Schadenfreude

72 hours ago, I posted a piece which expressed a bit of joy at the recent political winning streak on the part of both the Biden Administration and Capitol Hill Democrats. German speakers would call this relative joy freudenfreude, which roughly translates as “finding joy in the success of others.” Freudenfreude is not as nearly well known as its antonym, schadenfreude, [literally ‘harm joy’’] which refers to the uncanny giddiness people can feel upon seeing those they cannot stomach suffer harm or defeat.  Watching the Dodgers win 10-straight is ample cause for freudenfreude; seeing the gates of Mar-a-Lago thrown open in order to permit FBI agents to carry out a federal search warrant presents many with the opportunity to engage in a smirking bout of schadenfreude.   

One wonders how former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary (“Lock Her Up!”) Clinton must be feeling these past 72 hours. Is she struggling to contain herself from gleefully raising two thumbs upward . . . or simply smiling in the knowledge that “what goes around comes around?”  Having first been introduced to Secretary Clinton and her husband nearly 45 years, (and acting as a surrogate for her in the 2016 election) I think I know her well enough to put a dollar on the former and a fiver on the latter.  “How’s that possible?” you well might ask.  “After the tens of dozens of post-Benghazi hearings, the innumerable FBI-led investigations into her using a private email server, and the innumerable, incomprehensible, calls for her imprisonment . . . how could she possibly keep a civil tongue and not shout out for joy?”  In other words, where’s the schadenfreude?  Where are the explosions of mirth, the chorus of Munchkins singing the Harold Arlen/”Yip” Harburg song which begins with the words “Ding-Dong! The witch is dead . . .”

Don’t get Secretary Clinton wrong: like President Biden, Majority Leader Schumer, Speaker Pelosi and all those raised with a touch of class - Secretary Clinton has neither the time, the temperament nor the taste for revenge. Justice? Decidedly so and coompleted merited.. Revenge? That comes from elsewhere. Clinton, Biden et al know - and pray - that Donald Trump will get his; that he will wind up being unmasked, sentenced, and becoming the foulest footnote in all American political history; that he will ultimately make Buchanan look like a savant, Harding a vestal virgin and Nixon a saint. .

For the past 72 hours, responsible mainstream media have been reporting on precisely what happened at Mar-a-Lago; of how the Department of Justice, after thousands of hours of investigation, went to a federal magistrate judge (now known to be Bruce Reinhart, a former federal prosecutor) for a search warrant that would give them the legal authority to enter the former POTUS’s residence in search of top secret materials which, according to the Presidential Records Act, he had no legal right to have in his private possession. We have learned that his response was to go after both the DOJ and FBI (whose director, the Yale-educated Christopher Wray was first appointed by the former POTUS ); and of how, when (not if) he is returned to office, he will seek to defund both institutions. We have seen how many of his Congressional supporters (the majority of whom wanted nothing to do with him at various times before he was elected) have prostrated themselves at his Berluti-shod feet, angrily proclaiming that he is the ultimate victim of what they have chosen to characterize as “the modern incarnation of the Gestapo” . . . or as Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert would have it, “The Gazpacho police.”

The FBI’s legal search of Mar-a-Lago has brought out tons of nasty, nasty threats and responses.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has likely dashed any hopes he has of becoming Speaker by warning A.G. Merrick Garland to " . . . get your papers in order and clear your calendar.”  What in the world does this mean? That should he become Speaker, he will run a House whose main concern is neither climate, economy nor COVID but revenge and “GOTCHA” politics.  He, like his cultish boss, is far more concerned about the past than the future.  Florida Republican Senators Rubio and Scott (the latter being the head of his party’s campaign committee) are desirous of nothing more than defunding both the DOJ and FBI. And they dare to refer to themselves as “The party of Law and Order.”  That is why I am supporting Democratic Rep (and former Chief of the Orlando Police) Val Demmings to take over Rubio’s seat: "If you don’t show up to work you get fired!”  So goes the tag-line to one of her recent campaign ads.

With each passing day, Donald Trump’s woes . . . along with his legal bills . . . continue to mount  He spent the better part of yesterday (Wednesday, August 10, 2022) taking the Fifth Amendment nearly 450 times in a New York civil court investigation into his business practices.  (The only question he did answer was “Is your name Donald John Trump?”) Upon arriving at N.Y. Attorney General Latitia James’ Manhattan office, Trump told the press: “I once asked, ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’ Now I know the answer to that question,” the statement said. “When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.” The man is clearly scared to death.  Above and beyond the FBI search and the N.Y, investigation of his business practices, there is also the grand jury investigation into a minimum of 3 state laws he may have broken in Georgia.  Simply stated, he is a man with a mountain of problems. One wonders how much sleep he’s getting these days and nights.

It should come as no surprise that DJT is urging his most fervid MAGA supporters to continue contributing to his legal defense fund; only time will tell just how much more he can raise.  The most worrisome issue he faces, it seems to me, is the recent court decision compelling him to release his tax returns . . . which may well prove that he is not a billionaire and that he has played face and lose with his taxes for decades.

On October 2, 2020. Merriam-Webster.com reported that searches for the word schadenfreude had increased by 30,500% on the site, making it the most popular word of the day. Why? Well, that was the day it was announced that Donald and Melania Trump had both tested positive for COVID-19. One wonders how many searches for the untranslatable German word there have been in the past 72 hours.  One has a feeling that it must be in the tens – if not hundreds – of thousands.  And while it not all that surprising – in light of how many people truly despise Donald J. Trump – it may well be an emotional and/or psychological response we would do well to avoid.   While psychologists inform us that that there is nothing abnormal about feeling smugly joyous when we see or hear about wicked people “getting theirs,” it is not healthy. Or, to quote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (one of the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place):

                                                                   “To feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is devilish.”

Let Congress, the DOJ,  FBI, DHS, I.R.S. as well as the states of New York and Georgia and his former freunde (friends) at Deutsche Bank - to mention but a few - lawfully saddle Donald Trump with the future he so richly deserves.  I for one look forward to a time when freudenfreude replaces schadenfreude as the most-oft used  - though miserably unpronounceable - German word in the English language.

 Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Speaking of Senator Manchin . . .

Back in 1966, when he first ran for political office, Ronald Reagan, who was on the receiving end of a lot of ill will and jibes from California Republicans, announced that he would follow what he termed the unwritten Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” This made for smart politics, for following on the heels of the disastrous 1964 election when Lyndon Johnson destroyed Senator Barry Goldwater in the Electoral College (486-52) and won two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress, the GOP was in the finger-pointing mood. This “Eleventh Commandment” strategy worked well for Reagan, for not only did it fit his personality as “a nice man with a lose screw,” but led him to a 57%-42% landslide victory over the incumbent Democratic Governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. And, as they say, “The rest is history.”

For the next half century, Republicans pretty much heeded their Eleventh Commandment, which was, in fact, not the creation of Ronald Reagan, but rather of the long-forgotten Gaylord Parkinson, who served as state chair of the California Republican Party during the 1960s. Even during the worst days of Richard Nixon and Watergate, Republicans managed to put the screws to their president not by castigating him as a person, but rather by adhering to a tightly-constructed legalistic strategy. This all ended in 2016, when a ton of Republican “heavy hitters” (e.g. Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio et al) called Donald Trump virtually every name in the book . . . and then some.  Fat lot of good it did ‘em! Once “The Orange Man” became their official nominee, the Eleventh Commandment was reinstated and, in the words of Bing Crosby “. . . seldom [was] heard a discouraging word and the skies [were] not cloudy all day.” That lasted until January 7, 2022 when Republican leaders in Congress lambasted their leader for grave sins against the body politic.  Of course, their brickbats soon faded, and within less than 72 hours, most went back to honoring their Eleventh Commandment.  And ever since, institutional Republicans (with a few notable exceptions like Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger as well as Senator Mitt Romney) have stood idly by with mouths shut and permitted their titular leader rant and rave as he pleases. Once again, they are - at least on the surface - a unified party.

Looking over at the other side of the aisle, it is obvious that Democrats have never abided by a commandment which forbids negative speech against one’s political compatriots. As far back as the 1930s, Will Rogers, the cowboy philosopher, highest-paid Hollywood actor and political pundit joked, “I am a member of no organized party: I am a Democrat.” Back in those days, the Democrats were America’s party of dysfunction, an unstable coalition of urban Northern liberals and rural Southern conservatives. Occasionally, the two wings worked together, as during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, but more often they clashed, right up until the party splintered during the 1960s, as Southern conservatives bailed out to join the Republicans.  For the past several years, there have been obvious, clear-cut factions within the Democratic caucus: moderates and centrists, progressives and near-socialists, and a hard-core conservative or two. 

Included in this latter listing is Joseph Manchin III, the Senior Senator from West Virginia.  Manchin, a multi-millionaire whose fortune comes mostly from coal and gas, is wealthy enough to drive a Maserati and live on a houseboat in the Potomac River when in Washington. He is, without question, the most powerful Democrat on Capitol Hill. How so?  Well, in order for Democrats to pass any legislation in the United States Senate requiring a 51-vote majority (as opposed to a 60-vote filibuster-proof "super majority”), every Democrat - plus Vice President Harris - must vote as a unified bloc.  That’s where Senator Manchin’s power comes in, for like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) he can all but single-handedly stymie any piece of legislation. Just this past Thursday, Manchin informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would not support a Democratic proposal for new climate change spending and higher taxes for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.  This came after more than a year of negotiating (in what turned out to be bad faith) with fellow Democrats, always promising that he was “seeking a common middle ground” by which he could find a package which he could agree to vote for - a measure which would, in addition to allocating funds for climate change and lowering prescription costs, would be paid for it by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.  His announcement caused extraordinary consternation on the part of his Democratic colleagues.  Truth to tell, the Democrats should not have been so shocked; after all, Manchin had already stymied earlier attempts to pass President Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" legislation over concerns about the deficit and inflation. 

As Chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Senator Manchin can pretty much do whatever is best for him and his financial portfolio.  It should be noted that over the past several years, Senator Manchin has received the most funding from the oil and gas industry of any senator, including $1.6 million in donations from fossil fuel PACs alone.  This should come as no surprise, for not only is Manchin the Energy and Natural Resources Chair, he also represents West Virginia - the country’s largest coal-producing state.  In standing steadfast against anything green, Manchin is serving two masters at once: the mining industry and his own stock portfolio.  

Senator Manchin has drawn a lot of withering criticism from his Democratic colleagues for all but single-handedly limiting, then scuttling, his party’s attempt to enact legislation directly addressing climate change.  And then, within 24 hours of announcing that he could not go along with their latest proposal, he called in to a West Virginia radio show during which he suggested that in another month or so, he might see his way clear to salvaging the last bits of President Biden’s domestic agenda!  Is it any wonder that Democrats have had enough of (and with) Joe Manchin? While still in Saudi Arabia, President Biden was asked whether he thought Senator Manchin had been negotiating in good faith. The President demurred, saying he was not the one who had been negotiating with him. 

There seems to be next-to-nothing the White House and Congressional Democrats can do or offer in order to get Joe Manchin to cease being such a damnable political stumbling block. As New York Times writer Emily Cochrane noted in a recent piece, “On Capitol Hill, Mr. Manchin is something of a unicorn — the only national Democrat from his ruby-red state — and acts and votes accordingly. Set to face voters in 2024, he is unlikely to be threatened by a primary challenger in a state former President Donald J. Trump won by nearly 40 points in 2020.”  And so, it looks like the disorganized party of Will Rogers are stuck with him . . . unless or until they make his vote irrelevant.  How to do this?  Democrats have to put as much time, talent and treasure into flipping at least 3 or 4 senate seats this coming November.  The best chances will be in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida.  The first 2 are open seats in which Republican  incumbents have decided to retire and have political crazies running in their stead (J.D. Vance in Ohio and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania); the latter two have incumbents carrying serious baggage (Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Marco Rubio in Florida) and running against smart, well-funded Democrats (John Fettermann in Pennsylvania  and Val Demmings in Florida).  If, like me, you receive fund-raising emails from most Democratic campaigns, consider chipping in a few bucks from time to time.

Democrats have the issues: abortion, guns violence, home-grown terrorism, climate change, and the Republicans refusal to abandon their so-called 11th Commandment. Can this be enough to overcome Party of Trump whose vocabulary will be limited to precisely 5 words: “inflation” and “the price of gas.”  

I have to believe it is.

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone   

Federalists, Dystopians, and Extreme Nausea

Truth to tell, Friday’s 5-4* Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case centered on a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, didn’t come as that much of a surprise. Movement conservatives, including the Christian Right, the Federalist Society and their billionaire backers, have been pumping time, effort, energy and endless shekels into reversing Roe v. Wade for more than 40 years. Friday’s ruling has automatically jump started so-called “trigger laws” in 13 states as well as putting fear, loathing and extreme nausea into the minds, hearts and kishkes of an overwhelming majority of the American public. (* It should be noted that Chief Justice John Roberts did not join the majority, writing in a concurring opinion that he would not have overturned Roe, but instead would have only uphold Mississippi's law banning abortions after 15 weeks.)  Despite writing that Roe had been fatally flawed when decided back in 1973, Justice Samuel Alito tried to paper over the decision by stating that it was not intended to ban all abortions in the United States; merely to put the decision back into the hands of the individual states.  Can you say “disingenuous?” 

“Trigger laws” would effectively ban abortions almost immediately after a decision from the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.  These states include Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky and Alabama.  There are an additional 9 states which have already banned abortions: Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.  In an interview on Face the Nation, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem defended her state’s trigger law, rationalizing that in cases of rape and/or incest she does not believe one tragedy is "a reason to have another tragedy occur."  Governor Noem said her state will now work to bolster resources for women who will now have to carry their pregnancies to term, including with more mental health counseling and family services.  "I would prefer that we continue to make sure we go forward and that we're putting resources in front of these women and walking alongside them, getting them the health care, the care, the mental health counseling and services that they should need to make sure that we can continue to support them and build stronger families far into the future as well," she said, adding, "The Supreme Court did its job: it fixed a wrong decision it made many years ago and returned this power back to the states, which is how the Constitution and our Founders intended it."  It should be noted that Governor Noem has made more than a handful of comments that she’s seriously considering making a White House bid in 2024. . .

For the first 15 years after Roe guaranteed women the legal right to control their own bodily destiny, Republicans were as likely as Democrats to support an absolute right to legal abortion, and sometimes even more so. But 2010 swept in a different breed of Republican, powered by Tea Party supporters, who locked in a new conservatism. Going into the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats controlled 27 state legislatures going in, and ended up with 16; Republicans started with 14 and ended up controlling 25. Republicans swept not only the South but Democratic strongholds in the Midwest, picking up more seats nationwide than either party had in four decades. By the time the votes had been counted, they held their biggest margin since the Great Depression. From that point on, Republican-controlled state legislatures began passing more and more restrictive laws which began the inexorable path toward the total dismantling of Roe v. Wade. Not that all the Republican state legislators were saturated with Biblical fervor. They did, in many cases, become increasingly more pro-life in order to grow their majorities and assure greater funding from well-heeled (and largely anonymous) billionaire backers.  This funding issue is crucial; were it not for the Court’s egregious 5-4 Citizens United v. FEC decision back in 2010, which eliminated the prohibition on PACS (“political action committees”) and corporations making unfettered independent expenditures, it is likely that Roe v. Wade would still be settled law today. 

