IS AMERICA READY TO COME BACK?

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Toni Reavis

Despite the GSA finally “ascertaining that Joe Biden was the apparent winner of the Nov. 3 presidential election”, thus allowing the formal transition process to begin, what remains unchanged is that after four years of a Trump presidency, whatever America was before, it is not that anymore. And whatever “American Exceptionalism” might have meant in the past, it does not mean that anymore, either – certainly not to the world-at-large, which once looked to America as we kids once looked to Super Man in the 1950s, you know, “fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

Four years of Donald Trump was all the kryptonite needed to debilitate an image that had taken two centuries to build by the likes of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy. It is a testament to how fragile the structure of democracy is. 

And though Trump lost his bid for re-election, 74 million Americans still voted as if the last four years supported another four, which speaks to the lingering effect Trumpism will have going forward.

The elections of 2016 and 2020 have confirmed that if you inject enough fear and greed into a system, group-think will take hold and that it will be impervious to logic and rationality, as feelings trump facts, and no argument, no matter how concise, will be able to shake it.

Americans, it turns out,  are no different than any other human beings on the planet. The past means nothing if the future is threatened by one’s adherence to it. 

No, Trump 2016 was not a one-term aberration, a civic crie de coeur from a disenfranchised segment of the population for whom globalization wasn’t a boon but a bust. Instead, even after watching the 45th president trample every norm, upset every alliance, embrace every authoritarian, some 74 million good Americans still chose to see in him a savior rather than a lazy, ill-prepared, selfish saboteur. 

Facts, it turns out, are quite mutable in this current America where fear is regnant and comeuppance due. 

In other words, Trump was/is a reflection of the true red-blue split that has been building in America for 40 years. He was not the radical outlier, but a real hero to half the nation – though a revolting specter to the other half. And there is your divide. Neither blue America nor red can seemingly build a bridge with the other. Our colors have set like a permanent stain where there is no bleaching them out. 

We speak the same words but not the same language. We see the same thing but define it in different ways.

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President-elect Biden introduced his national security team on November 24, 2020, an impressive group of talent and experience that harkens back to America’s Best & Brightest (except for John Kerry, for whom I’ve never had much use). But it will take more than saying, “America is back” for that to be so, as the world has watched with a mixture of schadenfreude and horror as Trump has dismantled the post-WWII American world order.

America has always presented itself as different, unique, not beholden to blood and land but to an ideal expressed by its founders and embraced by succeeding generations that the free individual was the foundational element of society. But they also held that each free individual pledged allegiance to a mutual responsibility that undergirded their freedom. One cannot thrive without the other.

And that was all well and good as long as everyone (who counted – and not all did) was safe, secure, and relatively happy. But the minute that pursuit was challenged from below, all bets were off.

In the time of a hundred-year pandemic, in the wealthiest and most advanced country on earth, this 2020 election has shown how easily corrupted America could be. 

More than that, 2020 has been like the dotted-I and crossed-T to the 1980 Reagan Revolution. Reagan, you recall, came to office denigrating the U.S. government to its people. His joke, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help,” always delivered the laugh but it also seeded the distrust which blooms so vividly in 2020. 

According to the Pew Research Center, 1964 was the high watermark for trust in the federal government when three-quarters of the American people believing that the federal government would do the right thing some or most of the time. That trust level has dropped to 17% in 2020.

Reagan’s trickle-down economic approach of the 1980s also opened credit wide, exploded deficit spending (national debt tripled in eight years), and saw savings rates tumble as he liberated us to our appetites, greed, and consumption, turning us into a nation of grasshoppers.  

In the ensuing years, standards and institutions have fallen, debt has risen, savings dropped, and business and government become even more dangerously entwined. 

The Dotcom bubble of the late 1990s didn’t knock us off that path, nor when the US economy was staggered again during the 2008 financial crisis. We bailed out the banks but did not take an honest accounting and recalibrate our path by tasking ourselves with difficult but needed reforms.  Instead, we just kept pretending there would be no future consequence. 

It was during this time that China began to believe in America’s unrecoverable decline. 

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There is an old Chinese proverb: tao guang, yang hui – bide your time, build your capabilities. That strategy, in time, would overturn the old order, bring you to the lead and enable victory. Some observers also believe it is the current political philosophy of modern China. 

For over 200 years, it was our safe redoubt as the abundantly gifted, unthreatened nation protected by two expansive oceans that allowed us to grow and prosper on a continental scale even as the other nations of the world continued to scrap and squabble amongst themselves.

The First World War of the 20th century brought down empires and reconfigured the global map. In many ways, the world remains a remnant of that conflict. And while America was tasked greatly, she came out of World War II as the preeminent nation of the world with a huge advantage that succeeding generations took as their right and privilege, though it was the Greatest Generation that had made the sacrifice to earn that position.  

In an attempt to avoid another world conflagration, America helped establish a new world financial order at the Bretton Woods Conference in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the summer of 1944. There, the victorious nations from the war met to form a series of monetary institutions – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank – to steady the unsettled financial order that had led to military conflict in the first place.  Out of Bretton Woods, the American dollar became the standard unit of financial exchange worldwide.

