Artemis II

I woke up one day this month at 4AM. Outside our window was a nearly full moon which illuminated the room. None of that is unusual except this time, four brave astronauts, the first to leave earth's orbit in 54 years, were about to pay a visit to our nearest celestial neighbor. Obviously, I couldn't see them, but I knew I was looking straight at them.

And the thought thrilled me beyond words.

I'm not proud to admit this, but I didn't start paying attention to the Artemis II mission until a day or two before they lifted off from Cape Canaveral on April Fool's Day. How different it was back in the sixties and seventies when not a manned space flight went by without my undivided attention. Perhaps it was my young, impressionable age, or the thought that I was witnessing something that no one had ever done before which was the case with every space flight in that era, that made it all so compelling. 

I guess since we've been there and done all that, this time around was not quite the same.

And yet, maybe it was even better this time.

Artemis II crew clockwise from upper left:
Astronauts Koch, Glover, Weisman and Hansen.

Despite and perhaps because of all the mishegoss going on in our world today, this mission was bloody fantastic. 

The moment I laid eyes on the Moon early that morning, I've had several  questions about the mission and manned space flight in general, some of which have been satisfactorily answered online, others not. 

The first thing that occurred to me as I saw the nearly full Moon was this: if the Moon is full from our perspective, the side of the Moon that is perpetually opposite of us, sometimes mistakenly referred to as the "dark side", would have indeed been in darkness. As the astronauts would be flying around the Moon, why did they plan the mission to take place at a time when the part of the Moon not visible from Earth would be in total darkness?

The answer I got was painfully straightforward: observing the side of the Moon that never faces us was simply not an important part of the mission. We've been sending both manned and unmanned spacecraft there for nearly sixty years now, so its entire surface has been documented, although the Artemis crew did focus on specific areas NASA is interested in for future landing sites. But since the timing of the mission depended upon several factors regarding the relative positions of the Earth and the Moon, the illumination of the opposite side of the lunar surface during the mission was a non-factor.

The next question came up after learning that the Artemis II astronauts at one point in their mission, would break the record for the greatest distance human beings have been from the Earth. Wait a minute I thought, we've already been to the Moon, how is that possible? The answer came as I was watching the mission and learned the astronauts would break the record that was set in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13. If you recall, that was the ill-fated mission aborted after an explosion in an oxygen tank knocked out the power in the main portion of the spacecraft, the Command Module. 

I remember it well. There obviously was no good time for the tank to explode but if it had to happen, it could not have come at a more opportune time. The spacecraft was on its way to the Moon meaning the Lunar Excursion Module, (the L.E.M. for short), a separate vehicle, was still attached to the disabled Command Module. Fortunately, the astronauts could use the engines aboard the L.E.M. to make the maneuvers necessary to safely return them to Earth. Had the explosion happened as the crew were heading back to Earth after the L.E.M. had been jettisoned, or during the time two of the three astronauts were on the moon separated from the Command Module, all three would have been stranded in space with no chance of survival. 

Nevertheless, it was a harrowing experience as you know if you remember it, read about it, or have seen the movie Apollo 13, which from what I understand, was a reasonably accurate depiction of the event.

Anyway, with the main ship disabled, the crew couldn't just throw on the brakes, make a sudden U Turn and head for home. Rather, with the limited amount of power available to them, they were able to take advantage of the Moon's gravity to help send them back to terra firma. They did that by adjusting their trajectory to send them into a higher lunar orbit than the original plan. That meant instead of the ship being in a position to continuously orbit the Moon, in the higher trajectory the moon's gravity would have caught hold of the spacecraft changing its course but would not have been strong enough to hold on to it, thereby sending the ship back into space toward Earth.  *

That higher orbit explains why Apollo 13 held the distance record for manned space flight until this mission, a record the crew, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise certainly never intended nor hoped to break. 

But it was the intention of the Artemis II mission all along to make just one pass around the moon, using roughly the same trajectory forced upon Apollo 13, albeit just a little higher, accounting for the new record. Bragging rights aside, of all the magnificent accomplishments of the Artemis II mission, breaking the distance record had to be the least significant. **

We lost Jim Lovell last year but shortly before his death, the only astronaut to have been to the Moon twice without setting foot on it, recorded a heartfelt message to this crew, mentioning them all by name, and welcoming the four of them to "his old neighborhood." It was perhaps the second most poignant moment of the mission. *** You can hear the message here. 

Then of course I wondered, why only one pass around the moon instead of making several orbits as the crew of the first lunar voyage Apollo 8 (Jim Lovell's other trip to the Moon) did in 1968? It reminded me of my father who whenever we traveled anywhere, was content to get out of the car at our destination, have a look around for maybe a moment or two, then get back into the car and drive home. For him, just having been there seemed to be all that mattered. 

It turns out: the main focus of the Artemis II mission was to test the capabilities of the spacecraft, especially its life support systems in outer space, no small matter, so exploration was not the highest priority on the agenda. **** My father would have understood. 

Back to thinking about the recent passing of Jim Lovell who was without question my biggest astronaut hero as a child, I wondered how many of the Apollo astronauts are still around. I could only think of one, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin (Apollo 11), the second person to walk on the Moon. 

Here's the answer: Of the men who got to walk on the moon, in addition to Aldrin, David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16), and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) are still alive at this writing. Mentioned above, Fred Haise was denied the opportunity because of the aborted Apollo 13 mission but got a good view of the Moon. Unfortunately, he was probably too busy wondering if he'd make it home alive to appreciate it. He is still with us, as is Russell Schweickart who was aboard Apollo 9, which featured the first test flight of the L.E.M., but did not leave Earth's orbit.

Which got me thinking about how long it's been since we've been to the Moon. Surely it occurred to me, none of the crew of Artemis II were born yet when Harrison Schmidt and Chicago's own Eugene Cernan were the last people to date to have walked on the moon. Making myself feel really old, I was right.

Here is the crew of Artemis II who have returned to the good earth from their magnificent journey, listed in order from youngest to oldest:

Mission Specialist Christina Koch - 46.

Pilot Victor Glover - 49.

Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen - 50.

Commander Reid Wiseman - 50. 

All spring chickens. But not really, the average age of the Apollo astronauts when they went into space was slightly less than 40. I guess 50 is really the new 40.

Another difference is the racial and gender makeup of the space crews of yesterday and today. The Apollo astronauts sent into space, as well as those of the Gemini and Mercury programs before it, and those to follow for another decade, were all white men. That would not change until 1983. On June 18 of that year, Sally Ride became the first American woman astronaut to go into space. On August 30th of that year, Guy Bluford became the first black American astronaut to go into space. Since that time U.S. space crews have typically been a mixture of genders, races, and nationalities that reflect kind of sort of, the population of this country.

Perhaps the two most notable space missions of the Space Shuttle program were sadly the ones that ended in tragedy, Challenger in January of 1986, and Columbia in February of 2003. Aboard both those two doomed missions were women and people of color who gave their lives for this country, for science, for education and for the passion of exploration. 

One would think in this day and age, hardly anyone would bat an eye, as I didn't, that this mission included one woman and one black man. 

Here I couldn't have been more wrong, people did notice. The issue of D.E.I. in space (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) indeed came up as the current administration has mandated that all U.S. government agencies abandon efforts of hiring based upon gender and race. This means that NASA is now prohibited from even discussing the race or gender of upcoming or future crews that have not yet been assigned. 

It would not surprise me that since the Space Shuttle Program, race and gender have been issues considered in the selection process for space missions for many reasons, not the least of which has been PR. But here's the thing, PR has always been a significant part of NASA's mission, ever since its inception in the 1950s. 

