Weekend Political Update: Hillary's Obama Speech and the Trumpery of Today

After her nearly 50 point win in South Carolina Saturday, Hillary Clinton gave a victory speech that set the template for her Super Tuesday speeches beginning Sunday.  It was strategically positive, both in contrast to Trump and Co., and in line with the Democratic party as transformed by President Obama.

I don't know who Hillary's speech writers are these days, but they're getting very adept at sounding like Obama.  There were lines and cadences that were almost identical, with "imagine" a better future substituting for "hope" and "yes, we can."

She has the same unifying call, and has given it her spin with the organizing terminology of breaking barriers (instead of building walls.)  She's well on the way to identifying with the Obama coalition. She will need to inspire Bernie Sanders' supporters, and with a combination of positive themes and proposals, while making sure everyone knows the dangers of a triumphant Trump, she needs to generate voting.  If South Carolina is the template it seems to be, she's making great progress on the coalition, but not yet on the crucial turnout.

As Trump seems more inevitable and continues his act, Republicans are roiling.  The two aspects of Robert Kaplan's piece noted here last week were that Trump is the monster that GOPers created under the banner of conservatism, and that his candidacy was so extreme that it leads to voting for Hillary.

Others have made a similar case to Kaplan's that this is the current GOPer party's chickens coming home to roost.  And there's more talk of turmoil, but even the talk is in turmoil, as in this Washington Post piece which is boldly headlined The Republican party's implosion has arrived.  Within the piece however is evidence of revolt against Trump (and a few suggestions of not voting for him, though none of voting for Hillary) and also evidence of party members coming to terms with his candidacy, and even welcoming it.  Will GOPers unite behind Hillary hatred and lust for the Court?  That is the to be or not to be question.   

Meanwhile the other candidates are staying in at least until their home state primaries come up. (Ted Cruz saying that if Trump runs the table on Super Tuesday he'll be unstoppable probably means that Cruz feels he's got Texas)  Rubio, who now goes after Trump for everything including his orange spray tan, vows he's in it to the convention.

Trump's failure on Sunday to disavow David Duke and the KKK's support was puzzling to some, convincing others it was part of his southern strategy, and causing Jonathan Chiat to wonder if Trump was channeling the Know Nothings deliberately, or "more likely, he is even stupider than anybody previously believed."  But as Chiat writes, the Know Nothings got that name for doing precisely what Trump did Sunday, saying he knows nothing about white supremacists.  So maybe there is a current dog whistle involved.

Update: The New Yorker collects Trump's record of bigotry.

The David Duke story is likely to resonate for awhile (it quickly inspired a political consultant to declare Trump a bigot no one should vote for), but electorally the more significant Trumpism of the past few days was his ramble about a judge who ruled on an aspect of the Trump University debacle:"there’s a hostility toward me by the judge, tremendous hostility, beyond belief––I believe he happens to be Spanish, which is fine, he’s Hispanic, which is fine, and we haven’t asked for a recusal, which we may do, but we have a judge who’s very hostile.”

Linking that the judge is Hispanic with a possible Trump move for his recusal is the kind of inflammatory statement that got tagged immediately as "racial demagoguery."  But while others forget it in futile attempt to keep up with Trump's daily outrages, many Latinos will remember.  They will remember this slight, along with Trump's habit of referring to one of his Hispanic opponents as "little Rubio."  The Mexican wall etc. are policy matters, but these kinds of slights are more visceral, and they may be enough to motivate Latinos into the voting booths for the general election.

This I believe will survive a possible Trump pivot after the southern primaries are over.  Any prospective candidate looking at the primary season couldn't fail to notice that the momentum towards the nomination could be almost unstoppable if the south were won.  For GOPers this means appealing to their white base of de facto, closet and out racists.  For Dems it meant the African American voters plus enough urban white collar whites to offset the residual white collar GOPers.

Right now it seems to be working for Trump and Clinton.  By Tuesday night, we'll know better how well it's worked.  But even if Trump's tune changes as primaries move north and west, and the American media gets amnesia, it's very unlikely that black voters and particularly Latino voters will forget the Trumpery of today.

Woof-Woof, Win-Win

Okay, I think we're all ready for a win-win.

Dogs and cats as pets have never been more numerous, but a lot of animals are collateral damage, and have less than happy lives.  Those who aren't abused (or aren't abused anymore) but shy away from humans, still have less chance of survival. In a better world being a people animal wouldn't matter so much.  But that's the way it is now.

 When these animals wind up in shelters, they have less chance of being adopted.  Feral animals who hide or cower don't seem like promising pets.  Their lives may then turn out to be quite short.

