On this day in baseball history: May 2, 1939, Briggs Stadium, Detroit- The beginning of the end came a few days earlier after a routine ground ball. The first baseman struggled to get to the ball, then flipped it over to the pitcher Johnny Murphy covering first base. “Good play big guy”, Murphy said to his teammate. It occurred to Lou Gehrig that he was being patted on the back for making a play he used to be able to make in his sleep, but now was an effort. Gehrig had been declining for a few years, perhaps that case of lumbago he suffered back in 1934 was an early sign but no one knows for sure. His collapsing at spring training earlier that year was certainly an indication of what was to come.
But up until that day in Detroit when he told his manager Joe McCarthy that he was taking himself out of the lineup, Gehrig had played an astounding 2,130 consecutive games, earning him the nickname, The Iron Horse. In his prime, getting beaned by a pitch and rendered unconscious for five minutes didn't keep him out of the next game. Neither did that excruciating case of lumbago, nor the several fractures he sustained during his career, confirmed by the numbers of X-rays taken when the doctors were trying to find out what was wrong with him.
Everybody knows the rest of the story. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic discovered that Gehrig had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disease of the central nervous system that would take his life two years later.
Lou Gehrig Day
Yankee Stadium
July 4, 1939
July 4, Yankee Stadium- Gehrig would not play another game after that day in Detroit but would remain on the bench for the rest of the season serving as the team captain. Independence Day would be “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day” in New York. The ceremony took place between the games of a double header. Babe Ruth came back to his old digs to pay tribute to his friend. Mayor LaGuardia gave a speech, as did the Postmaster General. Gehrig gave his famous “Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth” speech and there was not a dry eye in the house.
Perhaps the most touching moment however came when Joe McCarthy holding back the tears, spoke directly to his stricken player and said:
...it was a sad day in the life of everyone who knew you when you came into my hotel room in Detroit and told me you were quitting as a ballplayer because you felt yourself a hindrance to the team. My God man you were never that.
On September 1st of that year, Hitler invaded Poland; two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany and the world would never again be the same. Even though the War was still a couple years away for most Americans, winning the World Series that year by sweeping the Reds, must have seemed quite empty indeed to Yankee fans.
I might have mentioned that I've been studying Spanish for the past year, trying once and for all correct my lifelong shame of not being able to speak a language other than English fluently. Some may argue that I can't even do that but that's beside the point.
One of my methods for learning the language is getting my hands on anything I can read that is at my reading level, around mid to upper intermediate. (Speaking is another story). Last week I googled "short stories in Spanish" and came across a site that contained classic short stories of the ages, the lion's share of which were a selection of Aesop's Fables. One of these ancient tales whose payoff is moral of the story, struck me as being relevant in our day.
The story was the "Goose that Laid the Golden Egg", except in the Spanish version, the ill fated bird was a gallina, a hen. In case you don't know the story, one day a farmer walks into his hen house (I'm telling the Spanish version of the story), and discovers that one of his hens has laid an egg of gold. Thinking this to be an anomaly, much to his surprise, the next day he returned to find another golden egg, the third day, the same and on and on for a few more days. "Hmmm..." the farmer thinks, "I could go on and on collecting eggs every day and eventually I'll become rich, or I could just kill the hen now, retrieve all the gold inside of her, and be fabulously rich now!"
So that's what he did. And he found nothing inside the hen other than your basic run of the mill chicken guts.
That's the story in its entirety, you probably don't need the moral spelled out for you.
Naturally the story reminded me of Donald Trump.
You probably don't need to have that spelled out for you either. The fact is, Donald Trump is not all that hard to figure out. His kind has been portrayed in children's stories to great literature, theater, opera, film, you name it from time immemorial. After all what would be melodrama be without diabolical, self serving, one dimensional, greedy bastards?
I'm not talking about classic villains like the Grinch or Scrooge, both of whom turn out to be somewhat complex characters who get redeemed in the end. Donald Trump is not the least bit complicated. It's funny how people accuse him of dishonesty and yes it's true he does lie a lot, but nobody, not even his supporters take his lies seriously. They are so numerous, so obvious and blatant that it seems as if even he is in on the joke.
For example, last week in one of his press "briefings" he contemplated the effectiveness of ingesting toxic bleach and disinfectant to kill the COVID-19 virus. Naturally he was pilloried by all but his most devout sycophants, and even some of them raised their eyebrows. The next day when questioned about it, he said he was being "sarcastic." He then refused to take responsibility for the several people who had to be hospitalized for following his suggestion, not thinking he was being sarcastic at all.
