Long before any of the Ukraine brouhaha came to light, I had read several books on corruption in the former Soviet Union and around the globe. Corruption was rampant as formerly state-owned properties were being privatized at ridiculously low prices (just one tiny example - a Russian fleet of fishing trawlers valued at $1 billion was sold off for $2.5 million). With such deals available, every manner of thug and criminal was attracted, none more ruthless or powerful than Vladimir Putin. And if a single fleet of fishing trawlers could be worth a billion dollars, imagine what oil and natural gas reserves might be worth. Thus, corruption throughout government in all the former states of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine became the norm.
Officials were not just on the take, but involved in government shakedowns where prosecutors and their henchmen would raid corporate offices to steal documents and corporate seals that allowed the government to falsify ownership records, literally stealing the companies back from rightful private owners. They used these types of threats to extort billions from companies who refused to play along. Not coincidentally, one company that refused to play along was represented in court by Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death for his efforts, leading to passage in the US of the Magnitsky Act (which was what the Russians sought to discuss at the Trump Tower meeting, but that is beside the point). What is important is that the Magnitsky Act was part of the U.S policy to penalize corruption in the former Soviet Union. This was all told in “Red Notice,” released in early 2015, before Donald Trump had even announced his candidacy, thus a book that makes zero mention of him. But it sheds light on the type of corruption surrounding Ukraine.
Based upon that book, Amazon's algorithms recommended “Thieves of State,” published in early 2016 (while Donald Trump was still considered a long shot). The author, a former journalist, left the profession to stay and help rebuild Afghanistan after the 2002 fall of the Taliban. Witnessing the effect corruption had on undermining trust and the rule of law, she became an active opponent of tolerating foreign corruption because she saw how doing so undermines our aims. In one passage, she counters the excuse that even if 80% of aid is siphoned off by corrupt officials, at least 20% still gets through, arguing those who the aid is meant for become resentful that we are essentially giving 80% to their oppressors. Our good deeds are seen as just the opposite and thus become not only a complete waste of money, but counterproductive.
Notably, in this book, she points to our stand against Ukraine corruption in 2015 as marking a sea change in US policy regarding our tolerance of corruption in pursuit of foreign policy objectives, instead making opposition to corruption an integral part of foreign policy.
All this was background reading that had nothing to do with the current president, but which provides a foundation for what I’ve learned since.
That said – and again, this is more background - as soon as Paul Manafort was named Trump’s campaign manager, I read into what his role was regarding Ukraine politics. It is not pretty. Yes, politics is never pretty, but the difference between Russian/Ukrainian politics and the dirty nature of our politics is the difference between anarchy and the rule of law. It cannot be so easily dismissed. Going back to review that history provides additional color to what was transpiring in Ukraine from 2009-2015, with Russia successfully - with Manafort’s help - placing Putin’s chosen candidate in the Ukraine presidency. Thus began the corruption that eventually became the focus of Western democracies, the International Monetary Fund, the Obama administration and finally, Joe Biden.
It is instructive to understand the timeline leading up to the events that placed Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma and his father’s call for the removal of the prosecutor looking into the firm. In 2009, Hunter formed an advisory firm with two partners, Christopher Heinz (John Kerry’s stepson) and Devon Archer. Heinz preferred to stay away from high-profile opportunities, but Archer was unencumbered by conflicts of interest and sought opportunities where they arose. After pitching a real estate investment opportunity in Ukraine, Archer was approached by Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky about joining the Burisma board, as part of what he claimed was a desire to adopt Western transparency standards. These reforms were in response to investigations into the firm and Zlochevsky by then-Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Pshonka. Zlochecsky had already recruited a former president of Poland known as an ardent reformer to Burisma’s board.
When Archer told Hunter Biden of the board’s need for expertise on corporate governance, Biden suggested a law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner (David Boies’ firm), where he was “of counsel.” That eventually led to Hunter being offered a seat on Burisma’s board in 2014. Boies, who represented Al Gore in the 2000 election battle over the Florida recount, is clearly a Democrat, but that is not a crime, nor evidence that one was committed in connecting Biden with Burisma. The important point is that Hunter was introduced to Burisma by his business partner, not his father. Furthermore, he was brought on as what was believed to be an attempt to create more transparency.
As it turned out, Zlochevsky was not the reformer he presented himself to be and pressure mounted for an investigation into his Burisma dealings. However, Viktor Shokin had replaced Pshonka as the prosecutor responsible for investing Burisma. Shokin was seen as weak on corruption at best, and likely involved in it at worst, prompting Europe, the IMF and eventually Joe Biden, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, to call for Shokin’s removal. Notably, Joe Biden was applauded while addressing the Ukrainian parliament in December 2015 when he attacked Russia, but his call to end corruption and limit the power of Ukraine’s oligarchs was met with “stony silence,” suggesting just how deeply-rooted that corruption was. That his call was backed by a threat to withhold $1 billion in aid was the “sea change” in policy that Sarah Chayes praised in “Thieves of State.” Withholding aid to stop ongoing corruption is prudent, whereas withholding it after the fact is as effective as whipping the dog today for what it did yesterday (which is what Donald Trump sought).
There is more, but there is nothing that says Joe Biden secured the role for Hunter or that he profited from his son's role. Furthermore, the evidence shows his call for a change in prosecutors was to increase scrutiny of Hunter’s company, not stop it. That is the crux of the matter.
Finally, a look at the character of those involved is warranted. Hunter is a mess, with serious addiction and relationship issues, but go back to around this time and you’ll find a video of Lindsey Graham speaking about Joe Biden’s character, choking up as he says you will not meet a better person than Joe Biden. That sentiment is common among people on both the left and right. Yes, he plagiarized a British Labor leader’s speech a couple of decades ago, and he does engage in some creepy, beyond old-school shows of affection. But I’ve yet to come across anything that suggests he is anywhere near corrupt. If anyone can provide something beyond leaps of assumption, I am all ears.
I’ve often said that one of life’s biggest disappointments is seeking evidence to back up a claim and finding you were wrong, while one of life’s biggest mistakes is making such a discovery and refusing to discard the claim. I’ve discarded many such claims when the evidence shows otherwise. In other words, I can be convinced – but the argument must be convincing. To date, the argument of corruption and Joe Biden regarding Hunter and Burisma has been nowhere close.
12/23/2019
The Fox and the Henhouse
We saw the movie "Dark Waters" last night. It was fascinating to see so many local Cincinnati connections - the woman played by Anne Hathaway graduated from law school with my wife, I've been to a number of events at the Taft law offices, we have friends who work there, etc. But the real story is the story itself. There's a line that states "corporations are people." So very true, and our very human nature is to pursue our own short-term self-interests. Sadly, greed is one of self-interest's most powerful motivators. We see the price others often pay when such self-interest goes unchecked, whether when stock market bubbles burst, a mortgage industry collapse nearly takes the entire economy down with it, or when companies bend the law to their favor in dealing with the toxic products they may profit from. Such was the story in "Dark Waters."
