill to make your head spin. Just a couple of examples: “prohibiting the procedures from prohibiting a parent from accessing certain records … prohibiting school district personnel from discouraging or prohibiting parental notification … in critical decisions …”** Who wrote this stuff?

Nevertheless, the question arises: Why are the Republicans, in Florida and elsewhere, so exercised about sex and gender and instruction thereof? Robert Reich—professor, author, lawyer, political commentator and explainer of the American economy—has a theory.

“First, it’s part of their culture war, and culture wars sell with voters …,” he writes. “Also by focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the rightwing extreme QAnon vote … Most importantly, a culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to talk about the real sources of their jet-fueled populist anger—corporate-induced inflation…soaring CEO pay, billionaires who pay a lower tax rate than the working class, and the flow of big money into the political campaigns of lawmakers who oblige by lowering taxes on the wealthy and big corporations and doling out corporate welfare.”***

Well, there you have it: a reason for the “far-right” craziness. More later.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

*Jonestown
**Florida Parental Rights in Education, aka "Don't Say Gay" bill
***Why Republicans are obsessed with pedophilia, gender identity, gay people and abortion

0 Comments

A Tale of Two Countries

3/30/2022

0 Comments

It’s difficult to be a pacifist these days. It’s only human, I think, to want revenge on those responsible for the death and destruction wrought by Putin’s forces on Ukraine. How does one not feel grief and outrage? It’s almost too much to bear, even at this remove. And yet … with all the horror and inhumanity come moments that uplift: volunteers caravanning refugees away from danger; a woman traveling with her own two children, taking a third under her wing when she finds him, a stranger, sitting in the street beside his dead mother; Chef Jose Andres and World Central Kitchen volunteers serving thousands of meals a day to hungry refugees; lively entertainers greeting fleeing young children as they disembark from trains; performers bringing the sounds of music into subways where thousands shelter, stranded; and the uncountable volunteers who donate clothing, strollers, food, personal items, and sometimes even housing to those whose homes are now destroyed.

Millions of lives have been cruelly uprooted. Surely I’m not the only one who thinks: There but for the grace of God go I. The physical devastation—the bombed-out buildings, the crushed cars, the remnants of children’s swings—we can see. But there’s so much damage that’s invisible: the emotional devastation of losing home, belongings, community, family; the evaporation of an unquestioning sense of safety; the innate belief that life somehow, eventually, makes sense. Now, innocence is lost and lives, changed. Many will be haunted forever.

On several occasions last week, for those of us luckier, more privileged, and thousands of miles removed, there was relief of a sort from the devastation in Ukraine as television turned our attention to the hearings on the historic nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, enroute to becoming the first black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Going from one venue to another felt like whiplash. We went from scenes of crumbling cities, structures in flames, and crowds of refugees to the relative calm of an expensively appointed Senate hearing room where we witnessed the American political system in its typical uneven fettle.

You know what I mean. There were those senators who were interested in Judge Jackson’s previous legal experience—her rulings in cases she had heard, her work as a public defender, her views on “originalism.” There was an emotional paean from Sen. Corey Booker (D-New Jersey). But the whole process was degraded by others who littered the landscape with such ludicrous questions that they couldn’t be taken seriously. For instance …

Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina), “What faith are you?” and “On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would you say you are in terms of religion?”

Ted Cruz (R-Texas), “Do you agree … that babies are racist?”

Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” (Judge Jackson’s reply: “…No. I can’t.”)

Then, Ted Cruz once more, as he prodded Judge Jackson to define the word, “I think you’re the only Supreme Court nominee in history who has been unable to answer the question.”

My question is this: How many have been asked? … And how many prospective male appointees have been asked to define the word “man”?

Juxtaposed with the unfolding calamity in Ukraine, the pettiness of such questions was particularly stark. This isn’t the first hearing to go off the rails. There have been worse. But we need to do better.

0 Comments

These Dystopian Times

2/28/2022

0 Comments

For most of our lives, dystopia has been the stuff of novels. Alas, no more.

During four years of Trump, in spite of the chaos and unreality of it all, I was able to convince myself that once he exited the White House, normalcy would return to the body politic. And it has…but only, in any reliable way, in the Biden White House and the attendant executive branch.

Unfortunately, half the Senate and almost half the House of Representatives are members of the party that, with only a few notable exceptions, remains in the thrall of the most unlikely specimen ever to rise to the highest office in the land. Trump calls Putin “pretty smart.” Mike Pompeo, his kowtowing former secretary of state, never one to miss a chance to ingratiate himself with the Mar-a-Lago maestro, calls the Russian leader “an elegantly sophisticated counterpart.” Really?

Shades of the infamous doublespeak (“war is peace”) of George Orwell’s 1984 and the dumbing down of language to restrict the thoughts that can be expressed by limiting nuance in the spoken word.

