That Treacherous Crawl

I’ve been watching Fox News lately. Now I haven’t put aside my unashamedly liberal tendencies and I certainly haven’t become a Trump Acolyte. But, how else will you get - right from the horse’s mouth - a clear-eyed look at what is driving the country.

All right, not the entire country. And, all right again, not a clear-eyed look, but only a little ray of light, shining through whatever crack in the curtain that it’s highly-paid commentators allow to reach their self-selected audience.

But, like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s famous cave - and shame on you if you never learned about it - the glimpses I have gotten in the past couple of weeks are really   illuminating.

I’m still learning. The big show continues to play on in Washington - Congress doesn’t actually have to be in Washington for the political turmoil to continue - and you can learn a lot anyway.

You want an example? Well here’s one. Some commentators were debating the other day on whether President Trump’s unpredictability was a good thing or a bad thing.

One of them (and no, I will not increase their public posture by even a single potential viewer by using their names) said that a lot of people wanted him to be unpredictable, and were happy to see he is keeping his promise.

Look at that Obama, they said. He told our enemies what he was going to do, and so they were prepared to react. Trump gives no such warning, which means he is more powerful and gets better results.

Well, it was two to one or three to one for Trump’s unpredictability. The lone dissent came from someone who said that people wanted government they could count on. 

The Trump supporters scoffed. They believe the President when he claimed he has stopped China from stealing our industrial secrets because its leaders are scared over what he might do, that he defeated ISIS by not telegraphing his moves ahead of time and has made NATO members pay their fair share. 

They didn’t say exactly what that fair share was, or how it was calculated, or what it was  paid to. But, that’s not the point. They also didn’t say how ISIS will respond to his order bringing our troops out of Syria. Maybe they will just wait until we leave until they attack.

If so, it will be obviously become the fault of the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Why? They didn’t vote to build a big, beautiful wall across the desert.

                                            So, What Could They Be Missing?

The Fox commentators neglected to say that that Trump’s being unpredictable was causing the stock market to drop like a stone, straining our military alliances to the breaking point, leaving farmers unsure what to plant next year and driving up interest rates.

See how easy it it is to tell what Fox News doesn’t want to talk about, just from the questions they ask and don’t ask. It’s a little ray of sunshine.

Even more important, watching Fox - even briefly - showed me something I never realized before - the Treacherous Crawl.

Now crawl is a term that has been used in the news business almost since cable news was invented. The crawl is that little line on the bottom of your television or computer screen that provides information which may have nothing to do with the show you are watching. Look at the words crawling across the screen.

On Christmas Eve, the Fox commentators were joking about the holidays and showing cute pictures sent in by viewers showing dogs in elf hats, children playing and heartwarming holiday scenes. The treacherous crawl was talking about the hundreds of people killed by a tsunami in Indonesia, but no one was talking about rescue missions or help or where to send donations.

There might not have been room. There are almost as few words in the crawl as in a Trump tweet. Wait. Come to think of it, he didn’t tweet about the tsunami either.

I won’t stay with Fox news much longer. But, if someone else is watching, please let me know who gets the blame for the collapse of the stock market. I want to see if I guessed right.

Cold Comfort

It’s getting to be winter here in New York. And, although the weather has been bouncing from the early-morning 20’s to the mid-50’s in some afternoons, it is swiftly moving through what has become a miserable few months.

So, I am taking cold comfort - pardon the  pun - from the hope that a bright new year is breaking, a year when change will shift some things from the bad column to the good column, and that the normally pleasant order of life will return.

Which, of course, gives a whole batch of new meanings to that phrase. You know, “cold comfort.” Actually, a lot of meanings.

It is, truly, seasonal. On some emotional level, I think, human beings take comfort in the change of seasons. For those of us who live in weather zones where leaves fall off trees, whole religions have sprung up telling us why the weather changes and days grow shorter. Turn, Turn, Turn.

In other places, the change in seasons was marked by changes in the moon, or the stars, or the times that rivers flood. Egypt and Greece celebrated those changes long before western civilizations even got into the act.

(fear not, this will eventually devolve into a political screed of sorts. But, for a while, let’s have some fun.)

This is the time of the year for another kind of cold comfort, which works equally well in the north and the south, the east and the west. Yes, it’s the time for hot stove talk about baseball, when teams make trades, and all the teams who were out of the playoffs long before the end of the season make trades - ok, most of them - to get better. Soon the players will start reporting to Spring training, and everyone will be healthy. Pitchers and catchers will make mistakes, and it will be chalked off to being rusty. Optimism will rule. 

Teams who pile up a winning record will have fans who are smiling. Teams which end up with a losing record will get a lot of cold comfort by saying that every team starts 0-0 when the season begins, or that no one remembers Spring training once the real season starts, or that this was only a chance to see what the farm team kids can do, or to evaluate draft choices.

See, cold comfort everywhere.

Old romances will die over the winter. New ones will be born. We will see new records for storms or snowfall, cities in the South where snow was a one-inch, once-a-year rarity will start debating buying snow plows. More cold comfort of a different kind. Some time in February or March, I will say to my wife “The weather has been miserable, but at least we never lost power.”