Now mind you, Dobbs (the case which overturned Roe) wasn’t the only terrible ruling from the high court this past week.  Just the day before ruling that women no longer had any say in their bodily destinies, the court struck down a New York gun law enacted more than a century ago that restricts carrying a concealed handgun outside the home. The opinion changes the framework that lower courts will use to analyze other gun restrictions, which could include proposals currently before Congress if they eventually become law.  According to Justice Clarence Thomas, courts are required to "assess whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment's text and historical understanding,"   

For instance, Thomas wrote, if a gun law is addressing a societal problem that also existed in the 18th century, it is evidence that the modern law is unconstitutional if there was no similar regulation then. Likewise, he said, if that societal problem was historically addressed using a type of regulation different than the one now before a court, this is also evidence that the modern law is unconstitutional.

"When confronting such present-day firearm regulations, this historical inquiry that courts must conduct will often involve reasoning by analogy—a commonplace task for any lawyer or judge. Like all analogical reasoning, determining whether a historical regulation is a proper analogue for a distinctly modern firearm regulation requires a determination of whether the two regulations are 'relevantly similar,'" Thomas wrote.  Thursday's ruling means that for a court to find any type of gun law constitutional, it will have to be consistent with how firearms were regulated historically.  This means states and localities will run into legal trouble whenever they try to enact a gun law that does not have a historical parallel, particularly if the problem the law is trying to address is a problem that arguably has existed for generations.  

In other words, just as with the Dobbs decision, this one invites us to travel back into the past . . . to willfully ignore past decisions of the court.  To a huge extent, this is the work of the  Federalist Society, which wants nothing so much as to return to an America in which men rule over women, states have clear control of the law, black’s and other minorities legal rights take a backseat to those of White Christians, and the frontier is once again, just outside our front doors.

During times like these, my reading habits change.  To get away from all the angst, worry and bile, I tend read as much P.G. Wodehouse as time permits.  (For those not familiar with him, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE [1881-1975] was one of the funniest, most inane British writers of all time.  He is perhaps best known and most beloved for his series of novels starring Bertie Wooster (one of the dotty “idle rich”) and his sagacious valet Jeeves. My all-time favorite, by the way, is Ring For Jeeves). For more serious, mind-numbing fiction, I find myself turning (or returning) to such classic dystopian novels as:

• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)

• The Iron Heel by Jack London (1908)

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

• It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1936)

• 1984 by George Orwell (1948)

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1984)

Dystopia is an imagined community or society that is dehumanizing and frightening. “Dystopia” is the bipolar opposite of a utopia, which is a perfect society. The novels I have been rereading, most notably Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, take us into an American society/political culture in which democratic freedoms have been wrenchingly upended by brutal autocrats and hideous dictators. What makes these novels so compelling is that no matter how long ago they were written or published, they all seem to be talking about today. The one drawback in most of them is that they offer no solutions to the problems they all predict . . . short of moving away to another country.

                          Wedding photo of Clarence and Ginni Lamp Thomas in 1987

Although by no means a novelist, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a world-class dystopian.  In his separate, concurring opinion in last Friday’s Dobbs decision, Thomas wrote that this was undoubtedly “an erroneous decision.”  Thomas went on to write that the Court should “reconsider” such previous rulings as those that protect contraception access (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965), same-sex relationships (Lawrence v. Texas. 2003) and same-sex marriages (Obergefell v. Hodges,  2015).  Not surprisingly, nowhere did Mr.  Justice Thomas mention the court’s unanimous 1967 decision (Loving v. Virginia) decision which made inter-racial marriages legal.  At best, Thomas’s omission could be considered a case of inconsistency; at worst, utter hypocrisy.  But then again, hypocrisy and inconsistency have long been key ingredients in both bare-knuckle politics and dystopian literature.  

For all those who have been so vociferously in favor of over-turning Roe v. Wade, one has to wonder whether they are going to do anything about assisting all these newborns (even those who are the product of rape and incest) with food, housing, medical care and education, or just leave them floating in the breeze.  And do all those ultra-conservative cretins who have hopped aboard the “Replacement Theory” bandwagon understand that by outlawing abortions - which will most directly affect non-whites and the poor - will greatly increase the minority population of the United States . . . thus making their supposedly “worst nightmare” a far greater reality?  Not only are they both inconsistent and hypocritical; they are immoral. 

As mentioned above, dystopian novels rarely provide suggestions for remediation . . .  short of emigration. Not being a dystopian writer, permit me to conclude with a  couple of suggestions:

1. Increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13 . . .  the number of Federal Judicial Circuits there are in the U.S.A.

2. Elect a staunchly Democratic Congress which will get rid of the filibuster and enact a bill which codifies abortion as a federal right.

3. Start the process of overturning the Citizens United  ruling. 

4. Make sure that Roe v. Wade is on every ballot in every state and district in 2022.

Never give up hope!  This land belongs to the majority . . . 

Copyright© 2022 Kurt F.  Stone

Don't Find Fault; Find a Remedy

The late Senator/Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey (1911-1978) was, in many ways, his generation’s version of Joe Biden; accomplished, mostly - though not universally - well-liked and respected, decent . . . and not overly quotable. About the only quip he is remembered for in a public career spanning nearly 35 years is: To err is human. To blame somebody else is politics.  Sadly, Humphrey’s bon mot carries even more weight and truth in 2022 than it did back in the early 1960s when he first uttered it. 

Although finger-pointing has long played a noxious role in politics, it has never been as much a replacement for action as it has become in the past several years. In the same way, hardcore, steel-encased partisanship was never as much an absolute roadblock to passing legislation of any kind as it has become in the era of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. For most of American political history, certain Congressional measures were invariably guaranteed of passage: federal judgeships, names of courthouses, ambassadorships and resolutions of praise or condemnation, to name but a few.  Sadly, this is not so much the case today, when an historic nomination to the Supreme Court barely passes, a resolution condemning anti-Semitism or praising cops for saving the Capitol on January 6, 2021 finds naysayers or H.R. 7990, Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro’s Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act cannot attract more than 9 republicans voting in its favor.  (Please note that Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who has become a bit of a fan-favorite amongst Democrats, actually voted against passage of the bill, which provides $28 million to address infant formula shortages.) 

Why ultra-partisanship should stand in the way of even the simplest actions being approved is not all that easy to limn, for their are a lot of disparate factors at play here. But to my way of thinking, one of the most obvious can be summed up in three words first used by Henry E. Peterson, an Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division at a 1974 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “Follow the money.” (For film aficionados, the creator of the term would be novelist/screenwriter William Goldman, who put the three words into the mouth of “Deep Throat” [as played by actor Hal Holbrook] in the 1976 blockbuster film “All the President’s Men.”)

So let’s follow the money. . . . Ever since the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision, Citizen’s United V Federal Elections Commission, which gave the green light to mega-wealthy citizens and corporations to flood American politics with unlimited $$$, politics has become a matter of doing what is best for the donor class. Doing their bidding has become far more important than doing what is right. Money has become the most impregnable roadblock in public life. That one judicial decision has had an immense impact on everything from the failure to pass gun safety laws and the successful banning of books in public school libraries, and from the inability to enact meaningful climate change legislation, to the emasculation of voting rights laws and the vast growth of self-financed, civically illiterate candidates for public offices ranging from local school boards and state legislatures to the very halls of Congress. Citizens United, which gave lucre protected speech status  under terms of the First Amendment and turned corporations into people, has also made it possible for political money to become both invisible and anonymous through the creation of hundreds of PACs - “Political Action Committees.”  These committees have the ability to bypass federal election laws, and contribute hundreds of  millions - even billions - of dollars to “causes” . . . which is a euphemism for both political candidates and corporate dreams.

Although we are only in the month of May, we are nonetheless up to our necks in midterm primaries; November 2022 is just around the corner. This means that as slow and relatively ineffectual as the current Congress (the 117th) has been, its going to become even slower and less effectual. Minority leaders McConnell and McCarthy are going to do everything in their power to bring all Congressional action to a virtual standstill. The Democrats are legislatively stymied; about all they can accomplish in the last months of this Congress is holding Republican feet to the fire by forcing them to go on the record through a series of votes and televising hearings of the January 6 Committee in the hope that the American public gets some notion of just how dangerously close we have come to losing our hold on Democracy.

In the upcoming midterm elections, the Democrats will run on a platform of issues and actions they seek to accomplish in the future. As for the Republicans, they have already admitted that they will not have a platform . . . outside of returning the Democrats to the minority by repeatedly harping on how the ultra-Left has caused historically high inflation and souring gas prices, as well as accusing them of being Socialists and Communists; of seeking to increase the flood of illegal immigrants in order to take away American job,s and then quickly giving them citizenship rights so that they may vote for Democrats.

Not much of a platform, is it?

And should they be restored to the majority, Republicans will no doubt hold hearings as a way of getting back at the likes of Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin and the gang for the actions of the January 6 committee.

In other words, they’re going to be doing the bidding of their well-heeled right-wing masters.  

Follow the money!

In the months leading up to the midterm elections, it will be the Democrats’ responsibility to get across the fact that although inflation is at a 40 year high, corporate profits are a 50 year high. Then too, whenever House and Senate candidates face each other in public debates (that is assuming that Republicans will agree to it in the first place), they must ask simple questions, such as:

“The price of gas is set by several factors:

• the price of crude oil and its availability

• refining costs

• the cost to distribute

• state and federal taxes

• the oil companies desire for profit

“Tell me: since none of these factors are controlled by the President of the United States, what are you going to propose that Congress do about it?   

What it all is going to boil down to in November is precisely whom the two parties’ candidates seek to serve: their donors or the voting public?  And what will they see as their most important challenge: to find fault or to  seek remedies?  

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Replacement Theory: Eugenics Refitted in 21st Century Rags

Of all the professional pursuits I have engaged in over the past half-century (Oy!), none has been more challenging or rewarding than the field of Medical Ethics. (Yes, I can hear the quip “Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?” for the thousandth time . . . and no, it is decidedly NOT). Medical ethics is the one field in which I truly feel I am making a difference in this world. At the same time, each day, each week, requires a tremendous amount of study, and a lot of learning. One of the things that takes up quite a bit of learning time is cramming tons of medical acronyms (such as ARDS, BPD, DVT or PML, to name but a teeny-tiny handful) and then translating them into understandable lay English for the masses. Please know that for purposes of this essay, we won’t  get into even a small sampling, lest you, dear reader, fear that any of the abbreviations or terms will become part of some final exam.

G-d forbid! 

Whether or not one knows the difference between “PK” (Pharmacokinetics) and PD (Pharmacodynamics) is not terribly important; it can easily be solved by asking a question or two from an expert.  However, in the world of modern politics, there are tons of terms (which may or may not have their own acronyms) which are terribly important . . . such as “CRT” (Critical Race Theory), “Let’s Go Brandon,” (a right-wing code for “F*ck Joe Biden,”) and one of the newest, “Replacement Theory,” which has come back onto center-stage as a result of this week’s massacre at a Buffalo-area supermarket which took the lives of more than a dozen African-Americans.

“Replacement Theory” (often prefaced by “The Great”), first came to public attention in July, 2017, when bands of White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis, attending a “Unite the Right” rally, marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, brandishing tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “You will not replace us!” Nearly two years later, two consecutive mass shootings occurred in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attacks were carried out by a lone gunman who entered both mosques during Friday prayer; 51 people were killed and 40 injured. Prior to going on his murderous rampage, the shooter, who was eventually sentenced to 51 life terms without the possibility of parole, issued a 74-page manifesto entitled The Great Replacement. In it, he expressed several anti-immigrant sentiments, including hate speech against migrants, white supremacist rhetoric, and calls for all non-European immigrants in Europe - who he claimed to be "invading his land" - to be removed.

In last week’s mass murder up in Buffalo, the eighteen-year old terrorist, like his counterpart in the Christchurch terrorist tragedy, posted a manifesto in which he accused “Jews, Democrats and Communists” of doing everything in their power to bring about “white genocide” - of “replacing” white people with “illegal immigrants, blacks, browns and Asians” who would then vote a straight Democratic ticket with an eye to eliminating “White Christians.” Somewhat lost in the shuffle was a murderous terror attack on a Taiwanese Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, a community in Southern California’s Orange County.  Once again, the shooter - who was hogtied by members of the congregation with an extension cord - killed because he was a racist who wanted to get rid of as many “aliens” as possible.  (The one person killed in the attack was John Chen, a 52-year old doctor of Sports Medicine in nearby Aliso Viejo.  If not for the heroic Dr. Chen, more congregants would have been murdered. Hauntingly, he was one of my niece Julie’s physicians some years back.)

“Replacement Theory,” got its name from a 2010 work (Le Grand Remplacement) by the French writer Renaud Camus. In his book, Camus depicted a population replacement said to occur in a short time lapse of one or two generations. The French migrant crisis was particularly conducive to the spread of Camus's ideas, while the terrorist attacks accelerated the construction of immigrants as an existential threat among those who shared such a worldview. It didn’t take too long for his worldview to turn into a conspiracy theory and find fertile ground in the rest of Europe and the United States. When all is said and done, Camus’ theory is not all that dissimilar to the 19th-century atrocity known as “Eugenics” - a set of beliefs and practices which aimed to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. The Nazis - particularly Dr. Josef Mengele (Der Todesengel, the “Angel of Death”) comes to mind. From Eugenics to Replacement Theory isn’t that great a leap.

Lest we sneer at “The Great Replacement” as the special provenance of political crazies, lovers of loony conspiracy theories, fans of Tucker Carlson and garden variety Neo-Nazis and racists, consider a few horrifying facts:

• About 1 in 3 U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains;

• About 3 in 10 also worry that more immigration is causing U.S.-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence. (Republicans are more likely than Democrats to fear a loss of influence because of immigration, 36% to 27%.)

• Replacement Theory has moved from the fringes into the mainstream among Congressional Republicans. With the exception of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-Wyo) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) who ripped their colleagues for not speaking out against White Supremacy which lay just beneath the Buffalo massacre (for which they have been roundly condemned) not a single member of the Republican caucus has said word one. Indeed, the number 3 member of the House Republican caucus (Elise Stefanik) chose to attack Democrats in general, and President Joe Biden in particular for the massacre: “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.

