THE LEWIS LEGACY

After a three and a half hour funeral, civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis was laid to rest yesterday in Atlanta.

What is his legacy?

At college in the late '50s, Lewis became a serious student of non-violence. In 1960, he  launched successful  sit-ins to desegregate Nashville's downtown lunch counters.  In 1961, he was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, refusing to sit in the back of buses as they rode from Washington DC to New Orleans.  In the course of those rides,  he was beaten in South Carolina and Birmingham, left unconscious from a beating at a bus station in Montgomery,  and regularly arrested. 

In Mississippl, he spent forty days in that state's Sunflower County penitentiary.

In 1963, at the age of 23 and as head of the nationwide Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),  he was the youngest speaker to address the crowd of a quarter million from the Lincoln Memorial, demanding voting rights at the celebrated March on Washington.  In 1965, on Bloody Sunday, he was planning to walk from Selma to Montgomery in support of those same rights and expected to be arrested. 

Instead, he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge right into the skull fracturing baton of an Alabama state trooper.

And wound up in the hospital.

In the 1970s, he ran the  Voter Education Project, adding four million minority voters to the rolls.  In 1981, he became a member of the Atlanta City Council, and in 1986 he was elected to Congress. Until his death earlier this month, he served there for thirty-three years.  He was regularly returned to his seat in the House by two-thirds of his constituents.

At yesterday's funeral,  three former Presidents -- George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- eulogized him.

In those eulogies,  they recounted the emergence of a poor sharecropper's son from Troy, Alabama.    Preaching to his chickens, running for the school bus, becoming an ordained Baptist minister, and so ignited by Dr. King's Biblical call to non-violence and justice that he made it his life's work. 

"It is a great honor to be back at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.," said Barack Obama, "to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple."

"He insist[ed]," said George W. Bush, "that hate and fear had to be answered with love and hope." He was so insistent, said Bill Clinton, that in 1966 he lost the leadership of SNCC to Stokely Carmichael,  refusing to believe that aggression and exclusion would be more effective than Dr. King's non-violent universality. "[I]t must have been painful to lose," said Clinton, "but he showed as a young man there are some things you cannot do to hang on to a position,  because if you do them, you won't be who you are anymore."

John Lewis never stopped being who he was.

In his eighty years, he fought discrimination in all forms . . . in all forums . . . against anyone . . . and at any time.

Even as an old man . . .

When he sat all night on the floor of the House of Representatives demanding a vote on legislation to end gun violence.

Even as a dying man . . .

When he stood on that street in DC on which  Black Lives Matter had been written, the street where protesters of all colors daily gathered in the wake of the death of George Floyd , the one from which US soldiers were illegally ordered to remove them.

What is his legacy?

It is, as Bill Clinton put it, "to suit up and march on."

"Bull Connor may be gone," said Barack Obama, "But today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans.  George Wallace may be gone.  But we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators."

"We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot," he continued, "[b]ut even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darndest to discourage people from voting -- by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrtrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don't get sick."

There's a lot to do.

"The story that began in Troy," said President Bush, "isn't ending today, nor is the work."  

On the morning of the funeral, aware of the praise that would come Lewis's way and therefore more or less on (psychological) cue, Donald Trump raised the possibility of delaying this November's election.  The ostensible purpose, according to Trump, would be to avoid mail-in ballot fraud, a fear he and Attorney General Barr have repeatedly stoked of late but one that lacks any basis in fact.

Almost immediately, Trump's latest trip to the altar of anti-democratic authoritarianism was rejected en masse.  

Democrats were predictably aghast but even stalwart right wingers thought this a bridge too far.  Prof. Steven Calabresi, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society, called the suggestion "fascistic",  and historian Michael Beschloss noted that during the Civil War President Lincoln had categorically rejected it.  Closer to home, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it wouldn't happen, and legal experts far and wide asserted that it couldn't anyway, the November 3 election date having been set by statute and unchangeable absent a new one.

But is it?

