The Roman Salute...

Right.

The spin doctors were having a field day last week with the gesture Elon Musk made at Capital One Arena in Washington after the presidential inauguration. Some insisted that the richest man in the world was inspired by a gesture supposedly used by the ancient Romans.* Others said it harkened back to the Bellamy Salute which American school children once used when presented the American flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Still others attribute it to Asperger's Syndrome, a condition Elon Musk acknowledges he has, symptoms which his defenders claim cause those who have it to "act weird" sometimes. After all he did prance around like a drunken cheerleader at that rally in Pennsylvania last October, didn't he?

Well, if anyone understands the true meaning of an outstretched right arm with the palm facing down, it is the Germans.

The title to this op ed piece published last week in the German weekly Die Zeit translated into English reads: " A Hitler Salute, is a Hitler Salute, is a Hitler Salute. 

Here's what Musk himself had to say:

Can we please retire the calling people a Nazi thing? It didn’t work during the election, it’s not working now, it’s tired, boring, and old material, you’ve burned out its effect, people don’t feel shocked by it anymore, the wolf has been cried too many times.

The strange thing is I agree with him. It is old and tired to call people you don't agree with Nazis and comparing them to Hitler. 

That is unless they do something deserving of that comparison.

What if I were to walk around in public with a tee shirt emblazoned with a swastika, should I be left alone, expecting people seeing it to assume I'm just wearing an ancient Indian peace symbol?

Yeah right.

Or what if I introduced my child to someone as "little Adolph", would I be right to expect people to buy my explanation that my wife and I simply liked that name?

I don't think so. 

The one beef I had with the Die Zeit article is the author's choice of the term "Dog Whistle" to describe Musk's gesture. A dog whistle is a signal intended to be only perceived by its intended target. In this case, the author suggests Musk is sending a signal to white supremacists who as it turned out, reacted very positively to the gesture. 

But any person with the slightest understanding of history, with eyes to see, and a scintilla of a brain to process information, understood exactly what Musk was doing. 

If Musk himself didn't, as he and his apologists claim, then he, and they are far stupider than I could ever imagine. 

As a metaphor, siren would be much more appropriate than dog whistle.  

When I first saw the illustration above, without the blue tape used for effect to cover up a gesture that is illegal to make in Germany, I was appalled beyond belief. But it got worse. I saw another image with a different cropping: 

Not only does his facial expression appear more brazen than in the first image, but as you can see, Musk is making that vile gesture while standing behind the official Seal of the President of the United States.  

I'll share a little personal story of the first time I became conscious of the presidential seal. It was on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. My most vivid image of that day, there would be many more from the days to follow, was of a man solemnly removing the presidential seal from a podium. To my five-year-old mind, that was a very powerful gesture, an act meant to symbolize the death of a president.  

I've carried that image with me my entire life even though I hadn't entirely understood its context nor saw it reproduced again for at least fifty years. When I finally saw a clip of the removal of the seal all those years later, it dawned on me that it was actually a quite trivial act repeated every time a president delivers a speech, that is, when after the speech is made and the crowds have left, a worker takes the seal reserved for the president down. But to this day the poignance of that particular moment has not been lost as it took place at the site of the intended destination of the president's motorcade where Kennedy was to deliver a speech that he never got the chance to make.  

To this day I never see that seal and not think of the significance of it as a symbol and of that terrible day.

Unfortunately, now I have something else to think of. 

Symbols matter, and this for many, including me, will be the enduring symbol of the current administration. It didn't help that the guy at the top, the one with ,with the funny hair and orange skin, bent over backwards to whine like a baby about the Episcopal archbishop of our nation's capital, demanding her apology after having the gall to beseech him to act like a Christian, said nothing about someone whom he's promised a major role in his administration, sieg heiling while using the symbol of his office, and of all the presidents who came before him as a prop. 

It seems that with this president, nothing is sacred or for that matter, profane, which couldn't be less of a surprise.

Which leads me to say directly to all the people who voted for him the following: 

Take a good look at that photograph, this is what you voted for.

* There is absolutely no evidence to suggest the ancient Romans ever used this gesture.

Here We Go Again

About five years ago, I thought I made headway with a friend on the issue of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Like many MAGA devotees, this friend, a real friend whom I have known for more than forty years, could rattle off the names of victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants as if they were his own grandchildren. As you might expect, these names formed the backbone of his argument that all undocumented people in this country should be deported, extenuating circumstances be damned. 

One name he failed to mention, because his story was not reported on Fox News, was that of a relative of mine by marriage, my wife's cousin. He was killed as he was driving with his wife from a wedding in Chicago to their home in suburban Milwaukee, when their car crashed head on with a car driven by a man going the wrong way on an interstate highway as he was being pursued by the police. Fortunately, my cousin-in-law's wife managed to survive the crash, meaning their two young boys who were thankfully home at the time, were not left orphaned. As these things so often go, the perpetrator of this tragedy who was intoxicated, also survived.

He'll have plenty of time to think about his actions that terrible night while he sits in an American prison, before he is sent back to Mexico where he'll most likely have more time on his hands to contemplate. 

I brought this up with my friend just to let him know that I did in fact, have skin in the game when it comes to the subject of undocumented people in this country committing crimes. I wanted to point out to him that despite the unspeakable tragedy of the senseless death of a loving husband, father, brother and friend, I do not hold all undocumented people in this country accountable, only one. 

