CELEBRATING . . . SOMEBODY

CELEBRATING . . . SOMEBODY

It's February 21, 2022.

Presidents Day.

Or President's Day.

Or Presidents' Day.

Never has the presence, absence or position of an apostrophe mattered so much.

In ten states, it's Presidents' Day. Call these the "s-pos" states.  In eight states, it's President's Day.  Call these the "pos-s" states.  And in three states, its Presidents Day.  Call these the "no-pos, just s" states. Together, and for reasons that will become clear later, call that triumvirate of choices the "s-trilogy".

This whole mess started in 1971 when the federal govenment passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.  Beforehand, the country universally celebrated Washington's birthday on February 22.  The Act, however, moved that celebration to the third Monday in February, which means the holiday can occur anywhere from February 15 to February 21.  For most federal holidays, this creates no more than a convenient fiction.  Instead of celebrating on the actual day something happened, it gets moved to a Monday and everyone enjoys a three-day weekend.  

With the alteration on Washington's birthday, however, additional complications were introduced.  These were largely owing to the fact that Abraham Lincoln had also been born in February (on the 12th) and numerous states (though not the federal government) had proclaimed his birthday a holiday as well.  When the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed, these states decided that they too would seize the third Monday in February to celebrate Lincoln as well.

Which has led to a veritable . . .

Linguistic Mess.

The pos-s states have just followed the federal government in treating the holiday (or at least referring to it)  as a celebration of Washington's birthday.  The s-pos states have apparently decided to honor Washington and Lincoln or Washington, Lincoln and all of their forty-four colleagues.  And the no-pos, just s states have punted on any precision at all.

Sharp minds will note that, when you add the s-pos, pos-s and no-pos, just s  states together, all you get is twenty-one. This means that thirty states have decided to forego any of these designations.  Even sharper minds will wonder how thirty states declined to embrace the s-trilogy in one form of another, when there are only fifty states and 21 plus 30 equals 51.

Not to worry.

Puerto Rico is not a state.

But it is an s-poser.

Anyway, back to those thirty others.

Among them, a host of alternatives has emerged.

Montana, Ohio, Utah, Colrado and Minnesota each embrace the holiday as a celebration of Washington and Lincoln's birthdays but avoid any catastrophic apostrophe problem by naming it after them specifically.  So it's "Lincoln's and Washington's Birthday" in Montana, "Washington and Lincoln's Birthday" in Minnesota and "Washington-Lincoln" or "Washington's and Lincoln's" "Day" in Colorado, Ohio and Utah, the latter of which abjures the hyphen. Maine goes for a compromise in favor of Washington. There it's "Washington's Birthday/President's Day". But Arizona goes the other way, with "Lincoln/Washington/Presidents' Day".

There are, however, purists.

States which are steadfast for Washington.

In Virginia, it's "George Washington Day".  In Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Louisiana and New York, it's "Washington's Birthday".  In Connecticut, Missouri and Illinois, it's a celebration of Washington's Birthday alone; each also celebrates Lincoln, but on the 12th.  And California celebrates it as Washington's Birthday but doesn't name it.

Then there are the real outliers.

Alabama celebrates the "George Washington/Thomas Jefferson Birthday".  Arkansas calls it the "George Washington's Birthday and Daisy Bates Day". And Indiana, Georgia and New Mexico celebrate in entirely different months.

At least one state appears exhausted by it all.

That would be Delaware.

Which doesn't observe the holiday.

For the five which remain  (for those of you still counting) . . .

Who knows.

I do not.

It is perhaps fitting that confusion should now be the order of this day. 

The country is polarized in the extreme.  As regular readers know, my own view is that there was nothing to celebrate in our forty-fifth president. And while I am convinced that this remains the case, especially given the events of January 6 and "the former guy's"  unyielding propagation of the outright lie that he won an election he clearly lost, I am equally baffled (and disturbed) by the fact that millions are still enthralled by him and that he either controls or at least has outsized influence in one of America's major political parties.

This is especially disturbing in light of the genesis of today.

Washington and Lincoln, despite their flaws, were giants in the American pantheon.  

The former helped birth a country by assuming a presidency the Founders crafted knowing he would be its first occupant. He then defined the job and thus created a template for future occupants.  His definition, which was non-partisan and faction-less, did not survive in anything resembling the actual form it took while he was president.  But at the very least he bequeathed an office bathed in the notion that the chief executive had to act in the interests of the nation as a whole and that federal unity was superior to state sovereignty.

As to the latter, he redefined the country, forcing it to come to terms with the founding Declaration and decide whether all were created equal in fact and not just in form.  He was willing to fight to see Jefferson's truth turned into reality.  But he also closely respected the representative realities that had to be accommodated in a diverse and widespread republic.  Slavery ended because of the Civil War.  There is no Emancipation Proclamation or Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution without it.  Lincoln knew this and his greatness, therefore,  is as much a testament to his patience as it is to his courage.

Which brings us back to today.

The actual today.

Not the today that is President's Day . . .  or Presidents' Day . . .  or whatever.

Our current President, Joe Biden, must operate on the knife's edge of an almost equally divided Congress where getting things done is next to impossible and a viscerally divided body politic that in many precincts hates any opponents.  

But whether you love him or hate him, the one thing Joe Biden has been in his thirteen months as President is . . . 

Patient.

As I write, he is attempting to cajole Vladimir Putin into foregoing an invasion of Ukraine that will upend the rules based order that has preserved the peace in Europe since 1945.  He is doing this by resurrecting the western alliance that Trump consistenly undermined and, through that alliance and the astute disclosure of real time intelligence, by making it clear to Putin that we know what he is planning as he is planning it and that he will pay dearly if he invades.  In the Trump Administration, Putin could count on either support or chaos, both of which he exploited.  That has ended.

At home Biden is attempting to cajole the stubborn among us who refuse to get vaccinated so that Covid can end and supply chains can recover.  In the best of all worlds, he would  not have to deal with partisans exploiting irrationality in the face of a health crisis.  In past health crises -- AIDS, SARS, etc. -- partisanship has been muted and irrationality avoided.  That, however, is not the world we live in today.  So Biden is working with what he has.

