They Hang Traitors, Don’t They?

                In the aftermath of the plundering of the American economy by the GOP and their rich donors, it can be hard to understand what really has happened in the eleven months of Trump’s reign.  So much that we had just assumed was part of the bedrock of our politics and our culture has been eroded or destroyed.  This week they finally found a way to kill off the ACA and start the process that will strip health insurance from millions – which is a wonky way of saying they just decided to kill thousands of people they were elected to represent.  It feels like watching a group of thugs in suits trash the neighbor girl’s lemonade stand, kick her in the teeth, and then, realizing they might have left a dime on the sidewalk, going back to take the dime and kick her again.   The spectacle of rich, old, white senators writing tax breaks for each other while kicking two million kids off health care makes the Grinch look like an amateur.

                As disgusting as this display was, the even more damaging news was that the Right has decided to defend Trump’s ties to Russia by attacking the special counsel.  What worries me is not the issue of collusion – which is pretty clear by now – or even the failure of congress to do one thing to stop Russian intrusion into our elections: what worries me is treason.  Trump has taken actions against NATO, the UN and climate change that have damaged American interests around the world.  Moving our embassy to Jerusalem just gave Russia the upper hand in any future political activity in the Middle East.  This is not just a matter of being incompetent – although he surely is that – it is a direct action that weakens American interests while aiding the interests of a hostile power.  Isn’t that treason?  Trump owes Putin and the Russian oligarchs (otherwise known as the Russian mob) billions for propping up his failing real estate empire.  Now he is paving the way for Russia to dominate world politics by dismantling the American government.

                He has destroyed the State Department, politicized and attacked the FBI, CIA and EPA.  He has nominated people for federal judgeships that have never tried a case.  His pathological lying has opened the door on a politics of deception that threatens the very notion of democracy.  He is still in violation of the constitution every day he doesn’t put his business interests in a blind trust.  I think we’ve just grown numb to the onslaught.  Every day is a new low.  Every news cycle brings an even more disastrous and unbelievable transgression.  We need something to focus our intention in a way that cuts through the noise and the chaos.  TREASON should do it.  Let’s stop talking about the normal political process or anybody’s legislative agenda.  This is basic.  You have to be an American or a traitor.  No more phony umbrage over NFL protests or hollow praising of the troops.  This is a moment to save your country or be part of the mob that aids and abets a traitor.

                Trump and Putin are the prototypes of a new form of post-nationalist power.  They represent the unfettered and unregulated use of wealth outside the structure of nation states.  They need a world of weakened states to allow their form of kleptocracy to flourish.  Trump, Putin and the GOP are in business of unshackling a new class of global robber barrens intent on destroying the environment and controlling the world’s economy.  To do that they are willing to make America a second- rate power and put the safety and health of its citizens at risk.  The interests of America are the interests of its people and not the interests of a craven class of political and economic opportunists.  The ‘tax’ bill they passed this week without even knowing what was in it, was a big step toward a new world disorder.

                This is the greatest existential threat to democracy since the Civil War.  This makes Benedict Arnold look like a clownish frat boy.  It’s time to tell the MAGA crowd that we’re the real patriots.  We believe in the good things that America can still become.  They are the enemy.  Their leader is guilty of treason.  To support him is to share his guilt.  I don’t just want an impeachment, I want a hanging

It’s Come to This

                The Republican Party is on the verge of doing what seemed impossible only a year ago.  They are about to pass legislation that will officially make this country a kleptocracy like Russia.  The new tax bill isn’t just a bad bill, it is the pretext for a new round of government austerity that will make it inevitable to cut social security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, health care and infrastructure.  It will mark the point at which we stopped being a functional democracy and started evolving into a caste system where there are one set of rights for the elites and quite another set of rights for everyone else.  We’re on our way to the same predicament as the folks in Puerto Rico who live in colony that the elites have abandoned and left for dead.

                All of this is brought to you by a party that will openly run a pedophile for the senate and refuse to question the sanity of a man who is quite obviously mentally unstable.  We have reached the point where 30 -35% of the people will now tell the vast majority of their fellow citizens that alternative or oppositional views no longer matter.  We are in the middle of an occupation that will only end when we end it.  The midterms and the 2020 elections are the last chance to stop this short of revolution.  The time to equivocate over candidates is over.  We have to form a coalition – hopefully it will be as diverse as the slate of candidates elected this year – regardless of the candidates to not just drive the Republicans out of office but to drive them to extinction. 

