Marj-at-Large: News &Views - Readers Write

The Psychology of Misinformation

3/19/2021

By Dick Eiden

Dick is a writer, attorney, and political activist living in Vista, California. He is the author of Paying the Rent, an autobiograpical account of anti -war and civil rights activism in the 1960’s and beyond. The book is available on Amazon.

The Psychology of Misinformation

was the subject of the meeting
and I thought
where the hell can we start

untangling this huge, ugly
monster of a topic, what edges
can we grab and begin to pull

carefully, like a weed, straight up,
not jerking or bending the sinister
connective fibers which tear off

so easily, leaving roots to rise
and break soil again. With a
worldwide pandemic,

racial reckoning summer
& open rebellion by a President
& his maggots of misinformation

feasting on wounds of the body politic,
it might take hours to agree
on where to start the untangling -

even then, someone is likely to disagree
and leave angry, buy a bottle and
visit their spouse in the cemetery.

Windy Blackout Days

1/24/2021

By Dick Eiden

Dick is a writer, attorney, and political activist living in Vista, California. He is the author of Paying the Rent, an autobiograpical account of anti -war and civil rights activism in the 1960’s and beyond. The book is available on Amazon.

Windy Blackout Days

I was driving slowly when it blew into the intersection
like a tumbleweed, a white plastic shopping bag filled with air
blowing through traffic like a running back dodging Teslas
and trucks, tumbling headlong toward some end zone
down the street where the howling was headed.

Such a thing could cause chaos & conflict among us, afraid,
late, and mad at dead traffic lights flashing red, four-way stops
revealing drivers who wait their turn and some who don’t
- so easy, they are, to anger and incite.

Do-gooders & Keystone Cops bumble to the scene
blowing whistles and directing traffic as maskless drivers
power past, screaming where to go and what to do with it.

Rocks & dead branches were turned up this year, the fertile
mulch of murder in Minneapolis, Louisville, Kenosha, the smell
of lies - It doesn’t take much to piss people off these days.

They say scoundrels thrive in chaos and relish opportunity in
flames of arson, iron grills pried from walls and broken windows,
while they sell death and hoard money in foreign accounts, get tests,
vaccines and Doctor Bone Spurs letters when they need them and
have lunch at the club with business politician friends from college,
not the rowdy thugs they use to storm the statehouse.

December 3, 2020

Making America Whole Again

1/12/2021

By Mary Ellen Brooks

Mary Ellen is an adjunct professor of sociology and anthropology at Palomar College in San Marcos, CA.

Making America Whole Again

All morning I’ve been hearing liberal media figures assert that the terrorist attack on the Capitol was all about racism. Pointing to the disturbing discrepancy between the aggressive police treatment of peaceful BLM demonstrators and the tolerant, if not encouraging, treatment of violent white, male Trump supporters, the media on the left are underscoring the breadth and depth of racism in the United States.

But is the fact that America has a serious race problem really the “breaking news” here? I think not.

The truth is that the social dynamics behind the attack on the Capitol are far more complex than we are being told. The terrorists who attacked the Capitol are indeed white racists, but they are only the outward face of the problem. Behind them and largely behind the scenes are powerful individuals and groups who have seized on American racism and are using it as an effective tool to achieve their own goal of maintaining and increasing wealth and power.

Winning Control
As threatening as they were with their bombs and firearms, the thugs who stormed the Capitol are not the most dangerous people in America. They were useful idiots doing the work of some very smart, obscenely wealthy people who knew that in a democratic system, they would never be able to win over the average American voter by telling the truth— by saying “vote for us, because we are the candidates who will take even more of the Nation’s wealth out of your pocket and put it into mine.” No, that message would never sell. To win ultimate control over U.S. and, indeed, global wealth, they had to find a wedge issue that would induce a large enough segment of the American population to vote against their own best interests and endow the upper echelon with enough power to overthrow our democratic republic.

Because let’s face it, not everybody in the US wants to uphold and protect our form of government, a government endowed with the ideological right and justification to redistribute wealth from the bloated rich to the starving poor. The democratic system of government that the founders and framers of the Constitution bequeathed us rests on the belief that all people, having been created equal, deserve the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but intrinsic to this foundational belief is the need to redirect money and resources from the highest echelons of wealth and privilege to the middle and lower classes when excessive wealth is concentrated at the top, and the gap between the wealthy and the rest of society is too great. The rich could never get behind the idea of Robin Hood running the government.