Has the whole world gone crazy?  Why oh why do so many people get their news and views from conspiracy-mongers who neither believe nor give a rat’s rump about so-called “White Genocide?  Anyone who could come up with an answer to that question would be in the running for the Nobel Prize in either peace or medicine.  As to what we can do to stifle the voices, the violence and the virulence of these monsters is a bit less confusing, but a hell of a lot more cumbersome.  It is up to us, the masses of ordinary citizens - those who seek a saner and safer society in which to live, love and learn - we MUST banish the bigots, the lovers of totalitarianism, those who are more concerned with the freedom to own weapons of mass destruction than to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and live up to the nation’s slogan e pluribus unum - “Out of many, one.”

I can see no reason why we, the masses of the ordinary, cannot band together and send the haters of humanity back to their humdrum lives . . . far, far away from seats of power.   Put up lawn signs; go knocking on doors, drive neighbors to the polls, and always, always remember the words of Churchill:

“NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER GIVE UP!! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER,NEVER NEVER-NEVER-NEVER-NEVER!!!”

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

"There Are More Horses' Asses Than There Are Horses"

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Without question, Dorothy Parker and Will Rogers were two of the most notable, quotable wits of the past century or so. Parker, a poet and world-class epigrammatist, screenwriter and saucy satirist, the teeny-tiny “mouth that roared” was best known for such pity maxims as “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk,” and a marvelous epigram about the equally quotable Oscar Wilde which appeared in a 1927 issue of the original Life:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Then there was Will Rogers: vaudevillian with a lariat, beloved motion picture actor, political commentator and honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, He was perhaps best known for the statement: “I belong to no organized party; I am a Democrat.” One of Mayor Rogers’ very best political quotes (although wrongly attributed to Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy) is as satirically insightful today as when he first uttered it nearly a century ago: “There are more horses’ asses than there are horses.”  Rogers’ bon mot is, perhaps, best understood by Parker,  who once noted: “There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

And indeed, when considering all the utter cruelty and cerebral rigor mortis occurring in partisan politics these days, Rogers’ quip about horse’s asses is absolutely spot on.  Need some examples? Just the other day, while a clear majority of America was proudly celebrating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to become the first Black woman to sit on the United States Supreme Court, there was a concurrent walkout of every Republican senator (save one, Utah’s Mitt Romney) the moment Vice President Harris announced the final vote.  Despite possessing virtually every quality and experience one might wish for a Justice - including humility and brilliance - 47 Republicans voted against her, claiming either that she was soft on crime, supported pedophilia or possessed an “activist” judicial philosophy.  Did they really believe it?  Of course not; they simply did not want to give the Republican base a reason to challenge them in the next election.

Then there’s the case of another Black judge, the late Joseph W. Hackett (1932-2021) who was the first Black man to serve on the Florida Supreme Court and the first Black judge on a federal appeals court in the Deep South.  Upon his passing, it seemed both natural and fair for Congress to pass a bill naming a federal courthouse after him.  When the time came to organize such a proposal, virtually every member of the Florida congressional delegation - Republican Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, along with all 16 Republican members of the House and all 11 Democrats, signed on as co-sponsors.  It appeared that Judge Hackett was going to be enshrined.  History was on the side of a man who attended segregated public schools and graduated from two historically black universities, and then rose to the judicial heights. For generations, the naming of federal courthouses after distinguished jurists has been the one area where congressional bipartisanship is both expected and de rigueur.  But such was not to be the case with Judge Hackett.  As journalist Annie Karni wrote in a February 22, 2022 (2/22/22) piece in the New  York Times: “ . . . in a last-minute flurry, Republicans abruptly pulled their backing with no explanation and ultimately killed the measure, leaving its fate unclear, many of its champions livid and some of its newfound opponents professing ignorance about what had happened.   

                                                  Rep. Andrew Clyde (R.-GA)

What had happened? The late Judge Joseph W. Hackett’s nomination had appeared in Georgia Republican Andrew Clyde’s crosshairs . . . that’s what happened. Clyde, shown in the photo on the right, is a dead-ringer for the australopithecus robustus, a late Pliocene-Early Pleistocene (4 to 2 million years ago) epoch humanoid. How and why did Rep. Clyde singlehandedly turn a routine vote to name a federal building after a trailblazing judge into a Republican purity test? 

First the how: Rep. Clyde circulated a 1999 Associated Press article about one of Hackett’s decisions relating to prayer in schools. Never mind that Hackett was following Supreme Court precedent when he ruled against student-approved prayers at graduation ceremonies. This single decision made him toxic among House Republicans, with 89% eventually voting against naming the courthouse after him. Since the bill’s passage was seen as certain, it had come for a vote under a fast-tracked process that required a two-thirds majority, which meant that with Republicans suddenly opposed, it failed.  When Republican members of the Florida Congressional delegation were asked why they wound up voting against a nominee they had originally supported, most answered “I don’t know.” Well, at least they were being honest . . . 

Next the why: Rep. Andrew Clyde, like fellow Georgian Marjorie Taylor Greene, is a first-term member of the House.  In his short Congressional career, he has become known for such things as voting against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to the police officers who responded to the January 6th insurrection; opposing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act that made lynching a federal hate crime; and voting against recognizing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.  He’s the guy who called January 6 “just a normal tourist visit,” and has been repeatedly fined for not wearing a mask on the House floor.  In other words, despite resembling a prehistoric ape, he’s one of congress’s leading horse’s asses.  And let us not forget California’s Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, who said not a word about Clyde’s - or his party’s lunacy.  And this is the man who desperately wants to become the next Speaker of the House! We can always pray that the stable suffers a bout of equine encephalitis.

This is not meant to imply that horse’s asses are housed in just one political stable. Goodness knows, one can find equine tuchases within the ranks of Democrats and progressives as well as Libertarians, Socialists and QAnon quacks.  But still and all, the largest and most egregious number reside in the Republican paddock.  

Here in Florida, we are subject to the constant whinnying of Governor Ron DeSantis who, while ignoring such major statewide issues as skyrocketing insurance premiums, unaffordable rental costs and a chief medical officer who does not believe in the conclusions of science, instead has created his own militia whose sole purpose is to ride herd on electoral fraud (?), made abortion all but illegal for women and definitely felonious for physicians, and puts  the rights of parents to keep their children from having to read any book which might “make them feel bad” well ahead of the purpose of education - teaching children how to think. Just the other day, the head of the State Department of Education announced that the state was rejecting more than 50 math textbooks from next school year’s curriculum, citing references to critical race theory among reasons for the rejections. When questioned, Gov. DeSantis said there were different reasons for the books being rejected and officials aimed to “focus the education on the actual strong academic performance of the students.” “We don’t want things like math to have, you know, some of these other concepts introduced. It’s not been proven to be effective, and quite frankly, it takes our eye off the ball.” If anyone can explain what the hell he meant by that, please text me ASAP.

So what’s the cure for this extreme number of horse’s asses? As I believe I suggested a couple of weeks ago, stockpiling tens of thousands of feet of film showing them at their worst . . . and then airing the evidence of their idiocy on ad after ad after ad. And make sure that the media asks them truth-seeking questions . . . make them justify why they are doing everything in their power to excise ethics, fairness and the truth from democracy.

When all is said and done, horses belong in stables, paddocks and racetracks; not in the hallowed halls of Congress, state legislatures, the various governors’ mansions and above all, the White House.

Copyright©2022, Kurt F. Stone

"Woke"

A couple of days ago, North Carolina Republican Madison Cawthorn, the youngest philistine in Congress, held a town hall forum in his home state. Speaking to the group - many of whom are not supporting him for reelection - he called Ukrainian President Zelinskyy (the correct transliteration of his name) a "thug," and posited that the Ukrainian government, now under siege by the Russian military, is "incredibly corrupt, and incredibly evil, and has been pushing woke ideologies." Someone should have informed the 26-year old man child that the word woke, when used in its relatively modern political incarnation is decidedly not plural. Simply stated, there are no woke ideologies. Had I been at the gathering I would have fought through the increasing nausea to inform him of his misstatement and then ask him a simple question: “Would you please define the term woke (or stay woke) in its political context for all of us?” Not having been there (thank G-d!), I can only imagine the utter jabberwalky with which my inquiry no doubt would have been met. By and large, I have rarely met a Trumpeter who has the slightest idea of what the word woke means. When coming from the mouth of a moron, it is intended to be a derisive political aspersion; a synonymous look-down-the-nose slur . . . a middle-finger-in-the-air epithet for politically correct, progressive or liberal. 

A little research turns up the fact that the term woke or the two-word phrase stay woke goes back nearly 85 years when blues musician Huddle Ledbetter (better known as “Lead Belly - the King of the 12-String Guitar”) used it in a 1938 protest song entitled Scottsboro Boys. In the song, Ledbetter tells a story about nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. Ledbetter warns black people that they “. . . best stay woke, keep their eyes open", when travelling through Alabama.  In addition to the Scottsboro Boys, he also wrote songs about people in the news, such as FDR, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, boxer Jack Johnson and, believe it  or not, Howard Hughes.

Three decades later in 1962, African American novelist William Melvin Kelley (1937-2017) wrote an article in the New York Times titled If You're Woke, You Dig It, in which he describes a 'woke' person as someone who's aware of the experiences of black people in the United States. The term gained popularity on social media in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a white police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. After prosecutors said that they did not have enough evidence to bring charges of murder or manslaughter against the officer, protests took place nationwide, with the slogan "stay woke" being used to shed light on instances of police brutality against Black people.

While it originally meant “becoming woken up or sensitised to issues of justice”, its meaning has changed over time into a political slur, according to linguist Tony Thorne.

The labels 'woke warrior', 'wokerati' (a British term) and 'woke worthies' are often used to insult people on the left, who are seen by conservatives as a threat to freedom of speech. A year ago, British P.M. Boris Johnson's spokesman said he was not sure what the word "woke" meant, despite the government having declared war on "woke worthies" and introducing a law to stop them. Then too, when leaving office in January 2021, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo tweeted: "Censorship, wokeness, political correctness, it all points on one direction — authoritarianism, cloaked as moral righteousness."

Secretary Pompeo’s statement is – as Granny Annie would have it “utter canal water.”

What this brief historico-entymological journey through the land of woke teaches us is a couple of intriguing factoids:

• That woke and its linguistic derivatives have a longer history than one might suspect;

• That its meaning changes over time, and that these changes are, generally speaking, due to changes in political action and vocabulary.

• That this single one-syllable word has so many meanings - especially today - as to be almost devoid of meaning itself.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), herself an avatar of wokeness, tweeted not too long ago that ‘Woke’ is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice.” As one of the most visible members of her generation (who grew up in the ‘90s, she insists - unlike progressives who grew up in the ‘60s through the ‘80s - that “Woke ain’t broke.” Where once woke meant to keep one’s eyes and ears attuned to social and political injustice, today’s up-and-comers believe it is far, far more. That being woke is senseless if it does not motivate liberals and progressives to action; to the understanding that words aren’t nearly as important as sweat they can produce.  

The next time you hear or read the word woke coming out of the mouth, pen or keyboard of a political Luddite, you might demand for them to define the term . . . and prepare yourself for the  sound of silence.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

From Rurik to Putin is Measured in More Than a Thousand Years . . . and Less Than a Couple of Hundred Miles

Once upon a time I was really into Russian history, literature and music. I went through a long spell reading their great writers - Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Yevtushenko - listening to their musical masters - such as Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich - and learning about their historic underpinnings going all the way back to the days of the legendary Rurik (830 CE - 879 CE), a Varangian (that’s Scandinavian or Viking) warrior who, in the mid-to-late 9th century CE, founded the first significant dynasty in Russian history. It would be called the Rurik Dynasty. Rurik and his heirs also established a significant geographical and political formation known as Kievan Rus’, the first incarnation of modern Russia. (Notice how the name consists of two entities - Kiev and Russia - which are all over the news these days? Some things never change)

The line of Rurik (that’s a bronze statue of him on the left) continued to rule Russia well into the 16th century and the mythology surrounding the man Rurik is often referred to as the official beginning of Russian history.

All this can be read in the first book of Russian history, known variously as either The Primary Chronicle or Tales of Bygone Years, which is the history of Kievan Russia from the year 850 to about 1110.  It’s not an easy read . . . but then again, neither are novels by Dostoevsky, or poems and plays by Pushkin.  I vividly remember reading these Tales of Bygone Years sometime in the late sixties; at the time Leonid Brezhnev was First Secretary of the Communist Party, although he had yet to consolidate his power to become the regime’s ultimate leader (he would hold that post until his death in 1982, and then be replaced by the long-forgotten Yuri Andropov).

One of the things I came away with from reading this ancient work (in English translation, of course) was that even as far back as the 10th century, these mythical, eponymous figures who would one day lead the Russian Soviets, were already showing signs and symptoms of possessing an historic, geographic and political inferiority complex classically defined as “an intense personal or historic feeling of inadequacy, often resulting in the belief that one is in some way deficient, or inferior, to others.”  It has also been described to as “a sense of incompleteness” or “a gateway to narcissism.”   

In keeping up with the latest news surrounding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shocking and - to my way of thinking, mindless - attempt to rewrite history, I see the unmistakable fingerprints of Rurik and the monks of Kievan Rus’. Like the ancients, Putin and his small inner circle of multibillionaire oligarchs are still trying to figure out who they are and where they belong  on the world stage.  Are they Europeans?  Are they Asiatic?  And what arrows do they have in their quiver to hold all the disparate nationalities, language groups, religions and time-zones (there are 11 of them ) together into a unified whole? 

 What is Putin’s ultimate goal in invading (or not) the Ukraine? To continue the process of reassembling the old Soviet Union? To earn for himself newer and greater chapters in history books yet written? To put NATO in its place? And where does this all stop? At the gates of Finland, Poland or Estonia? It seems to me that anyone who can plumb the depths of his mind and ultimate intent, is likely also capable of squaring the circle (completing a seemingly impossible task) . . . in this case, granting Russia the identity and superiority which has eluded it since the beginning of time.

Putin certainly knows and understands that invading the Eastern Ukraine is going to unleash an economic embargo against his country the likes of which haven’t been seen in decades. Russia’s two greatest assets are, of course, nuclear weapons and oil. The second is of tremendous importance.  Within the past couple of hours, Germany has pulled the plug on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (a 765-mile-long natural gas pipeline from Russia, running under the Baltic Sea to Germany. The project is intended to enable Russia to circumvent Ukraine and other countries and pipe its gas directly into Europe), as the UK and European shares see-saw and the ruble has already sunk to a two-year low. Hauntingly, this does not seem to worry Putin at all . . . at least in public.   He no doubt understands that sanctions from the U.S., UK and other Western economic powerhouses will likely have a negative echoing affect on these economies . . . such as significant raises in the price of oil. Then again, a rise in the price of oil in Europe can be a boon to American oil companies.