Many applaud the deregulation taking place today, saying it unshackles business to pursue its self-interest. But even the grandfather of free market capitalism, F. A. Hayek, argued that regulation is necessary to capture the true cost of production in the price of the product, rather than passing it on unwittingly to their workers, neighbors and society in the form of injury, illness, death and the destruction of the natural environment. If that price is too high to make the product economically viable, then so be it. This movie clearly proves how correct Hayek was.
Yes, business has a strong distaste for regulation - and regulation should be scientifically and morally reasonable. But there NEEDS to be a healthy tension between industry and the regulators, lest crony capitalism put the public at risk for the benefit of the well-connected. At a time when a coal lobbyist heads the EPA, an oil industry lobbyist is Secretary of the Interior, a pharmaceutical lobbyist is Secretary of Health and Human Services, a former Raytheon executive is Secretary of Defense and the founder of Perdue Farms is Secretary of Agriculture, it would appear that we have the fox guarding the hen house. We may enjoy that our 401ks are appreciating nicely, but the price we pay for those financial gains today (our short-term self-interest) is likely to be the health and well-being of our children, our environment and our society tomorrow, long after those responsible for the damage have departed the scene. The time to protect them from that future is now, but if those who have the power refuse to act responsibly, then we have the responsibility to change those who are in power. The future is in our hands.
Many applaud the deregulation taking place today, saying it unshackles business to pursue its self-interest. But even the grandfather of free market capitalism, F. A. Hayek, argued that regulation is necessary to capture the true cost of production in the price of the product, rather than passing it on unwittingly to their workers, neighbors and society in the form of injury, illness, death and the destruction of the natural environment. If that price is too high to make the product economically viable, then so be it. This movie clearly proves how correct Hayek was.
Yes, business has a strong distaste for regulation - and regulation should be scientifically and morally reasonable. But there NEEDS to be a healthy tension between industry and the regulators, lest crony capitalism put the public at risk for the benefit of the well-connected. At a time when a coal lobbyist heads the EPA, an oil industry lobbyist is Secretary of the Interior, a pharmaceutical lobbyist is Secretary of Health and Human Services, a former Raytheon executive is Secretary of Defense and the founder of Perdue Farms is Secretary of Agriculture, it would appear that we have the fox guarding the hen house. We may enjoy that our 401ks are appreciating nicely, but the price we pay for those financial gains today (our short-term self-interest) is likely to be the health and well-being of our children, our environment and our society tomorrow, long after those responsible for the damage have departed the scene. The time to protect them from that future is now, but if those who have the power refuse to act responsibly, then we have the responsibility to change those who are in power. The future is in our hands.
11/27/2019
Dog Genders and Presidential Trust
You can't make this stuff up. President Trump welcomed Conan, the military dog hailed as a hero during the raid that took out ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to the White House Monday afternoon. The Pentagon had identified the dog as a female, and the president referred to Conan as “it” repeatedly during the visit. But then he referred to Conan as “he” and you guessed it, confusion suddenly reigned.
The White House announced hours later that ”he” was actually a “she.” But wait, not long after that, they reversed course and announced the president had been correct - Conan is indeed a “he.” Eventually, the Defense Department released an official statement that they had “triple checked” and determined Conan is a boy. Perhaps this explains why the Pentagon has such trouble with transgender service people, but I digress.
All kidding - and the pretty obvious ease of determining a dog's gender - aside, how can we trust any of them? How can we trust this president - the one who used a Sharpie to redraw a National Weather Service map to prove he’d been right when he’d been wrong? How can we trust that the Pentagon isn’t saying Conan’s a boy just so it doesn’t upset a president who'd already fired a Navy Secretary in order to protect the war criminal that president had just pardoned? God help us if we ever find ourselves in a real crisis that requires the nation to accept the president’s word, because that, quite simply, is impossible.
True character is shown not just when no one’s watching, but when it doesn’t matter. Sharpiegate and now Genitaliagate are both inconsequential matters that should not raise questions about the trustworthiness of the United States president, but with this president they do. Admitting a mistake would go miles in proving both the president’s trustworthiness and his absence of insecurity. Of course, that would mean proving the nonexistent.
As it is, regardless Conan’s gender, the dog seems to be the only one with balls.
The White House announced hours later that ”he” was actually a “she.” But wait, not long after that, they reversed course and announced the president had been correct - Conan is indeed a “he.” Eventually, the Defense Department released an official statement that they had “triple checked” and determined Conan is a boy. Perhaps this explains why the Pentagon has such trouble with transgender service people, but I digress.
All kidding - and the pretty obvious ease of determining a dog's gender - aside, how can we trust any of them? How can we trust this president - the one who used a Sharpie to redraw a National Weather Service map to prove he’d been right when he’d been wrong? How can we trust that the Pentagon isn’t saying Conan’s a boy just so it doesn’t upset a president who'd already fired a Navy Secretary in order to protect the war criminal that president had just pardoned? God help us if we ever find ourselves in a real crisis that requires the nation to accept the president’s word, because that, quite simply, is impossible.
True character is shown not just when no one’s watching, but when it doesn’t matter. Sharpiegate and now Genitaliagate are both inconsequential matters that should not raise questions about the trustworthiness of the United States president, but with this president they do. Admitting a mistake would go miles in proving both the president’s trustworthiness and his absence of insecurity. Of course, that would mean proving the nonexistent.
As it is, regardless Conan’s gender, the dog seems to be the only one with balls.
11/24/2019
Biased Facts versus Biased Lies
Who broke the Watergate story? Who broke the Catholic church molestation story? Who broke the football CTE story? Who broke the Abu Ghraib story?
In order - The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the New Yorker. Each of these stories brought charges of unfair reporting and media bias. Meanwhile, conservative media, led by Fox, talk radio and online sites like Breitbart, Daily Caller and others were part of a deliberate and coordinated effort to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media that broke such stories. That is not the view of leftists or the mainstream media, but people like Charlie Sykes and Rick Wilson, who were part of that conservative ecosystem who now regret their role in destroying trust in legitimate media.
Yes, the mainstream media has a liberal bias that is reflected in the stories they cover and how they cover them, but that does not make them inaccurate.
For example, a 2016 New York Times article on Trump University began "The sales pitches seeking to separate Cheryl Lankford from her money began during the recession as she struggled to get back on her feet following the death of her husband, an American soldier serving in Iraq." That opening sentence is worded in an inflammatory way that betrays a certain bias, but there is nothing untrue about the underlying facts, and the rest of the article then gives specific factual details of how Trump University and another company using the Trump brand, Cambridge Who's Who, made repeated aggressive sales pitches to Ms. Lankford and others like her who had been identified as financially vulnerable and thus, ripe targets for such pitches. It was a damning story, the revelations of which played an important role in prompting Donald Trump to seek a settlement in the lawsuits brought against the so-called university (it was not an accredited school in any way, thus the reference to "so-called" university).
