Into the Woods – Page 98 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Nightmare? We’re just getting started.

Before I vent, let’s try to do some calculus on how life in America is going to change. We’ve known for years what right-wing radicals and the Republican Party want to do, so much of this exercise is obvious and easy.

The social safety net:

• They’ve promised to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Twenty million people will lose their health insurance.

• They will “privatize” Social Security, claiming that they’re saving it. But what it really will mean is that, even assuming that privatized Social Security is operated without fraud, corporate interests will skim 20 percent of the money while adding no value. Benefits will be drastically cut. Social Security will be useless for those who are now under the age of 45 or 50, though I think that even Republicans know better than to drastically reduce benefits for people who are already retired, since most of those people voted for Trump. However, I’d say that the odds are that bankers will have a party on the money and will raid and destroy the Social Security system, as they did with savings and loan institutions during the 1980s and during the mortgage disaster during the Bush administration. Millions of old people will fall back into poverty. Bankers will write the legislation for the privatization of Social Security. Republicans have wanted this for 70 years.

• They will “privatize” Medicare, again claiming that they’re saving it. Medicare will become more or less a voucher system for buying private insurance. The vouchers won’t provide nearly enough money to buy decent insurance. Insurance companies will make a killing, millions of old people will no longer get the medical care they need, the medical bills of old people with bad insurance will go unpaid, and the financial system will scoop up those old people’s assets (if any). Insurance companies will write the legislation for the privatization of Medicare.

• Medicaid will be drastically cut. There will be a crisis of health care for poor people and their children. It’s hard to imagine that Medicaid will continue to pay the cost of nursing homes for old people who have no assets. That cost is about $130 billion a year and rising, or about $80,000 a year per person.

• The social safety net is particularly important in an era of economic stress, job insecurity, and inequality. Republicans are about to pour gasoline onto the fire.

Education:

• It will take time, but Republicans will essentially dismantle the public school system. The public schools that remain will become rotting facilities for poorer children where little real education is possible. The children of the rich will go to private schools, subsidized with taxpayer money. The children of the average Trump supporter will get indoctrination, rather than education, in church schools and other sorry little schools run by for-profit outfits at taxpayer expense.

• The state university systems will be starved for money as their budgets are cut and cut again. The corporatization of universities (including some private universities) will accelerate. Faculties size and compensation will be reduced. There will be increasingly political pressure toward indoctrination and corporate training. The decline of liberal educations will rapidly accelerate.

• There will be no solution to the problem of student debt. It will only get worse, as deregulation allows bankers and other for-profit players to take advantage of young people who are struggling to find an economic niche for themselves that doesn’t involve frying chicken at Chick-fil-A.

The environment:

• It’s all over for global warming.

• The EPA will be gutted. Protections for clean water and clean air will be rolled back. Energy companies will write their own legislation for maximum profit and maximum pollution.

• The national park system will be sold off or ordered to find a way to make a profit — McDonaldized.

• Federal wilderness and forests will be sold off to corporations for exploitation with virtually no regulation.

• Offshore drilling will be permitted anywhere that oil companies think it might be profitable.

• Unless consumers demand better, the fate of animals in the industrial food system, which had started to improve a little, is going to get much worse.

Our infrastructure:

• The decline of our highway system, power grid, railway systems, and public assets of all sorts will be allowed to accelerate as budgets are cut.

Taxes, federal budget, and the deficit:

• Corporate taxes and taxes on the rich will be reduced to indecent levels.

• Estate taxes on the super-wealthy will be eliminated, and within two generations we will have an American aristocracy.

• There may be tiny and token income tax reductions for working people, but consumption taxes will more than make up for any reductions.

• The federal deficit will skyrocket. As the deficit skyrockets, deficits will be used as an excuse for yet more cuts in every area of the budget that Republicans don’t like. That means pretty much everything other than the military.

• Inequality, the worst social problem of our time, will rapidly worsen at a time when reversing inequality is absolutely essential to holding a democracy together.

Justice and the Constitution:

• Though they may pay lip service to the Constitution and the bill of rights, Republicans and their takeover of the courts will erode civil liberties in every way possible, especially as social unrest increases. The only part of the Constitution they really like is the part about guns. Look for a major clampdown on civil rights and privacy if there is a serious terrorist event.