That's the way it goes with human beings. If you take a representative sample of any group of people, then make a graph that measured the quality of their character, you'll inevitably come up with an enormous bell curve, with a handful of exemplary people at one end, an equal number of despicable people at the other, and a whole mess of people like my friend and me, average folks somewhere in the middle. 

Then I pointed out for every undocumented alien who commits a crime, there will inevitably be at least one who did something remarkable in the service of others. It's just that for some reason, their story doesn't get reported very often, especially on the ultra-right-wing media outlets my friend and millions of folks like him gravitate toward. 

Nonetheless, my friend seemed to get it. That is until our next argument when again he parroted off the names of all the American victims whose story he heard on Fox. 

Well today, you-know-who is about to become president again and he is promising mass deportations starting tomorrow, his first full day in office. With it will come some justice I suppose along with unimaginable human suffering. And I'm willing to bet my firstborn that none of this will do one iota to improve the lives of the American people as promised. 

The new president, the first and hopefully last Felon-In-Chief, plans to start deporting people by the way, right here in Chicago for reasons I can only assume stem from his animus toward this city. I don't know why he hates us so much, one of our largest buildings proudly displays his name so it can be seen for miles around. 

He loves that kind of shit.

But I digress.

When I told my friend that for every undocumented resident who commits a crime, there is at least another who does something remarkable to help someone else, it seemed so obvious that I just let it rest at that. Now I have something to back it up. Last week as Los Angeles was burning uncontrollably, this story came across the wires. (so to speak). 

Be sure to read it.

In a nutshell, as people were forced to evacuate their homes and their communities for their own safety, another group rushed in to help them. In addition to the first responders who were heroically doing their job, there were many others who volunteered to help put out fires in order to help save homes that hadn't yet caught fire.

Many of these people were undocumented. Here's the money quote. Israel Garcia from Guatemala made this comment as he was in the middle of saving a stranger's home:

I don't know who lives here, I don't know if they had children. But if they did, I'm thinking about what the children are going to feel when they come back and see that their house is gone. And I ask myself, how would I feel?

Interestingly enough, just now as I went in search of an article to share with you, I googled "undocumented immigrants help put out fires in LA." Dozens of articles with the story came up. Not surprisingly, none of them came from Fox. The lone article that popped up from that beacon of "fair and balanced journalism", as they once described themselves (but not anymore), was an article with the headline: "Man arrested near LA fires with a 'possible' blowtorch was an illegal immigrant." I read the article and so far, at least at its writing, the man had not been charged with anything.

And so it goes.

In other news, this month we said goodbye to Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States. Due to circumstances largely beyond his control, Carter was perhaps not our best president but was without question, our best former president. Jimmy Carter was a man of remarkable good will and charity, someone who took to heart the fundamental teaching of his faith, that is to say, love your neighbor, even if he is your enemy. 

Present at his funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. were all the living presidents, including one current and one future, as well as one recently deceased. These six men, as a representative sampling of Presidents of the United States are a good example of the bell curve of human nature. At the one end, representing exemplary character is Jimmy Carter.

At the other end, well let's put it this way, enjoy the next four years. 

Our Lady of Paris II

Something happened this month that remined me of this post published on the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing.

I noted at the beginning of the piece that the 1960s was a decade filled with life defining moments as far as national and world events were concerned.

Today the news outlets call it "breaking news", but in the competitive business of reporting the news 24/7  these days, "breaking news" can refer to anything from an assassination attempt to the proverbial cat stuck up a tree. 

Not so in the sixties when these words:  "We interrupt this program to bring you a news bulletin..." meant serious business, often the preamble to what would become one of those life-defining moments. And the news that followed those ominous words, was usually bad. 

Except once. 

I still get chills whenever I think of Walter Cronkite's reaction the moment when from almost three hundred thousand miles away, the voice of Neil Armstrong came through loud and clear: "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

Talk about a life defining moment. I feel privileged to have been around to experience it, old enough to appreciate it, but not old enough to be cynical about it. 

This month's re-opening of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris after a 2019 fire nearly destroyed the 900 year old treasure, was another of those life defining moments for me. 

You can read why in this post, written shortly after that devastating fire. 

In addition to being one of only a handful of pieces of good news in a very challenging year, I've found other parallels between the restoration of the cathedral and the moon landing.

The most profound similarity is that both accomplishments are sterling examples of triumphs of the human spirit.

Today I'm too old to be cynical about it, but not nearly old enough to not be able to fully appreciate it.

I imagine many of the folks who sat on the Rice University football field one hot Houston September afternoon in 1962 listening to President Kennedy proclaim his intention to successfully send astronauts to the moon (and back!) by the end of the decade, must have thought he was crazy. 

Maybe it was the heat. 

Granted we had already sent astronauts into space four times, but the difference between the Mercury missions of the time which orbited the earth, and the Apollo missions which would land men on the moon, is a little like the difference between driving in Chicago rush hour traffic, (no small accomplishment) and climbing Mount Everest. 

In his speech which you can read here, Kennedy mentioned that the "missile" required to send a spacecraft out of the earth's orbit and on to the moon, would need to be as tall as the football field they were sitting upon was long. And it would need to be constructed out of metal alloys that had not yet been invented. 

