Risk Assessment

The world can be a scary place, all the more so if you only experience it through the filter of others.  Americans are among the hardest working people in the world, and it is perhaps because we are so often devoted solely to our individual professions that we don’t take the time to actually experience the world.  To stay informed we will trust a few names or perhaps a single network to do the job of informing us, a decision that leaves a large swathe of Americans woefully ill prepared to assess reality and come to reasonable solutions.  I am a fan of NPR and I believe that as a news source it is certainly in the upper echelon in terms of objective reporting on the world as it is.  That said, I make sure that I get corroborating information from other networks some with ideological leanings that I do not share, because you can never be certain where the truth will be.  It has become painfully clear that I am not the rule but the exception when it comes to this, and it is most apparent in the simple inability of so many people to understand what the real problems we face are and how best we can address them.

I have lost track of the number of conservatives who have mocked President Obama’s claim that the greatest threat to the future generations is climate change and not terrorism.  The laughter of the ignorant rings out with undeserved pride like no other, and certainly this is no exception.  How could a concept like climate change possibly be a greater threat than barbarians with Kalashnikovs?  By the same token, how could a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas be more dangerous than bullets?  Yet it’s not the gun that is banned in war, but chemical weapons.  Obviously, I am using a bit of hyperbole here to make a point, but it’s an important point to be sure.  It’s very easy to see scary images on a screen and recognize it as a threat, particularly if they are repeated ad nauseam, but it’s much harder to fear an abstract concept, even if it is potentially far more dangerous.  And if you’ve never experienced the world around you or even put in the most basic work to stay informed it can be impossible to actually tell the difference between the real threats and the imagined ones.

We’ve come to trust gut instincts because in many situations they are useful and indeed correct.  When you take a test the common wisdom is to go with your first impulse and not second guess your answer.  But that gut instinct evolved from countless generations of human beings needing only to avoid the tiger that might pounce out of the brush, it did not evolve to carefully consider how to deal with microscopic bacteria that are much more deadly.  Perhaps it’s because I have a gastrointestinal disease that I am as skeptical of my own gut, but it seems reasonable to question the efficacy of our immediate instincts to see whether they are still working as they should.  We’re fast approaching flu season, and despite the fact that over a hundred American children are likely to die from the flu this year, it will get far, far less coverage than the two Americans who died of Ebola.

Even in the countries hardest hit by the Ebola crisis, like Sierra Leone, the biggest threat to life was never Ebola.  The biggest killer this year, as was the year before, will be malaria.  This is not to say that Ebola is not a threat or was not a threat, but that we need to remember that just because something seems exotic or foreign does not automatically make it more important than the mundane and frankly banal threats we endure every day.  We don’t consider the risks associated with driving in cars, even though that is literally moving at high speed thanks to repeated explosions.  We do not worry about all the common, every day threats because we live with them every day, so we know intrinsically that just because something is a possible threat doesn’t mean it will always harm you or kill you.  But the moment we encounter a new threat, however small, the fact that it is different makes it much scarier by comparison.  I can only liken it to having a paralyzing fear of sharks, even though you’ve never been to a beach in your life, while keeping a dog as a pet.  Because statistically, man’s best friend is more likely to finish you off than Jaws.  Incidentally, I am actually a dog person.

But let’s take the oh so scary threat of Radical Islamic Terror, the supposed greatest threat according to the Right.  I can certainly agree that we need to combat religious extremism, and we need to defend innocent civilians from the wrath of terrorists, but let’s not pretend that Islamic terrorism is the biggest threat to American civilians at this time, in this universe.  Setting aside the reality that something like obesity is hundreds of thousands of times more deadly to Americans than all terrorism, in the United States, Islamic terrorism is not even the greatest threat out of all terrorism.  White extremist groups and individuals kill more Americans than Islamic extremists to the tune of more than two to one.  Those innocent civilians in Emmanuel AME weren’t killed by Jihadis, neither were the members of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, nor the members of the West End Synagogue. It was not ISIS that blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but you don’t see extra scrutiny given to young, white men with Irish last names when going through the airport.

And my point isn’t that we should therefore start being more paranoid of these more common threats.  Certainly there are issues like healthcare and climate change that we do take too lightly, but in many cases it’s simply that we are making mighty mountains of mole hills.  The world does indeed have many horrors.  The fact that in many places in the world newborn children have a 10% chance of never seeing their first birthday, the reality that human beings are still being sold into slavery, the gruesome truth that every year some 3 million people will die of preventable disease, not to mention the people who live and die without even the hope of a cure should give every person pause.  We do still live in a world where who you are can determine what you can achieve, where you live can determine if you ever know a day of peace, what you think can get you locked up or worse.  But all of these injustices, all of these blights on humanity get rarer with each passing year, and as it does we need to start focusing on what our current threats are.

We live in a country and a world that is richer than at any other time in the past, is more peaceful than any other time in the past, is freer than at any point in human history.  Perhaps we’ve gotten spoiled by growing up in a world where it can be expected that every year there will be a great new stride in technology that we’ve become entitled to sense that we only need to put in the meagerest of efforts to think we know everything.  Whatever it is, we are now living in a world where it’s our pleasures that prove to be our greatest threats.  Our increasingly sedentary lifestyle with less than nutritious foods causes heart disease, diabetes, and, as I look at my own physique, a less than pretty waistline.  Our consumption of fossil fuels has put us on a course to irrevocably alter our environment such that human life on earth will be significantly challenged.  But we tell ourselves that these are the imagined threats compared to masked murderers claiming they want to attack the White House, in spite of all the evidence telling us what is already the greater threat.