This is an example of how a story can be biased but factual. It is also why those who choose to ignore such media consign themselves to a state of self-imposed ignorance, because nowhere on Fox, Breitbart or on-air with Rush Limbaugh or his cohort could you find the details of the settlement or the facts that made it necessary. In fact, one was far more likely to find dismissal or open ridicule of the facts themselves. By definition, lack of exposure to facts makes one ignorant of those facts. And democracy cannot thrive with an ignorant electorate.
Thus, why I will take biased facts over biased lies any day.
In order - The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the New Yorker. Each of these stories brought charges of unfair reporting and media bias. Meanwhile, conservative media, led by Fox, talk radio and online sites like Breitbart, Daily Caller and others were part of a deliberate and coordinated effort to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media that broke such stories. That is not the view of leftists or the mainstream media, but people like Charlie Sykes and Rick Wilson, who were part of that conservative ecosystem who now regret their role in destroying trust in legitimate media.
Yes, the mainstream media has a liberal bias that is reflected in the stories they cover and how they cover them, but that does not make them inaccurate.
For example, a 2016 New York Times article on Trump University began "The sales pitches seeking to separate Cheryl Lankford from her money began during the recession as she struggled to get back on her feet following the death of her husband, an American soldier serving in Iraq." That opening sentence is worded in an inflammatory way that betrays a certain bias, but there is nothing untrue about the underlying facts, and the rest of the article then gives specific factual details of how Trump University and another company using the Trump brand, Cambridge Who's Who, made repeated aggressive sales pitches to Ms. Lankford and others like her who had been identified as financially vulnerable and thus, ripe targets for such pitches. It was a damning story, the revelations of which played an important role in prompting Donald Trump to seek a settlement in the lawsuits brought against the so-called university (it was not an accredited school in any way, thus the reference to "so-called" university).
This is an example of how a story can be biased but factual. It is also why those who choose to ignore such media consign themselves to a state of self-imposed ignorance, because nowhere on Fox, Breitbart or on-air with Rush Limbaugh or his cohort could you find the details of the settlement or the facts that made it necessary. In fact, one was far more likely to find dismissal or open ridicule of the facts themselves. By definition, lack of exposure to facts makes one ignorant of those facts. And democracy cannot thrive with an ignorant electorate.
Thus, why I will take biased facts over biased lies any day.
11/06/2019
Trump's Tactics - We've Seen this Story Before
Sensing something was amiss with my party in 2010, I decided to run for a seat on our county GOP central committee, hoping to restore some sanity. I ran and won - only to learn just how off the rails the party really was - and how determined many seemed to be to take it even further to the edges of extreme.
I watched candidates seeking endorsements shouted down as they tried to provide thoughtful explanations of their views on capital punishment. I saw conservative Christians sharing photos of their AR-15s the way some share photos of their grandchildren1. I was personally attacked online for taking one member to task for referring to Muslims as “ragheads.” When the president of the Conservative Women of Ohio posted that we should not trust an evil President Obama when he announced the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, I was swarmed by an angry online mob when I simply cautioned against letting hatred overwhelm reason (I was effectively told that we are right to hate). Likewise, I was castigated for defending our “corrupt government” when all I did was use actual government data to refute wildly inaccurate claims regarding congressional benefits. I was criticized by GOP activists on Facebook for my use of “artful facts.”
These weren’t the railings of some crazy old uncle, deep into his bourbon, parroting what he’d heard on the extreme end of conservative media, but elected GOP officials and local party leaders tasked with selecting and endorsing candidates for local, state and federal offices, and their followers. Their craziness today would be our government’s craziness tomorrow. The anger, the disinterest in thoughtful debate and the complete disregard for facts left me so concerned that as my term came to a close in 2014, I outlined a novel where a media mogul, a business titan and a demagogue exploit that anger to foment a civil war fought by anti-government militia members led by a rogue general and backed by hard-right Christians, the NRA and Tea Party activists seeking to “take our country back.”
I meant it as a cautionary tale.
Meanwhile, in April that same year, during an online discussion on how demagogues rise, I wrote of how the Hitlers of the world “latch onto real or perceived hardships, find a scapegoat to blame them on, draw an ‘us vs. them’ battle line, then look for an opportunity to justify conflict to vanquish the enemy to the benefit of the ‘righteous’. Be ever vigilant for parallels.”
Hitler references always risk labels of hyperbole. Still, if there are circumstances where a Hitler can seduce a nation as he did in Germany, then certainly a demagogue presenting a seemingly less dangerous face could do the same elsewhere. Given what I'd witnessed within GOP circles, vigilance seemed warranted.
For one, we should never kid ourselves that Americans are somehow congenitally immune to the hate that makes the siren call of demagogues so seductive. One need only study the history of tacitly-sanctioned, mob-rule lynchings in the South to come to such a conclusion. The idea that “it can’t happen here” had already been proven to be false.
Of greater and more immediate concern was the level of vitriol that had become commonplace in conservative circles, driven by a conservative media that had found a profitable business model in dismissing rational debate in favor of stirred grievances that fed the irrationality displayed by my local GOP. Those grievances took on, among others, Muslims, immigrants and the United States government itself, with Tea Party activists sporting Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flags railing against a government perceived as corrupt and overbearing. Christians came to believe they were being persecuted, while NRA fund-raising letters warned of “jack-booted government thugs” coming to take away our guns.
A nation that had proven it was not immune to ethnic hatred was simmering in an angry witch’s brew, stirred by a coven filled with names like Coulter, Carlson, Limbaugh and LaPierre. The aggrieved were being fed an endless supply of scapegoats. All that was missing was a demagogue to exploit the “us versus them” narrative.
Enter Donald Trump, descended from Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency, making his now famous declaration, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists...”
There it was - us versus them - in a single sentence: “They” are not sending “you.”
At that point, exactly 300 words into his candidacy, I was sure he had permanently and irrevocably disqualified himself as a candidate for the presidency. He was drawing straight from the playbook used by demagogues across the ages, trading on public fears for political gain. Surely, despite what I’d witnessed inside the GOP, we would see through his naked appeal to the worst in us.
What I did not know, however - what none of us knew at the time - was that the year before, just as I was posting my 2014 call for vigilance, Christopher Wylie of Cambridge Analytica was being introduced to “Steve from America.” Steve was Steve Bannon, and over the next year he would work with Cambridge Analytica to test market phrases like “deep state,” “drain the swamp” and “build the wall” to determine their effectiveness, and more importantly, identify the characteristics of Facebook users with whom those phrases resonated.