There have been numerous reports over the last two years of unknown emergency powers available to the president.  Last week, former Sen. Gary Hart penned an op-ed in The New York Times.  "We have recently come to learn," he wrote, "of at least a hundred documents authorizing extraordinary presidential powers in the case of a national emergency, virtually dictatorial powers without congressional or judicial checks and balances."  No one, according to Hart, knows what these powers are or what specifically they permit, and delaying or otherwise avoiding elections may easily be one of them.   

For any who think Hart another Democratic Cassandra, he served on the Church Committee that investigated and laid bare the abuses of the CIA in the 1970s. He also co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission that predicted the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  

We ignore him at out peril.

And though, as President Clinton noted yesterday, "there are some things" his deceased hero would not do "to hang on to a position",  the same cannot be said of Donald Trump.

So . . .

What would John Lewis do?

I don't know precisely.  

But what he would not do is sit idly by assuming the worst was not possible or the best was likely.  He would not assume that past is necessarily prologue.  "We cannot treat voting as an errand to run if we have some time," said Barack Obama yesterday, "We have to treat it as the most important action we can take on behalf of democracy."  

At the funeral yesterday, the strains of "We Shall Overcome", that ancient anthem of hope,  reverberated through Dr. King's church.  It was sung to celebrate a man who was beaten within inches of his life because he insisted that all Americans had the right to vote.

Thanks to him, and others like him, we do.

We all do.

We still do.

And Trump better not fuck with it.

REFLECTIONS

REFLECTIONS

America has never in my lifetime confronted a crisis like the one it faces now.

The closest we came was with the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.

In that scandal, then-President Richard Nixon possibly authorized and definitely covered-up his re-election committee's burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).  The objective of the burglary was to photograph documents and install listening devices so that the President's re-election committee had on-going intelligence on the stategy and tactics of its opponents. On at least two occasions  -- May 28, 1972 and June 17, 1972 -- the burglars broke into the DNC's offices, the first time to install wiretaps and the second to photograph documents. On the second, they were arrested while committing their crime.

In September 1972, the five burglars were indicted.  A Republican judge made sure the case did not die with phony, low-level pleas and stonewalling, and Woodward and Bernstein met sources in their homes (and the best one in a parking garage), unearthing the truth that the burglary and subsequent cover-up went all the way to the White House. A  joint special committee of the House and Senate was empanelled to determine, in the famous words of Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, "what . . . the President [knew] and when . . . he [knew] it", and a Special Prosecutor was created to investigate the crimes and prosecute those responsible.   When Nixon directed his then Attorney General to fire the Special Prosecutor, that Attorney General refused and resigned, as did his deputy on whom the order fell.  After the third in command at the Department of Justice carried out the order,  a new -- and equally independent -- Special Prosecutor was appointed .

The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to disclose his tapes, which confirmed his guilt. The House Judiciary Committee voted to send Articles of Impeachment to the floor for a vote.  Seven of the seventeen Republican members of that Committee had voted "Aye". Republican Senators Goldwater and Scott and House Minority Leader Rhodes, also a Republican,  then marched to the Oval Office and told Nixon he would be impeached and convicted.

No one was pardoned.

Nixon resigned.

Crisis averted.

Things are different today.

In the early evening this past Friday, President Trump commuted the forty (40) month prison sentence of his friend Roger Stone. Just beforehand, Stone -- who would have had to report to prison this week -- suggested this would be appropriate payback for his silence.

Last November, a jury found Stone guilty  on seven felony counts of obstructing Congress's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.  The charges included lying to Congressional investigators and intimidating a witness into not testifying. In particular, Stone lied about conversations in which he reported to Trump the imminent publication by Wikileaks of the emails Russia stole from the Clinton campaign, lied about his contacts and conversations with intermediaries who had knowledge of Wikileaks' plans, falsely denied that he had any emails or text messages concerning these contacts and communications, and threatened a witness with death if that witness testified.  

Had Stone not lied, there's no telling what he might have said to implicate Trump.  

At the very least, truthful testimony probably would  have proven that Trump himself committed perjury when he told Robert Mueller that he could not recall any communications with Stone concerning Wikileaks' dumps of the stolen Clinton emails.  At most, that testimony might have demonstrated that Trump and Stone in fact participated in a conspiracy to aid and abet Russian interference in the 2016 election. Instead, Mueller could not prove that conspiracy and Trump has thereafter regularly -- and loudly --  proclaimed his innocence, all the while denigrating any notion that Russia helped him win his election in the first place, and despite having regularly obstructed the investigation that tried to hold him to account, ten likely examples of which, the Stone case aside, were set forth in Mueller's report.

