A Season of Waiting

 “These are dangerous times for democracy. The danger can be seen in rising xenophobia and growing public support for autocratic figures who test the limits of democratic norms.” Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit

For those Americans who see Donald J. Trump and what remains of the Republican Party for the clear danger they pose to America, the past year has been a season of waiting. We waited for the Democrats to nominate their presidential ticket; we waited for the party conventions, and then the debates. We waited for November 3rd, election day, and hoped Joe Biden would win by a margin too big to steal. He did. Then we waited for December 14, when the votes of the Electoral College were certified. We have since waited for January 5th, and the Georgia run-off election which will decide if Mitch McConnell retains his seat atop the smoking heap that is the Trump-owned GOP -- a party that for more than a quarter century has cared about one thing and only one thing: power -- and is now devouring itself, split between Republicans who still believe in ordinary reality and the Constitution, and the Trump wing which believes in fantasy and is ready and willing to trample the Constitution. 

And then there’s January 6th, when a heretofore largely ceremonial process -- the acceptance by Congress of the electoral college votes -- will be turned into a fascist spectacle by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz on the Senate side, and nearly seventy-five percent of House Republicans, led by the likes of Kevin McCarthy and Louie Gohmert. 

While those of us who care about democracy have waited, and waited, Donald J. Trump and his ragtag cast of enablers have filed bogus lawsuits alleging election fraud, made seditious statements in the media, and called the legitimacy of Biden’s win into question. Some of Trump’s pliant minions, like Cruz and Hawley, are playing along for reasons of ambition and self-promotion; others, like the aforementioned Gohmert, who is simply a nitwit, have contorted themselves to curry favor with Trump’s base, which they see as key to their future political advancement. Cynical? Yes. Dangerous? Absolutely. 

And then we learn of Trump’s hour-long phone call with the Georgia Secretary of State, in which Trump -- two months after the election, and with the vote counts certified and submitted to Congress -- put on his full mob boss act, alternately cajoling, threatening, and pleading for the Secretary of State to “find” 11,780 votes so he, Trump, could be declared the victor in Georgia. This act by Trump was shocking, but in no way surprising. We saw the same gambit with Ukraine. That escapade led to Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, and should have led to his removal from office. 

The only surprising thing is how pathetic and demented Trump sounded on the call, rolling out wild conspiracy theories that have already been debunked. As mob kingpins go, Trump simply isn’t up to the task, he’s too stupid. After his experience with Ukraine and Bob Woodward, what man goes into an hour-long phone call with other people on the line, including legal counsel, and lays out the play as if he’d never heard of audio recording? Answer, a really dumb, desperate man. 

I expect a circus on January 6th, and quite possibly some violence in the streets of DC. The coup plotters will drag out the proceedings as long as possible, but when all their rounds are expended, Biden will be declared the winner, again. And then those of us who believe in democracy will wait for January 20th. We will wait, and we will hope that a desperate, cornered Donald J. Trump will not launch a war against Iran. That two-week span might be the most dangerous time of all. Desperate men commit desperate, destructive acts.

Our season of waiting continues. 

Rebuild the Guardrails, America

“But if such a thing as legal objectivity ever existed, it was obliterated 20 years ago with Bush v. Gore. It was then that the Supreme Court proved by a 5-4 vote, that it was a purely political branch.” Elie Mystal, The Nation

For Halloween to fall two days before the election is one haunted house too many, an added torture, another crack of the psychological whip, as the country votes and votes and votes, and begins to hold its breath. The big turnout that is essential to a Biden victory looks as if it’s happening, but after the Shock of 2016,  I am ever skeptical. This is the United States of America, a crumbling, bumbling, empire that is in the hands of a crime family, and all manner of election fuckery is possible. 

Someone should ask stone faced Mike Pence this question: Mr. Vice President, If you trust the American people as much as you say you do, why does your party make voting so hard for so many people? How do you square that circle, Mr. Vice President? 