She will look at me with a sweet, sad expression around her eyes and reply “Shut up. You are going to jinx it.”

Cold comfort, again.

I am looking forward to the new year for a lot of reasons. The big one is January 3, when the 116th Congress will begin its term. Naturally, there will be fights between the Democrats and the Republicans, and there will be fights between Democrats and Democrats, and then between Republicans and Republicans. Which means we will be entertained and most of our nation’s problems will not be addressed. Cold comfort.

Then I heard on the news that our President has ordered all of our troops in Syria, about 2,000 of them, to be withdrawn, because they have defeated ISIS there and it is no longer a threat. So we will leave, and ISIS will go back. Then we can go to war again, or just bomb Syrian women and children as collateral damage. Cold comfort.

There is speculation that President Trump may have already been indicted, and that the indictment has been sealed. Cold comfort.

The Trump Foundation has been ordered to be disbanded by a judge, and a couple of million dollars - if that much is actually left - will be distributed to other charities. Now accountants are looking into what it spent and how much of its money was spent for inflated bills and services charged by other companies owned by our President. Cold comfort.

Well, you get the idea. We are heading for a couple of years of chaos. a Constitutional show-down of sorts and the likely collapse of many of our small farms, a lot of them owned by people who voted for Trump. Cold comfort.

That only touches on all the likely things that will happen next year, and gives just a small sample of how many kinds of cold comfort we will likely be getting.

Which is, in itself, cold comfort.

Time To Fire Your Editor

I got a report on farm conditions in Minnesota the other day, which no longer surprises me very much.

I have been getting reports on Minnesota weather conditions for weeks now, as well as the outlook for crop markets next summer from the state’s farm bureau. None of which I wanted, and all of which just popped up as soon as I called up Google on my old search engine.

I started it, of course. About a month ago, I was interested in a Minnesota Vikings game, and - naturally - I Googled the team, read a couple of articles in the local newspaper and on a sports magazine site, and thought that was the end of it.

No, it was just the beginning.

I search for a lot of different things on Google, often to avoid embarrassing myself, sometimes just to check the spelling of an odd name, or even something simple like, say, Mississippi.

Now those search choices rarely come back to me for more than a day or two. After all, when I type Ser... I could be looking for lots of different things, but if my last search was for Serbia, well then my computer remembers - or more likely something else someplace else remembers - and up pops what I looked for the last time. Quick, efficient, simple and often welcome. After all, it saves me 20 or 30 seconds of typing, or even more if the spelling is long and difficult.

I had to look up Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov the other day. See what I mean?

Now I started noticing the same thing happening on my phone when I search one of the news sites. It offers a helpful hint, telling me that I would probably be interested in these  other interesting stories.

It’s just as helpful in suggesting things I might want to buy. Storm windows seem to be high on the list, so is cat litter and protein drinks. And you can’t believe just how many prizes I have won, and all I have to do is just click on a link to claim them. Who says this isn’t a great country? If I actually did that, I would doubtless have more than enough money to pay for new storm windows, and think about them while I am warm and comfortable on some beach in the tropics, courtesy of one of those great prizes I have won.

                                                        So, Here's The Catch

    

So, what’s bad? Other than the annoyance of losing 20 or 30 seconds to those dumb pop-up ads, especially the ones that I have to force quit to get rid of. Hey, add that to the wasted time that I spend on people who call trying to sell me solar panels - some of them hang up on me when, after a few minutes, I ask if I have to take down the panels I already have to enjoy their offer - it comes to maybe 10 or 15 minutes a day. Maybe two hours a week. Maybe 100 hours a year - two days of my life wasted every year. It adds up.

But more to the point, those suggestions of stories I want to see have turned my computer and my phone into editors, sifting through a universe of stories and deciding what I - an audience of one - really want to see and hear. And know.

Now a real live editor has a lot of duties. In the good old days, newspaper editors had to fight every day for space - who gets how much space for straight news, for business, for sports. National news fought with local news, business page editors cherished their best story, and only reluctantly saw it drift up to the front page and off the business pages.

And they worried about balance. Not getting every opinion in every story, of course, but - over a week or a month - making sure that every valid side of every valid dispute was presented to their readers.

They worried about facts, too. There were copy desk people who checked facts in every story, librarians who provided more data than anyone could want on necessary background, and lots of files of previous stories and photographs to give the reporter a better sense of what they were writing about.

And they would worry about stories covering things I never heard of, or never would have thought to look up. The impact of over-production of oil on the delicate balance between Saudi Arabia and Israel, for example, or the possible impact of a new fundamentalism sweeping through India. Should I care? Certainly. Would I have thought to look it up? Probably not.

                                                  But, No Longer

Today my editor is some kind of computer program which looks at what I last saw and assumes I want to see more of the same. Which, sometimes, I do. But, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes, I want to know how other people see things. And, with all the junk sites that come up with every click, it gets harder and harder to find a valid opinion from the people who don’t agree with me.

Grandstanding politicians don’t help here. Repeating the same thing over and over doesn’t help much, either. On the other hand, how else do you say that maybe it’s time to bring the troops home from one place or another without repeating how long they have been there?

