CHRISTMAS 2024 -- FINDING GOD IN DARK TIMES

We are always being told to remember the original message of Christmas.

It's not supposed to be about the gifts and the parties, the cards and the carolers, the tree and the lights. It's not supposed to be about the long lines, crowded airports or frenzied families traveling to and fro. It's not supposed to be about the twelve days or seven fishes or eight reindeer.

Or the stockings hung by the chimney. 

Or St. Nicholas.

It's supposed to be about a visit.

By God . . .

To this world . . .

At a Roman backwater . . .

In  a small tribe . . .

As a real man.

And when you think about that seriously, and park all the seasonal tinsel and tumult, the claim is either the most important and earth-shattering thing to have ever happened in human history . . .

Or it is completely nuts.

Each side has had its proponents.

There have been times in the last two thousand plus years when individuals actually looked back in complete shock at the importance of the event.  Upon his own death in 363 CE, Emperor Julian (the Apostate) reportedly lamented the death of paganism and early triumph of Christianity with "Galilean, you have won." Others were in awe. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. Hopkin's wrote God's Grandeur. In the former, the Galilean becomes part of a biblical world order painted on five hundred square meters of a vaulted ceiling, in the latter the light that dispels the dark as the trinitarian "Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

There have been other times -- more prevalent of late -- when individuals looked back aghast at the irrationality of the claim and the disasters created in its name. This era's so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett -- are (or, in the now-deceased Hitchens and Dennett cases, were) contemporary spokesmen for this view. With Hitchens and Harris, the principal gripe is with organized religion; to the extent God dies in their world, it is more on account of what His followers have authored in His name. With Dawkins and Dennett, however,  whether He was there in the first place is the question (they think He was not).

Looking for evidence that God exists is, in my mind, a futile endeavor. 

Evidence of something entirely out of this world cannot really be found in this world. 

The Christian paradigm, of course, contests this claim. Its fundamental contention is "No, the real, actual first century (CE)  Jesus of Nazareth in this world is evidence that God too is here. He is the one who came, saw and conquered, albeit in ways Caesar could never have imagined". But the so-called evidence for this God-man is the Resurrection. Which its proponents admit is a miracle. And which, therefore,  more or less removes it from the realm of evidence (at least of the this-world sort).

So . . .

I look elsewhere.

In 1968, Hannah Arendt published Men In Dark Times. It is a collection of essays she wrote over twelve years about individuals who lived in the dark time of the mid-twentieth century, a time "when there was only wrong and no outrage". 

Though "there was," she wrote, "nothing secret or mysterious about" that dark time, "it was by no means visible to all" or "at all easy to perceive".  To the contrary, she explained, "until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody, it was covered up not by realities but by the highly efficient talk and double talk of . . . official representatives who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns." 

In this "camouflage[d] . . . public realm", she concluded, the function of which is to otherwise "throw light upon the affairs of men" to "show in word and deed, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do", darkness comes "when this light is extinguished by . . . speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality."

It was odd for Arendt to find my God in that time and place.

But, nevertheless, there He was.

The subject of Arendt's third essay is Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli.  Known to the world since 1958 as Pope John XXIII, Arendt titles her essay with the Pope's given name. My guess is that was intentional. Unknown and unsung at the time Catholic church elders could not agree on Pius XII's successor, they thought he would be "provisional, transitional" and "without much consequence." Throughout his life, however, Roncalli "made Christ his model".  

The "suffering" Christ.

The "gentle and humble" Christ.

"Knowing perfectly well," as Arendt, quoting the young Roncalli, explained, "that to be 'similar to the good Jesus' meant 'to be treated as a madman'".

And so . . .

The John who became a pope was simply the Roncalli who had been a real Christian. He talked (endlessly). And to everyone. He laughed (fully). And with anyone.  He cursed (mildly). But never in God's name.  "Shit" was acceptable; "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" was not. He was not patronizing. He was the fourth (and first son) of twelve children raised by farmers and molded by late 19th century Catholic Action, the church's alternative to the unstable state (from which it was then estranged) that created the cooperatives and credit banks Catholics like the Roncallis used to buy their farms. Born in 1881, he was a seminarian at 12, a priest at 22, and a Bishop at 43.  

Throughout his career, he was loyal to the institutional church.

But his loyalty never interfered with his ability to see and tell the truth about its leaders.

Or his country's . . .

Or the world's.

The popes he most admired in his lifetime were Leo XIII (1878-1903) and Benedict XV (1914-1922). These two were sandwiched between all the Piuses, Leo between Pius IX and X and Benedict between the latter and Pius XI (and then XII).  Leo and Benedict became famous, respectively, as the worker's pope and as a peacemaker. 

The Piuses IX and X were either reactionary or paranoid.  Pius IX became a prisoner of the Vatican after the Italian revolution and the fall of the papal states and forbade Italian Catholics from participating in politics; he was also the pope who shepherded the specious doctrine of infallibility though Vatican I, the council he more or less rigged to vote his way. Pius X manufactured the so-called "modernist heresy" designed to insulate Catholicism from religion not aligned with papal dictate or science and history not the product of medieval scholasticism.

Fortunately for the later church, however, Roncalli grew up under Leo and, upon ordination, became secretary to a modernist bishop -- Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi -- who Pius X had sidelined to Angelo's hometown.  

Radini-Tedeschi was the anti-pope.  

He was a fan of Catholic Action (which Pius X despised), supported striking workers, introduced science labs to the educations of future priests, and thought "authority" (papal and otherwise) had to be "harmonized" with "freedom" rather than deny it. 

The young Roncalli became an ardent supporter.

He found his own historic models in the Counter-Reformation's Charles Borromeo and Cesare Baronius. Through the sacrifice, service and scholarship of the first (a rich nobleman who gave it all up and reformed a debauched church) and the rational historic analysis of the second (who told Galileo, before the latter's trial, that "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go"), he avoided the intellectual poverty of anti-modernism without succumbing to the moral poverty of scientific positivism.

By the time he became a Bishop, he was fully formed. 

And so formed, he spoke truth to power in his dark time. 

He did not let the Vatican's efforts in negotiating and securing its own state (in the Lateran Accords) stop or limit his condemnation of Mussolini's fascism. And when he did it from the pulpit, he was given a one-way ticket out of Italy and exiled to Bulgaria as an apostolic visitor. He spent ten years there. Nor did he let the Vatican's later hesitancy with Hitler get in the way of his own honesty with German diplomats. During World War II, he was the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate to Turkey; Franz von Papen was Germany's Ambassador to Turkey at the same time. When von Papen sought his help in securing Vatican support for Germany once it  was at war with communist (and therefore anti-Catholic) Russia, Roncalli bluntly asked "And what shall I say about the millions of Jews your countrymen are murdering in Poland and Germany?" 

His opposition was also more than just talk.

Throughout World War II, his "baptisms of convenience"; "immigration certificates to Palestine"; refugees list from Istanbul Rabbi Markus; and personal interventions on behalf of Bulgarian Jews, Romanian Jews, Hungarian Jews, Italian Jews, orphaned Transnistrian children on a refugee ship, and those held in the Jasenovac and the Sered concentration camps, literally saved thousands from the final solution.

And later . . .

As Pope . . .

Long after it was over and just before he died . . .

He begged for forgiveness. 

Invoking the last words of the Jesus he imitated, he wrote a prayer to be delivered in Catholic churches throughout the world :

"We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren.  We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads.  Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we know not what we did."