• Trump, out of vindictiveness and the necessity of controlling his false narrative, will do everything possible to destroy the mainstream media and intimidate the exercise of free speech. The propagandization of the American people will intensify, and most Americans will eat it up. It’s too early to see how the right-wing media will reorganize itself and how it will cooperate with a fascist government.

• An activist Supreme Court will roll back every court decision possible that Republicans don’t like — abortion, gay rights and gay marriage, police overreach, the ability to discriminate on religious grounds, even basic civil rights. Remember, it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that, more than anything else, started this culture war.

• The militarization and thuggification of our police will continue.

• The prison population will grow.

• I have no idea to what degree Trump will be able to carry out his anti-immigrant and anti-Islam agenda. It will get ugly.

America’s place in the world, and the inevitability of war:

• Our allies as well as our enemies are terrified and will be looking for ways to contain us.

• Even before we try to weigh the international situation (and I am bad at this, because domestic issues are a greater interest for me), we can confidently say two things. First, Republicans and their corporate backers love war and its profits. War was the primary product of the Bush-Cheney administration. Second, fascism requires scapegoats, fear, and emergency. The Trump administration will be able to whip up plenty of scapegoats, fear, and emergencies domestically, but I doubt that domestic enemies will be enough. Foreign enemies will be required, just as Bush-Cheney required foreign enemies to enable their war and their right-wing agenda. The odds of a new war are terrifyingly high, I would say. The costs of that war will further wreck the federal budget and drive up the deficit. The war will further roil domestic and global turmoil.

We are now a fascist country

Just hours ago, rational Americans believed that we were going to narrowly avoid a terrifying brush with fascism. Instead, we now live in a fascist country. Let’s don’t bother to quibble about using the word “fascism.” The only questions are whether our democracy will be able to survive it and how much damage fascism will do — to our institutions, to our culture, to the health and psyches of our people, and to the world. It is impossible to estimate at this point whether the “deep state” will be able to restrain a fascist president and a fascist Congress well enough to allow us to muddle through and eventually recover. Muddling through, followed by a slow recovery, is the best we can hope for. But if there is war and domestic turmoil, all bets are off.

Who will resist?

Commentators like Andrew Sullivan already have written that we must resist. How will we do that, especially after the courts turn against us and basic civil rights are taken away? The risk of protest is very high, because fascists require scapegoats to justify their agenda. Certainly the intelligentsia will fight back, but the words of the intelligentsia will have no effect on fascists. A diminished political class will fight back, but the tools of fascism will be used against them. If resistance is criminalized, and if Trump makes good on his boast about putting the political opposition in jail, then we are doomed.

Those of us who can see through Trump know that he can’t possibly make good on his promises to those who were deceived by him. Trump never admits failure, so all failures must be blamed on someone else. Everything that goes wrong will be blamed on those who resist. The danger this poses to those who resist is terrifying.

The American people

Readers of this blog know that I have no illusions about just how stupid, vile, and eager for delusion Americans can be. However, until last night I thought that they were merely a minority to be managed and who might slowly be brought back to reality and back to a sane and rational politics with some economic and social justice. But now we know that there are more of them than there are of us. They know nothing. They crave, and feast on, the lies and distortion they are fed by the right-wing media, which is the only media that can reach them now. They are dangerous. They finally have their Hitler. They now control the government. There can be no happy ending to this story. The only question is how enormous the disaster will be, and how permanent.

A bonus about what happened in King yesterday

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the nasty little town of King, North Carolina. Once again, King lived up to its nasty reputation on election day. An atheist activist and veteran, who was carrying a sign that said “Veterans Against Trump,” was deliberately hit by a truck driven by an old white guy who is a member of the VFW. There’s video of it. The story got into the papers. I think it would have gone viral, but it was obscured by the election news. When you watch the video, note the rage, hatred, and blind stupidity in the old white guy’s voice as he leans out of his truck yelling at the atheist. I would say that this kind of person is what we deal with here in the rural South. But last night we learned that it’s much worse than that. This entire country just handed power to guys like this old VFW guy. They’re a majority in most states.

