Tag Archives: Trump Administration

The Parable Of The Plumber

 Parables are short stories intended to illustrate general principles or moral truths. Although the term is generally used in a biblical context, it occurred to me that a recent, extremely annoying, definitely not apocryphal experience I had with a plumber might be a parable for our time.

I won’t use the name of the company, not because it deserves such consideration, but because the problem it represents is anything but unique.

We had used this plumbing company without incident previously, and its name was well-known, so when our 16-year old toilet needed a new flush valve,  my husband called them.   The young woman who answered the phone was intent upon enrolling us in a yearly “maintenance contract,” and kept him on the phone for a considerable time selling him on its benefits. She finally scheduled the repair during a 4 hour window on the following day. He rescheduled some errands  (I was at work) and waited, but the plumber never showed.

When he called to inquire what had happened, he got another young woman on the phone, who checked to see what had happened. It appeared that person he’d spoken with previously had been so focused on trying to sell him the yearly contract that she’d neglected to schedule the plumber. Young woman number two apologized, during what also became an unnecessarily lengthy conversation.

In order to expedite the repair, my husband gave her the make of the toilet (Kohler–a pretty standard brand) and the part number of the flush valve we needed. She had clearly never heard of Kohler–she asked whether that was a brand and could he spell it, which was disconcerting coming from someone who worked at a plumbing company. She did repeat the part number twice, to be sure she’d heard accurately.

This time, the plumber did show up (the following day), but without the part. According to him, she hadn’t passed on the information. He said he’d have to locate the part and come back, but that we really should consider buying a new toilet.

This was a Friday. The plumber left (without selling us a new toilet) saying he would secure the proper part and be back Monday. He did return on Monday, as promised, but with the wrong part. He left again, promising to find the right one and to call when he did.

At that point, I called our daughter who had mentioned that she had a plumber she liked. When I called that company, the phone was answered by a knowledgable person who immediately dispatched a plumber, and texted me to let me know he was on the way. (They even included a photo of the man they sent, so I’d know it was him.) That plumber was at my home within an hour of my call, and proceeded to install the new flush valve–properly and without trying to sell us a new toilet.

Guess which company I will use in the future?

Why do I say this mundane story is a parable?

The first company markets itself constantly. It runs lots of television spots and internet ads, and periodically mass mails “special offers.” It’s pretty obvious that the owners place more importance on image than on competence.

We live in an age that promotes celebrity over substance. We prefer pundits who tell us what we want to hear to “elitists” who actually know what they are talking about–politicians who give us slick sales patters over less-assured candidates who recognize the complexities of issues. But name-recognition and celebrity will only take you so far. At some point, you have to be able to do the job.

The Trump Administration has a lot in common with that first plumbing company we called.

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Constructing Our Own Realities

In the mid-1990s, as part of the publisher’s effort to promote my first book (“What’s a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing at the ACLU?”), I was booked onto a call-in radio show in South Carolina. Belatedly, I found that the show I was on followed Rush Limbaugh; the calls that came in reflected that audience.

I vividly remember one of those calls. The country had been going through one of those periodic arguments about whether the religion clauses of the First Amendment preclude  posting religious texts–specifically, the Christian version of the Ten Commandments– on the walls of public buildings. (It does.)

The caller argued that the Founders would have had no problem with such practices, because “James Madison said we are giving the Bill of Rights to people who live by the Ten Commandments.” This supposed quotation had been circling through rightwing organizations; as I explained to the caller, not only had it been rebutted by Madison scholars, the statement was dramatically inconsistent with everything we know Madison did say. At which point the caller yelled, “Well, I think he said it!” and hung up.

This exchange occurred before the Internet, before Facebook, Twitter and other social media facilitated our ability to fashion our own realities. I recount it because it illustrates how desperately many of us–probably most of us–look for evidence that supports our biases and beliefs.(As the Simon and Garfunkel song says, “man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”)

What brought this exchange to mind was a column in the Washington Post by Ralph Peters, a commentator who has just left Fox News.

As I wrote in an internal Fox memo, leaked and widely disseminated, I declined to renew my contract as Fox News’s strategic analyst because of the network’s propagandizing for the Trump administration. Today’s Fox prime-time lineup preaches paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law.

Four decades ago, as a U.S. Army second lieutenant, I took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” In moral and ethical terms, that oath never expires. As Fox’s assault on our constitutional order intensified, spearheaded by its after-dinner demagogues, I had no choice but to leave.

Peters, who is very politically conservative, says the network was once an outlet for responsible conservatism (an assertion with which we might take issue), but has become an intellectually-dishonest propaganda source. There is a good deal of evidence that Fox has always been more interested in delivering Republican talking points than in objective reporting; what Peters is reacting to may simply be the outlet’s increasingly blatant partisanship. The age of Trump isn’t noted for subtlety.