But 75 years on, technology and global trade have brought the world closer and erased much of the American economic hegemony. And as U.S. jobs left for more clement taxes and cheaper labor abroad, and education was not prioritized at home, as the understanding that America’s business class was more attuned to its own health rather than that of its workforce, more and more factories were shuttered and jobs lost. All the while government sided with the bosses and did nothing to protect the people, and court rulings like “Citizens United” equated money with blood and bone, and money was taxed lower than labor until the frustrations felt by millions of displaced Americans finally turned to anger. 

But rather than engendering a national initiative to rebuild a robust middle-class, society kept putting off its hard choices and never developed a broad constituency for middle-class redevelopment.  

Thus, as the Haves grew increasingly have-ier while the put-upon class grew larger and no relief arrived to address the gut-level feeling of betrayal, a demagogue like Donald Trump arrived to find fertile ground upon which to plant his seeds of division and disunion disguised in the flag of “America First!”

And wasn’t he the perfect image for our time of national decline? Knowing this now won’t save us, God knows, but it feels good to do something that vents our deep-seated fears just the same.

Throughout this tumultuous time, long-cocooned China began implementing a plan that Michael Pillsbury wrote about in his 2015 book The Hundred-Year Marathon. In it, Pillsbury outlined China’s secret strategy to supplant America as the number one global superpower by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong in 1949.

America under Trump will have accelerated that exchange by a decade or more, notwithstanding his re-election defeat in 2020. That’s how consequential Trump has been in just four short years, and how fragile a democratic form of government has been shown to be. 

As we continue to vacate the world stage and dismantle the alliances and institutions that saw the global rise of the American Economic Empire—the empire of the dollar —China will continue attempting to fill that vacuum, however imperfectly. In 2019, China overtook the United States in the total number of diplomatic outposts worldwide. 

In 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping initiated the Belt & Road Initiative, a global infrastructure developmental strategy that has built ties in dozens of countries around the world, even as our president continued to preen and strut in our name, braying about being No. 1, the greatest country in history while walking away from American instituted international organizations and treaties.

This is not to suggest that China has an open road ahead. Its own internal fault lines and authoritarian thuggishness have hindered its own efforts overseas writes Samantha Power, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., in the Jan./Feb. issue of Foreign Affairs.

“Yet even as the United States has faltered in highly visible and costly ways, China is fumbling the mantle of global leadership, too, with its lethal cover-up of the pandemic, its bullying diplomacy and extraterritorial belligerence, its controversial approach to development, and its ongoing human rights horrors, including the mass internment of its Uighur Muslim population.”

Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, therefore, coupled with his vast international experience, while lending hope to a renewed American engagement with the world, still must contend with the domestic strength of the Republican Party, which picked up seats in the house and will likely holding on to the senate. That strength confirms the arc of history that we are on. Trump may have lost, but Trumpism goes on validated by the more than 70 million votes he garnered. 

The irony is rich, of course, as Fundamentalist Christians continue to follow the least Christian man in America, one who pays off strippers to keep them quiet, who wasn’t even a Republican till a black man came to the presidency in 2008, who uses other people’s charitable contributions to payoff lawsuit settlements.

If we remain polarized at home and isolationist abroad, we, like the Soviet Union before us, risk ending up as a dangerous nuclear power, but with an increasingly hollowed-out national center. As in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, life expectancy in America is already, for the first time, going down. 

As if on cue, like a trampolining effect, the combination of Trumpism and the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 hails the end of what’s been called the American Century.  It isn’t certain yet whose century the 21st will be, and there is still time for America to reassert its traditional role. But as of this writing, I’m glad the Greatest Generation and all previous ones aren’t around anymore to see what we have done of late with the legacy they left us. 

END

LEARNING FROM de TOCQUEVILLE IN 2020

Posted on September 30, 2020 by Toni Reavis

Remember that it was the French diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville who first extolled the vibrancy of America’s civil society in his two-volume Democracy in America (1835 and 1840).  Forty-six years later the French people affirmed de Tocqueville’s assessment when they gifted America with the Statue of Liberty (dedicated October 28, 1886).

In other words, it wasn’t us blowing our own horn, rather an outsider who saw in us something new and laudatory within the family of nations.

Historically, what made America so appealing is the same thing that made Babe Ruth so appealing. We were big and strong, but fun-loving, good-natured, and out-going, too, and maybe, endearingly, a little naive, as well. Though originally blind to the damage done by our slave-owning past and roughshod Manifest Destiny striving, overall, America was a smile and a clap on the back, a little less cynical than the ages-old societies that preceded us. And within that spirit was a readiness to lend a hand to those in need, another reflexive, Ruthian trait.

We didn’t play up our size or our might. Instead, we were ‘aw-shucks’ humble in our strength, embracing in our openness, and generous in our spirit.

What happened to that America?

