Happy New Year To All

 

Let me wish you all a happy and healthy New Year, although as 2020 rapidly fades I think that - at least for now - we should turn that around. So, a healthy and happy New Year to all.

Normally, people make a list of New Year’s predictions, or a list of New Year wishes. So, here’s my list. Consider it a gift - you can make as many wishes as you want for yourselves, free of charge.

Now, before I start, something personal. Because of construction work, my son, his wife and their kids will be moving in with me and my wife for - well, who knows.  They should be coming soon, and will likely stay for a month or two.

So, my first prediction - a reasonably accurate one. I will be playing a lot of Candyland. I will also be crawling on the floor, cleaning up Leggo pieces, and eating a lot of Mac and Cheese. Did I mention two of the kids are three and six?

I am not getting into the dietary tastes of teenagers. I know my limits.

My second prediction - also reasonably accurate. The world will not end on Jan. 20. What will end is the influence of the Republican Party, a slow and steady draining of its power.

It won’t be the dramatic leaving of Donald Trump - I have faith he will try and make it as dramatic as possible. But, the GOP became smaller as Trump become more powerful. He has almost complete support because Republicans who don’t didn’t support him have simply left.

He still got all those votes, of course. But, it takes a lot of organization to keep votes coming in year after year. Political parties run from the ground up, not the top down. That’s why the Democrats had so much trouble for so many years in so many states - very poor local organization.

Now things have turned around. It will take a while to see, but sooner or later the Proud Boys will have to figure out how to go door to door to turn out a vote, or how to draft a bill that will raise taxes to pay to fix roads someplace else. Good luck with that.

My third prediction - The long-suffering New York Jets will not make a miraculous turn-around and get into the expanded NFL playoffs. I think the Jets and the Giants (I do live in New York, after all) are taking  a page from the playbook of the New York Mets. They are starting to look good just as the season is ending.

False hope will build all through the winter. Their draft will be talked about during the cold months of January and February. We will march into March with false hope, and our dreams for a winning season will again be crushed.

I wonder if that’s how Damn Yankees got written. A wonderful musical, for those who may not be familiar with it.

Now a hope. I hope that our country will develop a really good education system for all our children. By the time they get out of high school, they should know something about the basics of capitalism - how people earn money, what interest rates are and how our tax structure favors some people over others.

They should also know basic math - things like how to add and subtract and figure out what interest rates do when you borrow money to make 144 easy payments for a car.

They should also know the basics of being a citizen. That’s why I want every high student to take the same test that people applying for citizenship in the United States takes.

There are 128 questions that may be asked, and an examiner asks 20 at random. The applicant has to answer 12 correctly. You can look it up. You can also see the acceptable answers.

One question I like is “why is the electoral college important? The only two answers that are acceptable to the government are “Decide who is elected President” and “Provide a compromise between the popular election of the president and congressional selection.”

Yeah, I didn’t know that either. One wrong on my test.

I got another one wrong, too. The question was why did Americans declare independence from Britain. I thought it was because our rights as British citizens were not being respected and we were being exploited by the King and his government.

I should have said the Townsend Act, or the Sugar act or because we did not have self-government. I don’t know what you would call the colonial Governors, but that’s a question for an advanced course at some summer college program.

 As I write this, I was listening to something on the news. A police officer was telling people they would not be allowed to congregate around Times Square this year to watch the ball fall at midnight. “Watch it on television said.”

That’s my last hope. May next year be as cold and crowded and uncomfortable as all of those who ever when to Times Square to celebrate the new year remember it.

And may the lights be on on Broadway, and in Atlanta and Chicago and St. Louis, and all the other places where people gather. And, in your own homes, too. Long before New Years Day comes around at the end of 2021.

Heath and joy and comfort to all.

Them and Us

 Them and Us

So, how do we explain what’s happening in Washington? What’s behind all the chaos and confusion now, and all the pain that will follow in the next few weeks and months?

That’s a big order. Commentators have been shouting loudly, and a lot of people are pointing fingers. Some are pointing so much they had to grow another hand, just to cover all their targets.

Well, I have a modest idea about what’s the matter. I’m not sure how to solve it, but figuring out what a problem is can be the first step toward solving it.

Here goes. It may take a page or two to explain, so keep up with me.

It started long ago. Millions of years ago. Certainly when our genetic ancestors - the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon - separated from their genetic ancestors and became separate species.

