Abortion [#1]

A Democratic Manifesto: 
Democratic Party Principles
#1 Abortion

Getting past the trivial and puerile, to which President Dotard wants us to focus our undivided attention, Mad Dog has decided to begin a discussion of the six issues which should define the Democratic Party:

1. Abortion: When is it infanticide? 
2. Health Care: Is it a right or a profit center?
3. Wealth disparity: Should the government play a role in redistributing wealth?
4. Guns, gun violence: Is this a single issue solvable by one law or a nexus of problems?
5. Drugs and the Opoid crisis: Is this a public health crisis or a criminal problem; is there an effective set of options?
6. Immigration: Do we really have an immigration problem or a perception problem?

I believe every Democrat, given enough time in any setting, platform, meeting, TV appearance ought to say these are the key issues which define Democrats. 
There are some things so fundamental they define discussion.
That freedom of speech is in the first amendment is no accident. It is the most fundamental of all rights, without which there can be no other rights, the sine qua non of all other rights.

So, Mad Dog will discuss each these 6 basic issues in a separate post.  

Mad Dog begins with ABORTION.

Blackmun, a Republican

Have you actually ever read Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Opinion in Roe v Wade, written in 1973? 
Few people I know have.
Nor have many read William Requist's dissent nor Whizzer Byron White's dissent.

These are good places to start, but the ultimate argument comes down to a decision in the mind of man when life begins.

The justices addressed the less important problem first--who has the right to decide whether or not abortion should be permitted? They did this because this is a matter of law, of jurisdiction, or who has "standing." 

But it all comes down to is the fetus a person? Like the Dred Scot case, in which the justices decided the slave had no standing to sue in court because he was not a person, or, at best, on 3/5 a person, so nobody could intervene from the judiciary or any other part of government on his behalf, if the fetus is not a person the whole debate dissolves.
And deciding about when the fetus becomes a person is treacherous water for a judge.
Blackmun goes through all the arguments, but in the end, if you are an absolutist, you cannot be persuaded. If you believe the moment the sperm penetrates the egg, it is a human being in the eyes of God or should be in the eyes of man, there is no arguing faith.
Like slavery, this is one of those disputes which, for some, has no middle ground.
But for many people, for Mad Dog in particular, there is a middle ground.
Mad Dog well remembers witnessing a "salting out" in medical school--in which a 28 week fetus was expelled from the womb and quickly shunted to a utility room off the operating room, where Mad Dog examined it, visually, with a nurse. It did not draw a breath. It did not move, beyond perhaps a spasm here and there. But it looked a lot like a human being to Mad Dog, in a gut check sort of way. In those days, 1971, two years before Roe v Wade, that fetus could not have survived out of the womb given the state of neonatal medicine then. 

But it sure looked almost human. It's lungs made not have been fully formed; certainly its brain was not, but it looked human. Looking human, of course, Mad Dog realized even then, did not make it human. He'd seen models of babies which looked human.
But that thing on the stainless steel tray looked, to Mad Dog, a third year medical student, like a victim of  infanticide.
But Mad Dog also saw suction curettage of 6 week fetuses which looked like nothing more than smudge on a gauze pad, and he saw fetuses, sometimes spontaneously expelled, at 14 weeks which looked like skinned newts, not human at all, although fetuses on ultrasound, magnified as they are by the technology--those images look pretty human. 

Not yet a human being

Ultrasounds of fetuses, one must remember are very deceptive--they make something look alive and human, but they are cartoons.  Donald Duck and Roger Rabbit look alive on screen, too. Just because something looks human doesn't mean it is really human--clouds can look like people, too.

Not human being

Clouds can look like angels, too, but that doesn't make them angels. 

Cloud, not angel

Ultimately, the judges in Roe v Wade chose not to believe the Catholic or Bible Belt belief that a 2 cell conceptus is alive, has a soul and commands the same right to life as a 28 week fetus. They said there is a progression toward becoming a human being, and that until 12 weeks (end of the first trimester) the fetus has virtually no claim to protection, after 24 weeks it may well have full claim to protection, it's for all intents and purposes, a person, and during the 2nd trimester, well, that's up for discussion, but since it's not viable outside the mother, it's her call.

