Author Archives: Sheila

Too Good Not To Steal

Mo Hosseini describes himself as a Palestinian American who is tired of stupid people. I hadn’t heard of him, but one of my sons sent me “50 Completely True Things” he had published in Medium. The 50 Things addressed the war in Gaza, and the list was so good–so compelling–it practically demanded widespread sharing.

Both my son and I were particularly partial to #39, but the entire list, with the possible exception of #50, was dead-on accurate–cutting through the bias and handwringing and pomposity that has dominated the punditry.

So–with attribution and gratitude (and apologies to anyone offended by some of the language) I’m sharing all 50.

FACT No. 1.
Some Jews are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 2.
Some Muslims are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 3.
Some Christians are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 4.
Some Arabs are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 5.
Some Americans are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 6.
Some Israelis are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 7.
Some Palestinians are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 8.
Not all Jews are Israelis.
 
FACT No. 9.
Not all Israelis are Jews.
 
FACT No. 10.
Not all Jews are white.
 
FACT No. 11.
Not all Israelis are white.
 
FACT No. 12.
Not all Muslims are Arabs.
 
FACT No. 13.
Not all Arabs are Muslim.
 
FACT No. 14.
Not all Palestinians are Muslim.
 
FACT No. 15.
Not all Arabs are Palestinian.
 
FACT No. 16.
Not all Palestinians are Hamas.
 
FACT No. 17.
Texans are not Arizonans.
 
FACT No. 18.
Germans are not Dutch.
 
FACT No. 19.
Palestinians are not Jordanians.
 
FACT No. 20.
Egyptians are not Palestinians.
 
FACT No. 21.
Where you are born does not actually determine anything about you.
 
FACT No. 22.
Your passport is not your political beliefs.
 
FACT No. 23.
Your government is not your morality.
 
FACT No. 24.
Not all Jews like the Israeli government.
 
FACT No. 25.
Not all Israelis like the Israeli government.
 
FACT No. 26.
Not all Palestinians like the Palestinian government.
 
FACT No. 27.
Israeli governments have committed acts of terror and violence against the Palestinian people.
 
FACT No. 28.
Palestinian organizations have committed acts of terror and violence against the Israeli people.
 
FACT No. 29.
US leaders do things that I do not agree with (e.g., 2016–2020)
 
FACT No. 30.
Israeli leaders do things that Israelis do not agree with.
 
FACT No. 31.
Palestinian leaders do things that Palestinians do not agree with.
 
FACT No. 32.
What happened to the Israeli civilians on 10/7 is fucking awful, and Hamas has earned every fucking thing that the Israeli military throws at them.
 
FACT No. 33.
What is happening in Gaza to civilians is fucking awful, and not the smartest thing for Israel to do, and some aspects of Israeli military activity may be war crimes, and it doesn’t have to be genocide for it to be tragic.
 
FACT No. 34.
You can advocate for Palestine without being a racist, antisemitic piece of shit.
 
FACT No. 35.
You can advocate for Israel without being a racist, anti-Arab piece of shit.
 
FACT No. 36.
People like to have sex with each other, and they sometimes procreate with people outside their tribes.
 
FACT No. 37.
No one in the Levant is indigenous. Every fucking empire in history has fucked their way through the Levant. There is no pure indigeneity. And let’s be honest: the entire planet has been colonized by hominids from the Great Rift Valley.
 
FACT No. 38.
Palestinians and Israelis share paternal Bronze-Age DNA. Yes, even Ashkenazi Jews.
 
FACT No. 39.
Stop with the fucking history lessons about what the Israelites did, or what the Ottomans did, or what the British did, or whatever. IT IS FUCKING IMMATERIAL. There is a pile of dog shit in the living room. Instead of arguing about whose dog took the bigger shit in the living room, maybe focus on how we clean up the dog shit, and maybe we keep the dogs outside.
 
FACT No. 40.
Any people have a right to group together and self-identify as whatever-the-fuck-they-want-to-self-identify as. When they get large enough as a group, those people have the right to self-determination and self-respect and a state where they can control their own destinies.
 
FACT No. 41.
Whether you like the idea or not, the Israeli state exists. It will also continue to exist until the ISRAELI people decide they don’t want it to exist. Your opinion on this matter (if you are not Israeli) is fucking immaterial.
 
FACT No. 42.
Whether you like the idea or not, a Palestinian state will exist at some point, and it will continue to exist until the PALESTINIAN people decide they don’t want it to exist. Your opinion on this matter (if you are not Palestinian) is fucking immaterial.
 
