The Armageddon Watch

 

The question of whether Putin's Russia will deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine is a live one.  If it happens, it is likely to happen soon. The tenor in the so-called liberal media is that Putin is losing and weak, without options. But last week I believe it was the NYTimes conservative columnist Brett Stephens who predicted Putin will deploy nukes, and he suggested Kherson as a possible location. Kherson is the first city and region that Russian troops controlled at the beginning of their invasion, but Ukraine troops are closing in on it.  The Ukraine forces have already retaken a number of villages in the region.

 Since that prediction, it looks to me that the chances of a nuclear weapon being used there has increased.  So far I've only seen the Guardian reporting on the evacuation of Russians and Russian sympathizers from the region, announced by the Russian puppet governor who requested and received official Russian help in evacuating.  To me, this is an ominous sign.  If a nuclear explosion is planned there, this would be a first step. 

Putin's apparent weakness is a reason it could happen. Russia's missile attacks on Ukraine this past week were seen as a vicious but futile response to recent humiliating defeats, without military advantage.  Russia used a number of expensive weapons in the attack, and western analysts say they are likely to be depleting their available missiles, since they cannot get high tech parts from western sources anymore.  If this is so, then Putin has pretty much only his sizable arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons left as "options."  Several weeks ago Putin repeated that all types of weapons can be used--and more than hinted this includes nukes--in Russia's self-defense.  He then began the elaborate charade of essentially annexing parts of Ukraine into Russia, and one of those places is Kherson.  All of this looks like step by step preparation, though so far no one in the west is saying so publicly.

Putin's groundwork has also allowed the US and western Europe to figure out exactly what they will do if Russia uses nukes.  The element of surprise is gone.  The world will be shocked, but it is unlikely that Putin will gain military advantage because of it.  Quite the opposite.  But exactly what will happen can't be known, except that it could happen very fast.  This is another case of letting slip the dogs of war, of self-renewing and escalating violence--with uncontrollable consequences.  It all has a tragic inevitability about it.

Here in the US, the slow motion Armageddon of democracy seems about to move faster, one way or another.  Several things are coming to a head.  Donald Trump is likely to face indictment for crimes on the federal level (either directly related to Jan.6 or to crimes associated with his theft of classified documents, or both), and on the state level (in Georgia, for election tampering; and New York, for financial crimes, not to mention a rape trial.) No one knows when any of these will happen, but one or more of them could be relatively soon.

Why is that a threat to the Republic?  There was a debate in the pages of the NYTimes this past week on whether the US faces a second civil war.  As usual, the semantics of it cloud the issue (exactly what is a civil war?)  But one journalist who has been interviewing far right/Christian right zealots for decades, wrote in the Atlantic that if and when Trump is indicted for just about anything,  large scale political violence is likely to break out.  He cited in particular how heavily armed these people are, and what they are expecting to do with those weapons.  He said that at gun shows during the Obama presidency, the reason people gave for stocking up on military weapons was the fear that because of school shootings, the feds were going to come after their guns.  Now (he said) what he hears more often is that they are convinced they are fighting a war against the Great Replacement etc., and the government is their enemy.  They are preparing to fight the federal government in particular.

Another participant in the discussion, a NY Times columnist with a deep knowledge of American history and the Constitution, agreed that political violence is likely, but the US has often suffered some small scale political violence.  And he wondered if these people have the stomach for large scale, sustained warfare against trained troops.  I agree that this is uncertain. So far political violence has been perpetrated by individuals or small groups, almost always against the defenseless: congregations in a church or synagogue, old people in a supermarket, children in school.  In other words, the act of heavily armed, camo-clad cowards.

Even the attack on the Capitol last January showed division.  Some people came to commit violence against the Capitol police and anyone who stood in their way.  Most others seemed more interested in taking video with their phones and posting it, breaking things and taking souvenirs.  No one can really predict what might happen (the dogs of war again) but we are quite possibly going to find out.

Then there is the upcoming election--another grave threat on many levels.  The election polls appear useless and other surveys of attitudes etc. are contradictory, but the punditry suspects the momentum in favor of the Democrats because of the abortion decision is waning, and continuing inflation and rising gasoline prices are favoring Republicans. Because they are so much more likely to fix that, and their candidates have detailed policies and plans to do so.  Just kidding.

 The old 33% of the electorate who were Always Trumpers now seems to have become 40%, and Republican power brokers are looking only at the R, not the candidate.  Will voters follow, and support the certifiably insane, the holy warriors, the authoritarians and white supremacists, the thoroughly corrupt, the dangerously stupid?  Will this be a wave election one way or another, or a state by state, district by district decision?

We probably won't know for days and possibly weeks after election day.  And unless our news media has gotten better and better equipped to cover this story, we may not know how corrupted the election processes are in individual districts and states.  We can be sure that Rabid Right Republicans will extol every one of their victorious candidates as elected righteously, and every election they lose as illegitimate.

Again, all this domestic potential for Armageddon has historical preparation, and an air of tragic inevitability.  But it may not happen on a very large scale, at least not this year.  However, a Republican controlled House and/or Senate next year may well usher in mayhem, as they hold the country and world economy hostage to go after old people (by slashing Social Security and Medicare) as well as young women, immigrants and the planet. Meanwhile as officeholders these brainless and heartless fanatics will have no capacity to govern, especially in times of complex crisis.  

Well, enjoy your day.  Every day you can enjoy.

Tree of Life

We are heartbroken.  Our thoughts and prayers are with you.  It's what everybody says after the all-too familiar catastrophes, especially mass shootings.

To some extent they mean it, of course.  But this time for me, for Margaret and me, it's more personal than usual.  Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh was once our home.

The candlelight gathering Saturday night after a heavily armed anti-Jewish ultra right bigot shot up a Squirrel Hill synagogue during services, was held on the corner of Murray Avenue and Forbes Avenue, a spot I know very well.  My heart is there with them now.

News stories rightly emphasize that many Jews live in Squirrel Hill, the historic center of the Jewish community well beyond Pittsburgh, and at least some stories also mention that it is now a very diverse area, as it has been for decades.  I'm sure many of the people at the memorial were not Jews but there to bear witness to solidarity with their neighbors.

I lived in Squirrel Hill in the 1990s.  Margaret and her children lived near its northern edge for longer than that, close to Wilkins Avenue where 11 people were shot dead and others injured.  I lived at its southern border, but at the foot of the steep hill that forms Murray Avenue, the neighborhood's commercial center.

