Thursday, January 12, 2017

Trump's Press Conference

Is He Really Serious?

            With Trump’s first press conference since July, we now know we’ve entered a bizarre world where entertainment has finally merged completely with reality. What can we call it?
            Reenterality? Enterealitainment?
            The President-elect of the United States is poised to come into office declaring what amounts to war on the U.S. intelligence agencies and the international press. He faults the agencies for leaking bogus information about his business deals and after-hours exploits in Russia, and he excoriates the press for reporting it.
            If this were a movie, we might be on the edge of our seats. We wouldn’t know what to expect. Whose side would we be on? The CNN reporter who made an ass of himself shouting questions that it was obvious Trump would not acknowledge? Or the man himself at the podium, turning every aspersion cast on his character back upon his accusers while promising to make everything better than it’s been in America for a long time, and to do it practically overnight?
            At a certain point I have to step back and run a sort of diagnostic on myself.
            Q: Has America ever been a real democratic republic, as the founders intended?
            A: No. There have always been powerful factions trying to limit a full democracy of one person, one vote and even citing the founders as their authority to do it.
            Q: Is Trump really a threat to our democracy, as many people warn?
            A: No. He can’t really get away with false claims and lies forever, even within his own party.
            Q: Is this really a coup d’etat by the right wing of our nation, which has long plotted to reverse our social gains going back to the New Deal?
            A: Uh-oh. That could be. But it’s an imperfect coup because the President is unstable.
            This is where Enterealitainment gets creepy, but if I were writing the script from here I’d have that instability at the top implode and, like the Towers on 9-11, the whole party which supported that top, essentially trying to control it and use it for its own ends, would collapse under the weight of its exposure and fall into the abyss of a lost identity.
            The Democrats in my script are not too far behind that chaotic scenario, as an elected minority tries to hold the ship of state steady on the course as we’ve always known it, pounded by storms that rock the very Earth on her axes. And then the Democrats split apart and fall into quarreling factions, as well.
            We’ll need a hero to save us, then—a Great President to rise from the people, the one some of my friends thought Obama would be. He wasn’t, but he could be the One Who Came Before.
            No, no, no, not a Second Coming! The first one caused enough trouble in the world!
            Bottom line: I think the Trump Presidency is a mistake. Countries make mistakes. People make mistakes. They recover. Or sometimes they don’t. That’s the suspense of mistakes. It usually takes courage to recover, especially from the big ones.
            We’ve been making mistakes at the top for a long time—mistakes compounded upon mistakes. Mistakes of hubris, mistakes of lust. Those mistakes are our mistakes. We are all complicit in them, in one way or another. Trump, larger than life, rises from the  consciousness of the Americans who voted for him and, frankly, of the Americans who didn’t, to show us a side of ourselves which very few, according to polls, are that happy with.
            But some of us think that because he’s a successful businessman he will make things better for us, give us a better deal, even if he is a snark.
            I’m drawn right back into my annual one-man show, “The Concise Dickens’ Christmas Carol” and poor Jacob Marley’s after-life torment for his misspent existence. As a successful businessman.
            In short, Trump’s first news conference, where he attacked the people who advise him and the people assigned to keep him honest, doesn’t bode well for the future of his presidency or of our democracy, which Obama the night before pleaded for us to keep alive.
            Whether or not it’s a coup, it’s shaping up to be a schism. And don’t think the real figurehead is Trump. Trump could easily be dumped by the House and the Senate, and then our President would be Pence.
            “Are there no prisons? Are there no work houses?”


Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Obama's Legacy

We're on Our Own Now

            Barack Obama's farewell speech Tuesday night was a bitter-sweet affair, especially given the look and feel of the oncoming train of frontiersmen about to disembark in Washington. Current media discussions of the strength or weakness of his legacy don't make the emotional experience of separation any easier to absorb.
            I agree with many on the left who criticize Obama for what seemed like his timidity in breaking with established institutions like the Wall Street banks, the insurance industry, and fossil fuels. I was disappointed with his orders to re-enter the Mideast militarily, his bungling of Syria, his hesitation to take definitive environmental positions, his surrender of a public option for Obamacare. The list could go on.
            Obama governed as a moderate—until the last two  years when he saw there was no hope of getting anything vaguely progressive through a recalcitrant—indeed, a defiant—Congress. Then he began issuing executive orders, making things happen that brought a sigh of relief to many on the Left, including me. Right on, Barack! Stick it to them!
            But all of that could be—probably will be—wiped away with a swipe of the Trump pen, just as it was put in place by an Obama pen. That's depressing to me, to say the least. More depressing is the thought of what might replace the social advances Obama finally made for us when it became clear all Congress had for him was the back of a hand.
            Still, the policies Obama put in place with his “executive over-reach,” as the angry white men (and women) like to charge, are not the principle reason I will miss Obama. I'll miss Obama for what he stands for, and what he articulated repeatedly and eloquently over his entire career, including in his farewell address.
            It is his vision of a diverse America, the Rainbow Coalition Jesse Jackson first brought to the fore when he ran for President in the 1980s. And, indeed, during the Obama years there was a grassroots surge of mingling traditions and races as people got to know each other outside of the comfort zones in which they'd been raised. I loved that!
            A diverse society based on the recognition that we are all human beings—far more alike than different—is a stronger common bond than any differences we may imagine divide us.
            That's what I'll miss—that ease of mingling among Americans of all colors and backgrounds which Obama's election enabled.
            Unfortunately, this was not to the taste of all Americans, and it seems we are about to enter the era of backlash, as if the price we must pay for electing Obama is the return of the White Avenger.
            We'll see. But I feel—or perhaps fear—that spirit of diversity shutting down in our national consciousness as the old American bug-a-boo re-emerges, the myth of the chosen people—white, Christian, and business-savvy with a secret, or not-so-secret, bias against the people they hire and serve.
            Life under Obama was like a reprieve from the oppressive right-wing vision in which military defense against potential enemies is the foremost duty of government, with citizens left on their own to promote their general welfare.
            That's not exactly what the Constitution says our government should be.
            Only Obama held back the faux-Constitutionalists pelting him with legislation to turn back the clock on benefits to the American people. Now that firewall is withdrawing. Will his enshrinement of a diverse society—a diverse world—be preserved?
            It looks as if we're on our own, as the tide turns against us. Practice your swimming. Or get out of the water.