                It is time to call the Trump administration guilty of treason, of selling out America for their own economic connections to Russia.  It is time to demand that Trump be removed from office and treated as the very sick and dangerous man he is.  It is time to hold him accountable for the sexual assault he bragged about committing and to call out the racist supporters of this administration.  It is time to tell the Christian Right that it is impossible to consider them Christians at all anymore.  What good is the idea of Heaven if when you get there you find Roy Moore and Donald Trump?

                This was legislation written up as it was passed.  No one could even know what was in it or what the possible ramifications of the bill would be.  All they knew was that their ‘donors’ told them to do it.  There were no hearings, no scoring of the bill, no debate and no compromise.  The Republican party is not an American political party.  An American political party realizes that the people who disagree with them still have rights.  Usually we talk about this as protecting the right of the minority, but in this case, it’s the rights of the majority that are being ignored.  Nothing in this bill is supported by the majority of the citizens.  The Republicans continue their use of phony data, their lies about what the bill would really do, and they are depending on a president too stupid to know the difference to sign it into law.

                The framers of the constitution never imagined a political party that cared so little about the republic or the people in it.  The Republicans have become the thing they most wanted to avoid: a class of political hacks who would sell the country for their own economic gain.  It’s time to vote them out or it's time to revolt.  Resistance alone isn’t enough anymore.  This era is over – get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand in making a new order.  

Flaked Out

                Arizona senator, Jeff Flake, became the most recent Republican to publicly break ranks with Trump.  He gave a couple interviews followed by a cliché ridden and overly dramatic speech on the floor of the Senate saying it was time to say enough.  Then he went off and voted to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations while raising them on the poor and middle class.  I guess decency has its limits.  The hypocrisy of Flake’s actions captures the fate of the Republican party.  Flake is a reliable vote for the Trump agenda.  He occasionally has a reflective moment that makes him criticize the way Trump and his ilk have abandoned all pretense of being interested in democracy or serving the people, but there is no daylight between them on critical issues.

                Flake, and others like him, make two things obvious.  First, they will never rein in, let alone get rid of, Trump.  Trump is the logical extension of a party that wondered off in to Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy camp and never found their way home.  Trump may not behave the way they think he should, but he’s their boy when it comes to driving the country back to the good old days of white supremacy and male dominance.  The reaction to the first indictments to come out of the Special Counsel say it all – silence.  Second, the problem facing the country isn’t just that we have a completely unstable and unqualified president, the problem is that he’s not alone in the way he looks at the world.

                The constitution assumes that if a tyrant ever became president that the congress would do its due diligence and remove him.  It assumes that there would never be a party so enamored with its own brand that it would put party before country.  Bad bet.  Not only have Republicans given up on following the constitution and performing their duty to govern, they have turned a blind eye to what amounts to treason.  It is more important to Paul Ryan to give his rich puppet masters a totally unneeded and undeserved tax break than it is to safeguard the country from an attack by an enemy.  Republicans are so far enmeshed in their own agenda that they have completely abandoned the notion that they have to protect the country, unless, of course, it involves another alleged misdeed by Hillary.  Instead of wanting to get to the bottom of what happened in the last election and prevent it from happening again, they sound like first-graders whining that “he did it, too.”

                Flake lives in the same fantasy world as the rest of the far right.  A world where there is no discrimination – except against white folks, of course – where people still mine and burn coal and the environment is run by God.  They are still believers in ‘supply side’ economics and are still saying that tax cuts will do more than just give the people at the top even more money to hoard.  They live in the conspiratorial echo chamber of Fox News and the more extreme fantasies of Steve Bannon.  They are not sane.  They make up whatever suits their purpose and never take responsibility.  If caught in a lie, they point their finger at someone on the other side and start screaming about what they did.  They are led by a pathological liar and malignant narcissist.  What could go wrong?

                So when Jeff Flake stands before the camera with every hair in place and his tie in a perfect Windsor knot, pardon me if I’m not impressed.  While he tries to summon something he imagines to be courage or decency, but is mere flatulence, the country is dissolving.  Until he and other Republicans join the real world and take real action to help ordinary people, address climate change, fund education or any number of obvious and critical needs, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he made himself feel a little better.  He did nothing to help the country.  