Though it is likely I have some Jewish ancestors, I was raised Catholic. I have never been more comfortable in a neighborhood than I was in Squirrel Hill.  I walked up Murray Avenue, and then up Forbes nearly every day.  People in Arcata are courteous.  People in Squirrel Hill were friendly, in a personal way.

A CBS affiliate story included a brief interview with the rabbi who until this year ran the Tree of Life, where the gunman attacked:

Meghan Schiller: Did you ever as rabbi think that you were gonna have to deal with this?

 Diamond: “I thought about it all the time, I have to tell you. When I was there, in the back of my mind, I always have the thought of something like this happening and what I would do, unfortunately, because of the world we live in.”

Or at least the country we live in.  The times we live in.

Who You Gonna Call?

West Virginia is most prominently known this year for anti-regulation and anti-government politics, and--enslaved to predatory coal companies--for climate crisis denying.

But experiencing an unprecedented onslaught of rain and flash flooding--the kind of extreme weather global heating science predicts--West Virginia is in need, and suddenly dependent on...government.  Specifically the federal government, via President Obama's declaration of a major disaster:

"This federal support will provide much needed assistance to severely-impacted regions," West Virginia's governor Earl Ray Tomblin said in a statement. "As emergency response efforts continue, with members of the National Guard and local emergency responders hard at work helping our neighbors, we will continue pursuing additional assistance for all affected areas."

This comes after FEMA officials toured some of the most impacted areas on foot and by air on Saturday.

It's easy enough to fulminate against easy targets of bureaucratic screwups, or of ego-bloated, doubletalking politicians.  And very appealing to say to people that they should keep their money because government is the problem, so starve it of taxes.

But then something big happens, and people depend on government to bring the resources, the expertise, the humanpower, quickly and effectively.  Just as they depend on government to ensure their food isn't poisonous, or their drinking water.  Or that there is a public health system with the resources and expertise to deal with big problems, maybe several at a time, and even be ahead of the curve.

But thanks to the anti-government fulminators, all of these are now political.  Even the funding to confront the dangerous Zika virus is mired in politics--Congress can't just vote the funds necessary, Republicans must blackmail the President with the nation's health to get partisan legislation that can't get otherwise.

But when you've got catastrophe and you need help, who you gonna call?  It ain't Ghostbusters.  And it sure ain't Republicans in Congress.

Polaritics and Trickle-Down Racism

The extremes represented by Donald Trump make the upcoming election a stark choice between evil and sort of good.  In a binary choice, the politics of polarization--polaritics--becomes inevitable.  Both sides will promote their visions of the Good while mostly bombarding us with the alleged Evil of the other one.  Of course, one of them is Evil, which complicates any argument against polaritics.

But what is usually and somewhat bloodlessly called the polarization of politics and of the American electorate is perhaps the greatest threat to democracy.  And it only takes one example to suggest why: In South Carolina last month, a tow truck driver refused to tow the car of a disabled woman because her car carried a Bernie Sanders sticker.  He left her stranded on the side of the road.

Polls show up to 90% unanimity on many issues according to party.  That's a bit troubling but more important is the lack of tolerance for divergent views.  Internet trolls may be leading the extreme abuse heaped upon people of another opinion, moving quickly to personal threats and violence, but it's becoming widespread.

When it begins to affect the basic social contract, more than symbolized by a tow truck driver whose job it is to render aid to fellow citizens, then society is in danger of falling apart.  Our society might agree that the owner-operator in this instance might be justified in refusing service because of inability to pay him, and in times and places (like South Carolina), such services would routinely be refused because of race.  But this is saying that the political candidate a person chooses to support in a major party primary marks that person as evil, as outside society.

This is just one case, but it is worthy of attention not because of its novelty but by its possible prophecy.  It sounds like the next step, and we do get the feeling that this is happening more than this once.  And once it does happen, it becomes an example for others.

It has its origins in theocratic politics most recently promulgated by the religious right, and in the behavior of Washington politicians, particularly Republicans, who oppose and condemn every idea supported by Democrats--especially by President Obama--even if it is an idea that Republicans recently supported or even originated.  And the easy vocabulary of hate, of hating Obama, of hating Hillary, that has gone mainstream.  There was plenty of Roosevelt hating in the 1940s, but by and large it was fringe.  Now the rabid right fringe is the establishment.

Donald Trump has wakened some Republicans to the danger, basically by being Donald Trump.  In today's news there are remarkable stories about a confab in Utah where party luminaries mixed with big donors, and some of those luminaries were outspoken in their dire warnings about Trump.  Meg Whitman reportedly compared him to Hitler and Mussolini.  An informal poll of big donors showed that only 20% were ready to back Trump with bucks, with others choosing "country over party."

 And Mitt Romney, of all people, contributed to the dialogue by highlighting an effect of Trump's candidacy that others have written about, but Romney gave it a name:

"I don't want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following. Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America."

At the moment Hillary is making this a teachable moment with her "Stronger Together" theme.  But it's about more than diversity as usually defined.  Political diversity, a diversity of ideas, are also at stake.  Our American society has been through this before (as has western civilization, many times, and eastern civilizations as well), for example the enforced conformity of the 1950s, patrolled by HUAC, the Blacklist, J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthyism, with the power to end careers, livelihoods, lives.

But political polarization that affects relationships at the root of society is particularly threatening given the likely future. This climate crisis-dominated near future will provide many tests and challenges (among others not directly related to climate that we can intuit may well present themselves.)  There will be many people who need help from strangers who are also neighbors.  There will be times when trust in each other, and in government and other institutions, will be matters of life and death.

In The Absolute At Large, one of the enormously skillful science fiction novels by the early 20th century Czech writer Karel Capek, a series of catastrophes rends civilization to tatters.  But some of the same people of a small town met at the beginning of the book manage to survive to the end.  They are discussing the reasons for the apocalypse they lived through.  One of them says: "Everyone has the best of feelings towards mankind in general, but not towards the individual man.  We'll kill men, but we want to save mankind.  And that isn't right, your Reverence.  The world will be an evil place as long as people don't believe in other people."