But it went further. As reported by Wylie in his whistleblowing book, “Mindf*ck,” Bannon and Cambridge Analytica began testing Facebook messages to determine just how deep racial animosity ran and how far people could be pushed. Questions asking whether blacks were capable of succeeding in America without the help of whites, or whether they were genetically predetermined to fail, were posted to gauge underlying racial attitudes. Bannon believed that political correctness and the civil rights movement had limited what he called “free thinking” in America and sought to expose what he considered the hidden truths about race. He believed those truths were not pretty. Facebook users did not fail Steve Bannon.
“Us versus them” narratives followed, with falsely planted posts arguing that racial relations were a zero-sum game, where the more “they” take, the less “you” have, or “they” use political correctness, so “you” can not fight back. This work exploited findings in the field of neuroscience that such messages activate the same part of the brain associated with identity. Thus, attempts to criticize or contradict such hateful messages were seen as direct attacks on one’s own self, causing the effort to backfire. This is known as the Boomerang or Backfire Effect, where attempts to counter an argument actually work to reinforce the original message. Bannon had found a winning formula - a formula that relied upon the worst in human nature AND human psychology.
Before they were done, they’d created fake user groups, presented as organic but actually initiated at Bannon's direction, to organize real-world meetups in coffee shops and similar small locales designed so that users were made to believe not only that they were not alone, but that there were far more who thought like them than there actually were. By creating that illusion, these outliers felt more at ease expressing their racial animosity publicly, drawing ever larger numbers into their circle. Once the dark side was released, it took on a life of its own. Eventually, the Boomerang Effect would have Republicans embracing the term "deplorables" and in turn, the alt-right, white supremacist xenophobes it was meant to describe, as kindred spirits. GOP voters who once found Donald Trump laughable or despicable as a candidate eventually became ardent defenders and supporters, not because he had changed, but because they had.
This is why, like any malignancy where it is difficult to separate good cells from bad, it becomes so difficult to separate disdain for the man from disrespect for his supporters. The truth is that like every nation that has fallen under the spell of a demagogue who uses hate and divisiveness to achieve power, good people at first laugh, then dismiss, and finally embrace the demagogue, as attacks on him are seen as attacks on them. And once again, us versus them narratives work their dark, biological magic.
This is how societies fall prey to charismatic demagogues. We have seen it before. In fact, the CEO of SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, explicitly stated that the tactics of propagating ethnic hatred employed by Donald Trump were no different than those used by Adolph Hitler. Yes, the people who helped develop the tactics used by a future president of the United States made the direct comparison to those used in Nazi Germany. Whatever circumstances I’d observed that led me to warn of the rise of demagogues in 2014 had been identified - and weaponized - by Steve Bannon, later to be exploited by Donald Trump. But whereas I had hoped to use a cautionary tale to salve a festering wound, Steve Bannon sought to pick at the scabs. Donald Trump was his rusty scalpel. In Trump, Bannon found what he called “the perfect vessel.” Lenin’s “intelligentsia” became Trump’s deep state. Mussolini’s “drenare la palude” simply needed to be translated into English: "drain the swamp". And Hitler’s Lugenpresse (lying press) became the American president’s Fake News.
There is a nearly throwaway passage in the book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” about the great migration of southern blacks out of the old south. A returning migrant visits a previously off-limits diner a few years after the end of Jim Crow and finds the experience so mundane that he wonders how such an ordinary act could have, just a few years earlier, generated enough anger and hatred that merely entering that same diner could have gotten him killed.
How, indeed.
But then we learn of the methodical exploitation of racial animosity by Steve Bannon and are reminded of our nation’s dark underbelly. We watch presidential rallies where foreigners are compared to deadly snakes, where facial expressions of supporters exhibit a mix of rage and glee, not unlike those in photos of lynch mobs of old, as chants of “Build that wall!”, “Lock her up!” and “Send them back!” echo and we’re reminded that it is a fairly straight and dangerous line from "Build that wall!" and "Send them back!" to “String them up!” And we realize, finally, that the ultimate manifestation of this anger never springs fully formed upon a society. It takes years of desensitization.
Years of being told not to trust the elites.
Years of being told not to trust the government.
I watched candidates seeking endorsements shouted down as they tried to provide thoughtful explanations of their views on capital punishment. I saw conservative Christians sharing photos of their AR-15s the way some share photos of their grandchildren1. I was personally attacked online for taking one member to task for referring to Muslims as “ragheads.” When the president of the Conservative Women of Ohio posted that we should not trust an evil President Obama when he announced the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, I was swarmed by an angry online mob when I simply cautioned against letting hatred overwhelm reason (I was effectively told that we are right to hate). Likewise, I was castigated for defending our “corrupt government” when all I did was use actual government data to refute wildly inaccurate claims regarding congressional benefits. I was criticized by GOP activists on Facebook for my use of “artful facts.”
These weren’t the railings of some crazy old uncle, deep into his bourbon, parroting what he’d heard on the extreme end of conservative media, but elected GOP officials and local party leaders tasked with selecting and endorsing candidates for local, state and federal offices, and their followers. Their craziness today would be our government’s craziness tomorrow. The anger, the disinterest in thoughtful debate and the complete disregard for facts left me so concerned that as my term came to a close in 2014, I outlined a novel where a media mogul, a business titan and a demagogue exploit that anger to foment a civil war fought by anti-government militia members led by a rogue general and backed by hard-right Christians, the NRA and Tea Party activists seeking to “take our country back.”
I meant it as a cautionary tale.
Meanwhile, in April that same year, during an online discussion on how demagogues rise, I wrote of how the Hitlers of the world “latch onto real or perceived hardships, find a scapegoat to blame them on, draw an ‘us vs. them’ battle line, then look for an opportunity to justify conflict to vanquish the enemy to the benefit of the ‘righteous’. Be ever vigilant for parallels.”
Hitler references always risk labels of hyperbole. Still, if there are circumstances where a Hitler can seduce a nation as he did in Germany, then certainly a demagogue presenting a seemingly less dangerous face could do the same elsewhere. Given what I'd witnessed within GOP circles, vigilance seemed warranted.
For one, we should never kid ourselves that Americans are somehow congenitally immune to the hate that makes the siren call of demagogues so seductive. One need only study the history of tacitly-sanctioned, mob-rule lynchings in the South to come to such a conclusion. The idea that “it can’t happen here” had already been proven to be false.
Of greater and more immediate concern was the level of vitriol that had become commonplace in conservative circles, driven by a conservative media that had found a profitable business model in dismissing rational debate in favor of stirred grievances that fed the irrationality displayed by my local GOP. Those grievances took on, among others, Muslims, immigrants and the United States government itself, with Tea Party activists sporting Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flags railing against a government perceived as corrupt and overbearing. Christians came to believe they were being persecuted, while NRA fund-raising letters warned of “jack-booted government thugs” coming to take away our guns.