Now we brag incessantly about how great we are – “the greatest country in the history of the world”.  We wrap ourselves in the flag and conduct military fly-overs at every turn, ostentatiously reveling in our armaments while simultaneously holding one hand over our heart while patting ourselves on the back with the other like a double-jointed massage therapist.

Coming from where we began and how the world came to know and respect us, it is all more than a little unseemly.  Instead of Uncle Sam, we have morphed into Biff Tannen from the movie Back To The Future.

When America declared her independence, the founders felt it prudent to address how the world would view our separation from England. Because our rational would undergird the moral standard to which the United States would strive as a new nation while deterring other nations from backing Britain in her pushback.

Thus, the final clause of the Declaration’s introduction read “…a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

“A decent respect to the opinions of mankind” was among the founding concerns of this nation. Now it’s “America First”.

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There has always been a difference between old money and new in how wealth was displayed. Old money hid behind long driveways and simple facades. The new has always presented more ostentatiously. Though a relatively new nation, America carried herself with understated confidence as she grew in size – “walk softly and carry a big stick”, said Teddy Roosevelt – knowing that with our declaration of equality, and goal of perfecting our union, we carried more than just an industrial might, but a moral strength, too. We did not ascribe to the Nazi or North Korean jack-booted, goose-stepping swagger.

Give me back that America of the big heart and open hand. Such attributes didn’t make us suckers, they made us saviors.

Remember what else de Tocqueville said of this nation: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

America is given that ability every four years on the first Tuesday in November. With a record of staggering incivility, disunity, and fear-mongering before us, we can see what a monumental error we made in November 2016. Though made in good faith, that error represented an honest attempt to put an end to the dynastic cycle of two families that had overseen the American government since 1980, the Bushes and the Clintons. But as some could readily anticipate, the bombastic cure we elected was much worst than the ill he was meant to heal (OUR PRESIDENTIAL APPRENTICE).

And so again on November 3, 2020, we will again be presented with an opportunity to correct what has become arguably the most corrosive agency ever allowed within the halls of power and near the founding spirit of this unique nation. Once again we are drawn to de Tocqueville for guidance.

“Society is endangered not by the profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”

Vote, my friends, as if your nation’s fate depended on it because it very well may.

END

 

AMERICA IN THE BALANCE

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Toni Reavis

Both political parties have staged their virtual conventions, both have set off their fireworks displays, and both have warned us against the existential threat to America posed by voting for their opponent. And that is the scratch line behind which we stand in the race for the White House in 2020. Perhaps the overriding question before us is: Irrespective of the outcome, can there be anything approaching a victory given such a divergent match up?

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Pressured by a polarizing presidency, a viral pandemic – along the economic crisis that attends it – and street protests erupting against a backdrop of police brutalities committed against unarmed black people (like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks), America is once again searching for those elusive ties that bind at a time when there are money and political capital to be made by the forces of denial, distrust, and opposition.

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC  poll (June 7, 2020) found that 80% of the public believes the country is out of control, while only 15% view it as being guided by a steady hand.  If we break that WSJ/NBC poll down, it is likely that we will find a wide gap in the understanding of how the nation became so polarized and what we might do to correct it, if anything.

 

But the sense here, and it’s an ironic one, is that the Gadsden Flag’s “Don’t Tread On Me” brand of staunchly American individualism and anti-government sentiment that earmarked our nation as something new and revolutionary at its founding, the same individualism that helped create the American pioneering and entrepreneurial spirits that proved to be such a strong character trait within a more widely spread but homogenous population, has now become the very quality that keeps us from being able to unite in a time of crisis in a more tightly packed, heterogeneous society.

Imagine that, our greatest strength now part of what is working to keep us apart. So much so, that the concept of “We, the people” no longer seems applicable some 244 years after our founding.

What’s missing in America 2020 is a widely accepted sense of common values and purpose, like the unifying drive for freedom from monarchical England in the 18th century – which, don’t forget, wasn’t monolithic at the time, either – or the shock of Pearl Harbor in 1941 or 9/11 in 2001.

But cataclysms don’t provide sustainable political unity. We have to be for something together, not just against this thing and that as individuals.

The effects of globalism that ties capital together beyond national borders, and a series of new technologies that make every citizen complete in him/herself, has left the once unifying concept of community and country incapable of bringing us under a common tent.

And absent any such a new unifying purpose, besides war – hell, even a raging pandemic doesn’t bring us together – the American experiment in self-rule will continue to split farther and farther into those deeply opposing camps until any sense of an American people as previously understood will dissipate into permanent divisions of Us and Thems.

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It’s a delicate determination, for sure, but the perception of what it means to be an American is what hangs in the balance this November of 2020.

If America is primarily defined by its language, borders, and culture, the first and third brought to the second from the shores of Great Britain – and later, the descendants of the slave population shipped to these shores beginning in 1619 – then the wave of brown-faced, not native-born Americans who are increasingly displacing those of a whiter shade of pale is understandably a disquieting turn worth opposing.