Fox bears a considerable amount of the blame for creating an environment in which voters prefer spin and propaganda to objective fact, science and evidence. Its influence is waning now, as television channels and internet offerings proliferate, and as its older audience dies off, but America will be dealing with the damage it has inflicted for many more years.

That said, the basic challenge we face isn’t new. Voters have always “cherry picked” information. Confirmation bias didn’t suddenly appear in response to Fox or Facebook.

Fox’s business plan was explicitly focused upon providing ideologically compatible “news” to an “underserved” Republican audience. (Less-well-known Sinclair Broadcasting is equally dishonest.) My caller, back in the mid-1990s, may have gotten his misinformation from books by “historian” David Barton, who made his money giving fundamentalist Christians a version of history more to their liking. There will always be ethically-challenged entrepreneurs willing to make a buck pandering to our fears and prejudices.

The question is: what can we do about it? How do we counter propaganda effectively, without doing violence to free speech and the First Amendment? The only answer I can come up with is better civic and news literacy education, but that will take time and a commitment to revitalize the public education that Trump and DeVos are trying to dismantle.

It’s a conundrum.

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A Better Future?

This weekend is a rare confluence of Easter and Passover, holidays with different but compatible messages. Each memorializes a sort of victory over an oppressive and unjust tyrant—Easter through resurrection, Passover through escape. Both hold out the hope of a better future, whether in the here and now or an afterlife.

My acquaintance with Christian theology is minimal, and I’ve forgotten much of what I learned about my own Jewish heritage in Sunday school. I do remember exhortations about the need to make this world more just. To paraphrase a Talmudic injunction: God doesn’t expect us to perfect the world in our generation, but we are not free to desist from the task. We are not free not to try.

Americans have very different definitions of justice, of what a “perfect” world would look like, and right now, those differences are pretty stark. What many of us see is a national administration dismantling hard-won progress—reversing measures to protect the environment, ensure fairer administration of justice and extend civil rights protections to people who had previously been marginalized. We see norms of democratic and ethical behavior, not to mention civility, being violated daily. We see a President who encourages tribalism and ancient hatreds.

And nowhere–not in the Administration, or in Congressional leadership–do we see any concern for “the least of us.” There’s lots of bible thumping, but evidently very little bible reading.

Those who support this administration applaud what they see as an overdue defense of white Christian male dominance and rejection of an (ill-defined) globalism.

Clearly, today’s Americans have dramatically different worldviews. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we inhabit different realities. We appear to have lost the ability to actually debate policy, perhaps because our differences are tribal, not philosophical.

So what do “hope” and “justice” look like in our divided America? What should sincere Christians and Jews—together with Muslims and atheists and others—conclude about the forces of division and resentment that challenge our ability to build an inclusive and tolerant society?

A not insignificant number of political scientists have recently characterized average Americans as uninformed and politically apathetic– one recent book calls deliberative democracy a “folk tale”–  but I’m not ready to write Americans off, because the one truly positive outcome of the 2016 election has been the degree of civic activism it has generated. That activism should give us all hope.

A non-exhaustive list of examples:

  • A number of Christian churches have emerged to challenge the Christian Right and its claim to represent “true” Christianity. Congregations and denominations that haven’t been socially active since the heyday of the social gospel have joined with with other faith communities to demand a fairer, more inclusive, more humane country. (As one pastor was moved to observe “When Episcopalians take to the streets, it’s serious!”)
  • Across both rural and urban America, women are refusing to return to second-class status and back-alley abortions, refusing to accept sexual harassment and unequal pay as the price they must pay for the privilege of employment.  Those women are putting on their “pussy hats” and running for public office in unprecedented numbers.
  • Most of all, it’s the kids who give me hope. The Parkland survivors were awe-inspiring, but what is even more impressive is the fact that they didn’t produce the March for Our Lives single-handedly. Thousands of young people, most of them high school students and many even younger, planned and coordinated one of the largest civic demonstrations in the nation’s history—a demonstration remarkable for its lack of violence or lawlessness, and for the measured and reasonable demands of its speakers. They show promise of being a genuinely civic generation.

Even those of us who are secular Americans can be encouraged by religious observances  celebrating victories over those who have misused the powers of government. They remind us that we are not free to desist from the fight for a fairer and more just America.

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Contracting–What Were They Thinking Edition

One of the unfortunate things about the daily tweet-storms and other indignities coming nonstop from the White House is that they inevitably distract us from the multiple reports of more long-term, ongoing damage being done by this Administration.

Case in point: Puerto Rico, where last week’s explosion at a power plant has once again deprived those who had actually gotten their power back of electricity.

For that matter, Trump has shown far less concern for the inhabitants of Puerto Rico than he has for the sensibilities of aides who are having a “bad time right now” because word of their wife-beating emerged. (Of course, people in Puerto Rico are brown…) His appointees at FEMA have made “Heck of a job, Brownie” of  Katrina infamy look almost competent by contrast.

