NORMAL

What is normal?

The dictionaries define it to mean usual, typical or routine. "The expected state or condition," says Oxford.   The word itself derives from the Latin word "normalis" which was classically defined as having been made in accordance with "a carpenter's square", the tool for "establishing right angles."  Bob Vila of This Old House fame calls it the "go to tool for framing, roofing and stair work". It has been around for centuries. 

The precision of the tool, however, hasn't migrated into the current meaning of the word. 

In today's "normal", there is play in the joints.  "Usual" or "typical" is not "always".  Or "precise". In fact, sometimes the messiness of abnormal is repeated so often that it becomes "the new normal", which in truth has to be a bit of an oxymoron.  Repetition takes time and typical requires data from more than one tomorrow.  If the new is routine or typical, maybe the old wasn't.

Maybe there isn't any normal.

Maybe we just create it . . .  

Perpetually turning the repetition perceived in our limited space- time horizon into routines that, from another perspective, are not all that usual after all.

Maybe things just appear normal.

Even though they aren't.

For the past four years, Americans pondered the challenge to normal that was their 45th President.  Many believe the 46th owes his position to the widespread perception that he, unlike his predecessor, is not abnormal.  On this view, an exhausted electorate replaced the narcissistic, self-appointed destroyer of norms with someone who respected them.  

At the end of the day, we tired of all the broken glass -- the absence of any real policy on health care, infrastructure, the environment; the dangerous world of lies where the response to disease was disinformation, where science was side-lined, where aides promoted “alternative facts”; the criminal obtruction and mob-like, omerta-induced pardons of admitted or convicted felons; the predicted (and ultimately deadly) transition abomination where delusion refused to acknowledge defeat; the constant drumbeat of one man's jaundiced ego in 59,553 tweets or re-tweets.

So, we replaced that with . . .

Normal.

And got to take a breath.

We should savor the moment.

Because it will not last.

In the month and a half that has been the incipient Biden presidency, traditional anchors have been laid and the ship of state has been at the very least steadied.  We are back in the Paris climate accord, consulting (rather than dissing) allies, re-peopling the various federal departments with secretaries and undersecretaries qualified to advance their missions,  combating Covid with experts and electeds singing from the same page, and distributing disaster relief with no reference to a state's red or blue political countenance.  

A product of almost a half-century in the political trenches, Biden understands that progress is always slow but can be steady. 

He doesn’t need to be on TV every day praising himself or stabbing opponents.  Other than his Inaugural Address, he has appeared just once, on a CNN Town Hall in mid-February.  On a daily basis, his press secretary talks for the administration.  She is calm and credentialed.  No one has been called fake news, banned from the press room, or had their credentials pulled. 

To his credit, Trump had fast tracked vaccine creation.   He was AWOL, however, on production and delivery.  To that end, and almost immediately upon being inaugurated, Biden used his authority under the Defense Production Act to ensure that the nation will have enough Covid vaccines and created a plan to get them effectively distributed and into the arms of waiting Americans.  

It's the difference between doing . . .

And tweeting.

For a President facing a once-in-a-century pandemic, it is also normal.

The administration's $1.9 trillion Covid relief package has moved through Congress and should be on Biden's desk in a couple of days. It will provide payments of $1,400 for those who earn less than $60,000 annually, extend unemployment benefits through September, and provide the funds states and localities need to retain first responders and open schools. It will also increase tax credits for children, so much so that experts predict the rate of childhood poverty may be cut in half. 

The right and the GOP claim the package is too big, that much of it is unrelated to Covid, and that it belies the President's pledge to be bipartisan.  Biden, however, sat down with a group of Republican senators shortly after being sworn in and made clear that their alternative proposal for less than a third the amount was a non-starter.  Following that meeting, the GOP did not come back with any counter-proposals, House Democrats voted for the bill, House Republicans universally opposed it, and Senate Democrats then amended it.   

They removed the minimum wage hike, reduced the amount of unemployment benefits, stopped states from using any of the funds to pay down public employee pension fund deficits and deleted two mega-transportation projects in New York and California.  

Mitch McConnell, however, still demanded that every Republican Senator vote against it.

Which they all did.

After the Senate Democrats voted for it, however, the amended bill was sent back to the House.

It is expected to pass on Tuesday, again on a party line vote.

In the world before Trump, this was the Republican party's standard modus operandi.  In 2009, in the midst of a financial crisis that threatened to turn into a Depression, no House Republicans voted for the Obama administration’s $787 billion recovery plan and only three GOP Senators crossed the aisle (one of whom, Arlen Specter, later switched parties) to support it.  Later in the administration, when Obamacare was being crafted, Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley -- then the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee -- proposed a host of changes in negotiations with the Democrats only to admit that, even if they were all accepted, he still would not vote for the bill.  

Twelve years later, the Democrats and President Biden were not willing to be fooled twice.

In the country as a whole, the Covid relief package has bipartisan support.  Over 70% of the voters support it, including more than 50% of self-identified Republican. A number of Republican governors also favor the bill, aware that it provides funding they cannot replace and without which they will be forced to cut critical services.  Bipartisan support evaporates, however, among actual GOP House members and Senators. 

Why?

Two reasons.

First, the Congressional Republican party is not a governing party.   In fact, it hasn’t been for some time.  The party is about opposition and grievance.  Policy for the most part is entirely absent.  In the Trump years, Congressional Republicans did two things.  They passed the 2017 tax bill that lowered rates for corporations and the rich, and they stacked the federal courts with Federalist Society judges. On a whole host of other issues -- health care, climate change, gun safety, voting rights, income inequality -- nothing happened.  

This was intentional.

In the Senate, McConnell sat on over 400 proposed bills.  He wouldn't allow them to be debated or voted upon.  The GOP couldn't even come up with the infrastructure spending Trump promised in his campaign (and Democrats would have been happy to pass), and their repeated opposition to Obamacare finally died because they never had an alternative. Indeed, if one of the signature Congressional moments in the last administration was John McCain walking into the well of the Senate in the early morning hours to kill repeal of the Affordable Care Act, one of its signature comedies was Trump constantly promising a new health care plan "next week" or "soon" that he never actually delivered.

Second, even though Republicans do not control the House and now no longer (but just barely) control the Senate, the upper chamber’s current rules -- which require 60 votes to end any filibuster and bring a bill to the floor -- institutionalize a minority veto.  To avoid this barrier on Covid relief, Congress used the budget reconciliation procedure. This special rule allows legislation effecting spending, revenues or the federal debt limit to advance without being subject to the filibuster but limits the number of bills proposed annually under the procedure to three and requires that any one of them not trigger reconciliation for the same reason as any of the others.

After the Covid bill, Democrats will have only two more chances this year to pass legislation using reconciliation.  They are now debating which of their promised packages can be saved via that route.  The likeliest is the planned $2 trillion infrastructure bill.  For those that cannot, the Senate filibuster is a gauntlet that will have to be run.

So . . .

What's a governing party to do?

The Democrats have two options.  

The first is to obtain enough Republican support to remove the possibility of filibuster on any particular bill.  

This will take 60 votes, ten more than they now have. In 2022, there will be 20 Republican and 14 Democratic Senate seats on the ballot, and of the 20, those in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio will be open because Senators Burr, Toomey and Portman are retiring.  It is possible that Portman and Burr might provide additional support now for Democratic legislation on infrastructure.   Toomey is less likely to do so because he is a fiscal hawk.  And none of them are likely to do so on any other Democratic proposals.  Even  if they were, of course, Democrats would still need seven or eight additional Republicans to avoid any filibuster, and after Senators Murkowski (Alaska), Collins (Maine) and Sasse (Nebraska), not even remote possibilities exist on that score.

Nor do the prospects appear much brighter after 2022. Assuming the Democrats pick up those three open seats and hold all of their own (prayers for Georgia Sen. Warnock, please), the only other possible switches are in Florida (Rubio) and Wisconsin (Ron Johnson). So even then, a 55-vote majority would leave the Democrats five short of being filibuster-proof, two short if Murkowski, Collins and Sasse are in play on any particular bill.

The second option is to eliminate the filibuster.  

In his recently published book, The Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues for precisely this approach. 

Jentleson was former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's deputy chief of staff and is now a writer. As his book explains, the filibuster was created in the 1840s by John C. Calhoun to protect slavery. It was formally refined and made a part of the Senate's rules in the early 20th century and was then embraced by southern Democrats to insure the survival of Jim Crow.  Indeed, before the 1960s, the only proposed legislation it was used to successfully defeat were civil rights bills. And in the ‘60s, in the wake of Brown, the freedom rides and Selma, the historic civil rights bills overcame it only because (i) the Senate Republican caucus at that time had liberals in it and (ii) President Johnson out- maneuvered his southern Democratic opponents.