But if the true America isn’t just its language and culture, important though they are, but the idea that was articulated at the founding that “ALL men are created equal, etc.”, the America exemplified by “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, if that is the real America, then whatever shade the American complexion may take or language it may speak or culture it may produce, are less consequential if those complexions, languages, and cultures pledge allegiance to that same originating American ideal, not simply its constantly evolving cultural milieu. And since our borders have long since expanded to Hawaii and Alaska, the concept of place as being determinative has already been traversed.

Yet in these circumstances, we can still wholly honor the founders of the country for their ideal in spite of their contradictory nature of claiming freedom and espousing equality while at the same time owning slaves, and put that contradiction into the context of their times even as their ideals continue to spread hope for freedom around the world.

But if America truly does define itself in terms of a  country of majority-white Anglo-Saxon Protestants with an additional few Catholics from middle and Eastern Europe, and some oppressed Jews, and maybe some STEM-infused Asians to keep us ahead of the scientific curve, and some ballplayers out of the Dominican Republic, and everyone else just stay the f#ck out, then America never was the country it purported to be in the first place.

At the same time, failure by newcomers to assimilate into long-standing national norms will only further fragment an already multi-faceted population until what we share isn’t a land but simply its ground.

In the end, we either believe in the founding declaration itself or just in the people who made the declaration and accept, as they did, the assumed limitations they intended upon making it, i.e. “all land-owning white men are created equal and endowed by their (Christian) creator with certain unalienable rights…”

And that is the question being asked of today’s Americans like never before.

It is how we answer that question in November – what truly defines “America”? – that will determine which direction this republic takes into her future years, a forward-thinking idealized one of many shades or the backward-looking one of a single color and attitude.

END

 

THE TRUMP COMEUPPANCE

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Toni Reavis

 

“We need to make this an aberration, not our reality,“ said historian Jon Meacham when asked what he took from former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s insider account of the Trump presidency, The Room Where It Happened. Yes, call 2017-2021 the Trump interregnum, a one-term crie de coeur from a long-suffering segment of the American population that Trump pandered to and then exploited for his own gain.

But while the world-at-large is being tested by a deadly novel pathogen, with some nations passing that test better than others, I have a sneaking suspicion that America’s triple 2020 whammy of Coronavirus, Donald Trump, and the Black Lives Matter movement is just old-fashioned karma finally come a-calling on the US of A. And we might one day come to know that combination as the Trump Comeuppance.

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Lawmakers and the judiciary often refer to Original Intent as the Northstar that guides our path forward as a nation. But you have to wonder how sincere our Founders’ declaration “all men are created equal“ really was if after 244 years we still can’t make it apply universally. And so, after a long and, to date, blemished record in color-coordinated democratic self-rule, America has finally seen the Fates step up.

 

In a fit of 21st-century pique, the Fates presented America with a Brioni suit-wearing Apprentice President, one over-ripened with vacuous self-confidence and a truly imbecilic understanding of government and history – “everything will be simple and done quickly”, right? Then taxed him with a raging pandemic, a nuanced foreign field of play, and a long-simmering domestic social injustice brought to a boil, and let nature take its course.

You never know what might be the catalyst for historic change. In a different time, at a different place, today’s catalyst would be just another average tragedy added to the long list of previous tragedies, like the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, for instance. Horrible to see, yes, but just chalk it up as another brown man killed for being brown, wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Seen it before, will see it again.

But the quickly following slow-motion kneel-lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and the jaw-dropping case of Breonna Taylor, killed in her own home by Louisville police who busted into the wrong house they were tasked to serve and protect, was enough to break the lockdown dam. The newly witnessed killing of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta police just added volume to the already rushing current.

And that’s all after the Fates had given us a mulligan or two when we first got started.

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After Columbus opened the American continent to Europe, competing national powers fought over and settled North America – well, took over would be a better description – by bringing a can-do pioneer spirit along with diseases that wiped out 90 percent of the indigenous population.

By the time of the American Revolution, however, our intentions were ennobled. We came out of the blocks as a nation with a mission statement for the ages, “All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

Historic words, indeed, and a breathtaking declaration in the era of the divine-right-of-kings. Except, our forefathers meant those words literally. Men were created equal. Actually, land-owning white men were created equal, not women, and for godsakes, not slaves. What, are you kidding? They were farther down than the native Americans.

From that starting point, it took 87 more years – the last three of which took the form of Civil War – before Abraham Lincoln reconfigured our mission to include freed black slaves. Once more the Fates gave us a pass. They could see we were on the right path, at least from a leadership standpoint.  But laws don’t change the hearts of men. And so did Jim Crow replace slavery as the privileged majority continued to see itself as the real and only first among equals. Even then, women, white or otherwise, didn’t get the vote until 1920.

And so have the original racist tendencies fostered by the Brits and Scots who founded this country continued to infect the body politic.  It’s true, the origins of American racism go back well before our founding. So maybe the Fates were allowing for that, as well. “We will give these new Americans time to figure it out then work it out.”