Roncalli's courage and witness to the truth in his time did not make him God or establish that there is one. It was evidence, however, of the power that imitation -- in his case, of Christ -- can have, the good it can do, the barriers it can break, the evil it can block, even the (just) wars it can win. 

It is, unfortunately, taken seriously by the world as a whole only (or mostly) after the fact.  Before the moment "catastrophe over[takes] everything and everybody", when the imitator is being "treated as a madman", the world's default position is to ignore the witness, soften and even deny the truth.  In Roncalli's time, it meant sending him to Bulgaria lest he get in the way of "normalizing" the Vatican's relationship with Mussolini's fascist Italy. In ours, it means bowing to Donald Trump, pretending (illegal) immigrants are inhuman, pretending truths about him are defamatory, ignoring or accepting his pathological lying and misogyny, prosecuting his enemies, attacking the free press, killing critical stories or editorials, abandoning Ukraine and rubber-stamping appointments to high positions of those whose first (and in some cases only) qualification is a sycophantic obedience to Trump himself. 

So much of this is exactly what happened in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. Fascism was immoral long before the Holocaust.

And it also could have been stopped long before then.

"'Do not obey in advance' is the main lesson of the twentieth century," says Tim Snyder. In his book On Tyranny, it is also "the first lesson". "Most of the power of authoritarianism,"  he explains, "is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what is more repressive, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

Roncalli wouldn't do that in his time.

But his time did not listen until it was too late.

Nor are many, perhaps most, in ours.

And that, in a strange but not un-Biblical way, may be even more "evidence" for my God.

Because . . .

In His time . . .

The Galilean was ignored too.

Merry Christmas.

THE PARDON

In a political world that these days mixes Kafkaesque nightmares with Orwellian lies in almost equal measure, comes now the pardon of Hunter Biden by his father, the President.

The president's pardon power is plenary.  

He can issue one for any reason or no reason.

Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has a whole unit --  the Office of the Pardon Attorney -- whose job it is to evaluate the sea of requests sent to the Oval Office. 

To do so, it has created -- and create is the operative word here -- a set of standards it applies to those requests. 

Thus . . .

In the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an applicant has to wait five years from the point of conviction to apply.  The Pardon Attorney evaluates  the post-conviction conduct, character and reputation of the applicant. He considers the seriousness of his crime, the impact a pardon might have on others, and the extent to which the applicant has accepted responsibility for his criminal conduct. 

None of those standards matter legally.

Yet they exist.

The apparent ultimate goal is to determine whether one who petitions for a pardon is worthy of one.

So . . .

Was Hunter Biden worthy?

As one might expect in today's polarized political world, opinions on that question are divided. As far as I can tell, they fall into the following five categories:

1. Absolutely not;

2. Absolutely f---ing not;

3. No, but understandable;

4. Absolutely, on the merits; and

5.  Absolutely, given the next president.

I fall into Category 5, despise 2, am sympathetic to 1 and 3 and (therefore) less so to 4.  

Category 1 is occupied by purists in the Democratic party who think the President has sacrificed principle. It includes the we-can-never-act-like-them crowd who consider such sacrifices fatal. Category 3 is occupied by those same Democrats but stifles the outrage by conceding any father in the President's situation might have done the same thing.  Category 4 is the ground upon which the Biden himself has for the most part chosen to stand.

Category 2 is peopled by the GOP's MAGA hypocrites who applauded Trump's own unparalleled abuse of the pardon power in his first term.  

In that first term, Trump gave pardons or commutations to friends, relatives and assorted hangers on, most if not all of whom had committed crimes far more serious than Hunter Biden's. Trump's recipients included political henchman Roger Stone (convicted of false statements, witness tampering, and obstruction), campaign manager and Russian-colluder Paul Manafort (guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, failure to disclose hidden foreign accounts, and sentenced to 47 months imprisonment), former National Security Adviser General Flynn (originally pled guilty to false statements), the loud mouth architect of MAGA authoritarianism, Steve Bannon (charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering), seven criminally convicted Republican Congressman (for crimes that included bribery, securities fraud, tax evasion and campaign violations), and his relative, Charles Kushner (convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering; Kushner is daughter Ivanka's father-in-law and Trump's now-proposed Ambassador to France). 

Category 2 folks deserve no sympathy. 

In fact, because their hypocrisy knows no bounds, irritating them is an advantage.

The best defense of the pardon is what awaited Hunter Biden going forward, not a watering-down of what he did in the past. 

President Biden, however, is being pummeled now because he is focusing more on what occurred in the past than on what awaited his son in the future. 

In that vein, the President's argument is that the gun and tax charges to which Hunter either pled or on which he was found guilty were overkill. In the case of the former,  the younger Biden lied on a form by saying he was not a drug addict at the time he purchased the gun. Because he only had the gun for a week (his sister-in-law wisely threw it away) and never committed any crimes with it, the general practice, had it been followed, would have been to not file a charge, especially given the fact that the would-be defendant was in recovery and years sober by the time the conduct was investigated.  In the case of the latter, the taxes Hunter owed were paid in their entirety, as was the interest and all the penalties, and these types of cases are often if not typically resolved administratively with civil penalties.

This overkill boat, however, is leaky.  

Apart from the fact that both crimes are often tried and not resolved administratively, addiction is not a defense to years-long tax evasion and honest answers on background questions are among the little we have left in what remains of any effort to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. There's a reason addicts and guns are a bad mix. Guns are dangerous and addicts are unstable. 

And there's no "I love my son" exception to those facts.

The justification for the pardon, therefore, cannot be found in US Attorney (and Special Counsel)  David Weiss's prosecution. That prosecution may have been aggressive.  But it was not selective. 

The justification, however, can be found in what awaited Hunter Biden.

The world changed on November 5. 

America elected Donald Trump and Trump has pledged to take revenge on his perceived enemies.  

Among those perceived enemies are the Bidens in general and Hunter Biden in particular. 

Trump has been gunning for Hunter for years and has never let up on his claim that Hunter and/or his father were taking bribes from Ukraine or were otherwise engaged in illegal conduct in connection with Hunter's (obviously) nepotistic seat on the board of Burisma.  Though these charges have been investigated by the GOP for years, no evidence whatsoever has been found to sustain them. In fact, the very evidence the GOP relied upon for the charge -- a statement from FBI informant Alexander Smirnov -- has been deemed false by Weiss, who -- apart from indicting Hunter --  has also indicted Smirnov for lying to investigators and making false claims that the Bidens had accepted bribes from Burisma.

Trump also blames Joe Biden for the two federal indictments levelled against him in connection with the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and his subsequent theft and illegal storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. All of this is also baseless. President Biden had nothing to do with those indictments.  They were brought by a Special Counsel who Biden did not appoint. So fastidious was the due process given Trump that he was able to delay the cases until after the election. Given the DOJ's policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, they have now been dismissed. 

Nor, contrary to the GOP's amen-chorus of Trump enablers, were the indictments the product of "lawfare" or "weaponization" of the Department of Justice. There was more than enough evidence to indict the former President on both charges, and though we will not know for a while (and maybe never) whether there was enough to convict him, that was the way to bet. Trump endorsed a scheme to deem fake electors legitimate. On January 6, 2021, he watched his supporters assault police and ransack the Capitol for hours before telling them to leave (which they did upon his order). Back in Florida after his administration ended, he lied about classified and highly sensitive documents he had taken and failed to return, and then tried to over-up his crimes and destroy evidence with the help of idiot-loyalists.

He is now committed to appointing sycophants to run the Justice Department and the FBI.  