Actually Donald Trump is not the least bit dishonest, at least about is himself and the fact that he is an unrepentant schmuck.
With him there is no subtlety, it doesn't take much time observing him to know he's up to no good. He's more of a cartoon villain like Snidely Whiplash from the Dudley Dooright series, the guy who's always tying the fair maiden to the railroad tracks. There is no remorse from or redemption for him. Nor is there for Old Man Potter from the film It's a Wonderful Life. His character is not quite believable because he does not have one shred of decency in him, well at least not as portrayed in the movie.
Then there's Baron Scarpia, the chief of Police in Rome in search of the escaped political prisoner Angeloti in Puccini's opera Tosca. In the first act, Angeloti seeks refuge and the help of his friend and sympathiser Mario Cavaradosi. When the two meet and Angeloti brings up Scapia's name, Cavaradossi responds:
Scarpia? Bigotto satiro che affinacolle devote pratiche la foialibertina e strumentoal lascivo talentofa il confessore e il boia!La vita mi costasse, vi salverò!
Scarpia? That licentious bigot who exploits the use of religion as refinements for his libertine lust, and makes both the confessor and the hangman the servant of his wantonness! I'll save you, even should it cost my life!
Now THAT'S melodrama. And not a bad description of Trump either.
There is nothing Shakespearian about Trump.
Consider the following, which US president said these words:
One of the most cherished goals of our democracy is to assure every American an equal opportunity to lead a full and productive life.
In the last quarter century, we have made remarkable progress toward that goal, opening the doors to millions of our fellow countrymen who were seeking equal opportunities in education, jobs and voting.
Now it is time that we move forward again in still another critical area: health care. Without adequate health care, no one can make full use of his or her talents and opportunities. It is thus just as important that economic, racial and social barriers not stand in the way of good health care as it is to eliminate those barriers to a good education and a good job.
The same president accomplished the following:
Signed the first S.A.L.T. talks with the former Soviet Union, dramatically reducing the number of nuclear weapons
Dramatically increased salaries for federal employees
Implemented integration of public schools
Instituted “Wage and Price Controls” in an effort to slow down the rate of inflation (about as anti-Free Market a policy as there is)
Created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
Created the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Passed the Clean Air and Water Act
Expanded funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities
Appointed three Supreme Court Justices, all of whom voted in favor of Roe v. Wade, which was decided during his term.
That president was Richard Nixon.
Now there was a complex man. According to writer Nolan Dalla who describes Nixon as "perhaps the last great liberal president since FDR":
...behind his utter disregard for the U.S. Constitution...and the crimes which eventually became known as the Watergate scandal, (Nixon) was a highly-accomplished man of tremendous intellect and great potential.
The author, Jacob Weisberg contends that Clinton's character can't exactly be found in the pages of Shakespeare:
He has Falstaff’s appetites for food and fornication (without his humor or ironic wisdom). He has Prince Hal’s political ambition and disloyalty to his old friends (without his heroism or rhetorical eloquence). But Shakespeare isn’t right for Bill Clinton, who even in collapse lacks the grandeur of the Bard’s tragic heroes and the absurdity of his comic ones.
According to Weisberg, Clinton meets his match in the work of Phillip Roth:
Alexander Portnoy, after he outgrows his autoerotic obsession, works for the liberal John Lindsay administration in New York City and does his best to demonstrate his concern for the poor and the oppressed. Meanwhile, however, he is shacked up with a girlfriend he calls the Monkey, who fulfills his sexual fantasies but leaves him living in fear of tabloid scandal. Like Clinton, Portnoy is highly intelligent, mother-obsessed, and pretty much out of control. Another similarity: Portnoy flees to Israel when faced with crisis. Drawbacks: Portnoy is more of a neurotic and less of a liar.
Nixon and Clinton were flawed men who left mixed legacies, but even in their failures, they were still figures of great substance, men worthy of lofty, if not altogether flattering literary comparisons.
Trump on the other hand will leave no mixed legacy, that much I know. Storytellers going all the way back to Aesop's time and probably before have warned us about people like him.
His enduring legacy is that he will forever be remembered as the president who killed the chicken who laid the golden egg, nothing more, nothing less.
Who is this Dr. Ezike we keep hearing over the radio and TV every day, standing alongside Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and having the unenviable task of telling the good people of this state how many people have contracted the COVID-19 virus and how many we have lost in the past day?
