Covid-19 Is Not Deadly Enough

“…nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes”, so Benjamin Franklin penned as one of his last great quotes. He could have stopped with “death”, but his nature and wit could not ignore that a social structure demands participation, something “taxes” embodies, and was also an undeniable reality. Yet we live our lives year after year as if reasonable certainty, beyond physical laws, was everywhere and anywhere. To do otherwise is to live in constant fear and indecision. However, in this century it appears that fear and indecision are winning. 

I find myself absolutely intolerant of the 40% of Americans who have decided not to participate in the inoculation of our population against the Covid-19 virus. The fact that this has developed almost entirely in the former Confederate, deep South and Conservative rural communities everywhere makes it even more infuriating. This may become the most divisive behavior yet contrived by those who profit from misinformation. It may ultimately decide the contest between emotion and intellect, between fear and knowledge. 

How do you get through to people? My son, who is sensitive and understanding, made the point to me that you can’t knock people over the head. He suggested we need to listen and understand their point of view in order to show and convince them that their views can change without compromise. I used to think that as well. No more. 

Republican politicians who are addicted to the wealth of power and Conservative organizations and media who are mostly addicted to simply wealth have spent nearly four decades building a solidly cohesive voting and spending bloc through the creative use of fear. They have become desperate not to lose it. Their primary tool is the twisted amplification of Benjamin Franklin’s old quote. They advance the certainty of uncertainty, to instill the fear they need for control. 

How do we know for sure that the Covid-19 virus is really a pandemic? How can we be certain that the vaccine will prevent the virus? Does anyone really know how dangerous the vaccine is? Can we really trust government to provide safe medical solutions? How can we truly believe the FDA, CDC, Fauci, Biden, or the local school board? Isn’t it possible that Liberals are really just Socialists, who are really just Communists, and support pedophilia?  If we let anyone into this country isn’t it feasible they’ll use up our resources, corrupt our elections, steal our liberties, take our money, confiscate our weapons, burn our churches, and rape our daughters? It’s possible, isn’t it? 

There are no answers to these questions or many questions like them because they are grounded in fear, and that fear is preserved by those who profit from it. It is only when an individual gives up the fear that they can open themselves to reasonable certainties, if not absolute certainties.

That the fears created have been vastly political in nature is particularly infuriating. As of today, 21 of the top 25 states showing increased vulnerability to Covid-19 due to the unvaccinated are "Red" states, including the top 14. The 14 least affected are all "blue". Yet the folly and absurdity of this fact is not touch by a single Republican leader.  

So what do you do without the support of leadership and media that deals with their own fear of losing control or money? Perhaps to handle a unique situation like a pandemic we have to fight fear with fear. Efforts to get individuals to be vaccinated with soft cajoling, pleas, or financial rewards absolutely turn my stomach. 

If the Covid-19 virus is not deadly enough for people to have one or two degrees of separation from it, then start the campaign to instill the likelihood that if they don’t get the vaccine they WILL die, or at the very least be tragically ill for the rest of their lives. Not true? Well…anything is possible…right? 

Perhaps the virus and its offspring will inflict that fear on its own. That would be such a sad alternative, but it could happen…right?

After the Shots

What is normal? That’s not an unusual question and undoubtedly overused. How many parents have looked at their child and thought why can’t (he) be normal? The older we get the less “normal” the world appears, as the “normal” we understand shrinks before our eyes. 

Perhaps not in three generations, since World War II, has there been such a call for returning to “normal” as what has come out of this last year of radical change. Additionally, for the past four years a majority of the American people have been yearning for something they could call “normal” coming out of the Federal Government. 

The problem is that “normal”, as we use it, is an emotional construct. It is essentially how we feel things should be. An analogous adjective, and far more useful, is the term: predictable. What we want is the reasonable expectation that a wagging dog will gratefully accept our petting, not the uncertainty that at any moment we could be bitten, because everybody knows dogs can bite. 

