Month: May 2019

THE BEAVER & THE DONALD: DON’T LEAVE IT TO EITHER OF THEM

Remember how idyllic life seemed to be back in the Leave It To Beaver days? Good old dad, Ward Cleaver, was the family’s sole breadwinner who never failed to get home in time for dinner.  His wife, June, was a happy stay-at-home mom, constantly smiling, even while vacuuming the living room in a dress, high heels and a strand of pearls. Their sons, the Beaver and Wally, partook only in wholesome antics and said “golly gee” a lot.  The Vietnam War was percolating. College kids were dropping acid. Racial tensions were imploding all over the place.  But none of that ugliness ever entered the Cleaver household, or their lily white neighborhood.

This 1960s sitcom represents the imagery of the second A in MAGA.  Donald Trump’s promise to his base is to return the country to the fictional greatness of Leave It To Beaver. A more straightforward pitch would have been “Bring Back The Sanctity Of White Privilege And The Subjugation Of Women”. “Make America Great Again” fits better on a cap.

MAGA is all about the Cleaver family and an unambiguous emotional ecosystem in which everyone knew their place. Marriage was between a man and a woman. Husbands were in charge and wives were their obedient servants.  Minority group members, the oppressed few among the dominating white majority, were seen but not heard.   In the six-year run of LITB, there was only one appearance by a black actor. She played a maid in a single episode.

Much to the consternation of the MAGA crowd, the Cleaver days are now long gone, even though they were never anything more than the imaginary figment of a wistful writing staff. America is rapidly changing. Same sex marriage is the law of the land. Not only are rigid gender roles loosening, the concept of gender itself is now seen as amorphous. According to Axios, by the time today’s teenagers enter their 30s, there will be more minorities than whites, more old people than children and more folks practicing Islam than Judaism.  Not exactly Ward and June Cleaver’s America.

So along comes Trump and his MAGA time machine to take us back to the good old days.  The president has been amazingly effective in leading this backward journey.  Sadly, the old days being recaptured look nothing like a Leave It To Beaver rerun. 

Take abortion for example. Back in the early 1960s, aborting a fetus was a felony in 49 states – and a “high misdemeanor” in New Jersey. Countless women, mostly poor, died or were badly injured in black market abortions performed by sketchy characters under incredibly unhygienic conditions.  Since 1973, however, women have had a Supreme Court affirmed right to choose a safe and legal abortion.  Trump, in turning back time, has proudly engineered a court majority he hopes will reverse that 46-year-old decision by denying women the right to control their own bodies.  A number of state legislatures this week adopted draconian abortion bans, reminiscent of the 1950s, all aimed at providing the court with a vehicle to overturn Roe v Wade.  Under a new Alabama law, a physician performing an abortion on a rape victim would serve a longer prison sentence than the man who raped her. 

If there is anything resembling a coherent theme of governance in Trump World, it’s this reactionary retreat into the dark corners of our past.  Numerous studies have documented substantial increases in hate crimes since he took office.  No, Trump didn’t invent racism. He just made it look acceptable, allowing closeted bigots to climb out from under their rocks and go after people who don’t look like them.  The Anti-Defamation League has documented thousands of  racial assaults, intimidation and vandalism in which the perpetrators referenced the president in carrying out their attacks.  

Rarely a day passes without Trump finding some way to turn back the cultural clock on human rights. Earlier this week he scuttled plans put in motion years ago to replace slaveholder Andrew Jackson’s picture on the twenty dollar bill with that of anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman.  The very next day he announced that his administration would make it easier for adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples and transgender people.  Previously, he rolled back LGBTQ protections in numerous areas, including health care, employment discrimination and military service.  

A number of commentators, including the Washington Post’s David Maraniss, have described the Trumpian zeitgeist of fear, demonization and attacks on free speech as eerily reminiscent of the red scare and McCarthyism days of the 1950s.  Back then, wrote Maraniss, “communists and their sympathizers were called un-American traitors. Now Muslims are disparaged as terrorists and Hispanics as ‘illegal’ and worse.”