Finally, the threat to our spirit continues to be those who call for an end to the “snobs” who want to get children educated, those who seek to remove knowledge from the classroom, those who see compassion as weakness, and those who play the victim whenever someone stands up for the oppressed.  It’s not for nothing but that famous poem that ends “then they came for me- and there was no one left to speak for me,” begins with the words “first they came for the socialists.”  There are people in this country who see everything in black and white, and are willing to cry ‘fascism’ over the smallest slights, and they just so happen to be the people who cry ‘socialism’ just as quick whenever someone tries to make government better and not just smaller, even as they depend on social security and medicare.  These are the people who make it so difficult to have reasonable discussions about how we actually address our real issues, and the only solution is to continue the work of putting truth out into the world and hope that something sinks in.

Saccharine Sweet

There are many characteristics that factor into how capable a leader you can be.  Certainly charisma can be a useful tool to rally support behind a cause, but charisma can also be a brilliant facade without any substance and that’s potentially dangerous.  When looking at the current flock of candidates for the presidency I’d say it’s difficult to point out any candidate that actually has any more than an average amount of charisma.  I say that even of candidates I like.  Bernie Sanders, for all his many strengths, is not necessarily the guy you’d expect to whip up a crowd simply by his demeanor; nevertheless, he does draw in some of the biggest crowds.  The other person who draws the big crowds continues to be the other guy with a Brooklyn accent, and unless I’m missing something here he doesn’t have a shred of charisma or likability either.  What is it then that draws crowds to these characters?

For my own part I think that the message on the Left is appealing because it is grounded both in a compassion that speaks to the heart, as well as the reason, facts, and evidence that make your mind concur. When Hillary Clinton or Bernie sanders call for the defense of women’s rights, it is informed both by the moral imperative that all people are treated equitably and humanely, but more than that it is informed by the simple fact that the full enfranchisement of women has been and continues to be one of the greatest catalysts for economic growth and more universal prosperity.  On the Right, however, the appeal to reality is at best incidental to the argument and far more often than not is utterly lacking.  After the most recent GOP debate I was left at something of a loss of words because with a few choice exceptions the responses of these people who wish to lead the country were either outright lies or else so ill informed that the speaker could not hope to even speak the truth, yet the audience applauded and cheered repeatedly.

It’s lead me to conclude that what people like about these candidates, the thing that draws the big crowds, and gets people to imagine that any of them could be presidential material is an addiction to sugar.  These candidates are saying exactly what the base wants to hear, big surprise from a primary I know, but they seem either unwilling or unable to tell the hard truths.  It sounds good to be able to say that what we need now and for all time are ever more tax cuts, it sounds oh so sweet to say that we just need to wall off our borders and we’ll be safe from all those scary foreigners, but there’s no there there.  Donald Trump is the easiest example of this fact, but it applies to each and every candidate that was on the stage, that if you push back even the tiniest bit the arguments fall apart because there is no substance, no nutritional value.

Setting aside the lack of awareness on who heads the Quds Force, Mr Trump is clearly unable to explain his position or provide any details to any policy he has put forward.  Smokescreens are thrown up so he can avoid the real conversation, with claims that he doesn’t want to let others know what his plans are or that he will at some point in the future learn the things he needs to know.  But the simple fact remains that the sweet talking candidates of the GOP couldn’t back up their claims even if they were forced to, because they base the argument on appeals to religiosity, patriotism, and raw emotion rather than actually thinking through what the pros and cons of any given policy might be.  Immigration needs to be stopped, even though doing so would only result in the complete collapse of the US economy because we would lose the biggest driver of population growth and therefore economic growth.  Planned Parenthood needs to be defunded because of a few selectively edited videos, even though that would only result in many Americans lacking access to affordable healthcare and force women who will still seek abortions to do so in unsafe conditions.  The debt limit must always be a fight that puts the running of the government on the line, even though the mere threat of this was enough to downgrade our credit rating and the actual practice left many Americans without a job for weeks.

The GOP has long been pretty good at playing the cheerleader, claiming that America is the greatest place in the history of the world, while actively pushing to undo everything that makes the United States great in the first place.  America is the most powerful nation in the world, that’s why we need to keep spending money on a military that simply can’t use another hundred tanks and put us in a situation that we have to sell the surplus to people we will soon fight.  America is the richest country in the world, which is why we need to keep funneling all the money to the top that way any economic growth we have just puts further strain on the vast majority leading to instability.  America is the freest country in the world, so it only makes sense that we institute religious tests, deny gay people their rights, pretend that the mass incarceration of racial minorities isn’t an affront to their rights, and set up ever more intrusive homeland security measures to ensure that any “un-American” thoughts are quickly eradicated.

Now, I’m not going to say that the Democrats or the Left more broadly are correct on every issue all the time, for the same reason that you do need some sugar in your diet.  A little goes a long way and we do need voices that defend the importance of markets, industry, and entrepreneurship.  We always need to be inclusive of outside voices, because you never know where the next great idea might come from, but there’s a difference between letting everyone have a voice and making the crazy guy with the sandwich board the leader of the free world.  The GOP has great rhetoric full of powerful and emotive phrases, but their sweet words don’t mask the fact that the policies they advocate erode freedom in practical terms and expand the waistline of the national debt.

