Tag: Donald Trump

TRUMP AND WOMEN: JUST ANOTHER POWER GRAB

At least Bill Cosby made one good decision in his life. He rejected Donald Trump’s advice on how to handle allegations of sexual assault. As reported by the Washington Post, Trump told an E! reporter in 2014 that the 79-year-old comedian was making a big mistake by not personally responding to the dozens of women who said Cosby forced himself on them. The Donald, of course, faced his own growing cavalcade of accusers this week, women who, one by one, came forward to say they were forcibly groped and/or kissed by the Republican presidential candidate.

Trump followed the advice Cosby turned down, and I am willing to bet half my 401(k) that, at some point this weekend, one of Cosby’s lawyers pointed to the candidate’s traveling freak show of a defense and said to his client, “Do you see now why we told you to keep your mouth shut.” Trump didn’t merely deny the accusations, he held rallies to denigrate and belittle the accusers. He claimed some were ugly, not worth his grope. The cult-like crowd was right out of a Rocky Horror Picture Show. Trump would cite an accusation of sexual assault and the audience would chant “we don’t care,” followed by laughs and jeers. Trump called the women liars and the faithful Trumpians chanted “Lock them up,” the official campaign refrain for non-believers.

One woman in a North Carolina rally Friday wore a hand painted t-shirt with the words “Trump Can Grab My” followed by an arrow pointing to her crotch. Two days earlier in an Ohio revival meeting, women wore shirts that said, “Hey Trump, Talk Dirty to Me.” In case there was any doubt, this is no longer Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. To these folks and their candidate, sexual assault is a myth, just like global warming, a conspiracy hatched by vile liberal interests designed to stop Trump from making America great again. Why else would all of these women come forward now with their accusations?

Of course, we know the answer to that question only too well. This is the way it always works. Women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted cower in shame and insignificance, afraid to come forward because no one would believe them. They spend years in turmoil and agony and powerlessness, wondering, in their darker moments, if maybe they somehow brought this on themselves. And then, later – sometimes years, decades later – one woman steps forward with a story she can’t hold in any longer. Another woman sees it and suddenly recognizes that she is not alone, not the only one, and she too goes public. Then the dam bursts and the flood begins.

I saw the pattern so many times in my work as a union representative. A young woman in her first job would find the boss’s hands all over her. To him, it was just another power grab. To her, it was the most traumatic moment of her life. Never once was there a single victim. Within days of the first complaint, the others quickly followed. None of it had anything to do with how the women looked, dressed or what they did. It wasn’t about sex. It was about power, about men in powerful positions taking what they wanted because they could. It had always been that way and would forever remain thus – until the first victim ends her silence and frees the rest to do the same. Just ask Bill Cosby or Donald Trump.

For me, a seminal moment in understanding this dynamic came in 1991. I was visiting my aunt who was 79 then, long retired from a career as a department store clerk. We were watching the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Anita Hill, who had accused Thomas of sexual harassment, had just completed her testimony. My aunt, rarely at a loss for words, sat in silence, seemingly in another place. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Finally, she spoke.

“I never knew it was wrong,” she said. “I mean we didn’t like it. Actually, we hated it. But these men were in charge. They were over us. And we didn’t want to lose. . . no, we couldn’t lose our jobs. We didn’t have a choice. It’s just the way it is.” It was the only time I saw my aunt cry. The moment was transformative for us both. She was apprehending a new day in which it was simply wrong for a man to use his power over a subordinate that way. And I, for the first time, was realizing there had actually been a point in our history when sexual harassment was an accepted norm: “just the way it is.”

So here we are, in 2016 – three weeks from electing the 45th president of the United States. Have we finally moved the gender fulcrum far enough to elect a woman? Or are we about to knowingly choose a sexual predator, who not only flaunts the rules of decency, but brags about it? My aunt has been gone for 15 years. She never missed an election and always voted Republican. Had she been around these past few days, however, I can tell you without hesitation that Donald Trump would not get her support. Once she saw a world where sexual harassment was wrong and not a way of life, she would never, ever, vote to go back.