Obviously, those were only two of the hurdles necessary to accomplish Kennedy's goal.

Given the timeline, this must have seemed an impossible task to anyone paying attention. 

No doubt that was the response of many who heard on April 15, 2019, the words of French president Emmanuel Macron who proclaimed as he was standing before Our Lady of Paris while it was still ablaze, that the cathedral would be rebuilt, and would reopen in five years. 

It turned out that with five months to spare, the crew of Apollo 11, backed by tens of thousands of dedicated individuals, maybe more, carried out Kennedy's goal.

And here, in photographs ripped off the internet, is how the cathedral looked inside and out earlier this month, just over five years after the fire, thanks to perhaps the same number of dedicated individuals:

If you've ever been there, it doesn't look exactly as it did before, does it? Gone is the austere look of centuries' worth of grime and soot, it's now bright and shiny, almost good as new. So much so it's actually a little jarring. To get an idea of the transformation, the sculpture at the lower right interior shot above is "The Virgin of Paris" a work from the 14th Century. You can compare it to my photograph of it made in 2010, seen in the post linked to above. 

The restoration will still take several more years, but just like when it was first built back in the Middle Ages, the cathedral will be open during the construction.

Just like the moon missions, there were detractors. 

Aren't there always?

Obviously, a good chunk of money went into the restoration, money which some believe, like the moon missions, would have been better spent elsewhere. I dealt with that subject in both my post about the moon landing and the one on Notre Dame, so I won't go into it here.

Suffice it to say, I disagree.  

All I'll add to that is this: if monumental treasures such as Notre Dame, the Pantheon in Rome, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Taj Mahal are not worth saving, then quite frankly, nothing is. Yes, these were all buildings built to serve a particular religion, but because of their beauty, their historical significance, and their status as indelible symbols of the place in which they reside, they have all transcended their original function and today belong not to any one country or religion, but to the whole world. The loss of any of these irreplicable works of art, and others that I don't have the space to list, is a loss for the whole of humanity, even for people never fortunate enough to step inside of them. 

Finally, I know there are some who would say the herculean task of restoring Notre Dame in little more than a blink of the eye, is nothing short of a miracle. 

Again, I beg to differ. While I did toy with the notion (not entirely tongue-in-cheek) that given the timing of the fire, perhaps some superhuman force (you'll have to read the post to see which one), was at least partly responsible for the catastrophe, its rebirth, like the moon mission, is entirely a human effort. From the Paris Fire Department whose quick thinking and flat-out heroism prevented irreparable damage, to the fundraisers and those who contributed money to rebuild the cathedral, to the architects, engineers and artisans who employed in their work techniques many thought had been lost for centuries, to the construction workers, laborers and the folks who fed them, and everyone I'm leaving out who made the plans a reality, to President Macron who set it all in motion, and to the people of France who demanded the cathedral be rebuilt exactly as it was meant to be, all their efforts are a lasting testimony to the fact that when a critical mass of human beings work together for a common goal, almost anything is possible.

I think that's a splendid thought we all should take into 2025.

Happy New Year.

A New Man

Well if you can't beat 'em, join 'em as I say. Sure, things didn't turn out as I had hoped this November and come January 20, our country will turn back the clock and return to a time that about 50 percent of the electorate hoped and prayed was gone for good.

So be it. I've made an early new year's resolution to stop caring. Of course, like all resolutions, don't hold me to that. In that vein I decided to wean myself from my former daily regimen of reading, watching, listening and talking about politics. Instead of reading for example the New York Times, The Atlantic, and my other once go-to sources of information about the world outside my door, I've only been reading about sports.  I've also given up the habit of automatically tuning in to the local NPR affiliate on the radio, instead I have my dial set to a station that plays nothing but Christmas music 24/7.  I've also given up discussing politics on social media and have turned my attention there solely to watching cat videos. And instead of watching news and political commentary on TV, I've turned to watching nothing but Italian soap operas.

The problem is that never before in my life do I remember a bleaker time for Chicago sports teams. So listening to endless stories about the futility of the prospects for all the hometown teams I've rooted for my entire life, does little to alleviate my depression of the thought of... 

Well, you know.

While I still love Christmas, for reasons I care not go into, the holiday has lost much of its sparkle for me. Consequently, the din of sleighbells, ho ho hoing and perfunctory cheer tends to induce more melancholia than merriment these days. 

And subjecting myself to hours of cat videos makes me seriously question what I'm doing with my life.

All I can say is this: thank God for streaming TV and Italian soap operas. 

Anyway, in the midst of decking the halls with mistletoe while rockin' around the Christmas tree, I did sneak in an NPR break. And on what subject were they reporting? Christmas music of course.

The story reminded me of a Christmas long ago and a conversation my brother-in-law and I had with our very Catholic father-in-law. As was their tradition, our wives' parents had non-stop Christmas music playing on the radio. I think it was just to pull his chain more than anything else, but both my brother-in-law and I brought up the fact that most of the Christmas music we were hearing that day was written by Jewish composers. 

Our in-laws, whose annual Christmas decorations consisted of a wreath on the front door and sign on the window that read, "Put Christ back in Christmas", were incredulous. 

But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. For starters, the percentage of Christmas music written by Jewish composers closely reflects the percentage of Jewish composers of popular music.

