Month: June 2018

FORGET CIVILITY. FIGHT TRUMP WITH WHATEVER WORKS

It seemed so clear to me when I started writing this post: tossing the president’s press secretary out of a restaurant was wrong. So were the boisterous dining disruptions that protesters foisted upon other Trump surrogates. Aren’t we supposed to go high when they go low? All this does is let the Trumsters play the victim card, right? Then a funny thing happened: I changed my mind.

Believe me, that was a painful experience. We all have our own style and approach to dealing with conflict, born of our life experiences. I spent more than 30 years as a union rep, tangling with some pretty virulent management types. The only real control I had – on a good day – was over myself. I chose civility, decency and respect, not out of a higher moral calling, but because that approach worked for me and my goal of helping union members get the best contract possible. That meant avoiding personal attacks and name-calling, and sticking to the issue at hand, while building power to make a decent deal.

So I cruised right along on my high horse, crafting this ode to civility and respect. I reread my words, searching for a pithy and righteous close. That’s when it struck me. I was wrong. This is Donald Trump’s America now, an ugly, hateful abyss that keeps turning darker and bleaker by the hour. Civility and respectfulness are not going to get our country back anytime soon.

During this past week:

A California woman screamed at a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent that Mexicans are “rapists, animals and drug dealers”, echoing one of Trump’s favorite litanies.

A Tennessee congressional candidate put up a billboard vowing to “Make America White Again”.

A South Carolina woman was charged with beating a black child and screaming racial epithets at him because he was swimming in a pool with white kids.

A North Carolina man who insists that God is a white supremacist and the Jews descended from Satan won the Republican primary for a seat in the state legislature.

Thousands of children, many in diapers, remain separated from their migrant parents as a result of Trump’s unconscionable political power play at the border.

The Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban and delivered a serious blow to organized labor. With Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, credible court observers predict that abortion rights will be abolished within 18 months, and that the court will tilt severely rightward for decades to come.

In other words, Donald Trump is doing precisely what he promised. He is shaking up the foundations of our country at levels totally off the Richter Scale. This isn’t a collegial debate over tax policy or farm subsidies. This is a historic existential battle for the heart and soul of America. We are in a cold civil war that is getting warmer by the day. It will take more than civility to win this one.

Earlier this week, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters was wildly cheered by a crowd of energized millennials when she told them: “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!” By the end of the week, Waters had canceled all public appearances because of death threats. Trump called her “unhinged” with an “extraordinarily low IQ” and claimed – incorrectly – that she had threatened to harm his supporters. Then came top congressional Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both blasting Waters for encouraging such incivility. Said Schumer: “If you disagree with a politician . . . vote them out of office. But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”

Oh yes it is, Senator. The Civil Rights Act did not flow majestically from a reasoned debate by golden tongued orators. It took years of street protests and massive harassment of political opponents. As Jonathan Bernstein, a former university professor, wrote for Bloomberg this week, “From the American Revolution on, the spoils of freedom, fair treatment and equality have not gone to the patient and polite. The spoils have gone to those who are incensed and determined, unafraid and unashamed to raise more than a little hell.”

No, embarrassing cabinet members in restaurants and other direct actions are not going to end our Trumpian nightmare. But they are viable tactics in a broader strategy to do just that, by flipping at least one of the two congressional chambers in November and removing Trump from office in the 2020 election, if not before. It’s all about voter turnout, tapping into the passion of those millennials who cheered Maxine Waters’ call to action, reaching blacks, Latinos and others, disenchanted with both parties, but ready to act now against a president intent on marginalizing them. Those actions pull them in, strengthen the movement and evolve into votes.

As a personal matter of style, I will continue to choose civility. If I owned a restaurant, I’d let Sarah Huckabee Sanders eat there. On the other hand, if someone tosses her out because of the abhorrent policies she has to defend, it reminds us all that these are not ordinary times. It reminds us that the rules of political discourse have to change in order to accommodate the toxicity of an environment that threatens the values we hold dear.