Perhaps if the original scientists of NASA had their way, there would be no astronauts at all as most space exploration, as we've seen over the past seven decades, can be carried out quite nicely by machines that don't place such great demands both physical and emotional on the program that human beings do. Plus, you don't have to worry about returning them to earth.

But nothing captures the public's attention like sending people into space, and to cover the enormous cost of space exploration, NASA needed to get the American public behind it.

It was President Eisenhower who decided that the people who represented this country by risking their lives going into space would be military test pilots. Today that seems like a no-brainer but early on, NASA administrators had all sorts of ideas of what kind of people would make ideal astronauts. The most important qualification in their minds was not being averse to risk. To that end, race car drivers and circus performers were early candidates to be our first astronauts. 

As the early manned space missions were controlled from the ground, the first occupants of spacecraft were essentially just along for the ride, hence there was no requirement of flying skill. I wonder how many people today realize that our country's first astronaut (so to speak) sent into space was not Alan Shepard, but Ham, a four-year-old chimpanzee in January of 1961. Incidentally, Ham didn't get his name until after his groundbreaking flight as the first American great ape in space. That was because NASA officials were worried that if the chimp had a name rather than just a number (No.65), the PR would be much worse if he were killed during the flight.

Naturally, sending highly conditioned and trained military pilots with massive egos to do the work of a chimp, did not sit well with the men who would be our first human beings in space. The seven Mercury astronauts, Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper, insisted in no uncertain terms that they would have at least some amount of control of their spacecraft (a term insisted upon by the astronauts over the word "capsule" coined by the scientists) as well as a window, not in the original design. Knowing full well their PR importance to the success of the entire space program, the astronauts threatened to go public with their concerns and the NASA administrators ultimately acquiesced. 

It may surprise you that women were indeed considered to be among our first astronauts. Here's a piece I wrote in 2021 about "The Women in Space Program", inspired by Wally Funk, the pilot who had it been another era, may have gotten her chance to have been among the Mercury Seven. 

Spoiler alert, she didn't get that chance because of PR.

Since we live in a much different era. today it should be a no brainer that we have crews that represent our diverse nation. I would challenge anyone to look at the resumes of Koch, Glover, Hansen and Weisman, and not be completely blown away by their pre-mission accomplishments. And I would challenge anyone to assess the three Americans' performances during this mission and not be exceptionally proud to have each of them representing the best of our country. The Canadian people are equally proud no doubt to be represented by London, Ontario's own Jeremy Hansen.

If the anti-DEI crowd is truly sincere that only the most qualified people should be selected for space missions, it will be interesting to see their reaction when a future crew of a high-profile mission consists entirely of women and people of color. 

Finally, beyond PR, why do we send people into space?

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of reasons, but here I'm going to give one example that is both mundane and mind blowing at the same time.

It is a photograph. 

Earthrise from the moon. NASA photograph by Bill Anders,  December 24, 1968

Planet Earth had already been seen and photographed from space on every manned mission flown by U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. So when the Apollo 8 astronauts set off on their mission to be the first humans to orbit the Moon, all their attention was focused on our natural satellite or as I prefer to think of it, our companion planet.***** While Moon bound, the astronauts didn't look back, there was no camera mounted behind their spacecraft and naturally, no rear-view mirror. 

Of course they were blown away being the first humans to set eyes upon the side of the Moon we never get to see from Earth, and set about to photograph it in great detail. But they weren't prepared for what they were about to experience. As they flew sixty miles above the lunar surface, Bill Anders described the color of the lunar surface as resembling "dirty beach sand." Mile upon mile upon mile of unrelenting dirty beach sand. Then it appeared on the horizon.  

The one spot of brilliant, glorious color in the midst of seemingly endless dirty beach sand and the vast, complete blackness of space..

It was Earth, our home as no one had ever seen it, the entire planet as seen from outer space. 

The mission was planned down to the minutest detail but one thing they did not expect was the astronauts' reaction upon seeing Earth from outer space for the first time. This wonderful piece from 2018 includes a recording of the three Apollo 8 astronauts as they first caught sight of our planet. In the recording you can hear three straight shooting 1960s military men, acting like little school kids on Christmas, which it indeed was. 

The crew was equipped with cameras which were intended to photograph the lunar surface. Being film cameras. the number of pictures they could take was limited to the amount of film they had on board. So when Earth first appeared to them unexpectedly above the horizon, Astronaut Bill Anders knew he had to fumble around to find the camera loaded with color film while the fleeting moment still presented itself.. I think we've all been there. Then on the recording you can hear Commander Frank Borman, the straightest shooter of them all tell Anders not to take that picture: "it's not on the schedule" he says. From his tone I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure he was joking.

That photograph would prove to be perhaps the most important photograph ever made. Allow me to quote myself:

For the first time we saw our planet exactly as that, a small, fragile, finite world floating in a see of nothingness. We haven’t seen our planet the same since. We once thought of the earth as a bountiful place with infinite resources. Today, at least the reasonable among us, see this beautiful planet as our home. I don't think that it was coincidence that the environmental movement gained tremendous steam after we saw those photographs. The last man to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan said: "We went to explore the Moon, and in fact discovered the Earth".

Had the crew of Apollo 8 been robots instead of human beings, that "unscheduled" photograph would probably never been made and no one would have been there to testify to one of the most humbling experiences imaginable. 

And wouldn't you know it, it would be Frank Borman of all people, the man of few words and fewer platitudes who was once described by a psychologist as the "most uncomplicated man he ever met"  who stated the experience of seeing the Earth from the Moon in the most profound and dare I say, poetic of terms: 

It's 240,000 miles away. It was small enough you could cover it with your thumbnail. The dearest things in life that were back on the Earth-- my family, my wife, my parents. They were still alive then. That was, for me, the high point of the flight from an emotional standpoint.

And now we're back to the Moon and we have a new set of pictures. As someone who knows a thing or two about photography, I'll use a term that I hope isn't too technical here.

The pictures are fucking unbelievable.

Honestly I could write a book about the hundreds of photographs I've seen so far made by the Artemis II astronauts but fortunately there's a video that does a better job than I ever could.

Here it is. Watch it, it's well worth the 30 or so minute run time.

And we have a new generation of explorers, one that isn't afraid to let down their guard and show their emotions. A good place to witness that is this link to the crew's appearance in Houston on Saturday, April 11, 2026.

I've gone on way too long here but I'd like to close with something Christina Koch said during that appearance the day after they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean last Friday:

Several years ago I was giving a speech and I was doing my usual talk about crew and crewmates and teamwork and someone asked the question: "What makes a crew? What is different about a crew from a team?"

 And I was like, I got this, I open my mouth confidently to tell then everything I knew about being a crewmate, and everything that came out of my mouth was completely without value....

But the last ten days I've gotten a little bit of a better answer on that question.

A crew is a group that is in it all the time no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, but gives grace that holds accountable.

A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably, (here she turns around to look at her three crewmates on the stage), beautifully, dutifully linked.

So, when we saw tiny earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn't necessarily just earth. It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging, undisturbingly in the universe.

(At this point she pauses briefly to gather her thoughts after being overcome with emotion.)

So, I may have not learned -- I know I haven't learned -- everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there's one new thing I know, and that is Planet Earth, you are a crew. Thank you.

So to answer the question posed above, machines are perfect tools of gathering data to better learn about our universe. We send people into space to bring back art and poetry, to better learn about ourselves.