A nation that had proven it was not immune to ethnic hatred was simmering in an angry witch’s brew, stirred by a coven filled with names like Coulter, Carlson, Limbaugh and LaPierre. The aggrieved were being fed an endless supply of scapegoats. All that was missing was a demagogue to exploit the “us versus them” narrative.
Enter Donald Trump, descended from Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency, making his now famous declaration, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists...”
There it was - us versus them - in a single sentence: “They” are not sending “you.”
At that point, exactly 300 words into his candidacy, I was sure he had permanently and irrevocably disqualified himself as a candidate for the presidency. He was drawing straight from the playbook used by demagogues across the ages, trading on public fears for political gain. Surely, despite what I’d witnessed inside the GOP, we would see through his naked appeal to the worst in us.
What I did not know, however - what none of us knew at the time - was that the year before, just as I was posting my 2014 call for vigilance, Christopher Wylie of Cambridge Analytica was being introduced to “Steve from America.” Steve was Steve Bannon, and over the next year he would work with Cambridge Analytica to test market phrases like “deep state,” “drain the swamp” and “build the wall” to determine their effectiveness, and more importantly, identify the characteristics of Facebook users with whom those phrases resonated.
But it went further. As reported by Wylie in his whistleblowing book, “Mindf*ck,” Bannon and Cambridge Analytica began testing Facebook messages to determine just how deep racial animosity ran and how far people could be pushed. Questions asking whether blacks were capable of succeeding in America without the help of whites, or whether they were genetically predetermined to fail, were posted to gauge underlying racial attitudes. Bannon believed that political correctness and the civil rights movement had limited what he called “free thinking” in America and sought to expose what he considered the hidden truths about race. He believed those truths were not pretty. Facebook users did not fail Steve Bannon.
“Us versus them” narratives followed, with falsely planted posts arguing that racial relations were a zero-sum game, where the more “they” take, the less “you” have, or “they” use political correctness, so “you” can not fight back. This work exploited findings in the field of neuroscience that such messages activate the same part of the brain associated with identity. Thus, attempts to criticize or contradict such hateful messages were seen as direct attacks on one’s own self, causing the effort to backfire. This is known as the Boomerang or Backfire Effect, where attempts to counter an argument actually work to reinforce the original message. Bannon had found a winning formula - a formula that relied upon the worst in human nature AND human psychology.
Before they were done, they’d created fake user groups, presented as organic but actually initiated at Bannon's direction, to organize real-world meetups in coffee shops and similar small locales designed so that users were made to believe not only that they were not alone, but that there were far more who thought like them than there actually were. By creating that illusion, these outliers felt more at ease expressing their racial animosity publicly, drawing ever larger numbers into their circle. Once the dark side was released, it took on a life of its own. Eventually, the Boomerang Effect would have Republicans embracing the term "deplorables" and in turn, the alt-right, white supremacist xenophobes it was meant to describe, as kindred spirits. GOP voters who once found Donald Trump laughable or despicable as a candidate eventually became ardent defenders and supporters, not because he had changed, but because they had.
This is why, like any malignancy where it is difficult to separate good cells from bad, it becomes so difficult to separate disdain for the man from disrespect for his supporters. The truth is that like every nation that has fallen under the spell of a demagogue who uses hate and divisiveness to achieve power, good people at first laugh, then dismiss, and finally embrace the demagogue, as attacks on him are seen as attacks on them. And once again, us versus them narratives work their dark, biological magic.
This is how societies fall prey to charismatic demagogues. We have seen it before. In fact, the CEO of SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, explicitly stated that the tactics of propagating ethnic hatred employed by Donald Trump were no different than those used by Adolph Hitler. Yes, the people who helped develop the tactics used by a future president of the United States made the direct comparison to those used in Nazi Germany. Whatever circumstances I’d observed that led me to warn of the rise of demagogues in 2014 had been identified - and weaponized - by Steve Bannon, later to be exploited by Donald Trump. But whereas I had hoped to use a cautionary tale to salve a festering wound, Steve Bannon sought to pick at the scabs. Donald Trump was his rusty scalpel. In Trump, Bannon found what he called “the perfect vessel.” Lenin’s “intelligentsia” became Trump’s deep state. Mussolini’s “drenare la palude” simply needed to be translated into English: "drain the swamp". And Hitler’s Lugenpresse (lying press) became the American president’s Fake News.
The Madness of Crowds
There is a nearly throwaway passage in the book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” about the great migration of southern blacks out of the old south. A returning migrant visits a previously off-limits diner a few years after the end of Jim Crow and finds the experience so mundane that he wonders how such an ordinary act could have, just a few years earlier, generated enough anger and hatred that merely entering that same diner could have gotten him killed.
How, indeed.
But then we learn of the methodical exploitation of racial animosity by Steve Bannon and are reminded of our nation’s dark underbelly. We watch presidential rallies where foreigners are compared to deadly snakes, where facial expressions of supporters exhibit a mix of rage and glee, not unlike those in photos of lynch mobs of old, as chants of “Build that wall!”, “Lock her up!” and “Send them back!” echo and we’re reminded that it is a fairly straight and dangerous line from "Build that wall!" and "Send them back!" to “String them up!” And we realize, finally, that the ultimate manifestation of this anger never springs fully formed upon a society. It takes years of desensitization.
Years of being told not to trust the elites.
Years of being told not to trust the government.
Years of being told not to trust the press.
Years of being told they are not like us.
That they are bringing problems.
That the more they get, the less we have.
That they’re snakes and human scum.
That we are the righteous and they are the enemy.
That there’s only one who can fix it.
Us versus them.
This is what it looks like. This is what it always looks like. We are witnessing it now. How it will end, God only knows, but our nation has been manipulated and a party taken over. Taken over by a campaign that willfully sought to exploit hate and anger. Meanwhile, the foundations of our democracy - a free press, the rule of law, the separation of powers and faith in the loyal opposition - are being tested by a steady drip, drip, drip of acidic invective straight from the president's mouth.
Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the Civil War was testing whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long survive. This president is testing that proposition again. We can let him point to a strong economy and fool ourselves into believing all is well, but like a shining flashlight corroded from the inside, we may learn too late that what makes America work - what has made it the ideal the rest of the world aspires to be - has been debased beyond redemption from within. And the blame will lie squarely upon the shoulders of those who chose to look the other way. That is how it always happens.
Years of being told they are not like us.
That they are bringing problems.
That the more they get, the less we have.
That they’re snakes and human scum.
That we are the righteous and they are the enemy.
That there’s only one who can fix it.
Us versus them.
This is what it looks like. This is what it always looks like. We are witnessing it now. How it will end, God only knows, but our nation has been manipulated and a party taken over. Taken over by a campaign that willfully sought to exploit hate and anger. Meanwhile, the foundations of our democracy - a free press, the rule of law, the separation of powers and faith in the loyal opposition - are being tested by a steady drip, drip, drip of acidic invective straight from the president's mouth.
Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the Civil War was testing whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long survive. This president is testing that proposition again. We can let him point to a strong economy and fool ourselves into believing all is well, but like a shining flashlight corroded from the inside, we may learn too late that what makes America work - what has made it the ideal the rest of the world aspires to be - has been debased beyond redemption from within. And the blame will lie squarely upon the shoulders of those who chose to look the other way. That is how it always happens.
**************************************************************
1 One of those at the table where they were sharing photos of AR-15s later became our state senator and found himself at the center of a controversy when he suggested the U.S. may need to resort to civil war if Donald Trump lost in 2024. This mindset has run through conservative circles for some time.
9/05/2019
Yes, Sharpiegate Could Mean the End of the World
On its face, Sharpiegate appears to be little more than perhaps the silliest moment in a sea of silliness emanating from the Trump White House. Opponents of the president find it a ridiculous example of the president’s insecurities, while his defenders see the brouhaha as both an example of fake news, claiming the president is victim rather than perpetrator of the errant sharpie markings, and further evidence of how the press and the president’s opponents seek every opportunity to attack the president, regardless how trivial the transgression. I am afraid both sides are missing the significance of this seemingly insignificant event.
First, this is nothing new. We saw it regarding the Central Park Five, where Donald Trump took out ads calling for the death penalty for the five New York youths who’d been arrested and eventually convicted of raping a Central Park jogger. only to have their convictions tossed out when a confession backed by hard DNA evidence showed they were not at fault. Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump has refused to admit he was wrong and continues to insist to this day that they are guilty. Fortunately, he was not in a position to do anything more than rail about their guilt in 1989. Today, his unwillingness to admit he is wrong could have far graver consequences.
Both cases also point to the president’s disregard, if not abject ignorance, of science. With regard to the Central Park Five, DNA evidence that puts the confessed rapist - and only the confessed rapist - at the scene fails to convince a man who swears by his gut instincts. In Sharpiegate, the childish extension drawn by the president (and, yes, the line was drawn by the president himself, as the Washington Post has reported), demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what the NOAA’s hurricane forecasting cones convey. Since they represent forecasting uncertainty, they always get broader the further out they go. Yet, the president’s alteration is more a globbed-on appendage than an extension of the cone of uncertainty.
Still, this may all seem like nonsense - until one considers the possible ramifications. Let’s not forget that this president has crowed about his relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. What if evidence arises that Kim continues to develop their nuclear capabilities? Will the president act upon that news in ways that are in our best interest, or will he deny it in ways consistent with his past behavior so as to preserve his self-esteem?
What about deregulation? Does he understand the science that shows the threat certain pollutants pose to workers, customers and communities? Or will he ignore those threats because he doesn’t understand them?
And what happens when his inability to admit a mistake meets his ignorance regarding facts and science? Climate change is certainly one such threat, but there are myriad others that come to mind.
Bottom line, Sharpiegate exposed both emotional and intellectual shortcomings in our president that could have dire consequences were those ever to be tested. Let us pray they are not, for if they are, prayer may be all we have.
First, this is nothing new. We saw it regarding the Central Park Five, where Donald Trump took out ads calling for the death penalty for the five New York youths who’d been arrested and eventually convicted of raping a Central Park jogger. only to have their convictions tossed out when a confession backed by hard DNA evidence showed they were not at fault. Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump has refused to admit he was wrong and continues to insist to this day that they are guilty. Fortunately, he was not in a position to do anything more than rail about their guilt in 1989. Today, his unwillingness to admit he is wrong could have far graver consequences.
Both cases also point to the president’s disregard, if not abject ignorance, of science. With regard to the Central Park Five, DNA evidence that puts the confessed rapist - and only the confessed rapist - at the scene fails to convince a man who swears by his gut instincts. In Sharpiegate, the childish extension drawn by the president (and, yes, the line was drawn by the president himself, as the Washington Post has reported), demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what the NOAA’s hurricane forecasting cones convey. Since they represent forecasting uncertainty, they always get broader the further out they go. Yet, the president’s alteration is more a globbed-on appendage than an extension of the cone of uncertainty.
Still, this may all seem like nonsense - until one considers the possible ramifications. Let’s not forget that this president has crowed about his relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. What if evidence arises that Kim continues to develop their nuclear capabilities? Will the president act upon that news in ways that are in our best interest, or will he deny it in ways consistent with his past behavior so as to preserve his self-esteem?
What about deregulation? Does he understand the science that shows the threat certain pollutants pose to workers, customers and communities? Or will he ignore those threats because he doesn’t understand them?
And what happens when his inability to admit a mistake meets his ignorance regarding facts and science? Climate change is certainly one such threat, but there are myriad others that come to mind.
Bottom line, Sharpiegate exposed both emotional and intellectual shortcomings in our president that could have dire consequences were those ever to be tested. Let us pray they are not, for if they are, prayer may be all we have.
2/04/2019
Donald Trump: Thinking Fast & Slow or Not at All
“Five percent think, ten percent think they think and 85% would rather die than think.” - Thomas Edison
There is a revealing moment early in HBO’s new documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” where Donald Trump is shown expressing his hatred - yes, hatred - for the young men accused of the 1989 rape and beating a female jogger in New York’s Central Park. He argues that if society needs a little hate for justice to be served, then so be it. He would eventually take out full-page ads in the city’s four major papers calling for a return to the death penalty. As New York reporter Pete Hamill, subject of the documentary, wrote at the time, “Snarling and heartless and fraudulently tough, insisting on the virtues of stupidity, it was the epitome of blind negation. Hate was just another luxury and Trump stood naked…Forget poverty and its causes…Fry them into passivity.”
It was an early insight into dark heart and empty mind of the man who would become President of the United States.
Yet as much as those early clips presaged what we’ve come to know about the future president – the rash judgment, the disregard for basic civil rights, the racial overtones as he appealed to the public’s worst instincts – it was the aftermath that is perhaps more telling and far more troubling. And we are just now seeing the cost of putting such a man in the Oval Office. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first...
The Central Park Five, as the five men Donald Trump wanted to see die would come to be known, eventually had their convictions vacated in 2002, when a convicted rapist provided an accurate and detailed confession to the crime, including non-public evidence known only by the police that could be used to confirm a confessor was knowledgeable about the case, backed up by DNA evidence that not only proved his guilt, but exonerated the Central Park Five.
Donald Trump was not moved. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he maintained they were guilty and refused to apologize for his false accusations that helped create the mob justice mindset that surrounded their initial trial. As recently as 2016, a quarter century after the initial assault and fourteen years following their vindication, then-candidate Trump was still proclaiming their guilt, lamenting their release and criticizing the settlement they had received from the city.
