SEARCHING FOR CLUES TO HAPPINESS ON THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER

There is nothing quite like death to make us think about life.  I’ve been doing just that sort of thinking lately, in the wake of my kid brother’s sudden death.  Although the state of mourning is never a destination of choice, it provokes a welcomed, if temporary, escape from the inertia of everyday life, from dreary headlines and other constipations that our social media diet foists upon us.

The Nelson brothers, Bill in foreground. (Drawing by Nan Nelson.)

I know that I will soon return to my avocation of ruminating about matters of politics and policy. But not right now. Not yet. In this moment, my thoughts are singularly trained on the life of my brother, Bill, my only sibling, who died a couple of weeks ago.  In almost any other situation, I would probably keep such thinking private.  But Bill’s life was a bit different, and therein lies a lesson worth sharing. 

In the early 1960s, when he had to repeat Kindergarten, my brother attracted the label of “slow”. When the redux didn’t take, he was called “mentally retarded”, back before that term was sanitized into “cognitively impaired” or “intellectually challenged”.  Then came “special needs” and “learning disabled”.  

Had he been born 20 years earlier, Bill would likely have spent most of his life heavily sedated in a dreary, crowded state hospital for the “feeble minded”, the label du jour of the early and mid 20thcentury.  Fortunately, we, as a society, wised up considerably since then. As a result, Bill spent the last four decades in various group homes where he savored relationships with his staff and housemates and was fully engaged in community activities. He sang in concerts, competed in Special Olympics, worked in a sheltered workshop, went camping and fishing, played BINGO with nuns, watched movies, went out for ice cream and attended so many parties it made my introverted head spin. 

Bill Nelson, age 63. (Photo by Melissa Nelson.)

This thinking I’ve been doing about life goes way beyond the fact that we now treat those at the low end of the IQ scale better than we once did.  Instead, my focus has been on all of the ways Bill totally surpassed us so-called normal folks when it came to experiencing joy, happiness and the unadulterated bliss of human connection.  

I never met a happier person than my brother.  Never mind the fact that he eventually lost his sight and ability to walk, Bill packed his life with sustained joy.  He had a passion for people, for connecting with them, staying in the moment with them and making them laugh.  If anyone – a nurse, a social worker, a relative – excused themselves to go to the bathroom, Bill’s line was always the same: “Don’t fall in the hole!”  It didn’t matter if it was the first or fiftieth time you heard it, laughter never failed to ensue.   

He had an affinity for old TV sitcoms, particularly I Love Lucy, and had committed most of the episodes to memory.  Borrowing from that deep well of television trivia, Bill endowed almost everyone he met with a nickname from a TV show. He called his van driver Fred Mertz, a visiting nurse Roseann Barr, his physician Dr. Kildare. One poor aide with a bray-like laugh got the title of Mr. Ed.  It brightened all of their days, none more than Bill’s.

A younger Bill on the lanes.

The contagiousness of Bill’s joy was readily apparent at the funeral home.  The ritual of viewing the deceased in a casket is typically a somber, tearful experience.   To be sure, my brother’s mourners let their tears flow.  But as they stopped to view his remains, there were instant smiles and suppressed laughter.  Bill was wearing a tee-shirt with his picture on it along with his mantra: “Don’t fall in the hole!”  A large I Love Lucy throw was draped over the casket. It was vintage Bill connecting with people, even in death, in his own unique way.

Here is something else about my brother’s relationships with people:  They were all positive. One recent study showed that 20 percent of those surveyed were permanently estranged from at least one relative. Another found that 40 percent had experienced family estrangement at some point in their lives.  And who among us has not dealt with seriously fractured relationships? Well, Bill, for one.  

One of the symptoms of his “disability” was a child-like acceptance of the people in his life. His expectations were minimal.  He just wanted them to be nice to him.  Once they passed his nice threshold – and virtually everyone did – Bill immediately took them into his life and accepted them for who they were.  There was no judging, no grudges, no resentments, no jealousies.  

Academicians who study this kind of stuff, have found that people living in 1957 were happier than in almost every year since then.  In other words, despite a higher life expectancy, a growing Gross Domestic Product and a reduction in the work week, not to mention a smart phone in almost every hand, people are far less happy now than they were 62 years ago.  A Stanford University study suggests that a key reason for declining happiness is that people are focused on the future rather than on the here and now.