I am sick to my stomach. I’m scared. I am doing my best to contain the rage I feel toward the American people — for their stupidity, their gullibility, and their turn to fascism. They don’t know what they’ve done, because they are too stupid and lied-to to know what they’ve done. While I’ve been writing this, my electronic devices have been chiming with Facebook messages, text messages, and phone calls from friends and political associates. Everyone is reaching out to each other for a bit of comfort in their shock and their fear for the future. But, at the same time, a majority of Americans are now celebrating and gloating. As Andrew Sullivan wrote last night, We the People did this.

We’ve got a lot of thinking to do.

Here’s a link to a newspaper story on what happened in King, with video. I’m quoted in the story, by the way. And here’s the next day’s version of the story with charges filed.

Update: My post was up before Vox.com came out with this today, but we’re on the same wavelength: Donald Trump’s presidency is going to be a disaster for the white working class

Update: Here is a story on Trump’s plans for highways and other infrastructure — privatize it, require Americans to pay tolls to use it, and allow corporations to rake in profits from it. If there’s anything white trash in the heartlands hate, it’s toll roads. Maybe this will help teach Trump voters what government is for, what government does, and why they need government.

Trump Just Told The Truth, And It’s More Terrifying Than His Racism And Lies

This is Obama’s fault — really

While the Republican Party’s strategy — for years — has been hell fire and scorched earth, President Obama persisted in his delusion that Republicans’ destructive, truth-free politics could be cured with “bipartisanship.” This delusion even persisted into Obama’s second term. It was in September 2013 that Obama appointed a Republican, James Comey, as director of the FBI.

We have waited all weekend for some kind of clarification on the meaning of Comey’s letter to the Republican Congress about Hillary Clinton. We’ve gotten no clarification. Until we hear some verifiable facts that might convince us otherwise, the safe assumption would be that Comey was under extreme pressure from Republicans in Congress to do something to swing the election that Republicans were clearly losing, including their Senate majority. How else can the emptiness and innuendo of the letter, and its timing, be explained? E.J. Dionne describes this scenario in a column yesterday in the Washington Post: “The evidence also suggests that he has been intimidated by pressure from Republicans in Congress whose interest is not in justice but in destroying Hillary Clinton… History shows that appeasing bullies never works. Maybe Comey has learned this lesson and will try to make amends in coming days.”

Obama campaigned as a liberal. After Obama took office, Republicans howled about his divisiveness and extreme leftistness, even as Obama governed for the center-right and the establishment and made bad appointment after bad appointment of establishmentarians and the usual suspects — no justice for the bankers who had so recently brought down the economy, no justice for the Republicans who had knowingly lied us into war, no justice for torture and war crimes. And those were just the justice issues. Republicans also had earned political payback, carefully measured out and carefully delivered under the klieg lights, to show that Democrats can play hardball, too, if that’s the game that Republicans insist on playing.

Obama’s cowardliness in responding to Republican bullying with bipartisan delusion was so exasperating that, during Obama’s first term, I actually changed my party affiliation from Democrat to unaffiliated, as a response to my frustration with the Democratic Party’s refusal to be Democrats. (I changed my affiliation back to Democrat a few years later when I got involved in local politics.) I can acknowledge that Obama’s political course was noble and statesmanlike. But let’s also acknowledge that it didn’t work, that it can’t work with today’s Republican Party, and that we’d be foolish to try it again. In politics, sometimes payback is the only thing that works.

I have a fantasy of having an opportunity to say a few words to President Hillary Clinton. I would ask her to act like a Democrat, even when no one is looking. No more bankers, no more tech billionaires, and no more of any of the “Third Way” Republicans-lite who had a hand in Bill Clinton’s presidency. President Hillary Clinton owes everything — everything — to the Democrats who worked so hard against a tide of ugliness and humiliation to get her elected. To Republicans she owes only payback, and lots of it.