His first nominee for Attorney General -- former Rep. Matt Gaetz -- spent years repeating Trump's "weaponization" lie and his second -- Florida's ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi -- is a 2020 election denier who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial and has promised to "prosecute the prosecutors" who indicted Trump during the Biden administration.  

His putative FBI Director -- Kash Patel --  has pledged to "find the conspirators -- not just in government, but in the media . . . who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections." As Patel put it, "We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out."  In his 2022 book Government Gangsters, Patel actually named the sixty people he intends to "come after".  The list is a Who's Who of Trump opponents and critics. It includes President Biden, Vice President Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, and witnesses who testified against Trump, some before the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, others in Trump's two impeachment trials.

These are not people who can be counted on to uphold the rule of law and they are not people Joe Biden is obliged to assume will proceed in good faith.  The far greater likelihood is that they will turn the Justice Department and the FBI into a today's version of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Wisconsin's then-junior Senator said he had lists of "known communists" working in the US State Department. He didn't but numerous lives were ruined as he pretended otherwise. Today's McCarthyism pretends Trump won an election he lost and wants to prosecute the very people who tried to hold him accountable for his attempted coup. To insure this occurs, Trump is appointing fellow travelers at DOJ (Bondi)  and the FBI (Patel).

For them . . .

Hunter Biden was a target in waiting.  

It wasn't going to end with guns and taxes. 

Regardless of the facts.

Consider this possibility:

Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced this month. Assume, for purposes of argument, that he was able to avoid serving time in jail and was given an extended probationary sentence and fines, neither of which would be uncommon given the victim-less nature of the gun crime and the full payments (back tax, interest and penalties) on the tax charge.

How do you think Trump, Bondi, Patel and the beholden-GOP would have reacted? 

What do you think Trump would have ordered Bondi and Patel to do on the afternoon of January 20, 2025?

For starters . . .

Fire Weiss, who obviously does not think Hunter or the President were bribed by Burisma?

Joe Biden was not obliged to find out.

Viewed as a life raft for a guy who did not deserve one, the pardon of Hunter Biden is an abuse of the rule of law.

But . . .

Viewed as a barrier that stops a fascist and his loyalists from turning the law into a machine that fulfills his own asinined grievances, pathological narcissism, and baseless conspiracy theories . . .

It is an act of statesmanship.

In light of the lethal possibilities that flow from Trump's inherent narcissism, Bondi's loyalty and Patel's hit list . . .

I hope there are many more.

THANKSGIVING 2024 -- SOUND AND FURY

For inveterate opponents of Donald Trump, and I am one, it seems a bit forced to be happy this Thanksgiving.

And nothing done in his brief tenure as President-elect has made that exercise easier. 

The big news since election day has been the rogue's gallery of incompetents Trump intends to appoint to  his Cabinet. 

For Defense, we have been given a FOX news host who thinks woman can't fight, war crimes are just fine, and the military can be used against any domestic political opponents he deems "Marxist" (the list is long); as the new DNI, an apologist for Putin and Syria's Assad who claimed the US funded biolabs in Ukraine to release deadly pathogens; at the Department of Health and Human Services, a lost Kennedy who thinks vaccines cause autism; and under him, the quack TV Dr. Oz to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Trump's first would-be (but now withdrawn) attorney general (Matt Gaetz) was despised in Congress, probably a statutory rapist, and in any case -- judging from pictures he was said to have shared on the floor of the House -- more than comfortable in whatever locker room Trump occupied during his now-infamous bus ride with Billy Bush.  

His next candidate, ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, is more qualified than Gaetz could ever be and is not a criminal so far as we know. She did, however, serve as one of Trump's defense attorneys in his first impeachment trial and supported his election denial lie. Her selection also makes both the nominated number one and number two (Todd Blanche) at DOJ Trump's former lawyers.

Trump thinks federal employees belong to him. In his first term he routinely referred to Defense Secretary Mattis, DHS Secretary Kelly and National Security Adviser McMaster as his generals and was livid when his two Attorneys General -- Jeff Sessions at the beginning of his term on the Mueller probe and William Barr at the end on President Biden's win -- would not do his bidding. He expects he has now insured nothing along those lines will ever happen again.

If he is right . . .

The fifty-year era of independence at the Department of Justice will have officially ended.

(Pro tip sidebar to Speaker Johnson: when your to-do list includes deep-sixing a report that shows your AG nominee is a statutory rapist while making sure a trans-sexual female cannot use  the House's women's rooms, stay home. It's always a bad look to cover up the sexual crimes of one in your party as you pander to the sexual prejudices of another.) 

In his first term, Trump appointed people who for the most part had a reasonable familiarity with their department's duties and capacities.  He also appointed people willing to follow the law and, as importantly, willing to require that Trump himself follow the law. In this go round, he is giving notice that no one need care.  The only obvious requirements are loyalty to Trump himself and a demonstrated willingness to piss off those who oppose him. 

If competence comes in (or, in the rare case, without) that package, as it does with Sen. Rubio at the State Department and would with either Kevin Warsh or Robert Lighthizer at Treasury (or the latter returned to the USTR), that is accidental. It may also be unnecessary.  Trump and his MAGA minions believe the entire federal bureaucracy is a sea of opposition that must be emptied.  He claims the bureaucrats routinely opposed him in his first term (which, thank God, was often true) and unfairly indicted him after he left office (which is false; Trump earned those indictments and the fact that trials are being aborted is yet another failure of America's institutions, which did not protect us from Trump or, as the last election demonstrated, ourselves). 

With rare exception (Rubio, Warsh, Lighthizer), therefore, lieutenants who might competently run the government are not on his wish list.  

Incompetent loyalists who could help him dismantle it are.

Trump's desire for revenge is also married to the GOP's knee-jerk hatred of government. For decades now, Republicans have won elections convincing Americans that government (or at least the part of government which does things for others but not them) can do no good.  In this world, incompetence is a feature, not a bug, the rule, not the exception. It fulfills the GOP's prophecy.

Because . . .

The easiest way to demonstrate government sucks is to appoint people so inept they prove it.

Trump now thinks he is bullet-proof.  And his fellow travelers are not disabusing him of that notion.  To the contrary, they are claiming he has a "mandate". A "decisive" one, say his billionaire bros Musk and Ramaswamy. To "disrupt", whatever that means. Beyond tax cuts, tariffs, deportations, an inchoate promise to magically negotiate a wars end in Ukraine, or the inherent nature of his personality, we are not being told.

And with that, we can finally get to this years . . .

Thank yous.

Which must be . . . 

To the 74.2 million people, myself included, who voted against Trump.

Thus rendering all this mandate talk . . . 

"a tale    

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing."

We can thank Shakespeare (or, if you prefer, Macbeth) later.

Once the idiot leaves the stage.

In politics, mandate talk is generally useless and has been for the past sixty years. In that period, the only credible mandate claims were those made by LBJ in 1964 and President Reagan in 1980, each of whom won enormous popular and electoral college majorities and control of Congress (in LBJ's case by almost super-majority margins).  Since 1980, no one has come even close; in fact, the only remote contender was President Obama in 2008. Everyone else won by small margins and governed in the face of significant opposition. Two -- Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 -- lost the popular vote.