On the other hand there are children who have trouble reading, or who can't see the point of reading. (Even before they get to the teen years when smart phones and pheromones dominate, and "books smell like old people.")

Then along came some genius to turn two apparently unrelated problems into one solution: kids reading to shelter animals (this article focuses on dogs, but it's also being done for cats.)

Being read to by a child stirs the animal's curiosity, and a child's voice is less threatening.  To what degree this actually increases the animal's social skills, who knows, but it does familiarize them with humans and human speech, in a safe place.

Meanwhile a kid who likes reading has somebody to read to, and to show the pictures to, just like a parent or teacher.  Or a kid who doesn't read too well is not facing a critic who picks at pronunciation or even aspects of the story that strictly speaking aren't reflected in the text.

It probably doesn't always work--the dog or cat is bored, or the child is--but it seems to work often enough to be a lovely win-win, and maybe the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Climate Crisis Perspective

The effects of the climate crisis have clearly begun.  More and more extreme storms, insect-borne diseases affecting more areas as they warm, and most floods in the U.S. are related to the climate crisis.

And it's likely to get worse, with more effects, and with worse and more widespread manifestations of known effects, as that study on floods shows.

Seas rose faster in the 20th century than in the previous 27 centuries, and this (other) new study shows that without the climate crisis they would have risen much less, or not at all.

A study of U.S. forests shows that they are all threatened by effects of the climate crisis.  Not just in the west or the north or the south, not just certain species of trees, but all the forests, everywhere.

And so on.  The good news is that a lot of things we're worried about now, people won't be worrying about in the near future.  The bad news is it's because they'll have newer and potentially bigger things to worry about.  Sometimes because things will be gone. In any case, things will be different.  Eventually, almost everything.

The jobs of the future are likely to be more basic, requiring a combination of skills now almost lost, plus skills more sophisticated than most of us have.

That's just to deal with the effects.  Addressing the causes is another very big job, with the potential, and probably the necessity of transformation.

It's going to take more than conservation, more than the hopeful but small movement towards clean energy technology, even as oil prices tumble.  It's going to take public policy and business working towards the same goals.

It's going to take new technologies, some of which are today's advanced and maybe crazy ideas, and some of which haven't yet been dreamed.

Some of the technologies most often  proposed in the recent past are very dangerous, and potentially more disastrous than immediate climate crisis effects.  But that can't stop us from using knowledge to see if we can't make trees more resistant, bring the oceans back to health, or develop better and easier clean energy forms, or (even if this isn't a climate change problem per se) stop the global die-back of pollinators--bees and butterflies--quantified in this new study, before our food supply crashes.

Skills being developed here and there in small pockets of sanity will need to be brought up to scale.  These include the skills of peace--of shared decision-making, of defusing violence and so on, because that's what everybody really fears about this--the fears of every gun for itself, zombie apocalypse, big wars that devolve into local wars over very scarce resources.

The politics of the moment obviously can have a major impact on all this, but we place our hopes in the people who are more or less ignoring this noise and who are concentrating on developing those skills and that knowledge that will be useful in the coming years.  And who teach the children well.

The Daily Babble: El Nino, Young Women, Emma Thompson and the GOP Zombie Apocalypse

It's raining today, but that hasn't happened very much this month.  Here on the North Coast we had a January that was 50% above the average rainfall, but we're closing in on a February that's about 50% of average.

So for all the ballyhoo about the monster El Nino, and all the power and uncertainty it may be putting behind weather elsewhere, it hasn't lived up to billing up here.  It's also been a dry month in the rest of California, where the El Nino noise and bits of rain have probably been a factor in the recent run of months that CA cities haven't met water conservation standards set by the state.  Whereas they were exceeded during the summer.

For us, instead of an El Nino anomaly, we've gotten pretty much what we've been getting in recent winters: one solid month of rain, and way below average the other winter months.  We do have March ahead, although its average rainfall is historically less, and there is some precedent for El Nino's effects to power up in March and April. But so far the drought--or global heating trends--are proving to be the more powerful factors.

Now for something completely different...

An intriguing article at New York on the changes that have been going on in America for young women.  The stats are basically 6 or 7 years old, but apparently they show a continuing trend:

In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent. In other words, for the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women. Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than 34 who had never married was up to 46 percent, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under 30, the likelihood of being married has become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans ages 18–29 are wed, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960.

The article dwells on the political ramifications, but of course there are more ripples in the social fabric than that.

With the Oscars coming up, there are lots of features about its history and so on, and what the awards might mean.  What they don't necessarily mean is that the winners will have lasting meaning.  Some will, and some have.  Kate Winslet is up for another best supporting Oscar (I did see that one, and she disappeared into that role.)  She won her first exactly twenty years ago in Sense and Sensibility, the title of which is often prefixed with Jane Austen's and followed by, a film by Ang Lee.  Though he was the director, it was really a film by Emma Thompson, who wrote it (and won an Oscar for doing so.)