Well, that’s the job of a real editor. Not to tell me what the weather is going to be like in two weeks in Minnesota.

Rest In Peace, W

I watched some of the three days of memorial events for George Herbert Walker Bush, and couldn’t help being drawn back to another time in our nation’s history. The contrast with Washington today was stark, and not flattering.

So, before the memory of those events fades - as everything seems to do these days - it would be a good idea to look at what happened and what it represented, and maybe think about what we seem to have lost.

I’ll try not to belabor the obvious too much. Rather, I want to look at a few little details and some of the history of good old 41, the last member of the Greatest Generation to serve in the White House.*

That much is true. But “greatest generation,” while a term of respect which is well-earned, is something we can quibble about in the corner bar. In this corner, an elderly man who used to be a 20-year-old giving up his old life to go fight against the Germans in Africa or the Italians somewhere on the boot of Italy. In that corner, another man who, when he was 20, gave up his old life to fight some faceless enemy in a jungle in Southeast Asia in a war that never seemed to end. Between them, we can put a soldier fighting in Afghanistan with no clear plan on how to win, or even what would define victory. Which, I admit, sounds a little like Vietnam, or maybe the battle along the Texas border against all those rock-throwing children and the invisible caravan.

But I digress. And, I shouldn’t. There is much to reflect on and much to admire in the life of George Herbert Walker Bush. Decency stands high on the list, but it doesn’t stand alone.

                                                  Some Things To Remember

He was as much a war hero as John F. Kennedy. His plane was shot out of the sky while Kennedy’s boat was blown out of the water. He went to Yale, entered the oil business by founding his own company, and became a millionaire by the time he was 40. His father didn’t give it to him. He was Director of the CIA, and was picked to be vice-president by Ronald Reagan after Reagan defeated him in the Republican primary for president. Good grief, he even signed (and took credit for) the North American Free Trade Agreement, better known as NAFTA - you know, the worst deal ever that was foisted onto the country by those sneaky Democrats. It only lasted a quarter of a century before we learned how bad it was.

All those actions are honorable, and all were earned by Bush.

But he earned a lot more - things like respect from powerful politicians, world leaders, and just plain people who knew him or his family. Even from strangers, some of whom turned against him when he broke that promise - you know “read my lips, no new taxes” which only saved our nation from going bankrupt or maybe just cutting social security payments in half.

George Bush was a naval hero, and the armed forces were well represented at the funeral. It reminded me that once, every single person in that room would have known the branch of service of each man or woman in uniform and many would have been able to tell you what every dash of color - the ribbons, the braid, the insignias and rank - meant.  It was important to him, and it said so much more than just “thank you for your service.”

Extra credit if you can tell me what the crossed dueling pistols on the little brass circle that I gave my daughter from an old uniform means.

One more thing, of course. The people in the front row at his funeral - at least most of them - seemed genuinely glad to be sitting together. They exchanged small talk, they smiled at times. And, there were tears as well.

Did I just imagine that only the sitting president seemed to be uncomfortable. Was it because this wasn’t about him, or because he was wondering how many of his associates would have to be let out of jail to speak at his funeral? And, what would they say? And who would tweet about it?

Sometimes, living in the moment - no past to look on proudly, no new ideas of your own for the future (bringing back the past as a plan for the future rarely works) and no idea of what to pass on as your legacy - just doesn’t work.

So rest in peace George Herbert Walker Bush, and thank you for the example you left for our whole nation. At least, for those who will stop to see it.

* Small footnote. Jimmy Carter is the right age to be considered part of the Greatest Generation, but he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1946, a year too late to serve in World War II. 

Another Day, Another Lie

So, here is how my life has been going lately. It seems like almost everyone and almost everything is lying to me. It’s hard to get used to, but once you do, it’s easy to ignore the big liar in the White House and all the little liars around him.

Sound paranoid? Well, it all started a few days ago when my old, out-of-date, no longer supported Safari search engine vanished from my computer desktop.

Now my computer is a little old - five years in computer terms is about 80 years in human years - but I was happy with it. All the sites I wanted to go to were bookmarked, I could search for a lot of things without annoying pop-up ads, and - most important to this blog - all I had to do was click on “blog” and up it came.

Then, one morning, it was gone.

                                                      So, What To Do?

I tried three other search engines, and none of them would let me connect to my own blog. One came close, but asked me for a password I had long forgotten. No problem, it offered to text a code to  me, but I needed another password for that.

Still no problem, it would send the access code to my cell phone. But the number hint it gave - 13 were the last numbers on the phone, the hint said - did not match my cell phone, our land line,  my wife’s cell, my tech-savvy daughters cells or any other familiar number.

So, I gave up pretending to be a Luddite, dug into the file that stored all the apps on my computer, and simply lifted Safari to the appropriate dock. Presto. The lie that it was gone was, well, gone.

So, then I heard about Paul Manafort being charged by the FBI with lying and breaking his plea agreement. Then I heard from the President that we used a “very mild” form of tear gas to protect our troops from babies in diapers on the Mexican border - turns out the troops only have one kind of tear gas, the regular kind - and then my cell phone rang.

