The American Way

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When a bomb maker targeted prominent Democrats, the response from Rush Limbaugh, the fraud squad at Fox News, and many Republican officeholders was to claim it was a Democratic hoax designed to tarnish Trump’s party prior to the midterm elections. Of course, it was actually a Trump acolyte out to attack physically the same people his hero has attacked verbally.

No sooner was this zealot arrested than another unleashed gunfire in a synagogue because he had been led to believe Jews were behind the Democratic Party, an invasion from Central America, and the degradation of American life for unappreciated people like him. Trump’s solution was the same as that proposed after Parkland. Then it was arm the teachers. Now it is arm the rabbis.

Such events are no longer weird aberrations but the daily news of life in Trump’s America. The bomber and the gunman are no longer lone wolves. They find like-minded alternative reality communities online and encouragement from a president of the United States who traffics in hate speech, discrimination, racism, misogyny, anti-semitic tropes and the stoking of grievance.

His followers are told America is in decline. white men like them are victims of the “others,” not of self-inflicted wounds, personal inadequacy, or the lack of needed skills in a changing economy. After having to endure the horror of people seeking Black Power, asserting Gay Pride, claiming Sisterhood powerful, Trump has emboldened some to express not just white pride but white supremacy.

What could go wrong? Well, according to the FBI, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, domestic terrorism is on the rise. Hate crimes have targeted LGBT people, Muslims, and Hispanics. Anti-semitic threats are up 57% in the last year. Over 900 extremist groups have been identified around the country since Trump began campaigning. Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, White Nationalists, and on and on.

This dark underbelly of American life has been there forever, but the embrace of Trumpism by the Republican Party has brought it out into the open. When Trump announces he’s a Nationalist, David Duke celebrates it as an endorsement of white supremacy. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Majority Leader of the House, seeks to scare Republican voters to the polls by invoking the conspiracy of three Jewish money lenders — Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg.

Republicans now unashamedly embrace their identity as the party of racial discrimination, voter suppression, guns and grievance. Successful, middle class, suburban voters who once voted for fiscally conservative Republicans now increasingly find it a party in thrall to far right attitudes that feel alien and un-American.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. These are not new strains in American life, but for a time they were driven underground. It was not politically correct to express such bigotry clearly. but it always lurked. It was behind the Southern strategy of Nixon, the launching of the Reagan campaign with a state’s rights dog whistle near the place where Civil Rights workers were murdered, and so on.

The election of the first black president produced an opposition party prepared to obstruct democratic processes and norms for years, and to pander to bigots more blatantly than at any time since the Civil Rights era with its Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox, its firehoses, attack dogs, massive resistance, confederate flags and obstructionism.

In fact, this country has discriminated de jure and de facto since before its founding. Native Americans were the first victims of white supremacy, followed shortly by the importation of slaves. The Constitution enshrined racial discrimination. There have always been “others” to denigrate and demonize. New England Puritans hung Quakers and ran Baptists out of town. Ben Franklin lamented the pollution of Pennsylvania by German immigrants. The Germans hated the next wave of immigrants — the Scotch-Irish.

Protestants thought it was un-American to admit Catholics to the country, and Jews and Muslims have been subjected to waves of hate. Congress authored a Chinese Exclusion Act and approved the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Indians got consigned to reservations. There is a long history of closing the border and keeping the “other” in their place.

Ghettoes aren’t confined to the Old World. Nor are laws making anything other than heterosexual orientation a crime. And a man of my grandfather’s generation, born in the 1890s, had a vocabulary stocked with an ethnic slur for every neighbor on his street — Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Catholics. He was an ecumenical bigot.

Trump and the Republican Party that is remaking itself in his image are in a long, bitter, shameful tradition. Will Trumpism make America great again or disgraceful again? Is confining the labor pool to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants likely to be a successful 21st century strategy, or the road to ruin? More to the point, is Trump any more likely than King Canute to stop the tide by commanding it to stop? Will all the mad shooters and bombers bring back the good, old days, or simply join their fellow white supremacists on the ultimate dead end — death row?

America is a global power because it has attracted immigrants from around the world. After four hundred years as a melting pot, it is far too late to separate out the ingredients and keep some and reject others. Racial purity is a fiction, as even the neanderthal part of Trump ought to understand. There was a time when Trump’s (Drumpf) Germans and Scots, Pence’s (originally Bentz) German and Irish ancestors would have been persona non grata in English colonies. Do they want to turn back the clock far enough to self-deport? Probably not. Everyone believes their ancestors were the good immigrants. That’s the American Way.

Why Lie?

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Trump’s habitual resort to fiction is in overdrive as the midterms approach. His stump speeches are a virtual black mass with their litany of alleged conspiracies and corruption by his demonic enemies — evil, dishonest, disgusting, horrible Democrats.

It can hardly come as a surprise that some gullible loon has chosen to act to please Trump by sending explosive devices in the mail to the targets of his rhetorical attacks — the Obamas and Clintons, Joe Biden, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, George Soros, John Brennan, and counting.

Was Henry II surprised when he said,”Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest,” and four knights rode off to murder Thomas Becket?

The real question is why Trump finds it necessary to lie constantly, other than, as in the old parable of the Scorpion and the Frog, because it is in his nature. And the answer is that all his life lies have gotten him what he wants —money, power, respect, applause, votes.

Thanks to reporting by the New York Times, we now know in some detail that he learned at his father’s knee to profit from falsehoods. Their real estate empire was based on illegal discrimination, deals with unsavory characters, and tax evasion that permitted the transfer of almost half a billion dollars to Fred Trump’s heirs while dodging a 55% estate tax bill.