Bill could have told them that.  He was a here-and-now kind of guy, totally absorbed in the joy of the moment.  His only thoughts about the future were focused on anticipating the pending delight of his favorite things, like seeing friends and family,  petting a cousin’s dog, taking a trip to the Dairy Queen, or to anyplace that served hamburgers and fries.

The conundrum I’ve been wrestling with these past few days is not about how a “mentally challenged” man ended up with more sustained and persistent happiness than anyone I know.   The research, after all, bears that out. An analysis of 23 correlational studies on the link between intelligence and happiness ruled out every potential connection, except for one. It found that people with learning disabilities were happier than everyone else. 

Bill enjoying a book. (Photo by Melissa Nelson.)

This is what leaves me baffled: How can the rest of us, if we are so darn smart, achieve the level of happiness Bill had?  What is it about our intelligence level that seems to produce so much angst, and anger, and dread, and resentment?  Thanks to our brain power we, as a society, have clearly surpassed all expectations when it comes to technological advancement. Yet, we are as collectively unhappy as we have ever been.  

I’m not smart enough to figure this out.  All I know is that I want to spend the rest of my journey here traveling in my brother’s footsteps.  That means accepting people as they are, setting aside differences in order to connect through our similarities.  That means savoring the moment, living in the now. That means finding joy in everyday life, in a sunset, a child’s smile, a dog running through the park. None of that, of course, will make the very real problems and conflicts we face – in the world and in our own lives – disappear. But maybe, just maybe, if we can capture some Bill-like happiness, it might put us in a better place to work on those issues.  It’s worth a try.

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. 

THE MUELLER REPORT: AN EPIC TALE WITHOUT A HAPPY ENDING

The biggest mystery of the Mueller investigation is why Donald Trump was so obsessed with stopping or stymying it. The outcome, in his post-fact universe, was always destined to be rewritten, revised and repurposed in order to cast the Donald as the perpetual winner he imagines himself to be. 

Not even Lewis Carroll could have envisioned a scene like this:  Trump beaming from ear to ear as he declared himself to be having “a very good day. . .no collusion, no obstruction.”  Such joy and jubilation from a 448-page report that paints a picture of an incendiary White House led by a dishonest, paranoid and prevaricating  president who repeatedly orders his aides to lie and falsify documents. God only knows what it would take for this guy to have a bad day.

Robert Mueller’s meticulous report has been analyzed, annotated and otherwise sliced and diced since its release. In many ways, the magnum opus is the legalese version in the glut of Trump books that hit the market over the past few years.  It portrays 45 as an out-of-control narcissist who views events through a prism of whatever makes him look good in the moment, a man who bows to no norm or ethical standard. 

Yet, there is little in this report to stun an American public that has sadly developed an immunity to Trump shock over these past tumultuous  27 months.  Take one of Muller’s more pedestrian findings: that the president dictated a deliberately falsified press statement relating to the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer and her entourage.  In any other administration, that would have been a page one story for days. Instead, it was merely Trump meeting our expectation of untruthfulness.  After all, we’re talking about a guy who, according to a former Mar a Largo butler, used to falsely tell guests that nursey rhyme tiles in Ivanka’s room were the original work of Walt Disney because, as Trump told his employee, “who cares” if it’s not true? 

One of Trump’s pre-presidential biographers, Michael D’Antonio, prophetically anticipated a major theme of the Mueller report weeks before the inauguration. In describing his vision of the then-incoming presidency, D’Antonio told Politico, “. . .he’ll give orders and they may not be followed, and he wouldn’t care if he doesn’t find out about it. He’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration of the government. It’s going to be what he seems to be gaining or losing in public esteem.”

Therein lies Trump’s biggest ego bruise from the Mueller investigation.  Revelation of his constant fabrications or utter disregard for ethical behavior does not faze him. That’s simply Trump being Trump, a persona he has embraced for 72 years.  For this president, the real kryptonite in Mueller’s findings is that his staff regularly ignores the Donald’s orders, otherwise known, in the words of former White House counsel Don McGahn, as “crazy shit”.   For a man who ran for president on the theme of “only I can fix it”, a pathological egotist who takes counsel from no quarter, the Mueller report had the impact of Dorothy’s dog, Toto.  It pulled back the curtain on this boisterous, vile-tweeting, bombast-spewing loudmouth to reveal that the mighty Oz is actually just a feeble old man who nobody pays much attention to.

