7 X 2021: Tucker Carlson

I received today an email sent to alert readers to the danger posed by Tucker Carlson, described as “the most dangerous demagogue since Donald Trump.” The notice focused on Carlson’s espousal of the “white replacement theory.” The theory is absurd, but it is a dandy BIG LIE that can delight xenophobes and racists by giving them a reason for their misdirected resentments and will increase those resentments very considerably.

Tucker Carlson calls to mind a remark by, if I remember correctly, Albert the Alligator: “That’s what you gets when you invites a pig into the parlor.” It is Carlson’s porcine qualities that give him so great an appeal with the “Trump base.” They feel that he is no better than they are and so will not “look down” upon them. The perception that he is “no better than they are” is created by his assuming a persona not unlike the persona assumed by people like Trump or Josh Hawley: down-home, good-old-boy, old-timey, straight talk masking vast cynicism and overweening ambition.

6 X 2021: Not all bad news

The news today is rather grim: our Senate rises to new heights of dysfunctionality; Trump claims that the 2020 election was the “real insurrection”; Missouri executes another condemned man after making him wait for 20+ years; the news is full of trashy figures, many of them in elective offices.

I was cheered, however, to see that Pat Robertson, an evangelical motor-mouth, is retiring from his “700 Club” talkshow. This man, a sanctimonious Rush Limbaugh, has for years made Christianity a laughing-stock and object of loathing for countless people. Good riddance!

5 X 2021: Our own College of Cardinals?

Some of the justices of the Supreme Court have become quite defensive lately, angered by application to them of epithets like “party hack.” They should not complain to those who call them “party hacks,” but to Mitch McConnell and other Republicans who selected them and, in some cases, forced their nominations through the Senate. Justice Barrett has declared that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties,” but they become so if political parties select judges based on their “judicial philosophies.”

Also, I wonder at the presence of six Roman Catholics on the Court. The Founders would have apoplexy if they could see this. But of course, Catholics come in several varieties, and I do not think we should lump Justice Sottomayor with the rest of the Catholics. But we can say at least that there are five right-wing Catholics on the Court. Is this simply a coincidence?

J. Edgar Hoover recruited Catholics for his F.B.I. Those Catholics were uniformly anti-Communist and so fit neatly into Hoover’s program. They were part of an authoritarian institution, and were pre-programed to avoid overmuch thinking and to obey unquestioningly.

I do not think the five reactionary Cathlolic justices of the current Supreme Court were appointed solely because they are Catholic, but their Catholicism, and their type of Catholicism, must have seemed to those who selected them to be an additional guarantee that they think our way and would “do the right thing” about Roe v. Wade.

Are these justices “political hacks”? We don’t have to be so coarse in describing them. “Politico-judicial ideologues” sounds much more classy and means the same thing. 

4 X 2021: Same old, same old

We’ve seen it before and we’re seeing it again. I read headlines today that report that Trump has called Adam Schiff “treasonous” and a “lowlife,’ and that he has hurled the same “lowlife” insult against Omorosa Manigault Newman.

Trump’s recent denunciations of people he does not like have shown again that he who has the “best words” is, in fact, as short on vocabulary as he is on decency, for it was Trump who has put the “lo” in lowlife.

3 X 2021: Solution to problems at southern border

It suddenly occurred to me that many problems at our southern border with Mexico might be solved at once if we would return Texas to Mexico. We took Texas (and much else) in the way Israel has been taking Palestinian territory. We sent in colonists, these colonists were militants who broke off from Mexico, started their own Republic, and then sought and obtained admission to the United States in 1845. But Texas remained a part of the United States only until 1861 when it seceded from the Union and joined the Confederate States of America.

So Texas’ membership in the United States has been irregular and intermittent. Moreover, many Texans insist that Texas has a special culture of its own, one distinct from the culture of the rest of the U.S and superior to it. Texans have frequently threatened to re-secede in the last two decades, thus manifesting their discomfort with the Union. 

So why not return Texas to Mexico? I imagine the Mexicans would be glad to have Texas again, with its vast spaces and wealth. Texas would be a vast filter through which migrants headed for the U.S. would have to pass or where they might make their homes.

1 X 2021: Settlers attack peaceful native village

I read today of an attack by Israeli “settlers” on a Palestinian village. The report said that this was the most grievous attack in a while, so grievous that four settlers were arrested. It was not another Wounded Knee, but the ethos at work is the same. The Palestinians own the land, the “settlers” want the land, and the “settlers” are going to take it. I would love to know how many of the “settlers” are of American or European background. That would explain a lot about their mistreatment of the native people.

These “settlements” are colonies founded on Palestinian land that has been seized by the Israelis. The Israeli government occasionally harrumphs about the illegal settlements, but that is a matter of wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The United States, recognizing kindred I-want-it-I take- it spirits in Israel, has given unimaginable amounts of military aid to Israel. And America alone, among civilized nations, keeps silent at Israeli neglect of international law and its many civil rights abuses.

