“As We Go Marching On” *

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can get you to commit atrocities." Voltaire  It’s been noted that I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a big fan of Donald Trump and that I have at times used this space to express my biased views.

True.

The responses from those who disagree have fallen into two categories:

1. Trump is doing what he said he would do. You may not like it. But he won.

All three sentences are correct.

2. Those who vent their sour grapes – with their unbalanced editorials and angry protest marches – are actually playing into Trump’s narrative, reinforcing his message, and firing up his base.

I believe that also is true.

#1. Not fair. The first objection is based on fairness, as quaint as that may seem in these times. Trump won, get over it and give the man a chance. The peaceful transition of power is how a democracy functions, so we all need to play by the rules.

But an election is not a coronation, and the latest one has not yet repealed the people’s first-amendment right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” (as a proponent of non-violence, I stress “peaceably”).

#2: Not smart. The second objection is based on stupidity. Trump’s opponents continue to pursue a losing strategy, and it’s backfiring.

But that may simply be buying into Trump’s narrative – repeated over and over and over again – that he won a crushing victory by tapping not just into Americans’ anger but into America’s soul. And therefore we should all just shut up.

The resistance may well be firing up his hard core. But it may also be (1) shrinking his broader support, which was never a majority in the first place; and (2) getting the attention of people who aren’t part of anybody’s base, including business leaders and Republican members of Congress.

If the opposition doesn’t keep drawing lines, then soon there may not be any lines.

* From:  "Marching Song of the First Arkansas Colored Regiment" 

Bubbles

OK, I admit it. I live in a bubble. And you live in a bubble.

We all live in bubbles.

Even those who criticize us for living in bubbles live in bubbles.

And those who say that people who live in bubbles can’t understand the “real” America, they live in bubbles, too.

So, let’s acknowledge our mutual bubbleness – the reality that most of us spend much of our time with people who are like us, people who share our views and reaffirm our values and with whom we can relax and be ourselves.

Problems arise, however, when we mistake our bubble for the whole world – which is why it’s good to get out of our bubble from time to time. To make an effort to climb – or at least look – over what Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “empathy wall” in Strangers in Their Own Land and try to understand people who are different from us. Maybe even to celebrate those differences, delighting in the vast diversity that is America.

That recognition of “the other” was at the heart of many of the responses to the Giving Very Small post: “With most of us living in our respective, rather narrow, community ‘bubble,’” wrote one reader, “a real interaction with someone outside of our comfort zone is remarkably valuable to all concerned.”

This is true because, by definition, the more narrow your bubble, the more constricted your life.

Donald Trump lives in an alarmingly narrow bubble, and he spent last week signaling his intention to impose his insular views on all of America. We must not let that happen.

I could care less about the size of Trump’s hands. But his tiny bubble scares the hell out of me.

And so it begins

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” ("Who will guard the guards themselves?") Juvenal. It was a holiday, the first one of the year, and who knew these guys would be at work, or even in town? But there they were in a presumably smokeless room deep in the caverns of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. filleting the Congressional Ethics Office, the independent agency set up to, well, monitor Congressional ethics.

By a vote of 119-74, with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in opposition, House Republicans approved Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte’s proposal to replace the ethics office with the “Office of Congressional Complaint Review,” which will answer to the House Ethics Committee.

If you find all that confusing, said Goodlatte, don’t worry. "The amendment builds upon and strengthens the existing Office of Congressional Ethics by maintaining its primary area of focus of accepting and reviewing complaints from the public and referring them, if appropriate, to the Committee on Ethics."

Never mind that the Committee on Ethics is controlled by the members – that is to say, by the people the original office was set up to investigate.

It seems ominous that, with all the issues we face, the first act of the new Congressional majority is to gut its own ethical guidelines. But the more important issue is how they twist the language to sow confusion rather than clarity.

''Political language,” wrote George Orwell many years ago, “is designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.''

I Didn’t Know It Was an Option

My life has not been the same since Grover Cleveland stole the election from James G. Blaine in 1884. It was a close campaign, “marred,” according to Wikipedia, “by exceptional political acrimony and personal invective,” something quite unusual in American political history. Cleveland, it turned out, had sired an illegitimate child, while Blaine had some unfortunate issues with a few railroad bonds. This led partisan zealots to call a man, long known as the plumed knight, “the continental liar from the state of Maine.” This was not good for the brand. Nobody got a majority. Spoilers from the Prohibition and Anti-Monopoly parties combined for almost 3% of the total vote, and the election itself came down to New York, which Cleveland (who just happened to be governor) carried by 1,047 votes out of 1,171,312 cast. That’s less than one one hundredth of one percent.

