Sorry, Mr. Lincoln, but the Time Has Come

Abraham Lincoln looked at the warring nations of Europe and drew the conclusion that the North American continent had to avoid that fate and so when the Southern states attempted to leave the union, he refused to grant them a divorce.

Better a bad marriage than no marriage, Lincoln thought.

The twentieth century proved the felicity of Lincoln's concept--were it not for an enormous country of unified  states capable of producing 10,000 airplanes a month, the Third Reich might not have been defeated and one needs only watch "The High Castle" to imagine the consequences.

But now, in the twenty first century, the truths of the 19th and 20th centuries may have to give way to a new truth. The new truth is that the time may have arrived when we should arrange for as amicable divorce as we can arrive at and go our separate ways.  Let the red states in the South and the middle of the country live happily in their own way and allow the blue states on the coasts with selected mid section friends form another country.

As Michelle Goldberg enumerates in her inaugural article in today's New York Times, there are such genuine and irreconcilable differences built into our union that we can no longer hope for even a more perfect union. That a citizen of Wyoming should have 67 times the power of a citizen of California, that 40% of the country should have 80% of the power in the Senate and even in "the people's chamber," the House, is simply an unworkable sort of politics.

As Lincoln noted in his second Inaugural address, when facing such disagreements, we all, on both sides,hope for a results less fundamental and astounding.  But the seeds of this dissolution were sown into the soil of the Constitution. The first cause for disunion was the unresolved issued of slavery, left intact by the Constitution which recognized "three fifths of all other persons," who were universally understood to be the colored slaves. "Indians" were mentioned as Indians, but slaves were not even called slaves, just, "three fifths of all other Persons." 

If slavery was the first fault line, then disproportionate representation was the second.  California has more people than 11 other states combined, which have a total of 22 Senators to California's 2.  The fact is, empty land, mountain ranges, deserts have been given more weight than human beings in the representation in Congress. 

The fact is, when I watched the Senate hearing on the Graham-Cassidy bill this morning, and saw arrayed on one side Senators from Nevada, Louisiana, Georgia, South Dakota, I loathed every last one of them. On the other side, the Democrats from California, New York, Washington were people I could smile about. They represented what I thought of as reasonable legislators.

It is true there were loathsome Republicans from Pennsylvania and Ohio. But overall, if you kept the Middle Atlantic states, New England, Illinois and Minnesota and the West Coast, you'd have, not a homogeneous collection of soul mates, but you'd have a workable grouping of liberal folks who believe in government, not as the ultimate solution to every problem, but as a bedrock resource for the common good. 

The red state Republicans talked about "one size fits all" medical care as if that was an anathema, oblivious to the biggest one size fits all medical program: Medicare, as if they would love to deny that to every American.  These tough minded, independent Republicans from tough minded independent states want to forge a country where no citizen asks help from any other, and certainly not from the government, because, don't you know, nobody deserves government help and nobody ought to think they do. Oh, just be sure no bureaucrat from Washington, D.C. comes between you and your doctor, or has anything to do with supporting you in your old age.

Private enterprise is the only moral mechanism for achieving the common good, and prosperity for all, according to the Republicans. Competition and the profit motive will solve all problems in medical care, in everything for that matter.  Tree huggers who worry about climate change, bleeding heart liberals who want to invite immigrants into this country, godless atheists who want to allow gays to marry, who want to allow for intermarriage of the races are what's wrong with this country!

Well, all this would be wrong in their country, for sure.

For generations, really from the late 19th century through the middle of the 20th century, the South, that bastion of the Ku Klu Klan and other more genteel versions of the Klan, managed to control the Congress and only when the Supreme Court and the Presidency intervened did segregation, racist laws and repression of civil rights of every stripe from those affecting women to homosexuals finally begin to wane.

But we are now swinging back into a repressive, racist society because of manipulations of the mechanisms of power, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, a Constitutional guarantee allowing for small states to wield disproportionate power, as if land mass were more important than people.

This is a structural flaw, built into our Constitution and nothing can change it because the power to change it has been rigged from the inception of the nation, intentionally, to prevent that change.