Which, of course, sounds stupid given that all the chaos in Washington is caused by Republicans and Democrats, not sub-species like Gorillas and chimpanzees. Again, stay with me.

What happened through evolutionary change is that successful species learned to differentiate between things that helped them survive and things that could hurt them. It’s still hot-wired into us.

Most of us instinctively fear things that are different. Things like snakes and spiders, or lots of ants or just one crocodile. We like things that can’t hurt us, like flowers or birds.

Some species that can hurt us as individuals have reached an accommodation if we both benefit. Dogs and cats can still be wild, but lots of them have found ways to fit in. They get food, we get protection from mice. And companionship. Over the centuries, relationships evolved.

As societies developed, humans changed “different” to another way of separating friendly from dangerous. We created “us” and “them.”

It’s a flexible idea. “Us” was originally seen as my family or my tribe. “Them” were the others who wanted to take what we had, or had what we wanted to take. Remember, we were still running around the jungles or vast open plains, and trying to invent clothing and the wheel.

Eventually, we became civilized. We built villages and grew crops. We formed governments to protect us from other cities and governments. Our nation was us. Them was everyone else.

Sometimes, one culture was hugely successful. Rome, Egypt, China. They all had empires, and all the people who weren’t Roman or Egyptian or Chinese were there to be exploited or enslaved or protected at a price.

Sometimes it got complicated. In Europe, the crown heads married daughters from other nations, and foreign alliances formed. Foreign countries became part of us. Royal titles grew longer. Different languages weren’t as useful to separate different people.

There’s a lot of history here, but let’s not forget we’re trying to figure out why there is so much chaos now in Washington. So, let look at one of those exploited colonies of a powerful nation - one that decided the “them” were the ones exploiting the “us.”

Remember 1776?

Well, after the Revolutionary War, we were all “us.” We had fought the British and won, all of us together, with the help of the French. That alliance lasted a long time - just over 20 years. Look up Quas-guerre. You’ll find out it was an undeclared war - quasi war in French - that took place in the Caribbean and off our coastline. It was fought over different interpretation of treaties, and lasted just over two years.

We were, of course, separate colonies that formed separate states, and the relationship between the states and the federal government wasn’t fully settled until after the Civil War.

But long before that, we formed political parties - the ones that George Washington warned us about forming.

Still, someone had to govern, and it was hard in Colonial times to travel from place to place. It could take months by carriage or ship, and someone had to stay home and watch the farm or the plantation.

Parties were a good shorthand. You knew what someone believed, because their party stood for it. A national bank. A trade agreement with another nation. Protective embargoes that would help our industries grow. Slavery.

Our party was us, and we supported it. Their party was them, and we fought it. Bitterly. After all, we survived by identifying the us and knowing who they are. The other.

Thats how us and them works. All the time. My party. My belief. Their party. Their belief. You see it in Congress all the time.

It started breaking down when Trump ran for president and the Republican Party decided not to adopt a platform. Remember that? It was just Trump. We support Trump.

Now you get my point. How we got here. Why Washington is in chaos. The GOP has gotten smaller and smaller every year, because people who look different or think differently don’t belong there any more.

And we have a President who truly believes he has never done anything wrong, and was betrayed. By Democrats, of course, but also by the Republicans who didn’t do what he wanted and reverse the election.

Now his inner circle is shrinking more and more. So, who’s left? Who is the other he can blame. Well, there are some judges on the short list. There is the leader of the Senate, who didn’t make these problems all go away. There’s the former attorney general….well, the list seems to get longer every day.

The other list - the people still around him who Trump can somehow punish - is changing too. It’s getting smaller and smaller.

I can hardly wait for him to come to one more conclusion. He has to resign to be pardoned. The Supreme Court might rule that if he pardons himself it won’t be valid.

But, if he resigns, Mike Pence will become President. And Pence didn’t give him enough credit for ending the fake Coronavirus. Or China Virus. Or England Virus. It’s hard to keep track.

What if it’s all a plot by Pence to get him out of office, take over, and not pardon him. What if those others have gotten to Pence. What does he want?

That would be an odd thought from someone who only thinks about what he wants.

Well, he can always turn to Jared. Or can he?

We've Seen This All Before

 

Reporters are interested in the now, what’s happening this day, this hour, this minute.

Sometimes there’s room to look back, to see how things started, or to shoot extra video showing where the truck that smashed into the crowd came from.

But, we mostly expect to see the “what happened” part right up front. That’s the whole point of news.

