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

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

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

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

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.

My Two Cents

8/17/2020

By Valena Dismukes

Valena is a retired educator and photographer and an active intentional traveler. Her photos and musings can be seen on her website, Valena Broussard Dismukes Photography. Here, she reflects on life in Los Angeles during a pandemic in a message she sent out to her friends. (Printed here with permission.)

My Two Cents

The other evening I went to dinner with friends downtown. It was the first time in months that I drove more than 3 miles and wore a pair of pants that didn't have an elastic waistband. Wow! What a treat!

Good things are happening:

People are exercising more
I get preferential treatment at Target and other stores
My Spanish vocabulary has increased
My ukulele ability is getting better
I'm exercising daily
A move toward justice is ocurring
I have painted virtually every horizontal surface in sight

Not so good things happening:

BLM--its methodology, mission, and concommitment violence
My clothes are gathering layers of dust
People are less friendly behind masks
Economic depression for way too many people
I eat everything in sight
Social media is beyond my comprehension

I really miss:

Yard sales
My friends
Getting and giving hugs
Traveling internationally
Photographing people without masks

And I won't give two cents for Kamala Harris--I don't like her record on criminal justice. Brace yourself for civil (or uncivil) unrest regardless of which candidate wins.

Val

People Aren't Getting Stupider; It Only Seems That Way

6/30/2020

By James Newton

James is CEO and founder of Open Source Motor Drivers and a core team member at the San Diego Makers Guild. He describes himself as "just some clueless guy who doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut. Luckily, very few people ever listen to what I ramble on about. That's the beauty of the internet; it's big enough that almost anyone can be ignored." As you can see in the piece below, he's also discovering there's a flip side too that.

People Aren't Getting Stupider; It Only Seems That Way

Recently, someone referred to the "rationality of the populace," and that sparked this thought: Doesn't it seem that people are getting stupider?

Well, I did some research, and IQ tests are not showing a drop. If anything, it's the opposite. So I cast about for what it is that's causing so many foolish ideas to spring up, and eventually came back to the question: "What has changed?"

I think the answer is this:

Most people are easily manipulated and always have been.

In the past, however, people didn't subscribe to too many stupid ideas, because the only source of them was themselves and their friends. The news was more or less accurate. Libraries filtered out patently false books. (Yes, they did; I couldn't even get Jack Kerouac). Book publishers wouldn't take a chance on a book that the library system probably wouldn't buy. Fiction was well understood to be fiction, and suggesting otherwise would get you laughed at. I hadn't realized it before, but our society used to have a pretty serious "bullshit" filter.

All that changed when the internet gave Russian, Chinese or other trolls direct access to our least enlightened citizens. That, in turn, forges connections between those who support each others' inane beliefs. There's safety in numbers, it seems.

That last point is obvious. What I wasn't getting was that in reality, some among us have always been this gullible; they had been protected, however, by an invisible filter that I didn't realize existed.

Could it be that this idiocy has always been among us, but the problem was hidden by forces unseen?

Of Cherry Trees & Other Myths

11/5/2019

By Jerry Franklin

Jerry is a retired high-school Government teacher residing in San Diego County, California.

Of Cherry Trees & Other Myths

Parson Weems was a part-time historian, travelling book-seller and full-time fabricator during the early years of the American republic. His work is known today throughout the land by every school child that has grown up in America during the past couple of hundred years. Ask any kid in the fourth grade if George Washington was capable of telling a lie and you will hear the story about “the hatchet and the cherry tree.”

We all learned it as children. It is one of the many fables American children grow up with, along with Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Most of us manage to transcend these early myths, appreciate them for what they are, and repeat them to our children. Weems included the story in an 1808 revision of his biography of George Washington first published in 1800. Ever since, it has just been too charming to dismiss. Plus, parents use the story to instruct their kinder with the moral significance of truth.

The ‘Donald’ may, or may not, have heard the story as a youth; he certainly did not accord it primacy in his value system. According to the accounting of the Washington Post, he told 6,420 lies in his first 649 days in the Presidency.

He tells us that historically America has never been as good, that our economy is the greatest it’s ever been. How would he know? He doesn’t read. And, by all accounts, he has the listening span of a four-year old.

Whether it is whim, hunch, notion, impression, whimsy, megrim or caprice he discovers his realities from within. And, curiously, all favor in some form or other, Donald Trump! His claim that his inauguration was huge and much larger than that of Barack Obama was a clear signal of what the country might expect from its new President.

Donald Trump will go down in history as having raised mendacity to new heights as a significant aspect of statecraft. To most Americans he is a self-aggrandizing narcissist—crude, rude and boorish, untutored and foolhardy. Were he a wine he would be unpalatable, with overtones of sodden earth, sour grapes and a lingering aftertaste of regret. The descendants of James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, U.S. Grant and Warren Harding are all looking forward to their forebears moving up in the annual voting of best and worst U.S. Presidents.

Here’s hoping that we will truly have 2020 vision next year.

The Thot Plickens

10/17/2019

By Jerry Franklin

Jerry is a retired high-school Government teacher residing in San Diego County, California.

The Thot Plickens

So, California billionaire Tom Steyer has decided to join the billboard of candidates running for President on the Democratic Party ticket. “I am not an insider. Look at the top four Democratic candidates. They have between them 70 years in Congress. That is the definition of an insider. If we are going to change, it will be a different way. It must be from the grass roots.” Cliches aside, his experience, his achievements, have come exclusively from the world of entrepreneurial finance. The CEO (and owner) of a Fortune 500 is the very definition of an autocrat.

One of the most egregious myths provided by historical example is the notion that dictatorships are, at least, efficient! “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” That may be true . . . but at what cost? In a large, stratified system of government overseen by an autocrat it is virtually impossible to find innovation or risk at any level. Managers, section chiefs and worker bees are all keenly protective of their station. Few will risk contradicting the status quo when making the wrong move could cost them their job (or in pre-war Italy, their life).

Like a complex spider web, our government is massive and filled with a thousand institutional structures each with a culture and personality of its own. Naively pluck a strand at one end and you have no idea what the reverberations may invite at the other. Only knowledge and experience can have a good chance of avoiding undesirable consequences.

There is very little wrong with our governmental system save for the folks that are in charge of it. No one can deny that the glaring stasis confronting the U.S. Congress is not the way it is supposed to be. Nor can anyone argue that this is the way it has always been.

“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite.” “Every nation has the government that it deserves.” Varieties of this little bit of wisdom have been credited to everyone from Adams & Jefferson to Lincoln, Mark Twain and FDR. Actually, it was said by a French revolutionary figure named Joseph DeMastre. It is in any case quite true. One cannot blame Donald Trump for being Donald Trump. That is who he said he was while running for office. That we cringe from day to day at his inept and shallow performance on the world stage may rightfully be laid at the feet of those who not only voted for him but continue to support him.

Arguably, our government could, with a decent tune-up, again run efficiently if not according to every political disposition. We should respect, and want, 70 years of government experience. Who better to fix, to adjust, to realign the gears and levers of power than someone who understands them? We’ve now seen almost three years of an amateur at the helm (his personal quirks notwithstanding), and he has proved not only lacking but an active negative agent.

Would it not be better to have someone who knows where all the bodies are buried—and how they got there—than one who has to start from scratch? That may sound like “end of the bar wisdom" but my vote will go to someone who does not have to ask which door to go through or where the rest rooms are.

Our children are the living messages we send to a future we will never see.

--Elijah Cummings