In yet another instance of this MAGA retreat to an anything-but-great past, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta recently suggested that Trump’s position that he is immune to Congressional inquiry harkens back to 1859. In the White House then was James Buchanan, widely acclaimed by most historians as the country’s worst president, at least until Trump was elected.  Buchanan was being investigated by a House committee for possible illegal activity.  He unsuccessfully argued at the time that Congress was simply a band of “parasites and informers” who had no business poking its nose into the business of the executive branch.  “Some 160 years later,” wrote Judge Mehta, “President Donald J. Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.” In upholding the House’s right to subpoena Trump’s financial records, the judge said Congress has “sweeping authority” to investigate illegal conduct of a president before and after taking office. He ended his decision with this line: “This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”

Unfortunately, this president is not only prepared to roll back that tide, he is obsessed with doing so. It’s the ultimate con by one of the most adept flimflam artists this country has ever known.  True greatness has never been achieved by turning our backs on the present and retreating into selective memories of the past.  Greatness comes only by looking ahead, not back, and always with an eye toward building a better future for all of us. Leave It To Beaver wasn’t real, and neither is Trump’s promise to create grandeur by going backwards. 

CRUISING THE ROAD TO TOLERANCE WITH MY MAGA COUSIN

I’d like you to meet my cousin Jaime. Frequent visitors to this space may have stumbled upon his occasional retorts (here and here) on my leftist pontifications. Jaime is a God fearin’, gun totin’, Trump lovin’ kind of guy.  If Hillary Clinton had ever met him, she would have quickly certified him as one of the deplorables. And Jaime would have worn it as a badge of honor.  

Well, Madam Secretary, I know Jaime Nelson.  We grew up together. Our fathers were brothers, and our families are close. Jaime Nelson is no deplorable. He’s a good man with a gruff exterior and a big heart. He is also a passionate supporter of Donald Trump and his policies, an agenda that many of us view as anathema to all that we hold dear.

This essay is neither a tribute nor a rebuttal to my cousin.  It’s an examination of a widening and dangerous fault line in our current combustible political culture. How do we – or, even, should we – maintain personal and familial connections with those whose world view so diametrically conflicts with our core values. 

We have never had a moment quite like this one.  The Gore-Bush debacle in 2000 was hard-fought, but did little or no permanent damage to family relationships. The reaction to Obama in 2008 was more visceral. Yet, as Republican pollster Frank Lutz told the New York Times, “With Obama, people hated him or people loved him. But you weren’t evil for how you felt.”  In recent polling, Lutz found that at least a third of those questioned said they had stopped talking to a friend or family member as a result of disagreement over Trump.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer is the director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a conflict resolution consultancy. During the 2012 presidential election, she said her outfit “got not a single message from anybody in the country about incivility.” Once Trump was elected, however, she said her business skyrocketed with pleas for help from clergy members, corporate CEOs and other organization leaders whose constituencies were at each other’s throats. “This is now deep in our homes, deep in our neighborhoods, deep in our places of worship and deep in our workplaces,” Lukensmeyer told a reporter. “It really is a virus.”

Unfortunately, there is no easy vaccine for this virus.  The divide over Trump and his policies cuts deeply through the bone and into the core of our marrow.  To many of us, Trumpism is a vile form of hatred, of women, of racial and ethnic minorities, of the LGBTQ community and others at the margins of our society. Jaime and his fellow Trumpers, however, see themselves marginalized by the political establishment. They have a sense of being left behind by a system that has little regard for native-born American white people who worked hard, only to be looked down upon and shoved aside by immigrants and diversity programs. They feel hated and ridiculed by many of us who resist Trump and his politics of hate and ridicule.