Whatever Joe Biden is, he is not the former guy.  There is a deliberateness and deliberation to the decision-making.  Gone are the petulent outbursts, the reactive tweets, the idiotic suggestions. No aides are rushing to the cable channels talking about alternative facts or walking back unhinged rants.

It may or may not work in the sense that the ultimate outcomes may or may not be preferred.  

As of now, there is no guarantee that Putin will not become a latter-day Nazi and take over some part  or all of an independent European state. There is also no guarantee that inflation will end within the next few months.  

What there is, however, is a steadiness in the White House that was missing for four years.

And on this day, whoever and whatever it honors, that is somebody to . . . 

Celebrate.

 

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN

"We are getting used to a lot of behaviors that are not good for us."

So said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in an article he wrote in early 1993 entitled "Defining Deviancy Down". 

Moynihan's claim back then was that previously condemned (or -- using his adjectives -- "abnormal" or "stigmatized") behaviors of all manner and type were being accepted for one reason or another and that we were kidding ourselves into thinking this a good thing.  The originality of the piece was not in linking acceptance to increase, which seems obvious, but rather in highlighting the tricks we devise to kid ourselves. 

Moynihan isolated three -- altruiism, opportunism and denial. The first redefines erstwhile deviance under the banner of care and concern.  The second accepts it because doing so creates advantages that remedy would remove.  And the third just ignores it. 

Many reading Moynihan's article today might be offended. 

His examples of altruistic and opportunistic redefinition were, respectively, the movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill and the explosion of out-of-wedlock births, single-parent households and broken families.  He argued that the former had led to the crisis of homelessness as the mentally ill were sent to the streets, while the latter had permanently disadvantaged a generation of children economically, educationally and socially,  and thus made poverty and violent crime more likely as Dads moved out. 

As I said, we might take offense to these claims today. 

De-institutionalization of the mentally ill was supposed to be accompanied by community care. When it wasn't, the problem became the absence of altruism, not its presence. And divorce was not supposed to create a fatherless America.  

Daddy and Mommy were de-coupling.

Not Daddy and the kids.

Still, much of what Moynihan said made sense.  

Though crime had exploded by the '90s relative to its mid-century levels,  our collective sense of outrage had been overcome by its frequency.  As Moynihan put it, "the vocabulary of crime reporting moved toward the normal".  What, for example,  shocked the nation in 1929 and led to new laws against machine guns  (the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) had been routinized by the 1990s such that  deaths by firearms exceeded those by auto accidents and even simple legislative fixes were avoided.  

At the time, Moynihan noted that the country had a two-century supply of handguns but only a four-year supply of  the ammunition -- .25 and .38 caliber bullets  -- needed to make them lethal.  But his proposal to cap that supply (as he put it, "Guns don't kill people, bullets do") went nowhere.

Generally speaking, denial doesn't get a real footing until altruism and opportunism have plowed the field and made it fertile. And so it was (and remains) on the gun front. Gun lovers treat firearms as means of protection that advance the altruistic goal of individual safety. Politicians view them opportunistically as both a source of votes and campaign contributions. And then the rest of us are forced to live with a new normal . . .

Bearing the names Columbine, Sandy Hook and Aurora.

Given that defining deviancy down has become so widespread, it's a small wonder that we do not seem to care, or for most of us even notice, when it infects other precincts.

Like, for example, politics.

It is late January 2022.  

We witness two anniversaries this month -- the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and the January 20 inauguration of Joe Biden as the nation's 46th president.  

A normal -- or, if that bothers you, perfectly acceptable -- view of these anniversaries is that the nation a year ago escaped a violent and illegal effort to overturn a completely valid election  helmed by the demonstrably false claims of a psychopath. 

The evidence for this view is overwhelming.  

About sixty courts, numerous recounts,  more than a dozen administrative officials (many of them self-identifying Republicans),  and even a few partisan "audits" have all made it clear that Trump lost and Biden won the 2020 presidential election.  

At the same time, more than 700 people have been criminally charged in connection with the assault on the Capitol, numerous experts have testified to Trump's psychopathologies -- his narcissism, sadism and sociopathic dishonesty -- and the bi-partisan House committee investigating January 6 has published the blueprint he agreed to in his effort to have Vice President Pence reject certified electors that day and either declare Trump the winner or send the election to the House where Trump would have won under the unit state vote rule.

Nevertheless, approximately 30% of America, and anywhere from 50-70% of Republicans depending upon how or when they are asked, do not accept this view as fact.  Unbelievably, the architect of January 6, Trump himself, is the leading (by a substantial margin) candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. 

Almost the entire class of GOP office holders either endorses Trump or at the very least appeases him by refusing to rebut his false election claim or hold him responsible for January 6. And those that don't are now considered apostates.  Some -- like Liz Cheney and Senators Romney, Rounds and Cassidy -- soldier on;  others -- like Pennsylvania's Sen. Pat Toomey or Illinois' Rep. Adam Kinzinger and New York's Rep. John Katko --  are retiring.

Facing this apparently impregnable lie, the Biden Administration has been forced to operate in a political ecosystem  that guarantees its inability to get much of anything passed.  

Critics assert that the  president has moved too far left,  that his messaging has been at best flat-footed, that he now owns the bad news (Afghanistan, Covid, inflation), and that there are bi-partisan "wins" out there were he to simply jettison the moralizing and govern. 

The factual support for this argument, however, is thin to non-existent.  

Everything in the (apparently) now dead Build Back Better and voting rights bills is supported by significant public margins; indeed, the Congressional GOP had told its caucus that their own voters support the voting rights bills and that, consequently, those bills must be killed via a silent filibuster rather than an open debate, the latter of which would hurt them in the mid-terms. 

