MY LATEST LUNG BATTLE: GASPING FOR BREATH IN A WORLD GONE MAD

For months now, I’ve been ingesting a plethora of antibiotics and sucking relentlessly on a nebulizer tube, all in an effort to slay an intractable lung infection. Instead of the meds, maybe I should have followed the current cultural norm and gone after this bacteria with a brutal and debilitating social media attack. After all, the most popular road to conflict these days seems to be paved with verbal viciousness.  

(Please stay with me on this; a point is about to emerge.)

As Joe Biden would say, here’s the deal: A friend died recently. She was someone I worked closely with decades ago; someone I admired and respected; someone with whom I lost contact, except for occasional Facebook posts.  A text message from a mutual friend said she died of COVID.  Her obituary, however, was silent on the cause of death, noting only that the end came after a “hard-fought battle.” 

The omission struck me as ironic. My friend had been a journalist. She never shied from a clear presentation of the facts. Between a quick perusal of my former colleague’s old Facebook posts, and a story in the current edition of The Atlantic, I figured out what was going on.  

Her FB page captures the woman I remember from 30 years ago.  Retirement clearly did not extinguish her passion; it merely opened up new avenues for it. According to her posts, she was thoroughly disgusted with both political parties, thought Emmanuel Macron should be removed as president of France, and urged friends to “read more books and be nice to each other.”  

But here’s the kicker: There was also a small smattering of messages in support of the anti-vaccine movement. “Imagine,” one of them read, “getting four vaccine shots in one year and calling unvaccinated people crazy.” I hadn’t pegged her as an anti-vaxxer, but it wasn’t a total surprise. Her world view wasn’t designed for pigeonholes.  

Then I read The Atlantic piece titled, “People Are Hiding That Their Unvaccinated Loved Ones Died of COVID.”   It turns out there is a rabid army of anti-anti-vaxxers out there just champing at the bit to publicly curse the corpses of unvaccinated COVID victims.  

These fully vaccinated guardians of morality delight in mocking the deaths of anti-vaxxers. Imagine being consumed with grief while preparing to bury a parent only to be bombarded with messages like this: “Glad your mom died. Too bad she wasn’t vaccinated.” To avoid such abuse, according to The Atlantic, many families of deceased unvaccinated COVID victims are omitting the cause of death in obituaries and other public announcements. 

It gets worse. Hundreds of thousands of supposedly concerned and caring pro-vaxxers have taken to web sites to display screenshots of anti-vaccination posts from mostly ordinary folks who subsequently died of COVID (here, here and here).  Their deaths are mocked, praised and championed. One site posthumously “honors” each death with an award named after Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate who died of COVID shortly after appearing maskless at a Donald Trump campaign rally. 

In less than two years, this pandemic has infected more than 72 million Americans, killed more than 870,000 of us, and shattered the lives of untold millions.  We now add a new category to the box scores of devastation: Deaths Celebrated.  

Call me naïve, but I didn’t see this coming. Sure, our public discourse has degenerated into an ugly verbal food fight. Where we once valued serious debate and dialogue over conflicting issues, we now rush to social media with vile insults and threats for those with whom we disagree. As disheartening as that development has been, however, going from a poisoned thumb tweet about someone whose beliefs you dislike, to dancing on their grave, is one enormous jump.  I so wish we had not made it.

I did not crawl out of my convalescence for the purpose of defending anti-vaxxers. They are completely wrong on the facts. Their actions have hindered efforts to control the virus. That in no way, however, makes it right to mock their deaths and desecrate the grieving process of their bereaved families and friends. Death with dignity is woven deeply into our humanity. It is not contingent upon having the right beliefs.

For centuries, our culture has embraced elaborate norms aimed at respecting the dead and comforting their grieving loved ones. Seventeenth century English poet John Donne, in a far less gender-inclusive era, captured the sentiment well with his famous lines: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

Even in war, there is respect for the dead. The military in most western countries have elaborate rules for the solemn and dignified care and handling of the bodies of enemy soldiers killed in action.  

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church and its picketing of funerals?  Leaders of the small independent congregation believed that the death of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan were God’s punishment for the country’s tolerance of gay people.  As the caskets containing the bodies of dead soldiers were lowered into the ground, the Westboro crew carried signs denigrating the deceased.  There was unanimous – bipartisan and universal – shock and repulsion over this grossly irreverent taboo.  

Unfortunately, the Herman Cain Awards and their ilk were not met with the same reaction. They should have been. To celebrate anyone’s death, to inflict even more pain upon grieving families, rips at the very fabric of our humanity.  

And that diminishes all of us.

MEA CULPA, TRUTH AND AN EXTENDED BREAK

Let me come clean.  

That brief mental vacation I told you I was taking from this space nearly two months ago was a Trumpian-like figment of my imagination.  Put another way, I lied.  

Not wanting to overshare boring details of what seemed like a minor health matter, I borrowed a concept that frequently pops up on Facebook these days, something to the effect that:  “I’m sick of all the politics and will take a break for a while.”

At the time, it seemed almost noble to be temporarily hobbled by the blathering punditry class and its inane obsession with spinning every ubiquitous blip into a narrative of doom.  These political prognosticators declare the Biden presidency dead at least once week.  They saw the less-than-elegant exit from Afghanistan as a fatal flaw.  They are sure Biden’s inability to shutdown COVID in its tracks will ruin him, despite the fact that the biggest impediment to herd immunity is the MAGA crowd’s refusal to mask up and get vaccinated.   Now they are warning that Biden will tarnish his image for all time by giving up on spending programs he campaigned on, all in order to get a compromise package through one of the most closely divided and divisive Congresses in recent history.  Can you imagine what a dismal, chaotic mess the theatre world would be in if Shakespeare had treated every mundane action as an arc to the final act? 