If it is not entirely obvious, let me put it plainly. “Normal” is not simply a state of being with definitive constants and minimal change. Change, and sometimes dramatic change, is always happening. “Normal” is how we seek to live without fear driving our actions and our choices. 

I’m am two weeks since I received my second shot (or as the British say: my second “Jab”). My initial normal will be to have unfettered contact with my children and grandchildren, but with the rest of the world…I may be challenged. 

Even if I feel inoculated from Covid-19, would my unconstrained behavior cause distress in others?  What about the slight chance of infection even with the vaccine, or what about those poorly explained variants?  Worst of all…what kind of guard is necessary against other deadly infections floating about in the public sphere? 

Many, perhaps most people in the United States and around the world have spent the last year looking at other people as if they were a clear and present danger. It’s almost been like a spinoff from the television series The Walking Dead. 

Not just strangers, for which we have successfully (and unfortunately) taught generations to view first with suspicion, but also we have seen our friends and relatives as personal threats. There have been times this past year when I’ve mindlessly drawn near to an individual only to be reminded as they suddenly backed off, their eyes looking slightly alarmed. 

“Social distancing” has been the norm now for a year and I wonder just how easily will it be to undo. You might think the light has changed from red to yellow, and when it turns green it will be kum-ba-yah all around. Don’t be too sure. 

Fear is the foundational emotion which not only drives behavior, but it is frequently used as a means of control, notably for mercantile and political purposes. We have been inundated with it for a couple of decades and now supercharged with it during 2020. 

Multiple studies of American social structure have shown that a majority of the Conservative voting public is literally afraid of Liberal voters, and that Liberals are equally fearful of Conservatives. That's just crazy. This impacts friendships, families, marriage, and business. If everyone’s political orientation were properly labeled across our chests would it also cause people to take wide swaths around each other in the supermarket? 

Most fear is irrational and almost all of it is created in the mind, not outside it. The “normal” we want is not the world of 2019 and before. The normal I want is to feel comfort in being able to reasonably predict that those I come in contact with have more in common with me than not and that they feel the same. To that end we have see beyond those who are empowered by making us think otherwise.

Limbaugh Remembered...One Last Time

Learning of the death of an individual you’ve never met is a tricky thing. It can be a cause for ambivalence, reflection perhaps, or even empathy. For most of us, nearly all of us I suppose, the death of a stranger, famous or otherwise, is rarely a cause for delight. Death and delight seem just so incompatible for those of us who don’t run with, say, the Russian Mafia. 

I have written several posts to this blog over the years with a focus on Rush Limbaugh. One I wrote eleven years ago was titled The Most Evil Man in America . Prior to that and ever since my opinion never varied, although became increasingly etched in stone.  I hated Rush Limbaugh, but not like I might hate someone who callously killed my dog. I hated Limbaugh like I could hate a disease. 

I believe most of the people who loved Limbaugh, and there were millions, never understood exactly what he was. If they understood without it affecting their devotion, it was due to envy.

Rush was an entertainer and an opportunist. The black sheep ne’er-do-well in a family of distinguished jurists, he was unleashed in 1987 (at the age of 36) by Ronald Reagan’s ending the 38 year old FCC regulation called The Fairness Doctrine. He realized he could apply his glib talents by being able to say and broadcast words appealing to the dark side of the American mindset without contradiction. 

Who were these devotees? I would bet my meager fortune that every one of the mob that formed on the Capital Mall January 6^th , to the last Man or Woman, were faithful listeners. Take that and extrapolate. 

Was Limbaugh an opportunist because he found a medium to relay a political and social philosophy he held dear? Not a chance. Nothing in his first 36 years indicates he had an activist bone in his body.  Like Roger Ailes, who in 1996 saw the same opportunity to create a news network that would make him and Rupert Murdock hundreds of millions, Limbaugh was motivate first and foremost by money…and succeed he did. 