If the Afghanistan departure was bad (and it was), the fault is certainly bi-partisan; Trump agreed to a drop dead departure date before Biden was even inaugurated and had Biden rescinded that agreement (as it was,  he delayed the departure date by a few months), the country would have had to send significantly more troops than the 3,000 or so there by the end and the commitment would have had to be open ended, neither of which  Americans support.  

As to Covid and inflation, the two go hand in hand.  The former created the supply chain bottlenecks that created the latter and right-wing vaccine deniers allowed variants to emerge.

Where are the putative "wins" critics claim to be available?

The infrastructure bill passed earlier this year was bi-partisan by today's standards.  But three of the GOP Senators who voted for it are retiring and those that  are staying want to avoid primaries if they can (and at least one, Lisa Murkowski, won't; she already has a Trump opponent).  So, despite their popularity, you can't find ten Republicans willing to allow BBB to go forward on an up or down vote, and breaking BBB into individual pieces (early education, climate change, community college) doesn't move the needle. 

On voting rights, there is talk that the GOP might be willing to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act to remove whatever ambiguities Trump tried to exploit in his run-up to January 6.  But maybes have not turned into actuals in the past, and there is at least one Republican who thinks the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act are just fine.

That Republican is Donald Trump. 

Even the current fight about the filibuster is anchored in consequences he created.  

The filibuster itself is an anti-democratic charade. It does not preserve debate.  It aborts it.  Historically it was used to protect slavery and then Jim Crow even though it could have been utilized in other contexts as well.  Once the speaking filibuster was functionally eliminated in the 1970s, however,  and all a Senator had to do was place a hold on a bill via a call to the cloakroom, the filibuster became cost free.  

And once it was put in the hands of Mitch McConnell during the Obama Administration, its use metastasized.

One of the highlights of the 1960s was the Voting Rights Act. It was the most important piece of federal voting legislation ever passed and it ushered in a period of bi-partisan agreement that suffrage had to be available to all and color blind. That began to end when the Supreme Court, in 2013, declared the Act's pre-clearance provisions void and states became free to enact voting rules which had previously required Justice Department and (often) court approval.

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and Trump's continuing lie that it had been stolen, nineteen states controlled by the GOP have passed thirty-three laws suppressing Democatic vote by limiting the mechanisms (excuse free absentee voting, early voting, voting by mail and drop boxes) that materially increased turnout that year. Some of these laws also vest the power to count and certify the vote in partisan legislators rather than neutral administrative professionals. 

Not surprisingly, Democrats in Congress have proposed counter-measures designed to preserve the practices that increased turnout and preclude partisans from overruling counts and certifying their own choices, the latter of which is exactly what Trump wanted Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin Republicans to do in 2020.  

In the Senate, the GOP is filibustering this Democratic effort and thus ensuring that the state-based restrictions designed to suppress Democratic vote and, if necessary, count and certify a Trump return are fully enforced. And Trump himself has made his support for these moves more than clear. "We have to be sharper the next time when it comes to counting the vote," he said last Saturday at a rally in Arizona, "Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate."

Somehow, with the GOP, it always comes back to him.  

Why is that?

A resurrected Moynihan would say we have defined political deviancy down.

And he would be right.

In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned in the face of almost certain impeachment and conviction. His crime was that he covered up the burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by the committee created to re-elect him.  Once the smoking gun in his taped White House conversations revealed this to be the case, he was gone in a matter of days.  

In 2021, Donald Trump orchestrated a violent attack on the US Capitol in order to force the Vice President to refuse to recognize certified electors so that he could  either illegally declare Trump president or illegally send the election to the House of Representative where Trump would have won.  Compared to Nixon, Trump's crimes were worse by orders of magnitude.  

Nixon broke the law in search of dirt or intelligence on the opposition.  

Trump broke the law in support of a coup.

In the half-century between these two events, however, political rules and norms changed.  

Until the mid-90s, for example, elections for the House of Representatives were relatively tame affairs.  The gloves came off with Newt Gingrich, who decided that the only way he could beat Democrats was by smearing them. The Bushes, father and son, tried to stay above this messy fray. But they were more than willing to get their hands dirty when necessary -- father with his infamous Willie Horton ad and son with henchmen claiming that the "judicious study of discernible reality" is just "not the way the world really works anymore . . .[W]hile you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too".

Along the way, the altruistic and opportunistic steered the boat. 

Some regretted it. 

As The Washington Post put it just after he died this past fall, "Colin Powell knew his name would be forever tied to the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq, and that lending his reputation and personal prestige to the faulty intelligence used to justify the ensuing war was an indelible stain."

Some even apologized for it. 

In 1991, shortly before he died, Lee Atwater (Bush Senior's presidential campaign manager) said, "In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements; the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not."

From smears, naked cruelty and created reality as acceptable means to political power, it is not a particularly large step to Donald Trump.

To his profanity-laced calls for physical (or state based, as in "lock her up") violence, his 30,000 lies or Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts". 

Indeed, the mother of all "alternative facts", the one half or more Republicans accept as their latest "created reality", the one driving their Congressional filibuster and their state suppression machines, is the claim that Trump won in 2020. 

It just doesn't get any more . . .

Alternative.

Or deviant.

Or dangerous.

So, once more . . .

Moynihan into the breach. 

"We are getting used to a lot of behaviors that are not good for us."

THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT

So, the Ghost of Christmas present arrived yesterday.

My daughter tested positive for Covid.

She was one of the careful ones.  Triple-vaxed. Face-masked.  Chairwoman of the Board when it came to monitoring and enforcing the family's compliance with Covid protocols.  Last Christmas, she orchestrated a testing and quarantine schedule that had her, her now-fiance and her brother arriving for Thanksgiving and then camping out for the entire month of December.  

She wouldn't allow Covid to kill Christmas.

And for the most part it didn't.

The California relatives could not travel east for the festivities.  But there was a big Zoom session on Christmas morning with everyone as the stockings were emptied and the presents opened.   My 91 year-old mother arrived from New Jersey along with my sister, and all was safe at our Covid free Christmas.

Thanks to Courtney.

This year was supposed to be different.  

We are all fully vaccinated.  

