Culture Wars

As if he weren't already the most despised human being in Washington, D.C., Texas senator Ted Cancún Cruz has added a few more groups of people to his mutual aversion society.

In response to President Biden's recent executive order on the government helping to relieve college debt, Cruz said this on his podcast:

If you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans and can't get a job—Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand. Like, holy cow! 20 grand. 

I'll give him credit for one thing, "Slacker Barista" or better yet, "The Slacker Baristas" is one heck of a name for a rock band. But I do question the wisdom of a politician dumping one particular group of American workers down the toilet.

I get what Cruz was trying to accomplish: perpetuate the culture wars that are all the rage now in this country. The term barista evokes high-end coffee establishments whose clientele is often associated with well-educated urban dwellers, the perceived "elite", particularly despised by the MAGA crowd Cruz is pandering to. 

But by slamming baristas, the people who work behind the counters of those establishments, Cruz by extension is berating all workers in the service industry. While he didn't cite wait staff at other food establishments, retail workers, or any other American whose job it is to serve the public, he may as well have. Many people who work in the service industry are college graduates with school debt. By further extension, Cruz is slamming all Americans with college degrees who are working in jobs that don't necessarily require college degrees. 

Perhaps these folks are not working the job of their dreams at the moment, perhaps they are working their way up to it, perhaps they are going through hard times or best of all, perhaps they are perfectly happy with what they are doing. My response to Cruz on the matter is this:

Who the fuck are you to judge these people, asswipe?

I'd be more explicit but perhaps children are reading this. 

How dare he call baristas "slackers", a term appropriate for folks who habitually short-change their portion of the bill at a restaurant, deadbeat dads, and save for a small handful of them, Republican legislators, but certainly not for gainfully employed, hard-working Americans. 

After all, what could define slacker behavior more than a Princeton and Harvard graduate with a distinguished record at both prestigious schools, engaging in sophomoric rants against his fellow citizens who have done him no harm? What could define a slacker more than a highly educated man, a lawyer who has argued cases before the Supreme Court no less, publicly buying into the obvious lie that the last election was stolen from the previous president?  And what could define a slacker more than a senator going on vacation to a resort in Mexico in the middle of a dire crisis faced by his constituents?

OK maybe slacker isn't the best term to describe Ted Cruz, perhaps scumbag is more on target. 

Cruz wasn't done slamming constituencies from whom he could have at one time garnered at least a few votes:

You know, maybe you weren't gonna vote in November. And suddenly you just got 20 grand. And you know, if you can get off the bong for a minute and head down to the voting station, or just send in your mail-in ballot that the Democrats have helpfully sent you—it could drive up turnout, particularly among young people.

It seems particularly foolish to me anyway, for a politician to insult an entire generation of Americans, especially those who will be around for a long time and will very likely remember you and your idiotic comments about them, especially at "the voting station" at election time. I had no idea how old Cruz was until I looked it up the other day, for all I knew, he could have been in his eighties. It turns out Cruz was born in 1970, placing him squarely within the group known as "Generation X".

I'm not going to get into making value judgements of different generations as obviously no one has control over when they were born. But the times in which someone grows up certainly has a tremendous influence on an individual in terms of personal experience and one's outlook on the world. I have to say that I am privileged to be part of the "Baby Boomer" generation (the tail end of it to be specific), the one just previous to GenX. As such I'm old enough to remember the tumultuous era of the sixties and early seventies, both its highs and its lows:

• I saw the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show live on TV. 
• I remember Martin Luther King being very much alive, marching here in Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement before and after his assassination. 
• I remember the devastation the Vietnam War wrought on that country and ours as well. 
• I lived through two major 1968 riots that took place a few miles away from my home, one on the West Side of Chicago after Dr. King was killed, and one downtown during the Democratic National Convention. 
• I saw my Czech father, tears in his eyes reporting to us that troops of the Warsaw Pact under the control of the Soviet Union had just invaded Czechoslovakia.  
• I vividly remember Watergate and the only resignation of an American president to date.
• And I watched live as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

The era in which I grew up was both exhilarating and terrifying, and I wouldn't trade my experiences of having experienced that time for the world. 

