SOME COMPARISONS

In the past few days, President Donald Trump has doubled down on his crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests in the city of Portland and threatened to send federal troops to other cities in a similar fashion.  Although he claims that his actions are being made to keep the peace and prevent "anarchists" from doing damage to federal buildings, it's obvious that his real motivation is to use troops to shut down protestors that he doesn't agree with while provoking violence that he can then use to fire up his political base.  The fact that his campaign has already used such images in their advertising reveals this to be true.

The most chilling aspect of this crackdown has been the sight of police in full combat gear grabbing protestors seemingly at random and then dragging them off into unmarked vans like the private army of a fascist dictator instead of peace officers in a democracy. 

To the conservatives who defend Trump's actions as necessary to prevent riots I would ask how they would feel if a Democratic leader like Barack Obama had used the same tactics against anti-abortion protestors?  After all, if you really want to look at a movement in this country that has often resorted to violence, the anti abortionists really fit the  bill.   According to the National Abortion Federation, since nineteen ninety three there have been eleven murders and twenty six attempted murders made by anti abortionists, not to mention dozens of bombings and arson attacks made against abortion clinics.  Clearly this is a movement that uses killing and violent intimidation as a means to its ends at a much higher level than the Black Lives Matter movement.  Despite that, I still believe that the anti abortionists have every right to engage in peaceful protest, and the idea that any of them could be beaten or dragged off by federal troops just for marching sickens me, even as much as I may disagree with them.

The issue of whether or not the Black Lives Matter protests are violent or not  gets even more complicated when reports of white supremacists purposely trying to hurt the whole movement by stirring up anger and violence start to roll in .  And then there's the tricky question as to whether or not the actions of the troops are preventing violence or provoking it, with both sides of the argument rolling videos to prove their point.  The important thing to remember is that the Black Lives Matter movement is pushing for a reevaluation of how the police in this country interact with the African American communities that they are supposed to be serving and protecting, and it's long overdue.  It's a worthy goal, even if some members of the movement take it too far.  Remember that in the early twentieth century suffragettes in Britain often resorted to acts of violence including arson, to try and win the right to vote.  Was it right for them to burn down buildings?  Obviously not.  But were they fighting for a just cause?  Again, of course they were.  Hopefully, the worthy goals of the Black Lives Matter movement will not be dismissed because of some overzealous members. 

LIVING IN A BUBBLE

Way back in the in the later years of the presidency of George W Bush, moderate conservative columnist David Brooks and several other right wing media figures went to visit the  president in the White House.  Everytime they broached the difficult subject of the war in Iraq, he fell back on the same talking points about how everything there was going great, without mentioning any kind of specifics.  Brooks said that even these men who were some of his biggest defenders clearly couldn't believe what they were hearing.  Was the president delusional about what was shaping up to be one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in history?  The answer is even worse: Bush's own advisors later admitted that he told them that he wanted to hear no more negative news about the war, behaving more like an ostrich with its head in the ground than the leader of the free world.  Amazingly,  the average American citizen probably knew more about how poorly the war was going than the president himself did.
Is that really a surprise?  Bush was raised in family of enormous wealth and privilege, and had spent the first forty of his life drinking heavily and avoiding work.  Someone that spoiled could not stand to hear that the voluntary invasion of a foreign country that he had pushed so hard for was turning into a disaster.   In interviews he started to defend the war by saying that history would say that he was right, and to this day he maintains that the biggest regret of his presidency was not passing Social Security reform (!).
I tell this story about our former president to draw an obvious parallel to our current one.  Now, naturally, a war and a pandemic are very different things, and Bush more clearly brought the disaster of the Iraq war upon himself than Trump did the coronavirus.  But the similarities are striking; from the beginning, Trump has downplayed the deadliness of the virus and completely botched the national government's reaction to it.  From saying it would disappear when the weather got warmer to putting his absurdly unqualified son in law in charge of medical supply distribution, Trump has stumbled from one terrible decision to another, just like Bush did during the Iraq war.  And just as Bush's premature declaration of mission accomplished turned out to be a tragic mistake, so has Trump's assertion that the worst of pandemic is behind us and that his administration handled it well, even as the number of Americans infected is actually increasing.  Trump has even started asserting that history will judge him well, no matter how unpopular he is now.  Sound familiar?
The fact that Joe Biden is now the favorite to defeat Trump in November (although I won't stop holding my breath until the inauguration) seems to show a clear pattern in this century: Democrats win the White House by pledging to clean up the mess that the Republicans leave behind.  Just as Obama won by saying he would end the Iraq war and fix the broken economy, Biden is winning by saying that he will handle the pandemic better than Trump has been.
In America, it often seems like  the Republican party is more like a stern father figure (supporting defense spending, tax cuts and law and order).  While  the Democratic party is more like a caring mother (supporting expanded health care, education and protecting the environment).  Right now,  the situation we have  is the wacky sitcom dad that accidentally floods the basement while trying to fix the pipes, and then leaves his wife to clean it up while he drinks beer with his friends!
Now am I saying that rich people should be excluded from politics?  Of course not, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of my favorite presidents.  But I do feel that the kind of family that you're raised in can impact not only your life, but the lives of other people around you, and that goes double for politics.  And of course what I really hope is that middle class white voters in this country will stop supporting politicians who pass huge tax cuts for the rich.  And that maybe they could support raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for national health care and daycare.  But I'm not holding my breath for that either.