Of all of Mueller’s findings, this one sentence carried the heaviest blow to Trump’s ego: “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” 

According to Mueller:

WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL MCGAHNrepeatedly refused Trump’s orders for him to have Mueller fired.

DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF RICK DEARBORN took Trump’s written instructions for the Justice Department to limit the Russia probe to future elections and threw them into a trash can.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS continuously refused Trump’s pleas to “un-recuse” himself from the Russia investigation so he could protect the President.

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DANIEL COATSrefused the president’s request to say there was no link between the Trump campaign and Russia.

DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY DIRECTOR K.T. MCFARLANDrefused Trump’s order to write a witness statement saying that the president hadn’t told her then-boss, Michael Flynn, to discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

CHIEF OF STAFF REINCE PRIEBUSignored Trump’s order to fire Jeff Sessions.

DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL ROD ROSENSTEINrefused Trump’s order to falsely announce that James Comey’s firing was Rosenstein’s idea.

The list goes on and on. In many cases, as Trump biographer D’Antonio prophesized, the refusal of presidential orders took the form of passive resistance. They simply ignored the assignment and waited for Trump’s attention to move to the next shiny object.  

While the Mueller report provides the most extensive documentation of how many of Trump’s aides routinely ignored his commands, it’s not the first we’ve heard of this phenomena. His former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, refused Trump’s order to assassinate the president of Syria and provide options for military action against Iran. Aides also prevented Trump from pulling out of trade deals by removing papers from his desk and waiting for him to forget about it.  Other top assistants reportedly declined Trump’s instructions to lobby the Justice Department to prevent the AT&T-Time Warner merger as a way of punishing CNN for what the president regarded as negative news coverage.

There is, of course, only slight solace in the fact that so many of the president’s subordinates found ways to avoid doing “crazy shit”.  Of those identified above, all except Coats have either left the White House or are about to.  

Now that the curtain has been pulled back on the illusion of the great and powerful Oz, passive resistance offers little comfort for the future of Trump’s presidency.  That means, unless we find a way to cut this nightmare short, we will need a pronoun change in what has been the most quoted line in the Mueller report, the part where Trump, upon learning of Mueller’s appointment, said, “This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”  The truth of the matter is that if his presidency doesn’t end soon, WE are fucked.  

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

CBS’s timing for the third revival of its other-worldly series The Twilight Zone could not have been more impeccable.  As we approach the precipice of a presidential election campaign, we are, indeed, about to enter another dimension. With apologies to the late Rod Serling, here is the introductory narrative:

Imagine if you will, a score or more of ambitious politicians, a horde of men and women of various shades of liberalness, all seeking their party’s nomination. It is, by and large, an honorable constellation of star candidates. Except for one thing. Each of them possesses a flaw. Although neither felonious nor disqualifying, these foibles haunt the presidential aspirants like a Dickensian ghost. Meanwhile, the other party has but one candidate, the incumbent president, an utterly immoral, soulless, bloviating shell of a man who routinely performs at least a dozen despicable acts before breakfast. What does it mean, you might ask, that a good candidate, even with a minor peccadillo, would not be a shoo-in when pitted against a deplorable bastion of evil?  It means that we are now in the Twilight Zone.

And we’d better get used to it. Between now and November of next year, this country’s quest to elect a president will be subsumed in a bizarre and preternatural odyssey unlike anything we have experienced.  The campaign will be void of symmetry, packed with irrationality and mired in a Byzantine battle of facts versus alternative facts.  

For the Democratic candidates, the focus will be on benign blemishes, things like having a faux American Indian identity, bullying staff members, being too close to Wall Street, dating a much older political figure decades ago, or having a rope line reputation for pressing the flesh a tad too much.

On the Republican side is Donald Trump, a rapidly growing malignant goiter on the body politic.  So far in 2019, he has clocked in at an average of 22 lies a day. He took migrant children away from their parents and caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. He said some neo-Nazis and Klan members are “very fine people”, and complained that Nigerians won’t “go back to their huts” and that Haitians “all have AIDS”.  He shared highly classified data with top Russian officials, and has sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies.  

In just the past few days, Trump has outdone himself when it comes to unraveling. He threatened to close the country’s southern border, and then backed off and said he’d use tariffs to force his will on Mexico. Then he urged border patrol agents to force asylum-seeking immigrants to turn around and go home because there is no room for them, completely contrary to facts and law. He promised a top Homeland Security official a presidential pardon if he ignored the legal rights of migrants. His record is so bad on this issue that there have been at least 25 federal court rulings that have blocked nearly every move Trump has made on immigration.  