All the arguments about who has the right to make this call are secondary--arguments the mother has the right because the Constitution implies a "right to privacy" are pretty weak. You don't have a right to kill your four year old in your home because that's a right to privacy. 

It all comes down to belief and the justices in Roe said, we have to draw the line somewhere. Legislatures don't have that right, mostly because they have made such a goddamn mess of that, so we'll do it.
They drew the line at the end of the 2nd trimester.

Mad Dog believes that was the right place to draw that line, at least in 1973.  Up to that point the fetus is like  a car frame on an assembly line--it has the shape, but still is not a functional, realized thing. 
But somewhere it does cross a line, and is more realization than simple potential. Early on, it may have the frame of an automobile, but it does not have a working engine, electrical wiring, gas lines, transmission or even tires, but somewhere along the line, it crosses over into being enough of a car to be called a car. 

Cloud, not human being

And that's where Mad Dog thinks the Democratic Party should plant its flag: We do not believe in infanticide. We do not believe a two cell thing is a human being. We acknowledge as technology changes and makes it possible for a fetus to survive outside the womb, we might draw the line a little earlier, but for now, we agree until the fetus is 24 weeks, abortion is permissible. 

If you believe differently, vote against us. That's where we are.

Preservation of Self in Everyday Life

When I was an intern, there were no female interns. There were very few female doctors in the hospital outside pediatrics and obstetrics/gynecology. That all changed during my residency and the advent of more women physicians had a civilizing effect on the training programs.


When we were told to "suck it up," and work a 70 hour weekend on call, or to run up and down flights of stairs to the blood bank to fetch bloods for transfusions for your bleeding patient, or to run down to the emergency room get back in time for rounds to make your presentation, you did it. You knew you were an intern and by definition of that job, you were going to be abused. Don't be a wuss, don't be a weenie. Just do it.

Discouraging protest

Women didn't buy all that and things started to change.


The Chief of Neurology humiliated and terrified students  with his grilling on rounds, and we all said, "education by humiliation" was his technique. My brother always said the reason he and I did so well in our neurology rotation was because our father was cut from the same cloth and we were accustomed  to that sort of abuse and just pushed ahead. while others, whose fathers were more indulgent, just fell apart.

Shaming was widespread. You don't know your patient's hematocrit? And you call yourself a doctor?  What if the patient undergoes cardiac arrest because you failed to check that? Should we call your mother and tell her to come pick you up because you are flunking out of internship?

Hostile work environment

A "hostile work environment" was not a phrase in those days.


It's true, none of this sort of hazing involved authorities caressing our breasts or genitalia or insisting on sex, or locking the door to the office from a button under the desk. And we were beyond adolescence.


But abuse of power by authorities was and likely still is part of some work environments. And when women get into positions of power, they often behave just like men, attempting to put subordinates in their place, asserting their dominance while underlings have to simply take it. The Devil Wears Prada. Nurse Wratched.


When I was 13 or 14 if a boy got too aggressive with his hands in places they were not welcomed, the girl could be counted on to issue a quick rebuke, possibly accompanied by a stinging slap across the face. Nobody objected that this was a provocation to further violence by the boy. Mostly, boys treated to this simply slinked away, lesson learned.


So I'm a bit mystified why Al Franken who was reported to have caressed the bottoms of women or attempted to kiss them, was not quickly treated to a right cross across the face.


I'm not educated in this discussion, which is why I ask now. But the question occurs to me.


Why did women not respond more forcefully at the time of these transgressions? Why do they come out only years later?


In the case of the District Attorney in an Alabama town in the car with a 14 year old, I can understand the silence and the passivity. But what about the journalist or the woman at the County Fair?
Not to say they should have behaved differently.
 Just asking.

Et tu, Bernie? Party of Self Righteous Eunuchs

You all did love him once, not without cause: 
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him? 
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts, 
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me; 

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

--Julius Caesar, Shakes.

Tonight I am ashamed to be called a Democrat.

I search in vain through the internet for detailed testimony on the predations of Al Franken, the testimony from specific women about specific acts and I find only two women mentioned by name, and the grabbing, kissing sounds like lame brained horseplay, but in any event years ago.