WASTED TIME

He finally wore a mask.  President Donald Trump, the man who has repeatedly downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic, the man who has even said that some people wearing masks in this country were doing so only to spite him.  Even he finally decided to wear a mask publicly yesterday while visiting a veteran's hospital.  Although on the one hand this may seem like no big deal, it clearly shows that our president, despite his innate belief that he has never made a mistake in his life, must admit that the country's fight against the pandemic has been an abject failure under his leadership.
There are two big issues that have dominated the media in the past few months: the pandemic and the protests over police brutality and the conversation about racial reckoning that those protests have brought.  It's obvious where Trump stands in the latter: he has threatened to veto a defense bill that includes changing the names of military bases that bear the names of Confederate generals, while calling the Black Lives Matter movement "hateful."  Clearly there's no way that he will stop stoking the flames of racial hatred before the election.  He knows that his base loves it. 
But the pandemic is a much trickier problem for him.  No matter how much Trump lies and tries to convince the world that his distorted version of reality is the truth, the facts about the pandemic cannot be avoided.  Our attempt to shutdown the country to lower the spread of the virus has not worked; in fact,, things are actually worse now than they were at the beginning of the shutdown, with record numbers of new infections rocking the country.  Today Florida reported fifteen thousand new cases, a number that tops even the infection rate that the state of New York had at the beginning of the pandemic.
The really tragic thing is that this could have been avoided.  Although there are a  number of factors, the main reason that our country has failed so poorly has been the chaotic response of the Trump administration and the echoing response of conservative  governors in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona.  During the shut down, states like those demanded that they be allowed to reopen their businesses and gathering places, even though they did not meet the guidelines set by the federal Center for Disease Control. “When you look at some of the most draconian orders that have been issued in some of these states and compare Florida,” Florida Governor  Ron DeSantis said back in April, "Florida has done better."  Sadly, that is no longer true.
Really, this conservative movement to reopen businesses and public gatherings  has been in complete defiance of common sense; anyone could see months ago that while the virus was hitting the coastal state of New York the hardest, that it would inevitably spread around the country and that reopening beaches and bars was a recipe for disaster.  But they did it anyway, acting out of a combination of blind hope and worry about the economic losses that the shutdown was causing.
And so here we are, with perhaps the worst part of the epidemic in front of us instead of behind us.  Facing another possible shutdown even as  other, better run countries start to reopen (and bar our citizens from entering!).  It is only in the shadow of things getting this bad that Trump has finally decided to publicly put on a mask, which is the equivalent of putting a band aid on a bloody stump.  And while it's good to see him actually modeling positive behavior for other Americans, he deserves no credit.  Last Wednesday, Tulsa Oklahoma health director Dr. Bruce Dart freely admitted that a surge of coronavirus cases in his city was “more than likely” linked to the June Twentieth rally that Trump held in that city.  So our president has not only been incompetent in dealing with the pandemic, he has actually made it worse just to hold one of his ego boosting rallies.  No mere face mask can cover up his pathetic indifference in the face of so much pain and suffering.