In fact, almost all of us -- and certainly Courtney --  had the  booster shot as well.  

We even  thought we had skirted tragedy earlier in the week.  

My niece, recently returned from a trip with her college friends to Nashville, had to check in to a nearby hotel for two days after learning that one of her travel mates had tested positive.  It was all hands were on deck as we awaited the results of her PCR test, which came back negative on Wednesday evening.

It looked like the virus was camping out elsewhere.

But, alas, it wasn't.

And to make matters worse, it turns out that we are not all that atypical.  

My son informed us earlier in the week that one of his co-workers had been exposed and that he would therefore take a test (it came back negative today). Our best friends told us this morning that they had to cancel their plans for a 10-person Christmas Day feast because their visiting son-in-law just tested positive.  And my colleague at work was set to welcome his son, daughter-in-law and seven-month-old grandson from Los Angeles but they cancelled their trip as Omicron invaded New York.

A big part of the problem here is . . .

Capitalism.

It turns out that capitalism is really good at invention but not particularly good at distribution.  

The government incentivized the creation of vaccines at what amounted to warp speed, and the private sector, especially Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, generated them.  The key thereafter was getting shots into arms across the world.  The original Covid virus mutated and variants emerged.  All of them, however, were seeded in the wake of effective vaccines by the existence of an unvaccinated population.  

Had everyone been vaccinated, neither Delta nor Omicron would have had their way.

But everyone wasn't.

So they have.

It's weird.

My family was all ready to combat Covid to celebrate Christmas last year.  

But vaxed to the max, it got us this year.

Screw it.

Merry Christmas anyway!

Given our ignorance . . . or obstinance . . . 

We can't beat Covid.

But God can.

And He arrives tomorrow.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

It's Christmas and I have been thinking about songs.

About Christmas carols to be precise.

Everyone thinks Christmas carols  were written long ago.  

And for most that is true. 

"Silent Night", for example, is a German carol -- Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht -- and was composed in 1818. "O Come All Ye Faithful" -- Adestes Fidelis -- was first sung in 1743.  And "Angels We Have Heard on High" -- an English carol -- was created in1862. In fact, Wikipedia lists carols from thirty-two countries or cultures going back to the 12th century. The overwhelming majority of those songs were created well before the 20th century.

Another interesting fact is that the songs composed in  the 20th century have a decidedly secular cast.

 More Rudolph than religion.

"Silver Bells" was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans in 1950.  The "Christmas Song" -- Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" -- was created in 1945 by Robert Wells and Mel Torme.  And Rudolph's glory as the "Red Nosed Reindeer" first saw the light of day (or night as it were) in 1947.

Secular or saintly, however, the songs unite.  

Every year around this time they come on and almost everyone chimes in with at least a bar or two, sometimes even the whole song. During the pre-Covid Christmas season in 2019, a crowd of morning commuters in a New York City subway station belted out Mariah Carey's 1994 hit, "All I Want for Christmas Is You".  Or, as Shileligh Law put it in  "Christmas in New York", their tribute to the victims of 9/11, "There's somebody singing a holiday song/You pick up the tune and start singin' along/You learned the words some time way back when/It's Christmas in New York again".

Sometimes the songs channel the Jesuits.

They challenge us to find God in the everyday.

To find the saintly in our very own secular.

Shileligh Law's 9/11 tribute was one:

          It's Christmas Eve, 11 pm

          You walk down to the church and you quietly go in

          You kneel down in the last pew right on the aisle

          And say "God I know that it's been awhile

          But can you do me a favor on this Christmas Eve

          Can you send out some blessings to people for me

          You know these last few months have been kinda tough

          And we could use a little love"

          So bless New York's finest, our angels in blue

          Giving us hope and helping us through

          And bless New York's bravest, the FDNY

          Giving their sweat and their tears and their lives

           And bless all the medics and our troops overseas

           Bless the guys in the hardhats, removing debris

           Bless the everyday people who answered the call

           Bless those who gave some and those who gave all

           Bless all the souls who left us this year

           You may be gone but you'll always be here

           Singing and dancing with family and friends

            It's Christmas in New York Again.

Another was "Do You Hear What I Hear", Regney and Shayne's plea for peace in 1962 in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis:

            Said the king to the people everywhere

            Listen to what I say! Listen to what I say!

            Pray for Peace, people, everywhere

            Listen to what I say! Listen to what I say!

            The Child, the Child sleeping in the night

            He will bring us goodness and light

            He will bring us goodness and light

The King's plea, however, was not a product of his own wisdom.   It came from one of the Bible's unwashed -- "Said the shepherd boy to the mighty King/Do you know what I know?"

I was in a restaurant last week in mid-town Manhattan attending a small dinner party my son's company was throwing in his honor.  Mid-way through the event, a half-dozen fellow diners at another table started singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas".   By the time they got to the "five gold rings", pretty much the whole restaurant -- along with the wait staff -- was joining in. 

My son this month is finishing up his second masters degree. 

This one in business administration. The first was in public administration.  

Most people choose one or the other.  He is unique.  In a world where ideologues mount their tribal parapets proclaiming the inherent superiority of one or the other sector, public or private, he has studied both and thus made himself an expert on the idiocy of all manner of present-day extremists.

He has always been like this.

In high school in a toney suburb, he and a friend decided to live in a treehouse for most of their senior year.  In college, he and that same friend traipsed over a good chunk of South America, bribing their way in and out of Bolivia. On a family vacation in Mexico, he announced he was not returning with us but would instead take an overnight bus to Guatemala to visit his girlfriend. When he told my wife that he thought "Dad was not happy about this", she explained that "Dad's unhappiness" might have something to do with reports of active volcanoes and civil unrest along his chosen route.

None of these were full on marches to "see how the other half lives".

But he definitely knew his own circumstances were not typical.

And wanted to explore the differences.

After graduating from Colorado College, he ran a family farm in upate New York . . .

With no in-door plumbing.  

While there, he resisted the political correctness of his little corner of liberal academia by hooking up with the Marines and applying to get into Officers Candidate School (OCS).  Most of his college professor friends, and not a few fellow students, raised their eyebrows.  