After exposing my brain to news reports and podcasts over the past few days, I’m feeling  anxious, testy, and nervous. I got to thinking about guardrails.  Like many others across the country, I’m trying to game out the various ways Trump can lose, and still hold his office. These are numerous and unsettling. If Trump’s time in office has taught us anything it should be this: the guardrails failed. From the start, four years ago, Trump has been testing the limits on his power. The American “system”, once thought so stable and secure, hasn’t stopped him. For all its flaws, the Mueller Report was conclusive about Trump’s obstruction of justice, a charge for which he should have been impeached. But the Senate, elected to office by a minority of the population, with the absurdity of populous California and under-populated Wyoming having equal power, is in the hands of a far-right GOP which refuses to play by established rules and norms. When every GOP senator, with the exception of Mitt Romney, voted to acquit Trump, a guardrail fell.  

Trump landed Marine 1 on the Emoluments Clause. Trump and his crime family have diverted millions of taxpayer dollars to the Trump Organization. Totally without shame, the Trump Gang will never meet a profitable conflict of interest they won’t embrace. Trump should have hit a guardrail the first time he dipped his beak in the public till, but he didn’t. A few Democrats grumbled about it, some media outlets reported on it, but there wasn’t a groundswell of outrage from the public. 

What protection do we have against demagoguery? When the Democratic-controlled House sent the White House a subpoena, Trump either sued or flat-out refused to comply, and he demanded that other federal agencies do the same. His party turned a blind eye and deaf ear every time. The founders feared majority rule, so they built in a few circuit breakers, the Electoral College being the kingpin. Trump can lose the popular vote by a pretty wide margin and still win the Electoral College. Every analyst I’ve listened to or article I’ve read points out that 2020 is not 2016. Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton. Trump isn’t the brash challenger, he’s the president, and more than 220,000 Americans have died through his incompetence and malice. His party, with very few exceptions, has aided and abetted Trump in his ill-fated effort to outwit Covid-19. If Trump’s not held accountable -- if the solid majority of us who think competence in government is a good thing, an important social benefit, can’t hold him accountable -- who or what institution will? 

I think of Highway 1 in California, the twists and turns, the many bridges, and how almost every time I’ve driven Highway 1, some stretch of it has been under construction. Our democracy should be like that, always being maintained at some key junction, shored up, rebuilt, inspected with critical eyes. The Federal Courts need reform. We have to fix our chaotic voting system. It’s time to ditch the Electoral College. We’re not living in the 18th century, and the Founding Fathers were not gods. They were white men, mostly of wealth, who created a system that spreads power around, with three co-equal branches designed to contain the others’ power. These white men understood the tyranny of kings. A system in some kind of balance was the idea, right? It was the best hope for a stable government and society that could expand and prosper; a government that is constantly falling apart can’t do those things. We can thank the Founders for the basic framework, imperfect though it is, commend them for an admirable run at self-government, but we have to make some repairs, restore balance to the system so that we have a chance to face and survive the massive climate challenge that is already here. The road we’re driving cannot get us where we need to go. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 33

“The past is uncertain, mobile. It shifts and rearranges back there. All might turn out and change back there yet.” Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

Sunny days in Santa Barbara, but so windy at times that the old windows in our apartment rattle. A gust pulls the back door shut with a bang. Our Covid-19 spring. SB remains in hibernation, though it seems more and more people are venturing out. Cautious optimism from local officials and Governor Gavin Newsome, the usual batshit happy talk from the White House. 

As of this writing, the Trump Death clock has recorded 55,642 deaths as a result of Trump’s incompetence.

The Orange Menace claims to be taking daily doses of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has shown little to no efficacy against Covid-19. Despite medical evidence, Trump continues to tout the drug, saying he’s heard many stories about its effectiveness. Still hoping for a magic bullet. 

By mid-June, if not earlier, we will know if this re-opening gambit was worth the potential risk. If a flare-up of infections is going to happen, it should happen around that time. I think about Frank Snowden, a historian of infectious diseases, most notably the Black Death that struck parts of Europe off and on for nearly 400 years, who contrasted the public health response in Italy (Snowden was there, caught Covid-19, recovered) with that of the United States. Unlike here, where the message about the pandemic has been inconsistent, chaotic, contradictory, and politicized, Italy’s public messaging about the virus was consistent, focused on public health, not politics, sparing lives, not attacking scientific authorities or drenching the public with magical thinking and empty boasts day after day.  

As of this writing, the Trump Death clock has recorded 55,642 deaths as a result of Trump’s incompetence. This shocking number and the misery and sadness and grief it represents, should spell doom for Trump in November, even against a cardboard cutout of Joe Biden, but this is America and there’s a very good chance that the Electoral College will once again deliver victory for Trump. 