This is classic Trump - react without thinking, internalize that thoughtless instinct, then refuse to let go regardless what evidence to the contrary might exist. As one White House aide states in Bob Woodward’s book Fear, “There are some things on which he’s already reached a conclusion, it doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter what arguments you offer, he’s not listening.”
This should come as no surprise. The president’s own words suggest a decision-making process absent thought or facts. Last November, on Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, he told the Washington Post, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” Regarding climate change, he said, “I have a natural instinct for science.” In neither case did he offer a basis for his opinion, nor did he indicate that he’d studied the reasoning behind the Fed’s decision or the science underlying climate change. Instead, all he had was a gut feel and he went with it.
He’s gone with his gut many times. Consider the decisions made with little to no justification outside of sound bite reasoning:
He pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
He pulled out of the Paris climate change accord
He pulled out of the Iran nuclear treaty
He pulled out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia
He announced an abrupt withdrawal of our troops from Syria
The president justifies these decisions on his gut instinct and, as he told Morning Joe back in 2016, his “very good brain.”
But science does not back him up. Despite what the president claims, and many of his supporters believe, we do not make good decisions when we go with instinct. In fact, we are far likelier to be wildly wrong when we go with our gut. And those who believe they are immune to this truth are often the worst offenders. This is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the well-known phenomenon where people tend to overestimate their knowledge or ability, especially among people of low ability (the opposite tends to be true of high-performing people, who tend to underestimate their abilities since they are more likely to know what they don’t know or at least recognize that they probably don’t know everything about a given topic). Two quotes capture this quite well: William Butler Yeats’ observation that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” and Henry Kissinger’s assertion that "To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." Donald Trump would appear to fall into Kissinger’s latter category.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the famed Israeli psychologists who essentially created the field of behavioral psychology demonstrated time and again the bad decisions humans make when they go on instinct rather than data. Their work became the basis for everything from data science to Moneyball. They showed humans were so inept at making gut decisions that when asked if their work was the basis for artificial intelligence, Dr. Tversky drolly replied no, that what they studied was natural stupidity.
And yet, we have a president - a rather unintelligent one at that - who relies exclusively, proudly on his natural stupidity. We can only pray that his stupidity doesn’t become ours.
12/20/2018
A Father's Lesson
Robert J. Szydlowski, November 15, 1930 - December 7, 2018
When my mom was sick, my dad kept imploring her to get up and keep moving. It was his sweetly desperate attempt to make sure the moving never stopped. But sweet as it may have been, I always wondered how he would respond when it was his turn. Well, let’s just say he walked the walk. Seriously, how many people confined to a wheelchair, too weak to stand – too weak to even lift their legs into the wheelchair footrests – and tied to oxygen tanks would allow, let alone demand, that they be carried downstairs to the Polish Village for lunch, spend five hours at the casino, attend mass and the Usher/Daughter Christmas party, watch the Lions, enjoy a shrimp dinner with his family and entertain his work buddies while Facetiming another in from Florida all AFTER receiving the Last Rites? His last weekend was just this side of Weekend at Bernie’s, with the only exception being that Bernie was calling the shots.It seems only appropriate that the first person mentioned in my dad’s eulogy was my mom because like Hope and Crosby, Lennon and McCartney or Ricky and Lucy, Bob and Joanne were meant to be together - and not just in a way where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. It was more than that. They were something special, a perfect, transcendent complement to each other.
I’ve long said that my mom taught us how we could be – finding the humor in everything, teaching us to laugh – especially at ourselves – and to understand that no matter how bad things might get, someday they would make a great story.
Meanwhile, my dad taught us how we should be. Honest, disciplined, generous, faithful, humble. Those lessons often came via his one-line lessons on life, such as the time he gave Pam money to buy school supplies. When she returned, he asked for his change, to which Pam replied, “But dad, it’s only 6 cents.” To which my dad replied, “Yeah, but whose 6 cents is it?” The lesson? If it’s not yours, it’s not yours to decide.
Or the time he stood watching quietly as I subtly improved my lie before chipping up to the green. Only after we’d putted out and were walking off the green did he say, while looking straight ahead, “How will you ever know how good you really are if you don’t play by the rules?” The lesson: It doesn’t matter what you accomplish if you don’t do it the right way.
And sometimes those lessons were passed on in a single word that I think only six of us in this room ever heard him utter: “No.”
But more often than not, those lessons were delivered through his actions – actions that made it seem he was incapable of saying “no.” His 56 years as an usher at St. Kieren’s, quietly served. His selflessness in taking care of his mother and her sisters when all he wanted to do was travel in retirement with my mom. Or arranging for a car for a soldier recovering from war wounds in a Philippine hospital, simply because he could. We all have such stories of his selflessness.
It was the humility inherent in all those acts that was probably my dad’s defining trait. His favorite movie was Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” and he would frequently quote the line, “You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.” Just by chance, my favorite poem is Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” which includes the line
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch
I can think of no better way to describe my dad. He could certainly walk with kings – if he had a problem with his retirement benefits, he didn’t call HR, he called the CEO of GM. When I showed him how Jefferson’s high school stats compared with that year’s top pick in the draft, he promptly sent those stats to Dave Dombrowski, President of the Detroit Tigers. Dave Dombrowski responded, expressing his appreciation for my dad’s love of his grandson and a promise to check Jefferson out – with the Tigers’ head of scouting copied on the reply.
When he retired, he received letters from auto executives and government ministers from around the world, including one from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Commerce, Malcolm Baldridge, thanking him for his work on behalf of the US auto industry and the American people.
So, yes, he could walk with kings.
But, to me, far more important was his way with crowds, and nowhere could that be better seen than at a Tigers game. Anyone who ever attended a game with my dad knows he was the King of Comerica Park, greeted like a returning hero by everyone from the time he pulled into the parking lot until he got to his seat. My most memorable moment – perhaps the most memorable of all my memorable moments anywhere with dad – took place when he was taking Hannah, Jefferson and me to a game. And I am so, so grateful the kids were there to see this. As we were pulling into the lot, the parking attendant – a rather large, young, black woman – reached into the car to give my dad a hug, while telling us, “I sure do love your daddy!” That wasn’t what I was expecting, so I waited until we pulled away to ask what that was all about.
My dad simply said, “Oh, she just graduated from dental hygiene school and I got her a card and a gift. I just want to support stuff like that.”
To my dad it was no big deal. Just a simple card and gift. But it was so much more. It wasn’t the card or the gift. It was that he had taken the time and interest in a parking lot attendant, a young woman like hundreds and thousands of others we all meet and dismiss every day. But not my dad. To him, she was SOMEBODY.
That is my dad’s lesson and his legacy. King or commoner, CEO or parking lot attendant, we are no better and no worse, no more and no less, than anyone else. We all matter.