Oh, I know. I am well aware.
For if we forgive Al Franken on the basis of time washing clean the wounds, then must we not forgive Roy Moore?

And maybe, the unthinkable, Roy Moore as the sexual predator is not quite as hideous as we want to believe.

And it's what we want to believe that counts.

But oh, the unkindest cut is that driven home by Bernie Sanders. 
We thought we knew you well, but no, ambition stains the brain, liquefies the spine. 
Sanders, for whom I knocked on doors, now knocks down the pillars of respect.

And Elizabeth Warren, who once looked so clear eyed, who dared speak truth to power, now languishes among the malodorous slime, as if to even voice the obvious, that we need not rush to judgment, now dwells with perfidy.

Kirsten Gillabrand, Maggie Hassan, ambitious women, willing to climb over the body toward their next step up. 

Oh, what a sad revelation to see those who have been our hope for salvation are just as dirty and corrupt as those they oppose.

The difference is they fight for the right cause.
Patton, Sheridan, yes even Sherman, were loathsome on occasion, and yet they fought to the right side of history. Eventually we forgave them, for the truth is, the good men and women do does not get buried with their bones, but may live after them. The evil also may survive them in memory, but for some the evil is outweighed by the good.

So it was with Al Franken, but those moral midgets were too frightened to see it. 
This once noble party has become a den of self righteous eunuchs. 

Diversity in Silos?

Writing in the New York, Thomas Chatterton Williams raises ideas about globalism, multiculturalism, race and identarianism, which evoked a reaction in me both personal and sublime.

T.C. Williams

Let me begin with three observations.

1. Some years ago, at a Department picnic at Yale, one of the Finnish doctors in our department announced he was leaving to go back to Finland. "Veikko," I said, "Your work is going so well here. You're one of the real stars in our department, how can you leave now? A few more years and you can go back and become the chairman of any department at any university in Finland or anywhere."
He smiled and he nodded at a raucous group of children, ages 5 to 14, rampaging about a set of jungle gym equipment. 
"See those kids?" he said. 
"Sure."
"Can you tell which ones are mine?"
I looked and all the kids wore pretty much the same clothes--jeans, T shirts. All were babbling in English. There were many colors of skin, hair, some blond, some Asian, some Black, some mixes of all of these.
I shook my head, "They are all just kids. Wonderful kids."
"Yeah, well, but three of them are mine. They blend in, just as all those kids do. But I want my kids to know they are Finnish. A few more years of this and they'll be like everyone else--Americans."
"But Americans can be anything. We are diverse. We are everything."
"Everything but Finnish," Viekko said.

American kids. Melting.

2. Forty years ago, I spent a little over two months in London. I'd always wanted to go there. I'd grown up on British movies about the heroic, debonair, plucky Brits muddling through the war against the virulent, racist Nazis And London was just like the movies, double decker buses, black taxicabs, rosy cheeked children. In retrospect, very White. Visiting again, about fifteen years ago, I was stunned to see Arab men sitting outside at small round tables in mid day, drinking from tiny coffee cups, not at work, and certain neighborhoods, I could imagine was not in London but in Baghdad. 

3. Just last week, an NPR story about the change in a population of fish in some lake, which had been "taken over" by some "invasive species" of fish was presented as a sort of eco warning story about climate change. It seems beloved trees, fish, a whole ecosystem was being transformed by global warming. It was all I could do not to throw something at the radio.  "That's what evolution IS!" I shouted. Environment changes, a species which is adapted to that new niche flourishes. Other species cannot compete and die out. More species by far are extinct than extant.  Why make this a morality tale, when all it is is nature playing by the rules of evolution?


Now back to The New Yorker and the article "You Will Not Replace Us."

What Williams was describing was the thinking behind the alt right's chant at Charlottesville, which has been heard across Europe from France to Poland. White people, White nationalists, White supremacists, neo Nazis, identitarians all fulminating about the "invasion" of previously White nations (England, France, Germany) by Muslims and Blacks. 
Sounds pretty easy to understand--"racial purity"  antisemitism, fear of the "other," all very familiar in Trumpland.

