It's That Time of Year!

 Everyone is telling you to be of good cheer. I’m trying. Before I forget, Merry Christmas.

And then there is Bah Humbug all around us. In a national address to the nation the other evening, the President told us that we had never had it so good. He told us we had the best economy in our history, and he implied that he might be a greater president than, well, Abraham Lincoln. And yet.

Our leader is an expert at the big story. It’s a standard strategy for those in power and those seeking power: tell the big lie because they are more likely to believe it than the small stories you could tell. So it is not unreasonable to think that a whole lot of people believe what they hear coming out of the White House.

The White House. Now there is something to be upset about. The home and office of the president are supposed to be simple, not grand like the palaces of Europe. We are a democracy, not a kingdom. Remember?

The Oval Office, that sacred ground of American power and grand simplicity, has been destroyed to the level of heresy. The desecration has reduced it to just another room. The mystic is gone. The symbol of world power looks like a decorator with no taste was let loose. It is gaudy, it is cliché, it is ugly. It proves money doesn’t buy class. It is embarrassing. 

The East Wing brings new fury, ripped from its connection to the White House. For what? For a ballroom bigger than the rest of the building, out of proportion to the rest of the site. It will take months to tear it down, if it ever gets built, after The Don leaves office. Could the place use a ballroom? Sure, but in proportion and without the glitz.

But back to the economy and stuff. If things are as good as we are told, why is the country in such a funk? We know that we have a pretty strong economy, but not the greatest. The polls are pretty much in agreement. The President’s numbers are in the toilet. Poll after poll indicates that the folks don’t think he is doing a good job managing the economy, the European war, the state of manufacturing, and most other issues. He does get reasonable marks for his efforts to reduce illegal immigration and close the border, but people don’t like how he is doing it.

We are not a country that sends masked men to pull people off the street and whisk them away in unmarked cars. We don’t put people on planes and send them to countries that will jail them for no reason. But we are becoming that kind of country.

Christmas letters are supposed to be uplifting, but too much is changing for the worse to be bright and shiny. We are paying too much for food, for gas, for entertainment, for basics like water and home energy. Too many will start the year with health insurance they can’t afford or no insurance at all. That is when the ER becomes the primary care provider, and our rates increase to pay for it.

There are three more years of this craziness before a term limit kicks in. My positive side says we will survive this. We survived the Civil War. We survived Teapot Dome. We survived other threats to democracy. We beat fascism in Europe, and we beat the Empire of Japan’s threat in Asia. We survived McCarthyism.

We can replace the new signs on the Kennedy Center and other buildings in DC. We can, with time, remove the Amazon-grade glitz from the Oval Office and the rest of the White House.

Based on what has happened this year, I shudder to think of what could happen in the next three. But there is hope for a better tomorrow. There has to be.

We still have great universities that are the envy of the world. We have local people trying every day to make their communities better and safer. We have millions of people in the streets across the country protesting the destruction of our institutions. When the people rise up, the people win. People can only wield power when we let them. So there is hope.

Let’s make our hope a positive force to help our democracy survive. Knowing we can do it gives me a much-needed brighter outlook as we end one year and begin another.

 

Happy New Year!!!

 

 

Hate!

 I hate America!

I didn’t know that until a few weeks ago. I didn’t come to it on my own, the Speaker of the House told me… I wasn’t singled out, mind you. It runs in the family, all four generations. Lots of my neighbors and nearly eight million others got the message at the same time. Speaker Mike Johnson told us that anyone who participated in a No Kings protest hated America. And you know me; I thought it was the other way around.

I don’t follow AOC on Instagram or Facebook; she is a bit progressive, you know, but she noted recently that calling someone who disagrees with your position on an issue un-American is the very definition of un-American.

On the other side, a young man slain for his beliefs, Charlie Kirk, garners thousands of chapters for his Turning Point organization that, in the name of saving democracy, spews views that are the antithesis of what America should represent.

A lot of what constitutes the new good is the opposite of what has defined America for generations. Affirmative Action is once again considered discrimination against white folks. A good education is no longer considered a worthwhile goal because we need more tradespeople. Why can’t we have both? Evangelical Nationalism, a growing segment of Christianity preaches the opposite of Christianity, calling us to turn to a theocracy instead of our tradition of advocating for the free exercise of any religion.