That's part of it.  But one doesn't have to be very optimistic about other people to realize that there's a principle worth putting into action.  Some people call it decency.  It doesn't sound like much, but if you read accounts of people in Europe who sheltered Jews and helped them escape the Nazis, it seems to be the difference.  It is the very powerful ethic of "you'd do the same for me."

That principle, that assurance is a necessity, which can be a trickle-up or trickle-across phenomenon as well as a trickle-down example by leaders.  In most basic societal ways, "We're all in this together" is a statement of fact as well as a rallying cry of principle.  It's how we act on it that's important, and social norms that support common decency are the social bedrock.  Trickle-down racism etc. starts breaking that down, but polaritics is already eroding it.    

Update: Divided response to the mass killings in Orlando Saturday night might be a tragic illustration of where this polaritics leads.  Both to the murderous violence itself, and in certain responses.

The Trump Card is the Joker

It's been wishful thinking so far, but now it may be happening.  Donald Trump is self-destructing, and his nomination by the Republican party is slipping away.

After so many have said so and been wrong, E. J. Dionne was brave enough to say it now, and I'm sure many more are thinking it.

Gabriel Sherman's insightful profile of the Trump for President operation suggests two reasons why this is happening, or maybe three.  Trump has been skillful and mesmerizing, and as Sherman writes, many of the outrageous positions he's taken have been the result of research--though that research was of the issues that most resonated on rabid right talk radio.

Sherman also reports what many have suggested--that Trump's political operation is very small and very inexperienced.

But three things have been happening.  Sherman writes that Trump seems very tired, and I've noticed this as well.  He's never been through anything like this, and it's wearing him down.

Second, at this stage of the campaign he's in over his head, or, to put it in today's jargon, outside his comfort zone.  He's being questioned, and he's answering, on topics not only beyond his experience or knowledge, but outside the rabid right radio-tested set of issues.

So now he's making pronouncements in his patented aggressive style that baffle everyone.  Tired, over his head and outside his core issues, he isn't resonating--he's just raving.

Some of his extreme assertions have some supporters, though few and fringe.  Others are just lunatic ravings.  And dangerous.

The test of this premise will be in the next several primaries.  The conventional wisdom is giving the Wisconsin primary to Cruz.  If Trump wins it, his chances for the nomination become strong again (and naysayers will be wrong again), especially since this is likely to buttress support in New York and other big states that follow.  If Cruz wins Wisconsin, he has the momentum, and Trump will have to stop him in New York, or his situation becomes dire.

The fractures in the Republican party have become so deep and open that in the last candidates forum, none of the three remaining candidates sounded like they would support the nominee if it wasn't them.  Trump has since said as well that if denied the nomination he might run anyway.  Somehow I don't think he will.

Few dispute that with Trump at the top of the ticket, the GOP will lose many congressional races and maybe governorships. They will most likely lose the Senate.  And judging by some of the extreme numbers against Trump summarized last week in the Washington Post ("Three-quarters of women view him unfavorably. So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.") he will lose the presidency.

Trump has triumphed by being the Joker, the wild card.  But he's in danger of becoming the joke.  Many Republicans are completely open about wanting to stop him.  They will however need the cooperation of voters. And if Trump loses the protection of his mystique and people start seeing him as a dangerous loudmouth crank, they may get it.

Update: I hadn't realized when I wrote this that Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker had even more pointedly referred to Trump as the Joker, more specifically the one in Batman (which I'd hoped was implied as a doubled image in my use.)  But Gopnik's piece is a fun read, especially as it begins with the saga of the prank petition to allow guns to be openly carried into the Republican National Convention.

Where the Terror is

Another horrible terrorist attack in Europe, and another round of panic from American media and politicians.  Trump wants to seal the borders and resume torture, Cruz wants to occupy American "Muslim neighborhoods."  Nobody seems worried about American toddlers, who killed more people last year than terrorists did.

No--Trump can dribble uninformed nonsense about fighting terrorism (according to the pros), after unveiling his set of foreign policy experts that no actual foreign policy experts have ever heard of.

Meanwhile, as Jonathan Chiat explains, Cruz's remedies will create the conditions in the U.S. (where Muslims are mostly assimilated) that pertain in Europe (where Muslims are segregated) and give us the terrorist problems they have: "In Europe, ethnically homogenous Christian populations have been unable to assimilate immigrant populations, with disastrous results. The Republican Party now appears doctrinally bound to replicate that failure."

But what about those toddler terrorists?  How do we get weapons out of their dangerous hands?  Don't ask the National Rifle Association, and its frothing at the mouth opposition to any gun regulation.  It is too busy vetoing a Supreme Court nominee.  In this crazy atmosphere, that one seems to have largely gotten a pass, but it shouldn't: the Senate majority leader said on Sunday that a Justice to the Supreme Court can't be confirmed because the NRA opposes him.  Gee, I missed that part of the Constitution, where the Senate cedes its responsibility to advise and consent to a organization representing gun makers.

I am not terrorized by ISIS. They're evil and hateful, but I have more chance of being hit by lightning (and we had a hell of a lightning storm last night) or shot by a toddler than hit by a suicide bomber.  But these guys, these Republicans, they terrorize me.

I'm not alone. Donald Trump is the most unpopular presidential candidate since the former head of the Ku Klux Klan says the Fix headline in the Washington Post.  He is viewed unfavorably by two thirds of the American public, with more than half registering extreme disapproval.

A study of a North Carolina Senate race suggests the Republican incumbent loses 26 percentage points--and his seat--if he endorses Trump.  But it's not just Trump.  That Senate majority leader McConnell is viewed favorably by just 15%---in his home state.  Some 60% of Republican primary voters say they are embarrassed by their own candidates and their campaign.  Hillary is not winning any popularity contests, but an overwhelming proportion of Democrats would be happy with her as President.

Trump's weekend session with the Washington Post proved once again that he is ignorant and unequipped for any national office--nobody with his lack of qualifications (he makes Sarah Palin look like an expert) has gotten this close to the presidency in at least a century. Trump and Cruz are counting on panic over terrorism to deprive voters of their sanity.  Trump thinks it worked for him last time, after Paris.  We'll see if it works now.  A terrifying thought all right.

Fateful Tuesday, the Day After

The day after Fateful Tuesday--which, most agree, was pretty fateful-- a number of media analysts had at the exit poll data.  The most interesting I saw was Alexander Burns in the New York Times.  His basic conclusion:

"Democrats and Republicans can now confidently predict which candidates will have the most delegates at their conventions in July: Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton each hold large and growing delegate leads. It would take an upset of staggering proportions for a rival to pull ahead of either one by the time the primaries end in June.

