Tag: Twitter

Day 51: America Held Hostage

Spiegel Cover

Oh, America.  How far we have traveled since 8 November 2016.  The wonders we have seen.  The tragedies, the euphoria … the horror.  Is this “Heart of Darkness”, or “Apocalypse Now”?  Can we tell the difference?

I have felt so many different things these last four months.  For quite a while, I was terribly depressed, and I despaired for the future of our country.  That lasted until 21 January 2017, when I joined thousands of women and men in Civic Center Park, here in the Mile High City.  It was incredibly inspiring!  I felt, almost for the first time in perhaps decades, that we the people still have power, if we will but use it.

There is so much to criticize, and so much to lampoon, about the fledgling Trump regime, and thousands of words have already been written (and will yet be written) about those aspects of the fix in which we currently find ourselves.  But there is something else about which I want to write:  Democracy.

Democracy is the thing that is most endangered just now.  It is under assault from many sides, but mostly from the increasingly isolated clique found at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C.  Well, I think they’re increasingly isolated.  They appear to think that things have never been better; that the Greatness of Donny Small Hands is spreading across the land, lighting lamps that have been dark for eight long years, lifting up the marginalized, the salt of the earth, the backbone of our great land.  Amazing!

You see how easy it is to slip into caricature.  Ok, there’s a lot of material to work with.  But still … we have more important work to do.

Democracy, as I wrote above, is endangered now in America.  And if it is endangered here, that means – and makes – the danger even greater elsewhere in the world.  Journalists, newspapers, and television news organizations are demonized.  Oh, there are exceptions:  Fox News and Breitbart prominent among them.  American intelligence agencies are lambasted, criticized, and accused of colluding with … someone.  The supposed goal of the supposed collusion is the thwarting of the Trump administration and its agenda, whatever the latter actually is on any given day.  It’s hard to tell, I know, but so insecure is Donny Small Hands, and so great his need for adulation, to say nothing of affirmation of every random thought that falls out of his head, that he sees enemies and plots everywhere, and slights which must be answered in the form of tweets in the middle of the night, or perhaps unconstitutional executive orders.

Against this wall of noise from The Donald and his fellow travelers, there has risen up, in a miraculously short time, a great deal of resistance.  Donny has only been president for 51 days – a bit over seven weeks.  I know it seems longer, but, yes, only seven weeks.  In this time, massive protests have arisen, in many forms and many places, all over the country.  That has been wonderful to see, but it is also wonderful to see journalists really act like journalists.  To me, that means approaching stories and events with a certain amount of skeptical curiosity.  It also means speaking the truth, regardless of how unpleasant that may be.

It further means that when the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue lies, print and video journalists must call that just what it is:  A Lie. Twice in the last few weeks, for example, an editorial in the Denver Post has carried a headline with the words “Lying Trump” in them.

Two newspapers must be singled out for their determined work to ferret out factual information (versus alternative facts), and then present it to the country:  The Washington Post and The New York Times.  Journalists and editors and publishers at both newspapers are providing an irreplaceable service for the country, and we must not allow the loud forces of obfuscation and distraction to change that fact.

It strikes me that the election of Donald Trump has had a galvanizing effect on the spirit of this nation, pushing us in directions of resistance and commitment that the election of Hillary Clinton might not accomplished.

So, hooray for ineptitude!  Hooray for hubris!  Hooray for narcissism!

We may yet save ourselves.  The past indicates that such a reversal is possible.  Difficult times call up unforeseeable acts and strengths out of ordinary people.  But we cannot afford to be complaisant.  We cannot afford to pretend that what is happening now to our country and our politics is even remotely ‘normal’.

I will do what I can.  I hope you will too.

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Cчастливого Рождества!

my-little-friend

Cчастливого Рождества,  Владимир Путин!

Merry Christmas, Vladimir Putin!  Happy Year of the Rooster, Xi Jinping!  Congratulations on the Utter Destruction of Aleppo, Basher Al-Assad!

Do you gentlemen (I use the word advisedly) like surprises?  If so, you must all be thrilled about the gift that has been made to you by some of my fellow citizens.  Who knew an ignorant narcissist could become president of the United States?  (Thanks, in part, to you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.)

See?  In America, anyone can become president!

Ok, a case can be made that George W. Bush proved that in 2000, but honestly, by comparison with the soon-to-be Twit-in-Chief (TiC), W. doesn’t look quite as awful as he once did.  Neither does Richard Nixon, which is a bit disturbing, but more about Tricky Dick in a later post.

Sure, W. and his crew started and then botched a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, based on the false allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in his hands.  (Admit it:  Don’t you sometimes wish Saddam were still in charge in Baghdad?  Do you ever wonder how the world might be different now, if W. had just left him alone?  One thing I’m pretty sure about is that Iraqi nuclear missiles would not have been raining down on New York City.  And as for truck-driving terrorists, well, we’ll never know the answer to that one, will we?)

At least W. and most of his advisors and cabinet members knew something about governance, even if, like Dick Cheney, they used that knowledge in inappropriate, and illegal, ways.  The TiC, on the other hand, is given to dictating – to say nothing of self-aggrandizement, at which he is particularly skilled.  What he is not given to doing is collaborating and politicking, his “Art of the Deal” notwithstanding.  It is true that, in the beginning of his administration, President Obama was disdainful of engaging in the sort of political horse trading that has historically been the main way things have gotten done in Washington, DC.  Nevertheless, the number of rules and conventions and standards of which the TiC is disdainful is vast, and it grows by the day.