Then there’s that other Orwell novel, the allegorical Animal Farm, with the famous line uttered by Napoleon, one of the leading pigs, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” Clearly, in the U.S., all voters are equal, but those who are able to contribute mountains of cash to elected politicians are more equal than others. Both parties share the blame for that.

On the other hand, the impulse to ban books from school curricula and (heaven help us!) dictate what words teachers can and can’t use in the classroom lives primarily in the hearts of Republicans … reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 in which the job of a fireman is to set fire to books the powers-that-be don’t like.

And, of course, we mustn’t forget The Handmaid’s Tale, the story of a society in which women are subjugated and stripped of all rights. Now, we have a pale shadow in the Republicans’ war on women, an effort in which they’re aided and abetted by many in the no-longer-impartial judiciary branch.

Finally, there’s a development for which both parties and society at large all share blame. That’s the rampant numbing of the senses by so many who use opioids and other illicit drugs. Trapped in a society in which some are more equal than others, falsehood and fantasy often replace truth, and opportunity seems non-existent, many give up and descend into the dead-end of addiction. The difference between us and Brave New World is that in the latter, the powers-that-be provide the drugs and supervise their use to keep the populace docile; in our world the users, most of them from a segment of society that feels less equal than others, seek out the drugs to escape what they perceive as hopeless lives.

And now … overlaid on this domestic dystopia, there’s the international arena where we have the unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine by Russian troops. Again … shades of 1984, in which war and its attendant dangers are used as a distraction and a rationale for the lack of freedom and the constant surveillance of the populace by the leader, Big Brother.

Disturbing times, both here and abroad.

0 Comments

What's Up Back Home in Indiana

1/18/2022

0 Comments

A few years ago, I returned to my hometown for the first time in decades. Having lived in California, land of canyons and freeways and ever-expanding residential sprawl, I was pleased to discover I could get in a car in my old hometown and go wherever I wanted with nary a Thomas Brothers map or GPS or a check-in with locals for directions. It felt like home, even after most of a lifetime away.

At first I thought little had changed and, in a sense, very little had. But then, in certain areas, I began to notice … here and there, a vacant house shedding windows, porches, siding and shingles, the area around the dying structure littered with the detritus of abandonment. These were houses, I soon realized, where some of my long-forgotten classmates probably had grown up.

Unlike California, where the population was growing faster than weeds in a median strip, the population of my Indiana home was down. Even worse, the local newspaper was a shell of its former self. I had spent four of the most satisfying years of my young life working for that paper. Fires? Auto accidents? Features on the newest additions to the local college faculty or the traveling science library or the pastor with 55 clocks? Obituaries? Headlines for the national news that clattered in on the teletypes? (Yes, it was that long ago.) I did it all. … And took photos in the bargain—using a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic camera that weighed just under a ton. That newspaper got its money’s worth.

Recently, I came across an interview of a reporter who had come to work at the paper, the Richmond Palladium-Item shortly after I had left. His description of life then and there took me back to those days and, on a whim, I subscribed to the on-line version of the paper. I don’t often have time to read it (and, frankly, there’s not a lot to read; more on that in a later post), but this recent headline caught my eye: “Commissioners commit dollars to attract remote workers, map broadband service”

“Wayne County’s commissioners committed $20,000 Wednesday for a partnership designed to incentivize remote workers moving to Wayne County,” the article stated. “… The city of Richmond would be the local applicant in [the] partnership …” And best of all, the $20,000 commitment was just the beginning of the project’s funding.

The reason this caught my attention was that for some time now, I’ve been the lone ranger among my circle of California friends in suggesting that we could escape the overcrowding, traffic gridlock, crushing cost of living, and sky-high taxes by leaving this alleged nirvana and moving inland. When they ask me where I’d go, I always suggest the Midwest and am met by “… but the weather.” So, I’ve given up on them.

Meanwhile, though I plan to stay exactly where I am it’s gratifying to see interior states taking advantage of the moment to further revitalize their economies. And there’s one more plus. With an infusion of coastal types in some of those inland communities, political races might swing a little bluer. In time for 2024? Maybe not, but we can hope. Therein the fate of democracy lies..

The 2014 map to the right shows how concentrated our population is along the coasts--east, west Gulf, and Great Lakes--as well as in those distant states of Hawaii and Alaska.

For an interactive map that will help you ponder the events of 2020 and think about possibilities in 2024, click here.

0 Comments

The Pressing Issue of the Press

12/12/2021

1 Comment

It’s easy to blame the failed Republican party for the chaos of our times, but there’s another major culprit: the press. From the moment Trump glided down the golden escalator, he attracted cameras and mics like a scantily dressed beauty queen. Was it the incongruity? The brashness? The out-of-body sensation of the experience? The entertainment value? … Or the unreality of it all?