Despite their words to the contrary, the wealthy deplore a “trickle down” economic system if the taxing of the rich is the means whereby wealth flows to the middle and lower classes. They much prefer a system that cuts their taxes, claiming— quite falsely—that the added money in their pockets will fuel the economy and “trickle down” to others.

Of, By, and For the Rich
What the wealthy much prefer is not a democracy of, by, and for the people, but rather a plutocracy— a government of, by and for the rich, and Donald Trump, though flawed in many respects, promised to give them what they wanted and almost achieved.

While Trump identified as being one of them in terms of class, wealth and power, he looked to them like he might just be the right man for the job they wanted done. Sure, he lacked the polish and sophistication of the upper class, and sure, he probably wasn’t really all that wealthy (at least not until he used the Presidency to accumulate wealth), but Trump brought to the battle some important assets that the rich and powerful thought they could use to their advantage.

Importantly, Trump was both a genuine racist and an actual reality tv star who knew how to dupe average white Americans into believing that he was a successful businessman with a sincere populist message. While crossing his fingers and winking at his rich supporters, he told out-of-work miners in West Virginia that he’d bring back coal mining, and he promised unemployed factory workers in Illinois and Michigan that he’d bring manufacturing back to the country and to their states. Sure, he was lying to them—promising them the impossible— but while his wealthy benefactors saw through his deceit, his working class supporters believed his lies and loved him all the more for telling them what they most wanted to hear.

Trump managed, then, to win support both from the ultra-wealthy who expected him to do their bidding, and from the much larger population of average, white, working-class Americans who have been watching their own economic strength erode increasingly over the past 50 years and who genuinely believed that Trump was going to restore their notion of the American Dream. He was going to give them back their jobs, their pay raises, their new cars, their nice homes in the suburbs. He was going to “make America great again.”

Cowardice or Avarice?
Meanwhile the richest of the rich knew what Trump was really doing. If you wonder why Republican Senators and Representatives stood by and did nothing to stop Trump from overturning our democratic system, the reason was not cowardice. It was avarice. Most of them had immense wealth to protect, and those few who weren’t wealthy believed they’d secure wealth and power by swearing loyalty to Trump and to the people who represent his REAL base—the ultra-rich in the US and abroad (including people like Vladimir Putin).

So yes, we have a race problem in the US, but what we’ve been seeing is not a return to Jim Crow racism. It’s worse than that. What Trump has been doing is to harness racism as a tool to seize ultimate power, and that, I would propose, is slavery re-envisioned, slavery reinstated.

If we want to prevent the history of the past four years from repeating itself, the way to begin is by doing what we can (and what we must) to fight racism. The way to begin, I believe, is by taking on institutional racism. The choices of people that President-elect Biden has made to join his leadership team are right on the mark in terms of diversity, and philosophically they appear to be fully prepared to lead us by policy and by example toward a country where people are judged by “the content of their character”— not by the color of their skin or the size of their portfolio. Though we are a nation deeply divided, if we can begin to remove that which divides us, racism, then we can reunite as a people and be made whole again.

Reconciliation

11/23/2020

By Richard Korts

Richard Korts is a software developer & IT manager who develops specialized internet apps. He resides in Escondido, California.

Reconciliation

Many years ago, President Abraham Lincoln, in a famous address, said “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” We are in that same situation now.

More than 75 million Americans voted for the Biden / Harris ticket in the 2020 election. But more than 71 million voted for Trump. So about 48.6 % of those who voted were for Trump and about 51.4% were for Biden. We cannot just sweep that 48.6% under the rug.

The Republicans actually gained in the House and unless a miracle occurs in the two runoffs of the Georgia Senate races, the Republicans will still control the Senate. If both Dems in Georgia win and the two independents currently in the Senate side with them as expected, the Senate will have a 50-50 split.

I believe we as Americans must find a way to overcome the extreme polarization in this country and it needs to start NOW. Not just with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other leading Democrats, but at the so-called grass roots level. But how do we do that?

I think it was in a broadcast of 60 Minutes in 2017 that Oprah Winfrey did a piece in which she led a discussion with 16 Michigan voters, eight of whom had voted for Trump and eight, for Hillary. Participants were able to avoid confrontation or anger by LISTENING to what the other side said, with no interruptions and no rebuttals, just listening.