The same is true of a majority of the TiC’s appointments and nominations thus far.  They are people who are either stunningly unqualified for the job or they’re committed to destroying the department or agency they will lead – or both.  It’s a challenge to have a favorite horror story with this lot, but I’ll delve into it anyway.

Is it the neurosurgeon who didn’t want an important government post?  If that’s the case, what was that recent run for the Republican presidential nomination all about?  Now, if approved by the Senate, this fellow will run the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  The TiC tells us that the reason he chose this particular man is because he grew up in an “inner city” neighborhood.  Oh, and he’s black, but the TiC seems to be ignoring that part.  Or maybe he’s not ignoring it, and he hopes that nominating Ben Carson will somehow endear him to the millions of African Americans who voted by the busload for Hillary Clinton.  I think it highly improbable that such a thing could come about, but then, I didn’t think the TiC could get elected in the first place.

And then there’s Rex Tillerson, currently CEO of ExxonMobil, the sixth largest company in the world, and the largest petroleum-centric corporation on the planet.  Every day, ExxonMobil pumps some 3.9 billion barrels of oil out of the ground, from which, in 2015, they made almost $270,000,000,000.  Mr. Tillerson has worked for ExxonMobile and its predecessors for forty-one years, which is to say, since he was twenty-three years old.  He knows nothing else.

Well, that’s not quite true.  He knows Vladimir Putin.  They’re great friends.  Rex and Vlad go way back; some twenty-five years, in fact.  Vlad admires Rex so much that in 2013, Vlad awarded the Order of Friendship (OoF) to Rex.  This is the highest honor Russia can bestow on a foreigner, and Rex earned his OoF by virtue of ExxonMobil discovering a huge new oil field for the Russians, in the Arctic.  Prior to that, for about five years, Rex was director of a joint US-Russian oil company that was registered in the Bahamas (a.k.a., tax haven).

Sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea put a stop to the big (300 billion dollars big) Arctic oil project, but Vlad, being such good pals with Rex, did not ask him to return the OoF, because that’s the kind of guy Vlad is.  And anyway, he probably figured that Rex would do something nice for him in the future, just to make up for the lost oil billions.

Assuming the United States Senate plays along, Rex will soon be in a position to do that nice thing, whatever it may turn out to be, since he will be the new Secretary of State.  Funny how things work out, isn’t it?  The moreso, when you learn that Rex, as CEO of ExxonMobil, appears to have made some decisions – purely business decisions, of course – that benefited ExxonMobil and its stock holders (and Rex), but did not benefit the United States.  In other words, he placed corporate profit above patriotism.  Or, to put it another way, his first allegiance is to his company, not his country.  Will he now, after 41 years of faithful service to Big Oil, change his priorities and think first about the good of America?  I hope so, but I’ll have to see it to believe it.

Seeing-is-believing is also the case with the TiC, since he has promised a variety of different, and sometimes opposing, things to a whole lot of people in the last year.  But I don’t have to wait to see if the TiC is going to change his priorities, because it’s already obvious that he is not going to do that.

Speaking of oil, his selection of Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy reinforces what I have already written about the TiC’s priorities and his much (self) vaunted wisdom.  Mr. Perry, besides being a former governor of Texas (the Republic of Oil), also sits on the board of the corporation that is attempting to build the Dakota Access Pipeline.  The same pipeline that was opposed by Native Americans, over whose land the pipe would be laid.  The Corps of Engineers has put a hold on the pipeline being routed beneath the Missouri River, which is the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.  I wonder what the new Secretary of Energy will think about all this?

Coincidentally, during his own recent run at the presidency, Mr. Perry, in one of the primary debates, could not recall the name of one of the federal departments he wanted to eliminate.  Oh yeah … the Energy Department.  As I said, funny how things work out.

I do not think there has been any other in-coming presidential administration that has encompassed the range of incompetence, and hostility, if not outright malevolence, towards the government, that we see in the TiC’s choices.  Incompetence is bad enough, but malevolence is dangerous, both to ourselves and to other nations.

At least with incompetence it’s out in the open, so you have a chance to withstand attempts to turn back the clock 40 or 50 years, such as this crowd proposes to do.

Malevolence, on the other hand, hides in the shadows.  It is threatening, and it is subversive.

A lot of folks who supported and presumably voted for the TiC have been accusing people like me of anti-Trump hysteria for suggesting that the path the TiC is going down could lead to authoritarianism in this country; that it could lead to a diminution of free speech, oppression of the independent and questioning press (to say nothing of certain minority groups), and a weakening of our place and strength in the world community.

This is not hysteria.  This is a profound concern about the malevolence I see and feel in the TiC and his followers (TiCists?).   Their attitudes and potential policies – Muslim bans, loosening of libel laws, destruction of environmental protections, and repressing women’s power over themselves, among many other things – can lead to a creeping regime change that is undemocratic; a change that is antithetical to everything we have believed America stands for, everything it has represented to the rest of the world.

The TiC would love to shut down the New York Times, and get Saturday Night Live off the air, because he feels they are being mean and unfair to him.  I have to believe that the good people who voted for the TiC did not think they would be sending a thirteen year old boy to the White House, but that, essentially, is what they have done.  A thin-skinned, spoiled, and marginally educated thirteen year old boy, who wants everyone to love him and be nice to him, even when he taunts and mocks other children, and bullies them, and threatens them with violence.

Well, silence is the best weapon we could hand to this annoying and dangerous child, and I have no intention of remaining silent.  I hope you won’t either.

M.