Who knows?

But from that moment on, those in the press seemed unable turn their eyes away. We had
wall-to-wall coverage of every campaign rally, elaborate dissections of charade debates, and the routine drivel of insults and exhortations to violence as Trump inserted himself into our daily lives.

For the first time in—maybe, forever (!)—“politics” were entertaining, and people who’d rarely given such affairs a passing thought were energized. For those of us who didn’t view those bizarre performances in the flesh, every major event was telecast in livid color.

Occasionally, an interviewer would attempt to draw Trump out on his thoughts about the issues of the day, but you didn’t have to be a genius to realize the thinking, unlike the man, was pretty thin. There was little need for the press to discuss policy because with Trump in the White House, the development of coherent in-the-public-interest policy was low priority, almost non-existent … such a low priority that the Republican party didn’t bother to publish a party platform for the 2020 campaign.

And for the press covering Trump, there was always the gaffe du jour, the verbal attacks, the firings and hirings, the lies, always the lies, to cover.

Now, we have a president active in the policy realm. With his leadership, legislators have passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and are seeking a compromise on another bill to fund needed social spending.

The basic job of the press is to inform voters on what’s in those bills and how they will be affected, but much of the focus has been, instead, on the interpersonal squabbling among senators who differ on the total cost. The actual provisions of the bills? Not so much.

Now that we have adults in charge in Washington, the press needs to provide concrete information on what’s at stake, not just a play-by-play of the competition.

1 Comment

Is This How We Honor Our Veterans?

11/10/2021

1 Comment

I’ve reached that stage of life when distant events sometimes emerge, uninvited, into awareness and stir unexpected reflections. I think often of my husband, Hal, who died several years ago. Considerably older than I, he had been drafted into the Navy before graduating from high school as World War II wound down.

Decades after the war, Hal and I and our youngest son, visiting the nation’s capital, drove out to Arlington and joined a small crowd on the concrete risers where visitors stand to watch the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. The ceremony is carried out in silence, save for the stern commands of the sergeant of the guards, the clicking of heels, and the slap of hands on rifles.

As we watched, Hal suddenly began to sob and, unable to continue standing, went down, collapsing on the step just behind us. I was stunned. Only later did I learn that what he had experienced was common in veterans who, years before, had come home from the war and, subscribing to the ethos of the strong, silent male, rubbed dirt on the wounds and moved on.

“Yet those costs, as hard as the nation tried to ignore them, did not go away,” Tim Madigan, novelist and journalist, wrote in a Washington Post article. “The soldiers I interviewed … and tens of thousands of others like them, were painful and often poignant proof of that. Though reverential books … glossed over it, the hidden anguish of the Greatest Generation has always been there.”

And, though we’re much more aware of the psychological effects of battle, so has the anguish of those sent off to other wars … Viet Nam … Iraq… Afghanistan … The anguish is there.

November 11th: On this day we recognize Veterans Day. If we pause to think about its history, its significance, and the people whose courage and perseverance made the holiday possible, we not only recognize the holiday. We observe it.

Millions of Americans have served in combat and, while pacifism is in my DNA, I nevertheless believe veterans deserve our respect and appreciation. What’s happening politically in this country not only disgraces us, but disrespects the veterans we claim to honor.

Trump’s “big lie” and the insurrection it spawned, the obscene flow of wealth to the wealthy, the stagnation of wages, the rampant poverty, the willfully hostage Republicans, racist mobs, the grandstanding by Josh Hawley, the bullying by Lauren Boebert the obscenities of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the covid denial of Ron DeSantis, the unhinged and dangerous threats of Paul Gosar … and the lying, the constant lying … and much, much more.

In defense of this, we continue to ask service members to risk life and limb and mental health?

Our veterans deserve better than that. So do we all.

1 Comment

The GOP: A Few Questions

10/31/2021

0 Comments

Even now, nearly five years after the unthinkable election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land, it mystifies me. Not the outcome of the election itself; we can take some comfort (though not much) in the knowledge that he lost the popular vote and was installed in the White House only because of the constitutional quirk called the electoral college.

No. What mystifies me is the perilous surrender of independent thought by people who should (and do) know better. The toddler is out of office now, thank goodness. But in his wake we have the detritus of a political party that has forgotten who it is, that remains as tied to the unhinged former guy as it was during the nightmare years, and that now has a singular goal: Contaminating the election process so completely that no matter what candidate receives the largest number of votes, the Republican will win.

“Republican,” of course, no longer means what it did in the past. It once referred to a political party. Now, it refers to something more accurately known as Trumpism and it’s not a political party at all nor does it pretend to be. In the 2020 election (you may not have noticed this in the sturm und drang of the process), the Republicans didn’t even bother to write a platform. I guess we were just to presume we’d get more of the chaos of the previous four years and let it go at that.

