2024 Ends with mixed reviews.

This is a funny time of year.   The season is supposed to inspire joy, and sometimes it does.  Other times it produces anxiety and fear.   The fear of impending mortality and illness. Living in a fundamentally uncaring universe.  If we do not care about ourselves, no one else does.  The difference between belief and knowledge are two different things.  Faith is belief in the unprovable, knowledge is based upon fact.  Ergo, the difference between the increasing irreconcilability between science and religion.  Religion requires faith.  For those that have faith, life might be easier, but perhaps delusional.  Whatever floats your boat.

We had faith Joe Biden was ok, but facts proved otherwise.  The knowledge was hidden from us by his handlers, to the detriment of the Democratic party and of the nation.

Joe Biden is clearly decrepit, and in that condition, condemned the Democratic party to at least two years in the wilderness, now either hoping that Trump fails, or that if he succeeds, not justifying their misgivings about a corrupt individual slithering by, further enriching himself and his minions. Father time has not been kind to Biden.  A basically decent man, suffering enormous personal losses and pain, finally achieving his goal of becoming President of the United States, passing some important legislation such as the CHIPS act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and pushing the nation toward a greener future with a world-beating, full employment economy.  But Biden diminished his legacy by staying around too long and even provoking controversy by pardoning his son.  Given the circumstances of a vengeful successor though, it is an understandable move.  What father would want to see his son go to prison for what Hunter did?  He is not a mass murderer or even a regular murderer-- just a confused, possibly advantage-seeking dilletante recovering addict whose father happened to be the most powerful man on the planet.  Still, the GOP MAGA groups who have condemned him, have their fair share of black sheep and hypocrites.  We know who they are, so let’s not go there.

 

Those of us who hope that Trump does not fail for good of the nation, are cautiously pessimistic about the future, but as Al Smith once famously said, “let’s look at the record.”  Will an unbound second term be better?

Governments do not run well without bureaucrats, or as Trump and Bannon (both convicts) would have it, “The Deep State.”  We need sailors to sail the ship.

On the foreign front, Biden has given pretty much everything the Ukrainians need to fight the Russians.  Perhaps some of the aid could have come earlier, but it is not certain it would have made a difference in this long slog of attrition.  The West is using the Ukrainians as proxies to elide Putin’s revanchist dreams of restoring the Soviet Union.  That is not going to happen, but his desperation moves are quite annoying.  If he gobbles up Ukraine, he will be stuck with a very angry populace, not unlike other occupation forces and perhaps continual guerilla warfare.  The Russian economy is suffering, and Putin knows it; so in desperation, he is using North Korean troops to fight his battles, probably to avoid draft riots led by Russian mothers not wanting their sons fed into a “meat grinder,” already the cause of what US and UK intelligence estimates of 700,000 Russians killed and wounded.  Europeans need to step it up if Trump backs off.  The German and French economies are not in good shape, but they need to quickly rearm to ensure European stability.  They are more worried about Europe than Trump who, for the time being, is concerned fulfilling his promise to deport dog and cat eating Haitians, who, among others, are polluting American blood, whatever that is.

In the Middle East, Israel has shown that it is a true warrior nation.  The exploding pager—walkie talkie offensive, the decimation of Hezbollah, the take down of Iran, the targeted assassinations of crucial terrorist leadership shows who the superpower is in the neighborhood.  This after many years of fear among Jews that Israel was on the edge of destruction, demonstrated by the weakness of the October7th Hamas attacks. Things might be on the upswing.

So let’s watch the fireworks on Biscayne Bay and herald in a better 2025.

 

 

 

 

American Reptile.

 

 

Someone said that Kamala Harris did not do enough to pass the message to voters.  The problem was that she did, but it was the wrong message.  And here in Florida, prominent democrats are trying float ideas attempting to revive a moribund party.  At this stage of the game, turning Florida blue is a Sisyphean enterprise. Democrats, let’s roll that rock up the hill anyway. Apathy is the worst enemy of democracy.

 

The woke mentality of the left was given a severe thrashing and it was the perception of most voters that they had, rightly, enough of cancel culture, with universities cancelling those of opposing points of view from the traditional left, DEI culture and the general feeling, among other things, that some trans rights were intruding on both traditional culture and common sense.

 

The Trump campaign hammered video of a clearly masculine, hairy, arm-pitted, grotesquely tattooed trans basketball player, twice the size of the opposition flexing his/her muscles to a group of befuddled, intimidated girls.  This was a blatant, but effective call to baser voter instincts. But that is what Trump does. Reptilian arguments stoke fear.

 

It really does not take too much thought to understand that trans women do not have the same physical attributes of female athletes, and that thought was conveyed at the ballot box. Sally playing with George (Georgina) is not playing well in flyover country or in Florida (fly to country.)

 

Of course, that is an exaggeration and an emotional argument which many believe would discriminate against people with alternative lifestyles.  That discrimination should not be countenanced.

 

Additionally, the pro-abortion movement was not sufficiently thought of as a reason for people to abandon their feelings about paying $8 for eggs, instead of $4.00 no matter how grassfed or organic they be.  And a majority did not care about Trump’s mendacity, sexual abuse, and misogyny.  Nor did they care about threats to democracy or the attempted coup on January 6, 2021.  