Since then, as Jentleson explains, the parties have “sorted” themselves.  The GOP has moved to the (far) right and "negative partisanship" -- the notion that it's more important to beat your opponent than pass an affirmative program -- has taken over.  Today, there is no such thing as a liberal Republican. Though red states comprise a minority of the country’s population, they can always elect at least 40 Republican Senators.   

As this reality increasingly interfered with the Senate's ability to get anything done , moves to end the filibuster gathered strength.  In 2013, the Democrats ended it on any lower court judicial nominees. Their reasoning was sound.  Before 2009, there had been 82 filibusters on all of the judicial nominees proposed by the forty-three previous presidents.  In the five years or so thereafter, however, the GOP filibustered 86 of President Obama's nominees.  

In 2017, the Republicans returned the favor and ended filibusters on Supreme Court nominees.  Having refused to debate or vote on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated upon Justice Scalia's death, they did so to avoid the inevitable filibuster that would have been mounted once Trump sought to fill that seat with Justice Gorsuch.  

Today, therefore, and apart from judicial nominations, the filibuster lives on.

The procedure was created and defended to preserve the Senate's ability to engage in "unlimited debate".  As practiced early on, this literally meant that filibustering Senators or their allies had to continually speak on the floor.  In a strange way, it required courage. For all their transparent (if not then, certainly now) racism, John C. Calhoun and Richard Russell had to stand up and defend their views at length to their colleagues. Today, however, all a Senator has to do is announce he or she will filibuster and then go silent.  Far from demanding courage, the current practice rewards cowardice.

In 2013, when West Virginia's Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania's Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, in the wake of the massacre of Sandy Hook's first graders, proposed the bipartisan and widely supported universal background check on gun purchases, the two of them literally begged the bill's opponents to debate the issue -- to question them and challenge their arguments -- on the floor.   No one bothered.  Instead, in individual interrupted sessions over the course of a week, opponents delivered prepared remarks to a largely empty chamber.  In total, they spoke for two hours and twenty-four minutes.

It was hardly a "debate".

And it certainly wasn't anywhere near "unlimited".  

Can the Democrats kill the filibuster for good?

Right now?

Probably not.

Why not?

Because . . .

There are only 50 Democrats in the Senate today . . .

And Joe Manchin, one of the very legislators stymied by that 2013 filibuster on unlimited background checks, has said he will never vote to repeal it. 

Manchin claims that doing so would turn the Senate into the House.  He argues that repealing the filibuster would end unlimited debate and turn majority rule into minority silence.  His claims, however, are overwrought. For starters, the House these days is far from the lesser body Manchin assumes it to be.  Unlike the Senate under McConnell, it actually votes on bills and gets things done.  The votes are messy and they are close. But there isn't any legislation that won't be debated and voted upon merely because the minority opposes it. 

More importantly, eliminating the filibuster is by no means synonymous with restricting or cutting off debate. As the 2013 background check fiasco demonstrates, the tool is not being used to preserve debate in any meaningful senses; in fact, given that no one has to take to the floor and utter a word, it is actually being used to stymie debate. In truth, when today's Senate avoids filibuster and proceeds by unanimous consent, it has no problem agreeing on the number of total hours each side will have to debate. There is no reason such agreements could not be struck in the future, and barring that, the rules themselves could easily be amended to kill the filibuster while preserving the right to debate within reasonable time limits. No one will be silenced.

It's probably unfair to pick on Sen. Manchin.  

He represents a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last two presidential elections and sees no need to walk the plank on a procedure the GOP deems critical to its survival, especially if doing so might lead to his defeat and the loss of Democratic control.  He also isn't up for reelection until 2024, and in the meantime, were the Democrats to win additional Senate seats in 2022, a more robust Democratic majority could eliminate the rule without Manchin's vote.  It is even possible that, were such a Democratic majority able to do so, the GOP might wave the white flag of compromise, lowering the threshold for a filibuster to, say, 55 votes, and requiring that filibustering Senators come out of the shadows and . . .

Actually debate.

I'm even willing to bet that this is what the veteran pol now in the White House, a half century of experience his guide, thinks may happen.

It's incremental.

And slow.

And frustrating.

Maybe even . . .

Normal.

AMERICAN WINTER

Victims of violent crimes generally tend to avoid week-long visits to the scenes of the crimes that victimized them.  Especially mere weeks after the crimes have occurred.  The violations are fresh, the post-traumatic stress real.  

The better venue at that point is a therapist's couch.

As opposed to the criminal's stage.

This was not an option in the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

The scene of the crime -- the US Capitol and its Senate chamber -- was the courtroom.  Victims of the crime -- the Senators themselves -- were the jurors.  Other victims -- the House managers presenting the case for conviction -- were the prosecutors.  And still others -- the working Congressional staffers and US Capitol police there on January 6 -- were spectators.

For all those victims, the trial became a series of reminders.

The Congress was reminded that, on January 6, it was only feet away from a violent mob bent on killing or kidnapping some of them in order to stop all of them. Senators Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer were reminded that they were actually running into that mob -- and the uncertain fate that awaits the marriage of target with violence -- until Eugene Goodman of the Capitol police intercepted and redirected them.  Speaker Pelosi's staff was reminded that those who invaded the Speaker's offices in the hunt for their boss failed to find and attack them only because the mob couldn't breach the two closed doors behind which they lay hidden under a conference table, whispering into cell phones for police assistance.

And, sadly, at the end of the day, America was reminded that, even after the horror of January 6, the party of Lincoln is still . . .

The party of Trump. 

The single article of impeachment charged Trump with inciting insurrection. To find him guilty, at least seventeen Republicans would have had to join forty-eight Democrats and two Independents in concluding that he did so.  

That was not a heavy lift.  

In the sixteen hours they took presenting their case, the House managers laid out in meticulous detail how Trump had invited and incited the mob on January 6 to overrun the US Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes and certifying Joe Biden as the winner of last year's Presidential election. 

The vast majority of the evidence came from Trump's own mouth and tweets.  In the years and months leading up to last November's election, he had repeated on dozens of occasions the lie that he could lose the election only as a consequence of fraud, and in the two-plus months afterward, he repeated those and other false claims that the dead had voted, that Biden ballots had been invented, and that digital scanners had been programmed in favor of his opponent.  None of those claims were remotely credible and all of them had been repeatedly rejected either by courts that heard them or government officials who investigated them.

At the same time, on January 6, Trump urged his followers to "fight like hell" and "stop the steal". He praised Rudy Giuliani, who at the same rally had called for "trial by combat". In the past, he had praised a politician who body-slammed a journalist, rally-goers who physically attacked Trump opponents, and armed militia bent on killing a sitting governor.  In all ways, therefore, he had made it perfectly clear that, in "fighting like hell", violence was acceptable. Equally damning, once the riot started, anywhere from three to six people tried to convince him to immediately intervene and tell his supporters to stop.  He did nothing.  Instead, he enjoyed the carnage.

On January 26, forty-five Republicans voted to dismiss the impeachment case against Trump on the grounds that the Senate lacked jurisdiction because he was no longer President.  That motion was defeated and this should have been the end of the issue. Jurisdiction is a threshold question.  Once you have it, you cannot disclaim it.  In other words, once the full Senate decided it in fact had jurisdiction -- which it did in voting down the motion -- even those who voted for the motion should have decided the case solely on the basis of Trump's guilt or innocence.

That, however, was not good enough for Mitch McConnell.  

After voting to acquit, McConnell gave a speech demonstrating Trump's guilt beyond any doubt but arguing once again that the Constitution itself gave the Senate no right to hold the now ex-President accountable by convicting him on the article of impeachment.  McConnell based his claim on the views of Justice Joseph Story who in 1833 wrote the first treatise on American constitutional law and concluded in it that impeachment in fact was limited to current office holders.  

Story's position has been rejected by most scholars and previously by the Senate itself.  In fact, even Story himself was skeptical, qualifying his opinion by stating that it was subject to review by the Senate and that in any case the Senate's determination would constitute the ultimate authority on the matter.  Since then, the Senate has spoken twice on the issue, once a little less than two weeks ago in Trump's case and earlier in 1876 in the case of the impeachment of then ex-Secretary of War William Belknap.  In both instances, the Senate concluded that it had jurisdiction to try the impeachment of a former official.  In other words, it rejected McConnell's position.  