All that is to introduce a really interesting piece in the Atlantic  about how the changes she made in characterization (giving the male characters dimension that Austen didn't) also created images or models of men: Sense and Sensibility deliberately imbued Austen’s first published heroes with qualities they either didn’t have in the novel or didn’t have to the same degree: egalitarian attitudes toward women, an affection for children, and emotional sensitivity.

This film has added weight this year because one of those men was played by Alan Rickman, who was (to my mind) even better in his non-villain roles.

Finally, politics.  The consensus on the Net about the GOPer debate Thursday was that Rubio landed some blows finally, but that Trump is still standing.  Such speculation was superseded today by Trump's endorsement by Chris Christie.

But something more interesting happened earlier in the week.  A columnist in the Washington Post wrote about Donald Trump, mixing Greek myth and Mary Shelley for his metaphors:

"A plague has descended on the [Republican] party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.

Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker."

He cites the pattern of "wild obstructionism" and "the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks." "No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers."  And not Trump first among those enablers, but "Republican party pundits and intellectuals." "What did Trump do but pick up where they left off, tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed?"

Partaking of both obstructionism and bigotry, he wrote, "was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified."  Though Obama's policies were well within the mainstream of Democratic candidates and Presidents, he was attacked as subversive and illegitimate.

Others have made similar critiques, including me.  The difference is the author: Robert Kagan, a Republican, a "prominent neoconservative intellectual" (says J.Chiat)  and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  And so there is the conclusion that is singular so far, but perhaps a harbinger:

So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.

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.

Another perishable post on politics

The Hillary camp must be watching quickly unfolding GOPer moves with particular interest.  On Sunday, some pundits were openly doubting that the GOPer Establishment (i.e. Jeb! backers) were going to rush to the aid of Marco Rubio, as their last stand savior.  At the end of Monday, the Washington Post reported that this was exactly what happened during the day.  Jeb! had left the race, and without much in the way of a mourning period, his backers were "flocking" to Rubio.

Good news for Rubio, at least in terms of money.  He had far less that Cruz or Trump.  But being the hero of the Jeb! Establishment in a voting with the middle finger year, not so much.

The Post piece agreed with others, however, that Rubio's road to the nomination is pretty narrow and uncertain, if not downright unlikely.  His announced strategy is to accumulate delegates without winning any of the March 1 Super Tuesday states, and start win some winner-take-all states on March 15.  Just to do the former, he'll have to leapfrog Cruz with the Evangelicals who don't vote for Trump.  To do the latter is the to be or not to be question.

From the Hillary point of view, Rubio must be their least favorite opponent.  I've been thinking about the debates.  Facing a woman candidate is an unknown quantity in presidential debates for GOPer candidates.  The hard edge of Tail Gunner Ted might not go over too well if he gets too aggressive.  That prospect is even greater with Trump.

Aggressive unto the threat of violence.  Too much?  Then you missed Trump on Monday, telling his adoring crowd that he'd like to punch a protester in the face.  Nothing on Cruz of course, who said he'd get Immigration police to round up and deport permanently all 12 million undocumented.

Of all the people who try to explain Trump's methodology, the one who makes the most sense to me is conservative columnist David Brooks.  In a column he wrote, prematurely burying Trump after his Iowa loss, he put his finger on it: and it's studio wrestling:

Donald Trump was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2013. He’d been involved with professional wrestling for over a quarter century. At first his interest was on the business side, because so many of the events were held at his hotels. But then he began appearing in the ring as an actual character.

What Trump apparently learned in that arena--the aggressive bluster that WWF fans love--he transferred to his TV persona and especially to his candidacy.

Professional wrestling generates intense interest and drama through relentless confrontation. Everybody knows it’s fake at some level, but it is perceived as fake and real at the same time (sort of like politics). What matters is not so much who wins or loses, or whether you are good or evil, but the aggressiveness by which you wage each mano-a-mano confrontation.

Many have been waiting for Trump's cartoon aggression and bullying of women in particular to go too far and rebound on him.  It hasn't, and absent real violence against protesters or media at one of his rallies (which is a growing possibility,) it probably won't in the GOPer primaries, especially in the South.

  Brooks explains his core support this way: Social inequality is always felt more acutely than economic inequality. Trump rose up on behalf of people who felt looked down upon, made them feel vindicated and turned social conduct on its head. And especially with available targets like uppity blacks and uppity women, Trump can keep blustering away.