But just like marathon runners can make pacing errors in the first 15-20 minutes that can have dire consequences down the road, the introduction of slavery to North America in 1619, and the vestigial remnants that have echoed on since January 1, 1863, were finally enough to exhaust the Fates.

“These people aren’t ever going to change.  This IS who they are. And now they double dared us by electing the current Tool in Chief?

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What about American exceptionalism, you ask, that hoary trope of self-promotion? Well, isn’t the old adage, “You’re only as good as your last race?”

So while there may well have been exceptionalism imbued in her aspirations, even in some of her foreign actions like with the Marshall Plan in Europe and General MacArthur‘s benevolent rebuilding of Japan following World War II, there were certainly less so in America’s actions at home.  In fact, those actions have been all too consistent from the get-go. Racial intolerance and injustice trace our history step-for-step like a country line dance.

Is that sad?  Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just honest. If you haven’t been able to live up to your own ideals after 244 years of nationhood and another 157 before that when you first imported fellow human beings in shackles to work as slaves, how likely are you to change in another 29, 49, or 60 more years?

This IS who we are. All men ARE created equal. Just not in the application of their higher ideals, but in the acting out of their frailties, faults, and base prejudices.

The Fates have seen enough. The time for self-correction has passed. The triple whammy of Coronavirus, the Trump presidency, and Black Lives Matter are the karmic payoffs. The economy is at risk of cratering, the President polarizes in a panic of self-interest, and the streets are awash with both protesters and magical thinkers even as the pathogen licks its lips in gluttonous anticipation.

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Today’s polarized populace has been spun to the far ends of the political spectrum, setting in motion centrifugal forces that threaten to spiral this country out of control. The sense of civic responsibility and the common purpose that defined America is disappearing faster than NCAA men’s cross country and track programs.

On top of that, there is race-based incivility that keeps on metastasizing even as we, of our own volition, elected a president who is as far from Abe Lincoln as a 58-story glass tower in Midtown Manhattan is from a log cabin in New Salem, Illinois.

Today, we have a president who is the gift that just keeps giving. Sadly, it’s to Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran.  So ill-informed of mind, so petty of personality, so weak in character, his Gatling gut reactions spray authoritarianism and flummery without any deducible coherence beyond self-aggrandizement.

Not only does our Dear Leader Donald not embrace the torment wracking the most vulnerable of his charges, but his utter bovinity (sic) not only spreads division but spews political bile like a projectile-vomiting Manchurian candidate planted to corrode the ties that bound E Pluribus Unum into a nation that much of the world took as the beacon for its own dreams.

How quickly the world’s oldest, most powerful democracy has come under existential threat with just one horrific choice for president.  What is leadership worth?  “What have you got to lose?” as one candidate candidly asked in 2016.  Look and see for yourself.

We just learned that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Knowledge of this policy made its way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the White House, but President Hear-No-Evil claims he knew nothing about it.

Our adversaries can save their time and money.  We won’t be overthrown by an invading foreign force. No need. We’ll take ourselves down from the inside in a Shakespearean tragedy for the ages. And the Future will weep at what might have been.

I’m telling ya, karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?

END

 

THE MADNESS OF KING DONALD
Posted on April 25, 2020 by Toni Reavis

BYE-BYE BERNIE

TRUMPSIT
Posted on April 5, 2020 by Toni Reavis

If you are searching for a particular set of tea-leaves to read before November’s U.S. elections – if they even happen in these very unsettling times – just look at the arc of the Brexit votes in the UK, the ones determining whether to withdraw from the European Union or not.  Spoiler Alert, they left!

In June 2016, the original Brexit referendum passed in what was seen as a shocker because so many Brits thought their “yes” to leave was simply a screw-the-establishment protest vote. Only after the votes were counted did it become clear that enough others had voted with that same thought that the referendum actually passed. Here are the totals.

Leave	17,410,742	51.89
Remain	16,141,241	48.11

Instantly, there was an outcry for a new vote so people could express their “real” feelings.  But three plus years and three Brexit delays later, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May, an early general election was held on 12 December 2019.

As opposed to the 2016 vote, the 2019 election delivered a landslide of 80 additional Parliamentary seats to the pro-Brexit Conservatives, representing the party’s largest majority since 1987.

Following the vote, Conservative standard-bearer Boris Johnson declared that the UK would leave the EU in early 2020. The withdrawal agreement was ratified by the UK on 23 January, by the EU on 30 January, and entered into force on 31 January just as the Coronavirus was about to explode.

Now recall the 2016 U.S. election. How many of the electorate voted for Donald Trump as a protest against the status quo?  Oops!  Now, 3 1/2 years later on the cusp of the 2020 election, with an impeachment acquittal in his rearview mirror, and the Democrats in lockdown amidst the coronavirus crisis,Trump, like Brexit, is poised for a landslide win in November. You watch.

Of all the times for an insidious novel coronavirus to enter the body politic. No time would be right, of course, but this time is particularly fraught.