The truth is that I am a committed political junkie. Tortured journalism is annoying, but it’s not going to push me away from my daily fix.  So I lied. My defense is one of mitigation.  I refer you to that noted tome on prevarication, The Oxford Handbook of Lying, by Simone Dietz. Although my fib would be heavily sanctioned by the “absolute-moralist” faction of serious thinkers on this subject, there is a more utilitarian caucus that would spare me the gallows.  This reformist movement notes that lies that are socially harmless or based on benevolent motives or consequences, fall short of evil.  Obviously, Donald Trump never read the memo on this subject.  

Here’s the real deal:  I’ve dealt with respiratory issues for some time, mostly the result of collateral damage to my lungs from successful cancer surgery and radiation 10 years ago.  It was all quite manageable until this summer when my symptoms worsened.  I was scheduled for a mind-boggling round of appointments within the ever-expanding universe of Johns Hopkins Medicine.  I thought it best to let the blog go dark for a bit in order to focus on my medical adventure.  I figured I’d be back on the keyboard by mid-September.

Well, the best laid plans and all of that stuff.  It turns out that I have a rare and stubborn lung infection known as Mycobacterium Avium Complex, MAC for short.  The treatment consists of four heavy duty antibiotics, one of them administered intravenously.  I’m told that it could take several months to eradicate the bacteria. Once that happens, I will continue taking at least some of the antibiotics for as long as another year, to guard against a return of the offending organisms.

I have so missed researching and writing this blog.  I didn’t realize how important it was to me until I took my so-called break.  Unlike many retirees, I neither build nor fix things.  I don’t like crossword or jigsaw puzzles.  I’ve never had much interest in sports.   But reading the news, thinking about issues, and trying to figure out what it all means has kept me fairly sane these past five years.   Unfortunately, the side effects of my antibiotics have made it far more difficult to sort it all out.  A cognitive haze has definitely settled in.  My doctors tell me that it will likely lift once my body becomes accustomed to the antibiotic regimen.

So there you have it, as the TV news folks like to say.  My story is neither compelling nor poignant; neither riveting nor amusing.  In fact, it’s not even interesting.

But I can assure you of this: It is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

You can also believe me when I say, I look forward to returning to this space as soon as the medicinal cobwebs leave my prefrontal cortex.

.

HOW TO GO AWAY WITHOUT LEAVING WHERE YOU ARE

Despite the digital revolution, newspapers have hung on to a few quaint artifacts from the ink-stained days of yore.  One of my favorites is the little placeholder marking the spot of an unwritten column.  The Washington Post, for example, acknowledges a writer’s absence by running this line below the column’s standing head: “So-and-so is away. Her column will resume when she returns.”

Of course, So-and-so has been filing columns from home since the pandemic forced a redefinition of the workplace.  She hasn’t set foot inside the Post newsroom for 18 months. This begs the question: From where is she away?  If she is taking a stay-at-home vacation, she is not away at all. Did she feel obligated to pack a bag and go somewhere for a bit, just so the newspaper’s declaration that she is “away” retains accuracy?  You never know when the Post factchecker might be on your trail.

Those are just some of the things I’ve been thinking about while trying to take a bit of a break from following the news of the day, such as it is.  Sometimes the cumulative weight of the daily newsfeed gets to be a tad too much, and you really need to get away for a bit.  But who wants to go anywhere while the delta variant runs wild?

I figured now is a good time for a short break.  This blogsite just had its fifth anniversary.  I can’t thank you enough for playing along with me these past few years.  I pontificate in this space primarily for the purpose of thinking stuff out. The older I get, the more cognitive exercise I need. But to know that a whole bunch of smart people actually read what I write is a wonderful bonus that I will always treasure.

I won’t be gone long. Please know that I am away, and that my blog will resume when I return.  Meanwhile, I will focus intently and singularly on this ontological query: How do I get to “away” without leaving the house? That ought to send me rushing back to the world of infrastructure bills, filibuster reform and, back by unpopular demand, the Taliban. 

Catch you later.   

COVID’S LESSON IN UNCERTAINTY IS A HARBINGER FOR FUTURE PLANNING

This pandemic has not only taken close to two-thirds of a million American lives, it has also killed one of our most powerful life forces, the illusion of certainty.  Depending on how we play it, that latter loss could well offer a silver lining.

Think back to very early 2020.  The rhythms of our lives were as measured as the clicks of a metronome. Everyone was up at the sound of an alarm. Kids went to school; parents went to work.  Dinner was at a set time.  So was bedtime. So were the electronic payroll deposits, and the bill payments they covered. Sure, there were little surprises here and there, just to keep things interesting.  But, for the most part, there was a structured certainty to our lives.  Or so we thought. 

Then came COVID-19, updated a year later by the delta variant.  The metronome is silent now, while everyone – from essential workers to bank presidents, from middle schoolers to university professors, from bartenders to Fortune 500 CEOs – mourn the loss of what they believed was certainty. 

Quite clearly, COVID has two lines of attack. One comes through a deadly coronavirus that infects the body’s respiratory system. The other launches a brutal assault on the psyche. It infects the body’s equilibrium, diminishing or eliminating our senses of order, structure and certainty.  