The more I think about all this, the more questions I have and the fewer answers.

First and foremost: Why did GOP senators not take control of their fate, band together and vote to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials? If they had, we would be rid of him (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 3) and presumably the GOP could have begun to reconstitute itself as a real political party.

That going unanswered, my next questions are these: What? and How?

What are the perks of being a Congressperson or Senator that render persons willing to
- efface themselves
- spew falsehoods
- become willfully blind to what is happening around them, and
- in general, deny their own moral compass (assuming they had one before they embarked on a political career)

Beyond the obvious threat to withhold political support and back a primary opponent, how does Trump evince such loyalty? If we were living in a rational world, we would probably guess either
- by threatening the safety of the politician and his or her family or
- by offering monetary reward

Although Trump and his gaggle of hangers-on sometimes behave as though a presidential election is just around the corner, we have three more years to go, and a lot can happen between now and then. It’s encouraging to see prominent conservatives joining others from varied political backgrounds to call for Congress to pass voting rights legislation, even if it’s necessary to change the filibuster to do so. “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy” penned by three political thinkers and supported by many others can be read in The Bulwark.

And for a more extensive list of current and former Republican officials who have indicated they lean away from Trump, see a running list in The New York Times You’ll find many familiar names: Cindy McCain, John Kasich, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John Bolton, just to name a few. Perhaps a real political party will emerge from the wreckage of the GOP. Perhaps that will save our democracy.

0 Comments

A Country Adrift

9/2/2021

0 Comments

Note: I wrote the piece that follows more than a month ago, but it disappeared into the deep, dark files of my computer. I discovered it when I sat down to write about more current events: the Afghanistan withdrawal, the climate catastrophe, Supreme Court cowardice, the willingness of governors to risk school kids’ lives, the Wild West (i.e., Texas)… and whatever else makes this moment feel like Armageddon. Unfortunately writing about all that might take a year and a day (well, maybe not), so I decided in the interim, I’d run the following piece. Maybe, by now, it will all seem tame.

As time wears on, so do I. “Wears on,” a vague expression, implies that time passes tediously. Typically, we don’t say that a person “wears on,” but right now, I feel that’s what I’m doing. Living in a country half crazed and half sane is exhausting. So much makes no sense.

We profess to believe in equality, yet as of July 14th, 18 of our states had passed 30 laws making it more difficult for constituents to cast ballots. Mail-in and early voting are more difficult; voter ID requirements, more stringent; voter purges, more likely. In all, more than 400 bills to restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states.

By the time you read this, there will surely be more, all brought to us by the Republicans, who are so unable to develop voter friendly policies that they failed to create a platform for the 2020 campaign, apparently having decided they couldn’t win on the merits and erroneously believing their presidential candidate was too big to fail. Turns out he was just too big.

Then there’s the recount charade in Arizona, carried out by the playful sounding Cyber Ninjas (a group that has not been legally certified to do that kind of work) and apparently financed by an assortment of pro-Trump sources ranging from the Arizona Republican party to L. Lin Wood, identified as a “QAnon-promoting attorney.”

At least the attempts to undermine free and fair elections, while despicable, make sense in their own despicable way. There is the whisper of logical thought: If you can’t win by appealing to the voters, try to win by keeping the ones you don’t like from voting in the first place.

What makes no sense … what gives rise to rumination in the middle of the night … what defies all reason … is the conflation of health and politics.

Refusing the Covid vaccine is like marching off to a war without a cause. How do people not understand that? The specter of death seems to be no deterrent.

We have a certain amount of craziness built into our system …

An electoral college that makes it possible for the presidential candidate with the fewest votes to “win”
Senate rules that make it possible for a minority of the members to block legislation favored by the majority
A Supreme Court whose members are appointed for life in a willy-nilly fashion: the luck of the draw, so to speak, by whoever happens to be president when a justice dies or resigns—unless, of course, one person, the majority leader of the senate, elected by the voters of one state, chooses to block the appointees confirmation

Now, one of our political parties is determined to make life even crazier--and not in a good way.

0 Comments

Suffer the Little Children ...

8/11/2021

0 Comments

The idiocy—and the hypocrisy—is astounding. Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Trump-wannabe governor of Florida, has mandated, in effect, that school districts must not require students to wear masks. If they do, they risk losing state funding, upon which most districts heavily rely.

In Texas, the famously failed state where a winter storm left millions without power or safe drinking water and summer heat has resulted in hundreds of power outages, Gov. Greg Abbott has issued an executive order also denying school districts the right to require masks on campus.

As I write, Arkansas and South Carolina are similarly restricted, though the former’s Gov. Asa Hutchinson has expressed regret over signing the bill that put the ban in place.