But the two front-runners are not on equal footing. Mrs. Clinton has assembled a formidable majority coalition within the Democratic Party that has resisted Senator Bernie Sanders’s appeals.

Mr. Trump has achieved something less than that. He has locked down a large plurality of voters on the right, but not enough to guarantee that he will win a majority of Republican convention delegates. And his position appears to be weakening."

Trump is winning, he writes, "but at a terrible price. The intensifying attacks on his personal character and business record, and the scenes of violence at his rallies, appear to be taking a toll, exit polls show. In no state did a majority of Republican primary voters say they believed he was honest and trustworthy. In every state that voted on Tuesday except for Florida, about two in five Republicans said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate over Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton in November."

While the numbers bear out Trump's popularity among working class white men, other figures suggest to Burns that "If Mr. Trump became the nominee, Republicans might risk a large-scale defection by upscale whites who voted willingly for Mitt Romney four years ago."

Hillary Clinton on the other hand has a clearer path to the nomination while Bernie Sanders has almost none.  But analysis by others points to the continuing trend in which Republican turnout is much higher and Democratic turnout much lower (although the big discrepancies in individual states tend to skew the averages.)  Ohio in particular had half the turnout of 2008, and so Clinton's support among unions and the Ohio Democratic party suggest reasons for her surprising margin of victory.

Clinton's sweep, by the way, is not yet official.  Apparently the Missouri vote has not yet been actually certified, and there are uncounted ballots that could change the outcome.  But the state is proportional, and the Sanders campaign said that even if they officially lose, it's unlikely that they would ask for a recount since it wouldn't matter much or even at all in number of delegates.  Update Thurs. p.m.: It's now official: Hillary won Missouri and it's a sweep of 5.

GOPer turmoil over Trump continues, but so does evidence that the party is reaping what it sowed, as New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer reminds us with a trip down Koch Brothers lane.

Make America White Again?

Here's how the coverage of the GOPer Nevada caucuses went on Tuesday: stories like this that declared Trump the winner, but included incidents of "irregularities" that look a lot like vote fraud.  And then pretty immediately, stories like this that analyze Trump's victory as if all those votes were legitimate.

The question for coming days is whether the media, which does not traditionally follow up stories about vote fraud, does so in this instance.  In newsrooms it may well be argued that Trump would have won anyway--which is probably true--so these risky stories would be for naught.  Except that the overwhelming percentage of his victory is a great deal of the story, and is a momentum-making argument for bowing to his aura of power and inevitability.

But sift through the tweets in that first New York Mag article, and see if you get the impression that the people who support Trump have little or no regard for the democratic process.  Because they're angry.

This is following right in goosestep with the rise of the proto-Trump in Germany in the 1930s.  His angry, less educated and economically backward supporters got weapons and snappy uniforms.  Trump's presumably already have caches of guns, so the brown shirts are all they'll need.  (Later on of course, rich, educated and cultured Germans latched on to the guy with immense and growing power, and got even sharper uniforms. Plus the houses of Jews and the run of wine cellars throughout Europe.  For awhile.)

The Nevada voters were older and angrier than earlier contests, and they were predominantly white. (That Trump maybe got the majority of a small number of Latinos is irrelevant.)  So they match up with the analysis developed and focused by several people but explained most recently in a Slate piece.   America was great not when the federal government left people alone (as in the current mythology) but when the recipients of federal help--the G.I. Bill, FHA housing loans, etc.--were mostly white.  Though there is some truth in the unfettered private sector argument--because without laws against racial discrimination in hiring, white people got all the jobs.

This story summarizes:    One of the reasons that there was so much of this "free stuff" available to white people back in the day is that it wasn't available to nonwhite people. Discrimination meant there were bigger slices of the pie to go around, so to speak, for every white person.

Non-white people are getting too much now, because they're getting anything at all.  So white taxpayers are paying for more than white people's needs. That has to stop---so returning to whites only is how to"Make America Great Again."

Which isn't going to happen.  Not without a fascist takeover, and no Supreme Court.

We can have compassion for people in pain, and politically seek to remedy unjust or unnecessary causes of that pain.  But politically we also have to understand how close we are getting to a very dangerous situation.

Our Psychotic Politics (and the P Word)

First, the politicians.  Are they crazier and more vicious than usual?  It's strangely comforting to be reminded of past precedent, as President Obama did in his Illinois address and elsewhere.  Thomas Jefferson was accused of being---wait for it--a Muslim, and some opponents warned that his election would mean that murder and rape would be openly taught.  Lincoln was called the obscene ape of Illinois, and worse.  And of course (though Obama didn't mention this) some of Lincoln's political opponents conspired to assassinate him, his vice-president and secretary of state on the same night.  One succeeded, at Ford's Theatre.

Apart from outright violence, there are plenty of other examples of outrageous charges and insults, and of persistent obstructionism.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt experienced both, during the Depression and even during World War II, which was not the unanimous national effort as depicted in surviving imagery.

But historical precedent, while calming, creates comfort that soon grows cold. President Obama spoke about the danger to democracy posed by political officeholders who can't civilly contend or eventually compromise, for political reasons.  But that's only one danger, and only one reason for it.  We have officeholders who can't civilly contend because their ideology forbids it, or because their political ambition and personal agenda mandate their inflammatory talk and action.  We have officeholders who are not equipped, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, for the job they were elected to do.

We have a new communications environment with new power.  Demagogues have often arisen and flourished in new communications environment--newspapers, magazines, especially radio.  Now in the television plus social media environment, we have new and so far successful demagogues, exploiting the new possibilities of these combined media.

Yet there are echoes.  The transit of Donald Trump--from an underestimated joke to the candidate others leave alone as they fight among themselves, to a populist figure trading on specific fears and prejudices as well as an image of personal power--tracks pretty well with the rise of Hitler.

Ted Cruz is more of a Joe McCarthy figure (that, plus his physical resemblance, prompted political scientist Jonathan Bernstein to dub him Tail Gunner Ted, since McCarthy was known as Tail Gunner Joe.)  Cruz operates in a different way from Trump. He uses political professionals and local conservative leaders to build political machinery to form a power base.  There's a lot that's subterranean about his candidacy.  He uses code words with far more aplomb than Rubio.