Now I hate unsolicited advertising when I am called at home. I like it even less when I am driving and my phone is on speaker. And a recorded voice told me not to hang up, that it was not an ad, and that I qualified to get a $100 credit card, apparently just for being me.

So I hung up. Didn’t get into a traffic accident. Didn’t get a ticket. And did get another call, telling me how much I could save on my insurance.

And I remembered some politician in Washington telling me that the government does not have the power to regulate those kinds of calls, and the wireless networks telling me they can’t legally block those calls, and some other politician telling me I have to be a smarter shopper, ignoring the fact that phone contracts have shelf lives a lot longer than bananas or bottles of milk in the refrigerator.  

                            And Just Who Is Keeping Those Calls Coming?                                

And, hey, forget about all those contributions from the tech sector that go to the politicians who could change the rules and eliminate those nuisance calls almost overnight, but somehow don’t get around to it.

Then I heard that auto factories around the country are going to close and cost tens of thousands of jobs, and that the national debt is growing faster than ever before, and that those barefoot immigrants are headed to Mississippi to vote illegally for Democrats. Trump and Fox News said those things were betrayals, and that it was all the fault of the Federal Reserve Chairman, who Trump had appointed before finding out just how bad he was.

But, good news, the immigrants have no money and can’t walk that fast. What they should do, the President said, is just wait and come into the country legally. Do it the right way. Lots of people are saying that.

Then some news reporter said the government was processing a hundred amnesty applications a week, and that there were 5,000 people waiting to come into the United States from that border hot spot. So, I did the math in my head, and if nobody else joins the crowd, it will take almost a year for them all to get in, assuming that they all qualify.

So, who will feed them and house them and cloth them and take care of their medical needs? After all, many fled from the terror of their home country with just the clothes on their backs.

Well, let’s see? Could it be Mexico? I wonder why that nation isn’t cooperating with our border patrols as well as it could.

But, it is. Donald Trump told me so. That was a few days after Mitch McConnell told me that our Congress should work to be more bipartisan next year, reaching across the aisle and cooperating. That was right after he said there was still time to approve a few more Republican judges before Congress adjourns.

See how easy it is to live with liars?

Go Ohio!

This will be about an old law, the law of unintended consequences. But, first, we have to talk about a new law, and Ohio - that wonderful and creative state - looks like it is about to jump head-first into the great unknown future. And take us all with it.

Yes, we’re talking about Roe v. Wade.

Now Roe v. Wade has been around for a long time, and it was never as simple as most people today see it. We all know that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that a woman had the right to have an abortion without the interference of the government - that it was a matter of privacy, and that keeping the government out of a woman’ s decision with her doctor was protected by the Constitution of the United States.

                                                   But what, exactly, is it?

It led to a frenzy of laws in different places, with advocates claiming all sorts of things. THe ACLU’s Sexual Privacy Project said it also defended the rights of gays and lesbians, women living with boyfriends, adult porn stars, sex workers and people arrested for cross-dressing in public. And several states began a campaign that has lasted more than 40 years, saying that even though abortion may well be legal, they could make it difficult to get by putting restrictions on where abortions could be done, on the age of the fetus being aborted, on the required credentials and hospital affiliation of the doctor performing it. Things like that. You know, make it so expensive that only really rich women could get one.

Well now we have Ohio, and its newly proposed law - passed by the Ohio House of Representatives - that would make it a felony to perform an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. With modern ultrasound equipment that can be done about six weeks after conception, before most woman even know they are pregnant.

It’s similar to a bill passed two years ago in Ohio and vetoed by Gov. John Kasich, who said it was illegal under Roe v. Wade. 

Now the Ohio Senate gets to vote on it again, and Republican Christina Hagan, one of HB 258’s sponsors, said Roe v. Wade was exactly the point. She believes that high court decision was wrong, and her bill will lead to a friendlier Supreme Court overturning the landmark federal decision.

Oh, and forget about another veto. Republican Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has already indicated he would sign a heartbeat bill after he takes office in January.

                                                     Why Should We Care?

When abortion opponents started attacking Roe v. Wade all those long years ago, they focused on how wrong abortion was, not about the right to privacy. And it worked well - ask anyone you know what Roe v. Wade is about and almost everyone will say abortion.  Some may say abortion, duh. Very few will say the right to privacy.

Now where could that take us as a nation? Well, let’s say you have a gun in your house and the government thinks you are a criminal, or you commit domestic violence, or you drink a lot. Why, their right to protect lives trumps your right to privacy, and the cops can come in with a no-knock warrant. After all, you have a gun.

Or let’s say you worship God in a way that is not popular with today’s religious conservatives. Not even Cristian, or not even the right sect. Or, maybe not really worshiping from their bible. Who knows what you may be doing behind closed doors?

Well, the government should know. After all, you have no right to privacy.

Here’s a better one. Let’s say that sometime soon a liberal Democratic President is elected and a liberal Democratic Congress is elected, and you have contributed money to Republicans. To overthrow the government, obviously. Want to donate without anyone knowing it? Well, forget that. You have no right to privacy.