Ronald Reagan is indeed the patron saint of the GOP, and for good reason.  The tax cuts he pushed along with the increase in military spending caused massive increases in the debt.  The targeted way he cut taxes ensured that we would continually be put in a cycle of large swathes of people losing their jobs in hard times and getting worse paying jobs in good times.  So on economics, at least, there is a clear line between his failed policies and the failed policies being pushed today by the Right, but even Ronald Reagan was not so indoctrinated by his own ideology that he was completely blind to how irresponsible it was.  Reagan raised taxes eleven times to try and fix his own mistakes.  It wasn’t enough by any stretch, which is why the top marginal tax rates are still historically low, but at least he hadn’t signed some ridiculous pledge to never ever raise taxes.  There was indeed a tiny bit of there there with Reagan, some substance to his argument, which goes someway to answering why many people still see him as a great leader.  Not so with the many people trying to lift up his mantle today.

It can be difficult at times, but we do need to eat our vegetables.  It may not be pleasant to hear that we need to pay taxes because the alternative is the loss of the military, social security, public schools, national parks, clean air and water, etc.  You may not like that a person of a different faith can hold a position of power in this country, but the defense of their religious freedom is the basis of your religious freedom.  And yes the thought of immigrants coming to this country to work may seem like it will result in fewer available jobs, but the reality has always been and continues to be that immigration is a large part of why America went from a fledgeling confederacy of states to the biggest economy in the world so quickly.  A leader needs to know what the people want to hear and what the people need to hear, when they need their vegetables and when it’s time for a little dessert, but when it comes to the GOP they are fresh out of both substance and leadership.

What’s an American

There has been something bothering me over the last few days, particularly in light of my post about who counts as authentically American these days.  I feel that I fell into the same hole that so many of the patriotic facade crowd never tire from falling into, and that is the lacking any substantive expression of what an American is.  This is no small question because it can more or less settle the argument over who is American at the outset.  Obviously, the basic definition of an American citizen isn’t sufficient, both because that would very well make the whole conversation a bit superfluous and that in light of several candidates claiming they want to redefine what an American citizen is in the first place that it is merely shifting the goalpost by one step.  Is there something intrinsic to being American or is it simply the label given to those of us who for whatever reason live, work, and sometimes vote in the United States?

It should be strange to think that about 90 years ago being a Native American did not guarantee you US citizenship.  Even after the passage of the 14th Amendment the indigenous tribes of this land were not Americans, they were just “Indians.”  The simple lack of recognition for the only group that even comes close to a legitimate claim of not being immigrants has long been a sore spot in American history, now relegated to a few impoverished reservations and glittering casinos if we are to believe only the broadest generalizations.  To say that this brutal history lesson is all there is to say about these Americans would be inaccurate, but it reflects an important first step to recognizing what an American is.  We are descendants of so many different peoples, cultures, languages, histories.  There are significant blotches on who we were that we need to be able to recognize, or else we will only be able to paint in unhelpful generalizations at best and ignore reality at worst.

Our nation’s common history is replete with examples of abuse between races, religions, classes, etc.  The founding sin of slavery gave way to wave after wave of ill-treated immigrants to fill the gaps of our required cheap labor.  From the demonization of Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, to the almost mythical mistreatment of the Irish in the East we have seen generations and generations of new Americans filling the full meaning of what it means to be this immigrant nation.  The dark parts of our past inform the great steps forward we made.  After all, what would have been the point of the Civil Rights Movement if not for the Jim Crow past it fought?  An American is a truly hard worker, it is what we are famous for even if it is not always recognized.  American industry was born out of the necessity of hard headed puritans trying to eke out a living during a New England winter and the even harder work of the immigrants who came later and had to prove that they could surpass the unreasonable expectations of those who were already here.

And we have worked hard, often for very little.  Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam are symbols of the hard work America has demanded of itself.  During war we were expected to make the sacrifices necessary to bring our troops back home, safe and victorious.  Americans bought war bonds, they recycled aluminum and rubber, and Americans even cut back on driving when the call went out.  Americans are ever hopeful that by hard work and playing by the rules that any person can rise up to be better off than his parents, perhaps, but more importantly leave the next generation just that much better off than they received the world.  But it’s been a long time since we were expected to sacrifice anything, it’s been quite a while that we’ve simply felt that our optimism was justified through an entitled sense of our own greatness.

During the Bush years, even as we sent our troops to fight in two wars with less than adequate equipment, we were required to sacrifice nothing.  When the Twin Towers fell, there were indeed many brave Americans who didn’t wait to be called to do their part, but for too many of us it was taken for granted that our liberty meant we could do practically nothing.  Taxes went down, deficits went up, and we decided to buy lots of SUVs that would never touch so much as a drop of mud.  Americans, as a general rule, sacrificed nothing, save perhaps a couple bucks to buy a yellow ribbon bumper sticker.  Even when the names of dead American servicemen and women came in, we did nothing and let the VA silently accumulate the problems of the soldiers that did come home.  Americans today are served the world on a platter, we have every opportunity and liberty imaginable but without a sense of responsibility to make these freedoms into a virtue.

This is where the misplaced anger comes into play, because anyone with eyes and ears can tell that something isn’t quite right, it’s just a little bit harder to understand who or what is to blame.  We see that there are Americans ready and willing to work but there is a lack of jobs that pay enough, and so we want to find scapegoats.  Despite the fact that immigration is now and has always been the greatest source of wealth and growth in America, the foreigners make such a good target for taking the jobs of the “real” Americans.  We are inundated with images of the horrific things happening in the world and we want to find scapegoats.  Despite the fact that more Americans are killed by Rightwing terrorists with legally purchased guns, the Muslim American community is just too tempting a target to miss for scorn.  These should be immediately recognizable facts to anyone with an inquisitive mind, but Americans have a good reason for girding themselves from reality.