GOP’S ANSWER TO TRUMP PROBLEM IS BLOWING IN THE WIND

When our newest Nobel Laureate wrote that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan had never met the current crop of Republican politicians. These folks desperately need emergency meteorological assistance. Their old windsocks of public opinion are no match for the velocity of the October gusts of Donald J. Trump.

Ordinarily, politicians publicly shower fellow party members with obligatory superlative prose that has all the sincerity of an Eddie-Haskell-to-June-Cleaver compliment. That’s only when the mic is on. Behind the scenes, it is more Jerry Springer than Leave it to Beaver. Alas, this is no ordinary election. The challenge for Republican congressional candidates has been how to distance themselves from a toxic presidential nominee without losing votes from the deplorables who love him. After anguishing through months of tortured Trumpisms, each raising the level of racism, misogyny and xenophobia one step higher, most GOP leaders and candidates managed to stake out deeply contorted positions on The Donald. They were tightly parsed and highly nuanced, a natural result of simultaneously condoning that which they condemn. Then the Access Hollywood tape hit and all bets were off. And then on again. Consider, for example:

Darryl Glenn, Republican Senate candidate from Colorado, withdrew his endorsement of Trump after the tape hit the news. In it, the presidential candidate boasted about using his star power to get by with sexual assaults. Glenn told Fox News that “America cannot have a man who speaks this way about women be the face of our country to the Free World.” After 48 hours of backlash from Trump supporters, however, Glenn reversed course and threw his support behind Donald to be the face of our country to the Free World.

Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) came out against Trump on Saturday, telling Politico that the Republican nominee’s remarks were “disgraceful” and that he “is not fit to be president of the United States.” By Tuesday, however, Byrne was back on the Trump Train, regardless of how disgraceful and unfit he may be.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) has outdone the Kama Sutra in finding unique positions. She clearly loathes the guy but is involved in a very competitive reelection battle in a state where Trump has a solid base of support. Initially, Ayotte refused to endorse him but said she would vote for him, a dubious status akin to being a little bit pregnant. Then she was asked during a television appearance if she thought Trump was a role model for children. She said yes. The next day, however, she reversed herself, saying that Trump was no role model but that she would still vote for him. After the groping tape was released, Ayotte made a clean break and said she would not vote for Trump, a stand she says may end her political career.

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) had supported Trump until the tape went public. She immediately reversed course, according to the Omaha World-Herald, saying that his comments were “disgusting and totally unacceptable under any circumstance.” She reversed herself once more on Tuesday and said she will vote for Trump.

The list goes on and on, with changes occurring hourly. There has been far less fluctuation in the stock market this fall than in the Trump positions held by Republican leaders. What remains unknown at the moment is whether any of the un-endorsement “recanters” will flip once more on the heels of new allegations by women who say Trump sexually assaulted them. The only law that matters right now is the uncertainty principle of physics: positions constantly change based on the momentum of events.

Even those who have gone a few days without a reversal are left with some curious juxtapositions. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) says Trump is a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.” Yet, he has endorsed him. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) characterized Trump’s remarks as “textbook definition of racist.” He refuses to campaign with him. But, for the record, the Speaker has endorsed the racist.

There is, of course, an unprecedentedly long list of high ranking Republicans, who have publicly repudiated their party’s presidential candidate. For the most part, they are the ones not up for reelection this year. As for those who are, this is my plea:

Donald Trump is a very mean man, a man who brags about the women he has forcibly groped, a man who has denigrated every minority group, a man who can’t tell fact from fiction, a man who has most of us frightfully scared over what will become of our country, our world, should he be elected. For the love of God and America, please don’t let this man bring us down. No job is worth that price.

PUSSIES AND THE UNMAKING OF A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

So let’s recap. Prior to last Friday, we knew that Donald Trump believes:

Laziness is a trait in blacks;
Mexican immigrants are rapists;
It’s funny to mock a disabled reporter;
Muslims should be prohibited from entering the country;
Megyn Kelly had blood coming out of her whatever;
His money should be counted only by “little short guys that wear yarmulkes”; and
The Pope is disgraceful.