We don’t have to become Trump to beat Trump, but neither should we cling blindly to an honor code of civility when dealing with a lying thug who takes children away from their parents and emboldens bigotry of every stripe. That, Senator Schumer, is what is really not American.

BLATHERER-IN-CHIEF DESERVES ZERO TOLERANCE

This was the toughest week yet in our abominable Trumpian nightmare. The visceral pain of children pulled from their parents’ arms was exasperated by the president’s repeated lies, and the abject dysfunction of a government gone mad.

Still, the Donald managed to trot out a slogan that describes his presidency with amazing accuracy: “Zero Tolerance”. In the interest of truth-in-labeling, those are the words that should adorn his red baseball caps. After this week – and the 75 weeks that preceded it, “Make America Great Again” is a brutally inaccurate description of this dystopia. “Zero Tolerance” really nails it.

This president, and his merry band of hateful sycophants, have zero tolerance for truth, decency, complexity or compassion. They have zero tolerance for the poor, or for those who are neither white nor male. On a deeply personal, existential level, Donald J. Trump has zero tolerance for anyone who is not him, although he has been known to carve out an exception for those who carry his DNA, and/or bow down and worship him.

The atrociousness of this president’s conduct seems to be reaching new lows on a regular basis. It’s like waiting for an addict to hit rock bottom, only to realize there is no bottom, only an indeterminate descension. That means we miss, or forget, so many of Trump’s incomprehensible utterances while preoccupied with the major horror stories of the day. When fixated on images of tormented children wailing in cages, it’s difficult to focus on off-the-wall presidential statements, particularly when there are so many of them.

As a public service, I offer this small sample of presidential inanities, some of Trump’s more bizarre words that may have been lost in the smoke from the American values he’s trying to burn:

JUDICIAL GRAFT. In a speech to a business group this week, Trump ridiculed his own administration’s proposal to hire thousands of new immigration judges to relieve the backlog at the border. Said the president, mocking his own Justice Department, “Seriously, what country does this? Thousands and thousands of judges they want to hire. Who are these people?” Then came the kicker: “Now can you imagine,” the president asked, “the graft that must take place?” This is the president of the United States accusing federal immigration judges of being on the take. Not only is there no evidence, or even a credible accusation, of such corruption, it’s hard to imagine a Honduran migrant stepping off a raft from Mexico with the wherewithal to bribe an immigration judge.

SPACE FORCE. The president proposed a new military branch this week, the “Space Force”. Beaming before the cameras, he boasted that it will be “separate but equal” to the Air Force. Trump is the first president to trot out that old Jim Crow phrase since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate is inherently unequal”.

MINING HIS THOUGHTS. In a Duluth, Minnesota speech Wednesday, Trump addressed a highly controversial local issue involving proposals to mine precious metals in that state. Here’s what he said: “We’ll do it carefully and if it doesn’t pass muster, maybe we don’t do it at all. But it’s going to happen, I will tell you.”

CANADIAN SHOES. In one of his many warning shots over Canadian tariffs, the president claimed that our neighbors to the north are smuggling goods across the border. “They buy shoes,” he said, “then they wear them. They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old.” He offered no further explanation but ended his remarks with this aspiration: “We can no longer be the stupid country. We want to be the smart country.”

WHATCHAMACALLIT HOUSE. Standing next to the Easter Bunny and the First Lady during last spring’s White House egg roll, Trump tried to thank his wife for keeping “this incredible house, or building – or whatever you want to call it, because there really is no name for it, it is special.” You’d think it would be easy for this white nationalist president to remember that he lives in the White House.

BOWLING FOR TARIFFS. Here’s how Trump, in a recent speech, described how Japan keeps American cars out of their country: “It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify.” It was unclear what he meant and the White House communication office had no comment.

INSPIRING GRADUATES. Here’s the profound inspiration the commander in chief shared with this year’s graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy: “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning, you got to win.”