But he went to Quantico anyway. 

And crashed out after two weeks.

At the end, a drill-sergeant type asked him what he intended to do to "grow up".  He said he didn't know but that, right then and there, he wanted to  "speak Spanish".  

The officer thought he was nuts.

He wasn't.

He just didn't like being yelled at constantly.

I asked him how he had managed to spend a couple of years working to get into OCS if "yelling" -- their love of which the Marines do not keep secret-- was a problem.  He told me he had intentionally avoided looking at that portion of the promotional video.  

So he left OCS and got a job . . .

Speaking Spanish.

It was more than that, of course.  He represented day laborers in their efforts to get work -- and get paid for it -- in northern Westchester County. Then it was on to the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, a non-profit that for almost fifty years has been helping to bring businesses and jobs to that impoverished precinct. And most recently, as a senior officer at the National Development Council's Grow America Fund, he has been financing -- preserving really --  small businesses in America's northeastern rural rust belt.  

In all three, he has married the conscience of a public sector idealist with the pragmatism of a private sector businessman.  

To the notice of those in both.

Last year, during the height of Covid, Delaware's Sen. Chris Coons praised him for personally calling scores of his clients in that state, many of whom were getting the run around from the big banks, to walk them through the process and paperwork needed to get the Paycheck Protection Money that kept them in business.  And one Mom and Pop hardware business even produced its own video singing his praises for getting them the  financing larger banks would not provide.

Those are real differences . . .

For real people.

So NDC threw him a party.

Ostensibly for getting his MBA.

But really just for being . . .

Conor.

It's Christmas in New York again.

THE KENOSHA TRAGEDY

On August 25, 2020, a seventeen-year-old left his home in Antioch, Illinois, drove fifteen miles north to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and returned home later that night.  While in Kenosha, and armed with a military assault rifle, he killed two people and injured a third.  Today, a jury found that seventeen-year-old not guilty of both intentional and reckless homicide.  Earlier in the week, the judge had dismissed a misdemeanor gun possession charge. 

On the criminal charges, the jury verdict is defensible.  

At the trial, the teen argued that he acted in self-defense.  

Under Wisconsin law, a defendant claiming self-defense has the initial burden of production. This  means he must present facts which, if proved, could support a finding that his use of force was valid. If a defendant satisfies that initial burden, the state must disprove some element of the defense, either that the defendant was reasonable in believing he was in imminent danger or that the force used was reasonable under the circumstances.  To do so, the state must disprove one of these elements beyond a reasonable doubt. 

In this case, the defense easily met its initial burden and the jury decided that the state had not disproven any element of self-defense.  Both conclusions are defensible.   There was evidence that the first victim tried to grab the teen's gun just before the teen shot him; that the second was hitting him over the head with a skateboard and struggling to grab the gun before he was shot; and that the third pointed his own handgun at the teen before he was shot in the arm.  

As to the misdemeanor charge, the teen's possession of the  military assault rifle was not illegal because, though the applicable statute makes it illegal for minors to possess dangerous weapons, those under 18 can be found guilty if, but only if, they are 16 or the length of the barrel is less than 16 inches. In this case, the teen was 17 and the gun barrell was 16 inches long.  So the statutory crime had not been committed.

In the run-up to the trial and its immediate aftermath, all the usual suspects showed up with all their usual bromides.  On the extreme right, the teen was turned into an avatar of the Second Amendment who voluntarily put himself in harm's way to protect property from unhinged BLM protestors. On the left, his out on bail "Free as Fuck" tee-shirt while posing for pictures with men singing Proud Boy anthems made him a white supremacist.

Both pictures are wrong.

And before any more teenage boys  decide to answer any more self-induced calls to action armed with AR-15s . . .

And more people wind up dead who did not have to be . . .

It behooves us as a country to get the picture right.

So here goes.

Kyle Rittenhouse was and remains an immature, male adolescent.  

I have a wealth of experience with immature, male adolescents.  

I was once one myself.   

Like many immature, male adolescents, I could convince myself that my view of  the world  was all that mattered, that the uninformed and unwilling simply did not get it, that what adults called prudence or patience was really cowardice.  While talking myself into this excited state of euphoric certainty,  I could play the role of superhero, get in the face of authority, tell them off, courageously accept the challenges lesser men avoided.  

Unfortunately, however,  excited immature male adolescents usually forget to take a deep breath.  They lose any sense of perspective.  They unravel.

When I was 17 and unraveled, I was first threatened with expulsion and then given a stern talking to by a Jesuit who cared.  

And then . . .

I started to grow up.

When Kyle Rittenhouse unraveled, he drove to Kenosha.  Instead of  talking him down, we allowed him to grab a gun. 

A military assault rifle.

Something no immature boy wound up in his own sense of self-righteousness should ever get his hands on, no matter the length of the barrel.  

There are no heroes here.  

Not  the cops who talked to him that night while he stood outside a Kenosha vehicle dealership armed to the teeth.  Not the businesses who supposedly encouraged the presence of  self-appointed and untrained  pseudo-cops to "guard" their properties.  Not the immature male adolescents sitting in Congress -- Florida's Matt Gaetz and North Carolina's Madison Crawthorn -- offering him interships. Not the gun nuts who have no problem mixing assault weapons with unhinged levels of testosterone.  Not even the lefties blaming the trial judge and ignoring the evidence.

On August 25, the adults were AWOL.

So, instead of growing up . . . 

The unraveled Kyle Rittenhouse blew up.

None of us should be surprised.

 

THE PERILS OF PANIC

Panic is a bad thing.

Personally or professionally.

Individually and socially.

The consequences can be tragic.  

Before Keynes ushered in the era of modern economic thinking, economic panics were recurrent.  The Great Depression of 1929, itself a species of panic, was not all that unique.  In the preceding century, there had been at least three of them.  The Panic of 1837 was the then young United States' first major economic catastrophe; the Panic of 1893 its second; and  the financial Panic of 1907 its third.  