But those are big things. What about something closer? You know, that neighbor down the street who is doing something suspicious. Quick, call 911. 

Oh, wait,  you can’t get on the phone. Your wife is busy calling police to report her cheating husband. Don’t worry, you will be able to clear your name in court, but if you don’t make bail, you will be in jail a long, long time. The docket is kind of crowded.

It's Creepy

So, there were our soldiers - volunteers trained for combat who had already risked their lives for our nation - standing in the hot sun at the border between Texas and Mexico, being told by Defense Secretary James Mattis that what they are doing was “great training.”

Now soldiers are training all the time, polishing up their existing skills and learning new ones. And, it’s important. In a war, you can have only seconds to do something right or people will die. And, you don’t know ahead of time what that may be.

It takes you a few extra minutes to load a truck, someone 80 miles away may not get the ammunition they need. Yes, it happens.

But wait. Let me pull back a minute. Why am I looking at this relatively obscure event at a time our nation has so many big things happening it’s hard to focus on any of them? 

Well, it’s always a good idea to take a few minutes to look back on things. We’ll get back to that later.

For the moment, let’s just look at the troops who Secretary Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (it’s a little early to call her outgoing secretary. The President’s wife isn’t mad at her yet) were talking to at their camp in the unrelenting sun.

The troops are there to protect us from a caravan of immigrants, the President told them. And the caravan is real. At least, Fox News told me that. And showed me pictures.

                                     But Don'tAlways  Believe Your Own Eyes

What? You don’t watch Fox News? Well, they showed pictures of migrants climbing over a wall, although it wasn’t clear when the clip was filmed or where the climbing was taking place. Or even why the patriotic Fox News cameraman didn’t just throw his camera to the ground and make a citizen’s arrest.

But the giggling, head-nodding commentators said this was the beginning of the caravan coming to the United States. Nine buses, they said. A very precise-sounding number of 357 migrants on them, they said. But, N=not enough time to say where their number came from.

Anyway Fox said they had arrived in Tijuana by the hundreds (now watch it shrink) and that several hundred got off the buses and made their way to shelters to get food. And, they said, dozens were seen scaling the border fence, and - finally - for the Fox audience members who aren’t good with geography, we learned that border patrol agents were waiting for them. Near San Diego. Which is in California, not Texas.

So, why were those two high-level government officials in Texas talking to the troops? Well, that’s where more than 5,000 of them are now stationed. They are learning to work together to string barbed wire, and move the barbed wire to where it was needed. And, apparently to stand around, but not to arrest anyone because that is illegal. No, unless martial law has been declared, our Army and Navy and even the Marine Corps can not be used for civil law enforcement. It’s in the Constitution.

Now critics have called the deployment a stunt. And doubling down, the president wants to increase the troop level to between 10,000 and 15,000.

What’s interesting is the frank exchange between some of the troops and Secretary Mattis, a former Marine Corps general. He suggested they ignore the harping criticism being reported in the news and just concentrate on their job and their orders from their officers and non-coms.  (non-commissioned officers, for those who were never in the service).

He assured them that the United States has never used its armed forces for a political whim. The military, he said “doesn’t do stunts.” He said their mission was legal and necessary.

But when one of the soldiers asked him just what their mission was, he said that was still being decided.

                                                     A Personal Observation

Which gets me to half the point of this blog, bringing up an old personal memory. Something that happened to me a long time ago.

I was finishing up my military service with a Long Island military police unit, and we had all been called up on the orders of President Richard Nixon because postal workers had gone out on strike. Critics at the time said the call-up of Army Reserve units was a publicity stunt, but the White House said it was necessary. 

When you are wearing a green uniform, you do what you are told. So, there I was, driving a duce and a half (a two and a half ton truck) filled with my fellow MP’s down the Long Island Expressway, unloaded sidearm and baton at the ready. We got to Manhattan, parked at a no parking zone near a really big post office, and the guys in the back got out. I stayed with the truck, with my assistant driver for company.

And most of us reflected on our orders. “Don’t touch anything.” At the end of the tour, they got back in the truck and I drove back to our battalion headquarters. It was a job well done. Not a single envelope was touched, as far as I know.

My own opinion is that it was not really necessary training. And, while bad things happened to President Nixon, it was likely not caused by our activation. I did get an extra two weeks of active duty, and was paid the standard daily rate. Which, of course, was subtracted from my regular pay by my employer.

A victory all around.

                                           And Now, The Heart Of The Matter

Now the other half of my point.

There are about 5,200 troops now on the border. And, they will all have  something to do. You don’t just sit around on your hands in an army on deployment.

But, there is something that your officers, and their officers, and the officers above them do. We’ve done it before, and will likely do it again. Just two words, old familiar words that lead to a whole lot of anguish.

It’s called mission creep. That’s the military equivalent of “when you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s easy to forget your job was to drain the swamp.” It means that whatever you do, something will come along that has to be done as well.

You are camped out on flat ground? Well, wouldn’t you be more secure if there was a lookout or two on that nearby hill? And if the lookouts on the hill need to be supported, wouldn’t it be better to build a road? And shouldn’t some scouts go out to see what is happening past the lookout station’s line of sight?