OPIOIDS. In a Nashville speech, Trump boasted – incorrectly – that the country’s opioid addiction problem was lessening, thanks to his program. Here’s how he described that program: “We’re getting the word out – bad. Bad stuff. You go to the hospital, you have a broken arm; you come out, you’re a drug addict with this crap. It’s way down. We’re doing a good job with it.”

SPACEY INFINITY. After signing an executive order on space exploration, the president waxed philosophical about what might be out there to explore. “A lotta room out there, right?” he said. “This is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don’t really know. But it could be. It has to be something – but it could be infinity, right?”

THE POOR NEED NOT APPLY. In a Georgia speech, Trump professed his love for the poor but drew the line at hiring them. Here is what he said: “And I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?”

Sadly, there is absolutely nothing about this man, his presidency, or his monopolization of our thoughts these past 16 months that makes the slightest bit of sense. When it comes to Donald J. Trump, all we are left with is Zero Tolerance.

ABRACADABRA! THANK DONALD ALMIGHTY THERE’S PEACE AT LAST

How did a bungling blowhard like Donald Trump became a master illusionist? The guy reaches into a top hat, pulls out absolutely nothing but insists it’s a rabbit. And 40 percent of the country cheers wildly, as if David Blaine had just made the Washington Monument disappear. That pretty much sums up this week’s Singapore Magic Show, where Donald The Magnificent supposedly pulled world peace out from behind the ear of a ruthless North Korean dictator.

Ronald Reagan was known as the “Teflon President” because he could screw up without repercussions. Trump goes way beyond Teflon. He is the Bubble President, encased in a truth-free bubble, hermetically sealed off from our fact-based universe. His illusions are created by neither sleight-of-hand nor clever equipment. Instead, they germinate in a damaged, ego-driven imagination that would make Walter Mitty blush. They go from there, totally unfiltered, directly to his mouth. Reality in Trump World, is whatever the Donald says it is. That’s one mean parlor trick!

But there he was, in front of American and North Korean flags, shaking hands with Kim Jong Un and announcing a “very comprehensive” agreement that will bring peace to the world. He later tweeted that people can “sleep well” now that there is no nuclear threat. Outside the bubble, however, North Korea has not given up a single nuclear weapon and retains the missile system to deliver them. The agreement signed in Singapore contained only promises to work toward disarmament. There was nothing comprehensive about it. In fact, it didn’t go beyond the same kind of general pledges the U.S. secured from North Korea in the past, pledges eventually broken by the totalitarian regime.

Look, after a year of Trump and Kim trading threats to blow each other up, is it better that they are sharing plates of crispy fried pork in Singapore? Of course. What’s unsettling is Trump’s total lack of a grasp on what’s happening. The negotiations with North Korea did not end with the Trumpian stagecraft this week; they have barely begun. The fact that these two oddball leaders are talking to each other is, indeed, an improvement over comparing the sizes of their nuclear buttons, but the immediate reality remains that North Korea has nukes and their elimination has yet to be worked out. Trump’s wholly premature victory lap in declaring himself the architect of world peace when substantive negotiations have barely begun, casts grave doubt on his ability to shepherd such a delicate process to a productive conclusion. Seeing only what you want to see, rather than what is really there, is one of the worst occupational hazards in negotiations.

Yet, that has been this president’s biggest Achilles heel. His pathological tendency to construct his own reality, and then make decisions based on those illusions, has plagued every square inch of his presidency. He went after Obamacare, boasting that he had a plan for much better insurance at a lower cost. There was no plan. He insisted that he had a way of getting Mexico to pay for the wall he wants to build. He didn’t. He claimed to have a scheme for a $1.5 trillion program to repair the country’s infrastructure. He didn’t.