NOTES:

* I made it sound simple, that correction in trajectory required a precise series of engine burns to get the spacecraft into the correct position to first enter the Moon's orbit, then be "slingshot" back to Earth. It took ten minutes for an IBM 360 mainframe computer which filled an entire room to come up with the set of instructions for the correct sequence of engine burns which had to be fed one burn at a time in order for the astronauts to execute them correctly. Of course I had to see how that would compare to a modern computer such my cellphone. Care to guess how long it would take? A small fraction of a second. We may not have been to the moon in 54 years but we've done a few other things in that time.

** I was watching live coverage of the mission on NASA's YouTube channel at the time the Artemis was supposed to break Apollo 13's distance record. The time until breaking the record was displayed on the upper right corner of the screen, and I wondered what would happen once that clock counted down to zero. The answer is nothing, not one of the crew nor anyone at Mission Control in Houston mentioned it. What did happen was this...

***Unquestionably the most poignant moment of the mission when Jeremy Hansen announced that three members of the crew decided to name a previously unnamed lunar crater Carroll, in honor of the late wife of the fourth astronaut, their commander Reid Weisman.  

**** Nonetheless, there was still a good amount of exploration putting the astronauts' valuable time in space to good use.

***** Of the nine planets in our solar system (yes I'm counting Pluto), six of them have moons, or celestial bodies that revolve about them. All of them, except ours, are significantly smaller than the planet they orbit.  Our moon is about one quarter the size of Earth meaning that if you were to view the Earth and our moon say from Mars, the two are close enough in size to appear as a double planet. 

Opening Day 2026

We pick up where we left off last November after what was in my opinion, one of the greatest baseball postseasons I've ever experienced, perhaps second only to the 2005 season when my favorite team won the World Series for the first and only time in my life.

If you've forgotten about last year's MLB playoffs, you can read about them here.

Or to save you from what was perhaps my longest post ever, (that's not even counting the epilog which had to be added to cover the World Series), you can cut to the chase. This is how I ended the epilog: 

Baseball is a strange game and that's probably why I love it so much.

For me, with nothing personally invested in either team, the chill rains of the end of baseball for the year will be quite tolerable. Watching, listening to and reading about this year's post season was like eating a magnificent meal and being completely satisfied, leaving no room for dessert. Or like reading a novel that you can't put down which at the end leaves you moved and inspired but also drained. These experiences don't come along every day, or even every year. Sometimes they are once in a generation or even once in a lifetime experiences.

Which is why we remember them.

Come to think of it, the 2025 MLB Playoffs may have been even more enjoyable to me as I didn't have much emotional investment in any of the teams last year, excluding the brief appearance of the Chicago Cubs; consequently the games were stress-free and I could tune in for one reason only, pure love of the game.

Here's a link to an article from this weekend's New York Times about a significant change coming to baseball this year, the introduction of reviews of ball and strike calls. This is how the article titled Introducing the Robot Umpire, written by Matthew Cullen begins: 

The foundations of baseball have largely remained the same since Babe Ruth swung a bat. Nine innings make a game. Three strikes and you’re out. And the ultimate authority on all pitches is the home plate umpire.

With all due respect to Mr. Cullen, those foundations he mentions go back farther than Babe Ruth's time, perhaps by sixty or seventy years. But he's absolutely right that baseball has been a game historically averse to change and when change does come, there are some who claim all is lost and vow to never watch another game. That said, they usually come back after a few weeks. 

To some, the introduction of reviews of balls and strikes using the Automated Ball and Strike Challenge System (A.B.S. for short) is a no-brainer. For several years now, many televised broadcasts of major league games have featured graphic superimpositions of the strike zone above home plate, and a spot marking where the ball crosses the plate, giving the viewer clear evidence of whether each pitch was a ball or a strike. *

One might argue that given this technology, the role of umpires calling balls and strikes is superfluous. And yet, home plate umpires will continue to call balls and strikes on top of all their other duties. This year the only change will be that players, namely the pitcher, catcher and batter, will have the opportunity to challenge a call they don't agree with, turning the call over to the A.B.S. Each team will be given two opportunities per game to make an overruled challenge, meaning that because there's a premium on them, games won't be bogged down by frivolous challenges. 

This seems like a reasonable compromise between the folks who want to keep the "human element" in the game, and those who insist that the only thing that matters is getting the call right. 

Personally, I'm in the human element camp as part of the aesthetics and drama of a ballgame is the reaction of and to the umpire calling a pitch. That would all go for naught if baseball goes the route of professional tennis which has for the most part eliminated human line judges in favor of automatic ones. 

For me, bad calls seem to even each other out, you win a few, you lose a few, just like in life. When thinking about issues regarding sports officials, I always think of someone I knew for whom the only possible outcome for his team was this: either they won the game, or the game was stolen from them by the refs. Life was hard enough for the poor guy; I can't imagine what it would have been like for him if he didn't have bad officiating to hang his hat on and be forced to admit that his team actually lost.

But I think there is one driving factor that is going to make the human element dinosaurs like me lose this battle forever. It's another recent change in baseball and other sports in this country, legalized online betting.

For that I turn your attention to this brilliant article in The Atlantic titled not entirely ironically: My year as a degenerate gambler, written by staff writer McKay Coppins. 

In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a law passed by Congress which restricted most sports betting to the state of Nevada. Before that ruling according to the article:

...professional sports leagues remained determined to keep gambling at a distance. High-profile scandals—the White Sox World Series fix in 1919, the Mafia-instigated point-shaving scheme at Boston College in 1978—had convinced commissioners that betting posed an existential threat to organized sports.

Coppins goes on to quote Paul Tagliabue, the late commissioner of the NFL who testifying before Congress said this: 

Nothing has done more to despoil the games Americans play and watch than widespread gambling on them.

After the 2018 Supreme Court ruling however, the leagues took a 180-degree pivot and made up for lost time as fast as their legs could carry them. 

In his article. McKay Collins uses a wonderful literary metaphor (no, not Shakespeare) to suggest why the highest court of the land in their infinite wisdom, may have not made the right decision. You'll have to read the article to find out why. 

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that legalized betting is a boon for the sports business. Much as they'd like to depend on the love of the game folks like my son and me, there just aren't enough of us around to turn much of a profit. Sure, fans will always tune in to their favorite teams' games, but how many folks would spend their valuable free time watching a meaningless late-season game between two teams they have no particular interest in? 

But if they have a wager on that game, well that's another story. 

Which is where the demand to get the calls absolutely right comes in. Back in the good ol' days when sports leagues distanced themselves from gambling, they could go on as they always had, letting human beings imperfect as they are, make the calls, then shrug their shoulders claiming that bad calls are simply a part of the game. But now that the leagues and the sports gambling companies are virtually tied at the hip, ** any bad call, even the ones that have little or no impact on the outcome of a game, will send a red flag to bettors that the games may not be completely on the up and up. 

As McKay Collins points out in his article, betting has been around as long as competitive sports. And as I've pointed out a number of times in this space, betting is the reason that spectator sports such as baseball exist in the first place, If not taken to problematic extremes, sports betting can be a fun social activity and bonding experience, just ask the tens of millions of Americans who at this moment have their own bracket or ten entered in the office NCAA Basketball Tournament pool. 

Baseball is a game that lends itself perfectly to betting, perhaps more than any other with the possible exception of American football. Since a baseball game can be broken down by each pitch, betting lines can be set up for any number of occurrences, most of which have nothing to do with the outcome of the game.   

