Monday, May 28, 2018

Please Don't Let Their Sacrifices Be In Vain

It's Memorial Day, of course, as I write this.  I do so with the hope--dare I say, the expectation--that you will, in ways large and small, find a way to remember and pay tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice or served in uniform on behalf of their nation and the values to which it has traditionally aspired.  Many of you, including me, have family members who fall into that category.  In my case, it is a father and a father-in-law I was lucky to know, and an uncle and a cousin I did not get a chance to meet.  All of them are a source of pride and reverence for me, as I am certain that similar members of your families are for you.

Which is why I am especially outraged over the current state of America on this Memorial Day.  And why I hope and pray that you are similarly outraged.  Outraged enough to do more than grumble and tweet about the present.  Outrages enough to take action--positive action--but, if necessary, to make whatever sacrifice may be necessary not to make America "great" again, but to make America America again.  If that can be done, the greatness part will take care of itself.

For, as of right now, America isn't America.  Over the past eighteen months, the nation has rapidly moved away from being the America the world aspired to emulate, and has instead moved rapidly toward becoming more like the despotisms the world has always tried to escape.

It is, of course, a process that started when we put a professional narcissist and bully named Donald Trump in the Oval Office.  Of course, only 46% of us did that, but that's federalism and the electoral college, plus a lot of voters who looked the other way and sat at home because they foolishly comforted themselves with the idea that their vote meant nothing--an idea that Memorial Day itself stands toward in opposition.

In any case, both pro-Trump and anti-Trump voters comforted themselves with the idea that he was little more than an entertainer.  So how much harm could he possibly do to the nation and its values?

In eighteen months, plenty.

Trump has shown in that time that he is not merely an entertainer, a buffoon, a narcissist, and a world-class bully.  He has shown every intention of becoming what nobody thought that he could become, indeed what no one thought anyone could every become in the United States.  A dictator.

Does that sound extreme to you?  Its extremity, if any, is only exceeded by the nature of many of Trump's decisions and statements.  Consider the following partial listing:

As is well-known by now, Trump's favorite presidential activity is using his Twitter account to inflate his record and libel his opposition.  Accordingly, he has attempted to use the "block" feature of Twitter to silence those who respond in opposition to his tweets.  This led to a suit in Federal court and a judge's ruling that Trump's account is a public forum that cannot be allowed to exclude anyone from responding.

You might think that this ruling would be the end of the matter but, in Trump's America, you would be wrong.  In fact, Twitter itself is wrong; since the judge's ruling, the social media site has been locking out anti-Trump accounts.  Do you imagine Twitter would be doing this on its own?  I don't.  I think the impetus to do this comes straight from the West Wing.

And, at any rate, the fascism expressed in all of this is not in isolation from Trump's other recent actions.  He has demanded that the Washington Post, a newspaper that has been highly critical of him on a number of fronts, register as a lobbyist because of its supposed Democratic leanings.  Anyone who has read the Post in the decades after the paper's Watergate coverage knows that it has been anything but easy on Democrats.  Nevertheless, this is what Trump really is working toward here:  a national press that he can control, censor, and otherwise manipulate so that it will always be friendly to him, just as it is to dictatorships in other countries where news outlets are "registered."

He is not alone in his administration in attempting to censor the press.  His EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, barred reporters from CNN and the Associated Press from attending a national summit on harmful contaminants, to the point of physically restraining them from entering the EPA building.

Trump has gone, at least verbally, beyond the issue of mere restraint to suggest that, if you don't live up to his definition of patriotism, you should leave the country.  This, of course, was in the context of his opposition to NFL players who kneel during the playing of the National Anthem at games, to protest violence against African-Americans.  To protest that, and not the flag, the Anthem, or even Trump personally.

And, when Trump thinks you should leave the country, he truly thinks that should happen "by any means necessary."  You need only to look at his treatment of immigrants--the most American aspect of America--to see how far he is willing to go in his inhumanity to our fellow humans.  He has deliberately separated parents from children at our border with Mexico, on such a scale that the babies literally have their own buses, courtesy of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  He has required the use of yellow bracelets to identify the parents of these children (sound familiar?).  And even this level of efficiency hasn't prevented Trump from losing track of nearly 1,500 children who arrived unaccompanied at the border.