Random Bits

1.       Trump on Korea:  One of the constant mantras Trump uses to justify his stance in Korea is that our policy there is a failure.  Actually, our policy in Korea has been a huge success.  There hasn’t been a war there for 64 years.  That’s pretty good.  Trump thinks we can stop the North from developing nuclear weapons, but that is unrealistic.  Any country that wants to pay the economic and political price to develop a weapons program can do so.  The technology, by today’s standards, isn’t that hard to come by.  Any claim America has to denying North Korea a nuclear program is undercut by Trump’s own actions.  Who in their right mind would agree to a deal with a guy who changes his mind about agreements already signed on a regular basis?  If there was a viable military option in Korea, it would have been used a long time ago.  There is no reason to talk so tough when the options are so limited.  The number thrown around is a million people would die in the first days of the conflict.  But if the North has the ability to hit not just the South but also Japan with a nuclear weapon, that number could be in the tens of millions.  Just shut up, please.

2.       Jimmy Bakker says it’s bad to make fun of God:  Jim Bakker is tired of people making fun of him and says that what they’re really making fun of is God.  Furthermore, God will punish those who laugh.  Well, if that’s the case, Jimmy better join the witness protection program.  It’s hard to imagine someone who has made more people laugh at God than Jimmy Bakker.  How many lives do these guys have?

3.       Trump on ‘Honoring’ the Military:  Trump likes to say that the people protesting at NFL games are dishonoring the military (and first responders and mom and the flag and ice cream).  First, they’re not protesting the flag, they’re protesting police violence against minorities.  Second, how can you dishonor the flag by taking advantage of the rights it represents?  Third, who is Trump to suddenly be so enamored of the military.  When he had a chance to fight for his country he declined.  Some of those deferments were legitimate, but at least the last one was a blatant bribe by his old man.  I don’t care that Trump didn’t serve, but please stop with hypocritical flag waving.

4.         Harvey:  The fallout from the Weinstein scandal continues to escalate.  Recriminations about who knew what when and revelations about other people in the industry are bound to continue.  The real story here is the women who came forward and how it might be a pivotal moment in how we see these issues.  A tangential concern for me is how these few powerful men with their abhorrent attitudes about women dominate our cultural production.  If you follow the money, only a few studios and a few powerful men control most of the entertainment industry.  That industry produces almost all our images of love, desire, sex and romance.  If men like Weinstein control those choices, the art they produce replicates their tastes.  In their hands, everything is reduced to a misogynistic and adolescent male fantasy or fetish.  Rather than exploring desire or sex in a diverse and human scale, we have the same images shoved in front of us over and over, creating a simulacrum of human desire.  Removing them not only protects the women who work in the industry, it may lead to a more diverse and fully human treatment of love and desire.

5.       Meanwhile:  We’re still talking about Trump too much and not focusing on what we might do to improve the world.  One of the regrettable by-products of some versions of American Protestantism is that the chosen can do no wrong.  Once you’re a good guy, you’re always a good guy.  The people who still support him will never change their minds.  It leaves the rest of us frustrated and tired.  Winter’s coming – it’s no time to let our guard down or stop the resistance.  Make some soup and gather your friends around the table and tell some stories or sing some songs to make it through the days ahead.

The Bully in the Pulpit 

                It’s common place to talk about presidents using the “Bully Pulpit” to drive their agenda or promote their ideology.  Now we have a president that really doesn’t have an agenda or ideology.  Now we have a president who is a common bully.  Like all bullies, he sucks all of the air out of the room and wants all attention focused on him and what terrible thing he might do next.  If you cross him, he attacks, throwing tantrums and signing more ‘executive orders’ to let us all know that he’s in charge.

                We’ve reached the point in this presidency where any hint of responsible governance is gone.  He’s like a toddler sent to his room for behaving badly who decides to tear the room apart as revenge.  The ACA or DACA, it doesn’t matter.  As long as Obama did it, he wants to destroy it.  It doesn’t matter that he is hurting real Americans with these tantrums, he just wants to lash out in anger.  It doesn’t matter to him that the states he carried and the people that voted for him will be the ones suffering the most because of his actions.  He just wants to show he’s tough.  While the people of Puerto Rico face months of danger from disease and famine, he threatens to cut off aid.  It’s an open question whether or not he even knows they are citizens.  He lies about (you really could put just about anything in this space) his tax plan helping middle class or working families while orchestrating a huge give away to himself.  None of it matters to the bully as long as the cameras roll and the attention continues.