Alain de Benoist

But there is Alain de Benoist who is decidedly emphatic about not being a White supremacist who argues we ought to keep the various races and ethnicities separate, not because he fears polluting White populations with Black people but because he thinks the distinctiveness of different peoples is under attack by this mixing and that diversity he so cherishes is under attack by globalists.

He argues that White Western Europeans have tried to homogenize the globe, first with the crusades, to convert everyone to Christianity, then with colonialism to foster European political principles, then with trade to impose economic development and industrialization and finally with imposition of moral principles they call "human rights."

Benoist argues, much as my Finnish colleague did, that diversity is to be celebrated, it is the most precious quality of human life and it's being threatened by mixing. The "citizen of the world" is simply an agent of imperialism.  He argues for diversity achieved through isolation.

His solution to immigration is to support local African nations so their citizens do not think of leaving for better pastures and hunting grounds, make them "self sufficient."

This brought me face to face with my own contradictions. On the one hand, I was abashed and, admittedly disappointed that my pristine, fairy tale London now looked like Baghdad, while at the same time I was furious at people who thought it was somehow a moral imperative to keep their favorite fish in their stream or their favorite tree in the woods behind their homes.

Terrible Swift Sword

And then you face the other factor: What if you say, okay, I like racial mixing and the melting pot thing, but what if a group arrives which says:
1/ We do not want to mix. We want to live here, but we do not want to become at all like you. We do not want to learn your language or marry into your family or allow you to do that to our family. 
2/ We detest your values, first among them, the freedom to disagree. We do not accept your disagreeing with our views and will do everything we can to prevent you from expressing your views. We are intolerant of tolerance.

What do you do with that? How does that fit your dream of diversity?

I'm still with Rev. King who hoped for the day people would be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. 
And I think it a fool's errand to believe it's practical to hope to erect barriers to prevent people from mixing in today's world, just as silly as trying to prevent that new fish from taking over the pond in your back yard and transforming the aquatic fauna, no matter how much you loved the speckled trout who once thrived there.
That is the ineluctable law of nature, of Darwinian law.

Whether you can succeed in building a wall to prevent Darwinian law from prevailing over human populations we shall see.

Where Have All the Real Men Gone?

Some days, after watching Fox News, CNN, Morning Joe, The Squawk Box on TV as I do my treadmill, seeing The Dotard, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, various pundits, I just groan inwardly.

Beneath Contempt

Phony tough guy

Phony tough guy

Phony tough guy

I think about the men I've been reading about lately, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Lee, Longstreet and I think, "Where have all the REAL men gone?"

Real tough guy

Just look at these current incarnations of what passes for leaders of men nowadays--puffy pink men,  full of sound and fury, signifying an inner gelatinous core. Never  had a shot fired in anger at them.  They talk tough to hide their core softness.


Then look at Sherman, Sheridan, Grant.  And, of course, Lincoln. 

Of course, these real men are not angels, nor even "heroes." 
Sheridan, after his service in the Union army playing a large part in winning the Civil War, led the cavalry as an  Indian fighter, and was said to have been the author of the immortal line, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."


Sherman hated newspaper reporters: "If I could kill them all, I would. But then we would likely get reports from Hell before breakfast."
 And Grant, frustrated with the black market in cotton behind his lines and told (by his father) the merchants were mostly Jews issued an order banning all Jews from his department, which Lincoln, who tried to never interfere with Grant, had to, in this one instance, intervene, reminding Grant you cannot ban a entire class of people; you have to deal with individuals when you consider the law.
Lincoln, of course, was a lawyer.
Lincoln was  real man. He would have seen right through a Muslim ban.

Tough guy veritas

Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator. He was the Reluctant Emancipator. He did not free all the slaves, just those who were politically expedient to free.


But, for all their faults, they were real men.
Just look at their photographs and compare the real men to the sorry excuse for malehood we have today.

"Occupied" The Future is Now

As I am carried along by "Occupied" the Norwegian dystopia on Netflix, I have the same recurring thought:  "How could I have been so ignorant?"

