I'm in Maryland, on the east coast of the United States, so it's only a few hours before the start of 2019. Since this is generally a time for reflections, I'm going to reflect, while at the same time commented on several recent events.
I can't quite escape the feeling that I should be happier than I feel at the moment. After all, the country has just experienced a national election in which the Democratic Party took control of the House of Representatives by a wide margin, and made other gains in state and local elections. In addition, a large number of progressive ballot initiatives were passed as well. Even in the Senate, where the electoral map was heavily stacked against Democrats, the party's net loss of seats was a relatively small one.
All of this opens up the possibility of a full-scale investigation of D***** T**** and the shenanigans in which he, his family, and his appointees have engaged over the past two years. It opens up the possibility of making progress on progressive issues at the state, if not the national level. It suggests that the possibility of removing T**** from office in the next two years, either by impeachment, resignation, or defeat at the polls.
So why is my face long tonight as I contemplate the new year?
Because even though the Democrats made huge gains, that fact doesn't seem to be translating into a resurgence of democracy in America.
Let's start with the fact that, as of the moment, the federal government has been partially shut down by T****, in a last-ditch effort to get the federal government to fund his frequently-promised wall along the southern border. You know, the one for which Mexico was going to pay.
This is obviously an act of pure desperation by T****, who has nothing else going for him at this point. The stock market is in a slow-motion collapse, the budget deficit is blowing up, our allies are deserting us, and the legal walls are closing in on the Administration (especially on T**** himself). But it is also a naked attempt at political blackmail, one which Democrats have no choice but to reject if they are to have any credibility as a political force and any chance of keeping their supporters with them. There is no political case for the wall; were it otherwise, it would have started to become reality during the past two years of all-GOP control of Washington.
So what's the endgame? Is there an endgame?
If you rely on the MSM for answers to those questions, all you get is the who''s-up-who's down sports-style of reporting that the work-the-refs approach to the press by conservatives has produced. You would end up concluding that, sooner or later, someone will blink, and life will go on.
But there's another alternative. It's probably the alternative only a madman would pursue. On the other hand, remember: T****. If he's not a madman, who is?
That alternative is to use the powers granted by Congress to the executive branch to declare a state of national emergency, which in turn would give him the opportunity to transform himself from a would-be dictator to being an actual one. Frankly, I was not aware that this potential power existed, until I saw this Daily Kos piece. If you have not read it yet, please feel free to step away from my blog for a few minutes and read it. You will discover that, by constitutional means, we have effectively granted the executive branch the power to subvert our constitutional order.
Now that you've had a chance to read it and come back, do you have any doubt that we may be in a position where elections have no consequences for T****?
To say nothing of his party?
Look at what has been going on in Wisconsin and Michigan, where Republican legislatures are determined to make sure that elections replacing Republican governors have no consequences.
In the case of Michigan, look at what the Republican legislature has done to ensure that a minimum wage increase and a sick leave proposal that the voters wanted will not happen. That's right: they're deliberately picking the pockets of the people they are sworn to serve, so that they can line their own pockets with even more campaign contributions.
Now, let's leave the Midwest and go back to Washington, where, I'm sorry to say, it gets even worse. We find a Republican senator who is actually willing to use the loaded words "civil war" when it comes to stopping the newly-elected House Democratic majority from doing its duty to hold T**** accountable. Query: how many of his colleagues feel the same way? Will the investigations that are about to begin actually lead to shots being fired? We may find out shortly, because there will be investigations, whether Mike Lee likes it or not.
And finally, let's stay in Washington, and take a very short trip from Capitol Hill to Maryland Avenue, where we find the Supreme Court, and its newest Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who despite being the object of more than 80 complaints about his ethics, is essentially bullet-proof because the Court and its Justices apparently answer to no one when it comes to ethics. You can read all about this in painful detail here, while contemplating the fact that Kavanaugh will be on the Court for life, which, given his relative youth and barring some form of divine intervention, could very well be for a mighty long time. (For more background on the social cesspool that gave us Kavanaugh in the first place, take a look at this.)
So, here's where we are. No hope from the Supreme Court, or the Senate. Certainly no hope from a White House that is, to put it politely, a national embarrassment and a disgrace. No hope even where Democrats have taken governorships but still have to worry about state Republican legislators. If there's any hope at all, it rests, seemingly, solely on the shoulders of Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic members in the House.
Is it going to be enough?
I wish that I could give that question an unqualified "Yes." The history of the country itself gives me some reason to think that it will be. But nothing is guaranteed by our institutions.
The only guaranty that it will be enough--that we will get our democracy back, and continue to build upon the accomplishments of the past--is all of us. All of you.
We can only make this a Happy New Year if we become, in Barack Obama's words, the change we want to see. No one will save us but ourselves.
Stay alert. Keep in touch. Organize. Raise money. Vote. And never, ever, give in, despite the odds. It isn't about the odds. It's about how much you care.
And be assured, I will continue to do exactly that, here, and elsewhere.
Happy New Year.
Monday, December 31, 2018
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Can Federalism Be The Key To A Progressive Future?
Federalism. The concept that certain government powers belong to the national government, while certain others belong to state and local governments. It's a concept embedded in our Constitution, and it's also a concept at the heart of our national division of not just of opinion, but also of day-to-day reality. And, as a consequence, it's reflected in Washington right now in a particularly divisive way.
We have a House of Representatives that will, in just a few days, be controlled by the Democrats, because the majority of the people in this country, as election after election in this century has shown, identify either with the Democratic Party or the progressive ideals for which it has traditionally stood. On the other hand, we have a Senate that, for the foreseeable future (and I hope I'm wrong) will be controlled by Republicans because the minority of people in this country live in the majority of states, and consistently vote for Republicans despite the fact that Republicans have spent the past four decades on trickle-up-and-out policies that shift wealth from workers to investors and, ultimately, oversees (along with the workers' jobs). More on that later. Of course, we also have a President elected by a minority of the people because federalism, by way of the Electoral College and its allocation of electoral votes, allows the states to control who occupies the Oval Office.
And because the federal structure of our government is embedded in our Constitution, it's not going anywhere soon. Anytime.
Perhaps it shouldn't.
A key historical argument against it is the fact that, originally, its strongest proponents have been those who saw it as a convenient philosophical vehicle for transporting an inherently racist institution, slavery, into their own economic convenience without regard to its power to poison the lives of the enslaved and the larger character of the nation as a whole (think, for example, of those in the North who found it convenient to support slavery in the South through the Triangle Trade). Those advocates were successful, leaving us with a national curse that public and private institutions have slowly begun to unravel.
But that does not mean that federalism can't and doesn't have a valid purpose. Part of what has kept it alive over the centuries is the obvious fact that some issues, such as the prosecution of war and the regulation of trade "among the several States" is most easily and effectively done on a national scale, while others more dependent on an understanding of conditions on a smaller scale, such as police and education, are most effectively dealt with on a local scale. With that in mind, it may make sense for progressives to stop fighting or bemoaning the existence of federalism, but rather to start figuring out ways by which to make it work on behalf of the causes they care about.
Take economic development, for example.
Like it or not, government at all levels has been involved in the national, and in local, economic conditions. That has been even more true over the past century, as national government has been forced to deal with economic dislocations often caused by international events (i.e., the Great Depression), and state and local governments have likewise been forced to deal with changes in their communities and, relative to that, their tax bases (i.e., post-WWII suburbanization). Perhaps the most interesting feature about this trend, in fact, is the manner in which it has over time become one of the few truly bipartisan aspects of our politics, both pro and con. Thus, you have Republican governors offering Amazon taxpayer-funded "bribes" to add a new corporate headquarters within their boarders, but you also have Democrats decrying such "bribes (rightly, IMHO, as an Amazon member) as an unjustified form of corporate welfare.
Well, since government promotion of economic development is no longer a purely partisan issue, why not integrate it into our federal system? What if we did this promotion on a national scale, tethered to goals set at a national level, but with enough flexibility that states could, in fact, tailor it to their specific needs?
Take, for example, the concept of block grants, a concept beloved by conservatives as a way of funding social programs for states. What if we were to give each state a sum of money each year, with the specific sum for each state determined by its population, and with the stipulation that it had to be used to ensure a job for every able-bodied adult in the state--but with no other stipulations about how it was to be used? State and local governments could take these funds, and then tailor their use to local conditions. And they could be used to address unemployment caused by anything, whether historic poverty related to race, or rural poverty based on bigger structural changes in economics (such as the decline in extraction industries).
Don't like giving away taxpayer money? Then don't. Instead, create federal tax credits that can be used with the same flexibility as the block-grant proposal I just described. And again, tie those credits to federal oversight, to ensure full employment across the country. The point, ultimately, is that there are ways to take federalism and make it work for, rather than against, progressive goals.
I've been thinking about this subject for a while, and recently saw two New York Times articles that made me think that the time may now be ripe for making this approach a part of our political discussion.
This one, about the tendency of rural Kentucky voters to vote Republican despite their financial dependence on federal welfare programs, indirectly comes to the conclusion that this tendency is most logically explained by the fact that people in these communities would rather have jobs than welfare--a feeling that is doubtless universal. What I'm suggesting is a way that would directly address that desire, with the added benefit that local workers would be able through their votes to have some say in the types of jobs that are created.
And this one, about how to save small-town America, suggests from some of the suggestions about how to do it that people are ready for that type of approach. Think locally about solutions to poverty; build up mid-sized cities; create incentives for new industries to replace departed ones. All of these are ideas presented in this article, and all of them would be encouraged by what I'm proposing here.
I'm so convinced of the significance of what I'm proposing here (and no, not because I'm proposing it) that I'm willing to say that the presidential candidate who makes this central to his or her campaign will be the one who wins not only the nomination, but also the honor of being the person who will make us forget all about D****** T****. Any takers among the 20-plus hopefuls for that honor?
Maybe it'll happen if enough of us get behind us and push it. I know I'll be pushing hard, this year and next. I hope many of you will join me.
We have a House of Representatives that will, in just a few days, be controlled by the Democrats, because the majority of the people in this country, as election after election in this century has shown, identify either with the Democratic Party or the progressive ideals for which it has traditionally stood. On the other hand, we have a Senate that, for the foreseeable future (and I hope I'm wrong) will be controlled by Republicans because the minority of people in this country live in the majority of states, and consistently vote for Republicans despite the fact that Republicans have spent the past four decades on trickle-up-and-out policies that shift wealth from workers to investors and, ultimately, oversees (along with the workers' jobs). More on that later. Of course, we also have a President elected by a minority of the people because federalism, by way of the Electoral College and its allocation of electoral votes, allows the states to control who occupies the Oval Office.
And because the federal structure of our government is embedded in our Constitution, it's not going anywhere soon. Anytime.
Perhaps it shouldn't.
A key historical argument against it is the fact that, originally, its strongest proponents have been those who saw it as a convenient philosophical vehicle for transporting an inherently racist institution, slavery, into their own economic convenience without regard to its power to poison the lives of the enslaved and the larger character of the nation as a whole (think, for example, of those in the North who found it convenient to support slavery in the South through the Triangle Trade). Those advocates were successful, leaving us with a national curse that public and private institutions have slowly begun to unravel.
But that does not mean that federalism can't and doesn't have a valid purpose. Part of what has kept it alive over the centuries is the obvious fact that some issues, such as the prosecution of war and the regulation of trade "among the several States" is most easily and effectively done on a national scale, while others more dependent on an understanding of conditions on a smaller scale, such as police and education, are most effectively dealt with on a local scale. With that in mind, it may make sense for progressives to stop fighting or bemoaning the existence of federalism, but rather to start figuring out ways by which to make it work on behalf of the causes they care about.
Take economic development, for example.
Like it or not, government at all levels has been involved in the national, and in local, economic conditions. That has been even more true over the past century, as national government has been forced to deal with economic dislocations often caused by international events (i.e., the Great Depression), and state and local governments have likewise been forced to deal with changes in their communities and, relative to that, their tax bases (i.e., post-WWII suburbanization). Perhaps the most interesting feature about this trend, in fact, is the manner in which it has over time become one of the few truly bipartisan aspects of our politics, both pro and con. Thus, you have Republican governors offering Amazon taxpayer-funded "bribes" to add a new corporate headquarters within their boarders, but you also have Democrats decrying such "bribes (rightly, IMHO, as an Amazon member) as an unjustified form of corporate welfare.
Well, since government promotion of economic development is no longer a purely partisan issue, why not integrate it into our federal system? What if we did this promotion on a national scale, tethered to goals set at a national level, but with enough flexibility that states could, in fact, tailor it to their specific needs?
Take, for example, the concept of block grants, a concept beloved by conservatives as a way of funding social programs for states. What if we were to give each state a sum of money each year, with the specific sum for each state determined by its population, and with the stipulation that it had to be used to ensure a job for every able-bodied adult in the state--but with no other stipulations about how it was to be used? State and local governments could take these funds, and then tailor their use to local conditions. And they could be used to address unemployment caused by anything, whether historic poverty related to race, or rural poverty based on bigger structural changes in economics (such as the decline in extraction industries).
Don't like giving away taxpayer money? Then don't. Instead, create federal tax credits that can be used with the same flexibility as the block-grant proposal I just described. And again, tie those credits to federal oversight, to ensure full employment across the country. The point, ultimately, is that there are ways to take federalism and make it work for, rather than against, progressive goals.
I've been thinking about this subject for a while, and recently saw two New York Times articles that made me think that the time may now be ripe for making this approach a part of our political discussion.
This one, about the tendency of rural Kentucky voters to vote Republican despite their financial dependence on federal welfare programs, indirectly comes to the conclusion that this tendency is most logically explained by the fact that people in these communities would rather have jobs than welfare--a feeling that is doubtless universal. What I'm suggesting is a way that would directly address that desire, with the added benefit that local workers would be able through their votes to have some say in the types of jobs that are created.
And this one, about how to save small-town America, suggests from some of the suggestions about how to do it that people are ready for that type of approach. Think locally about solutions to poverty; build up mid-sized cities; create incentives for new industries to replace departed ones. All of these are ideas presented in this article, and all of them would be encouraged by what I'm proposing here.
I'm so convinced of the significance of what I'm proposing here (and no, not because I'm proposing it) that I'm willing to say that the presidential candidate who makes this central to his or her campaign will be the one who wins not only the nomination, but also the honor of being the person who will make us forget all about D****** T****. Any takers among the 20-plus hopefuls for that honor?
Maybe it'll happen if enough of us get behind us and push it. I know I'll be pushing hard, this year and next. I hope many of you will join me.
Saturday, December 29, 2018
George Herbert Walker Bush, And The Death Of WASP Culture
It's been several weeks since the death of George H.W. Bush, and quite a bit has happened since then, politically speaking. I always get behind in my blogging around this time of year, and 2018 has been no exception. I'll catch up with recent events in a few days, or at least do my best to do so. But it's impossible for me to allow Bush's death and funeral, and the media frenzy surrounding both events, without using some of the bandwidth available to me to make a few observations.
