Grateful for...

Generally I'm allergic to pro forma clichés, to saying what everyone else is saying on a subject.  

Like announcing to a world that is not waiting to hear on Thanksgiving what I'm thankful for.  Dozens of politicians, organizations and op-ed writers filled my Inbox today with their own announcements of thankfulness, and I deleted almost all of them unread.  

Except I did open one this morning, from a South Jersey Congressman-elect named Jeff Van Drew.  I opened it because I wanted to give him some feedback regarding the letter he co-signed to pledge to vote NO on Nancy Pelosi.  In his message he told me that he is "grateful" for my support of his campaign, to which I had sent a contribution.  My reply to him is at the bottom of this post.    

Now as I said I am usually loathe to add to anyone else's Inbox one more banality of thankfulness.  However, because I (rightfully) spend most of my keyboard time bitching, railing, accusing, indicting, exposing, spreading dark apprehension and alternatively sometimes exhorting and rallying, I wanted to go positive-ish today.   

I'm as thankful as everyone I know is thankful for beloved family and friends on both sides of the semi-permeable membrane between planes of existence, not to mention on both sides of the country!  Those in between, meh.  (Kidding!)  And for lots of other things about being healthy and alive in America in 2018 -- to list which would turn a brief bout of banality into a blechy blob of bathetic bromides.  So just fuggedaboutit.     

We can each reflect on the timeless joys, memories and connections in our lives without a manual.  

So I just wanted to spotlight an item or two that have made me grateful and hopeful over the last few days: a 39th net-gain House seat called in Utah (Dems at 236 with one yet to call -- leaving room for 18 stalwart NO's to show their purple districts that they're not flaming socialists); Rep.-elect Ocasio-Cortez and Rep.-elect Higgins declaring yesterday for Nancy Pelosi; John Roberts standing up against micro-Mussolini to defend the "independent judiciary", which is anathema to autocrats, along with an independent legislature (come on, January!) and a free press (with his despotesque verbal onslaught against the freaking Chief Justice of the United States, rump may have set the SCOTUS default in U.S. v. Trump toward upholding the law and leaning away from the appearance of collusion with a coercive foreign power -- i.e., rumputin; the twit's attacks on Roberts may be designed as a play to delegitimize all courts and thus to keep the cult on his side when he loses in the top court, but 70 percent of the country will side with the Constitution in a Constitutional crisis.); and, last but never least, high-quality, highly snarky wit.  Such as is found in the two wonderful Thanksgiving commentaries from today's Philadelphia Inquirer, here and here.    

Happy Thanksgiving with Love, H~~

Here's my reply to Rep.-elect Jeff Van Drew (D, NJ):

 

To: info@vandrewforcongress.com

Subject: Re: Grateful

Date: Nov 22, 2018 12:50 PM

I'm glad you won your seat.  With my support.  Congratulations!     Now I would be gladder if you gave up your opposition to Nancy Pelosi's Speakership.  She supports policies that nurture your constituents' ability to attain and sustain a high quality of life.     Pelosi is the best choice to lead the Democratic effort to pass desperately needed funding to begin restoring American infrastructure, to which the American Society of Civil Engineers has (generously) given a grade of D.  That means 11 million well-paying jobs will be created in the service of bringing our country up to the level that many other developed nations already have achieved.  We are shamefully behind China, Japan and Europe in roads, bridges, railroads, ports and low-emissions public transportation in, around and between cities.     Speaking of catching up, expanding Medicare eligibility down to age 50 would also help bring the country up to the level of other industrialized nations in health-care outcomes.  Ask Congressman Brian Higgins, an ex-signatory of your pledge letter against Ms. Pelosi.  (By the way, pledge letters are a bad look for us Democrats.  We should leave that cattle-herding groupthink to the Nordquists and other plutocrats.)    The richest country in the world?  It's time to find a cure for the disease of toxic inequality that has only been exacerbated by tax cuts for the wealthy and policies that have caused stagnation, deterioration and diminished quantity and quality of services in public education, health care, transportation, energy, housing, etc. etc. etc..   Thanks, Jeff.   Howard

Us vs. Evil: Lies and Elections Matter

On October 30, the Washington Post updated its fact-check monitoring of Trump's lies.  In 649 days from his swearing-in, the count of fact-checked violations of truthfulness by the so-called president had ticked up to 6,420.  Mmm, that's ten a day.  