So, while Gunga Din might have been thought a better man than Cary Grant or Colonel Weed, or whoever the character was my dad quoted, I can honestly say, in the true spirit of the way you lived your life, Dad, that there was no man better than you.
11/26/2018
When Do We Finally Say Enough?
I want to ask each of us to look into the mirror and into our own hearts. And to be honest with ourselves, if not with each other.
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy by stating those coming from Mexico were rapists and drug smugglers, assuming “some” were good people, meaning most in his mind were not good people, did you speak out against it for the lie that it was, or did you look the other way – or worse, accept that it was true?
When he referred to those arriving at our border this past summer as an “infestation,” were you repulsed by the dehumanizing ugliness of the term, disgusted that words meant to describe rodents and cockroaches were used to describe our fellow human beings, or did you look the other way – or worse, agree it was an apt description?
When we ripped families apart, sending infants and toddlers hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from their parents, did you suffer a pain in your gut and an aching in your heart for the cruel, inhumane act done in our name, or did you look the other way – or worse, feel it was justified?
And when our government tear-gassed toddlers in diapers at our border, did you recognize we were crossing a line, where our fear and anger at others was turning us violent against mothers, fathers and children, or did you look the other way – or worse, cheer because you felt it was about time?
If you are not, finally, among the repulsed, I need to ask what it will take. When do you say enough is enough? Because this is how it happens. This is how it always happens. First we accuse others of being the source of our pain – our joblessness, our low pay, our crime. Then we paint with a broad brush, telling lies about the evil of those “others.” Then, we begin to see them as something less than human. It makes it easier to accept inhumane acts because, well, how can one be inhumane to one not really human. And all along, we look the other way, or worse we cheer. We are doing it to men, women and children along our border. It’s been done to men, women and children as long as man has created borders real and imagined between us and "them."
How else would nations that gave us Confucius and Tchaikovsky and Einstein fall under the spell of men like Mao and Stalin and Hitler. Simple. They start with small insults, desensitizing us to the larger atrocities to come. And by the time those atrocities come, we don't recognize them for the horrors they are. We are witnessing just such a progression in our own backyard, done in our name. So the question again, is when do we say enough? Is it when we attack children. Is it when we tear them from their parents? Is it when we refer to them as vermin? Or is it when we lie about them in the first place. If you haven’t taken a stand yet, it is not too late. But if you once again choose to look the other way, understand that you are an enabler – and well on the way to becoming just as much an accomplice as anyone in history who chose to simply look the other way.
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy by stating those coming from Mexico were rapists and drug smugglers, assuming “some” were good people, meaning most in his mind were not good people, did you speak out against it for the lie that it was, or did you look the other way – or worse, accept that it was true?
When he referred to those arriving at our border this past summer as an “infestation,” were you repulsed by the dehumanizing ugliness of the term, disgusted that words meant to describe rodents and cockroaches were used to describe our fellow human beings, or did you look the other way – or worse, agree it was an apt description?
When we ripped families apart, sending infants and toddlers hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from their parents, did you suffer a pain in your gut and an aching in your heart for the cruel, inhumane act done in our name, or did you look the other way – or worse, feel it was justified?
And when our government tear-gassed toddlers in diapers at our border, did you recognize we were crossing a line, where our fear and anger at others was turning us violent against mothers, fathers and children, or did you look the other way – or worse, cheer because you felt it was about time?
If you are not, finally, among the repulsed, I need to ask what it will take. When do you say enough is enough? Because this is how it happens. This is how it always happens. First we accuse others of being the source of our pain – our joblessness, our low pay, our crime. Then we paint with a broad brush, telling lies about the evil of those “others.” Then, we begin to see them as something less than human. It makes it easier to accept inhumane acts because, well, how can one be inhumane to one not really human. And all along, we look the other way, or worse we cheer. We are doing it to men, women and children along our border. It’s been done to men, women and children as long as man has created borders real and imagined between us and "them."
How else would nations that gave us Confucius and Tchaikovsky and Einstein fall under the spell of men like Mao and Stalin and Hitler. Simple. They start with small insults, desensitizing us to the larger atrocities to come. And by the time those atrocities come, we don't recognize them for the horrors they are. We are witnessing just such a progression in our own backyard, done in our name. So the question again, is when do we say enough? Is it when we attack children. Is it when we tear them from their parents? Is it when we refer to them as vermin? Or is it when we lie about them in the first place. If you haven’t taken a stand yet, it is not too late. But if you once again choose to look the other way, understand that you are an enabler – and well on the way to becoming just as much an accomplice as anyone in history who chose to simply look the other way.
11/01/2018
Toward a More Perfect Union
America is not perfect - it never has been. Our founding fathers understood that, which is why the Preamble to our Constitution states it's purpose is to form a more perfect union. We have been faithful to that promise, moving steadily, if haltingly toward that more perfect union. That progress has included the end of slavery, the end of separate but equal, the recognition that internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was an abomination. It's meant recognizing Joe McCarthy for the shameless demagogue he was and Martin Luther King for the transcendent figure he was. It's meant giving women the vote, an African-American the presidency and gay Americans the right to share their life and love like everyone else.
It is the nation that saved the world from two global wars and sought no land or treasure in return, only peace and liberty for both the victorious and the vanquished. It ensured stability for trade, safe harbor for those faced with oppression, and armed reassurance to those faced with a Soviet threat across their border. As a result, the world has enjoyed the most peaceful seventy years in human history. Mankind has the United States of America, and the generosity and sacrifice of it's people, to thank for that.
The arc of our history is as clear as it is dramatic. We have an opportunity to keep America on its path and pedestal, serving as a beacon and example to the rest of the world. We can seek to be generous and open or selfish and closed. We can be confident and resolute or fearful and vindictive. We can believe in the future, or long for a past that never was. The choice we make will determine whether we continue to be the America the world seeks to follow, or a nation unrecognizable from which the world turns away. That opportunity, that choice presents itself this Tuesday.
Vote.
It is the nation that saved the world from two global wars and sought no land or treasure in return, only peace and liberty for both the victorious and the vanquished. It ensured stability for trade, safe harbor for those faced with oppression, and armed reassurance to those faced with a Soviet threat across their border. As a result, the world has enjoyed the most peaceful seventy years in human history. Mankind has the United States of America, and the generosity and sacrifice of it's people, to thank for that.
The arc of our history is as clear as it is dramatic. We have an opportunity to keep America on its path and pedestal, serving as a beacon and example to the rest of the world. We can seek to be generous and open or selfish and closed. We can be confident and resolute or fearful and vindictive. We can believe in the future, or long for a past that never was. The choice we make will determine whether we continue to be the America the world seeks to follow, or a nation unrecognizable from which the world turns away. That opportunity, that choice presents itself this Tuesday.
Vote.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)