October 3, 2106--Armageddon

It surprised me the other morning when Jack said that we are approaching Armageddon.

He's as solid a citizen as there is, totally rational, totally secular, totally progressive. He of all people was talking this way?

It might have been a response to what Joe said. Joe, a Trump supporter from even before Donald formally announced he was running for president.

"I'm for him," he responded when I challenged him at that time, "because he knows how to get things done." This before the full extent of how he actually "gets things done" was well known.

On Thursday Joe said, "If Trump loses the election, or even if he wins, I predict there will be a civil war within 20 years."

"Are you being serious?" I asked, "Or just wanting to be provocative now that your boy is on the path to defeat?"

"I'm being serious. There's so much dissension, so many angry people on all sides, race relations are heading for an explosion. And then there are all those rich people while everyone else is struggling and falling behind."

That's when Jack said that about Armageddon.

"You agree with Joe?" I was incredulous. This is the first time Jack agreed with him about anything, You think we're headed for a civil war?"

Jack who was sending money to Bernie before Hillary won the nomination and since then has been a fervent supporter of hers was being serious, which caused me to be concerned. Not about him but about the possibility of what they both were predicted.

"You talking Armageddon because of what Joe said about race and economic inequality?"

"Basically yes. And of course they're related. On a collision course."

"This feels very pessimistic. You tend, as most liberals, to be optimistic because as a liberal you think things can be improved by human intervention. Including by governments."

"In general that's true. But even progressives are fed up with governments. Yes, there are some things that are working well. For me, at my age, that includes Medicare. Though I know it among other things is bankrupting the country. When the due-bills arrive, that's when Joe's prediction will come true. When the money runs out and people don't get their medical care or Social Security. Then, watch out."

"He's right," Joe jumped back in, surprised to find Jack agreeing to anything he had to say. "It may be a trivial example, but have you driven on the roads lately?"

"Obviously. Even to get here to the diner."

"Didn't you tell me that because of the condition of the roads you had to get your tires aligned three times in eight months? And that you had to replace all four tires after a year and a half? Michelins? How much did all that set you back?"

"For all of it," Rona said, "more than a thousand."

"Who is responsible for the roads?" Joe asked.

"I guess the county."

"And what is the county?" Not waiting for me to answer he said, "Government that's what it is. Government."

"Your point?"

"Among other reasons, that's contributing to making people crazy. Fortunately for you you can come up with the thousand, but for a lot of folks, including right here, that's a month's take-home pay. And then, like it or not, agreeing with me or not, when they see people with food stamps and subsidized heat, and all that, the resentment builds and will, as I said, boil over when things get scarcer and more unequal. Civil war, pure and simple."

"Armageddon pure and simple," Jack chimed in not smiling so I knew he was being serious.

When later in the day I told another, even more progressive friend about this, he pulled me close to him and whispered, almost  as a non sequitur, "We never should have sent troops to Iraq or anywhere else in that region. What we should have done, what we should do, is announce that anyone that attacks Israel will get nuked."

Incredulous, I said, "Nuked? That would lead to Armageddon, wouldn't it?"

He thought for a moment, shrugged, and said,"That's where we're we headed anyway so . . ."

November 10, 2015--Angry Black Man

I have been struggling to understand Ben Carson's appeal to Republicans.

He is so boring, so unable to express himself, so passive and weak feeling, so unlike the kind of militant commanders-in-chief conservatives traditionally admire.

And so what is it that for the moment has him as the leader of the GOP pack?

Is it because of his calm exterior, his obvious God-given blessings, or the feeling that as a physician he will heal a deeply wounded America?

Or is his popularity a matter of a physician who has healed himself?

I suspect largely the latter.

I have been particularly perplexed by his defense of his claim that he had a violent past. As he put it in his autobiography, it was the result of a "pathological disease" A pathology he was able to cure, not so much because of his medical skills but because he turned to God. To Jesus.

This is a not an unfamiliar political redemption story that appeals to religious conservatives. Like George W. Bush who when he first ran for president subtly let it be known that he had a drinking problem as a young man but was able to overcome it when he was "born again." Or, to be bipartisan, Jimmy Carter's story about lust.

Redemption is essential to Carson's representation of his own personal narrative. He is after all not running a campaign rich in policy pronouncements and promises. His appeal is his life story itself and outsider status.

But his insistence that he was uncontrollably violent when a young man is unique in political history. Drinking is one thing, lust another, but violence?

If anything, if this were true, one would expect he would minimize, not inflate that aspect of his character. Admitting to having had a violence problem when, as president, he would have access to the nuclear codes with the red button always close at hand one would think would be more a political liability than an asset.

But then in his case there is also the powerful matter of race.

As a black man raised on the mean streets of Detroit, it would be understandable, sociologically and psychologically, that he would be a violent and angry man.  The very kind of African-American that looms in the fearful imaginations of many white people. Especially those conservatives who are dog whistle racists and thus for whom people of color haunt their feverous dreams.

For them, if a black man such as Carson can be "cured" of his blackness, if he can be so neutered and emerge so seemingly self-controlled there is less to be feared about the world and its threats.

For his cure to be fully believable and comforting it is essential that voters believe he began as that archetypical angry black man he repeatedly represents himself to have been. If he could heal himself of that perhaps he can be trusted to "treat" all the others with similar "pathologies" who make so many people feel threatened.