Here's a brief bio that I came across on the web in of all places, the website of the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority:
Ngozi Ezike is acting director of the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH). Dr. Ezike is a board-certified internist and pediatrician who comes to IDPH from the Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH), where she served for more than 15 years. She also was medical director at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. Prior to joining CCDPH, Dr. Ezike served as Austin Health Center medical director where she actively engaged with the community on a variety of health initiatives. She also has delivered inpatient care at Stroger Hospital and primary and preventive care in community and school-based clinics.
Dr. Ezike is a national policy advisor on juvenile correctional health topics. She received a medical degree from University of California at San Diego and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvard University. Dr. Ezike also holds a management certificate from Harvard Business School and is an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Rush University.
Impressive credentials indeed, clearly this is a person who should be listened to, and is exactly where we need her to be as the voice of authority and reason to the people of this state, offering in a very comforting voice, at least in my opinion, hope for the future, and above all, the facts.
And she does this in English and Spanish.
Beyond this I know absolutely nothing about Dr. Ezike, there's no Wikipedia entry on her, at least not yet, nor any easily tracked profile about her from any of the local news outlets. This to me is a bit surprising as in our media saturated society, practically anyone who gets their 15 minutes of fame for any stupid reason gets their insignificant story and their mug plastered all over the web.
Yet Dr. Ezike has gotten at least five minutes of statewide coverage every day since the governor declared his shelter-in-place order to this state over one month ago. I'm not going to do the math, but she's gotten way more than her allotted 15 minutes.
My guess is that she's perfectly fine with that, simply doing what she she sees as her role as a public service with no other agenda, keeping us informed in as clear, calm, and compassionate manner as anyone on God's green earth could possibly do.
In my last post I commented on how the world changing in unimaginable ways since I last put fingers to the keyboard in this blog last month, made much of what I wrote utter nonsense. And yet...
I didn't get quite everything wrong in the last two posts of February, 2020.
For example in this post, I wrote about the importance of the African American vote. Lo and behold, Joe Biden who was all but left for dead when I wrote the post, won the South Carolina primary by a landslide against Bernie Sanders, largely thanks to the African American voters who turned out for him. In the same fashion, he won every other primary held in southern states as well as Michigan and Illinois. I also wrote that if African Americans turn out for the Democratic presidential candidate in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania anywhere close to the way they did for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, the Democrat will win the election.
Therefore the turnout in the African American community in the primaries must be positive news for the Democrats, except apparently Bernie Sanders supporters.
I wrote last month that many supporters of Bernie Sanders don't seem to be interested in voting for the Democratic candidate, if it is not Bernie Sanders. I said that does not bode well for the Democrats in November. Nearly a month later, with their candidate squarely against the ropes, little seems to have changed. I'm reading more Biden bashing from Bernie supporters than from Trump supporters.
The irony is that when Sanders was winning states and delegates early on in the Democratic primaries, both Sanders and his supporters demanded that the winner of the nomination be the candidate who ended up with the most primary votes, not the candidate hand picked by the Democratic National Committee. Now that Biden has a plurality of the vote, clearly a bona fide mandate, steadfast Bernieites are claiming there is still a conspiracy among Democrats which resulted in all the other serious candidates suspending their campaigns and throwing their support to Biden. But they fail to mention that even Sanders' most reliable base, young people, have all but abandoned him at the polls, even without the one candidate in the race who had a chance to siphon votes away from Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, who has not as yet offered an endorsement.
It's anybody's guess if the possible resurgence of the African American vote will offset the number of Bernie supporters taking their toys and going home by sitting out the election, but chances are they will because many Sanders' supporters did just that four years ago.
I'm adamant about this because the most important issue of our day by a long shot, the Coronavirus pandemic, has only emphasized the gross incompetence of the current president. Once again, given a golden opportunity to step up to the plate and prove his meddle as a leader, Donald Trump has struck out with two outs and the bases loaded.
Let me say at the outset, Trump is NOT responsible for the pandemic. That much is obvious. Less obvious is that he is not responsible for the current collapse of the stock market, although it would only seem fair that since he took so much credit for the good economy he inherited from his predecessor, he should take the blame for its downward swing under his watch. Don't hold your breath for that one folks.
But no, the pandemic is responsible for the current fall of the stock market, not Donald Trump.
That said, I do believe he hasn't helped at all either, and has probably exacerbated both.
