October 2016 – Into the Woods

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.”