                The cowards and traitors who run what’s left of the Republican party are afraid of the bully, too.  They pander to his whims in the hopes that he might sign some God forsaken piece of legislation they haven’t even read yet, some small trophy they can waive in front of the Koch brothers claiming to have done what daddy wanted.  They don’t care that the bully is edging us toward a conflict on the Korean peninsula that, if it turns nuclear, could kill at least 40 million people.  All they want is one last tax break for the petro- barons and a way to persecute people they don’t like.  They are willing to ignore the damage the bully does to the constitution every day.  They will do nothing to stop the bully.

                No matter how bad any of us thought it would be, it’s worse.  The magnitude of the bully’s depravity is overwhelming and all-encompassing.  Normally, we would proceed a policy or an issue at a time, but the bully doesn’t know anything about policy or issues, all he knows about is power and destruction.  He puts his own staff in the position of denying what he says because it’s so crazy.  He’s only in it for the attention he gets – and, of course, the money.  He has tapped a dark, sick spot of the American psyche and the pain is only just beginning.  He couldn’t have done this by himself, he’s to venial and stupid to have thought it through this far.  This won’t be fixed by voting for Democrats (although I encourage you to do so).  This probably won’t be fixed by politics. 

                I think we’ve come to the point where this can no longer just be patched back together with laws and policy.  I think we’ve come to the point that in order to move forward we have to reconnect with the people around us, even the ones we disagree with, even the ones we don’t like and who probably don’t like us, even the ones who voted for the bully. The bully needs to divide us.  He needs us to hate people who exercise their right of free speech to protest.  But he also benefits when we hate the people who hate the protesters.  Giving in to the anger is helping the bully win.  It is, as Springsteen sang, “gonna be a long walk home.”  We can protest and resist, but we also have to figure out just what it is we stand for.  What is the bigger narrative that makes us brothers and sisters even if we don’t agree about everything.  Purity is the enemy of solidarity.  Maybe, it’s as simple as the old line from a Dylan song, “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”

                

Free Speech

                We’ve all been inundated the last few days with the free speech issues connected to the latest flap over the protests in the NFL.  As the Ken Burns series on Viet Nam, which happens to be running alongside this latest Trump clown show proves, the outlines of this debate are pretty predictable.  While almost everyone agrees that players have free speech, many feel that the flag is sacrosanct.  They think that ungrateful players, black players in particular, should ‘respect’ the flag.  It never occurs to them that respecting the flag is respecting free speech, not just including controversial or unpopular speech but particularly respecting controversial and unpopular speech.  The idea that they shouldn’t ‘politicize’ a sporting event because it ‘isn’t the right time or place,’ simply ignores the value of protest.

                Free speech is meant to be uncomfortable.  Trump and the people who agree with him want to make this about veterans and police officers, as if they are the only ones represented by the flag.  The rights the flag is supposed to represent belong to everyone, there is no special restriction on them that bars everyone from appropriating them however they see fit.  The players aren’t the ones politicizing football.  Playing the anthem at all is politicizing the game – there is nothing that mandates this.  If you don’t want sports to be political, then keep the flag and the anthem out of it.  Once it’s been introduced, no single point of view has the right to restrict how that symbol is used and interpreted.  (By the way, holding the flag horizontal over the field is desecrating the flag, too.)  The NFL is selling, and is getting reimbursed for, a cheesy version of patriotism that, just like the ‘love it or leave it’ crowd during the Viet Nam era, assumes that there is some righteous elite that own what this democracy represents.  The ‘shield’ is being used to recruit volunteers into the military which, again like Viet Nam, is engaged in ongoing conflicts of dubious merit.

                Colin Kaepernick’s protest started as a response to racism.  He wasn’t disrespecting veterans or cops.  Trump made it about him and diverted or attention away from the main issue.  If it’s ok for country singers and Milo Yiannopoulos can wear flag clothing (another violation of the 1926 code for displaying the flag) why can’t football players kneel for the anthem?   This becomes an argument about who owns America.  The answer is that we all do.  It isn’t supposed to be a monolithic thing.  It’s supposed to be a dynamic and evolving ideal.  You shouldn’t have to agree with what a protester is saying to appreciate the protest.  Like all honest protesters, he has paid the price for his gesture. 