  While it may be impolitic to call fellow politicians idiots and fascists (as President Obama said), those of us who are not politicians must call them as we see them, and some of these guys are idiots, some are fascists, and some are both.

Political support for obstructionism comes from powerful organized groups or, these days, a few billionaires.  But crazy pols--or evil pols that just talk crazy--also need response from the crazy side of ordinary people, who vote, or at least talk to opinion pollsters.

So, the people.

"Because when people are scared, then strange things can happen in politics. When people are nervous and feel threatened, then we can get a politics that is not about bringing people together, but is about “us and them,” and looking for somebody to blame."--President Obama

We typically deal in labels and shorthand abstractions, like income inequality or political discontent.  But people don't live in the abstract.  They live every day.

First, there's the normal darker side of human nature.  It isn't necessarily predominant, as has been pretty much the majority view of professionals who misunderstand evolution (sometimes willfully) or who believe that human nature is basically sinful, and cannot be otherwise without the intercession of an omnipotent being.

On the other hand, it's silly to deny that the darker side exists and is often expressed.  When President Obama spoke about getting our politics to align with how the American people approach their daily lives, it must be said that in terms of how some people live their daily lives, it is so aligned now--with aggressive, aggrieved, resentful, deluded, angry, clueless and/or greedy behavior.  I'm not sure having our politicians behave as some parents do at Little League games (one of Obama's examples) will be any improvement over how Republican candidates behaved at their last debate.

But there is also good--there is the impulse and commitment to civility, there is kindness, generosity, fair mindedness, cooperation, compassion, empathy, altruism and grace. As well as intelligent common sense. There is a balance we might call sanity that permits the better side to guide behavior.

Consistent sanity under extreme pressure can waver and break, leading to desperation, obsession and a lashing out.  So we talk about income inequality, or poverty, or unemployment, or working three jobs to make ends meet, or health problems.  What we don't talk about much in our political discourse is pain.

The P word is not politics or psychosis.  It's pain.

There have been many articles commenting on the news that the death rate in America has risen for only one category--middle-aged white men-- and that much of the rise seems attributable to suicide and drug addiction.  One of these articles, in the Guardian, pegged its abstractions on the story of an individual, a man who was in constant pain--not just the "broken heart" that Bill Clinton attributes to the political disenchantment of white men, who are the most prominent supporters of right wing politics--nor the pain of not having enough money to pay the bills or help a child in trouble.  But actual physical pain.

The article centered on a middle-aged white man in Montana whose health was ruined partly by overwork, which was necessitated by poor pay.  That used to be called exploitation, now it's called normal.  He had health insurance, but with deductibles and copays and a lot of operations etc., he went heavily into debt just for medical care alone. It took government five years to process his application for disability, but even a large lump payment for back benefits went entirely to medical bills, and that wasn't enough.  He remains heavily in debt, and doesn't have the money to even file for bankruptcy.

This is a man who did not smoke or drink, and once built homes for Habitats for Humanity alongside Jimmy Carter.  He has never owned his own home.  And he has chronic pain.  It's an everyday experience.

Each story has its particularity.  But medical costs continue to be a burden in the US that they just aren't in other countries.  Partly because of the financial vagaries of the so-called healthcare system, many men especially don't see doctors when they are sick or injured.  Couple that with the physical results of a toxic environment loaded with chemicals etc. that attack human bodies, as well as poor nutrition and other unhealthy behavior pushed by the consumer economy, and what you get is a lot of people who are in pain.  It's hardly coincidental that the fastest growing category of drug abuse is painkillers.

There's also the ordinary pain of working badly paying jobs--even running from one to the other-- that are likely unpleasant ways to spend those hours (awful and questionable work for petty tyrant bosses enforcing decrees of distant corporations, and perhaps dealing with rightfully angry and frustrated customers)  while juggling family concerns and expenses, in a round of sleeplessness and walking exhaustion.  The physical costs of standing or sitting and repeating rote physical and mental tasks are high, if not as obvious as coal mining.  This is a life of different kinds of pain that is itself insane, and the body and mind experience it as such, even if it isn't defined out loud in these terms.

People like the Montana man never achieved what others with their education and background did in the previous generation.  Others who were able to carefully assemble some financial support and as close to an independent life as most people get--i.e. a home and some savings--were wiped out by the Great Recession.  And while the millionaires and billionaires made their money back, most others did not.  Their lives are harder and more painful.

More and more Americans of retirement age don't have the means to retire.  Contrary to almost universal belief, social security is often not adequate to stave off poverty, especially for people who never earned much in a given year.  Medicare--whether "Medicare for all" or as currently constituted-- is not free medical care, but comes with monthly premiums and high deductibles, as much or more than private plans in recent years.  So older people work as long as they can, regardless of pain, and live with pain when they can't afford medical care except when they can't avoid it any longer.

So again it's not surprising--however shocking--that whereas a man in the top half of income in the early 1970s could expect to live about a year longer than a man in the bottom half, the difference is now 14 years.  (And this is one category where men and women are about equal, for those born in 1950 and after.)

When people are in pain of all kinds, when the pain is relentless, their remaining energy can turn to desperation and anger.  They lash out, without much regard for accuracy.  Anyone with more power seems like an appropriate target.  And many are really victimized by government bureaucracy, and increasingly by corporate indifference, hiding behind "customer service" that can't be contacted, leading only to endless waiting and scripted response by badly paid workers across several oceans with whom communication is frustrating if not impossible.

For their general plight they may blame other groups, especially when they come to believe the easy answers of false information (that black people don't work and are supported by government in lavish style, or Obama gives them cushy jobs etc. or even that Mexicans are taking their jobs.) Such misery loves company, and the illusion of power, fueling another increase in the number of hate groups, including armed hate groups.

 Even anarchy seems just if you are in constant pain.  Why not?  How much worse can it get?  Maybe if others feel some pain, they might understand.  Politics as justice easily becomes politics as vengeance, most often against those who aren't the cause.

Pain and powerlessness fuel the need for guns.  (Somebody wasn't really wrong years ago when he talked about people clinging to their guns and their religion.)  So the symbol of this insecurity kills the people with guns, as well as their children and total strangers who are trying to help them.