In the first two, collapsing bubbles (in, respectively,  real estate and railroads) combined with tight money (in favor of gold and absent regulation from any central bank) led to bank runs, which imploding demand turbo-charged.  As prices collapsed and unemployment surged, a perfect storm ensued.  The customers had no jobs and the producers had no customers.  In the third, the financial Panic of 1907,  a misguided scheme to corner the market in US Copper stock led to the collapse of its share price, the insolvency of banks and trust companies with large collateral positions in that stock,  and a cascading run on banks and trust companies. As the contagion spread, J.P. Morgan and a consortium of his fellow travelers came to the rescue,  pumping liquidity into the system via loans that prevented additional insolvencies.

There was no J.P. Morgan in 1929 when the Great Depression hit.  And though a fellow product of the Gilded Age, Andrew Mellon, was serving as Secretary of the Treasury, his  advice to then President Herbert Hoover was decidedly different from Morgan's two decades earlier.  "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," he told President Hoover,  "Purge the rottenness out of the system."  

Mellon's advice was not remotely correct.  

In fact, it was its own form of panic. 

Of the intellectual kind.

Workers and farmers were not the problem or the inherently  rotten part of the system. That role, it turned out,  was being played by the speculators who had bought and sold  stock on (enormous) margin, creating a market bubble not remotely linked to actual value that burst on Black Tuesday, and the do-nothing governments -- ours included -- who refused to inject liquidity into the system thereafter as wages, prices and production cratered and  a quarter of the population could not find work.

"Dangerous nonsense" is what Milton Friedman called it.

Today, thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats, we are not in the throes of economic panic (more about that later).  We are, however,  plagued by a different form of panic.

Of the political sort.

Political panic ensues when a system continually produces sclerotic government unable to confront, solve or even mitigate obvious problems.  

And it takes different forms in our two political parties. 

For Republicans, political panic takes the form of backlash.  Because the party at its core does not believe government can really solve problems (indeed, and to the contrary,  it believes government often makes problems worse), it blames the continuing presence of those problems on amorphous groups of others.  Whoever those others may be -- welfare recipients, immigrants, political opponents,  or foreigners --  they are defined as the source of those problems.  

Hence, they become . . .

Freeloaders (welfare recipients), illegals (immigrants), socialists (Democrats) or users taking us for suckers (most UN member states). 

Over time, the political consequence of this approach  makes someone like Donald Trump inevitable. 

Since 1980, the GOP has supported two policies, tax cuts and conservative judges.  Otherwise, it has been the party of "No".  No infrastructure spending, no universal health care, no Medicaid or Medicare expansion, no spending on child care, nothing to combat climate change, and little to no environmental enforcement. And because their two policies have not materially improved things for the middle and lower economic classes, who have either been running in place or falling behind for the last forty years, they have to justify this otherwise oppositional approach.  They do that by embracing the politics of backlash.  

Initially, this backlash was clothed in rhetorical or pictorial sleights of hand -- Reagan's 1980 general election campaign kick-off in Philadelphia, Mississippi; Bush I's Willie Horton ad; Romney's (supposedly) confidential talk about 47% of us as takers.  Sometimes the backlash became too much and the candidate actually stopped it -- McCain pulling the mic from a supporter calling Obama "an Arab" in 2008.  But sooner or later, if  what you espouse is that nothing government does will work, and what you do espouse clearly has not worked, the  vacuum left over can only be filled by the politics of anger, resentment and grievance. 

Which Donald Trump raised to an art form.

And was willing on January 6 to embrace all the way  to an insurrectionist  coup.

For Democrats, political panic takes a different form.  

It takes the form of doubt.  

For my entire life, the Democratic Party has been arguing with itself.  In the '60s, it argued with itself about civil rights and Vietnam.  In the '70s  and '80s, it argued with itself over whether it would be the party of old labor (Walter Mondale) or new ideas (Gary Hart).  In the '90s, members of its Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) like Bill Clinton trimmed the sails of liberals and centrists like New York's Pat Moynihan sidelined Hillarycare, the liberal side of President Bill's "two for the price of one" electoral promise.  In the aughts, the moderates didn't think America could elect a black man as President. Or pass Obamacare in 2010 after Ted Kennedy died and his Republican successor made the filibuster real.  

They were wrong . . .

Twice.

But today the Democrats are still arguing . . .

With themselves.

This time, it's the moderates versus the The Squad,  Joe Manchin versus Biden's Build Back Better, or, as some think . . .

Biden (as President) versus Himself (as the 2020 Presidential candidate).

This past Tuesday, the Democratic nominee for Governor in Virginia narrowly lost and the Democratic nominee for Governor in New Jersey narrowly won.  Those results upended two pieces of conventional wisdom and led to the immediate birth of a third.  The two conventions were that Virginia  was a blue state where suburban women and college graduates have elected nothing but Democrats to statewide office since 2014,  and that New Jersey was super-blue, Biden having pasted Trump by eighteen points in 2020.  The third is that Democrats are now in big trouble and had better jettison Build Back Better (BBB), pass the bi-partisan infrastructure bill and hunker down for the mid-terms (which they will probably lose).

I think much of that conventional wisdom is wrong.

Not all of it.

But a lot of it. 

And here's why.

First, the underlying notion here is that the Biden presidency is a failure and that is not remotely true. When Biden was sworn in on January 20 the unemployment rate was 6.6%. Today it is 4.6%.  When it scored the administration's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which passed without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said we would not hit 4.6% until 2023.  Biden and the Democrats beat that forecast by a substantial margin.  In October, the Biden economy created 531,000 new jobs and the figures for August and September were revised to show an additional 235,000 jobs in those months.  In Biden's first nine months, 5.6 miilion new jobs have been created, more than any created during that period in the last three Republican administrations.