Consulting Professor Google for background I read about Finland. Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, was, during the cold war, so intimidated by the colossus on its border that no Finnish cabinet could form without Russia's approval, and dissidents who escaped Russia were promptly returned to their fate back in the motherland. This gave rise to the word "Finlandization" which meant the reduction of a supposedly free state to a puppet state by the Russians.
Apparently, while the Norwegians have looked at their own past, with respect to the individual choices made during the Nazi occupation, Finland has not. 
In Norway, when I visited 30 odd years ago, few people spoke English, but if you tried to speak German, you got dirty looks. They don't forget, apparently.

The word "Quizling" actually derives from the Norwegian puppet who delivered control of Norway to the Nazis. Collaboration meant that Jews trying to escape Germany were delivered back to the maw of the Nazi holocaust machine. 

Quisling

Watching "Bordertown" the Finnish nordic noir, one gets the feel for the relationship between Russia and Finland, but in some ways, "Occupied" feels more revealing.

A review in Politico by James Kirchick, from early in 2016 remarks on how upset Russia has been by "Occupied" and a statement from the Russian embassy in Oslo trots out the three cardinal features of Russian mindset:
1/ Russia is the victim of character assassination in the West
2/ Russia won the big war against Hitler and without this heroic effort Western Europe would still be under the rule of the Third Reich
3/ Russia is a pussycat and no threat to its neighbors.

All this, and nobody mentions Ukraine or Crimea. Not that I really know anything about Ukraine or Crimea, but I do read there are Russian troops in both places now, and Mr. Putin claims Ukraine really isn't a country, just a part of Russia with pretensions.


For his part, the Norwegian Prime Minister, who spends most of his time looking like he was written by Ethan and Joel Coen, one of those Minnesota types who is always breaking into a sweat and unable to finish his sentences and says, "Well, but, no..." a lot, squirms from one bad position to another. He explodes at his adoring assistant for wearing high heel shoes which make too much noise, so he is unable to concentrate. When he wakes up in bed with her, after a drunken celebratory party, he asks her for aspirin and barely seems to know where he is, but he gets on Skype to talk to his wife who is in Paris. 
It is Scandinavia, after all, and there's a lot of extra marital sleeping around. 
Another interesting character is the owner of a restaurant, fallen on hard times until the Russians discover it and take it over, keeping her bank accounts solvent. She eventually starts sleeping with the Russian overseer, but she has second thoughts about that when the Russians, some Russians, decide to kill her husband, who is a journalist digging into a false flag explosion at a Norwegian gas plant, which provides an excuse for the Russians to extend their "assistance" at the Norwegian power stations.
This whole narrative is a little difficult to follow, of course. One of the reasons Europe is behind the Russians in their take over of Norway is that oil from the Middle East has ceased flowing owing to civil wars there. But you would think Russia would be overjoyed at that development, being a major oil producer and one of their big competitors has just been eliminated. You'd think they'd be only too  happy if Norway took itself out of competition as well. Oh, well, not everything can be explained. It's television, after all. 

The Beast You Can't Ignore

But the best thing about "Occupied" is the wonderful character of the Russian Ambassador, a ice cold blonde, with her hair severely pulled back, who begins every scene by protesting how she is only trying to maintain peace between Russia and Norway and she is forever put in the position of having to defend Russia from the irascible and dangerous Norwegians. She seems blithely unaware that the presence of Russian troops on the Norwegian oil rigs and gas fields and the tendency of the Russian "security" forces to cordon off streets in Oslo might be found somewhat provocative by the average Norwegian. 

When Russians in black body armor storm the Norwegian prime minister's office, she begins with the Russia is a pussycat trope--we have no idea who these men are; they have nothing do to with the Russian government, and then she slides to the "we can't control terrorists" and to the "we do not negotiate with terrorists" and then slides to the "you are impugning our reputation and assassinating our character." But she also finds the demands of these mysterious men in black reasonable, "They were clearly provoked because the prime minister started rounding up innocent Russians in Norway and deporting them."  When the terrorists are shot dead in a surgical SWAT team operation, she is outraged because "You have shot Russian citizens!"  So the men she previously disavowed are now her victimized countrymen.

What you can see from this series is how vulnerable small European, particularly Scandinavian states, feel living next door to this brute, Mother Russia. 