Bush was a one-term president, which might surprise some of you who did not live through his presidency as I did. If your view of him was or has been formed at least largely by the lionization of him by the MSM earlier this month, you would have thought that he was another FDR, someone who would have been elected to four terms had the Constitution permitted it. The truth of the matter is that the administration of the 41st President, even from the most non-partisan of perspectives, a decidedly mixed bag, one that, in the end, was undone at the polls in no small part because of a weak economy, and a violation of a campaign promise not to raise taxes.
I noticed that one of the wire services pointed that fact--and fact it is, as Yoda might say--in announcing the news of his death on Twitter. The tweet was immediately pounced upon by the usual right-wing media hookers looking for attention, and denounced by them as an insult to a deceased leader and World War II veteran. As a consequence, the tweet was subsequently followed up by a "correction." Well done, Michelle Malkin and your cohorts in libel; let's see you show the same posthumous respect to another one-term president and veteran, Jimmy Carter, when he passes away. I for one am not holding my breath.
Fortunately, although the MSM is instantly and complete cowed by professional media-hunters like Malkin who love to "work the refs" to promote their lies, the Internet proved to provide greater diversity in assessments of Bush and his public life. You can, for example, find a relatively complimentary piece here, one that also takes a number of Bush's critics to task for overlooking his accomplishments, including his volunteering to be a Navy pilot and his facilitation of a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. As for the critics, you can certainly find them as well; this piece, and this one as well, do a fairly comprehensive job of cataloging Bush's various sins, although I'm shocked that neither of them mentions Bush's pioneering work in placing a sexual harasser, Clarence Thomas, on the Supreme Court for life, paving the way for Brett Kavanaugh to join him.
What made it perhaps somewhat easier for MSM outlets to lavish praise on Bush was his stature as one of the last Rockefeller Republicans on the national stage, someone whose devotion to Wall Street and gunboat diplomacy was tempered by a desire to work collectively with those on the other side of the ideological fence. That desire is perhaps best reflected in the accomplishments for which I, as a card-carrying progressive Democrat, believe that he legitimately deserves genuine praise for achieving: the budget deal that, in conjunction with the one subsequently passed by the Clinton Administration, paved the way for the prosperity of the 1990s (and, of course, required him to break his earlier no-new-taxes pledge), and the prosecution of Gulf War I against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Unlike the subsequent Gulf War prosecuted by Bush's son, GWI was based on principles of international law, with the consent and cooperation of the international community and the full authorization of Congress. Bush's handling of GWI reflected a commitment to the pillars of the post-WWII order that subsequently characterized his dealings with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations in ending the Cold War.
No doubt those accomplishments, as well as perhaps others, were based on the fact that Bush built his entire political career on connections, building a business and political Rolodex one card at a time that took him all the way up the Washington ladder and earned him the nickname "Mr. Resume." But a career built on connections can be something of a double-edged sword, depending on the nature of the connections themselves. Two names can be pulled out of the Bush Rolodex to illustrate that point: Roger Ailes, and Shafiq bin Laden. The former helped Bush build a electoral strategy for the 1988 presidential election that was built on racism and challenges to the patriotism and mental competency of his opponent, Michael Dukakis. The latter belongs to the family that used its access to American (gained through the Bush family) to savagely, tragically attack the United States on September 11, 2001, and change the history and culture of this country for the worse, perhaps forever.
I think it's precisely this mixed bag of his connections that informs, perhaps even dictated (in hindsight) the mixed bag that is George Bush's presidential legacy. And I think that the bag is mixed in the first instance because Bush, lacking a true ideological compass, just grabbed for whatever connections he could get as he moved up the political ladder. It didn't matter whether those connections were on the left or the right, whether they were friend or foe to this country, or whether they even genuinely liked Bush as much as he thought they like him. All that mattered was that they could help him "move up." And so, when he finally got to the top, he was beholden to too many people with too many conflicting interests to have a coherent presidency with a consistent focus and clear priorities. You can find a more extensive discussion of this here.
So, then, why the orgy of MSM worship on the occasion of his death?
I don't think that it was really all about Bush, or his presidency, or his fondness for handwritten notes (which, ironically, underscores the "connections" dimension of his career). I think that, in an age and a current presidency defined by racial animosity and the rise of the poor white class as the focus of our political debate, it was really a kind of media Viking funeral for the elite WASP culture into which Bush was born, and which for decades served in a number of ways to mediate the differences among the various demographic groups that make up America's famously multicultural mosaic. That culture is largely gone, its survivors in political retreat, and nothing has emerged to replace it as a mediating force. If anything, the Internet has emerged to further fracture an already fractured nation, while simultaneously giving it millions of "channels" by which to express its increasingly divided character.
But the elite WASP culture, however much it may have mitigated the influence of racism in America, also institutionalized it in order to preserve its credibility with poorer white Christians. That institutionalized racism harmed generations of people of color, and denied the country as a whole the benefit of the dreams and the talents these people possessed. And, even if WASPs themselves are in retreat as a political force, the racism (and, for that matter, sexism) they institutionalized still remains a sore subject in our national debate.
This is why the aforementioned orgy of worship is, with all due respect to Bush's family, friends, and other supporters, sadly and seriously misplaced. True, Bush was a former president; he deserves a certain level of respect, and his passing is unquestionably a major news story. But it is also an entirely appropriate to use the occasion of his death to take stock of his impact on the nation and its people. The power of the presidency is such that we as a people need to properly take stock of a president's actions and inactions, for better and for worse. And the natural and appropriate grief that an individual's death inspires should neither influence nor deter that assessment process. This is one of the many sacrifices a president's family makes for the sake of their family member's service. We owe them a debate carried on with respect. But we owe all of us, for the sake of our democracy, an otherwise honest debate.
As one of the pieces linked above puts it:
Bush was a one-term president, which might surprise some of you who did not live through his presidency as I did. If your view of him was or has been formed at least largely by the lionization of him by the MSM earlier this month, you would have thought that he was another FDR, someone who would have been elected to four terms had the Constitution permitted it. The truth of the matter is that the administration of the 41st President, even from the most non-partisan of perspectives, a decidedly mixed bag, one that, in the end, was undone at the polls in no small part because of a weak economy, and a violation of a campaign promise not to raise taxes.
I noticed that one of the wire services pointed that fact--and fact it is, as Yoda might say--in announcing the news of his death on Twitter. The tweet was immediately pounced upon by the usual right-wing media hookers looking for attention, and denounced by them as an insult to a deceased leader and World War II veteran. As a consequence, the tweet was subsequently followed up by a "correction." Well done, Michelle Malkin and your cohorts in libel; let's see you show the same posthumous respect to another one-term president and veteran, Jimmy Carter, when he passes away. I for one am not holding my breath.
Fortunately, although the MSM is instantly and complete cowed by professional media-hunters like Malkin who love to "work the refs" to promote their lies, the Internet proved to provide greater diversity in assessments of Bush and his public life. You can, for example, find a relatively complimentary piece here, one that also takes a number of Bush's critics to task for overlooking his accomplishments, including his volunteering to be a Navy pilot and his facilitation of a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. As for the critics, you can certainly find them as well; this piece, and this one as well, do a fairly comprehensive job of cataloging Bush's various sins, although I'm shocked that neither of them mentions Bush's pioneering work in placing a sexual harasser, Clarence Thomas, on the Supreme Court for life, paving the way for Brett Kavanaugh to join him.
What made it perhaps somewhat easier for MSM outlets to lavish praise on Bush was his stature as one of the last Rockefeller Republicans on the national stage, someone whose devotion to Wall Street and gunboat diplomacy was tempered by a desire to work collectively with those on the other side of the ideological fence. That desire is perhaps best reflected in the accomplishments for which I, as a card-carrying progressive Democrat, believe that he legitimately deserves genuine praise for achieving: the budget deal that, in conjunction with the one subsequently passed by the Clinton Administration, paved the way for the prosperity of the 1990s (and, of course, required him to break his earlier no-new-taxes pledge), and the prosecution of Gulf War I against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Unlike the subsequent Gulf War prosecuted by Bush's son, GWI was based on principles of international law, with the consent and cooperation of the international community and the full authorization of Congress. Bush's handling of GWI reflected a commitment to the pillars of the post-WWII order that subsequently characterized his dealings with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations in ending the Cold War.
No doubt those accomplishments, as well as perhaps others, were based on the fact that Bush built his entire political career on connections, building a business and political Rolodex one card at a time that took him all the way up the Washington ladder and earned him the nickname "Mr. Resume." But a career built on connections can be something of a double-edged sword, depending on the nature of the connections themselves. Two names can be pulled out of the Bush Rolodex to illustrate that point: Roger Ailes, and Shafiq bin Laden. The former helped Bush build a electoral strategy for the 1988 presidential election that was built on racism and challenges to the patriotism and mental competency of his opponent, Michael Dukakis. The latter belongs to the family that used its access to American (gained through the Bush family) to savagely, tragically attack the United States on September 11, 2001, and change the history and culture of this country for the worse, perhaps forever.
I think it's precisely this mixed bag of his connections that informs, perhaps even dictated (in hindsight) the mixed bag that is George Bush's presidential legacy. And I think that the bag is mixed in the first instance because Bush, lacking a true ideological compass, just grabbed for whatever connections he could get as he moved up the political ladder. It didn't matter whether those connections were on the left or the right, whether they were friend or foe to this country, or whether they even genuinely liked Bush as much as he thought they like him. All that mattered was that they could help him "move up." And so, when he finally got to the top, he was beholden to too many people with too many conflicting interests to have a coherent presidency with a consistent focus and clear priorities. You can find a more extensive discussion of this here.
So, then, why the orgy of MSM worship on the occasion of his death?
I don't think that it was really all about Bush, or his presidency, or his fondness for handwritten notes (which, ironically, underscores the "connections" dimension of his career). I think that, in an age and a current presidency defined by racial animosity and the rise of the poor white class as the focus of our political debate, it was really a kind of media Viking funeral for the elite WASP culture into which Bush was born, and which for decades served in a number of ways to mediate the differences among the various demographic groups that make up America's famously multicultural mosaic. That culture is largely gone, its survivors in political retreat, and nothing has emerged to replace it as a mediating force. If anything, the Internet has emerged to further fracture an already fractured nation, while simultaneously giving it millions of "channels" by which to express its increasingly divided character.
But the elite WASP culture, however much it may have mitigated the influence of racism in America, also institutionalized it in order to preserve its credibility with poorer white Christians. That institutionalized racism harmed generations of people of color, and denied the country as a whole the benefit of the dreams and the talents these people possessed. And, even if WASPs themselves are in retreat as a political force, the racism (and, for that matter, sexism) they institutionalized still remains a sore subject in our national debate.
This is why the aforementioned orgy of worship is, with all due respect to Bush's family, friends, and other supporters, sadly and seriously misplaced. True, Bush was a former president; he deserves a certain level of respect, and his passing is unquestionably a major news story. But it is also an entirely appropriate to use the occasion of his death to take stock of his impact on the nation and its people. The power of the presidency is such that we as a people need to properly take stock of a president's actions and inactions, for better and for worse. And the natural and appropriate grief that an individual's death inspires should neither influence nor deter that assessment process. This is one of the many sacrifices a president's family makes for the sake of their family member's service. We owe them a debate carried on with respect. But we owe all of us, for the sake of our democracy, an otherwise honest debate.
As one of the pieces linked above puts it:
Rest in peace, Mr. President. Thank you for your service, and for your family's sacrifices. And rest assured that the rest of us will continue to respect both of those things, no matter how much we may disagree with each other. And we will continue to build a stronger, safer, more prosperous and peaceful nation on your legacy.A president lies in state, as Bush is to do beginning today, not because he is kind to his family or has delighted those closest to him with his thank-you notes and a patrician manner, though those stories are important for historians to gather. A president lies in state simply because he was president; because he held power over the fates of hundreds of millions of citizens, and the direction of the world.How he used that power, or failed to use it, must be reckoned with by any who seek to fully understand his legacy.
Friday, November 30, 2018
Fallen Heroes, Lasting Work
Deaths of celebrities, it is said, come in threes. That was certainly the case this past month for me, as three famous people who made an impact in my life, as well as the lives of others, passed away. Not prematurely, thankfully. All of them lived very full lives and left behind legacies that, although complicated in certain ways, will have a lasting positive impact on many people, especially in the arts.
I'll begin my discussion of those legacies with the member of the group who, for me, has perhaps the most complicated legacy: Stan Lee, the co-creator of the Marvel comic-book universe. The complicated part is, in fact, summed up in that word "co-creator."
Lee was a tremendous story-teller and promoter, who worked for many years in the comics business when comic books were considered a medium strictly for kids, and one no self-respecting adult would confess to having as a source of pride, let alone as a source of employment. In fact, Lee admitted that there was a time when he was ashamed of the industry that ultimately made him both rich and famous. Bur those riches and fame began to accumulate in the 1960s, a time when Lee sensed (correctly) that cultural boundaries were shifting, especially the ones that defined "high" and "low" culture. He felt that there might be room in the comics for stories that dealt with topical issues and with the struggles of heroes who, while having super powers thrust upon them in a variety of ways, were still very human, with very human flaws and disappointments.
And so those superheroes became, over the course of the '60s and the decades that followed, household names to millions of comic-book readers, and, ultimately, mass-cultural phenomena when the technology of film making made it possible to show the adventures of these heroes in films and on TV. And Lee's talent for story-telling made all of that possible. As well as his talent for promotion. He was not just Stan Lee, editor and writer. He was Stan Lee of "Stan's Soapbox" in every Marvel book, using the space to promote current issues--and I'm not just talking about the ones with superheroes. He was willing to jump into politics, which helped him to expand the Marvel market from grade schools to college campuses and beyond. This is without a doubt the best-known, and best-written example, and one cited frequently in the many obituaries of Lee.
He also used his Soapbox to promote "the Bullpen," the small army of creative talent whose contributions to Marvel were no less memorable than Lee's. This was especially true of the artists, who created the "look" that defined a highly visual medium and continues to do so down to the present. And this, sadly, is where the legacy becomes complicated. As Lee became more of a celebrity and, in the process, more of an executive, he became less of a colleague and more of a boss, one who was not there for his creative team when some of its members badly needed him. This was most egregiously the case with Jack "King" Kirby, the artist who did more to define the Marvel "look" than anyone else. When Kirby's heirs attempted to claim the copyright (and related royalties) to much of Kirby's work for Marvel, Lee supported Marvel's assertions that Kirby was an "employee" of Marvel and therefore didn't own the rights to his art. He did this despite an earlier statement in a deposition to the opposite effect.
Ironically, then, Lee, like many of his co-creations, was a flawed hero, one who, in the case of Kirby and by extension other Marvel artists, through his co-creators under the proverbial bus at a point when they could have used his help in a significant way. Does it make his live not worth celebrating? Frankly, I'm not in a position to say that. If I do, I'm effectively denying not only the value of his writing, but the value of the art by the artists he injured as well. Together, they created books that helped children like me, children who had trouble fitting in to the world around them, feel that, one day, the world might be a place in which "fitting in" was possible. They gave me the patience, and the confidence, that one did not have to be "like everyone else" in order to matter. Today, no matter how badly the Lee-Kirby relationship ended, I, along with millions of others, have the two of them to thank for that.