We need to try doing something like that now. We need to reach across the partisan divide and listen to each other. I’d like to suggest we try it. Try assembling small groups of people on both sides of the divide and listen to each other. What have we got to lose?

To the Creators of the Lincoln Project

11/8/2020

By Bruce Thompson

Bruce is an adjunct instructor of philosophy at Palomar College. His Ph.D. is from the University of Colorado. His major emphasis in philosophy is critical thinking, formal logic, and American pragmatism. He is also a poet, violinist, and raiser of back yard chickens.

To the Creators of the Lincoln Project

An open letter to Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, and to the many other Republicans and former Republicans whose opinions have served to educate and inform me:

It has been a pleasure. When the Lincoln Project was formed I believe I was among the first liberals to email you to ask, “How can I support you? Where can I send money?” I have since given more money to the Lincoln Project than I gave even to Democratic candidates that I supported. It was a small amount (because I am only an adjunct college teacher), but every dollar of it was heartfelt and given without regret.

I believe our destinies must now part ways. You are called to do important work, and to go where I cannot follow. You must rebuild an honest, patriotic, and sincere conservative party. I am a liberal, and that is not my work. I will work to see a liberal agenda enacted: universal public health care, strict environmental regulations, and high taxes on the rich to fund programs that benefit the poor. I do not expect you to follow me in those efforts.

But I wish you well. The country needs an opposition party. Sometimes that opposition will be the conservative party; sometimes it will be we liberals. But we cannot thrive without each other. The party of Trump was so venal, so corrupt, so out of alignment with the values that all Americans share, that honest Republicans could no longer be a part of it. It had to end. But I have seen this before: given enough years in power, Democrats are capable of becoming just as corrupt and authoritarian as Republicans have shown themselves to be. When that time comes (and may it be many years away) we will need each other again.

I don’t believe the “Republican” party can be saved. It is now too much the “party of Trump,” devoted to tinfoil-hat conspiracies, racism, misogyny, as well as the denial of science, facts, reality, and basic logic. We need a new conservative party. Perhaps it could be called “The Party of Lincoln,” or, simply, “The Lincoln Party.” Made up of centrist Democrats and disaffected former Republicans, such a party could quickly become a formidable force in American politics.

But forming such a party is not my job. It is yours, and I sincerely wish you the best of luck with it. I will be your opposition, but I will never question your victories, nor celebrate your defeats.

Bruce Thompson

Adieu ...

11/8/2020

By Jerry Franklin

Jerry is a retired high-school Government teacher residing in San Diego County, California. A major goal of his teaching was "to install in students a special inner ear capable of detecting either nonsense or unsubstantiated claims."

Adieu ...

In the immediate aftermath of most presidential elections we generally see either disappointment or satisfaction. Today we see relief and joy! Watching the TV coverage reminds me of nothing so much as the end of World War II. There is a gigantic collective WHEW !

Trump is headed for the dust-bin of history and will join James Buchannan, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding in the basement apartments of ex-presidents. With the exception of Johnson, most of those who live in that neighborhood were simply feckless. Trump, like Johnson, did actual harm to the government he was elected to lead. Besides being crude and boorish, his decisions (and his non-decisions), policies, lies and meddling misuse served to weaken the structure of most of the governmental agencies and international “understandings” he was nominally charged to support. His ignorance of both government and history buttressed his indifference to any coherent foreign policy.

He did not read. According to many who worked in the White House, he had the attention span of a four-year old. He treated most of the agencies and departments of government with either scorn or indifference, allowing them to flounder without leadership or replacements in the face of departures. Chiefly, his decisions began and ended with one question: what will this do for me? If the matter did not affect him personally, he ignored it.

Biden’s first task will be to aggressively focus on the pandemic currently holding the nation in its grip. Beyond that, his job will consist largely in the restitution of good order to the agency of government. It is reassuring to know the country will once again have a leader who accepts the judgment and the integrity of science as a guiding source in the establishment of policy.

Further, we may also look forward in the coming year to a restoration of close relationships with our traditional friends and allies in the world. We will quickly rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, and I would not be surprised if we also rejoined the treaty established with Iran with such difficulty.