Before you dismiss all that as so much overwritten hyperbole, take a look at a small sampling of news headlines from the past few weeks:

  • America’s Children Head Back to School Amid Growing Uncertainty. (U. S. News)
  • U.S. Mortgage Rates Fall Again as COVID-19 Delivers Yet More Uncertainty. (Yahoo Finance)
  • Uncertainty Is Back on Main Street as Delta Variant Rattles Reopening Plans. (CNBC)

On one end of the spectrum, is an unemployed single mother. She doesn’t know whether to take a new job, fearing that a sudden quarantine might close her 6-year-old daughter’s school without notice.  On the other end, is McKinsey & Company, the Cadillac of management consultants. From its recent client advisory:  “The COVID-19 crisis has undermined most of the assumptions of the traditional planning cycle. Meticulously prepared status reports are now outdated before they reach senior managers.”  

Everyone, it seems, is in their own individual hell of uncertainty.  And it’s about so much more than the efficacy of vaccines, masks, and social distancing.  Most of us thought we had a bead on the trajectory of our lives. It took a deadly pandemic to teach us what survivors of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires already knew: Life does not come with a warranty of certitude.   The axiom holds for people and countries.

In many ways, COVID has already shaken government and business organizations out of their cultural inertia and into meaningful change.  Before the pandemic, a $15-an-hour minimum wage was seen by the business community as a socialist plot. Many entry-level positions at restaurants and other establishments are now paying at least that much. Virtual “telehealth” visits between patients and medical providers exploded during the pandemic, and have become a significant component of our health care system.  There has also been a dramatic transformation of organizational structure built around the concept of remote work, all because COVID forced managers to discover that their employees could perform well from home. 

Comes now the potential silver lining, a long shot to be sure, but a very real opportunity to improve our lives. Ready?  We embrace uncertainty.  Once and for all, we rid ourselves of all spurious notions that it can’t happen here, that for all its foibles, the status quo is pretty darn good, so don’t mess with it. Put another way, we step out of our comfort zone, let go of our inertia, and build better a better life before a another crisis totally engulfs us. 

As the American Medical Association noted, our country was not prepared to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude.  Our illusion of certainty kept it off the priority list because nothing like it had happened in our lifetime, despite the warnings of experts.  

The same is true with climate change. A recent UN report called the devastating impacts of global warming unavoidable, with a small window to stop it from worsening. Scientists have been tracking this existential crisis for decades, with little to nothing in terms of policy changes.  The good news, says environmentalist Paul Gilding, is that things are so bad right now we will be forced to deal with the crisis. “We are slow, Gilding said, “not stupid.” The motto, sadly hopeful and optimistic, needs to be printed on our currency.

Then there is the matter of our democratic way of life. We were brought up to believe that our country was the envy of the world.  We wrote the book on democracy. We fought wars over democracy. It’s what American Exceptionalism was all about.  Yet, the majority of one of our major political parties still believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.  Some 147 Republican members of Congress voted against accepting the results of the Electoral College vote. Yes but, comes the certainty argument, Trump’s attempt to override election results was rejected by judges throughout the country.  Meanwhile, many state legislatures have passed, or are considering, bills, that would allow state officials to reverse election results on some of the same grounds those judges rejected last year. They would also make it more difficult for Black people to vote.  Alas, there is nothing certain about the perpetuity of American democracy. 

As a joke, I donned a MAGA hat back in 2015, saying to friends that I totally supported Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, simply because he could never be elected president.  Of that, I was certain. That’s why I am done with the mirage of certainty.  Horrible things we were certain could never happen can, indeed, happen. And have. To avoid, or mitigate against, future catastrophes, we need to be mindful, vigilant and intentional in our actions.  In a perfect world, we would have figured all this out earlier.  But it’s not too late.

After all, we are slow, but not stupid.

ANTI-VAXXERS, NOT BIDEN, OWN DELTA

Fully vaccinated and maskless, many of us were basking in what we thought was COVID’s summer endgame. Then along came delta, an ill-timed pandemic redux. Suddenly, there was déjà vu all over the place.

Along with skyrocketing infections, came thunderous news reports of President Biden falling asleep at the coronavirus switch.  After all, the guy was elected on the promise of cleaning up Trump’s horrendous COVID mess.  Biden was credited for taming the virus, so he must now be blamed for its sequel.  Or so it would seem from reports like these:

  • “Biden’s Struggles on Delta Overshadow Infrastructure Victory”. (World News Network)
  • “For President Joe Biden, who pledged a ‘return to normal’ on July 4, (delta) is a tacit admission that competence alone won’t vanquish the coronavirus.” (Politico)

My admiration and respect for these and other major news outlets comes with a cautionary warning: Always read the whole report.  Relying on only headlines or story tops can grossly distort the full picture. In this instance, looking solely at these blurbs, it would be easy for a casual news consumer to conjure an image of Biden personally cranking out this new viral strain from his own Wuhan-like lab, deep in the bowels of his Wilmington, Delaware basement. 

Read a little further, however, and a demonstrably different picture surfaces: This highly contagious delta variant emerged in India last December. It inundated that country and Great Britain before making its way to the United states a few months ago.  It quickly blew up our descending trajectory of new infections, going from an average of 13,500 a day in June to 92,000 as of August 3. Some models forecast more than 200,000 new cases a day by this fall.  The delta variant now accounts for 85 percent of new infections.  Most of them are in people who have not been vaccinated. 

So how does any of that put Joe Biden in a pickle?  Where exactly was his stumble?  Much of this honeymoon-is-over reporting was predicated on the President’s July 4 “declaration of independence” from COVID. At that point, 67 percent of adults had at least one vaccine shot, and pandemic cases were down in all 50 states for the first time.  The media wrap on Biden was simply that he said things were getting better, but then they got worse.