First of all, two years ago his administration disbanded the National Security Council's entire global health security unit, the office set up by his predecessor after the Ebola outbreak. Had it been in place, it would have been an essential resource to coordinate government efforts in recognizing the problem early, and taking adequate measure to insure necessary items such as test kits medical masks and other personal protection equipment essential to keep the people on the front lines, health workers safe, would be readily available at a moment's notice. Well its turns out that we are behind the eight ball at the moment, as there is a critical shortage of all those items. Of course hindsight is always twenty-twenty and I'm sure there were valid arguments at the time to close or re-arrange duties in an office that may have become top-heavy. But when asked about the disbanding of the office at a press conference, Trump said that was a nasty question, and that he didn't even know the office had been disbanded. Naturally videos emerged from a couple years ago showing Trump announcing the closing of the office.
Much more serious is that evidence points to the fact that Trump understood the severity of the pandemic as early as January, yet he publicly denied that Coronavirus was any more serious than yearly strains of influenza, until two months later. One could argue that the president didn't want to cause panic among the American people. On the other hand as has become obvious, by not acting sooner, by not influencing the public to avoid large public gatherings from the outset, the virus has indeed gained a foothold in this country that it wouldn't have had we acted sooner.
Here is a timeline of Trump's public comments since the time the severity of virus became known to him:
Granted this is a biased video benefiting from the magic of selective editing. But these are all public comments, he said little or nothing else to claim that COVID-19 was more than just a walk in the park until very recently. You can also find clips of Fox News celebrities mirroring Trump's comments, calling the virus a hoax designed to undermine the president, until Trump finally admitted on March 11 that yes folks, we have a problem here. Not until Trump's address to the nation from the Oval Office that day did his official propaganda wing at Fox change their tune.
This Friday I witnessed two events that clearly demonstrate the difference between real leadership, and the clown show the administration in Washington has always been. At Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker's announcement that his state was to enforce a stay-at-home policy, one of the speakers at that press conference was the chief epidemiologist at the University of Chicago, Dr. Emily Landon, As the Governor and the Mayor of Chicago stood at a respectable distance and listened attentively. Dr. Landon gave a blunt, impassioned, and brilliant address about what we could be in for if we don't act now. She relayed an anecdote from the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed millions around the world. It turns out that while the city of St. Louis enacted a stay-in-place order to stem the spread of the deadly virus, the city of Philadelphia hosted a large parade to send off soldiers headed off to WWI. One week later, Philadelphia hospitals were overrun and thousands died, far more than in St. Louis.
As we are seeing today in New Orleans who allowed their celebration of Mardi Gras to take place a couple weeks ago, that city is now seeing a greater increase of new cases of COVID-19 than other cities around the country.
On the same afternoon as Governor Pritzker's draconian announcement that he was forced to choose between "people's lives and their livelihoods". the president of the United States held a similar conference at the White House. At the dais, going against all pleas for social distancing, was a slew of people huddled together as if they were in a rugby scrum. The president, still trying to paint a pretty picture of a pandemic, touted his enthusiasm about an anti-malaria drug that might have positive results against the "Chinese virus" as he referred to it. He was challenged by an NBC reporter who asked if his over-optimism about the drug was doing a disservice to the American people who deserve to know facts, not just the president's hunches. (my words not his). "I'm a smart guy, I feel good about it" was the president's response. After a back and forth between the reporter and the president, the reporter asked, "with nearly 200 dead and 14,000 sick, what do you say to the American people watching you right now who are scared?" The president's response was: "I'd say that you are a terrible reporter. I think it's a nasty question and a very bad signal that you're putting out to the American people." He accused the reporter of "sensationalism" and then went on a brief tirade about the news organizations of NBC and COMCAST.
Now to be fair, watching the unedited version of the exchange instead of just the soundbites that made their way across all platforms, the reporter was goading the president on for several minutes before the outburst. That said, annoying as the reporter may have been to him, there is no room for childish outbursts from the supposed leader of the free world in response to a pandemic. To add insult to injury, one of the reporters asked if Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was standing behind Trump at the press conference would comment on the drug. Politely, trying to speak the truth yet not wanting to directly contradict the president, Dr. Fauci said that while not discounting the possibility that this vaccine may prove helpful, any evidence to that effect was purely anecdotal, that testing was still underway, and that a "cure" as the president claims is still several months if not a year away. Incidentally since that day, Dr. Fauci has not been heard from at one of Trump's daily press briefings.