Here on the home front, President Biden has, in my opinion, been handling the situation with a far greater degree of intelligence, aplomb and political craftsmanship than his predecessor ever could have hoped for. Responsible members of the Republican leadership in Congress, along with - believe it or not - the editorial page writers of the Wall Street Journal have had some pretty positive thing to say about Biden’s handling of this looming international event.

One Republican no one has heard from during the past several weeks and months is the former POTUS .. . . until just today. The former President slammed President Biden’s handling of the crisis with Russia, insisting that Vladimir Putin would never have invaded Ukraine on his watch. Touting his close relationship with the Russian autocrat (“I know Vladimir Putin very well, and he would have never done during the Trump Administration what he is doing now, no way!” ), Trump suggested on that he would have figured out a way to prevent Putin from moving troops into breakaway provinces of Ukraine, without offering any specifics. Even for Trump, the harsh attack on Biden marks a shocking break from the traditional deference that the opposition party leaders typically give to a sitting president during a mushrooming global crisis.

When all is said and done - and there is so much yet to be said and done - Putin’s reasons for invading (or not) the Ukraine are as unknowable as the Russian soul, as cold as a frigid Muscovite winter. He seems bent on earning for himself an entire chapter in the saga which began with Rurik oh so many centuries ago. At the same time, his immediate goal, Donetsk, is a mere 535 miles from the Kremlin.

The one person who likely understands Vladimir Putin the best, died 71 years before the future Russian strongman was even born: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. For in his immortal novel, The Idiot, (his own personal favorite), he writes: “Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Beware the Poisonous Newt

Most crossword puzzle freaks - defined as those who would never be caught dead using a pencil - know that the answer to the clue “eft” is “newt.” For those who don’t inhabit the world of Will Shortz (the puzzle editor of both the New York Times, and National Public Radio and likely the world’s leading enigmatologist - “Newt” is a salamander in the subfamily Pleurodelinae. There are easily more than 100 varieties of the creature, a couple of which are highly toxic. The most deadly contain a toxin known as TTX, the most lethal non-protein substance known to man. When ingested into the body, this toxin directly attacks the nervous system and causes muscle paralysis, which can easily lead to cardiac arrest.

But please know that this week’s post deals with a slimy creature belonging not to the Salamandridae family, but rather to the subspecies of Homo Sapiens we shall call letalis ultra-conservativa popularis (Latin for “lethal ultra-conservative Republican”).  And by now, I’m pretty sure we’ve all sussed out that the Newt we’re referring to is Newton (“Newt”) Leroy Gingrich, House Speaker during the  Clinton administration, primary author of the “Contract With (Against?) America, and current Fox News contributor.   And like his animal kingdom namesake, he can be plenty toxic. Gingrich, like the the “Man From M.A.G.A.” whom he adores, loves lights, camera, action and all the attention a narcissist can handle. As a 10-term member of the House of Representatives from Georgia’s Sixth District, he was never what you’d call a legislative powerhouse; he’s always been more interested proving that he’s the smartest guy in the room. Like the former president, he has a long track record of treating his first two wives like dirt and once blamed his marital indiscretions (he was actually having an affair with his soon-to-be third wife while leading the impeachment charge against then-President Clinton) actually blamed them on his love of country, saying: "There's no question [that] at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.")

Over many years, Gingrich has co-written a series of “alternate history” novels about the Civil War (Grant Comes East, and Never Call Retreat: Lee and Grant: The Final Victory) and World War II (Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8, and Days of Infamy), as well as dystopian novels (with titles like Treason, Duplicity and Collusion). Among the things one learns about the former Speaker through reading his fiction are that:

1. He isn’t a very good writer;

2. He is history’s deus ex machina;

3. He has an abiding love of - and extraordinary admiration for - white men who almost single-handedly change the course of history  . . . and not necessarily for the better.

Newt’s self-image is that of a prophet; one who not only can see the future . . . but has been endowed with the power to shape it in his own toxic image.  His latest prophecy was announced to the world this past Sunday on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bertimoro. In addition to railing against the current Democratic legislative agenda, he suggested that people who favor higher levels of government spending to build out the social-safety net are in thrall to a "secular religion" (as opposed to the supply-side economics that have governed the Republican Party ever since Art Laffer laid out the theory on a cocktail napkin in 1974) and compared its practitioners to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks.  Then came the bombshell, based on a Gingrich op-ed piece published in Newsweek, entitled "The Wolves Will Become Sheep," in which he accused the Jan. 6 Committee of being a “lynch mob,” but (as was the case in his TV segment on Fox) does not cite any specific laws that have been broken by investigators. The closest he came to making an actual indictment was saying that “The Jan. 6 Select Committee is in the process of potentially bankrupting scores of Americans who worked for or supported President Trump. They face financial ruin defending themselves against the committee’s attack.”  Say what?

Forgetting that during the Obama years, the Republican-led Congress spent more time and money investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role in the attack in Benghazi, Libya (in which 4 Americans - including the American ambassador were murdered by terrorists) than it did on the 9/11 attack, Gingrich floated the idea that the January 6 Committee was nothing more than a “partisan lynch mob” (despite having 2 Republicans on that committee) To all but the politically deaf, dumb and blind, it was obvious that the real purpose of the innumerable Benghazi hearings was to drive down Secretary Clinton’s national polling numbers on the way to the 2016 presidential election.

With regards to the single, ongoing January 6 committee hearing, Gingrich blustered that once the G.O.P. took back the  majority after the 2022 mid-term elections, committee members would be tried and sent to prison.  And this prognostication came on the heels of possible future Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggesting that come January 2023, he would move to have members of the January 6 committee stripped of all their House committee assignments . . . if not expelled and put on trial.

This streak of authoritarianism as exemplified by former Speaker Gingrich, possible future Speaker McCarthy, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz (who is giving serious consideration to his state seceding from the Union) is breathtaking in its gall, its political chutzpah and utter political toxicity.  Among those in Gingrich’s corner, one finds such political oddities as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (who, though loudly, proudly, defiantly unvaccinated, has been buying and selling stock in Pfizer and Moderna, which likely makes her guilty of insider trading) and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz who, appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast said “You know what, Newt’s right! We are going to take power. And when we do, it’s not going to be the days of Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy where the Republicans go limp-wristed, where they lose their backbone, and they fail to send a single subpoena.”  On the same podcast, Bannon himself also floated the idea of impeaching Joe Biden. It’s probably just a matter of time before both ideas—Gingrich’s and Bannon’s—are the default positions for Republicans running for office.

Indeed, as Charles Dickens wrote in the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities: 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, …”

Beware the toxicity of a Newt Gingrich, the authoritarianism of  a Steve Bannon or the seditiousness of a Donald Trump; for where they go, poison enters the body politic.

And to them and those who support them I say: Be careful what you pray for . . . . 

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Liz Cheney: Lauding the Courage of a Politician I'd Never Vote For

                                   Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)

Back in November, 2009, when this blog was still called “Beating the Bushes,” I posted a piece entitled In the Words of Joseph Nye Welch. In this op-ed, I castigated right-wing radio Luddite Rush Limbaugh for continuing to claim that then-President Barack Obama (who had been elected the previous November) was continuing to proclaim that our 44th POTUS was not only foreign-born (thus invalidating his presidency) but a Muslim plant to boot. In that essay, I called upon the ghost of the late Harvard- trained attorney Joseph Nye Welch (1890-1960) who, in 1954, became the epitome of a political hero when, during the nationally-televised “Army-McCarthy Hearings” unmasked the Wisconsin senator for the ogre he truly was:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness . . . . If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me . . . . , Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?  As history records, Welch’s heroism turned out to be what would become the first - and ultimately deepest - shovelings in what would shortly thereafter become Joseph McCarthy’s grave. 

Now mind  you, Welch was not an elected official; he had no seat to lose, nor would he carry a target upon his back.  He was just (just!) a mild-tempered man with a love of justice and the courage to put his convictions before the court of public opinion.  In her own way, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney is a Welch clone; a courageous person willing to put her convictions foursquarely before the court of public opinion. What obviously separates Rep. Cheney from attorney Welch is that the former has much to lose . . . like  her political life. In voting for the conviction of former President Trump and then becoming one of the most visible and forthcoming members of the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack (of which she serves as Vice Chair) Liz Cheney has already been thrown out of her position as Chair of the House Republican Conference, has earned the undying enmity of the former president and nearly 100% of her caucus. Moreover, she stands a good chance of losing her seat in Congress.

Without question, Liz Cheney is Republican Royalty: her father, Dick Cheney, at various times served as Chair of the House Republican Conference (1987-89); Secretary of Defense (1989-1993) and 46th Vice President of the United States (2001-2009); her mother Lynne served for seven years as Chair of the National Council of the Humanities under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (1986-1993). Yet despite her political bloodlines, Republicans treat her as if she were the spawn of Bella Abzug and Barney Frank. With every pronouncement or revelation regarding the January 6 coup she makes, the lower her stock goes with her former political allies. The Wyoming Republican Party has disowned her; along with the former president, the party has endorsed Harriett Hageman to be Ms. Cheney’s opponent in the 2022 Republican primary. (It should be noted that in 2016, Ms. Hagemen tried to overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Wyoming presidential primary, noting that Trump was both “racist and xenophobic.” Once he endorsed her for Ms. Cheney’s seat, she began referring to him as “the greatest president of my lifetime.”)

These days, the only people saying positive or congratulatory things about Liz Cheney are Democrats and a tiny handful of what the Jim Jordans, Madison Cawthorns and Rand Pauls of the world call “RINOS” - “Republicans in name only," like Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger and Senators Mitt Romney, Richard Burr, Ben Sasse and Lisa Murkowski. I’ve even chatted with a few people who wonder if Democrats could convince her to move to the other side of the political aisle and join the party of FDR, JFK, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  Sorry, one Joe Manchin is enough . . .

Whoa there!

As much as I admire her courage and stiff spine, I will remind you that Liz Cheney is a dyed-in-the-wool ultra-conservative. Jake Bernstein, co-author of the book Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, recently noted: “I think part of the reason for why Liz Cheney is doing what she’s doing is directly the result of her father in the sense that her father was the very embodiment of the Republican establishment for decades. . . . She’s still very conservative. She would never see eye to eye with Democrats on anything else but a belief in the institution of Congress and the democratic process. To believe that she is in any way a moderate politically says more about what Donald Trump has done to the Republican party than it does about her.”

Need proof of Cheney’s ultraconservatism? According to an article in the May 26, 2021 issue of Forbes, from 2017 to 2021, Cheney voted in line with Trump's position 92.9% of the time, supporting him more consistently in House votes than even his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Believe it or not it wasn’t all that long ago that Cheney publicly feuded with Rand Paul over who was "Trumpier.”

Make no mistake about it: outside of the valiant stand she has taken vis-à-vis the impeachment of Donald Trump and informing the public about his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, few of those reading this piece could find any political commonality with Liz Cheney. And that’s OK. Political courage need not be packaged in a set of positions which find favor with voters on both sides of the aisle. One can, however, hope and dream that such courage is ultimately contagious.

Three cheers for Liz Cheney!

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

"The Darkness on the Edge of Town"

This past Thursday (December 9, 2021) the veteran journalist and news anchor Brian Williams signed off as host of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, thus ending his 28-year run with NBC News. In his final 3 minutes and 51 seconds on-air, Williams delivered a highly reflective valedictory which, if it had had a musical backdrop, would undoubtedly have come from Paul Anka’s My Way, featuring the lyric Regrets, I’ve had a few/but then again, too few to mention/I did what I had to do/and saw it through without exemption . . . But more than that, he spoke out for his greatest fear: the future of America:

After 28 years of Peacock logos on much of what I own, it is my choice now to jump without a net into the great unknown,” he said. “As I do, for the first time in my 62 years, my biggest worry is for my country.

The truth is I am not a liberal or a conservative, I am an institutionalist. I believe in this place, and in my love of country I yield to no one. But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It is now at the local bar and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for. Grown men and women, who swore an oath to our Constitution — elected by their constituents, possessing the kind of college degrees I could only dream of — have decided to join the mob and become something they are not, while hoping we somehow forget who they were. They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside. That should scare you to no end.

Williams announced he would be leaving NBC News back on Nov. 9, bringing to an end a relationship that began in 1993 when he joined the network. Before moving to MSNBC, Williams served as chief anchor and managing editor of NBC’s Nightly News, succeeding the legendary Tom Brokaw in 2004. In 2015, he faced scandal and a six-month suspension over false claims about his helicopter being hit by a grenade in March 2003 while covering the Iraq War. He was later replaced by Lester Holt in the anchor role, and made his transition to the 24-hour cable network.

To Brian Williams’ detractors, the scandal and suspension represent the entirety of his nearly 3-decade career. Sadly, that’s the way things go in the modern world; one’s detractors make sure their audience never forgets the foibles of the fallible who happen to occupy the opposite side of the whatever aisle divides them, all the while turning both a deaf ear and a blind eye to the imperfections of those they support. A handful of mistruths from Brian Williams make him lower than Lenin in the minds of the Fox/News Max/OAN/Breitbart crowd, while the 30,000+ whoppers told by Boss Tweet matter neither whit nor farthing.

Like many on our/my side of the aisle, I found Brian Williams' valedictory to be terse, his words well crafted and his message scary as hell.  His message - and what today we increasingly refer to as “messaging” - hit the nail on the head.  “Messaging” is a fairly new concept, and means something like: the ideas or messages conveyed either explicitly or implicitly by a politician, advertising campaign, etc., or the way in which this is done.  Williams’ political messaging, in a nutshell, conveyed a great truth: We need more people WITH A PLATFORM to step up and say, “Hey folks, we’re on the ledge of losing our imperfect republic, our highly flawed but great democratic experiment. Open your eyes. We are hanging on by our freaking fingertips. 

Writing about Williams’ messaging in The Daily Kos, progressive Stella Ray noted “There will be those who say this is hyperbolic---but I now think those are the same sort who didn’t see Hitler coming, even after the Brown shirts had arrived. And make no mistake about it, the Brown shirts have arrived in the United States of America. They just go by different names these days. All sorts of  names, but most disturbing of all is this name: the Republican Party. There is no ‘both sides do it’ in this ultimate game, despite my opinion on the many imperfections of the Democratic Party.  I

I think there is no doubt this is who Williams was talking about.  Think about it: so much of what is driving Americans apart and democracy down is due to things such as:

• The promotion of anti-vaxxing, anti-masking lies in the name of “preserving individual freedom,”

• The passing of countless pieces of state and local legislation making voting terribly difficult - if not impossible - for the poor and people of color . . . and this in the name of safeguarding against electoral fraud;

• State-after-state enacting laws which make abortions next to impossible for all but women (or families) of means;

• The perpetuation of a solid slate of lies concerning the dangers posed by refugees, asylees and non-white immigrants;

• Perpetuating myths and lies about the teaching of Critical Race Theory; fostering bullying against children who are LGBTQ;

• Denying climate change;

• Spreading conspiracy theories about virtually everything in order to keep their base close at hand;

• Convincing a vast portion of America that anything they disagree with is the product of a Socialist/Communist revolution in the making.