There is all kind of pain in this society, and it isn't reserved for white men without a college education.  The affluent society, the pressure to conform to materialist goals and career tracks, must still alienate some young people.  Women who must deal with gender discrimination and sexual predators.  And people of color confronting the realities of racism and white supremacy, as so surprisingly and well described by Hillary Clinton recently in Harlem.

Only distance can provide a sense of irony about white male privilege to white men who have never felt many of its benefits.  Race doesn't trump class, nor does class trump race.  The combination these days just gives us Trump.

There are lots of reasons for the rise of psychotic politics in our time, including geographical and cultural pockets of mutually reinforcing darkness.   Perhaps the climate crisis, as nuclear bombs in my generation, is an underlying cause of fear and despair that cannot be named, it's just too big.  But there's one everyday contributing cause.  Pain.  Because pain drives people crazy.

Trumped?

Viewed from afar, the Trump debate affair is intriguing, if not actually interesting.  It could be consequential.  If the Fox debate ratings are actually higher (within the realm of possibility), Trump is wounded, perhaps mortally.  The debacle may also signal the beginning of the end for Fox's hegemony, as the spectacle of the lunatic right in blood combat with themselves continues.

If Trump triumphs on the ratings and then in Iowa, it does seem to put the in in inevitable.  But Cruz went on the attack in the day or so between Trump's fascist move of demanding to choose his interviewers--admittedly a common practice for more than 30 years in entertainment "journalism" but new to electing a President. If Cruz continues tonight, Trump can't answer him.

It comes down to how many Iowa caucus voters are put off by Trump refusing to debate his opponents, a violation of an almost sacred practice in this particular ritual of presidential campaigning.

A NY Times story suggests that voter registration figures don't support the idea of a Trump voter surge in Iowa anyway.  (Nor for that matter for Bernie Sanders.)  We'll see.  Only then will there be informed speculation on whether this debate or its ratings made any difference.

Trump is not going to be President, ever.  Nor is Bernie Sanders.  So the possible interest is in what effects their candidacies will have on the campaign and the parties.  Trump sinking Fox may be good enough.  Sanders showing the latent leftward idealism in the electorate and pushing the inequality issue can only help the Democratic party.

Update: The early consensus of those who were paid to watch the GOP debate is that Ted Cruz blew a golden opportunity.  Without Trump, he was the most prominent target for the others, and they went after him effectively, or so many thought.  Contrary to my expectations, Cruz did not go after Trump with any consistency, although he did mention that his absence showed his lack of respect for Iowa voters.  But he wasn't alone in this--Perry Bacon at NBC.com noted that no one attacked Trump, the frontrunner in Iowa, which is inexplicable, unless...Trump designed this whole thing to get Cruz and the others to self-destruct.

Update 1/29:  The overnights are in and the GOPer debate trumped Trump's competing event, by 12.5 million to 2.8 million in viewers.  Trump can trumpet that the ratings are down, which they are from their high points for GOPer debates, but clearly Trump's absence gave the others an opportunity--which, according to the pundits, none of them successfully grasped.  If the debate made any difference, they say, it will likely show up in Iowa by who comes in second.

On the Democratic side, I'm betting that Iowa and New Hampshire split.  In 2008, Barack Obama blew everybody away by convincingly winning in Iowa, and he had a clear lead in New Hampshire.  But contrarian NH voted for Hillary, and that meant a long contest into May.  If Bernie wins the Iowa caucus, the same seems likely to happen in New Hampshire--having voted for Hillary once, they'll do it again.  If Hillary wins Iowa, she will be anointed as the near-certain nominee, and New Hampshire will feel comfortable in voting for their Vermont neighbor, Bernie Sanders.

A Republican American Tragedy

Update 1/28: Further evidence of GOP government cynicism: the state gov provided bottled water for state employees in Flint beginning at least a year ago.

The tragedy of Flint illustrates the major features of the current Republican destruction of the American political process.

First, the demi-fascist takeover of cities by the Michigan state government, who appoint an "emergency manager."  Nearly all of the white representatives of the Republican politico-corporate complex rule over minority majority cities,  industrial ruins made more ruinous by racism.

Then the refusal to believe any reality that runs counter to rabid right ideology.  Then the incompetence bred by contempt for government, resulting in political appointees or corporate stooges.  Then the deflection of responsibility to others while the high priced ass-covering goes droning on for years.

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker has the basic story. To save some money, the Flint manager stopped getting water from Lake Huron that had been clean and safe for years, and tapped into the highly polluted local river in Flint.  Not even copious chlorine could sanitize it, and either from gross incompetence, contempt for the non-white non-rich of Flint (Davidson's emphasis) or another attempt to save money--likely some combination of all three--they failed to add an anti-corrosion agent to the water.  It was flowing through lead pipes, and the lead began to corrode and crumble into the water.  The citizens of Flint--including the most vulnerable, growing children--were being poisoned.

And the state government headed by new GOPer darling Rick Snyder insisted it wasn't happening, the water was fine, just a bunch of lazy whiners in Flint, as per GOPer mythology--sorry, GOPer Gospel.

 Meanwhile their supposed environmental people were doing a heckava job trying to support their governor's contention with bad or downright fraudulent testing.  Because polluted lead-infested water is a liberal hoax, like global warming.  Just a lamestream media fantasy.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Flint were getting hit with exorbitant bills to pay for the water that was poisoning their children and possibly killing them.

The regional branch of the federal EPA was not blameless either, and it took citizen agitation and the independent research of a whistle-blowing professor who had previously exposed danger in the DC water system during the GW Bush administration. But eventually even a GOPer darling governor had to face the poisonous reality.  Though some heads rolled, the state investigations illustrate another facet of corrupt GOPer governance: investigation of state actions under GOPer control by GOPer state officials, in this case directed by an attorney general who both defends and investigates the state government he hopes to lead (pronounced "leed") by running for governor in the next election.

Meanwhile, starve-the-government conservative Gov. Snyder is complaining that the federal government isn't giving him enough money to pay for all the damage done as a consequence of his style of non-governance.   Flint is reconnected to the Lake Huron water now, but the pipes may carry lead poison until they are replaced.  Which in Flint may mean never.  It hasn't gotten any less black or poor, after all.

Reality has consequences, and this will for years, not only feeding layers of lawyers and investigators for years, but the illnesses and conditions and stunted growth and disabilities that well may accrue.  Not to mention that it's all going to turn out to be much more expensive, further hobbling the economic future of Flint.  (And let's not forget the folks in  the auto companies and their industrial satellites that polluted those waters and the pols who refused to deal with that reality.)