Less complicated, perhaps, are the legacies of Douglas Rain and William Goldman. Rain had established a solid career as a Shakespearean actor in Canada when Stanley Kubrick made a last-minute decision to cast him in the rule of HAL, the computer that wasn't programmed to keep a secret and then was given one to keep, leading him quite logically to try killing off all of the astronauts on the spaceship he was designed to operate. While he may have been a last-minute choice, he was an absolutely inspired one. Rain managed to combine the tonal neutrality one would expect from a machine with the quiet intensity of an entity experiencing intense conflict. Even lines as simple as "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" were charged with a sinister effect that was as effortless as it was effective. Rain's accomplishment has informed my efforts to develop a career in acting, by reminding me that acting is an art that must seem effortless to work, and that, when it does, there truly are no small parts.
As for Goldman, his work as a screenwriter and as a novelist speaks for itself. Alas, when it came to the stage, he did not enjoy the same level of success he attained in those other arenas. He wrote two shows for Broadway with his brother, James, who would go on to write the libretto for the Stephen Sondheim musical "Follies," and neither of those shows was, to put it mildly, a hit. But Goldman found Broadway success in a very different way, by writing "The Season," a show-by-show analysis of the 1967-68 season on the Great White Way that used each show to analyze a different aspect of American theater. Despite being 50 years old this year, "The Season" does not feel dated in the least; if anything, Goldman was especially prescient in foreseeing (in the last chapter, "What Kind Of Day Has It Been?") the demise of the impresario model of producing in favor of corporate/not-for-profit producing. Thus, from Goldman's experience, I learned the value of mining one's failures in order to find a different kind of success.
I miss all three men very much, especially Lee and Rain, whom I will now never meet. I got to see Goldman speak in my student days, during which he talked about his experiences at Oberlin (my alma mater as well), and we had a very brief exchange as a result. I'm grateful for that memory. But I'm even more grateful for the work all three men left behind, and the value that work will continue to have long after I'm gone. I would be thrilled if anything I managed to do before I die managed to be a fraction as valuable as what Lee, Rain, and Goldman accomplished.
But I would be even more thrilled if we as a nation can get past the current wretched moment, and build a world worthy of what they accomplished.
I'll begin my discussion of those legacies with the member of the group who, for me, has perhaps the most complicated legacy: Stan Lee, the co-creator of the Marvel comic-book universe. The complicated part is, in fact, summed up in that word "co-creator."
Lee was a tremendous story-teller and promoter, who worked for many years in the comics business when comic books were considered a medium strictly for kids, and one no self-respecting adult would confess to having as a source of pride, let alone as a source of employment. In fact, Lee admitted that there was a time when he was ashamed of the industry that ultimately made him both rich and famous. Bur those riches and fame began to accumulate in the 1960s, a time when Lee sensed (correctly) that cultural boundaries were shifting, especially the ones that defined "high" and "low" culture. He felt that there might be room in the comics for stories that dealt with topical issues and with the struggles of heroes who, while having super powers thrust upon them in a variety of ways, were still very human, with very human flaws and disappointments.
And so those superheroes became, over the course of the '60s and the decades that followed, household names to millions of comic-book readers, and, ultimately, mass-cultural phenomena when the technology of film making made it possible to show the adventures of these heroes in films and on TV. And Lee's talent for story-telling made all of that possible. As well as his talent for promotion. He was not just Stan Lee, editor and writer. He was Stan Lee of "Stan's Soapbox" in every Marvel book, using the space to promote current issues--and I'm not just talking about the ones with superheroes. He was willing to jump into politics, which helped him to expand the Marvel market from grade schools to college campuses and beyond. This is without a doubt the best-known, and best-written example, and one cited frequently in the many obituaries of Lee.
He also used his Soapbox to promote "the Bullpen," the small army of creative talent whose contributions to Marvel were no less memorable than Lee's. This was especially true of the artists, who created the "look" that defined a highly visual medium and continues to do so down to the present. And this, sadly, is where the legacy becomes complicated. As Lee became more of a celebrity and, in the process, more of an executive, he became less of a colleague and more of a boss, one who was not there for his creative team when some of its members badly needed him. This was most egregiously the case with Jack "King" Kirby, the artist who did more to define the Marvel "look" than anyone else. When Kirby's heirs attempted to claim the copyright (and related royalties) to much of Kirby's work for Marvel, Lee supported Marvel's assertions that Kirby was an "employee" of Marvel and therefore didn't own the rights to his art. He did this despite an earlier statement in a deposition to the opposite effect.
Ironically, then, Lee, like many of his co-creations, was a flawed hero, one who, in the case of Kirby and by extension other Marvel artists, through his co-creators under the proverbial bus at a point when they could have used his help in a significant way. Does it make his live not worth celebrating? Frankly, I'm not in a position to say that. If I do, I'm effectively denying not only the value of his writing, but the value of the art by the artists he injured as well. Together, they created books that helped children like me, children who had trouble fitting in to the world around them, feel that, one day, the world might be a place in which "fitting in" was possible. They gave me the patience, and the confidence, that one did not have to be "like everyone else" in order to matter. Today, no matter how badly the Lee-Kirby relationship ended, I, along with millions of others, have the two of them to thank for that.
Less complicated, perhaps, are the legacies of Douglas Rain and William Goldman. Rain had established a solid career as a Shakespearean actor in Canada when Stanley Kubrick made a last-minute decision to cast him in the rule of HAL, the computer that wasn't programmed to keep a secret and then was given one to keep, leading him quite logically to try killing off all of the astronauts on the spaceship he was designed to operate. While he may have been a last-minute choice, he was an absolutely inspired one. Rain managed to combine the tonal neutrality one would expect from a machine with the quiet intensity of an entity experiencing intense conflict. Even lines as simple as "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" were charged with a sinister effect that was as effortless as it was effective. Rain's accomplishment has informed my efforts to develop a career in acting, by reminding me that acting is an art that must seem effortless to work, and that, when it does, there truly are no small parts.
As for Goldman, his work as a screenwriter and as a novelist speaks for itself. Alas, when it came to the stage, he did not enjoy the same level of success he attained in those other arenas. He wrote two shows for Broadway with his brother, James, who would go on to write the libretto for the Stephen Sondheim musical "Follies," and neither of those shows was, to put it mildly, a hit. But Goldman found Broadway success in a very different way, by writing "The Season," a show-by-show analysis of the 1967-68 season on the Great White Way that used each show to analyze a different aspect of American theater. Despite being 50 years old this year, "The Season" does not feel dated in the least; if anything, Goldman was especially prescient in foreseeing (in the last chapter, "What Kind Of Day Has It Been?") the demise of the impresario model of producing in favor of corporate/not-for-profit producing. Thus, from Goldman's experience, I learned the value of mining one's failures in order to find a different kind of success.
I miss all three men very much, especially Lee and Rain, whom I will now never meet. I got to see Goldman speak in my student days, during which he talked about his experiences at Oberlin (my alma mater as well), and we had a very brief exchange as a result. I'm grateful for that memory. But I'm even more grateful for the work all three men left behind, and the value that work will continue to have long after I'm gone. I would be thrilled if anything I managed to do before I die managed to be a fraction as valuable as what Lee, Rain, and Goldman accomplished.
But I would be even more thrilled if we as a nation can get past the current wretched moment, and build a world worthy of what they accomplished.
Saturday, November 17, 2018
It's Time For Democrats To Be Democrats; Or, More Unpacking Of The Midterms
I'm coming back to the midterms for this week's post, simply because there's a lot to unpack from the results, as well as the fact that we're still in the process of unpacking them.
I want to start with the bad Senate news for Democrats: specifically, the losses in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas. As things stand at the moment, the next Senate will have at least 51 Republicans and 47 Democrats. The fact that it will be under Republican control in any case can be largely laid at the feet of the three incumbent Democrats who lost their seats: Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Claire McCaskill. McCaskill made a post-election appearance on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program, in which she laid the blame for her defeat, and that of other Democrats, on the increasingly popular view that expertise (legislative, in her case) is on the decline as a quality people look for in deciding how to vote.
I don't disagree with her on that point entirely. After all, a declining respect for the value of experience plays a large role in getting self-interested imbeciles like T**** in office, where they don't belong, but where their "outsider" status allows them to "shake things up" (usually, for the worse). But I don't think the voters of Missouri "fired" her because she was inexperienced. Rather, they did so because they tried to pretend that they wouldn't be Democrats if they were elected. This was most notoriously tried by Heitkamp, who boasted in ads about how frequently she voted with T****, before she decided to roll the dice and bring out Resistance voters by voting against Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination. But McCaskill wasn't much better; in a dead heat in the polls, unlike Heitkamp, she decided to run a series of commercials in which she proudly boasted that she wasn't one of those "crazy Democrats." Presumable, this meant that she wouldn't stand for the things that Democrats now routinely stand for, despite the fact that those "things" poll very well. Donnelly's campaigning was basically the same.
I can understand why, in purple-to-red states, moderating one's tone matters. But it's possible to moderate your tone without moderating your substance. If you do that as well, you end up with a political universe in which you have, for all practical purposes, two Republican Parties (as the late David Brinkley once pointed out). Or, to use Harry Truman's formulation of this approach, given a difference between a Republican and a Republican, people will pick the Republican every time--by which he meant the real Republican, not the ashamed-to-be-a-Democrat.
Of course, at this point, this is little more than 20-20 hindsight for Democrats in Indiana, North Dakota, and Missouri. But it is food for thought for the next election, which will be upon us sooner than you think. Moderation as a political philosophy may be the media's favorite flavor of politics, even when they can't tell us what it tastes like. But there's a lot to suggest in last week's results that it may not be a flavor that people want to buy, in any case. After all, in Texas, Beto O'Rourke created a Senate race that none of the "experts" thought could possibly exist, and he did it in part by not shying away from progressive policy stances. On the other hand, in Tennessee, Phil Breseden ran a more typical, Blue Dog, all-things-to-all-people campaign--and, despite being a popular former Governor, spectacularly lost to a bat-sh*t crazy Republican candidate who will help push the Senate event further to the right.
My point: Maybe it's OK for Democrats to be Democrats going forward from here. The key is to do what O'Rourke (no known relation, BTW) did in Texas to come within 3 percentage points of unseating Cruz, the Republican even other Republicans love to hate. Go out to the people. Get to know their concerns. And explain what you have in your policy bag to help them. Our bag has better ideas than the other sides' has. Trust that. And go help others to do the same.
Maybe it helps--or should help--that people are gradually coming around to our ideas. On guns, for example. And, even in California, the birthplace of the so-called "tax revolt," a referendum to repeal a new gas tax to fund infrastructure projects failed by ten percentage points.
Maybe the fact that they're coming around to our ideas is the reason why the only thing the Republican Party now stands for is dark money, gerrymandering, and straight-up voter suppression. As of this writing, all three of those things have carried them across the finish line in the gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia. Will they continue to do so in 2020?
As always, that's up to you. Keep doing what you did this time. Encourage others to do the same. And, as Barack Obama, a real President suggested, be the change you want to see.
I want to start with the bad Senate news for Democrats: specifically, the losses in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas. As things stand at the moment, the next Senate will have at least 51 Republicans and 47 Democrats. The fact that it will be under Republican control in any case can be largely laid at the feet of the three incumbent Democrats who lost their seats: Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Claire McCaskill. McCaskill made a post-election appearance on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program, in which she laid the blame for her defeat, and that of other Democrats, on the increasingly popular view that expertise (legislative, in her case) is on the decline as a quality people look for in deciding how to vote.
I don't disagree with her on that point entirely. After all, a declining respect for the value of experience plays a large role in getting self-interested imbeciles like T**** in office, where they don't belong, but where their "outsider" status allows them to "shake things up" (usually, for the worse). But I don't think the voters of Missouri "fired" her because she was inexperienced. Rather, they did so because they tried to pretend that they wouldn't be Democrats if they were elected. This was most notoriously tried by Heitkamp, who boasted in ads about how frequently she voted with T****, before she decided to roll the dice and bring out Resistance voters by voting against Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination. But McCaskill wasn't much better; in a dead heat in the polls, unlike Heitkamp, she decided to run a series of commercials in which she proudly boasted that she wasn't one of those "crazy Democrats." Presumable, this meant that she wouldn't stand for the things that Democrats now routinely stand for, despite the fact that those "things" poll very well. Donnelly's campaigning was basically the same.
I can understand why, in purple-to-red states, moderating one's tone matters. But it's possible to moderate your tone without moderating your substance. If you do that as well, you end up with a political universe in which you have, for all practical purposes, two Republican Parties (as the late David Brinkley once pointed out). Or, to use Harry Truman's formulation of this approach, given a difference between a Republican and a Republican, people will pick the Republican every time--by which he meant the real Republican, not the ashamed-to-be-a-Democrat.
Of course, at this point, this is little more than 20-20 hindsight for Democrats in Indiana, North Dakota, and Missouri. But it is food for thought for the next election, which will be upon us sooner than you think. Moderation as a political philosophy may be the media's favorite flavor of politics, even when they can't tell us what it tastes like. But there's a lot to suggest in last week's results that it may not be a flavor that people want to buy, in any case. After all, in Texas, Beto O'Rourke created a Senate race that none of the "experts" thought could possibly exist, and he did it in part by not shying away from progressive policy stances. On the other hand, in Tennessee, Phil Breseden ran a more typical, Blue Dog, all-things-to-all-people campaign--and, despite being a popular former Governor, spectacularly lost to a bat-sh*t crazy Republican candidate who will help push the Senate event further to the right.
My point: Maybe it's OK for Democrats to be Democrats going forward from here. The key is to do what O'Rourke (no known relation, BTW) did in Texas to come within 3 percentage points of unseating Cruz, the Republican even other Republicans love to hate. Go out to the people. Get to know their concerns. And explain what you have in your policy bag to help them. Our bag has better ideas than the other sides' has. Trust that. And go help others to do the same.
Maybe it helps--or should help--that people are gradually coming around to our ideas. On guns, for example. And, even in California, the birthplace of the so-called "tax revolt," a referendum to repeal a new gas tax to fund infrastructure projects failed by ten percentage points.
Maybe the fact that they're coming around to our ideas is the reason why the only thing the Republican Party now stands for is dark money, gerrymandering, and straight-up voter suppression. As of this writing, all three of those things have carried them across the finish line in the gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia. Will they continue to do so in 2020?
As always, that's up to you. Keep doing what you did this time. Encourage others to do the same. And, as Barack Obama, a real President suggested, be the change you want to see.
Monday, November 12, 2018
Light In The T**** Darkness
On Tuesday night of last week, I slept more soundly than I have slept in the past two years.