Sure, the president congratulated the country back in July for getting vaccinated and helping to turn the corner on this virus.  But here’s what else he said then: “Now, I can’t promise that will continue this way. We know there will be advances and setbacks, and we know that there are many flare-ups that could occur. But if the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other unvaccinated people around them. If they do not, states with low vaccination rates may see those rates go up – may see this progress reversed.”  

And that is precisely what happened.  The areas hit hardest by delta are those with the highest rates of unvaccinated residents.  This demographic through-line also aligns those concentrations of anti-vaxxers with counties Trump carried in 2020.  Sure, there are multiple reasons behind vaccine reluctance.  But the spiteful Trumpian politics of refusing the shots Biden is pushing is a big part of this picture.  That makes the news media’s flippant narrative all the more insidious.  Blaming Biden for a delta flare up caused by 93 million unvaccinated Americans has to be putting at least a small smile on the grievance-obsessed face of Donald Trump.  

The sad irony is that some journalists feel the need to demonstrate their fairness and balance by attaching a negative spin to a political leader who has received considerable positive coverage. This phenomena, which is neither fair nor balanced, is even more pronounced in this post-Trump era.  The former president did and said mostly off-the-wall bizarre stuff, resulting in negative stories that Trump called “fake news.”  Then comes Joe Biden, who as the anti-Trump, presents as a bastion of competence and composure, resulting in generally positive news coverage.  Yet, some reporters have this weird balance itch that needs to be scratched. So when Biden’s July 4 reference to the light at the end of the COVID tunnel turned out to be a train called delta, they just had to take him to task.

Meanwhile, Biden remained calm and competent. He and his team assessed the delta data and made major changes in their strategy to conquer this pandemic.  The communication from this White House has been clear and concise: The only way out of this mess is vaccination.  So he is requiring some 11 million federal employees and contractors to either get vaccinated or face adverse employment consequences. Same goes for the military.  

This move, as intended, triggered mandatory vaccination programs in a number of other state and municipal governments, along with a growing list of large companies, including Google, Facebook, Anthem, BlackRock, Cisco, Delta Airlines, Door Dash, Equinox, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Lyft and Microsoft. Theaters and other entertainment and cultural venues have instituted mandatory vaccination policies for customers and employees.

All this happened at the same time headlines had Biden “stumbling” his way into a “pickle” over a dramatic rise in new COVID cases. Yet,  CNN reports, that the number of newly vaccinated people in the eight states with the highest delta caseloads has increased on an average of 171 percent each day over the past three weeks. 

Results like that don’t come from a stumble.  They come from a leader who assesses the rapidly evolving terrain of this pandemic and then responds with appropriate strategic adjustments. Earlier this year, Biden was adamant about avoiding mandatory vaccinations. He not only wanted to dodge the political fallout from such a move, he believed that the overwhelming majority of Americans would vaccinate out of self-interest.  When the carrot approach left 30 percent of the country unvaccinated, and delta began its rampage, the president set politics aside and turned immediately to the stick of making inoculation mandatory wherever possible. 

When the final chapter of this pandemic is written, my bet is on Politico being wrong: Joe Biden’s competence will, indeed, have vanquished this virus.  

CLUELESS GOP FRESHMEN RAKE IN THE CASH BY SAYING DUMB STUFF

Based on media attention and fundraising prowess, many of today’s Republican congressional “stars” are knucklehead neophytes who make up for a lack of public policy chops by mastering the dark arts of outrage and chicanery. 

Think Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s the QAnon alum from Georgia who, during her first few months in office, managed to insult more than a quorum of the House and Senate. She was elected in 2020 after endorsing a call for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s execution.

Although MTG, as headline writers call her, is clearly driving the clown car, she is not alone in the vehicle.  Riding shotgun is Colorado’s latest gift to Congress, Lauren Boebert who created all sorts of pandemonium when she tried to smuggle a loaded handgun onto the House floor. Then there is North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, the House’s youngest member at 25. He insists Dr. Anthony Fauci is a “pawn in the Chinese Communist Party,” and that Sen. Cory Booker is working to “ruin white males.” 

Although these fumbling fledgling freshmen have yet to perform a substantive legislative act, their ability to monetize the preposterous placed them in the House’s top five percent of campaign fundraisers. In the first quarter of 2021, MTG raised $3.2 million, mostly from small dollar donors. The only House member to outraise her was the person she wanted killed; Speaker Pelosi at $4 million. 

In another era, very few of us would have even been aware of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Why is that? Well, once upon a time, members of Congress were ordained to venerate their high offices by working hard, speaking less, and generally earning respect through a persona of thoughtfulness and integrity.  All that has gone the way of rotary phones and floppy disks.

Sam Rayburn, the legendary House speaker during the Franklin Roosevelt era, crafted his own orientation session for newly elected members. According to his biographers, Rayburn listened to their plans for changing the world overnight. Then, he offered them a glass of bourbon and this advice: “You know here in Congress there are 435 prima donnas and they all can’t be lead horses. If you want to get along, you have to go along.” 

For decades, new senators were given information packets that explained the norms of Congress.  Following Rayburn’s equestrian theme, the briefing quoted the advice an unnamed senator offered new members back in the 1950s. He said Congress was composed of two kinds of people, “show horses and work horses. If you want to get your name in the papers, be a show horse. If you want to gain the respect of your colleagues, keep quiet and be a work horse.”

