Stop Pretending This is OK!

Let's play Match Game, a TV game show on which contestants tried to guess how a celebrity would most likely complete a phrase. For instance, one might have to guess how someone would complete Baby ____. For instance, it might be baby face, Baby Ruth, baby oil, etc. You get the idea. Right now, how would most Americans complete the phrase School _____? School spirit? possibly. School play? maybe. School dance? could be. There are a number of possible answers but there is no question that many or most Americans' first thought would be "School shooting."

How did this happen?! In the 20th century the number of mass murders that took place at schools wasn't zero, but "shooting" certainly didn't automatically fill in "school____" the way "cream" might complete "ice ___." School shooting" should sound as perverse to us as "quilting bee knife fight" but it doesn't and that's tragic. Despite living in relative peace and prosperity, far too many Americans can't comfortably coexist with other human beings unless they are perpetually in a position to kill them should they ever threatened...or disrespected...or more likely, just spooked by whatever bogeymen plague their imagination.

I'm a little too young to have gone through duck and cover drills. However, to this day I have a distinct memory of the air raid drill from 1st grade. We had to leave school early and walk home immediately! We were told that if we didn't walk home as fast as possible the police would take us to jail. As a small child I actually believed that I would be arrested on what I can only presume would be a charge of 2nd degree dilly-dallying. I bring this up for a reason. In the 20th century we were in the throes of the cold war. The enemy was what Reagan called the "Evil Empire". Now, instead of drills to protect ourselves from a foreign foe, we are now having active shooter drills in schools. Children no longer expect their worst nightmares to come from other countries; they prepare to avoid being murdered by young American men. The mass-murderer in this case bought his weapons of mass destruction when he turned 18. Republicans who ironically claim to be pro-life love that he can do so even if he can't celebrate this purchase with a beer or wine cooler for three more years because he isn't thought to ready to handle it. For the same reason. if he wanted to rent a car to take him to the hellscape he was about to create, he would have to wait another seven years.

The naked face of evil is no longer represented by a hammer and sickle. It now lives in a home that watches Alex Jones or at least Tucker Carlson. I think of the movie Mississippi Burning and the Willem Dafoe character saying "What's wrong with these people? when he took part in rescuing someone from a lynching. I'm absolutely horrified by what we have become, and I refuse to pretend that it's simply another point of view. I am as ashamed of who we are as Americans as I used to be proud of who we were. Also, stop telling me it's about mental health and not our love of killing people. First, OK, so what are you doing to fix out mental health crisis? Yeah...that's what I thought! Other countries have citizens with mental health issues but no country like us comes anywhere near our bloodshed. If you continue to pretend that this is OK, I'm not sure I can continue to pretend that millions of Americans are OK.

It Can and Did Happen Here

I once overheard a conversation between a political science professor and a student and I've thought about it from time to time ever since. He said this is still the American experiment. Two-hundred-some-odd years is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Until that made me think about it, I always just took for granted that the United States, its government and way of life were the gold standard to be emulated to the extent it was possible and envied to the extent it wasn't, and this of course was fixed and permanent The professor made me realize that this is by no means a settled issue.

I grew up in small town America, a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. I was born during the Kennedy years and grew up in the 60's and 70's, raised by parents from the "Greatest Generation" including a father who was a proud World War II veteran. They would be heartbroken to see that we have gone from greatest to worst in only three generations. By the way, I'm well aware that the decades I just cited as my formative years were turbulent to say the least! Nevertheless, one of the hallmarks of American life or the American psyche was optimism. I remember attending a lecture by political pundit Mark Shields in which he emphasized optimism as being fundamental to who we are as a nation. When we studied the rise of fascism in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, we were convinced that it couldn't happen here.

Fast forward to the '80s and I worked for a while at BMW North American headquarters. As you might imagine with a German company, there were a number of Germans there, both those who became American citizens and German nationals who were just working abroad until they returned home. Obviously they weren't monsters; they were as decent as anyone else. If fascism could take hold over these people why would we possibly think ourselves immune? I even remember a conversation about one executive who rode a tank in a Nazi panzer division and one of the (American born) engineers saying, "Hey look, he was just in the army." I see his point.