Clearly, no American president has stood for reelection with a record as odious as Trump’s.  Yet, it is very possible that he will win a second term in 2020.  He remains revered by his base as the Great White Hope in a country that has grown far too diverse for his supporters’ tastes. And he remains acceptable to many mainstream Republicans who may hold their noses privately while publicly applauding his tax cuts for the rich and appointment of conservative judges.  Besides, his acts of atrocity are so numerous and frequent, they have a way of fading into the ether to make room for their successors.  That leaves us with this bizarre, irrational and asymmetrical  environment in which the quotidian flaws of Democratic candidates have a staying power that outlasts the cumulative horror that has been Trump’s presidency. Not only that, the challengers’ flaws pale in comparison to Trumpian foibles in the same category.

For example:

AMY KLOBUCHAR has been accused of bullying staff members.  Trump routinely insults, demeans and verbally abuses not only staff but cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries.  

ELIZABETH WARREN has been unable to shake the criticism that she incorrectly claimed to be an American Indian.  As of March 17, Trump told 9,179 lies since taking office. One of them was that his father was born in Germany.

KAMALA HARRIS is constantly bombarded with reports that, as a young political apprentice, she dated – more than 20 years ago – a much older Willie Brown, former mayor of San Francisco. This barely even qualifies as a flaw but she has been getting flack on it. Harris was single at the time, although Brown was technically married but estranged from his wife. Trump’s alleged flings with a porn star and a Playboy Playmate, along with hush money paid to both, don’t even make the top ten list of his aberrant behaviors.

CORY BOOKER has been on the carpet for having close ties to Wall Street.  From day one of his presidency, Trump has catered to the moneyed class, filling his cabinet with Goldman Sachs alumni, rolling back regulations for the financial sector and cutting taxes on the mega rich.

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND has acquired the “flip flop” label as a result of becoming more liberal after she moved from a moderate House district to her current New York Senate seat. Trump has not only spent his life flip-flopping (abortion, gun control, LGBTQ rights), but lately, as noted above, he has been reversing himself on an almost hourly basis (border closing, health insurance, Special Olympics funding). A creative entrepreneur has had great success in selling “Presidential Flip-Flops”, sandals that carry Trump’s contradictory tweets on the straps of the footwear.

JOE BIDEN has run into problems with his habit of expressing affection with hugs, kisses and caresses that sometimes make people feel uncomfortable.  Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 23 women and boasted on the Access Hollywood tape of grabbing them by their genitals.

The good news in all of this is that any of the Democratic candidates would be head and shoulders above Trump. The bad news is that it does not assure electoral victory. That will come the way it always has, through good messaging and the hard work of voter registration and turnout. It’s either that or four more years in the Twilight Zone.

UNCLE JOE’S TOUCH IS . . . WELL, OUT OF TOUCH

I’ve been a fervent Joe Biden fan for most of my adult life. How do you not love a guy who blurts out stuff like: “This is a big fucking deal” into a hot mic? I even cheered with guilty pleasure when he said he wanted to take Donald Trump “behind the gym and beat the hell out of him”.  In a world of buttoned-down, circumspect politicians guided by focus groups, Biden has forever been one of a kind. But please, Joe, don’t run for president. 

I don’t say this because of the seven women (at last count) who have complained that he invaded their personal space by hair smelling, nose rubbing, head kissing, shoulder squeezing or prolonged hugging.   I say it because his most endearing quality – being himself – is out of sync with an evolving and younger world around him.

As a 69-year-old retiree who had to turn to Google for a definition of the word “woke”, I feel his pain. Yet, one of life’s most important choices is when to leave the party. Particularly after the past few days, now seems like the time for Joe to call it a night. He can flash that disarming trademark smile, take his bows, and lend his considerable wisdom to the diverse and growing cast of Democratic candidates seeking the one office that has forever eluded him.

Because of my affection for the guy, I initially vacillated on the question of whether he should run as the women’s stories began to emerge last weekend. The media frenzy – both social and mainstream – didn’t help. As each woman complaining about Biden’s touchy-feely behavior stressed, this wasn’t about sexual assault or harassment.  Many news stories, however, failed to make that clear, as they trotted out #MeToo background references to men who were accused of assaultive or harassing behavior. Even the esteemed Washington Post, in its Tuesday print edition, ran a cutline saying “Bidden denied sexual misconduct charges”.  

