Mr. Khan

Take a good look at this face, it is the face of America. It is the official US Army portrait Captain Hunayun Khan who was killed in a car bombing in Iraq in 2004. As the suspicious vehicle entered the compound in which Captain Khan was stationed with the soldiers under his command, Khan told his troops to stand back while he checked out the vehicle. He took ten steps toward the car when it exploded. By sacrificing his life he saved the lives of those under his charge. Khan was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, the hallowed ground across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial, along with hundreds of thousands of others who served their country, many of them paying the ultimate sacrifice.

This year's presidential election is different from those that came before it. For starters, for the first time ever, a woman is the nominee of one of the two major parties. However the historical significance of that is overshadowed by the extreme nature of her opponent, a man who has never held political office. That in itself is not a first, in 1952 the Republican party nominated as its candidate the five star general who served as commander of Allied Forces during World War II, Dwight David Eisenhower. The current Republican presidential nominee has a much different resume than Eisenhower.

As we all know, Donald Trump is a real estate developer with a knack for self promotion. Long before he became a reality TV star, Trump was already well known for his glitzy buildings, Atlantic City casinos and his conspicuous display of wealth. Never holding a job in public service does not mean that Trump does not have political experience. Like many in his line of work, for decades he has been deeply connected to politicians, especially the mayors of New York City. That's why at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week, Trump was able to say that he "knows the system", which produced an uneasy chortle from the crowd.

The nomination process for both major parties has changed considerably in the sixty four years since Eisenhower was nominated. Gone are the proverbial "smoke filled rooms" where deals were brokered by party leaders who would be largely responsible for selecting the person who would lead the ticket in November. That system was replaced by the slightly more transparent primary system where most states hold public elections to choose delegates whose numbers determine the candidate.

It would be hard to argue that this is a more democratic process to select a candidate. On the flip side, it has resulted in the nomination of Donald Trump, a man who has been held at arm's length if at all, by most of the Republican leadership.

Trump's greatest skill is publicity. He knows how to get attention which is why he was able to win his party's nomination by spending a fraction of the money his opponents spent. Under the philosophy that any publicity, good or bad, works to his advantage, he did this mostly by making controversial, outrageous statements such as all Muslims should be banned from the United States.

That is where Captain Khan comes in. He was a Muslim. On his gravestone at Arlington is the Star and Crescent, the symbol of his faith, just as crosses mark the headstones of Christians and Stars of David, those of Jewish soldiers.

This week, many of us saw Captain Khan's mother and father on TV, addressing the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Khizr Khan. the dead soldier's father spoke for the two of them. If you didn't see it, please click to follow this link.

Mr. Khan spoke briefly and eloquently about honor and patriotism. As he spoke, chants of "USA USA" rose up from the crowd. If you had your eyes closed and didn't know the particulars, you may have guessed his words and those chants were coming from a Republican convention of bygone days. But open your eyes and you saw, like Captain Khan's, the face of America in all glorious shades of color, ethnicities, and religious creeds.

This election is unfortunately different as well as both candidates are highly unpopular. Most choices, at least at this point seem to focus on which candidate for whom NOT to vote. At the RNC, the incessant "USA" chant was often replaced by chants of "LOCK HER UP", in reference to the kerfuffle over Hillary Clinton's lack of email acumen.

Of course the Democrats, from Hillary Clinton on down spent much of their time lambasting Donald Trump. Vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine shouted out the mantra, "believe me" in mocking reference to one of Trump's favorite catch phrases. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said "God help us" in reference to Trump's alleged business acumen as a qualification for office. President Obama in one sentence equated Trump, the "home grown demagogue" with jihadists. Here's the quote:

That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadis or home-grown demagogues will always fail in the end.

But nobody at the convention came as close to destroying the character of Donald Trump as Khizr Khan. He spoke of true heroism, courage, sacrifice and liberty, all things in his mind, Donald Trump knows nothing about. Mr. Khan said that his son stood for and lived those values, while if Trump had his way, Captain Khan, who came with his family from the United Arab Emirates as a child, would not have been allowed into this country. Then came the piece de resistance. Addressing Trump directly, Mr. Khan asked the candidate if he had actually read the United States Constitution. This produced a wild cheer from the crowd which hadn't let down when he pulled out a copy of our most sacred document from his jacket pocket. Then he said with the crowd still cheering "because if not, I'll be glad to lend you my copy."

It was brilliant theater which left not a dry eye in the house. Unfortunately for Mrs. Clinton who would speak later that night, she couldn't match the intensity or emotion of that moment. On the other hand, I don't think anyone possibly could have.

Mr. Khan's six minutes were the highlight of the convention, if not the entire election.

POST SCRIPT:

Donald Trump had a few choice reactions to Khizr Khan's address to the DNC, especially his claim that he, Trump sacrificed nothing for this country. Trump claimed that he did indeed sacrifice by becoming very successful and creating thousands of jobs. He then went on to lambast Captain Khan's hijab clad mother who stood by her husband's side at the convention but didn't speak. Trump postulated that her religion prevented her from speaking her mind.

It turns out Ghazala Khan can speak her mind thank you very much. Since Trump's asinine remarks, she has given interviews and written an op ed piece for the Washington Post. You can read that here.

Strange Bedfellows Indeed

Poor Donald Trump can't seem to catch a break from the press these days. According to him:

I'm the only one in the world who can raise almost $6 million for the veterans, have uniform applause by the veterans groups, and end up being criticized by press.

Those remarks were made after it was revealed that money he supposedly raised for veterans at a fund raiser held during one of the Republican debates he refused to attend because of an ongoing snit with Fox reporter Megyn Kelly, didn't reach its intended beneficiaries until after reporters publicly questioned where the money was. In response, according to a CNN report, Trump called the press :

"dishonest," "not good people," sleazy, and among the worst human beings he has ever met."