That makes me think of my greatest moment of clairvoyance at a baseball game. I was sitting in the left field bleachers at Wrigley Field one sunny weekday afternoon when the Cubs' late Hall of Fame second baseman Ryne Sandburg was up to bat. With runners on base and a three ball and no strike count on him, I made the comment to my friends, presumably heard by several other folks within earshot: "Do you think he's going to swing at the next pitch?" 

General baseball logic says that batters shouldn't swing at a 3-0 pitch. But I assumed Sandburg would, given that a pitcher not wanting to walk the batter, will often deliver a nice fat pitch up the middle that a great hitter like Sandburg could take advantage of. Which naturally he did, launching a drive that landed in the seats not far from where we were sitting. I looked like a genius, if only I had put money on that claim. 

I bring it up because that moment is stuck in my memory, unlike all the other times I made similar comments only to have the batter take that 3-0 pitch for ball four. Those memories are long lost within the recesses of my brain. If I had placed bets all those times, I'd be deep in the hole.

Which is precisely why I don't bet on sports, I have far too many other methods to part with my money thank you very much.

Needless to say, I'm perfectly happy enjoying stress-free experiences at the old ballpark which I hope to do at least a few times this season with my kids God willing. And yes, I'll be keeping score.

Which means the only thing I'll have to worry about is a team sending more than nine batters up to the plate in a single inning, thereby messing up my tidy scorecard. 

I can't wait.

Play ball!

* Of course, no system is perfect, but it's safe to say that the A.B.S. is more accurate in calling balls and strikes than umpires. For me the best part is when the automated system proves the umpires right.

** If you don't believe that the sports leagues and the betting companies are tied-at-the-hip, next time you watch a game on TV, note the number of times you'll see an ad for an on-line betting site. 

That Voice

On the day after of the passing of the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr, I found myself driving to work after a treatment at the University of Chicago Hospital, just a stone's throw from Rainbow/PUSH headquarters, the organization that Jackson founded in 1971. It dawned on me that morning that we had just lost the last significant figure in American history that has remained a constant, relevant presence on the scene since my childhood.

Rev. Jackson first appeared on my radar in 1968, in the terrible days following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I was not quite ten years old at the time.

Like a figure out of central casting with his athletic 6'4" frame, his charisma, his endless supply of self-confidence, his movie star good looks soon to feature feature an impressive afro, and his preference for casual attire, Jesse Jackson cast a stark contrast to the more conservative, buttoned-down image of Dr. King and most of his other associates who would try to fill the void after the great Civil Rights icon's death. 

In a word, the rough-around-the-edges Jesse Jackson was the personification of cool.

On top of that, while he may have lacked some of his mentor's gravitas, Jackson was an equally gifted orator, whose delivery and rhetoric had the power to move people to tears, to anger and most important, to action.

All of that in time contributed to Jesse Jackson's inheriting the role as the de facto leader of the American Civil Rights movement.

Of course, he wasn't Dr. King, something he no doubt was reminded of endlessly since April 4, 1968. The one thing he happily lacked in abundance was MLK's most distinctive trait, the role of martyr.

That 's clear even in our day as folks you know damned sure would have excoriated Martin Luther King when he was alive, trip over themselves to praise the dead icon today. 

They don't trip over themselves like that for Jesse Jackson and his own successors.

That said, I've had plenty of occasions over the past 58 years to roll my own eyes over some of the antics of Jesse Jackson, especially the tendency he had to never to shy away from attention. I wasn't alone, in a 1972 article in the Chicago Sun Times, columnist Mike Royko dubbed him "Jetstream Jesse." 

Lest you think those are the opinions of two old white guys grumbling about black people "who don't know their place", no less a figure than Martin Luther King himself was skeptical about the effects Jackson's over-the-top personal ambition and arrogance would have on the movement he led.

Was Jackson a self-serving, attention seeking prima donna? Of course he was. And I might add, we are all the better for it.   

Now it's time for you to roll your eyes at me. Reverend Jackson happened to pass away as I was in the middle of writing my last post, looking for insights from William Shakespeare on the political situation we find ourselves in today.

Wouldn't you know it, the Bard has some insight on Jesse Jackson's ambition as well. 

In Act II Scene 1 of the play Julius Caesar, one of the plotters in the plan to assassinate the great Caesar says this: 

I have not known when his affections swayed
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.

Shakespeare uses the word "ambition" sparingly in his plays but when he does, it is always as a negative trait, much like we would use the term "power hungry" today. Here Brutus is expressing his fear that Caesar has the ambition to become king, something the people of Rome during the time of the Republic stood steadfast against. He is offering no evidence of this, but rather points to examples of aspiring tyrants cultivating the trust of the lower classes, in Roman terms the plebeians, only to turn their backs on them once they ascend that ladder of ambition.

After Brutus and his fellow conspirators assassinate Caesar, the crowd at first is drawn to their side when Brutus makes their case. Then Mark Antony, a strong supporter of Caesar's is allowed by Brutus to speak to the crowd. At first he seems to take the conspirators' side:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

But he goes on to brilliantly dismantle their argument piece by piece until by the end of his speech, the crowd demands the heads of the conspirators. First, Antony points out Caesar's commitment to Rome and its people:

He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

In other words, Caesar could have pocketed all of the spoils of war for himself, but he didn't.  

One of the most substantial differences between Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, contrary to their relative appearances, is that Dr. King was highly skeptical of capitalism and advocated for the complete redistribution of wealth. Were he alive today he would be branded a radical socialist. 

On the other hand, Jesse Jackson believed that the most practical way to lift people out of poverty, was to reform capitalism, opening it up to provide opportunities for the disadvantaged. In that vein he successfully challenged both Wall Street and Silicon Valley which helped many people of color and women become financially successful. Had he played his cards right, through those connections he made with big business, he could easily have made himself a very wealthy man, but he didn't.

Next in Mark Antony's speech, he testified to Caesar's commitment to the poor: 

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

I don't think I need to add anything here regarding Jesse Jackson's commitment to the poor. That is self evident, especially after he made it to the top of that ladder of ambition. He was fond of saying: "Don't look down on anyone, unless you're trying to lift them up." His commitment extended to the downtrodden, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised of all colors, including the LGBT community, back when it was not popular to do so.

Finally Marc Antony addressed the chief concern of the conspirators, Caesar's kingly ambitions:

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Jesse Jackson indeed had lofty ambitions, which in our time we don't necessarily see as a bad thing. He ran twice for the nomination of the Democratic Party to be their candidate for president, in 1984 and 1988. The odds against him winning the presidency however, especially in 1984 against an extremely popular incumbent, Ronald Reagan were enormous. The man who won the Democratic nod that year, former vice president Walter Mondale, lost the general election in a landslide. 

I have little doubt that in his heart of hearts, Jesse Jackson knew he didn't stand a chance to win the presidency those years. And yet, his were two of the most significant presidential campaigns in modern American history as they created a seismic shift in national politics, opening doors for people who before never would have stood a chance for success in American politics. Jackson never got to that promised land, but many successful lawmakers, governors, one Speaker of the House, one Vice President and one President of the United States did, all while standing upon Jesse Jackson's broad shoulders. 

Here is the closing of Jackson's 1988 Keynote Address to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, not far from Ebenezer Baptist Church where Dr. King began his career and where his final resting place is. In this clip you'll find a full display of Jackson's compassion, his empathy, his powerful oratory, his self-confidence, his desire to bring people of all races together..... and yes his audacity and his self-importance, with perhaps a little blarney thrown in for good measure. 

It's all there. 

But I dare you to watch this and not be moved to tears. 

Without Jesse Jackson's passion, his insight, and especially his chutzpah, what would we have left? Most likely the guy who ended up winning the Democratic nomination that year and went on to be trounced in the general election in November, Michael Dukakis.

