A Liberal's Wishes for James Comey

James Comey. What is there to say about the man that hasn’t already been said. I hated him with a white-hot passion after his attention-seeking, self-promoting criticism of Hillary helped Trump become president. I don’t claim that he alone is responsible for her loss, but like in civil trials when percentages of fault are assigned to various parties, he bears, beyond a reasonable doubt, some percentage of the responsibility for Trump. And while there is no way to quantify that number, even if it is small, a small percentage of a tragedy the magnitude of the Trump presidency means Comey is responsible for causing enormous, perhaps fatal, damage to the country that could have led the world out of the journey to destruction that it has now been set upon.

Comey should have been fired for what he did to Hillary and to all of us. But to hear Trump use it, initially at least, as justification for firing him when he appeared to be getting serious about exposing Trump’s indebtedness  to Russia, was doubly galling.

My wish is that Comey loves his country and his family and realizes the enormity of the harm he has caused, and at three in the morning he awakens feeling more than “mildly nauseous” at what he has done, but rather with the same moaning, sweating, despair that so many of us feel at the realization that the hope that our children might have the same quality of life that we had has been swept away.

I remember late on election night saying goodbye to my son who had recently graduated college and who was heading off to the city to his start his adult life, and the panicked look on his face as he said, “She’s going to win isn’t she?” When he was a child, I would have reassured him that everything was going to be all right.  But that night, there was no comfort I could offer. I wish that Comey is haunted by the faces of the billions of children whose lives he has helped destroy. I wish that he has a soul and that it is in torment. It’s not cruelty in my opinion, just justice.

In 2016 the world teetered on a razor-edged tipping point. In one direction was a long uphill slog toward slowing the rate of manmade global warming, reducing income inequality, promoting social justice, and preventing corporations from making debt slaves of our children. In the other direction was a downhill slide into the abyss of moral, social, and, ultimately, physical destruction. Pushing us in this direction were Republicans, and their corporate and media allies with their virtually unlimited wealth. Trying their best to overcome the strength of these powerful forces were people of good will, but limited resources.

Even with such a disadvantage, the battle was, for a time, a stalemate, and it looked as if the forces of greed, ignorance, and bigotry might be overcome, but at the most crucial point, Comey added his weight to the side of the deplorables and the battle was lost. Was he the deciding factor? Impossible to say. But what decent human being would have chosen that side?

Now we hear self-recrimination from the left that the Trumpsters should have been listened to, that their concerns should have been acknowledged, and that they must be brought over to our side before the next election. As someone who lives in Trump country, I’m here to tell you it’s not happening. Not unless we do like Trump and Fox News do, and lie to them continuously, telling them that all their problems are brought on by liberals, minorities, and immigrants; global warming is a hoax; tax cuts for the rich benefit the poor; and when elected we will immediately make all their problems disappear. Of course we can’t do that, and that is the only way to win them over.  

I’m not sure that people living outside Trump country really understand the extent to which the Trumpsters have become citizens of the alternate country of the right, a country that abides by a different set of moral values than we do. Like the Civil War confederates they adore so much, they regard a Federal government controlled by anyone but themselves as illegitimate and to overthrow it by any means as the patriotic thing to do.

Just as the confederates tried to enlist England and France as allies, today’s Trumpsters view accepting Russian assistance to defeat Democrats as a perfectly acceptable strategy. Liberals, minorities, immigrants, these are the real threats to America, and any individual or country willing to fight them is a friend.  The majority of Trumpsters would vote for Putin over a Democrat.  Just as has occurred in many elections around the world, they would vote for someone who would end all elections and replace democracy with dictatorship if convinced the candidate was one of them.

Trumpsters are lost to reason, to rationality. Like cult members, they will willingly sacrifice themselves and their children if told to do so by the cult leader. So the next election will be as close as the last one. We will have to marshal all our forces to defeat them and fight Republican efforts at voter suppression. And still it may not be enough. Again, the winner will be decided by a margin as thin as a razor’s edge.  All we can do is be prepared, tell the truth, expose Republican lies, encourage minorities and young people turn out, and hope no turncoats like Comey defect to the other side.

Trumpsters

I’ve been putting off writing this entry because it makes me sick to think of Donald Trump as President of the United States.  The image of him sitting in the oval office conducting America’s business is more suited to a miserable, fever-induced dream than reality. Then to wake up and have to face that it isn’t a dream after all and the day ahead will be another day of living during the Trump administration is living in a nightmare that refuses to go away with waking.  Another day of knowing that they actually did it.  They voted for Donald Trump for President. 