Trump's corruption of our most basic values has begun to destroy the fabric of other American institutions as well.  Sadly, the NFL is a prominent example; its recent decision to divide players between those who will stand for the Anthem and those who won't, with the latter exiled to the locker room for the duration of the Anthem, is an example of how to compromise the First Amendment without even talking to the affected players or acknowledging the controversy that led players to start kneeling in the first place.  Far from affirming the unifying power of the Anthem, the league has allowed Trump to weaponize both it and the First Amendment.  This, despite the fact that the NFL is a non-profit organization (!) that, by law, is constrained in its ability to express any political speech, and has so little respect itself for the Anthem that it prefers using its playing as spots for advertisers.  (It does have a few heroes in it, however; see here.)

Trump's corruption has descended all the way down to the citizen level.  allowing individuals to insult and assault people who are guilty of no other crime except that of not being white males. Oh, and Christians, of course.  Let's not forget them, especially the ones who want to make their beliefs as mandatory for the rest of us as possible.

Is this the America you want to live in?  Is this the America that those we remember on Memorial Day died for?  Do we want to ensure that their sacrifices were for nothing?

Please don't let that be the case.  For the sake of my absent family and friends, and for yours, please get out there, one way or another, and resist the tyranny that is slowly creeping around all of us, and is threatening to make the greatest experiment in the history of democracy just another failed empire consumed by the base desires of a few, instead of the hopes and dreams of everyone.

Saturday, May 19, 2018

The First White President?

Given my recent experience with using articles from The Atlantic Web site as a jumping-off point for these blog posts, I'm half-tempted to just tell all of you to just ignore my blog and buy a subscription to The Atlantic instead.  Or, at least, get a subscription of my own.  Granted, I have something of a family connection to the publication, as I have previously explained, so my self-interest is already tied up in the publication to a small degree.  But that doesn't matter.  Frankly, given the current state of our country and its government (or what passes for it), I really don't care where you get your wisdom from, so long as you, and others get it.

But I digress.

Here is a link to an Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, making the case for Donald Trump as the nation's first white president.  This is a case Coates makes successfully, and as carefully and thoroughly as possible.  He starts with a discussion of Trump's own personal history, documented the racism that has been the single common thread throughout all of his public life, from keeping people of color out of his father's apartment buildings to his personal assaults on Obama's personal history and character during Obama's Presidency.  Coates goes on from there to review the data from the 2016 Presidential election, and shows that whiteness, not economic distress, was the single demographic factor against all others that identified Trump support (yes, even including gender).  Finally, Coates goes back into our history, and shows how race has been manipulated from the very beginning as a tool of both economic and social oppression.  In the process, he also shows why progressive white Democrats who want to "unify" with Reagan-Trump Democrats are doomed to fail in their efforts.  It is not possible to transcend the issue of race without directly confronting the racism that exists everywhere in our society.

And I truly do mean everywhere, based on my own personal experience.  Consider, for a few moments the fact that Trump's various raced-based political appeals, now largely but not exclusively focused on the issue of immigration, make him a slightly-more-silk-suited version of George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who carried five states running on a third-party ticket in the 1968 Presidential election.  But Trump's a native New Yorker, you say.  How could such a blue state like New York, and especially such a blue city like New York City, produce a political clone of Wallace.

Well, fairly easily, when you consider the fact that Trump, who built his real-estate career in Manhattan, was born and raised in Queens, the home bureau of Archie Bunker from "All in the Family."  And, although the Queens of today is very much of a multi-ethic, multi-national melting pot, that was certainly not the case in the Queens where Trump came of age.

As I suggested a moment ago, a little personal experience here.