Now that I’m a retired reporter - you don’t ever stop reporting, you just stop being paid to do it - I’m getting more and more interested in how things got the way they are, and if they ever happened before. So, let’s look at the massive support Donald Trump is getting and try to see if it will matter five or 10 or 50 years from now.

Short answer is it just might. After all, we’ve been down this road before.

Let me explain. It happened well over a century ago, but don’t let that put you to sleep. There’s an important lesson here.

Just imagine. State after state voted to leave the Union. Most of the best officers in the U.S. Army resigned, to go fight with their states against the Army they had served.

Lincoln was elected. War broke out. Four years of fighting and 300,000 dead - more than all the deaths in all the nation’s wars to that point. And Lincoln was assassinated and reconstruction began, punishing all those states that Lincoln had wanted to come back as equals - you know, with malice toward none, with charity for all.

Well you know the rest of the sad story. Blacks were elected to office across the south, then chased out. No one was punished for their part in the war - Robert E. Lee became President of Washington University and after he left the school was re-named. It is now Washington and Lee University.

The Ku Klux Klan was organized, and lynching of blacks became common throughout the South, fueled in part by a dynamic movie in that new form of entertainment. Audiences across the nation cheered as southern whites donned robes and masks and rode out to defend gentle maidens, and “Birth of a Nation” made its way into cultural history, to be bookended decades later by the nation’s most-read novel - Gone With The Wind, with Clark Gable as the dashing and heroic lead when it became a film in 1939. It became the industry’s most successful movie when it was released.

What does this all have to do with us? Well, it was the myth. The Lost Cause. The myth that the South didn’t really lose the Civil War, that it was only betrayed by weak politicians. That all those Southern soldiers were only fighting for the noble idea of independence and freedom, not for the right to enslave hundreds of thousands of blacks who were denied those things.

Let them vote? No, impose poll taxes. Redraw election districts. Use violence. After all, the South didn’t lose. Keep minorities in inferior schools, or from taking good jobs, or make them ride on the back of the bus. Just remember, we are only keeping a noble cause alive.

After all, dreams die hard when they become part of a cultural identity.

Which, if you think about it, sounds just like Donald Trump and his chorus of Congressional Republicans.

He didn’t lose. He was betrayed. He will rise again. No, wait, that’s Jesus, not Donald. He will never rise again, because he will never go down. He will live forever in our nation’s political life - after all, he has all that money, and all that power. Trump didn’t lose, he was just betrayed by the very people some of his traitorous advisors told him to put on the Supreme Court.

Think it was the only time? Well, back in the 1930’s, in the depths of a world-wide depression, things were really tough. And, nowhere were things worse than in Germany, which had been saddled with paying the debts of the nations that won World War I. There seemed no way the county would ever get out of that trap.

But, a leader came along who grabbed the attention of the German people. The country hadn’t lost the war, he told them. Germany was betrayed. Betrayed by the Jews. Betrayed by the Communists. Betrayed by those politicians who ran the nation and kept things from getting better.

You may remember the name. It’s not fashionable to compare Trump to Hitler, but they share the same dream. We didn’t lose. We were betrayed.

A lot of politicians in Germany saw that Hitler was very popular, and agreed to let him run the country. They thought they could control him, let him get the votes of the people, and then direct him from behind the scenes. A lot of businessmen thought the same thing, and for a while they got richer and richer. And Germany got more and more powerful.

Then some very bad things happened. Germany lost World War II. A complete, humiliating defeat. And, the dream died. So did millions of Germans.

Now in the United States, some officials are taking down statues of Confederate generals and talking about renaming all those military bases named for traitors who fought against the United States in the Civil War.

Others are objecting. They talk about preserving our history, but don’t like the “revisionist” history that points out the flaws in our national heroes.

It will be interesting to see how many Republicans play this out to the very last card. I hope, for their sake, they realize the leader of their party is just bluffing, and getting very rich while doing it. They don’t have much more time to do it.

The Lies We Tell

 Of all the lies being told in our country, the worst are the ones we tell ourselves.

When the Coronavirus began to sweep across the nation, a lot of people were telling themselves that it was just a problem in big cities.

Some even told their friends it was only a problem in those Eastern cities run by Democrats and full of immigrants and other foreigners.

Their plan, fully supported by the President, was not to do much of anything. Which worked for a while, until people started getting sick in every state in the union.

Then we looked at the death rates, which - compared to the total number of illnesses - were relatively small. Again, our President told us that even if you get it, it wouldn’t matter much. Then he did contract Coronavirus and he seemed fine. See, he was right.