As rumpistas anxiously say at every TV opportunity, past presidents and most politicians have lied too.  So you know, what's the big deal?  

The big deal is that this corrupt and criminal regime is unique in predicating its entire communications and policy strategy on lying.  As Paul Krugman recently wrote, the New York Times' editors had never allowed writers to comment on politicians' lies as "lies"... until Trump.  We all know that the dam has burst on that constraint all over the print, online and TV/radio news media.  For Trump cultists, the "they-all-do-it" fig leaf is good enough; they say they know he lies, but it's all good cuz it's just the fake-news media and the elitist libs who care about it, and the cultists "never took him at his word anyway".  Vey is mir.      

The thing to keep in the foreground about lying as an everyday political strategy is that it is a primary and necessary building block of autocratic despotism.  When there is no longer any independently verifiable truth, then reality is reduced to whatever is heard from those with the most visibility and the most unbridled appeal to the lowest urges, grievances and hateful prejudices in the population.  

As to the visibility, the stupefyingly venal American media disgraced themselves for years by overexposing rump's daily demagoguery throughout 2016 and for most of the time since.  These days, as the maga-rally ratings boon has faded, that overexposure has been ratcheted down quite a bit on the networks.  The most responsible hosts on MSNBC have made it their policy to show his face or his tweets only briefly and rarely, when it's deemed essential to telling a particular story.   

As to the urges, grievances and hateful prejudices, it's been said a thousand times that the good old days of GOP dog whistles have morphed into bull-horn messaging that has steadily shed layers of discretion as each day of this corrupt administration has unfolded.  Some may consider it over-the-top hyperbolic or even hysterical for me to say this, but this trend is more than just reminiscent of the way things went down in Germany and Poland in the late 1930's and early '40's.  

On Wednesday night, Yona and I viewed a film called "Who Will Write Our History" that used contemporary film and photographic images (mostly shot by Nazis for propaganda purposes!) along with recreated scenes to show the history of the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of the Polish Jews from the time of the Nazi invasion to the ultimate razing of the entire Jewish sector.  Three million Polish Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during WWII.

The film documents the incremental tightening of the noose as the city was divided, as the Jews were barred from more and more spheres of city life, as one order after another, each more outrageously inhumane and sadistic, was posted on the walls and doorways, until carts full of skeletal remains of those starved to death were rolling through the streets to mass burials.  (This was shown at the National Museum of American Jewish History adjacent to Independence Mall as part of the Jewish Film Festival, but I spoke afterward to the director, Roberta Grossman, who said it would be shown on at theaters and on PBS at some point. If you can bear it, you should see it when it shows.) 

The parallel with our present situation is not necessarily that genocide would be on the agenda of an American dictatorship -- not necessarily, though not at all unthinkable -- it's the famous frog-in-boiling-water pattern of death by degrees.  Whether it's the stepwise heinous starving -- and often the gunshot-in-the-back -- mass-murdering of Jews or the death of freedom-protecting civil rights and democracy, the pattern is to perform increasingly naked acts of cruelty and criminality.  

Having gotten away with each act, and having acclimated the populace and the world to another normalized outrage, the next act pushes the boundaries of evil down to a new level... until the boiling point is reached and mass murder -- or autocracy -- goes on without interference.  There is no bottom to this spiral, absent an uprising from within or a mobilization of forces from outside.  

The GOP, as Paul Krugman wrote in the above-linked article, have thrown in their lot with mendacity and rump's evil attack on American values and the Constitution.  Hey, it gets votes, and that's the name of the game, right?  