First, there was the award of a 300 million-dollar contract to a two-man firm (“coincidentally” from Ryan Zinke’s home town) to restore power on the island. That generated enough blowback that it was terminated, but not before the entire fiasco further delayed efforts to return Puerto Rico to a semblance of normalcy.

Now, we learn that this is who got a $156 million Federal Emergency Management Agency contract to deliver 30 million meals in a matter of weeks:

[Tiffany] Brown, who is adept at navigating the federal contracting system, hired a wedding caterer in Atlanta with a staff of 11 to freeze-dry wild mushrooms and rice, chicken and rice, and vegetable soup. She found a nonprofit in Texas that had shipped food aid overseas and domestically, including to a Houston food bank after Hurricane Harvey.

By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000. And FEMA inspectors discovered a problem: The food had been packaged separately from the pouches used to heat them. FEMA’s solicitation required “self-heating meals.”

“Do not ship another meal. Your contract is terminated,” Carolyn Ward, the FEMA contracting officer who handled Tribute’s agreement, wrote to Ms. Brown in an email dated Oct. 19 that Ms. Brown provided to The New York Times. “This is a logistical nightmare.”

I am prepared to give FEMA a very dubious benefit of the doubt; unlike the power contract, I doubt this one was the result of “wheeling and dealing” or quid pro quo. My guess would be monumental incompetence–which has sort of become a hallmark of this administration. Whether corruption or incompetence is the explanation, however, Puerto Rican’s aren’t eating.

As a post to Daily Kos put it,

FEMA can’t claim to be an innocent victim here—Brown had a history of canceled government contracts for failing to deliver food to the prison system and for getting an order with the Government Publishing Office wrong. She also had no experience in this kind of disaster relief work. FEMA hired her despite having absolutely no reason to believe she could deliver what she was promising.

In more ordinary times, with more conventional Presidents–i.e., adults–the continued suffering of people in Puerto Rico would have been front-page news for months. With this Administration, however, the hits just keep on coming: ICE agents breaking up law-abiding families, Presidential aides accused of domestic violence, budget proposals to slash the already-inadequate safety net in order to fund the recent tax giveaway to the rich, an infrastructure “plan” that is equal parts fantasy and privatization…

Speaking of “thoughts and prayers,” I pray we aren’t all too emotionally fatigued by the daily doings of the Kakistocracy to vote in November….

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No Ice Floes Handy?

According to legend, when their elderly became burdensome, Eskimos put them on ice floes and let them drift out to sea.

If I thought that Trump and his “best people” could read, I’d suspect they were emulating the Eskimos.

A week or so ago, a friend who no longer lives in Indianapolis was in town, and met my husband and me for breakfast. During the “catching up” talk that takes place when old friends haven’t seen each other for a while, we asked him what his wife was doing. He said she’d been working part-time as an advocate for nursing home patients–a position required as a condition of federal grants for nursing home care–but that the Trump Administration had eliminated the requirement, along with a number of other regulations intended to protect the sick and elderly residents of such institutions. So she was looking for another job.

I was pretty incredulous; why would even this benighted administration refuse to protect helpless old folks against the well-documented abuses encountered in numerous substandard nursing homes?

Turned out, however, our friend was right. I saw this article from The Hill not long after our conversation:

The Trump administration is reportedly rolling back the use of fines against nursing homes that have been cited for violations such as neglect or mistreatment.

The move comes after the nursing home industry requested the change in the Medicare program’s penalty protocols, The New York Times reported over the holiday weekend.

The American Health Care Association had argued that inspectors were too focused on finding wrongdoings at nursing homes instead of assisting the facilities.

A 2001 Congressional investigation uncovered reports of serious, physical, sexual and verbal abuse in a third of the nation’s nursing homes. That led to more monitoring and additional regulation. Since 2013, nearly 6,500 nursing homes have been cited  for one or more serious violations. Approximately two-thirds of those were fined by Medicare.

Nevertheless, the personnel installed by Trump at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services argued that the regulations and fines were counterproductive.

“Rather than spending quality time with their patients, the providers are spending time complying with regulations that get in the way of caring for their patients and doesn’t increase the quality of care they provide.”

A lawyer from the Center for Medicare Advocacy disagreed, observing that the revised regulations and diminished penalties have “pretty much emasculated enforcement, which was already weak.”

So let’s see….this administration wants tough penalties for street crime and drug use and illegal immigration, because Trump and Sessions say punishment is a deterrent to socially undesirable behaviors. But we don’t need to fine or otherwise punish the owners of nursing homes that mistreat their vulnerable inhabitants. (Sorry–I know the word “vulnerable” has been banned.) We can  gently suggest they desist, and maybe those bedsores will go away by themselves….

The regulations no longer being enforced weren’t imposed by some abstract, rule-happy big government bureaucrat; they were put in place because of evidence that far too many nursing homes were abusing and neglecting their elderly, incapacitated patients, and doing so with impunity.

Someone needs to explain to me just how forbidding elder abuse “gets in the way of quality care.”

Actually, ice floes might be more humane….

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