Flashback:  It is 1979, the first of my four-year sojourn in New York, largely as a civil servant and later as a would-be commercial artist.  Summer has come and, with them, summer blockbusters at the movie theaters.  I'm living on the top floor (with elevator access) of an apartment building in Elmhurst, a neighborhood in northwest Queens that had become (and may still be) the most ethically diverse zip code (11373) in the entire nation.  The hallway on which my apartment is located includes two Indian families, a single East European woman, a gay African-American and Hispanic male couple, and a Caucasian-Japanese straight couple. 

Far from being frightened by all of this, I'm enjoying the diversity, even though it includes nightly visits from that well-known New York pest, cockroaches.  I find myself, even as I write these words, aching with a sense of loss for these friends from my early adulthood.

And then, one Saturday night, I decide to go see "Rocky II" at a movie theater in Flushing, a neighborhood in northeast Queens that, at the time (and no longer) was still predominantly a white-ethnic conclave.  And my eyes are opened, not only to the spectacle of Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers duking it out in the ring, but to the spectacle of racial hatred that the film's climatic fight unleashed.  I was surrounded by young white men in a small, neighborhood theater, all of whom suddenly, and then for the rest of the fight scene, chanted almost in unison "GET THAT [N-word]!  GET THAT [N-word]!" 

I hated having to sanitize the memory, because it robs you of experiencing the full impact of the hatred I experienced.  But I feel that to not sanitize it is, in some real sense, to become complicit with it, which I refuse to do.  In any case, I realized that night that Queens, regardless of my Elmhurst experience, was not a racial paradise.

And neither is New York.  And, for that matter, neither is America.

So it should not be surprising that a President from Queens should be the one to unleash the inner bigot of so many Americans who attempt to sanitize their feelings with cliches about being hard-working, everyday, not-those-coastal-type, economically-left-behind Americans.  What far too many of the white people who hide behind these cliches are, fundamentally, is the thing that can never speak its true name, but must always hide behind a pretense of nobility it can neither earn nor deserve.

They are bigots.  And they now feel free, in the age of Trump, to be who they really are.  Loudly, proudly, and destructively.

You can see them doing it here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

So pervasive a pattern is this--white police attacking innocent black people--that it has been identified, researched, and reported as a systemic problem.  And that problem is reflected in our nation's prison system as well.

But why should that be surprising?  Systemic racism is openly reflected not only in public policy on behalf of "the poor" (i.e., those who are presumed to be black but very often are white), or with reference to "national security," but even within the halls of government itself, in the way that white public officials relate to their colleagues of color.

In fact, racism is the single most rational explanation for the fact that immigration, and racist attitudes against it, are at the center of the current national political debate.  Let's go back to New York for a moment here--in fact, to Manhattan, that supposed citadel of open-minded tolerance--and take a look at this incident, involving the most horribly naked bigotry being displayed against people of color, for no reason other than the fact that they are people of color.

Do you really have any doubt that this explosion of hate rests on Trump's shoulders?  Does that really seem far-fetched to you?

Well, from the vantage point of persuasion on this argument, I've deliberately saved the best piece for last.  Take a long look at this, and tell me if you still think everything I've documented here is somehow separated from our Criminal-in-Chief.

So, how do we fight it?  One thing we don't do is respond in kind, such as petitions like this one.  For one thing, people have a civil right to bigotry.  Sad, but true.  The irony of freedom is that it protects many ugly things, in no small part because freedom is what exposes the darkness to the light, ultimately killing it.

That, in fact, is what we must do.

We must expose the fundamental bigotry on which America is built to the light of public discourse and debate, and ultimately to our political process.  We must re-shape not only our politics, but also our economy and culture, to fight against and ultimately destroy hate in this country.  But do so without destroying either the haters, or the hated.  It is bigotry itself that must be destroyed because, left unchecked, it will destroy all of us.

It destroys no one, however, to simply remove them from public office, thereby preventing them from spreading the poison within them throughout all of the people.  Donald Trump has not been the first President who also happened to be white but, as Coates has so eloquently described, he has certainly been the first White President.

By peaceful means only, let's make sure he's the last one.

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Forget About The Internet Of Things. What About The Internet Of People?