I’m registered as “No Party Preference.” I can speak out of both sides of my mouth. I’m usually just a bit left of center, but not enough to be called a leftie. I’m worried about our democracy. I’m told I shouldn’t worry about it; it’s what older folks do. Nobody cares, really. Worry about the important things, the pundits say, affordability, the new buzzword.

The recent government shutdown illustrates the dichotomy weaving its way through the country. While millions are worried about the price of health insurance, the lack of healthcare, and the price of food, other millions are worried about maintaining power and crumbling all the institutions that seem to be bothering them: universities, education in general, safety nets for the less fortunate, libraries, science research, gold-standard economic reporting, and even classic architecture. Have you noticed what they have done to desecrate the Oval Office and the White House in general?

The younger members of the Democratic Party are calling for new leadership. Those in their seventies and eighties have lost control of the narrative and ability to lead. They had the wind at their backs during the shutdown and blew it. They fought for affordability and gave in to easier flying schedules. They are a party with no discipline and no cohesive or catchy message aimed at the younger generations, arm wrestling against a supercharged and highly organized party of zealots.

The national movement to return to an affordable but democratic nation has begun. Prodded by young people and supported by folks of all ages, the nation is starting to awaken to the travesty thrust upon them in the last several months.

The first nationwide No Kings rallies a couple of years ago attracted only a few million people. The rallies last June attracted about five million people. The protests in October attracted more than seven million people.

Erica Chenoweth, a distinguished professor at Harvard, has studied the history of anti-authoritarian movements around the globe. She found that movements that achieved their goal usually represented three and a half percent of the population of the country. That is a lot of people. If the trend continues, twelve million Americans protesting against the current regime isn’t hard to imagine.

If you are a pessimist, the chances of success for No Kings are slim to none. An optimist thinks it’s possible with a little effort. It will take a lot of effort, but worth a try. But it will fail if it doesn’t bring forth a highly respected national leader.

Today, it has an organizer, Indivisibles’ Ezra Levin, but no leader. The civil rights movement had MLK. The current effort to restore our democracy needs a national leader who can rally the populists to do what is needed and what is right.

How do we know when we are in trouble?

When a nation sends its army against its own citizens, democracy is lost. When a nation sends masked secret police against its people, democracy fades. When national leaders turn the Department of Justice into a personal law firm to prosecute political enemies, democracy is done. When a nation tries to tell its universities what to teach and how to teach it, democracy is history. America was once the model of a modern democracy. Why did we let it lose its way?

We are told that it is always the economy that drives people’s feelings and their votes. Recent elections around the country tell a mixed story. The people of the State of New Jersey and the Commonwealth of Virginia elected Democratic governors. They both ran on an economic agenda, but the President’s agenda was on the ballot as well.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania returned three justices to its Supreme Court despite the opposition of the President. The Vice President’s brother lost an election in the very red State of Ohio.

The most interesting election to me was California’s Proposition 50, which reconfigures its congressional districts to offset the redistricting efforts in Texas. Not one person was on the ballot, and economics wasn’t on the ballot; it was all about the future of democracy. It garnered sixty-four percent approval from the voters. That is what a mandate looks like. Why did millions turn out to vote on one issue? Because the President had asked the State of Texas to Gerrymander their congressional district to make it easier to elect five more Republicans to Congress. When California retaliated by designing districts that would likely elect five more Democrats to Congress, the President instructed the Department of Justice to sue the state because it was an unfair tampering with the system; audacious is an understatement.

One must ask if a few elections in blue states equate to a national repudiation of the current administration’s efforts to undo our democratic processes. Maybe not. But all long marches begin with the first step.

It could also be a wake-up call for the administration. It might just let them know that their methods for achieving their economic and cultural objectives are just too severe, or just not the way we customarily do things. Masked men whisking people off the streets into unmarked cars is not the American way. It is the way of Russia and Hungary, or earlier, Chile, or Argentina. We have an annoying history of insisting on due process, even for hardened criminals.

It could be a reminder that government officials who take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution ought to follow its provisions.