For good measure, even an ex-President, John Quincy Adams, has weighed-in on the issue.  

In 1846, while serving in the House, Adams told his colleagues that "I hold myself, so long as I have breath of life in my body, amenable to impeachment by this House for everything I did during the time I held any public office."

McConnell's speech was delivered with all the gravitas he generally marshals in the performance of his official duties.  Not the same, however, could be said for many of his confreres. On trial Tuesday, Missouri’s Republican Senator Josh Hawley perched himself in the Senate gallery above the floor where all his comrades were sitting at their desks.  With his feet casually up, Hawley reviewed paperwork as the House managers below presented stark video evidence setting out Trump's months long advance of the big lie, his express instructions to the armed and dangerous mob on January 6 that they march to the Capitol and "Stop the Steal", and the mob's violent and deadly attacks on Capitol police as it overran the building. 

Hawley, who had actually saluted some of the mob on his way into the Capitol that day, was among those who earlier claimed the Senate lacked jurisdiction. As noted, most Constitutional scholars reject this view. Their principal fear is that doing so will give chief executives permission to engage in high crimes and misdemeanors -- pretty much a la Trump and his "Stop the Steal" induced riot -- so long as those high crimes occur at the end of their terms. Hawley didn’t care. With designs on the 2024 GOP nomination, he covets the Trump base. Jurisdiction was one of his political life lines.

The other was sheer idiocy.

Even after the riot on January 6, when Congress returned to complete the work Trump’s riot had interrupted, Hawley still insisted on being one of the Senate sponsors demanding that Congress refuse to count Pennsylvania's electoral votes. That effort raised ignorance of the law to an art form.  The courts had already upheld Pennsylvania's vote, as they had Michigan’s, Wisconsin's, Georgia's and Arizona's, the selected targets of Trump's putsch. Hawley’s opinion to the contrary was nonsense.

As for the rest of the GOP, they were either bored . . . 

Or insane

The bored were variously described as "struggling to stay awake" (Indiana's Sen. Mike Braun), "not paying much attention" (Iowa's Sen. Marsha Blackburn), or "doodling" (Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul).  Florida's Sen. Rick Scott was seen examining "what appeared to be a map of Southeast Asia." 

The lunatic fringe was occupied by South Carolina's Lindsey Graham. 

Following the conclusion of Wednesday's session, Sen. Graham lambasted the Capitol police, saying they hadn't used enough deadly force on the mob.  Ashli Babbit, the 35 year old Air Force veteran shot and killed as she climbed through a broken window into the Speaker's lobby, apparently needed company.  Whether that company would have included more police officers -- and not just more mobsters -- went unasked (and unanswered), but this too is the GOP way.  Their favorite fundraiser/lobbyist, the NRA, routinely endorses a bullets uber alles approach to crime, even when that approach is likely to create, as it would have on January 6 (the mobsters had guns too), more dead bodies.  

But that was Graham's take regardless.  

Memo to South Carolina voters -- aren't you tired of being on the wrong side of our (un)civil wars?

After the House managers finished their case on Thursday, Trump's ever-changing cast of attorneys put on his defense. It lasted less than three hours and consisted of three assertions -- (1) that all politicians use the word "fight" without being accused of advocating violence, and Trump hadn't done anything different; (2) that in arguing that the election was flawed, Trump was merely exercising his First Amendment rights; and (3) that those who breached the Capitol on January 6 did so of their own accord and are being criminally prosecuted.  

Sometimes brevity is the soul of wit.  

This time, however, it was just . . .

Witless.

No other President has been like Trump and Trump himself has been like no other President.  

He is sui generis, unique.

 A set of one. 

You can search the speeches of others without finding any examples of Presidents or presidential candidates telling supporters to beat up opponents or equivocating before a crowd in the face of the obvious potential for violence.  No Democrat has ever done this. Trump, however, has either been advocating or winking at violence in the service of his political goals for years.  In the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene,  he has even created elected Republican acolytes. 

You can also search the speeches of other Presidents and presidential candidates without finding any who, in the immediate aftermath of a clear electoral defeat confirmed by election officials, the national media and numerous courts, claimed that he or she won by a landslide, demanded that state officials "find votes" that did not exist, or summoned thousands so that they could march on the Capitol to stop a pro forma count that they claimed, without any evidence whatsoever, constituted theft.  

Finally, you also will never find another President who, when faced with an armed and deadly attack on the US Capitol that threatened to take out other public officials, including the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House, actually stood by, did nothing, and . . . 

Enjoyed it.  

The First Amendment neither sanctions nor excuses any of this conduct.

In the end, seven Republicans -- Senators Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Burr, Sasse, Cassidy and Toomey -- voted to convict Donald Trump.

Forty-three of their party colleagues voted "not guilty".

The seven who voted to convict will become this era's profiles in courage.  

As for the forty-three who didn’t, Chuck Schumer had the last word. Their "failure to convict Donald Trump,” he said, “will live as a vote of infamy in the history of the United States Senate.”

When the impeachment trial ended and Trump was acquited last Saturday, it wasn't the Democrats who lost.  

It was the country.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

 

ODD FELLOWS -- THE ROAD BACK

Insurrection. 

Impeachment. 

Inauguration.

If a year ago you had asked anyone what the chances were of those three words appearing in a sentence that would accurately describe the two weeks leading to January 20, 2021, you would have been told you needed professional help.  

The conventional Republican wisdom at that time was that Trump was an over-the-top but ultimately harmless showman,  always ready to walk to a line but willing to cross only those that either weren't all that important to voters in the first place (e.g., proper "presidential" speech or etiquette) or that in crossing he could later fudge as to their meaning (e.g., his "fine people on both sides" comments in Charlottesville in 2017 or his attacks on the Mueller investigation, the former of which he defended as a reference to the non-Nazi statue lovers in that crowd, the latter of which he escaped by turning self-enforced prosecutorial boundaries into legal exonerations).  

Even the nightmare that was Trump's response to the pandemic was spun toward some form of acceptable -- the denial, ridiculous pressers and idiotic messaging (ingesting bleach, for example) offset by a vaccine developed at warp speed.

On this view, Democrats would, as was their wont, overreact, a consequence of both their unwillingness to ever accept Trump as president and an identity politics that made it impossible for them to appreciate both the level of anger outside their metropolitan and suburban base and the fact that Trump's nastiness had actually connected with a lot of those who were angry.  Also on this view, Trump had delivered for his voters with a growing (pre-pandemic) economy, tax cuts, a cadre of conservative courts, and a level of frustration among his opponents -- "owning the liberals", as it were -- that more than made up for his foul-mouthed narcissism and compulsive lying.

Not to be outdone, the conventional Democratic wisdom back then was that Trump was a pathological liar and corrupt narcissist not remotely interested in or capable of doing the job but absolutely bent on retaining it at any price and regardless of consequence to the country at large.  

In their mind, his attempt to bribe Ukraine's president to announce a phony investigation of Joe Biden was emblematic of what his narrow and legalistic escape from Mueller's investigation had wrought -- a dishonest and unhinged megalomania. And his subsequent inability to competently manage the nation's response to the coronavirus pandemic, indeed, his distortion and politicization of it, confirmed their worst fears.

Conventional wisdom is conventional because in many respects it is correct.  And that may have been true of the competing conventional takes on Trump as well.  The conventions themselves, at least in their less extreme form, were not necessarily at odds with each other.  It was at least possible that over time Trump's dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence -- all Democratic tropes -- might have (more or less) peacefully co-existed with an economy running hot on auto-pilot while conservative judges in the background reined in perceived overreach and expanded the scope of their favored constitutional rights located in the Second Amendment and in the religion clause of the First.  

Trump defenders even had a practical rule on how one got there.

You had to, they said, take Trump "seriously but not literally."  Those who did could navigate Trump's verbal sewer and disordered psychology on their way to a more or less normal politics of competing interests where one side -- the GOP -- occasionally (but not always) won and the other occasionally (but not always) lost.  Those, however, who violated the rule -- who took him literally but not seriously -- would wind up increasingly frustrated, victims of their own unwillingness to concede that they were often as over the top as the President they -- so it was said -- never accepted as legitimate in the first place.

And then came January 6.

And that whole model just blew up.

It didn't blow up simply or only because the Trump-induced march on and riot at the US Capitol that day was an attempted coup.   It was that, of course.  But it was also a lot more than that.  And the more, hard as it may be to fathom, is probably even worse than the attempted coup.  