With luck, by the time you read this, those states (and others) will have come to the common sense recognition that they need to change their ways. A mask mandate is a no-brainer.

However, it seems the Dark Ages are upon us once again. Ignorance reigns. A former political party, now a cult, has led millions into a wilderness where healthcare decisions are based not on science, but on the rantings of politicians and a spurious belief that a vaccine is more dangerous than the disease that has taken over 600,000 American lives.

In banning mask mandates, Gov. DeSantis declared that they deprive parents of the freedom to make decisions regarding their children. Apparently, he's willing to risk the lives of the innocent and powerless. Children rely on the "wisdom" of grown-ups. De Santis betrays that trust.

And where's the logic? Critical thinking, to use the lingo of the day, has been canceled.

Think about it: Parents, these hands-off states say, should be free to make decisions in an arena where their choices may have a devastating impact not only on their child, but on unknown numbers of people in contact with that child. However, in those same states a female facing one of the most profound decisions of her life, a decision which endangers no-one, must first participate in state-directed counseling or undergo invasive procedures or face unrealistic deadlines—or, in some cases, all three. Because apparently the state knows best. You know what I’m talking about.

There’s also this: If we can’t get people to face the imminent and obvious danger posed by a here-and-now deadly disease, how on this (temporarily) green earth are we going to get them to take seriously the devastation promised by climate change? How many more fires, floods, and famines will it take? If climate change continues unaddressed, soon—like the movies—they’ll be coming to a theater near you. The unthinkable continues.

0 Comments

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

7/29/2021

0 Comments

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …” Thus, Charles Dickens, 19th century novelist and social commentator, opened his classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities. He continued “… it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …”

Unconstrained by an English teacher disdainful of run-on sentences, he ran on: “…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Sound familiar? Think about where we are today. We have the wisdom of Dr. Fauci, the CDC, the vaccine developers; the foolishness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the anti-vaxxers, the climate change deniers.

We have the positive beliefs of the Black Lives Matter movement; the incredulity and refusal to believe of the white supremacists.

We have the light of the young leaders of March for Our Lives; the darkness and ignorance of the insurrectionists.

We have the hope of Amanda Gorman*; the despair of the drug-addicted.

And in regard to the last sentence in the Dickens quote above, remember we recently had a noisy “authority” who was addicted to superlatives. I suspect he still is, but mercifully he’s no longer in authority except to those who have willingly surrendered their independence and free will.

But I digress.

One of my favorite pieces of literature to share with teen-agers during my teaching years was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In that book, a group of young boys are stranded on an uninhabited island. With no adult guidance, they soon quarrel over what they should do and eventually split into two antagonistic groups. Chaos ensues and two of the boys are killed. The book closes when a naval officer lands on the island and finds the boys, some of whom have been longing for an adult to take charge.

As I listened to Joe Biden’s inauguration speech six months ago, I realized how the boys in that book must have felt when that grown-up appeared: Instantly relieved, but not fully aware of what awaited.

But now we have an inkling: Details to follow.

*Amanda Gorman is the young poet who read her work, "The Hill We Climb," at Joe Biden's inauguration. Read it here.

0 Comments

Half Crazed and Half Sane: Political Life in America

6/6/2021

1 Comment

On June 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln accepted the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination for a seat in the U.S. Senate. In his acceptance speech, he famously said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure … half slave and half free.”

Racism had enabled Whites, apparently guilt-free, to enslave other human beings. More than 150 years later, with racism still a force in America, we’ve come to another critical divide, not as cruel, not as inhumane, but dangerous for us all. That’s the divide between illusion and reality.

This democracy cannot survive, half crazed and half sane.

Lost Opportunities

Republican senators had two opportunities to join their Democratic colleagues in convicting an inept, corrupt president after he was impeached by the Democratically-controlled House. Hostage to Trump, Republican senators refused.

They then could have joined their Democratic colleagues in creating an independent panel to investigate the unprecedented (and, until the age of Trump, unimaginable) attack on the Capitol on January 6th. Hostage to Trump, again they refused.

That’s head-in-the-sand insane. The Republican party has been hijacked. It lives in the world of Donald Trump's illusion.

Meanwhile, while Trump continues to hawk the notion that the Dems "stole" the election, a video surfaces in which the Texas attorney general happily takes credit for Trump's win there. He simply blocked the distribution of mail-in ballots in selected areas, he tells us. Then there's also the inconvenient fact that federal judges rejected or declined to hear 61 of the 62 lawsuits in which Trump attempted to overturn election results in states Joe Biden won.

The Time of Magical Thinking

Analyzing stages of child development, Jean Piaget, 20th century Swiss psychologist, identified early childhood as a time of magical thinking, a time in which a child believes that what he or she wishes will affect actual events. Piaget theorized that most children emerge from that stage around the age of 10.