Ask any of the people running around without a mask, and they will tell you the same thing. The disease is a fraud, or it’s only media hype. Of course, we’re just beginning to learn about the  after-effects of Coronavirus, which are likely to cause health problems years after the initial infection.

The good news is that vaccines are coming on line, and much of the population should have gotten immunization shots by Summer. There is only one more big lie to wring out of the process.

The Trump administration brags that vaccines will be shipped all across the country at warp speed, flying off production lines as it is produced. The lie is that the problems have all been solved.

Just how vaccines get from those airports to where it is needed is being left to each individual state. Every state is supposed to develop its own distribution plan. Of course there is no federal money to pay for that work. And, it mostly hasn’t been done.

Some of us still nod and say it will work out. Every pharmacy will have the vaccine in stock, and we just have to go and get it. And you don’t even need special refrigeration units - just pack it in dry ice.

Which sounds good, until you learn that once you open the box the vaccine starts to warm up. And there isn’t a distribution network to keep every pharmacy in America stocked up with dry ice 24 hours a day. And a pharmacist who spends 10 minutes to give the vaccine to one patient won’t be able to handle more than six an hour, or 50 or 60 people if they work 10 hours a day.

Anyone who has picked up medicine from a pharmacy knows it often takes five or 10 minutes just to get to the front of the line. That’s before the pharmacist has to spend all their time giving shots.

So, just add more people. More pharmacists to fill the prescriptions for everyone not getting vaccinated. Clerks to record who got a shot and make appointments for them to come back in two weeks for the second shot.  And contact people to be sure they come in for the second vaccination shot. And check ID’s for the people getting vaccinated. And lots of other things.

We also have to deal with the problem of getting people from rural areas to the hospitals. Just how bad could it be?

Well, the data keeps changing, but the Alabama Rural Health Association recently said eight of the state’s rural counties have no hospitals at all. One didn’t have a single physician.

Hampshire, Mass. has one hospital for its 161,000 people and Chittenden, Vermont has one for 162,000. There is no good data on how long it takes to get to a hospital if you live in rural Texas or in the vast empty spaces in the heart of Oklahoma or Kansas. 

Then there’s the question of what to do when lots of people drive  three or four hours just to get to that hospital or university and find it will take another four or five hours to treat the people already waiting on line.

It’s a shame we don’t have a couple of thousand pharmacists and nurses just sitting on a shelf, waiting to go out to work in whatever mass vaccination clinics are being set up. 

At least those big cities on the East Coast already have a big medical infrastructure in place, and are used to handling a lot of people.

But, that’s not the biggest lie a lot of people are telling themselves. I just started with vaccinations to show how easy it is to believe something that isn’t true.

The real lie is in the political arena. It is the lie that lots of Republican office holders are telling themselves. They’re pretending that things will go back to normal for them after Trump is out of office.

They may be afraid to disagree with the President in public about things like his losing the election, because his followers will vote against them in a primary. Ah, but they need those Trump supporters to vote for them in their next election.

So, don’t get them mad. They haven’t factored in the desire of Donald Trump to run for President again, and demand absolute loyalty from them for the next four years. Loyalty as in put all the money you raise in my fundraising pak, and I’ll give you back what you need to win.

Which will work fine, until they end up as the next target of his wrath, for not fully supporting him. Unlikely? Do you really need the list?

After all, the President who never made a mistake had to have been betrayed by those Republicans who let the election results go through. So, think of the next four years, as he hunts those traitors down, one by one.

Hey, if he makes a mistake and gets a new person into Congress that he doesn’t like, Trump can just get rid of them too. After all, the Republican Senate has given him the authority to do anything he wants.

Or, what if all those Trump Republicans simply leave the party. Now the Republicans left in Congress will be free to speak their mind, to tell the truth. To face the public in their next election with half the supporters they had when Trump was in office.

Like Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go home again.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

 

Here I was, still relaxing after Thanksgiving and thinking - at least in one little corner of my mind - that the days when I would have an easy target to pick on were soon ending.

I started blogging because I thought that some of the stories being covered or talked about in newspapers and on television - and blogs, and pop-up news feeds and facebook and twitter and all the rest - weren’t telling the whole story.

That clearly didn’t last too long. I got Trumped.

So, as the clock ticks down, I thought I could get back to where I started, seeing how all those media platforms cover things like the economy and science, religion and sports. Maybe even culture or agriculture or population demographics. After all, who knows what the future will bring?