Today, two days later, the president still doesn't get it, or simply doesn't care. Despite unanimous consensus from scientists and health care professionals all over the world who assure us that the pandemic will get much worse before it gets better, and that the only way to reduce the amount of carnage, is for all of us to avoid social contact and stay home for two or three months at the very least, today the president told his nation that he expects that everyone will be back at work in two weeks.
Meanwhile his premature announcement about the anti-malaria drug, chloroquine , has caused a massive run on the medication, causing shortages and an astronomical increase in price, leaving people who take it for other illnesses, such as lupus, left without a medication they depend upon. Others have died taking the drug (which has serious side effects) without a doctor's supervision, assuming it would cure them of COVID-19.
For three years, Donald Trump's malfeasance, gross negligence and incompetence have done a great deal of harm to our country, to its credibility its democratic institutions, and perhaps most significantly, to its unity. Up until two months ago, most reasonable Americans could breathe a sigh of relief that at the very least he was not at the helm during a real crisis. Well he his now and people are dying because of his initial inaction, his indifference to the severity of the situation, and his insistence on lying to cover up the true nature of the pandemic.
The sad thing is that during times of crisis, the people turn to a president to provide leadership, comfort, and above all, the truth. During such times, a president's approval rating usually goes through the roof. Not so with Donald Trump. A good sixty percent of Americans believe he is not to be believed or trusted. The good news is those sixty percent at least, will not be taking anything this president says seriously, and despite his rants about how "the cure can't be worse than the disease", will work to protect themselves and the rest of us. The ones who do take him seriously well all I can say to them is, good luck to you, just don't go anywhere close to me or my loved ones.
God willing Trump will not be president come next January, but since we're stuck with him at least until then, the least he can do is provide some useful information to the people of this country to help get us through this crisis.
Short of that, maybe he could just shut the fuck up and let the adults in the room do the talking.
Never in all my years on this planet, have I experienced such drastic change as we have in the past month. I look back at the time when I wrote my two last posts, just about three weeks ago, with a certain blissful nostalgia. Yet how could I have been so wrong and naive?
The wrong part came in the first post where I wrote that the president's "perfect phone call" with Vladimir Zelensky, while leading to his impeachment, also...
...all but killed Joe Biden's life-long dream of being the principal occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Thank goodness I added the "all but" because as of today. Biden is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party in the upcoming election. What I didn't see coming was the effect Biden's landslide victory over Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina primary would have in subsequent states. Up to that point, the primaries had been held in non-diverse states with largely white populations, with the exception of Nevada which has a significant Latinx presence. Sanders won all but one of those states with Biden coming in a distant third or fourth. It appeared that Sanders' momentum could very well carry him on to becoming the party's standard bearer, with the only real challenges coming from Pete Butigieg or possibly Mike Bloomberg. It seemed as if the only person in the world who believed Biden had a chance was Biden himself, who alone understood the critical importance of the African American vote, which carried him over the top in South Carolina, all of the southern states that have held primaries, and Illinois and Michigan. Sanders won the biggest state of them all, California, but as of this moment, it's Biden's contest to lose.
However as we've seen in the past month, who knows what the future brings?
Needless to say, the election is peanuts compared to the global crisis of COVID-19 and Coronavirus .
In my final post of last month, while I recognized the seriousness of the virus, I was still in denial about the impact it would have on the world. After all, we've been through countless epidemics, SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, and Ebola from 2014 to 2016, just to name a few. Yes thousands of people perished all over the world from those deadly viruses, but those of us who didn't, the vast majority of people on the planet, got through those crisis without experiencing much disruption of our lives.
Previously I thought about what we are about to face over the next several months as a being terrible inconvenience. I became irritated when I heard folks likening this experience to the Depression and WWII. That is until I heard my elders, people who actually lived though the Great Depression and the great war, make that very comparison.
The truth is, none of us knows what this virus may bring nor how many of our loved ones, or even ourselves will survive. Our very survival depends on tremendous sacrifice from all of us, giving up many of the things that back in those wonderful days of the first two months of 2020, we took for granted.
The Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, declared that his state, the state in which I live, will be on shut down until further notice. Only people whose jobs are deemed essential to maintain health, safety, and provide the basic necessities for living, will be allowed to go to work. People have been instructed in no uncertain terms that with only very limited exceptions, we are to stay at home . He told the people of his state that he was in the very unenviable position of having to choose between "people's lives, and people's livelihoods."