With all due respect of course.

The tag phrase that comes out at the end of the clip, "Keep hope alive" will more than likely be Jesse Jackson's epitaph. But there is another phrase of his that I will forever associate with him: 

"I am somebody"

Like another truism that was coined much later, in a perfect world, "I am somebody" should never have had to have been said. But our world is far from perfect and for far too long, black people were treated like nobodies in a country where black lives didn't matter.

I don't remember the first time I heard Jesse Jackson deliver that line in call-and-response fashion that is so common in the black church, but it couldn't have been long after I first became aware of him. I realized immediately that he wasn't only speaking to his audience in the room, he was also speaking to me, a white kid who had just moved with his family to a new neighborhood, and to a new school where my new classmates made me feel like an outsider, a nobody.

At a very young age, it was from that moment on I knew that despite all the baggage he may have carried with him, Jesse Jackson was the real deal.

Today, the day of Jesse Jackson's public going home ceremony on the far South Side of Chicago, back at the hospital about a mile from where he will be laid to rest tomorrow, I had the opportunity to ring a bell signifying my completing twenty sessions of radiation therapy. At that moment, Jesse Jackson's voice saying  "Keep Hope Alive" took on an entirely new meaning to me. 

That voice, the voice of my generation and several to follow, is the voice of the conscience of our nation. It is a voice that death will not silence, not as long as people are willing to listen.

Winter II

He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.

He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for the notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.

He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination, He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble or wince in pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult.  These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than he desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. 

Excerpt from Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. by Stephen Greenblatt.

Now who could that possibly be about? If you read my first post of this year titled Winter of Our Discontent. you can probably guess this passage describes the character of King Richard III from the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. *1

If you haven't read the post (you can find it here), these words might remind you of someone else.

And if that someone else happens to be the current occupant of the White House, the resemblance is not an accident. Although he doesn't address any current political figure by name, Dr. Greenblatt's Tyrant was published in 2018, well into the first administration of this POTUS.  And if there were any doubt where he's going with all of this, other passages in Greenblatt's chapter on Richard, and indeed elsewhere in the book, include obvious clues such as references to "the adults in the room" and "making England great again".

There's a long history of Shakespeare productions where the characters hint at real life, often contemporary figures. A 2012 production of Julius Caesar at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis was set in modern times with the title role performed by an actor who was made up to resemble the current president at the time, Barack Obama. Then in 2017, The Shakespeare in the Park Festival in New York City featured a production of the same play, the lead character again resembling the current president, this time sporting a much too long red tie and a ridiculous combover.

Needless to say, halfway through the play, the character dressed as the current POTUS in both productions is assassinated. 

Before that happens, this is what he says:

I could be well moved, if I were as you.
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;
They are all fire and every one doth shine.
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion; and that I am he
Let me a little show it, even in this:
That I was constant Cimber should be banished,
And constant do remain to keep him so.

Then he gets stabbed by members of the Senate including some of his closest allies for being shall we say, a little too full of himself, as is so often the case with tyrants. *2

It's no secret that presidents have enormous egos and no small amount of arrogance; that's in the job description. And while it may be a bit of a stretch to take this beautiful late 16th century verse and place it in the mouths of contemporary politicians, the spirit fits both 44 and 45/47.

For example, who said the following?

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

Perhaps not whom you might think. What about this?

I alone can fix it.

Both statements capture the hubris of that quote from Julius Caesar, making both presidents candidates to have the role of Julius Caesar, if not his eloquence modeled upon them.

Bits and pieces of attributes of all sorts of Shakespearean characters can be associated with real people, perhaps none more than the current president. King Lear is a good example.

For starters, there's little secret of this POTUS's vanity and narcissism. 

At the opening of Shakespeare's play, the eighty-something Lear announces his plan to go into semi-retirement, leaving the day-to-day running of his kingdom to his three daughters. Lear's plan is that each daughter's share of the kingdom will be determined by her public display of love for him. What follows could pass for a Cabinet meeting in the current White House, with the daughters, two of them anyway, each waxing poetically about their deep respect, love and affection for their old man. Spoiler alert, they're both lying. The third daughter, well I'll get to her in a moment.  

One can imagine after that scenario; things don't work out so well. A couple acts later, Lear finds himself stranded out of doors, having been expelled by one of his ungrateful daughters and left defenseless in the middle of a horrific storm. 

In the following passage, I can't help be reminded of the time the current president attempted to change the course of a hurricane with the swipe of his magic Sharpie.  Here is Lear admonishing the elements:

Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the
cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking
thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.

We could see signs of his creeping dementia before, but this tells us once and for all that he is now completely off his rocker. 

But wait a minute, am I talking about Lear or the POTUS? 

Take your pick.

Unlike the senile Lear, I'm sure this POTUS would love to be compared to Julius Caesar. But other than having been a charismatic populist leader with authoritarian tendencies, sporting a combover to boot, Julius Caesar was also a great military leader and a brilliant writer. The current POTUS well, not so much.

Shakespeare gives us very little in the way of a backstory for the first eighty or so years of the fictitious King Lear's life. Was he a good king or not? We'll never know because in terms of the story, it's irrelevant.

But even in his decrepitude, during brief moments of clarity, Lear turns out to be a wonderfully complex character, not the one-dimensional cartoon villain we've come to expect from our current POTUS.

I've contemplated a couple times in this space about possible antecedents in classic literature for this president and have concluded that one would be better off looking in the fables of Aesop rather the plays of Shakespeare. *3

But the one character in Shakespeare who comes closest to being a one-dimensional cartoon villain, at least among the characters with the title of "King" in front of their name, is Richard III. 

One aspect of the character of this POTUS that Stephen Greenblatt overlooks, because his book was written before it surfaced, is his desire for retribution.

We learn right at the outset of Shakespeare's play that the motivation behind Richard's treachery is his desire for retribution at the entire world, for having been born disabled.

Here are the first lines of The Tragedy of King Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. 

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—

This is Richard telling us that he cannot share the great joy of the peace brought to England by his brother, King Edward IV, because of Richard's bitterness and shame over his own physical condition, so horrible that even dogs bark upon first sight of him. 

Therefore... 

...since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate, the one against the other;
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mewed up
About a prophecy which says that “G” *4
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.

Richard lives up to his promise by disposing of everyone who stands between himself and the throne. And unlike Macbeth who is forever burdened with crippling guilt over his own treachery, Richard carries out his dreadful work with no remorse, but with aplomb, and even sheer delight.

As I pointed out in the earlier post, in Shakespeare's time, the physical deformations Richard suffered from were considered windows into the soul, peering into an equally deformed personality which would by nature explain his behavior. 

Today of course we see physical afflictions separately from the personality, however with the potential given the wrong circumstances.to contribute to the psychological profile of the personality. In Richard's case, the wrong circumstance proved to be his mother, a real piece of work, who from his birth, never concealed her disgust over her youngest son. It was she who informs him during the play that it would have been better had he not been born. 

Not too hard then to understand what made him such a loathsome creature.

I've heard this president's niece Mary, a psychologist by trade, describe her uncle's somewhat complicated relationship with his own mother, so there's maybe another connection between the two.

What are we all to learn of this? After all, in our time as in Shakespeare's, vile creatures such as these are a dime a dozen.

It only gets interesting when we contemplate why people follow such characters and ultimately their orders, thereby turning merely despicable people into tyrants.