Tragically, the optimism that was present in conservatives who love this country, or at least their vision of it, is largely gone. I can't shake the memory of a social media post from a friend this summer. He's a bright, thoughtful, successful, very decent man for whom I have great respect but his post shocked me. He pointed out a whole litany of bad things that were happening and concluded that you had to be a special kind of stupid not to see why people want to vote for the current president. Wait...what...you mean vote against him, right?! No, he meant vote for him. He laid out a dystopian nightmare as the status quo, but that still couldn't compete with the horrors he conjured up in the fever dreams of his imagination.

The scariest part of Trump's fascist cult of personality is the successful gaslighting of tens of millions of Americans who now literally can't tell fact from fiction. They will believe whatever he wants them to believe no matter how implausible or how easily disproved. As we descend further and further into the abyss a few break off and rejoin the reality based community, but the bulk of his cult like following remains intact. If Donald Trump got nineteen of his followers to hijack airplanes and fly them into our buildings, even in the face of incontrovertible proof that he was behind it, I doubt he would lose more than 20% of his support. The remaining majority would be divided among those who would claim it's bad but others did bad things too so let's just move on, those who say, "Fake news! He had nothing to do with it", and scariest of all, those who would be fine with it because Donald Trump wants it.

The silver lining is that Donald Trump was impeached again today, and this time with some Republican support. Joe Biden's election was affirmed and he will be inaugurated right on time. Trump's dozens of absurd lawsuits were laughed out of court. In short, the safeguards of our democracy held...this time. However, seeing how easily nearly half the country was seduced by this demagogue is chilling. Trump's claims, advocated by Rudy Giuliani, who at this point probably couldn't win a case of Pepsi in a food court, were so divorced from reality that courts couldn't help, but what if next time we elect someone who is both sociopathic and smart? If you think it can't happen here, you're wrong.

Don't Drink the Lemonade!

In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate for being an unscrupulous bully who waged a campaign of fear mongering that left countless lives damaged or even destroyed. "McCarthyism" as it has come to be known cast a pall of suspicion over an already anxious nation. We look back in disgust and shame that we as a people were so susceptible to this type of reckless demagoguery.

If there's any good news here it's that he was censured on a bi-partisan basis once we found the courage to regain our national soul. The vote against Senator McCarthy was a lopsided 67-22. Perhaps more importantly, the title of this post is a reference to something said by one of the 22 who did vote on the side of Senator McCarthy. A fellow Midwestern Republican, William E. Jenner of Indiana said, "Joe, you're the kid who came to the party and pee'd in the lemonade." Clearly we had reached a point where we began to look inward and say, "Oh my God, what have we done?!"

It has been said that history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes. History may very well show that like HUAC before it, MAGA is a dirty four-letter word that signaled a point at which half of the country chose to forsake our core public virtues. I'm not worried about my country because Trump supporters are bad people; I'm worried because they aren't. Many of these are salt of the earth people whose fears were too easily exploited by a narcissist without even the smallest trace of a conscience.

The pillars of our democratic republic are being savaged by our president, and nearly all elected "leaders" of his party are too cowardly to stand up to him. To be clear, it's not that they agree with him; it's the worst kept secret in America that privately, many Republican elected officials are horrified by much of what Trump does, says and is, but they are too afraid him and his supporters to stand up for what they know is right. They choose instead to sacrifice their souls on the altar of feigned agreement with their fuehrer.

For the entirety of Trump's political existence, the truth itself has been an enemy to be vanquished by him and his followers. I could easily fill a blog post with nothing but a list of the most outrageous examples of this, but for now I'll focus only on the most recent. After Trump lost Georgia and that loss was confirmed by a hand recount, he lashed out at Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. Please understand that Mr. Raffensperger is a rock ribbed Republican who made no secret of the fact that he voted for Trump. Nevertheless, during a Thanksgiving press conference, the president called him "an enemy of the people" for simply doing his job with integrity. This follows numerous attacks on the free press, the military, the intelligence community and anyone else who would speak the truth rather than tell Donald Trump that his every fabrication, however preposterous, is the unvarnished truth.