A GENERATIONAL CHANGE

In nineteen seventy four,  Charles Bronson starred in a surprise hit film called Death Wish, which was about a peaceful man who goes full vigilante in New York City after the killing of his family.  The film's endorsement of the man's violent behavior,  as he becomes a folk hero to the city and is secretly admired by the police, seemed to tap into the attitude of both the people of New York and of the country at large.  Violent crime seemed to be out of control at that time, and movies that celebrated heroes who got tough fighting against it, like Death Wish, Dirty Harry and The French Connection, ruled the box office.  In twenty eighteen, Hollywood released a remake of Death Wish starring Bruce Willis; it flopped at the box office.  A story that had seemingly once captured the nation's collected fears and frustrations was now seen as out of the touch, with the only vigilantes capturing the nations's interest being the ones in superhero movies.
There has clearly been a generational change in our country's attitude towards violent crime for a very simple reason: the rate of violent crime has been consistently dropping since the mid nineteen nineties.  While there are a number of factors as why this is, there is one pet theory (that I've already blogged  about here ) that makes the most sense to me: lead removal.  In the sixties, the dangers of babies being exposed to lead fumes from paint and car exhaust led the government to begin a program of lead removal, with most communities becoming lead free in the nineteen eighties.  The drop in crime that started in the nineties happened because you had children growing up not being poisoned by lead, which causes both a drop in IQ and a reduction in the development of impulse control, and therefore less likely to become criminals.  I first wrote about this theory over six years ago, and as time has passed I've come to believe it more.  Especially when you consider that Chicago, a city that still has a problem with violent crime, is also one of the few cities in the US that still uses lead pipes for its drinking water, becoming the exception that proves the rule.

This drop in violent crime has lead to a generational shift in this country, with young people growing up in  less violent world and being less worried about it.   This is part of the reason why so many young people are joining in the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence. Unlike their parents, they don't understand  or accept the violent behavior of the police because they don't see violent crime as out of control. 
And they have every right to protest, because the falling violent crime rate has not resulted in changes in the police's behavior; if anything, it has gotten worse in the past few years, with more cops being outfitted in surplus army gear, looking more and more like soldiers, and wielding weapons like assault rifles, and yes, even grenade launchers.
So yes, with violent crime on the wane, it is time to start defunding the police budgets and spending that money on homeless shelters, drug addiction centers and mental health facilities, all of which will cause a reduction in crime without increasing violence.  And also on continued removal of lead, because it is still a problem, and one that, according to a twenty seventeen report by the department of House and Urban Development, is one that is far more  likely to affect children of color.
The good news is that the recent protests really do seem to be sinking in with the American public, with polls showing more and more approval for changing the police departments.  Will this attitude hold?  Will real change take place?  Only time will tell, but for now, it looks like the Black Lives Matter movement has really arrived.

DEATH CULT?

Donald Trump's hold on the Republican party has been so complete that it is reasonable to say that the party has become a cult built around him.  And that all elected members of the party (save Mitt Romney) have to never publicly criticize him in any way lest they feel the wrath of his supporters.  From Ted Cruz endorsing him even after  he said that Cruz's father may have been involved in the Kennedy assassination(!),  to Lindsay Graham veering from calling Trump a "religious bigot" during the campaign to becoming one of the president's strongest defenders, there appears that there is literally nothing that Trump can do that his party will criticize him for. 
And how strong is the Trump cult?  Consider the rally that Trump held last Saturday in Tulsa Oklahoma.  In the age of the coronavirus, holding a rally with thousands of people in an enclosed area would seem to be a recipe for disaster.  And yet it was held.  And it should be said that this rally held no great relevance: he unveiled no new policy ideas or made any attempt to address the nation as a whole.  His only mention of the virus was when he blamed it, yet again, on China, calling it "Kung Flu" at one point.  So the only function of this rally was the same as every other rally he has had in the past three years; as an opportunity for Trump's massive ego to swell even larger in front of  an adoring crowd as he fires up his base.
Now it is true that precautions were taken in the lead up to the rally, with temperatures taken, and hand sanitizer and masks made available.  But the fact of the matter is that it was still an unnecessary gathering of thousands of people, in a state that has actually seen a recent increase in the number of infected people.  And most of those thousands did not wear masks or socially distance themselves, as the picture above clearly shows. 
And the attendees knew full well of the danger.  Before attending they had to sign a release form saying that they would not hold the Trump administration responsible for getting the virus at the rally.  In other words, our  country's president held a rally that risked the lives of his own followers (not to mention other people they could come in contact with)  for no reason other than he wanted another chance to bask in the glow of their adulation.  Normally, this would be big and frightening news,  but Trump has so denigrated the office of the presidency in this country that it's just another day in Trump Land USA.
It really does appear that Trump's followers will follow him right off a cliff; just as he has dismissed and downplayed the still serious danger of the coronavirus even as the number of infected Americans continues to climb. so have most of his followers decided to defiantly not wear masks or observe even the slightest safety measures.  It gets even worse when you consider that Trump's loyal base are mostly older people, putting them squarely in the category of people mostly at risk from dying from the virus.  And he just doesn't care. 
The  good news is that while Trump may have a stranglehold on his base, the rest of the country is getting tired of his lies, boasts and conspiracy theories, and his recent approval ratings have fallen as the election in November approaches.  While running simply as the "not Trump" candidate may seem a simple strategy for Joe Biden, it may be just enough to get him into the White House.  It's enough for me, anyway.