But it's one thing to bully women and the media remotely, or to do it for GOPer debate crowds.  It's another to do it face to face in the Finals, in the context of a one-on-one presidential debate.  With an audience of voters that do not fit the profile of GOPer primaries.

 As repulsive a spectacle that might be should Trump face Bernie Sanders, the more likely scenario of facing Hillary could be his undoing.  Although the ratings will be spectacular, which may be all that he really wants.

For this alone, Trump must be the candidate Hillary people wish for.  It may be that it's a case of careful what you wish for, and in that particular column Brooks was premature at best in sounding Trump's demise. But given the choices, I suspect the candidate the Hillaryites want to face least is Rubio, with his altar boy face and smile.  His youth might be especially appealing.  He's just as extreme as Cruz and Trump, and in some areas more extreme, both in domestic and foreign policy.  He would be just as much a catastrophe.  But even with his robotic demeanor, he might do better in debates than they.

Still, as long as GOPers are determined to vote with their middle fingers, Rubio is running for vice-president.

Black History

Every picture has a story, and sometimes that story is history.  His story is that he's three years old, and Barack Obama is his hero.  His favorite book is "The White House Pop-Up Book."  And that's President Obama's hand on his cheek, and his mother behind him--she brought him to a Black History Celebration at the White House, the last time the first African American to be President of the United States would be its host.

The photo is an official White House one by Pete Souza.  I've posted several, maybe even many of these over the years.  I favored the ones depicting President Obama with children, particularly children of color.  Children respond to him, and he clearly responds to them.  They say a lot.

This particular photo became the subject of a moving story by Janell Ross in the Washington Post.  Though young Clark is on the other side of the rope line, President Obama stopped to talk to him, and fix his tie.  Ross wrote of the moment:

"The look in Clark's eyes offers one half of America's current story. A country once determined to import and enslave black Americans is now, indeed, led by one. That is a transformation so profound and complex that when another young black child, Jacob Philadelphia, visited the White House in 2009 and asked the then-new president if they have the same hair. Obama bent down and advised Jacob to find out. The answer -- yes -- said much more to Jacob, the millions of Americans who have seen the Souza photo of that moment since. It said, I am like you. You are like me. The most powerful elected office in the world is mine and is truly possible for all of us. Obama reportedly gave the photo a permanent and special home in the White House.

But then, there is Obama's tender touch on Clark's cheek this week. It is another remarkably familiar gesture between strangers which also reveals something deep and true. It speaks to the other half of America's current story. Obama is our president. Still, this remains a country where children who look like Clark, but are perhaps a decade older, are widely regarded as a menace. They are to be feared and contained. Obama's touch says, this child is precious and valuable because of who he is and what he can become. But when Obama said as much -- telling reporters in 2012 that if he had a son, that son would look like Trayvon Martin -- a good portion of America reacted as if that reminder was itself an extreme affront.

On Thursday, before Clark left the White House, President Obama inscribed Clark's favorite book. Clark's mother brought it along. The inscription reads: "To Clark -- Dream big dreams! Barack Obama."

And at the other end of history, also visiting the White House was Virginia McLaurin, who is nearly 107 years old.  She remembers when Hoover was President, the Model T and living before electricity (as many did even in the 1930s.)  And of course, growing up in the South, she remembers segregation, which--if you posit that it effectively ended in 1964, was in force for some 55 years of her life.

She thought she would never live long enough to see a black President--and she was 99 before she did.  But more incredible than that, she made it to the White House, and to meet the President and First Lady.

She was so happy that she danced.  And they danced with her.  In a video that apparently went viral, after being posted on the White House Facebook page.

Gateway Drug

I have to be very careful about listening to music.  It can take over.  My brain plays it incessantly, my moods synch to the lyrics, my psyche gets entrained to its rhythms.

Fortunately I am not tempted to listen to much new music, as befits my age, and I can handle classical music and jazz pretty well, though I still get infected sometimes.

But once in awhile I happen on music that's new to me, and I can get in trouble.  That happened recently when I innocently clicked on an article in the New Yorker about a 90s band I'd never heard of, and never heard.  (I confess I looked at the article because it was by "Bill Wyman," but it turns out to not be the Rolling Stones' Bill Wyman.)

But the article made the band--called the Vulgar Boatmen-- sound intriguing so I hopped over to YouTube and began listening.  There's a lot there--songs off their 90s records, a few live performances (though as the article notes, the band is actually two bands, and the performances don't always match with the band that made the record) and especially the remixes, which are pretty startling in their clarity, economy and musicality.

So I listened to them all, and wound up disagreeing with much of what Wyman wrote that he hears, but I did get hooked, especially on this song, "You Don't Love Me Yet."  To me the lyric strategy is to throw in some names and observations but mostly assemble random sticky lines from other songs.  So at best they wind up with sort of mysterious but compelling lyrics along with this unique music (as on perhaps their best-known song, "You and Your Sister.")