Today, Trump marches to the Oval Office having won less than 50% of the popular vote and only slightly more than Harris.  His party has a non-filibuster proof  four-vote margin in the Senate and an infinitesimal (as low as three and no more than five, depending on final counts) margin in the 435-member House of Representatives. Thirty-three senators (twenty-six of them Republicans) will be up for re-election in 2026, as will the entire House. None of their lives will be made easier by Trump, who has always been long on outrage but notoriously short on actual accomplishment. Indeed,  his party was slaughtered in the 2018 mid-terms, i.e., even in the so-called glory days of the pre-pandemic economy Trump continually touts.

Lots of people have never liked him.

Lots still do not.

And he has a habit of keeping it that way.

Mandate lovers -- and perpetually panicked Democrats -- are very good at ignoring reality.  This time, in addition to the small numerical margins, one of the realities being ignored is that Democratic candidates for the Senate actually won in four (Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin) of the seven swing states Trump won, came close in a fifth (Pennsylvania) and won the gubernatorial election in a sixth (North Carolina). In those Senate races, three of the winners (Rosen, Baldwin and Slotkin) were women. Had Harris not failed where they succeeded, she'd be the President-elect today.

In his victory speech in the early hours of November 6, Trump said his "promises made" would be "promises kept."  If so, he is off to a bad start as nothing on order thus far -- tax cuts, tariffs and deportations --  will return the price of groceries to their pre-pandemic level or remedy the severe economic inequality plaguing rural and non-college educated Americans.

Meanwhile, he will appoint judges bent on eliminating substantive rights and Cabinet and agency heads bent (again with notable possible exceptions) on rubber-stamping his whims.

Part of the problem here is that Trump, when he is not dangerous (which is way more often than not), is lazy and not interested in policy.  If he seriously wanted to put a dent in inequality, he'd have to invest his political capital in convincing his party that redistributing some wealth is not a bad idea.  That's the only way it's been done in this country since the frontier closed and moving west could no longer be America's de facto growth and/or welfare policy.  Think anti-trust law, the 16th Amendment (which allowed the federal income tax), the Federal Reserve, Social Security, unionization, the GI Bill and a minimum wage; the Civil Rights laws in the 1960s then removed the racism FDR had been forced to swallow in order to pass his New Deal. Collectively, these measures restrained the top, distributed productivity gains more evenly, and created the middle class.

All of them, however, are anathema to the GOP. 

While Trump is in love with any form of hatred that gives him votes (hence his fascistic claims against immigrants), that's as far as he ever gets. Tax cuts will not cure inequality, and tariffs and deportations will actually exacerbate it, the first by inflating prices, the second by cutting the labor force that creates a lot of the agricultural supply. Real immigration reform replete with paths to citizenship and reasonable guest worker programs would avoid this problem; deportation will only make it worse. Meanwhile, if Musk and Ramaswamy, neither of whom understands how federal spending works, take their proposed meat-ax approach to cuts by eliminating programs where specific authorizations have lapsed, some of the very programs the most vulnerable rely upon (e.g., veterans health benefits) will die.

In a world where a free and aggressive press laid bare the implications of Trump's approaches, the GOP might be forced to change.  That, however, is not today's world.  For, in addition to having convinced struggling white guys that their economic woes are caused by illegal (brown) aliens and affirmative action, Trump and the GOP have also convinced them that FOX is real news and the mainstream media (The New York Times, Washington Post, and three major networks) are not. 

So . . .

Brainwashed, the MAGA base will continue to live in a world of resentment and fact-free pseudo-solutions.  

If we survive that world and Trump's own disorders . . .

The thank yous to Harris voters will be voluminous.

In the meantime, this Thanksgiving . . .

In this year's parade . . .

They get mine.

MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKS

There's a reason they are on the sidelines.

Monday morning quarterbacks, that is.

It's because they aren't playing in the real game.

The 2024 election is now a week old. Trump won.  Harris lost.  That wasn't all that hard to say.  Too bad Trump couldn't say it four years ago.  Too bad millions of Americans couldn't either.  As I write, Trump is going to the White House today to meet President Biden for the post-election congratulatory meeting where the new guy and the old guy (unfortunately, they've all been guys thus far) meet to assure America that the transition will be seamless and peaceful.  Too bad that didn't happen last time either.  Five people died and hundreds were injured as a result.

For the past week, we have been flooded with "analysis" on why Trump won and Harris lost.

The simple answer is Trump got more votes in states where it counted.  

Not a ton more.  

But enough to win.  

Four years ago Biden got not a ton more but enough to win in those states and in the election before that Trump did.  

Frankly, for all the presidential elections that have been held since 1988, that has been the pattern.  

There haven't been any blow-outs.  

America is a divided country.

And has been for over thirty years.

There's also been a see-sawing quality to these results.  In 1992 and '96, the Democrat won. In 2000 and '04, it was the Republican.  Back to the Democrat in 2008 and 2012. Then a Republican (2016), a Democrat (2020), and now a Republican again.

Into this sea of apparent indecision, or at least a sea of different decisions over a relatively short span of historical time, have waded a boatload of analysts ready to tell us the reasons why. Typically, this being America, the loser in this analysis takes it on the chin and the winner is perceived to have wrought some sort of personal triumph. 

Back in 2000, when Florida's hanging chads and a ballot that had Jews in Palm Beach voting for Pat Buchanan allowed members of the Supreme Court to vote twice and thereby make George W. Bush president, Al Gore was upbraided for sighing and making faces during that year's debates, signs -- it was said -- that meant he wasn't the guy you'd want to have a beer with in an election so close that the would-you-have- a- beer-with-that-guy vote had to have mattered.

In 2004, another close one, a war hero lost because he was supposedly a wind-surfing Nantucket elitist.

 In 2016, Hillary allegedly went down for being "unlikeable".  

Hard to believe the "pussy-grabbing" alterative was more likeable.

But what do I know.

Now the swords are out for Kamala Harris.

A week before the election, people were praising her flawless campaign.  

They were marveling at her adept eleventh-hour entry following President Biden's departure and praising the speed with which she herded the cats that are her party, avoided the expected bloodletting, and fought Trump to a toss-up that might be won.

Now . . .

She either wasn't dishonest enough to repudiate Joe Biden.

Or progressive enough to win back the working class.

Or specific enough to sway the undecided.

Or wise enough to pick Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro as her running mate.

Or a candidate long enough to have battled through primaries that, I guess, would have somehow increased her appeal among black and Hispanic men . . .

Or resulted in a different candidate with all of her attributes but none of her flaws.

The problem with all of this is that in a race as close as the one we just witnessed, any of these explanations might be right. Or they might be wrong.  In the real world, there is no way to know.  We'd have to redo the election with all these variables changed and see the results.

My own view is that none of them would have mattered.

Because . . .

They all ignore the other side.

They get to have a say too.

Even when they shouldn't.

I think election analysts should have to be certified.  Others are.  Lawyers pass bar exams.  Doctors are licensed. My wife just spent thousands becoming a CFRE.  That's short for certified fund-raising executive.

Here's a modest proposal.

Before you decide why someone lost an election, run in one.

Put your name on a ballot.

Make all these decisions in real time.

In the game.

Not on the sidelines.

I have and I cannot tell you why Kamala Harris lost other than to say Trump got more votes. 

Shit happens. 

Whether Trump should be president is a different question.  

He shouldn't be.  

He is a rapist, a felon and a fascist. 

His election does not change any of that.

The people who voted for him are responsible for putting him back in the Oval office come next January.  They made a bad decision, one that I believe over time they will regret and one that has already done serious damage to the country and will do even more damage in the future. Even as I write, Trump is naming yes-men and women to his Cabinet, demanding that he be allowed to make recess appointments to avoid the need for Senate confirmation, and fulfilling Liz Cheney's dire predictions of a government beholden only to his dictatorial impulses. Abroad, Vladimir Putin is emboldened, Europe and Ukraine prepare for American cowardice, and China eyes Taiwan. 

