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 . . .
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.
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.
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