But as Trump continues to claim he’ll be “reinstated” as president soon, I wonder: Is Trump stuck in this stage, the time of magical thinking? And is this “stuckness” reinforced by a Republican party that has taken him to heights that, by any measure, is beyond his scope? Do Republicans truly believe their only power comes from a guy

whose support depends entirely upon their surrendering independent thought and action?

If so, they become powerful, ironically, only by becoming powerless.

Think of the consequences …

In the House, Greg Pence, Indiana 6th congressional district rep, votes against authorizing an independent investigation into the January 6th insurrection, one aim of which was to hang the vice president, aka his brother!
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, majority leader, repeatedly demands that Republican senators block action that would support the continued existence of democracy--by authorizing the creation of an independent body to investigate the insurrection, for instance.
Republican senators, complicit in the constipation of the Senate and hungry for donations from deep-pocket donors, sheep-like, comply.

What Motivates Voters?

Still, there’s the question of what motivates the voters to cast their ballots for such a transparently selfish and unprepared man.

Science journalist Tanya Lewis, writing in Scientific American, says “What attracts people to Trump? … The reasons are multiple and varied, but … developmental wounds … make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. … When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals.”

In Plain English ...

In other words (and more crassly), it’s akin to the relationship between Jim Jones and the 900-plus members of his cult who “drank the kool-aid” in a mass suicide in Jonestown in 1978.

It should come as no surprise that Trump’s hunger for adulation is driving him to resume prematurely his “rallies.” I suppose they fill a need for a man once characterized by an interviewer as having achieved something remarkable: “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

1 Comment

Fear the Fearful Republicans

5/28/2021

0 Comments

Once we had two major political parties that, every four years, articulated their goals in documents known as platforms, revealing their concerns for the country and plans for improving our lives. Now we have a party that still does that and another that has been captured by the man now known as “the former guy.”

It must be terrible to be in the latter group. With a few notable exceptions, to be a Republican operative in good standing is to give up your right to conscience, critical thought and free will. Instead, you surrender to fear.

Then this is what happens ...

Your fear of large swaths of voters drives you to do whatever you can to deprive selected constituents, especially Blacks and other minorities, of their right to vote. (Witness states' voter suppression laws.)

Your fear of females (even if you’re a female yourself—go figure) means you believe state governments rightfully limit women’s control over their own bodies. Mandating vaginal probes. Requiring a pregnant woman to view ultrasounds of the fetus. Setting impossibly early deadlines for abortion decisions. (This is "small government?")

Your fear of those who identify as LGBTQ results in your failure to support states’ anti-discrimination laws in areas such as housing and to stand behind measures limiting the participation of transgender athletes in sports they love. (What, exactly, are you afraid of?)

But worse than all the above, you fear the truth. You fear the truth so desperately that you demand expensive recounts of votes in what has been characterized by those in the know as the most secure election in history.*

You fear the truth so desperately that you blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the facts surrounding the bloody insurrection at our Capitol on January 6th.

And this brings us to the most damning fear of all, the one that renders you powerless: You fear a man who, in four tumultuous years in office, proved over and over again that he is functionally illiterate, ill-informed, incompetent, uncaring, dishonest, cruel, a total narcissist, and completely lacking in adult social graces.

Every time I wonder aloud at this widespread selling of the Republican soul, I’m told by people of analytical bent that it’s all about power. They align with Trump in order to stay in power, the analysts tell me. But to stay in power, I argue, they actually become powerless—and worse yet, powerless in the face of incompetence.

“Doesn’t matter” is the usual return. “Just doesn’t matter. They just don’t care. They just want to stay in office.”

So . . . Self-respect doesn’t matter. How do they live with themselves?

First thing every morning, I read the latest posting in “Letters from an American” by Heather Cox Richardson,** a college history professor who writes clear overnight summaries of almost every day’s major political events. It’s a way to start the day without hyperbole or gnashing of teeth or other distractions. However, even Heather has limits and in one of the bi-weekly talks on her Facebook page she spoke about the danger of losing our democracy and urged her followers to contact their congresspeople.***

“I’m very, very concerned about the Republican party” she said, “doubling down on this lie [that the election was stolen], tying themselves to Donald Trump and that wing of the party … so thoroughly that it’s very difficult for a Democrat to overcome. … this is the moment when we either level the playing field again or we recognize that we’re in very deep trouble indeed. … we really need to step up now and make our voices heard because if, in fact, the Trump people lock themselves into power after 2022, we’re not going to get another chance …”****

* In Arizona, this has been done by a private company called Cyber Ninjas. I can’t help myself: Did you know a ninja is “a person trained in ancient Japanese martial arts and employed especially for espionage and assassinations”? (Merriam-Webster)

** To visit her Facebook page, click here

*** For information on contacting your Representative, click here
For information on contacting your Senator, click here

**** To see the video, click here
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

0 Comments

Two Bretts and a. Life Sentence

4/26/2021

0 Comments

Elections have consequences. Some affect millions in ways both trivial and profound; others affect only a few, but for those few, the consequences can be life-changing.