                Democracies have to value free speech.  They have to value the dissenting voices, because they mark the areas of concern and disagreement that have to be resolved.  Increasingly, we have become a nation of people that can’t or won’t even listen to a dissenting opinion.  This is true on the right and the left, although in different ways.  Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than college campuses.  Colleges should value a diversity of opinions, even if it makes some students ‘uncomfortable.’  Their discomfort should be addressed, but not at the expense of silencing other points of view.  College should be a physically safe environment but not an intellectually safe environment.  That is hard to do, but rigid codes of behavior will not bring people together.  On the other hand, it puzzles me why someone like Yiannopoulos should speak on a college campus at all, not because of his politics but because of his lack of any semblance of intellectual rigor or honesty.  College isn’t just about expressing any opinion but about the thoughtful and rigorous exchange of opinions.  Name calling just doesn’t fit the bill.  He should be allowed to speak, but it’s hard to see why a college campus should host him.

                As someone who lived through the Viet Nam era on a college campus, it’s distressing to see how little has changed.  It’s distressing to see people shout at each other in more and more combative and shrill tones.  It’s appalling to see a President call a citizen an SOB because of his political views.  Trump can’t help himself.  It’s doubtful he’s even read the Constitution, but we should.  We have a lot to talk about, a lot to work through.  If a football player kneeling for the anthem is too much for us to bear, what are we going to do about the real tough things to come.  As that old civil rights anthem advised, ‘keep your eyes on the prize.’

The End of Vocationalism

                For decades now American education has been vocationalized in delivery and in content.  We have so imbedded the notion that education leads to work that questioning that assumption is almost heretical.  Students arrive on campus with program guides touting the quickest route through the maze of college to reach their career goals.  Eighth graders put together career portfolios talking about what they might become.  There are a lot of reasons to object to this trend.  The idea of a ‘well rounded’ person or a general education are usually trotted out as reasons to resist.  Sometimes the objections mention ‘soft’ or ‘integrated’ skills beyond career concerns.  Occasionally – but only occasionally – citizenship as a goal of a full education is offered as some buffer to the constant drumbeat of vocational education.  Even liberal arts colleges defend their existence by claiming that their graduates do better in professional programs and careers.

                There is, however, a more compelling reason to challenge the dogma that school leads to work: the end of work.  We are at the very early stages of a sea change in the way ‘work’ is thought of and performed in our society.  Automation and computers have already changed manual labor, and AI is about to send all of that into hyperdrive.  Some estimates are that in as little as 10 to 20 years 50% of the jobs in the economy will be eliminated.  Eliminated – not replaced by newer high tech, high paying jobs.  Eliminated.  If our experience with the digital revolution so far tells us anything, it’s that those estimates are too low and too slow.  The already frayed and problematic narrative of education leading to work is about to become an unsustainable fairy tale.  Children entering the public schools today are being introduced to a curriculum that, when they complete it, amounts to a long walk off a short pier. 

                It may be that no culture can prepare for such a profound transition.  Certainly, the banking families of Florence weren’t waiting in the wings with the monetary and constitutional programs that brought forth the Renaissance – they just reacted.  Maybe that’s all we can do.  But if there is something we can do to pile up sandbags before the flood, it must start with separating education and work.  Maybe if we can pull our collective heads out our text book and testing industry asses for a minute, we might find a better thing to do than prepare children for a future that will never come.  The questions they will have to answer aren’t on a bubble answer sheet.

                The next generation of students will have to think about climate and sustainability, including a sustainable level of human habitation.  They will have to wrestle with not just the potential and possibilities but the very real threat of AI.  Those questions will run through the so-called STEM curriculum, but they can’t be solved there.  There isn’t a single significant question facing that generation that won’t require ethics and values that must come from outside the technical and scientific realm.  The algorithms of AI and not human technicians are going to control the STEM world anyway.  What they are going to have to do is create a narrative of their place in the world that doesn’t end up sounding like “A Modest Proposal.” 

                The Fordist/Taylorist schools that served Modernity are not constructed to help students through the cultural transition is front of us.  It makes no sense to teach them to work in factories and businesses that won’t exist in their world.  They are going to have to be more divergent thinkers, more imaginative and more creative.  We can’t solve the problems they are going to face – we could at least get out of the way.