America is a country with a rich tradition of the common man doing right and doing better than the supposed experts.  One of the most influential documents in American history is “Common Sense,” and our folklore is filled with John Henrys who just needed their own brute force to beat even the greatest inventions the minds of intellectuals could come up with.  It’s been our greatest defense in keeping government from growing into a Leviathan, the skepticism of those in charge; however, there can always too much of a good thing.  Many Americans view education itself as a threat just as much as any expert claiming to be a little too big in his britches.  New information must be ignored if it conflicts with gut opinion, and the Monday morning quarterbacking of this country has become something of a national pass-time, to the extent that Donald Trump has been the GOP frontrunner for months.  It doesn’t matter that he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to actual policy, what he needs to know he can pick up along the way or hire advisors to do for him.  Incidentally, this certainly applies to the number two in that race as well, Ben Carson.

But just as painting the entirety of the Native American experience as reservation life was wrong at the outset, so too would be painting the entirety of what the American experience is as anti-intellectualism.  The United States of America is a country of countless lives and ideas trying as hard as they can to make more and make better.  We remain the country that comes out with the newest iPhone and the country that lifts up the next Elon Musk.  Unfortunately it is also true that we are the same country that comes up with the Apple Watch and that lifts up the next Kardashian, but the point remains nonetheless that the United States is still the county that allows for the creation of what is truly American.

An American is a descendant of the Sioux, Iroquois, Creeks, Seminoles, etc, but we are also the descendants of the British, Irish, Chinese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Dinka, Arabs, Persians, Germans, Nigerians, Cubans, Russians, and every other country, every other ethnic group, and every single race on earth.  An American is still the hard worker who wants to put in the time and effort to put bread on the table and get his or her kid through school.  An American is still the optimist, who sees that hard work as an investment in their child’s future.  But we can’t rest on our laurels, because too many Americans are so ill-equipped, so ill-informed that despite our many advantages we are in danger of losing ourselves.  An American can be great, but we have to actually make the effort to achieve and earn that greatness.

Who’s American?

It should come as no great shock that in national elections the rhetoric can get somewhat nationalistic.  We talk about American exceptionalism, without ever defining what that is actually supposed to mean in practice, and we construct various narratives that frame our own world in a very us vs them narrative.  And by we, of course, I mean those twenty some people who are running for president and all the various minions that seek to bask in their glory until they lose.  But in these discussions about America, Americans, American values, etc rarely do we discuss the double standard of the definition of what it means to be an American.  See, there are people in this country who include all Americans in their definition of what it means to be American and there are those who simply don’t, not to put too fine a point on it.

September 11 was somber reminder that although we might like to think of America as separate from the rest of the world, that we are indeed connected to the current events that affect even the lives of Saudis and Afghanis.  It was a tragic shock to our own sense of self, so great that there is simply no returning to the less panic fueled world we lived in before those attacks, even as the world gets safer with each passing year.  In the aftermath of those attacks we did indeed come together as a country, or at least that is the common narrative.  As is so often true in our politics, it seems that for many it was simply a matter of waving the flag enough to be recognized as sufficiently American.

The response to these attacks from so many people was truly inspiring, as men and women ran toward the collapsed towers to save as many lives as they could.  These 9/11 first responders entered an environment that was decidedly hazardous, and not just because of the flames, the broken metal, and the jagged concrete.  The particulate matter released by the collapse of the World Trade Center has caused long lasting health problems for our heroes, and in response we passed the Zadroga Act… well it actually wasn’t that simple.  The original bill didn’t pass, as the Congress apparently thought that this nation-unifying tragedy was just New York’s problem.  In the Senate 42 people stopped the bill from advancing to the floor, despite the 57 Senators in favor.  The argument put forward was that this was too big a price for the nation to bear, as a new entitlement for the people they publicly praised.  It was only after this galling hypocrisy was pointed out by Jon Stewart did people even notice this disgusting bit of politics, but once the light was shown on the issue it did finally get resolved.

The Zadroga Act is nearing the end of its funding in the very near future and prospects of it being renewed are not bright because of the Republican led Congress.  This isn’t just some sucker punch at the GOP, because I should have mentioned which party all but one of those Senators who blocked the bill represented.  Yes, 41 Republican Senators fought to deny healthcare to the 9/11 first responders and now that they control Congress it looks quite possible that they will do it again.(http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&session=2&vote=00269) It’s perhaps worth mentioning that the only Democrat who voted against it, Harry Reid, voted that way so he could us a parliamentary trick to quickly get it back on the floor when they did have sufficient numbers to break the filibuster.  But to be fair, these 41 members who effectively blocked healthcare for 9/11 first responders don’t think of themselves as heartless, they think they are doing the right thing by keeping government limited and allowing local communities to take care of their own problems.  I don’t agree with this position because I think helping our nation’s heroes is actually a responsibility of the people and the government as a collective, but ok if they think that’s the best way to react to a crisis then I suppose I could accept the point.  Incidentally, what ever happened when Congress was called to help a red state in need?

We recently passed the 10th anniversary of the devastating landfall of Hurricane Katrina.  It too was a nation-unifying event as people from across the United States and indeed across the world came to give aid, both monetarily and through volunteer work.  The Bush Administration’s response to the hurricane was, famously, bungled at the outset but did play a large part in getting people temporarily housed while the Gulf Coast communities were rebuilt.  Yet at no point in the rebuilding of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida did any of the many Republicans who have quite a bit of control in these states say they’d rather the federal government go away to let them handle these problems themselves.  Neither did we hear calls from Republicans or Democrats for that matter to cut the funding for FEMA as an unnecessary expense for the federal government.