Democrats have long been unsuited to repelling Republicanism. Hells bells: Democrats have long been unsuited to fighting fire with fire, to calling a spade a spade or showing anger. For too long, Democrats have strapped on lace gloves for any lethal Mixed Martial Arts battles they’ve entered. For the past couple of decades Democrats have held on to the canard that “working across the aisle” is the best way to survive, succeed and progress.  

It seems to me that if Democrats are going to succeed - to continue occupying the White House and leading both the House and Senate, they are going to have to shine one whole hell of a lot of cleansing megawattage on that “Darkness on the edge of town” of which Brian Williams spoke during his final segment of “The 11th Hour.”

Democrats are going to have to pump ungodly amounts of cash, courage and energy into races for POTUS, Congress, governorships, state legislatures, county commissions and boards of supervisors and education across the country. We are going have to flood airways with visuals and actualities of what such political miscreants as Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley et al have been vomiting out for the past several years . . . mostly as an act of obeisance to their cult leader, Donald J. Trump. In addition to being the one party running on a platform of political possibilities, Democrats will have to point out their opponents’ lies, conspiracy theories and penchant for scaring the daylights out of the citizens of America. Anything less will spell not only loss at the polls, but the loss of democracy in cities, towns and farmlands of this once great nation.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

Without Truth, Democracy Corrodes

                                      Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)

On any given day, I am the recipient of a minimum of 75 emails from various members of congress and state legislatures, political PACS supporting causes as varied as gun safety, climate control and overturning Citizens United . . . even the White House. Like many political activists, I am on lots and lots of different email lists; unlike many, I also have many different email addresses . . . some devoted to Democratic politics and politicians; one just for Republicans and conspiracy groups; one for congregants and rabbinic questions; one which is in Hebrew; one which is devoted to medical issues and clinical research trials; one strictly devoted to the world of film and my beloved “Hollywood Brats”; and even an address which is limited to family, close friends, and people who can legitimately call me by my first name.

So far as political emails go, I receive just as many from people and causes I support and/or mostly agree with, as those whom I execrate and/or simply cannot fathom. Among the latter are Representatives Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, and Paul Gosar, as well as Senators Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn. I also receive email notifications from liberal/progressive groups as People for the American Way, Right Wing Watch, The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Brady Center Against Gun Violence as well as such far right/racist/anti-Semitic groups as The Daily Stormer, The American Thinker and Liberty Nation News.

Now don’t get the idea that I read all the emails I receive on a daily basis. To do so would make earning a living next to impossible. Nonetheless, I do peruse enough of my mail to get a sense of what or who is demonstrably true, civil, upright, and honorable for some, and precisely the opposite - false, crooked, discourteous and utterly dishonorable - for others. Besides delving into different approaches, realities and points of view, I also keep my antennae up and searching around for that which strikes me as being factual, against that which is most likely the product of conspiratorial hogwash.

So what have I learned? Well, most importantly, I’ve learned that there is a high, fortified wall standing athwart the political landscape. One person’s fact is another’s fiction; one set of eyes sees a bright light where another set sees nothing but vast darkness; one side’s heroes are another’s arch-enemies. There is, of course, a huge difference between fact and fiction, truth and lies.  The former – fact and truth – stand firm, while the latter – fiction and falsehood – eventually wither under their own weight.  Nowhere is this better or more clearly displayed than in an ancient Hebrew lesson.  To whit: The Hebrew word for “true,” (emet) is made up of the letters alef-mem-taf,  (א-מ-ת).   One notes that all three letters are the same same size and are thus stand firm   . . .   whereas the word for “lie” or “falsehood” (sheker), which is also made up of the letters shin-kuf-resh ( שּ-ק-ר )   cannot stand . . . its middle letter is longer than its mates and thus will soon topple. 

Nowadays,  with so many different forms of communication, it’s nearly impossible to separate truth from falsehood. All too frequently, people decide what is true based not so much on a collection of provable facts, but rather on who is making the presentation. The same goes for falsehoods; people conclude that something is untrue, based not nearly so much on a set of declarations or explanations, but again, on who is making the declaration. The most brazen example of “true lies” goes back to an interview that MSNBC’s Chuck Todd had with long-time Trump counselor and advisor Kellyanne Conway a few days after her boss’s inauguration. At one point in the interview, Todd stated that then-Presidential Press Secretary Sean Spicer had told an obvious and provable lie during his very first press conference, saying with a straight face that the Trump inauguration was attended by more people than any President in American history. Todd then had a picture put up on the screen showing an aerial view of those attending the Obama inauguration versus that of Trump. It demonstrably proved that  the gathering for Barack Obama vastly outnumbered that for Donald Trump. 

“Why put him out there for the very first time, in front of that podium, to utter a provable falsehood?” Todd asked Conway.  Her response? “Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving — our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is . . .”  At this point, a visibly exasperated Todd cut in. “Wait a minute. Alternative facts? Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered . . . were just not true. Alternative facts are not facts; they're falsehoods.” And things have been going downhill ever since.

Trump supporters refuse to believe anything Chuck Todd or anyone working for or appearing on MSNBC (or CNN or National Public Radio) says . . . ergo, they all are incapable of telling the truth.  But this is by no means a one-way street: many people find it next to impossible to believe what they hear from people working for - or appearing on  - Fox News, Newsmax or “One America News Network” (OANN) And let’s not forget the overwhelming number of people who get their “news and views” on radio from the likes of Mark Levin, Joe Pags, Sean Hannity or Michael Savage to name but a few.  What the above have in common - in addition to their politics and love of conspiracy - is the lack of civility and respect they show for those who have opposing points of view. I fear that one reason why right-wing radio, television and the blogosphere succeeds far better than those media outlets in the middle or the left is that they are far more entertaining. While driving from lecture to lecture and university to university, I frequently listen to right-wing talk radio. Although most of what I hear is laughable, it is frequently sickening, I’ve got to admit the hosts are a tonic for low blood pressure.

At the moment, I have just finished reading Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost our Democracy and Still Could by California Representative Adam Schiff. It is an impeccably well-written book which details the impeachment(s) of Donald Trump from the perspective of a man who has played a pivotal role as both Chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and the manager of Trump’s first impeachment trial before the United States Senate.  I would rate Adam Schiff as one of the best and brightest - not  to mention brainy and humble - members of Congress of the past half century.  His importance to that body - and indeed, to Democracy itself - cannot be overstated.  I have often thought that he would make a world-class Attorney General . . . or Justice of the Supreme Court.

For all his efforts both past and present (he currently serves on the 1/6 committee), he has received tremendous praise and accolades - along with death threats and vile calumnies, being nicknamed “Shifty Schiff,” being labeled a "Communist,” “abject liar” and far worse. Despite all this, his knowledge, candor and courage have made him a hero to many. If there is one thing he has sought to uncover above all else during his 20 years in the House, and  before that as a highly successful federal prosecutor, it is THE TRUTH. As a constant target of what he refers to as the “Misinformation Machine,” Adam has never ceased shining a spotlight on political facts.

In a recent email outlining many of the attacks he has suffered at the hands of the aforementioned “machine,” he wrote: “I can take these attacks. But with every false story or misleading segment, our idea of shared truth is shredded. And nothing is more corrosive to a democracy than the idea that there is no truth.”

I for one could not agree more.

And so, read and listen to as much as you can stomach, learn what those who disagree with you are saying, and, in the words of Winston Churchill, “Never, never, never, never give up.”  Never give up believing that despite what the other side claims, there really, truly is such a thing as THE TRUTH.  Finding it is never easy, but don’t let that stop you.  

Courage, it seems to me, is the antidote to political corrosion. And what is courage? That which it takes to stand up and speak; that which it takes to sit down and listen.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

Creating Solutions to Problems That Don't Really Exist: A Toxic Political Strategy

By the time you get around to reading this blog, Virginians will likely have gone to the polls to elect a new governor. Looking into my frequently unreliable crystal ball, I see 3 possible outcomes:

1) Former Governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who served as the Commonwealth’s 64th governor from 2014-2018 would be returned to office by a nose;

2) Republican businessman and Republican donor Glenn Allen Youngkin, a Trumpian clone, would defeat McAuliffe in a squeaker, or that

3) Younkin would lose in a particularly close race and then claim that McAuliffe stole the election from him.

Sound familiar?

McAuliffe, a seasoned poll and self-made millionaire, chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2001-2005 and then the National Governors Association in 2016-2017. He has long been close to the Clintons, and campaigned largely on his economic record from his single term as governor (Virginia only permits non-consecutive terms), supporting infrastructure improvements, voting rights, and President Biden's current “American Rescue Plan." McAuliffe has also managed to get in a few words about Donald Trump, letting it be known that his opponent is very much in Trump’s thrall and, like the former POTUS (who endorsed Youngkin no less than ten times during the campaign, is a multi-centimillionaire making his first run for office.

During the campaign, whatever support Youngkin showed for Trump was more tacit than obvious; the name T-R-U-M-P barely passed his lips even once. And one can be reasonably certain that he prayed that the de facto head of the G.O.P would not come into the Commonwealth to campaign on his behalf. So what were Youngkin’s main issues? At first, he avoided any discussions of divisive social issues in favor of praising of free markets and job creators, lower taxes, and balanced budgets (an historically typical Republican smorgasbord) and conservative activists actually knew very little about him other than the fact that he has a degree from Harvard Business School, a long and lucrative career in private equity, devout religious convictions and even a family love of horses . . . making him more similar to Utah Senator Mitt Romney than former POTUS Donald Trump.

Then, in the election’s final two weeks, he made a sharp right-hand turn and began promoting causes which animate and energize the conservative Republican base (read: Trump); now he began hammering away at the “danger and peril” of teaching of “Critical  Race Theory” in schools as well as transgender children. In other words, Youngkin no longer ran against Terry McAuliffe; now his targets were school bathrooms and sports teams to the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning writer, poet and essayist, Toni Morrison. What all these - and many other - “dog whistle” issues have in common (besides being “dog whistles”) is that they are arguing for “solutions” to “problems” which really do not exist.  Nakedly, they combine to make a political campaign strategy which is both toxic and represents a clear and present danger to the future of “small-d” democracy.

Candidate Youngkin has quickly made the banning of Critical Race Theory (“I’ll do this on the first day I’m in office”) the number one issue for his campaign. According to Fox News it has pushed him to a 54%-46% lead in various polls. (I for one take polls run on Fox, News Max or OAN with a dollop of salt). He wants to protect Virginia’s children from having to be “indoctrinated” with “. . . left, liberal, socialist notions that America is a racist nation . . . and will make our children into a bunch of Californians.” The fact of the matter is that Critical Race Theory is not part of the state-wide curriculum in Virginia . . . or Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona or any of the other states which have either banned it as a matter of law or are in the process of doing so. It is a toxic solution to a problem that does not really exist.

Here in Florida the State Board of Education unanimously approved an amendment to its rules this past June. The amendment instructs public school staff to teach topics around race "efficiently and faithfully," using materials that meet "the highest standards of professionalism and historical accuracy." It bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory, which the legislation describes as "the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons." It has the full-throated approval of Governor Rick DeSantis.

Why has Fox News mentioned “Critical Race Theory” more than 1,300 times in less than 4 months? What is causing state legislatures, governors, and candidates for school board across the country to be so adamantly opposed to something which exists far more in theory than in reality? What is it about the late Toni Morrison and her best-known, most widely read novel — Beloved - to so rile up the right? And by the way: how many have actually read it? (Watching the 1998 movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover doesn’t count).

For those who have neither read nor watched Morrison’s Beloved, it is a graphic, violent and harrowing novel, sort of a Sophie’s Choice transferred back to America’s post-slavery era.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986.  In brief, the novel is based on the true story of a Black slave woman, Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her husband, Robert, and their children. They sought refuge in Ohio, but their owner and law officers soon caught up with the family. Before their recapture, Margaret killed her young daughter to prevent her return to slavery. In the novel, Sethe is also a passionately devoted mother, who flees with her children from an abusive owner known as “schoolteacher.” They are caught, and, in an act of supreme love and sacrifice, she too tries to kill her children to keep them from slavery. Only her two-year-old daughter dies, and the schoolteacher, believing that Sethe is crazy, decides not to take her back. Sethe later has “Beloved” inscribed on her daughter’s tombstone. Although she had intended for it to read “Dearly Beloved,” she did not have the energy to “pay” for two words (each word cost her 10 minutes of sex with the engraver).

These events are revealed in flashbacks, as the novel opens in 1873, with Sethe and her teenage daughter, Denver, living in Ohio, where their house at 124 Bluestone Road is haunted by the angry ghost of the child Sethe killed. The hauntings are alleviated by the arrival of Paul D, a man so ravaged by his slave past that he keeps his feelings in the “tobacco bin” of his heart. He worked on the same plantation as Sethe, and the two begin a relationship. A brief period of relative calm ends with the appearance of a young woman who says that her name is Beloved. She knows things that suggest she is the reincarnation of Sethe’s lost daughter. Sethe is obsessed with assuaging her guilt and tries to placate the increasingly demanding and manipulative Beloved. At one point, Beloved seduces Paul D. After learning that Sethe killed her daughter, he leaves.

The situation at 124 Bluestone worsens, as Sethe loses her job and becomes completely fixated on Beloved, who is soon revealed to be pregnant. While the lonely and largely housebound Denver initially befriends Beloved, she begins to grow concerned. She finally dares to venture outside in order to ask the community for help, and she is given food and a job. As the local women attempt to stage an exorcism, Denver’s employer arrives to take her to work, and Sethe mistakes him for “schoolteacher” and tries to attack him with an ice pick. The other women restrain her, and during the commotion Beloved disappears. Paul D later returns to the grieving Sethe, promising to care for her, and Denver continues to thrive in the outside world.

Admittedly, Beloved is not everyone’s cup of tea; Morrison’s writing style is both unique and difficult to plumb for the casual reader of fiction. Nonetheless, for those who have read it in its entirety, it is a novel that remains forever. From listening to and reading the remarks of those anti Critical Race Theory automatons who go on and on about how dangerous this book is and how it should be outlawed in public schools and universities, I get the impression that they have never read it. True, it is not an easy read. True, it shines a brightly uncomfortable light on a part of American history that many would care to avoid . . . or even believe never happened. But it is not meant to teach students to hate being white or turn them into anti-patriots. This is all stuff and nonsense dreamed up by those who believe banning books is a sure-fire way to solve problems which simply do not exist.

This is, of course, nothing new. American politicians began blaming immigrants for the nation’s economic woes as far back as the “Panic” (recession) of 1837. American “masters of morality” have urged the banning of books they considered harmful for well over a century (who remembers the folderol over Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead” ]which contained ‘that word’] and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye [which dealt with such “immoral” issues as teen angst, alienation and the superficiality of modern society?]). The, of course, there was the Hollywood “Black List.” which accused innumerable actors, directors, screenwriters and even hair stylists of being “Fellow Travelers, “premature anti-Fascists” and “rotten Commies.” All these - and oh so many more - presented so-called “solutions” to problems that truly did not exist.