Although Trump’s governance by delusion has been the hallmark of this administration, he took his magical thinking artform to new heights this week. After the photo-op pageantry with Kim, reporters asked the president why he thought the North Korean leader could be trusted to disarm, particularly in light of that regime’s extensive history in breaking promises. Trump’s answer, as reported on a Washington Post podcast? He’s a “good judge of people” and his “gut” tells him North Korea won’t go back on its word. Let that sink in for a minute: We can sleep well now because Donald J. Trump is a good judge of people. Pass the Ambien, please.

A central storyline of this presidency has been Trump’s utter ineptness at judging people. His former national security advisor, a campaign foreign policy advisor, his campaign manager and a deputy manager have been indicted on felonies or have already pled guilty. The Donald has had major falling outs with most of his hand-picked cabinet members and top advisors. Just ask Anthony Scaramucci, White House communications director for 10 days and the posterchild for terrible personnel decisions. Steve Bannon was his go-to guy until Trump kicked him to the curb, claiming that Bannon had “lost his mind”. Similar stories for Reince Priebus (Chief of Staff), Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), Tom Price (HHS Secretary), H. R. McMaster (National Security Advisor) and a host of others. No elected first-term president in the past 100 years has had this much turnover in the people he appointed to top positions.

Trump presumably spent considerable time interviewing and reviewing background information on his appointees, and still ended up going sour on most of them. Yet, he meets Kim for the first time and immediately senses a “very special bond” worthy of his trust. This is a man who had his subordinates killed for falling asleep in a meeting or showing “disrespectful posture”. Kim also had his uncle and a brother murdered, along with at least 340 other people whom he felt did not sufficiently respect him. Given that Trump is limited to dealing with his detractors through a mean tweet, the “special bond” here may well be based on envy.

There is no presidential magic that will successfully denuclearize this ruthless, oppressive regime. If that goal can be accomplished, it will come only through steely eyed negotiations, focused on hard facts, not illusions of grandeur, and based on legitimate interests of both parties, not on the ego needs of deranged leaders. It would also be immensely helpful if the Bubble President took a profound cue from the Teflon President’s experience in a similar quandary: Trust, but verify. It beats the bonding of speed dating every time.

APES, CUNTS & TWITTER, OH MY!

What’s worse on the hierarchy of insults: calling a black person an ape or the president’s daughter a cunt? That insightful question is at the heart of our latest national conversation. Remember when our national conversations focused on substantive, compelling issues, like race, sexual harassment, gun control and income disparity? We are so through the looking glass right now, it’s hard to distinguish a Saturday Night Live sketch from the Nightly News. We have become our own parody.

Yet, for one, brief shining moment, it seemed that the hateful, racist, misogynistic depravity that has been gushing into our cultural veins since the 2016 presidential election had finally encountered a substantial abatement. A major corporation, ABC, acted against significant financial interests in an unambiguous repudiation of racism. The Disney-owned company summarily canceled the “Roseanne” show after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” For at least 24 hours, hardly anyone disagreed with her. It was an amazing, almost redemptive, moment in our Trump-induced dystopia. A corporate conglomerate slaughtered its cash cow in order to take a principled stand against racism. There was no instant rebuttal from the right, no white nationalist defense of the centuries-old African-simian racist trope. You could almost make yourself believe that there was a national consensus that this kind of blatant, hateful bigotry was simply wrong and unacceptable. It was so pre-Trump.

Then comedian Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, and all hell broke loose. Bee, on her cable show, had shown a warm, loving picture of Ivanka and her young son, and contrasted that touching parental moment with the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their immigrant parents. Said the comic, “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child. But let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

The Twittersphere was apoplectic with demands for equal justice for foulmouthed entertainers, an insistence that if Roseanne had to be sacrificed for her racist criticism of an Obama confidant, then surely Samantha should be fired for calling Trump’s daughter a cunt. Needless to say, the illusion that ABC’s principled stand in canceling “Roseanne” was a positive turning point in our culture wars, was now dead. What had briefly looked like a constructive consensus was now a full frontal battle between ape and cunt, a bizarre false equivalency between racial hatred and the use of a crude profanity.