I is thus essential to this hopeful personal narrative that Carson was as violent as he has repeatedly represented himself to have been. That he stabbed his friends and once threatened to strike his mother in the head with a hammer must be believable if his campaign is to have this unique appeal and traction.

If he somehow grew up a sweet little boy who then managed to get to Yale and medical school--an urban Horatio Alger story--the meaning of his life story would be merely a remarkable exception, not literally miraculous.

And here is the political point and the key to his appeal--unless his representations are true, he could not represent himself as able to bring about similar cures for others equally afflicted. 

He represents the promise that blackness itself can be overcome. That it is curable. He is living proof of that.

Just as other Republican conservatives hold views about other pathological Americans who can be cured by prayer--homosexuals who, if they want to chose another "life style," can pray away the gay, Carson tells us that Blackness too can be prayed away.

From Ben Carson's House 

December 8, 2014--A Conversation About Race

Every time there is an outrageous example of how the justice system in America works differently for white people and people of color, political leaders, the press and clergy say that we have to have a serious, dispassionate national conversation about race so that we can at long last overcome our still fraught racial history.

This call was raised after the OJ Simpson trial when it was obvious that whites and blacks experience the justice system almost as polar opposites--the vast majority of caucasians saw him to be guilty of homicide while blacks in overwhelming numbers cheered the jury verdict.

For a week or two after the verdict a version of that national conversation occurred; but here we are again, nearly 20 years later, with two grand juries--one in Ferguson MO, another on Staten Island--failing to indicate two white police officers who killed unarmed black men. Again there are street demonstrations, 24/7 media coverage, and renewed calls for that discourse about race.

But before we can even get started talking across the racial divide, people are criticizing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (who has a biracial son and daughter) and Barack Obama (who is obviously African American) either, as in the case of the former, for "throwing the police under the bus" (as ludicrously claimed by the president of the NYC patrolman's union) or, as in Obama's case, for not speaking out passionately or personally enough.

The Washington Post over the weekend wrote explicitly about this--"N.Y. Mayor Bill de Blasio Spoke Bluntly On Race, Policing in Ways Harder for Obama."

Yes, the mayor spoke bluntly--actually he was more compassionate than blunt--praising the vast majority of police officers who protect citizens black and white while calling for the need to retrain them in the appropriate use of force and then "spoke from the heart" as a father of a dark-skinned son who sports a huge Afro while Obama spoke more professorially, less as a black man and father of two daughters.

Obama may have tempered his remarks out of concern that they might interfere with his Department of Justice's investigations of both cases, exploring whether or not the victims' civil rights were violated though they will be difficult to press since the DJ would have to prove intent. He may have wanted to avoid the legal storm that arose after Trayvon Martin was killed when he, with emotion and truth, said Trayvon "could have been me."

Yes, any President needs to tread carefully when talking about on-going criminal investigations, but surely there must be ways, there must be appropriate words for our first African-Ameircan president to speak publicly about race in less than his usual dispassionate way. For him, if you will, to testify about what it is like, what it feels like to be a black man in America and the father of teenage children who must worry when his children are out and about, even with Secret Service protection. And how he must have residual fears about his own safety when in public. Fears exacerbated by the fact of his skin color.

I understand that during his first term, for political reasons alone, he did not want to come off sounding like a "black president." He was and is the president of all the people, even those who disagree with and even despise him. Further, considering the underlying racism so pervasive in America, he did not want to give bigoted whites the excuse to have their views confirmed that he is the proverbial boogie man (epithet intended)--a militant Angry Black Man.

But now, with the last midterm elections over (and lost) what continues to hold him back from truly speaking his mind and leading the long-overdo conversation? He has nothing significant to lose. Now more than ever we need his perspective and passion.

January 24, 2014--"Who's this Calhoun?"

At the Delray News Shop the other morning an elderly man asked Richard, one of the owners, if he had a copy of this week's New Yorker. He had heard about David Remnick's long article about Barack Obama and wanted to read it.

"I heard about it too," I said, "the one where, among other things, Obama talks about being a black president."

"That's the one," the man said. "Outrageous."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"That he views himself that way. And blames all his failures and the criticism he deserves on people who he accuses of being anti-black."

"That's hard to believe," I said, "If anything, Obama plays down his blackness and gets criticized for that by some African-American leaders."

Richard didn't have the issue yet and, since I too wanted to read it, did so on-line.  I also had seen excerpts from the article in which there were a few quotes from the president about how some people don't like him because he's black. The Fox News folks jumped all over that, claiming this as evidence of Obama's own racism and hatred for white people.

So, if you haven't seen the article, here is the full quote from the Remnick piece so you can make up your own mind:

Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late.

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. 

"And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy."

I doubt if people such as Sean Hannity read the full article preferring, for his ideological purposes, to quote it out of context. Of if he had, I wonder if he would know anything about the history Obama refers to.

"Who's this Calhoun?" I could hear him hollering at his staff. "Some Chicago pal of Obama's?"

I also wonder what the New Yorker was doing, also quoting Obama by releasing very selected out-of-context excerpts of only the most controversial material. I guess for them it's also all about selling copies and making money.