The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy waited 17 months after he was first elected to speak on the floor of that chamber. And he began his primordial speech by apologizing for not waiting longer.  “. . .It is with some hesitation that I rise to speak on the pending legislation before the Senate. A freshman Senator should be seen, not heard; should learn, and not teach.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no Ted Kennedy.  She filed articles of impeachment against President Biden on his first full day in office, much to the embarrassment of House GOP leaders.  She publicly ridiculed the transgender daughter of a congressional colleague. She compared the House’s mandatory mask mandate to the Holocaust. Just last week, she tweeted that COVID-19 won’t hurt you unless you are obese or over 65, provoking Twitter to suspend her account for 12 hours. As discipline for her incorrigible outrageousness, the House voted in February to remove Greene from all committees.

That meant MTG suddenly had more time to convert that outrageousness into campaign donations.  Two weeks after the House voted to banish her from all committees, Greene’s popularity among Republicans went up 11 percentage points, and her national recognition gained 14 points.  That in turn led to more than 100,000 donors sending her an average of $32.

As Vox’s Gregory Svirnovskiy noted, MTG’s fundraising haul is “a reminder that gaining notoriety on conservative media – rather than making efforts to pass meaningful legislation – is what holds real value in the modern Republican Party.  

That’s why Rep. Cawthorn, the 25-year-old from North Carolina, decided to forgo the hiring of legislative analysts in favor of a staff focused only on communication. He, like Greene and Boebert, make no pretense of passing laws. To them, it’s all about marketing themselves by doing crazy stuff.  As their mentor, Donald Trump, taught them, there is a rabid, hateful, antivaxxer base out there that won’t hesitate to share their credit card numbers with anyone promising to blow the system up. 

Another key player in the Trumpian school of outrage over substance is, of course, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.   Although under federal investigation involving sex trafficking allegations, he raised $1.8 million in the first quarter, mostly by preaching the Gospel According to Trump and mouthing whatever other silly narratives struck his fancy.  In his recently released book, Firebrand, Gaetz spells out his formula for political success: “Why raise money to advertise on the news channels when I can make the news? And if you aren’t making the news, you aren’t governing.”

Take one more look at that last sentence to fully grasp the political philosophy of this young crowd of Republican influencers: “And if you aren’t making the news, you aren’t governing.” Back in the 18th Century, our founders struggled to create a new system of governance. They turned to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They talked about “natural rights”, about a “social contract”, and “popular sovereignty”. They believed that the best form of governance is when elected leaders represent the interests of the people, a notion known then as republicanism. After intense thought and debate, they put it all together, this new concept of governing. That was the beginning of the United States of America.

Then, 245 years later, comes a clarion call for a totally new concept of government. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? “If you aren’t making the news, you aren’t governing.”

God help us all if these new Republican firebrands ever take over.    

THANKS TO THE SUPREME COURT, GOP MOVES CLOSER TO MAKING BLACK VOTES NOT COUNT

The racial reckoning ignited by George Floyd’s murder entered its second year with a severe case of whiplash. In a rare bipartisan vote, Congress designated Juneteenth as a national holiday, marking the end of slavery 156 years ago. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court took a sledge hammer to one of this country’s premiere civil rights laws.

As if that were not enough to provoke metaphysical vertigo, many of the Republicans who voted for the Juneteenth holiday are hellbent on keeping the subject of racial strife – past and present – out of public school classrooms.  They insist that systemic racism ended a long time ago and teachers should not talk about it.

So here’s a subversive extra credit assignment for high school students:  Download the Supreme Court’s recent decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act (VRA), and then, with a highlighter, mark every past and present example of systemic racism you can find. (Tip: don’t forget to read Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, even if you have to buy a second highlighter.) When you return to school this fall, quietly drop your work on the teacher’s desk.  If you live in a red state and like your teacher, put it in a plain paper bag.

The VRA was all about systemic racism. Long seen as the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, this powerful 1965 law was designed to quash a multitude of systems that kept Black people from voting. The law’s teeth were divided between two chapters. One of them required a number of southern states with a history of discrimination to have any new voting law approved by the Justice Department. Between 1965 and 2006, that department blocked nearly 1,200 discriminatory voting laws from taking effect (P. 8 of Kagan dissent).  

Eight years ago, however, the Supreme Court tossed that entire chapter out, saying that “times have changed,” and that states no longer need Justice Department approval on voting regulations.  To no surprise of anyone paying attention, the dearth of new discriminatory voting laws had little to do with changing times.  It was all about preclearance from the Justice Department.  Within days of that 2013 decision, Caucasian-centric states started cranking out election laws making it more difficult for people of color to vote.  That production line continues to operate at full speed.

The only solace was the remaining VRA chapter on enforcement, the one that prohibits states from having any election practice that “results in a denial or abridgement” to vote on the basis of race. In theory, the courts could strike down laws that brought about that kind of a discriminatory result. Until now, that is.  In its final decision of this year’s term, the Supreme Court used an Arizona case to effectively slam the door on the law’s only remaining enforcement mechanism.

That 6-3 ruling came from Justice Samuel Alito and five fellow conservative justices, all rabid adherents of deciding cases by the precise text of a statute, rather than attaching their own meaning to a law.  Amazingly, they ignored the law’s singular threshold for finding an election regulation to be discriminatory, namely that it “results in a denial or abridgement” of voting rights on the basis of race.  Instead, the majority upheld two Arizona election regulations that resulted in a disparate impact on the voting rights of Blacks, Latinos and American Indians (P. 32 of Kagan dissent). Why? Because, said the court, there was no proof that those results were motivated by an intent to discriminate.  Congress amended the VRA back in 1982 to make it clear that the standard of enforcement of a voting law is whether it has a discriminatory impact on the basis of race, regardless of motive.  