Discussing Hegel, Marx once said that "world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."  The attempted coup on January 6, however, varied that theme.  It was tragedy and farce all at once. 

Thousands stormed through police barricades, smashing windows, trashing offices, proclaiming electoral lies and asserting a patriotic superiority borne of both their own arrogance and an ignorance cultivated and harvested by the nation’s 45th President.  Many were bent on stopping the electoral vote count then in progress.  Others wanted to kidnap or kill elected officials, including the Speaker and the Vice-President.   In their attempt at an illegitimate putsch, they told the police "There's a million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump -- your boss." They breached the chambers of both legislative branches and rifled through the papers of the legitimate Representatives and Senators who only moments earlier had to be quickly ferried to secure locations because their lives were at risk.  Five people died.  One was shot trying to break into the House.  Another, a police officer, died from injuries sustained in the assault. Hundreds of Congressional staff sat terrorized in offices listening in abject fear to the outrage just beyond their locked doors.

Those tragedies, however, were intertwined with absolute farce.  

In the truest sense of that word.

Comic buffoonery, crude characterization and ludicrous improbability.

Milling about in the Senate, one rioter suggested that "while we're here we might as well set up a government." Why not?  Maybe the half-dressed guy sporting horns, face paint and animal fur could be appointed the Secretary of Costumes. Another looking through papers on his desk said "Cruz would want us to do this, so I think we're good."  Even better.   A sitting Senator with his authority still intact blessing the coup. 

Others were confused.  

"This don't look big enough," said one traipsing through the smaller Senate chamber. "This can't be the right place."  He was obviously a victim of too much internet, where the enemy is always bigger.  

At one point, giving voice to the absurdity around him, a cop calmly asked a group of rioters whether there was "any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?"  Apparently there wasn't, even though one of those illegals looked incredulously at the same cop and said "You should be stopping us."  In response, the cop pointed out that there were five of them, including the horned guy, but only one of him.  

Another selfie by the horned guy provoked another exchange. This one was of the cop-as-parent, rioter-as-child variety: "Now that you've done that," said the officer, "can I get you to walk out of the room, please."

He did.

He was arrested later in the week.

For more than being a jerk.

But for at least that as well.

About a year ago, a very smart friend who is an investment banker by day, accomplished historian by night, and local official in between, posed a question at dinner.  Apropos of the current American political scene, he asked "when did we start doing stupid?" I immediately responded:  "1980".  At first he appeared startled.  But then he reprised Ronald Reagan's famous line about "trees caus[ing] pollution" and we proceeded to congratulate ourselves in tracing a straight line from some of the Gipper's more famous gaffes through voodoo economics, non-existent WMD in Iraq, and Sarah Palin's word salad, leading to that champion of rank dishonesty himself, Donald Trump.  

Today, stupid has taken a far more insidious form than the occasional gaffe from an otherwise genial chief executive. Over 70% of Republicans actually believe the 2020 election was stolen.  There is nothing behind this claim, not a single fact that supports it, other than Donald Trump's lie -- uttered daily since election day -- that it was.  And that is all it has taken. That lie, like all his lies, was ingested by Trump supporters and their numbers then created the background for invented efforts to manufacture some patina of support by hundreds who should have known better -- the Giulianis, Cruzes, Hawleys and 130 or so Republican House members who decided to contest Arizona's and Pennsylvania's uncontestable electoral college votes on January 6.  Meanwhile, a mob -- clad in their flak jackets, helmets, horns and MAGA hats -- tried to take down the government all in the service of that lie.

Pace President Biden, the road out of this mess will require much more than unity. 

And pace President Lincoln, it will also require much more than the "better angels of our nature" summoned from the “mystic chords of memory".

My suggestion is that we try intelligence.

Which in the past has proven useful.

And from which there are small signs of progress even today.

Two days after the riot, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram took down Trump's social media accounts. And not since Samson's hair was cut has power dissipated so rapidly.  One survey reported that the amount of "misinformation” about the election declined by over 70% in the days that followed, and the two weeks after January 6 were characterized by something not seen from Trump's White House in the past 206 -- relative silence.  

This is a space in which sanity can begin to reclaim at least a part of the public dialogue.  

The problem with Trump as Twitter President was that he could always suck all the oxygen out of the room with his latest outrage.  Those outrages had to be reported and reacted to and analyzed by the media, and whenever anyone suggested some form of benign neglect in the interest of progress (or even a semblance of rationality), there was always the rejoinder that he was -- after all -- President and that journalists (of whatever stripe)  had a duty to disseminate what he was saying.  Without Twitter, Trump did not lose the right to be heard.  

But he did lose the opportunity to mainline lies unfiltered into the veins of the body politic.

Intelligence, in other words, works.

For the sake of resurrecting intelligence as a sought-after characteristic of public discourse, it is also important that the impeachment trial of Trump go forward.  

In the weeks to come, Republicans will argue that any such effort will be foolish at best or illegal at worst.  The latter claim is almost certainly false as ex-officials have been impeached in the past and the potential consequences of presidential impeachment -- which include a lifetime ban from holding any office of "honor, trust or profit" in the United States -- themselves contemplate the need for that possibility with the chief executive. 

As to the former, the argument is that impeachment will merely delay any effort at unity by solidifying the divisive commitments of America's competing tribes.  On this view, those who support Trump will treat him as a martyr and double down on his electoral fictions, the trial of which will at the very least re-broadcast them, and those who don't will meet the same fate they met last January in the form of another Senate acquittal.

I don't think so.

An impeachment trial is the only venue in which both Trump and his enablers can be held responsible. And, for a number of reasons, the chance they may escape should not become an excuse for short-circuiting that hearing.  For the same reasons, those now assuming an acquittal may very well be counting eggs before they are hatched.  At least a half dozen Republican senators, including their leader Mitch McConnell, appear open to conviction today and there is no guarantee ten more won't find their way to that result once the evidence is heard.

Trump incited a violent insurrection.  

He sent forth a mob to kill the constitutionally-required work of the first branch of the government in order to insure his continued but illegitimate control of the second branch of the government.  He and his seconds are now defending his January 6 rally speech by claiming that it never demanded or approved of violence and in fact at one point specifically sanctioned only "peaceful" protest.  

That defense has to be heard and refuted.

Because it is both false and dangerous.  

It is false because you cannot spend months inviting thousands to Washington DC for the express purpose of reversing non-existent electoral theft; fully understand that the group you summon will be (illegally) armed; literally observe them outfitted for battle as you speak; tell them to march on the Capitol while instructing them that they will "never take back [their] country with weakness";  and then pretend it was not your fault -- or your words -- that led to deadly violence merely because you sandwiched the word "peaceful" into what was otherwise an hour long jeremiad of the lies you have been spouting for three months.  And you certainly cannot do that if you are Donald Trump, having preached unmitigated aggression from the presidential pulpit for four years and having told rally goers in the past to bust heads.  

And then there is the overriding issue of danger.

The Roman Republic -- from which much of our own governmental architecture was inspired if not directly drawn -- began to collapse when violence became an accepted method of political combat.  That occurred in the late second and early first century BC as candidates for the two annual consul positions discovered they could command armies loyal to themselves rather than the republic and then fight or leverage their way to political power on the back of brute force.

January 6 was a test run to see if such an approach might gain traction here in the US.  

For Trump and the more violent extremists who stormed the Capitol that day, the hope was that a demonstration of armed strength would in fact coerce others -- most particularly, Vice President Pence -- into declaring the recent election illegitimate and thus force Republican state legislatures in a half dozen swing states to switch their state's electoral votes from Biden to Trump.  Had it succeeded, America would have ceased being a republic for the same reason Rome did.  Might would have made right.  Elections would have become irrelevant.  

For years after violence became a feature of its politics, Rome preserved its republican forms.  Consuls, praetors, tribunes and magistrates were elected and Senators appointed.  But none of that mattered.  Because long before Augustus, the republic had died.  January 6 could have been a similar crossroads for us and at the very least should therefore be a reminder.  

This experiment in republican government is fragile.  

It is by no means inevitable.  

Ben Franklin wasn't kidding when he told that inquiring lady in Philadelphia in 1787 that the founders had given them a republic "if they could keep it."  Keeping it  relies on what they thought of as civic virtue and you and I call good faith and basic honesty. It also requires a willingness to compromise and an eternal preference for ballots over bullets . . . 

And bullies.