 On "You Don't Love Me Yet" it's the guitar riffs that get me, and the voice (a little Paul Simony to my ear.)   I remember that riff from 1980s New Order (I think--their stuff on YouTube doesn't sound anything like it).  If I had a band, I'd be getting them to listen to this music.

Listening to it now I'm relieved that the spell is broken (I think--I'll know later if I can still think straight without hearing that riff), but I'm passing it on to you anyway.  Maybe you're one of those who can take it or leave it, you can quit anytime.

Voting with the Middle Finger

Weird weekend with the Democrats caucusing in Nevada but the Republicans voting in the South Carolina primary.  The Republicans will caucus in Nevada this week, and next weekend the Democrats vote in South Carolina.  Or maybe this separation should be viewed as symbolic, of two different democracies.

In any case Donald Trump triumphed in South Carolina.  One of the voters there explained why--he was "voting with my middle finger."  Hillary Clinton won in Nevada.

Now that some numbers exist, political pundits feel more comfortable in predicting the final outcome of the nominating contests.  Various of them made strong cases that this weekend's winners are going to be the candidates.

Jonathan Chait made the salient point that Rubio's second place tie--ten or so points behind Trump--is less impressive than he'd like it to look.  He needed to win South Carolina and didn't.  He's not utterly out of it, nor is the universally despised Tailgunner Ted, but fighting for second place is not going to be enough.  Even with establishment GOPers starting to line up behind him, the only ray of hope that South Carolina provided Rubio is that late deciders broke for him, not for Trump.  But if Trump keeps notching victories in March, it's very probably over.

Meanwhile, Chris Danner's roundup of punditry makes the case that Bernie Sanders has peaked.  They base this on numbers, but a rationale is not hard to develop. Sanders is the Democrat's anti-establishment candidate, though his appeal isn't to anger alone but to hope.  His supporters ask that people vote "with their hearts."

But if these pundits are right, Democrats are also checking their heads, as Dems are wont to do.  Barack Obama won their hearts, but in debates, town halls, speeches and in response to real world events, he demonstrated an ability to handle the job of President.

 Bernie Sanders has an intriguing record.  I first became aware of him when he was the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont.  (I was following the local rebellion against a proposed giant shopping mall, which turned out to be the first such project stopped by citizen action.)  Sanders turned out to be both a creative and pragmatic mayor, and if memory serves he was voted as the best mayor in the nation by his fellow mayors.

That was a long time ago, and it remains to be seen if Sanders can convince heads as well as hearts that he is up to the full range of presidential responsibilities.  But the nominating process is a matter of accumulating delegates, and he is rapidly running out of time.

That of course is not even a question being raised by the finger-voting GOPers who support Trump.  If we needed a reminder of how extreme all the surviving GOPer candidates are--and how that extremism is growing--here's one from the New Yorker's Amy Davidson.

The Republican party is becoming the party of the middle finger.  Whether it destroys itself in immense defeat in 2016 or destroys the country in victory is the open question.  Even an immense defeat in congressional elections may not prevent the GOP from functionally destroying the Supreme Court.

Hillary Clinton has not proven to be an especially skillful executive of her own campaigns, or even of the State Department, but at this point, voters may calculate that she's as close to a stable transition to a better country as we've got running. The GOPer friendly columnist David Brooks is not the only one who is already beginning to miss President Obama.

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.

Our Self-Destructive Politics

We'll start with the long view, and a rational analysis based on ideals central to the American identity, at least until now.

Last week President Obama spoke about the current state of American politics to the Illinois legislature, where he began his elected public service, and where--nine years to the day--he announced his candidacy for President.

  After some ruefully funny stories about his early days there as a rookie and in the minority party, he detailed some of the relationships between Republican and Democratic members that grew over the years, as well as among members from cities and downstate rural areas, and from different ethnic groups.

"I don’t want to be nostalgic here -- we voted against each other all the time," he said. "And party lines held most of the time. But those relationships, that trust we’d built meant that we came at each debate assuming the best in one another and not the worst... And we didn’t call each other idiots or fascists who were trying to destroy America. Because then we’d have to explain why we were playing poker or having a drink with an idiot or a fascist who was trying to destroy America."

It was this experience, he said, that gave him confidence in a better kind of politics.  Because that spirit mirrored how constituents talked and went about their lives, the people that they represented. "And it convinced me that if we just approached our national politics the same way the American people approach their daily lives –- at the workplace, at the Little League game; at church or the synagogue -- with common sense, and a commitment to fair play and basic courtesy, that there is no problem that we couldn’t solve together."