Rush Limbaugh’s personal fortune is estimated to be well north of $500 million. Not bad for a college dropout disc jockey. I suspect we will find out specifically one day since his ego would never allow the degree of his success to go unappreciated. It is his happy legacy. 

Will his followers ever realize that he was milking them with every racist, misogynist, homophobic, hate laden, and conspiratorial utterance he made? Not likely. Perhaps their children will. 

So how does one deal with the death of someone as objectively dissolute and immoral as Rush Limbaugh? I almost reluctantly have to admit that delight was not the first reaction I had to the news. Had there been a compatriot nearby I might have high fived them, but it would have been without enthusiasm. 

Perhaps the only thing left is to survey the damage and move on.  The only real joy is the satisfaction of living long enough to see it happen. 

Be a RINO

How do you get the word out to solve an obvious problem? It’s becoming clearly evident that the Republican Party is at a crossroads…long in coming. It will be a battle in which the outcome impacts everyone. 

Much rhetoric, really lip service has been given to the idea that unity for a politically split America can be achieved with just so much kum ba yah.  Obama thought he could sell it and, as a result, he got his clock cleaned by the Mitchell led Republicans ending in four years of Trump horror. Now it has become a lead infomercial for Joe Biden. 

Our Nation has a majority left leaning, moderate electorate. There is room in that majority for moderate, conservative Republicans and the Nation would be politically less dynamic without them. However, since the beginning of this century the Republican Party has been hijacked by an extreme Right wing of the Party, primarily by philosophies rooted in White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism. 

They have cloaked themselves in flags, “patriotism”, prayers, slogans of “law and order”, and “righteousness”. However, what really drives them is an endless dirge of fear propagated by power hungry politicians and a dedicated, profit driven media. Rush Limbaugh deserved a metal, sure, but it should have been for amassing $500 million by soaking the faithful. 

The far Right (otherwise known as the Trump base) have been brainwashed (truly brainwashed) into fearing that “Liberals”, Government, minorities, immigrants, intellectuals, homosexuals, and the poor are conspiring to take away everything they hold dear, and, even worse, poisoning their children to their values and beliefs. This mindset is virtually no different than that embraced by white Southerners immediately after the Civil War. 

Like political fundamentalists, there is no wavering from Right Wing Conservative dogma, so any Republican that strays is immediately thrown into the Liberal stewpot. In fact, those Republicans are the most targeted, not just for their “heresy” but because they can actually be taken down within our democratic process. 

It wouldn’t be an issue was it not for the fact that the arcane mechanisms by which we choose representatives in Government is weighted in their favor.  The Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandering gave this minority real power. They created a President Trump and the people who enabled him for four years. This should not, cannot happen again. But to stop it will take more creative effort than has been rallied to date. 

Democrats and Independent voters (D&I) need to take on Republican extremism. Not by trying to win general elections in Red states and districts, but by controlling them where it counts…at the Primary level. 

Democrats and Independents need to vote in Republican primaries to assure that the only choice available in the general election is between two individuals who believe their power and future will ultimately be determined by defending the Nation's well being. 

A movement needs to begin right away to prepare D&I to register as Republicans in those states that require such to vote in a Republican Primary (closed or semi-closed), or to educate them to vote Republican in those states that have no requirement (open or semi-open). Every adult American citizen should have the right to vote in both Republican and Democratic Primaries, but that would have to occur at the state level, and we’re probably decades away from that. 

Changing registration to Republican would also allow Democrat and Independent voters to influence Republican caucus states. 

This should not be stealth activism, quite the opposite. We want to encourage moderate Conservative Republicans to take on the extreme Trumpian candidates, and we want existing Republican lawmakers to know they don’t have to define their actions through appeasement. 

The sacrifice of not using a vote to influence the Democratic nomination is minor compared to the need for keeping the door closed on Right Wing extremism. It’s time for the American majority to define the future. Become a Republican in name only…be a RINO.

We Need More Wind

On August 11, 1949 Margaret Mitchell stepped off the curb on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, a street known by millions of people because of her. She was suddenly hit by a passing car, her husband watching just behind her, and died five days later at age 48. 