Here we are, not only in the middle of an election year when political contention is always at its highest, but now trapped in a healthcare vice that threatens to crumble the very foundations of the nation, and who do we find as captain of this Ship of State?  None other than an impeached but acquitted novel president, unmasked and unyielding, confidently unknowing, prowling the halls of the White House, prescribing unproven drugs based on late-night conversations with his kitchen cabinet cronies, cursing at anyone and everyone he perceives to be working against him, unable to see beyond the tip of his tanning-bed tinted nose as the danger mounts and the body counts rise.

“What we’re doing right now I think is going to be very successful,” he says as governors and mayors throughout the country beg for a national policy to coordinate a response to the growing crisis, even as he adds that at a certain point “we have a big decision to make. We cannot let this (lockdown) continue. So at a certain point, some hard decisions are going to have to be made.”

The perfect storm has arisen and with a Queegish captain at the wheel, the Ship of State is floundering.  As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Now, in a divided country, efficient and farsighted government is necessary to overcome obstacles unprecedented in magnitude and global scope.”

People around the world just sit in slack-jawed wonder thinking, “OMG, maybe this is what America has become after all.”

Who would have thought it possible?

Here we sit deep into the era of our thumb-in-the-eye-of-the-establishment President who is changing the course of the American Ship of State without any navigation tools, charts, or dead reckoning skills to speak of, yet clinging grimly in all his strawberry blond, damn-the-torpedoes belief that he is the indispensable man despite overwhelming evidence of a Dunning-Kruger Effect insecurity and incompetence that argues the very opposite.

In 1992, 19% of the electorate was willing to take a chance on a squeaky-voiced Texas business man with sky-is-falling charts to plot the course ahead.  Fortunately, the 81% prevailed.

In 2004, candidate McCain chose a gubernatorial pin-up girl from Alaska as his running mate. But after the act proved paper thin, even hard core Republicans couldn’t find the courage to pull the lever for her ascent to VP.

And wasn’t that the thinking on Trump, too, in 2016?  Of course, this entertaining but buffoonish TV carnival barker wasn’t qualified for the job. People will come to their senses when they enter the voting booth.

But like the Brexit vote in the UK in 2016, what most thought would be little more than a strong protest vote, instead added up to an OMG election victory.  And now we are reaping the harvest of that whirlwind as a heartless virus spreads with a relentlessness that knows no borders and is blind to moronic, bombastic hubris.  Good luck, America, the piper is knocking at your door.

END

ALTERNATIVE FACTS?

Campaigning for office and serving in office require two very different skill sets. Hillary Clinton proved again how poor she was in the former even as her work as New York senator showed a degree of acumen in the latter. 

Throughout his winning campaign Mr. Trump led his rabid followers like a drum major while beating the Republican field like a drum. He considered a bold assertion every bit the equal of a proven fact, and often its better – facts, after all, are so messy and inconvenient with that whole need for supporting evidence. He said as much in his books.  

“People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest,” he said in The Art of The Deal. “Call it truthful hyperbole.”

So he says what he thinks people want to hear in order to close the deal, and doesn’t let truth get in the way. Recall what Paul Simon reminded us of in his classic song The Boxer, “still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

That’s why the 58-story Trump Tower was advertised with a top floor at 68 stories. Not because it had a 68th floor, but so it would sell at a higher price if listed at 68, and caveat emptor.

This is why, in the face of evidence to the contrary, Mr. Trump can say that Vladimir Putin had no hand in altering the election with Russian hacking, say his election is “a movement like we have never seen before in history”, or why he can look at the overhead pictures of his inaugural crowd compared with others taken at exactly the same time of day in previous years and declare his was the biggest ever. 

Black is white, down is up, bad is good. It’s the cynicism of the Big Lie. Tell it over and over and over again and, who knows, after a while it begins to seep in until people will either begin to believe it, or don’t know what to believe. Truth is only what is perceived as truth. History, after all, is written by the winners.

But this kind of truth-twisting is significant in a president, because now it involves each of us, and the world at large. And to show how the disease can begin to infect the body politic, already presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway has coined a new Orwellian phrase for it,  “alternative facts”.  As if 2 + 2 = 5 is an alternative fact to 2+2 = 4.

And to prove how “on message” the new administration is, on Monday White House spokesman Sean Spicer told the press corps in the first press scheduled briefing under President Donald Trump, “I believe that we have to be honest with the American people, but I think sometimes we can disagree with the facts.”  As if opinion and fact were now interchangeable.

Can you believe it?  

Heaven help us. 

END

MARCHING NOW?!

From a distance the scenes were resonate of the massive anti-war rallies that eventually led to the U.S. pull out of Vietnam in the 1970s.  But those protest marches took place when their opposition actually helped determine the outcome of the war.  In the case of yesterday’s series of protest marches across America railing against the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States the question looms, NOW everyone gets upset about the election?  Now, after he’s been administered the oath of office?  Little tardy to the party, don’t you think? Didn’t Obama say, ‘don’t boo, vote’?