FACT No. 43.
You cannot bomb a people into true submission — the Blitz did not ‘soften’ British morale.
 
FACT No. 44.
You cannot fight a war and kill a people’s desire for safety, freedom, and self-determination. You can stifle it. You can try to ignore it, but one way or another, you will have to deal with it. This is as true for my Israeli friends as it is for my Palestinian ones.
 
FACT No. 45.
The solution to the Middle East conflict will not be found on Threads, or TikTok, or in the streets of any city that isn’t within a 2-hour car ride from downtown Jerusalem.
 
FACT No. 46.
If you want to be an ally to Palestinians, please feel free to continue to advocate for peace, security, and self-determination, but do it without dehumanizing or stereotyping Israelis and Jews.
 
FACT No. 47.
If you want to be an ally to Israelis, please feel free to continue to advocate for peace, security, and self-determination, but do it without dehumanizing or stereotyping Palestinians and Muslims, and Arabs.
 
FACT No. 48.
If you just want to advocate for peace, try to be a voice for reason, and don’t inflame or over-simplify an already chaotic, complicated, and deeply emotional issue. Help people find common ground and help bring the temperature down. You can be moral and stand up for what you believe in without being an asshole.
 
FACT No. 49.
Yes, an amazing one-state liberal democracy where Palestinian boys & girls could fuck Israeli boys & girls & make cute babies, & everybody spoke Hebrew & Arabic & we all agreed that hummus and falafel are delicious and Palestinian and sufganiyot are delicious and Israeli would be awesome. But this wonderful future has about as much chance of happening in the near term as this 5’8″ 53-year-old Palestinian has being a starter for the Golden State Warriors. A two-state solution is the only workable one.
 
FACT No. 50.
Hummus is Palestinian. I am immovable on this.
Don’t fucking @ me
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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HCR Connects The Dots

One of Heather Cox Richardson’s recent Letters clarified–in a way I’d not seen elsewhere–the stakes of our upcoming election. She began by reporting on a recent interview in which Bill Barr, who headed the Department of Justice under Trump, acknowledged Trump’s volatility and unstable behavior, but then indicated his intent to vote for him.

When the interviewer asked him why he planned to vote for someone he knew had tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power–someone incapable of achieving his own policies, who lies repeatedly, and faces multiple criminal charges–Barr responded, “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

Just wow.

Later, Richardson shared a speech Barr had delivered that illuminates that otherwise incomprehensible response. The speech was a defense of the so-called “unitary executive” theory (a “president as king” theory, the origin of which has been attributed to Samuel Alito.)

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.

That is the unbridgeable gulf we face. The over-riding question Americans will face in November is whether the United States will continue to be the secular democratic republic bequeathed to us by the nation’s founders, or a Christian Nationalist theocracy.

As Richardson noted, a number of pundits have shared a recent, blistering diatribe by George Stephanopolis, focusing on the numerous other differences between the upcoming election and previous contests.

“Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

Stephanopolis’ passionate summation was absolutely correct–but it was also incomplete. What he neglected to add was that those who are prepared to ignore all of it–prepared to cast a ballot for this wretched joke of a man– are motivated by an underlying philosophy utterly incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Christian Nationalism–not to be confused with genuine Christianity–often cloaked in legal jargon about a “unitary executive” and MAGA slogans about putting America First–is at the root of Trump support. MAGA Republicans are all about remaking America into their version of a “Christian Nation,” and we are just now beginning to see that movement for the racist, misogynist, utterly regressive effort it is.

This is no time to debate the merits of this or that policy. We can argue policy later. In November, we need to prevent MAGA Christian Nationalists from turning America into the country of Bob Barr’s wet dreams.

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It’s We, The People

Robert Kagan recently published a lengthy excerpt from his recent book  “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart — Again” in the Washington Post.

In it, he dismissed a variety of explanations for the MAGA embrace of Trump–discarding arguments that the movement is a result of rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses. Instead, he pinned it on failures of We the People.

It is what the Founders worried about and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue. They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest. Although James Madison and his colleagues hoped to establish a government on the solid foundation of self-interest, even Madison acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans.

Kagan worries that too many of us no longer care about preserving the system the Founders bequeathed us–a system based on the principles of universal equality and natural rights. Preserving that system, he says, “plain and simple, is what this election is about.”