At this juncture, it might make more sense to smile, shake the hands of the folks in the South, the Far West and possibly many in the Midwest, and say, "Good luck and best wishes. You are on your own. We are heading our own way."

Nothing New Here

Today a woman told me, "I can't get my insurance to pay for my husband's medications and they're giving away methadone free to drug addicts!"


She was more than resentful. She was spitting mad.


I said, "Well, maybe you should go ask for some methadone."

Her husband's last full time job was drIving a truck from their home in Essex County, Massachusetts, to Wolfboro, New Hamsphire, where he picked up bottled water to bring back to a distribution plant in Massachusetts. But he required insulin for his diabetes and that meant he could not qualify for a commercial driver's license, because the government regulators didn't want him driving off the mountain road or Route 95 in a hypoglycemic swoon.
That was their complaint about the government then.


Now, it is methadone for undeserving drug addicts.


After thirty years, renting a house, the landlord decided he could make more money by refurbishing it and raising the rent. That was a bitter ending. There is no government run rent control, no government regulation to prevent that in Essex County.

Now he drives a van, delivering car parts to dealer ships locally, but he only gets three days of work weekly.

Life is spiraling down hill for this couple in their late 60's.


They got married out of high school and he has been able to cobble together enough money to get by but now they see their options drying up. He's never done anything wrong, far as he can tell. He went to work after high school. Never looked to get trained for higher paying jobs. Never had much ambition. But that's no crime, is it?
They were satisfied to rent a house for 30 years but then they discovered why people buy houses, when they got kicked out. They are not angry at the government for not providing for a health care system; they are angry about the government providing free health care for some no good, undeserving addicts.

I didn't ask, but I'm betting they voted to make America great again.
They are still waiting.

Progress?

Remember the 1968 Olympics?  

Two American runners were vilified for "politicizing" the Olympics by bowing their heads and holding up their fists.
Now, you have to realize, they were standing on a platform with the flags of the countries of the winners being raised, while the national anthem of the gold medal winner is being played, and in this jingoistic moment, these athletes were accused of being too political.

Well, that was the 60's.

Now we have crowds in Indiana and Foxboro, Mass chiding the black football players and screaming "Stand up!"  when the players knee down during the playing of the national anthem.

Sometimes the Air Force or the Navy or the Air National Guard flies over the stadiums just after the Star Spangled Banner is played, a wonderful melding of government and commerce. Oh, such patriotism. A moment to compete with Nuremberg, for sure.

As if the Olympics isn't one of the largest commercial scams ever.
As if all those flag and marching soldiers at the stadium are actually something to do with patriotism.
What is it about flags, anyway?
My wife, who is an Army brat, for Pete's sake, the daughter of a guy who had a "flag rank" which meant he could ride around with a little red flag with two stars on it attached to his car, and she now refuses to allow me to fly even a state flag on our property.
"Flags are all fascist," she says. "They are no good and they are stupid."

Well, maybe she has a point. 

The Leftovers, A Parable for Trump's America

Emily Nussbaum, writing in the New Yorker observed that the "White Walkers" who are the zombies of "Game of Thrones" can be seen simply as global warming, a cataclysmic threat which will make all the wars among the various factions we have been watching irrelevant, because, as at least some of the warring parties recognize, if the White Walkers sweep through the kingdoms, nobody will survive. Once you see the story line of Game of Thrones that way, you see the whole point of the series differently.

The same must be true for "The Leftovers" which has multiple story lines, but the main story line, the overarching theme is the whole notion of belief, particularly the belief in consoling fantasy in the face of loss and unbearable truth, and the importance of delusion to people who cling to delusion. Without their belief, they have nothing.

The background story is that 2% of all people on earth, in the United States as elsewhere, simply disappear, and usually it's just some members of a family, so the others are left bereft.  And everyone feels threatened because they do not know when the next disappearance, or "departure" as it's called will happen.

In a sense the fact that it was only 2% directly removed, but so many more affected by the loss of children, parents, siblings, friends that makes it worse. Why are we stricken and so many others not afflicted. That must occur to the folks in the small town in Wisconsin who see their factory close, while down the road, people are still working. 

