March 2021 Archives

Dear America,

I have always felt that movements like "Black Lives Matter" and "#Me Too" were worthy of supporting by all of us because it is a given that some of the socially or physically strong and powerful victimize those of us who are possessed of less social or physical power and strength.  A movement that seeks to address the effects of this power disparity serves all of us, even those who are not in the specific group served by the movement.  I used to tell my children when they raised issues that reflected this phenomenon that the problem isn't politics or society.  It is that as a species, we are not sufficiently evolved to understand and eschew these injustices, and that hasn't changed in my mind, nor, I believe, has it changed in fact either.  The problem is ubiquitous.  But that there are so many on the disadvantageous side of this power imbalance doesn't mean that there can be no abuse of the momentum that develops in service of rectifying the injustice of it all.  

Take for example the first column on the left side of the New York Times front page this Saturday.  It is about something that we have all heard about: the purported sexual misconduct of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and it goes like this:

"He called her and her co-worker 'mingle mamas.'  He inquired about her lack of a wedding ring, she said, and the status of her divorce.  She recalled him telling her she was beautiful--in Italian--and, as she sat alone with him in his office awaiting dictation, he gazed down her shirt and commented on a necklace hanging there."

Set aside the questions of fact that this account of an event precipitates: assuming that there was a desk between them, how could Cuomo have seen down her shirt without standing up and craning his neck; as it turns out, her interpretation of Cuomo's remark about her beauty is a function of her asking her parents, whom she claims to be sufficiently fluent in Italian to know, what Cuomo's comment meant, which makes her account impermissible hearsay, and so on.  Just consider her account of the interaction between these two unattached people in its entirety.  She accuses Cuomo of looking at her as if she were attractive to him (I assume she is in some objective sense) and inquiring as to her marital status and, by her implicit interpretation, that he was interested in her romantically.  It is true that there is a power disparity between the two people, all of it reposing in Cuomo.  Also assume that she did not express reciprocal interest, and that there were no consequences of her demurring.  I'm tempted to be flippant at this point, but I'll try to remain temperate and simply ask this rhetorical question: if this conduct by Cuomo is sexual harassment, who among us men seeking the company of a woman has never harassed a woman sexually?  And to put it into a slightly different perspective, when I was young I had an older, more powerful woman pat me on the ass at a co-ed softball game.  I don't think I was harassed on that occasion.

The rest of the article provides other details of this encounter and of other encounters between Cuomo and a friend of the woman whose complaint I just reiterated, as well as accounts of some other complaints about Cuomo, and at least one of them was not just significant, but serious.  He has apparently been accused by one woman of actually putting his hands on her intimately, and he is accused as well of kissing some women without invitation to do so, and those events might be significant, albeit perhaps with regard to the kissing no more than a function of questionable judgment as to how men should interact with women in general.  During the sixties, everyone hugged everyone else, and some of us flower-children ( not me, by the way) never stopped.  But if every flirtation...every overture from a man to a woman is forbidden, our species is just that much more susceptible to extinction.

Don't get me wrong.  If the woman in The Times told Cuomo that his attention was unwelcome and he persisted, even what I construe as a colorably benign fashion, that is a problem.  Also, before any of us touch any of the others of us, we should have a clear invitation to do so.  But if flirtation, even inept and presumptuous flirtation becomes grounds for ruining someone's life, more of us are in trouble than just governors and Supreme Court justices.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I don't know whether the Republican Party drives conservatism or conservatism drives the Republican Party.  Similarly, I don't know whether progressivism drives the Democrats or the other way around.  But the fact is that the two party names are misnomers.  They should be changed so as to make our political proclivities clear and obviate all this dissembling about bi-partisanship being desirable.  The reality is that if the majority is liberal we get liberal laws and policies.  If, on the other hand, the majority is conservative, we get conservative laws and policies.  The election process is what should, and actually does, control the political direction of our nation, America.  This talk about "crossing the aisle" and including the opposition in decision making when one party or the other is in control of the two houses of congress is nothing but obfuscation.  If we would rename the parties "Liberal" and "Conservative" we would be dealing in political realism when we go to the poles, not political fealty.  The latter is dangerous because it is deracinated from morality, ethos, ethics and practicality.  The former is a true reflection of the political climate of the nation; as a consequence of adopting such a party nomenclature, we could be honest about the nation's direction in our political discussions.  We could begin to talk about what is right and what is wrong rather than how to get members of our parties elected, and thus obviate much of the wrangling that now occurs in all of our capitals and get down to the real business of defining America instead of assigning political labels to excuse it.