That's not an exaggeration. Two years of the T**** nightmare has put more stress on me, my family, our business, and just about everyone we know than anything else that we can remember. The knowledge that there will be at least some relief from that stress can't possibly be understated.
I had hoped, as I had in the 2016 election, for a Democratic "blowout," by which I specifically mean not the type of "blowout" we had in that election, where the Democrats were completely blown out of power. Truthfully, I would not describe this election as a "blowout" for either side. As of the time I'm writing this, it appears that the Republican hold on the Senate may grow at least a little bit. The majority of states will still be under GOP control, to varying degrees (including, sadly, here in Maryland, where an amazing number of voters decided that mediocrity in the Governor's Mansion was just fine with them). And, at least for the short term, T**** himself isn't going anywhere.
But, if you want a gauge by which to measure how much Tuesday's results, as well as the results that continue to trickle in from several states, have disrupted the D.C. status quo, T****'s behavior is an excellent one to use.
He fired his Attorney General, and replaced him with a loyalist of dubious constitutional standing, one he feels will protect him from Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in his election. He has publicly berated members of the media for daring to criticize him, suggesting that doing so is somehow unpatriotic, and even going so far as to revoke the press credentials of CNN's White House correspondent (something I don't recall being done even by Richard Nixon). He has openly challenged the legitimacy of close elections in which votes are still being counted (and, in the case yet again of Florida, recounted), even to the point of suggesting that the counting should be frozen in favor of Republican candidates. This latter suggestion is an unbelievable insult to men and women serving overseas, who are allowed an extra ten days to have their ballots received and counted.
And, in perhaps the ultimate insult to those men and women from a Commander-in-Chief, he failed to make a public appearance at a Paris military cemetery to commemorate the centennial of the armistice that ended World War I. His excuse? It was raining. Lightly. All of the other heads of state who had come for the ceremony somehow managed to suck it up and show up. The only exception was the man more worried about his combover than about those who sacrificed to make his abominable Presidency possible.
As someone who lost an uncle in World War II, and with three other relatives who served in uniform (my father, my father-in-law, and my cousin), I have no words for this. The public insult, the dereliction of duty, the unfathomable narcissism of this, can't truly be captured in any words. And yet, it gets even worse: Vladimir Putin was there, and for their public greeting of each other, T****'s face lit up as though he was a little boy on Christmas morning. One is force to wonder whether T**** missed the cemetery ceremony to huddle with his Russian master and get fresh instructions.
All of this only magnifies my sense of relief that Tuesday's results ensure a House of Representatives that will, without any doubt, serve as a check not only on T****'s behavior, but also the actions of Cabinet officials and departments, and other agencies under the executive branch's control. I have noticed that there has already been some degree of debate about whether or not the new House should focus on investigation or legislation. Personally, I see no reason not to do both: the need for the former speaks for itself, and the latter process, even if (as is likely) stymied by the Senate and/or T****, will at least help to set a Democratic agenda for 2020.
My other takeaways from last week's elections:
That's not an exaggeration. Two years of the T**** nightmare has put more stress on me, my family, our business, and just about everyone we know than anything else that we can remember. The knowledge that there will be at least some relief from that stress can't possibly be understated.
I had hoped, as I had in the 2016 election, for a Democratic "blowout," by which I specifically mean not the type of "blowout" we had in that election, where the Democrats were completely blown out of power. Truthfully, I would not describe this election as a "blowout" for either side. As of the time I'm writing this, it appears that the Republican hold on the Senate may grow at least a little bit. The majority of states will still be under GOP control, to varying degrees (including, sadly, here in Maryland, where an amazing number of voters decided that mediocrity in the Governor's Mansion was just fine with them). And, at least for the short term, T**** himself isn't going anywhere.
But, if you want a gauge by which to measure how much Tuesday's results, as well as the results that continue to trickle in from several states, have disrupted the D.C. status quo, T****'s behavior is an excellent one to use.
He fired his Attorney General, and replaced him with a loyalist of dubious constitutional standing, one he feels will protect him from Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in his election. He has publicly berated members of the media for daring to criticize him, suggesting that doing so is somehow unpatriotic, and even going so far as to revoke the press credentials of CNN's White House correspondent (something I don't recall being done even by Richard Nixon). He has openly challenged the legitimacy of close elections in which votes are still being counted (and, in the case yet again of Florida, recounted), even to the point of suggesting that the counting should be frozen in favor of Republican candidates. This latter suggestion is an unbelievable insult to men and women serving overseas, who are allowed an extra ten days to have their ballots received and counted.
And, in perhaps the ultimate insult to those men and women from a Commander-in-Chief, he failed to make a public appearance at a Paris military cemetery to commemorate the centennial of the armistice that ended World War I. His excuse? It was raining. Lightly. All of the other heads of state who had come for the ceremony somehow managed to suck it up and show up. The only exception was the man more worried about his combover than about those who sacrificed to make his abominable Presidency possible.
As someone who lost an uncle in World War II, and with three other relatives who served in uniform (my father, my father-in-law, and my cousin), I have no words for this. The public insult, the dereliction of duty, the unfathomable narcissism of this, can't truly be captured in any words. And yet, it gets even worse: Vladimir Putin was there, and for their public greeting of each other, T****'s face lit up as though he was a little boy on Christmas morning. One is force to wonder whether T**** missed the cemetery ceremony to huddle with his Russian master and get fresh instructions.
All of this only magnifies my sense of relief that Tuesday's results ensure a House of Representatives that will, without any doubt, serve as a check not only on T****'s behavior, but also the actions of Cabinet officials and departments, and other agencies under the executive branch's control. I have noticed that there has already been some degree of debate about whether or not the new House should focus on investigation or legislation. Personally, I see no reason not to do both: the need for the former speaks for itself, and the latter process, even if (as is likely) stymied by the Senate and/or T****, will at least help to set a Democratic agenda for 2020.
My other takeaways from last week's elections:
- I remember thinking, after the GOP wave election of 1994, that the outcome was sort of the second wave of the Reagan Revolution. The comfort level people developed during the 1980s in voting Republican reached a stage in the 1990s where people were willing to take a chance on congressional candidates bearing the same essential message. The New Deal era was, as of that point, over, and the Reagan Era, with a Democratic President whose authority was compromised by his personal life, was on the ascent. We now have record numbers of women and people of color in the next majority of the People's House. Does this foreshadow the beginning of an Obama Era? Time will tell. Even the losses produced rising stars like Amy McGrath and Beto O'Rourke (no relation, to my knowledge) who, hopefully, will stay in the process and run again soon.
- Meanwhile, in not only Florida but also Georgia, the election results are being challenged by Democrats as a consequence of actions by the Republican candidates, both of which reflect conflicts of interests on their part. In the case of the Georgia gubernatorial election, the Republican running was also (until a few days ago) the secretary of state overseeing the election process and disqualifying large numbers of voters, while in Florida, the sitting governor is attempting to interfere with the recount of the elections for the Senate seat (for which he was running), and for the man to replace him in the Governor's mansion. Two more reasons to think of the GOP less as a political party, and more as a crime syndicate.
- Even if the Senate remains in Republican hands by a vote or two, it looks as if that outcome is largely due to the embarrassing process of putting a probable sexual assailant and perjurer on the Supreme Court. At this rate, Mitch McCONnell may want to consider expanding the size of the Court simply so he'll always have a nominating process to use in skewering election results. That's assuming he'll be around for a while, and that might be less than a guaranteed proposition--and not just because he's up for re-election in 2020. Take a look.
- The gains that were made by the Democrats at the state level, combined with the pressure that can be applied by the new Democratic House, offers some hope that the systematic abuse of the redistricting and voting processes by Republicans in the past decade can at least begin to be dismantled.
But none of this will matter unless all of you stop treating Democratic waves as something that should only happen once every decade. They need to happen every single election year. Think about how different things would be regarding income inequality, climate change, immigration, the composition of our court system, if Obama (and Hillary Clinton, for that matter) had benefited from a steady succession of Democratic waves. Never mind them, even; we all would have benefited.
Don't make voting a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Make it a habit. It's the only way to ensure that Americans continue to make democracy a habit. And the only way we're going to end the T****/GOP nightmare once and for all.
Sunday, November 4, 2018
The Real "Caravans"
At 6:00 p.m., at the end of a very long work week, my wife was dead tired, and well into months of pain from a leg injury. She ought to have sought treatment for the injury a long time ago, but has feared the possibility of a diagnosis and treatment that would prevent her from seeing law clients for weeks, if not longer. On this particular day, she had hoped to spend some time catching up on work that was deferred by months of client appointments that seemed to have no end and whose beginning can probably be traced back to, say, roughly two years ago.
It wasn't meant to be, however. The day of catch-up work had, instead, become a day of walk-in appointments. Walk-ins are an experience she has gotten used to over the past 20-plus years and, until (again) about roughly two years ago, it had never been a significant source of stress. Since then, it has grown to the point at which a heavy client day no longer consisted of six scheduled appointments, but something closer to six scheduled appointments and six walk-ins.
But, on this day, the walk-ins had come and gone, and it was 6:00. She thought she could go home. She turned off the downstairs lights in our office, dragged her injured leg back upstairs, and began to shut down the electronics in her office. And that was when she heard it.
The sound of the outside office door, opening, and someone entering the lightless first floor. It was yet another walk-in, determined to see her no matter what.
She very politely explained to him that she was getting ready to leave for the day, and that he would have to arrange to see her at another time.
He didn't move.
What else could she do? She met with him, of course.
I said that all of this happened at the end of a long work week.
Did I mention that it happened at the end of a long work week that was, in fact, the end of a long calendar week? And that the next work week would begin the very next day, on a Sunday?
Now, I am not describing all of this at this level of detail simply because it involves my wife, who (full disclosure) is also my partner in our law practice. I am doing so because her practice area is immigration. All of her clients are immigrants, in varying stages of documented status, from aspiring to expired. All of her experiences, minus the part about the injured leg, are utterly common to virtually all American immigration lawyers in the first two years of the T**** nightmare. And all of these clients, regardless of the status of their documentation, are painfully, needlessly scared to death.
To begin with, the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants in this country are not the so called "caravans" from Central America that T**** uses to whip up fear among his dwindling base of supporters. (Actually, if you are willing to check more reliable sources of information that T****, the size of the current caravan is dwindling as well.) They are individuals who entered the country in a documented status--a visitor, a student, an investor, a manager, a short-term worker, and yes, as a fiance(e). These categories differ substantially from the ones used by those fleeing various forms of persecution and upheaval, as is the case with those coming from the south.
The people in these categories overstay their visas not because of any intention to do so, but due to an immigration system that is broken and expensive, and which we steadfastly refuse to reform, despite the general acknowledgement that it needs such reform. Contrary to the venom spewing on a daily basis from what passes for T****'s mouth, these individuals are not "bad hombres." They are people more concerned with trying to live their lives, for the sakes of themselves and their families, than with having any kind of criminal or political impact on the U.S..
Yet, because T**** found it personally and politically convenient to spread fear about the undocumented, they are now living in the shadows, afraid to come out and attempt to adjust their status in the U.S., afraid due to the threat of prosecution that is not warranted by the lives these people have led, or the expense that such prosecutions entail. Even worse, immigrants who have "played by the rules," the ones we supposedly want to reward for doing so, are now being subjected to denials and delays in the processing of their papers that all but guarantees that it will be years before their status is finally resolved--and many years more before any of them will be able to naturalize and vote (and don't think for a moment that this latter aspect is an accident; voter suppression is a chameleon that can take many forms).
This is why the T**** nightmare is also the immigrants' nightmare. It is also the nightmare of their esteemed counsels, always overworked and underpaid in any case, but never more so than now, and never more aware that one single, human mistake on their part might be the end of a person's life, or the lives of families. As I noted previously, that produces pressure that has the potential to lead to self-destruction. That fact alone, plus the awareness of doing battle on a daily basis with the most corrupt Administration in the history of the Republic, is why the members of the immigration bar are, in my 25 years of experience practicing law, the most unified and cooperative attorneys I have every had the privilege of meeting.
And the victories they win are not just victories for their clients; they are also victories for all of us, and the system that protects us even in the midst of the current darkness. Ask our less-than-esteemed Attorney General if he would disagree with you.
So, then, those are the only two caravans that should concern you. The caravan of the unjustly persecuted, and the caravan of those who defend them. They are not your enemies. That would be the current miserable occupant of the Oval Office. Send him a warning on November 6. And, at the same time, send both of the two caravans a message of well-deserved hope.
P.S.: My wife got home safely. She's seeing a doctor on Monday. Thanks for asking.
It wasn't meant to be, however. The day of catch-up work had, instead, become a day of walk-in appointments. Walk-ins are an experience she has gotten used to over the past 20-plus years and, until (again) about roughly two years ago, it had never been a significant source of stress. Since then, it has grown to the point at which a heavy client day no longer consisted of six scheduled appointments, but something closer to six scheduled appointments and six walk-ins.
But, on this day, the walk-ins had come and gone, and it was 6:00. She thought she could go home. She turned off the downstairs lights in our office, dragged her injured leg back upstairs, and began to shut down the electronics in her office. And that was when she heard it.
The sound of the outside office door, opening, and someone entering the lightless first floor. It was yet another walk-in, determined to see her no matter what.
She very politely explained to him that she was getting ready to leave for the day, and that he would have to arrange to see her at another time.
He didn't move.
What else could she do? She met with him, of course.
I said that all of this happened at the end of a long work week.
Did I mention that it happened at the end of a long work week that was, in fact, the end of a long calendar week? And that the next work week would begin the very next day, on a Sunday?
Now, I am not describing all of this at this level of detail simply because it involves my wife, who (full disclosure) is also my partner in our law practice. I am doing so because her practice area is immigration. All of her clients are immigrants, in varying stages of documented status, from aspiring to expired. All of her experiences, minus the part about the injured leg, are utterly common to virtually all American immigration lawyers in the first two years of the T**** nightmare. And all of these clients, regardless of the status of their documentation, are painfully, needlessly scared to death.
To begin with, the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants in this country are not the so called "caravans" from Central America that T**** uses to whip up fear among his dwindling base of supporters. (Actually, if you are willing to check more reliable sources of information that T****, the size of the current caravan is dwindling as well.) They are individuals who entered the country in a documented status--a visitor, a student, an investor, a manager, a short-term worker, and yes, as a fiance(e). These categories differ substantially from the ones used by those fleeing various forms of persecution and upheaval, as is the case with those coming from the south.
The people in these categories overstay their visas not because of any intention to do so, but due to an immigration system that is broken and expensive, and which we steadfastly refuse to reform, despite the general acknowledgement that it needs such reform. Contrary to the venom spewing on a daily basis from what passes for T****'s mouth, these individuals are not "bad hombres." They are people more concerned with trying to live their lives, for the sakes of themselves and their families, than with having any kind of criminal or political impact on the U.S..