So many in-your-face current events brought right into your living room courtesy of the TV, in the days when everyone was watching more or less the same broadcast, made people my age very aware of the greater world outside of our own little private worlds. You simply could not avoid it.

 

Yet long after those days, I'm afraid there is little of substance to distinguish my generation from previous or subsequent ones. For example, I can't say the passionate, idealistic Baby Boomers of the sixties and early seventies have done a particularly good job at running our country or our world when it became our turn; we seem to have repeated the mistakes of our elders, and even created new ones that later generations will have to deal with. 

 

While we may have become complacent in our old age, one thing my generation has going for us is we do tend to vote, which does distinguish us from Ted Cruz's generation as well as the subsequent ones. I for one have only missed voting in one election since I became eligible to do so, a school board election in suburban Oak Park, Illinois about forty years ago. Yea me. 

One thing that my generation definitely shares with subsequent ones, is our fondness for getting high. 

Where exactly Cruz comes off blasting a generation not his own for skipping voting because they're too busy getting stoned is a mystery to me. Perhaps it's his own experience of doing just that. 

In his comments, Cruz implies that the president's executive order is a cynical attempt to get more votes for Democrats in the upcoming November elections. Now I get that college debt forgiveness is a controversial subject and that people have valid arguments against it. However, Cruz seems to ignore the fact that Joe Biden ran on a platform of removing college debt; in fact, many on the other side claim that the president didn't go far enough this time. Whether it results in more Democratic votes in November or not, there is absolutely nothing cynical about Biden's act. Having grown up during the heyday of the Chicago political machine when our Department of Streets and Sanitation always did a superlative job cleaning the streets and alleys the week before an election, I happen to know a thing or two about cynical acts designed to get votes. Sorry Ted but the president here is merely fulfilling a campaign promise. 

Then there is something more insidious in Cruz's comments apart from their nastiness, partisanship and old-fogeyism. 

In his comments, education itself is under attack. 

In much of the civilized world, education is a prized asset, not just because it enables a person to get a fancy job and make lots of money, but because those "useless things" students study in college tend to open them up to a whole new world, ideally anyway, and help create well-rounded people who can think effectively and critically on their own.

 

Of course, opening up a whole new world doesn't resonate with the MAGA crowd. Look at their pathological obsession with the issue of immigration, or their stance on LBGTQ rights.

As has been abundantly clear since the exPOTUS began his run for office in 2015, independent, critical thinking is not valued in the MAGA world either. It was Kellyanne Conway early on in the Trump administration, who put it in the most Orwellian of terms when she said: "there are facts, and then there are alternate facts." In other words, there is no difference between facts and opinions. As everybody is entitled to his or her opinion, everyone according to the MAGA crowd should believe whatever "facts" he or she wants to believe, verifiable fact or alternate fact; to them they are the same in terms of validity. 

But it's education itself that is most under attack from the MAGA right. Republican state legislatures in red states have inserted themselves into the role of arbiters over what children should and should not be taught and allowed and not allowed to read in school. 

Under the guise of "parental control", they are banning discussion and materials on human sexuality and alternative lifestyles in the school setting.

Using the red herring of "Critical Race Theory", they are decreeing that schools limit or even eliminate entirely the discussion of race in schools.

And rallying the troops around the curious battle cry "We Ain't Woke!!!", they are eliminating curriculum which dares to go beyond the laudatory praise of all things American. 

It seems that the only guiding principle of these surrogate "educators" is to turn students into those "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys you see at giftshops, hardly a useful method to encourage children to become well-rounded, creative, thoughtful, critical thinking adults. 

This is not surprising because as they say: "an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people." That catchy aphorism is often incorrectly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but I believe it is spot on just the same. The contrary is also true, totalitarianism thrives on an uneducated citizenry.