Yet, Trump was only a couple of poll points behind Hillary Clinton and enjoyed the backing of most Republican office holders. Then came the Pussy Tape and all hell broke loose. At least now we know there is a line never to be crossed. This will be helpful for future campaigns. You can denigrate blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, the disabled and the Pope and still be acceptable to most Republicans. But boasting about grabbing women by their pussies is a deal breaker.

Well, maybe it’s not quite that linear. There is another explanation. Jacob Riis, a 19th century photographer and social reformer, taught that progress comes from the cumulative effect of many events. The same is true of regression. Here’s Riis:

“. . . I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

Applying the Riis paradigm to Trump’s fall from GOP grace, it took more than a pussy grab to throw the Party of Lincoln into a cataclysmic frenzy. As Hillary suggested in Sunday night’s debate, if Donald’s bus ride peroration on groping, extramarital seduction, furniture shopping and Tic-Tacs had been a singular aberration, he might have gotten a pass, particularly if he promised to forever keep his two small hands to himself. But coming as it did, on the heels of serial character flaws, rarely seen by someone not on a registered sex offender directory or a terrorist watch list, it was almost too much to take. Even open-minded, understanding Republican congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan called the boys on the bus dialogue sickening, repugnant and unacceptable. And then, just to hedge their bets, continued to endorse Trump to become the leader of the free world.

Pussygate’s most fascinating feature has been the Rorschach quality of responses from party leaders. See if you can pick out a unifying theme in this sampling of reactions from GOP White Guys:

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (Trump’s running mate): “As a husband and father, I was offended by the words and actions described by Donald Trump. . .”

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush: “As the grandfather of two precious girls, I find that no apology can excuse away Donald Trump’s reprehensible comments degrading women.”

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: “Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters. . .”

Utah Senator Mike Lee: If anyone spoke to my wife or my daughter or my mother or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person. . .”

Get it? Thank God these men have women in their families so they can muster enough empathy to recognize that forcibly grabbing them by their genitals is not an appropriate precursor to the presidency. Then again, neither is calling blacks lazy or denigrating Muslims, Jews, the disabled or the Pope. It’s just that those demographics don’t have a seat at the table in most white Republican households. Some foibles are easier to overlook, but this talk of groping white women really hits home with these guys.

It harkens back to some really messed up gender role stuff, a quid-pro-quo known as The Art of a Very Bad Deal. In days of old, when men ruled the roost, social norms required that they protect and revere their womenfolk. House Speaker Ryan actually touched on that notion when he explained why the Trump pussy tape “sickened” him. Said Ryan, “Women are to be revered and championed, not objectified.” The basic deal was that men would open doors for women, pull out their chairs, lift them to their pedestals and forever protect them from harm. In exchange, men called all the shots, held all the power, owned all the property and cast all the votes.

So here we are, in a new era. Not only can women own property and vote, one of them is on the verge of becoming the next U.S. President, thanks in large part to her blustery, braggadocios, bloviating, blowhard of an opponent. And his penchant for grabbing women by their pussies. Although we may not necessarily live happily ever after, there could not be a more delicious ending to this very grim fairytale.

SHIELDING STUDENTS FROM EVIL WON’T HELP THEM ALLEVIATE IT

College campuses, once a hotbed of anything-goes radicalism, are morphing into antiseptic bastions of thought cleansing. The source of this depressing trend is a new breed of students, determined to avoid offense or emotional discomfort at any cost.

Harvard Law School students, according to The New Yorker, have asked their professors not to teach about rape law because the subject is traumatic for them. Northwestern University students filed federal charges, eventually dismissed, against their instructor for writing a professional journal opinion piece opposing prohibitions against faculty-student dating. They said it made them uncomfortable. Students in a number of colleges have been allowed to skip reading assignments that contain passages that might upset them. Here’s how Atlantic Monthly introduced a lengthy analysis of this trend: “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities.”