Yet, because T**** found it personally and politically convenient to spread fear about the undocumented, they are now living in the shadows, afraid to come out and attempt to adjust their status in the U.S., afraid due to the threat of prosecution that is not warranted by the lives these people have led, or the expense that such prosecutions entail. Even worse, immigrants who have "played by the rules," the ones we supposedly want to reward for doing so, are now being subjected to denials and delays in the processing of their papers that all but guarantees that it will be years before their status is finally resolved--and many years more before any of them will be able to naturalize and vote (and don't think for a moment that this latter aspect is an accident; voter suppression is a chameleon that can take many forms).
This is why the T**** nightmare is also the immigrants' nightmare. It is also the nightmare of their esteemed counsels, always overworked and underpaid in any case, but never more so than now, and never more aware that one single, human mistake on their part might be the end of a person's life, or the lives of families. As I noted previously, that produces pressure that has the potential to lead to self-destruction. That fact alone, plus the awareness of doing battle on a daily basis with the most corrupt Administration in the history of the Republic, is why the members of the immigration bar are, in my 25 years of experience practicing law, the most unified and cooperative attorneys I have every had the privilege of meeting.
And the victories they win are not just victories for their clients; they are also victories for all of us, and the system that protects us even in the midst of the current darkness. Ask our less-than-esteemed Attorney General if he would disagree with you.
So, then, those are the only two caravans that should concern you. The caravan of the unjustly persecuted, and the caravan of those who defend them. They are not your enemies. That would be the current miserable occupant of the Oval Office. Send him a warning on November 6. And, at the same time, send both of the two caravans a message of well-deserved hope.
P.S.: My wife got home safely. She's seeing a doctor on Monday. Thanks for asking.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
A Few Almost-Final Thoughts On The Midterms
I will probably have more to say, actually, about the midterms in a few days, especially in light of recent tragic events. I'm recovering from a bad bout of stomach flu as I write this to you. I would probably still be in bed for the sake of my recovery. But I've decided to get out of bed for at least a little while to write this.
These days, my legal work includes a great deal of time spent with firms that review documents produced for litigation. On one such project recently, in a conversation with a colleague on a project, the subject turned to politics (a lot of this work is done in D.C., so that's probably not surprising. We started talking about why young people generally don't vote, and, on the basis of current reporting, are probably not going to vote in next week's midterm elections. He advanced the theory, advanced many other places in the MSM and social media, that young people don't vote because they don't see themselves as gaining or losing anything by not doing so.
Then he surprised me by including himself as one of those young people.
I say "surprised" because I assumed that someone who had been through both undergraduate and law schools, passed more than one bar exam, and worked on a regular basis in what is arguably the political center not just of the nation, but the world, would understand the power of voting. I would not necessarily expect that person to have an appreciation of all of the sacrifices that have been made for the sake of the right to vote, although I would hope that he (or she) would do so. But I would think they would know that voting affects a broad range of issues that ultimately do affect young people--the economy they graduate into, the ability to pay for tuition, and the assurance of health care coverage, for example.
Apparently, however, it's not enough for this cohort to make political appeals based on issues that affect everyone. Somehow, they're expecting to get something specifically, uniquely targeted at them, regardless of its impact on anyone else. And, even worse, they seem to think that, by not voting, the right political appeal will just come along looking for them. To put it another way, they don't think like citizens, putting the interests of the country first. Rather, they think like consumers, regarding themselves as a market that will, sooner or later, be "served" by a politician wise enough to do so.
But that's not how politics works today, if it has ever worked that way at all. On the Republican side of the nation's partisan divide, the pursuit of power at the expense of every other consideration is its only motivating force. The GOP pursues power largely for the sake of holding onto it, so that it can protect itself, as well as its principal funders, the investor class.
If you are not a significant member of that class (and 99% percent of us are not), well, the Republicans are still interested in you. But not as a market to be served. Rather, as a market to serve them.
I shared with my colleague a quote that I am fond of sharing in these circumstances: "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you." I made the mistake of attributing it to Brecht; judging from the Internet, its provenance seems a bit uncertain. Regardless of the source, however, it has always been true, and remains true. Even in a world where it may be hard to find politicians perfectly or mostly aligned with you, it is nevertheless absolutely essential, especially in this political climate, to practice what can be referred to as "defensive voting." At the very least, do what you can to protect not only yourself, but any other people or causes you care about, from the potential of greater harm to your interests should the results go to a candidate less aligned with those interests than someone else might be. Perhaps this explains it somewhat better than I'm doing here; it's worth a look, in any case.
In any case, my colleague was not particularly impressed with the quote. I hope and pray that you will feel differently.
And vote next month like your freedom depends on it. Because it does.
These days, my legal work includes a great deal of time spent with firms that review documents produced for litigation. On one such project recently, in a conversation with a colleague on a project, the subject turned to politics (a lot of this work is done in D.C., so that's probably not surprising. We started talking about why young people generally don't vote, and, on the basis of current reporting, are probably not going to vote in next week's midterm elections. He advanced the theory, advanced many other places in the MSM and social media, that young people don't vote because they don't see themselves as gaining or losing anything by not doing so.
Then he surprised me by including himself as one of those young people.
I say "surprised" because I assumed that someone who had been through both undergraduate and law schools, passed more than one bar exam, and worked on a regular basis in what is arguably the political center not just of the nation, but the world, would understand the power of voting. I would not necessarily expect that person to have an appreciation of all of the sacrifices that have been made for the sake of the right to vote, although I would hope that he (or she) would do so. But I would think they would know that voting affects a broad range of issues that ultimately do affect young people--the economy they graduate into, the ability to pay for tuition, and the assurance of health care coverage, for example.
Apparently, however, it's not enough for this cohort to make political appeals based on issues that affect everyone. Somehow, they're expecting to get something specifically, uniquely targeted at them, regardless of its impact on anyone else. And, even worse, they seem to think that, by not voting, the right political appeal will just come along looking for them. To put it another way, they don't think like citizens, putting the interests of the country first. Rather, they think like consumers, regarding themselves as a market that will, sooner or later, be "served" by a politician wise enough to do so.
But that's not how politics works today, if it has ever worked that way at all. On the Republican side of the nation's partisan divide, the pursuit of power at the expense of every other consideration is its only motivating force. The GOP pursues power largely for the sake of holding onto it, so that it can protect itself, as well as its principal funders, the investor class.
If you are not a significant member of that class (and 99% percent of us are not), well, the Republicans are still interested in you. But not as a market to be served. Rather, as a market to serve them.
I shared with my colleague a quote that I am fond of sharing in these circumstances: "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you." I made the mistake of attributing it to Brecht; judging from the Internet, its provenance seems a bit uncertain. Regardless of the source, however, it has always been true, and remains true. Even in a world where it may be hard to find politicians perfectly or mostly aligned with you, it is nevertheless absolutely essential, especially in this political climate, to practice what can be referred to as "defensive voting." At the very least, do what you can to protect not only yourself, but any other people or causes you care about, from the potential of greater harm to your interests should the results go to a candidate less aligned with those interests than someone else might be. Perhaps this explains it somewhat better than I'm doing here; it's worth a look, in any case.
In any case, my colleague was not particularly impressed with the quote. I hope and pray that you will feel differently.
And vote next month like your freedom depends on it. Because it does.
Saturday, October 20, 2018
What I Learned From An Understaffed Hotel
As I mentioned last week, my wife and I recently returned from Louisville, Kentucky, where she attended an embroidery conference and I went sightseeing. And, as I mentioned, we had a good time. But one negative aspect of it has stayed with me, as it has a bearing on what is arguably the major issue of our current political debate, especially headed into the midterms.
We stayed in--well,, I won't mention the name, but it was a major hotel designed and built to serve the needs of convention-goers. The city's convention center is a very short walk away from the hotel, in fact, as are a number of major tourist attractions. The room was very spacious, clean and comfortable. But there was one major problem, one that surprised both of us given our experience with conferences and conference hotels.
Everything was understaffed. On our first full day in Louisville, we had dinner at one of the hotel's restaurants, and ended up waiting over an hour for our meal. We both noticed that the wait staff seemed badly outnumbered relative to the number of tables in the restaurant. When our food finally arrived, we complained to our waitress, who told us that there were only two cooks in the kitchen. Two cooks, and perhaps four or five servers, for a restaurant that had over 60 tables (a rough estimate on my part). On the plus side, she did give each of us a free dessert, without a lot of negotiation on our part. This tended to make both of us think that our complaint about the wait for our meals wasn't an unusual one here. On our way out, we noticed a crowd of about 20 people waiting to be seated, with no host or hostess to seat them but plenty of available tables. I tried to shout to them that they may want to go elsewhere, but I doubt that any of them heard me. Needless to say, after that, we took all of our meals outside of the hotel.
Then there was housekeeping. Or, rather, there wasn't, unless we made a complaint to the front desk to have our room cleaned and made up, and our bathroom supplies replaced. Again, given our experience with the restaurant, we suspected the problem was not with the diligence of the housekeeping staff, but with the level of staffing that the hotel was maintaining. And my wife discovered, from talking to some of her fellow conference attendees, that this was indeed a hotel-wide problem.
I realize that, in the broader scheme of life's potential problems, these are relatively petty complaints. They didn't detract from the fact that the overall experience was a wonderful break from other responsibilities that my wife and I both badly needed. But I found myself looking at the understaffing of the hotel from a business management standpoint, and I found myself wondering: why would a major convention hotel, one whose management should be well aware of the staffing levels needed to keep its business running smoothly, allow itself to be so poorly staffed while still marketing itself as a full-service hotel for conference business?
Not deliberately, of course. But what circumstance beyond its control could put the hotel, and perhaps others, in a circumstance that threatens its short-term effectiveness and its long-term existence?
Well, when you've traveled as much as I have, and you notice how many hotels rely on immigrants to staff their businesses, especially on the food service and housekeeping side, it becomes pretty clear what's really going on here, in the Age of T****.
It's not that there aren't people who are available, willing, and often very experienced to fill these vacant positions, thereby energizing the economies of cities all over the country and creating more jobs for everyone, native-born or otherwise. It's that we have a "President" who has turned his back and the nation's back on the centrality of immigration to the very essence of the history and greatness of the United States. All of those potential housekeepers, cooks, servers, and porters are just grist for the deportation mill, and for T****'s manipulation of the immigration issue for personal political gain. Sadly ironic, given how much of his alleged economic gain has come from the use--and abuse--of immigrant labor.
But what about all of those "economically distressed" T**** voters? The ones who supposedly have a better work ethic than all of those POC willing to risk their lives for the sake of making their lives better, and keeping America great? Why aren't they making themselves available to take these jobs, which are clearly there for the taking? What do they have to say about their seeming unwillingness to cross city and state lines to do so, a far less riskier process than crossing national borders to do so?
In a word: {crickets}
That's all you really need to know about both immigration and the state of the economy, currently pumped up by debt but shortchanged by the subtraction of labor from people who will take any job, and any risk associated with that job. That's how much we as a people, at the moment, are willing to throw away the American Dream for the sake of perpetuating the continuance of the American Nightmare: racism, the original sin of America's founding and the thread that runs through every major crisis in our nation's existence.
Does it really make any sense? Is it even what a decent people would expect of themselves? Have we struggled and sacrificed as a nation for nearly three centuries to die a death inflicted by caving in to our worst impulses?
T**** has no interest in anything except exploiting our worst impulses for short-term political gain. Immigration, on the other hand, has been an enduring part of our nation's growth, and a part that we have neglected fixing for decades. If I have to chose between T****, and the people who really want to exemplify the American work ethic, the people who should be filling the jobs at the convention hotels across the country--well, I've made my choice.
And I'm making it again on November 6.
I hope and pray you will join me.
We stayed in--well,, I won't mention the name, but it was a major hotel designed and built to serve the needs of convention-goers. The city's convention center is a very short walk away from the hotel, in fact, as are a number of major tourist attractions. The room was very spacious, clean and comfortable. But there was one major problem, one that surprised both of us given our experience with conferences and conference hotels.
Everything was understaffed. On our first full day in Louisville, we had dinner at one of the hotel's restaurants, and ended up waiting over an hour for our meal. We both noticed that the wait staff seemed badly outnumbered relative to the number of tables in the restaurant. When our food finally arrived, we complained to our waitress, who told us that there were only two cooks in the kitchen. Two cooks, and perhaps four or five servers, for a restaurant that had over 60 tables (a rough estimate on my part). On the plus side, she did give each of us a free dessert, without a lot of negotiation on our part. This tended to make both of us think that our complaint about the wait for our meals wasn't an unusual one here. On our way out, we noticed a crowd of about 20 people waiting to be seated, with no host or hostess to seat them but plenty of available tables. I tried to shout to them that they may want to go elsewhere, but I doubt that any of them heard me. Needless to say, after that, we took all of our meals outside of the hotel.
Then there was housekeeping. Or, rather, there wasn't, unless we made a complaint to the front desk to have our room cleaned and made up, and our bathroom supplies replaced. Again, given our experience with the restaurant, we suspected the problem was not with the diligence of the housekeeping staff, but with the level of staffing that the hotel was maintaining. And my wife discovered, from talking to some of her fellow conference attendees, that this was indeed a hotel-wide problem.
I realize that, in the broader scheme of life's potential problems, these are relatively petty complaints. They didn't detract from the fact that the overall experience was a wonderful break from other responsibilities that my wife and I both badly needed. But I found myself looking at the understaffing of the hotel from a business management standpoint, and I found myself wondering: why would a major convention hotel, one whose management should be well aware of the staffing levels needed to keep its business running smoothly, allow itself to be so poorly staffed while still marketing itself as a full-service hotel for conference business?
Not deliberately, of course. But what circumstance beyond its control could put the hotel, and perhaps others, in a circumstance that threatens its short-term effectiveness and its long-term existence?
Well, when you've traveled as much as I have, and you notice how many hotels rely on immigrants to staff their businesses, especially on the food service and housekeeping side, it becomes pretty clear what's really going on here, in the Age of T****.
It's not that there aren't people who are available, willing, and often very experienced to fill these vacant positions, thereby energizing the economies of cities all over the country and creating more jobs for everyone, native-born or otherwise. It's that we have a "President" who has turned his back and the nation's back on the centrality of immigration to the very essence of the history and greatness of the United States. All of those potential housekeepers, cooks, servers, and porters are just grist for the deportation mill, and for T****'s manipulation of the immigration issue for personal political gain. Sadly ironic, given how much of his alleged economic gain has come from the use--and abuse--of immigrant labor.
But what about all of those "economically distressed" T**** voters? The ones who supposedly have a better work ethic than all of those POC willing to risk their lives for the sake of making their lives better, and keeping America great? Why aren't they making themselves available to take these jobs, which are clearly there for the taking? What do they have to say about their seeming unwillingness to cross city and state lines to do so, a far less riskier process than crossing national borders to do so?
In a word: {crickets}
That's all you really need to know about both immigration and the state of the economy, currently pumped up by debt but shortchanged by the subtraction of labor from people who will take any job, and any risk associated with that job. That's how much we as a people, at the moment, are willing to throw away the American Dream for the sake of perpetuating the continuance of the American Nightmare: racism, the original sin of America's founding and the thread that runs through every major crisis in our nation's existence.