As we saw, Ted Cruz himself is far from uneducated. Yet he's more than happy to demonize people who like himself, sought out higher education, simply because it fits like a glove into his and MAGA's game plan of trashing the well-educated elite, further fueling the culture wars and dividing our already bitterly divided country. Despite being himself in the elite to the elite category as far as education goes, Cruz talks to the Trumplican base as if he were a second grader, to disguise his own provenance as an Ivy Leaguer two times over.

They say that Cruz is hands down the smartest person in Congress. One of his Harvard professors, Alan Dershowitz, called him "off-the-charts brilliant." So what is one to make of the fact that moments after the insurrection of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol Building, Cruz among several of his Republican colleagues, without a shred of evidence, gave credence to Donald Trump's lie about a stolen election, and voted to reject the vote count of two states in an attempt to block the results of a free and fair American election? 

Here's what I make of it:

Either Cruz is not as smart as people give him credit for, or he is a fraud. Well I've seen him in action several times when he's not trying to portray himself as just a Good 'Ol Boy, a "Red Neck, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer" kind of guy. I can attest to the fact that he is indeed pretty smart. You can make of that whatever you please. 

Sad isn't it that all the brains in the world and the best education money can buy, still can't afford the guy a trace of integrity nor a touch of decency.

 

If I were you, I'd be careful with that cup of java Teddy.

 

The Chicago Line

In terms of pure numbers, there have been more murders in Chicago this year, and in many previous years, than any other any American city. It comes as little relief that because of its large population, Chicago ranks anywhere between #10 and #30 (depending on which day and where you check the stats), in murder rate in this country, in other words the number of homicides in relation to the size of the population.     

One could argue because of that second statistic, Chicago is not the "murder capital" of the nation as it is so often referred. That's hardly a bragging right.

Some would diminish the significance of our increasing murder rate as it is concentrated in certain "bad" neighborhoods and not the entire city. High crime rates have historically been associated with areas of poverty combined with ethnic and racial segregation, unemployment, the breakdown of families, the predominance of street gangs and other factors. As the crime and murder rate in much of the city has remained fairly stable, it stands to reason that the murder rate in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago has skyrocketed, well out of proportion with the overall rate of the city as a whole.

Despite not living in a neighborhood with a particularly high murder rate, I don't find any comfort in that. On the contrary. This is my city and every murder, whether it be in affluent Lincoln Park, the economically challenged Englewood, or my neighborhood somewhere in between, Rogers Park, is an unspeakable tragedy.

There is no way to sugar-coat it, we cannot spin the situation to make it better, we are all affected by the horrific number of murders in our city.

Therefore, I'm not averse to Chicago's murder rate being openly and honestly discussed by those who have a legitimate concern for the wellbeing of this city and its inhabitants, preferably accompanied by some useful thoughts addressing the tragedy.

What I have no tolerance for are politicians and pundits who use violence in Chicago as a distraction from one of the pressing issues of our day, gun control. 

You hear the trope every time there is legitimate outrage after a mass shooting. Defenders of not doing anything to control the obscene availability of guns in this country will predictably drop the Chicago Line in order to "prove" that gun laws do nothing to prevent crime.

This is the Chicago Line: "Despite having the toughest gun laws in the nation, Chicago also has the highest murder rate."

Strictly speaking, neither of those points are accurate, but that's not a problem for me. If there were a legitimate argument for Chicago being an example of strict gun laws having little or no effect on crime, it would be a valid point.

But it's not a legitimate argument and therefore not valid. The bottom line is that in Chicago's case, the correlation between its relatively strict gun control laws and its high murder rate, is purely anecdotal, much like the tentative correlation many people make between vaccines and autism (a story for another day).