That thought is too depressing to contemplate at this early hour of the day, when I can hear birds chirping in the yard. 

Democrats are decent when it comes to governing, but hopeless when it comes to winning elections; Republicans have their message down pat, know how to perpetuate their power, but can’t govern their way out of a wet paper sack. Republicans can’t get over their ideological wall to deal with reality, while Democrats are so compromised by being joined at the neck with Big Finance that they have alienated millions of people who once supported Democrats, no matter what. 

And there we sit, on this slippery, dangerous slope. Our old nemesis, avarice, grins at us from higher up, dislodges a boulder with his foot, and laughs as it tumbles down. 

Spring of discontent, disaster, depression, denial, and dereliction. 

Sun climbing the bottlebrush tree, a crow squawks and is answered by a bluejay. Another Covid-19 morning.  

The Worst and Dimmest: the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump

“Rich man wanna be king/And a king ain’t satisfied/Till he rules everything.” 

Bruce Springsteen

If hell exists, Devin Nunes will occupy a front row seat in Satan’s luxury box, near the fiery pit, where the smell of sulphur is most pungent. Listening to his opening statement for less than five minutes made me want to puke. An acquaintance, the comedian Kimmie Dee, put it aptly, albeit crudely, when she posted on Facebook that Nunes’s ability to speak with Trump’s dick in his mouth is remarkable. Indeed. Nunes is quite a talent. 

What is the strange hold Trump has over many Republicans? Why does this bombastic, ignorant, narcissistic, ridiculous failure scare the bejesus out of the GOP’s rank and file, its leadership, and the Republican National Committee? I suppose one can ask the same question about any cult leader. Logic, reason, morality, and common sense go right out the window. Here, drink this Kool-Aid and all your doubts and difficulties will evaporate.  There was never any mystery about Donald Trump or any question that he would govern the same way he ran the Trump Organization or that he would fail spectacularly; spectacular failure is Trump’s stock-in-trade, as is lying, cheating, and defrauding others. What is mysterious, baffling, is the utter, complete lack of honor among congressional Republicans. Damn near every last one of them has debased himself or herself since Trump got anointed by the Electoral College. Loyalty to a political party or a leader at the expense of the law, the country, or principle is a hallmark of despotism. Every last member of the GOP has forgotten that he or she swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. The Constitution, not the GOP and certainly not Donald J. Trump. 

What is wrong with these people? Wake up, open your eyes and look at whose ass you’ve been kissing for three years. 

I’m so tired of hearing Republicans claim that Democrats are trying to overturn the 2016 election. Republicans conveniently forget that their boy Trump lost the popular vote; the only reason he made it to the White House is because the undemocratic Electoral College favors small states over larger ones. Impeachment is not about the 2016 election. Impeachment is about one co-equal branch of our government checking the abuses of power by the executive. Our Founding White Fathers had many shortcomings, but their fear of unchecked executive power was grounded in experience. 

Having no defense, all Republicans can resort to are spurious attacks on the process.

1000 Days of Madness

“If we are not currently an authoritarian nation it’s thanks in part to the insubordinate spirit of a good deal of the American public and the underlying confidence behind this relative fearlessness.”  Rebecca Solnit

1,000 days of the madness of would-be King Donald I. At times it feels like a bad dream and I long to snap wide awake and breathe a sigh of relief that Trump never happened except in our imagination. The idiocy, cruelty, venality and mendacity is almost too heavy a burden. When we look back at this period -- if the republic survives and what remains of our institutions hold -- one question that must be answered is why many of our fellow citizens followed Trump, believed in him, and thought he was doing good for the nation. Any conscious, sane person who listens to Trump for more than a minute should reach the conclusion that the man is nuts, insane, a sociopath. I don’t think all of Trump’s supporters and followers are bad people, but I do marvel at how misinformed they are.

Trump is P.T. Barnum on crack. 

Has Trump made us stupid or did we make Trump because we are stupid? During the reign of George W. Bush the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson often said that America was trapped in a downward spiral of dumbness. W. Bush, now being rehabilitated as a kindly nitwit, seemed the epitome of elite decay, a man buoyed by his family name and connections and wealth, a serial fuck-up who always landed on his feet, smiling, a faux cowboy. Donald J. Trump makes George W. Bush look eloquent by comparison. I never thought I would see that. Trump doesn’t have as much blood on his hands as Bush does, not yet anyway, but who knows if he manages to escape impeachment and scandal and win another term via the undemocratic Electoral College. 