The commutation was widely condemned.  Mitt Romney explained that "an American president commut[ing] the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president"  amounts to an act of "historic, unprecedented corruption." Rep. Adam Schiff said it was a "body blow to the rule of law."  Vice President Biden's contempt was reduced to one word -- "Enough"-- and even some of the President's ususal  enablers demurred.  Attorney General Barr, who previously called the Stone prosecution "righteous",  said he recommended against commutation, and on the Sunday talk shows former Governor Chris Christie said he wouldn't have done it. 

The man who prosecuted Stone, Robert Mueller, was having none of Trump's  phony claim that Stone had been an innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors.  "Stone was prosecuted and convicted," said Mueller, "because he committed federal crimes.  He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so." Noting that "Russia's actions were a threat to America's democracy" and that Stone himself "had communicated in 2016 with individuals known . . . to be Russian intelligence officers", Mueller then made the obvious point:  "When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government's efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable. It may ultimately impede those efforts."

Ya think?

All of this, however  was only Trump's latest outrage.

In June, he assailed nationwide protests of the death of George Floyd while in police custody.  Lumping the relatively few who vandalized or looted in with the otherwise vast majority who peacefully demanded an end to brutaity, he labelled governors "fools" who had to get "tougher", threatened to (illegally) send in the military to clear the streets, and then did so in DC so he could stage a photo-op.  This was more or less the reverse of his reaction to protests in Charlottesville in 2017, where a group of neo-Nazi protesters were counted as including some "fine people".

Last December and earlier this year, he ignored intelligence reports warning of the Covid-19 pandemic and never adopted a cohesive national program to acknowledge the danger and create the needed testing, tracing and treatment capacity to confront it.  Instead, he regularly encouraged premature re-openings, sympathized with militants who assailed state governors and legislators for ordering quarantines, and even turned the act of wearing a mask into a loyalty test. The product of  this colossal incompetence has been 138,000 dead and  a continuing pandemic that is now growing at alarming rates  in places where it had either abated or not been all that extensive.

Last Summer, he tried to bribe Ukraine's president, withholding already appropriated aid in an effort to get Ukraine to start a phony investigation of Joe Biden.  For that crime -- confirmed at the time by multiple witnesses, including one eye witness, and later by his own National Security Adviser --  he became the third president in US history to be impeached.

In addition to Stone, he has during his term in office (i) pardoned Arizona's ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted on federal criminal contempt charges of refusing to obey court orders banning racial profiling; (ii) pardoned NYC's ex-Police Commissioner Bernie Kerick, convicted of tax evasion in connection with trading on his connections to the response to the 9/11 attacks; and (iii) commuted the sentence of  Illinois' ex-Governor Rod Blagojevitch, convicted of extortion and  soliciting bribes in exchange for filling Barack Obama's Senate seat.

Unlike Nixon, Trump perpetually gives the middle finger to the law, to norms that have allowed American government to function for more than two centuries, and even to settled practices of civility and comity that make life liveable at something less than the level of a nervous breakdown.  As a matter of life-long habit, he doesn't even try to tell the truth, and over the course of his administration, he has lied so often and so outrageously that the media keep  a running tally.  It now stands at more than 20,000 lies or misrepresentations (and counting).  If the President were Pinocchio, he'd regularly trip on his own nose.

Congress will not save us.

Senate Repubican have already refused to do so.

Prosecutors will not save us.

They think a President cannot be prosecuted while in office.

The press and media will not save us.

They have published or broadcast his every outrage, lie, curse, crime, failure and pathology.

So have Comey, Bolton and Anonymous.

So has his niece.

No tweet has been left behind.

But the President marches on.

Often unglued, uninformed and  untethered.

Always unembarrassable,

Who will save us?

Look in the mirror.

That's who.

HOW LATE BECOMES NEVER

HOW LATE BECOMES NEVER

There was one thing I liked about former President George W. Bush.

He was always on time.