 

They cared about the border for sure.  Earlier generations of immigrants always became “American” enough to reject later generations.  It’s history. American history.  Chinese, Japanese, Italians, Irish, Jews all suffered rejection at first.  Did they threaten jobs of the people already here? Probably.  But America thrived with immigrants and will do so again.  Just keep the criminals out.  Trump mischaracterized immigrants to his advantage.  People did not believe Kamala’s protestations. She bore the brunt of the MAGA attack and bore the responsibility for the Biden immigration policy.

 

What does that say about America in the 21^st century?   We really do not know.  Is the MAGA movement the slippery slope to authoritarianism?  Is this, as Putin thinks, the decline of the American world order?   I like to think not, judging by worse things we have come through as a nation.  Civil War, Great Depression, World Wars I and II, Viet-Nam, the Cold War etc. etc. 

 

People who fear authoritarianism are correct to do so.  Authoritarian bent leaders select lackeys and knuckleheads to serve in the government because they have nothing else to recommend them, save the leader, and will be completely loyal to him, or lose their jobs.   Trump learned his lesson about having people smarter than he is around him.  Dimwits do not write books trashing the boss. Kim Jung Un has similar hiring habits but says “you’re fired” in a less salubrious manner.

 

Trump’s cabinet picks so far with the perhaps the exception of Rubio, are not serious.  They are intended as a loyalty test for Republican senators.  Previously, the loyalty test was simply saying the election was stolen.  Now it is whether an incompetent dunce, no matter how unqualified, can pass confirmation muster and perhaps to determine which GOP senator will be relegated to Trumpian purgatory for not following the leader.

 

For those who forgot how chaotic Trump’s first term was and voted for him because they did not like the Biden administration, are you scared yet?   Stay tuned. 

Be careful what you wish for.

 

Well, well, well.  The election is over.  Kamala gave a graceful concession speech, unlike Donald Trump would have, certainly, appealing to the better angels of our nature, unity, freedom, praising justice and congratulating Trump on his victory.  Trump got his justice last night, from  clearly enthusiastic millions of his supporters.   Jack Smith will go away, and Trump will not.

 

The mystery to us Democrats, despite the howls of pundits is what caused so lopsided a victory for Trump?  What was it that Democrats did not see that a majority of voters in the country did?  Was it jobs, the cost of living, racism, gender bias, foreign interference, social media, a low-information electorate, rage against cultural elites, immigration?  Or was it all these things, melded with years of propaganda from FOX news, and Rupert Murdoch’s malign influence on the information cycle?  Was it lies becoming truth?  Was it Orwellian verisimilitude?

 

Some of my liberal friends think the world is coming to an end, or at the least, the American experiment will now go down in a whirlpool of authoritarian power and revenge, presided over by a convict, rapist, and truculent liar?  Maybe.  I told them not to take it so hard. Get a life. Turn off MSNBC and read a novel or do some navel contemplation.

 

It would behoove those who think the sky is falling, to reflect on some aspects of American history.  That we have survived , among many other disasters, a Civil War, two World Wars, the Korean War,  a plethora of equally malodorous con men, racists, bigots and scoundrels, including, but not limited to, Father Coughlin, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, the House Un American Activity Committee, Communist witch hunts, backlists, Atomic spies, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, misbegotten wars in Viet Nam and Iraq, The Great Depression, The Great Recession,  Jim Crow, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Segregation, and  failed presidents like James Buchanan, followed finally by Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union.  Then assassination.  And don’t forget, after Lincoln, came Andrew Johnson, a racist who was impeached, just like Trump, but stayed in office by just one vote in the Senate doing what he could to sabotage reconstruction.

 

Some of us feel like we have been cheated out of seeing Trump marched away in a complexion-matching orange jump suit  and handcuffs  on his way sharing a cell with one of his insurrectionist constituents, the guy with the fur hat, outrageous tats and horns who now, among all the others, Trump promises to pardon for trying to  overthrow the government and hang Mike Pence for doing his constitutional duty. 

 

Now, Kamala Harris will preside over the Senate when the votes are certified.  Just as did Al Gore when he lost to W.  There will be no cries from Trump’s minions, since this election will be deemed Trumplistically “perfect,” Why? 

 

 

 

 

 Be careful what you wish for.

 

Well, well, well.  The election is over.  Kamala gave a graceful concession speech, unlike Donald Trump would have, certainly, appealing to the better angels of our nature, unity, freedom, praising justice and congratulating Trump on his victory.  Trump got his justice last night, from  clearly enthusiastic millions of his supporters.   Jack Smith will go away, and Trump will not.

 

The mystery to us Democrats, despite the howls of pundits is what caused so lopsided a victory for Trump?  What was it that Democrats did not see that a majority of voters in the country did?  Was it jobs, the cost of living, racism, gender bias, foreign interference, social media, a low-information electorate, rage against cultural elites, immigration?  Or was it all these things, melded with years of propaganda from FOX news, and Rupert Murdoch’s malign influence on the information cycle?  Was it lies becoming truth?  Was it Orwellian verisimilitude?

 

Some of my liberal friends think the world is coming to an end, or at the least, the American experiment will now go down in a whirlpool of authoritarian power and revenge, presided over by a convict, rapist, and truculent liar?  Maybe.  I told them not to take it so hard. Get a life. Turn off MSNBC and read a novel or do some navel contemplation.