The voters, however, are not the only responsible parties.

The institutions of America failed.

The two biggest failures were the US Senate and the US Supreme Court.  

Following the carnage of January 6, 2021, the Senate should have convicted Trump on his impeachment and made it impossible for him to ever be president again.  For the same reason, the Supreme Court should have enforced the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause and made it impossible for him to run again.  Both had the power to do so. The impeachment and insurrection clauses in the Constitution were designed precisely to confront and eliminate the problem Trump presents, an autocrat as president who dishonestly and regularly violates the rule of law, seeks to exercise dictatorial power, and resorts to violence as a means to that end. 

The Founders and the authors of the 14th Amendment knew that elections alone could not be counted on to preserve American democracy and a Constitutionally-based republican form of government.  

Sadly, the Senate and the Supreme Court forgot that lesson. 

The fact that Trump won the 2024 election means he will be president again.

It does not mean he should be. 

The fact that Trump won means Harris lost.

And that doesn't mean she should have either.

LOST YOUTH

I am sixty-eight years old.

But I remember August 6, 1968 like it was yesterday.

That was the day my Uncle Al died.  He was forty-two, a New York City cop. Our whole extended family was on vacation at a small house my mother had purchased in Highland Lakes, NJ with her share of the proceeds from the sale of our family home in Brooklyn.  That home had been sold after my parents separated and we moved in with my grandparents. Uncle Al had spent the first week of his vacation painting the new house with my grandfather. On the weekend, however, he woke up sick and had to go to a doctor.  

The doctor immediately put him in the hospital.

A day later he was moved to another hospital.

A day after that he died.

The hospital was not that close to Highland Lakes so my mother and Aunt El were staying in a motel near the hospital.  The hospital called at 5 am and told my mother, who was a nurse, that they had to come over quickly.  When they got there, they were told Uncle Al had died.  They drove back to Highland Lakes and told the rest of us -- my grandmother, grandfather, sister and cousin, Uncle Al's oldest son. His other son, the baby John, was a year old in his play pen.

It was a gut punch to the entire family.

My forty-two-year old aunt had lost her husband of eighteen years.  My twelve-year old and baby cousins had lost their father, my sister and I our uncle and the guy who in many respects had become a surrogate father given our mom and dad's separation.  My grandmother had been through two wars and raised her own (and a good chunk of her extended) family in the when-there-was-no-safety-net Depression.  She was a rock.  

But that day she just kept crying.

Our big Irish-Catholic family held a wake and a funeral. It was and remains the biggest I've been to. After the funeral Mass, a two-block line of cars moved slowly from the church in Brooklyn to the cemetery at Pinelawn in Suffolk County. At the wake, lots of men had promised my cousin they'd take him fishing. He and his father had loved to do that. They'd wake up at 4:30 am and head out to Sheepshead Bay to catch a 6:30 half-day charter for fluke or bluefish.

After August 6, there weren't any fishing trips.

When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a reporter, Mary McGrory, told Daniel Patrick Moynihan "We'll never laugh again."  Moynihan replied "Mary, we'll laugh again, but we'll never be young again."

Actual tragedy is weird.  It's not like history, where you know the future. It's more like perpetual uncertainty.  You know it's bad but you have no idea how all that badness will play out. There's a sense of emptiness.

That's how I felt on August 6, 1968.

It's how I felt yesterday, November 6, 2024.

America will never be young again.

TRUMP'S LASTING LEGACY -- THE INDECISION TRAP

Sometime this week I will cast my vote for Kamala Harris for President.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

Long after this election is over, history will write its epitaph.  And no matter what the actual outcome is next week, history will not be kind to Donald Trump or those who supported him.  

If Trump wins, he will govern as he has promised.  

Perhaps his only positive quality is his utter transparency. 

He does not disguise any of the ugliness. 

And the government he will lead will be ugly.  

The economy will crater under the burden of inflationary tariffs and trade wars. Human rights -- indeed, simple decency -- will be discarded as 11 million immigrants, many of them innocent children, are seized, jailed and thrown out.  Constitutional norms will collapse as he creates a Department of Justice that takes political opponents off the field and rubber stamps his every lunatic move. America's alliance of democracy will collapse as he sacrifices Ukraine to Putin and the depravity of Russian rape and pillage. 

The courts will throw up their hands in frustration.  

If they disagree with him, he will ignore their decrees, certain that no consequence will follow. He has been  freed from the rule of law by the permission slip John Roberts created when six conservatives on the Supreme Court voted to give presidents immunity for the crimes they commit on duty and by the lemming-like refusal of remaining Republican office holders to ever impeach and convict him no matter how high his crime or misdemeanor.

But what if Trump loses.

How will history treat him then?

The answer is . . .

No better.

Trump has become worse, much worse, over time. 

What started out as puerile schoolyard bullying in a 2016 campaign no one took seriously has become, in the chilling words of Yale author (How Fascism Works) and professor Jason Stanley, "textbook Mein Kampf."  Political opponents are no longer "Crazy Nancy" or "Shifty Schiff".  They are the Hitlerian "enemy within". His attempted coup on January 6, 2021 proved that his love affair with lying, and with himself, is not merely rhetorical. 

He is serious. 

Deadly so.

But too many cannot or will not see this.

These days, even some who used to see, like the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, have put on blinders.

Why?

I think Hannah Arendt knew the answer.

In a 1974 interview with the French jurist and scholar Roger Errera, Arendt said "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."

"This is because lies," she continued, "by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end, you get not only one lie . . . but . . . a great number of lies".

Unique among politicians in contemporary America, Donald Trump has done more than any other individual to convince the American citizenry that "everybody always lies". 

His own lies are constant and over time have become voluminous. And because he insists upon and enforces blind loyalty, his lies have metastasized. Though often but not always repeated verbatim, his followers never reject his lies. Instead, and as Arendt foretold, they rewrite them. 

Trump's lie that he won the 2020 election becomes JD Vance's lie that he and Trump were merely pointing out "problems" . . .

Or Trump's refusal for three hours to call off the January 6 carnage at the Capitol becomes Vance's  lie that he merely advocated peaceful protest . . .

Or Trump's departure on January 20 becomes Vance's lie that the transfer was "peaceful" and January 6 is beside the point.

Nor does Trump limit his serial prevarications to the 2020 election and subsequent attempted coup.  

As President, he lied about COVID, pretending early on that it would end with warm weather and later that it might be cured with bleach.  Tens of thousands died as a consequence. Throughout the current campaign, he has lied about abortion, claiming the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade was approved by all. It was not. 

He also lies in claiming the decision jeopardizes no one. 

Three women have died in anti-abortion fetal heartbeat states because they could not get the medical care needed to treat their miscarriages or other complications. Given the lag time in undertaking and then reporting on reviews of pregnancy-related maternal deaths subsequent to Roe's reversal, "there are," as Pro Publica reports, "almost certainly more."

"The result," Arendt explained in her 1967 essay Truth and Politics, "is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end -- is being destroyed."

This is fatal to  democracy. 

Because . . .

It is fatal to judgment.

To our ability to think.

"A people that no longer can believe anything," Arendt concluded in her interview with Errera, "cannot make up its own mind.  It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

This is where we are with Trump.

And it is where we will be even if he loses next week.