I was hoping they wouldn’t do it.  I was afraid they would, even halfway expected they would, but deep inside, I held out some small hope they wouldn’t. I should have known better.  You see, I know them: the Trumpsters.  I’ve socialized with them, worked with them, I’m related to many of them. So, knowing them as well as I do, I’m not surprised that sixty-three million of them would vote to destroy the country they so loudly and constantly profess to love by voting for a man so unqualified and so unworthy, so venal and loathsome, so corrupt, ignorant and immoral, that he will sell this country to the highest bidder, pocket the proceeds, and watch his supporters sicken and die without one pang of guilt.

Why would they do that?  Why would so many people who rely on government spending and government programs for jobs, healthcare, childcare and education, vote against their own self-interest, but what’s even worse, vote against what’s best for their own children, to elect a self-centered, self-serving representative of whomever will pay him the most? That is the big question, isn’t it, and I don’t pretend to have the answer. To try to provide some context, if not to actually understand it, I look at the behavior of cult members. 

A cult is governed by a leader who allows no dissenting opinion.  A leader who creates the reality in which the members live.  He (it’s always a he) identifies the powerful and evil external forces that threaten the lives and the souls of the cult members, and he offers the only path to salvation, which always involves complete and unquestioning allegiance to him.

Those of us born without the cult gene can’t understand how cult members would willingly hand over their identities, their freedoms, their fortunes, their lives, even their children, in order to be accepted as members in good standing.  But it’s vital for the rest of us to understand the reality of the phenomenon. Trump didn’t create his cult members; they’ve always been here, waiting in limbo for a cult leader to come along and claim them. They waited until Trump came along to tell them what they wanted to hear: that nothing wrong in their lives is their fault, that everything that is wrong is the fault of immigrants, and minorities, and gays, and liberals.  And he told them that if they trusted him, if they were loyal to him, he would fix it all, never mind the details of how.  And that was what they had been waiting for. 

It’s vital to understand the relationship between Trump and his supporters, for once it’s understood, we can stop the useless exercises of analyzing the election loss and figuring out how to win them back next time.  The only way to win them is to offer them a leader more Trump-like than Trump. That is, more right wing, more simplistic, more dishonest, even more willing than Trump to tell them what they want to hear, knowing that it’s all a lie.  

But we can’t do that, can we, because we’re decent people.  So we have to accept that Trump supporters are lost to us.  There will be another Trump eager to take his place once his indulgent lifestyle claims him. So we have to go on without them. We have to go on trying to save our country and the planet in the face of their active opposition. Not an easy task, probably an impossible one, but what else is there but to try, and to mourn what has been lost.

There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.

Deplorables

I disagree with Hillary's statement that half of Trump's supporters are "deplorables", defined as people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or some combination of those.  Based on my life experience, 100% of them exhibit these traits in whole, or in part. And you can also throw "dumb as a box of rocks" into the mix.

Harsh? You have to actually live in Trump country and deal with his supporters on a daily basis to know how true it is.   I've interacted with angry white guys all my life, working class and professional, and I don't feel sorry for them a bit. To hell with the lot of them.  Pundits may say their anger is the result of frustration over the loss of the jobs that allowed their fathers to live a middle-class lifestyle without a college degree. And there's truth in that. But instead of blaming the ones responsible for their plight - Republicans - they take the easy way out and blame immigrants and minorities. And Democrats. Instead of embracing their most potent weapon for combating the Republican economic agenda of transferring all remaining wealth to the already rich - collective bargaining - they hoard guns and ammunition and pretend they will have to take on Democrats to preserve a way of life that is being taken away from them. When in reality, Democrats are the ones trying to save it for them.

Trump supporters would rather lose everything they have now, and everything their children might ever have, including a chance to go to college, healthcare, even  a habitable planet, in order not to have to face a reality in which they have common cause with poor and middle-class immigrants, minorities, and LGBT individuals in the fight against Republicans.  The only thing that matters to them is the fantasy that no matter how bad things get for them, they are still superior to those people. Trump encourages them to live in this fantasy world, and like drug addicts, they will destroy themselves and the world around them in order to keep that feeling.

So, racist, ignorant, selfish, delusional, and dumb as a box of rocks.  Eventually, their fantasy world will disintegrate and the ship of delusion they have constructed will capsize, but I'm afraid when that happens the basket of deplorables will be so large that we will all be dragged down with it.

There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.