It was an ominous message, but one that needed to be heard, and a truly courageous move on his part.
Many people will die as a result of this virus. Those of us who survive will suffer hardships, some of them terrible. While (the collective) we will certainly survive this in the long run, our immediate future is very cloudy indeed.
The American Vice President made a particularly un-helpful comment the other day. He said that during this time of crisis we should all spend more time on our knees rather than on social media. Including the inevitable vulgar responses that comment will inspire, the truth is that while prayer may be a comfort to many, we need social media now more than ever. As we're holed up in our homes trying our best to not kill our immediate loved ones, (don't lie, you all know that thought will cross all your head sometime in the coming weeks and months), social media will enable us to reach out to our loved ones afar, our friends, colleagues, acquaintances and perfect strangers all over the world, all of whom will let us know we're not alone in our time of trial.
Despite the cliche, we're all in this together, and seeing folks in at least five continents outside of our own experiencing what we are, that is fighting a common enemy, may, just may help to in the long run help make the world a smaller place and bring us all a little closer together.
Coronavirus which is dominating the news cycle at the moment is a big deal. I've been poo pooing it for a few weeks now but have been informed in no uncertain terms that's wrong. There's nothing funny about the nearly 3,000 people who have died so far at this writing and the eighty plus thousand individuals around the world we know of who have contracted the disease. That's a lot of people, true a small percentage of all the people in the world, but that percentage surely will go up as so far there are no vaccines to stem the spread of the disease. By all indications it is a tremendously infectious virus whose end is nowhere in sight.
Listening to the radio this morning I heard an epidemiologist with some dire warnings sharing much of the same advice you'll find on the WHO website. But he added another important bit of advice.
Don't panic.
It would appear that lots of people are not heeding that advice and are letting fear and ignorance get in the way of rational decision making. A while ago before the outbreak of the disease was made public, I saw a brilliant cartoon that describes much of the current state of the world. In the cartoon, a laboratory beaker with a substance labeled as "ignorance" is heated by a burner labeled as "fear". The resulting condensation of the vapor collected in an adjacent test tube was labelled "hate".
A couple days ago in my own city of Chicago, there was a group of good people who put together a public outing to patronize the restaurants of this city's Chinatown, as despite there not being one report of an infection here, those business saw a dramatic drop in business since news of the outbreak which began in China reached these shores.
I reiterate, Coronavirus is nothing to, pardon the pun, sneeze at. But that reaction in Chicago and elsewhere harkens back to a story my mother was told by the nuns when she was a child in Catholic school in the early forties. The story went something like this:
There was a high school couple who were ice skating on the frozen lagoon in Humboldt Park in Chicago, back in the day before climate change made that impossible. The girl fell on the ice and cut her lip. The boy used his handkerchief to help stop the bleeding. Shortly thereafter the girl contracted syphilis. As these were two good Catholic kids, they certainly could not have been up to any monkey business right? Certainly not. Fortunately for the reputation of the two, it turns out that the handkerchief had recently been laundered at a local Chinese laundry, most certainly the source of the dreaded disease which at the time, was still a few years away from a cure.
Mystery solved.
As absurd as that story is, it left an indelible mark on my mother and her classmates about Chinese people. Remember this was the time when we were sending American citizens of a particular ethnicity to concentration camps because we were at war with their ancestral relatives. And for no reason other than physical resemblance, some Americans had to assure their fellow countrymen that they were of Chinese ancestry not Japanese.
German Americans whose ancestral relatives were also at war us, and folks who merely resembled them did not have the same unfortunate experience.
Clearly there is a long history of bigotry in this nation and recent events have shown that not much has changed.
Now you might say I'm over-reaching, as the two stories are completely un-related. Coronavirus is highly contagious, transmitted through moisture droplets suspended in the air. In other words, you can get it through very casual contact with people while syphilis is only transmitted sexually. Coronavirus originated in China and that is where the majority of its victims live. You might say it only makes sense that limiting one's exposure to Chinese people is simply a matter of sensible risk management.
Fair enough.
But let me add that as of this writing, the country with the third highest total of Coronavirus infections is Italy.
The most memorable scene from an otherwise forgettable movie was shot inside of one of Chicago's most spectacular interiors, the sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica on the West Side. The sacred space provides a brilliant contrast to the conversation that takes place. It's from Brian DePalma's 1987 The Untochables, and features Sean Connery as grizzled Chicago police officer Jim Malone, explaining to a still green FBI agent Elliot Ness, played by Kevin Costiner how things work in this city:.