 

It would behoove those who think the sky is falling, to reflect on some aspects of American history.  That we have survived , among many other disasters, a Civil War, two World Wars, the Korean War,  a plethora of equally malodorous con men, racists, bigots and scoundrels, including, but not limited to, Father Coughlin, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, the House Un American Activity Committee, Communist witch hunts, backlists, Atomic spies, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, misbegotten wars in Viet Nam and Iraq, The Great Depression, The Great Recession,  Jim Crow, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Segregation, and  failed presidents like James Buchanan, followed finally by Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union.  Then assassination.  And don’t forget, after Lincoln, came Andrew Johnson, a racist who was impeached, just like Trump, but stayed in office by just one vote in the Senate doing what he could to sabotage reconstruction.

 

Some of us feel like we have been cheated out of seeing Trump marched away in a complexion-matching orange jump suit  and handcuffs  on his way sharing a cell with one of his insurrectionist constituents, the guy with the fur hat, outrageous tats and horns who now, among all the others, Trump promises to pardon for trying to  overthrow the government and hang Mike Pence for doing his constitutional duty. 

 

Now, Kamala Harris will preside over the Senate when the votes are certified.  Just as did Al Gore when he lost to W.  There will be no cries from Trump’s minions, since this election will be deemed Trumplistically “perfect,” Why? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because you dummies, he fucking won.

 

I am exhausted after nine years of Donald Trump.  And now another four?  Now we are sentenced to four years ourselves.

 

I promised myself that if Trump won, I would not watch cable news or read a newspaper for four years.  I would not listen to journalists wringing their hands about what the Democrats did wrong enough to lose the election.  Or how all those voters could be fooled and vote for someone who did not represent their values.  Or how they drank the Kool Aid.  Au contraire.  The voters got what they wanted.  Trump represents their values.  They overlooked his criminality, his self-enrichment, his disdain for the rule of law.   They got what they wanted, what they wished for.  So as the saying goes, be careful about those wishes. 

Because you dummies, he fucking won.

 

I am exhausted after nine years of Donald Trump.  And now another four?  Now we are sentenced to four years ourselves.

 

I promised myself that if Trump won, I would not watch cable news or read a newspaper for four years.  I would not listen to journalists wringing their hands about what the Democrats did wrong enough to lose the election.  Or how all those voters could be fooled and vote for someone who did not represent their values.  Or how they drank the Kool Aid.  Au contraire.  The voters got what they wanted.  Trump represents their values.  They overlooked his criminality, his self-enrichment, his disdain for the rule of law.   They got what they wanted, what they wished for.  So as the saying goes, be careful about those wishes.

Eating the Cats and Dogs

Do not worry about the Cats and Dogs.  Vote.

 

It is manifestly inconceivable, yet here we are on the cusp of the election with the possibility of a depraved scoundrel who has perverted the American experiment with a good chance of being re- elected President of the United States of America.

 

I have voted in every presidential election since 1960, and I have never experienced America in such turmoil, existential angst, a mixture of rage and fear. Even during Vietnam. Even during Watergate. Nine years of Trump since he came down on the golden escalator.  Enough already.

 

On the one hand, Trumpists believe that their cult of personality has the keys to saving the republic.  That despite all the hate and fear mongering emanating from his supporters, that Kamala Harris, a woman, a black woman, represents more of a threat to the nation than Trump.  Even if one thinks that Harris lacks the gravitas to be president, one must  cling to the hope that she will be able to restore a sense of normalcy to our politics.  Yes, Biden hung around too long and she was anointed without going through the primary process.  And yes, they gaslighted us by saying old Joe was fine.  And yes maybe there could have been a more perfect candidate. But those possibilities pale in comparison to the threat of Trump’s disrespect for the rule of law, for the constitution. No other argument need be advanced.  For God’s sake, he tried to overturn the election, to provoke a coup d’etat.

 

Surreal that Trump, after shattering all norms of political and civil discourse, after demonizing half of America could be returned to the White House, threatening to deport 12 million people.  No one can even understand what a disruptive force that would be to almost every walk of life.  Trumpers do not dare talk about what a budget buster that would be. How many familial bonds would be shattered.  Children would again be separated from their parents and watch their mothers who gave birth to them in America, be dragged away from their citizen children, while the Joseph Goebbels of Trumpworld, Stephen Miller, executes his heartless, compassionless agenda while “Haitian immigrants feast on cats and dogs.” That said, the border should be secured, and criminals should be sent packing.  Harris has said she will correct that error.

 

Putin and XI and Kim Jong Un are rooting for Trump.  Our NATO allies are not.

 

Apologists for Trump such as Ben Shapiro, divine that Trump will not do what he says, that he only says things to gain leverage.  “Watch what he does, not what he says,” says Shapiro.   The problem is that not believing a proto fascist is dangerous.  41 of the 44 high government officials who worked for him, including a four-star Marine general, John Kelly, and Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say that he is unfit, dangerous and unhinged, unable even to understand a briefing.  These are serious nonpartisan 

people.  And the advisors he selects this time will be sycophants.  Trump will be unbound.  Heaven help us.

Church, Tribes and State 2024.

  

 

My father told me once, quoting Disraeli, that “the secret to success is constancy of purpose.”

Well, if this election cycle is successful, it will have succeeded in driving Americans mad.  And I mean mad in the bonkers sense, not the angry sense as is commonly misused in American parlance.

 

Chiefly, the assault on our senses by the media, social networks, and our friends, some of whom have become so deranged by the onslaught of opinion, misinformation, disinformation and rumor, we have algorithmically relegated to the trash bin, among solicitations from Amazon, Vitamin Shoppe and LA Fitness.  We have set our email systems to tune them out.