In his book, Stephen Greenblatt using the example of Richard III's "enablers", divides them  into several categories. Again, it's a little hard to tell in the book where Richard III ends and the current POTUS begins, so here I've compressed his categories into five using my own labels followed by quotes from the author, then my comments on the enablers of the POTUS:

The duped. Those who are "genuinely fooled by Richard, crediting his claims, believing in his pledges, taking at face value his displays of emotion." These are the prime targets for populist demagogues, folks who are swayed by emotional appeals to their desires and prejudices. In our time, these folks could be referred to as the Base.

The scared. "Those who feel frightened or impotent in the face of bullying and the menace of violence." The obvious contemporary counterparts are the Republicans in Congress who express their disdain for the president in private but wouldn't dare cross him in public, lest they fall victim to one of his vicious tantrums and real threats of endorsing another candidate, resulting in ending not their lives as Richard's enablers who went astray, but their cushy political careers. 

The dismissive. Those who figure "He's kind of a joke. He can't be this bad, there will always be enough adults in the room." These are the folks who once believed that our system of government under the Constitution was stronger than any potential tyrant. There were plenty of these working in the Executive Branch during the POTUS's first term, but none of them are left. To quote the last line of Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci: "La comedia è finita."

The cynical. Those "who persuade themselves that they can take advantage of him... watching the casualties mount with cool indifference". This would include pretty much everyone working in the administration today with the exception of the following group.

The thugs. Here I'll quote directly from the book: 

Finally there is a motley crowd of those who carry out his orders, some reluctantly but simply eager to avoid trouble, others with gusto, hoping to take something along the way for themselves, still others enjoying the cruel game of making his targets, often high in the social hierarchy, suffer and die. The aspiring tyrant never lacks for such people, in Shakespeare and, from what I can tell, in life."

On second thought, the line between the last two categories seems quite blurred, if it exists at all. 

Three characters in this president's cabinet who are clearly defined by both categories immediately stand out to me. They are the current (at this writing) Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Director of Homeland Security, all of whom seem to take pleasure, or at least express indifference, in the suffering and yes, even the death of the targets of this president.

The amazing thing about the time we are living in, is that there is a new source of inspiration for these political posts of mine virtually every day.

One example: as I was conceiving this post last week, the Attorney General testified before Congress regarding her Department of Justice's handling of the Epstein Files. 

As members of Congress including a few brave Republicans tried to get to the bottom of why she and her department are stonewalling the complete release of the files, the AG armed with her "burn books" filled with information she deemed unflattering to the lawmakers who world question her,  mocked, chastised, obfuscated, pouted, twiddled her thumbs and did everything possible to avoid answering any questions. It was such a pathetic and embarrassing performance for her and the administration that Fox News refused to broadcast it.

But as they say, it was a performance for one, her boss, who must have been pleased because despite the fact that just about everybody, Democrat and Republican alike in Washington is demanding her head, at this point she still has her job.

And what did she do that pleased him so? She sang his praises at every opportunity. As a handful of Epstein's victims looking for justice stood directly behind her, she took pains to ignore them, then went on to point out, how her boss is the greatest president this nation has ever had (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln be damned), and how well the Stock Market is doing, among other non-sequiturs.

From an article published last September in the online magazine Medium, Leigh Silverton writes that this AG "has the diction of a high-school guidance counselor and the moral compass of a slot machine." She goes on: The president "of course adores her". This AG "is what you get when you cross Lady Macbeth with a press secretary and give her a Sephora gift card."

Another Shakespeare reference. But I'm afraid Ms. Silverton here is giving the AG a little too much credit. Lady Macbeth was the brains behind her husband's treachery; she pulled all the strings, while the AG, at least for now, is a mere apparatchik. I'd save the Lady Macbeth role in this administration for the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, the little man who bears a strong resemblance to Joseph Goebbels, both physical and ideological. 

For the Shakespeare version of this AG, I'd pick King Lear's second daughter Regan. If you recall, the King offered his daughters pieces of his kingdom, based upon how much each expresses her love for him.

The eldest daughter Goneril goes first:

Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter, 

 Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, 

Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, 

No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; 

As much as child e’er loved, or father found; 

A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable. 

Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

Next comes the middle daughter Regan who essentially says: "yeah what she said, yet ever so much more." 

And the king, like the president, was very much pleased.

Yet this president should take heed as these two are the daughters who when push came to shove, betrayed their father, leaving him out in the cold to face the tempest on his own.

The third daughter, Cordelia, the king's favorite up to that point, would not give in to her father's vainglory. When it came her turn to speak, she told it like it is:

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth.

I love your Majesty According to my bond, no more nor less. 

You have begot me, bred me, loved me. 

I return those duties back as are right fit: 

Obey you, love you, and most honor you. 

Why have my sisters husbands if they say They love you all? 

Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry 

Half my love with him, half my care and duty. 

For this affront to the king's ego, he banishes his beloved daughter.

Inspired by Cordelia, and by events that have taken place since Dr. Greenblatt's book was published, I'm adding another category to his list of enablers, the true believers who nevertheless have a limit. For these people, despite their commitment to the cause, there is a line of truth, decency and morality which they will not cross.

The two prime candidates for this category that immediately come to mind are former representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Chaney. They may not quite fit the mold of true believers, yet as Republican lawmakers during this president's first term, both of them voted overwhelmingly along with his agenda. Yet their first commitment was to the Constitution and to the rule of law, and when the president set in motion an insurrection to overturn an election he wasn't happy about losing, they, unlike most of their Republican counterparts, world not go along with it, and paid a heavy price. Did I mention they are former lawmakers?

Dare I say another former lawmaker, one who was surely in the true believer camp, is Marjorie Taylor Greene, at one-point hands down the president's most ardent supporter in Congress. Yet she was moved by the victims of Jefferey Epstein and could not stand by silently as the administration refused to give them justice by protecting the powerful wrongdoers who abused them. For that, like Cordelia she was labeled a traitor by the president and knowing she could not survive reelection without his support, resigned from Congress. 

As we live in a democratic republic, a tyrant has no power over us without the will of the people, at least initially. This president, despite a long public history of corruption, illegal activity, much of it directed against the Constitution and our system of government, as well as other misdeeds, legitimately won two out of three national elections, receiving even in defeat in the third, the support of over 70 million voters who shrugged all that off, as they had other issues more important to them. 

Which in a democracy is their prerogative.

Yet after the tragedy that befell the Twin Cities last month where American citizens were murdered by federal agents, all in the name of rounding up and deporting as many "undocumented" human beings as they could get their hands on, I must say it's more than a little disheartening to hear folks brush it all off by saying "Well, that's what I voted for."

Not surprisingly, Shakespeare has something to say about that too.

I'll leave the last word for him and his greatest living interpreter: *5

NOTES:

*1) It's important to emphasize here the phrase "the character of King Richard III" to distinguish it from the historical King Richard as there is much debate over how much (or more likely how little) the character in Shakespeare's play resembles the real person. For more on this, please refer to my earlier post on the subject. 

*2) For more on the Minneapolis and the New York productions of Julius Caesar, check out this post.

*3) Here's my post with the Aesop connection.

*4) Here Richard has fomented the rumor of a plot by his brother the Duke of Clarence, (Clarence for short) to kill their brother the King. Clarence's real name is George, hence the reference to "'G' of Edward's heirs the murderer should be." The next scene, a perplexed George, Duke of Clarence is in custody being led to the Tower of London, while feigning confusion, Richard asks him on what charges. "Because my name is George" was Clarence's reply. Many thanks to my friend Steve for catching my error.  

*5) From The Stephen Colbert Show which aired this past February 4. Click here to see the entire segment featuring Sir Ian McKellen, 26 minutes well spent.