DEFUND THE POLICE?

The recent protests over the police murdering of George Floyd seems to be having better results than any other recent protests around the same issue.  This time the protests have endured, and the American public are now on their side .  In a stunning reversal, recent polls have shown sixty percent of Americans now agree with the Black Lives Matter movement, an increase of twenty points since the last poll was taken.  Like the issue of gay marriage, the country is clearly starting to be more on the side of equality than not.
There are several reasons for this: The first is quite simply it is impossible for any decent human being to watch that horrible Floyd video without being outraged and disgusted.  It's not just the needless brutality of the killing, it's also the casualness of Derek Chauvin, the officer with his foot on Floyd's neck and the equally blase manner of the other cops around them, even as Floyd was calling out for mercy.  The unthinking, cold manner of those officers can one lead to one conclusion: they've done things like this before without punishment, and they clearly thought that they could get away with it again.  (And Chauvin has already had seventeen complaints made against him in his twenty years of service).  It also really shows how much the importance of nearly everyone in America having a cell phone in their pocket has changed things: Floyd's killing and other recent cell phone videos of police brutality would have gone unseen by the public, allowing the police to file false reports and sweep the violence under the rug, as it certainly appears that they have been doing for decades.
Another reason that these protests seem to be sinking through is because some police departments have responded to protests over their being too violent with acts of excessive violence, from clubbings to tear gas firing, shooting themselves in the foot politically.  Also, the marches have been more ethnically diverse than past ones, and, let's face it, legislators are more likely to listen to white people complaining than people of color.  The fact that even Mitt Romney (who has proven himself as the only honorable Republican elected official in the country) marched in a Black Lives Matter rally shows how this issue is getting through.
The good news is that the sudden popularity of the movement may lead to real changes not only in the police departments around the country but also in other ways: Nascar recently banned Confederate flags from their races, statutes of Confederate soldiers have been removed, and there is a movement to rename military  bases named after Confederate leaders.  (Unfortunately, our president is on the wrong side of this).
While there have been many solid suggestions made by police reformers, from the list on the 8 Can't Wait website (click here to see it) to some ideas about how our country should change the way that the police are used (why have them waste time pulling over drivers for minor traffic violations?).   One  new slogan has emerged on signs at the rallies: Defund the Police.  In spirit, I agree with the sentiment of it; even the police themselves have complained about how they are used to deal with issues like homelessness, drug addiction and mental health issues because the country  has failed to deal with them.  Defunding the police means that cities should stop giving so many tax dollars to the police while taking money away from drug rehab programs, homeless shelters and other kinds of social spending that do a better job of preventing crime in the first place.  It's the kind of change that America should have started making years ago.
But there's a problem with the nature of the slogan: it sounds extreme.  The right wing media has already latched on it and openly claimed that the protesters want to abolish the police entirely, leading to anarchy on the streets.  Even though this absurd notion does not seem to have seeped out of the right wing media bubble and into the mainstream of the country,  it does give right wingers the opportunity to try and discredit an entire popular movement simply by purposely overstating the intention of a slogan.
It might seem silly for me to focus on the wording of a slogan, but sloganeering is an important part of our modern political discourse, and conservatives have been better at it than progressives for years.  Consider that conservatives have discovered that instead of saying that you're anti abortion, you can call yourself "pro-life", or that you don't hate the LGBT community, you just want to "defend traditional marriage".  The sad fact of the matter is that coming up with a catchy bumper sticker sized slogan is important in our country; as much as I despise Donald Trump's presidential campaign of twenty sixteen, "Make America Great Again" was an undeniably great campaign slogan and the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign couldn't come up with a good one to counter it is part of why she lost. 
So, "MAGA", is a good slogan,  but "Defund the Police"?  Not so great in my opinion. It is truly sad to think that from having a catch phrase that is viewed as going too far, an entire positive movement may be killed or crippled before reaching any of its laudable goals.  But I do think it's possible.