And don’t we need to build some garages for our trucks?

Well, you get the picture. Or, you don’t. If you don’t, here are some more words. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Korea. You know, places where our troops serve, go home, and then go back again.

I don’t think we really want to add Arizona and Texas and California to that list.

So, Where Are We?

I know it’s hard to tell, even a week after the election. So many things are happening. So many things are still undecided. So many important votes have to be counted, or re-counted, or not counted at all.

Then there is the question of what will happen in January, after the new Congress is sworn in. And what will happen before January, while the old Congress is still in power. And who will be running the Justice Department and whether there will be any more Supreme Court nominees.

And the border wall, and the caravan, and all those troops stringing barbed wire across miles of empty desert, and told to shoot at kids throwing rocks by the President and told not to shoot at all by their non-coms.

And mass shootings, and climate change, and the mounting cost of natural disasters.

Hey, do we really need another Kent State to distract us? Oh, yes, this may be a generational thing. If you don’t know what happened at Kent State because you are too young, I’ll give you a hint. Some National Guard troops assigned to keep order at a college where kids were demonstrating had rocks thrown at them and thought they were in danger. So they shot, and killed some of the protesters.

That was in 1970. Four students were killed and nine more were wounded. It’s now the fourth thing you find when you do a Google search for “Kent State.” You should look it up as a reminder of the reality behind Trump’s words.

Our President is old enough to remember, but maybe he was doing a deal that day and wasn’t paying attention. That day, or the next day, or the day after that.

Anyway, with all those big things happening - and a lot more big shadows slowly filling out and becoming reality - what are the take-aways from the election? In short, where are we?

Well, I can’t tell you. I don’t know what will happen over the next few months any more than you do. But, what I can do is highlight some of the things that aren’t being talked about much in the media or by the candidates, and which may turn out to be really, really important.

                                                    But where to start?

Well, I like numbers and demographics and number crunching (it’s a learned habit), so let’s start by looking at the vote. More people voted last week than in any other off-year election, but - since our nation has been growing for three centuries - it doesn’t really mean that much.

There are always more people in the voting pool. What really matters is the percentage of voters who took the trouble to cast a ballot that counts.

We had about 113 million people vote - more or less - and that came to 48 or 49 percent of the eligible voters. That’s right, more than half of us didn’t go to the polls or even cast an absentee ballot.

It was a pretty high number for an off-year election. It sure beats recent highs like the 36.8 percent vote in 2014 and the 41 percent vote in 2010. Yep, for all the fire and fury, as a nation a lot of us just don’t care. It kind of explains why politicians sometimes ignore protesters.

Now you can do a lot of deep digging on this, looking for voter suppression or lack of interest on the part of some minority groups, the difficulty the elderly and the handicapped have in getting to the polls or getting a mail-in  ballot, or the willful efforts of some people - including local officials - to keep other people from voting.

There are so many arguments that people of every political stripe can argue why the low turnout matches their prejudices. Here’s one take-away - the people who benefit from low voter turnout tend to be the ones already in office or their supporters. After all, they are the people making the rules that determine how we vote.

Now let’s look at the myth of which party will control the Senate and the House of Representatives next year. A lot of people thought they knew when the election results came in. Democrats have the House and Republicans kept the Senate.

Well, cracks are already starting to show. We still don’t know for sure who won a couple of key Senate races. It might even make sense for Florida to hold two elections, one in the Summer which could be re-counted and argued about for months - a kind of new tourist attraction, especially for people who watch court TV shows. Then they could hold another one in November, when all the problems have been corrected.

                                         Now, What Is It All About?

We just have to look at the big picture. A lot of what will be happening over the next few months is just a bridge to 2020, and those forces - remember the shadows taking for I talked about - are really interesting.

Again, some facts. Off-year voters tend to be older, whiter and more conservative than the voters who come out in Presidential race years. Not an opinion, just a fact. Look it up yourself, or ask any politician or anyone who sits behind a desk at the polling place and hands you a ballot.

So, the voters in two years will likely trend younger, include more minorities and be a little more liberal than the ones who voted last week. Now everyone in the House runs for re-election every two years. The Senate is different. It has six-year terms, so only a third of the members are ever on the ballot at the same time.

Last week, about two-thirds of the Senators whose terms had expired were Democrats, and the vote was set up for Democrats to lose some seats. A rigged election if I ever saw one. in two years, the Senators running for re-election will break the other way, with two-thirds of them being Republicans. Guess what that means!

Now, lets take a look at what the Democrats and Republicans really won on Election Day.

The Democratic side is easy. We just don’t know. They haven’t held power in the House since 2009, and it’s still not clear what their agenda will be or how it will play out. Should be interesting.

The Republicans have gotten rid of some of their veterans and have a batch of fresh new faces who - in the election - stood firmly behind Donald Trump. Just imagine what happens when they find the members of that other branch of government don’t do what they want.

                                                          The Best Part

A more interesting question - and not many people are asking it right now - is could there be a complete control of our government in 2020,  just like the Republicans hold right now?