Here is the question: Can we passionately oppose Trumpism and still maintain a connection with the MAGA people in our lives?  Before answering, let me make this even tougher by using Cousin Jaime as an example. Here are two of his recent Facebook posts, both generated by a conservative site.  The first is a picture of an enthused and energetic Beto O’Rourke. The copy reads: “Obama: Now Available In Vanilla”.  Then there’s a picture of Obama and Hillary Clinton embracing under this heading: “This is the only time you will ever see a Muslim hugging a pig.”

Pretty vile, right? They go against everything we bleeding heart liberals believe in.  Why not hit the unfriend button?  Yet, after knowing Jaime for nearly 60 years, I have much more data about who this guy is. He is more than his Facebook page. He has showered my family with repeated acts of kindness over the years.  He’s also posted anti-bullying messages on Facebook, along with this sage piece of advice, attached for unknown reasons, to a picture of John Wayne: “Just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I hate you. We need to relearn that in our society.”

Yes, I cringe a bit at a few of his political posts, just as I do with some posted by fellow liberals. Like this one: “At this point, if you still support Trump you are either rich, racist or just plain stupid.”  Or this one: “Why I am not a Republican: I don’t hate women. I don’t hate minorities. I don’t hate the poor. I don’t hate gay people. I’m not greedy and I’m not a traitor.”

As for the question posed a few paragraphs ago, the answer is yes, I believe it is possible – and necessary – for us to maintain personal and family connections with those whose politics we abhor.  The basic tenets of liberalism are based on the values of treating people with kindness, dignity and respect.  One of the main reasons Trump drives us up the wall is that he dehumanizes large groups of people.  He sees Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He wants to ban all Muslims and black and brown people from “shithole countries.”  Writing friends and family members off on the basis that all Trump supporters are stupid or racist is playing a card from our opponent’s hand.

Obviously, every situation is different. I’m not sure I could sit down at the dinner table with a relative who donned a white hood and carried a tiki torch through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  But that’s not everyone in MAGA World.  I suspect Cousin Jaime disagrees with at least 90 percent of everything I have written in this space. Yet, his comments have always been directed at the substance of my content, never an attack on me. The fact that we can vehemently disagree about Trump but still care for each other is a rare ray of hope at a time of intense division and animosity.

In another context, we of the progressive persuasion, have stood steadfast in our belief that our country should build bridges to the world rather than wall ourselves off from it. Regardless of what happens in 2020, the eventual healing process for this virus of division is going to take a long time. Between now and then, we need bridges, not walls, in our relationships with those on the other side of this political divide. As my cousin says, we can choose to disagree without hatred.  For the sake of our country, our families and our own quality of life, that’s a far, far better road to follow. 

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION RECORD IS A CONSISTENT, UTTER FAILURE

Donald Trump has tackled his pet issue of immigration with all of the bluster – but none of the effectiveness – of the Big Bad Wolf.  He has huffed and puffed his way through dozens of lame attempts to keep brown and black people from entering the country.  Unlike the nursery rhyme villain who succeeded in demolishing two-thirds of the Three Little Pigs’ real estate, the Donald’s bloviation has accomplished absolutely nothing. On the contrary, he has managed to make a broken immigration system far worse than it was. 

Strategic thinking, of course, has never been in this president’s wheelhouse.  He’s a tactics-only man, the kind of guy who tosses fecal matter against the wall with no plan to make it stick.  So far, none of it has. As a matter of fact, there is no wall for it to stick to. Mexico won’t pay for it and neither will Congress. All of his tactics have imploded: a government shutdown, family separations, troops at the border, threats of sealing the border, firing Homeland Security officials for not being tough, asking immigration agents to ignore the law by refusing to let migrants into the country.  Now he wants to charge asylum applicants exorbitant fees and eliminate bail for those accused of entering the country illegally. 

Meanwhile, government officials processed more than 103,000 migrants last month, the highest level in more than 12 years.  Not since the Vietnam War, has an administration demonstrated such utter ineptness at problem solving.  Not only have Trump’s mindless and manic remedies failed miserably, they have exacerbated the very crisis that has defined his presidency.