America needs a re-boot. It needs to exorcise Trump's demon notion that truth either does not exist or does not matter.  There are no "alternative facts". It also needs to re-establish its republican bona fides. That may not occur even if the impeachment trial goes forward. But it definitely will not occur if it does not. If that happens, poltical violence will have escaped consequence.  Another Trump at another time will take another run at her.  

And next time . . .

The clowns may decide to stay home.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., America's 46th President, thus stands athwart a moment in history.  It is a multi-dimensional moment. A virus still plagues us.  Our politics divides us. And an insurrection almost ended us.  The capital (and Capitol) from which he delivered his Inaugural Address today was rimmed by 25,000 troops from the National Guard, there to preclude any reprise of January 6, and the mall he faced was flooded with flags, not people, in deference to Covid.

Since election day last November, Joe Biden had struck all the right notes.  He has been calm, deliberate and forthright -- the un-Trump as it were.  

Today he was all that and more. 

To the "riotous mob [who] thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground," he repeated the simple truth -- "It did not happen." In a "crucible for the ages, . . . America [had] risen to the challenge. The people [had] been heard, and . . . heeded."  

To the country, he then made a simple pledge.  On his watch, mob rule "will never happen.  Not today.  Not tomorrow.  Not ever."  And then another pledge: "I will always level with you. I will defend the Constitution.  I'll defend democracy.  I'll defend America."

He offered a laundry list of “the foes we face, anger, resentment and hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness.” As expected, his prescribed antidote was “unity”.  But not unity as a “foolish fantasy”.  “[T]he forces that divide us are deep and they are real,” he said, “But . . . they are not new.” “History, faith and reason show us the way of unity . . .  We can treat each other with dignity . . . We can . . . stop the shouting [and] end [our] uncivil war . . . There is truth and there are lies."

What will all of that look like?

Joe Biden is not elusive.  In fact, he is as easy to find as the Main Streets that produced him, the parents that guided him, the nuns that taught him, the ambitions that seized him, and the tragedies that confronted him.  He knows “there’s no accounting for what fate will deal you.”  There are “some days when you need a hand”, others when you’re “called to lend” one.  We're in this together because we have to be.

Even when we do not want to be.

Joe Biden is also not particularly eloquent. So today he left the eloquence to an elderly priest and a 22-year-old poet. The priest reminded us that “Dreams are built together”, the poet that “there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it/ If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Biden is brave enough.

Are we?

THE TRUTH IS NOT NOISY

When he was falsely accused of covering up Cardinal McCarrick's decades-ago abuse of seminarians and minors, Pope Francis told reporters at his first press availability after the charge that he would have nothing to say about it.  He told them they were all "responsible journalists" who could make their own judgments based on the facts and that, at some point in the future, he might comment.  

In the months that followed, the truth came out.  The Pope had not known of McCarrick's crimes, had immediately started the investigative process that led to McCarrick's laicization -- or removal from the priesthood -- once he was told of them, and also had not refused to enforce prior penalties against McCarrick (which had been privately requested by Pope Benedict XVI but ignored by McCarrick and unknown to Francis).

In his morning homilies shortly after the false charge had been made, the Pope embraced the notion of discernment.  "The truth is meek. The truth is silent.  The truth is not noisy," he said, and "lies . . . destroy the unity of a family, of a people."  The antidote is often silence. This is not to be confused with passivity or cynicism.  Years before, in a 1990 essay, a then Father Bergoglio explained, in the words of Austin Ivereigh, that "silence allows the different spirits to be revealed.  In a time of tribulation, that is never easy: in the electric storm of claims and counterclaims, truth and lies get fused, and everyone claims noble motives."  

Eventually, however, truth outs.  

Lies refute themselves.

But we have to let them do so.

The truth can be preached or revealed. 

But it cannot be forced on anyone

It has to come to them.

Wednesday afternoon, as a joint session of Congress began the largely ceremonial task of counting the electoral college votes for President and Vice-President that had been previously delivered to it  by the states, thousands of angry Trump supporters descended upon the Capitol, breached rather flimsy security barriers and a not particularly well organized police response, and then proceeded to vandalize offices and terrorize legislators in a ginned up effort to either stop the vote count or otherwise deliver to Donald Trump the second term he lost but has insisted -- now for months  and without any evidence whatsoever -- was stolen from him.  

Since November 3, Trump has insanely but repeatedly asserted that he won the election "in a landslide" despite having lost the popular count by more than seven million votes and not having come remotely close in the electoral college.  

He has invented claims that hundreds of thousands of illegal votes were cast for his opponent by dead people, non-registered citizens from other states and imposters; that digital technology was manipulated to count ballots for Biden; that poll workers triple-counted and otherwise created phony Biden ballots; and that legislative and administrative changes making it easier to vote by mail in this year of pandemic were themselves illegal.  

As to the first three of these claims, Trump and his attorneys have offered no persuasive evidence at all to support them and neither the courts which have heard them nor the state election officials forced to investigate them have found any.  As to the last, the legislated and administrative changes were legal and upheld by the courts.

During this entire period, Trump's tactics have become increasingly more unhinged. 

And dangerous. 

In November and early December, he lobbied Wayne County officials in Michigan to not certify Biden-heavy vote precincts and later asked state legislators to appoint his electors instead of the actual winners.  On December 20, he discussed imposing martial law in order to have the election re-run in selective states he lost.  Last week, he spent an hour on the phone with Georgia's Secretary of State asking that official to find the 11,780 votes needed to overtake Biden in that state.   And yesterday, at a rally with thousands of MAGA-hatted, Trump-flag waving supporters he had begged to show up in Washington DC on the day of the official electoral vote count, Proud Boys, neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracists among them, he told them to march on the Capitol.  

"We will never give up," he said at the rally. Milking the lies he has told for months, he claimed “You don't concede when there's theft involved."  He asserted -- again falsely -- that "All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president"; in fact, Pence had no authority to do any such thing. And then he told them to "walk down" to the Capitol "to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women,” the ones willing to do his bidding.  For the others unwilling to do his bidding, he had different advice. "You have to show strength," he said, "and you have to be strong."

So they marched to the Capitol.

Breached the barricades.

And went inside.

Though for most it probably counted more as a show of feral idiocy than strength, a pipe bomb was later found in the Capitol (as were pipe bombs outside both the Republican and Democratic National Committee offices in the Capitol neighborhood), windows and furniture were smashed, and both the Speaker's and others' offices were ransacked.  For the first time ever, a Confederate flag flew in the Rotunda.  Or at least "through" it, the flag carried casually like a cheerleader's half-time totem. A cocky, middle-aged poseur later identified as Richard Barnett was photographed boots up on one of the Speaker's desks.  Others were photographed loitering in the Speaker's chair in the House chamber and in the presiding officer's chair in the Senate.

As with Trump himself, much of the activity inside the Capitol was bravado and performance.  

The halls rang with deafening shouts of "Stop the Steal", the mob's go-to lie that was created and has been flamed by Trump for the past three months. At other times they yelled "Our House", an ironic claim of ownership in view of the fact that they were pretty much trashing the place. Later in the day, as the Capitol was emptied and order restored, one obnoxious trespasser told cameras that the "Capitol police did not take back the Capitol.  We gave it back."  Another announced that they had "stopped the vote".  

Much of the activity, however, was more serious. 

Apart from the property destruction and sheer terror created as they tried to breach interior space, the mob included leaders from the Proud Boys, one of whom is part of a group called "Murder the Media"; members of the National Socialist Club, a neo-Nazi group; and QAnon supporters, a conspiracist sect that claims the Democrats worship Satan and abuse children.  Journalists who remained inside reported at least one part of the mob looking for Vice President Pence in order to kill him.  Others reported blood and feces on statues and vile epithets uttered against Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Schumer.  One guy was wearing a "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt.

Over eighty were arrested.  Five people died.

Though Trump himself issued two statements while the Capitol was under siege, neither condemned the lawbreakers.

In the aftermath, there were some truth tellers but also a lot of "noble" claimants fusing "truth and lies" in the "electric storm of claims and counterclaims" that a handful of Trumpists had turned the pro forma vote count into at Trump's or his putative base's (and all of the nutjobs who had earlier trashed the place's) insistence.  

Of the former, Mitt Romney continued to shine.  Addressing the Senate after it returned to debate objections to the vote count, he berated Trump.  "What happened at the U.S.Capitol today was an insurrection," he said, "incited by the President of the United States."  Earlier, seething with anger in the secure location to which Senators had been removed when the Capitol was breached, he yelled at the Republicans advancing Trump's electoral lies -- "This is what you've gotten, guys."  