Over the course of the last four years, I have always been amazed that there were any people undecided on Trump.  I thought his acts so clear and so reprehensible that no one could really avoid not only a decision but also one that unhesitatingly rejected him. The man is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, business fraud and charlatan. As demonstrated most recently at last Sunday's rally at Madison Square Garden, his campaign is a foul-mouthed verbal sewer of racism and denigration never before witnessed in American politics.  His fascism is his worst but by no means only disqualifying trait.

How could anyone be undecided?

Now I know.

It's not that people are undecided.

It's that Trump has undermined, and for some even killed . . .

Their ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Or what is true from what is false

Their ability . . .

To evaluate.

To judge.

To think.

Decisions are different from reactions. Reactions are reflexive, automatic.  Decisions at least at some level are considered. If, as Arendt lamented in the face of a culture of lies, we lose "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end", decisions become impossible and all manner of reflexive reaction takes over. There are no facts. And therefore no gatekeepers, no experts, no standards. 

Everything can be excused because nothing is true. 

And because there are no standards, opponents can be falsely or at the very least hypocritically judged . . .

Or disgustingly dismissed . . .

Or even jailed. 

All of which, in the current campaign, has been done to or threatened against Kamala Harris . . .

And Liz Cheney . . .

And Generals Milley and Kelly.

Kamala Harris is a normal politician with more or less standard Democratic party positions on the issues.  As Biden's Vice President she participated in an administration that led us through COVID, rescued us from economic catastrophe, created jobs, tamed inflation, renewed NATO, helped preserve the post-World War II rules-based order and appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. In any other time, with an economy the envy of the world, this would be a record that would seal victory at the polls. In any other time, with the threat to women's rights at an all-time high, the margin would not be close.

But we do not live in any other time.

We live in Trump time.

The time of lies and Hannah Arendt's worst nightmare.

An era where, as the internet meme puts it, "he gets to be lawless and she must be flawless."

It's not that people are undecided. 

It's that they can no longer decide. 

I'm voting for Kamala.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

If you can't decide, do it for them anyway.

History may not treat you kindly.

But they certainly will.

A TALE OF TWO FASCISTS

Hitler's Statements

"There is living among us a non-German foreign race"

            -- Letter, September 16. 1916.

"The feelings of the Jew are concerns with purely material things . . . From this feeling emerges that concern and striving for money and for power which can protect it, which makes the Jew unscrupulous in his means, ruthless in his use of them to achieve his aim.

             -- Id.

"The final aim  . . . must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether [and is] possible only under a government of national strength, never under a government of national impotence."

            -- Id.

"If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world . . . the planet will move through the ether devoid of men."

            -- Mein Kampf, 1925.

"[The] Jew is not the attacked but the attacker . . . The means by which he seeks to break . . . upright souls is not honest warfare, but lies and slander."

            --  Id.

"The personification of the devil as the symbol of evil assumes the living shape of the Jew."

            -- Id.

"With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundation of the people always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race."

            -- Id.

"The time seemed to have arrived for proceeding against the whole Jewish gang of public pests . . . [I]t ought to have been the duty of any  government which had the care of the people in its keeping . . . to exterminate this vermin."

            -- Id.

"We shall exterminate the Jews."

            -- To Czech foreign minister, January 21, 1939.

"We are resolved to prevent the settlement in our country of a strange people which are capable of snatching for itself all the leading positions of the land, and to oust it . . . Above all, German culture is . . . German and not Jewish."

            -- Speech, January 30, 1939.

"The criminal race had two million dead of the [First] World War on their conscience."

              -- To Command Headquarters,  October 25, 1941.

"The sole German objective in the region will be to liquidate all the Jews who live in the Arab countries, under the patronage of Great Britain."

            --  To the Mufti of Jerusalem, November 28,1941

Trump's Statements

 Migrants commit violent acts because being "a murderer -- I believe -- it's in their genes."

            -- To Hugh Hewitt, October 9, 2024.

"It takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. But reckless migration policy can change it very quickly and destroy everything in its way."

            --  Id.

"And you see how bad it's getting. With the migrants attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest in particular right now, but it's all over."

            -- Campaign Rally, September 21, 2024.

"A vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens . . .  stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life."

            -- Id.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs . . . They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people who live there. And this is what's happening in our country."

            -- Debate, September 1, 2024

"On Day 1 of my new administration, I will seal the border and send [11 million] illegal aliens back home where they belong."

            -- Wildwood, New Jersey, May 2024.

Migrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and are being sent from "prisons, jails, mental institutions [and] insane asylums."

            -- Campaign, 2024.

"No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals."

            -- Green Bay, Wisconsin, 4/2/24.

"They're coming in as terrorists. Many . . . are coming in with very contagious disease. You know, like all of a sudden there's a run on tuberculosis."

            -- WABC Interview, May 22, 2024.

"The ones in South America are sending all of their criminals and their prisoners and their gangs."

            --  To National Rifle Association, May 18, 2024.

"[The] conduct on our border is a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America. [They] want to nullify the will of actual American voters and establish a base of power that gives them control for generations."

            -- Greensboro, North Carolina, March 2, 2024.

"It's a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing you can have."

            -- New Hampshire Rally, December 2023.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out."

            -- Oval Office, January 2018.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best . . . They're sending people that have lots of problems . . . They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

            -- Opening Campaign Speech at Trump Tower, 2015.

            *            *            *            *            *             *

On November 11, 2023, at a Veterans Day speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump said "We will root out . . . the vermin within the confines of our country."

This, said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works, "doesn't echo Mein Kampf; it is textbook Mein Kampf."

Last week, the following exchange between Howard Kurtz and Trump took place in an interview on FOX News:

KURTZ: "You call Americans who don't support you 'the enemy within.' That is a pretty ominous phrase to use about other Americans".

TRUMP:  "I think that's accurate. These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. [W]hen you look at . . . Schiff and some of the others, yeah,they are to me the enemy from within. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within."

Hearing Trump's claims, Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die, called it "classic authoritarian discourse." 

In Europe in the 1930s and Latin America in the 1960s, Levitsky explained, "[A]utocrats used exactly this language: there's an enemy within that's more dangerous than our external enemies and that justifies the use of extra-constitutional measures."

"How many times," he asked,  "does Trump have to use this rhetoric before we realize that this is not a normal election."

In The New York Times today, John Kelly, Trump's longest serving chief of staff and his first Secretary of Homeland Security, explicitly stated that Trump is a fascist. 

"[L]ooking at the definition of fascism," Kelly explained, "It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, [and] belief in a natural social hierarchy."

"[C]ertainly, in my experience," he concluded, "those are the kind of things [Trump] thinks would work better in terms of running America. Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators ".

"So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure."

Textbook Mein Kampf.

Classic authoritarian.

Fascist, for sure.

To all those who think they will or might still vote for Trump, it's not too late.

If you want . . .

There's still time . . .

To smell the coffee.

POETRY AS PROPHECY -- SLOUCHING TOWARD NOVEMBER

"Who says poets can't be prophets? He had the whole 20th century figured out in advance. Wow."

So wrote my law school roommate on Facebook three days ago.

The "he" was William Butler Yeats.

The prophecy was The Second Coming.

So I re-read the poem.

And wrote back to my roommate . . .

"Maybe he had this one figured out too."

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre," wrote Yeats in 1919, "the falcon cannot hear the falconer".