We learned nothing from the Brexit vote in the U.K?  At least you can excuse Brits who never understood what Brexit meant. But who didn’t know exactly who this guy was?  You think he was holding back for the last 18 months, disguising his qualifications and personal qualities?  He reveled in them.  You didn’t see?

So what forces, you think, kept this civic uprising from happening before 11/03 when it might’ve done some good?  Where was this passion then?  I’m sure 99.7% of the marchers voted for Hillary, but it wasn’t with any of the fire in the belly, which is what the Trump supporters had. 

The Democrats got caught napping, that’s what happened.  They believed the polls, and assumed that what they saw as self-evident – that Trump, like Sarah Palin in 2008,  was unqualified for national office –  would be apparent to everyone on election day, too. Instead, not even close! 

Trump generated passions on all sides, yes, but there was a larger group pushing him forward than there was shoving him back. People miscalculated, but didn’t realize how badly till it was too late. Now they march?  Now they carry placards?   

That said, only 26% of those eligible actually voted for Mr. Trump, but more than enough to win the electoral college tally. And it wasn’t just true Trumpers either, there was bleed-over from those Repubs and Indys who voted Obama in either 2008 or 2012. Don’t think there wasn’t.

What is evident is that Hillary never struck a nerve this time around. She was like an old Republican candidate, say Bob Dole; it was just her turn. But there was no passion in the argument for her, only angst in the opposition to her opponent. 

So here we are with the Tangerine Dream ensconced in the Oval Office in command of the full set of powers that attend it.  I get it, and wish him God’s speed for all our sakes. But the fact that a misogynistic unqualified opportunist is now POTUS is the unblinking mirror that America will have to look into each morning for the next four years.  So all the protesters have to ask if they did enough when the chips were still on the table. 

But now is not the time to despair, it’s time to trust the system that has sustained the country for nearly two and a half centuries. How fragile would that system have to have been if this man could fundamentally alter it?  We need to have more faith than that in all that has come before, and the continuing promise that lies ahead.

END

DISRUPTOR IN CHIEF 

With the entire political establishment arrayed at his back, and leaden clouds looming overhead, newly sworn in President Donald J. Trump addressed his “Make America Great Again” followers in the crowd stretched along the capital mall.

“From this day forward, it’s going to be ONLY America first, American first,” he said, speaking simultaneously to a jittery world beyond. “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”

Mr. Trump had promised never to betray his followers, and his inaugural address  didn’t disappoint.  “Me and you against them,” was his message as the rain began to fall.  There were some who thought (wished) Mr. Trump would assume a more conciliatory tone once the swearing in had taken place, as Lincoln had in his famed second inaugural, as Trump himself had done when meeting with President Obama at the White House during the transition.  But the tone of his 16-minute inaugural address was vintage Trump, reflecting his bombastic campaign stump speeches more than any of the previous 57 inaugural addresses.  Absent was any historical context, unifying message. or appeal to what Lincoln called ‘our better angels’. Instead, Trump gave them the devil.

“Their victories have not been your victories,” he said speaking of the Washington insiders; “their triumphs have not been your triumphs.  And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”

Pure pessimism with solutions that were presented, as always, as simple, Trump-centric,  and never complex. In fact, there was little more than the Trumpian promise to deal in short order with what he described as the dystopian American carnage of crime, gangs, drugs, and rusted out factories that like tombstones are scattered across the American landscape.  Just as he promised to wipe radical Islamic fundamentalism from the face of the earth, rebuild the military, reconfigure the healthcare system while refitting America with a whole new infrastructure.  Easy.

America as leader of the free world, bulwark against injustice and totalitarianism wherever it may be found, re-builder of vanquished foes in Europe and Asia, architect of the post-WWII Pax Americana, well, that had come to a full-stop reset. The America that Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg had given us on the big screen had slipped away in the name of quarterly profits.

Even giving the New York billionaire builder president the benefit of the doubt that he was still playing to his base, and will come to his senses once he sees reality for what it is – America remains the richest, most powerful nation in the world, the indispensable North Star   –  the fact that his mind is so fixed, so lacking in self awareness as not to understand how his words could be interpreted by crazies on the fringe, enemies at the ready, or allies in a panic is enough in itself to frighten many more than it comforts.  This isn’t a matter of being PC, telling it like it is, it’s a matter of having a fundamental capacity for critical political judgement.

Presidential?  Makes you yearn for G.W. Bush. And who thought that would be possible? Trump is a walking carnival barker, constantly trying to coax people into his gold-fringed freak show tent.  And for responsible Republicans to kid themselves into thinking this blustering editorial cartoon is up to the office of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan and Adams because of some sense of party loyalty, is a testament to how far off-road that party has gone.

Remember well, it was writer Joseph de Maistre who said, “In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve.” So good luck fellow Americans, we have quite a future coming our way over the next four years with no one left to blame but all us rubberneckers as we pass the next political accident sitting in the ditch off the side of the road.