As we saw this week, any translator who has to make sense of Trump’s gibberish is in a most difficult spot. “The Kurds have sand, a lot of sand. More sand than is good for them. Lot of sand, too much. It’s hard to imagine so much sand. You can’t believe it. Sand everywhere. Gets in your shoes and your hair. Hard to get the sand out of your hair. I’ve got great hair, the best hair of any American president, ever. Very soft, very shiny, it’s beautiful, my hair, my great and unmatched hair.”

1,000 days of madness, drifts of BS up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, Abraham Lincoln turning in his grave, George Washington sobbing uncontrollably as King Donald tramps over the republic. This can’t be happening, yet it is. It’s not a dream. Trump and the fourth string crew who surround him are becoming more and more blatant and defiant of every norm. Wholesale disregard for the Legislative branch. Total disdain for the rule of law. This is dangerous territory. 

Letter To My Daughter

“All meaningful resistance takes place outside the formal political structures.” Chris Hedges, Truthdig

In a few weeks you will turn eighteen. You will be eligible to vote, a right that women in this country struggled to obtain for three quarters of a century. Fearless women. Women armed with iron will and determination. Resolute women. You should never forget -- or take for granted -- the blood, sweat and tears that made it possible for you to exercise the franchise. Civil rights in this country are never given -- they have to be won -- and then protected, guarded, with unrelenting vigilance. 

Your education in our local public schools didn’t prepare you to be an engaged citizen, and our degraded media landscape, 95% of it controlled by corporations with their own interests and agendas, which, you will learn, has little to do with your interests. Corporate media mainly serves to obscure, confuse, or distract the public. How many times in your young life have you heard me rail at the television, furious at the mindless trivia that passes for news or apoplectic at the refusal of the weather person to say the words “climate change?” Understand, my daughter, that you must pay more attention to the subjects the corporate media doesn’t cover than those it does. If you want to be informed, you must look elsewhere, to independent media where real journalists are more intent on exposing the motivations of the powerful than they are cozying up to them and repeating their talking points. Here are a few names. Amy Goodman. Jeremy Scahill. Allan Nairn. Mehdi Hasan. Patrick Cockburn. Abby Martin. Robert Fisk. 

It’s no fault of your own that you have yet to realize how limited American democracy -- and I refer here to federal and state offices more than local ones -- is, and that it is so by design. The Founding Fathers, all white, all male, many of them slave owners, placed, from the beginning, the sanctity of private property above the needs of the people. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few, had no love of popular democracy. They feared the mob, the uneducated masses whose passions might be manipulated by a demagogue or charlatan, and they created impediments to popular sovereignty. One of these constructions, the Electoral College, is why the nation and the world is saddled with the malignant fraud who currently occupies the White House. 

Polls consistently show that the majority of the American public supports some form of universal health care, secure retirement, good and affordable public education, protection of the environment, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a reduction in military spending. The problem is that what people want and what the political system is willing to deliver are two completely different things. The United States Senate is firmly in the hands of the Republican Party whose base of support is in underpopulated rural states; our state, for instance, has nearly 40 million people, but we have the same number of Senators as Wyoming and North and South Dakota whose combined populations are puny by comparison. You are destined to learn about the tyranny of the minority. This is not an accident. It’s one reason why the popular will is continually thwarted. 

As it is want to do, money has perverted our political system. There is a pathology of great wealth in America. Too few hands control too much wealth, and that wealth enables these few hands to bend the political system to their will and for their interests. This breeds more tyranny. The wealthy are largely unaccountable. Their greed is sanctioned and protected by the legislators they buy and control. 

The broad American middle class built after World War II, when Germany and Japan and most of Europe was in ashes, has been shrinking for decades. Today it’s practically shrivelled. To go into all the reasons here would make this letter too long, but let me give you a thumbnail version: the decline of manufacturing and organized labor, and the decision of the Democratic Party to abandon its traditional constituencies after electoral losses in 1968 and 1972, coupled with a conservative backlash against the 1960’s counterculture, got the ball rolling away from the middle class and toward the wealthy. Ronald Reagan convinced people that government was the source of their problems, and that cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy was the magic solution. Democrats went right along. 

