Category Archives: Random Blogging

Why It Matters

A recent newsletter from Charlie Sykes really resonated with me. Sykes began by exploring why he focused on political reporting–why he didn’t turn his face from the disastrous dismantling of the American Idea to more pleasant concerns. Why is he reporting on Trump and his merry band of morons and psychopaths, rather than listening to music, or learning a new language, or spending more time with his grandchildren?

As he wrote,

I’m at the age now when every twinge or ache makes me think: is this the thing that’s going to kill me? So why am I devoting so much of my time to writing about the stupid, the inane, and the futile? How many years do I have to squander on Donald F’ing Trump?

I really related to that question. Like Sykes, I’m at a “certain age.” And I am one of the very fortunate–I still really, really like my spouse of 45 years; my children (who have evidently overlooked my deficits as a parent while they were growing up) are attentive and caring; my grandchildren are perfect (okay, maybe I’m a bit over-fond…); our blended family is loving and compatible, and–at least until Trump destroys the robust economy he inherited from the Biden administration–we have enough money in our retirement funds to live comfortably. I should be happy all the time.

Instead–as regular readers undoubtedly recognize–I’m routinely livid. Like Sykes, I sometimes wonder why I allow the country’s fraught political situation to displace the good fortune for which I should be grateful, so I was interested in his conclusion, which rested on an essay by former political pundit Charles Krauthammer.

A man of Renaissance sensibilities, Krauthammer could have written about literally anything, but he chose to write about politics, because he knew that was the one thing we had to get right.

“In the end,” he wrote, “all the beautiful, elegant things in life, the things that I care about, the things that matter, depend on getting the politics right. Because in those societies where they get it wrong, everything else is destroyed, everything else is leveled.” Krauthammer was echoing John Adams who wrote: “I must study politics and war, so that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”

But Krauthammer had the added benefit of our own grim history.

“You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures,” he wrote. “Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.”

Sykes quotes Krauthammer for his observations about the extreme importance of governance and politics, pointing to examples like North Korea, “whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material,” and to China’s Cultural Revolution, which he labeled a “sustained act of national self-immolation” that aimed “to destroy five millennia of Chinese culture.”

“The entire 20th Century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War One not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europe’s senseless self inflicted devastation forever changed western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues, and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly — to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state — that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution.

“Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now vanished world of European Jewry.”

I think it was Santayana who said “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

Those of us who did learn history–or at least a great deal of it–can choose to do one of two things. Those of us who have the option can burrow back into our comfortable lives and ignore the current fascist takeover, or we can join together with others who are determined to fight the malignant forces that threaten all of us, but especially those whose lives are more precarious.

When you think about it, unless you are a very self-engrossed person, it isn’t much of a choice.

I’ve been working with Central Indiana Indivisible. I hope those of you in the area will join me. If you can’t attend protests and participate in other resistance activities–and even if you can– you can support them financially here.

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Borowitz Shames Legacy Media

Sometimes it takes comedy to cut through the fog and propaganda. Back in the day, my husband and I were devoted watchers of The Daily Show–a time when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert skillfully skewered the pompous and self-important. (Admittedly, these days, we look at those we thought of as the “bad guys” with something approaching fondness. Compared to Trump and his collection of nutcases and incompetents, they look positively cuddly…)

Recently, the satirical Borowitz Report took on the legacy media’s obsession with President Biden’s decline while in office–an obsession fed by a book accusing his staff of “hiding” the effects of aging. His take was perfect.

In a bombshell report that stirred controversy on Tuesday, a prominent conspiracy theorist claimed that Joe Biden concealed his health problems by making the American economy boom for four straight years.

“Biden thought he could hide his health issues by making the U.S. economy the envy of the world,” the conspiracist, Harland Dorrinson, said. “Low unemployment, a surging stock market, and a stable dollar all played their parts in the cover-up.”

Strengthening NATO and bolstering relationships with allies were also key components of Biden’s elaborate scheme to hide his health woes, Dorrinson said.

“Biden kept the media distracted by making the US trusted and respected around the world,” he said. “Trump would never do that.”

The Biden presidency wasn’t perfect, but it was transformational, repairing the international damage done during Trump’s first term and growing the economy “from the middle out” as he liked to say. Perhaps, as he faded, some of those advances were managed by the highly competent people around him, but they were real. The government worked. Rather than focusing on the substantial progress being made, however, the legacy media jumped on every gaffe, every stumble. 