Such is the situation in Jones v. Mississippi. In that case, by a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court recently overturned precedent to uphold the life sentence without possibility of parole of Brett Jones, a juvenile offender, who was 15 at the time of his offense.

Over the past 16 years, the court had limited the use of the harshest penalties for juveniles, first striking down the juvenile death penalty and later restricting life imprisonment without possibility of parole to those whom a trial court had found to be “permanently incorrigible.” Such a finding had not been made in the Jones case.

What does all this have to do with elections? Well, look at the Supreme Court vote. The justices in the majority were Republican appointees, all: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.* Opposed were the Democratic appointees Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Elections have consequences.

Brett Jones, the plaintiff in question, was 15 in 2004 when he stabbed his grandfather to death in an altercation about young Brett’s girlfriend. Irony abounds. The court’s majority opinion was written by Brett Kavanaugh. In a Washington Post opinion piece Ruth Marcus writes, “Brett Kavanaugh upheld Brett Jones’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing his grandfather just 23 days after his 15th birthday. (And, yes, let us pause here to note a certain irony in the fact that the opinion was written by a justice whose confirmation hearings featured discussion about how people can change after high school.)”

In arguing against the majority ruling, Justice Sotomayor pointed out that, while Jones is white, 70 percent of juvenile offenders sentenced to die in prison are children of color. She further noted that in Louisiana, where a finding of incorrigibility is not required, a life sentence without the possibility of parole has been imposed on 57 percent of eligible juvenile offenders. In Pennsylvania, where a finding of incorrigibility is required, fewer than 2 percent have received such a sentence.

There is no judicial recourse from a Supreme Court decision.

The timing of this decision is striking: A 15-year-old, in the heat of the moment, stabbed and killed his grandfather and is serving a lifetime in prison. His appeal from this sentence fails. This, on the heels of the conviction of Derek Chauvin, who spent 9 minutes and 29 seconds—plenty of time to reflect and change his behavior—choking the life out of George Floyd. Although Chauvin has not yet been sentenced, it is expected it will fall far short of the 40 years which could be imposed.

Justice?

*And just think of this: Of the six, three were appointed by presidents whose last name was Bush (Thomas by George H.W. Bush, Roberts and Alito by George W. Bush) and three were appointed by Trump ( Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett). Just sayin’.

0 Comments

The Tyranny of the Minority

3/18/2021

0 Comments

I was introduced to life in the hallowed halls of Congress when I was 12, old enough to tolerate a modicum of boredom, but young enough to recognize absurdity when I saw it. My father was scheduled to attend a conference in D.C. (we lived in Indiana at the time) so it was decided the whole family would go along for the ride. My dad said we’d get to see where and how laws were made (or not, as it turned out) before his conference started.

The first day there, off we went to the Senate gallery, from whence we watched some grizzled “lawmaker” drone on about the number of boxcars sitting, unused, on sidings all over the country.* Happily for me, my tolerance for boredom being strained, we didn’t stay long, and after we left, I asked my dad what law they were talking about.

“Oh, they weren’t talking about a law,” he explained. “That was just a filibuster.” He went on, of course, to explain what that meant.

“Just a filibuster.” That was back in the days when a filibuster (a word which, incidentally, appears nowhere in the Constitution) meant someone had to stand up and speak for hours and hours to keep the senate from voting on a bill he didn’t want to pass. (Save for Margaret Chase Smith, they were all “hes” back then, more’s the pity.) I thought it a strange way for sentient adults to pass the time, but oh, well …

Now, however, the standing up and speaking for hours on end isn’t necessary. As Philip Bump explained in the Washington Post,“… In practical terms, filibusters these days are only rarely hours-long riffs driven by passion for a cause. They are much more frequently hand-wavey threats to offer such a speech, with the end game of forcing legislation to meet a supermajority standard before passage.”

By some arcane process a senator who knows he’s in the minority on the bill in question can, in effect, announce he’s conducting an imaginary filibuster to prevent the proposal moving through the august body enroute to

becoming a law. Sixty votes (a 3/5 majority) are required to overcome the tyranny of the minority he represents and move the proposal along in a process called “cloture.”

Currently, Republicans all over the country have been pushing new state laws to make it ever more difficult for those with Democratic leanings to vote. In response, the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, has passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. It is now up to the Senate, where Republicans threaten to block the proposal with a filibuster.