But we know that this administration has no intention of protecting and defending the Constitution. They told us during the campaign that they would implement the Project 25 programs. It was a nine-hundred-page outline for changing the country from three equal branches of government to a country with a strong executive branch. It was a plan for increasing the power of oligarchs and moving us toward autocracy with a strong military dispersed among the citizenry. If it succeeds, the country is lost. If it succeeds even a little, we will not see our greatness again.

 

I don’t hate America, but I am concerned about the current state of affairs. Nobody runs for office with the promise to change nothing,  but change must be done within the norms of our longstanding institutions and culture. But people should not live in fear. Parents should not be afraid that when they send their kids to school, they may never see them again. People who follow the rules and go to the immigration office as scheduled should not be deported for following the law. Our police services, who pride themselves on serving and protecting themselves should not be forced to wear masks and walk the streets with weapons of war. Members of Congress should not be prevented from performing their oversight duties at detention centers. I don’t hate America; I just want it to be America again.

 

War!

  

At the end of World War II, the countries of Western Europe were in ruins. A xenophobic, egotistical believer in nationalism and white superiority had gained control of the fledgling democracy.

Germany created a war machine with the simple objective of taking over Europe, creating a home for the Aryan race, and getting rid of, literally, those of Jewish or African descent. It nearly succeeded.

With the help of the new world, England, France, and Russia brought the warmongering nation to heel at a cost of billions of dollars and millions of lives. A new world order was desperately needed.

 Then, never trusting Russia, many Western European nations, the U.S.A., and Canada created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

The Eastern European nations formed the Soviet Union, which increased distrust of them, and with good reason. What Churchill described as the Iron Curtain between the East and the West became literal when East Germany erected a wall between itself and its familial neighbors.

Article 5 of the NATO Charter states that an act of war against a member in Europe or North America is considered an attack against all. The only time it was invoked was on 9-11 when the U.S was attacked.

That world order kept peace in Europe for nearly eighty years. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Since Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic, was not a member of NATO, the Obama administration essentially did nothing to prevent the takeover. When Russia sent incursions further inland and occupied nearly 20% of Ukraine and shelled the rest, the U.S. sent armaments but ensured that there would be no U.S. boots on the ground. These actions cost billions of dollars; dollars that went to U.S. manufacturers to replenish our supplies.

The first Trump administration tried to gut NATO's effectiveness and saw little value in allied relationships between nations, except on a transactional basis. The second Trump administration has called for an end to the war, but again, on a transactional basis. Its basic approach has been to ask Ukraine to cede the land it has lost and eliminate its military on the condition that Russia not invade any more of the country. Perhaps that is an overgeneralization of the negotiations, but it's within the margin of error.

Essentially, the administration is saying that it is OK to invade another country with no expectation of retribution or costs. Moral standing is missing from that viewpoint. The world order is left to the strong over the weak. Transactional!

Why would you expect an administration to get all worked up over Russia invading another country when it has expressed its intention to take over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and annex Gaza, turn it into a resort site after expelling all of its citizens? The lack of understanding of international relations, mutual aid pacts, world economics, and a peaceful world order is overwhelming, to say the least. It’s embarrassing, and it causes chaos among nations that don’t know when the next early morning tweet will drop. We must do better.

I suggest a simple solution: if your country invades another country, the world will descend on you with all its might, and you will suffer the consequences for years to come on the stage of world opinion, and your armed forces will be decimated. No matter the cost.

The current administration has announced that it will give the peace process another week or so before it decides that peace is not worth the price or effort. That is not the American way. Russia’s military should be ousted from Ukrainian territory. Full stop. Russia should be ousted from the world economic stage for several years. There has to be a price for bad behavior.

When peace between nations becomes transactional, it increases the likelihood of full-scale wars down the road. Are we willing to say that we will not defend Poland when Russia invades, or if it invades  Estonia, or Lithuania? What about Belarus or Moldova? Hungary or Slovakia? 

It's Official!

Taylor Swift has spoken. A few minutes after the presidential debate last week. the most famous diva of our time, the headliner of The Eras Tour, posted her endorsement of Harris for President. It included a picture of herself with a cat – The Childless Cat Lady. Thankfully, her tour doesn’t take her to Springfield, Ohio. J.D. Vance says cats and dogs don’t stand a chance in that town. Anyway, it’s official now. The candidates can begin the campaign.