 

I do not know how to make sense of the motivations of those Americans who still support MAGA Republicans, although I have been fed a diet of many opinions by journalists, friends and even clergy.  Clergy have not much else to ruminate about these days since most of them can no longer argue, except to true believers, that God or some facsimile thereof, still exists.  I think the most recent information reflects that only 50% of the public has expressed certainty that God is still up there on a cloud answering our prayers, his white beard festooning the heavens.

 

In view of the fact that a majority of the founding fathers were deists rejecting the efficacy of prayer, but believing in some form of divine creation, but non-intervention in human affairs, it is even more difficult to discern why evangelicals and other fundamentalists, including conservative Catholics, believe in all the recent steps taken by the current Supreme Court as some form of progress in the 1789 constitutional experiment. 

 

Abortion is one of the issues advanced by religious fundamentalists.  That issue has riven the country, and although Donald Trump, as a candidate who lost the popular vote by three million in 2016, appointed three religious zealots to the Supreme Court who lied to congress in their confirmation hearings and later overturned abortion rights that had been in place for over 52 years, resulting in life threatening social consequences. That Trump really had no popular mandate did not disturb him or Mitch McConnell a bit.

 

Religion (tribalism, I use the term interchangeably)) has prospered in this country because of the wall of separation between church and state, not in spite of it.  There exists no state religion, as in Europe, the flight from which was a guiding ideal of the pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. That freedom was later affirmed by the founders.  Massachusetts and Maryland and Rhode Island, for example, were settled by different religious factions.  But back then there was no national consensus, no modern exchange of information, no telegraph, no internet exposing people to differing points of view.  There were local newspapers, but they did not widely circulate.

 

The irony of the separation of church and state being under attack by fundamentalists lays waste to the ideal that religion has been beneficial to our polity.  Yes, there has been benefit, in social order and morality, but these days, on balance, it is challenging to accept that it is a positive force.  It is too subject to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians who have no sincere religious beliefs, but instead, are guided by transactional agendas.  

 

I am clinging to the hope that the American public will not fall for the siren call of a charlatan who has fooled them once.  The electoral college is another creation of 1789 that compromised democratic ideals to slave states which, among other rationales, reasoning that the bible conferred authority to enslave other human beings.  As a result, about 80 years after the founding, a great civil war tore at the sinews of the nation, partially to cure the biblical notion that slavery was endorsed by a divinity. Lincoln himself did not subscribe to traditional Christian beliefs, but instead to a complex philosophy of rationalism and fatalism, allowing him to evolve and eventually eschew the doctrinal justification of slavery existing in the old and new Testaments (as have some modern theologians who now define slavery differently.)

 

Let us not think that religion or tribalism did not play a part in strongly contributing to that war, and many other wars, crusades, pogroms and inquisitions as well, including the inescapable notion that if Jews were Muslims or Muslims were Jews there would be no war in the Middle East.  And take it a step further. No Holocaust predicated on 2000 years of liturgy that Jews killed Christ.                                                                                                   

Solving the Mystery of Donald Trump

 “I don’t understand how anyone can support Donald Trump.  How can people be that stupid? How can people vote against their own interests?”

There is no mystery.  Donald Trump is no mystery at all.

Anger, frustration and fear are blowing in the wind; or else Donald Trump would have disappeared years ago. We know that.  But fear is the sine qua non of button pressing, the go to argument for persuasion.  Or for anyone.  Almost anyone who wants to win an argument or pass a point of view.

 When I was trying cases before juries, the most persuasive arguments were to what the noted trial lawyer Don Keenan emphasized in his book, “The Reptile,” was fear. That book became a phenomenon in legal circles, virtually assuring that a larger verdict would be forthcoming if appropriately utilized in the right case.

The philosophy of the book is that juries or people do not really care what happens to others, but instead, care about themselves in the context of a community. A tribal ethos of self-preservation, an evolutionary protection. And for a long time, it worked in primitive hunter-gatherer societies.  In the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years of humankind there has been only ten thousand years since the dawn of agriculture, an evolutionary nanosecond to adapt to a civil society. Our genetic makeup does not work that fast.

About five thousand years ago, there arose a priestly class, arrogating to itself the power to control its peers by manipulating fear of divine anger and retribution.  These priests quickly learned how to usurp the previously direct individual connection primitives had with the spirit world, say, for example, dancing around a fire to comfort their fear of enemies, of famine, of the elements, of a harsh and unforgiving world of predator and prey.

Now the primitives could be told how to live their lives, pay homage to priests, and live in a community governed by an organized religion devoted to protecting them from harm, assuming they lived according to the rules. Among those rules was a rule book, (the bible) tribal markings, brandings, nose rings, circumcision, denoting those who belonged to the tribe and denoting outsiders as hostile, worthy of exile, death or even extermination.

One need only look to the blood-soaked twentieth century to see the workings of fear.  Fear of Jews, Communists, Blacks, Non-Catholics, Catholics, Asians, Non-Aryans, Socialists, Liberals, Atheists, Protestants, pick one. If one goes back five hundred years or five thousand years, it does not matter.  Humanity is rife with fear. 

So, when people ask why Donald Trump has been successful in being elected to the Presidency of the United States of America and are confounded by his still large following, the answer is fear.  Trump has mastered the art of manipulating fear and turning it into a cult, the religion of Trumpism. Fear of others.

When Trump talks about eliminating “vermin” from our midst, that statement alone should have been disqualifying.   But it has not been.  Because people fear vermin.  People visualize rodents as loathsome, just as they did when Dr. Goebbels portrayed Jews as rats in his propaganda.  Just as members of his tribe did nothing to speak out against the calumny.