Monday, January 09, 2017

The Real War

It’s Not Just Them

I
            So it now appears we’ve got to prepare for cyber war. I try to unpack that concept in my aging brain. For my generation the terrifying threat was nuclear war, horrifying enough, but if it didn’t hit your city you could still survive, unpleasant as survival might be.
            But with cyber war you’re sitting with your family at dinner some cozy winter evening when, in an instant, everything goes off. And as the invisible response-in-kind is launched, whole sections of the so-called civilized world lose their infrastructure. Electricity, gas, telephone, water, internet—all gone in an irretrievable instant.
            The elite, of course, will carry on with their generators and back-up systems. We “civilians” will do the best we can, but conceivably in this type of war the modern world as we know it will collapse, and there will be universal suffering for everyone, even the most well-stocked. And who’s to say cyber won’t come home to nuclear in a nervous breakdown of everything we’ve known?
            So of course we must mobilize. We need more geeks, more skilled hackers, more brilliant programmers, more drones, all oriented toward military objectives. A cause! At last we have a cause beyond just finding good jobs and making enough money for retirement (because we all know Social Security won’t last and never paid enough, anyway).
            Is anyone else tired of this? Why, exactly, are we attacking one another? What’s the point, when everyone suffers horrendously as a result of whatever gene causes some people to enjoy—indeed, thrive—on making enemies to defeat, capture, or kill?
            Donald Trump is saying he wants to get along with Russia. That offends even his honest supporters in Washington. Frankly, it doesn’t offend me, although Donald Trump generally does. But I read Crime and Punishment four times, on my own, before I was 21. Dostoevsky, Russian to the core, shaped my conscience and my consciousness in a major way. How can I call Russia an enemy?
            Yet the problems Obama and Putin have had getting along with one another have become problems for us all. How many thousands have died because two proud men, leaders essentially of rival gangs, get on one another’s nerves?
            In my opinion, as a person raised as a pacifist in the most violent, militarized country in the world, we need to look at the way we raise boys. It really makes a difference in how a boy thinks if he’s taught from an early age that violence committed against another is not just unacceptable behavior. It’s damage done to himself.
            But what alternative is there for a boy growing up in a world where he’s expected to be competitive and, if necessary, defend himself and others with violence?
            And now girls are ramping up their defensive skills as well. You can’t blame them. You can’t really blame anyone, violence is so ambiguous in our culture. You almost need a rule book in your pocket to double-check when it’s acceptable and when it’s not.