As the popular music industry is above all. a business, success means having your songs played a lot, which naturally translates to sales (a difficult subject these days in the music industry) and everything that entails. Now think of all the pop songs that actually make money compared to the total number of songs that are written and recorded in a given year. I have no idea what that number is, but it has to be extremely small. And when a song does become a hit, meaning one of the most listened to songs of a particular moment, that moment is the window of opportunity to make serious money. And that window opening, unless the song becomes a major hit, is fairly short lived. 

Now imagine writing and recording a hit Christmas song. If it catches on with the public, not only is there a window of opportunity to make beaucoup bucks soon after the song is released, but also during every subsequent holiday season. 

But I never realized HOW lucrative Christmas music can be. The NPR piece pointed out that at this writing, the top five songs on the Billboard hot 100 (the industry standard for determining the most popular songs of a given week), are all Charismas songs, some of them recorded over 60 years ago.

I don't have anything to back this up, but I imagine Paul McCartney has made more money on his insipid (to my ears)  Wonderful Christmastime, than he has on Hey Jude. According to this article about the public's enduring ambivalence to his holiday song, McCartney makes between 400 and 600K per annum for all the times WC gets played between October 31st and December 24th in all the Walmarts, Shopcos, and Piggly Wigglies across this great land of ours, and their equivalents around the world. 

But that number pales in comparison the reported 2.5 million dollar royalty check Mariah Carey gets every year for what has become the most popular Christmas tune of all for the umpteenth year, All I Want for Christmas is You. 

And it seems that the really successful Christmas tunes if anything, gain traction over the years, so the window of opportunity for them to make scads of money only becomes wider every year. Who knows what Mariah and Macca (by then in his nineties) will be making on those songs in ten years!

So the moral is, if you want to be a pop songwriter, try your hand at writing Christmas tunes. Cha ching, you just never know.

The other not surprising in the least thing about non-Christians writing popular Christmas music is that the vast majority of it is not religious at all, and probably a majority of the non-religious stuff is not even about the holiday. Much of it centers around winter, and all the fun things you can do in the snow such as riding in a one-horse open sleigh. Or if that doesn't float your boat and you find the weather outside frightful, you can stay inside where it's warm and delightful, and go wherever your imagination desires, while resigning yourself just to let it snow. One wonderful, racy and to today's ears somewhat controversial song is the 1944 Frank Loesser diddy Baby I'ts Cold Outside, which doesn't even leave to the imagination what you can do inside.

One of my favorite pop music Christmas songs that really is about Christmas is the 1943 classic, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, written for the film Meet Me in St. Louis by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine. It's about the very real pain of celebrating the season during a time of suffering and loss, made especially poignant as the song was written and originally released during the middle of World War II. Of course, that sentiment runs contrary to all the feelings we're supposed to feel this time of year, so the song's lyrics were altered several times over the years to make it "less depressing." Today it remains one of the most popular Christmas songs that you'll hear played incessantly along with Holly Jolly Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bell Rock, and the rest at your local Target.

Heck I'm going there now, oh boy!

Which brings up one final thought. 

The web is filled with articles about surveys of people's favorite and least favorite Christmas songs. Should anyone be surprised that the same songs are on both lists?

While I wouldn't put it on my list of least favorite Christmas songs, by the third or fourth time I've heard Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas played on the same shopping trip in the same store, I wouldn't mind never hearing it ever again. That goes for a lot of songs that at one time I really loved. 

You can guess how I feel about the Christmas songs I've never loved in the first place. 

So what do folks like me who love Christmas, just not the same 20 songs played again and again every holiday, listen to by choice?

Sometimes songs are popular for a reason and finding good alternatives can be a little challenging. 

One way is to match artists with material you wouldn't automatically associate them with.

When you think of Christmas, the last person you might come up with is Screamin' Jay (I Put a Spell on You) Hawkins. Halloween yes, Christmas no. In preparation for this post, I discovered with great joy and expectation that he does indeed have a Christmas song.

Unfortunately it really sucks.

I listened to the whole thing expecting a payoff at the end, but it never came. Screamin' Jay really should have stuck to Halloween.

The cool cats go for kitsch and what could be better than the Queen of Kitsch herself, Marlene Dietrich? Here she is, singing Little Drummer Boy, in German no less. 

Not bad but a little maudlin in my book. Like Sreamin' Jay's Christmas song, perhaps the idea of it is better than the song itself.

But five years ago I found it, my perfect Christmas song. It's a song we all know, sung by two wonderful artists who while not being as far-removed from the idea of Christmas as say Screamin' Jay, or even Marlene, nonetheless are a little out of their element here. 

That's why it works so bloody well. 

And it truly captures the spirit of joy of the season as well as any song I can think of, heck I wouldn't even mind hearing it a thousand times a year. 

The best part is that I will never have to. Here's Leon Redbone and Dr. John, together singing Frosty the Snowman: 

The video isn't so bad either.

Anyway, Christmas the secular holiday that is, will be over in a couple of days and along with it all the popular holiday music. Then the real Feast of the Twelve days of Christmas will take place and with that, the sacred Christmas music which in my book never grows old, will continue.

Then will come January 20 and with that who knows, Armageddon perhaps? 

Let's hope not.

Communque, avremo ancora la televisione italiana, e non vedo l'ora. 

Buon Natale a tutti!

Where Do We Go From Here?