Indeed it is. The movement’s origins were benign and well intentioned. It started with infrequently used “trigger warnings” on assigned readings, designed as a heads’ up for students who had experienced trauma – sexual assault or other violence. They weren’t excused from the assignment, but the advance warning allowed them to consult with a therapist or take other precautions. In those same early days, human rights training for both faculty and students focused on a concept of “microaggressions”, a form of subconscious racism or sexism typically involving a stereotype. An example would be telling Asian students they must be good at math.

Those noble and sensible beginnings, however, evolved into darker outcomes. As a result of student pressure, backed by threatened social media attacks and the filing of federal discrimination charges, trigger warnings expanded way beyond the traumatized few and are now issued by more than 50% of the faculty, and for such subjects as racism, classism sexism, disregard for personal autonomy, spiders, drug use, suicide, indigenous artifacts, Nazi paraphernalia and slimy things. Worse yet, many schools report that a trigger warning now means students don’t have to read the objectionable material. Fortunately, leaders of some of the country’s leading educational institutions have recently tried to dial this movement back. American University, the University of Chicago and others have adopted policies against trigger warnings. Meanwhile, microaggressions have gone from a human rights learning strategy to a list of things that should never be said. In the University of California system, for example, the faculty has been warned against using a long list phrases, including, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

Sheltering students from unpleasant thoughts and offensive ideas is anathema to what education is all about. How do you teach history without exploring the horrible trauma of war, slavery, Jim Crow laws and the treatment of American Indians? How do you teach literature if you have to trigger out Shakespeare’s “Othello” because of its violence against women, or his “Henry V” because of Henry’s use of warfare and threatened sexual violence as a way of obtaining political success? What about the suicide themes of Sylvia Plath’s poetry or the fear, pain and suffering caused by totalitarianism in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels? If the goal of education is to teach students not what to think, but how to think, you don’t get there by allowing them to remain in their comfort zones.

Trying to shelter students from racist and sexist microaggressions may alleviate momentary angst, but it does nothing to eradicate the broader problem that produced them. When they surface, why not use them as teachable moments so the entire class can learn what stereotyping is and the pain it causes? It is sadly ironic that this push to create a sanitized, safe and protective campus environment is happening at a time when this country is 30-some days and a handful of poll points away from electing as president someone whose campaign has been filled not with microaggressions, but with “YUGE” macroaggressions. Here is a small sampling of the headlines: (TRIGGER WARNING: These news reports are likely to cause anxiety, depression and a sudden interest in Canadian real estate.)

Donald Trump Eats a Taco Bowl to Prove His Love for Hispanics
Trump Campaign CEO Complained of Jews at Daughters’ School
Donald Trump: If Black Lives Don’t Matter, Then Go Back to Africa
Trump Calls for Banning Muslims From Entering U.S.
Trump Wanted to Fire Women Who Weren’t Pretty Enough

That’s the world outside of the campus cocoon. The Donald Trumps out there do not come with a trigger warning. Dealing with them, resisting their vile hate and racism is not optional. That’s why we need college graduates who are ready, willing and able to work against the forces they’d rather not think about. It’s the only way we can move this evil trauma from the headlines to the history books.

LONGING FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF MITT ROMNEY

The date was Oct. 2, 2012. The day’s top political story? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for permanent immigration reform. Elsewhere on memory lane, do you remember Romney’s biggest gaffe on women? It was during the second presidential debate. He was excitedly describing his diversity hires from his days as governor of Massachusetts and said, “We had binders full of women.” With those six words, Romney created an instant internet meme and one of the most popular Halloween costumes of 2012. Four years later, his successor spent the weekend trashing a former Miss Universe and then called the New York Times to complain about how his opponent said bad things about the women her husband slept with. Oh Mitt, we hardly knew ye!

It’s all such sweet, innocent nostalgia now, but it wasn’t always thus. As we approached the 2012 election, those of us on the left side of the aisle saw Romney as the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. We couldn’t imagine anything worse than a Romney presidency. Now we can. He is still the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. But if Hillary Clinton’s numbers suddenly go south, and if we could make a quick deal with the devil, well, Hail to the Chief, President Mittens!