Defending the Indefensible

I began writing my penultimate post titled The Winter of Our Discontent this past January 6th, on the fifth anniversary of one of American's darkest days, the day of the insurrection at the United States Capitol Building. That event and the subsequent actions of this current administration, rewriting (whitewashing if you prefer) that day's history, inspired me to write about another case of rewriting history, namely the story of King Richard III of England. 

Little did I know the next day, January 7th, would be another day of infamy for this country, and would unfortunately provide even more inspiration for that post. It was the day Renee Macklin Good was murdered by a federal agent on the streets of Minneapolis.

Like so many of the events in the news lately, I learned about the killing from my news junkie mother who called me at work to tell me that ICE had just shot and killed a woman in the Twin Cities. What struck me was how much the story sounded like an event that took place last September in a suburb of Chicago where a man was shot dead by ICE as he drove away while they were trying to apprehend him. The "official" version of that story was as the man was driving away, one of the agents was dragged along by his car (not quite sure how that is possible), and fearing for his life, the ICE guy shot the man dead. 

It sounded suspicious and in normal times an event such as that would have been investigated and remained in the news cycle for at least a couple weeks. But in this shitstorm of chaos we've been living through since the return of this administration a year ago, something else came up that grabbed all the attention, the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Anyway just like in Chicago, a similar story, a woman gets shot as she uses her vehicle as a weapon against officers, almost killing one of them. So said the director of Homeland Security at a press conference where she inexplicably sported an enormous cowboy hat. The president chimed in saying the officer was taken to the hospital and we are all praying for his survival and a speedy recovery from the terrible tragedy that befell him. 

Later that day when I had a free moment, I googled "ICE shooting in Minneapolis." I clicked on the first link to come up which happened to be a live feed from Fox News. What they were showing was the aftermath of the shooting with I'd say several dozen angry demonstrators confronting masked ICE agents in their para-military getups who were throwing cannisters of tear gas into the crowd. 

As could be expected, the Fox reporter on the scene was denouncing the protestors, blaming the civil disorder on the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis for not cooperating with and protecting the federal authorities. Little was said about the shooting however, other than the remarks from the cowgirl with the ten gallon hat. This is what she had to say:

It was an act of domestic terrorism.

Our officers were out in enforcement action, (and) got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out their vehicles when a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and rammed them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him and my understanding is that she was hit and is deceased. 

Here's the video in case you think I'm making it up or taking her words out of context.

Although videos of the shooting had already surfaced, Fox in their infinite wisdom did not choose to show them, at least not while I was watching.

As I've become skeptical about virtually everything I see or read on Fox, I assumed they weren't telling the complete story, but I did assume that at least some of what they said in this case had a trace of credibility.

It wasn't until I got home and actually saw the videos that I realized everything coming out of the cowgirl's mouth at that press conference, except the part about the victim being deceased, was a bold faced lie, even the part about the cars being stuck in the snow.

I assume that by now you dear reader like the whole world have seen the multiple videos of Renee Good's murder, and how the whole notion of her attacking ICE agents with her vehicle as they were stuck in the snow is preposterous.

If by chance you haven't seen the videos, by all means do, you won't have any problem finding them online.

From those videos, all of them, you realize that without a shred of doubt, Renee Good did not ram her vehicle into anybody.

You've seen how she turned her steering wheel to the right to avoid hitting the man who would kill her, and how he recklessly and foolishly did something you are taught on day one of Police Academy never to do, he placed himself in front of her car. And you've no doubt seen how Renee Good's last act on earth as captured by the cellphone of her murderer, was smiling and telling him that she's not mad at him. 

Those were probably her last words before she was shot and then presumably unconscious, rammed her car into a another car.

And if you saw the video captured by her murderer's cellphone, you no doubt heard him call the woman he had just mortally wounded a "fucking bitch."

Horrifying as Renee Good's murder was, even worse was the administration's reaction to it. While they obviously had to revise the cowgirl's initial depiction of events, they doubled down on the domestic terrorism part, insisting that Renee Good and her wife who was present at the scene were up to no good. And while not saying it in so many words, this administration by their acts and deeds convinced many Americans that Ms. Good deserved to die.

As far as conducting an honest and thorough investigation into the shooting as should and would happen in any civilized society, the Feds banned state authorities from investigating the crime, AND instead of investigating the acts of the shooter, they conducted investigations of the victim and her spouse. 

I say the government's reaction was worse than the killing itself because by their inaction, the administration explicitly gave ICE agents the license to kill, which they they took full advantage of last Saturday, not far from where they killed Renee Good. 

Again it was my mother who broke the news, this time as my son and I visited her. "Did you hear what happened?" she asked.

This time watching on her TV, the cowgirl, without the signature hat, addressed the nation in a press conference, telling us that the man, Alex Pretti, whom ICE agents just killed, was another domestic terrorist, this time one who was brandishing a gun and threatened ICE agents with it. According to her, he was set on doing grave bodily harm to law enforcement officials. Another high ranking member of the current administration, the one who bears a strong resemblance to Joseph Goebbels, called the shooting victim a would-be-assassin.

Here is the cowgirl's press conference shortly after the death of Alex Pretti. I've chosen to link to a version of it in its entirety (rather the edited version) which includes remarks about other topics, so as not to take anything she said out of context.

This time I already saw videos of the shooting so I had an idea of what really happened. It was obvious from the get go that she was jiving. Alex Pretti did have a gun on him but at no time did he have his hands on it. The only thing he was "brandishing" was his cellphone, recording the men who were about to kill him.

When my mom left the room I asked my son to switch to Fox to see how they were covering the story.

Remember by this time, the videos of the shooting had already been widely shown, except of course on Fox, but I'm guessing even they in their heart of hearts knew that the government's version was bullshit.

So they had to come up with ways to defend the indefensible.

In the roughly ten minutes we watched Fox, I remember several points they made.

They keep making these points a week after Alex Pretti's murder:

1. Most of the demonstrators we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis are in fact, outside agitators.
2. Why aren't the people in the streets protesting the deaths of (fill in names of victims of violent acts committed by illegal immigrants).
3. Why was Alex Pretti carrying a gun?
4. The Feds sent ICE to other cities where the citizens there did not respond in protest as did the people of Minneapolis.
5. The actions of the government are acceptable because the American people elected a president who promised to rid this country of illegal immigrants.  
6. Why don't the protesters stay at home and let law enforcement officials just do their jobs?

Let's look at these points one by one:

Number one on the list is one of this president's favorite tropes which he uses every time he's asked about the unrest in cities like Minneapolis.

It's merely a smokescreen to discredit the protesters and to trivialize the real anger and sense of betrayal by their government which is prevalent among them. As is common with this president, he presents no evidence to back up his accusations. Why? Because there is no evidence of paid outside agitators at these protests. 

Number two is one of the favorite tactics of the MAGA crowd, cherry picking real tragedies and using them as anecdotal evidence to pin the blame on entire communities for the actions of a few. In the case of Minneapolis, the administration is using a fraud scheme allegedly perpetrated by members of the local Somali community, to demand that all Somali refugees (whom the president collectively labeled as "garbage") be sent back to their war torn country.

People of good will by nature are appalled and mourn individuals who lose their lives to violence of any kind. This is not a case of valuing the lives of Renee and Alex over the lives of other crime victims. The difference is we know the killers of the people MAGA mentions were undocumented because they have been identified, apprehended and presumably ended up in jail. Of course that doesn't bring these poor folks back but at least they and their families received some justice.