“A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin allegedly said of the government created by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This is the year we may choose not to keep it.

Kagan follows that sentence with an extended recap of what most Americans know–about the intent of the January 6th insurrection, about Trump’s candid announcements of his goals, about the unconscionable failure of the Senate to use impeachment, the mechanism provided by the Founders, to negate the threat of further insurrection. Then he gets to the crux of his argument.

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. This should not come as a shock, for it is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it is as old as the republic. Historians have written about the “liberal tradition” in America, but there has from the beginning also been an anti-liberal tradition: large numbers of Americans determined to preserve preliberal traditions, hierarchies and beliefs against the secular liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. The Founders based the republic on a radical set of principles and assertions about government: that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.

That paragraph introduced a lengthy historical discussion in which Kagan reminded readers that MAGA is really nothing new. Throughout our history, significant numbers of Americans have rejected the classical liberal foundations of the nation’s constituent documents–and especially the notion of civic equality.

For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism”….

Kagan reminds us that the fury on the Right against “wokeness” is nothing new. “Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism.”

There is much more, and it is definitely worth reading in its entirety.

Bottom line: MAGA’s Christian Nationalism is nothing new. In November, We the People will either defend our “natural rights” or we will lose them.

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Doonesbury Nails It

Stinging humor has been one of the more notable characteristics of what I devoutly hope will NOT be known as “the age of Trump.” Late-night comedians have gone where GOP politicians terrified of their MAGA base (and Democrats persuaded to  “go high” when Republicans “go low”) have failed to go. 

The result has been a situation in which the most biting–and frequently, most accurate–commentary has come from stand-up comedians and the Sunday funnies. Last Sunday, Doonesbury used a fictional psychiatrist to echo observations and conclusions that have been discussed for several months by real mental health professionals: Trump is rapidly slipping into dementia.

Elias–Doonesbury’s fictional “resident psychiatrist”– points to the symptoms: repeatedly mixing people up (not just forgetting names, which happens to all of us, but calling Biden Obama or Haley Pelosi); phonemic paraphasia (“freestyling” off the stem of a word); slurring; semantic aphasia; and tangental speech. The last panel of the cartoon is a warning, showing nonsense words coming out of the White House.

In all fairness, I didn’t find the Sunday strip funny. I did find it educational–and terrifying.

Trump’s “word salads” have been the subject of innumerable Facebook jokes and memes, but mental health professionals and pundits agree that his more recent speeches and outbursts have changed in nature. The Doonesbury labels appear to fit.

Phonemic paraphasia, for example, is defined as a disorder in which incorrect phonemes are substituted. For example, one may say “spot” instead of “pot.” Literal paraphasia could also be switching syllables or creating reverse compound words such as “markbook” instead of “bookmark.” There are differing types; according to Wikipedia,

Wernicke’s aphasia is characterized by fluent language with made up or unnecessary words with little or no meaning to speech. Those who suffer from this type of aphasia have difficulty understanding others speech and are unaware of their own mistakes. When corrected they will repeat their verbal paraphasias and have trouble finding the correct word….

Phonemic paraphasia, also referred to as phonological paraphasia or literal paraphasia, refers to the substitution of a word with a nonword that preserves at least half of the segments and/or number of syllables of the intended word. This can lead to a variety of errors, including formal ones, in which one word is replaced with another phonologically related to the intended word; phonemic ones, in which one word is replaced with a nonword phonologically related to the intended word; and approximations, an attempt to find the word without producing either a word or nonword. These types of errors are associated with Wernicke’s aphasia, among others. Phonemic paraphasias are often caused by lesions to the external capsule, extending to the posterior part of the temporal lobe or internal capsule.

Wikipedia defines “semantic aphasia”as a “progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by loss of semantic memory in both the verbal and non-verbal domains. However, the most common presenting symptoms are in the verbal domain (with loss of word meaning). Semantic dementia is a disorder of semantic memory that causes patients to lose the ability to match words or images to their meanings.”

Tangential speech is a communication disorder in which the train of thought of the speaker wanders and shows a lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic of the conversation. (Full disclosure: my kids will tell you I have this one…although usually I do– eventually– return to the initial topic.)

Quite obviously, I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. Neither is Gary Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoonist. That said, Trudeau hasn’t created this diagnosis out of thin air or political pique–increasing numbers of mental health professionals have raised alarms. It began during his first term, with “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” in which 27 psychiatrists evaluated concerning aspects of his personality; and has accelerated with psychologists warning of the dangers posed by  more recent evidence of his mental decline. (One example: Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell University who has been critical of the former president’s mental health since he was first elected, said Trump was showing clear signs of onset dementia.)