The wonderful song played behind the opening credits of each episode of Season Two is perfect: It addresses the basic mystery of life we all live with--where did we come from before we were born and where are we going after life? People have dreamed up explanations. Some people need an explanation, no matter how outlandish that explanation might be--they feel better having one.

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say once you're gone you're gone forever
And some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
If in sinful ways you lack

Some say that they're comin' back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I'll just let the mystery be

If you see the departure as the loss of factories in the Rust Belt, the loss of financial security, the wrecking of family life, as young people disappear off in search of a living elsewhere, if you see the Departure as the laying waste to all those red, Trump counties across the fly over territory between the coasts, you can see the three seasons as an exploration of the importance of creating an explanation for what happened. Doesn't matter if the explanation is wrong, if it is pure fantasy; people need something to believe in, they need some explanation other than, "It just happened. We don't know why."

Manet

Some characters decide to simply feed into this, to give people something to believe in, so they intentionally create scams to deceive people who are looking for explanations into believing reassuring explanations--the wife of the town policeman conspires with a man to offer people as sort of seance experience to explain things. 

A deranged man leaps from a tower and his wife claims he departed and she saw it, because the people who camped out around the tower want his disappearance to make sense, to be part of a bigger trend.

So it is with Donald Trump, who offers explanations for the collapse of the economy, the loss of jobs, the withering of life in the Rust Belt and in those empty counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. He knows why all this happened: Those horrible trade deals, those hordes of illegal immigrants, those terrible, incompetent civil service workers in Washington, D.C.

All those talk radio shows, from Rush Limbaugh to the prosperity churches offer certainty. They are all cocksure.  They know. 

There are investigators, like the liberal media, in "The Leftovers" who try to expose lies and delusional thinking and they are hated and reviled. 

Renoir

It's a tale for the modern age.
I haven't seen the entire final season, but there are indications, things do not end well.

Let's Cut Taxes: Party Like It's 1983!

After so many months of dreary headlines, usually beginning with the word "Trump" (enough to create a whole new expression--"Oh, that's another five letter word we consider obscene"--) we finally have some good news:  Republic-cons have decided to vote their benefactors a trillion dollar tax cut for the billionaire class.

It's a Corker!

Finally, something to celebrate.

I remember the last time they did this, back when Ronald Reagan was President. Here's the way President Reagan promised it would work:  You cut taxes and everyone makes so much more money,  even though they are paying at lower rates, they are being taxed on higher incomes, so the taxes collected actually rise and the government gets more money, which balances the budget. 

Got that?

George H.W. Bush--you remember him, the one before the demented George W. (who is looking a lot better by comparison to current Presidential timber)--called this "Voodoo Economics," a phrase which even Donald Dangerous has not topped, and the Donald is a great two word phrase maker. (Just ask Little Marco or Crooked Hillary.)

But, who cares?  

Once we get this tax cut in place, we'll be able to spend on infrastructure and dig new coal mines and lease out new oil rig drilling sites off the East Coast and in Alaska and maybe in downtown Topeka, and happy times will truly be here again.

You got to give Donnie Dubious some credit here--he has pushed the Republic-con party back toward it's glory days, when Ronald Reagan was President and we were enjoying Morning in America and getting Marines blown up in Lebanon and mucking about in Central America and nobody from Mexico even wanted to move here. 

We don't need no health care for all, no environmental regulations, no bad treaties, no bad trade deals. What this country needs is a trillion dollar tax cut.

That's leadership, right there!

The Trump Dump: Green Marble and Ham

One thing you have to admit about Donald Delirious is he has a sense of aesthetics. He leans toward the ornate, golf leaf and the sort of Roman Empire stuff.

He does not like green marble, which he says looks cheap and he wants the UN to replace that stuff, maybe with marble with gold leaf inlays, and some red plush drapes.


He will have Iran pay for that.

He also disparaged the White House, which he called a "dump" because some of the marble staircases were sagging, having borne the weight of Lincoln, Kennedy, Roosevelt and others over the centuries.  He'll work on replacing that and having Canada pay for that. Or maybe Korea.