During the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has been vacillating between two of his current obsessions: the body size of the 1996 Miss Universe, and intimate details of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal life. The two are linked only in the byzantine torture chamber that is Trump’s mind. HRC caught the Donald off guard during last week’s debate when she introduced Alicia Machado, the beauty pageant winner and one of his many body shaming victims. Trump left the debate sputtering about how he might have to “get nasty,” as if he’d been teaching a Dale Carnegie course all these months. He later clarified, in the call to the Times, that his new appeal to women will be to drudge up Bill Clinton’s affairs and “reveal” how Hillary criticized some of the other women in her husband’s life. That would be an October surprise only to someone who has never heard a country-western song or read the Starr Report, whichever came first. Then, a few hours later, he reversed course and complained to a Pennsylvania rally that Hillary has never been loyal to Bill.

In the beginning, Donald Trump was a joke, the Pat Paulsen candidate of 2016, someone who parodied the antiseptic, polished, focus-group-tested rhetoric of real politicians. In one of the cruelest twists of political fate our country has ever seen, the joke caught on. Many of us stopped laughing a long time ago. This campaign is no longer about issues or public policy. It’s about human decency and dignity and civility. It’s about showing respect for people you disagree with, or who come from different backgrounds, ethnicities or experiences. This qualification for office was unwritten and unspoken but has always been there, and until now, was always followed. We Americans argue about everything else – taxes, foreign policy, education, the environment, – but we have always shared the desire to be led by a decent, dignified president. Prior to August of 2016, every presidential nominee, regardless of party affiliation, met that standard.

Trump does not. He is mean, vindictive and cruel. He delights in name calling, in hurting anyone who differs with him. He embodies the very worst of our current culture and its screaming, divisive discourse of verbal abuse and incivility, of dismissing contrary views with brutal, painful attacks on those who hold them. Sadly, this election is not about any of the vital policy matters facing this country. We don’t reach those issues, because this election, first and foremost, is about only one thing: keeping a man who delights in hurting people out of the White House.

UNDECIDED MILLENNIAL VOTERS AND THE FOG OF BOOMER MEMORIES

There is a lot of handwringing in the Hillary Clinton camp over a sizeable contingent of recalcitrant millennials whose electoral preferences right now are either a third party candidate or none of the above. I’ve also noticed a few angry Facebook jabs at the younger set from fellow baby boomers wondering what is wrong with kids today? I was all set to the hit the like button on one of the them, but was interrupted by a 1968 flashback, my room covered with Eugene McCarthy banners and my father yelling at me: “What the hell is wrong with you kids today?”

Like it or not, we boomers are handing the demographic baton to our millennial progeny on Nov. 8. This will be the first election where those born between the early 1980s and 2000 outnumber us. According to recent polling, this generation prefers Clinton over Trump by 50% to 18%, leaving a whopping 32% of the country’s largest voting bloc up for grabs. It’s a tough nut to crack for both major party candidates because, frankly, one third of these young voters think the whole system sucks.

Take Jo Tongue. She’s 31, a Fort Collins, Colorado mother of two with another on the way. She told the Washington Post that she can’t make herself vote for either Clinton or Trump and feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.”

Then there is Nathan Mowery. He’s 26 and lives in Gainesville, Virginia. He told the New York Times this week that, as a Muslim, he would not vote for Trump, but finds Clinton to be uninspiring. He plans to vote for a third party candidate and, according to the Times, was unapologetic about his decision. “I’m casting a protest vote because it makes it visible to major parties that there are people who are motivated to vote but are unwilling to vote for either of them,” he said. “I hope that whoever runs in 2020 will get their act together and one of the parties will put somebody up that younger voters can align themselves with.”

To the progressive boomer crowd, this is heartbreaking. We lie awake at night, shuddering at the thought of a Trump Dystopia, a toxic cornucopia of everything we have spent our lives fighting – racism, misogyny, xenophobia, autocracy. This is a close election and these votes are desperately needed, not just to stop Trump but to elect as president, for the first time, a superbly qualified woman. Why can’t those kids see that?