Now I understand why NATO seems so important to its members, outside of Donald Trump.
Of course,  what Trump says feeds into what people on both sides of the Atlantic have always said in private--The Europeans doubt we'd actually risk our necks to defend them against Russia and Americans say we have no business propping up these slackers who haven't spent on their own defense and expect us to continue giving the Europeans a free ride.

Well, well, well, this is all very interesting. 
Who knew? 
I did not even know Norway shares a border with Russia. Sweden does not, but Norway does. I have a globe and I just consulted it.

I have lots more to learn about Scandinavia. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark.  
Each has a story to tell and they are living right next door to Mr. Putin and his pugnacious country, which saved us all from Hitler, is not a threat to anyone and which suffers the slings and arrows from the West, which is always trying to belittle, demean and insult Mother Russia for no good reason other than innate perversity.

2024: Jigsawed America (A Crowd Sourced Sci Fi Project)

Okay, fellow voyagers of the blogosphere, here's your chance.  
Let us create, as a flashcrowd/crowd sourced/ 21st century group orgy of imagination--the new Netflix Series: "2024: Jigsawed America"

Here's the set up: you write the follow on scenes, events and outcomes.

But here's a suggestion for the opening: 

Single card each: white on black. Ten seconds each. Roughly a three minute sequence.

Background music: Marvin Gaye, "The Ecology"

2024
+ President Trump is starting the final year of his Presidency.
+ Medicare and Social Security have been privatized.
+ The Supreme Court Overturned Roe v Wade. Abortion now legal in only 12 states.
+ The Right to Parenthood Act stipulates wives need written permission from their husbands to have an IUD inserted
+ Sanctity of Marriage Act, outlaws Gay marriage.
+ The Supreme Court has struck down all restrictions on gun ownership and sale.
+ The Immigration Reform Act of 2022 forbids immigration of Muslims.
+ Camps in Arizona and Texas house 10,000 illegal immigrants
+ Gitmo houses 5,000 prisoners.
+ Reservations for Muslims near Detroit house 20,000
+ Windmills, solar panels now carry a 50% excise tax.
+ Drilling in Alaska and the lower 48 states is permitted without government approval.
+ Fishing and shrimping collapse from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico after a series of oil leaks from offshore drilling.
+ The average annual  temperature in Minneapolis has risen from 55 o F to 74 oF. 
+ Palm trees planted along lake Michigan in Chicago have survived four winters.

FADE IN:

Rally in Madison Square Garden, New York City.
Man at the podium: I don't need to tell you why we are here today. Why we have to be here today. And I don't need to say more than, "Here he is!"

To the background of general tumult, a man walks across the stage. He is smallish, trim beard, might resemble Ulysses S. Grant, or maybe Jon Stewart, or maybe that hobbit from "Lord of the Rings."

He reaches the podium, barely seems to hear the crowd, pauses to smile a friendly smile and begins:


Hobbit: Are you ready for something completely different?

The crowd responds with delirious roar, standing on chairs, thunderous.

Hobbit: Really, this can't go on. Not like this.  
I've never been one of those to think we have seen anything really abnormal in this country over the past 8 years. 
Our national history, since its inception has seen wild partisan divides, conspiracy fantasies and true conspiracies, punctuated by political violence, assassinations, deliberate subversion of constitutional principles, years of bumbling ineptitude, bizarre personalities in the Presidency.

And I am happy to live in a country which, unique in the world's history, fought its most costly war, its most desperate, tragic and costly war to free an underclass. 

That war was sold on a lie, at first, or at least it was sold as one thing and then there was a bait and switch:  It was a war to save the Union, which even racists could support, but by his second Inaugural, Lincoln, in a burst of candor and deep honesty, admitted, "everyone understood that somehow slavery was the cause of the war."

Well, I'm glad we fought that war. It was the right thing to do.
But you know, as we've begun to engage in this discussion about dissolution, we keep hearing, "Well, we fought a war about that already." 
But no, not really.

That's a half truth.
I'm glad we stayed together in 1865. Our nation, a continental Goliath, played a huge role in defeating two of the twentieth century's most malignant nation states, and had we been divided, had we been smaller, we might not have been able to play that role.