Politicians have a habit of being late.  In August 2014, The Washington Post calculated that Barack Obama had been "a cumulative 2,021 minutes late for events".  Bill Clinton was  perpetually tardy. NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio  has been so late so often that, when he announced his presidential candidacy last year, one wag sported a campaign button that said  "Make America Late Again".  In 2015, he was even an hour and twenty minutes  late for a speech he delivered on climate change at the Vatican.

Donald Trump is his own kind of late.  Like other pols, he routinely shows up late to events and announcements. As is usually the case,  he was hours late to his campaign rally in Oklahoma two weeks ago.  During the spring and winter, his afternoon coronavirus pressers started late, often by more than an hour.  In 2017, 2018 and  2019, he was late to meetings of the G-7.

Unlike other presidents, Trump also doesn't show up in the Oval Office on most days until  11am.  In other words, he is generally . . .

Late for work.

Explanations (or excuses) for being late abound.  Polticians typically over-schedule themselves and this creates multiple opportunities for delay; one event or meeting goes over (they love to talk) and everything thereafter can't start or finish on time.  They could, of course, pack less into a single day or stay rigorously on the clock. But the first option  is never tried and the second is (genetically) impossible (Bush II excepted).

In the archive of consequence, being late is rarely fatal. Clinton, Obama and Trump won their elections in spite of their allergy to time, and George W. Bush did not leave office any more loved because he respected it. For some, late is an opportunity. Think bankers who have turned it into a profit center with all their late fees.  For others, it's the excuse for a low-rent penalty. Think the IRS . . .

Or the NFL.

It's also a widely shared belief that late beats not-at-all.

Better late than never . . .

They say.

But is it?

Is late merely annoying?

Or can it be fatal?

The two biggest crises in America today are Covid-19 and racism, the latter manifest most obviously at this time in  the deaths of blacks in police custody, and with both, delay has been the enemy of progress.

With coronavirus, an early unwillingness to acknowledge the potential severity of the problem left America flat-footed when the pandemic was upon us. Denial at the top gave away precious months that should have been used to stock up on supplies, develop a competent testing and tracing regime, and implement early quarantines that could have signifiantly lowered both the rate of infection and death.  And today, months into the crisis, premature re-openings coupled with an unwilllingness in certain precincts to require masks or enforce distancing and tracing has allowed the epidemic to spread and grow exponentially in areas that had been spared or were less severely affected.

With racism, a head-in-the-sand approach has defined reality for centuries.  From 1619 until 1865, we were explicit (violently so) in our devotion to the notion that blacks were inferior, and in the 155 years hence, our progress in resolving that problem has been intermittent, always divisive and often non-existent.

Following the Civil War, it took a hundred years to pass and enforce the civil rights laws.  While we were waiting, Jim Crow, lynchings and discrimination were the order of the day for most of that time.  In the later years, Brown v. Board of Education, desegregation, the 1960s Voting and Civil Right Acts and Obama represented undoubted progress.  But each was met with backlash and retreat.  One result is that, with police today, a formal opposition to brutality (which is illegal everywhere) runs aground on a consistent unwillingness to fire the relatively few bad cops who cause repeated problems. Protected by culture and contract, they remain on the beat.

This past Saturday, July 4, America celebrated Independence Day.

As with many things American, the day itself is bathed in paradox.  It's the day we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, a document which endorsed Revolution based on the simple truth that "all men are created equal" but whose prinicpal author owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime. As it turns out, that large paradox was joined by a host of minor ones.  Independence was actally declared on July 2 and the docment was not fully signed until August 2.  All that happened on July 4 is that the Continential Congress approved the final text.  In other words, what we are celebrating on July 4 is really . . .

The day we stopped editing the Declaration.

Which is fitting.

Because we have been caught in a sort of editing trap for the last 244 years . . .

Embracing the document's fundamental principle but unable to write it into our actual history.

Even today.

On Friday, President Trump went to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.  Before about 7,000 maskless supporters, he kicked off the naton's Independence Day weekend with an attack on those who have been protesting the killng of George Floyd under the banner of Black Lives Matter.  He called them "angy mobs . . . trying to . . . unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities", supporters of the "new far-left fascism" in "our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms" that ""sham[es] dissenters and demand[s] total submission from anyone who disagrees."  "If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantra, and follow its commandments," said the President, "then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished."

