Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in August 2020

In 100 days (or so) …

richardson

As I write this, we are 100 days out from the November 3rd election. Ever since election night 2016, I’ve been holding my breath. The Russian-engineered election of Donald Trump to the presidency was, for so many of us, a traumatic event. Every day since that terrible night, we have seen ever deepening shadows of oligarchy, tyranny, and torture.

As the litany of horrible words and deeds has spilled forth from Mr. Trump and his sycophantic entourage, I have feared for our country, for the future of our representative democracy, for the rule of law. He doesn’t just ignore our nation’s governing norms, he obliterates them.

Long before he took the oath of office, Mr. Trump sought to exploit our differences and divide Americans, to turn us into a nation of bitter rivals who talk past each other, excoriate each other, and see governing as a zero-sum game.

If there had been the slightest hope that a President Trump would exceed expectations and become even a sliver of a statesman after the election, that hope was extinguished on Inauguration Day when he bellowed out his “American Carnage” speech. His presidency, like his candidacy, would be that of a demagogue. He would play, relentlessly and unashamedly, to his base.

And if there was any hope that members of his party would stand up to Trump’s recklessness and savagery, that too was annihilated when it became clear that the senate and house GOP “leaders,” and their respective caucuses, would turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to any and all presidential wrongdoing. They transcend mere enablers; they are fully Trump’s confederates.

Over the last two years, the resistance has grown with the Women’s March, the rise of Indivisible Groups, and the abundance of new leaders stepping up to run for office. The 2018 mid-term election offered a life-line to our republic, issuing in a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Yet, the senate has remained in the grip of Mitch McConnell, a ruthless partisan who, like Trump, cares only for his own power and privilege; the country be damned.

Through it all I’ve held my breath. It hasn’t felt safe to exhale because the senate Democrats have been helpless to stop the Federalist Society’s hostile takeover of the judiciary, because our president has routinely alienated our allies and kissed-up to our enemies, often expressing his desire to emulate them, and because he sends anonymous federal law enforcement agents into our cities to suppress protesters exercising their first amendment rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.

It hasn’t felt safe to exhale because our president shamelessly monetizes the presidency for personal gain and speaks highly of an accused child sex trafficker, while routinely denigrating democratically elected women leaders, because he demeans and dehumanizes members of the free press, especially reporters who are women of color, and because he has utterly and completely failed to address the pandemic ravaging our nation. Indeed, he has routinely made it much, much worse. This is, of course, a woefully incomplete list of Trump’s transgressions; but any one of them warrants his resounding defeat and removal from office.

Now, 100 days out from the general election, I dare to hope that the day will come when I can exhale, that our nation will reject Trumpism and its cruel treatment of immigrant children, of the elderly and disabled, of Gold Star mothers and prisoners of war, of those poisoned by lead in their drinking water and others decimated by hurricanes, of black Americans whose demands for equal justice have been too long denied; of vulnerable people of all ages and backgrounds who are falling ill and dying of an insidious virus.

I dare to hope that our nation will, in the words of our sixteenth president, be touched again “by the better angels of our nature,” that a government “of, by and for the people,” will not perish from this earth.

So, I will continue to volunteer and contribute to former Vice President Joe Biden. I will lend my voice to the resistance and persist in speaking my truth. Our republic and its citizens cannot endure four more years of unchecked, burgeoning tyranny. Until the polls close on November 3, we cannot relax; we cannot exhale. And when we prevail, the work of rebuilding our nation will lie before us. It starts in just 100 days.

Magical thinking

johnsonlogo1

“Yeah, the schools should be opened. Schools should be opened. Kids want to go to school. You’re losing a lot of lives by keeping things closed.”
– Donald Trump, July 13, 2020

For decades Republicans have preached the gospel of “local control” of schools; the idea that the local school board – the homemakers, the local real estate guy, the small business owner – are the people who should have ultimate say about educating our kids. But like almost every other conviction of bedrock conservatism “local control” is no longer, to borrow a word from the Nixon era, operative.