The answer is in my 1968 flashback. To me, back then, the major party candidates in that election, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, symbolized everything that was wrong with this country – a horribly immoral war in Vietnam, rampant racism and an entrenched old-white-guy establishment that refused to share power. If I had been old enough to vote then, I would have rejected them both and written in “Clean Gene” McCarthy, the lefty peace and love candidate who lost the Democratic nomination to Humphrey. Through the wisdom of hindsight, of course, that was a bad call. Humphrey, the Father of Liberalism, helped deliver the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and the Test Ban Treaty. If he had gotten a few more votes in ‘68, we would never have had Richard Nixon and Watergate to kick around.

Yet, in that 1960s moment, while our friends were dying in an endless war, many of us young boomers yearned to reject the entire political system that created that cancer. We had no desire to be either realistic or pragmatic. We wanted to start over with something new. That was our vision, our dream. Youth is a time for dreaming, even when it produces bad choices.

I say let’s cut the millennials some slack. First of all, half of them are already supporting Clinton, mirroring the population at large. A far smaller group, 18%, is backing Trump, who according to most polls is over 50% with baby boomers. As far as the progressive cause is concerned, our young friends are doing better than us geezers. That leaves the pox-on-both-your-houses crowd, a third of this gigantic youth demographic. Within the next few weeks, some of them will undoubtedly discover that the House of Trump is far more dangerous than the other one. But let’s respect their process. They aren’t exactly inheriting a perfect world from us. Let them dream, let them learn, let them grow. Even if it means making mistakes. Like we did.

DECISION 2016: ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE VERBAL ABUSE A CHANCE

This presidential campaign is quickly emerging as one of our country’s darkest hours. Public policy discourse has taken a back seat to brutal name calling. Poetic rhetoric has been replaced by angry noise. Civility is out. Personal attack is in. The worst part is that this venomous angst is seeping through the pores of the body politic, infecting all of us – our relationships and our families. Roughly one third of people polled recently

A House No Longer Divided
A House No Longer Divided

said they have been attacked, insulted, or called names on the basis of their political opinions. One in four of those surveyed said a recent political discussion permanently damaged a relationship.

Facebook executives recently told the Associated Press that U.S. users sent out four billion political messages during the first seven months of the year. Although the network claims not to track unfriending metrics, a spokesperson told AP that such communication cutoffs are on the rise. That includes people who left FB in disgust over political posts, as well as those who stayed but selectively weeded friends based on partisan rants. The news service quoted Scott Talan, an American University communication instructor who tracks social media and politics as saying he has seen some fairly hostile Facebook exchanges recently. “They range from pretty harsh, graphically laced, attacks upon people. . .to statements of ‘if you support this person, you can no longer be my friend.’”

My 90-year-old uncle, Jenner Nelson of St. Cloud, Minnesota, encountered an analog version of this Facebook estrangement and adroitly moved to rectify it. He’d been lobbied for months by the Trump and Clinton factions within our family and decided to let us all know where he stood by posting both candidates’ signs on his lawn, as pictured above, but only after covering their names with large X’s of red duct tape. “To heck with them both,” he said. Although the gesture didn’t dampen any of our partisan passions, it helped, at least momentarily, put a political campaign in perspective.

A couple of factors brought us to this point. But first, these words from our two major party candidates for president: “racist”, “bigot”,  “crooked”, “totally unqualified”, “dangerous”, “dishonest”, “incompetent”, “fraudulent”, “basket of deplorables”, “lose cannon”, “stupid”, “unfit”, “weak”, “total disgrace, and “pathetic”. And those are just for starters. The word cloud emerging from this campaign is horrendously strident. Put that together with the political intransigence that has paralyzed Congress for the last several terms and we are left with . . .well, a lot of people yelling at each other. One recent survey indicated that the incivility of political discourse is so bad that 40 percent of classroom instructors are hesitant to teach about the election for fear of adding to what is already a serious bullying problem in their schools.