So, Trump has become a high priest, a pied piper to his followers. Just drink the potion, the snake oil. You cannot argue with religion.  In a way, most religions are cultish.  They leave their initial cultishness behind with the passage of time.  The older the religion becomes, the more acceptable it becomes, the less of a cult it is, the more it assuages fear.

People adhering to strict tribal customs perhaps do themselves and their community a service, but in rejecting the more widely acceptable customs of a society also isolate themselves from a more fearful, cosmopolitan (yes I use that word) point of view.  More accepting of others. They inhabit a more insular world, more obvious in their differences and thus more of a target for hatred and prejudice.  The answer to that is not clear. I imagine the answer could be a more tolerant society.  But that is rare, and it seems  that more illiberal societies arise in a time of immense technological and economic change, a more challenging time.  A time more susceptible to Trumpian demagoguery and fear.  Trump has mastered the art of manipulating fear.  The fear of change. The need for scapegoats.

So, Trump is no mystery at all.  Trump is fear itself.  FDR’s “nameless, unjustified, unreasoning terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” So when Franklin Roosevelt worked to overcome fear in America, Trump has worked to restore it mightily to his own advantage, but to the disadvantage of his countrymen.

 

 

Better Governance

 

Those who say that we must reduce the rhetoric of violence causing further acts of violence, must ask themselves the question of what has exacerbated the violence of an already violent and gun infused society.  Seems like we need a new form of governance—a more enlightened form of governance.  Smarter, more humane leaders. Not necessarily humans, though.  I’ll get to that in bit.

 

No one individual has done more to stoke the fires of hatred than Donald Trump.   He has sowed the wind, but by a turn of his head, missed reaping the whirlwind.  If he is re-elected, as he now almost certainly will be, strapping on seat belts will not be enough to be sucked from the improperly bolted airplane.  He’s the orphan pleading for mercy after he killed his parents.

 

Some say the dysfunction of our government and political system is on the verge of dealing with chaos of unspeakable magnitude and is no longer capable of governing.

 

Those who believe the demagoguery of “leaders” who recently said that Democratic persecution of Trump is responsible for the heated political climate, must look to themselves.   JD Vance says it is the Democrats fault for calling Trump a threat to democracy.   (JD wants to write another elegy—this time as vice president.)

 

That truth is not forthcoming in social media, in the mainstream press, nor in the heated oratory of political office seekers.  We are losing the battle for effective leadership.

 

The struggle between good and evil, the moral battles of mankind are no newer than humanity itself, and it is just the present moment that makes it seem most acute.  It must have been just as urgently felt in 1861, in 1941, and in 1968.  

 

If it is true that the evil that men do lives after them and that the good is interred with their bones, the potential assassin’s poor aim will have made no difference.  If Trump had been killed, as many of those baser instincts of his enemies desired, it would have magnified his martyrdom although it is an open question of without their dear leader they would have had as much cohesion.

 

Trump does not belong in the pantheon of martyrdom:   Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy—all victims of the American malaise, violence and a frontier mentality that still accommodates the expediency of evil.  The same ruthlessness that built our country yet saved Western democracy.   The contradictions of humanity as reflected in the American psychosis, all corrupted, anachronistically governed by a failing political system and anchored by decrepit institutions and gerontologic leaders.  

 

The frustrations and rage of Americans seem particularly strong at this moment.  To those who think that the rhetoric from both sides is morally equivalent, perhaps the “threat to democracy” cries are overwrought.   To those who think that the threat to democracy is very real, must ask if speaking out against the perceived evil of our fellow Americans will aid our nation recover and glide past the current crisis. Edmund Burke to the rescue.

 

While it is true that political assassinations have altered the course of history, the effects of those assassinations have caused wars, changed the political dynamic of nations, but mostly not for the better.   The boils and blisters remain.   Poverty, ignorance, prejudice, and hatred.

 

The technological changes occurring now have increased exponentially both the processing speed of AI and the degradation of human dialogue, people no longer communicating with each other, looking at screens for instant gratification, and listening to shallow snippets of misinformation, incomplete information, or siloed opinion.

 

So, finally, is it worse now than in the past?   Optimists think not.  Statistics contradict the perceptions.  Less poverty, a higher literacy rate than 100 or even 25 years ago.  Each of us carrying a supercomputer in our pockets, medical advances extending human life, science working to combat climate change, new sources of renewable energy.

 

All the contradictions of humanity, religion, tribalism still remain, but are we on a better path?  Depends on your point of view.   If as Stephen Hawking predicted, humans are engineering their own demise, if AI will replace most professions, are we headed to a Faustian end?  Maybe not.

 

All this anger and argument reminds me of McEnroe violently arguing over the line calls; this was eliminated by electronic line calling.  Why not the same result for political discourse, clearly not capably handled by people?

 

Could properly designed algorithms replace Congress?   Certainly, the combined intelligence of those in Congress cannot compete with a computer that can defeat the complicated board game “Go.”  The luddite Supreme Court could be replaced by a more enlightened AI to render more humane, well-researched, enlightened decisions.   Most certainly the office of the President of the United States could be better served by an ageless cloud-based decision maker not subject to cognitive decline, narcissism, self-enrichment or  gilded toilets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deus ex Machina, please!