Does it really make any sense? Is it even what a decent people would expect of themselves? Have we struggled and sacrificed as a nation for nearly three centuries to die a death inflicted by caving in to our worst impulses?
T**** has no interest in anything except exploiting our worst impulses for short-term political gain. Immigration, on the other hand, has been an enduring part of our nation's growth, and a part that we have neglected fixing for decades. If I have to chose between T****, and the people who really want to exemplify the American work ethic, the people who should be filling the jobs at the convention hotels across the country--well, I've made my choice.
And I'm making it again on November 6.
I hope and pray you will join me.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
The Kavanaugh Aftermath
I spent last weekend with my wife in, of all places, Louisville, Kentucky--in other words, in Mitch McCONnell's home state. Louisville is a relative island of blue in a sea of Bluegrass red, so I can't say I picked up anything from the locals about the nature of their support for the Senate majority leader. However, and despite the fact that we had a good time on our trip, McCONnell and his fellow caucus members still managed to put a damper on our mood, as well as that of millions of Americans (and women in particular). They did this, of course, by ramming through a vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, by a margin of 50-48--the lowest number of votes for a Supreme Court nominee in the nation's history.
McCONnell and his Senate cronies, of course, don't give a damn about making this kind of history. Nor do they care about the sham FBI investigation of Kavanaugh requested by the aptly-named Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. This, of course, would be the investigation that was arbitrarily limited in scope by T**** (or T$$$$, if you will; works just as well), to make sure that nothing was discovered, and in which any number of witnesses who volunteered to cooperate were without exception ignored. The investigation, in other words, that accomplished nothing except formalizing the politicization of the FBI that began almost the moment that T$$$$ took office.
Nor did McCONnell and his cronies care about the systematic trashing that they, and their media allies, did not only of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the principal accuser against Kavanaugh, but other women who came forward to share their knowledge of Kavanaugh's abusive behavior. All of these women were systematically slandered or libeled, and, with the exception of the sham FBI investigation previously mentioned, none of their accusations were investigated in any way, or treated with the seriousness that they deserved in connection with the potential (now actual) lifetime appointment of Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land.
If anything, the Republican caucus members and their fellow-travelers on Fox News and the Internet felt obliged to show blatant, over-the-top disrespect for the accusers in a way that not only demeaned them individually, but also demeaned them as women as well (and thereby demean all women). Typical of this sort of verbal assault was the suggestion by Senator Lindsey Graham that Dr. Ford was little more than the lowest form of prostitute, looking for attention from Kavanaugh. To put that slanderous accusation in a little political perspective, it was not long ago that Graham, along with his late colleague John McCain, was regarded as one of the more moderate Republican members of the Senate. If that is still true of Graham, then the rest of us can only conclude that the World's Greatest Deliberative Body has been led completely off the deep end.
Anyone watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings from the very beginning, however, and doing so with any degree of objectivity and intelligence, would have been able to see almost immediately that he was almost certainly a perjurer, and temperamentally unsuited for any judicial post at all, let alone an Associate Justiceship on the Supreme Court. I'll put aside the question of how he couldn't remember whether he recently talked to a law firm or not, yet somehow had detailed calendars from over three decades ago covering his prep-school personal life. I'll even put aside the question of his personal finances, even though that question did and still does have a bearing on his character, especially his ability to be blackmailed.
Instead, I'll point out something that, in all of the controversy over the sexual abuse allegations, somehow got overlooked. And that is the fact that there exists evidence that Kavanaugh perjured his way into his previous position on the D.C. federal circuit court. You don't have to believe me; you can find out more about it here.
Now, you may recall that a Republican Congress once upon a time impeached and put on trial in the Senate a popular Democratic President on the grounds that he had committed perjury while defending himself in a civil lawsuit--a lawsuit in which he was accused on engaging in the sort of conduct that Kavanaugh was accused of engaging in with Dr. Ford. This was allegedly done not because of the salacious details of the alleged conduct leading to the suit, but because the President's alleged perjury showed contempt for the rule of law, which every president swears to uphold.
Needless to say, every candidate for a federal judiciary post testifies under oath and, if a candidate lies while doing so, is subject to the penalties of perjury. If Kavanaugh did commit perjury, it not only disqualified him from service on the Supreme Court, but also makes him a candidate for impeachment either from his former circuit court position, or his new one. Unsurprisingly, neither the Senate Republicans nor the politically-tethered FBI delved into the question of Kavanaugh's possible perjury too deeply--or, indeed, at all. Thus, a new entry can be made in the catalogue entitled "It's OK If You're A Republican." Especially OK, of course, if the opportunity to politically pack the Supreme Court for a generation is at hand.
Aside from the question of Kavanaugh's fidelity to the truth, however, there is also the matter of his temperament. Judges are supposed to be fair and, in order to be fair, are expected to keep their feeling on the proverbial even keel, thereby preventing them from being swayed in their judgments by anything other than the application of the law to the facts of a given case. Likewise, in order to be fair, they are supposed to deal with individuals who come before them in a way that does not show partiality to one cause or another.
If it seems overly obvious to make those points, it is only so I can demonstrate the abundant lack of temperament that Kavanaugh demonstrated over the entire course of his confirmation hearings. Early in the process, at the end of one day's session, he was approached by the parent of a school shooting victim, one who was concerned about Kavanaugh's Second Amendment views. Kavanaugh could have politely greeting him, shown a modest amount of respect for the man's loss, and otherwise excused himself without tipping his hand on how he might rule in a case that raised the issue of school gun violence. Doing so would not have betrayed any degree of prejudice regarding the relative rights of gun advocates versus students.
Instead, Kavanaugh retreated from the man with the demeanor of a frightened rat who was looking to avoid being poisoned. Again, you need not take my word for it; you can look for yourself. Personally, I was convinced right then and there that he was not someone who belonged on any bench. Why should the law of the land be shaped by someone who is clearly afraid of the people to whom it might be applied?
As if that wasn't enough, there was his diatribe defense against Dr. Ford's allegations, for which he appeared to have been coached into doing an amateur imitation of Trump. Whether he was following a specific line of strategy or not, he made an absolute embarrassment of himself. No sane person could come before a judge who acted like this and expected justice, or even fairness. The clincher in the whole mess of words was his reference to his previous work for Kenneth Starr against Bill and Hillary Clinton, suggesting that the accusations against him were only some form of political retaliation for that work. That reference, far from serving as an effective line of defense, only served to poison his own reputation by exposing him as a political hack, one who was only being considered for the Supreme Court to serve a partisan agenda. It also served to illustrate, for the umpteenth time, the Ahab-like obsession that conservatives have with a Democrat who, during his time in the White House, gave them much of what they wanted in a desperate attempt to avoid impeachment--and then ended up being impeached anyway.
Despite the many doubts raised against Kavanaugh, despite the fact that there were undoubtedly other conservative candidates for the Court with far less baggage dragging behind them, McCONnell rallied his colleagues and rammed the nomination through a badly divided Congress. Because, of course, that's what McCONnell does. Nothing he does has anything to do with serving the interests of the nation, its people, the Constitution, or the Senate itself. All of these long-term interests, in the majority leader's world, are routinely sacrificed in favor of the short-term political victory. And that is especially so when doing so may well have the effect of tipping the outcome in midterm elections that now are less than a month away. You can understand McCONnell's inability under the circumstances to refrain from gloating in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh vote--even though at least one conservative has counselled against doing so.
So, without further ado, here is my five-point plan for wiping the smug grin off of McCONnell's oyster-face.
First, impeaching hearings much be launched, not only against Kavanaugh, but also his partner on the High Court in sexual shenanigans, Clarence Thomas. As I said earlier, there is certainly evidence that Kavanaugh has committed perjury; there was also the likelihood that Thomas did the same thing, and was allowed, in less enlightened times, to get away with it. If anything is clear in all of this, it should be the fact that we no longer live in less enlightened times, and Thomas, for the sake of the Court's reputation and for the sake of justice in this country, should not get the benefit of being barely confirmed (52-48, the previous record-holder for a close confirmation vote) to the Court simply because a less enlightened Congress made that possible.
Second, take a page out of Franklin D. Roosevelt's book, and pack the Court. There's never been anything constitutionally sacred about nine seats: the Court could have one, a thousand, or any number that Congress and the President see fit for it to have. Add two seats. Hell, add four, or six.
Politically, it would be a very heavy lift but, like FDR's attempt, it might send a message to the Court that its jurisprudence can't survive if it is not sensitive to the will of all the people. And it would certainly send a message to the Republicans that there are consequences to playing politics with the judiciary. Having already blazed that trail, they are in no position to try to club the Democrats over the head with that argument.
Third, and either of these would be a heavy political lift as well, either pass a statute limited the jurisdiction of the Court or, better yet, do so by constitutional amendment. Such an amendment could also impose term limits on the Justices, thereby lessening the pressure and the high-stakes politics that now surround lifetime appointments. It could also provide a mechanism for overturning Supreme Court decisions, such as by votes in the state legislatures.
Fourth, investigate the living daylights out of McCONnell. There is every reason to believe, going back to his willingness to block a Russian investigation before the 2016 election, that he is every bit as complicit as T**** is with allowing Vladimir Putin to try to turn the United States in a proxy state to do his bidding. Just as we need to know everything we can find out about T****, we need to do likewise with McCONnell.
Fifth, and the most fundamental point I can make here, is that none of these ideas are going to go anywhere in the current configuration of political power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. We need, American needs, our future needs a Democratic Congress in Washington by next January, so that all of this can begin, and include the impeachment of T****, without question the most impeachment-worthy President this country has ever had the misfortune to have.
You know what you have to do.
DO IT!
McCONnell and his Senate cronies, of course, don't give a damn about making this kind of history. Nor do they care about the sham FBI investigation of Kavanaugh requested by the aptly-named Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. This, of course, would be the investigation that was arbitrarily limited in scope by T**** (or T$$$$, if you will; works just as well), to make sure that nothing was discovered, and in which any number of witnesses who volunteered to cooperate were without exception ignored. The investigation, in other words, that accomplished nothing except formalizing the politicization of the FBI that began almost the moment that T$$$$ took office.
Nor did McCONnell and his cronies care about the systematic trashing that they, and their media allies, did not only of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the principal accuser against Kavanaugh, but other women who came forward to share their knowledge of Kavanaugh's abusive behavior. All of these women were systematically slandered or libeled, and, with the exception of the sham FBI investigation previously mentioned, none of their accusations were investigated in any way, or treated with the seriousness that they deserved in connection with the potential (now actual) lifetime appointment of Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land.
If anything, the Republican caucus members and their fellow-travelers on Fox News and the Internet felt obliged to show blatant, over-the-top disrespect for the accusers in a way that not only demeaned them individually, but also demeaned them as women as well (and thereby demean all women). Typical of this sort of verbal assault was the suggestion by Senator Lindsey Graham that Dr. Ford was little more than the lowest form of prostitute, looking for attention from Kavanaugh. To put that slanderous accusation in a little political perspective, it was not long ago that Graham, along with his late colleague John McCain, was regarded as one of the more moderate Republican members of the Senate. If that is still true of Graham, then the rest of us can only conclude that the World's Greatest Deliberative Body has been led completely off the deep end.
Anyone watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings from the very beginning, however, and doing so with any degree of objectivity and intelligence, would have been able to see almost immediately that he was almost certainly a perjurer, and temperamentally unsuited for any judicial post at all, let alone an Associate Justiceship on the Supreme Court. I'll put aside the question of how he couldn't remember whether he recently talked to a law firm or not, yet somehow had detailed calendars from over three decades ago covering his prep-school personal life. I'll even put aside the question of his personal finances, even though that question did and still does have a bearing on his character, especially his ability to be blackmailed.
Instead, I'll point out something that, in all of the controversy over the sexual abuse allegations, somehow got overlooked. And that is the fact that there exists evidence that Kavanaugh perjured his way into his previous position on the D.C. federal circuit court. You don't have to believe me; you can find out more about it here.
Now, you may recall that a Republican Congress once upon a time impeached and put on trial in the Senate a popular Democratic President on the grounds that he had committed perjury while defending himself in a civil lawsuit--a lawsuit in which he was accused on engaging in the sort of conduct that Kavanaugh was accused of engaging in with Dr. Ford. This was allegedly done not because of the salacious details of the alleged conduct leading to the suit, but because the President's alleged perjury showed contempt for the rule of law, which every president swears to uphold.
Needless to say, every candidate for a federal judiciary post testifies under oath and, if a candidate lies while doing so, is subject to the penalties of perjury. If Kavanaugh did commit perjury, it not only disqualified him from service on the Supreme Court, but also makes him a candidate for impeachment either from his former circuit court position, or his new one. Unsurprisingly, neither the Senate Republicans nor the politically-tethered FBI delved into the question of Kavanaugh's possible perjury too deeply--or, indeed, at all. Thus, a new entry can be made in the catalogue entitled "It's OK If You're A Republican." Especially OK, of course, if the opportunity to politically pack the Supreme Court for a generation is at hand.
Aside from the question of Kavanaugh's fidelity to the truth, however, there is also the matter of his temperament. Judges are supposed to be fair and, in order to be fair, are expected to keep their feeling on the proverbial even keel, thereby preventing them from being swayed in their judgments by anything other than the application of the law to the facts of a given case. Likewise, in order to be fair, they are supposed to deal with individuals who come before them in a way that does not show partiality to one cause or another.
If it seems overly obvious to make those points, it is only so I can demonstrate the abundant lack of temperament that Kavanaugh demonstrated over the entire course of his confirmation hearings. Early in the process, at the end of one day's session, he was approached by the parent of a school shooting victim, one who was concerned about Kavanaugh's Second Amendment views. Kavanaugh could have politely greeting him, shown a modest amount of respect for the man's loss, and otherwise excused himself without tipping his hand on how he might rule in a case that raised the issue of school gun violence. Doing so would not have betrayed any degree of prejudice regarding the relative rights of gun advocates versus students.
Instead, Kavanaugh retreated from the man with the demeanor of a frightened rat who was looking to avoid being poisoned. Again, you need not take my word for it; you can look for yourself. Personally, I was convinced right then and there that he was not someone who belonged on any bench. Why should the law of the land be shaped by someone who is clearly afraid of the people to whom it might be applied?
As if that wasn't enough, there was his diatribe defense against Dr. Ford's allegations, for which he appeared to have been coached into doing an amateur imitation of Trump. Whether he was following a specific line of strategy or not, he made an absolute embarrassment of himself. No sane person could come before a judge who acted like this and expected justice, or even fairness. The clincher in the whole mess of words was his reference to his previous work for Kenneth Starr against Bill and Hillary Clinton, suggesting that the accusations against him were only some form of political retaliation for that work. That reference, far from serving as an effective line of defense, only served to poison his own reputation by exposing him as a political hack, one who was only being considered for the Supreme Court to serve a partisan agenda. It also served to illustrate, for the umpteenth time, the Ahab-like obsession that conservatives have with a Democrat who, during his time in the White House, gave them much of what they wanted in a desperate attempt to avoid impeachment--and then ended up being impeached anyway.