My fantasy continues with walking across the Mall to the Capitol and saying a few words to the Senate Majority Leader, Dianne Feinstein. I want investigations, I’d say. I want never-ending, vigorous, hell-fire and scorched-earth investigations. I want investigations and media grandstanding just like the investigations that Republicans have done, but based on real crimes as opposed to imagined ones. I want to know what kind of communication James Comey had with Republicans before he sent to Congress his letter of Oct. 28, 2016. I want war crimes investigations. I want investigations of war profiteering. I want Dick Cheney prosecuted. I want prison sentences for everyone who was involved in torture, at every level of government, the military, and non-government organizations. I want bankers investigated. I want some bankers and billionaires in jail. I want churches and lots of Republican political outfits fined and taxed for violating IRS rules about tax-free meddling in politics. I want state governments that tried to restrict voting rights returned to federal oversight. I want Medicare expanded to cover all Americans of all ages. I want the Fairness Doctrine reintroduced and applied to cable television, putting an end to the propagandization of the most gullible and regressive elements of the American population. I want Elizabeth Warren to oversee the overhaul of federal taxation and banking. I want Bernie Sanders, not corporate lobbyists, to write the legislation for the 115th Congress, with climate, energy, infrastructure, education, and inequality as the first items on the agenda.

I want eight years of hell-fire, scorched-earth Democratic partisanship. I want no oxygen for the Republican Party, other than the oxygen required to burn it. Then let’s get on with the real work of government.

The dying gasps of the 1950s

There is an ugly little suburban town on the southern edge of my county that I would have to say is one the nastiest and most hateful little places I’ve ever known. To this day — 2016! — black friends tell me that black people are afraid to go there. In 2014, while I was working in the Democratic tent at the county fair, which is held in this little town, an older white man working a concession stand hesitated sourly before selling me a Coke. He did sell me the Coke, but he handed it to me with a hate look, because he knew that I’d come from the Democratic tent. Also, on election day in 2014, there was a great deal of embarrassing television and newspaper coverage after a Democrat was charged with assault on a Republican. The Democrat, a woman, had gotten fed up by, and felt threatened by, an older male Republican who had been in her face for much of the day outside the polls, using ugly terms that I won’t repeat here. She knocked him down.

Just yesterday, a Democrat who is running for office had yet another unpleasant experience in this nasty little town, outside the polling place where early voting was going on. Again, I mustn’t repeat the hateful and racist language that Republicans were using about Democrats. This candidate for office happens to be country lawyer, and you’d think that he’s probably heard everything by now. But he was pretty shaken by, and disheartened by, this experience.

I’ve often wondered how that little town came to be so nasty. Partly, I’ve assumed, it’s because a large fundamentalist church run by a group of tiny-minded little Bible-college preachers pretty much runs the town. But friends who know more of the history of this county than I do tell me that, after Emancipation in the 19th Century, as freed slaves left the nearby plantations and went looking for land, and homes, this little town put up signs telling black people to move on, that they weren’t welcome. Why am I not surprised? This nasty little town has been a nasty little town for 150 years. It has nursed its hatred and racism for that long. It even has a white “militia” now to police itself. The militia even has a booth at the county fair.

This nasty little town remains pretty much segregated. I just ran the numbers and found that black voters are 1 percent of the population. Compare that with the nearby city of Winston-Salem, which is 35 percent African-American. What does it take to keep a little Southern town segregated? Nasty people, nasty churches, nasty politics, and nasty words for anyone who is seen as a threat to 150 years of nastiness. The name of this nasty little town is King, North Carolina. I apologize to the good people who live in this town. There certainly are some, and some of them are friends, but they’re a minority.

On the ground here in the rural South, election season is a tough time. Two weeks ago, in an adjoining (but also Republican) county, I went with my brother into an auto parts store to get some things we needed to hook up a TV antenna for our sister. The printer for the cash register was down, and while one of the guys behind the counter was working to fix it, a small cluster of customers was waiting to check out. A typical loudmouth Republican — white, male, and dumb as the brake shoes he was buying — based on no context that I was aware of, made a racist comment about President Obama, loud enough for all to hear. I looked away and ignored it. Then he made another racist comment about President Obama.

“Careful,” I said. “There might be Democrats in the room.”