Second, though political prognosticators typically read a lot into the results in Virginia and New Jersey in the year before the mid-terms, the tea leaves this year are not as clear as they have been in the past. In 2009, the last time a Democrat was in the White House, Republicans won the gubernatorial races in both those states.  And by comfortable margins.  In New Jersey,  the incumbent Democrat, Jon Corzine, got only 44.9% of the vote.  54.3% of the voters went with either Republican Chris Christie (48.5%) or the independent  Chris Daggett (who for his entire life 'til then had been a Republican  and who won 5.8% of the vote).  And in Virginia, the Republican won in a landslide -- 58.6% to 41.3%. In Virginia, the  Republicans also controlled that state's House of Delegates until 2018 and they controlled the state Senate until 2019. 

The notion of Democratic inevitability in either state  is thus a canard.  

The accurate and more relevant claim, however, is that the results in both races counsel message discipline for the Democrats going forward.

In Virginia, though the Democratic nominee, former Governor Terry McAuliffe, was a centrist, he put his foot in his mouth when he said parents shouldn't be telling schools what to teach their children.  Parents are critical in the education of their children and of course can and should have input into  curriculum.  The real problem is that they should not be lied to about what is being taught or how it is being taught 

Governor-elect Youngkin's  education pitch was that Virginia's kids are in effect being taught to race hate and that teachers are being indoctrinated with some sort of anti-Enlightenment version of Critical Race Theory (CRT). 

Neither claim was true. 

I have read the same sources Andrew Sullivan and other CRT opponents have cited in claiming the contrary and they are wrong.  

These are the facts: 

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd last year and other similar tragedies, educators in Virginia were alerted to some CRT literature as one among many resources they might consult in an effort to teach about the issue of race in America.  Those teachers were not told to ignore or otherwise de-emphasize the Enlightenment or engender guilt in white kids on account of their race.  Nor did the state Department of Education or its school districts endorse CRT. Those claims are myths.  In fact, of the documents Sullivan and other opponents of CRT  cite, the one  from the Loudon County Schools expressly states that Loudon County "has not adopted CRT".  And the other -- cited for the proposition that Virginia's Department of Education (DOE) "embraced CRT in 2015" -- did in fact endorse CRT.  But that document was from an outside consultant, not the Virginia DOE,  and the CRT it endorsed in at least one place was  the acronym for "Culturally Responsive Teaching", not "Critical Race Theory".

Andrew et al. need to read what they cite.

Before citing it.

As for New Jersey, it provides even less support for panic.  The Democratic Governor, Phil Murphy, was re-elected.  He is the first Democratic governor reelected in that state since 1977.  As noted, the state had a Republican Governor, Chris Christie, from 2010 to 2018.  Though the GOP has not controlled the legislature for twenty years, Republicans are not an endangered species there.  The gubernatorial race was closer than expected and that too counsels message discipline.  Murphy's foot in mouth during the campaign was as bad as McAuliffe's.  Murphy said "If taxes are your issue, then New Jersey's probably not your state." Now, in context, he was pointing out all the good reasons people might come to New Jersey -- good schools, pleasant towns, a clean environment, a good transportation system, etc. -- and saying that, if you're a one issue voter who does not care about all of  that but does care about taxes only, then you'll probably go elsewhere.

But c'mon Phil.

This wasn't your first rodeo.

Of course the opposition will snip that comment from its context and air it a million times in a negative commercial.

So . . .

Please be smarter than that.

(Meanwhile, as the commentariat waxed eloquent on the (overwrought) meaning of New Jersey and Virginia, two other factoids from those states underscored the form  political panic takes among Republicans .  One was Donald Jr. calling Murphy's New Jersey win "a blatant crime being committed". In contrast, Terry McAuliffe congratulated his opponent and delivered a gracious concession in Virginia.)

Third, the notions that Build Back Better is some radical socialist construct or that Biden himself opposed it as a candidate in 2020 are also false.  

As Greg Sargent pointed out in yesterday's Washington Post, the Biden campaign in 2020  ran "TV ad after TV ad after TV ad and [delivered] speech after speech after speech [making] a core promise: Higher taxes on the rich and corporations to fund large investments in climate, job creation, health care, education, infrastructure and even the care economy."  I don't know whether Biden ran to be the next Franklin Roosevelt, or whether the voters do not want him to be.  But I do know that  he did not run to be another Republican . . . 

Or another centrist who refuses to deal with long term problems because of electoral risk and just kicks them down the road. 

The bi-partisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill that passed after liberals allowed the House to vote on it last night is major progress and  will help fund maintenance and improvements in hard infrastructure -- roads and bridges, airports, tunnels,  rural broad band, the electric grid and coastal improvements to deal with the consequences (but not the causes) of climate change.  It will do nothing to combat inequality, promote pay equity or improve health care. For that, we need Build Back Better. Even a small version of it will be  better than nothing.

The moderate Democrats in Congress want infrastructure without BBB because they think BBB will hurt them next fall.  Though they have succeeded in paring down BBB to under $2 trillion, and though five of them last night agreed to vote for BBB conditioned on how the CBO scores it so that liberals would allow an immediate vote on the bi-partisan bill, the moderates are channeling their inner Republican by worrying about the effects of BBB on the deficit and inflation.  That worry is silly.  The $1.7 trillion or so in the latest version of BBB will be spent over ten years.  During that time, given projected GDP of approximately $250 trillion, the expenditure will be a mere bagatelle and not remotely inflationary. In fact, by increasing productivity, especially among families who will be helped with child care, paid family leave and free community college, it will improve productivity and therefore reduce inflation.

If the Democrats lose in 2022, it will be on account of re-districting, voter suppression and cultural issues, not BBB.  Of those three problems, they can only solve two of them, the first by jettisoning the filibuster and passing a Voting Rights Bill to eliminate state suppression efforts, the second by more nuanced messaging that talks about race but pivots to economic class and doesn't demean parents or taxpayers.  If the pandemic ends, mask and vaccine mandates will be rewarded. And in any case, since you cannot end the pandemic without them, a responsible government really has no choice.