At issue in the Arizona case were two new election laws.  One made it a crime for people to pick up sealed absentee ballots and deliver them to a collection box or polling place. The other voided all ballots cast by voters in the wrong precinct. There was evidence that both laws impacted Black, Latino and American Indian voters far more than it affected whites.  

But, but, but, say Alito and his textualist buddies, the state had a noble intent with these laws, namely to prevent voter fraud, although there have been zero instances of such fraud involving out-of-precinct voting and ballot collection.   

Although intent is not an element in VRA enforcement, it doesn’t take a think tank to figure out what is motivating an avalanche of state election restrictions aimed at making it more difficult for minority voters to cast a ballot.  Most people of color vote for Democrats. Keeping them away from the polls is good for Republicans.

In making their case for these two Arizona laws, GOP legislators openly argued that the restrictions are needed to damage the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaigns.  During oral arguments at the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked an attorney for the Republican National Committee why the party has an interest in the litigation.  The answer: the restrictions reduce Democratic votes and “politics is a zero sum game.”

In other words, the party of Lincoln is saying, in effect: “Nothing personal, Black people. We want to keep you from voting because most of you support Democrats. It’s got nothing to do with race.” The enormity of this court decision reaches far beyond Arizona.  The flood gates in every red state are wide open to unlimited obnoxiousness when it comes to keeping racial minorities away from the polls.  So far in 2021, 28 restrictive voting laws have been passed in 17 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

There is a gravestone in a Hattiesburg, Mississippi cemetery that bares this inscription: “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” According to The Nation, buried in that grave is Vernon Dahmer, a voting rights activist and Hattiesburg NAACP chapter president back in the 1960s. Just months after the VRA was passed, Dahmer died when his home was firebombed by Klansmen.

Fifty-six years later, the future of the Republican Party depends on making sure that millions of non-white voters don’t count.  

Even with Juneteenth as a federal holiday, systemic racism marches on. And on. And on.

SAID THE BISHOPS TO THE PRESIDENT: DO AS WE SAY OR NO COMMUNION

Bless the bishops, Father, for they have sinned.

A substantial majority of U.S. Catholic bishops voted last week to initiate a process that could force President Biden to either alter his position on abortion, or never be allowed to take Communion again.  It’s a new spin on the old stick-up trope of “Your money or your life.” The operative dichotomy here is: “Your politics or your faith.”

You’d think the hierarchy of American Catholicism would be enthralled with having the first Catholic president in 60 years – only the second in the country’s history.  But come now the bishops with a theological ransom scheme designed to extort the White House. 

As a recovering Methodist, I mean no sacrilege.  Although I disagree with the Catholic position on abortion, I have always respected it as an understandable extension of the Church’s sanctity and dignity of life presumption, a principle it has applied to a panoply of social justice issues.  (See capital punishment, gun control, medical care, racial justice, income inequality and the just war theory.)

But these bishops have taken their anti-abortion advocacy to an utterly cruel and immoral level.  Catholics regard the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, as the Church’s most important sacrament. According to its teaching, the bread and wine taken during Mass literally transforms into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. To deny Communion to an observant Catholic is to deny the presence of Christ (here and here).

Although he has never worn his religion on his sleeve, Catholicism has long been an important part of Joe Biden’s life.  According to the Washington Post, he was taught by nuns in Catholic schools, seriously contemplated entering the priesthood, rarely misses Mass and clutches rosary beads when making major decisions. The bishops’ threat is built upon the leverage of Biden’s deeply held faith.  And that is why this extortion effort is so very wrong.

Without getting deeply into the weeds of Canon Law, the bishops going after Biden cite a provision that says Catholics cannot receive Communion if they are “conscious of grave sin.” That basically means knowingly and repeatedly engaging in a mortal sin without repentance. Since the Church views abortion as murder, the bishops argue that the president’s support for abortion rights is a disqualifying “grave sin.”  

Over the centuries, Catholic theologians have drafted numerous lists of acts rising to the mortal sin level.  Among the entries is extortion.  Threatening someone with an adverse action in order to achieve something of value is seen as a “grave sin.”   That’s why I wrote what I did in this piece’s first sentence. The bishops trying to extort the president of the United States are, themselves, committing a grave sin. 

Of course, grave sins are nothing new to many of the Church’s priests and bishops.  According to the Bishop Accountability Project, more than 7,000 American Catholic clerics have been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than 20,000 victims, most of them children.  For years, many bishops and other Church leaders were aware of the problem but covered it up, thereby allowing assaultive priests to continue offering Communion to their parishioners. Sins don’t get much graver than that.

Clearly, the bishops’ motive here has far less to do with the sanctity of the sacrament and far more to do with attempting to strongarm the president.  In their rhetoric, the bishops would have us believe that they would deny Communion to any political figure who supported either abortion or capital punishment.  Yet, none of them denied the Communion chalice to former Attorney General William Barr as he expanded the number of federal executions.  

My immediate visceral reaction to the bishops’ vote last week was directed at the raw meanness of it all.  Here’s Joe Biden, the person. At 78 he is actuarily in the twilight of his life, a life defined by his losses and his victories. He buried a wife and two children. His religion is deeply important to him. The hymns, the Bible verses, the prayers, the sacraments and all the other rituals come together as a tapestry that somehow sustains him, Joe the guy.  How dare men of power in this Church even think of ripping out major threads of that tapestry by converting the Sacrament of Holy Communion into a political weapon. 