But now we have to face a different truth.

You know, in the final years of the Soviet Union, Russia became a society where everyone knew what their leaders were saying was not real. But everybody accepted that and pretended it was real, because NO ONE COULD IMAGINE ANY ALTERNATIVE.


Silence in the Garden. You could hear the proverbial pin drop. The hobbit looks around and continues:

Hobbit:  Well, we have reached that stage in our nation's history, where "alternative facts" and "fake news" and "don't take him literally but take him seriously" have played out for the past 8 years. 
And now folks who depended on, who planned for health care with Medicare are languishing, dying for lack of care. Retirees are losing their homes, moving in with their kids, if they have kids, going on the street if they don't. The ranks of unwanted children are swelling again. Racism has been institutionalized again, this time aimed at Hispanics and Muslims.

And it is all so normal now. And legal. It's been enacted by Congress and supported by the Supreme Court.

But that Court is the creation of a new mean gerrymandered tide centered in the Bible Belt and which now controls Congress, not by force of numbers, but by manipulation of an obsolete and now corrupted system of redistricting and a President who has appointed the 21st century version of Roger Taney at every opportunity.

From the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, a small, determined group of Southerners controlled Congress and made sure our armed forces, our neighborhoods, our schools, our restaurants, swimming pools and even our bathrooms were segregated. Eventually, they were thwarted, but only temporarily. Their will remained unsuppressed.

Our Congress is now in control of an equally determined group of reactionaries, but they are not exclusively from the South, although, for the most part they are from the South and those from the South are almost exclusively in this Far Right party.

I do not pretend to like these people, but I cannot say they have done anything illegal or immoral. They have simply seized power and wielded it.

But they have created a country which suits them, not us. It is said every Northern state is a melange of large metropolitan with Alabama in between. But the fact is, nationwide, the Alabamans among us are not in the majority; they reign by voting in blocks and by playing with voting districts. Nationwide, the Right constitutes about 2/5 of the population and the Left about 3/5. The distribution places the Right in the empty spaces of the West and the rural parts of the Midwest and solidly in the South, so they are strategically placed to control the country as an army, strategically deployed can control and occupy a much larger population.
We have, in the North, the East and the West Coast, functionally, become an occupied country. Occupied by the Far Right. 

They want their guns and their Bibles in public schools and their churches ruling community life and they want their communities to be all White again and they don't want immigrants or different languages heard on the street or in stores and really, they want to return to the 1950's when Whites ruled and the colored cowered and things were stacked in their favor.

Can't blame them. They want to be winning again.

So, as you know, I've proposed a difficult but obvious decision.
We have a dysfunctional, unhappy family. Let us dissolve it. Let us divorce--a no fault divorce. We do not ask Southerners or rural Pennsylvanians  to accept our view of them or their values. We simply ask to be allowed to go our own way.

It will be good for them, and we surely think it will be good for us.

There will be a time of transition and difficulty.  I hope and expect conservative people living in the new United States of Diversity, will look around and find the taxes, the role of government, the restrictions on guns and proscriptions against religion in government will not suit them, and many, if not most will move to the more welcoming South. 

I hope we'll not have anything so traumatic as the India/Pakistan experience, where Muslims moved out and Hindus remained behind and the two new countries were at each other's throats for generations. I hope our parting will be less rancorous.

We have simply reached the point of irreconcilable differences and we should part.
The details remain to be worked out. 

The only clear form I can see is our new nation, the United States of Diversity, will not be contiguous. But we've had Hawaii and Alaska which have not been physically connected to the lower 48 and we can easily handle this.

Will we need passports to travel from Boston to Montgomery, Alabama? Very possibly.

But, from my point of view, that is a price well worth paying to not have Alabama controlling my Medicare, my Congress, my future.

If fate wills it that we should part, then let us make the most of it. 
Let us appeal to the Red States to accept our request for divorce and start our negotiations.

The USD (In Blue) Member Need to Apply

And let us consider, as we do this, exactly what sort of a nation we want to build among the states or parts of states which want to join us. 

FADE TO BLACK.
Okay, that's the pitch.  You've seen the pilot.  You write the next episode.