"You wanna get Capone..." Malone says, "...here's how you get 'em. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.
"That's, the Chicago Way."
I'm reminded of this by last week's train wreck of a debate in Nevada between six of the hopeful nominees for the Democratic candidate for president. With the exception of about 60 million Americans, the majority of people in this country would prefer to see another person taking the oath of office on the steps of the Capitol Building come January 20th of next year. Despite that, it's looking increasingly clear that's not going to happen.
And if things turn out as I fear, the Democrats, and everyone else who would like to see a change in the White House will have nobody to blame but themselves. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, like Mallone asks of Ness, "what are we willing to do to win this election?" It appears at least at this moment, not enough.
The real problem I fear is that the Democrats are doing everything in their power to lose the election, just as they did four years ago. For starters, there are the supporters of Bernie Sanders. As you may recall, in 2016 the current leader in the race for nomination lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton. So incensed by their man losing the nomination, many of his supporters chose to rather than vote for Clinton, sit out the election, or vote for a third party candidate. One might think that everyone would have learned the lesson that enough of them doing just that won the election for the current president. One would think wrong, I'm hearing much of the same uncompromising rhetoric from the Sanders camp that I heard during the last election. I'm convinced that a very significant number of Sanders supporters have no intention of voting for the Democratic candidate if it is anyone but Bernie.
Then there's the candidate himself. One of his rivals for the nomination, former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg said that win or lose the nomination, he will contribute a large portion of his fortune to the Democratic candidate in order to defeat the current president. Bernie Sanders has made it clear that if offered to him, he will turn down that money.
Well isn't that special.
If Sanders does win the nomination, his Republican opponent will have no such qualms about where his money is coming from. The sad fact is that money, and lots of it, is essential in winning an election in this country. The Supreme Court in its highly controversial 2010 ruling Citizen's United vs. FEC has guaranteed that.
Bloomberg who had not until last week participated in any debates and still has not run in any primary, has saturated social media and the air waves with commercials and memes promoting himself as the only candidate who can defeat the president. In the process he has already spent a fortune and his incredibly deep pockets as the eighth richest man in the world ensure he will have plenty more in reserve. Without having done the hard, nose to the grindstone work that his current rivals have, Bloomberg has still succeeded in developing a significant growing base of supporters. If Bloomberg is sincere about his pledge to donate money to the Democratic candidate win or lose, Sanders would be a fool to turn that offer down because if he is the nominee, he'll need all the help he can get.
I'll go on record here and say of the six people who stood upon that stage in Las Vegas last week, Bernie Sanders probably has the least chance of beating Donald Trump. "But look at the polls..." his supports insist, "... most of them have Sanders beating the president." Again we apparently haven't learned much of a lesson. Four years ago, by looking at the polls, the idea of Donald Trump being elected president was unimaginable.
There's good reason why this president has been relatively and uncharacteristically silent on the subject of Bernie Sanders. There's also a good reason why the man who probably knows this country, its politics, our habits and our foibles more than anyone else, Vladimir Putin, has chosen to root for Sanders to run against Trump.
The fact is that Sanders is the president's (and Putin's) dream opponent in the upcoming election, as Trump will have a field day if the 78 year old senior senator from Vermont gets the nod from the Democrats. Yes there will be all the rhetoric about Socialism and Communism, but never mind all that. What will really sink Sanders in the general election is his real if not well advertised plan to significantly raise taxes on the middle class and of course the rich. His justification is that the savings from his proposed one payer, universal health care and free college tuition plans will more than make up for the money lost to income tax. Well it might for some people but there are an awful lot of folks in this country who are satisfied with their current health insurance plans from work and/or don't have college age children. It's going to be a hard sell to convince all but the most altruistic of these people to vote for a candidate who promises to significantly raise their taxes while offering them little or nothing in return. Like it or not, self-interest plays a more significant role in determining whom to support in a presidential election than altruism.
Should Bernie win the nomination, you can count on the Republicans running ads featuring the likes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nicholas Maduro, and scores of other Communist leaders past and present chanting slogans like "Death to Capitalism", "Death to Free Enterprise", and "Death to America", inter-cut between clips of Bernie advocating for Socialism, for the "Redistribution of Wealth" in this country, and having nice things to say about Fidel Castro. And for good measure, the ads will remind voters that Sanders plans to raise the income tax rate to ninety percent for every man, woman and child in the country.