Or so they thought, before Tuesday, and now the ones that are left in the House are even more viciously committed to rumpism.  (By the way, while the bot army of right-wing rump apologist-pundits spew forth a wave of lies that the Democrats' gains were nothing special [biggest Dem gain in House since 1974, no biggie], my guess is that the GOPers whose asses are up for re-election in 2020 are not so sanguine about their prospects.  Damn, if the voters saw through their pre-existing lies, what BS might they not swallow next time?)  

Right now the demagogues are gnashing teeth and accusing election officials in Florida, Georgia and Arizona of -- wait for it -- vote fraud!  Florida invested disproportionate resources in the election infrastructures of Northern Florida precincts and withheld them from the Democratically-inclined counties in the south, and now they attribute vote-counting problems in the latter to "liberals trying to steal the election" (words of Gov. Scott.  Broward County's top election administrator was appointed by the Honorable Gov. J. Bush, 'case you were not aware.)  Georgia, for God's sake: Sec of State Brian Kemp, purger of 1.5 MILLION voters from rolls.  Arizona, where the bad-people party is suing to abort the vote count and Cindy McCain tweets in response that she expects her damn vote to be counted!

Imagine those bastards, now pro-abortion.  

There will be no international rescue mission for American democracy.  We be the whole ball game.  I don't think there's anywhere else in the world even to take refuge.  

The water heat just went down a degree or two with the influx of a cooling BLUE WAVE, but the work has only begun.  

A Favor to Ask of You Today

If you think there is value in these commentaries and/or in the articles that are linked within the posts, I would appreciate your helping me to spread these messages around by sharing the link to this blog with people in your networks beyond our email group. 

We're about to find out if this country is redeemable.  The racist-nativist-spoiled-brat white-nationalist right is terrorized by the irrepressible (if not altogether insuppressible) march of demographics (even without a single new immigrant -- immigrants are a bogeyman that represents the threat posed to white supremacy by all the babies of color born to people with American birth certificates).  Their error is not to think that these changes in a democracy will be reflected in changes of government policy and laws; their error is in thinking that their best interests will be submerged and trampled in a wave of minority and women decision-makers.  In truth, their practical interests will be better served by progressive policies, it's only their basest prejudices and fantasied status of racial superiority that are at risk of being marginalized.  A saner policy program in the U.S. will mean investing in education, health care, infrastructure, retraining, renewable energy, environmental protection, and all the things that they and their children and grandchildren must have to realize their American dreams.

Now, it is true that demographic trends are on the side of progress toward deeper and broader achievement of a nation that expresses American values of inclusion, equal opportunity, social justice and government of by for ALL the people.  It's also true that young people of all hues hew to the belief in equal respect for people of all races, ethnicities, genders, religions and even NFL rooting interests.  

What may or may not be true is that these trends will determine what the hell happens to our country.  If they don't show up on the vote tallies, their impact on democratic decision-making is nil, and politically speaking, they may as well not exist.  So the demise of the country would come from irresponsibility, ignorance and indifference that will have caused enough voter self-suppression to hand power over to a depraved minority of haters, bigots and selfish greedy bastards.  

So effing obvious that it comes down to getting everyone out to vote.  

 

AND, while I assume that this may only be reaching people who don't need any reminding, it's de rigueur to say it anyway: 

V OTE !

V OTE !

V OTE !

V OTE !

… and then say a prayer for our country, keep your fingers crossed, count your rosaries, throw salt over your shoulder, chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, hug your children, and do whatever the hell you can to help get out the vote.  Yona and I are on deck to drive neighbors to the polls.  

Connecting the dots of America's diseased ethos of hate

In a profile appearing in Sunday's Inquirer, Canadian physician Gabor Maté ties together a lot of the puzzle pieces of our national predicament.  Maté specializes in treating people with addictions, and he talks in the interview about the roots of addiction in childhood trauma.  Unhealed early wounds continue to hurt; people do what they do to ease the pain and deal with the anger about it, which can mean use of substances as psychic analgesics or it can mean obsession with external targets onto whom they project outward the source of pain within.