Forget it. I think I will have a new target to pick on, a whole new source of troubling actions that will linger over our society like a dark cloud, leaving a trail of wreckage in its path.

Yes. The Supreme Court.

There are three new Trump-appointed judges on that court, which has always said courts don’t make any new laws, they just interpret what people can legally do as defined in the Constitution.

No politics here. Except for that one judge who got mad when President Obama dared criticize him publicly and refused to go to his swearing in for a second term. Forget decades of tradition. Hissy-fit is the new norm.

Now why am I going a little crazy about this, especially when President Biden hasn’t even taken office yet?

Well, it was that recent court decision being celebrated by a lot of Orthodox Jews and leaders of the Catholic Church - the one that said New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, was wrong, wrong, wrong, in imposing really strict limits on how many people could go to houses of worship in areas which had become coronavirus hot zones.

Now if you don’t live in New York, you may not know that some religious groups - particularly some Orthodox Jews - have been proudly and publicly defying limits on public gatherings, and showing as much contempt for wearing masks as motorcycle riders at the Sturgis rally. Some church groups were doing the same thing. For example, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn went to court seeking an injunction against the ban.

Now, right up front I have to admit I though the restriction - limiting church attendance (I just don’t want to have to type church and state every time it comes up, just assume those six little letters - church - stand for church and temple, synagogue and mosque, Christian Science reading room and a whole batch of other things) - was too harsh.

After all, there was no consideration of how big the church was. You could put 20 people in a storefront house of worship and be crowded, 500 in some of the biggest ones had have two out of three seats still empty.

It’s a really complex issue. After all, when you are in church, you pray. Out loud. You normally sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers for an hour or so, all breathing in and out in what is usually an older building which does not have a lot of air exchanges per hour.

But, the ban wasn’t sophisticated. It just set a limit. Of course, coronavirus cases were going up sharply in those hot zones, and people flouting regulations about things like social distancing and mask wearing were leading to things like hospital overcrowding and lord knows what else.

So, the Supreme Court ruled that the Governor’s ban was unconstitutional. The 5-4 decision simply said the Governor had overreached. He was found guilty of ignoring constitutionally protected religious freedoms which clashed with public health concerns.

Why am I upset? After all, a lot of priests and rabbis (and all the other religious leaders) thought it was a good and important thing to do, to curb the ever-growing influence of secular government over religious freedom.

Heck, you have probably seen the plot on television lots of times. A criminal confesses to a priest, and a wrong man is put in jail. What can the priest do? The confessional is sacred.

Now I used to argue stuff like this with Jesuit-schooled friends when I was younger, but we where just having fun. Now, however, the Supreme Court has put the whole issue front and center.

The question is where do you draw the line. Lots of people want to gather in a building and worship as they choose. Free to do it? Good. Lots of people want to gather outdoors for a religious ceremony. Free to do it? Good.

Lots of people want to go to church on Sunday and there is no place to park. Some of them park by a “no parking” sign and get a ticket. Their lawyer says the city or town is keeping them from worshiping. Tear it up? Good.

A church is having a 30-day worship ceremony. Or the mosque is having a 30-day observance, or the temple is having an eight-day service at the end of the year, or someone wants to go to mass all through Lent. Tear up all those parking tickets too?

If you think that’s all too ridiculous to actually happen, I spent a couple of years doing stories about a temple in Westhampton Beach that wanted to erect an Eruv - a symbolic piece of string on telephone polls. It would  - define an area where they could do things otherwise banned by their religion as working on God’s declared day of rest - things like wheeling a baby carriage to services. I also covered arguments in Southampton Village on whether a religious group could worship in a building that did not have adequate parking.

I can hardly wait until the Supreme Court gets to decide what groups can claim to be a recognized religion. After all, what if some anti-Trump demonstrators were to demand next week that police can’t interfere with their right to worship right there in the street. Or on the beach. Or in front of the White House. With their sacred protest signs.

All of the country’s motorcycle riders could form their own religion, and make gathering in Sturgis once a year as a holy pilgrimage. Hey, what could go wrong?

Well, in Minnesota, they identified 51 people who came down with coronavirus from the Sturgis rally and 35 more who got the disease from them. Four were hospitalized, one died.  It led to a month-long shutdown of bars.

You know, I know some people who use wine as part of a religious service. Some of them think their church is wherever they pray.

Set ‘em up, Joe. First drink is on the Supreme Court.