Ah, we have witnesses to the nefarious activities that took place in New York City’s heavily Irish neighborhoods, where Tammany Hall ruled with an iron fist, doling out jobs and liquor in exchange for votes – where the air was rife with stories of men literally rising from the dead to cast a vote for Cleveland.

Blaine gracefully accepted his narrow defeat, as that was the custom in those days, and Cleveland went on to govern well. I don’t think it occurred to Blaine that he had another option. He had devoted his life to government and to a political system in which he believed – and 19 years after Appomattox, he also knew how fragile that system could be.

When will they ever learn?

“It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.” Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) in the aftermath of Watergate. The disquieting image of two private jets on the tarmac in Phoenix: plush capsules that transport the powerful who seem ever more insulated from the rest of us 30,000 feet below; the 30-minute visit to discuss grandchildren and golf that was handled with more attention to secrecy than some state department documents; the silence until questions were raised by the press.

Thank God for the press.

So it goes with the Clintons, who first came to Washington on behalf of ordinary people “who work hard and play by the rules,” and who long since began behaving as if the rules don’t apply to them.

And so it is with the emails. It’s not the numbers: 110 of 30,000 (0.4%) were classified; 12 (0.04%) were top secret. It’s the gall – the evasions, the untruths, the stonewalling, the decision to move headquarters from Foggy Bottom to Chappaqua in the first place.

And the silence. Yesterday Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced a college-tuition plan, and while I’m all for getting back to the issues, ignoring the Comey report is not taking her campaign to a higher level.

She is already too much above the fray, too disengaged from the people she seeks to serve. She needs not just to “take responsibility” but to take ownership of this tawdry mess.

Because this is the kind of political behavior that gives license to demagogues.

In case you hadn’t noticed.

Trump, the Uniter!

“A lifelong Republican, my complete and utter disgust at Donald Trump moved me to write a check to Hillary Clinton! It will be the first election, during the 45 years of my marriage, that my wife and I will pull the same lever.” We read so much (including, it’s fair to say, from me) about Trump the divider, the relentlessly negative bully who mocks anyone who gets in his way. The two-sentence note above from a college classmate got me thinking differently. Here, for example, is a couple who have been married for 45 years and never once agreed on their presidential candidate – until Trump brought them together.

And think of all the other people he’s unifying: Latinos, African Americans, women, young people – large numbers of whom are put off by Trump's nasty, divisive, demagogic rhetoric. He even united me with an old Republican friend I hadn’t seen in decades.

One other thing about my friend’s note: despite their longstanding political differences, he and his wife are still married after 45 years. They like each other even though he’s a Republican, she’s a Democrat. Forty-five years ago that wasn't so unusual.

Indeed, isn’t that how it’s supposed to be in a democracy? Oren Hatch and Ted Kennedy, senators of vastly different opinions, were close friends for years. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill amiably tried to work through their disagreements over amber-colored libations.

Different groups joining together in search of a consensus – isn’t that what the founders had in mind for America?

Who knows? Maybe Donald Trump is the consensus we’ve been waiting for.

A Government of Laws?

“The judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great.” This sentence (well, actually it’s not a sentence, but never mind) tells much about the presumptive Republican nominee, who made the comment in a rambling rant against Gonzalo Curiel, the U.S. District Judge overseeing two class-action lawsuits brought against the defunct Trump University

First, what’s up with the “we”? I’m guessing it’s both the royal we and the deniability we (“Hey, I never said I believed”).

Then there is the stereotype with faint praise, a favored rhetorical device of the candidate. Suffice it to say that the state of relations between Donald Trump and Mexicans is not “great”. It’s also hard to imagine Trump saying such things about others. “Rudy Giuliani, who we believe is Italian” or “Sheldon Adelson, who we believe is Jewish” or “Barack Obama, who we believe is . . .” OK, maybe that’s the exception.

Third, the conflict of interest. Much has been made of the potential conflicts presented by the Clinton Foundation – and rightly so – but what about the Trump Organization? Has anyone asked Trump how he plans to separate his personal interests from the public trust? He certainly hasn’t done so in this campaign in which he’s been a walking billboard for his businesses. Now he’s threatening a federal judge over Trump University, one of his most egregious enterprises.