For those of us who want to remain optimistic, we should remember that while this period may evoke the specter of McCarthyism, history may "rhyme" again in another way. Right before McCarthy's censure that effectively signaled the beginning of the end, Senator McCarthy's favorable/unfavorable rating was a net (-11%) unfavorable. That's basically where Trump has always been. My fervent hope is that after he leaves office and we regain some of our lost decency and values, Trumpism will be as reviled as McCarthyism and for the same reason.

Frank Capra's America on Backward Day

Yesterday, January 31st was Backward Day (look it up) and it couldn't have come at a more appropriate time. For those unfamiliar with this, on Backward Day we're supposed to do the opposite of what's normally done. Since everything this country has ever maintained to be good, honorable or noble is being undone in favor of blind fealty to an American fuehrer, the timing is poetic.

Like Frank Capra movies, we used to be the country that celebrated the triumph of what's right over the forces of corrupt and powerful bullies thanks to the courage of underdogs and society's belief in the dignity of the common man. Sadly, thanks to the cowardice of the entire Republican Party, we have officially abandoned everything admirable about our system of government. Nearly every Republican we elected to provide a check on a would-be autocrat has chosen instead to be an accomplice in the systematic dismantling of every single thing we once stood for, leaving in their place an indelible stain on our history.

Every day seems to bring a new example of things happening that I once thought would never happen here. One small example is Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) trying repeatedly to illegally expose the "whistleblower" in the Ukraine scandal. There are several reasons why this is so indicative of moral rot and bankruptcy of the Republican Party in the age of Trump: 1) We passed laws protecting whistleblowers so that someone who stood up for what was right could be shielded from retaliation from the criminals they exposed. 2) Rand Paul is philosophically a libertarian, meaning he is in the vanguard of those who would support rooting out and stopping the corruption of an overreaching government official. 3) There is no probative or other value in naming this person, so 4) The real and bone-chilling reason Paul is doing this is pure thuggery. He is counting on intimidation of those who would do the right thing. He is like someone in the early 60s sharing the names of people in Mississippi who were helping blacks register to vote.

We used to stand for the rule of law and while there was the sort of partisan wrangling one might expect in a system such as ours, what we're now seeing is so far beyond the pale on a continual basis that things that would have been front page scandals just a few years ago now provoke a collective yawn. It was like a bad dream yesterday to see headlines that Republicans had managed to block any witnesses from testifying in the impeachment trial. That is to say, they managed to stop facts from coming to light. To put it another way, they succeeded in obstructing justice and helping to create a post-truth world.

The worst part of all is that elected Republicans still know right from wrong but they refuse to do what's right. There is virtually nothing and no one they will defend against Trump's wrath. The free press, the military, our intelligence agencies, war heroes, gold star families, Navy SEALs...are all examples of those Trump has gone after if they differ with Dear Leader. In the last example on that list, Navy SEALs, they have been lumped in with the "deep state"...Navy SEALs!! Trump undid the punishment for the SEAL who by all accounts did what was wrong, then went on to punish those who dared to stand up and do what was right.

If this actually were a Frank Capra movie, Donald Trump would have succeeded in turning Bedford Falls in to Pottersville and the MAGA hat wearing faithful would worship at the altar of Mr. Potter and call George Bailey a "libtard". As proud as I once was of this country is how ashamed of it I am now. Happy Backward Day indeed.

The Anti-Griffith Show

In 1925, Bobby Jones lost the U.S Open golf championship by one stroke after calling a one-stroke penalty on himself earlier in the tournament. He believed that a ball had moved after he addressed it even though no one else saw any such thing. Over the objections of tournament officials and Walter Hagen, his playing partner and competitor, Jones insisted on adding the penalty stroke. When the press congratulated him for his honesty, his reply was, "You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.” To Bobby Jones and people like him, integrity was inviolable and not for sale at any price.