None of this is true.

The vast majority of protests over the past months have been peaceful and non-violent.  In many cases where property destruction appeared imminent, protesters themselves stepped in to de-escalate any violence.  This was particularly true in Newark, NJ, where police and protesters together stared down those whose intentions were either unclear or were veering in the wrong direction. Moreover, the notion that "schools, newsrooms and even . . . corporate boardrooms" have now been infected with "far-left fascism" is comical.  Tell that to Fox, the Wall Street Journal,  Falwwell's Liberty University or the entire SEC.  None have been shuttered nor are any less than free to pursue whatever interests they perceive as their own.  For years, blacks couldn't sit at lunch counters with whites, but boycotting Walmart is now  "the very definition of totalitarianism"?

Wrong, Donald.

It's actually the very definition of capitalism.

Trump is an Orwellian farce.  He pins labels (e.g., fascist, a/k/a a fact-free authoritarian who demonizes minority races, immigrants, and a free press while seizing extra-legal and/or illegal powers) on opponents that don't at all describe them but come pretty close to describing him.  He governs by fear when he governs at all, routinely lies, and literally tries to destroy any who dissent, a large portion of whom are the Mattises, Kellys, McMasters, Scaramuccis and Boltons who once worked for and supported him.  At Mt. Rushmore, he created a fictive universe of violent counter-culturalists bent on "destroying" American "civilization", all the while ignoring the one reality, Covid-19, that has already killed 130,000 of us.

The virus is unmoved by Trump's agitprop.  It creates its own deadline with reality.  You can ignore him, wear a mask, socially distance and live.  Or you can stand shoulder-to-shoulder, unmasked,  in a newly re-opened bar, get sick, and either die or give it to someone who may.  You can even be undecided and uncertain, masked one day, maskless the next; properly distanced on Tuesday but tired of it all by Friday; one day cocky in the face of a President who refuses to model good behavior, the next suitably brought to shore when you meet someone who is sick.

The President doesn't care.

You, however, might.

Because with Covid-19,  late may not be better than never.

It may be never.

The same is true with police brutality.

It is no accident that the Black Lives Matter movement arose in  2013.  These were the latter years of the Obama administration, and Obama himself was the personification of progress on civil rights.  Many thought that if he could be elected -- and he obviously could because he was --  our worst racial sins were behind us.

Late, it seemed, had finally  beaten never.

But it hadn't.

And the "all lives matter" opposition actually proves it.

One would think that a nation over Jim Crow and lynchings, and able to put a black man in the Oval Office, would not have a terribly difficult time rooting out the small number of police who cause problems, that the fact that "all lives matter" would have by now produced a reality in which blacks no longer have to worry about their own being in peril at the hands of the state, that "they" are in fact treated as part of and not apart from the "all".

But it hasn't.

And they haven't been.

In 2013, George Zimmerman disobeyed police orders that he cease following Trayvon Martin, killed him after doing so, and was acquitted.  In 2014, Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner was killed by the NYPD. Neither officer was charged.  Between then and now, more than a dozen unarmed blacks  have similarly been killed while in police custody or pursuit or by de facto vigilantes.

In 2016, Donald Trump called immigrant Mexicans rapists and became President.

In 2020, to win again, he is calling Black Live Matters protesters totalitarian fascists.

Trump dresses up his racism in stylized artifacts designed to deflect the charge before it can be made. At Mt. Rushmore, he lumped all the post-George Floyd protesters -- black and white, violent and non-violent -- into one undifferentiated "totalitarian" and "far-left fascis[t]" camp.  He did the same to those who have called for removal of Confederate monuments and statues.  They became  an undifferentiated  part of the "angry mobs . . . trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities."

In his world, non-violent protesters who want cops held to account stand accused (falsely) of "attack[ing] . . . our magnificent liberty", and those who want Generals Lee or Stonewall Jackson taken off their public pedestals stand accused (falsely) of wanting George Washington removed fom his as well.

Staw men erected, the bad cops go unpunished,  the statues still stand . . .

And late once again becomes never.