Liberal Test

So what is a liberal?  Once in awhile a situation comes along that allows us to answer that question fairly definitively. Most recently it's the action taken by professional football player Colin Kaepernick, who remained seated during the pre-game playing of the national anthem to protest discrimination and violence against minorities in the US.

So, here's the test: Do you agree or disagree with his action? If you think the question is getting at, Yes, I  Agree = Liberal, or No, I Disagree = Conservative, it isn't that simple.  Here's the answer that defines what a liberal is: It doesn't matter.   As a liberal it doesn't matter if I agree with him or not. He has the right to engage in peaceful protest of a situation he sees as intolerable.  But going even further than recognizing his right to protest in this fashion, a liberal respects him for his action, and the words used to explain his action - respects him for putting his livelihood at risk. For in the macho, conservative world of pro football, his career has surely been jeopardized, regardless of his performance on the field.

I have my own feelings about what he did, and continues to do, but it doesn't matter, I support his right to do it. And that's the essence of being a liberal.  It's what  separates us from conservatives, whose value system is defined by what they believe is good and everything else is bad.  They cannot rise above themselves and their own beliefs in any debate about any issue. And the stronger their opinion, the more wrong is any other opinion. That's why the more they are in charge, the worse this country and the world becomes.

Many years ago I was attempting to have a rational conversation with a conservative coworker.  I knew the odds were against success, and I was right.  We were discussing the ACLU and he was expressing his disapproval by saying, "They do a lot of things I disagree  with." My response was that was the point.  If they weren't doing things we disagreed with, there would be no need for them.  He couldn't comprehend that.  I pointed out their defense of free speech by the Ku Klux Klan and American nazis as actions I disagreed with, but that free speech can't be only speech we agree with. To have a free society, we have to be willing to defend speech we don't agree with. I might as well have been speaking Klingon.

It's not easy being a liberal.  We have to defend not only our own liberty to think, speak, and act freely, but in order for us to be free, we have to defend the liberty of those who would gladly give our freedoms away: conservatives. They appear incapable of recognizing that the American flag means nothing if we aren't allowed to burn it. That the national anthem is just a song if we can't sit through it in protest. The concept of an underlying principal behind a symbol seems foreign to them.  The idea that the right of Muslims to practice their religion must be protected in order for Christians to enjoy the same right is nonsense to conservatives. So, as liberals we fight for ourselves, and for those who despise us and would happily jail us if they could.

That's what a liberal is.

There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.

Coal Country

Here is what the right-wing press would have us believe about Hillary's comments when asked why coal miners should vote for her:

"God only knows, because when I'm President, I'm going to put a lot of coal companies out of business and a lot of coal miners out of work," she said, while rubbing her hands together and smiling gleefully.

While in reality, according to Politifact, this is what she really said: 

"Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right.  Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let's reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities. So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right? And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on. So whether it's coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America.  We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the '90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history. Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.  So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work."

Which is the correct strategy to raise the coal-producing areas of the country out of the poverty that has afflicted them for generations. Contrast this tough, but honest, portrayal of the situation with Trump's pandering promises to bring back lost jobs by using his magical conservative powers to make coal an economically competitive source of energy again.  

Coal country is where I'm from.   My father was a coal miner and my mother a coal miner’s wife, which meant she worked longer hours than he did.  We were poor, as was everyone we knew. The wealth of the region traveled north with the coal trains, leaving behind poverty, ravaged mountains, polluted water, and poor health.  The men worked in the mines until they died or were disabled.  The women cooked, cleaned, tended garden, and cared for sick and dying husbands, parents, and children. 

My father died at the advanced age of 58, scarred and bent, an oxygen tank by his side and a plastic tube beneath his nose.  He never complained, though. None of them did.  This was their life.  Just as it had been the life of their parents and grandparents. So, when I saw them cheering for Donald Trump as he complained that, because of the fight to slow global warming, his favorite hair spray was not as effective as it used to be, I was sad, but not surprised.  This has been part of their lives, too: another rich guy from the big city promising a good life for them and their families, all the while planning to take everything they have now and everything they ever might have. 

There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.

Trade

Trade, especially global trade deals, have been in the news lately, and as is usual in the age of Twitter, the arguments, pro and con, are greatly oversimplified. Usually it's conservatives who make the black-white, good-bad arguments because evidently their brains can't deal with any amount of nuance, context, or complexity.  But on the issue of trade, it's the left that's making the  argument that trade agreements like NAFTA and the proposed TPPA result in reduced wages and lost jobs for American workers.  Donald Trump also says he believes this, but who knows what he truly believes, if anything. His head is like a gumball machine, with unrelated ideas bouncing around that occasionally pop out in random fashion during his stream of unconsciousness speeches. The truth about how trade affects labor is complicated.