"And that was the vision that guided me when I first ran for the United States Senate. That’s the vision I shared when I said we are more than just a collection of red states and blue states, but we are the United States of America."

"Now, over these nine years, I want you to know my faith in the generosity and the fundamental goodness of the American people has been rewarded and affirmed over and over and over again," he said, and gave examples.  But he also acknowledged that America's politics has not gotten better, but a whole lot worse.

In a preview of what we're likely to hear after he leaves the White House, he outlined structural changes that could counter entrenched divisiveness.  He spoke (Bernie Sanders-like) about the "corrosive influence of money in our politics."  He called out the Citizens United decision, and said exactly what I've said here: "I don't believe money is speech."

 Because of gerrymandering, most congressional seats belong to one party, so the greatest threat to a congressperson is somebody from their party attacking them from (for GOPers) the right or (for Dems) the left--pushing both parties to extremes, and demonizing compromise.  So drawing congressional districts has to be reformed (again, always.)

And the best way to make politics more responsive to peoples' needs is for more people to vote--and so voting should be made easier, not harder.  He went on to talk about American and democratic ideals, about reason and compromise, and ended with a subtly breathtaking metaphor.  He's often talked about the phrase "a more perfect Union," and how we're in a continual process of perfecting that Union.  But this time he layered it with another union:

And that’s the thing about America. We are a constant work of progress. And our success has never been certain, none of our journey has been preordained. And there’s always been a gap between our highest ideals and the reality that we witness every single day. But what makes us exceptional -- what makes us Americans -- is that we have fought wars, and passed laws, and reformed systems, and organized unions, and staged protests, and launched mighty movements to close that gap, and to bring the promise and the practice of America into closer alignment. We’ve made the effort to form that “more perfect union.”

America as the struggle to create a more perfect union between ideals and reality, the promise and the practice of American democracy--it's a beautiful image and a real inspiration.  To have such a vision can inform action and commitment at every given moment.

With that vision in mind, President Obama's prescriptions for structural changes made a lot of sense.  Increasing participation, opening up the process, not only further the goal of this better union, but lacking them does help explain why our politics today are so awful.

But they don't explain everything.  The next day after this speech, President Obama appeared at a party fundraiser north of San Francisco, among people who have supported him since the 2008 primaries.  In the course of his remarks, he spoke to them about income inequality, and its effect on this year's politics:

"And people are deeply concerned about inequality in the sense that the system is rigged against ordinary folks. And they’re not wrong that lobbyists and narrow special interests have disproportionate influence in Congress, and that big money and unaccountable, undisclosed money is distorting our politics in ways that are going to be damaging over the long term.

And that disquiet, that concern is expressing itself in the Republican Party as well as the Democratic Party. And we have to listen to that, and we have to pay attention to that and be mindful of it. 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."

And that last paragraph will be the text that begins my next sermon on this here site--on psychotic politics.

Blue, Too

And while we're on the feline circuit...Back in 2010, I wrote about a cat that had befriended me during the previous fall.  I called her Blue, for her eyes. She disappeared at the end of a semester, and so I assume she'd had a student owner, and left with her or him.

In 2015 I was befriended by another cat, much in the way as that one, also with striking blue eyes.  I called him Blue, Too.  Or Blue for short.

Blue was a skinny young cat when he started coming around.  (Although Margaret thought Blue was a she--and thanks to surgery, there was no easy way to tell--I always felt he was he.)  He tried to get inside the house, tried to cozy up to Pema, with little success.  He liked me, though.

Because of Pema, Blue couldn't come inside but we spend time together on the back porch. When I sat in the chair he would come up my chest, nuzzle my neck, and make an entire transit from one shoulder to behind my head to the other shoulder.  Other times he would just sit in my lap, occasionally falling asleep. (Once he fell asleep lying on his back--I've never seen a cat do that.)  And in an odd coincidence, one night we both saw a shooting star, just as the first Blue and I had watched the sky during a purported meteor shower (but didn't see any that time.)

I began seeing Blue so often that I worried he was homeless.  Students leaving cats behind is not unknown in this neighborhood.  So I gave him some dry food in a plastic cup.  He devoured it.  (That was very different from the first Blue, who was indifferent to food.)

It soon became apparent that Blue was bulking up, so he was probably eating somewhere else as well.  At first, assuming Nurse Margaret was right about gender, I thought Blue might be pregnant.  So of course I worried even more about food, shelter and where (and when) the kittens would drop.

But time passed, and Blue was filling out more than in the belly.  So that panic passed.

Still, I left a permanent bowl out on the porch for him, and put food in it when he came around.  I would see him on the back porch at all hours, so I left one of the cat beds Pema doesn't use anymore in a protected place.  But during the night he preferred to sleep on the chair.  Still, on many sunny afternoons I saw him asleep in the cat bed.