This ideal was common in popular culture when I was growing up, but of all the examples I could cite, first and foremost in my mind is The Andy Griffith Show. The show revolved around Sheriff Andy Taylor and the other residents of Mayberry, North Carolina, a typical small American town. While the show was very entertaining, it was also a moral compass and a celebration of our national character at its best. The show inspired us to be better people.

While I may not have had the words for it in my childhood, I was most impressed by Sheriff Taylor always being the bigger man no matter what. He wasn't only kind and unselfish when it was easy, but also on occasions when the rest of us might have retreated from our noblest ideals. People came first and his ego was no part of the equation, For instance, if he had to bring people together, Andy would try to promote peace and harmony without any need to take the credit, and he would even pretend he wasn't as wise as he actually was. He didn't need acknowledgement of his superior insight, and more importantly, he wouldn't buckle if people laughed at him and said. "Gee, Andy, you would think a smart fella like you would have known better!" He would just smile and take it, allowing them to laugh at him because he cared about others and he would do the right thing whether it was hard or easy.

We now have a United States president who is the exact opposite. His narcissism will always take precedence over all else. For this reason he has done everything in his power to erode and destroy the institutions of a free and civil society. Because he isn't man enough to admit the indisputable fact that he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, he'll stop at nothing to have people believe that our very democracy is compromised and unreliable. He has also made any number of jaw-dropping comments about our courts, for instance suggesting that no jurist with any Mexican heritage can be trusted in a case involving Trump or calling a well respected member of the federal judiciary a "so called judge." No judge can be considered legitimate unless he says Donald Trump is absolutely right about everything. Worst of all, his endless ranting about the media and his critics is designed to make us believe that real news is fake and fake news is real. This Orwellian nightmare come to power is the single greatest threat to our national peace of mind and cohesion I've ever lived to see.

I can't help but think of Superman, not only because that comic book gave us Bizarro World, a planet on which everything was the opposite of the earth, but also because I'm now witnessing an American president who is literally at war with truth, justice and the American way.

The United States of aMErIca

The title of this post wasn't capitalized at random; the upper case ME and I are intended to show emphasis. The old maxim, "There's no 'I' in team," is an exhortation to think of others with whom we share common purpose, and to be willing to sacrifice for the greater good rather than focusing exclusively on our own selfish desires. Unfortunately, there's not only an "I" in America, there's also a "Me". Our rejection of the team player mentality has become painfully apparent in recent years. The national ideal of "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" can now be safely buried beneath JFK's eternal flame at Arlington.

Just as everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die, nobody likes paying taxes but everyone expects the road to be paved, and to make matters worse, Americans tend to bristle at the idea of coming together to solve our problems because in this society we celebrate rugged individualism over anything that even remotely smacks of collectivism. While individual drive contributed to our meteoric rise, self-absorption to the exclusion of all else will trigger our fall. We would have achieved only a small fraction of our success if we hadn't also made huge personal sacrifices for the greater good of the country. It's this half of the equation that's been missing from the conversation in the last thirty years. It's been given short shrift by the political left and ignored entirely by the right. Unlike prior generations, we no longer seem to understand the distinction between enlightened self-interest and petty selfishness.

It's heartbreaking to watch my country that once stood alone in greatness sliding towards the middle of the pack. It's even more painful to realize that our decline and fall is self-inflicted and brought about in large part because we can't seem distinguish between the government and the society. We talk about the government as though it were a disembodied iron fist beating us into submission rather than a mechanism through which we come together and decide what we want to do as a nation. We've become so fractured and dysfunctional as a society that we can't even have a constructive, civil conversation about what our priorities are and how we might achieve our goals and solve our problems, much less undertake the difficult task of executing the solutions.

Most of all, I'm bothered by the consummate and ill-founded arrogance of those who spend their lives wailing about how put upon they are because society asks them contribute like those who came before them and built the country we love. These malcontents are aMErIcans. These people are like the dreaded third generation ne'er-do-wells who squander what was handed to them on a silver platter. The first generation rises from rags and builds a business to be proud of. The second generation grows up watching the hard work, sacrifice and the glory of success and expands the business, generating real wealth. The third generation, growing up knowing nothing but country club life and a sense of entitlement, destroys what others worked so hard to build.