That disproportionate attention to the ravages of age would have been less offensive had the same degree of attention been paid to Trump’s far more obvious mental illness and decline. But the same media that criticised Biden unmercifully has continually sane-washed Trump.

I agree with Robert Hubbell, who finds the differences in coverage maddening and incomprehensible. Noting the recent “tell-all” book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson claiming that Biden’s advisors “covered up” his “decline,” he wrote:

Let’s put aside for a moment that several of the key figures who allegedly witnessed events described in the book have said publicly, “Not true. It didn’t happen.”

Let’s put aside for a moment that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson were writing a book about an alleged “cover up” when they were actively reporting on Joe Biden’s presidency, but never mentioned the “cover up” that they were allegedly discovering through 200 interviews.

Let’s put aside the implausability of the notion that one could “cover up” the cognitive state of a man who was appearing daily at campaign events, delivering addresses to Congress where he outwitted the entire Republican caucus, providing interviews to major media outlets, and guiding America through a period of stable foreign relations and successful domestic policy.

If it was a “cover-up,” it didn’t prevent major media outlets from reporting daily on Joe Biden’s age, stutter, stiff gait, and alleged gaffes.

Hubbell does agree that there was a coverup.

Donald Trump was, and is, cognitively impaired. And that fact is being covered up by the media every single day.

We all know it. The press knows it. His advisors know it. But the media gives a fraction of the coverage to Trump’s much more serious manifestations of cognitive decline than to the anonymous reporting in Jake Tapper’s sensationalized book.

Hubbell is absolutely correct when he says that the coverage media is giving today to claims about a former president who guided our nation through one of the most successful presidencies in the modern era is shameful when compared to the normalizing coverage of an “obviously cognitively impaired president who is violating the Constitution on a daily basis and running an administration that seems to be an open cesspool of graft.”

As Norman Orenstein observed, “I have a hard time watching journalists high five each other over books on WH covering up for Biden. A diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election. False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.” 

Hubbell is entirely correct when he accuses the legacy media of failing America–of failing to provide appropriate coverage of the threat posed by Trump. “And they keep doing it. To their everlasting shame.”

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It Isn’t Left And Right

I’ve become convinced that the contending “analyses” of MAGA/Christian Nationalist extremism and its far-left antagonists really misses the real nature of our current political and social distress. The root of our dysfunctions isn’t really policy differences or political orientations. It’s fundamentalism versus broad-mindedness.

A recent article from The American Prospect about the death of the right-wing crank David Horowitz reminded me of a conclusion I’d reached several years ago, when I became reacquainted with a distant cousin who had moved back to Indianapolis after many years on the West Coast. I hadn’t seen him since college, when I was one of the very few family members who defended his very unpopular left-wing political activism. (Despite being pretty conservative myself at the time,  I was appalled when Bloomington’s then-prosecutor brought charges against my cousin and a few others for their “socialist” activities.) 

Fast forward some thirty-plus years, and–lo and behold–he’d “evolved” into a Right-wing true believer. Just as doctrinaire, but from the opposite political pole.

The article about Horowitz made the point that such changes aren’t uncommon. (Remember the intellectuals who defended their move from Left to Right as a response to being “mugged by reality”?) Horowitz was a communist in early life who transitioned into a rabid Right-winger.

Decades before “woke” became a term of derogation, Horowitz began raging at the academic community: not just the far left, but even social democrats who criticized the far left, like Todd Gitlin, who figured prominently on a Horowitz-devised list of 100 dangerous academics who would be fired if Horowitz ruled the world. Even conservative leaders who declined to drink the Trump Kool-Aid were traitors to the cause: Writing in Breitbart, Horowitz labeled neocon Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew” for the sin of supporting a different presidential candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries. Fellow former lefties who’d repudiated the far left for mainstream conservatism, like the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern, also ran afoul of Horowitz’s diktats for their failure to join the far-right Visigoths taking arms in the culture wars. In 2021, Stern co-authored a New Republic piece with Ron Radosh (both of whom had known Horowitz since his far-left days) in which they documented Horowitz’s career-long commitment to violent extremism. “In that earlier era,” they wrote, “he celebrated the burning of a bank by a student mob. Today he’s an intellectual pyromaniac who honors the MAGA mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.”