This ugly predicament, however, offers up another consideration:  What if the bishops’ extortion plan worked?  What if the president, in order to be assured of access to Communion, pulled back all of his executive orders supporting a woman’s right to choose, and made it clear that, from this point forward, his administration would do everything possible to make abortion illegal?  Never mind the fact that 60 percent of the country – and 57 percent of Catholics – support abortion rights.  The result of such a power play is almost unthinkable: a bunch of men with “bishop” in their title would have commandeered the presidency of the United States.

Fortunately, that’s only a hypothetical, and one very unlikely to ever surface.  Biden would never cave to this extortion attempt. Asked about the threat last week, he told a reporter, “It’s a private matter, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”  The leaders of the two dioceses where he worships most frequently, Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware, have made it clear they have no intention of keeping Biden away from Communion in their jurisdictions. Yet, the mere fact that a sizeable group of Catholic leaders in this country have come this far in their threat to force the president’s hand on one of the most volatile issues of the day is, to say the least, cause for great alarm.  

It is very possible – even likely – that the U.S. Supreme Court will one day drive the final nail into the coffin of Roe v. Wade. As sad as that would be for a majority of Americans, it would nevertheless be in accordance with our democratic, three-branch system of government.  A similar result coming from a takeover of the Executive Branch by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops would be more than catastrophic.

It would be a grave sin.

THE GOP’S NEW BIG LIE: SYSTEMIC RACISM DOESN’T EXIST

Just as Republicans pulled the plug on investigating the deadly January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, many of us were learning – for the first time in 100 years – of something called the Tulsa Race Massacre. It seems that the long and winding road from 1921 to 2021 is paved with deception.

A large Black community just outside of Tulsa was decimated by white Oklahomans in 1921.  Some 300 Black men, women and children were murdered, thousands of homes were burned to the ground. Black businesses, schools and churches were destroyed. 

As the great white fathers of Tulsa surveyed the ashes of their destruction, the obvious question was how to weigh, measure and record this brutal massacre so that future generations could learn from it.  Their answer: Fuhgeddaboudit!  They covered it up, claimed it was just another riot by uppity Blacks. The newspapers didn’t touch the real story and neither did the history textbooks.

The Tulsa Race Massacre, it turns out, was not unique to early 20th Century America. Similar atrocities of white mobs killing hundreds of Black people played out in Atlanta; East St. Louis; Chicago; Knoxville; Omaha; Chester, Pa.; Longview, Texas; Elaine, Ark.; Wilmington, Del.; and Washington, D.C., among numerous other cities. In each case, this murderous, torturous behavior of white citizens was treated as a deep, dark family secret. It took historians almost a century to extract and piece together these long-hidden truths.  

Nearly a hundred years later, our nation’s capitol was invaded by an angry white supremacist  mob of gun-toting, confederate flag-waving rebels, hell bent on stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the country’s duly elected president. Five people died and more than 100 police officers were injured. What sayeth the great white fathers of the GOP on the matter of thoroughly investigating this treasonous incursion so that we never encounter a sequel?  Their answer came directly from the script of their Tulsa forefathers: Fuhgeddaboudit!  Best to just move on and pretend it didn’t happen. Again.

Here’s a truth that passed the test of time with flying colors:  “The more things change,” wrote French author Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1849, “the more they stay the same.” Our world has changed in profound ways since 1921. We have Wi-Fi, Tesla and Zoom. We use words like “ideation” and “reimagine.”  We take conference calls where we “circle back” and “unpack.”  But when it comes to the politics of race, white conservatives still bury the truth and lie through their teeth like it was 1921.

And there is no bigger lie than this one:  Systemic racism doesn’t exist.  Former Vice President Mike Pence says it’s a “left-wing myth.”  South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham says there is no systemic racism in America, only a few “bad actors.” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton insists there is no sign of systemic racism in our country.  Then there’s the multi-tasking Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves who, on a single Fox News appearance, denied the existence of systemic racism and proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month. 

The same conservative crowd that pushed red states to make it harder for Black people to vote (based on the fabrication of rampant voter fraud), are now advocating legislation that would prohibit public schools from teaching about the way race influences politics, culture and the law. The bills are aimed at keeping students away from any notion of systemic racism. Such laws would forbid teaching about race, racism and white supremacy. Some measures go so far as to prohibit public universities from requiring diversity training.

Another key component of this legislative package requires teachers dealing with ugly historical episodes, or current racial controversies, to explore all sides of the issues “without giving deference to any one perspective.”  Can you imagine a lesson plan outlining the pros and cons of lynching, or the murder of hundreds of Back people?

The insipid irony in all of this is that a legislative coverup of past and present racial oppression is, in itself, a form of the very systemic racism these Republican lawmakers swear does not exist. For better or worse, laws create systems. The system these head-in-the-sand legislators want is one where we pretend there is no racism, and that Blacks are on an equal footing with whites. And that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 never happened.

The truth is that it is hard to find a system in this country that is not racially skewed to the detriment of Black people. Take, for example, our systems of education, home ownership and its redlining roots,  employment, wealth accumulation and medical care.  Although occasionally adjusted in response to issues of racial inequity, they all retain the same DNA that created them back in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. 

Here’s where those systems have taken us:  

  • Median net wealth:  White families: $188,200. Black families: $24,100.
  • Median net wealth for people between the ages of 25 and 40: White: $41,800. Black: $3,500.
  • Home ownership: 73.7 percent of whites own homes. 56 percent of Blacks do.
  • Health insurance: Although Blacks make up 13.4 percent of the population, they account for half of the 30 million Americans who have no insurance.
  • Education:  Predominately Black public schools receive $2,226 less in per-pupil government aid than predominately white schools.  