And before you think I’m getting ridiculous in stating that politicians might ever withhold disaster relief funding, let’s not forget what happened in response to a hurricane that affected the areas much closer to ground zero than the heart of Dixie, Hurricane Sandy.  36 Senators, again all Republican, tried to stop the disaster relief that went to the states hit by Hurricane Sandy, 31 of whom had previously voted in favor of similar funds that helped their own states when they’d been hit by natural disasters. (http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=1&vote=00004)  So again, their principled stance is that the government should always be responsible and withhold public dollars when it’s someone else’s family and friends drowning and not their own.  Also worth noting that among these Senators who voted against Sandy relief are current presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham and former presidential candidate John McCain.  These are people who aspire to lead all Americans but seem only willing to help certain Americans.

So what gives?  For far too long those of us on the Left have been more than willing to bite our tongues whenever folks on the Right get up on their high horses about how patriotic they are.  In most cases, I don’t doubt the genuine patriotism of American citizens, it’s their politicians who are the real problem.  The professional politicians of the Far-Right haven’t had to work especially hard to convince people that some Americans are more equal than others.  We can all come together to help conservative states, but when it comes time to help the blue states the money is always just about to run dry, but it doesn’t matter because those folks just aren’t as American anyway.  You can tell that New Yorkers aren’t particularly American because they don’t have an American flag bumper sticker next to their confederate flag bumper sticker, which shockingly they also don’t have.

People like Donald Trump then use this strange shift in definitions of what is American to gain support from people who refused to take even two seconds to think through what he just said.  Don’t you understand? He doesn’t hate immigrants, he hates all the immigrants… that bring crime across our borders.  He doesn’t hate the military, he hates the soldiers that get captured and sent to POW camps.  He doesn’t hate people that disagree with him, he just doesn’t want them to get a word in edgewise.  And it’s ok that he hates all of these Americans because he knows what real Americans are and they aren’t it.  Truly it takes some mental gymnastics, but it makes much more sense if you don’t waste any time thinking about it.

We are all Americans, the conservatives and the liberals and everyone in between.  I find it more than a little ridiculous to hear someone like Ben Carson claim that it’s progressives who are the ones dividing the country, because it’s the Democrats who keep helping Americans regardless of where they live or who they voted for.  It takes a special kind of person to claim that the unifying message of “I got mine, now kindly fuck off in your time of need” is both conservative and truly American.  The conservatives I know are appalled when they find this out, the trouble is that few conservatives seem to ever discover the truth and so they keep voting for these spokespeople of what is truly “American.”  The first step, as ever is to keep getting the information out there.  It’s usually going to fall on deaf ears,  but you have to hold out hope that we can all be seen as American some day.

The Last of the Republicans

Despite what any rational person might expect or hope, Donald Trump is still the front runner for the GOP.  Granted we are still months away from even the first contest, leave alone the conventions where nominees are actually confirmed, but no one expected a candidate like Trump to even be a flash in the pan after his lack of performance in 2012.  The sheer spectacle that is the gilded campaign of Mr Trump has cast a shadow over a much larger story that is worth examining; that being the end of the Republican Party.  I’m not saying this as a political partisan hoping that the opposition is just going to defeat itself, I mean specifically that there is very little about the Republican Party that matches what it traditionally has been and the best representatives of what the GOP can be in a good year just aren’t even showing up any more.  The GOP has become, in more ways than one, a facade of its former glory.  Instead of a ‘Republican’ party that actually is dedicated to the United States, under a strong legal framework, with the goal of limiting the scope of government in people’s lives; we are now left with various factions, of which the three main ones are the Theocrats, the Good Ol’ Boys, and the Market Worshippers.

Let’s begin with what the Republican Party used to be, the party of Lincoln.  In this I’m referring less to the party platform of the mid-19th century and more to the party that fought for individual liberties, the rule of law, and a government that speaks softly and carries a big stick, to adopt a phrase from a slightly later Republican.  In this way it was a classically liberal party, which is why the GOP was the party that ended slavery and passed the 19th amendment.  Throughout the 20th Century, there were environmentalists in the Republican Party: from Teddy Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.  And even in our own time we’ve had some truly decent figures who held the banner of what the Republican Party had been, certainly before the Reagan Revolution at any rate.

Colin Powell is a prime example of a Republican who cared less about party politics and more about principled policy and effective government.  He supported both Presidents Bush and Reagan on the Republican side as well as Presidents Obama and Clinton on the Democratic side, because the success of his country means more to him than scoring political points.  He laid out a perfectly well thought out prescription for US foreign policy, the lack of adherence to which has resulted in needless war and the proliferation of terrorists.  As he grew up philosophically he let go of past prejudices against gay people and joined the cause of ending DADT and agreed with the cause of marriage equality.  While he has been more than willing to express his differences of opinion with President Obama on fiscal matters, he is not blind to reality and supports the Iran Deal as a workable solution to the problems at hand.  But Colin Powell is not running for president, is he?