Hopefully, with our allies, we will be able to overlook as a temporary aberration the last four years. It is likely this will be the case as it is in everyone’s best interest to do so. Donald Trump was a source of intemperate curiosity to the world just as he was to Americans. The demise of Trump will be of regret only to those countries in the grasp of undemocratic authoritarian regimes, those Americans whose politics begin and end with the words “profit” and “loss” and other Americans whose cultural sympathies are complemented most readily by those of the Silver Shirts of the 1930’s and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1800’s.

Ethics, Integrity, Self-Interest, and Hypocrisy

10/5/2020

By Jerry Franklin

Jerry is a retired high-school Government teacher residing in San Diego County, California. A major goal of his teaching was "to install in students a special inner ear capable of detecting either nonsense or unsubstantiated claims.

Ethics, Integrity, Self-Interest, and Hypocrisy

The chief support of American middle-class morality is, and always has been hypocrisy! To aver one thing and yet do the exact opposite is a proven characteristic within the social fabric of American life. It is as American as sour apple pie. We like to think of ourselves as good and decent folks and, as Winston Churchill pointed out, “In the long run the Americans will almost always do the right thing.” Still!

In private circumstance hypocrisy is generally punishable in one way or another. As a defensive option it is most often and effectively employed in the world of commerce and politics. In those arenas the substantive issue at question is twisted and distorted by so many voices that in the long run questions of deceit and fault are submerged in a contradictory river of verbiage. Eventually the party or parties injured become not ethical victims but rather merely names within a topical issue in an ocean of many others: an issue du jour, quickly lost to the next day’s headlines. When it comes to the behavior of politicos it is so common as to be hardly worthy of mention.

Polite society dictates that we never sully or denigrate social order with salacious details of our “private” lives. To do so would be to contradict the rules of the American middle-class ethic. We merely cite this behavior as either discretion or a matter of privacy. It is good that this is so, for without such an ethic social order would be somewhere between difficult and impossible. The old radio program, “The Shadow,” used to begin with the portent laden words “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

Chico Marx having once been discovered flagrante delicto by his wife, turned to her and said “I wasn’t kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth.” Most are not as quick witted as he; nevertheless, we all manage to closet our indiscretions both petty and large. One is capable of lying both by omission and commission. “That’s fine, just don’t mention it” is the largely unspoken mantra for a successful social life in America.

The Grand Old Party is currently busy explaining why they intend to rush through the replacement nominee for the Supreme Court despite the passionate argument issued by them to justify their denial of a fair hearing for Merrick Garland during the waning months of the Obama Administration. With nary a flicker of guile in their voices and facing the waning weeks of the current Trump Administration the current GOP leadership argues that “We should quickly name a replacement in order to guarantee a full court.”
Like an old man slowly twisting his moustache while ogling a sweet young thing, they leer to the side and say, “Hypocrisy, us? . . . never!”

“We can, and so we shall” is the order of the day. Which is to say, we have the power and we will use it to serve our purpose. If EVER there was a better illustration of hypocrisy I cannot recall it!

Landing Patterns

10/1/2020

By Dick Eiden

Dick is a writer, attorney, and political activist living in Vista, California. He is the author of Paying the Rent, an autobiograpical account of anti -war and civil rights activism in the 1960’s and beyond. The book is available on Amazon.

Landing Patterns

We watch them descend toward
a small airport grown from hobbyists
hotshots and crop dusters for the

groves that lined the valleys like
green carpet spotted with orange
after World War II. The groves

are long gone and small jets now
bring executives from Japan
and Silicone Valley to business parks

in gleaming hi-tech buildings
soon to be left behind
in the onward rush of cause and effect.

The first hotshots and barnstormers
had been pilots in WWI and flew
loop-de-loops for picnicking families

in fields out of town on Sundays,
stood in soup lines and marched
to D.C. for food in ‘32. No work

for warriors after the war, they
camped on the National Mall
as generations have, looking for
someplace to land in America.

September 15, 2020

Despicable

9/11/2020

By Jerry Franklin

Jerry is a retired high-school Government teacher residing in San Diego County, California. For several years, he pioneered in his field, teaching a course called Critical Thinking. Would that he had been able to reach a wider swath of the electorate. The complete title of the document below is ..