Some things never change.

So what is to be done about the stench of pro-gun-racist-white-power-anti-immigrant-Critical-Racial-Theory? Trying to talk sense to these social misfits and miscreants is a fool’s errand, tantamount to taming a rabid rhino. People who listen intently to the malicious, hateful cadences of the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Madison Cawthorns, Tucker Carlsons and Joe Pags of the world aren’t going to be disabused of what they hear or see through rational discourse. That is why so many still fully believe that the Clintons are pedophiles, Barack Obama is an African-born Muslim, that the Democrats are going to take guns away from all “real Americans,” ban the Bible and turn control of the country over to George Soros. Yes, it is sheer twaddle, but there’s plenty of it out there.

Political revolutions are just as frequently created from the bottom up than from the top down. Our attention must be even more laser-focused on school boards, town councils and county commissions as on state legislatures, governor’s mansions, Congress and the White House. I urge readers to attend school board meetings . . . not to outshout, but to listen and to learn and to grasp. I urge you to volunteer to register voters, to join campaigns and to never, ever except toxic political strategies where elbow grease is needed.

 We close with a thought from Toni Morrison which says it all: "There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone 

Enough!

About a week ago, Catherine Rampell, one of the Washington Post’s best and brightest young op-ed writers, published an opinion piece entitled “The GOP rebrands itself as the party of tax cheats.” Her essay began:

Once upon a time, Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of small government and family values. Recently, though, GOP leaders have been cobbling together a new coalition, welcoming insurrectionists, white-nationalist tiki-torchers and people who think Bill Gates is trying to microchip them.

The latest recruit to the Big Tent? Tax cheats.

Ms. Rampell’s excellent article delved into the issue of the approximately $600 billion of legally owed, but un-paid taxes of the wealthiest 1% in this country.  Putting this ghastly figure into perspective, she noted: “For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers. . . . To be clear, rank-and-file wage-earners are not necessarily more honest or patriotic. It’s just much harder for them to shortchange Uncle Sam.

She then went on to explain how Congressional Democrats were attempting to pass legislation which would make it far more difficult for the über-wealthy to “sneak unpaid liabilities past the I.R.S.”

Of course, keeping taxes on both huge corporations and hyper-wealthy individuals as low as possible is really nothing new. Remember the macroeconomic theory of the Reagan years known as “Supply-Side Economics” or its genetic model, the so-called “Laffer Curve,” which showed that lowering tax rates for the wealthy and the corporations they own, ultimately led to increased consumer spending, which ultimately raised tax revenues for the middle class? Although never referred to by name in polite company anymore, “Supply-Side Economics” is just as much an article of faith in 21st century Republicanism as it was 40+ years ago.

As the Biden Administration and a near majority of Democrats on Capitol Hill are hammering out the largest domestic spending increase of the past 80 years, Republicans have firmly mired their boots in hardened concrete. Whether or not they favor federal funding on dams, roads, bridges and the like, they are fully against raising taxes by so much as a dime in order to pay for it. They are planning on scaring the daylights out of working class Americans between now and 2022 by warning them that regardless of what the Democrats promise, they fully favor raising their taxes in order to pay for all the “ needless goodies” like universal pre-K, childcare, climate change etc.

Are the Republicans really that near-sighted and hard-hearted? Many, I fear, are. But many more, I firmly believe, have a different motive responding to any and all Biden proposals with a near unanimous thumbs-down: keeping their wealthiest mega donors writing all those big fat checks which keep them in office. Without corporate and PAC dollars, they might just lose their seats, their power and self-worth.

While pondering the venality of America’s billionaire and multi-centimillionaire class, I found myself wanting to get them - the fantastically rich - to answer a single question: “What are you going to do with all the additional millions your Republican lapdogs lay aside for you? How many more mansions, yachts or private jets do you need? Is an additional billion or two or ten going to make you any happier, healthier or more content?”

While pondering this, I found myself remembering a brief piece the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote about his late friend, the writer Joseph Heller, whose most famous work was Catch-22. Published in the New Yorker back in May of 2005 the “poem” was, in a sense, Vonnegut’s eulogy to Heller. It was simply entitled:

Joe Heller

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer

now dead,

and I were at a party given by a billionaire

on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel

to know that our host only yesterday

may have made more money

than your novel ‘Catch-22’

has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in peace!”

I can justs imagine some of the negative, name-calling emails I’m going to be receiving from some of my readers; otherwise good and kind people who go bat crap crazy when anyone even suggests that there should be some sort of limitation on unfettered, untaxed wealth. They will no doubt accuse me of being a naïve, idealist, a radical relic of the sixties who wants nothing more than to take away lucre from the rich and shower it upon the poor. They will likely remind me that they “. . .earned their own fortunes by their own ingenuity and the sweat of their own brows,” and that “. . . those who want riches should bloody well go out and earn it for themselves!” Sorry if I’ve ruffled your truffle, but to my way of thinking, its time to unstack the deck; to make it possible for the have-nots to climb aboard the stairway to the middle-class. And if building that stairway means allocating funds to healthcare, childcare and education; to creating millions of jobs through greater expenditures on climate change, clean water and clean air . . . so be it.

I do not mean to lump all billionaires and their “poorer cousins” - the multi-centimillionaires - into a single cauldron of cupidity. I am well aware of all the those hyper-wealthy souls who, at the urging of Bill and Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett joined in and took the “Giving Pledge” to donate no less than half their fortunes to charitable organizations and causes either during their lifetime or in their wills. Thus far, the group has donated tens upon tens of billions of dollars to various causes and philanthropies. Ironically, one small snag has emerged: though they’ve promised to shed at least half of their wealth for the common good, many of the billionaires are richer than ever . . . this, according to the Institute for Policy Studies noted in a recent article. This piece noted that, “. . .while some pledgers earnestly intend to fulfill their promises, many are unable to because their assets are simply growing too fast.”

What a world!

While I do not hold out a great deal of hope for the most visionary and generous aspects of President Biden’s spending plan to be enacted, I do, nonetheless, applaud him and his supporters on Capitol Hill - many of whom, like Speaker Pelosi (CA), Senators Mark Warner (VA), Dianne Feinstein (CA), and Richard Blumenthal (CT) and Reps. Don Beyer (VA), John Yarmuth (KY), Suzane DelBene (WA). Scott Peters (CA), Hugh Auchincloss (MA) and Lloyd Doggett (TX) - multi-millionaires all - for trying their utmost to pass meaningful legislation.

They, like the late Joseph Heller, are fully in agreement with a truly important two-syllable word:

ENOUGH!

Copyright2021, Kurt F. Stone 

Texas: The Lone Tzar State

Ask the average non-Texan what the state’s official slogan or motto is and you’ll likely here the words “The Lone Star State” . . . and they’d be wrong. Actually, in 1930, the state legislature made “Friendship” its official motto, According to state historians and southwestern etymologists. "Texas" or "Tejas" is a Spanish pronunciation of a name for the native Indian Caddo tribe and their land.  The Caddo's (or Tejas') name for allies or friendship is taysha. The Spanish in this way, adopted a derivation of taysha as a descriptive name for the friendly tribes in what is today Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. In this way the Texas motto "friendship" may be intended to symbolize a hopeful fertile fusion of Western and Native American culture.

(It should be noted that Howard Hughes [1905-1976] one of Texas’ most famous and eccentric native sons, named his film production company “The Caddo Company.”  Under that name, Hughes produced such classic films as “Scarface,” “Hell’s Angels” “The Front Page,” and “Two Arabian Knights,” which won the first - and only - Academy Award for Best Comedy in 1927).

As a kid growing up in the ‘50s, the two things I knew about Texas were Davy Crocket (starring Fess Parker) and Gene Autry singing Deep in the Heart of Texas (which he also wrote). I was also aware that Lyndon Johnson was a senator who went by the initials L.B.J., and had quite a drawl.  What I did not realize was that "The Friendship State” was also the home to some of the weirdest, most right-wing nuts imaginable.  In terms of politics, Texas was about as Deep South as one could get; Democrat to the core.  Until LBJ became  an accidental president in 1963 and then rammed through both the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Medicare (1965), about the only progressive who ever came out of the state was the late Senator Ralph Yarborough.  Since then Texas has developed some progressive pockets, sending the likes of Barbara Jordan, Sheila Jackson Lee, Al Green and Juaquin Castro to the House of Representatives and electing Ann Richards Governor of the state. 

Today, Texas has the reputation for electing some of the farthest right, most autocratic members of the “loony tunes brigade” such as Senator Ted “Cancun” Cruz, Rep. Louie Gohmert and current Governor Greg Abbott.  Texas, like many states, has some of the strangest laws on the books:

• In Texas, it is illegal to milk another person’s cow;

• Criminals must give their victims 24-hour notice before committing a crime, either orally or in writing;

• It's against the law to sell Limburger cheese on Sundays in Houston;

• It's illegal to emit obnoxious odors while on an elevator in Port Arthur;

• Any person who sits on a sidewalk in Galveston may be fined up to $500.

(OK, you can also find crazy laws in just about any city or state if you know where to look . . .)

• Between Governor Abbott, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton and the state legislature, Texas has become the nation’s leader in oppressive, partisan political action - a “Lone Tzar State” if you will.  Not only do the folks of this state fry everything they eat and pack guns in public places, their leaders have enacted laws and executive actions which:

• Makes abortion all but illegal for anyone (except those with the financial means to travel out of state);

• Have gerrymandered the state’s Congressional Districts to make the election of minority candidates (read: black, brown and non-Christian) near impossible;

• Drastically changed election laws thereby aiding GOP incumbents and decreasing minority representation;

• Outlawed virtually any and every mask mandate in the state;

• Passed Texas law HB3979, which seeks to restrict discussion of race and history in schools.  Ostensibly, this law was enacted in order to make the teaching of Critical Race Theory (which in matter of fact isn’t part of any school district’s curriculum), thereby scoring points with their ultra-conservative, largely fundamentalist political base.  The law, among other things, mandates that social studies teachers can't "require" or include in their courses, the concept that "one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex" or the concept that "an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously."   (please do note how poorly written this section is!)

The act, which Governor Abbot signed into law on September 1, 2021, notes that "a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs." Teachers, according to the bill, can't require or give extra credit for a student's political activism.  The craziest part of the bill makes it mandatory that if a teacher does engage in such a discussion, the teacher is required to "explore such issues from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective."  It would seem that no one in the Lone Tzar State paid attention to where this bill might lead — like teaching an “opposing view” with regards to the Holocaust.

How’s that you say?

Just the other day NBC News revealed a leaked audio clip in which a top administrator with Southlake Texas’s Carroll Independent School District advised teachers that if they have books on the Holocaust in the classroom, they should also include “opposing” viewpoints on it.  The school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction was quoted as saying “Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979 […] And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”

“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher can be overheard saying in response.

“Believe me. That’s come up,” Peddy responded.

The release of the audio recording resulted in widespread controversy. The school district released a statement saying the comments in the recording “were in no way to convey that the Holocaust was anything less than a terrible event in history. Additionally, we recognize there are not two sides of the Holocaust.”

Holocaust denial is spreading with every passing year.  According to Deborah Lipstadt, author of the seminal 1993 work Denying the  Holocaust and President Biden’s nominee to become the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting anti-Semitism, "When you learn the history of the Holocaust, you are not simply learning about the past. These lessons remain relevant today in order to understand not only anti-Semitism but also all the other 'isms' of society. There is real danger to letting them fade."  

It seems that with every passing week, Texas and its lone Tzar Governor are enacting bills and issuing executive orders which capture the imaginations of autocratic wannabes around the country. These acts and pronouncements - whether they deal with what they insist are “election integrity,” or gerrymandering, the outlawing of mandates and restrictions, or the banning of critical thinking within our schools, all stand a good chance of falling prey to what the seminal sociologist Robert K. Merton (Meyer Robert Schkolnick) referred to as the “law of unintended consequences.” I rather doubt Tzar Greg had given enough thought in signing HB3979 to realize that it could actually lead to putting a positive spin on der Führer. Then again, the purpose of the law was the rewriting of American history . . . at least in terms of race relations. Talk about unintended consequences!

Other unintended consequences - and not just in the Lone Tzar State, but across the entire country - deal with the twin issues of “Stopping the Steal” and the enforcement of anti-masking, anti-vaxxing legislation.  Both issues are meant to stimulate stronger support from core Trumpeters; both can, in reality, lead  to the diminution of their numbers at the ballot box - either because they don’t trust those who count votes so why even show up, and/or there are fewer anti-vaxxers out there because they have died. 

I can live with the former; they (the anti-mask, anti-vax crowd) I regret to say, cannot live with the latter.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

In the Words of Hedy Lamarr ("That's HEDLEY!")

                   Harvey Korman as Hedley Lamarr in “Blazing Saddles”

Without question, Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” is one of the greatest comedies ever produced. Who can suppress a belly-laugh during the campfire bean-eating scene? Or not chortle  at the very name “Lili Von Shtüpp,” the send-up of Marlene Dietrich  for which the late Madeleine Kahn was nominated for an Academy Award? Then there’s Governor Lepetomane’s power- behind-the-throne “Hedley Lamarr,” as played by the marvelous Harvey Korman, who is given some of the picture’s best lines, such as “My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives,” to which his dumber-than-dirt side-kick Taggart (played by Slim Pickens) responds “God darnit, Mr. Lamarr, you use your tongue prettier than a twenty dollar whore.”

Again, without question, Blazing Saddle’s best lines belong to Hedley, the most dexterous of which of comes when he is telling Taggart about the gang of miscreants he wants rounded up in order to overthrow the town of Rock Ridge: “I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.”

I don’t know about you, but to me, this sounds a lot like former President Trump’s cattle call for the January 6 insurrection. But in this case, the verbal shopping list wasn’t meant for merely one set of ears (Taggart) but rather for a handful of co-conspirators, among whom were Chief of staff Mark Meadows, presidential aide Dan Scavino, professional grizzled hobo Steve Bannon and determined remora Kash Patel. (The remora by the way, which in the world of ichthyology, is known as the “suckerfish,” is known for getting a “free ride” on host fish.  As such, remora has also come to describe a person or a group of people who get a free ride and a free meal by way of the efforts of others.)  

As of today, Donald Trump’s gang of “. . . mugs, pugs, nitwits, halfwits et al are in severe legal jeopardy.  Although “Rock Ridge” (the nation’s Capitol) has not been torn down, they themselves have all been subpoenaed by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Not surprisingly all 4 have declared that they will neither honor said subpoenas nor turn over any documents relevant to their participation in the January 6 insurrection.  And more on point, Trump, the FPOTUS (“Former President of the United States”) has also declared that he will not hand over any documents related to the insurrection, claiming that he is protected by Executive Privilege.” (n.b. There is a possibility that members of the former president’s staff who have yet to be issued subpoenas are speaking to the Select Committee behind closed doors, away from the spotlight, in order to save their hides and future careers.)