Setting aside the way the George W Bush administration defamed his character by pressuring him throughout the UN speeches, there’s a very good reason why the Republican Party could not accept him, or even someone like him, as a candidate.  The reason is that the Republican Party he represents no longer exists, and the candidates that have recently tried to take up that mantle have failed miserably.  Take for instance someone like Jon Huntsman.  He was governor of a very red state, Utah, and was by all accounts a very effective and popular governor.  He was willing enough to work across the aisle that when President Obama asked him to serve as ambassador to China, a significant post to say the least, he did his duty.  When he ran in 2012 he was crushed.  The reasons why range from his acceptance of science to his ability to work with people who disagree with him, because that’s so 1970s.  No, the GOP can no longer tolerate tolerant people, they need to be willing to say terrible things about the ‘others’ of America and to do so in American.

And the unfortunate, or fortunate depending on your perspective, truth of the matter is that there is not a singular Republican Party to fill the gap.  There are the Theocrats like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, etc.  They are Christian supremacists, by which I mean their own specific brand of Christianity.  The Constitution, far from being a secular legal document that was unprecedented in its tolerance of belief of any kind, is an instrument that must be used to impose religious values on a public that is already far more moral than any of these want to be preachers in chief.  The United States as a “Christian nation” needs to spend less time and money helping the poor, the imprisoned, the war-torn, etc and do more punishing, start more wars, and stop the insidious effort to make the world more educated.

They are joined by the Good Ol’ Boys, who share many traits, but whose central thrust comes less from dogmatism of a religious stripe and more from a nationalistic sense of superiority.  This is the camp of Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum, etc.  The central tenet is that American Exceptionalism means their own definition of what it is to be American is the metric of what a human being is.  Current immigrants are insufficiently American, regardless of their legal status, but particularly the illegal immigrants make a more widely accepted scapegoat.  And it doesn’t matter that they are all clearly the descendants of immigrants, in the case of someone like Santorum very recent descendant, there is a clear to them but never explained definition of what it is to be American and anything that deviates from the canon, with the exception of the holders of this opinion, deserves to be deported at best.  There is nothing at all cerebral about this position, as the core is not in the brain but in the gut, where it is just so obvious that immigration, far from being one of the single biggest drivers of the American economy, is a threat and must be destroyed… with walls if at all possible.

And last comes the Market Worshippers, though I’ll admit this is a less than ideal term for the group.  I could almost agree to a term like Neo-Con, but it seems to miss the extent to which candidates like Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and Rand Paul truly believe that there is no question to which the answer isn’t to give more power to those who already control the private sector.  True, they tend to have slightly different rationales and justifications for these positions, but it always seems to stem from the belief that no matter how tyrannical the private sector can be at its worst, it will always be better than the government at its best, the same government that they almost invariably entrust with ever greater stockpiles of weapons.  People like the Koch Brothers are job creators, even when the policies that benefit them only send jobs overseas.  Industries that have a financial incentive to exacerbate the climate change problem we face need to be given even more power and fewer regulations, because the world may yet become inhabitable but we can’t risk even the slightest inconvenience to polluters.  After all it’s the EPA that is really responsible for environmental issues and not the polluters they try to stop.

Yes, there is indeed overlap in these groups, as a Market Worshipper like Jeb Bush does occasionally find it worth while to pray in public and throw a bone to the Theocrats, and a Theocrat like Mike Huckabee does like to play the nationalist card of the Good Ol’ Boys from time to time.  But the factions that have been growing in the GOP are becoming ever more entrenched and always at the exclusion of legitimately good candidates like a Colin Powell or Jon Huntsman.  The closest comparable thing you have at this moment, and even then he’s a poor facsimile, is someone like John Kasich who has garnered, at best, some 6% of the GOP’s support.  Everyone else seems to have learned to shut up and let the crazy people speak for them or else leave the party.  There are many examples of the past few years, where Republicans have finally recognized that their party no longer exists and either become independents or Democrats, not least of all someone like Lincoln Chafee, who is running for the Democratic nomination.  And if demographics are any kind of indication, the groups that currently fall in the camps of the GOP will not be enough to win national elections ever again.  If your goal is to have Democratic dominance in this regard this may sound like good news, but for those of us who would like to have a legitimate choice at the polls, who want to actually choose good candidates and not just the lesser of two evils, then it is a sad sight to behold the last of the Republicans leaving by hook or by crook.

Church and State

At this point it seems like absolutely everyone has heard about Kim Davis and her crusade as clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky.  We’ve all heard it and almost without exception we all have our own opinions on the matter, so there’s really no point in my offering yet another two cents to conversation.  But here I am.  In the unlikely event that the reader hasn’t heard of this story, here’s the current situation.  The disagreement between her supporters and everyone else varies from person to person.  Some see this as an attack on religious liberty, others see it as the friction point between LGBT and Christian communities, still others see it as an example of the rule of secular law in process.  I definitely fall into the last camp because once you get past all of the vitriol and outrage, this is one of the most clear cut legal issues I’ve ever seen.

Let’s start by setting aside the things that a lot of people want to talk about, perhaps because they are more entertaining.  First of all the hypocrisy of Ms Davis is, in itself, both astounding and hilarious.  The fact that she is defending the sanctity of marriage as defined by the bible while having had three divorces is just ludicrous.  The bible didn’t have one word to say about homosexuality one way or the other, but he did have some choice words about divorce.  But while this may be fascinating it is not the point.  Not only is this irrelevant because a hypocritical person could still be right, but more importantly divorce is legal in the United States and our secular legal system.  Second, her supporters will sometimes argue that she found her own compromise by not officiating any marriages and thus treating the community equally.  This too is a non sequitur because that just means she is all the more avoiding her job as county clerk by denying people their marriage certificates, and because ultimately this too is not exactly the reason why she is currently sitting in a jail cell.

