The Great Forgetting

 “How hard will the Democrats fight for the majority that elected them, and how hard will the Republicans fight to enshrine minority rule in our institutions?” Waleed Shahid, The Nation

He’s gone. The blessed day finally arrived. Trump lumbered away, disgraced, deflated, and defanged.  The people’s house is under new management; Joe Biden is now president. No riots broke out, the hallowed steps of the Capitol weren’t stormed by heavily-armed Trump supporters. It seems those malign forces went back to ground. 

But no sooner did Biden sit down in the Oval Office -- after it had been thoroughly disinfected, fumigated, saged, and exorcised -- than did the Great Forgetting begin. Republican halfwits like Lindsey Graham called for unity and warned of angering millions of people if Trump is tried by the Senate. Cries of “Putting a former president on trial is unconstitutional!”were heard on the cable networks. One piece I read on Politico or The Hill even argued that in the name of national unity Biden should pardon Trump as Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. The argument didn’t sway me. There can be no unity unless there are consequences for Trump and all connected with the January 6th Insurrection. We must call it what it was: a brazen attempt to seize political power by force, and by terror. Some of the folks who stormed the Capitol at Trump’s instigation believed they had license to rampage and immunity from consequences. Where did that notion come from, who planted the seed? 

America has to look under its bed and find out who gave aid, comfort and money to Trump’s foot soldiers, but I fear the January 6 Insurrection will slip out of focus, lose purchase as time passes and Congress gets distracted by shiny political objects. We need to immediately establish a commission invested with broad authority to investigate, hold public hearings, and out the enablers on the inside, the ones with badges and government-issued ID, and possibly even a few who sport Congressional lapel pins. 

In our investigation of the Insurrection, we must determine what Trump was doing and who he communicated with while the insurgents ransacked the Capitol and chanted for Mike Pence to be hung. Phone records, text messages, emails -- we need to see it all. 

Donald Trump will not enjoy his final years on this earth. Too many arms of the law encircle the worst president in modern American history, twice loser of the popular vote, twice impeached, and let’s hope once convicted. 

I repeat what I have written before -- it will take a few years to gauge the full effects of Trump’s single disastrous term. He drove the country blindfolded at full speed, convinced that only he knew the way, and millions of people took his word for it and went along for the ride. Biden’s crew has just begun to sort through the slag left by Trump’s people, and will no doubt be stunned and horrified by the incompetence and stupidity they discover. 

Like millions of my fellow citizens, I felt a sense of relief when Inauguration Day came off without a hitch. It was a good day for the country, a great day for women as Kamala Harris assumed the vice presidency. I see America too clearly to get weepy about the performative rituals of American democracy, but I do not dismiss their value. The spectacle surrounding the peaceful transfer of power was all the more remarkable and meaningful after four long years trapped beneath Trump’s oppressive ego. It was solemn and serious and steadying, a measure of comfort for a weary nation. The Trump years were hard, marked by cruelty and stupidity on a stunning scale. When the helicopter carrying Trump cleared DC’s airspace the tone of the country immediately changed. Biden gave a heartfelt speech full of platitudes about unity and American ingenuity and our essential, enduring decency, but along with the words themselves, it was the sound of a reassuring voice that many needed to hear. 

I don’t have any doubts about Biden’s basic decency, honesty, and sense of honor. It’s his policies on the economy, the use of military force, mass surveillance, climate change, and racial justice where I worry about Biden. Policy and time. Let’s not forget that Biden is a 78-year-old man faced with multiple challenges. 

After only a couple of days’ time the rose began to wilt. The usual political fuckery began with Mitch McConnell reverting to his obstructionist role. Biden’s doing as much as he can by Executive Order, but sooner or later he will need to pass legislation and that still entails striking deals with McConnell.  

Unity and reconciliation will come through accountability for Trump, as well as his enablers and collaborators. 

The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 13

 “Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity for none.” Wade Davis on Donald Trump, Rolling Stone

Biden selects Kamala Harris as his running mate. Old Joe made the safe choice. In this moment Harris casts a longer shadow than the other contenders for the job because of her recent experience and exposure in a national campaign, and the high profile posts she held in California. Harris is smart, quick on her feet, telegenic, the daughter of immigrants, and, of course, a woman of color. That’s a lot of boxes checked. There are things to like about Kamala Harris, but if you’re a Progressive she’s still a disappointment based on her criminal justice record as the District Attorney in San Francisco and Attorney General of California. Idealism and realism, pick your poison. If I thought a headless mannequin could beat Trump, I’d vote for the mannequin in a heartbeat. 

Biden-Harris v. Trump-Pence. In a sane country this is no contest, like Bayern Munich shredding Barcelona 8-2 in the Champions League quarter finals. A hiding, a pasting, an annihilation and humiliation. Barcelona bruised and bloodied and dazed, the great Messi with his head down, not just beaten, defeated. That’s what Donald Trump deserves for the hell he’s inflicted on this country and its imperfect institutions. But not just Trump needs to go down, the GOP needs a hard reckoning for allowing themselves -- and in some cases eagerly volunteering -- to be bullied, humiliated and punked by Donald J. Trump. The moral cowardice in that ideologically stunted party is staggering. 