This is - or in any event should be - a non-starter; there is absolutely no mention of executive privilege in the Constitution. Richard Nixon, who knew one hell of a lot more about what was in that document than the immediate FPOTUS, learned his lesson the hard way . . . and resigned office before he could be arrested. (And while it is highly likely that arrangements had already been made for Nixon’s hand-picked successor, Gerald R. Ford, to pardon Nixon, there are precisely two chances that current President Biden has made the same sort of arrangement with his predecessor: absolutely none and one hell of a lot less than that.)

Battle lines between the White House, the Select Committee and those who remain steadfastly in support of Donald Trump have been both widening and hardening in recent days. For in addition to the various subpoenas handed down, President Biden announced this past Friday his steadfast demand that the FPOTUS hand over thousands upon thousands of pages dealing with January 6 to the Department of Justice. Trump swiftly responded with the “Executive Privilege” argument, calling Democrats “drunk on power” and insisting that “this assault on the Constitution and important legal precedent will not work.” Without question, the Constitutional issues involved here are soon to be headed into federal court.

Legal experts say they think Biden, as the sitting president, is far more likely to prevail in court than Trump. But they also say that the legal questions raised by this conflict are highly significant.

“This is one of the historic tests of executive power,” says Walter E. Dellinger III, the Solicitor General under President Bill Clinton and the
Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus of Law at Duke University. Still, he says, “the decision of the current president not to assert executive privilege is going to weigh heavily” on those having to make the decision. Select Committee member - and longtime Constitutional law professor - Jamie Raskin, speaking about Trump’s lawyer’s assertion that Congress has no claim on any information put it succinctly: “This is a matter of the utmost seriousness, and we need to consider the full panoply of enforcement sanctions available to us. And that means criminal contempt citations, civil contempt citations and the use of Congress’s own inherent contempt powers.”

 The last of these -- “Congress’s own inherent contempt powers” - - is found not in the Constitution, but rather in the U.S. Code (Title 2, Section 192), but has not been used since 1934. According to the Code, Congress has the unilateral authority to fine or even jail recalcitrant witnesses. The offender(s), after being cited for contempt of Congress, is/are  tried on the floor of the chamber of Congress invoking the power. If a majority affirms the contempt charge, they may instruct the Sergeant at Arms to arrest the offender(s) and detain them in the Congressional jail [yes, there is one in the basement of the Capitol] or until they comply with the subpoena or until the end of the session. This is highly unlikely to be employed, mainly because it would all but certainly involve a lengthy court battle involving Trump and his “mugs, pugs and  thugs” which would no doubt run on the front pages of papers as well as the twenty-four-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week propaganda industrial complex for years to  come . . . thus giving Republicans a political issue for the ages. 

To my way of thinking, even before the House Select Committee concludes hearings and issues its final report, it should begin working in tandem with Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice.  Let the DOJ do its job.  With the legislative and executive branches working together, they then should be able to issue arrest warrants and ultimately put the sowers of sedition in prison. And it could, as an added benefit, force individual Republican office-holders and future candidates to go on record as to whether or not they support those who sought the dismemberment of our democracy.

Insurrection is not a matter that should be taken blithely; it carries serious sanctions which should be undertaken for the sake of our future as a nation.

How do you like them eggs Hedy . . .  (that’s HEDLEY!)

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

In the Majestic Words of JFK (Or Ted Sorensen, or Winston Churchill or George St. John)

Without question, one of the most majestic and awe-inspiring of all presidential inaugural addresses was the one delivered by the then 43-year old John Fitzgerald Kennedy on January 20, 1961. It was also one of the shortest - a mere 14 minutes. That speech contained such gems as:

• 'Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.'

• 'If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.'

• 'Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.' and perhaps the most magical of all presidential phrases:

• 'And so, my fellow Americans - ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.'

The inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) represented a seismic change in American politics.  He was, after all, more than a generation younger than his predecessor, President Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969).  He was also the first president born in the 20th century and brought to the White House, a dash and flair, an energetic youthfulness and élan unlike anything America and the world had ever seen before. JFK and his picture-perfect family had it all: wealth and movie-star good looks; sophistication, 50-mile hikes and above all, breathtaking charisma.  He only lived a brief 46 years; unbelievably, he has now been dead for nearly 60. 

Kennedy’s image is that of a fire-breathing progressive.  In truth, he was anything but.  Rather, he was a slightly right-of-center moderate Democrat whose greatest accomplishments - Medicare, the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts - were mostly completed by his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was likely American political history’s most masterful legislative prestidigitators.  What Kennedy had in spades over Johnson - and most all of our presidents before or since - was the ability to motivate people of all ages to get off their backsides and give something back to “The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.”  The motivation of which we speak was of course wrapped up in the ultimate sentence of JFK’s  inaugural address: to "Ask not what your country can do for you, [but rather] ask what you can do for your country.”  Ironically, those words for which he is best remembered may well have not come from his pen . . . or that of Ted Sorensen, his brilliantly poetic 33-year old speechwriter.  According to Chris Matthews, the former press spokesman for Speaker Tip O’Neil,  chief speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and former MSNBC news host, that phrase likely came from either from one of Winston Churchill’s war-time speeches or George St. John, who was JFK’s headmaster at Choate  in the early 1930s.  In his 2011 book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,  Matthews, who interviewed many of Kennedy’s Choate classmates, notes that they frequently heard headmaster St. John tell his students precisely the same thing.

I well remember listening to JKF’s inaugural address on the radio in Miss Cook’s class that January afternoon in 1961.  (The next day would be our father’s 45th birthday).  The new president sounded so young; his Boston accent was like something we only heard in movies; hearing Robert Frost read the poem The Gift Outright was especially rewarding . . . I was terribly smitten by great poets, thanks largely to “Granny Annie,” my mother’s mother. (Actually, Frost had written a brand new poem for the event entitled Dedication.” He approached the microphone, but blinded by the sun's glare on the snow-covered Capitol grounds, Frost was unable to read it. Thinking quickly, he instead recited "The Gift Outright," a poem he had written in 1942.)

I also well remember wanting desperately to join the Peace Corps and go out on a 50-mile hike. Alas, one needed a minimum of a B.A. in order to join the former, and their parents’ permission to participate in the latter. (I was but 11 at the time and possessed neither the degree nor parental permission.) Nonetheless, JFK inoculated in many of us a desire to be active, to give something of ourselves back to the country of our birth. JFK would be the reason why many of my generation became involved in what used to be known as “causes.” It’s something woefully lacking in today’s world . . .

        Post-war: able to get back into tailored clothing!

As a child, I well remember going to either the Union (train) Station in downtown Los Angeles or what was then known as the Los Angeles Airport (where parking was still both unpaved and free). In my recollection, both places were filled with uniformed soldiers, sailors, and marines rushing to make connections. In our neighborhood, there were many men who still bore the scars and halting gait of men who had been injured in the war. Unbeknownst to us - children living lives of relative privilege, many of our parents were actually in the 91%-92% income tax bracket and yet never tried to start a revolution. They were children of the Great Depression who survived a gruesome war and helped rebuild both a nation and a world. For some, it was a matter of noblesse oblige; for most, it was part of the obligation of being a patriotic citizen.

Where have those times gone?

I for one firmly desire to see Congress and the Biden administration institute something akin to “National Service; a series of programs and policies meant for the masses to join, thereby repairing our country while answering JFK’s challenge to “ask what we can do for our country.” In one of the very few conversations I ever had with my father about his 6 years of service during WWII, I remember him telling me that perhaps the best part of being in the service (outside of winning the war and coming back alive) was working alongside and getting to know people he otherwise would never have met. “I learned so much about people who were vastly different from myself . . . and they about me. Imagine: I was the first Jew many of these lads had ever met . . .”

Let’s face it: for quite some time, Americans have been growing further and further apart, whether the dividing lines be race, religion, politics, ethnicity economics or a combination of any or all these things. We frequently take sides, “knowing” that our problems or shortcomings are due to others with whom we have next to no contact with - let alone or knowledge of. This is a loss for all of us. If there were some way for people to work together for the common good, perhaps we could revive the dream of JFK: to ask what we can do for our country. I for one couldn’t care less whether the words come directly from JFK, Ted Sorensen, Winston Churchill or George St. John or Bob Dylan. If America is to survive, we must all find a way to work together.

Interestingly, the one person in the Biden Administration who has spoken most about reviving a national service program is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He is all all in favor of expanding the Peace Corps (which still exists), as well as Vista and other such programs. Ironically Elaine Chao, Secretary Pete’s immediate predecessor at DOT (she is the wife Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) served as the head of the Peace Corps during the first Bush Administration. Perhaps Buttigieg and Chao should get together with President Biden and his Chief of Staff Ron Klain in order to begin the process of creating a new National Service agenda for all of America.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

What Does Tucker Carlson See in Viktor Orban?

Let’s assume that most, if not all of you reading this piece know who Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is. For the few who don’t, Tucker (1969- ), is the son of Richard “Dick” Warner Carlson, a former “gonzo” journalist who eventually became the director of the Voice of America, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles. When Tucker was nearly 10, his father married Patricia Swanson, an heiress to the Swanson Food Enterprises fortune. Tucker is a Paleoconservative news commentator for Fox News. As of the beginning of 2021, he is the most-watched, most popular commentator on cable television. Estimates of his salary at Fox range from $6-25 million a year. The ultimate preppy who received his undergraduate education at St. George’s School in Rhode Island (where he chaired the “Dan White Society” [an apparent reference to the American political assassin who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk] and married the headmaster’s daughter Susan), Carlson has long been a vocal opponent of progressivism, a critic of immigration, and has been described as a racist, misogynistic, ultra-nationalist. He is also a first-class pain in the ass, who while on camera interviewing someone he disagrees with, is well-known for maintaining a look of puzzlement; at times variously frowning and raising an eyebrow in supposed consternation. 

This past week, Tucker Carlson broadcast live from Budapest, where he spent a good deal of time interviewing and exchanging grins with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who heads an authoritarian government bent on targeting liberal institutions, including universities, the judiciary and the media. While in Hungary, Carlson took a helicopter to inspect a border fence designed to keep out migrants. Yes, in addition to all his other political phobias, P.M. Orban is also a xenophobe. Carlson’s visit bolsters Mr. Orban’s mission to establish Budapest as an ideological center for what he sees as an international conservative movement. 

Orban (1960- ) who refers to his governing philosophy as “illiberal” democracy, has, over the past twenty years, been compared to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, France’s Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump . . . which tells you just about all you need to know about the corrupt Hungarian autocrat. To Tucker Carlson and a growing number of American paleoconservatives, Orban is a shining star; a guidepost on the path to a new America built for – and run by – white Christian men who bar the gates to most of the world’s “struggling masses yearning to breathe free,” and use whatever conspiracies they might concoct in order to keep their camp followers scared witless.

In his first nightly newscast from Budapest, Carlson praised Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us,” and held up Hungary’s hardline policy on rejecting asylum seekers as a model for an American immigration system that he believes is too lenient and has weakened the power of native-born citizens, an argument that Carlson’s critics say overlaps with white supremacist ideology. Carlson also praised Hungarian Prime Minister Orban for not allowing "this nation of 10 million people to be changed forever by people we didn't invite in and who are coming here illegally.” To make sure his US viewers understood his message, he contrasted Mr Orban's policies with those of President Biden:

"Because the lessons are so obvious, and such a clear refutation to the policies we currently have, and the people who instituted those policies, Hungary and its government have been ruthlessly attacked and unfairly attacked: 'It's authoritarian, they're fascists…' There are many lies being told right now, that may be the greatest of all."

Unbelievably, Carlson has gone so far off the rails as to claim that Hungary is “freer than America.” In Orban’s Hungary, the ultimate preppie told his fellow travelers, their leader refers to white Christians as “the original inhabitants” of the country. Carlson treats this vision of national identity as fundamental to Hungary’s “success.” As Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent recently noted: According to Carlson, here [in America] . . . you’ll be silenced by Silicon Valley or hounded from your job if you dare criticize the “orthodoxy” of liberal internationalism and social liberalism — that is, if you yearn for association with a national identity that is culturally insulated and unsullied by socially liberal threats (like “transgender athletes”) to traditional conservative values. Who’s freer? If you’re an American, the answer is painful to admit.

It would be a pleasure to say that Tucker Carlson is a lone voice in this disgraceful, despotic forest. But alas, he is not; far from it. As the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum noted in an essay which came out just the other day, The aggrieved Americans who now find their way to Orbán or Vladimir Putin also dislike their own country, albeit for different reasons. They cannot abide its racial diversity, its modern culture, its free press. Those who dream of a white-tribalist alternative—one that also puts pressure on gay people and uses anti-Semitic tropes in its propaganda—believe they have found this nirvana at dinners and think-tank events in Budapest. What American paleoconservatives fail - or even worse, refuse - to recognize is the irony that under a nationalist autocrat like Orban, it’s impossible for a Hungarian equivalent of Carlson—a loud television pundit, critical of the government, watched by millions of people—to exist. In Hungary, the ruling party doesn’t merely influence the press. It owns the bulk of the press, and not metaphorically.

My dear “Pal Al” Blake - the nicest Yankee fan I know – sent me an email the other day asking whether it might work for people to start boycotting Tucker Carlson’s advertisers on Fox.  Well, I looked it up, and to my amazement discovered that at his peak the likes of Disney, T-Mobile and the brokerage firm Ameritrade were among those who paid big bucks to keep him on the air. Of late, most have left the fold. In the second quarter of 2021, Tucker Carlson Tonight had as its most prolific sponsors “Fox News Channel” (17 airings), “My Pillow” (13 airings), “Balance of Nature” (9 airings) and “Rejuvenate Muscle Health” (5 airings.) Could it be that the preppie who has been at the forefront of pushing anti-vaccine theories, called the Joint Chiefs of Staff head “a pig” and continually talked up replacement theory is now on a downward spiral? Well, in the words of Elliott Ness, “Follow the money.”

To give the paleoconservative Carlson the benefit of the doubt (why, I do not know . . . but I guess that’s the rabbi in me), that he truly doesn’t believe much more than a soupçon of the bilge he broadcasts on Fox, his cynicism about America is so profound, and his nihilism so overpowering, that he simply does not care. If he can make people angry, he achieves his most important goal. Sound like anyone who served as POTUS from 2017-2021?

This is all very, very dangerous stuff.  People like Tucker Carlson, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar and Matt Gaetz as well as Governors Ron De Santis  and Greg Abbott (and let’s not forget the terrorists of January 6), American Democracy stands atop a desperate precipice.  