It will all be bullshit of course, but very effective. Like a spectator hollering "He's Guilty!!" in the middle of a criminal trial, no matter how much a judge instructs the jury to disregard the comment, the damage will have been done. Those ads will piss off and scare the bejesus out of a great deal of folks who would otherwise vote for anyone but Trump.
I said above that Sanders is perhaps the least likely candidate of the six (I'm not counting Tulsi Gabbard and Tom Steyer who are technically still in the race but are extreme longshots) who could win in November. But frankly as things stand now, I don't see much hope in any of them bringing enough people together to beat Trump. I bemoaned that to a friend who works as a political strategist for the Democratic Party. Yes he told me, trying to find a silver lining, but that is only an indication of how diverse the Democrats are as a party. I suppose he's right, so long as by November 3rd, that diverse crowd is able to come together and at least during that one day, come to an agreement as to whom should be our next president or at the very least, who should not.
On the other hand, I looked at the six candidates standing together on that stage in Vegas. Yes there was some diversity there, and the election of any of them would be precedent setting. Two are women, we've never had a woman president, two are Jewish, we've never had a Jewish president, one is openly gay and we've never had an openly gay president. If elected, Pete Buttigieg also would be by five years, the youngest president elected. At the other end of the spectrum, four of the six if elected would be the oldest president ever elected to a first term, and two of those, Sanders and Bloomberg will have beaten that record by a whopping eight years!
Yet something is obviously missing from that group and herein lies the biggest missed opportunity, there no candidate of color. For a party that claims diversity to match the diversity of this nation, that is utmost unthinkable. Yes indeed the road to the presidency is a long and arduous one, and political parties no longer deem from on high, well at least not entirely, who gets to be their standard bearer.
But as it stands, it will be nearly impossible for a Democrat to win the upcoming presidential election without a great deal of support from people of color. That's not to say a white candidate cannot attract the support and bring out the vote of minority communities. Up until a few months ago. it looked as if Joe Biden would be the president's most formidable opponent based largely upon his support in the African American community. Then came that "perfect phone call" and the subsequent impeachment that in an alternate universe would have doomed the president. Instead it only bolstered his support and all but killed Joe Biden's life-long dream of being the principal occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Formidable as the odds of Trump winning a second term are, he's not a shoe in, not yet. It's true that he did win the electoral college by a landslide against Hillary Clinton in 2016 (while losing the popular vote by three millions votes), but in reality, turning around a few key states by a relatively few number of votes could very well turn the election around. Those states, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all have metropolitan centers with large minority populations. Black voters in cities such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Milwaukee came out to vote for Barack Obama in both of his successful elections. Foolishly Hillary Clinton chose to overlook this essential demographic in 2016.
Here is a recent article from the New Yorker speculating on how the African American population in the city of Milwaukee could play a pivotal role in the upcoming election. Despite living in desperate poverty in what is considered to be one of the worst places in America to be black, the article suggests that the current situation puts that population in a place of considerable political power, if everyone plays their cards right that is.
We can complain until the cows come home that the Electoral College is an unfair, undemocratic institution that was invented to appease slave holders and has no place in contemporary politics. However as long as one party feels it benefits them, there is no chance it will be gone anytime soon.
As much as we'd like the political process to be above board and pure, it is anything but. How wonderful it would be to simply debate issues and select the candidate we feel best represents our values and ideals. But when the opposition will stop at nothing, and I mean NOTHING to gain an advantage, the other side has to modify its ways and focus on winning above anything else. That's the only way it will happen.
It would be impossible to out-cheat or to go lower than the Republicans have of late. But given the vagaries of the Electoral College, there is a razor thin difference between winning and losing if you look in the right places. That Trump base we've heard so much about is formidable because they vote, but it's also static. Trump and the Republicans have made no efforts to expand it. Likewise the Democrats have a strong base who will not be moved. Most of them including myself would vote for a roll of paper towels before they'd vote for Donald Trump. In reality, there are probably very few Americans who are on the fence in the November election, the difference is getting the vast majority of of them who do not support this president out to vote for the only viable alternative, the Democratic candidate. Whomever that may be HAS to appeal to as diverse a population as possible, and for God's sake, will not forget places like the north side of Milwaukee.
Will the Democratic Party and opponents of this administration heed that advice?
If they don't it's going to be a very long and dangerous four more years for anyone who cares about this country and our democratic republic.
,