Horowitz’ new certainties influenced some of the worst MAGA ideologues, including the odious Stephen Miller.

The problem with individuals who go from hard-Left to hard-Right–or from hard-Right to hard-Left–really has little to do with the “epiphanies” that trigger their philosophical changes. The real issue is their obvious need for doctrinal certainty in a very complicated and uncertain world. These are people who simply cannot tolerate the ambiguities of modern life–who are desperate for a world rendered in black and white, a world without any shades of gray.

Let’s think about that.

The noted jurist Learned Hand famously said that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” My youngest son has similarly distinguished “good religions”–which help people wrestle with moral dilemmas– from dangerous ones that tell people what they must believe and how they (and others) must act.

Neither of these insights are meant to suggest an apathetic approach to important values. They are, however, recognition of the importance of intellectual humility, what we might think of as a scientific approach to our understanding of the world we inhabit. (One of the reasons some religions reject science is because scientific hypotheses are always open to falsification. Absolute certainty is unavailable.)

Reasonable people can mediate or surmount most differences in policy preferences and political philosophy. (Granted, not all.) Fundamentalism, however, abhors and rejects compromises. It leaves no room for “agreeing to disagree.” The philosophy of “live and let live” that permeates America’s Bill of Rights is anathema to True Believers. 

Unfortunately, rigid adherence to any worldview– scriptural, dogmatic or ideological–inevitably leads to the drawing of distinctions between the ingroup of “righteous” folks and everyone else, and justifies all manner of inhumane behaviors.

I don’t know what psychological issues lead people to these rigid and dogmatic places. But I am convinced that the need for certainty, intolerance of difference, and the rejection of ambiguity and intellectual humility are far more damaging to the American Idea than the particulars of philosophy at either end of the political spectrum.

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Shades Of Scopes

Christian Nationalists have tried to discredit science ever since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Most Americans know about the Scopes litigation–probably thanks to the movie, Inherit the Wind–but fewer know that Scopes (and science) lost at that Tennessee trial.

It’s comforting, albeit misleading, to think that respect for science, the scientific method and empirical evidence eventually won out.

It’s misleading because the forces antagonistic to scientific research and verifiable knowledge haven’t yielded to logic or evidence. Those forces are alive and well in the Trump administration, and they are rapidly eradicating America’s longstanding global dominance in the creation of human knowledge.

The New York Tmes recently took a “deep dive” into the Trump administration’s war on scientific inquiry. Noting the resignation of the head of the National Science Foundation–a man Trump appointed during his first term–after Trump cut more than 400 research awards from the NSF budget, the report noted the administration has also slashed budgets for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA, and has defunded thousands of researchers.

The explanations offered for this wholesale attack are typical Trump hogwash. “Cost-cutting,” “government efficiency,” and my favorite: “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” It appears that numerous grants were eliminated simply because their descriptions referenced aspects of reality rejected by MAGA morons– climate, diversity, disability, trans or women.

Economists tell us that every dollar spent on research has returned at least $5 to the economy.

Nevertheless, Trump’s administration has defunded studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physics. It has laid off meteorologists at the National Weather Service; pandemic-preparedness experts at the C.D.C.; and black-lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The Times reports that a next-generation space observatory, already built with $3.5 billion over a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.

Predictably, American scientists are evaluating their options. France and Canada are among several other countries courting American researchers. A recent poll found that more than 1,200 American scientists are considering working abroad.

What is even more frightening is the administration’s effort to count as “science” only “findings” that accord with the administration’s beliefs–and the National Science Foundation will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ Why? The administration says that efforts to correct lies and disseminate accurate data “could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” And a Justice Department official accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”

I am not making this up.

The Atlantic has responded to this insanity with an article titled “This is Not How We Do Science. Ever.”

Since its first days, the new Trump administration has clearly shown where it thinks scientific attention should not be focused: It has attempted to censor federal scientific data, cut billions in government spending on research, and compromised care for some of the world’s most at-risk populations. Now, as the nation’s leaders have begun to encourage inquiry into specific areas, they are signaling that they’re willing not just to slash and burn research that challenges their political ideology but to replace it with shoddy studies designed to support their goals, under the guise of scientific legitimacy.