Here’s what it comes down to, does an individual in a seat of even a minuscule amount of political power have the right to force others to abide by her own religious morals?  The obvious answer is no.  Ultimately the reason why she is in jail has less to do with her unwillingness to participate in the marriage of gay couples as it does with her prohibition of the rest of the staff to do so.  Every level of the legal system has sent the quickest of responses to her case and al of them have found her in the wrong, regardless of their own political persuasions.  This is because even the most dogmatic conservative Christians should understand that the separation of church and state protects them to practice as they wish.  That separation demands that our own convictions remain our own and not thrust upon others without their consent.

Ms Davis is free to believe as she wants, she is free to practice her religion as she wants, she is free to a church whose first and last commandments say that above all else gay couples will never be allowed to marry there if she wants.  But at no point in any of those legitimate liberties is she entitled to dictate to others that they must believe as she believes, that they must practice her sect of Christianity, and that the state must act as if it were her church and deny marriage licenses to people purely based on gender.  She was told by no lesser authority than the Supreme Court that as county clerk it is her obligation to uphold the laws of the land and that it is not her right to forbid her deputies to disregard the laws of the land.  True, marriage of equality is pretty new to some areas of the country, but the ruling of the Supreme Court in June expounds on why that should not be the case.

We are all equal under the law.  We are not all equal in terms of education, income, wealth, etc; however, the Constitution, including the amendments to it, set the foundation that allows everyone to be legally equal and there has to be an extraordinarily good reason for stripping a person of their rights even momentarily.  This is why even prisoners are allowed to be wed in the middle of their sentences.  This country, and most of the world for that matter, has historically treated the LGBT community as less than equal under the law for a long time, but more recent rulings have defended the rights of all people to be secure in their consensual relationships and to seek civil marriages.  At no point has the court ever ordered churches to officiate weddings of gay individuals, though there are churches that have done so willingly, and they never will because this is not about the religious practice of marriage but the secular practice of uniting two individuals so that they can be sure if one of them dies that they will actually be recognized as next of kin, for example.

Any and every person is entitled to think that this is disgusting or reprehensible, but their revulsion does not shake the solid legal foundation of the marriage.  As county clerk, Ms Davis swore an oath to uphold the law, which has defended the right of gay couples to be wed.  She has forsaken that oath, which she is entitled to do so long as she resigns her position.  She did not.  She is head of the office, which includes several deputy clerks who are willing to officiate these marriages.  She has forbade them to do so.  She was told in no uncertain terms what the consequences would be if she continued to ignore the courts’ rulings and having continued to ignore them she is, rightfully, held in contempt of court.

I don’t know if any readers have ever watched the film “My Cousin Vinny,” which incidentally you should, but there are several moments in that film wherein the titular Vinny is held in contempt of court.  You will never guess what happens to our poor maligned hero.  He is thrown in jail, because that is often what happens when you are held in contempt.  To call Ms Davis’s actions contemptuous of the courts’ repeated rulings would be putting it mildly, and so she found herself in jail and now literally chooses to remain there rather than abiding by the law that says you are entitled to your beliefs but you are not entitled to impose those beliefs on others, including your deputies.  This is so astoundingly obvious that only an absolute lackwit would disagree with it, which explains why the Far Right disagrees with it.

This is not about an appeal to the authority of the Supreme Court, though it shouldn’t be completely disregarded either; nor is this an appeal to the vast majority of people, who also find Ms Davis’s actions suspect.  There are many people in this country that do not agree with marriage equality, and some of them hold positions where they would now be required to recognize the marriages of gay couples.  To those people there are some options.  You can realize that these are civil marriages and do not in any way reflect your religious definition of marriage, particularly since atheists can get married and that has, by definition, no religious significance.  If you are unwilling to do that, then you can not fulfill your legal oath and must allow others to do that job.  That means either stepping aside to let others within your office perform the task or else stepping down from your post to let someone else fill it.  Other clerks have done just this, and Ms Davis should do so as well if she cannot bring herself to fulfill her oath, though one would hope she at least abstained from duels.

It really can only be because we’ve allowed the lines between church and state blur so much that something this clear cut could even be the slightest bit contentious.  Secularism is what separates countries that actually have the freedom of religion from those that hang apostates.  It is not a conspiracy to create special privileges for atheists, though the defense of non-believers is indeed a side benefit.  Secularism exists to protect believers from being dominated by other believers, which is why we don’t allow people to use the weight of the government to impose their religion on others.  If someone starts to force churches that don’t want to accept marriage equality to officiate the weddings of gay couples, then I will join the side of the churches.  But this is not anywhere close to the same thing.  It is just so glaringly obvious that Ms Davis was in the wrong, it pains me to realize there are people so ill informed that they can’t see it.