Back on the floor, Romney punctured whatever was left of the claim only six Senators remained willing to support.  As he put it, pointing out the silliness of Sen. Cruz's ten-day audit demand to satisfy the disaffected, "No Congressional led audit will ever convince those voters [who believe the election was stolen], particularly when the President will continue to claim that the election was stolen.  The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth. The truth is that President-elect Biden won this election.  President Trump lost."

Because, however, truth is not, as the Pope put it, noisy, the nobility caucus also had its say.  

Opposing an objection to Pennslyvania's vote, Sen. Pat Toomey said "We witnessed today the damage that can result when men in power and responsibility refuse to acknowledge the truth. We saw bloodshed because a demagogue chose to spread falsehoods and sow distrust of his own fellow Americans."  At the same time, Toomey admitted he had voted for the demagogue.  

Which begs a host of questions . . .

About Sen. Toomey.

He can ask them.

The rest of us should leave him alone.

For his part, a folksy Lindsey Graham said "Enough is enough," placing himself among the judges and elections officials who have ruled the election legitimate.  One of those rulings, by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, came in a 4-3 decision that the challenges in that state to absentee and early voting had come too late. Lindsey was OK with that: "If Al Gore could accept five-four he's not president," said Graham, "I can accept Wisconsin four to three."  

All fine.  

And noble.

But he also said that he and Trump had had "a helluva a journey . . . From my point of view, he's been a consequential president."

Unfortunately, Graham was right.

One of those consequences was a woman shot that afternoon in the Capitol.  

She later died.

Another was a Capitol Police Department officer who died Thursday evening from injuries sustained during the attack.

A little before 4 am on Thursday morning, Vice-President Pence announced the final electoral vote -- 306-232 in favor of Biden/Harris.  Joe Biden officially became President-Elect and Kamala Harris Vice President- Elect.  Immediately thereafter, Trump's press office tweeted out a statement (the President's own Twitter account had been suspended by the company because it thought, correctly, that he had incited violence).  The statement read "Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th".

This, of course, is just another lie.

The facts do not bear him out.

Later on Thursday, the noise continued.  

Former Attorney General Barr said that "orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable," and that Trump had "betray[ed] his office and supporters."  Former Chief of Staff and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said that the Cabinet should exercise its right to remove Trump pursuant to the 25th Amendment.  Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, Trump's longest serving Cabinet member, resigned effective next Monday.  She called the assault on the Capitol by Trump's supporters "entirely avoidable."  

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger, and the former Chief of Staff and current envoy to Northern Ireland, Mick Mulvaney, resigned immediately, as did the First Lady's Chief of Staff and the White House's social secretary.  For his part, Mulvaney said that Trump had had a "long list of successes" but that "all of that went away yesterday".  Meanwhile, potential resignations were reported involving other national security officials, including National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien.

Throughout the day on Thursday, there were calls for Trump's removal pursuant to the 25th Amendment. Speaker Pelosi said that if the Vice President and Cabinet were not willing to take this step, her caucus was prepared to impeach Trump again.  The Wall Street Journal issued an evening editorial calling on the President to resign.  Around 7 pm, Trump issued a video statement.  In it, he for the first time condemned the mob, promised they would be held accountable, called for healing, acknowledged he would no longer be President come noon on January 20, and said he would work to insure a peaceful and orderly transition over the next thirteen days.  

David Gergen, who has over the years advised four presidents (from both parties), was appearing on CNN at the time the statement was broadcast.

When it was over, Gergen marveled at its sheer "chutzpah".

John Donvan is a college friend of mine.  He is also an ABC news journalist and over the course of a forty plus year career has been stationed at and covered the news from capitals around the world.  On Wednesday on Facebook, he posted video footage that came over his desk in London in 1981 of a coup attempt in Spain, where armed military had burst into Spain's newly created parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, and tried to stop it from voting to elect a new prime minister.  In recounting his reaction to the video at that time, he remembered feeling "so glad that [he] lived in a country where something crazy like that could never happen."

He then said no more.

Just arched his brow.

On the post, he wrote "In the end, no words".

The truth is not noisy.

CHRISTMAS TREES AND CROOKED TIMBERS

My daughter, her boyfriend and I went shopping for a Christmas tree this year.  

At our first stop, the pickings were slim.  The "farm" to which we ventured had pretty much run out.  Some threadbare remainders scattered the lot, orphans in a strange year that the season itself seemed unable to make right.  Up the road, a small field of uncut pines in another farm seemed promising.  But those were not being cut or sold.  Unlike their orphaned companions, they were not desperate.  Just determined.  Refusing to celebrate a year in which so much could not be celebrated, they were more or less . . .

Un-Christmas trees.

They would not be unearthed.

It was hard to blame them.  

Optimism and pessimism are generally considered dispositions. One of my best friends is the proverbial boy in the room full of you-know-what furiously shoveling because he knows there's a pony in there somewhere. We tease him mercilessly but envy his ability to stare down adversity.  Some of history's greatest leaders had a similar bent.  FDR's nothing-to-fear-but-fear itself kept the nation afloat in the Depression, as did Churchill's steely unwillingness to bend in any way to Hitler as Great Britain marched alone through its "finest hour" in 1940. 

Both were indispensable. 

The Depression emasculated America as it unemployed a whole generation of middle-aged men, and the German Blitz killed 43,000 Londoners in eight months while making another 1 in 6 homeless as it destroyed 1.1 million British flats. 

Neither, however, was sufficient.  

It took more than Roosevelt's or Churchill's rhetoric to end the Depression or survive the Blitz and ultimately win the war.

And both men knew this.  

The New Deal was a program, not a personality.  In the eight years before World War II, it entailed enormous amounts of domestic spending in the form of direct relief, price supports and unemployment and old age insurance to support and increase economic demand; a relaxed gold standard that increased the money supply (which also enhanced demand); labor laws that allowed workers to compete more equally with their employers to bid up wages; and structural reforms to the banking and securities industries to end the speculative abuses that had facilitated the economic crisis in the first place.  

As for Britain and the war, Churchillian rhetoric became actual success for two reasons, neither of which depended on the great man's words alone.  The first was the Royal Air Force (RAF) which won the Battle of Britain and thus torpedoed Germany's invasion plans.  When Churchill told the British in the Summer of 1940 that "Never in the history of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few," he was paying tribute to the Spitfire pilots who almost single handedly had kept Germany at bay.  And when, on December 7, 1941, he knew Britain had been delivered and would ultimately prevail, it was because America was entering the war.  He had hoped for it, argued for it, and begged for it.  In contemplating the possibility that the British Isles might be overrun, he had even predicted it. But in the end, it was the Japanese and Hitler who made it happen.

Though today's challenges are eerily similar, the cumulative response has been anything but.  

As Covid marches on, America's death toll has reached 320,000.  Over 2,500 Americans are dying on average every day. Though vaccines are becoming available, they will not be administered to the vast majority of us until sometime next summer.  For herd immunity to occur, at least 70% of Americans will have to get vaccinated.  Though a September poll found that only about 60% said they would do so, that level of support had reached 70% by December.  In the meantime, social distancing, masks and intermittent quarantines -- all of which have unfortunately been turned into political statements -- remain the only effective antidotes.

The absence of leadership is and has been striking.

On Covid these days, Donald Trump is AWOL.  Other than claiming credit for the vaccines, he has literally said nothing about the crisis since the November election.  His White House arranged a host of holiday parties, disregarding scientific advice to the contrary and generating additional super spreader possibilities.  At those events, masks were more in evidence than in the past but distancing -- a casualty of indoor events -- was not. 

Trump himself has avoided many of these holiday events, instead hunkering down is his residential bunker where he avoids public exposure, and on the rare occasions when he does show up, he simply touts his phony claims of election fraud.  Those claims, repeatedly rejected by the courts and for which literally no credible evidence has emerged, never die in his White House, even as they become more outlandish.  Over the past few days, a coterie of crazies -- Giuliani, sometimes Trump-lawyer Sidney Powell and the pardoned former National Security Adviser (and ex-General) Michael Flynn -- even discussed the possibility of Trump imposing martial law to stop Biden from being sworn in on January 20.  

For his part, Flynn reportedly endorsed and advocated the idea. 

Whether Trump himself endorsed the idea is not clear, and this kind of opacity is typical of both him and his administration.  A bully and pathological liar, Trump's signature rhetorical move generally takes the form of "people are saying".  It allows him to traffic in lies while denying responsibility for them. Flynn's suggestion creates a slight variation on this move.  This time, there actually is a person -- an ex-General, no less -- saying something.  So, Trump gets to hide behind Flynn's ostensible credentials while further stoking the (false) fires of illegitimacy designed to destroy Biden's coming Presidency.