The heart of the matter as it relates to the current American sickness of hatred and partisan/ethnic/racial violence is conveyed in a few paragraphs from the article:

People like the shooter from Pittsburgh have, according to Maté, “anger [that] has got nothing to do with what they think they are angry about. They are just angry because of what life has done to them as children and then they find external targets.” Politics plays a role, too. “It will give them a target and an explanation to their rage and an outlet to express their rage,” and “adds more and more fuel to direct their violence toward certain groups,” he says.

Two major forces contribute to hate: racism and inequality.

“The research is absolutely clear,” Maté says. “The more inequality in a society, the more hate, the more dysfunction, the more mental illness, the more physical illness.” It should come as no surprise, then, that we see more addiction and more mass shootings since “the inequality is rising all the time.” Violence against racial, ethnic, or religious groups “is a manifestation of a society that foments division amongst people and sets people against each other.”

This insight works for me in part because my own experience has shown me that anti-Semitism can inhabit -- and I believe most frequently does inhabit -- the minds of people who have no personal experience with actual Jews.  They were carefully taught.  The teaching comes from one's parents, conveying the mythos they inherited from their own parents.  But that mythos originally sprang at some point from a corrupt institution looking to deflect its victims from noticing their own victimhood.  As a dispersed tribe that has maintained the integrity of its identity through thousands of years and dozens of rounds of migrations, settlings-in and expulsions, Jews have been outsiders ripe for persecution whenever a scapegoat might come in handy.  

Not that the hate Maté is talking about is exclusive to Jew-hatred.  In our country, Repubicans have prospered by promoting and projecting hate toward racial and sexual minorities, abortion and those who facilitate it, women, liberals, socialists...  That's why the party is fully culpable for the hate having morphed into violence under rump's incitement and modeling.  

But after three years-plus of rump's spewing hatred toward black and brown people, women and Democrats, now it's the Jew-hatred that has come front and center.  Even though some commentators are allowing that "trump is not an anti-Semite", as Trudy Rubin lays it out in her Inquirer op-ed piece at minimum he facilitates anti-Semitism.  He is inclined to invoke any form of bigotry that he believes will help him achieve whatever his goal is.  (Rump may not hate Jews, or he may hate Jews, but he certainly traffics in -- and in my view fully believes -- the most invidious stereotypes about Jews [as well as the more benign ones, like Jews are great money managers -- I am proof against that stereotype, just ask my wife!].  He believes Jews are venal, blacks are stupid and Latinos are criminals.)  In her op-ed column, Trudy references the Times of Israel interview of Abraham Foxman.  I had printed out that TOI  interview before I saw her citation of it; it is compelling and highly recommended.)  

Now, I'm not saying that racism and inequality comprise a complete explanation for the rump nightmare specifically, nor for the rise of fascism in societies in general.  But Maté's analysis connects critical dots that are central to an explanation of the sickness -- and more importantly to an understanding of what a cure would require.  

The first thing required in the present circumstance, is to elect a Democratic majority in Congress.  Democrats absolutely have been complicit in the growth of inequality, notwithstanding that they've been pikers in that regard compared to the GOP.  The corrupting infection of boundless money has meant courting Wall Street to survive, so the Clintons and Obama have done that.  However, Democrats after 2016 have begun revisioning the party as a progressive force, returning to its erstwhile identity as the party of labor and social justice.  This year the hope an the strategy is that people power in the streets and the campaign offices and the polling booths can outweigh all the expensive, disgusting, cliché-riddled, carpet-bomb TV ad campaigns from the Lee Atwater/Fox News party.   

There has been speculation that a Democratic Congress could counterintuitively be a boon for rump politically, inasmuch as his success as a demagogue (and 2020 presidential candidate if God forbid he is still cage-free) is totally reliant on having enemies to tweet-attack incessantly, enemies that his cultists will lustily join him in hating.  No doubt the attacks will be non-stop.  

However, the alternative would mean an accelerated pace of destruction and degradation of American governance and democracy.  The kleptos and white nationalists would have no check, no accountability.  Nor would there be any chance of passing any legislation that would help working people or start to redress the cancerous inequality that is eating away the spirit and confidence that had made America the paradigm of hope for billions of people.