Wow that must have stung.

I'm sure over the duration of his campaign to win the  Republican nomination for president, many tears have been shed on both sides of the on-going struggle between Donald Trump and the press. And every one of those tears has been of the crocodile variety.

The truth is, calling the relationship between Donald Trump and the press mutually beneficial, would be the understatement of the century. 

For the American news media, Donald Trump has been a godsend. Like covering a ballplayer on a torrid hitting streak, every time Trump opens his mouth, be it a racist rant, a sexist slur, or a generous helping of bigoted bluster, every time he lowers the bar on decorum and common decency, it's newsworthy. Every time Trump displays his prodigious ignorance of domestic and foreign policy and even the very purpose and function of the job he allegedly aspires to, people can't get enough of him. Articles on Trump like this one, have a way of writing themselves. All a writer has to do is print the vile garbage that comes out of his mouth and then say: "did he really just say that?" Whether they love or hate him, Donald Trump brought people back to news in an era when at least in this country, interest in current events was at an all time low.

As for Trump, a long time ago he learned there's no such thing as bad publicity. It's almost as if the purpose of Trump's candidacy is simply to prove the point that a candidate needn't spend billions of dollars to become president, so long as gets enough attention. For their part, the press has been more than willing to oblige by giving Trump all the attention he wants, for the mere price of a comment or a diatribe filled with them.

That of course isn't my idea; the notion that Trump really couldn't care less about being president has been bandied about quite frequently in the past year. For the record, I happen to buy into that theory. In my mind the Trump candidacy is a sham, nothing but cynical disregard for our government, our people, and our political process.

Could that in any way be a good thing? God knows our political system is flawed and in need of either repair or complete overhaul. Perhaps the silver lining to all this is that candidate Donald Trump is like a safecracker hired by a bank to figure out the vulnerabilities of its vault.

Safecracker Trump has certainly exposed many of the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of the Republican primary system, as another safecracker, Bernie Sanders has done on the Democratic side. Far more serious, Trump the safecracker has exposed the morally reprehensible, seedy underbelly of the American psyche that some thought had disappeared along with the days of Jim Crow. Trump supporters claim their man is a breath of fresh air who "tells it like it is", destroying the tyranny of "political correctness" as he derides minorities, immigrants, women, and anyone who happens to disagree with him. His slogan "Let's make America great again" is a thinly veiled call for a return to the exclusive white, male hegemony of this country's past. Trump says publicly what millions of frustrated white male Americans have been saying under their collective breath for decades.

For the other side, Trump bashers have the privilege of being able to take the moral high ground without any reservation, intellectual rigor, or in some cases, logic.  Case in point is this open letter to the American People initially signed by 450 notable American writers and subsequently by tens of thousands of citizens.  For eight sentences the letter spells out the power, both good and bad, of language, the values of democracy, justice, diversity and truth, the evils of nativism and bigotry, and the threat of demagogues manipulating "the basest and most violent elements in society." For those eight sentences the writers had me eating out of their hands. Then came the last sentence that completely lost me:

...we, the undersigned, as a matter of conscience, oppose, unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States. (emphasis mine)

As far as I know, Donald J. Trump meets all the demands the Constitution specifies for being a candidate for president, namely he was born in the United States, he lived here more than fourteen years, and he is over 35 years of age. We may not like him, agree with him, or think he is qualified for the job. We may think he is in fact entirely unqualified for the job and if elected would be a detriment to the country. The good news is we have a say in whether he gets elected or not, and that doesn't involve a select group of like minded people unequivocally opposing his candidacy.

While it's certainly well within their rights to create a petition expressing their opposition to his candidacy, I'm afraid it will only serve as fodder for Trump as he will no doubt use it as an example of how little concern the liberal establishment has for the democratic process. I can hear him now: "how dare these elite eggheads oppose the will of the people who choose to support me." And in this case he'd be right, democracy allows for people to vote for whomever they please, even a buffoon. It is completely meaningless for a group or individual to oppose the candidacy of someone who meets the constitutional requirements for running for office.

Unlike the character Trump plays in this reality TV version of a presidential campaign, I have a very strong notion that the real Donald Trump is not a buffoon. He knows exactly what he's doing. As he has done continuously throughout his candidacy, Trump has managed to spin viral negativity against him to his favor, and this petition will be no exception.

I also believe that Donald Trump does not believe half of the things he says on the campaign trail. As I said, any publicity is good publicity, and Trump welcomes the bad along with the good. As long as he and his floppy hairdo are on the air and in people's minds, as long as we the people continue to be fascinated with him, he benefits, and so do those who wouldn't vote for him come hell or high water. 

In his excellent book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, author Charles Leerhsen suggests that we need our villains for no other reason than to make us feel better about ourselves. That's why some people took a dead baseball icon with a challenging personality and turned him into a psychopathic monster. The myth of Donald Trump, just like the myth of Ty Cobb the monster is pure bullshit, The only difference is this, it was Trump himself who invented his own myth. And unlike Cobb's reputation, the myth perversely continues to serve Trump well. 

The biggest lesson I suppose we're learning from Safecracker Donald is that getting a candidate before the people early, often, and relentlessly, is an effective strategy for getting votes. We the people have decided that we may not necessarily like Donald Trump, but we sure can't get enough of him. And the press has responded in kind by giving us exactly what we've asked for, more and more Donald. We can probably thank Trump for teaching us the lesson that this is no way to elect a president.

A bank hiring a safecracker is indeed an effective way to discover and correct that institution's weaknesses. That is until the safecracker becomes president of the bank. Then it's time to look for a new bank.

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.