This has actually been a great season, coming as it does during the golden age of TV, and we have Archie Bunker in the White House.


As long as he doesn't actually try to do anything, we ought to be alright and we can just enjoy the show.

Once he gets around to destroying healthcare--that "disaster known as Obamacare"--or deporting the 800,000 "dreamers"--or nuking Korea, then we can start gnashing and wailing, but until then, he's just a six year old demanding attention, which, if he's funny, can be amusing.


I'd worry more about that dark force coalition out there, all those foundations and think tanks with the bland names like "American Prosperity" and "American Enterprise" and "Free Congress Research and Education" and Cato, Hudson, Hoover, Manhattan, or the "Institute for Justice" or the Washington Legal Foundation.


You'd never know these are right wing nests of iniquity from those names. They sound so friendly, so open, so non judgmental.
 
But these are the real termites in the timbers which hold up the house. Trump may be out there shaking the rafters, but unless the little chewies have been at work over the years, the foundation holds.  Given a good strong infestation, however and all it takes is a good hard shake to bring it all tumbling down.

Liberals Behaving Badly

Who should have the right to define rape: survivors who have experienced sexual violence or those who are accused of perpetrating it?


One of the true talents of the radical right, which is to say the Republic-con party, is to find issues which draw out the most damaging and absurd statements from liberals and that makes progressives/liberals look bad--not just on a single front but on all fronts.

Betsy Devos has found one such area in the issue of "campus rape." 
The opinion piece in the NYT today about "Who gets to define rape" is a case in point.


Over the past 20 or 30 years ardent, self righteous people on mostly liberal campuses across the land have twisted the idea of rape into a shape so misshapen as to be almost unrecognizable. 

A  NYT article by Nicol Bedera and Miriam Gleckman-Krut, who are "campus sexual violence researchers" pursuing PhD's in sociology at the University of Michigan, begins with the sentence noted above, which is a rhetorical question, containing in it the answer they believe is obvious. The article was a response to  Ms. Devos's attempt to change the Obama policies on campus rape. As one letter writer noted, a girl who has had sex with her roommate's boyfriend and wakes up the next morning, hung over and regretful, has not been raped.


Nor has the girl who got drunk and walked back to an equally inebriated boy's room and had sex and wakes up the next morning and feels badly about that.


Rape is a violent crime which involves forcible sex against the expressed will of the woman. This should precipitate a criminal investigation with the presumption of innocence protecting the accused, including his identity until the appropriate time.


The argument of Ms. Bedera and Ms. Gleckman Krut is that the protections of the defendant are too high a hurdle and men should be punished for their depredations and the star chambers established by colleges allow this punishment on the least evidence and with the least protection for the accused, which is only right, if what we are most worried about is the feelings and the experience of the complainant.

the flag the Right captured

Harvard, and most egregiously Brown, have set up committees which well deserve the description of "star chambers" to meet in secret and determine the fate of accused without any of the rules which protect the accused in ordinary criminal proceedings.


There is no justification for this other than the emotional nature of the crime and there is quite a lot of "politics" by which I mean the individual act, which is always defined by particulars of person, place, time, personality are stuffed into a more general anger over women being forced into unpleasant and even horrific acts against their will and then "the system" making them a victim the second time.


The British series "Broadchurch" has depicted the difficulties of pursuing a case of a rape in great detail and as is true of most human experience, there are areas of doubt but evidence can be collected by well trained people which sometimes corroborates and sometimes refutes accusations.

One wonders about Ms. Bedera and Ms. Gleckman Krut.  They are professional advocates, I presume, as "campus sexual violence researchers" which means their bread is buttered by the creation of a need for their services. It is always difficult to get a man or woman to listen to reason if his/her salary depends on not listening to reason. Without knowing anything more about them, I suspect from these shreds of description, they are exactly the sort of liberals who give liberalism a bad name.

Unfortunately, the Right is right on this issue more than it is wrong and the left isn't even close to right.



There are other wedge issues out there:  Transgender rights, which the left too often has conflated with "homosexual" rights.  The right to free speech when that speech is offensive. 


As rabid Democrats, we ought to be very wary of getting drawn into traps.
They can make us look bad.