We're at the end of the month that saw perhaps the most consequential election of if not our nation, at least our lifetime. Quite frankly I'm at a loss for words.

In my last post I mentioned a friend who voted for Donald Trump. In challenging him I brought up the insurrection after Trump refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election. 

My friend's response? 

"What's that?" 

I said: "you know what happened at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021."

He said to me and I quote: "Oh you're not going to hold THAT against him?"

In a post-election radio interview, one of the authors of the book "How Democracies Die" either Steven Levitsky or Daniel Ziblatt, can't remember which one, said that the public cannot be held responsible for preserving a democracy, rather it is the responsibility of democratic institutions, and the people placed in charge of them. 

If that's the case, then God help us.

For me, I tuning out of politics for now, as I'm trying to mend a broken heart, quite seriously. 

Fatalistic as it sounds, let's hope for the best and expect the worst.

See you next month.

Post Mortem: The Blame Game

On the afternoon of Election Day before a single vote was counted, I flushed all my hopes down the toilet that Kamala Harris might pull off a victory. No, I wasn't disillusioned by one of the plethora of polls that made me see the light, or dark if you prefer. Nor was it a commentary written by one of the great thinkers of our day. Rather, it was talking to a friend who was set to vote for Donald Trump when he got off work. I asked him why and he told me this: "Because the economy is so bad." 

I foolishly set about trying to convince him that the economy really wasn't that bad, and that Donald Trump was by far the lesser of the two candidates because of the many threats he poses to this nation.

My friend was unmoved.

I've had countless arguments with Trump supporters who more or less are just like me in that they spend a lot of time thinking about politics and are just as passionate and strident about their views as I am about mine.  

But I've never talked politics to folks like this friend, that is to say, people whose world doesn't revolve around current events, especially what's going down in Washington, not to mention the rest of the world. The fact that until Tuesday afternoon we'd never in the decade or so we've been friends discussed politics, illustrates that point.

Simply put, folks like my friend are doing their best to get by one day at a time, struggling in his case with health issues, with living in a not always safe neighborhood, and especially having enough money to live a reasonably comfortable life. After having worked hard and honorably through his mid-fifties, he certainly deserves it. 

So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that my friend and tens, of millions of Americans like him, don't make their electoral decisions based upon any ideology, but rather personal experience. And he feels his life was better under the Trump administration than under the Biden/Harris administration.

Quite frankly, who am I to tell him otherwise?

After our brief encounter Tuesday afternoon, it dawned on me that Kamela Harris didn't stand a chance to win the presidency, not because this country has taken a sharp turn to the right, but because more Americans are moved by the words "five dollars for a dozen eggs" than by these: "existential threat to democracy." 

In post after post, I tried to make the case that this attitude was selfish and myopic, that we were better to follow JFK's famous words "Ask not what your country can do for you, ,,," than Ronald Reagan's famous question to the American people during one of his debates with incumbent president Jimmy Carter in 1980: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

Compounding it was the realization that from what I consider any reasonable viewpoint, the policy proposals of Team Trump, namely mass deportations and imposing blanket tariffs on all goods coming from abroad, would only exacerbate inflation and have other disastrous impacts on the economy.

But what do I know?

Since the election I've read dozens of reasons why Harris lost. 

In a post-election podcast by New York Times writer and commentator Ezra Klein. Klein places the blame squarely on the shoulders of Joe Biden who Klein says, should have withdrawn from the presidential race long ago, so there would have been enough time to have a proper primary to pick his successor as the Democratic Party nominee. I agree that Biden should have stuck to his pledge in 2020 not to seek a second term because of his advanced age, but would that have made a difference? 

I don't think so.

We have history as a model. In March of 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, leaving open a field of Democrats, including Robert F. Kennedy, to seek their party's nomination. Kennedy was assassinated in June of that year and shortly thereafter came the contentious Chicago convention in August which left the party in disarray. Johnson's vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey was nominated standard bearer and as the representative of an unpopular administration, lost the November election to Richard M. Nixon. Another vice president who unsuccessfully ran to replace an (at the time) unpopular boss was Al Gore in 2000. Granted, both elections were extremely close, but as they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

At least, some say, the Democrats should have had an honest-to-goodness primary which included Biden with other candidates challenging him. Well, the last time an incumbent president was seriously challenged by his own party was in 1980 when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries that year. Carter ended up losing the November general election to Ronald Reagan. That one wasn't at all close. Why? Well yes, Americans were still being held hostage in Iran, but the overriding issue of that election and the reason that Jimmy Carter was a one term president, as was his predecessor Gerald Ford, was inflation. 

I remember it well.

The interesting thing about all the finger pointing is that it seems to come from folks who have a particular bone to pick about something or other. Some claim that Harris lost because she refused to rebuke the Biden administration's policy on the war in Gaza. Had she been more open to the suffering of the Palestinians and the need for their own homeland they say, she would not have lost the many progressive voters who refused to vote for her. 

Other progressives were offended when Harris joined forces with never-Trump Republicans, especially the Cheneys, whom they hold in particular disdain. Surely, they say, she might have won had she kept the whole lot of them at arm's length.

Bernie Sanders and others blame Harris, and the majority of Democrats for abandoning the working class.

Others claim she lost because of her gender and her race, claiming that Americans are too sexist and racist to elect a woman whose heritage happens to be black and Indian.