We spent this past Thanksgiving with Margaret's daughter, son in law and grandson Beckett in Menlo Park, six or so hours down the coast.  Monika, who works at Northtown Books and also does cat-sitting, lives nearby and came around twice a day to feed Pema.  To our usual feeding instructions, I added a note that this neighborhood cat with the blue eyes was apt to come around when he saw her, and if he did, please drop some dry food in his bowl on the porch.

Pema remains very shy of anybody but us, so in the two times Monika has taken care of her while we were gone (several days each time), Monika has never even seen Pema.  But this time she certainly saw Blue, who was very insistent on being attended to, and fed.

When we came home and I opened the car door, Blue was right there looking up at me.

Since then Margaret met our new neighbors across the street--a young family.  They told her that Blue was theirs, and that cats of his breed often adopt another household, and are generally very friendly.  And yes, Blue is male. Only they didn't call him Blue.  They named him Richard.

Even bulked up (likely an effect of castration at any early age) Blue (because I still call him that) is a beautiful cat.  The placement of black, brown and white is striking and various.  As the rainy season began and nights were colder, I don't see him around as much, especially at night.  But usually not more than 2 or 3 days go by without a reunion.  Sometimes he's distracted, but sometimes these are quite joyful reunions.  He still likes me to pick him up (which Pema still does not) and he can still do that transit from shoulder to shoulder.  We're buddies.

Meditating with Pema

Pema the cat joined our household almost ten years ago.  She was a young feral cat, who friends found in their barn, near starvation.  We named her Pema after Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun who has written several books and made many recorded talks about meditation.  In the past several months, Pema the cat has come more fully to her name.

Pema did know about stillness.  She used to sit in one spot outside and look around.  And as she's gotten older, she's spent more time being, well, still.  But she recently made this a more formal practice.

In recent years, when the television came on sometime after dinner, Pema made herself scarce.  I think it was when we had to put speakers on the floor--something about the sound alarmed her.  But recently Margaret and I revived our after dinner practice of meditating.  At first we went the traditional route, on our old meditation cushions in front of the couch.  But after a knee problem Margaret retreated to her chair.  Not wanting to her to feel out of place (and willing to seize on any excuse), I moved my meditation to the couch, where I sat upright.

Our stillness and silence attracted Pema like a magnet.  She can't get up on Margaret's chair as easily as she can hop on the couch, so she joined me.  With just a little hesitation she moved onto my lap.  And so Pema the cat joined us as Pema the meditation cat.  She has adopted this as part of her routine.

Of course, I am expected to pet her, rub her head, cheeks, ears etc., which pretty much disallows single point meditation.  However I try to stay in the moment.
And there are forms of meditation that this should allow or even enhance, such as the kind practiced by...Pema Chodron, of course.

Clearing the Air

The sudden death of ultra-conservative Republican Supreme Court Justice Scalia and the likelihood that the Republican Senate will at least try to maintain this vacancy for a long time is also likely to result in a number of important no-decisions that will fracture federal law, as lower court rulings that conflict with one another will rule over different parts of the country.

But the negative effect of at least one recent Court decision--to postpone federal regulations on carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act--is likely to diminish. Even before today, despite the dire headlines, that decision was probably not going to have a major impact anyway.

While that stay issued last week does delay formal implementation of the regulations, it was likely only a delay.  As Jonathan Chiat noted: "Because the Supreme Court ordered the regulation of carbon in the first place, there’s little doubt that some kind of power plan could be designed that would pass legal muster."  This might require a different approach to the regulations, which would further delay implementation, but not ultimate success--as long as the executive branch wants those regulations.  Which means a Democrat in the White House.

Even a delay could weaken American leadership in the global effort to address the climate crisis that the world formally engaged in Paris 2015.  But as a practical matter, there may be no delay--because US power companies are going forward with their plans to meet the carbon goals.  The Washington Post reported:

"Executives for electricity producers and industry trade associations say they expect little deviation from what was already an industry-wide move from coal-burning to cleaner and cheaper forms of energy to produce electricity. The shift is likely to accelerate further in the near future, industry officials and analysts said, meaning that many of the administration’s carbon-cutting goals may be met regardless of what courts and lawmakers ultimately decide to do."

But now the legal fate of the regulations in the near term is clearer. The Supreme Court's stay on the regulations is to be in effect until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals makes its decision on the merits.  Chiat today:

"The stay indicated that a majority of the justices foresee a reasonably high likelihood that they would ultimately strike down Obama’s plan, which could jeopardize the Paris climate agreement and leave greenhouse gasses unchecked. Without Scalia on the Court, the odds of this drop to virtually zero. The challenge is set to be decided by a D.C. Circuit panel composed of a majority of Democratic appointees, which will almost certainly uphold the regulations. If the plan is upheld, it would require a majority of the Court to strike it down. With the Court now tied 4-4, such a ruling now seems nearly impossible."