So much of the response to this story has been predictably hyperbolic and tribal.  Fox News has had a field day with “Creepy Uncle Joe” stories. The other side has questioned the political motives behind the accusations.  Social media has been inundated with variations on the social construct that Biden’s hair kissing is de minimis compared with Trump’s pussy grabbing, an assertion that is at once factually correct and a lousy basis for selecting a president.  

Finally, after several days of insisting he never acted inappropriately and had no intentions of causing discomfort, Biden issued a video statement yesterday that was filled with his charismatic charm and empathy, along with a promise to change his behavior. He said he recognizes that “social norms (have) shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset, and I get it.”

I watched the video three times, warming to Biden’s embrace of human connection as a vital force in life and in politics.  But what really got to me was the fact that he still doesn’t get it.  The boundaries of personal space have not changed.  What has changed is that women have become more empowered to speak out about men who enter that space without consent.  As long as 50 years ago, about the time Biden entered politics, academic researchers put a microscope to tactile communication. They found it to be powerfully constructive if used correctly, but also cautioned that it is far more susceptible to misinterpretation between sender and receiver than verbal or other nonverbal communication. Particularly problematic, they said, is the matter of touch initiated by someone in a position of power over the recipient, as in the case of a professor and a student, or a vice president and a campaign volunteer. 

 In my career as a union representative, I rarely encountered a female worker who didn’t have at least one story of an overly tactile, Biden-like boss. It wasn’t sexual harassment per se, but the managerial touches left them uncomfortable. Because of the power imbalance, the vast majority opted not to complain.  The only thing that has changed over all these decades is that many women are now objecting when they feel their personal space has been violated.

If Joe really got it, yesterday’s statement would have included an apology. With his characteristic authenticity and warmth, he could have said:  “It pains me to no end to think that I made some women uncomfortable. Because we are now in a new era where women – thankfully – feel comfortable in telling us when they are uncomfortable, I know now that I crossed a line that I didn’t know existed. I am so sorry.  I get it now and I will immediately change my behavior.”

Joe Biden, to use his own terminology, is one hell of a decent guy.  But he is of a different era, and it is not easy to adjust to change. That’s why, in a recent speech, he referenced 23 people by name and only three were born since 1961.  That’s why, in another appearance, he blasted the “younger generation” for complaining about how tough things are, and then listed all of the accomplishments of his generation.  That’s why he told a New York gathering that he regrets that he “couldn’t come up with a way of getting (Anita Hill) the kind of hearing she deserved,” a reference to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing he chaired in 1991.

I know well the pain of comprehending that your best years are behind you.  Growing old and being – at least a little – out of touch is a natural life rhythm. But it is not a useful predicate for a presidential campaign. The Democratic field for 2020 is packed with unprecedented diversity, in gender, race, age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, as well as new thinking and ideas.  It’s hard to imagine how the enthusiasm in all those constituencies carries over to the general election if the eventual candidate turns out to be an old white guy trying to defend everything he has done since 1972.  For the country’s sake, and for Joe’s sake, I hope that doesn’t happen.

WATER POLO: THE NEW AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Now that we’ve spent a couple of weeks shaking our heads over the college admissions scandal, it is time to reckon with the fact that our system of higher education is seriously broken.  This is about more than a water polo coach on the take.  It’s about affordability, access and equal opportunity. It’s about how the decimation of those qualities has put a generation of young people at risk.

A four-year private college degree now carries an average price tag of a quarter of a million dollars. Even with scholarships and parental assistance, the typical graduate starts adult life $30,500 in the red.   Nationwide, student loan debt exceeds $1.5 trillion.  The insanity of those economics has created a scarcity of opportunity, a Hunger Games-like competition in which 18-year-olds are forced to fight for an educational slot that might give them a shot at the good life and upward mobility.

As a result, high schools throughout the country are experiencing a mental health epidemic. The intense pressure on kids to compete for grades and test scores that could create a path to the “right” college has heaped enormous stress on students. Wrote a high school counselor in Maryland, “Honestly, I’ve had more students this year hospitalized for anxiety, depression and other mental-health issues than ever.”  A February Pew survey showed that 70 percent of teenagers saw anxiety and depression as a “major problem”.  An additional 26 percent said it was a minor problem.  