She had a minor career as a journalist while in her 20s, but she gained extraordinary fame and literary “immortality” for the only book she ever wrote as an adult, Gone with the Wind. Published in 1936, this first book by an unpublished and unknown author sold for $3 a copy (probably due to its 1037 pages), the equivalent of $56 today. It sold a million copies in the first six months…during the depression. 

It has been and is considered one of the greatest works in American Literature.  Polls as recently as 2008 and 2014, have the American public rating it as their second favorite book of all time...after the Bible. Mitchell was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award. The epic film from her book was completed only 3 years later, and, more often than not, listed in the top five of greatest American films to this day. 

The book appears to be somewhat autobiographical, in the sense that Mitchell used her experience growing up in Georgia in a relatively wealthy family and had close relationships with her grandparents who had firsthand experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction years in Georgia. Once published it appears she lived off her fame with her husband, John Marsh, giving interviews, christening warships, and such, till her untimely death. 

There is no equivalent publication story in American literary history, even though were it written today…it would never be published.  We’ve come too far. 

As a child I saw the movie actually in a movie theater, for the film was periodically re-circulated to theaters until the early 1960s. I thought it was incredible. It was a major reason I grew up (in New York) with a sense of empathy for the plight of the scrappy Southerners during and after the Civil War. It remains one of the finest examples of “educating” the general population about history in the form of entertainment. As with most movies that center on wars, entertainment trumps history every time, and ignores the insidious themes that flow beneath. 

Decades later, incarcerated in a pandemic, with time to spare, and in search of another book to read; I thought Gone with the Wind …why not? Now having read it and, at nearly the same time, watching real history being made, such as the mob assault on our Capital Building, I am taken aback how this beloved novel found its way into the darkest regions of America’s beating heart. 

Movie goers would give casual description of Gone with the Wind as an epic love story, which is understandable from the marquee posters to the last words of Rhett Butler as he walks out into the fog. Certainly the novel devolves into a well conceived romantic melodrama in the last 200 pages or so. 

The movie makers knew what they were doing. It takes reading the book to understand the underlying message which laments stolen heritage and the wicked destruction of rigid social classes. 

I write this not as a review of the novel. It is, in fact, beautifully written, really quite extraordinary for a first time author. The characters are rich with character and the story is complex and complete. I am writing this because both story and characters define the essence of what reactionary Americans, who count themselves as Christian Conservatives, have become in the 21^st century. 

I could almost see the tinsel insurrectionists screaming through the halls of Congress with a Bible in one hand and a copy of Gone with the Wind in the other, just as those sympathetic with their motivations might imagine it so, but with endorsement. 

Nearly countless signs, flags, masks, hats, and politician rhetoric on January 6^th at the Capital sported the phrase: Stop the Steal. Those signs, et al, echoed Trump’s endless drumbeat, begun even before the election and daily thereafter, to perpetuate the “Big Lie”. Still, in the light of virtually no evidence to justify The Lie, why have so many Americans so emotionally embraced it to the point of debasement. 

I believe the “steal” they feel so heinous is not simply about an election outcome. You can find it in the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s book. They have been fed the illusion that the lives they envision for themselves and their children are in the process of being stolen.  Her novel begins with goodness surrounding a class of landed, white aristocracy, seeking only God given freewill, Nature’s manna from heaven, and self determination. This honorable goodness is ripped away by a criminal Federal government, “scallywags”, and “free issue N-----s”. 

Today's Trump supporting Christian Conservatives want a life back that they never had; that they were told had been theirs. Trump and those like him have fed that anxiety for 155 years. As a candidate and then President, Trump used his honed persona and seemingly endless lies and conspiracies to rally and incite white Christian Conservatives to believe that a “Great” America was something to be reclaimed. 