He responded with a sexist comment about Hillary Clinton. Now one of the men behind the counter joined in.

“I just walk away if somebody says something I don’t like,” the man behind the counter said.

“Yeah, I just walk away,” said the man who had made the racist comment about President Obama.

“You’re not walking away,” I say. “You’re just standing there throwing out insults.”

My brother, embarrassed, told me to shut up. I can’t say that I blame him. He’s a Democrat, but he has to live with, and keep the peace with, these idiots. Whereas I can’t take it anymore.

Every morning, in front of my computer, I check my usual sources of news and commentary looking for something helpful and intelligent about what is going on in this country and what we might be able to do about it. I’m usually disappointed in the quality of the commentary. Our public intellectuals are as frustrated and dumbfounded as I am. Because I’m exasperated, one piece that has stuck in my mind is Dana Milbank’s piece in the Washington Post on Oct. 21. Trump, Milbank says, mustn’t just be defeated. He also must be humiliated, out of respect for the American democracy, which Trump obviously abhors and to which he is a grave danger.

Even before Trump, I was fed up. I am fed up with racist, hateful, ignorant white people. I am fed up with their politics. I am fed up with what comes out of their mouths. I am fed up with their religion. I try to channel my fed-upness into useful political work. If I ever truly told them what I think of them — and what they truly need to be told — I wouldn’t survive long. These people, increasingly, live right on the edge of violence. A part of the danger of Donald Trump is that he encourages the anger and the violence.

It is sometimes said that the old white people who support Trump idolize the 1950s as a golden age, and that basically what they want is to return to the golden age of the white ignorati. If only there was something like the ghosts who visited Ebenezer Scrooge, who would spirit these tiny-minded white people off on a trip around the country in the 1950s — and the planet — to see what life was like for hundreds of millions of other people. For many, it was not a golden age. It was a hell. No wonder the voiceless and powerless rose up. No wonder the 1960s happened. No wonder the Civil Rights Act happened, or gay liberation, or the women’s movement. Even white young males like me felt smothered by all that, and we threw it off. I’m a child of the ’60s. In our retirement and old age, we children of the ’60s seem to be having our last battle with the children of the ’50s. We children of the ’60s will win, too. Because we’re younger, and our children are younger.

If the miserable year 2016 is about anything, it’s about the ongoing project of throwing off the dark side of the 1950s, forever. I expect to live to see it. But the ’50s’ last stand is turning out to be the ugliest period of my fairly long life.

Fall blooms at the garden shop

When you’re serious about your yard, garden, and orchard, there are times when you need the advice and help of experts. The abbey is lucky to have access to a former agricultural agent who now runs a business of his own. Here’s what was blooming at his garden shop today. The photos were taken with my iPhone, which is a surprisingly good camera if you work with the limitations of its lens.

I bought this kieffer pear tree, which will be planted here within the next week or two.

Backyard game camera

The backyard parties seem to go on day and night.

It’s time for ridicule now, everyone

Any time the make-believe right-wing world is imploding, which is a lot these days, I like to go to the Drudge Report to see how they’re spinning it. Just last week, for example, everyone in the right-wing bubble just knew that Wikileaks was going to release some stuff that would absolutely destroy Hillary once and for all. Instead they got a Wikileaks infomercial trying to raise money for Wikileaks. It was hilarious.

Drudge Report flopped around all day today trying to figure out what to do with the Trump meltdown. Finally they got a headline in the Wall Street Journal that was suitable for Drudgers. I’ve reproduced it below.

Is there an equivalence? Is the Drudge view of the world equally real? Sometimes it takes months and even years for the right-wing delusions spread by the right-wing media to fly apart. It this case, it will take, at most, exactly one month. Let us count the days.

Tabloid media aside, here’s what New York Times readers are seeing. Let’s revisit these headlines on Nov. 9.

P.S. What was it you were saying about Bill and Hillary? For the last twenty years?

As the world turns

It’s an ill hurricane that blows nobody good, I suppose. Hurricane Matthew, for all the damage done elsewhere, brought two days of much-needed steady rain here. It was the first steady rain in many months and put an end to summer’s low-grade drought. Suddenly the weather switched from summer mode to fall mode. Today is, in short, the perfect day for baking.