If anyone had told me back in the 1960s that a half-century later I would consider myself and fellow “freaks” more patriotic than the “straights,” I would have asked them what in the hell they were smoking. But this is no more the case.  As we used to say back in the days of the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park . . . “let your freak flag fly” . . .

Don’t give in, and above all, don’t give up: America is not and never shall be Hungary . . . or Russia or Brazil.  We are the land of the free and the home of everyone . . . 

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

Way Down East in the Land of Lobsters

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Maine, the easternmost state in the nation is tiny. According to the most recent census, it is home to a mere 1.344 million people (42nd smallest in the nation). In 2018, HealthIQ.com named Maine the nation’s 3rd most vegan state; in 2010, a study found Maine to be the least religious state in the United States; in 2018, Bon Appetit magazine name Portland, the state’s most populous city (population c. 67,000) “Restaurant City of the Year.” By far, the most famous people to hail from Maine have been Nelson A. Rockefeller, Dorothea Dix, film director John Ford (to my way of thinking the greatest of them all), as well as writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.B. White, and Stephen King.

Maine is also known for its pristine parks and waters, and for producing more lobster, crabs and kelp (seaweed) than any other state in the nation. These have long provided a steady flow of jobs and income for the state whose motto Dirigo (Latin for “I lead” or “I direct”) has long set a striding point for the people of this physically beautiful, utterly delightful state. (Springtide Seaweed, the nation’s largest organic seaweed farm, can also be found on the shores of Frenchman Bay, located in a onetime cannery.)

But much of this is now in jeopardy, and cries out for our help . . . no matter whether we live in Maine, Florida, Ohio or Washington State.   

So what is the challenge?   

According to a troubling, fact-filled article published in the July 23rd, 2021 edition of the Boston Globe Magazine, there is a move afoot on the part of a firm larded with Norwegian investors called American Aquafarms to build the world’s largest “closed cage” ocean-based salmon farm — 30 circular pens, each 150 feet in diameter — on two sites covering 120 acres in the heart of Frenchman Bay (shown in photo). According to Globe writer Ellen Rupell Shell, “At full capacity, the annual yield of the [proposed] farm is projected to be 66 million pounds [of salmon], three times the total production of the state’s only other large salmon farming operation.”  And here’s both the rub and the challenge: not only would the “aqua farm” cause Maine’s lobster industry (which represents a substantial percentage of the state’s annual income) to plummet by as much as 62% and likely cause the nation’s largest kelp/seaweed business to collapse; it would cost thousands upon thousands of jobs, and destroy one of the most Edenic places in the United States. . . Frenchman Bay.

A brief word about Frenchman Bay (called by some “Maine’s most dramatic bay”): Likely named for Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer who visited the area in 1604, it was an important staging point for French warships preparing to fight the English during “King William’s War” (1689-97).  Located in Hancock County, the bay is bounded on the east by the Schoodic Peninsula, and on the west by Mount Desert Island; parts of both are in Acadia National Park. The area has long been the summer home of rich easterners (including several generations of Bushes whose compound, “Walker Point Estate” has been in the family for more than 100 years) and provided the state with a significant financial base. 

Frenchman Bay also has a highly fragile and vulnerable ecosystem; because it is served by no large rivers, the bay’s ability to flush out waste is rather limited.  And this presents yet another glaring problem with American Aquafarm’s proposed “closed cage” salmon farm. It would likely force the remaining lobsters (already beginning to suffer from the effects of global warming) to move north (thus decimating an entire industry) and turn a historically untarnished biome into an ecological trash heap.  And to what end?  Profit my friend . . . tons and tons of profit for shareholders who will never have to witness precisely what their investment hath wrought.

From Norway, American Aquafarm’s vice president Eirik Jors (founder and former CEO of a Nordic securities firm), insists that what he calls his company’s “cutting-edge” closed-pen technology — built around a cavernous fabric bag tucked around the pen to collect debris and ward off pests — will prioritize fish health and “on average” capture 90 percent of solid waste, thus minimizing ocean pollution and deadly algae blooms.

One should note, however, that the cited technologies have not as yet, to the best of my knowledge, been tested under Maine conditions, making their potential for ecological impairment unknown.  Then too, Norway, the world’s standard-setter in commercial fish farming, has extremely strict environmental regulations that include — among other things — limiting the size and density of aquafarming operations. The salmon farm that American Aquafarms has proposed for Maine will have 20 to 60 percent higher density of fish than would be permitted in Norwegian waters.  How does American Aquafarms expect to accomplish this “miracle” in the face of a lot of lots and lots of devoted Mainers who fervently oppose the salmon farm?  One way might be for American Aquafarms to spread tons of $$$ to members of state government and convince them that it will be in everyone’s best interest to give the project the go-ahead. 

Sound familiar?

Don’t get me wrong: I am by no means against capitalism; we Stones are still beneficiaries of our father’s career as a stock broker. Nonetheless, I’ve never been sanguine with those whose drive for profit all but blinds them to the rest of reality. I mean, what good is yet another fortune if in so doing it ultimately destroys the ecological balance?  Can more millions shield anyone from increased global warming, a decimated environment or the utter destruction of the brilliant balance the Good Lord constructed during the six days of creation?  I for one find it utterly stupefying.  If a lobbyist temps a stakeholder with a treasure, what will that treasure avail him/her if it ultimately adds to the destruction of other living creatures?  Let’s just hope that there are far more people out there who love the lobsters of Frenchman Bay than pots of gold. 

We Americans are a most resilient people.  Born of revolutionary fervor and nurtured by the concept of e pluribus unum (Latin for “out of many, one”) we have the unique ability to band together as Davidic warriors when it comes to going up against the Goliaths who attack us. This is precisely what is going on up in Maine.  I urge readers to check out the website of the Frenchman Bay United Organization – a group of brothers and sisters who have banded together to stop the raping of their beloved corner of the ecosphere.    I am in personal contact with many of them, offering what little advice I can for their campaign against those who would trade in their lobster/kelp culture for the big business of salmon farming.  They are good people who deserve both our praise and assistance . . . regardless of where we live.  

The good people of Frenchman Bay United Organization are of course striving to keep the issue before state leaders from Maine Governor Janet T. Mills (who just announced she is running for reelection) on down to members of the state legislature and local municipal leaders.  Precisely how much lobbyist money is going to ultimately flow around the state (on the part of the pro-fish farming gang) is as yet uncertain.  What is known is that the folks of Frenchman Bay, Acadia National Park and beyond possess something the deep-pocketed investors and lobbyists do not: people power. 

Although I don’t personally indulge in lobsters, clams, oysters or other treyf delicacies (keeping kosher will do that), I nonetheless whole-heartedly applaud and support the efforts of both the people and the shellfish who love Frenchman Bay.

Check out their website and see if you can lend a hand . . .

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

We Alone Can Fix It

In their riveting, best-seller on the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency (Only I Can Fix It) crack Washington Post writers Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker have thrown open the doors and windows of an Oval Office and an administration which perpetually put personal gain and political triumph well above the needs, interests and future of the people of the United States, and thus the world. Far from being a partisan political screed, Leonnig’s and Rucker’s book is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment account of what history will likely remember as being the most misguided presidency in this nation’s history - ever since the day George Washington took the oath of office in New York. Speaking of our country’s first President, Trump actually had the delusional chutzpah to claim “I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead, and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.”

In their painstakingly-documented work, Leonnig and Rucker dispassionately show Trump’s growing inability to respond to the Covid pandemic, thus separating the nation’s health from his own political needs - most specifically, of wiping up the electoral floor with former Vice President Joseph Biden in the November election 2020. Most of us well remember reading about Trump’s personal encounter with Covid-19; of his brief hospitalization at Walter Reed, and his sudden return to the White House. Upon reading that he had been treated with a pharmaceutical cocktail of Dexamethasone (a steroid commonly used to treat asthma and rheumatoid arthritis), the experimental drug Remdesivir, (a monoclonal antibody cocktail, also called REGN-COV2), Zinc, Vitamin D, famotidine (Pepsid, to treat ulcers), Melatonin (commonly used to treat insomnia) and aspirin, I thought it to be a rather bizarre medical package with many potential side effects. Particularly the first, Dexamethasone, whose known side effects include paranoia, delirium and hallucinations. From this point on (October 2020) Trump seemed to get weirder and weirder . . .

Trump’s political modus operandi was all about down-playing the seriousness of the Covid-19 virus, and proclaiming - against all available medical evidence - that warm weather (or hydroxychloroquine or internally administered bleach) were just what the doctor ordered — precisely which docs he never got around to telling us. Those who remember his presidential press gatherings will no doubt recall the severely pained, looking down at their shoes responses of such MDs as Deborah Birx (the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator) and Anthony Fauci (the then long, longtime Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and today, President Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor).

Then there was the issue of wearing masks, maintaining social distance and keeping public crowds to an absolute minimum. With all these issues, Trump and his closest advisors came out on the wrong - the strictly political - side of the challenge.  As early as October 2020, Trump told his team that he would not wear a mask in public because he thought it would “make me look weak” in the eyes of his supporters.  In one rambling comment, Trump told a reporter: I just don’t want to be doing — I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk. I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.”  Truth to tell, there were any number of high-ranking members of the  administration who paid close attention to what the medical folks were advising. But for many, their tight-lipped approval wound up being a one-way ticket back to the private sector.

As time went on, the Trump version of Covid-19, masking and what its true dangers might be, seeped into the very marrow of his political base . . .  including those who were and are most comfortable with conspiracy theories. They decided that if their leader wouldn’t wear a mask, neither would they;  if their local leaders told them that vaccines were more dangerous than the virus itself, they surely would never submit to a vaccination which included electronic tracking devices . . . and on and on.  

Eventually, Trump and his team came up with their version of FDR’s Manhattan Project: they called it Operation Warp Speed; the name was derived from Star Trek’s imaginary USS Enterprise’s ability to travel at a speed faster than light. Trump’s greatest priority was creating a vaccine (a “cure”) by early November 2020 - just before America went to the polls.  Turns out that the British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca came through with a vaccine that was highly effective in blocking transmission of the virus first.  Jared Kusher, the president’s son-in-law quickly brokered a $1.2 billion deal to purchase 300 million of the first one billion doses the  company planned to produce. When told this, his father-in-law “sounded deflated” in Leonnig and Rucker’s words.  “I’m going to get killed,” the president said.  “Oh, this is terrible news.  (British P.M.) Boris Johnson is going to  have a field day with this. . . . I don’t want any press on this” Trump told Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar (the former CEO of Eli Lilly & Co. “Don’t do any press on this.  Let’s wait.” 

And so they had to wait until January 21, 2021 - the first day of the Biden administration - to make “Operation Warp Speed” completely functional.

As we head into August, 2021, America and the world are entering a new phase in the COVID19 pandemic. In the past month alone, cases of COVID-19 have tripled, and hospitalizations and deaths are rising among unvaccinated people. While the rates are still sharply down from their January highs, officials are concerned by the reversing trendlines and what they consider needless illness and death. Where at the beginning of June the CDC advised that those who were vaccinated were pretty much out of the woods and that schools, businesses and sporting venues could pretty much resume as before, by the end of July President Biden, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Wilensky and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical advisor, are urging that due to the Delta mutation and the fact that so many, many Americans are refusing to be vaccinated, we are likely going to see the return of masks, social distancing and a massive campaign to get people immunized.   “Look,” the POTUS said just the other day, “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”

Indeed, there are now approximately 90 million Americans who have yet to get shots. Just four states with low vaccination rates made up 40% of new cases last week, and nearly half of them came from Florida alone. Those of us living here in Florida are well aware of how Governor Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. “Donald Trump’s ‘Mini Me’”) has placed economy over health and actually threatened to fine any business, school or cruise line for mandating people to show proof of having been vaccinated against COVID-19. And, it is strictly against the law here in the “Sunshine State” to mandate the wearing of masks.  According to statistics provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation, states, and individual Congressional Districts that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 had a significantly lower percentage of adults receiving COVID19 vaccinations than states and districts that gave their votes to Joe Biden.  Not only does the rate of the vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated show a partisan political divide, so too does educational level (the lower the amount of schooling, the smaller the percentage of those receiving vaccines) and then there’s  urban-versus rural.  

According to Dr. Fauci, the U.S. is in an “unnecessary predicament . . . . We’re going in the wrong direction.”  And just as the number of those entering hospitals is on the rise, so too are conspiracy theories which keep people from seeking prophylactic measures.  Case in point: when the president suggested that healthcare volunteers go “door'-to-door” talking to people about the importance of getting themselves vaccinated, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R.-NC) warned “Now they’re talking about going door-to-door to take vaccines to the people . . . . Then think about what those mechanisms could be used for,” Cawthorn darkly warned. “They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could then go door-to-door to take your Bibles.” 

Although I am a firm supporter of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech, this is going too far; it is akin  to violating Justice Holmes’ dictum from the 1919 Schenck v. United States case about "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."  Those who spread these kinds of vile lies via the internet, blogs or the so-called “dark net/dark web” should be fined and be held accountable.  Period.  This is playing with people’s lives, and from what I can see or tell, for purely political reasons.

So obviously, Donald Trump’s claim about “Only I Can Fix It” contained a massive dose of what Grandma used to refer to as “canal water.”  I would like to amend this and state  that  when it comes to the current grave challenge, “Only we can fix it.”  And despite the rapid rise in new cases of COVID-19 and the Delta variant; despite the even greater levels of anger, fear and brainlessness which adhere to imbecilic anti-vaxxers,  there are some challenges which we may well be able to fix.  Increasingly over the past few weeks, there are a greater number of people both great and small, beginning to emerge from the anti-vaxxer’s closet.  Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Louisianan Steve Scalise, number two in House Republican leadership  and Alabama Governor Kay Ivey are admitting to having been vaccinated and urging their constituents to do likewise.  Conservative radio and television celebs like talker Phil  Valentine and Fox News’ Sean Hannity are talking up the necessity of being vaccinated.  (Egad . . . for the first time in my life Sean Hannity and I actually agree on something!)

Locally, teachers,  preachers, sports icons and just plain folks are standing up, helping people change their minds . . . coming to the understand that getting a shot and wearing a mask is not  the end of personal freedom . . . but can actually save lives.  I’ve come to believe that where once  these  Republicans used the weapon of fear in order to score  points and win votes, it’s now come too close to home; the time to act like responsible, empathic leaders is now.

I wish I could tell you that having a heart-to-heart conversation with a staunchly anti-vaxx neighbor, friend or family member just might help them change their tune - but I cannot.  Debating people who  choose not to think for themselves is akin to banging one’s head against a brick wall; all you gain is a concussion or a migraine.  And so, unless you are in love with cerebral pain, leave the convincing to those occupying the same original space as the naysayers.

These are difficult times.  However, I do believe that a healthier future is within our grasp - if only we recognize that together, we can fix it. 

Masks on!

Copyright2021 Kurt F. Stone