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned

By the time he wrote these words, Yeats himself was an accomplished Irish poet and playwright. In the years thereafter, he also became a politician, serving in the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928. In that capacity, he combined the Irish nationalism to which he became committed with the Protestant Ascendency in which he had been raised to warn his newly created Free State brethren that "If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the north . . . You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation." He was right about this but the Free State did not listen.

In 1919, Yeats obviously could not know that Nazis would overrun middle Europe twenty years later or that Stalin and Mao would, along with Hitler, kill millions in the service of either a false historic materialism (Stalin and Mao) or a xenophobic racism (Hitler). He did, however, understand that for any civilization to survive, the "centre" had to hold.  This was true for his Ireland and for Russia in the first two decades of the 20th century, just as it would be true for Germany in the 1930s and '40s and for China thereafter. 

Yeats also recognized the sign that presages any collapse of the centre:

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

For Yeats, a mystic and lover of Irish mythology, the centre had a spiritual element to it.  In holding, it keeps things together. But it isn't glue. It is more like gravity. Though it does not bind the surrounding parts forever to each other, it at least creates a field in which they tend to stick together. In politics, it makes pluralism possible because it creates space for negotiation and compromise.  Like gravity, however, it can be disrupted.  And also like gravity, when it is disrupted the consequences can be cataclysmic.

The rest of the poem is a meditation on the nature of that cataclysm.

It could be the promised "Second Coming".

Or, more likely, the "blank and pitiless" sphinx.

A little more than a month before the Presidential election on November 5, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance engaged in a ninety-minute Vice Presidential Debate last night sponsored by CBS News.  Because neither one of them is Donald Trump, the debate had all the trappings of a normal pre-Trump political contest. No one screamed or yelled. No insults were levelled. The back and forth was polite. Both candidates answered (or didn't) the questions put to them and confined their responses to the agreed upon time limits. 

To the experts, the pundits, the commentators and the sundry and various who make their living fly specking these things, there weren't a lot of surprises.  A CNN instant poll had Vance narrowly exceeding expectations, unsurprising in view of how bad his roll out has been since the GOP convention in July. And because he in particular is not Trump, a number of his jaw dropping inventions -- that Trump "salvaged Obamacare" (he tried to kill it) or that Vance himself did not support a national abortion ban (he did, and more than once) or that illegal firearms are coming into the US from Mexico (they aren't) or that the Haitian immigrants in Ohio are not there legally (they are) -- could have been easily lost on anyone who does not make a living paying attention.

The most jaw-dropping moment came at the end when the debate turned to the issue of democracy, Trump's election denialism and the violence of January 6.  

One after another, Vance either soft peddled Trump's lies, invented new ones of his own, or just refused to answer.

Asked point blank whether he would "seek to challenge this year's election results" even if -- as was the case in 2020 -- "every Governor certifies the results", Vance falsely claimed that "all" he and Trump have "said is there were problems in 2020" and  "we should debate those issues peacefully". Accused point blank of "deny[ing] what happened on January 6" when his running mate became "the first . . . President [who] tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power", he resorted to phony outrage. "Yeah, well, look Tim," he complained, "it's really rich for Democratic leaders to say Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20th, as we have done for 250 years".

Finally there was this:

"Walz: Did [Trump] lose the 2020 election?

Vance: Tim, I'm focused on the future . . .

Walz:  That is a damning non-answer." 

For me in those final moments, all of Vance's polished prose evaporated. Instead, he stood on America's stage exposed as no better than the fraud at the top of the GOP ticket and maybe even worse.  

The problem here is that Vance knows better.  He knows Trump lost the 2020 election.  He knows there was no significant fraud. He knows Trump can't pretend to have advocated peaceful protest on January 6 when for hours he refused to stop the violence.  He knows Vice President Pence did the right thing when he refused to deny the certified vote count or pretend that fake electors were legitimate. And he knows that, in saying he would have done what Pence refused to do, he is enabling Trump's continuing lie and undermining the sine qua non of American democracy.

This last flaw is his saddest.

Vance is the child of a recovering addict.  As the child of a recovered alcoholic myself, I empathize with him. Because the one trait we share, other than having graduated from Yale Law School, is that we were both enablers. It doesn't work.  It makes any addictive dysfunction worse, not better. Trump is addicted to himself.  Like all drunks and druggies, he is in denial. Helping him stay there is not good for him.  And making him President (again) will be worse for us.

Whether any of this will change the minds of those who say they will vote for Trump is anyone's guess.  

Sadly, however, probably not is more likely than maybe so. 

Because . . .

Vance is not alone in his "passionate intensity".

The Republican Party that embraces Trump and excommunicates any critics; the Supreme Court that left him on the ballot and then clothed him with immunity; the Senate that refused to convict him; the right- wing media that supports him; even the establishment media that "sanewashes" him or sacrifices truth for some false notion of objectivity . . .

All helped orchestrate the centre's collapse.

What comes next?

In 1919, Yeats did not know.

But he did not think it would be pretty.

    The darkness drops again, but now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    What rough beast, its hour come round at last

    Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Neither should we.

CATS AND DOGS

So . . .

The most important thing that happened at last night's presidential debate . . .

Wasn't the debate.

More about that later.

In the meantime, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took to the stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia last night for their first debate. By the time it was over, Harris had clearly wiped the floor with him.  

As importantly, sixty million Americans saw her do it.

Harris's objective was to persuade the sliver of undecided voters that she can be President and that her policies will help them.  Trump's objective (at least as disclosed by his campaign managers) was to focus on issues the polls put him ahead on (the economy and immigration) and otherwise not go off the rails.

When it was over . . .

It was clear the rails had won.

Over the course of the six-week period in which Harris has been running for president, both the GOP and many in the pundit class have had a field day pretending she is not a particularly skilled debater.  This was largely based on her aborted campaign for the presidency in 2020, which ended before a single vote had been cast and is remembered, if at all, only for her "I was that little girl" debate line on school busing that was designed to but never knocked Joe Biden off the pedestal Rep. Clymer fashioned and then launched him to the Democratic Party nomination on following what by then had been Biden's own floundering campaign. 

Harris's failure in 2020, however,  said nothing about her ability to go mano a mano against Trump or anyone else.  

Indeed, in search of tea leaves, Harris's opponents haven't been looking in the right place.

She is a former prosecutor.  

And not just California's Attorney General or Alameda County's District Attorney. 

She served for years as an Assistant District Attorney.  

She tied cases. 

She convinced juries.

I've done that too.  

And the thing about a jury trial is there is no real filter between you and the twelve people who will decide your case.  

If you are a phony . . . or pretentious . . . or even remotely dishonest, they figure that out.  And then you lose.  

And while critics often assume prosecutors have the decks loaded in their favor (unlimited investigative resources and the power of the state behind them), the truth is usually different in cases that actually go to trial.  

In those situations, there is always something the other side can exploit.  

As a young prosecutor, I had a case where the police had mistaken the date on which our only witness  had the defendant committing the crime. The witness told the cop it was done on Thursday and without probing he assumed she meant the last one.  Unfortunately for us, the defendant was in jail on that Thursday; the actual crime was witnessed a week earlier and the cop had just made a mistake in failing to pin down the date. 

In preparing for trial, convincing him to admit that mistake took some doing. Failing to do so, however, would have been fatal.

On a larger stage last night, Kamala Harris the trial lawyer made her case to the jury that is America's voters.  

She was prepared and precise.  

Anyone looking for policy specificity found it in child and business start-up tax credits, down payment assistance for first-time home-buyers, an anti-gouging law to combat unjust price hikes, and the restoration of Roe v. Wade as national policy. She did not duck her change on fracking and on immigration, she preached the specificity of a bipartisan bill that Republicans in the House and Senate had supported but Trump killed because, as she put it, he "preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing" it. 