Yet the GOP is so invested in its increasingly insular and detached from reality gospel that the likelihood that they learn anything from this approaches zero.

It's an American tragedy, different from the Greek.  In classical tragedy, the leader's hubris brings him down.  In American tragedy, the people pay for the leader's hubris, with their lives.  The leader may have to learn to survive on speaking fees and corporate board handouts.

Republican Holy War

Update: President Obama in a press conference Tuesday: 
"We are not well served when in response to a terrorist attack we descend into fear and panic...We don't make good decisions if it's based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks."
Of Republican candidates:
"They've been playing on fear to score political points or to advance their campaigns and it's irresponsible. It needs to stop because the world is watching," Obama said."I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here in the course of this debate." 

Jonathan Chiat's column today casts the despicable and predictable Republican response to the Paris terror attack in a bright if frightening light: nearly everything their leaders are saying are exactly what ISIL/ISIS/ Islamic State and the jihadists want them to say--exactly what will provide them with more power and troops.

Republicans are promoting a holy war of us (white Christian rabid right Republicans) against them (the entire Islamic world.)  It's the mirror image of ISIS, engaged in a holy war of them (a minority with a twisted interpretation of Islam) against us (everyone else, including most of the Muslim world.)

The stakes in defining this conflict could not be higher.  Chiat writes:

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, believes in defining the conflict in the most narrow terms. There is a very good reason for this. The United States is not actually at war with Islam. Non-extremist Muslims account for the lion's share of the victims of jihadist terror, and are needed as allies in the conflict.

 Air strikes and counterterrorism may be important tools against ISIS, but in the long run, we need non-radicals to maintain the loyalties of the majority of the Muslim world. If the Muslim world gravitates toward its most extreme elements, the West will find itself in an unwinnable struggle against an enemy that can generate fighters moving invisibly among 1.6 billion people worldwide. 

The radicals want to persuade the rest of the Muslims that they represent Islam writ large in a clash against Christians and Jews. The West’s strategy is predicated on breaking down this link, making it as hard as possible for them to claim that the West is at war with Islam as a whole."

In this context, it's worth noting this, from an evaluation of terrorist threats to the U.S.:"And Daniel Byman, a Brookings Institution analyst, noted in an interview that many such plots since the attacks of September 11, 2001 have been disrupted because of tips from American Muslims."

The most extreme elements of the religious right have long had this twisted mirror agenda of holy war, as it fulfills what they believe is the prophesy--for the end of the world, which of course only they will survive in clouds of glory.

Republicans were falling over each other to see who could be more extreme in their response.  Marco Rubio won--he endorsed this holy war.  But Jeb Bush wasn't far behind--he proposed that America accept only Christian refugees.

At a news conference at the G20 conference, President Obama was blunt and passionate: Without naming him, Mr. Obama singled out a comment by former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, one of the Republicans seeking to succeed him, for suggesting the United States focus special attention on Christian refugees. “That’s shameful,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not American. It’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

He denounced ISIL as "the face of evil" but refused to be terrorized into overestimating its strength in the Paris attacks:
“If you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s one of the challenges of terrorism. It’s not their sophistication or the particular weaponry that they possess. But it is the ideology they carry with them and their willingness to die.”

He noted that he has used force (often to criticism) but insisted on maintaining a sane pragmatism in word as well as deed.  Not only does ignorant bluster play into the hands of terrorists who recruit members on the basis of a holy war, it is the talk of irresponsible people who fortunately for the moment don't have responsibilities to actually respond.  The Times report concludes:

But he said he would not be pressured into “posing” as a tough president by doing things that will not make the situation better to satisfy his critics.

“Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said. “Because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough."

Ryan's the Hope?

What? Me Worry?

Maybe not so much.  In countering the push to convince Paul Ryan to run and be crowned as Speaker of the House, the rabid right backlash has gathered strength enough for a New York Times headline that Stanley Kubrick or Kurt Vonnegut would have loved: Latest Unease on Right: Ryan Is Too Far Left

Paul Krugman doesn't think much of Ryan either, but for a different reason:

"What makes Mr. Ryan so special? The answer, basically, is that he’s the best con man they’ve got. His success in hoodwinking the news media and self-proclaimed centrists in general is the basis of his stature within his party. Unfortunately, at least from his point of view, it would be hard to sustain the con game from the speaker’s chair."

And Krugman puts his finger on how Ryan has succeeded so far:

"To understand Mr. Ryan’s role in our political-media ecosystem, you need to know two things. First, the modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems. Second, pundits and the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality."

But here's another wrinkle.  Congress is recessed and Ryan says he won't say this week whether he will run.  So between now and Oct. 20, a lot of candidate wannabes (an amazing number of whom are from Texas) will test the waters.  If none of them gets warm, then Ryan starts to look inevitable all over again.

Maybe.

Weekend Update: GOPers, Guns and El Nino

Though I saw the GOPer earthquake/meltdown coming, I was still amazed by a story Friday, written by a veteran political reporter (Karen Tumulty) and published in the Washington Post:

Less than a year after a sweeping electoral triumph, Republicans are on the verge of ceasing to function as a national political party.

That's something that was unthinkable, even during Watergate. "Ceasing to function" is of course the scary part in terms of shared governance.  "as a national political party" is an interesting characterization, for there is a strong argument that the Republican party electorally is becoming regional.  We aren't Red States and Blue States, the freshman Senator from Illinois famously said in 2004, we are the United States.  But are we?  If not entire states all the time, we do have Red and Blue congressional districts that are divided by more than party label.  And some of those Red Staters aren't interested in the interests of the United States, or the world.

But responding to the latest congressional GOPer crisis--the sudden end to the heir apparent's ascension to Speaker, and the resulting chaos that leaves no credible candidate for the job but Paul Ryan, who so far is refusing to run for it--Tumulty describes the tumult in her second graph/sentence:

The most powerful and crippling force at work in the ­once-hierarchical GOP is anger, directed as much at its own leaders as anywhere else.