Though the abbey’s only attempt at growing pumpkins was quickly ruined by raccoons, I’m good at picking choice pumpkins at roadside produce stands. This pumpkin will be pie before dark.

Why are we not investing in young people?

Jobs — but no lives and not much education

One consequence of our dumb-as-rocks political and media culture is that the pig circus intentionally distracts us from talking about things that matter. To her credit, Hillary Clinton has proposed a plan for making it possible for young people to attend public univerities debt-free. As for Donald Trump, the scam of Trump University (now defunct, of course) tells you all you need to know. To Donald Trump, young people are just a natural resource to be exploited for profit. As for the voters, the mean and ugly me-first issues of old white people are dominating the 2016 presidential election — when we even talk about reality at all.

If you asked a hundred random Americans to name in one word what young people today need most, probably “jobs” is the answered you’d get most. That’s the centrist answer. The liberal answer probably would be “educations.” And the right-wing answer probably would be “Jesus.”

If you asked me, I’d do my best to come up with a more radical answer. How about lives for what young people need? We Americans rarely think beyond earning and consumption. We train people to be cogs in the economy and to be submissive citizens (which is part of what religion is for).

Thus I was intrigued this morning, while making my daily check of the Irish Times web site, to come across a story saying that the European Union is considering giving all 18-year-olds an InterRail pass so that they can explore Europe and expand their cultural horizons. An advocate of the idea said, “But the fact is that a lot of people and especially young people do not get to travel as much and explore Europe first hand and so they go to Front National and join right wing parties.”

I live in a poor, rural county politically dominated by Republicans and culturally dominated by nasty little white churches. Our young people pay a huge price not only for the poverty, but also for the small-mindedness and the hatreds instilled by the Republican Party and by the churches. The smartest of our young people leave for college and never come back. Many leave for dead-end jobs in urban areas and never come back. Though a very few black sheep buck the process, most succumb to the various forms of impoverishment that make them pretty much just like their parents — ignorant, Republican, racist, primed for resentment, and completely unequipped for a life in the 21st Century world.

Sometimes, standing with liberal friends and observing these local young people at events such as outdoor music festivals, I notice their lack of social skill, the early onset of obesity and bad health, the total lack of vitality and style, the dying-inside looks on their faces, and I feel sorry for them. More than once I’ve said something like, “If only we could give them a passport and send them on a trip to Copenhagen. They’d never vote Republican again.” Yes. And it also would bring us some cultural rethinking and cultural renewal. And we probably should send them to France as well to learn about food.

But small-mindedness and small-heartedness, of course (preferably with a wall around us), are exactly what Republicans and white preachers want in their customers — empty, dead-end lives of work and consumption. A vote for Trump is the only outlet for anger and for the shame of failure. A Confederate flag in a trashed yard is the only source of pride, except maybe for a big pickup truck.

There are vast amounts of money in this country. It continues to flow up to the rich. The rich, of course, invest heavily in their young — tomorrow’s 1 percent. As for everyone else, forty-five percent of 25-year-olds are in debt. The net worth of 35-year-olds averages one month of expenses. Shouldn’t we be talking about this?

P.S. Eventually, as older generations die off, all wealth, of course, is transferred to the young. A study in 2000 for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that 92 percent of Americans will receive no inheritance at all. Of the 8 percent who inherit something, half of them will inherit less that $25,000. Only 1.7 percent of the population stand to inherit more than $50,000. This is how oligarchies and aristocracies are built and sustained. The Republican Party wants to make this much worse by eliminating inheritance taxes on the super-rich. It has been two years now since Thomas Piketty told us pretty much everything we need to know about inequality. But what are we talking about? Overweight beauty queens and Bill Clinton’s infidelities. And our low-investment young people, like older white failures, can’t really follow a conversation that’s more complicated than that.

October reading

I’m afraid that this book may make some pretty scary reading in the weeks before this election. But many other Americans will be reading this book right now, and we might as well band together for mutual support and discussion.

The photograph, by the way, was taken in the rubble of a textile mill in Madison-Mayodan, North Carolina, shortly after I picked up the book at the post office.