Yet, there is something else going on here. Families, friends and coworkers have always differed on political choices, usually without creating an interpersonal crisis. My parents used to joke about canceling each other’s vote on election day. Nobody is laughing now. The difference with this election is that it goes to deeply held values, the kind of stuff that is part of our core, that defines who we are. We can have friendly disagreements over health insurance or NATO funding without a lot of existential angst. It’s a whole different situation when you are talking about keeping Muslims out of the country, deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall around Mexico and issues of equity and justice for African Americans and the LGBT community.

This is visceral, heart and soul stuff. We are in different places because we’ve had different experiences that have contributed to our conflicted wiring. My 1960s childhood turned me into a passionate human rights advocate. That means I’m against the wall, the Muslim ban and for amnesty-based immigration reform. That also means I see Donald Trump as a pariah, someone whose world view is totally contrary to my values. On the other hand, there are good, decent folks out there who see jobs disappearing and their communities filling up with people from other countries and cultures. They long for the days when America was a different kind of place. They want to recapture what’s been lost. To them, Clinton is the pariah and Trump is the one with a map to their promised land.

Our vision for the future could not be more different. Yet, they are both so clearly valid to us that, particularly among people who share a connection, it is painful to talk about politics right now because it is a conversation that, by necessity, challenges and threatens our deeply held conflicting views of the world. This interpersonal quagmire could be mitigated by national leaders who would engage us with a vocabulary of civility and accommodation instead of name calling and polarization. Sadly, those cards are not on the table. All we can do right now is follow the road that is right for us and respect those we care about who take another path.

A COLLECTIVE NUMBNESS TO TRUMP ATROCITIES

The most perplexing mystery of our time, other than Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, has been how Donald Trump can say so many stupid things and continue to be a viable presidential candidate. Let me crack that cold case with one word: volume. He says so many stupid things that they evolve into an anesthetic blur. Under the power of that anesthesia, well over 40 percent of likely voters are ready to extend their middle finger to the political establishment and send this clown to the White House.

Take the past 24 hours as an example. Trump came clean about his fabricated conspiracy over President Obama’s birthplace, falsely accused Hillary Clinton of creating the issue, and then suggested that her Secret Service agents disarm and see if anyone tries to kill her. And Al Gore paid a price because he claimed to have invented the internet. But don’t you see? That’s the point. We remember Gore’s internet gaffe because it was one of the very few stupid things he said. He spent the rest of time talking about boring stuff, like carbon footprints and Social Security lock boxes.

If Trump had been intently focused on well thought out policy issues for the last 10 months and then, in a weak moment, advocated the assassination of his opponent, it would have been curtains on his campaign. It’s all people would have talked about from now until the election. Instead, in a matter of hours, he will have pushed that thought from our minds and replaced it with another outrage. The human brain is not equipped to simultaneously concentrate on multiple atrocities.

Broadcaster Keith Obermann took a stab at it this week, much to the delight of the progressive community. In a well scripted and delivered 17-minute rant, Obermann listed 176 truly outrageous things Trump has said or done. He included the attack on the Pope and the Gold Star parents, his history of not renting to black people, his claim that Obama invented ISIS, his suggestion that Russia hack Clinton’s emails, his insistence that his buddy, Valdimir Putin, would never go into Ukraine, which he invaded two years ago, and 170 other equally bizarre comments and actions. Yet, days later, when I started to write this paragraph, I had to download a transcript of Obermann’s rant because I couldn’t remember the laundry list. It’s like laughing your head off at a comedy club but being unable, the next day, to remember more than one or two of the jokes.

This is why it seems like the media is hounding Clinton on the email and foundation stuff while not holding Trump to his foibles. In one instance you have two issues with long shelf lives. In the other, you have serial defects, each succumbing to its successor. In the history of dumb political stuff, nobody holds a candle to Trump’s volume. That’s why it is easy to recall those other non-Trump blunders. Remember how John Kerry “voted for the bill before I voted against it”? Or, Howard Dean’s scream? Or Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato? Or Rick Perry’s “Oops”? Or a helmeted Michael Dukakis ridding in an armored tank? Or Gerald Ford promising no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe when such domination was already well in place? Or Sarah Palin’s foreign policy bonafides based on the proximity of her back yard to Russia?