The ensuing dialogue had nothing to do with civility or decency. It was all about politics, in the most decadent use of that term. Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that “such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned,” leaving the door open, of course, to condone use of the c-word for Hillary Clinton, as many Trump t-shirts and campaign signs did during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself weighed into the battle, insisting that Bee be fired since that was the fate his buddy Roseanne suffered. That left us with yet one more unimaginable absurdity about the times in which we live: you can be elected president after admitting that you grab women by their pussies, but calling the first daughter a cunt is a dischargeable offense for a comedian.

Then the left fired back with numerous examples of Trump having used the c-word, along with the often told story of singer Ted Nugent calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and then being invited to dinner at the Trump Whitehouse. Moving right along with this scintillating intellectual exchange, the conservative surrebuttal hit its stride with counterclaims to Barr’s dismissal, including a Bill Maher episode featuring side-by-side pictures of Trump and an orangutan. As is so often the case with political discourse these days, the parties use whataboutism the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

There is simply no moral equivalency between a brutally racist comment and the use of the c-word, particularly in this context since it was not used to demean women on the basis of their gender. Bee offered a sincere apology, as she should have. Her sin was not so much the offensiveness of the word, but the fact that its use predictably detracted from her overall valid message about the hypocrisy of Trump family values versus the treatment of immigrant families.

This is, obviously, a powerful word that packs a seismic etymological punch. Yet, it has not always been so offensive. In Middle English, the term was a standard reference for the female genitalia. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the name of a 13th century London red light district street, Gropecuntlane. Chaucer used a variant for the word in two of his works. Shakespeare spun puns from the word in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. By the mid-1900s, the c-word had become quite notorious, generally considered one of the vilest of obscenities. It was used mostly by men to demean women, an angry, hateful, misogynistic slur, like “bitch” squared. That began to change in the 1990s. Many prominent women entertainers, prompted by playwright Eve Ensler and her The Vagina Monologues, began using the word, in effect reclaiming it from the misogynists. That new meaning was reflected in actress Sally Field’s reaction to this week’s brouhaha. Bee, she said, was “flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt (because) cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” So sayeth the Flying Nun.

As the dust begins to settle from this latest culture wars skirmish, we seem to be in a pretty good place. Roseanne remains canceled, and an apologetic Samantha is still going strong. When it comes to evil, racism trumps obscenity. After all, cunt is just a vowel movement away from can’t. Now, there’s a bumper sticker for you!

A RAINBOW SHINES OVER CUBA’S STORM CLOUDS

A rainbow was the last thing I expected to find in Cuba. This was, after all, our hemisphere’s epicenter of evil back in the 1960s. I had to practice hiding my rotund body under a grade school desk because Cuba had Soviet missiles pointed at us. After suffering such an indignity, you’d think I’d prefer sailing to Dante’s Inferno rather than to Castro’s Cuba. Alas, Norwegian Cruise Lines has no Inferno itineraries. So, off to Havana we went.

Rainbow spruces up Havana Harbor.
(All photos by Melissa Nelson)

And there it was, this strikingly brilliant rainbow, glowing like a celestial chandelier above the Havana Harbor. There was, to be sure, no pot of gold in sight, only remnants of a broken and crumbling infrastructure in a country where time, in many ways, has stood still since 1959. Yet, this stunningly beautiful rainbow, casting its glow on a people who persevered through one existential threat after another, is a perfect metaphor for Cuba. This country shouldn’t be judged by its storm clouds alone. You have to look for the rainbow, as well.

If you want a vacation destination totally void of nuance, contradictions and complexities, a place filled with perpetual smiles, sunshine and laughter, get thee to a Disney property pronto. The Havana port of call is not for you. On the other hand, if you’ve been frustrated by knowing Cuba only through the endless dialectic of the left and right, and have longed to see it, hear it, breathe it and feel it, up close and personal, go there now, before our president completely closes the door on that opportunity.