 

The country I know and love is at a critical crossroad.  Will the conservative majority confer immunity for crimes committed by a rogue president attempting to subvert the votes of 80 million Americans who had voted for the current president?   Will it carve a new exception for the schemes of those who would arrogate power to themselves, contrary to the will of the people?  Will it delay the DC election subversion trial that should already have been underway by throwing oil on the bonfire of Trump’s vanity?

These questions and more rock the nation.  More importantly, will the American voter decide that the kind of country we become—a nation that has cast aside the rule of law, one that coronates a King? 

Frightened as I was to listen to the oral arguments presented to the court by Trump’s unapologetic lawyers, that fright was exponentially increased by the pandering Justices, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch asking questions of the advocates so far distant from the issue before them, advancing a false narrative, upon which they could construct an opinion to further delay the DC election subversion trial. 

How quickly they forget—the speech on the floor of the US Senate by Mitch McConnell, after hypocritically voting not to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial, gaslighting the nation, stating that Trump would be held accountable by the criminal justice system.  Never mind putting the country through the ordeal under which it now suffers. Any other candidate, a patriot, (as did Al Gore, and even Richard Nixon in 1960, in a tightly contested elections, would have stepped aside for the good of the country.)  Not Trump. 

We could have had a normal GOP candidate whose policies with whom one might legitimately disagree, running for President, debating the issues instead of the nightmare scenario of Trump brazenly standing before his throngs crying “retribution.” McConnell now says he will support Trump, if he is nominated, even after recognizing Trump’s corrupt and even treasonous enterprise. 

Norms are what our country runs on.  Cuba, for example, had a written constitution modeled after our own.  We know how that worked out.  Norms that are abandoned or shredded fall to the famous Benjamin Franklin remark when asked by a bystander when he emerged from the constitutional convention in 1789.   “What did you do Dr. Franklin?” He responded, “We give you a Republic, if you can keep it.”

We do not yet know how the court will rule, but they have already given Trump a leg up and if they do not rule quickly, voters may not have the information needed to make an intelligent decision.    

Democrats need far more votes to win than Republicans, because of the bizarre and antiquated electoral college, the US Senate, and the gerrymandered House of Representatives.   Candidates with a minority of the popular vote should not win elections.  It is not democratic.  It is not fair, and it adds to the public discord and the notion that the rich and powerful, the landed gentry (in our times the billionaire class) is favored, is preeminently privileged, is controlling the discourse, and again the Supreme Court, in allowing dark money flowing freely swaying elections, is again throwing a judicial get out of jai free card to Trump. Of this injustice, nations fall.

In Florida, Democrats see that their votes in a Presidential election do not matter, because of winner take all electoral votes.   Florida should consider rank choice voting and award proportional allocation of the vote to each candidate.  And nationwide, the electoral college should be repealed or a state compact awarding all the votes of each state to the winner of the national popular vote.  Too hard to amend the constitution.

No more minority popular vote presidents. No more battleground states.  No more wasting millions of dollars on politicians jetting around when they should be doing their jobs.  Just a few debates on television.  No more two- year riving presidential election process.  No more Iowa caucuses.  Just an election of the nominees selected in a national primary followed by an election six or so weeks later.  These reforms would also lead to less divisiveness, something of which we sorely need.

We live in an age of AI, of internet banking, of remote work.  Of great technological change.  Let’s get with the program.

America, let us please reform our anachronistic, creaky, outdated, elections system.  

 

 

 

Democracy in America

 

Mitch McConnell shares the ignominy of Donald Trump for doing more shredding  our democracy than any other of the conservative actors of our time.

McConnell thought Donald Trump was in his political death throes after Trump’s slim escape from conviction in his Senate impeachment trial.  After voting not to convict, McConnell passed the task off to the Justice department, which under Merrick Garland, diddled about prosecuting a clearly criminal insurrectionist and his enraged band of miscreants.  “Trump will be held accountable by the justice system,” McConnell asserted.  Maybe not.  Trump is trying to run out the clock.

When Al Gore lost the election of 2000, the Supreme Court throwing the election to Bush, Gore dutifully stepped aside “for the good of the country.”  How wistful, even naïve, that seems today, one would ever thinking that Trump would ever do anything for the good of the country.  Instead, he puts country through the worst constitutional agonies since the prelude to a civil war in which 700,000 Americans died slaughtering each other. 

In 1857, the Supreme Court issued the infamous Dred Scott decision, denying essentially that black people are humans, instead they are chattels, like cows or dogs.  Roger Taney,  chief justice, owned slaves and was apparently determined to keep them.  His decision was supported by other members of a slave-owner influenced court.

The Taney court was, for the time, a national disgrace, contributing to national anger, the court repealing the Missouri compromise by judicial fiat.  The Missouri compromise was an attempt to balance the entry of slave states with free states entering the Union. Dred Scott enraged abolitionist and popular opinion, eventually electing Abraham Lincoln.

The Roberts court will, in 100 years be looked upon the same way as we look on Taney’s abortionate decision (forgive the pun).  This court has in short order, repealed a woman’s right to reproductive choice, exacerbated the presence of dark money in politics, and arrogated unto itself the rewriting of the 14^th Amendment that had clearly barred insurrectionists from holding office.   Add to this, corrupt practices and gifts received by the justices the largesse of which comes from billionaires having potential interests to be protected by their judicial friends, including Clarence Thomas, whose wife helped fund the festive party at the Capitol on January 6^th.  

And let us not forget the Roberts court’s evisceration of the voting rights act, that had required those great bastions of civil liberties, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi to preclear voting districts to protect minorities.   We have done all the civil rights work necessary, says Justice Roberts, all is well, no further protections needed. 