When the infrastructure bill was finally voted on late last night, President Biden correctly called it "monumental".  To get there, the vote had to remain open for fifteen hours as leaders cobbled together the deal that allowed the vote to go forward and Biden then worked the phones to sell it, convincing moderates to vote on BBB once the CBO scores it later this month and liberals to trust a written pledge that such a vote will actually occur.  At the end of all this torture, Nancy Pelosi said "Welcome to my world -- this is the Democratic Party.  We are not a lock-step party."

No kidding.

Hers -- and mine --  is the party of doubt.

It's our form of panic.

But it beats the other side's.

FALLEN LEAVES

This morning was chilly. 

And even as the sun burned away the clouds, it is still a bit cold.  

So, maybe fall has finally come to my home town in New York. 

But maybe not.

For the past three weeks, it's been unseasonably warm during the day but comfortably cool at night. We retired the  air conditioner for the year but the heat, though on deck , has not yet had to bat.  In New England, the colors have already turned and the "peaks" have begun to move south.  But they are not here yet.  The leaves are still fighting. Though some are down, others resist what is inevitable.  They know they all have to die someday. But not necessarily this day.

In this season at war with itself, politics finds a companion. 

It is now a schizoid mix of the normal and the existentially threatening.

As to the former, Biden is trying to hammer the Democrats into some unified approach to the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills.  The first enjoys bipartisan support; the second the support of all Democrats but two and no Republicans.  Hence those two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema,  are more or less the ball game on that second bill.  As are the progressives who will not vote for the first unless some version of the second moves as well.  Since neither can have it all, both will have to compromise.  In the meantime, each is wondering when the other will blink.

In this realm of "normal" politics, Biden's GOP opponents are claiming he is Jimmy Carter, the  one-term Democrat who fell in 1980 amidst the twin peaks of roaring inflation and the Iran hostage crisis.  Though neither exists today, Republicans have had to make due with some pandemic created supply chain bottlenecks that have temporarily increased prices and a messy departure from Afghanistan that they now lament but did nothing to avert.  

In their world, we are back in the '70s.

Even though we aren't.

Inflation is running at about 5% annaually, not the 13.5% that helped put Reagan in the White House in 1980. It  also has not been at that rate for any length of time, again contrary to the experience of the 1970s.  Though the data on core (important) versus volatile (less so) inflation can be read to signal trouble, the pandemic radically changed buying patterns (from services to stuff) and created supply chain problems in today's world of just-in-time inventories that did not exist in the 1970s.  Both the consumers (you and I)  and the suppliers (all those tankers in the Los Angeles Harbor waiting to off-load their containers) will presumably revert to the norm, as will prices, once the pandemic abates.  Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has its eyes on the data, as does the European Central Bank.  Both are poised to tighten credit if they must.

And . . .

There are no hostages in Afghanistan.

Then, however, there is the existentially threatening.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection just recommended that the entire House refer Trump henchman Steve Bannon to prosecutors for criminal contempt in view of his refusal to honor the committee's subpoena for relevant documents and testimony.  The report accompanying the recommendation quotes extensively from insurrection participants specifically linking their attack to Trump's false election fraud claims.  It also quotes from Bannon's own social media posts on the eve of the attack telling would be revolutionaries to be in DC the next day.   "[W]e're on the point of attack tomorrow," he said, and joined others that night -- including Trump lawyers Giuliani and John Eastman, campaign spokesman Jason Miller and felony convict Roger Stone -- in meetings at the Willard Hotel.

Eastman has clearly usurped Giuliani  as Trump's most dangerous -- and dangerously insane -- lawyer.  Thanks to the Washington Post's super duo --  the aging but intrepid Bob Woodward and his young and never-exhausted sidekick Robert Costa -- we now know that Eastman wrote a memo literally laying out the coup Trump planned and attempted to implement this past January just as Congress was to meet to certify Biden's victory.  

Step One was to declare that there were competing slates of electors in seven states, thus rendering uncertain the results in those states.  Step Two involved either declaring Trump the winner based on the electoral vote count in the remaining states (where Trump would have won a Constitutional "majority of electors appointed") or sending the election to the House (where Trump would have won because each state delegation would cast one vote and twenty-six of those delegations were controlled by Republicans) on the theory that neither Biden nor Trump had won the required 270 electoral vote majority.   

As Woodward and Costa recount in Peril, the plan was an absolute lie.  

There were no competing slates. Just as there had been no election fraud.

Even then, however, neither Eastman nor Trump relented. 

In an evening meeting on January 4, in Trump's presence and with his full support, Eastman told Vice President Pence that he, Pence, could unilaterally declare the results uncertain so that Republican legislatures could then hold special sessions and send alternate slates of electors to Washington.

Pence wouldn't do it.

And because he wouldn't, Trump's rioters threatened to hang him on January 6.

In the run-up to Biden's election and inauguration, and as also reported in Peril, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, thought Trump "crazy" and twice reached out to his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the United States was stable and, contrary to their belief that the US was secretly planning to attack them, would not initiate any kinetic action. The first call was made four days before the election and the second two days after the January 6 insurrection.  After the insurrection, which he characterized as an attempted coup, Milley also summoned senior officers from the National Military Command Center to remind them of the procedures in place should Trump order a nuclear strike and literally exacted an oath from each of them that they understood they were required to and would report any such order to Milley, to the Secretary of Defense and to a set of attorneys before it could be carried out.

Trump doesn't care about any of this. He is still lying about the election.  And he is demanding that all other Republicans lie with him.  Last week, he announced that Republican voters should not vote in 2022 or 2024 unless his fictitious "fraud" claim is resolved in his favor.  Roughly half the Republican voters believe his claims and even those that do not are willing to suppress Democratic turnout with new laws that limit mail-in, early and drop-box voting.  Meanwhile, in Congress, voting rights legislation that would counter the GOP's suppression efforts is being held hostage to the filibuster.

This is how you lose a country.  

Yeats said it best:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    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;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

Gen. Colin Powell died this week.

The cause of death was complications from Covid-19.

But that wasn't the real cause.

The real cause was that . . .

Someone else refused to get a shot.

The worst. 

Full of passionate intensity.