Des'pi-ca-ble (des'pi'ka-bel) adj. to be despised; contemptible.

Can anyone . . . will anyone . . . stand up and say, with even the slightest timbre of honesty, that the word does not accurately describe Donald Trump in the latest descent into his pathetic
world view? Beyond self-serving sycophants, will anyone seriously stand up and defend his comments on the American military? If there are such creatures, let them join him in his own self-made Hell. I can understand those who will blindly continue to support him because he makes their lives better by virtue of his economic policies, irrespective of the cost to millions, his lies and his narcissistic ego. For those identified by their racial bias that readily vote for him, I have little but contempt. But to call those who have given their lives or bodies on the battlefield in the name of service to their country suckers is impossible to accept by any standard or excuse. “Bone-spur” Donald proved that he was no “fool” by avoiding military service. “Tell me again, which foot was it?” Oh!, clever him.

What in the name of reason can we say of those who would elect to the most prestigious office in the world a man who does not even know the basic causes for U.S. entry into the Great War? I had thirty-two years of high school students, most of whom could have explained our entry into that war. How damn ignorant could Trump be? He is a man who depends upon his biases for his policies and his imagination for his facts. He has rarely met a circumstance he knows nothing about without offering his “opinion” on it.

He is a despicable and dangerous human being and needs to be summarily chased from the White House. The descendants of Buchanan, Fillmore, Andrew Johnson and even old Harding can breathe relief, for their forebearers are soon to rise a notch from the bottom of the heap. Trump will become the worst president in American history. Let us all hope and pray that he remains the standard bearer.

What worries me most are not the vulnerable and politically naïve Americans who constitute Donald’s “true believers.” No, it is the self-serving and politically astute who, knowing Trump for what he is, use their wealth and position to back him because they know how to employ their wits in a transactional world in order to support themselves at the expense of the American people: the real suckers! How many of Trump’s true-believers have utterly no idea how they are manipulated (branded), daily in mahogany board rooms? To the clever and self-serving corporate mind they are a reasonably managed political and economic resource; the cost of doing business; loose change . . . like parking tickets and the office coffee fund.

What the Dems Want

9/8/2020

By Bob Delaney

Bob is an attorney and bridge player with the rank of Diamond Life master. He lives in Richmond, Indiana, where he is active in the Indivisible movement. The piece below is excerpted from a missive he sent to a group of long-time, but not always like-minded, friends and I thought it deserved a wider audience. Bob says it is a “rewrite, compilation and expansion” of an item posted by Greg Hilligoss, a retired Richmond teacher, who in turn had drawn from a text by a writer whose identity is unknown.

What the Dems Want

Trump and Pence say the Democrats …

…hate the police and want to defund and disband them.. That's a lie. We want to root out racism, and police brutality and hold those who abuse power accountable.
…want to open the borders to criminals and others. That's a lie. We want to give asylum seekers a chance and help those coming from unimaginable terror and poverty. We want to ensure children aren't separated from parents and none are kept in cages.
…want to take away guns. That's a lie. We want sensible gun control to help prevent mass shootings.
…want to get everything for free. That's a lie. We want to work hard to ensure that healthcare and education are affordable for all.
…want to make war against traditional marriage. That's a lie. We want people of all sexual orientations to be able to love freely, no matter whom they love.
…want to destroy history. That's a lie. We want to recognize ugly parts of our past and say unequivocally that what happened is not okay; we want to prevent ugly episodes from happening again.
…want to take away constitutional rights. That's a lie. We choose to believe science, wear masks and try to prevent the spread of disease.
…want to hate America. That's a lie.We recognize our faults (racial injustice, economic inequality, and abuse of police power) and want us to do and be better using truthful civil discourse.
…want to regulate everyone and everything. That's lie. We want to protect our air, water, soil and people, especially children, and our health. If we go overboard in that regard, that's better than polluting our planet, killing our workers, and battering our children with an unhealthy environment.
…want to let the protestors destroy our cities. That's a lie. The bulk of our protestors are peaceful and seek action on our societal wrongs.

We know that Trump is a pathological liar and educationally stupid. We know that Putin isn't stupid; he understands propaganda and how to use it and his assets, of which Trump is one.

Are we headed for a dictatorship run by Putin? Or will we recover our democracy and start repairing the enormous damage done by the Trump cult? That is the question.