From a public policy perspective, the fix for this predicament is not exactly rocket science. Rather than treating college education as a scarce resource, it needs to be offered in abundance, free of charge, or at least on an ability-to-pay basis. In addition to academic ability, admission decisions need to reflect a need for racial and ethnic diversity and a leveling of the family income playing field.  What we have now is just the opposite: a college entrance turnstile heavily weighted in favor of the financially advantaged.

The real travesty in the college cheating scandal wasn’t that rich parents bribed their kids’ way into top schools.  Sure, it was sketchy for coaches to take payola for greasing the admission skids of phony athletic recruits who had neither the ability nor desire to play on their teams.   But in terms of applying a moral compass, the repugnancy level of that alleged felony is not that far removed from standard operating procedure on many campuses. This broader ethical quandry is a quiet affirmative action plan favoring well-heeled white kids with a mastery of sports like water polo, sailing, fencing, golf, tennis, lacrosse or hockey.  

According to the recent cheating indictments, all of the elite colleges involved had a set number of admission slots for each sports team.  Coaches identify the kids they want for their teams and, for the most part, they get in.  The National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates that between 61 and 79 percent of student athletes are white. Of the 232 Division I sailing athletes last year, none were black. In the case of lacrosse players, 85 percent were white, as were 90 percent of the hockey players. 

Kirsten Hextrum, a University of Oklahoma professor, told the Atlantic that it is not unusual for parents to spend $10,000 a year or more on equipment, private trainers, summer camps, and travel to tournaments in order to help their kids achieve the level of athletic proficiency needed to secure one of the admission slots reserved for their particular sport. Her research, and that of others, shows that students admitted through the athletic route have substantially lower academic ratings than non-athlete applicants. 

This preference pool of mostly white and privileged water polo stars – and others of that athletic ilk – was constructed with the same architecture as the old affirmative action and quota systems that once promoted ethnic and racial diversity.  For the past 40 years, however, those routes to college enrollment diversity have been battered into near oblivion at both the state and federal level.

Eight states have banned race-conscious admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1979 landmark Bakke case, struck down the use of racial quotas in college admissions, but left the door open to the consideration of race as one of many criteria in student selection.  Through subsequent court decisions, however, that door has been slowly closing, and many legal observers believe it is about to be slammed shut in a case currently before a very conservative Supreme Court. As a result, according to a New York Times analysis, black and Hispanic students are now more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges than they were 35 years ago. 

This leaves us with a startlingly absurd result:  Colleges are prohibited from creating a diverse student body by giving preference to ethnic and racial minority applicants, but it’s perfectly acceptable for them to create admission quotas for a pool of predominately affluent white athletes with less-than-stellar academic records.  Affirmative action isn’t dead. It has simply become a codification of white privilege.

In a TMZ kind of way, it was tantalizing to see television stars and investment brokers doing the perp walk on accusations that they bribed their kids’ way into top schools. But their approach differs only in kind – and legality – from what has become the accepted norm in college admissions. Affluent white families go to the head of the line, and everyone else battles it out for whatever is left.  Delusional defenders of the system call it a meritocracy, but it is far, far closer to being a plutocracy. And it needs to change. 

WHAT DEMS NEED TO WIN IN 2020: A BIG TENT AND A SHIFT TO THE LEFT

Pay no attention to the tortured handwringing over the alleged foibles de jour of the Democratic Party. Yes, it’s lurching to the left. And yes, its internecine squabbles can be a tad unseemly.  The fact of the matter is that you can’t have growth without growing pains.  And without growth and change, we are left with the party of 2016.  In case you forgot, it didn’t end well.

I understand the anxiety. If Democrats blow it in 2020, we’re stuck with the worst Groundhog Day of our lives: four more years of Trumpian nuclear winter.  So our blood pressure soars when we see a headline like the one in the Washington Post the other day:  “Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism”.  Ditto for the almost daily prognostications that “socialist” concepts will assure defeat on election day (here, here and here). 

Best to take a collective deep breath and recognize three basic truths:  The election is more than 18 months away; the depth and breadth of our current problems transcend the reach of centrist ideology and Clintonian triangulation; and, the occasional chaos in the House Democratic Caucus is the very positive result of expanding the party tent to include more than white men. 