Throughout history, trade among nations has been the most effective way to increase national wealth and raise personal income.  And it remains so today. Ideally, a poor nation sells it's natural resources and low tech goods and services to a rich nation, thereby generating income for its citizens, who then can afford to buy the rich country's high tech, value-added goods and services. Then, after a few decades of this arrangement, the poor nation's work force and infrastructure have improved to the point that it begins manufacturing value-added goods and services and selling them to poor nations, and since workers' wages have increased along with the level of education and training, the newly rich nation ceases to manufacture cheap goods and to sell it's natural resources to rich countries, instead opting to buy both from poor nations who use the revenue to buy expensive imports from rich nations and invest in educating their labor force and improving their infrastructure and on and on it goes.

Since the beginning of civilization, this cycle has played itself out, resulting in a world that is wealthier and more advanced than it otherwise would have been. I'm old enough to remember when every little cheap knick-knack and Cracker Jack prize had a tag that said Made in Japan. This was in the fifties and early sixties, when Japan's economy was still recovering from WWII.  Just a few decades later, cheap trinkets were no longer being made in Japan; instead their exports were cars, computers, and consumer electronics.  China took over from Japan as the manufacturer of cheap goods, but now as China advances, that role is shifting to Bangladesh, and in twenty years it will be some other emerging country.

But this ancient cycle doesn't always work as it should and, that's because human greed often intervenes to distort what should be a natural and reliable process. Greed shows up as rich countries acting as colonial powers exploiting the cheap labor and natural resources of poor countries so that there is no money for them to invest in worker education and infrastructure, so no economic advancement takes place.

In the richest and most advanced country, the distortion is taking another form.  Conservatives are refusing to allow America's wealth to be invested in education and infrastructure, choosing instead to keep it in the hands of a small percentage of the population. The result of this distortion of the natural economic cycle is that low-paying, low-skill jobs have been lost, but are not being replaced with high-wage, high-skill jobs making value-added goods, so the middle class is disappearing, leaving only the rich and the poor.

Labor organizations and liberals are not helping by rejecting trade treaties and lobbying for protectionism.  It makes no economic sense to try to keep low-wage jobs in this country; the goods produced will never be competitive on the global market, and the wages paid to Americans will not allow for anything beyond a subsistence level existence.

American workers should not make textiles; they should make the machines that make textiles, whle buying towels from Bangladesh.  We should make expensive, high-tech cars, and buy economy cars from Mexico. In the future, we should make magnetic transporters and buy smart phones from Argentina. This is the way the world advances.  But, because conservatives control so many corporations and have taken over so much of government, we are stuck in a world of low taxes and low wages, and are missing out on the world of high taxes and high wages. The difference is a world apart.

There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.

More murders

In my opinion, just about everything wrong with this country is the fault of conservatives, and, with the exception of natural disasters, they are behind almost every catastrophe that befalls us. And, actually, the many natural disasters that have their origins in global warning can also be laid at their feet. What a great country, and great world, we could have if it weren't for conservatives.

Take the current state of affairs between cops and black people. Recently, there have been far too many incidents of cops shooting and otherwise killing black people who are guilty either of nothing, or of relatively little. And, now it looks like black people are organizing and fighting back.

Why has our county come to such a sad state of affairs?  Conservatives, as usual.  For years, they, in close coordination with their political arm, the GOP, and lobbying arm, the NRA, have engaged in a strategy to turn America into the middle east. So that now it's gotten to the point that cops have to assume that everyone they approach, especially young males, are armed. Racism, and racial polarization don't help the situation, but that has been improving slowly, as more liberal policies of diversity and inclusion have been adopted to replace regressive conservative policies.

But no amount of dialogue and reconciliation can improve the situation much, not after conservatives have successfully turned the country into a collection of armed camps, and expanded their efforts by inflaming emotions in order to set the opposing sides permanently and irrevocably against each other.

Their strategy has succeeded to the degree that it seems like cops now see white men legally carrying guns as potential allies, while black men legally carrying guns are definite enemies.  And as the police increasingly become military organizations in response to an increasingly militarized populace, their tendency is to deal with enemies as the military does.

Conservative spokesmen remind me of bad magicians, constantly and clumsily trying to direct our attention to the threats from outside the country, in order to distract us from the carnage going on inside our country. The fact that so many of us fall for their act says as much about us as them.

There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.