Justice Samuel Alito, that paradigm of intolerance, cited that a 17^th century precedent in English common law that criminalized the killing of a fetus.  Originalism run wild, authored by a religious zealot. He forgot to mention the burning at the stake part.

The sad part of all of this is that the present court comprises justices appointed by two presidents elected by a minority of American voters.  By a president who lost the popular vote to Al Gore, and a president who lost the popular vote by millions to Hillary Clinton. Abetted by leader McConnell who would not even consider Merick Garland because it was too close to an election, except when it was Amy Coney Barrett, who needed a quick confirmation close to the next election. Public sentiment be damned.  So when one speaks of American exceptionalism, it is in the pejorative sense.  Frank Underwood would be proud.

Moreover, the coming election will have two candidates, neither of whom inspires much confidence.  One is an unhinged criminal defendant trying, with the aid of his judicial friends, to stay out of jail, and the other who projects being feeble and frail.  Perhaps he is not, but that is the popular perception, and perception being reality, these days, you fill in the blanks.  All of this to be decided by a few thousand voters in battleground states. The Electoral College says, why should voters on the coasts where most of the people live have an equal say with rural overrepresented voters?  After all, 500,000 voters in North Dakota should have two senators, just like the 40,000,000 people who live in California.

 That’s the way it was in 1789; it should stay the same in 2024, don’t you think?

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Obsessions

War clouds are festooning over Europe. 

 In August 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, famously said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” announcing the beginning of the Great War. 

After losing in 1918, Germany was forced to disarm and pay backbreaking reparations to the Allies under the Versailles Treaty. This planted the seeds of the next war. 

In anger over the treaty, Hitler obsessed with Germany’s defeat, stoking public opinion, playing the humiliation of the German volk, incorporating it in his rise to power, marked by enormous illegal rearmament. Territorial demands followed.  In 1939, came the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

Vladimir Putin is also obsessed--with Russian humiliation by the greatest tragedy of his life:  The collapse of the Soviet Union.  This low-down KGB blood-soaked thug rose to the pinnacle of power in a country that never enjoyed democratic traditions. A thousand years of authoritarian culture-- Czars, Bolsheviks, and now a pitiless dictatorship.

Putin’s agenda is as clear as a moonlit night on a mountaintop.  He craves weakening NATO, perhaps invading a small NATO country like Lithuania, daring the west to challenge him.  He wants to expand his empire to enhance his flailing economy.  Poles are terrified.  Lithuanians, too.  They think the United States will not come to their aid if they are attacked.  It might not. If Ukraine falls, they are next. Maybe us too.

GOP house members are also obsessed.  Their hard right obsesses about impoverished migrants purportedly flooding the country; they want to trade crucial aid to Ukraine as though it were some sick parlor game.  House Republicans obsess how they can support an unhinged criminal defendant in his own obsession--staying out of jail.

In 1938, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons, presciently obsessing that failure to rearm would lead to war.  No one listened.  He was a warmonger.  Instead, Neville Chamberlain, obsessed with “peace in our time,” naively signed the Munich agreement giving away the Sudetenland; one year to the date before Hitler invaded Poland, starting the bloodiest war in history. 

Europe faces a new fascist threat, the murderous Vladimir Putin, beginning to reverse his initial failures in Ukraine.  European leaders are panicking.   Europe has not rearmed, nor has it mobilized. War is coming without more force to stop a revanchist Russia, with a leader whose Czarist obsessions are both pathological and propelled by his other obsession--being deposed or assassinated. 

Germany needs to massively rearm and to possibly institute conscription.  France as well. They need to exponentially increase defense expenditures.  Some experts think it will take 5 years to reach parity and by then it might be too late.  Russia has one thing Ukraine has not.  Overwhelming manpower.  The same manpower that overwhelmed Hitler’s legions.  The same manpower that defeated Napoleon.  If Ukraine falls, war will surely come to us. 

Any Russian opposition is crushed by an avalanche of propaganda and fear. Navalny murdered.  Others tossed out windows, shot, poisoned, wings falling off their airplane.  Putin’s agenda is audacious, abetted by perverted congressional politics and Trumpian attention to his own criminality.

Putin sees NATO as a threat to his imperial ambitions.  He seeks to destroy the alliance which has preserved the world order since the end of World War II.  With Trump’s help that could happen.

The US should immediately pass the aid to Ukraine Bill, which only represents 2-3% of our defense budget.   Not likely to happen, but reinstitution of military conscription in the US and in Europe could send a strong signal to Moscow. 

This sounds alarmist, but Lenin himself said, “Push forward the bayonet.  If you find steel, pull back.  If you find soft flesh, push forward.”

Lenin is Putin’s hero.  The free world should obsess about that.

 

 

 

The Oral Argument from Hell.

The Oral Argument from hell.

 

The idea that Trump might not be evicted from the ballot, judging from the discussion at oral arguments this week before the Supreme Court is supremely depressing.   Trump continues to plague America like the ineradicable odor of a skunk.

 

After all, the constitutional scholars on television had pretty much agreed that Trump should not be a choice for a befuddled and divided electorate after all the prognostications about how Section III of the 14^th Amendment clearly states that Trump is disqualified, after the incitement of an insurrection, after people died, after a committee of congress presented all the damning evidence, after courageous witnesses risked their lives and safety to speak the truth, after a trial found Trump guilty of insurrection and the  Supreme Court of Colorado found Trump an insurrectionist and held him clearly disqualified from office, the justices of the United States Supreme Court are mentally masturbating whether disqualifying Trump would cause a disparate result in the various states, with some keeping him off the ballot, and other states doing the contrary.  The Justices asked questions about procedural minutia, hinting that they would avoid the issue like a root canal, and let him stay.