I have this nagging feeling that I haven’t done enough to leave you and your brother a more just world and a more promising future. I write this letter to you because I’m afraid of what’s coming, of the world you are soon to inherit. The dark forces of racism, ignorance, cruelty, brutality and bigotry are marching all over the world. Almost as deadly is the absolute denial in the corridors of power, particularly in Washington D.C., of the onrushing climate catastrophe. It borders on the criminal, but to whom can we appeal? The wealthy believe their money, power and influence will shield them from climate change, as if they inhabit an alternate biosphere. Climate change is only for the rest of us. 

The answer? I don’t know. Vote wisely, but don’t expect too much from political leaders. Cultivate a healthy suspicion and remember that all governments lie, as the great American journalist I.F. Stone famously said. Real social change rarely comes from the top -- it starts from the bottom, with people willing to demand change, like the brave women who agitated for decades until they won the right to vote. Carry that legacy into your future. 

Election Day 2018: A Disc Brake on Trumpism?

“You cannot use the word ‘liberty’ when it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics.” Chris Hedges

I don’t know what will happen with the voting today. Will every person who is eligible to vote be able to cast a ballot, and will that ballot be accurately tallied? In the good old days of American mythology, this was taken for granted. Of course every vote was counted properly. How could it be otherwise? We were the nation that lectured other countries about democracy, who took it upon ourselves to oversee their elections. Democracy was in the American wheelhouse, the measure of our sophistication and greatness. Nobody did it better.

Our history is, of course, replete with examples of complete disdain for democracy, from excluding African-Americans and indigenous people to the anti-democratic Electoral College to the fact that we didn’t directly elect US senators until 1913. The 2000 presidential election of George W. Bush was stolen in broad daylight, and in 2016, Donald J. Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. In between, the Republican Party, aided by Republican Governors and Secretaries of State, has put in place mechanisms to purge voters from the rolls, require ID, disenfranchise former felons, and gerrymander voting districts.

The only way a minority party like the GOP can win elections is by cheating. With Trump at its head, the GOP is now an unabashedly white party. If the electoral playing field was level, the GOP would never win, it would not dictate political, economic, and judicial life in America to the majority of citizens. This isn’t to say that life would be grand if only the Democratic Party held the reins of power. While there are differences between the two parties, on matters of economics and war, in particular, the parties are remarkably similar, and in fact, are fueled by the same corporate donors. This is the reason Chris Hedges writes that an American voter cannot vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. Even if the Blue Wave materializes and sweeps Democrats into control of the House and Senate, our endless war in Afghanistan will go on, as will the failed War on Terror; the defense budget will remain untouchable. Democrats might make some noise about reversing Trump’s tax giveaways to the wealthy, but how vigorously will Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi battle Goldman Sachs and the other mega-banks?

Obviously, I’m hoping for the Dems to take at least one house of Congress and preferably both, not because I expect they will do much of anything about climate change, income inequality, white nationalism, immigration, voting rights, or the other issues pushing the country toward the brink. My hope is more limited: a disc brake on the Trump junta. That’s pretty much it. I have no faith that the Democrats, should they gain control, will have the spine to use their subpoena power to go after Trump’s myriad financial conflicts of interest. I can easily imagine Pelosi sputtering about the need for unity, to look ahead rather than back, to heal, etc. I’d wager that Pelosi will give Trump a pass the same way Obama gave the big banks a pass. The Democrats are nothing if not feckless. The only force that can alter this tendency for self-immolation is if progressives pull the party toward the left, out of the arms of the Clintonites and the Obamas and the Schumers and the Pelosis. That will be a hard task that requires organizing and mobilizing well beyond election day. The issues are there for the taking -- Medicare For All, free tuition at public universities and colleges, an unwinding of the carceral state, cuts to the Pentagon, and real action on climate change -- but establishment Democrats are unlikely to do much but tinker around the margins, as Obama did for 8 years.

Tomorrow morning the political furniture on the deck of the Titanic that is America may be poised for a new arrangement, but the structural icebergs that thwart true democracy and action on climate change, racism, militarism and poverty will still be in place.