END

BY THE LIGHT OF A NEW DAY

Astronomers believe there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, and between 100 and 300 billion stars in our own Milky Way alone.  The sheer immensity of it is both humbling and beyond our modest comprehension.  Yet more and more people can’t even take in the vast spray of stars cast across the night sky anymore, as that display has been veiled by the light pollution enveloping our cities. Thus, while much has been gained in our relentless technological trek, much has been lost along the way.

With even the majesty of the night sky taken we tend to shrink in the dim light of man’s own making.  By that weak light many people remain in the darkness of fact-aversion, beyond the light of acquired knowledge and accepted science.  And though all science is amenable to challenge, there is no light strong enough to penetrate blind denial or unquestioning allegiance.  Accordingly, many see only right/wrong, light/dark, win/lose, here/there, yes/no, a very restricted, brittle outlook, indeed. Even our political framework has been so constructed into cartoonish either/or choices.

As one eventful year bleeds into the next, we find ourselves increasingly at a distance from one another. Yet to co-exist, much less thrive, we must embrace certain basic premises like no cutting the course, the line forms here, and ours is a country of laws rather than men or the teachings of any particular belief system. And that understanding has worked quite well for over two centuries, because over that time there has been a large enough aggregate invested in the system where the differences in other beliefs have been assuaged by the common good.

But once the constitutional system begins to corrupt and representation becomes available to the highest bidder rather than to the average voter, powerful historical forces like technological advancement and globalization can redefine winners and losers as the interests of the common man give way to the those of a few particularly advantaged men.  Soon special interests form while the population at-large drifts into camps of flinty-eyed like-mindeds.  Without a moderating middle things begin to polarize, until, dramatically out of balance, one side or the other snaps.

This is the unsettling equilibrium that now confronts us as an analysis from Oxfam shows how just eight of the richest men in the world have accumulated as much wealth as the bottom half of the planet’s entire population.  This imbalance is part of what helped elect Donald Trump, as he first reflected then ginned up a righteous, frustrated anger through an increasingly fearful population eager to lash out against perceived losses — even if not fully realizing the consequences of that lash.  Because once set loose a pent up populism will dance spastic for a while like a pack of lit firecrackers before it burns through leaving a charred husk behind. We may not be at the combustion phase yet, but the sparks of dissolution are becoming increasingly evident and disturbing.

Both the rest of the world and the U.S. have now repeatedly been visited by episodes of mass shootings, police shootings, bombings, and indiscriminate targeting of police by citizen shooters. Predictably, the carnage has released a welter of emotional responses, from anger and sadness, to fear and righteous indignation.  In the U.S. there have been calls for fewer guns and for more guns; for a more open, inclusive society and for a more fearful, walled-in nation. (BROTHERS ON ARMS)

In the Cold War the choice was between free-market capitalism and state-run communism, and the world fell into rough alignment along that borderline.  It took half a century for capitalism to prevail/communism to fail.  But the Soviet implosion left a vacuum along the political spectrum rather than a single-pole winner. It also had a shriveling effect on the entire left wing of political ideology, a reality that became apparent in the U.S. this last November 8th.

Today, camps have been pitched along several fronts, including one that lies along a values continuum balancing the advanced technologies and inclusive social mores of the progressive West against a retrenching populism at home. Another foments an even more radical 7th century barbarism in the Middle East, and yet a third extols a revanchist pride here, there, and everywhere.  And let the world beware of each.

While the promise of technology has always been great, its corresponding danger lies in how it simultaneously isolates us into a whirlpool of conspiracy theories that demonizes the “other”, while bringing us into closer proximity to the point where we can’t keep from bumping into one another. Now heat that brewing stew with the fervor of organized, faith-based belief – doesn’t matter which particular faith, because each and every one of them offers a zero-sum game that leaves no room for conciliation. It is my way or the Hell Bound Highway.  And moral certitude is dangerous no matter who wields it.

Rather than seeing one another as culturally-specific expressions of the same natural impulse, e.g. the search for meaning and and a path toward purpose-driven living, the righteous in every belief system sees an existential choice, either-or, with-us-or-against-us, with the consequences of right and wrong viewed through the prism of that particular belief’s tenets.

This is where sport once helped mend the torn fabric of humanity. Sport is where we strip ourselves bare and share the same humanity on a base, gravitational field. But sport, too, has been ripped by its own hand, abdicated its integrity, leaving the agitated world to build even more pressure. Fear and revenge are among the sticks of societal dynamite being set. All they need is a certain spark.

As  news reverberates that eight white men own as much wealth as the bottom 3.6 billion people on earth,  the 1% meeting in Davos, Switzerland have to be smart. Walls and safe-rooms have only limited utility, for whatever walls you might construct can just as easily come tumbling down like the on in Jericho once did.

The way forward isn’t to isolate and pull away, but to invest against the growing disaffection.  You aren’t separate from the masses, my friends, you are among them for better or worse. We have entered Fram Oil Filter ad territory – “you can either pay me now, or pay me (much more) later”.  So pay it forward while you still can, you Masters of the Universe, before the tinder ignites, and things blow apart and we make a light such that the stars themselves will weep at the loss beheld.

END