By contrast, that's not the case of the murderers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti who have also been identified but as of yet anyway, have not been held accountable. What's more, these killers are public servants who draw their paychecks from our tax dollars. By extension, that means Good and Pretti were killed in our name.

I'm not OK with that, are you?

The anger of people in the Twin Cities, all over the nation, and indeed in much of the rest of the world, is about justice, pure and simple. That shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

I happen to agree with point number three, that is, had Alex Pretti not been carrying a gun that morning, he'd probably be alive today, although possibly still in the hospital due to the thrashing he received from the ICE agents and the chemicals they sprayed into his face. My opinion has always been that private citizens have no business carrying firearms in public, concealed or open. As a matter of fact, I'm delighted that MAGA agrees with me on this issue and maybe we can get together to come up with a plan that puts an end to this dangerous activity. 

Are you with me on that MAGA? 

I didn't think so. The irony is so thick on this one, you'd need a chainsaw to cut through it. Agree with the law or not on this issue and I certainly don't, Alex Pretti was well within his legal rights to carry a gun.

Number four is a point I keep hearing from Republican legislators who while publicly expressing dismay over these two murders, apparently feel the need to throw a bone at their MAGA base. But saying other cities who've had ICE sent their way, haven't protested the way Minneapolitans have, is like a father saying "I don't get it, I beat all my children equally, but only little Johnny seems to have a problem with it. What's wrong with that kid?"

Number five is particularly interesting as it really cuts to the chase about how our government is supposed to work. Yes, elections as Barak Obama pointed out early in his first administration have consequences. And yes, the majority gets to pick who represents them in government while the minority has to accept that fact that not everything the government does will be to their liking.

But the minority has the right to expect that what the government does will be in accordance with the law as spelled out in the Constitution, and can expect that their own rights and the rights of others will not be violated. 

In the case of the mass deployment of ICE agents in cities across the nation, those agents are not the police and are not the military, meaning they do not have the authority of either. Their charge is to investigate and if necessary, detain and deport individuals who are in the country illegally, after they receive due process, that's it. 

This gang of thugs is going much farther however, stopping people on the street, undocumented and American citizens alike, including children, demanding proof of their citizenship. People are being held in detention centers without being formally charged with anything, and people are being deported, at times to countries they have no connection to, without due process, all in violation of the law, not to mention plain human decency. 

During the last election, the current president claimed the focus on the purge would be people who have committed serious crimes. And yet in their purges of immigrant communities, ICE members don't discriminate; anyone who appears to be from someplace else, especially if they happen to have black or brown skin including irony of ironies, Native American people, stands the risk of being stopped for no other reason by these goons, and if they don't have the papers to prove on the spot that they are either citizens or are here "legally" as immigrants, they are in for serious consequences. 

I had that happen to me in Russia, par for the course over there I figured. But never in my wildest dreams did I think it could happen here. 

The fact is, it gets to be a little tricky when a government who is supposed to enforce the law, willfully ignores or outright breaks it. Then what?

Which brings us to point number six, why don't these people just mind their own business and let the law enforcers do their job?

That question reminds me of the second most heart wrenching scene from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit which is set in a German town near the close of the Second World War. In the scene, Jojo, a young boy about ten years of age and his mother walk into the town square to encounter a ghastly scene, four townspeople hanging from a gallows. 

"What did they do?" Jo Jo asked his mother.

Her response is just as relevant today as it was for the time and place the film was set. She said to her son:

"Whatever they could."

I know MAGA folks get offended when the administration they so dutifully support is compared to totalitarian regimes of the past.

But anyone with a modicum of knowledge of history can easily see parallels between the actions of this administration and those of dictatorships of the past and indeed, those of the present.

Case in point, just one of many: This administration is claiming that the deployment to cities of thousands of members of para military force is a good faith effort to improve the safety of the people who live in the places where they are sent. 

Wouldn't logic tell you that any good faith effort by the Feds aimed towards public safety would involve providing help by working with local law enforcement officials rather than having thousands of poorly trained wannabe bad asses descend on a city without the local officials being consulted? 

Think of it this way, if your house had mice, one thing you might do is get a cat. You obviously wouldn't get a mountain lion because despite it being much more powerful than a domestic cat, a mountain lion wouldn't be as good as catching mice, and it certainly would create far more problems than it would solve. 

The Minneapolis Police Department has 600 officers. Over 3,000 ICE agents have been deployed to the city. Sounds to me like a mountain lion where a cat would be much more effective. Here's a little bit of anecdotal evidence that might back that up; so far this year there have been three homicides in Minneapolis, and two of those were committed by federal agents. 

Doesn't sound like they're helping much as far as public safety goes. 

Call the people in the current administration whatever you like, but they're not idiots. They're sending mountain lions to cities like LA, Chicago and Minneapolis to name just three knowing full well the damage they're causing those places. That's the point. 

In his 2024 campaign for president, the current occupant of the White House made a most peculiar campaign promise. He said: "I will be your retribution." Finding the answer to why anyone would find that a sensible reason to vote for a presidential candidate is way beyond my pay grade, but by saying that, he made clear what his top priority was, to get back at all the people who pissed him off at one time or other. 

So far, he has made good on that promise. He has at least three gripes with Minnesota which very likely explains his deployment of mountain lions to that state. One of his most despised members of Congress is naturally one of his biggest critics, Ilhan Omar whose district includes Minneapolis. Omar herself is a Somalian refugee which may explain his particular bias against her fellow countrymen.

Next, he claims (of course without evidence) that he won the state of Minnesota in the past three presidential elections, despite the election results proving otherwise. He lost Minnesota three times. 

He's also pissed off at the governor who had the nerve of running on the ticket that opposed him in the last election. To add insult to injury, said governor called the then candidate for president something that he could not tolerate. I don't think he'd have a problem being called a wannabe dictator, a despot in waiting, or simply vile and cruel. In fact he'd probably concur on all of those labels. No, the thing Tim Walz called him that truly got under his skin was this, he called him "weird." 

That was the last straw.

It's obvious to me that this unnecessary deployment of thousands of federal agents to the state of Minnesota and especially to the Twin Cities is an attempt to intimidate and punish its elected officials and its residents. I'll go further to say it is also attempt to lure people into violence, (so far unsuccessful), which would empower him to declare a state of emergency and ultimately suspend upcoming elections. 

Far fetched you say? Well before January 6, 2021, if you had told me that thousands of rioters would at the behest of the president break into the Capitol Building in an attempt to overturn the election and to murder the vice president for his refusal to be complicit in their plan, I'd say that was pretty far fetched as well. 

If you can provide a reasonable argument refuting that, I'm all ears.

If not, then you're just going to have to accept that this is what dictators do.

We could all follow the advice of people like the current vice president who says that if we have a problem with the government, we should do what I do, that is write blogs and social media posts criticizing it.

But what we've seen in the past month is that without people being out in the streets, confronting and recording the acts of an out of control government as Renee Good, Alexi Pretti did and thousands like them continue to do, the rest of us would just have to take the word of the cowgirl, the Joseph Goebbels lookalike and the current occupant of the White House, and accept their blatant lies.

Which brings me full circle, back to the incident in Franklin Park, Illinois that took place last September. There was nobody there to record the killing of Silvero Villegas-Gonzalez, so consequently we haven't a clue exactly how or why he died. All we can assume after what went down this month in Minneapolis is that the "official" version is wrong. 

The difference between people like Renee Good, Alex Pretti, the folks out in the streets with their cellphones, and me, is that I am by and large a coward, while they are heroes.

That's why they don't just sit at home minding their own business.

Thank God for that.

Rest in Power Renee and Alex.