Folks both left and right of center blame Harris for not distancing herself from the president, whom they point out has desperately low approval ratings, especially on issues like the economy and immigration, 

Sam Harris (no relation to Kamala), whom I've quoted in this space extensively, in his latest podcast, before completely eviscerating Trump and his supporters, takes a good deal of time eviscerating the Democrats for losing the election because of their allegiance to identity politics and other sacred cows of the Left, singling out in particular the Party's defense of transgender rights.  

As I see it, these issues may have cost Kamala Harris votes but, they are all break even issues. Had Kamala Harris spent more time addressing the plight of the Palestinians, which admittedly I think she should have, she would likely have lost Jewish votes. Had she followed the avowed Socialist Sanders' advice, she would have lost the votes of some of the centrists whom she picked up with her alliance with Liz Cheney. 

I don't honestly see any credence that she lost many votes because of the Cheneys, but I have no doubt she did lose votes because of her race and her gender. On the other hand, I think it's likely that she won at least as many votes because of those two undeniable facts, so there's another break-even issue.

And had she thrown Joe Biden under the bus, as many suggest she should have, that would have left her vulnerable to accusations of disingenuousness and hypocrisy (being an integral part of that administration), and would have caused a tremendous rift in the Democratic Party who still by and large believes, as I do, that when all is said and done, Biden will go down in history as having been a very good president.

I had an equally illuminating conversation with another friend the week before the election. We shared our disbelief, given Trump's record, his policies and his lack of decency, that anyone still supported him. This friend had a one-word solution to the problem, education. It's no secret that Harris won the vote of people with college educations quite handily, while his shall we say, unorthodox style late in the campaign, led some to believe that Trump was speaking directly to male voters without college degrees. Given the vulgarity of his rants, that should be considered a tremendous insult to male voters without college degrees.

Now this particular friend and I by and large share political ideologies although I would have to say he is to the left of me. He also comes from a background of undeniable white privilege as do I, only more so in his case if you factor money into the equation. And he married into a family of even more privilege if you catch my drift. 

So it's easy for him to say that education is the answer as he and his wife had the means to send their four children to good colleges, paying their way in full.

By contrast, the friend I spoke with the day of the election is neither white nor privileged.

But privilege transcends both race and money. My definition of privilege includes a child having parents, family, friends and an environment that encourages curiosity, critical thinking, and above all, a love of learning. I had all that in spades when I was growing up, but unfortunately many people do not. Having money, and the ability to afford going to college alone, do not necessarily grant this important privilege. 

That's not to say people who grow up without the privilege of having been taught a love of education, cannot develop one, they just have to work harder. 

I agree with my friend about education being the key to a well-functioning society, especially as we've been seeing lately, populists with bad intentions can easily manipulate people without a sense or desire to think critically. Could it be a coincidence that the President-elect plans to do away with the Department of Education?

Unfortunately, curiosity, a love of learning, and critical thinking are not things we as a society can expect of everyone, as education is just not everyone's bag.

It's likely that more Americans are like my friend the Trump voter who thinks about politics most likely only during election season if then, rather than the habitual watchers of FOX, or like me, people who for better or worse, think about politics on an almost daily basis. 

In the aforementioned podcast, Sam Harris takes some admittedly well-deserved jabs the Democratic Party's losing touch with average Americans with their over-devotion to the alphabet soup of progressive dogma from PC, to CRT, to DEI, with a little woke thrown in. But he tips his hand when he claims that all of the Trump voters he knows are not concerned about the nuts-and-bolts issues that directly affect people's lives like crime and inflation, but rather culture war stuff like Christmas, taxpayer-funded art, and trans rights. If that's the case, I have a sneaking suspicion that he doesn't know too many people like my friend the Trump voter whom I can assure you doesn't lose sleep over any of those things. 

This is not just an American phenomenon. At the beginning of the podcast I mentioned earlier, Ezra Klein points out that in the past few years, Great Britain, Japan, Sweden, Portugal and Finland all have had dramatic swings in their governments. These shifts were not ideological, conservative governments lost to liberal ones, and vice versa. The only thing they all had in common was the voting public's demand for change, in whatever form it might take.  

Why? Well as they say, it's the economy, (or at least the public's perception of it) stupid.

And how.

So what do the Democrats have to do to get back into the White House? That's another question I've been hearing ad nauseam since last Tuesday. Tremendous soul searching is the response I hear the most. 

That's Democrats for you.

No, there's only one way for them go get back into the Executive and Legislative Branches. Take a page from the Republican playbook and do everything in their power to make sure Donald Trump and the Republicans seriously fuck up in the next four years, and the American electorate will be looking for yet another change. 

From what he suggests he's going to do once in office, they won't have to work too hard.

At least we've got that going for us.

On Respecting Opinions

On the eve of the upcoming election, I've noticed a surge in pleas to "respect each other's opinion." On the surface that sounds like an honest, sensible and heartfelt attempt to help alleviate some of the divisions in our country at the moment. After all, everyone is entitled to their opinion, aren't they?

Well sure, it's a free country, at least for now.  But on the same token, while we should grant others the right to their opinion, no one should feel in the least, the obligation to accept, or respect that opinion.

Here's an extreme example: Suppose a person is of the opinion that their own race, nationality or religion is superior to all others and therefore members of their group should be granted rights not granted to other groups? Not only do I vehemently disagree with that opinion, but I find it vile, repugnant, and entirely unworthy of respect. 