 

I hope that they rule on the briefs and the overwhelming historical analysis, and that oral argument was not an omen of judicially avoiding the lessons of history.  Court rulings in the past have caused national disruption, such as Brown v. Board of Education, but then the court was courageous and fair.

 

No one, not even the liberal justices, expressed any concern about preserving the Republic. Or the intent of the framers.   There was no discussion of the historicity of the 14^th Amendment, designed to keep insurrectionists off the ballot.   Con men can be popular.  And Trump has announced his revenge agenda.  I think the court should believe him.

 

This did not seem to bother the justices when they overruled Roe v. Wade.  The states are busy enacting different rules and creating a hodgepodge of laws, most of which are detrimental to the health and safety of young women.  Or when they gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder allowing enlightened places like Mississippi to disenfranchise as many African American voters as possible.

 

“Why were there no prosecutions after the Civil War and the 14^th Amendment?” asked Clarence Thomas.   Well, because there was post war amnesty passed in Congress in 1872.  Guess you did not learn that from Harlan Crowe.   And because no one else and no President ever caused an insurrection since then, until Donald Trump.

 

 

Welcome 2024 (or not)

 

 

2024 promises to be a year filled with high and low expectations, judicial decisions affecting American democracy, trials of one especially ignominious former President, war in Europe, war in the Middle East, and a host of other undesirable scenarios, including a battle between two gerontocrats for an office that turns people gray and demands youthful vigor.  Except they already are gray, if Trump shuns the hairdresser. Trump used his vigor to pour fuel on a bunch of Fox news brainwashed pseudo patriots, demonstrating their loyalty to the constitution by invading the capitol and hitting capitol police with shovels and crowbars.  “Hang Mike Pence,” patriotism writ large.  Biden has shown his vigor by announcing today that Trump is a threat to democracy, his voice modulating between a normal rasp and a shout. He needs to get out and talk to young people.

 

Over the past few years, it seems like people do not care about threats to democracy.   They have bought into the “good-old-days-were-better” argument.

But were they really?  Yeah, we had Elvis and the Beatles, Cecil B. DeMille, and “out of my cold dead hands,” Charlton Heston, but we also had Segregation, the Cuban missile crisis and nuclear brinksmanship.  Civil rights were on the back burner.  Forget about accommodations for disabled people or being inside a restaurant with clean air.  After all, tobacco was good for your T-Zone, said the Lucky Strike hucksters, as they lied about tobacco’s dangers, or that your T-Zone might have to be irradiated or need a voice box and a hole in your neck or your tongue removed.  You get the picture.

 

The Supreme Court is about to rule whether Trump should be kicked off the ballot.

It’s rich that Trump argues that kicking him off the ballot will disenfranchise millions of Americans when he tried to send his slate of fake electors to the capitol.  The argument is that it is anti-democratic to deprive the voters of their say.  Well, so is not allowing felons to vote, not allowing people under 35 to be President, not allowing Johnny rebs to return to office, and keeping a narcissistic charlatan from being qualified to run again.  Protecting minority rights is also not democratic.  That is why we have a constitution and a bill of rights.  A government of Laws, not men (or women or of whatever pronoun you want.)

 

Some people think we have made progress in perfecting the Union. In the 1950s Americans were petrified about the communist (Soviet) menace. Children in elementary schools did drills hiding under their desks to avoid being vaporized by an H-Bomb.  Black school children had to be escorted to class by the national guard.  Racism was rampant.  “Segregation forever,” cried George Wallace.   George got a lot of votes until someone shot him. Everyone has a gun, remember? And let’s not go back to a civil war or enslavement, which Nikki Haley did not mention and had to be called out upon.  Nikki wants Trump voters.

 

People nowadays are concerned that we have no attention span, purloined by the little screen we carry around, people sitting at the dinner table, their phones at the ready, to look up a fact or check a movie while their real-life companions are ignored, feeling the frustration of abandonment.  How can we solve global problems when we do not talk to each other? 

 

If Franklin Roosevelt were running for office today, CNN would be doing close up pictures of his leg braces and wheelchair, asking questions if he had the stamina to be President.  FDR was only 63 when he died in Warm Springs of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by blood pressure of over 220.  He was running a war, dealing with Churchill, Stalin, and the Manhattan project.  Trump is running so he can avoid the slammer.

 

Biden might be old, but he is not feeble.  He only seems feeble.   You do not have to be quick to be President. You only must be quick to participate in a Presidential debate with a deranged lunatic.  Being President, you need to sit with your army of advisors and have the wisdom of years of experience to make wise decisions.   Things have gone well for Joe, aside from his Hunter problem. Joe has known pain, is compassionate, and the respect of foreign leaders he has known for many years.   That seems like enough to be President.

 

On the other hand, Trump is blessed with many years of fighting court battles, screwing workers, removing classified documents from the White House, defending himself against rape charges, fraud accusations, and 91 felony counts.  Remember the Obama birth certificate scam?   Any other candidate would have stepped aside for the good of the country.  Not Trump.  He is running to stay out of jail and to make America great again.  This is like Captain Hook taking down the jolly roger and putting up the stars and stripes.