Jonathan Chiat analyzes how this plays out rationally, if not reasonably:

"What actually separates the insurgents from the Establishment is not ideology but tactics. The insurgents refuse to accept the constitutional limits of their power, and believe that more frenzied assertions of their core beliefs, combined with a periodic willingness to shut down the government and threaten a currency default, can prevail over President Obama through force of will. The insurgents mistakenly interpret disagreements over means as disagreements over ends; when Republican leaders express reluctance to shut down the government over Obamacare or Planned Parenthood, the insurgents take this as actual support for those programs."

Ryan's refusal may well be sincere--it's worse than a thankless job, and a former vice-presidential candidate doesn't need the prestige.  But if it's tactical, in order to let support build until he's crowned by acclamation, he risks what is starting to happen: rabid righters rebelling against Ryan basically because people they don't like support him, and he's unlikely to do crazy stuff like defaulting on the debt or shutting down the federal government.  So it seems he's going to have to declare in or out pretty soon. Update: Maybe too late. By late Saturday, Reuters has a story that their opposition is growing.

But even that may not be enough.  The New York Times Saturday suggests that rabid right insurgents want to take away much of the Speaker's power, which the story opines Ryan is unlikely to like.  If such demands are made, a Saturday Washington Post story also asserts, Ryan won't take the job.

Why would he? He's the most powerful chair of the House's most powerful committee.  And if insurgents get their way and distribute much of the Speaker's power to others, including committee chairs, he'll become more powerful by staying put.  Only big pressure to save the party might sway him.  But aren't the GOPers billionaires more rabid than right?

Of course, if the rabids prevent the US from honoring its debts on the debt ceiling vote in November, such "power" will be dismally irrelevant.

Land of Guns

President Obama had to hurry to comfort mourners and survivors of the gun massacre in Oregon but couldn't get it all done before there were two more campus shootings.

But it turns out these were fairly ordinary days in America.  Data published in the Guardian shows that in 1,004 recent days, there were 994 mass shootings, almost one a day on average, when "mass shooting" is defined as four or more victims.  Check out the chart.

Nick Kristof in the New York Times sifts more stats: more Americans killed by guns in America than died in all wars since (and including) the American Revolution.  And this one:

In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013), according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI.

Kristof suggests ways of breaking the impasse and doing something about gun violence, for example by treating this as a public health issue.  He notes however that Republicans in Congress have forbidden the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence.

Meanwhile President Obama is considering using executive action to redefine what constitutes a gun dealer to include large-volume dealers at gun shows, so buyers would have to pass background checks.  This idea has been around since 2013, and seems to be the same as what Hillary Clinton proposed through aides the other day.

There's also been quite a bit of noise about arming more people to defend themselves against crazy shooters, along with louder condemnation of any kind of gun control (using false history and a phony Hitler quote to suggest the Nazis triumphed because they enacted gun control. They didn't enact gun control, and they encountered armed resistance.)  The latest poster child for giving more people more guns was a woman shopper who whipped out her concealed pistol to shoot at shoplifters.

El Nino Update

National Weather Service updated their El Nino forecasts, with even the official pronouncements bringing good news for northern California: an 80% likelihood of normal precip this winter (after several years of way below normal), and a 40% chance of above normal.

But a NASA climate expert at the Jet Propulsion lab said this was typically conservative--that the El Nino is so strong that northern California will get lots of rain, including a restored snowpack in the Sierras, maybe twice normal.

The problem with all these forecasts is that they are based on comparing this year's data with previous El Ninos and their effects.  Two problems actually: first, the number of El Ninos with data attached is pretty small.  Second, this isn't 1950 or even 1996 in terms of the other phenomena affecting weather that seem caused or exaggerated by global heating and its effects in the atmosphere and especially in the oceans.

So if it starts raining and raining a lot in November, it's encouraging. But we won't know about how this El Nino interacted with the Blob etc. until looking back at this winter.  However, maybe it's wishful thinking, but the feeling here is yeah--it's gonna rain and rain.

It's Getting There

It was one small step for political hacks, one giant leap backwards towards the new Dark Age.

The Republican Congress has passed a budget which slashes funding for NASA's earth sciences research.  There are many other preposterous cuts in their budget so when it comes time to compromise with the White House on a final budget, this funding may be sacrificed.

The cuts are obviously aimed at NASA's climate research, which includes weather forecasting.  Republicans and their fossil fuel masters are at war with reality, but everyone else is going to pay the price.

Jane Jacobs wrote a book, her last, called Dark Age Ahead, published in 2004.  Jacobs, along with Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Frances Perkins, Halle Flanagan, Eleanor Roosevelt and others, was one of the great women of the 20th century.  She was famous for The Death and Life of American Cities and other books on cities, and she changed what cities look like and what they are today.  But this last book was ignored.  It's time for it to be revived.

She writes that a Dark Age is not just some primitive state.  It is a time when what was once known is culturally forgotten.  It is when knowledge is at first denied and ignored, and then it disappears.  Once started, it can become very extreme.  In the last Dark Age, people lost the skills required to measure time, and so in a sense in daily life, time itself was forgotten.

"Cultural xenophobia", a "fortress or fundamentalist mentality" are the signs that the fall into an age of darkness has begun.

In the New Yorker article I linked above, Elizabeth Kolbert uses a term I've used here before: willed ignorance.  That's what is happening among our "leaders."  That's why, if it's not dark yet, it's getting there pretty fast, and this latest effort--especially if it succeeds--is a notable step towards that darkness.  With chaos ahead.

The cost of willed ignorance is increasingly steep, as is the lack of societal will to do the difficult things necessary to stop our self-destruction.

So the news is always the same, and yet significantly worse.  Species disappearing from the planet,including large herbivores like elephants and rhinos and species of primates, with consequences of the crash of natural systems we can't predict.  And of course, the continuing acceleration of pouring carbon pollution into the atmosphere, condemning our progeny to a hotter, more violent and in many ways, a poorer world.  This week it reached a long-feared record.

Meanwhile the rabid right grows ever more extreme and perverse, with the latest feverish delusion of an ordinary military training exercise really being an Obama-led military takeover, because (as columnist Gene Lyons wrote) "where else would you start a military takeover but the strategic hamlet of Bastrop, Texas, commanding the crucial highway junction between Elgin and LaGrange?"

 And when it doesn't happen, rabid rightists and their pandering politicians will brag that their vigilance stopped it.  It would be nothing but funny if it weren't another de-legitimizing tactic that has consequences for the planet and the future well beyond the petty careers in the tiny lifetimes of power-hungry hollow men.