Trump did it primarily for his own enjoyment and aggrandizement; even to the point when lost he and his confederates engineered perhaps the most ludicrous attempt to overthrowing a major government in modern world history. I wouldn’t have been surprised had the mob been armed for the final attack with MyPillows. Humor and tragedy are so often different sides of the same coin. 

It is sad for me to think someone as gifted as Margaret Mitchell might have supported the assault on the Capital last month, but it’s hard to see it any other way, after all…she wrote the book. If Republican Senators had any sense at all, they would take that book and throw it directly at Donald Trump. 

The Constitution is a Piece of Paper

Pundits, both Conservative and Liberal, have of late proclaimed the fragility of Democracy. Democrats, while reflecting on the mob attack of the Capital, have especially warned of Democracy’s near demise in the US. None of that is precisely true. Democracy is far more a verb than it is a noun. It is claimed we are a Constitutional Representative Democracy. We do not carry out Democracy like a PTA, Elks Lodge, or sorority house.

The operative term and true noun of how we do Democracy is Constitutional. Most people view our Constitution, sometimes reverently, as the “rule book” for how we do Democracy and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. However, it is not a rule book like the rules for playing Backgammon, which probably can stretch back unchanged for thousands of years. 

The Constitution is intended to be fluid, correctable and only asks that a clear majority of Americans agree on the changes. In the body of the Constitution the Founders stated that they: 

…expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution. 

It was a radical idea in its day, for the rules from governments, whether King or Tyrant, were always intractable rules until they weren’t, replaced by the next set of intractable rules. 

In the new United States all laws became by default tentative and challengeable. The cohesiveness of citizens that evolved from the understanding that nothing was etched in stone as long as a clear majority of the governed was in agreement turned the US Constitution, the Country, and its people into a powerhouse of potential. The stone prevailed and the world looked on in envy. 

The key has been the cohesiveness and, to a good extent, diversity among social classes, economic classes, and intellectual secularism (if secularism might be defined as the absence of religion in the creation of law) in every state of the Union. Without it, all bets are off.

To put it bluntly, if a significant portion of the American people concluded that there was no Constitution (or anything else) that binds them with every other citizen in the Country then our Constitutions could create no flame of Democracy greater than the match to burn the paper it was written on. 

There have only been two significant periods in American History where there has been no success or even effort to modify and improve the Constitution of the United States. One was the 61 years prior to the end of the American Civil War. In recalling Lincoln’s and other’s reflections on the times, they understood that our Constitution was in peril for a lack of adherence. His speech proclaiming a house divided against itself cannot stand has stood the test of time as rhetorical prophecy. 

The other major period of American History where there has been an inability to modify our Constitution to deal with present circumstances is the 54 years preceding the inauguration of Joe Biden. That’s 54 years and counting (note: I have not included the ratification of the 27^th Amendment which was a minor act passed in 1789 that got a final perfunctory ratification in 1998). 

When the Trump mob stormed the Capital building, encouraged to radical behavior by Trump and a substantial number of Republican Congress men and women, they fashioned themselves as “patriots” defending the Constitution. They and their Republican mentors appear to have had no ability to understand that they were doing the exact opposite. They were demonstrating that the US Constitution has no validity for a motivated minority. It would be of lesser consequence, given the single event by a relative few, however polls taken immediately after the event showed a 70-80% majority of Republicans approved of the effort made by the mob. 

This is the stuff constitutions can’t survive. 

Mitt Romney (R-Utah) rather eloquently pointed out on the floor of the Senate that the only way to overcome irrationality is on a foundation of truth.  Trump and Senators like Cruz and Hawley traffic in seeking the type of power where the rule of law is not based on a majority adherence to a constitution, but rather on the temporary emotions of those they have succeeded in turning fearful. They, along with Mitch McConnell and others have stoked Christian Nationalists to hate our form of Democracy, all the while lighting their cigars in the back room with copies of the Constitution.

Watching them beat a Capital Hill Policeman with an American Flag on a pole while Trump called them “special” was perhaps the best metaphor to emerge from the riot.