It doesn’t correlate with age. Some people “lose it” at sixty; others are mentally sharp at 100.

And it isn’t simply the bone-chilling prospect of a single, truly demented head of state. The Trump presidency has illuminated a challenge going forward. It has become standard for candidates to share their medical evaluations with the voting public; is it time to require aspirants for high office to be screened for mental illnesses? 

And given some of our past Chief Executives, where would we set the bar?

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Allow Me To Translate..And Pontificate

In a recent column in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall once again returned to the subject of political polarization, and–as is his typical approach–quoted scholars on the subject. As a former member of that tribe, I will admit that the problem with quoting academics is the occasional impenetrability of the language. (It’s not a problem limited to academia–not long after becoming Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I was counseled by a member of the national staff to stop sounding like an “ACLU lawyer.” Every career has its jargon…)

At any rate, allow me to quote–and then translate–one of the scholars who responded to Edsall:

Interventions to reduce affective polarization will be ineffective if they operate only at the individual, emotional level. Ignoring the role of polarizing politicians and political incentives to instrumentalize affective polarization for political gain will fail to generate change while enhancing cynicism when polite conversations among willing participants do not generate prodemocratic change.

In other words, polarization isn’t just a matter of individual hostility for those on the other “team.” Political leadership bears considerable responsibility for MAGA resistance to democratic norms. The polarization reflected in our everyday conversations is cultivated by political “culture warriors” like Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Green and her Indiana clone, Jim Banks. As a different scholar (one evidently more comfortable with normal English usage) put it:

I don’t think any bottom-up intervention is going to solve a problem that is structural. You could reduce misperceptions for a day or two, or put diverse groups together for an hour, but these people will be polarized again as soon as they are exposed once more to campaign rhetoric.

A recent study evidently found that widespread popular opposition to anti-democratic policies is insufficient to prevent their adoption. That research found that what the scholars called “backsliding behavior by elites” occurred irrespective of a lack of public approval or support; and that much of the problem is rooted in the fact that “Americans, despite their distaste for norm violations, continue to elect representatives whose policies and actions threaten democracy.”

In other words–and this will most definitely not come as a shock to any citizen who’s been paying even the slightest attention–virtually all of the current dysfunctions of governance are caused by the various doofuses we’re electing. (I cannot restrain myself from reminding you, dear readers, that it is frequently thanks to gerrymandering that we are electing these performative, anti-democratic culture warriors.)

As another scholar opined,

Whatever techniques might exist to reduce citizen animosity must be accompanied by efforts to reduce hostility among elected officials. It doesn’t matter if we can make someone more positive toward the other party if that effect is quickly undone by watching cable news, reading social media, or otherwise listening to divisive political elites.

In other words–as several of the researchers contacted by Edsall confirmed– positive effects of efforts to intervene and ameliorate polarization “are almost immediately nullified by the hostile rhetoric in contemporary politics.”

A professor of psychological science at the University of California-Irvine attributed the persistence of polarization to what he dubbed a “moralized political environment,” and that phrase resonated with me. I am hardly the only person to see today’s political disputes as evidence that contemporary political combat takes place between partisans who hold significantly different values. 

As Edsall noted,

The issues dividing the parties have changed. When the two parties fought over size of government, taxes, social welfare programs, it was possible for partisans to imagine a compromise that is more or less acceptable even if not ideal. Compromise on issues like abortion, gender roles, L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, the role of religion is much more difficult. So losing feels like more of a threat to people’s values.

From my vantage point, we have moved from good faith arguments about the proper approach to various issues–the “how”–to arguments about “whether.” Rather than debating, say, the best way to feed poor children, we confront self-identified “pro life” politicians who simply oppose spending any tax dollars on food for poor children. Rather than debates about America’s global role and the least dangerous way to approach Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine, political figures like Braun and Banks vote–as conservative George Will wrote–“to assure Vladimir Putin’s attempt to erase a European nation.” Etcetera.

We aren’t having “political” arguments. We are having deeply moral ones.

Survey research confirms that a majority of the American public is on the right side of those moral debates–but that obsolete political structures allow MAGA Republicans–a statistical minority– to ignore We the People.

Political structures empowering ideological minorities are the reason we can’t just “make nice” and “all get along.”

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