The truth would have landed Trump in legal trouble and made him look like a spoiled rich boy. Claiming to be a self-made billionaire was a useful fiction. He has exploited this false origin story for decades and denied the reality. Without his father around, Trump’s record is one of bankruptcies, business failures, cons and incompetence.

Similarly his political career has been based on lies, beginning wth birtherism, and boasts that he could work wonders if elected. But, in fact, he has failed to master the federal government or to create any new initiatives or innovations, unless you count the imaginary Space Force. He has concentrated on tearing down the work of others rather than building anything new.

His appeal has been to a disappointed and passed-by base of voters for whom the present has been unrewarding. He has promised them a return to an imaginary “good, old days” in which blue collar jobs paid well, foreign competition was not a problem, segregation and isolationism kept white men at the top of the pecking order, and women and minorities knew their place.

Lacking any real plan to deal with post-modern reality, he denies it. He is less a president than a rap artist or con artist, on tour spinning tales of grievance and revenge. He scares his credulous fans with bogeymen, thrills them with phony bravado about standing up to “enemies,” and tittilates them with dreams of wealth, power and victory.

So, beware an invasion by a caravan of Middle East terrorists and Hispanic drug gangs funded by Nazi collaborator George Soros.. Beware horrible, disgusting people like the fake news media and left wing liberals who want to take away your guns and your healthcare, raise your taxes and rig elections. Don’t trust Robert Mueller, a corrupt, dishonest man on a witch hunt who has conflicts of interest. Trust Trump.

Trump will protect you from the failing New York Times, the Jeff Bezos Washington Post and CNN. Putin and the Saudis didn’t meddle in his election or kill journalists, but they do spend a lot of at his hotels and buy stuff from the United States. He’ll give you a ten percent tax cut. He’ll make tremendous trade deals. He’s a billionaire. He knows best. Soon you’ll be tired of winning. Trump is your Reality TV friend. He’s not going to let angry, left-wing mobs take away your jobs.

Why does he lie? Because truth has never gotten him what he wants. So far, lying has worked just fine. Why stop?

Debugging The Planet

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In Middle School a friend of mine used to go into empty classrooms and write a message on the blackboard for the next class to discover: “The bugs will inherit the earth.” For a generation brought up on apocalyptic Cold War fears and science fiction, that was darkly amusing. But it turns out, he was an optimist.

The Washington Post recently reported that a team of international biologists studying European insect populations announced in 2014 that in the last 35 years invertebrate populations — bees, beetles, etc. — had declined forty-five percent. Last year, a similar study in Germany discovered an insect decline over the previous decade of seventy-six percent.

And now, the National Academy of Sciences has announced a similar decline in America. The biomass of invertebrates since 1976 here may be down seventy-five percent. Pesticides and emergent pathogens probably play some part, but around the world there is a consensus that climate change is also implicated. Tropical creatures, for instance, are adapted to a narrow climate range. Bugs suddenly subjected to a hotter climate may not be able to regulate their own body heat or lay eggs.

One might be inclined to say, who cares? What’s a bug ever done for me? The answer is, more than you know. Thirty-five percent of the world’s plant crops require bees, wasps and other pollinators to thrive. When pollinators die, the fruits, vegetables and other food stuffs we depend on are in trouble. Invertebrates also aerate he soil, recycle dead organic matter, and so on.

Insectivores, including many lizards and birds, feed on bugs, and now some lizard species have declined by 30 percent and some bird populations by 90 percent. So the death of arthropods, butterflies, bees, centipedes, spiders, grasshoppers, moths isn’t occurring in isolation.Next are those they feed, and up the food chain to animals we care about —like us.

There is a pattern here. Coral is dying and the reefs are incubators of sea life. Lightning bugs no longer illuminate the summer evenings. The seas are being denuded of fish. The great chain of being is losing one link after another. Something is killing these lifeforms, and the something is us and our creations.

In “The War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells posited a Martian invasion brought low by pathogens too tiny to see. If a species sits in pride and arrogance at the top of the food chain, it may seen inconceivable that the loss of a bug can lead in time to their starvation, but it is an all too familiar process.

Sooner or later we will discover that the ladder of life that we imagine we sit securely atop depends on all the rungs. Since we are systematically seeing through the one’s below us, as if we were the Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon, our perch is becoming precarious.

We are about to learn not just that pride goeth before a fall, but that in an interconnected web of existence no species is an island. The bell that tolls for the bees and beetles, the fish at sea and in the polluted lakes and rivers, the creatures of the filthy land and toxic air, tolls for you and me.

If it is possible to commit careless, feckless, oblivious suicide, our species is doing so. Getting and spending, we will end in a poverty of life where once abundance fed our every need. If there were to be survivors of the apocalypse we are crafting, they could easily chart the missteps leading to our demise. They’d find plenty of villains, foolish decisions, inflection points, but on a ruined planet devoid of life there will be no one to conduct the post mortem, and no one to write or read an obituary. The bugs will not inherit the earth. We have set in motion a process that will produce a planet with no heirs apparent.

It may not be too late to change. But hair-on-fire warnings have recently been sounded. Climate change is accelerating. There may be only a decade left in which to reverse the process. Huge changes in our behavior would be required. In response to this alarming news, did the subject become an burning issue in the midterm elections? Are leaders around the world racing to adapt? Are corporations that profit from the status quo rethinking their plans? Are consumers changing their lifestyles?

You know the answers. Alas, if the planet is a vast living computer, it is infected with a virus. It doesn’t need to be debugged. It needs to be dehumaned. Yet the hardest advice for our species to follow is the present imperative. We must change or die.