There is nothing simple about America’s long-broken immigration system, but there is one basic truth that has permeated this issue for decades:  deterrence is no magic wand when it comes to keeping migrants out of the country.  Threats of indefinite imprisonment didn’t hold the Cuban or Haitian boat people back in the Carter and Reagan years.  Fences and intense border patrol policing during the Clinton and Bush years simply rerouted migrants through a deadly Arizona desert. The Obama administration’s Central American advertising campaign warning against family migration had no impact.  

Then along comes Trump and his innate inability to comprehend complexities.  His immigration policy consists of insults and an endless barrage of cruelty designed to keep the “animals” and “bad hombres” from entering the country.  He justified his gambit of pulling migrant children out of the arms of their parents as a deterrence mechanism. Never mind the moral ends-means conundrum.  The government’s own figures showed the caging of children separated from their parents had zero impact on the flow of migrants.  

It was almost as if Trump had no knowledge of the great Sonoran Desert diversion of the 1990s. And, of course, he probably didn’t.  Not many people did until New York’s public radio station, WNYC, produced an astounding Radiolab series called Border Trilogy.The documentary told the story of how government immigration officials used a combination of massive border patrolling and fencing to reduce illegal crossing through a swath of Texas.  The strategy was to reroute migrants through Arizona’s deadly Sonoran Desert, a treacherous path certain to produce serious injuries and death.  The thinking was that word of such adverse consequences would serve as a deterrent to entering the country.  Turns out that they had only part of the theory right. Desert deaths went from four or five a year to hundreds as soon as the plan was put into place.  But the migrants were not deterred.  The death toll went as high as 10,000, and may be even higher because many remains, picked over by vultures and other creatures, were never found.   If the threat of death doesn’t deter migrants in search of a better life, what would?

Deterrence theory is predicated on a behavior model foreign to the immigration context. It assumes that the decider is relatively rational and capable of applying a linear cost-benefit analysis to a contemplated action. Most migrants entering the country are fleeing Central America’s northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It’s an area where weak, corrupt and autocratic governance has yielded violent gangs, drug trafficking and rampant human rights abuses. 

One 15-year-old Honduran boy told Stanford University researchers nothing would stop him from trying to make his way to America. “Here we live in fear. . .I’ve thought of it a lot. I will go.” Why?  His sister was killed by gang members.  Five teenagers were gunned down outside of a youth center he regularly went to, and a grocer in his neighborhood had just been shot.  When that’s the only life you know, a cage or tent in El Paso is hardly a deterrent. It may not be what Janis Joplin had in mind, but it certainly fits: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

In order to understand that, however, policy makers have to be able to get out of their own heads and see the world through the eyes of the Honduran boy.  And that is something our empathy-deficient president is unable to do. So he just keeps flinging crap at the wall. For example, take the punitive action of cutting off foreign aid to the northern triangle countries. It may make Trump feel tough, but the result will certainly be a further deterioration in those countries, sending even more migrants to our borders. Similarly, the president’s overzealous approach to arresting asylum seekers, gives him the aura of the powerful new sheriff in town. Yet, the reality is that the country now has a backlog of 850,000 immigration cases, up by more than 200,000 since Trump took office. With fewer than 450 immigration judges, Central American families arriving now know they will have years to spend in this country until their case comes up, the very outcome Trump wants to avoid.

The ultimate solution to this crisis will come from neither all-cap tweets nor scorched earth, stick-it-to-them tactics.  There are multiple pieces to this puzzle and they need to be addressed in a comprehensive immigration-reform legislative package.  Sadly, even before the 2016 election, Congress was unable to rise to the occasion. Such an outcome now is about as likely as Trump replacing William Barr with Robert Mueller as attorney general.  Our only hope is that at least some of those Trump voters who believed their guy would singlehandedly resolve this immigration mess by building a big, beautiful, Mexico-paid-for wall has not only failed to deliver the goods, he’s made matters much worse.