The article reports on several administration directives clearly intended to confirm Trump’s desired results.

This is consistent with everything Trump and his allies have revealed about their views on science since January: that it is not a means to better understand objective reality, but a political weapon that they must guard against, or deploy themselves. In recent months, Kennedy has accused the expert committee that counsels the CDC on its nationwide vaccine recommendations of being in the pocket of vaccine manufacturers; the administration has also fired from HHS several scientists who were prominent leaders in the COVID-19 response, including a few closely affiliated with Anthony Fauci, whom Trump has ridiculed as a “disaster” and an idiot and Desai derided as one of many “demonstrably fallible ‘experts.’” Last week, administration officials also redirected two federal websites, once used to share information on COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines, to a page promoting the idea that the coronavirus pandemic began as a lab leak, rather than Fauci’s “preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.”

MAGA’s revolt against science is an important part of the GOP’s continuing rejection of the “reality-based” community.

A psychiatrist friend defines denial of reality as insanity. (See yesterday’s post…)

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Cultural Revolution?

In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman compared the Trump administration’s anti-DEI (i.e., pro-racism & misogyny) efforts to China’s cultural revolution under Mao.

Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.

As we’ve seen, China’s efforts failed–albeit not without years of unnecessary suffering. As I’ve previously opined, changing a nation’s culture rarely if ever works. But our would-be king–unhampered by anything suggesting intellect or competent appointees within his “administration,” is certainly trying to fulfill the most ardent wish of his MAGA base–taking American society back to the 1950s (or perhaps before), when women were pushing out babies and doing the dishes in the kitchen, and Black Americans were subject to segregation and confined to subservient positions.

That effort requires eliminating evidence of the worth and competence of women and Blacks. Accordingly, I did a search for federal websites that have been scrubbed of references to the contributions of women and black people.

Here’s what I found.

The Department of Defense undertook a significant purge of DEI-related content, resulting in the removal of profiles and articles about Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, a Black Medal of Honor recipient; the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team; the Navajo Code Talkers (including profiles of Indigenous veterans; women veterans such as Lisa Jaster, the first female Army Reserve graduate of Ranger School); historical figures like Jackie Robinson, who served in the Army during World War II; the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots; and notable gravesites of Hispanic and Black service members at Arlington National Cemetery.

Some content has been restored following public outcry, but many of those pages remain inaccessible .​

NASA removed profiles of women and people of color from its website. The profile of Rose Ferreira, a Dominican-American intern, was taken down and later reinstated after public backlash. However, the restoration led to harassment directed at Ferreira, highlighting the challenges faced by individuals whose stories were previously celebrated .​

The National Park Service revised its content to align with the administration’s directives. Those erasures included the removal of mentions of transgender individuals from articles about the suffragist movement; changing terminology from “LGBT” to “LGB” and omitting the word “queer;” altering language in articles about the Underground Railroad, including removing a quote and image of Harriet Tubman and the term “slavery.”

The Small Business Administration removed a photograph from its website depicting a diverse group of individuals, including women and people of color, in front of a whiteboard.

Other federal agencies that have complied include the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has removed content related to LGBTQ+ veterans; the Federal Trade Commission, which has deleted over 300 posts, including those reporting on antitrust actions against tech giants; and the State Department, which altered the language in international travel advisories, replacing “LGBTQ+” with “LGB” and omitting references to safety concerns for transgender Americans abroad.

I have no idea how many Americans visit these sites; certainly, the information that has been deleted is widely available elsewhere. (In the age of the Internet, erasure of information previously available is a pipe dream…) That said, these alterations provide additional evidence (as if we needed it) of the central preoccupation of the White Christian Nationalists and other assorted bigots who form the majority of MAGA adherents.

It remains to be seen whether those who supported Trump because he promised to reward their racism–to return them to social dominance– will be steadfast in that support despite the chaos and damage being done to the economy, public health, science, education and the rule of law, among other elements of accelerating collateral damage.

As Krugman admonished readers, looking for rational strategy in Trump’s hysterical assault on DEI and “woke-ism” (aka equality and humanity) is a fool’s errand. “Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.”

Mao couldn’t change his culture. I don’t think Trump will change America’s, either. But we’ll suffer while he tries.

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