Biden and Harris make a decent tough on crime duo, but is that old Democratic Party formula what’s needed in this moment? The squishy middle ground when it’s so clear that much bolder initiatives are desperately needed? Slow, incremental change will not meet the climate, economic, and social justice challenges we can no longer afford to kick down the road. We’re like the Barcelona back line -- too exposed and easy to exploit. 

If I thought a headless mannequin could beat Trump, I’d vote for the mannequin in a heartbeat. 

The election should be a cakewalk, but this is America on the downslope of empire, a crazed fool roams around the Oval Office in search of conspiracy theories. America is no stranger to electoral mischief, as many of us witnessed in 2000, when a conservative Supreme Court delivered the country into the hands of George W. Bush. In 2016, perhaps with a boost from Russia, America handed its heart to Donald J. Trump, and some people, myself included, foresaw a shitshow of epic proportions. I saw Trump as a fraud the minute he came down the escalator, and cannot believe any person of sound mind ever expected anything from Trump other than what he has wrought; transgressions stretching far longer than Abraham Lincoln was tall. Honest Abe. Dishonest Don. But that’s my point. Trump has always been a con man, a tax cheat, a draft dodger, a philanderer, a business failure, a liar, a fabulist, and, of course, always, and above all, a showman selling magic beans, all of which seemed obvious to me and why I expected colossal incompetence and corruption. In this regard Trump has delivered. I didn’t predict a pandemic, but every administration is tested in some way, challenged by some crisis. Bush had 9/11, Obama the economic crash, and Donald J. Trump and Co. got the Covid-19 pandemic. The rest will live in infamy. 

Trump is reeling all over the political map now, firing on his remaining cylinders, stoking racial fears in the Leave It to Beaver suburbs, repeating as fact scurrilous lies about Kamala Harris’ birthright citizenship, promising vaccines and cures for the coronavirus, magic money to keep the Social Security System solvent, and peace in the Middle East. The Trump campaign, but more importantly Trump himself, knows he has fried his own goose, and the only path to reelection is through voter suppression, depressing turnout, and seizing control of what in this pandemic year is the backbone of our electoral system: the US Postal Service. For his own political survival, Trump is willing to neuter an institution that has existed since the beginning of our republic. 

Because Trump is a crude and stupid man, he wields power like a sledgehammer, not a scalpel.  Imitating the autocrats he holds in such esteem -- Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan --  Trump forces key arms of government to work in the  interests of his political agenda, not that of the people. For proof look no further than the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Now the USPS, in broad daylight, is being corrupted for Trump’s benefit. What American institution will be next? 

After almost four years in office, Trump still has zero understanding of the legislative process, and refuses to learn. He can’t tell the difference between a bill introduced in Congress and one of his empty Executive Orders. Trump wants to rule by decree. When he signed four mostly useless EO’s last week at one of his golf clubs, I think Trump believed he was solving the economic crisis we are in. The man dwells in his own universe.

The hard reality is that even if the Biden-Harris ticket prevails in November, the road ahead will be perilous, especially between November and January 20th. The pandemic will almost certainly still be with us, the economy might be worse, and the white people who cling to dreams of past glory and supremacy will be angrier than ever. Trump and Co. will be busy stuffing suitcases with files and money, issuing pardons, stealing silverware. One last orgy before charges are filed. Our best hope is to stop the bleeding, stabilize the nation, and then get to work on the massive problems we face, including climate change. As Bill McKibben writes in the New York Review of Books, “The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming.” Biden must be pushed to address climate change in a serious, systematic way. Old Joe isn’t the man to take on the entrenched corporate power that owns our country...how can he when he actively helped Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama turn the American economy into a rigged game? 

That’s a downer, but so is thinking about the extent to which unfettered corporate consolidation has perverted our country. This is a subject rarely explored on corporate media, for obvious reasons, but it’s finally getting some attention (thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges have warned of concentrated corporate power for more than a decade) from the mainstream. Thom Hartmann is out with a new book about monopolies, as is David Dayen, author of Monopolized. When every aspect of our lives, from health insurance to air travel to internet service to banking to our food supply, is controlled by a handful of corporations operating a functional monopoly, we cannot begin to address climate change, income inequality, systemic racism, housing or health care. No corporation should ever be allowed to become “too big to fail.” Concentrated economic power doesn’t happen without political power. It’s time to reject Robert Bork’s perverse interpretation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Bork got it all wrong. It’s not about lower consumer prices for laundry detergent, it’s all about power. 

As Bill McKibben writes in the New York Review of Books, “The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming.”

After yesterday’s horrific defeat to Bayern Munich, heads are sure to roll at the Nou Camp. Many people will find themselves out of a job. Top level club football is a hard gig. When giants like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventas fall short in the Champions League, managers get sacked and players get sold or sent out on loan. Bayern Munich are a relentless team, a high-pressing, quick, physical and technically-gifted group. I lost track of how many times Bayern won the ball in Barcelona’s half, and even with a four goal cushion, Bayern midfielder Thomas Muller was chasing balls down like the match was in the balance. Relentless and ruthless. I don’t feel so bad about my beloved Chelsea’s 7-1 defeat to Bayern on aggregate.