Despite the many doubts raised against Kavanaugh, despite the fact that there were undoubtedly other conservative candidates for the Court with far less baggage dragging behind them, McCONnell rallied his colleagues and rammed the nomination through a badly divided Congress. Because, of course, that's what McCONnell does. Nothing he does has anything to do with serving the interests of the nation, its people, the Constitution, or the Senate itself. All of these long-term interests, in the majority leader's world, are routinely sacrificed in favor of the short-term political victory. And that is especially so when doing so may well have the effect of tipping the outcome in midterm elections that now are less than a month away. You can understand McCONnell's inability under the circumstances to refrain from gloating in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh vote--even though at least one conservative has counselled against doing so.
So, without further ado, here is my five-point plan for wiping the smug grin off of McCONnell's oyster-face.
First, impeaching hearings much be launched, not only against Kavanaugh, but also his partner on the High Court in sexual shenanigans, Clarence Thomas. As I said earlier, there is certainly evidence that Kavanaugh has committed perjury; there was also the likelihood that Thomas did the same thing, and was allowed, in less enlightened times, to get away with it. If anything is clear in all of this, it should be the fact that we no longer live in less enlightened times, and Thomas, for the sake of the Court's reputation and for the sake of justice in this country, should not get the benefit of being barely confirmed (52-48, the previous record-holder for a close confirmation vote) to the Court simply because a less enlightened Congress made that possible.
Second, take a page out of Franklin D. Roosevelt's book, and pack the Court. There's never been anything constitutionally sacred about nine seats: the Court could have one, a thousand, or any number that Congress and the President see fit for it to have. Add two seats. Hell, add four, or six.
Politically, it would be a very heavy lift but, like FDR's attempt, it might send a message to the Court that its jurisprudence can't survive if it is not sensitive to the will of all the people. And it would certainly send a message to the Republicans that there are consequences to playing politics with the judiciary. Having already blazed that trail, they are in no position to try to club the Democrats over the head with that argument.
Third, and either of these would be a heavy political lift as well, either pass a statute limited the jurisdiction of the Court or, better yet, do so by constitutional amendment. Such an amendment could also impose term limits on the Justices, thereby lessening the pressure and the high-stakes politics that now surround lifetime appointments. It could also provide a mechanism for overturning Supreme Court decisions, such as by votes in the state legislatures.
Fourth, investigate the living daylights out of McCONnell. There is every reason to believe, going back to his willingness to block a Russian investigation before the 2016 election, that he is every bit as complicit as T**** is with allowing Vladimir Putin to try to turn the United States in a proxy state to do his bidding. Just as we need to know everything we can find out about T****, we need to do likewise with McCONnell.
Fifth, and the most fundamental point I can make here, is that none of these ideas are going to go anywhere in the current configuration of political power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. We need, American needs, our future needs a Democratic Congress in Washington by next January, so that all of this can begin, and include the impeachment of T****, without question the most impeachment-worthy President this country has ever had the misfortune to have.
You know what you have to do.
DO IT!
Saturday, September 29, 2018
A Few Words About A Subject That's All Wright
Well, if you've paid attention to television or social media over the past week, you know that our country is in a badly divided place right now. I've commented on that over and over again, in different ways, from different reference points when it comes to specific stories and issues. And G-d knows there's plenty of material for me to work with, if I wanted to do that today.
But, frankly, I'm not feelin' it. Right now, I'm so sick of the negativity that seems to hang over everyone's lives that I'm desperate to talk about something positive. Almost anything, in fact.
And, since it's not only the end of the month, but also the end of the baseball season, there's a very convenient way to do that.
I'm going to talk about David Wright.
If you're not a baseball fan, or a New Yorker, you probably don't know who Wright is. For most of the past 15 years, he has been the New York Mets' regular third baseman, on a team that, prior to his arrival, was notorious for not having a regular third baseman.
Wright grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the minor-league (AAA) Norfolk Tides. At the time, the Tides were the top minor-league affiliate of the Mets, the last stop before the big leagues. As a consequence, Wright grew up a Mets fan, even though they were not the closest major-league franchise to his home. A gifted athlete, Wright was ultimately drafted by the Mets, and got to play before his hometown family and friends on his way to the major leagues.
When he was called up from Norfolk in the summer of 2004, Wright made an instant impression in a town where making any kind of impression at all is, to put it mildly, a challenge. Not only for his all-around ability in playing third base, both offensively and defensively, but also for the way he conducted himself as a person, whether with fans, fellow players, the media, and anyone else my failing memory has left off of that list.
No tabloid scandals. No stiffing fans asking for an autograph. Always accessible to the press, and always willing to cooperate with their demands (of which, in New York, there are a lot). No bragging about being indispensable, even though, in just a few short years with the team, he pretty much made him so.
Perhaps, in our badly divided state as a nation, it is most poignantly summed up by this simple fact: a white man from the South, Wright's best friend on the team was (and still is) Jose Reyes, from Villa Gonzalez in the Dominican Republic. A shortstop, Reyes played next to Wright for their best years, and formed a friendship that will always link them in the minds and hearts of Mets fans.
Wright, of course, is only human, so I'm sure that, somewhere inside of him, he has faults. But nothing that damaged the allegiances of his family, his friends, his fellow-players, and most of all his fans. That's an incredible accomplishment.
Unfortunately, fate, or whatever prime mover you believe in, through a spanner into the works of what should have been a Hall of Fame career. It did so in the form of spinal stenosis, a medical diagnosis that Wright received a few years ago.
I'm not a medical professional, so I'm going to refer you to this. Basically, spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the space occupied in the spine by the spinal cord. This puts intense pressure on the cord producing equally intense pain. There is limited treatment for it in the form of surgery, but that treatment is palliative in nature rather than curative. Living a normal life with spinal stenosis is difficult at best; maintaining a career as a major-league player is impossible. Just ask Don Mattingly, the former New York Yankees first baseman, whose career ended prematurely as a consequence of spinal stenosis.
As is Wright's, now. Today will be his last game as an active player Fittingly, it will be in front of Mets fans at home, with family members present, and with Reyes next to him at shortstop. He will have five innings, and two at-bats, and call it a career. There will be a ceremony honoring him at the end of the game, and a presser, and, in the days to come, perhaps other related events as well. But, from a games-and-stats standpoint, today will be it.
It's difficult for me as a fan to avoid feeling not only a sense of loss, but also a sense of injustice, about this far-too-soon termination of the baseball career of the best player to wear only a Mets uniform. Had he been blessed with more health and more time, there is little doubt that he would have had the numbers to make an easy and early entrance into Cooperstown. He might have had a chance to win a World Series, rather than just play in one. None of that is meant to be. And many, many people in that position would be tempted to ignore their good fortune in favor of cursing their ultimate fate.
I'm happy to say, however, that David Wright is not one of those people.
For the past two years, Wright has been on the disabled list, working as hard as possible to get back to the point at which he could play. The expectations from everyone but Wright were anything but high. Including those of people who cared about him the most. And including the medical professionals who consulted with Wright and the Mets.
Wright didn't care. He had to let his body tell him when it was time to call it a baseball day. He worked for a very long time to get that answer. He worked past the point at which most people would have called it a pleasure to give up. And, in the end, his body gave him the answer he didn't want to receive. But he heeded it. And, with the cooperation of everyone in the Mets' organization, he is being given a last opportunity again to do the one thing he wanted to do: to play.
I'll end this by letting him have the last say. It tells you why, whether or not you're a baseball fan, you should appreciate what makes him special, and why you should pray for more people like him.
But, frankly, I'm not feelin' it. Right now, I'm so sick of the negativity that seems to hang over everyone's lives that I'm desperate to talk about something positive. Almost anything, in fact.
And, since it's not only the end of the month, but also the end of the baseball season, there's a very convenient way to do that.
I'm going to talk about David Wright.
If you're not a baseball fan, or a New Yorker, you probably don't know who Wright is. For most of the past 15 years, he has been the New York Mets' regular third baseman, on a team that, prior to his arrival, was notorious for not having a regular third baseman.
Wright grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the minor-league (AAA) Norfolk Tides. At the time, the Tides were the top minor-league affiliate of the Mets, the last stop before the big leagues. As a consequence, Wright grew up a Mets fan, even though they were not the closest major-league franchise to his home. A gifted athlete, Wright was ultimately drafted by the Mets, and got to play before his hometown family and friends on his way to the major leagues.
When he was called up from Norfolk in the summer of 2004, Wright made an instant impression in a town where making any kind of impression at all is, to put it mildly, a challenge. Not only for his all-around ability in playing third base, both offensively and defensively, but also for the way he conducted himself as a person, whether with fans, fellow players, the media, and anyone else my failing memory has left off of that list.
No tabloid scandals. No stiffing fans asking for an autograph. Always accessible to the press, and always willing to cooperate with their demands (of which, in New York, there are a lot). No bragging about being indispensable, even though, in just a few short years with the team, he pretty much made him so.
Perhaps, in our badly divided state as a nation, it is most poignantly summed up by this simple fact: a white man from the South, Wright's best friend on the team was (and still is) Jose Reyes, from Villa Gonzalez in the Dominican Republic. A shortstop, Reyes played next to Wright for their best years, and formed a friendship that will always link them in the minds and hearts of Mets fans.
Wright, of course, is only human, so I'm sure that, somewhere inside of him, he has faults. But nothing that damaged the allegiances of his family, his friends, his fellow-players, and most of all his fans. That's an incredible accomplishment.
Unfortunately, fate, or whatever prime mover you believe in, through a spanner into the works of what should have been a Hall of Fame career. It did so in the form of spinal stenosis, a medical diagnosis that Wright received a few years ago.
I'm not a medical professional, so I'm going to refer you to this. Basically, spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the space occupied in the spine by the spinal cord. This puts intense pressure on the cord producing equally intense pain. There is limited treatment for it in the form of surgery, but that treatment is palliative in nature rather than curative. Living a normal life with spinal stenosis is difficult at best; maintaining a career as a major-league player is impossible. Just ask Don Mattingly, the former New York Yankees first baseman, whose career ended prematurely as a consequence of spinal stenosis.
As is Wright's, now. Today will be his last game as an active player Fittingly, it will be in front of Mets fans at home, with family members present, and with Reyes next to him at shortstop. He will have five innings, and two at-bats, and call it a career. There will be a ceremony honoring him at the end of the game, and a presser, and, in the days to come, perhaps other related events as well. But, from a games-and-stats standpoint, today will be it.
It's difficult for me as a fan to avoid feeling not only a sense of loss, but also a sense of injustice, about this far-too-soon termination of the baseball career of the best player to wear only a Mets uniform. Had he been blessed with more health and more time, there is little doubt that he would have had the numbers to make an easy and early entrance into Cooperstown. He might have had a chance to win a World Series, rather than just play in one. None of that is meant to be. And many, many people in that position would be tempted to ignore their good fortune in favor of cursing their ultimate fate.
I'm happy to say, however, that David Wright is not one of those people.
For the past two years, Wright has been on the disabled list, working as hard as possible to get back to the point at which he could play. The expectations from everyone but Wright were anything but high. Including those of people who cared about him the most. And including the medical professionals who consulted with Wright and the Mets.
Wright didn't care. He had to let his body tell him when it was time to call it a baseball day. He worked for a very long time to get that answer. He worked past the point at which most people would have called it a pleasure to give up. And, in the end, his body gave him the answer he didn't want to receive. But he heeded it. And, with the cooperation of everyone in the Mets' organization, he is being given a last opportunity again to do the one thing he wanted to do: to play.
I'll end this by letting him have the last say. It tells you why, whether or not you're a baseball fan, you should appreciate what makes him special, and why you should pray for more people like him.
When it’s all said and done, I want to be able to say I got the most out of my potential. I don’t want to look back, however many years from now, and say, ‘I wonder if I would have worked a little harder. I wonder if I would have done this or done that, how things would have turned out.’ I want to, when it’s all said and done, be able to put my head on my pillow and say, ‘I did everything I could do — good or bad.’
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Overcoming My Kavanaugh-Related Despair
I have a personal confession to make.
I sat down tonight to update my blog, with no shortage of topics about which to write. My mind started to sort though them. I reviewed my Diigo library of news articles I saved toward that end. The nightmare that is the confirmation process of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been unfolding at breakneck speed over the past month. Discussing that process, and what it has revealed about our country at this point in history, is easily worth a month's worth of blog posts all by itself.
And then I came face-to-face with it. Despair. The same sense of hopelessness that I felt in the days immediately after the election two years ago.
It puzzled me for a while. There are a number of reasons to not let despair wrap itself around me. After all, the midterms are less than a month-and-a-half away, and things look very promising for the Democrats. They will probably take back the House, they may take back the Senate (although that's a bit iffier), and they will undoubtedly make significant gains in state office-holders. There is, of course, the current inexplicable madness here in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, routinely saved from his worst mistakes by a Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly, has a 22-point (that is not a typo) lead over Ben Jealous in the gubernatorial race.
But even that is not the principle source of my despair. Hogan's lead is principally the product of local print and broadcast media that are scared of looking too liberal, and a voting base too tuned in to its own short-term pleasures to really dig into the issues, the positions of the candidates, and the potential consequences that four years of either man may bring. I'm fairly confident that, if we end up with four more years of Hogan, his perception of a mandate will end up leading to mistakes that not even a legislature can easily fix, and that will remind voters that Maryland has done well as a blue state for decades for a reason--namely, being a blue state.
So, why is this blue voter/blogger feeling so blue?
I think it comes, as much as anything, from what the Kavanaugh confirmation process has revealed about the extent to which one of our two major political parties (guess which one) given a choice between democratic (small d) processes and conservative outcomes, chooses conservative outcomes every time. In other words, it has absolutely no faith in its ability to openly, freely persuade voters that its ideas are worth adopting. Its only faith, in fact, is not even in the ideas to which it gives lip service in its campaigns, is in maintaining institutional control of the levers of power.
I began to think about this very recently, after I read a Twitter post by Bruce Bartlett going back to the fiasco of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat on the Supreme Court now held by Neil Gorsuch. That Gorsuch is on the Court instead of Garland was, of course, the by-product of a campaign overseen by Mitch McCONnell over the course of 2016, one in which McCONnell invented the "Biden rule" that Presidents could not make nominations to the Court during an election year, when the voters (contrary to the Constitution) should be allowed to "weigh in" on the process.
At any rate, Bartlett's point was as simple as it was completely accurate. Then as now, McCONnell was the Senate majority leader, and had the votes to simply give Garland, out of respect for the Constitution and the traditions of the Senate, a normal confirmation process strung out over the better part of the year, terminating in a vote where he would find a way to whip his entire caucus into rejecting the nomination. At that point, he could easily say that it was too late to consider someone else, and that would be that. McCONnell, in other words, controlled the process in any event; it would have been easy for him to manipulate it in a way that preserved the illusion of tradition and fairness without being too-cute-by-half about it.