You know what else is inoperative: competence. Donald Trump and the collection of inept D-list flunkies that surround the president – Education Secretary Betsy DeVos comes to mind – have spent the last three weeks threatening governors, teachers, parents and common sense. Trump even said he’d withhold money from states refusing to open schools, a hollow threat he cannot possibly fulfil, but one in keeping with this administration’s mendacity. Significant amounts of federal education aide go to the poorest schools and to help children with particular learning needs.

The bullying and demanding from Washington, D.C. isn’t based on any serious concern about how schools might operate in the midst of a still accelerating pandemic, but it is based on Trump’s need to manufacture the optics of “a return to normal” that is only happening between the ears of the “very stable genius.”

As columnist Rex Huppke put it in the Chicago Tribune: “You brats are going to listen to me and to your president, Donald J. Trump, and you’re going to march your little rear ends off to school come fall. I don’t care if you have to wade through 5 feet of coronavirus to get there, you’re going!”

Yet the people most affected – parents, teachers, school cafeteria staff, among others – seem impervious to this Trumpian logic. “I have yet to see any data where there are appreciable numbers of people who say, ‘Yes, I want my kids back in school,’” says Glen Bolger, a veteran Republican pollster, in an interview with the New York Times. “They want their kids back in school, but not right now. I think safety is taking priority over education.”

Or as Kristi Wilson, the superintendent of a small district in Arizona told the Washington Post: “Although the administration can apparently absorb the 150,000 COVID deaths without care or consequence, we do not have the luxury of even losing one.”

It might have been wise to devote the last couple of months to strengthening distance learning and helping parents prepare for a school year without kids in school buildings. What we got instead is the persistent incompetence and quackery of the Trump Administration and the frightened conservative politicians who dare not offend the man who acts like he has all the answers but possesses none of them.

While the president lamented Dr. Anthony Fauci’s high poll numbers compared to his – “but nobody likes me,” Trump whined, while wondering if it had something to do with his personality – he again touted hydroxychloroquine, the drug the FDA says has no proven effectiveness against the coronavirus. We won’t go into the quack doctor Trump citing who “made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens and that they’re trying to create a vaccine to make you immune from becoming religious.”

Trump era magical thinking has positioned the United States, with only five percent of the world’s population, but with a quarter of all the world’s cases and vastly more deaths than any other country, as a case study of failure when it comes to controlling the virus.

The squandering of precious time from late March to mid-May when organization of a national strategy to test, trace and isolate cases could have been done, but wasn’t will be this administration’s deadly legacy. The spreading of quack theories about unproven drugs and phony treatment, while making wearing a mask an ideological litmus test is the final proof of the abject failure of Republican efforts to lead and govern.

The GOP has given up on fighting the illness. It’s just too hard for them to handle, a position Idaho Governor Brad Little summed up perfectly last week when he was asked if his state’s schools would reopen. “I think the answer is, it depends,” Little said.

The governor or his counterparts in Florida or Texas or Arizona might have said: “You know, the answer for very much schools is no. We must recognize that the disease is out of control, spreading uncontrollably and we must redouble our efforts to fight it. One step is to end the magical thinking that suggest we should put teachers and children and the grandparents of school children at real risk by too quickly going back to in person schooling. We have more work to do before we can do that.”

Something like that would have been an honest and indeed helpful answer, allowing parents and teachers to plan and prepare, but instead of the functional equivalent of “we will fight on the beaches…we shall never surrender” to the virus we get “it depends.”

“This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics,” long-time Republican consultant Stuart Stevens wrote recently. He compared the collapse of the party, its abandonment of expertise and common sense and its embrace of a reality television star, to the demise of the Communist Party in the old Soviet Union. In short, what the party says it is bears no resemblance to what is actually is.

The disconnect between what Republican leaders tell their constituents about issues like wearing a mask and opening school and the relentless, unbending reality of the pandemic is simply not sustainable. The terrible logic of the virus is going to win every time and the way the incompetents continue to handle it signals that we are on track to never put it behind us.

Ask yourself this logical question: If, as a result of a still little understood disease that will almost certainly claim thousands more American lives between now and Labor Day, your local school board, your health district, your state board of education is reduced to meeting by Zoom to consider reopening the schools is it really such a great idea to reopen the schools?