The problem with the correlation between Chicago (more appropriately Illinois) gun laws and the murder rate is quite simple. While Illinois gun laws are fairly strict by US standards (ranked eighth strictest in the nation), the laws in its neighboring states are anything but. Given that, it stands to reason that a state with strict gun laws being an island surrounded by states with lax guns laws is no more effective than a no peeing section in the middle of an open swimming pool. It turns out that well over half of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from out of state, the majority of those from Indiana, which is literally across the street from some parts of Chicago. 

The state of Illinois requires all gun purchases to be accompanied a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card on the part of a buyer, issued by the State Police which must be presented to the seller for verification at the time of purchase. That process alone takes a few days so you can't simply walk into a gun shop in this state and leave with a shiny new weapon. This FOID card can be rescinded any time its holder is considered a risk such as having committed a crime or determined to be mentally unstable.

None of this is true in Indiana or Wisconsin where almost anyone with absolutely no business having a gun can make the easy drive across state lines to buy one.

But the real problem with this nation's lax gun laws insofar as crime is concerned, is the that they enable guns to be manufactured at a staggering rate. I looked at one of my previous posts a decade old and recalled that ten years ago, there were as many guns as people in the United States. Today it is estimated that there are about twenty percent more guns than people in this country. That translates to (if my math is correct) roughly 80 million more guns in circulation today in this country than ten years ago.

Sure there are lots of responsible gun owners who take pains to prevent their firearms from getting into the wrong hands. But what happens when they sell those guns which are later re-sold or stolen? That's not to mention all the irresponsible gun owners out there.

Since guns are so plentiful in this city, one needn't bother making the trip to Indiana or Wisconsin, they can be had right here, mostly illegally of course. As the gun crowd rightfully points out, criminals aren't going to let a mere law prevent them from getting a gun. But if there weren't so many guns around in the first place, it wouldn't be so damned easy for criminals to get their hands on them. Sorry gun guys but this one is on you.

Another inconvenient fact debunking the correlation between Chicago's murder rate and gun control is that cities with comparable or higher murder rates than Chicago such as Birmingham, Little Rock, New Orleans and St. Louis are all in states with far more lenient gun restrictions than Illinois. In contrast, cities like Los Angeles and New York, both in states with stricter gun laws than Illinois, have far lower murder rates than Chicago.

Unfortunately there is a segment of our society who seems to be immune to reason and facts. That's why anti gun control politicians and pundits keep getting away with using the Chicago Line as their main line of defense in arguing the failure of gun control.

You may ask why Chicago is singled out as the gold standard of American murder and mayhem. Could it be that all those other cities are in solidly red states that typically oppose gun control? Oh I dunno, just a hunch.

The Chicago Line was a favorite of the exPOTUS who was fond of trashing the blue state of Illinois and especially Chicago, home of his predecessor and favorite target, Barak Obama. 

In a bit of horrendous timing, days after the mass shooting of fourth graders and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas, an NRA convention was scheduled to take place in Houston, 278 miles away. Many folks who planned to attend either as speakers or entertainers, cancelled their appearances out of respect for the dead and their families. Not the exPOTUS who danced a little gig at the end of his address to the crowd, after paying "homage" to the victims of Uvalde by mispronouncing most of their names. Also present at the gun-lovers' orgy in Houston was Texas senator Ted Cancún Cruz who predictably used the old reliable Chicago Line in his speech. Here is what he said: 

Gun bans do not work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the murder hellhole that it has been for far too long.

Which is interesting because in 2019, Cruz was excoriated by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot after he dropped the Chicago Line in slightly different words, after a particularly brutal holiday weekend in this city. It's bad enough to extol the virtues of guns by exploiting Chicago violence in reaction to a tragic weekend in the Windy City, but it's a whole other level of bad to use it in the wake of another town's tragedy.

Perhaps the most tasteless use of the Chicago Line to date came from Texas governor Greg Abbott at a press conference in Uvalde, the day after the shooting. You may remember it was Abbott who famously blamed windmills for the disastrous power grid failure last year after an unusual snap of cold weather in the Lone Star State. Never mind that wind power generates only a minuscule amount of Texas energy. 