This is going to be obvious to everyone involved, and further motivate electricity producers to go ahead with changes to limit carbon pollution.  Once that happens, even a Republican in the White House wouldn't be able to do much about it, because after all that investment, power companies aren't going back.

President of the United States

As for the impact on the election of Scalia's death and the Republican's open demand that the Constitution be violated and the President of the United States not appoint a Justice to fill the vacancy, at least one analyst believes it could further the likelihood of a Democrat being elected President in November.  John Cassidy in the New Yorker:

"If the Republicans block the nomination without properly considering it, which also seems likely, a huge political row will ensue, enveloping the Presidential race. (In fact, it has already done that, as the Republican debate proved.) Come summer and fall, the Democratic candidate, be it Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, will be able to go the country and appeal for support in preventing the Republicans from humiliating President Obama and making a mockery of democracy."

So in that case who would win the 2016 election? By bringing to the polls the coalition that elected him twice:  President Obama.

Update: A summary of other views on how Republican "strategy" on the Supreme Court vacancy could hurt them in November and beyond. 

Listen

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black Lives Matter, the Oscars So White, the primaries move to predominately black South Carolina--all during Black History Month as it becomes ever more starkly clear that the existence of President Obama has brought racism back out of hiding behind codewords and euphemisms.

So some of the most stimulating writing I've read on the Internet lately has been about such issues as reparation and white supremacy, and written by black writers. The best example is, not too surprisingly, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who received a lot of attention (including a National Book Award) for his book Between the World and Me.

Coates has been named as successor to James Baldwin, and in at least one sense has taken that on, since this book owes its form to one of Baldwin's.  In the early 1960s, Baldwin's books (The Fire Next Time was the first I read) made me conscious of racial history and the costs of injustice, more deeply than any other writer or speaker or events.

  I learned also--more instinctively than consciously at first--that the experts on experiences you haven't had are the people who have had those experiences.  They may help you educate your empathy.  But imaginative projection is limited.  And there are other factors at work within you.  As I wrote more recently in a related context: Sometimes you can imagine what things look like from another’s perspective. Sometimes you can’t. You just have to listen.

That's what makes listening to these voices--for what experiences you have in common and what you don't--is so important. Apart from blatant out-front racism, and the institutional and historical meaning of these concepts in the real world, white supremacy or white privilege is expressed in this way--by not listening to those voices.  It's not just that the Oscars look past black actors when they can.  It is that Hollywood won't give African Americans their own voices, to describe their own experiences in cinematic art.

I haven't read Between the World and Me.  So I can't say that the reviews I read do or don't accurately describe or characterize it.  But I have read several of Coates articles, essays and blog posts in the Atlantic, and his voice there is not what these reviews describe.  He's a careful, logical as well as eloquent writer, and the case he makes for the idea of reparations is very strong.  His perspective allows him to find and expose aspects of history that are ignored in the standard tellings.  And he tells that history well.  (Having written about some of the same history---like post-World War II suburbia--I am made very aware of what I missed.)

 Here's a link to get started.  And a long interview with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now to get acquainted.

It was in the Goodman interview that Coates reluctantly answered the question of who he would vote for, and it was Bernie Sanders, despite a couple of columns criticizing Sanders' views on reparations.  Meanwhile, another black writer with the big megaphone of the New York Times, Charles Blow, was chastising Sanders for paternalism in relation to black voters, but making many of the same points that Coates has.

From a popular culture point of view, Rembert Brown in New York has a fascinating piece on white privilege.  All of these offer not just eye-opening points of view to non-African American readers, they are (especially by contrast with most online political and cultural writing) refreshingly substantive and well-argued, while honoring the complexity of the subject.  Though the subject matter is often painful, the writing is a pleasure to read.

NH 2016

With his first victory (a massive one to boot) Bernie Sanders gave a succinct victory speech that hit all his right notes.  He also said very early in the speech that in a few months all Democrats (and Democratic candidates) will have to unite to defeat any of the possible--and uniformly horrific--Republican candidates for President.

In 2008, Barack Obama made his most famous speech--the now-mythic "Yes We Can" speech--in conceding New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton.  Does anybody remember what Hillary said?

In  2016, Hillary may have given the equivalent for her campaign.  Her concession was the best speech I've ever heard her make, not only in content but in delivery.  Will it do for her campaign what Obama's did for his?  I guess we'll see.