From the introduction:

“We Germans were liberated from Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off,” Eberhard Jäckel concluded in a lecture in 1979, adding: “Hitler will always be with us, with those who survived, those who came afterwards and even those yet to be born. He is present — not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of.”

The debate

Blurry losers from a lost world watching Fox News and sagely repeating Republican talking points, the morning after the debate

Y’all knew that a rant was coming today, didn’t you?

First, here’s my prediction for the debate, from an email to a friend a couple of hours before the debate started:

Two things that give me hope about tonight…

1. Hillary will be totally in her element. She is a total wonk. She’s been in congressional hearings so many times that she’s accustomed to right-wing goons trying to entrap her and throwing sound bites at her. She’s a lawyer. Whereas Trump is totally out of his element. He doesn’t know shit. He’s not a lawyer. He’s accustomed to speaking only to the ignorati. His canned statements (what else does he have, since he knows nothing?) will sound canned, and his ad libs will be perilous for him.

2. Hillary has been defined by other people for 25 years. Many goon-rods know her only through what the right-wing media say about her. An audience of 100 million people, many of whom normally would not see Hillary herself, will see Hillary herself tonight, unspun by right-wing media. She came off extremely well at the Democratic convention. She can do it again, but this time for a larger audience that includes far more non-Democrats.

Unless something totally unexpected happens, she’ll rip him to shreds, while smiling and keeping her cool. He will lose his cool and show his anger, smugness, nastiness, and self-love. The only catch is that a certain percentage of the electorate despise competence and love his nastiness. But I suspect that they’re only about 30-some percent. The rest should get it.

Ailes will have prepped Trump to appeal to the 30 percent. Everyone else will be disgusted.

This debate — like the impressively intelligent Hillary Clinton — went right over the heads of a large portion of the American public. Hillary talked about important and urgent issues that are never mentioned in the right-wing media, which panders to people who have no idea what government is for or what government does in the 21st Century and wouldn’t be able to understand if you told them. There was a funny story in the New York Times about words that were used during the debate that sent many debate-watchers to online dictionaries, including stamina, temperament, cyber, “stop and frisk,” and braggadocio.

Trump supporters, in short, can’t even follow a conversation about what’s involved in being president of the United States, let alone have a useful opinion on the subject. And yet they can vote. Much worse, there are so many of them that a large and highly profitable segment of the media industry arose to feed and flatter their stupidity and to manipulate their votes for the Republican Party.

I was truly touched when Hillary Clinton spoke to those people outside the United States who have a very hard time understanding how Americans can be so ignorant and so vile, and how an orange clown like Donald Trump could be within a few percentage points of being president of the United States.

To all the readers of this blog in Europe and other civilized places, I apologize for us Americans. Those of us with two or more neurons to rub together are doing everything we can not only to stop Donald Trump’s election but also to hasten the burial of the rotting corpse of the Republican Party. And if you happen to see Rupert Murdoch’s sons at a party in London or Melbourne, please plead with them to clean up Fox News with a water cannon and to start all over again, in reality this time.

About the photo at the top of this post: I had to go to the post office and stopped for lunch, since my political commitments cut into my cooking time these days. I sat down at an empty counter, not knowing that I had invaded the place where old white Republicans meet for lunch and to watch Fox News. Suddenly I was surrounded. They coughed a lot and were full of germs. I thought about moving, not so much to not have to listen to them, but to get away from the bad health and the germs. Their Social Security and Medicare bills must be such a burden on taxpayers! (Except of course to rich people like Trump who are smart and don’t pay taxes.) But I stayed so as not to appear rude, and, believe it or not, I listened to their outpouring of horse shit and ignorance through my entire lunch without saying a word. As I told a friend yesterday in email, I sometimes wish for a magic spell that would transport Acorn Abbey from the godforsaken Republican-infested Bible Belt to a quiet little dell in the Scottish Highlands. But normally I don’t deal with these people. There are deep woods between the abbey and them, and no one gets past the owls, crows, squirrels, rabbits, raccoon, bears, and white deer that guard this place against those who don’t know the password.