This isn't a new idea for me.  I've thought it, and said it, for decades.  When we apply euphemisms to our politics--and that's all that the party names are--we allow ourselves to hide behind them and make false claims about...ourselves.  Over the past four years, we have reaped that whirlwind: Donald Trump.  Trump initiated a certain coded political colloquy when he descended that garish golden escalator in Trump Tower and pronounced people coming over our southern border criminals and rapists who bring drugs into the country.  Statistics show that they are actually less likely to commit such offenses against us than are our citizens and both illegal and legal aliens.  And the studies of those statistics have bourn out that fact since the Dillingham Commission of 1911 through the Barbara Jordan Commission of 1994 to the Cato Institute studies, some focused on Texas where immigration is not just a national issue but a local one, in 2019.  Trump's sub rosa message validated anti-immigrant sentiment and violence, not just against Mexicans and others from Latin America, Muslims and others from elsewhere, but specifically against people of Asian descent, for which he was particularly responsible by virtue of his denomination of the Corona virus as the "Asian virus."  Between immigration and xenophobia generally, and vilification of all Black-Lives-Matter protestors as vandals and criminals, he inspired a certain segment of our society unfortunately labeled "a basket of deplorables" by Hillary Clinton to manifest their false beliefs in action, including the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  He unleashed that group, albeit probably a minority of Republicans, by making himself the icon of the Republican Party and converting the party platform, which was not modified in 2020 from what it was in 2016 when Trump was nominated, to the Trump platform.  If the party had been the Conservative Party instead of the Republican Party, the canard that the border wall was a political issue rather than a moral one would have been dispelled.  The illusion of political affiliation as a motive would have been debunked and all those looking to hide behind political taxonomy for shelter from the ignominy of spurning everyone who wasn't them would have been exposed for what it was, and thus to the potential for moral disrepute, and lip service to everything and everyone from Emma Lazarus to the drafters of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution would have been exposed for the fraud that it has become in some conservative circles. 

We have to begin calling things by their right names in this country...our country.  The country is us, and we are the country.  In order for us to live up to the creed that our founding documents prescribe, we must face ourselves and admit our flaws, not just boast about our virtues.  We are the nation, not the rabble who tried to halt democracy and vitiate our republic on January 6.  We should be honest about ourselves, and call not just things, but ourselves by our right names.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Now that we have seen and heard Donald Trump's post-presidential bombast delivered at CPAC, the bombasts' convention for the ultra-conservative segment of the Republican Party, we know that Trump "[will] not go gently into that good night" of presidential emeritus status.  He will continue to be the cynosure of what Hillary Clinton christened "a basket of deplorables," and to hold court with his retinue of peremptory, arrogant sycophants, many of whom repudiated Trump at the beginning of his official political career just six years ago.  I will never understand how such practitioners of political expediency as Lyndsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz could be co-opted so thoroughly and reliably as to become members of Trump's retinue...as to be regular invitees to the golf course and relied- upon mouthpieces for a moral bankrupt like The Fat Man.  But teasing out of recent history how Trump could even emerge as a significant factor in our politics--and if you look back at news clips you will see more than once that even he was surprised--you will only find sub-rosa, presumptive-but-cogent evidence to go by.  

Over the course of our history, conspiracies have continually played roles in our society, some recent examples being those surrounding the assassination of JFK, the first moon landing, the attacks of 9/11, and most recent of all, the "stolen election" fabrication that seems to have started as a figment of Trump's ego-driven, polluted imagination that needed only his imprimatur to gain acceptance among a certain element of our polity.  It seems evident to many that Trump's popularity is hinged on racism and xenophobia, and by events like the siege of our capital on January 6, whereat overt pronouncements by people wearing camouflage uniforms in the middle of a city and horned helmets with faces painted as if this most serious of things they were doing were tantamount to attending a home game in person, presided.  If someone conjured up the images of these people and their words and deeds as well, it would be seen as nothing more probable than a satire by most rational people.  But it was genuine lunacy, not a parody of it.  We all saw it on the news and we have all followed the efforts to bring those who, on that occasion actually precipitated deaths, to justice.  And now we have witnessed an organized political event to which Trump was invited as the star attraction.  Even in the wake of the debunking of his mountebank's effort to retain power and the cognate impeachment trial at which the overwhelming evidence of his scheming was played before the American public and our senators, who by a fourteen vote majority voted to convict, this group that professes to be the embodiment of a legitimate electoral constituency of reactionaries and closet bigots is shamelessly oblivious.

This Conservative Political Action Convention is no less than evidence of a trend in our electorate toward confirmation bias that I cannot help believing is attached to a lack of either sound mind or intelligence, and in many cases both.  The problem is that either way, these people may dictate the future for us, America, and I have no idea how we should cope with this menace.  It is anti-democratic as evidenced by the newly energized Republican effort to curtail the voting rights of those who are not them, and by the consequent  "gerrymandering" we will witness in at least 23 states in which Republicans control both the legislatures and the governors' offices simultaneously.  It is without moral constraint as demonstrated by both it's leader's contumacious lack of probity and the zeal of they who inexplicably claim to be the moral voice of our ethos even as they almost beatify, if not deify the most overtly amoral person to ever hold national office in our history.  And they now comprise the vast majority of the members of one of our only two national political parties, within which an estimated 80% are true believers in their false idol's message.

As I have written before, my fear is that we are on the same path toward a culture of personality Germany was before the Nazi movement that supplanted German democracy and led to the persecution and murder of not just 6 million Jews, but also somewhere between 6 and 9 million members of other designated pariah groups like the handicapped, the mentally impaired, political adversaries of the authorities in power, people of color and so on.  The worry is this: that all of us Americans who are not them will be the "so on" this time.  Time to get my passport renewed.

Your friend,

Mike