30 IX 2021: How much can you swallow?

I read with wonder, if not surprise, of the struggle within the Democratic contingent in Congress: the far left wants this feature, the near left wants that, moderates want neither, etc.

It seems there is a tendency in our Congress to minimize effort by cramming together things that ought to be separate. Take the vast bills that the Democrats have put forward. Each faction has included in these bills favored initiatives that may or may not have much to do with the general focus of the bill. Others react negatively to some of these initiatives and may or may not or might or might not support the bill on that account. It makes me think of a group of picky eaters trying to agree on a pizza order.

In any case, diverse matters are lumped together in an enormous single bill that must be swallowed whole. Isn’t there a mechanism, there ought to be, that will allow these huge packages to be broken up so that their components could be debated and voted on in a case by case process? This would, of course, take a lot more work and would compel legislators to make decisions on specific issues.

Of course, if a legislator is a Republican there would be no need for personal decisions. The Republicans are another gross, forced amalgam that cripples the Congress. Individuals are not allowed each to use their own judgement, but must conform to the “party line.” And Republicans comply with a regularity and uniformity that is really quite surprising in what pretends to be a democratic government. Are they all so thoughtless or incapable of independent judgement, or are they coerced to go along because they want to get along? I think of a verse from an old anti-Stalin parody:

Party comrade, Party comrade,

What a sorry fate is thine!

Comrade Stalin does not love you

‘Cause you left the Party Line.

How our legislative process would be improved if focus could be directed to individual proposals and if Republicans could behave like free human beings and not like Communist drudges.

27 IX 2021: What punishments for liars?

Who, except for people like Trump, ever said that it’s o.k. to tell lies? But America has reached to the point where telling lies is expected and tolerated behavior.

But lies and misinformation are such a disservice to society and polity that people who tell lies and spread misinformation must be restrained. At least the “social media” has taken the positive step of shutting down or limiting the accounts of some egregious liars. But much more must be done to discourage, indeed, prevent public lies. 

Frankly, I do not know what to suggest. I do think that those who are spreading misinformation about the vaccines for COVID19 are guilty of manslaughter or attempted manslaughter. Politicians who ignore COVID19 or even oppose attempts to contain it are guilty of depraved indifference, at least.

Moving into national politics … The people who continue to assert that Trump was the real winner, that the election was rigged, etc., etc., would, in earlier times have been placed in an institution. Now their every comment is publicized. Politicians who keep telling lies to mask the Jan 6 Rebellion become, eventually, as guilty as the rebels.

At the least, the mainline media can do something like the social media corporations have done and try to limit the spreading of lies. We are guaranteed freedom of speech, but we are not guaranteed an audience. Why, why does every alarmist statement of the conspiracy theorists, every seditious statement of leading politicians and small town militia have to be reported? This is where the media must exercise some self-restraint. Much of their audience has no self-restraint, and their drug-of-choice is scandal, bloodshed, and outrageous behavior. The media must exercise discretion, stop being a platform for vicious people, stop feeding this popular addiction.

14 IX 2021: Another imaginative attack by Donald Trump

I read that Little Donny Trump has taken to calling Gen. Mark Milley a traitor. Again Trump falls back on his usual maneuver of charging others with the misdeeds of which he is most guilty. It’s the same old pattern. 

Trump has called lots of people traitor and while doing so has made it clear that he does not know what “treason” means. He thinks “treason” means not doing what Trump wants. 

Gen. Milley is, of course, a military man and has no psychiatric training as far as I know, but one needn’t be a psychiatrist to conclude correctly that Trump was in a serious mental decline after the election. Of course, screaming fits, suborning rebellion, full time delusions of election fraud, and daydreams of his imminent “reinstatement” in the month of August are signs of a mental decline, but I would not connect them necessarily with loss of the election, because Trump has been this way all his life. 

11 IX 2021: What 9/11, Trump, and COVID19 tell us about ourselves:

We might have learned from 9/11, for it showed us how naive, passive, and weak we had become. Politicians had for years been alternately frightening us with threats of foreign attack and assuring us that we were absolutely safe, and we believed them on both counts. In our panicked reaction to 9/11 we were ready to surrender our rights, to make believe that George W. Bush was competent, to wink at atrocities committed by a lawless government in our name, and to be abused by the extravagant but useless airport routines of the Transport Security Administration.

We might have learned from the election of Donald Trump and the complete moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party. But here, after eight plus years we are tolerating the same crimes and anti-democratic behaviors. The Trump Experience has shown us how ignorant, gullible, mindlessly angry, void of principles, racist, misogynist, and just plain foolish we are.

The hostile reaction to the COVID19 vaccines is a legacy from the Trump years. The self-destructive rejection of the vaccine, instigated by Trump, embraced by the Trump base, and exploited by a throng of self-promoting politicians tells us that during the Trump years many Americans have regressed from a lingering adolescence to unembarrassed childishness.