From a purely empirical perspective, systemic racism is as real as it gets. The far tougher question is how to dismantle a malignancy on our country’s soul that has been there for . . . well, forever? The only place to start is with the truth, no easy task in an environment where disinformation reigns supreme. Folks who believe that Donald Trump will be “reinstated” as president in August, are only too willing to accept the notion that America is a racist-free country.  

Only a powerful and aggressive countermovement – by Democrats, non-Trumpian Republicans, independents, progressives, Green Party members and socialists – can deliver us from the diabolical illusions that are now the cornerstone of conservatism. Let’s start by stopping state legislatures from banning classroom discussion about the evils of racism.

Whitewashing the ugliness – past and present – only begets more ugliness.  

CAMPUS FREE SPEECH ISSUES AREN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE

Back in the heyday of the 1960s, when everything seemed urgent and salient, there was a righteous battle for academic freedom. As the decade drew to a close, a delightfully liberal Supreme Court declared that free speech does not stop at the “schoolhouse gate.” 

More than a half century later, the issue of academic expression is up for relitigation. Unlike their solid and compelling predecessors of yore, these new cases are, in keeping with the tenor of our times, petty and silly.

Before wading into the shallow waters of what passes as today’s version of educational free speech, it’s worth a brief reminiscence of the far more glorious struggle of the ‘60s.  As the decade began, many public colleges and universities prohibited students from engaging in any political activity on campus.  In 1964, the issue came to a head at the University of California at Berkeley. 

While distributing leaflets proselytizing against the Vietnam War, Berkley student Jack Weinberg was arrested and placed in a squad car. Within minutes, thousands of student activists surrounded the vehicle, immobilizing it for 32 hours while making speeches from its roof. That was the beginning of the Berkley Free Speech Movement. 

Over the next few weeks, Joan Baez showed up to sing “We Shall Overcome”.  Berkeley Free Speech leader Mario Savio uttered his infamous command for students to “put your bodies on the gears . . . when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.”  

After more than 800 students were arrested, many injured by police, a student strike shut down the campus until the administration lifted its restrictions on political speech.  Many other schools gradually followed course. For those that didn’t, the Supreme Court made it abundantly clear in a 1972 opinion that public colleges are a “marketplace of ideas” and that students and have a First Amendment right to express those ideas, regardless of how unpopular they may be. 

Meanwhile, a similar free speech movement was making its way through junior and senior high schools.  In 1965, then 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker and her friends decided to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands in their Des Moines, Iowa public school.  They were quickly suspended. That discipline was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Students,” the court wrote, “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”  

Now flash forward 50-plus years, to what legal commentators are calling the most important free speech case since Tinker v. Des Moines.  Sometime next month, the Supreme Court is expected to decide the fate of a trash-talking middle schooler from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania. Back in 2017, Brandi Levy was a 14-year-old junior varsity cheerleader who had just been turned down for a promotion to the varsity squad.

Stewing over the rejection, Brandi, of course, reached for her smartphone and composed a Snapshot message preordained to become a landmark free speech case.  With her middle finger raised, she uttered nine words destined to live in judicial infamy: “Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, and fuck everything.” Brandi was summarily suspended from cheerleading for one year. 

Needless to say, Joan Baez didn’t rush into Mahanoy City to sing “We Shall Overcome.”   And regardless of what the Supreme Court does with this case, you can be pretty sure it will not wax poetic about finding space for “fuck school” et al, in the marketplace of ideas.  

Meanwhile, from the professorial side of the classroom, comes this annoying trifle of a contention that teachers are somehow enshrined with the “academic freedom” to choose the pronouns they will use for their students. Court dockets are filled with teacher lawsuits insisting they have the constitutional right to refer to transgender students with pronouns and honorifics based on their birth gender (here, here and here).

Take, for example, Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee (Ohio) State University.  As the semester began, Meriwether called on a student he assumed was male by using the honorific of mister.  The student, a transgender woman, sought out the professor after class and asked that he refer to her as Ms and use the pronouns she and her.  

That, Meriwether said, would be a problem.  As a Christian, the professor explained, he believes God created only two genders, and for him to use female honorifics and pronouns for someone born as a man would be a violation of his faith. Citing school policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity, the administration ordered Meriwether to refer to the student as she, her, or Ms. The professor rejected the order on First Amendment grounds, sending the issue up a crowded federal flagpole of similar cases.

What a difference a half-century makes. In the 1960s, academic freedom was about the right of professors and students to have an open exchange of ideas.  It is now being subverted to mean that a teacher can ignore with impunity the very identity of a student.  

For God’s sake, Professor, just call the kid what she wants to be called! You’re a philosophy teacher, so teach it. Share with your class the foundation for your principle that gender is binary and unalterable. Invite your students to explore other thinkers – including Christians – who have a contrary opinion (here, here, here and here). Let the dialectic be part of the learning.  Meanwhile, use she, her or Ms when referring to the transgender woman in your class. It’s just a name, a title, and since it is hers, she controls it. This isn’t about you or your beliefs, it’s about the basic human decency of calling someone what they want to be called. 

It has been years since I’ve been in a classroom, but I seem to recall that a strong predicate for learning was a welcoming, respectful student-teacher relationship.  You don’t get there by using the word mister for a 19-year-old transgender woman, someone who has undoubtedly struggled with a level of transformational pain most of us will never comprehend.

So there you have it: two vastly different free speech movements, one in the 1960s and one in the 2020s.  We sang “We Shall Overcome” back then.  We obviously need a new anthem. 

How about: “We Shall Overlitigate”?