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this modern-day Don Quixote would bring up Chicago while blocks away, grieving parents were in the process of receiving the remains of their murdered children who had to be identified the night before by DNA samples as the bullets from a high powered military grade weapon ripped apart their bodies and destroyed their faces.

In order to assure his fellow gun toatin' Texans that he wasn't moved by the unspeakable tragedy that befell his constituents in Uvalde enough to keep weapons like the one used at Robb Elementary School out of the hands of people likely to use them against ten year olds, Abbott said this:

I hate to say this, there are more people that are shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.

Perhaps he was bemoaning the fact that there aren't enough schools in Texas but I don't think so. Not giving him the benefit of the doubt on that one, his statement is so wrong on so many levels. 

Beyond the errors in logic, by comparing numbers of murder victims in Chicago and Texas, Abbott is treating human lives as if they were commodities. He may as well have been talking about spark plugs or widgets. 

Not only did Abbott receive the wrath of the Mayor of Chicago, but also that of Jay Pritzker, Governor of Illinois for his thoughtless remarks.

As pointed out by Mayor Lightfoot, worst of all, Abbott's statement downplays the tragedy he was on hand to address. Uvalde is a small town where practically everyone has a connection to at least one of the victims of the massacre. I'm guessing that not a soul in Uvalde was comforted by learning that a lot of people are murdered in Chicago too. 

But these gun-loving yahoos press on with their empty rhetoric about good guys with guns, people killing people, not guns, and about that hellhole, Chicago.

You don't hear Ted Cruz or Greg Abbott, both with presidential aspirations of their own calling Indianapolis, Tuscaloosa, Menphis or Baton Rouge murder hell holes, even though those cities have higher murder rates than Chicago. 

For them. Chicago is an easy target as this city's violent reputation as every Chicagoan who has ever traveled abroad knows, precedes it. Besides they have nothing to lose as neither of them have a snowball's chance in hell of winning Chicago or Illinois in a presidential election. 

As I said, if there were any credence to the Chicago Line, it would be fair game. But there is not, it is a simplistic logical fallacy, deliberately cherry picked by unscrupulous politicians and their masters, the gun lobby, to empower and enrich themselves off the blood of innocent children, and to further divide the American people. 

So we can expect to keep hearing the same old bullshit Chicago Line ad nauseam.

Not that it will make a bit of difference but to that I will quote our mayor while adding a few choice embellishments of my own:

If you don't give a rat's ass about this city or its people, keep our name out of your fucking mouth.

With all due respect. 

Demagogues

A couple posts ago I wrote about how our political process is being affected by the combination of few credible candidates, a preponderance of citizens receiving the majority of their news through late night comedy shows, and above all, anger. My conclusion was that all of the above have turned Americans into cynics, but this op-ed piece in the Washington Post ups the ante a hundredfold. The author, Dana Milbank interviewed Nazi Holocaust survivors who see frightening similarities between the xenophobic, race bating rhetoric of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and other candidates and the reaction from their supporters, to what they heard and saw in the twenties and thirties in Germany.

Now I'm very leery of comments equating contemporary individuals and issues with fascism and the Nazis, and need to state unequivocally that I as much as I dislike their platforms, I don't believe that Trump, Cruz, or any of the other candidates spewing hate speech, espouse to be junior Hitlers. To the best of my knowledge, none of them have published an equivalent of Mein Kamf or have gone on record, as Hitler did, advocating genocide as a solution to the problems of their nation. I'm not even sure they truly believe some of the words coming out of their mouths, they're simply telling people what they want to hear. And what they want to hear is what scares me.

Phrases like "let's take this country back, carpet bomb the enemy, go after their families, then build a fifty foot wall to keep them out", are music to the ears of many Americans who feel threatened by people coming into this country, (and many who've been here a very long time), who have different values and opinions. Of course this feeling has only been exacerbated by the threat, both real and imagined, of terrorism.