Donald Trump outdoes all of them combined, before breakfast. On a rational level, it is eminently sensible to suggest that the American people would be embarrassed to have as their leader someone so thoroughly entrenched in ignorance and buffoonery. For a sizeable portion of the electorate, however, this campaign is not about rationality. It is about their utter disgust for our government. It’s not so much that Donald Trump is their savior. He’s their middle finger, their protest vote against a changing world they’ve come to hate. They are united in anger and there is no revelation, no October surprise, that will deter them from trying to foist their candidate of rage onto the source of their scorn. Instead, the only path to hope in this election rests with those who, despite all that is wrong with this country, care enough to change it rather than blow it up with a middle finger.

CLOWNS: AN UNMEASURED DEMOGRAPHIC

As if this crazy season of identity politics wasn’t screwed up enough, somebody in the Carolinas decided to send in the clowns. You may have missed the New York Times’ exceptional coverage of this alarming clown crisis. After all, it’s barely been 24 hours since Apple revealed its decision to omit the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. A person can take on only so much emotional trauma at one time. So here’s a recap:

It started two weeks ago in Greenville County, S.C. with multiple sightings of “creepy clowns”. Depending on the report, the clowns either offered children money to go into the woods with them or simply stood under a late-night streetlight and waved. Once, the Times reported, a clown jumped out of nowhere and stared at a woman as she left a laundromat. Then the action moved to North Carolina where Winston-Salem police responded to a number of calls complaining of clowns offering treats to children. No arrests have been made, and the Times described the situation in both states as one of “panic.” It noted local news reports from Greensboro, N.C. of a man with a machete who chased a clown into the woods but did not catch him.

(As an aside, the male pronoun is being used here because eye witnesses described the clowns as men wearing white overalls, white gloves, large red shoes with a white face, bushy red hair with a matching red nose. With that disguise, however, there is enough gender ambiguity that these clowns need to be very careful in choosing a public restroom in North Carolina. It is a crime there to enter a loo not designated for your birth sex. A wise clown would do well to tape a birth certificate to his seltzer bottle; an even wiser clown would stay the hell out of North Carolina.)

It took less than 36 hours for this bozo calamity to evolve into a political issue. Enter one Michael Becvar, with the clown name of Sir Toony Van Dukes. He runs the website Just For Clowns and he told the Times that his people are being unfairly profiled and persecuted. He wondered aloud to a Times reporter what would have happened “if instead of clowns, people were dressing up as aliens, witches, zombies or doctors? What if they were wearing hospital scrubs, lab coats and a stethoscope around their neck? Would the news report that doctors were hiding in the woods trying to lure kids with candy?” Mark my words: Sir Toony will have a “Clown Lives Matter” sign on his clown car before the end of the week.

This must be driving the pollsters crazy. North Carolina is a swing state where Clinton and Trump are running neck and neck, but nobody has been measuring the clown/anti-clown vote. Given the white face description of the suspects, along with the speculation that they are men, it would be easy to assume that the clown vote will break for Trump, particularly if they never graduated from clown college. Then again, we have no way of knowing what is under that disguise. Peel off the white face paint and you might find a female Latino with an advanced degree in theology. But it is highly unlikely.

Of course, this election is not just about identity politics. It’s also about fear. The demographic of people who are afraid of the Great Other – anyone who doesn’t look, talk or act like them – is breaking big for Trump. He might just tap into that constituency by promising, within 30 days of taking office, to round up all the clowns and send them back to wherever they came from. “Make America Clown Free Again!” would fit well on a red baseball cap. In other words, Trump could end up with both the clown and anti-clown vote. Where does that leave Hillary? Right back on Saturday Night Live, singing the chorus from that old Stealers Wheel tune:

“There’s clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am
Stuck in the Middle with you.”