THE AMERICAN POWDERKEG

America has certainly had troubled times before, but right now it is suffering through a truly unique set of circumstances: the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu outbreak of nineteen eighteen, combined with the most violent political rallies since nineteen sixty eight, added to the most polarizing president in modern times.  It has become surreal to be an American, as we see masked protesters both protesting police violence and trying to maintain social distancing. 
Although the protests are ostensibly about the terrible choking death of George Floyd by one police officer as several others looked on, it's clear that they are also based on the growing tensions that have been rising in the past few years as the killing or serious injuring of African American suspects by the police have continued in this country even as violent crime rates have decreased.  Add to that the fact that the pandemic is hitting non white communities harder than others, and the country's general  level of frustration at our ongoing partial lockdown and tanked economy, and anger and protest seem like  reasonable responses. Most protestors appear to be peaceful, but violence has started breaking out at many of the gatherings.  And even that violence has become polarizing, as we watch video after video on the news: clearly it appears that the police are openly attacking non violent protestors with clubs and rubber bullets, but it also appears that some attacks are being made on the police also, along with burning and looting.  Both sides of the political fence are now pointing fingers, with far left group Antifa or far right white supremacist groups being blamed for the violence (There are even reports of white supremacists dressing up in Antifa garb, just to really confuse things!).
While sorting through all of this craziness is difficult (and honestly it appears to me that both the police and protestors are responsible for the violence, although I lean towards having more sympathy for the protestors given the understandable anger over Floyd's horrific death).  One thing is for sure: not only is Donald Trump the worst possible president to have during a pandemic (over a million more cases of coronavirus in the US than in the next highest country), he is even perhaps even worse at bringing the country together in some kind of racial reconciliation.   Yes, the man whose first real foray into politics began with him repeatedly questioning the birthplace of Barack Obama is hardly the right person to attempt to bridge the deep racial divide in this country.  And Trump has done exactly what you would expect him to do; after a few words of sympathy about Floyd's death, he has condemned the protestors, calling them "thugs", has considered sending in the military, suggested that there should  be a counter protest by his supporters and tweeted out “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” , a statement that may have been a conscious repeat of a quote made by Walter E. Headley, Miami’s former police chief, in 1967, a militant foe of the civil rights movement. But then what do expect from a president who once openly joked in a speech given to police officers that they shouldn't be "too nice" when making arrests.  As usual, he only cares about firing up his base by whipping up racial fears and hatred.  Why not, it's how he campaigned to be president.
Trump's typically erratic behavior culminated in yet another bizarre moment in a presidency that produced more than a few: last Monday he and his people decided to have a photo op moment at  St. John’s Church in Washington DC.  To clear the way, Attorney General William Barr ordered federal law enforcement officers to move away peaceful protestors, which led to several acts of brutal violence being carried out by the police on camera.  All of this was done just so that Trump could be photographed standing  in front of the church, awkwardly holding a bible like a statue.  No statement was made, no prayers said, nothing.
Although the protests won't last forever, the anger that drives them will return unless something is done about the treatment of minorities by the police.  Which will never happen under the current president.  The only way that this country can at least start to move in the right direction on this issue is for the country to soundly reject the hatred and bigotry that Trump has carried out in both word and deed in  the past four years.