Does Swift’s endorsement really have an effect on the electorate? That depends to whom you speak. She has 284 million followers on X. Four hundred thousand responded positively within one hour of her posting. The November vote count will tell us.

The debate was a runaway win for Harris, but Trump thought it was his best debate. One wonders if it will have any effect on the final vote count. It is possible both candidates made some inroads with the undecided voters of the country, although only a little movement, based on network interviews just after the debate. So why bother?

The 2020 election was decided by less than one hundred thousand votes. Some pundits suggest that it will be even closer this year. That means the election comes down to a few precincts in a few states. All of the polls are within the margin of error.

Pope Francis said recently that we should do two things – vote and vote for the candidate we think is the lesser of two evils. That doesn’t give a lot of people a lot of comfort. He spoke from the point of view of the leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination and as an Argentinian, which gives him a different perspective on U.S. politics. So what are we to do?

Most voters believe they have an easy decision; nearly fifty percent want Trump again and nearly fifty percent want Harris. Half of the voters will be disappointed with the results. The candidates represent two different views of America. One wants to go back to a time when rural life and conservative values permeated the nation; the other wants to move forward to a more perfect union. One has been remarkably successful as the stormtrooper for those who consider themselves the forgotten, the passed-over, the regular folks. The other is seen as the representative of the coastal elites. Two things are true about those thoughts: only 17 percent of the U.S. population live in non-urban areas so their needs are often forgotten or unrecognized by the 50 percent who live within fifty miles of the coasts and/or the 83 percent who live in urban areas.

So it is going to be a close call. The emotions are high. Because we are a democracy we are subjected to contrary views every day, and that is ok. What I don’t like is the obvious way in which many in the Republican Party are buying into the lies spewed by many of the former president’s surrogates and the conspiracy theories that abound. Millions are convinced that undocumented immigrants are voting in big numbers and they support new laws to keep them from voting. It is illegal in every state for a non-citizen to vote and there is no evidence of undocumented immigrants voting. Some states are creating new procedures for reviewing all votes before the results are certified based on lies about fake votes and illegal voters. It goes on.

The election should be about the character of the candidates. Trump doesn’t meet the high bar required of a president. He didn’t the first time and he doesn’t now. Did I mention that he was a convicted felon awaiting sentencing and trial for another 30-plus felony indictments?

The election should be about policies and programs. Trump’s former staff, hundreds of them, helped the Heritage Fund write Project 2025, a 900-page plan to tear down our democracy and replace it with a strong autocratic form of government. Trump has demonstrated his willingness to favor the rich over the poor in tax codes and safety-net programs. He doesn’t measure up to the needs of the nation.

The election should be about the Constitution. Trump said he would ignore the sacred document on his first day in office. He has said that he would use the military to quell protests, which is against the law. He has demonstrated that he is unwilling to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. He showed that on January 6, 2020. He demonstrated that by his friendship with the dictators of North Korea, Russia, and Hungary to name a few, all known enemies of America or its institutions. He hasn’t met the high bar required of a president.

Kamala Harris has demonstrated a willingness to support the Constitution, to fight for the middle class, to disrupt our trek to oligarchy, and protect our civil rights. She may not be the perfect candidate but she seems to be honest and focused on more than the upper one percent of the population.

What are we to do?

First, we must vote. That is what a democracy is all about. In his book On Tyranny, Yale professor Timothy Snyder references a hero in a David Lodge novel who says that you don’t know when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Consider the Germans who elected an autocratic government who then started WW II. Consider the Czechs and Slovaks elected an autocratic Tito, or the Russians who continued to elect an autocratic leader. Even if we are unhappy with our current state of affairs, we must vote to protect our democracy, to prevent the destruction of our institutions. We may not all agree on how to do those things, but we know that those who don’t vote allow bad leaders to win.

But, we have a choice. If we want to keep  America great, if we want to preserve our democracy, if we want to write a new chapter for our country, and if we want to ensure that it is not the last vote, or the next to the last vote, the choice seems easy to make. Vote for Harris.