Well, it’s not at all unusual. In the last 100 years, the Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress for 35 years, and the Republicans had them all for 16 years. It kind of puts things in perspective.

And is anyone sure what the new crop of Senators and House members will be like? Will Mitt Romney turn out to be a Trump yes man? Fat chance of that. Will a Senator who saw their reliable red state turn blue this year stand firmly behind the President’s demand to shut down our government if his border wall is not funded? Or what will they say when someone asks them what is happening to those immigrant children taken from their parents and still held in detention camps? Sooner or later, someone will notice.

Then there’s the question of what will happen when the President submits another budget with a trillion dollar deficit, or one that cuts the debt by cutting Medicaid and Congress has to vote on it?

Just like the current crop of Democrats, I don’t want to even talk about indictments until there is actually a Democratic majority seated in the House of Representatives. But, I will bet a cup of coffee and a donut that some Republican Senator from a state that is no longer solidly Republican may bring up the topic in the next month or two.

You know, one of those people who will be facing re-election in two years and who saw the Trump wave break against their party in his state.

Hey, when there is a revolution brewing, it is a lot better to be ahead of the crowd and leading it than being chased by them.

The Little Things

It’s relatively easy to play Monday morning quarterback, to explain what happened in an election a few hours or a few days or even a few weeks after it is over. Not that those things don’t deserve to be done, of course. I just feel that bloggers and other media critics should make some pointed observations before the election.

You know, put some skin in the game.

I recognize that we are collectively drowning in a sea of twisted evil coming from some crazy people who use the language of our President and who wear his hats, and who chant “lock her up” with great regularity.

Then they say it’s only a joke, or the other side does it too, or the media is really anti-American and lies all the time. You know, the kind of excuses that  six-year-olds give when they are caught doing something really bad.

So, before the election, let me look at some little things. Why? Because the big things are already right out there in front of us, written in letters of fire 20 feet tall. They can only be ignored by people who will not see, and you know what the bible says about that.

Now I will not be talking about the ugly throbbing evil that came out from under a rock when the GOP candidates started saying it was all right to spout unchecked filth. You know - don’t take the President literally when he says he doesn’t know who David Duke is.

And I refuse - absolutely refuse - to get into any discussion of what is more evil - to kill a defenseless six year old school girl and lots of her classmates or to kill a 97 year old woman praying in a Temple and lots of her fellow congregants. Or even to condemn that violence one minute and encourage it the next.

Nor will I make predictions about what will happen after Election Day plays itself out. I will leave predictions of the election results to the Sunday newspapers and really good predictors like Nate Silver’s 538.

There is more than enough to look at some of the little things that are going on, almost unnoticed under those burning letters of fire. Lots of stuff will happen because of the election, and lots of stuff will happen despite it. And little things can mean a lot. It’s a lesson we learn over and over again.

So, here’s what I see us talking about after Election Day,  in no particular order. (The numbers are just ironic internal dialogue)

                                                               And Here It Is

1 - Just who is who? We will be asking this a lot before the 2020 vote. 

The question is a belated notice that a lot of the political advertising this year didn’t really show who was paying for the ads. Oh, they were tagged with a “paid for” label at the end, but I doubt if one person in a hundred bothered to track who was behind those sponsors, or behind the people behind them. Are you the candidate of big pharma, or big unions, or the military-industrial complex? How will we ever know unless those ads sport a party label.

Right now, we live under a convenient fiction - approved by the Supreme Court - that while donations to political parties must be reported, any corporation has the right to free speech and can give as much money as they like to “independent’ groups which promise - swear to god - that they are not co-ordinating their ads with political parties.

1a - A sub-group. A funny thing happened to a lot of political campaign signs in my neighborhood this year. You couldn’t tell which party was behind some of the candidates. They didn’t have traditional campaign colors, where every candidate in one party had one color scheme and every candidate in the other had a different one. Is it just an effort to show how independent the candidates are of the party that nominated them, carried petitions for them and is financing them? Or is it just a subtle effort to promote name recognition, kind of like those pictures of an attractive model and the brand name in the corner, without even showing the product?

Are we supposed to believe that people spending big money on the candidates picked by the Republicans and the Democrats really wants to support independent candidates who just happen to be running on those party lines?

That is kind of like a big company announcing they are conducting a nationwide search for a new vice president, and ending up with the current President’s son. Shocked, we should be. Shocked.

2 - Introspection, 2.0. Two years ago, after the election of Donald Trump and the total takeover of the federal government by the Republican Party, the big media outfits started looking inward (OK, most of them) to figure out what happened. The talked about how they covered lie after provable lie without calling out the liars, and allowing any outrageous claim to stand as true, for fear of being accused of censorship of a political candidate. Sound familiar? 

I hope we don’t go through that charade again. Just go out for a sandwich, admit you screwed up, and try not to do it again in 2020.  Remember that fairness and balance does not mean giving each side of a campaign the same amount of time and space. “Gee, Mr. Hitler, why do you want to attack France?’ shouldn’t be a topic for a 30 minute debate, with each side getting 12 minutes and three minutes for opening and closing statements.