For sure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have preferred to have spent the past week doing something other than mediating an internal party battle between the comparative evils of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  It’s safe to say that no other House speaker has faced that challenge.  That’s because the new Democratic House majority looks substantially different than its predecessors of either party.  There are record numbers of women, people of color and millennials. Of the 43 non-white women elected for the first time, 22 are African American, six are Asian Pacific Islanders, 12 are Latina, two are Native American and one is Middle Eastern/North African. 

In the good old boys’ club days of Congress, freshmen were to be seen but not heard.  With this new big tent group, however, social media savvy has chipped away at the seniority system for determining prominence in Washington.  At 29, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York became a super star months before her election to Congress, a fete fueled largely by her Twitter following. Falling closely behind her is Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American from Minnesota, who was at the center of last week’s flap.  Omar has frequently criticized Israel with language that borrows heavily on anti-Semitic tropes, setting off a furor that remained at the top of the news feed for the past week. 

As an old white guy, judging linguistic nuances of Jewish and Muslim criticism is beyond my pay grade and life experience. It strikes me, however, that the conflict hardly diminishes Democrats. Instead, it is a byproduct of their vision of diversity and inclusiveness.  If you want a big-tent party, expect and accept some rambunctiousness. If you are more comfortable with politicians who look, act and think alike, vote Republican. 

The other inane anxiety attack that some Democrats are having ( to name a few: Ed Rendell, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown) is that the party is swinging too far to the left. They are quaking in their centrist boots over selective red-baiting by a president who owes his election to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin troll farm.  It is beyond absurd to label proposals for single payer health insurance, free college tuition, meaningful climate change precautions and higher taxes on the mega rich as the destruction of capitalism.  Although it is highly unlikely that any of those goals will be fully adopted anytime soon, the Democratic Party would be indulging in malpractice if it failed to push strongly in a leftward direction right now. 

Our government has spent the past several decades helping the rich at the expense of everyone else, resulting in a level of economic inequality not seen since the late 19th century.  That is the observation of the New York Times’ David Leonhardt who went on to note that the really radical approach would be to do nothing, or to make inequality worse, as Trump’s policies have.

Peter Beinart, a political science professor at the City University of New York, writing for The Atlantic, observed that the left has not traditionally had much influence on the Democrats. Yet, he said, there were two critical times when it was able to push its programs onto the table: the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s.  Both occasions involved circumstances very similar to what we are now facing. 

Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal legislation was the result of intense agitation on the left from forces like Huey Long and Francis Townsend. Their populist movement, according to Beinart, drew support from millions of people who demanded labor rights, easy credit and nationalization of banks and industries. As those very non-centrist aspirations won mass appeal, Roosevelt and many Congressional Democrats moved leftward, producing one of the most liberal legislative programs in history:  a pro-labor law, higher taxes on the rich, Social Security, unemployment insurance and aid for low income families.  Most historians have observed that those sweeping changes would not have happened without a mobilized left wing.

A similar dynamic played out in the 1960s.  Julian E. Zelizer, in his book The Fierce Urgency of Now, writes that John Kennedy had no intention of taking up the cause of racial inequality and the plight of the poor.  He was focused on tax cuts and, according to Zelizer, did not want to waste political capital on social justice issues that he thought had no traction in Congress.  His thinking changed dramatically, however, after two years of intense civil rights struggles and sustained pressure from the left.  After his death, Lyndon Johnson picked up Kennedy’s progressive agenda, resulting in the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act, federal aid for education, food stamps, job training, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid. 

There has not been anything even remotely close to that kind of progressive legislative reach since. Clearly, now is the time for a third wave of bold, sweeping changes to address profound social problems.  But that will not come from a Democratic Party beholden to Wall Street and the status quo. Polling shows significant public support for so-called socialist concepts like single payer health insurance, free college tuition, tax increases for the rich and sweeping steps to combat climate change.  

Just as in the ‘30s and ‘60s, the left is unlikely to capture the entirety of its agenda.  But without forcefully pushing it and agitating for it, none of it will see the light of day.  In this moment, the center of the road is an unproductive and lonely place to be.      

RACISM RUNS FAR DEEPER THAN BLACKFACE & THE N-WORD

You would almost think we are smack in the middle of the biggest racial reckoning since the end of the Civil War.  Sheepish white pols are throwing out their blackface kits. A Maryland legislator is on political life support after having uttered the n-word in a cigar bar.  A member of Congress lost his committee assignments because he defended white supremacy.   We may never have another Black History Month as provocative as the one that just ended, nor as shallow.