Walled Off

There are times when, having grown comfortable with a constant and steady stream of idiocy plodding on in the background, that you really need a decent shock to your system to start addressing problems.  Perhaps in that regard I should thank the current slate of GOP contenders for not only hitting rock bottom but crashing through it with such force that the rest of us are momentarily left dumbfounded.  The political status quo in America has been annoying but tolerable for quite a while now.  Yes, there’s always the uninformed demands from unfortunately loud fringes, but for the most part the country finds a way to get things done, even if it is at the last possible second.  So far in Obama’s tenure, despite the obstinance of the Congressional GOP, we’ve expanded healthcare coverage, recovered from the Great Recession, pushed the cause of equality for the LGBT community forward, brought down deficits, etc.  All the while there were petty attacks ranging from Birtherism and the questioning of the leader of the United State’s love for his country, to make believe scandals in the IRS and Benghazi.  To his credit, Mr Obama has proved confident enough not to even dignify the mud slingers, but this has allowed the baseless Republican base to just get worse because no one seems prepared to just call them out.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that calling out stupidity would only serve to fan the flames, but seeing as ignoring it hasn’t worked all that well it’s time to give it a shot.  We’ve long grown accustomed to the inane calls to wall off our Southern border, but now the trump card in Right Wing politics seems to be insanity.  Now we face calls to track individuals like Fedex packages, demands to end all immigration, and the suggestion that we wall off the Canadian border.  Yes, we’ve long had to endure the waves of Canadian immigrants, flooding across the border to pay dearly for healthcare and university educations, but finally Scott Walker is saying what no one is thinking.  This is the modern Republican Party, the most expensive and ridiculous reality show in the world.

But it’s just too fitting that the solution to every problem that the Right comes up with these days is a wall, because their ideology is clearly to wall off their minds from reality and their hearts from empathy.  Walls have two goals, to keep out and to keep in, and in both cases they always fail as a solution.  The Great Wall of China was supposed to keep out the Mongol Horde, and yet the fact that the Chinese currency is called the Yuan serve as a modern reminder that the Mongols did indeed get past that barrier and form the Yuan Dynasty.  The Berlin Wall served as a barrier to keep the people of the USSR from ever escaping to freedom, even the patron saint of the GOP was against that wall, but it too failed as a final defense of communism.  But yes, of course what we need now is to wall off every last inch of American soil.  And why stop at our land barriers?  Plenty of illegal immigrants come through our ports and airports so lets wall off our harbors and runways, can’t see how that could go wrong.  And heck, we can’t have illegal immigrants escaping law enforcement by going to the next state or country over, so let’s just make a nice grid of walls all across the land of the free.

Just a few years ago it would have been clear that the last of these suggestions were straw man arguments, but the way things are going, it seems more like an inevitable prediction of what one of the ludicrous characters running for with an R next to their name will propose in the coming weeks and months.  So it goes, and again it’s not just in physical barriers that the GOP is all in for walls.  Children must be walled off from truth and reality if those pesky facts conflict with the beliefs of the parents.  We’ve seen the proliferation of schools that shove religious rhetoric down students’ throats as well as an increased number of home schooled kids.  While either of these can produce great results for kids in theory, in practice we’ve seen that it is very often an excuse to propagandize against evolution, climate change, and the scientific method in general.  The repeated attempts to rewrite textbooks and curricula to exclude the painful parts of American history is equal measures of patronizing and dangerous as we need to make sure the whole country understands what we’ve done so we can try to avoid repeating our mistakes and truly appreciate our successes.

And we’ve simply condoned the idiocy that has been spreading like a plague throughout our country of people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to science, math, history, geography, law and civics.  Freedom isn’t the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want; but we just look the other way when people bring guns into bars and restaurants, when people threaten others through social media, when people take the lives of unarmed victims and claim self defense.  Any attempt to actually address these issues is treated as a threat to liberty, as if the freedom of a remorseless killer like George Zimmerman is so much more important than the life and freedom of Trayvon Martin.  Real liberty is a value worth pursuing, the endless defense of the entitled is not.

The idea of religious liberty specifically has been, perhaps, the worst example of the perversion of words and the walling off of sensibilities from reality.  Religious liberty is the freedom to believe what you want, to live your own life in accordance with those beliefs, and to express those beliefs to the rest of society if you so choose.  Religious liberty is not the use of government to impose your beliefs on others, to deny others the ability to live their own lives, and to mandate that your beliefs take precedence over reality.  Every complaint of religious intolerance against Christians in this country, that I’ve heard of, is an example of people who are so used to being separated from a pluralistic society being forced to recognize that the rest of the world exists.  We know what religious persecution looks like.  Even in the modern world ISIS is hanging Christians, White Supremacists try to murder Jews, and laws are drafted to bar atheists from holding office.  Those are actual slights at real people, not the requirement that clerks, representing the government, actually do their damn jobs and follow the law.  But if you’ve only ever lived in a world where it was ok to speak negatively about gay people then it seems like the walls come tumbling down if you are required to stamp papers for the civil marriage of a gay couple, i.e. your job.

In fact the only wall that the right seems to be against is the one wall that our founding fathers actually put up, the wall of separation between church and state.  In the first GOP debate the moderators didn’t ask about climate change, they didn’t ask about gun control, they didn’t ask about providing mental health services, they didn’t ask about how these candidates would make a college education more affordable; but they did manage to find an incredibly large spot of time to talk about how God speaks to these candidates.  At least there has been a marginal improvement on this front, because less than half of the candidates are claiming that God told them to run and that he was going to ensure they won, perhaps the loss was a chastening experience after all.  But in every speech these candidates seem to feel the need to run for the office of preacher in chief far more than commander in chief.  And both by their own religion and the law of the land they should be keeping as mum on this subject as possible if they want to be treated as both a decent statesman, or woman, and devout Christian.  I don’t have to talk about Matthew 6:5-6 again do I?

We see now the failure of the wall between church and state, just as well as the failure of any other wall.  Our founders did their part to establish the protections of the people; in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens, “Build up that wall, Mr Jefferson.”  But we let it fall down because we were willing to allow the insane and the asinine of our country to talk up countless other walls.  We need to break through the walls of the obstinate and get reason back on our side, or else endure the tenure of a president that sounds very similar to Donald Trump.