Desperate for votes, these candidates find tailor-made audiences in angry, frustrated, predominantly white, Christian Americans who feel that privilege, power and success in this country are their birthright. That birthright they feel, has been stripped of them in recent years, and it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see the slogan, "let's make this country great again", coming out of the mouth of a Donald Trump, as a call to arms to restore that birthright to its proper place.

Trump supporters find their candidate's willingness, even glee in trampling upon currently accepted standards of decorum and decency, refreshing. When he attacked Mexican immigrants calling them thieves and rapists, much of the country was aghast at his insensitivity, but not Trump supporters. When he made his statement that no Muslim should be granted entrance into the United States, even his staunchest right wing critics flinched at the un-American-ness of that idea. Meanwhile his supporters jumped for joy. And most recently, Trump's on-going feud with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has brought to light the many repulsive and degrading comments he has made about women. One would think that insulting half the population of this country would make a dent in his poll numbers, but not so, in fact a recent profile I read of the Trump crowd claimed a typical supporter of the billionaire real estate tycoon turned presidential hopeful, more than likely is a woman. To those supporters, Trump stands out as a beacon of light amidst a sea of that old bugaboo, "political correctness."

Ted Cruz is going after a different angry crowd, specifically evangelical Christians who in addition to the domestic issues that irk Trump supporters, are particularly upset about moral issues like the legalization of abortion and gay marriage. In his speech after winning the Iowa caucuses last week, Cruz pointed out that his campaign was guided by the "Judeo-Christian values that this country was built upon." However he didn't ingratiate himself too much with the Judeo part of that when he blasted Donald Trump recently for his "New York values", what many consider a thinly veiled reference to Jewish values. 

What both campaigns share is their apparent disdain for government and the characterization of their candidates as political outsiders. It would seem that Trump is the bigger outsider of the two as he has never held elected office, but both try to outdo the other in proudly claiming themselves to be the one most unqualified for the job.

In another Dana Milbank piece for the Washington Post this week,  he wrote:

I followed both Cruz and Trump this week at multiple campaign events across New Hampshire. It was, in a sense, a pleasure to see them use their prodigious skills of character assassination against each other. It was demagogue against demagogue (emphasis mine): lie vs. lie. Both men riled their supporters with fantasies and straw men. 

Getting back to the original Milbank piece I sited at the top of this piece, it is the sheer demagoguery of the candidates that sends shivers up the spines of some Holocaust survivors. Here he quotes Irene Weiss, a survivor of Aushwitz:

I am exceptionally concerned about demagogues, they touch me in a place that I remember. I know their influence and, unfortunately, I know how receptive audiences are to demagogues and what it leads to... 
...“It has echoes, and maybe more so to me than to native-born Americans, I’m scared. I don’t like the trend. I don’t like how many people are applauding when they hear these demagogues. It can turn.

To my ears it's not the demagogues per se that Irene Weiss fears, it is the applause of the audience. I couldn't agree more. This current election season has brought out a tremendous ugliness that once resided just below the surface in our country. The current front running Republican presidential candidates don't scare me very much as their popularity is limited. After all, demographics show again and again that white people will not be in the majority in this nation for very long, and there will always be a lot of white people, myself included, who wouldn't vote for a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz if their life depended on it. Consequently, appealing ONLY to right wing whites is not a recipe for success in winning an American presidential election anymore. Along those lines, here's a critique from the right of the current Republican  front runners in this article in The New Republic.

What truly scares me is that this country is only one or two terrorist attacks and another financial crisis away from being pushed over the edge. If that happens, it wouldn't take much for a group with truly nefarious intentions to forge a much broader coalition of angry people, focusing upon one or two groups of minorities as scapegoats for all the problems of the country. That minority could be Muslims, it could be black people, or it could be that age-old scapegoat, the Jews. Yes, it could even be white Christians who will soon find themselves in the minority of this country.

We may like to think that could never happen here, as a nation we're better than that. But these last few months unfortunately have proven otherwise.