On the divisions Trump foments as a matter of course, the democracy he tried to destroy on January 6, and the dictators he wants to emulate in the White House, she invoked the generals who have deemed him "a disgrace", the scores of Republicans who have endorsed her, and the allies who joined us in restoring NATO.  

She also allowed Trump to destroy himself.

He refused to say he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Putin's Russia but claimed he would somehow end it before he was inaugurated. He wouldn't or couldn't say how.  And in truth, the only way that happens is by giving Putin a lot of what he wants (and allowing him to go back for more later, after he rests, re-arms and re-mans his army). 

Which is a long way of saying what Harris said in five words:

Putin "would eat you for lunch."

On the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has claimed for eight years he wants to replace but has yet to offer any plan for doing so, he said he now has "concepts".  

If that means anything, he didn't share it.

She told us he would lie.

And he did.

About winning the 2020 election.

He lost.

As Harris put it, 81 million voters decided to fire him.

About crime being "through the roof".

It's actually down.  

About his proposed tariffs being paid by foreigners.

They will be paid by American consumers.

About babies being killed after they are born in pro-choice states.

It doesn't happen in any state.

And about immigrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio.

It never happened.

By the time he got to this last lie, he was more than off the rails.  As Joy Reid noted in her own post-debate analysis, "the cheese" was no longer "firmly affixed to the cracker."

When the debate ended, Trump had performed so badly that he had to replace his seconds in the spin zone to pretend his act was other than a flop.  While there, the media reported what was perhaps the biggest development of the night -- Taylor Swift's endorsement of Harris.

Alone among today's crop of entertainers, Taylor is a world-renowned icon.  She is the most famous "Childless Cat Lady" on the planet. She has 283 million followers.  Within a half hour of posting her endorsement on Instagram, 2.3 million people had liked it. By around noon today, that number had risen to 9 million.

The endorsement itself was substantive.  It wasn't a shout out and it was a far cry from the celebrity kitsch that often accompanies Trump (think Hulk Hogan's "shirt tearing" at the RNC). 

She began by asking her fans to "do" their "research on the issues . . . and stances" Harris and Trump "take on the topics that matter  . . . the most" to them. She explained that part of her reason for endorsing now was an "AI of ['her'] falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run . . . posted to his site." She explained that "It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation," and that she "need[ed] to be very transparent about [her] actual plans for this election as a voter."

"The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth."

"I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election," she said. "I am voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them . . . [S]he is a steady-handed, gifted leader." Calling out Trump, she continued that she "believe[s] we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos." Calling out JD Vance, she explained that she "was . . . heartened and impressed by [the] selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman's right to her own body for decades."

She finished by saying "I've done my research and I've made my choice." 

But she did not end there.

Instead, she concluded with: "Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make."

She then signed off . . . 

"With hope and love,

Taylor Swift

Childless Cat Lady"

In many ways, her last lines were  the most important.

She was rightly alarmed by a Trumper's  AI attempt to hijack her voice and create a false endorsement. She knows, however, that there are lots of ways to hijack a voice.  

Misinformation is one of them. 

Ignorance is another.

So too viciousness.

More than two hundred years ago, the founders warned that these flaws could kill our experiment in republican democracy.  As Pennsylvania's Benjamin Rush put it : "If the common people are ignorant and vicious, a republican nation can never long be free."

Yesterday, Taylor told her Swifties much the same thing. 

GEORGIA ON MY MIND

The song was written in 1930.

By Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell.

There is a debate over whether the song is about the state or a woman. Hoagey, who wrote the music, said it was about the state.  Gorrell, who wrote the lyrics, claimed it was about a woman.

Hoagy's sister to be precise.

In 1979, Georgia made it that state's official  song.  

More specifically, it made Ray Charles's 1960 bluesy cover the official state song.  That version had rocketed to the top of the Billboard magazine's Hot 100 and became the song most associated with Charles's iconic career. So much so that, in 2003, Rolling Stone  named it --  Ray Charles's cover, not Hoagy Carmichael's original -- the 44th greatest song of all time. 

If you listen to the two, it's not hard to understand why.

The song is about a memory.

Of a place or a person?

Who knows.  

The difference is that Charles, a Georgia native and black child of the segregationist south, made it about a place. And in slowing it down and bluesing it up, in singing it through the prism of his own voice and experience, he also made the memory unforgettable . . .

And real.

Or the opposite of merely ideal.

Which is how, I imagine, it became in 1979 the song of a post-segregationist state.

Other arms reach out to me

Other eyes smile tenderly

Still in peaceful dreams I see

The road leads back to you

I said Georgia

Oh Georgia, no peace I find

Just an old sweet song

Keeps Georgia on my mind

Yesterday, another memory was made unforgettable in Georgia.

Unfortunately, the road it leads back to is well-traveled . . .

Overcrowded . . .

And has to be closed.

Now.

Four people were killed by a 14-year-old at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, a small city fifty miles northeast of Atlanta and about half that west of Athens. The four victims included two freshmen and two math teachers. Like their killer, the freshmen were 14-year-old boys. One of the teachers, 39-year-old Richard Aspinwall, was also the assistant football coach; the other was 53-year-old Christina Irimie.  Nine others were injured and hospitalized.  The firearm used by the killer was a semi-automatic AR-platform style rifle.

There is really no question on why we as a nation are regularly witness to mass shootings of young people and others.

It happens nowhere else with either the frequency or lethality at which it happens here.  

It's the guns, stupid.

On the issue of guns, however, we are in the place we were in on the issue of race in 1896.  

That was the year the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson constitutionalized segregation under the legal myth that a state could satisfy the Fourteenth Amendment's color-blind demand for equal protection by providing different races separate but ostensibly equal services.  

On guns, we now live in a world where the Supreme Court has constitutionalized an individual right to bear arms unmoored from the Second Amendment's original and stated need to provide for a well-ordered militia. 

The myth on race in 1896 was that separate could be equal.

It never is.

The myth on guns today is that individuals need weapons of war to protect themselves in times or places of peace.

They don't.

Apalachee High School at 9 am yesterday was as serene and calm as schools across the continent.  Nothing required anyone other than law enforcement to bring a firearm to that school.  Colt Gray, the 14- year-old now in custody and charged with murder, was not in any danger himself. And he did not need protection from anyone but himself. 

Today, Gray's aunt claimed he had been "begging for months" for mental health help and that may very well be true. A year ago, he and his father were  interviewed by a Jackson County Sheriff's officer following an FBI tip that Gray had allegedly threatened on-line to open fire in middle school. When the on-line address could not be linked to Gray, that investigation was closed.

The problem here is not mental illness or investigatory negligence. The notion that we can insure absolute safety by improving mental health services or through investigations is nonsense.  Someone will always fall through the cracks and no police department or bureau of investigation will be able to ferret out one hundred percent of those who may be planning a mass killing.

In 2024, as of September 4, there had been 385 mass shootings in the United States.

In Georgia, yesterdays was that state's sixteenth.

The only solution is getting the guns.

Ban  semi-automatic weapons

Ban assault weapons.

Ban multi-magazine clips.

Ban bump stocks.

Ban Saturday night specials.

If the Supreme Court will not alter its ludicrous construction of the Second Amendment . . .

Repeal it.

The deer hunters will not lose their sport.

And our kids will not lose their lives.