While the Democrats have a slim majority (48 Dems, 2 Independents, and the tie-breaking vote of VP Kamala Harris) and could either abolish the filibuster or make it harder (by requiring those marathon speeches, for instance), they hesitate. Why? Well, first, they’re not sure they’d have all 50 votes of the aforementioned senators and for another, when they’re the minority party, they sometimes like to use the filibuster themselves.

The fact is that the proposed voting rights act is vital to our democracy. Without it, we face a future in which Republicans can dominate the electoral college without ever receiving a majority of the popular vote. That’s happened twice already in this young millennium and we’ve all seen how that’s turned out. The GOP is now pushing for new restrictions that would make it even more difficult for minorities and the disadvantaged to vote in 33 states.

Why? In a recent Supreme Court hearing in Arizona, the attorney representing the Arizona Republican party explained that without the restriction in question, the Republicans would be “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.” In other words, the Republicans need to stack the deck to win.

Preserve the filibuster? Or preserve democracy? That’s the issue here. Let your senator know which is more important to you.

*Interestingly, the aforementioned trip to the nation's Capitol occurred in the last millennium. Apparently, the boxcar problem remained unsolved for a long time. I googled "boxcars on sidings" and found several newspaper articles complaining about the boxcar problem. They were published in newspapers in 2009. Click here to see the Wall Street Journal coverage.

0 Comments

The CPAC Experience: Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo

3/3/2021

2 Comments

Soon, someone is sure to pen a fictionalized version of the bizarre story of Donald Trump and our tortured recent past. Perhaps somebody already has. If so, what, I wonder, is the genre? Satire? Fantasy? Psychological thriller? Apocalyptic tale? … Horror?

The story of last weekend’s CPAC alone would lend itself to any one of those literary types. Think about the name, for instance: Conservative Political Action Conference. I’ll admit I couldn’t bear to watch the entire lunatic event, but when I did, I didn’t see any conservatives and there was no conferring going on. The “former guy” (gotta love the Biden-inflicted moniker) fumed, whined and lied in a repetitive dump of hubris and prevarication that passed as a major speech. Sucking the oxygen out of the ballroom for an hour and 30 minutes, he provided lots of grist for satire, but none of it involved conferring with other attendees.

You haven’t experienced the real Donald Trump until you’ve read, as opposed to heard, a few “sentences.” Here’s a sample from his opening remarks: “I stand before you today to declare that the incredible journey we’ve begun together, we went through a journey like nobody else. There’s never been a journey like it. There’s never been a journey so successful.” And you thought listening to him was painful! (For complete text of the former guy’s verbal meandering, click here.)

Then there’s Ted Cruz, fresh from the self-imposed embarrassment of his Cancun adventure. (You know … the one where he abandoned his Texas constituents in their frozen, unheated, waterless state.)

He showed up in Orlando, stuffed into a business suit, and strutted about the stage, spouting inanities. “Bernie is wearing mittens, and AOC is telling us she was murdered,” he crowed a propos of nothing. And later we wandered into “… the media here looks at the men and women gathered here, at the young people gathered here, as dangerous radicals. This is the Rebel Alliance and Vader and the emperor, and let’s be clear, they’re not your father, are terrified of the rebels who are here. And I’m proud to tell you, Gina Carano [whoever she is] is standing with us.” Winding down, he closes with what he calls encouragement: “ . . . these are dark days and the media tells us this is the new Galactic Empire forever and 1,000 years.” Ted Cruz is a horror story in and of himself, and an apocalyptic one at that. (For text of his verbal adventure, click here.)

The speeches are blessedly forgettable, but I don’t know how I’m going to delete from memory the study in chaos that is the golden icon: that six-foot statue of Donald in flag-themed board shorts, red flip-flops, and (oops!) business attire on top; holding a star-topped magic wand worthy of Cindy’s fairy godmother in one hand and a document headed “We the people” in the other. And here’s the piece de resistance: hair styled in a pompadour a là Elvis Presley. It’s kind of Elvis meets the founders for a day at the beach and a long speech with a magical lady.
And never mind the inevitable comparisons with the idolizing of the golden calf in the Bible. That adventure turned out badly. Republicans, beware . . . (Text of Exodus 32 here. It’s short. You should read the whole thing.) Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo!

2 Comments

<<Previous

1984 Redux

Republicans Missed Their Chance

Big Government Misogyny

The Unprotected Class

Another School Shooting; How Many More?

Oh, Florida

A Tale of Two Countries

These Dystopian Times

What's Up Back Home in Indiana

The Pressing Issue of the Press

Is This How We Honor Our Veterans?

The GOP: A Few Questions

A Country Adrift

Suffer the Little Children ...

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Half Crazed and Half Sane: Political Life in America

Fear the Fearful Republicans

Two Bretts and a. Life Sentence

The Tyranny of the Minority

The CPAC Experience: Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo

Thoughts for Our Time

Archives

Categories

Copyright © 2017