And we all get to marvel at another new low.

At the end of the day, there will be no martial law.  Indeed, were this morally bankrupt President to give any such order, the military would not follow it and the courts would promptly kill it.  It is unclear who among the cowards' caucus of Congressional Republicans would join in this repudiation, and sadly, the number would be far short of all of them.  Since the election, one of the principal cowards -- Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- has taken to painting the political future as a contest between better manners and poor policies.  According to him, "Our problem is tone, their problem is policy."  Graham likes the GOP's "chances better because we can act better [but] it's harder for them to legislate differently."

Seriously?

The four years of lies, successful Russian cyber-attacks, 320,000 Covid deaths, assaults on Obamacare with no credible alternative, weakened alliances, continued climate crisis, ongoing racial unrest and newly active militias and "some fine people" white supremacists are all a consequence of . . .

Tone?

What Graham refuses to recognize is the rot that lies at the foundation of his political party.  He won re-election and his party survived the past four years not in spite of Trump but because of him. Anywhere from a quarter to a third of the GOP vote is now comprised of inveterate Trumpists, those who actually thought the Supreme Court should have discarded the ballots of over 20 million Americans and now believe martial law would be a good thing.  

Pundits think Trump drove up turnout among Democrats, which is true, and that once he leaves, that will abate, which may be true as well.  But Trump himself also drove up turnout among Republicans and succeeded in so dividing the country that the GOP cannot win these days without all of his voters, even the crazy ones.  If those voters stay home, as may be the case in the coming Senate run-off races in Georgia, Republicans will lose.  But if they show up, they will drive "tone" into the same ditch Trump has driven it for the past four years. For them, like Trump, "act[ing] better" is for losers and being better is not really possible.

Today, there are two political parties in America.   

The Democratic Party.  

And the Anti-Democratic Party.  

The first counts votes.  The second suppresses them.  The first respects elections. The second tries to overturn them.   The first follows the law.  The second breaks it. The first has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. The second has won it once.  The first wins in spite of a federal structure that tilts the electoral playing field against it. The second wins because of that structure.  The first needs to maintain its coalition and policy sanity to succeed going forward.  The second needs to get rid of its rot if it has the same goal.

If I were betting, it would be on the Democrats.  There are lots of Joe Bidens -- decent more or less centrist pols -- in the Democratic Party.  But there aren't a lot of Mitt Romneys in the Republican Party.  And there are way too many Donald Trumps.   

Graham and his friends will discover how many once Trump leaves. 

In search of a Christmas tree, our final stop was a nursery three towns away.  When we arrived, the only  other customer was on his way out.  Christmas tree shopping in the world of Covid is like all shopping in the world of Covid.  Socially distant at best, solitary and lonely at worst. A couple of employees, no doubt seasonal and brought in for the (un)expected rush, lingered over a chain saw as we inspected the selection. 

This nursery had plenty of trees.  Erect, they bent ever so slightly because they were real.  Though full, the branches were alive. They darted in and out.  And up and down. They avoided artificial symmetry and were thus appropriate reminders, perhaps more so this year than any other, of us -- Kant's veritable "crooked timber of humanity" from which "no straight thing was ever made".

We bought one, took it home and put it up. 

It stands in front of a mountain of books, antidotes to ignorance for any crooked timbers to pursue.

It is the perfect Christmas tree.  

In the perfect place.

For this imperfect year.

THANKSGIVING 2020 -- FLOWERS IN THE FALL

I remember the day we buried my best friend's baby.  

His wife was lucky to be alive.  Well into her ninth month and with the birth mere weeks away, her uterus burst internally, killing their son and almost killing her as well.  My friend was by then a prominent New York attorney, well-acquainted with late nights and long trips.  That night, however, he was home.  Had he been away, he would have come home to two tragedies.  

One was enough.

At the funeral, as he began his sermon, the priest looked out over a small group of familiar faces.  

He knew us all.  He knew we were ambitious, hard working, take-charge types, unwilling and unable to let mere fate take its course, always prepared to intervene, to move life in the direction we wanted, to shape the future rather than simply await it. He knew this because, decades before, he had been one of the Jesuits who taught us the skills we'd use to do so.

Now, in the still, silence of a small chapel in Manhattan, he was teaching us something else.

We highly educated, ambitious, hard-working citizens of early 21st century America control things.

"But," he said, "not everything."

Welcome to 2020. 

The year of lost control.

Covid, a quintessential manifestation of lost control at so many levels, has killed over 250,000 in America and more than 1.3 million worldwide.  Bookended by a dysfunctional politics that has made things even worse, we approach Thanksgiving in circumstances very similar to those that existed in 1863 when Lincoln first proclaimed the last Thursday in November a national day of thanks.  Then, we were on our way to killing 763,000 in a war with ourselves over whether one man had the right to own another.  Now, we are marching toward a projected number of deaths of anywhere from 350,00 to over half a million largely dependent upon whether all of us are willing to wear masks, stand apart, and occasionally quarantine until an effective vaccine is widely distributed.  

In 1863, Lincoln asked us to thank God for the fact that war had not "arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship." The economy, it seemed, was doing rather well wherever armies were not creating the first killing fields of modern warfare. At the same time, acutely aware of the war's toll in "widows, orphans, mourners [and] sufferers", Lincoln demanded that the day's prayer be one of "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience."  He knew that the Civil War was at its core the product of both.

In 2020, our prayers should be similarly schizophrenic. The genius of American science and American business is on full display as three companies complete testing and are on the verge of issuing an effective vaccine. The US military is poised to deliver it to the initial wave of recipients within 48 hours of final approval.  The speed with which this likely remedy was produced is unique, breathtaking really, and conjures a reality that buttresses all those (often exaggerated) claims of American exceptionalism.

Be thankful for that.

Covid did not "arrest", as Lincoln would put it, our ingenuity.

After thirty years of over the top right-wing rhetoric, it also did not arrest our ability to embrace the necessity of effective, even big, government.  

One of the principal reasons Pfizer and Moderna and AztraZeneca were able to generate their vaccine at the bureaucratic equivalent of the speed of light is that the federal government -- the one so many of us now habitually hate -- guaranteed their market.  It's a lot easier to get on with the business of discovery, testing and production when you have already been guaranteed payment.  In economic terms, it pretty much eliminates risk, or what is worse in the capitalism of contemporary America, shareholder derivative suits.  For the time being, we also can ignore the fact that, in truth, this whole guaranteed governmental purchase thing is a form of socialism for shareholders, a truth that uncovers a bee hive of hypocrisy in our current zeitgeist.  As is always the case when socialism adds to corporate profit margins, we must put that aside.  

And just . . . 

Thank Uncle Sam.

Not unexpectedly, our current but soon to be ex-President is demanding we thank him as well.  When not inventing election fraud claims his own lawyers -- lest they lose their licenses -- refuse to repeat in actual courts before actual judges, he now asserts that his FDA never would have fast tracked a vaccine without his insistence. Hard to know if this is the case, but even a "perhaps" deserves a nod of approval.  The problem, however, is that Trump insists upon so much, and so much that is false, that it is hard to tell whether anything he says generates progress rather than chaos.  The other problem is that, even assuming he deserves credit for lighting the bureaucratic fires that got this (almost) done, he is now impeding the incoming Biden Administration's ability to distribute the vaccine by refusing to share the data and plans the new President will have to implement.  

I have no idea what, specifically, Trump said to the FDA.  Or even if the agency listened.  But I am certain that, if something goes wrong between now and when the first vaccine is delivered, Trump's insistence claim will vanish.  I am also certain that Trump will never concede his loss to Biden and have tired of waiting for Republican office-holders and appointees to do their jobs regardless.  The head of the GSA is still pretending she cannot "ascertain" that Biden won the election and thus free up transition funds, and every day she waits is one lost to a seamless vaccine delivery after January 20.

So, no thanks, Mr. President.

My original intention in this year's Thanksgiving missive was to thank my Mom.  She is 91 and Covid has been difficult for her and my sister, both of whom live together about two hours from me in New Jersey.  She misses her grandchildren and me and her daughter-in-law.  On Mothers Day, we drove down to surprise them and assembled (socially-distanced) at their coop's picnic area.  With the new spikes, the area has been closed.  She is (fortunately) healthy and we all intend to keep it that way.  She is also a nurse and understands better than most what is at stake.