Fourth, the personal attack accompanied by the bullying threats. “Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case?”

And last, but hardly least, the statement is untrue. Judge Curiel was born in Indiana.

“¡Three EGOs!”

Like an aging athlete who was upset in the last Olympics, Hillary Clinton desperately pursues her last chance for the record books. And as Republican politicians and donors get increasingly comfortable with their candidate, the other party now threatens to implode. Bernie Sanders, who raises a critical issue – the wealth gap – without providing a solution, is becoming a bald and rumpled edition of Trump, driven by ego, feeding off his crowds, hammering Hillary; while Trump remains empty and dangerous – dangerous precisely because he is so empty. The email affair is deeply troubling, and it isn’t going away. In fact, it could get a lot worse. A friend who served in the state department years ago told me that Clinton’s handling of classified material, even if well-intentioned, might still be an indictable offense. Meanwhile, the wagons have circled and her apologists do what they always do – obfuscate, split hairs, deny. They even blame the state department, although Clinton ran the place.

She has a far deeper problem than likability. In fact, those who know Clinton seem to like her, and while she may make a good president, she is proving a terrible candidate, driven by a toxic combination of entitlement and concealment. She could lose the California primary, and who knows what will happen at the Democratic convention in July?

In this election the road not taken is the high road. It’s not on Donald Trump’s map. If Hillary Clinton were to take responsibility for her actions, she could still find it.

The Klanbake Convention

Thinking of traveling to Cleveland in July, I did a little research on that city’s first Republican convention and the election that followed. The three-day event took place in June 1924 and produced the first-ballot nomination of Calvin Coolidge, who had succeeded to the presidency on the death of Warren Harding less than a year before. It was the first Republican convention at which women had equal representation, and the only hint of disgruntlement was the defection of Senator Robert LaFollette, who ran – and won almost 5 million votes – as a third-party Progressive.

In contrast to the civil Republican convention, its Democratic counterpart in New York’s Madison Square Garden was a disaster. It required 16 days and 103 ballots to nominate the little-known-nor-long-remembered John W. Davis. The preconvention favorites, Al Smith and William Gibbs McAdoo, bowed out after a stalemate driven largely by the power of Ku Klux Klan, which had resurfaced as a vehicle for white working-class anxieties over the perceived threats posed by immigrants, African Americans, and the growing political power of Catholics and Jews.

After knocking off Smith, the Catholic governor of New York who had denounced lynching and racial violence, thousands of hooded Klansmen – including hundreds of delegates – held a rally at which a speaker denounced the "clownvention in Jew York," while the crowd hanged Smith in effigy and set fire to a cross.

That was the “Klanbake” convention, and surely such a thing could never happen today.

Coolidge was elected easily – although he failed to carry a single southern state.

American Soul

With Donald Trump, who is the sort of demagogue the founders feared, now the leader of the Republican Party, it’s time to examine our “exceptional” credentials. And it’s not just Trump who reveals a country at odds with its self-image. In New York, the Democratic Assembly Speaker is on his way to prison, with the Republican Senate leader close behind. In Chicago, a judge pronounced the former Speaker of the House a “serial child molester.” In two new books, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, the authors describe a nation with the highest rate of incarceration in a world that includes Russia, China and Iran; where one of every three native-born black men will go to jail; where three times as many mentally ill people are in prison as in a hospital; where economic disparity and voter repression proceed unabated.

I’m happy that Trump will be the nominee. Not just because the singularly repugnant Ted Cruz has departed, at least for now. Not because I think Trump will be trounced in November, because I fear he won’t. But because the overarching American myth on which we have been nourished for generations is unraveling before our eyes – and it should, for while it may have reflected our aspirations, it does not describe our reality.

We now have a candidate who appeals to the basest parts of our national character, and if that doesn’t galvanize the rest of us to get involved, I don’t know what will.

Trust the Young

I’m just not feeling the Bern. It’s probably an age thing. The young are flocking to Sanders’ revolution. They want to change the world . . . or so I’m told. At my age, it’s hard just summoning the energy to try and tweak it. Back in the 1960s when we didn’t trust anybody over 30, we too set out to change the world. But along the way we gave up or we gave in or we dropped out. The world changed, but not because it bent to our will. Still, I read with hope that today’s 18-29-year-olds are among those who most disdain Trump – and most strongly support Sanders.