II
            If I had conquered my own violent tendencies, I could now give my formula for how you, too, could become violence-free. Maybe I could even charge money for sharing the secret to that exalted state. But that’s not a point I can make.
            I did realize early on, though—around the age of 12—that I had a temper which could get me into a lot of trouble if I didn’t curb it. Because I was raised to understand that violence is an inferior way of communicating, I was able to grasp that my capacity for blind rage was not productive. It didn’t resolve differences, it made them worse. But if I disabled or at least delayed that response to every situation which crossed my will, I entered a calmer state of mind. I encountered patience, a valuable skill.
            But what if I’d not been trained primarily by my mother to forswear violence (my father had problems of his own containing his temper) but learned it as a cultural standard? What if I’d been formally and culturally educated for peace, not for defense against enemies?
            It’s not visionary to say that we need a better way to conduct civilization if we want to lay claim to being a civilized world. That’s obvious. But there is vision in the suggestion that we raise our kids wrongly when we tell them to fight fight fight for their right not just to survive but to thrive.
            What if life isn’t really a fight but an inevitable process of unfoldment as we learn to know and understand ourselves and live together in mutual cooperation, not just because it’s in our self-interest, which it is, but because we want to?
            How do we learn to want to live in peace? That’s the point, I think, which needs to be addressed. To live in peace seems to be a beneficial state of being. What’s preventing us from prioritizing it?
            A big problem, I submit, is our stubborn commitment to the honor and glory of war, a serious human focus largely supported and advanced by the male sex. As a group we haven’t learned the art and, I’m sure, the science of side-stepping the passionate surge of will-to-kill every time someone threatens our quietude, crosses our interests, or has what we want but can’t get for ourselves or for our families.
            But if we would prioritize skills of self-management, I’m sure the enemy on the other side of that red line would look a lot like us.
            It takes courage to go into battle, no doubt about that. But it also takes courage to lay down your arms and walk free with no back-up plan against attack. This is not naiveté. It’s living as though peace is the universal condition and violence but a temporary disturbance, like a growing pain, on the way to realizing a better quality of life.
            And if, defenseless, you get killed or irreversibly maimed? It can happen. No path is a guarantee against tragedy and death. But the risks of death and injury are omnipresent and certainly far more magnified in a society sworn to the sacred cult of the sword.
            The question isn’t either/or but what is best for the health and happiness of our world? I’m proposing, if only for fun, that we pretend we live in a peaceful, restorative dream rather than a nightmare. If enough of us practiced that delusion, perhaps it would cease to be delusional. Or, if not, it would surely be more pleasant than a life lived in constant preparation for attacks from abroad or from thieves and killers stalking our streets at home. I speak from experience.
            The only thing worse than a knife at your throat is the fear of a knife at your throat. And there aren’t enough weapons in the world to defend you from that!
            But you can take on the fear in your mind. Careful, though. That struggle goes deep before it comes out on a sunny beach.
            Even so, it’s the real long war we could all be waging, within ourselves rather than with each other. It’s more effective in defeating enemies, too, and certainly cheaper than an outward struggle with all its waste of life and limb and howls of grief and rage.
            An angry man is his own worst enemy. And I guess that goes for women, too.


Sunday, January 08, 2017

He Was Ready, I Was Not

Did It Really Matter?

            One must accept one’s nature, it seems. In spite of all the formulas for success we’re taught by our parents, teachers, mentors, and peers, we’re bound by who we are, whether we acknowledge that person or not.
            My neighborhood friend and I went to middle school and high school together and were set to attend the same hometown college. But after we graduated from high school our paths separated. My friend practiced memory exercises all summer in preparation for his freshman year. Should I be doing that, too? I couldn’t think of anything I’d’ve rather done less! So I didn’t.
            But I worried about it. There was a right way and a wrong way to do everything, I’d been taught, and my friend seemed to be preparing for college the right way while I wasn’t thinking about college much at all—the wrong way.
            But it wasn’t a matter of right or wrong, as I feared then. It was a matter of following my nature by not preparing for what was ahead, just as my friend followed his by preparing so assiduously that I had to say I hardly knew him any more.
            We both came out of college with honors, but he got the higher ones because, you could say, he prepared for college and I didn’t. And there is something to that assessment. He started his freshman year ready for what was coming, acing his tests from the start. I was not ready. College came as a shock to me, and it took me most of my freshman year to settle in and figure out how to succeed in this new and demanding environment.
            But there was no way I could have prepared for where my nature was leading.
            In that summer when he was memorizing his flash cards I was sweating in a print shop, taking TV Guides off a reptilian binding machine which engorged the printed pages, collated them, stapled them, folded them, cut them to size, and spit them out on a conveyer belt in lots of 25. My job was to scoop up each lot and stack it, one on top of another, on a skid. When the skid was piled high enough, a fork lift brought in another, taking the loaded one away to another part of the building where a crew of women inserted the magazines inside the Sunday paper.
            When I wasn’t working, I was at the swimming pool with my girl friend, who still had another year to go in high school, or I was at her house watching TV with her parents, or, if they were out, exploring each other’s anatomy as we came ever closer to “doing it.” College seemed remote, certainly not a priority for me...yet.
            At the end of the summer, as I was about to leave the bindery to start college, the director of personnel came to see me on the factory floor. He had a proposition for me. How would I like to be an editorial trainee on our city’s daily evening newspaper? It was a program the company ran for promising college students. I’d work part-time during school and full-time over summer, learning the newspaper business from the ground up.
            This was a stunning opportunity for me, one I couldn’t refuse, though it made adapting to college while learning a profession on the side an even more difficult initiation for this ex-happy-go-lucky high school grad.
            Yet there was no way I could have prepared for something I didn’t expect—an opportunity to learn journalism, get paid, buy my first car, support a girl friend, and finally make it to the dean’s list, too! I even played a role in a community production of “A Christmas Carol.” And I went on to become co-editor of my college newspaper.
            Is that success or is that success?
            It’s not my nature to think ahead, making plans to position myself for opportunities. My nature is to wait for the right thing to come to me, then respond. I’ve groped my way to happiness living that way for nearly a lifetime. I see no reason to discontinue the practice now. Besides, I couldn’t if I tried. It’s my nature.
            My old neighborhood friend, by the way, got his PhD and went into academia, as I might have done if I’d been better able to prepare. But the last I heard he dropped out of all that and was writing a novel. I never heard whether it was published.
            Maybe doing those flash cards that summer wasn’t in his nature after all.