Most adults have a hard time with change.  My mother, however, is different.   I am not certain she always accepted change.  But she certainly navigated it.  In 1947, she graduated from an elite NYC high school but did not have the chance to go to college. In 1950, she became a nurse, a profession she practiced into her 80s and one for which she was perfectly suited.  Principally because she had a natural empathy for others, a natural aversion to judgment, and a respect for intellect and science.  Illness, especially mental illness, was a fact, not a fault.  And she nursed everyone, including herself, through it.

In 1955 she married my father, who she loved. He, however, loved martinis a bit more. Which, generally speaking, ends badly.  At 50, she was newly divorced and wondered whether she'd grow old poor.  At 56, she married my step-father, who loved her (and not martinis). They took care of each other.  At 72, however, she buried him.  Like her sister, she had had sixteen years of a very good marriage.  

The only problem was . . .

It ended too soon.

Instead of resenting reality, however, she surfed it.  She always found the next wave.  And when she washed out, she always got back on the board.  She passed her dreams of higher education onto her children.  Both of us.  Gender did not matter.  She refused to assume that a bad marriage could not be followed by a good one.  Or that the death of loved ones made it impossible to be sustained by the memory of their love.  In Landslide, Stevie Nicks asks "Oh, mirror in the sky what is love?/Can the child within my heart rise above?/Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?/Can I handle the seasons of my life?"  

She needs to meet my mother.  

Whose life is a resounding "Yes!"

Someday I'll say all of this in a church.  I hope that day is a long way away.  In the meantime, I'm reminded of another priest who wrote my mother a letter once praising her work and explaining that bouquets were not just for funerals.  

So, Mom, this Thanksgiving . . .

This bouquet's for you.

FLAT EARTHERS, BIG-BANGERS, AND THE RISKS GOING FORWARD

A week and a day ago, America voted and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won.   They are now the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect of the United States.  While some votes remain to be counted and their vote totals will therefore rise, we know at this moment that 76,997,481 voted for them and that, on January 20, 2021, at high noon in Washington, DC, Donald Trump will no longer be President.

That is the good news.

Here is the bad.

71,926,283 voted for Trump.

In the wake of his defeat, Trump has for the past week tweeted out an unending string of lies claiming he won the election.  He has made unproven and unevidenced assertions that illegal votes were counted and that the election itself was marred by fraud in critical states (though never in the ones he won or, apparently, in any districts where the GOP won House or Senate seats).  He has also initiated a host of lawsuits making the same unspecified claims, all of which are now before the courts, many of which have already been dismissed, and none of which have either a basis in fact or the ability to overturn the result.

In a national opinion survey conducted from last Saturday to yesterday by Reuters/Ipsos, 79% said they believed Biden won the election, 13% said the election had not yet been decided, 3% said they thought Trump won and 5% said they did not know.  If so, 97% of the country is telling us that Donald Trump is . . .

Nuts.

It is more or less a given in this country that 97% of us can never agree on anything.  

In 2018, a YouGov.com poll found that only 84% of those surveyed "have always believed the earth is round".  Though only 2% reported they "have always believed the earth is flat", 7% reported that they had "recently" become "skeptical" one way or the other and 7% said they "weren't sure" or didn't know.  When the internet lit up with a partial report, based on that poll, that a third of millennials thought the earth flat, outrage was immediate -- only 4% of them thought that; the other 29% were skeptical or not sure.

But c'mon.

How can anyone be "skeptical" . . . 

Or "not sure".

On the flat earth question?

There are, of course, many questions on which disagreement is both predictable and to be expected.  

Take, for example, the debate between creationism and evolution.

A July 2019 Gallup poll reported that 40% of Americans believe in a so-called “pure” form of creationism in which God alone created the universe and us roughly 10,000 years ago.  In that same poll, the rest reported that humans evolved over millions of years.  23% said that happened without God's assistance.  33% said it occurred with divine assistance.

I'm in that last group.

I believe in the big bang theory.  I think the universe started gazillions of years ago in that instantaneous explosion and that ever since it has been expanding and evolving.  I believe we humans represent a mere nano-second on that time-line and that our forebears were apes.  I believe -- with Einstein -- that if we could run at the speed of light, we would . . .

Out-run time.

And I believe that when we die . . .

We finally do.

I believe all that because I also believe in God, the Divine Pre-Banger as it were , the Aristotelian first cause that set it all in motion. I believe that all those scientific laws we keep discovering, the ones Stephen Hawking and his friends won Nobel Prizes elucidating and writing books about, could not exist without Him or Her or It.  And I believe that the bright light reported by those who have approached death but returned to tell us about it is . . .

God winking.  

Inviting us to that other side of the space-time continuum.

When pressed to disaffirm any of these beliefs, I can't.  

Not because they are false.  

Or true. 

In fact, they are neither.

They are just unknowable.

The results of the recent election, however, are neither unknown nor unknowable. Biden and Harris won. Trump and Pence lost.  That the vast majority -- in fact, at this point all but three -- of the GOP's Congressional caucus refuse to say so at this point does not make it so.  Most of them privately admit the gig is up for Trump.  They know the law suits are just the most recent examples of the President's narcissism and petulance, that none of them can overturn the outcome and that collectively, therefore, they are simply a waste of time.

They also know that what Trump is doing is dangerous.

Perhaps fatally so.

There is nothing ineluctable about democracy or the American republic.  Unlike the Big Bang, it was an act of men, not God. Like the Big Bang, however, it contains its own set of unknowables that make it work.  These are the unwritten traditions and norms that, over time, have stopped the experiment from imploding.  In 1800, after he lost the Presidency to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams thought he had been robbed by an ignorant mob of the unschooled and uninformed.  He could have told his Federalist supporters to hit the streets and undo the perceived wrong.

Instead, he went home to Massachusetts and cooled off.

In so doing, he birthed the tradition that power is to be transferred peacefully when the opposition beats you.  And with one exception, that tradition has been followed ever since.  By Adams's son in 1828, Van Buren in 1840, Cleveland in 1888, Hoover in 1932, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980 and Bush in 1992. The exception was 1860 when the south refused to tolerate Lincoln.  As a consequence, 720,00 Americans died in the Civil War.

Trump does not advocate violence but he flirts with it.  Over the past week, the violent, white supremacist Proud Boys claimed that Trump's infamous "stand-back and stand-by" pronunciamento from the first presidential debate -- a statement widely derided at the time as a presidential permission slip in waiting -- had been "rescinded", and though on-line threats have not actually materialized since then, neither have they evaporated.  

This, moreover, is the Trump way.  

Every planet of reality -- counting and certifying the vote, conceding the election, funding and undertaking the transition a mere 70 days away, the normal day to day functioning of the federal departments, even proscriptions against violence -- must orbit around the sun of his own narcissistic fictions and lies.  

If you dissent or even demur, you are removed.  

Two days ago, the Defense Secretary was fired, throwing the country's national security apparatus into disarray. The head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, is reportedly on the chopping block. The Attorney General remains in office, probably because he authorized the DOJ to investigate any ostensibly "substantial" irregularities in last week's vote count.  Though this was not all of what Trump wanted, it for now apparently will do.  In response, Richard Pilger, the director of the elections crimes branch in DOJ's Public Integrity Section, resigned. Said Pilger: the "new policy abrogate[es] the forty-year old Non-Interference Policy for ballot fraud investigations in the period prior to elections becoming certified and uncontested."

The 71.9 million who voted for Trump for the most part do not believe he won but also do not care that he has refused to concede or has settled on frivolous legal maneuvers for ends unknown to all but his embittered psyche. In this, they are behaving true to form.  They did not care about the 20,000 plus lies, or bribing the Ukrainian President to start a phony investigation of Biden, or separating the children from their parents at the border, or the Access Hollywood comments, or the two dozen sexual harassment claims.  They did not even care about his rank incompetence on Covid.

How is that possible?

Are they all flat-earthers denying reality or at least skeptical enough about it that the Trumps of the world now get a chance they would otherwise be denied and can hold all of us hostage in the meantime?

Or are they big-bangers, secure in their faith that controlling the Senate and the Supreme Court outweighs any risks that shattering long-practiced traditions entails?

I do not know.

The part of me that celebrates is grateful that 76.9 million of my neighbors got rid of Trump, a cancer on democracy.  The part of me that worries is that 71.9 million of them didn't.   I have Facebooked with them, tweeted with them, talked with them, and am even related to and love some of them.

I just do not understand them anymore.