Cuba is an island of warts and wonders, an ideological Rorschach test, designed to slot you on a scale from Che Guevara to Oliver North. Fidel Castro is dead and his brother, Raul, just retired, but the legacy of their 1959 Revolution is very much alive and on the minds of the tour guides ushering Americans through the streets of a country once considered our mortal enemy. From the windows of our tour bus, we see collapsed roofs and walls splitting apart. Window glass is missing and paint has long vanished. As we take all that in, like we were inspecting the damage of a Category 5 hurricane, our guide quickly notes the complete absence of homelessness, “thanks,” she says, “to the Revolution.”

Much of Cuba’s infrastructure is missing its 1959 sparkle.

Yes, the tour guide works for the government, the commies who inherited the Revolution. So does most everyone else in Cuba. But her spiel was far from empty spin. Based on independent fact-checking, there was far more accuracy in her three-hour presentation than in, say, a random Trump tweet. She correctly boasted that every Cuban is guaranteed quality health care at no charge, along with a free education, up to and including graduate school. She accurately noted that the Revolution eliminated illiteracy and gave everyone a place to live.

And then came a question from the back of the bus: “What’s the average income here?” The poor woman sighed, knowing that her pitch for a very beloved Cuba was about to sink into the international weeds of cultural dissonance. This, after all, was a bus tour, not a microeconomics lecture hall. Her quick answer: about $50 U.S. a month. That might be slightly exaggerated. Most sources peg it at $25 to $30. She quickly added that those amounts have very different meanings, depending on whether you live in Cuba or the U.S. That’s a tough message to get through to American vacationers who had just been charged more than a month of Cuban wages for bottled water on their cruise ship.

Only a few Cubans own cars, and they are all pre-Revolution models, most hobbled together with junkyard auto parts.

But she was right. Money means drastically different things in these two countries. The goal of Cuba’s 1959 Revolution was to dismantle private wealth in order to create a life where people’s basic needs were taken care of by the government. To this day, Cubans stand in lines daily to receive a loaf of bread and other rations. Their housing is paid for, as is their medical care and education. That means a medical doctor, a teacher and a store clerk all make about the same amount of money, and all get the same services from the government. Job selection is based on interest, skill and satisfaction, not economic opportunity.

It’s not easy for us Americans to wrap our heads around a system that devalues money. We are so accustomed to using our adjusted gross income as we did our GPA in college, as a measure of our worth and value. The American Dream is rooted in the belief of working hard in order to move up the economic ladder. That makes it tough for us to understand a place like Cuba where people are supposedly content in their subsistence, without ever having the chance to improve their lot.

Sunset on Havana Harbor.

The truth is that both these countries, despite their ideological animus, are more alike than they are unalike. Yes, one is rooted in capitalism and the other in Marxism. But both systems have produced amazing flashes of a quality life. And both have experienced dismal failures, a result of opposing operating systems running amuck. Cuba remains economically cut off from the world, struggling to survive. Yet, it manages to educate, feed and house its people, and provide them with top-notch medical care. On the other hand, dissidents are jailed without due process and there is no freedom of speech or other hallmarks of democracy.

Yet, here in the good old U.S. of A., we’re not exactly without our own warts. In fact, we just elected one as president. The great middle class has been rapidly shrinking. Some 20 percent of the nation’s wealth is owned by 1 percent of the population. The bottom half takes in only 13% of the income. Millennials are saddled with absurd amounts of college debt, even as their job market declines. Meanwhile, 32 million Americans can’t read or write and 28 million have no health insurance.

Unlike in those Soviet-inspired missile crisis days of yore, Cuba no longer poses a threat to us. Much of the economic embargo we imposed on our southern neighbors in the early 1960s, was lifted during the Obama Administration. Trump then reinstated the bulk of those sanctions. That was a severe blow to the Cuban people, with no benefit to U.S. interests. It’s time to return to that détente mediated by Pope Francis. Let’s lift those meanspirited sanctions. Somewhere over the rainbow, let there be solidarity between the people of Cuba and the United States.