I’m not yet ready to join them. For one thing, I believe in the power of a free – and fair – marketplace to effect change. Not the one where corporate cartels – too big to fail and too entrenched to regulate – ride roughshod over the common good, but the one where start-up businesses breathe new life into their neighborhoods; where impact investing is a powerful social, environmental and economic tool; where young entrepreneurs bring their creativity and passion to Detroit, intent on making not just a fortune but a difference. Will they stay? Will the dig in? Will they hold onto their visions? With the young, you never know. But it's exciting.

The young are the future, and they have historically been the forerunners of change. Though I’m not ready to join them on Bernie’s bandwagon, I support their journeys, and I look to them to lead the way.

Gunfight at "The Q"

Next Up: Packing heat in downtown Cleveland. As of yesterday, over 35,000 people had signed a petition demanding the Republican National Committee close “Quicken Loan Arena’s unconstitutional ‘gun-free zone’ loophole.” No candidate has denounced the petition; Donald Trump is studying its “fine print.”

Can you imagine a Republican convention with Trump and Cruz supporters bristling with hardware, ready to protect the honor of their hero’s wife – egged on by two of the most repellent presidential candidates in American history, one of whom has predicted riots if he doesn’t win? But the delegates will be ready for ISIS; ready for protesters who have different ideas of how to make America great again; perhaps even ready to walk Cleveland’s nearby streets where the nation’s truly forgotten people live.

I spent last week in British Columbia’s Selkirk wilderness where I was reminded that the natural world is a majestic place largely indifferent to its strutting bipeds.

So I missed the titillating details of the newest chapter in American exceptionalism, the one in which we are no more the city on a hill but the laughing stock of the world.

As the laughter dies on our lips, may the ridicule these guys deserve give way to a determination to reclaim our public discourse.

And for those who look at Trump and Cruz and say it cannot happen here, consider the words of H.L. Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

Dirty Waters

Flint’s water is back in the news, now politically as well as physically toxic. “The Birthplace of General Motors” is perhaps the most beleaguered city in America: 40% of its people in poverty; crime and unemployment almost triple the national rates; a city unrecovered from the 2008 housing catastrophe. It’s a place you leave if you can (its population is half what it was in 1970) – but that’s not easy for homeowners facing plummeting housing values.

Two years ago, the state-appointed emergency manager switched Flint’s freshwater source from Lake Huron to the Flint River for one reason: to save money. Dirty water should be cheaper than clean water, right?

Not in Flint, which has the most expensive water in the country. As in much of America, both urban and rural, poverty and environmental vulnerability go hand in hand.

Clearly, Flint requires a lot of economic investment, much of it to rebuild its decayed infrastructure, but don't hold your breath in these anti-government times. But we should think beyond vast engineering projects. Particularly when it comes to water, using nature’s infrastructure is a far better way to go – for if we take care of our upstream watersheds, their streams and rivers can actually process pollutants and clean their own water.

Almost 20 years ago, New York City also faced a water and financial crisis. Instead of building a multi-billion-dollar filtration plant for its 9 million users, it invested a fraction of that amount to protect its water sources up to 100 miles away. The result is cleaner and cheaper water.

In the long run, Flint’s water doesn’t need more chemicals; it needs cleaner sources.

Holy Smokes

Friday’s post brought quite a reaction, particularly after my social-media consultant (who in real life is my daughter Annie) spent $50.00 to “boost” the post on my blog’s Facebook page. I’m not exactly sure where the money went, or why, as I’m challenged in these matters, but measured solely by “cost per insult” we definitely got good value. Things started out well. Some people agreed with me, others didn’t. It seemed that a civil conversation might actually break out. “I respect your views but do not agree,” wrote Adelina Clonts in a decided understatement. “I’m glad [Obama] has someone who thinks of him respectfully. Thank you for sharing your view.”

“I’ve read all the entries since mine,” wrote Joann Williams, “and am pleased that dialogue was taking place.”

Which turned out to be the red flag in front of the bull. “You’re a moron,” responded Matt Wargny, and we were off. As the disputants turned on each other with escalating and expletive-laced ferocity, I seemed to fade into the background.

“That’s probably not a bad thing,” said Annie. “But you are still the cause of their vitriol.”

As the process took on a life of its own, and more and more Obama denigrators joined in, it started to feel like a Trump rally – although Annie assured me I wasn’t in any immediate danger: “Nah, they just want to hear themselves talk.”

Facebook has a Compassion Team to make personal interactions “more human, and more humane.” Maybe they’ll launch a political arm.