3 - Red Meat. We used to make fun of the television mantra “if it bleeds, it leads.” It’s what the news show people used to use to decide which story should get the cherished lead spot on the evening news show. An in-depth financial analysis of the state budget? Nope. A fire with a lot of firemen running around? Maybe. A plane crash half way around the world that killed 243 people? Do we have video?

Well, the red meat of elections are baseless accusations, yelled loudly and presented as fact without actually being fact-checked. Remember the pledges of the news media to check out stories for factual content before they are run? How quaint that was.

4 - Love that face time. A lot of news, or what passes for news, seems to be taken up by people saying the same thing over and over again. Now, I know a lot of this is understandable - the audience won’t line up and all watch a news show at the same time, and the people who can’t see something at 9 a.m. deserve a chance to see it at 11 a.m. or 3 p.m. - but must everyone on the show (and I don’t care which show) smile and laugh at the same thing. Every time? 

There is not one single network commentator alive today who could hold a candle to Robin Williams or Jack Benny or Sinbad, so why not just report the news. Then people can be shocked or angry about it, or maybe just do what news people are supposed to do - be objective and not comment on the content of a story in any way. Leave that to The View and The Talk.

5 - Fact Check. It seems almost quaint now, but once - a long, long time ago - the claims of candidates were actually checked by the news media. Oh, it took a while in that long-ago age before high-speed computers, but we have a new tool that could be put to use to actually see if the things a candidate is saying are actually, well, true.

Imagine if there was some really good AI program  - or maybe a half dozen human researchers - turned loose on the claims of all candidates for national office, checking what they say against a world filled with data bases. Now you can’t check claims that candidate X or Y will truly bring prosperity and increase employment, but you can ask who “everybody’ is when a candidate or a press agent says “everybody says that’s the biggest problem.”  Want to talk about health care, then when you promise everyone will have access to a doctor, the little AI program would check to see if you actually have a plan. If not, the story should say Candidate Jones says he wants to do this, but doesn’t have any idea on how to do it.

You know, a list like this could go on forever. I’ll stop it here. Read it once or twice, have a good meal. Get lots of sleep, and go out and vote.

My World Turns Upside Down

William Shakespeare gave us a lot in his plays. In Hamlet, he had an old rambling character give this advice: Brevity is the soul of wit. Of course, he was neither brief nor wise in the speech, giving us one of the first examples of irony in an English play.

I woke up a few days ago and, just as I do every morning, I let the dogs out, fed the cats and then let the dogs back in and fed them, While they ate, I opened the front door and the cats marched out, single file, onto the front porch.

A normal beginning to a normal day. Then, as I was reading the paper, it hit me. Without ever realizing it, my whole life turned around. Intellectually, politically, morally - I still don’t know what is happening.

It started, I think, with a story about how Donald Trump wants to quit the nuclear arms treaty and build more missiles to counter Chinese military expansion in the Pacific. Or it could have been the story about the Russian woman indicted for trying to influence the 2018 political campaign by spreading fake news on Facebook. Or, maybe,  the mystery ads that have been running on the web in Britain - ads that suddenly vanished when the rules changed and the real people who were paying for them had to be made public.

But, there it was. All the things I have mocked almost all of my adult life have turned out to be true. Ronald Reagan was right. Moscow really is the beating heart of an Evil Empire.

Like much of life, that one simple thing led to a lot of more complex things. When I made fun of the House Un-American Activities Committee for its ceaseless (and often baseless) attack on liberals and Jews and blacks for being Communist agitators trying to undermine our country, was I mistaken? Do I owe someone an apology?

Communist agitators have been trying to undermine our country for a long, long time. Maybe long before Karl Marx created Communism. At least, the original form, which was unworkable.

And, if the Republican party stood for truth and justice and anti-Communism for all those long decades, just when did that mantle fall to the Democrats? Just where are the Republican anti-Communists now? Oh, some still talk a good game, but actions count. See any? And you can’t go back to Eisenhower.

Which brings up the way other things have been turned on their head. Just when did freedom of religion become freedom to impose your religion on other people. At least for some religions. Are we bringing back the old Blue Laws, that kept you from selling things and doing things on Sundays? Wait, why can’t I buy a beer until after noon or 1 p.m. So we don’t get drunk driving to a football game?

And now that we have a Supreme Court loaded with “original Constitutionalists,” what does that mean. There’s still no Constitutional Amendment to allow the federal government to create and fund an air force, or to give subsidies to farmers or to enforce any environmental regulations at all, except for that old elastic clause - you know, the one that says the government can do anything which is “necessary and proper” to provide for the needs of our nation.

(That is, of course, an overstatement. That’s why we need Supreme Court interpretations. The clause - article one, section eight - allows Congress to pass any law necessary for it to implement the powers it gets from the rest of the Constitution. Now, we need a court to define what necessary means, what those other powers originally mean and what implement means. I’m pretty sure that when it was written - back in the day of slaves, indentured servants and an average life span of about 40 years, it doesn’t cover health care.)

So, I’m holding off on my apology to the long-dead members of Congress who were active in HUAC (again, just look it up, Or, better still, watch The Front, an old Woody Allen movie) until I see how things play out.