I'm happy to commend this article in The Atlantic by James Fallows, for a number of reasons (as well as the disclosure that Mr. Fallows is the father-in-law of one of my father's former students).  Primarily, I appreciate the fact that Mr. Fallows, in his travels around our politically divided nation, found many reasons for optimism in the ability of many small American communities to pull together and find solutions to the problems that divide our nation's capital as well as our national debate.  It offers some confirmation of my theory that the Internet has become more of an electronic megaphone through which we can shout at each other, instead (as I had once hoped) to be a window through which we could look at and honestly get to know each other.   As it turns out, virtual reality is no substitute for actual reality.

That's reassuring, all by itself.  But I can't help, in thinking about the article after I read it, that it's easier to feel reassured about what's happening around the country if you have the ability to jump around it in your own jet.  Not that I begrudge Mr. Fallows that privilege.  In this case, you're reading the words of someone who thought that, by now, we would all have flying cars that would allow us to travel around the country with the same ease that we now call each other from around the world.  Unfortunately, we can't do that at the moment.

If only we could.

If only there was a way that we could travel not only from city to city, but even from state to state, at speeds faster than are possible on highways.

If only that way provided enough opportunities to go anywhere in the country, with as much convenience as the automobile does with regard to people's personal schedules.

If only that way made use of existing infrastructure and emerging technology, so that it was feasible to finance its existence and, at the same time, create tens of thousands of temporary and permanent jobs.  And, in the process, bring hundreds of communities back to life, by providing direct investment in them and business opportunities with other communities.

If only this involved a mode of transportation this nation once used on a regular basis.  One that, in fact, help build this nation in a, dare I say, transcontinental way.  One that people still use today, on a regular basis, in the nation's most prosperous areas.  One that, admittedly, has always required a substantial degree of public investment, but has always proved to be worth it.

In case you didn't figure it out after the second "If only," I'm talking about ... railroads.

Railroads, which have the potential to be the Internet of people.

But isn't the Internet already made up of people?  Frankly, it's kind of hard to tell these days, from the way we shout at each other, as though we've actually known each other long enough to know that we can't stand each other.

If you want to experience an Internet whose members are almost unfailingly polite to each other, you're better off dealing with the Internet of things.  Simply put, this refers to the growing ability of our technology to communicate directly from device to device, with little or no human interaction to help them do so.  If you have a smart phone that allows you to connect with a "smart home," and set your cable, HVAC, and security settings, you already know what I'm talking about.  But the Internet of things goes well beyond consumer needs, and is well on its way to dominating and even controlling international commerce.

That sets up the possibility of a world in which our devices effectively run us, instead of the other way around.  Or, as Marshall McLuhan is reputed to have once said, we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.

Maybe, in such a world, shouting at each other through our online caricatures, and posturing to people we've never met, just isn't enough to keep us safe not only from natural catastrophes, but the ones that we manage to make for ourselves, through our own cleverness.  Maybe we need to spend more time in each other's actual presence, so that we can get to know each other as individuals.  Maybe, just maybe, in such a world, we would discover that we might actually like each other more than we ever before thought was possible.  And maybe, at the same time, we would find more ways to more the wealth around the country, along with ourselves.

Imagine, for example, if someone could, via high-speed rail commute from St. Louis to Chicago, bringing a large income back to a city that could use all the large incomes it could get, in much the same way that immigrants from other countries send U.S. dollars back to their home countries and support their families.  Imagine if that led to more direct investment in communities from wealthy cities like Chicago to less-fortunate ones like St. Louis.  Imagine if that made those latter communities less dependent on public support, and instead transformed them into sources of support for public enterprises.

Imagine, if other words, what would happen if we did invest in technology that created a real Internet of people, one that was made up not of bytes and impulses, but real, actual people who didn't have a technology that just encouraged them to posture, instead of one that forced them to, well, you know, actually be themselves.

Maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be the Divided States of America anymore.

Maybe, just maybe, America really could be great again.

Maybe, just maybe, Mr. Fallows' optimism would have support from the successes of thousands of communities.

Maybe it's just a dream.  But I'm willing to bet that it could be an American one.