Here's another: What if someone believes in something that is verifiably false, such as the earth being flat? Are those of us who have come to the conclusion that the earth is not flat by personally witnessing empirical evidence to the contrary, supposed to agree to disagree?

I would hope not. The size and shape of planet Earth is an established fact, as it has been for thousands of years. It is not an opinion.

Opinions by definition can never be wrong. But opinions can be misinformed, illogical, unconscionable, and a score of other things that should reasonably disqualify them from respect.

Virtually every issue that is front and center in the current election cycle in the United States can be honestly and intelligently debated. I don't have the slightest problem with people who disagree with me on those issues and indeed I respect those opinions so long as they are well thought out and based upon credible evidence.

For example, I assume most people accept that we can't possibly grant residency in this country to every single person who wants it, as that would be an untenable situation, consequently there must a system that manages immigration. It is not unreasonable to argue that the current administration could have done better on that front. 

I also assume most reasonable people agree that it would be a mistake to ban all immigration as naturally all of us who are not among the indigenous American population, are descendants of immigrants if not immigrants ourselves, AND that immigrants continue to contribute a great deal of good to this nation.

Just exactly how to balance these two is a matter worthy of sincere and above all, honest debate.

The Republicans behind their standard bearer in the 2024 presidential election have made immigration the centerpiece of their platform. 

I agree with them that there is a reasonable argument that can be made for deporting some people who are here illegally. 

On the other hand, in my opinion, the blanket deportation proposed by the exPOTUS is short-sighted, not to mention morally objectionable, as it would create vastly more problems in this country than it would solve. 

For starters, in purely practical terms, much of our economy depends upon the labor of undocumented workers. Contrary to what the exPOTUS might have you believe, undocumented workers do not take away jobs from American citizens, they occupy jobs that the vast majority of American citizens would never do, especially for the amount of money those workers get paid. In a perfect world, everyone would get paid a fair wage for their labor but in the real world, the idea of paying ten dollars for a single tomato at the grocery store or twenty dollars for a head of lettuce picked by U.S. citizens making a living wage would make even the most fair-minded of us re-evaluate our well-intentioned values. 

In addition to the inflation many cite as their primary reason for voting for the exPOTUS this time around, we are also experiencing a housing shortage which has been exacerbated by a labor shortage. Many folks working in the construction industry, as Donald Trump could (but won't) testify as he's hired many thousands of them as a real estate developer, are guess what, undocumented workers. It doesn't take an economic genius to figure out what a wholescale Trump deportation program would do for the housing problem.

Deporting tens of millions of undocumented immigrants is one of the exPOTUS's handful of campaign promises. It doesn't help that Trump and his running mate are unapologetically promoting outrageous lies to attempt to cast illegal immigrants as the source of every problem this nation faces. 

I must say it's a little difficult to take the immigration problem seriously when the best these guys can come up with are fantasies of Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, that criminal elements from Venezuela are taking jobs away from hard working honest-to-goodness American criminals in Aurora, Colorado, and that immigrants as a whole are coming to this country to take away "Black jobs." 

Another sweeping solution to all our problems from Trumpworld is imposing stiff tariffs on all imported goods. Again, you don't need a doctorate in economics to understand who will ultimately pay for those tariffs, the consumer. You think inflation is bad now, just wait.

Yet despite the Republicans' dubious agenda, imbecilic exaggerations and outright lies, people in this country are legitimately struggling and feel that government at the moment is not doing enough to help them. I can't fault people for wanting to vote out of pure self-interest, even if they haven't quite thought the whole thing through.

Nor can I completely fault single-issue voters, the people who feel that one issue above all others is so important that it trumps, no pun intended, all others, and are willing to overlook a candidate's shortcomings because they feel he or she best represents their view on that particular issue. There are many such issues but the two I'm specifically thinking of at the moment are abortion and the War in Gaza.  

Unlike the issues mentioned above, finding compromise on these particular issues is exponentially harder as many Americans stand firmly on one side of the fence or other, without any intent of considering the other side. I won't go into detail because I've written extensively about both issues, here's a piece on abortion and here is one of many on the Middle East War.

All I'll say is that emotions run at a fever pitch for many Americans who will undoubtably cast their vote based solely on one issue, come hell or high water. 

Do I understand their opinion if they choose to vote for Donald Trump if he happens to appear to be on their side on one of those issues? Yes. Do I respect those opinions? I'll get to that in a moment.

If you know me or have been reading my political posts, and admittedly there have been way too many of them since 2016, you know that I have about 30,000 reasons, one for every lie he told while he was president, why I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump even if he were the proverbial last person on the earth. 

But those are my opinions, so who cares.

On the other hand, I have reasons that go beyond opinion. You see I happen to love my country despite its faults. I deeply believe in our Constitution, in participatory democracy and in the Democratic-Republic we have managed to nurture along for nearly a quarter of a millennium. 

In that time we've had our share of good presidents, bad presidents, and so so presidents. All of them except one, have had a few things in common, a profound love of this country, a deep respect for our system of government and the document that holds it all together, and an understanding of the meaning of the office of President of the United States, especially in regards to the limits imposed on the job both by tradition going all the way back to George Washington, and by law.