So, why didn't he do it this way?
I think that there is only one possible answer. Mitch McCONnell knew that preserving even the illusion of the process was not enough to intimidate opposition from the Democrats. To do that, he had to deliberately sabotage democracy itself. He had to game the system to such an extent that the Democrats would have to either go outside of it to advance their goals, or be aided by some sort of deux ex machina set of circumstances. He was prepared to deal with the former by questioning the patriotism of the opposition, and the latter by the fact that his party's funders have the financial resources to muscle the Republicans' way though anything.
The Kavanaugh nightmare has revealed not only his preparation, but that of his caucus and his contributors, for dealing with both possibilities. The restrictions on access to Kavanaugh's records, as well as on the questions that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could ask him, led to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey's decision to disclose some of the documents that Republicans were hiding. Booker's decision, as he acknowledged, put him at risk for expulsion from the Senate, and Republicans wasted no time in floating that possibility out to the press.
But then, there was the discovery that Kavanaugh might well be another Clarence Thomas, a man with a history of sexual abuse that he and his supporters were working to cover up. Even then, it appeared that the Republicans were prepared to counter this news; within hours of it surfacing, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, produced a letter signed by no fewer than 65 women attesting to Kavanaugh's character. The existence of this letter, combined with Kavanaugh's denials of the allegations against him, raise the possibility that Kavanaugh is willing to commit perjury to reach the Supreme Court, and that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were willing to suborn it to help him do so. (This wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh had been exposed as a perjurer in the process, moreover.)
Then, however, things began to spin a little out of control into deux ex machina territory.
Kavanaugh's accuser, originally anonymous, came forward to say that she would be willing to testify before the committee. Corroboration of her story slowly began to emerge. And one of Kavanaugh's supporters worked with a public relations firm to float and promote a ridiculous story that the accuser might have confused Kavanaugh with someone else who arguably looked like him.
One might be tempted to think that Senate Republicans would decide to call it a day on Kavanaugh's nomination and move on to the task of getting re-elected in a few weeks. But remember what I said about McCONnell: he believes the system has been so gamed in favor of his party that he can do anything. And with that in mind, consider the following recent quote from the majority leader.
Mitch McCONnell sees his job as protecting Mitch McCONnell First, foremost, and last. The same is true of nearly every Republican in Congress. And it is especially true of the Republican who has the misfortune to occupy the White House.
And that is the source of my despair. That, and the knowledge that enough of my fellow countrymen and women support these Republicans to the point at which I am beginning to believe that civil unrest, and perhaps even civil war, might be the only door that leads out of our current national misery.
But, if history teaches us anything, there is always a door.
And, even if I do not live to see it, or walk through it, I'll do everything I can to help others find it and use it. As long as I can breathe, and type, that's my promise.
I sat down tonight to update my blog, with no shortage of topics about which to write. My mind started to sort though them. I reviewed my Diigo library of news articles I saved toward that end. The nightmare that is the confirmation process of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been unfolding at breakneck speed over the past month. Discussing that process, and what it has revealed about our country at this point in history, is easily worth a month's worth of blog posts all by itself.
And then I came face-to-face with it. Despair. The same sense of hopelessness that I felt in the days immediately after the election two years ago.
It puzzled me for a while. There are a number of reasons to not let despair wrap itself around me. After all, the midterms are less than a month-and-a-half away, and things look very promising for the Democrats. They will probably take back the House, they may take back the Senate (although that's a bit iffier), and they will undoubtedly make significant gains in state office-holders. There is, of course, the current inexplicable madness here in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, routinely saved from his worst mistakes by a Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly, has a 22-point (that is not a typo) lead over Ben Jealous in the gubernatorial race.
But even that is not the principle source of my despair. Hogan's lead is principally the product of local print and broadcast media that are scared of looking too liberal, and a voting base too tuned in to its own short-term pleasures to really dig into the issues, the positions of the candidates, and the potential consequences that four years of either man may bring. I'm fairly confident that, if we end up with four more years of Hogan, his perception of a mandate will end up leading to mistakes that not even a legislature can easily fix, and that will remind voters that Maryland has done well as a blue state for decades for a reason--namely, being a blue state.
So, why is this blue voter/blogger feeling so blue?
I think it comes, as much as anything, from what the Kavanaugh confirmation process has revealed about the extent to which one of our two major political parties (guess which one) given a choice between democratic (small d) processes and conservative outcomes, chooses conservative outcomes every time. In other words, it has absolutely no faith in its ability to openly, freely persuade voters that its ideas are worth adopting. Its only faith, in fact, is not even in the ideas to which it gives lip service in its campaigns, is in maintaining institutional control of the levers of power.
I began to think about this very recently, after I read a Twitter post by Bruce Bartlett going back to the fiasco of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat on the Supreme Court now held by Neil Gorsuch. That Gorsuch is on the Court instead of Garland was, of course, the by-product of a campaign overseen by Mitch McCONnell over the course of 2016, one in which McCONnell invented the "Biden rule" that Presidents could not make nominations to the Court during an election year, when the voters (contrary to the Constitution) should be allowed to "weigh in" on the process.
At any rate, Bartlett's point was as simple as it was completely accurate. Then as now, McCONnell was the Senate majority leader, and had the votes to simply give Garland, out of respect for the Constitution and the traditions of the Senate, a normal confirmation process strung out over the better part of the year, terminating in a vote where he would find a way to whip his entire caucus into rejecting the nomination. At that point, he could easily say that it was too late to consider someone else, and that would be that. McCONnell, in other words, controlled the process in any event; it would have been easy for him to manipulate it in a way that preserved the illusion of tradition and fairness without being too-cute-by-half about it.
So, why didn't he do it this way?
I think that there is only one possible answer. Mitch McCONnell knew that preserving even the illusion of the process was not enough to intimidate opposition from the Democrats. To do that, he had to deliberately sabotage democracy itself. He had to game the system to such an extent that the Democrats would have to either go outside of it to advance their goals, or be aided by some sort of deux ex machina set of circumstances. He was prepared to deal with the former by questioning the patriotism of the opposition, and the latter by the fact that his party's funders have the financial resources to muscle the Republicans' way though anything.
The Kavanaugh nightmare has revealed not only his preparation, but that of his caucus and his contributors, for dealing with both possibilities. The restrictions on access to Kavanaugh's records, as well as on the questions that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could ask him, led to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey's decision to disclose some of the documents that Republicans were hiding. Booker's decision, as he acknowledged, put him at risk for expulsion from the Senate, and Republicans wasted no time in floating that possibility out to the press.
But then, there was the discovery that Kavanaugh might well be another Clarence Thomas, a man with a history of sexual abuse that he and his supporters were working to cover up. Even then, it appeared that the Republicans were prepared to counter this news; within hours of it surfacing, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, produced a letter signed by no fewer than 65 women attesting to Kavanaugh's character. The existence of this letter, combined with Kavanaugh's denials of the allegations against him, raise the possibility that Kavanaugh is willing to commit perjury to reach the Supreme Court, and that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were willing to suborn it to help him do so. (This wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh had been exposed as a perjurer in the process, moreover.)
Then, however, things began to spin a little out of control into deux ex machina territory.
Kavanaugh's accuser, originally anonymous, came forward to say that she would be willing to testify before the committee. Corroboration of her story slowly began to emerge. And one of Kavanaugh's supporters worked with a public relations firm to float and promote a ridiculous story that the accuser might have confused Kavanaugh with someone else who arguably looked like him.
One might be tempted to think that Senate Republicans would decide to call it a day on Kavanaugh's nomination and move on to the task of getting re-elected in a few weeks. But remember what I said about McCONnell: he believes the system has been so gamed in favor of his party that he can do anything. And with that in mind, consider the following recent quote from the majority leader.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether "gonna plow right through it and do our job" is how one would characterize one's response to a situation in which sexual abuse has emerged as a major factor. I think it's enough to say that the quote reveals what he believes his "job" to be. Not to defend the Constitution. Not to submit his politics to an open political process. Not to respect his opponents and their rights to participate in that process. No, not even to respect the concerns and injuries of a citizen who has come forward to tell her painful story and look past her own pain to protect the country from giving a monster a lifetime chance to re-shape the laws of our country.You’re all following the current Supreme Court fight, and you will watch it unfold in the course of the next week. President Trump has nominated a stunningly successful individual. You’ve watched the fight, you’ve watched the tactics, but here’s what I want to tell you: In the very near future, judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court. So my friends, keep the faith, don’t get rattled by all of this ― we’re gonna plow right through it and do our job.
Mitch McCONnell sees his job as protecting Mitch McCONnell First, foremost, and last. The same is true of nearly every Republican in Congress. And it is especially true of the Republican who has the misfortune to occupy the White House.
And that is the source of my despair. That, and the knowledge that enough of my fellow countrymen and women support these Republicans to the point at which I am beginning to believe that civil unrest, and perhaps even civil war, might be the only door that leads out of our current national misery.
But, if history teaches us anything, there is always a door.
And, even if I do not live to see it, or walk through it, I'll do everything I can to help others find it and use it. As long as I can breathe, and type, that's my promise.
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Larry Hogan: A Kinder, Gentler Version Of T****
I am a native of Baltimore, and have lived in Maryland most of my life. Politically, I have watched it evolve from middle-of-the-role Republicanism, when it gave its electoral votes to Richard Nixon three times, to middle-of-the-road Democratic politics in the wake of Nixon's self-immolation by way of Watergate, as well as the self-immolation of his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, a former Maryland governor whose corrupt past caught up with him in time to give us Gerald Ford as his replacement (and later Nixon's).
Middle-of-the-road, in fact, is more or less the normal state of politics here in the Old Line (or Free) State. That status, as well as the two nicknames, reflect Maryland's geographic position among the original 13 colonies and the issue that divided them as well as the rest of the expanding nation, even to today: race.
Its northern border, part of the Mason-Dixon line (named for the two surveyors who created it to resolve a border dispute among four states) is now political shorthand for the divide within the nation over this issue. Maryland, in fact, was a state with slaves and slaveholders, kept in the Union at gunpoint by Lincoln in a battle that gave the state its official song, "Maryland My Maryland" (its original anti-Union lyrics long since politically corrected by our General Assembly). The zoning of Baltimore, the state's largest city, was designed to enforce the legal segregation of the races its white residents wanted. That zoning still strangles the development of the city. And yet, the proximity of Baltimore to other large, Northeastern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston brought a degree of liberal thinking and cosmopolitan social life to Maryland.
What has popularly become know as Maryland's "middle temperament" comes out of the close proximity within a geographically small state between liberal Baltimore and the more conservative counties surrounding it. Early in the state's history, the need to function socially and economically led its politically divided residents to work hard at avoiding conflicts and finding ways to cooperate peacefully. This pattern persisted well into the 20th century, which is why Maryland produced moderate governors of both parties such as Theodore McKeldin, a Republican, and William Donald Schaefer, a Democrat.
However, and with all due respect to the late Speaker of the House of Representatives "Tip" O'Neill, all politics in the United States are no longer local. Almost every aspect of our life has been nationalized to varying degrees, as the functions of national government have expanded into formally localized functions such as schools, and the operation of the economy has been restructured to favor large, nation-wide enterprises over local ones. As this has happened, Americans no longer discuss politics face-to-face. They discuss it media portal to media portal, through an endless barrage of cameras and Web sites that thrive on conflict, or at least the appearance of it.
And so, in the 21st century, Maryland politics has begun to reflect these trends. In this century, the state elected governors with more of a taste for combat rather than consensus: the sharp-elbowed Robert Ehrlich and the morally earnest Martin O'Malley, who, in very different ways, wore out their welcome in a state whose middle temperament had little stomach for being pushed in one direction or another.
Enter Larry Hogan, stage right. Very far right, in fact, but with some knowledge of how to conceal it. A political legacy, whose father (also a Republican) voted in Congress for the impeachment of Nixon. A supposedly self-made small-businessperson who is, in fact, worth millions of dollars by way of a commodity that practically sells itself with the right connections: real estate. A man with a slightly goofy, grinning public persona perfect for that cliched politician complement, a "guy you could imagine having a beer with." A man who would seem to be a perfect fit for a state with a middle temperament.
And a man who, to an electorate weary of conflict and accustomed to making choices based on style points, seems to be a kind of hero. How else to explain, in a supposedly "blue" state, his 16-point lead over his Democratic opponent for re-election?
But, in fact, Hogan is the political equivalent of the guy sitting all the way at the end of the bar, complaining that the beer is watered and the pretzels are stale, and demanding to pay less and get away without leaving a tip. A man to whom much has been given financially, who still doesn't feel that he's been given enough. A man who expects to be seen as a hero for being sick, but who doesn't see the irony in being saved by government-back health insurance not available to every citizen under his charge. A man who, in Oscar Wilde's words, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But also a man who knows, perhaps by way of his real estate experience, how to wrap up nothing and sell it as something. And so, he has positioned his likeability in such a way that it conceals the ineptitude and inherent racism of many of his policy choices.
How else to explain his decision to throw away a billion dollars in federal transportation money by cancelling the Baltimore Red Line project, which could have been the backbone of a real, city-wide commuter rail system and thereby cut through the legacy of the city's racist zoning practices? As a former state procurement officer, I personally know that Ehrlich, for whom Hogan worked as appointments secretary, believed in capturing every dollar Maryland could get from Washington. He would never have thrown away that money.
And the repercussions of this decision affect the whole state, since it makes getting additional federal moneys for transportation projects less likely. This is not just something we can ill afford; in fact, we can't afford it at all, given the current status of our infrastructure and commuting needs. All in the name of protecting the racial status quo. Cancelling the Red Line was not a decision that eliminated a fiscal "boondoggle"; it was a tightening of the white noose around the city's African-American residents. Take a look.
For that matter, how else to explain his bragging about cancelling O'Malley's so-called "tax on the rain," which in fact was a tax to fund the management of rain run-off from from the kind of rampant suburban development that helped Hogan make his fortune? He didn't eliminate the "rain tax" to help consumers; he did it because he felt it was picking his pockets, as well as the pockets of his like-minded cronies. Now, to protect the stapled-together, overpriced townhouses multiplying their way through Howard County, his Republican cronies in that county want to "save" historic Ellicott City by tearing it down, one block at a time.
This is their response, and Hogan's response, to the floods that have twice submerged the historic district and led to deaths on their watch, NOT to better regulate the development that led to the floods and the deaths in the first place. After all, it's not as if historic preservation is an economic generator that could, in fact, raise revenues and help pay for some of that regulation ... oh, wait!
Larry Hogan. Putting development over people's lives. Putting racism over ending poverty. Basically, a Maryland version of D****** T****. A man with a smile on his face and a shiv in his pocket for anyone who will stop him from lining it. Not a man with a middle temperament. And not deserving of a second term as governor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)