Sadly, this spectacle of superficiality shows no signs of abating. We are now into a four-day international story over whether Virginia’s first lady, Pam Northam, committed a racist act by handing raw cotton to black students during presentations on slavery. She insists she gave the cotton to students of all color.  The BBC ran a piece headlined “Virginia’s First Lady in Cotton-picking Race Row.” This was only weeks after she mitigated her husband’s (Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam) self-inflicted wounds by stopping him from doing the moonwalk at a news conference where he confessed to having used blackface in a 1984 Michael Jackson dance contest.

Now comes Michael Cohen, former Trump attorney and consigliere, – and soon-to-be federal prison inmate – with scathing Congressional testimony about his former boss. Cohen said of Trump: “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”  In a day-long committee hearing, House Republicans made no attempt to defend their president on the conman and cheat charges.  But Trump loyalist Rep. Mark Meadows pulled out all stops on the racist label.  He had a black woman stand next to him during his televised questioning. Meadows pointed to her and said, in the tone of a Perry Mason gotcha moment, that she is a long time Trump family friend, so how could the president possibly be racist?  He proudly rested his case, but not for long.

It went quickly downhill from there.  A number of committee members said Meadows’s use of the woman as a prop was, in itself, racist.  That sent the Congressman into an intensely emotional diatribe, protesting that he can’t be racist because he has black nieces and nephews and is very good friends with the committee chair who is black.  As a child of the 1960s, I naively thought that old racist trope about “some of my best friends are black,” had gone the way of the hula hoop and segregated lunch counters.

There are two takeaways in all of this early 2019 racial news.  One is that America’s infectious goiter of racism is every bit as malignant as it was 50 years ago.  Regardless of how offending politicians try to frame the issue, white guys corking up in blackface is not just an ancient taboo.  It’s always been wrong, but prominent white folks seem hell bent on doing it, despite the ensuing furor. A Google search for blackface produces millions of hits, a virtual who’s who  of entertainers and political figures who keep right on smearing the burned cork over their white privilege (here, here and here).  

Yes, there is a slightly higher risk now for politicians who partake in racist symbols, whether by blackface, use of the n-word or similar bigotry.   When the Virginia blackface story first broke, there was a stampede of Democratic leaders and presidential candidates issuing calls for Northam’s resignation.  A few days later, however, the situation changed dramatically.  The state’s lieutenant governor, a black Democrat, was accused of sexual assault by two women.  Then the attorney general, second in the line of succession for governor, also a Democrat, revealed that he, too, had done the blackface bit.  If all three of them quit, the new Virginia governor would be the current speaker of the house, a Republican.  Suddenly public pressure on Northam to resign all but disappeared.  Polling data show that 58 percent of the state’s African Americans want him to remain in office.

Therein lies the second – and most important – object lesson.  While elected leaders donning blackface or spewing blatantly racist speech are inexcusably despicable, their behavior is but a symptom of a much larger problem, one that gets far less attention than the deplorable antics that have captured recent headlines.  Here’s the deal:  Institutional racism is deeply baked into our culture and government, putting non-whites at an inherent  structural disadvantage when it comes to virtually every aspect of life. That will change only through new laws and public policy. For the past 100 years, that aspirational transformation has been an anathema to the Republican Party. 

It’s not difficult to understand why most African Americans in Virginia want to retain a Democratic governor with a penchant for blackface.  The alternative is control by a party of white faces totally oblivious to their needs.  And those needs cut deeply into this country’s soul, inflicting far more pain than the racist buffoonery of ignorant politicians.

Here is the real problem with America’s racism in 2019:  Black households have only 10 cents in wealth for every dollar held by white households. Only 43 percent of African Americans own a home, a figure that has fallen almost every year since 2004. Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men.  Blacks are incarcerated in state prisons at more than five times the rate of whites. Overwhelmingly white school districts receive $23 billion more than predominantly black districts, despite serving roughly the same number of children. Black people face a greater risk of death than white people at every stage of life. One study found that racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths in a year, about as many as were caused by strokes.

As depressing and distressing as it is to relive the racist tropes of the 1960s, it is far worse to assume that our deep racial divide will be healed by simply getting rid of politicians who dabbled in blackface or used the n-word.  I’d like to think such a purge would be a start to dealing with the underlying evil of structural racism.  But I fear it is a superficial diversion, one that may create the illusion of doing the right thing, while leaving a diabolically broken system still very broken.