This is what General John Kelly, the man who served the longest as President Donald Trump's Chief of Staff had to say about his former boss:

A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior (General Mark Milley) who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said, God help us.

Ah, you say, that's just the opinion of one man who obviously has a chip or two on his shoulder against Trump.

Fair enough. 

Nevertheless, Donald Trump is uniquely unqualified to be president, period. This is not an opinion, this is a fact of the law as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, Article Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to be exact. I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: 

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

(Emphasis mine)

You can dance around those words all you want, but the fact remains that on January 6th, 2001, Donald Trump relinquished his right to return to the office of the presidency when after exhausting his legal rights to contest an election he lost, he sent a mob from the White House to the Capitol Building for the sole purpose of interfering with an official act of government, intended to declare his opponent Joseph R. Biden, President of the United States. 

People, including police officers as they were defending the Capitol Building, died as a result of that attack on the most sacred symbol of our democracy, while Trump gleefully watched it all unfold on TV, refusing to lift a finger, which is all it would have taken for him to stop it. 

In a bi-partisan vote, Congress determined that yes, what happened on January 6th was indeed an insurrection and that Donald Trump as its chief instigator, did in fact, engage in it, albeit from a distance. For that he was impeached for the second time. 

My opinion of Donald Trump notwithstanding, Trump's actions on that day and those leading up to it, disqualify him from being president according to the Constitution, just as they would have disqualified any president, good, bad or indifferent who would have done the same.

One week from today, we will be electing our next president but only one of the two major party candidates, Kamala Harris, has shown any intention of actually being president if elected. In his words and in his deeds, Donald Trump has proven again and again that he has no interest in being president. He might like to be king or dictator perhaps, but not president.

Not only does he continue to defend the indefensible by maintaining his lie that the last election was stolen from him, but he declares solidarity with the people who on his behalf, desecrated our Capitol and killed and injured scores of Capitol police, by referring to the murderous insurrectionist traitors as "we."

Perhaps even more disturbing if that is possible, Trump has recently taken it upon himself to describe people, both public servants and private citizens who oppose him as "enemies from within, more dangerous than any foreign adversary." Yes that includes the likes of Kin Jun Un and Vladimir Putin, who according to Trump, are more dangerous than people like me and anyone else who opposes him. Despite attempts at damage control from Trump loyalist FOX News talking heads trying to reign him in, Trump doubled down by suggesting using the "military if necessary" to go after these people, in other words, U.S. citizens, our fellow countrymen.  

It's impossible to consider this and not think of historical figures who have said the same thing and carried out their plans.

Now, calling a politician you disagree with a fascist and comparing him or her to Adolph Hitler is certainly a tired cliche which should be avoided if at all possible. 

I will say this unequivocally, Donald Trump is no Adolph Hitler. 

But he sure appears to want to be. 

In addition to declaring his detractors as "enemies of the people", he continuously channels Hitler by using phrases directly linked to the German dictator such as "poisoning the blood of the people" in reference to immigrants. He has used the term Hitler used, "vermin" to describe his political opponents. Cruder still, out-Hitlering even Hitler style rhetoric, again referring to immigrants, Trump just this week called the U.S. under the Biden/Harris administration, "a garbage can for the world."

Then there's this.

The article written by Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic titled: TRUMP: I NEED THE GENERALS HITLER HAD, reveals tidbits into the mind of Trump through conversations he had with his aforementioned Chief of Staff and retired four-star general John Kelly, and other high-ranking members of the inner circle of the Trump administration. 

Some of the main takeaways from the article are Trump's profound lack of historical perspective, his ignorance of the U.S. Constitution, and his complete lack of respect for the military. Here Goldberg quotes retired General Barry McCaffrey:

The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes... It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.

But the main takeaways from the article are Trump's fascist tendencies and his admiration for Der Führer which we've been hearing about all week in the news, starting with the quote revealed in the title of the Atlantic piece. Simply put, Trump rejects the American ideal that members of the armed forces take an oath to the constitution, not the president. The generals he longed for were ones who would serve and obey him, not the country, just as he imagined Hitler's generals did. If that isn't a mockery enough, Kelly had to point out to Trump that on several occasions, Hitler's generals tried to assassinate him.

OK you get it, I don't like Trump for many reasons, some of them personal opinions, some of them not. It's the ones that are not, like his betrayal of our country and its democratic norms on January 6th, and the revelations from those close to him that he really wants to be dictator (not much of a surprise there), that make me realize no American who takes this country or our constitution seriously, regardless of their political ideology, has any business supporting him. 

That is what makes the current alliance between the Harris/Walz campaign and die-hard conservatives like the Chaneys so compelling. These are people who despite their profound ideological differences are coming together because they share one idea in common, that country comes before party, ideology, and everything else.

The thing is this: out of the plethora of issues facing us, we should all be able to agree to disagree on the multitudes of ways to address those issues. But for those of us who believe in our in our system of justice and government, flawed as they are, we should all agree on one thing, that no one in our country is above the law, not even the President of the United States. 

There in a nutshell is the most basic foundation of our democracy. 

No one should ever expect or be expected to agree with all or any of the policies of the president. The truly special thing is that we all get to directly address our objections every four years. 

But the one thing all of us must expect from a president, is that he or she lives up to the solemn pledge made before God and country at inauguration, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." 

If he or she refuses to do that, then truly nothing else matters. 

And that is a fact, not an opinion.