These aMErIcans think that the world should just leave them alone to work their magic, and that their success is born exclusively of their great gifts and hard work. They don't see how their lives were aided because we built an amazing society, educating our populace, building an infrastructure, devising and enforcing laws that protected people, physical and intellectual property, fighting and winning wars that allowed us to establish favorable business arrangements, and on and on. All of these things came about because prior generations gave so unselfishly for the good of the country. Because of the enlightenment and great sacrifice of those who came before, these aMErIcans were born on a mountain top, yet they act as though they summited the peak themselves without the aid of oxygen or Sherpa guides.

To those Americans who came before me and allowed me to be born into a life that most can only dream of, I lack the words to adequately express my respect and gratitude. Let me also apologize for the ungrateful, greedy, solipsistic aMErIcans who have risen to political prominence lately. They disgrace your legacy and you deserve much, much better.

All the President's Menaces

In 1776, Thomas Paine began his series of pamphlets entitled, The American Crisis with the famous words, "These are the times that try men's souls." If Paine were alive today he would express the same sentiment regarding the current American crises. We have big problems yet we can't come together enough to solve even the simple ones. We've faced tremendous challenges throughout or history, but right now whether we're talking about routine matters such as raising the debt ceiling or vexing, intractable problems such as our dismal employment situation, all struggles have been exacerbated because, among other things, Republicans have decided to cut off the country's nose to spite the president's face.

Conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers are cheering on GOP lawmakers who seek first and foremost to obstruct President Obama at every turn. If their opposition happens to mesh with a principled stand, so much the better, but in the absence of a good reason or anything resembling integrity, they'll oppose the president anyway. Of course if al-Qaeda had hatched such a plan to paralyze our national government, rendering us incapable of dealing with our pressing issues, these very same right-wingers would become hysterical and pour into the streets in a blind rage with three or four guns apiece in tow. Sadly, Republican lawmakers have been ideologically hijacked by the fringe elements of their party and, consequently, while our nation is foundering, these legislators who are well paid to be part of the solution, have become a conspicuous part of the problem.

The employment situation is still a nightmare. As I said in a previous post, we need to add at least 125,000 jobs per month just to essentially maintain the status quo. Thus, from June 1, 2000-June 30, 2011 (133 months) we needed to add over 16.6 million jobs, but we actually lost 868,000 jobs over that period, leaving us 17.5 million jobs in the hole. I don't blame President Obama for the job losses that have occurred since he took office 30 months ago any more than I would blame a pitcher for his dreadful 1-7 win loss record if four of the eight guys playing behind him have been bribed by gamblers to purposely lose ballgames. The Republican Party has made dimming President Obama's reelection prospects a top priority, and in their eyes, deliberately prolonging the agony of the American people is nothing more than acceptable collateral damage.

I know that people are upset. I understand that the Tea Party faithful could (and did) weather economic hard times with a president they kind of liked and economic good times with a president they didn't like, but hard times with a black Democratic president named Barack Obama was more than they could endure and they were sucked into a vortex of paranoia and unbridled hatred. What I don't understand is why so many people of comparatively modest means insist on throwing themselves on live grenades just so the very rich won't have to be bothered by those distracting explosion sounds.

Republicans have at every opportunity replaced the term "wealthiest Americans" with the term "job creators" and made these people sacred cows we disturb at our peril. However, our wars and other endeavors must be paid for by someone, so every dollar those at the top don't contribute must come from those below them on the economic ladder. More importantly, the notion that increasing taxes on those with the highest incomes will cost us jobs is questionable at best. In 1993 Republicans thundered the same warning as Bill Clinton raised taxes on top earners. However, what followed was the greatest expansion of jobs in our country's history. Right after that boom, George W. Bush lowered taxes on the economic elite, unleashing the worst prolonged period of job losses since the Great Depression. This would suggest two lessons about the claim that we need to cut taxes on the very rich or we'll lose jobs: First, ignoring this and doing the polar opposite can yield the best results we've ever seen and, secondly, following this advice can unleash a gut-wrenching catastrophe for all but the extremely wealthy.