Deja Vu

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For many years the two political parties gave voters a choice at each election, but nothing lasts forever. It is not a good sign for democracy that one of those parties now seems intent on self-destruction. 

The Republicans entrusted a notorious grifter with zero political experience with the presidency once and is poised to do so again even though Trump faces one criminal prosecution after another and polls show that many Republican voters would abandon the GOP ship rather than vote for a convicted felon.

As if that weren’t enough, the party has made slavish fealty to their leader the price of admission. A failure to bow down to Trump is regarded as heresy as is any willingness to cooperate with Democrats to pass a bipartisan bill. As a result, not since the “do-nothing Congress” that Harry Truman complained of has there been a Congress with a worse record of legislation. 

They should have known better since the previous Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, was voted out of the leadership by Trumpian extremists for the sin of cooperating with Democrats. Another of his bomb-throwing acolytes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has recently proposed impeaching McCarthy’s replacement as speaker, Mike Johnson, for the same transgression — proposing to pass bipartisan legislation.

As David Kirkpatrick said in “Maga Mike,” a recent “Atlantic” article about the new Speaker of the House, “Trump is  both the dominant figure in the Republican Party and its greatest liability. Nobody else so commands the conservative base, and nobody else so effectively turns out Democrats.” 

Trump beat Hilary Clinton in 2016 by close to three million votes, but after four years as an unruly president the scales had fallen from many voters’ eyes and he lost to Biden by seven million votes and lost the electoral college by 306 to 232. He has recently begun to attack President Biden by asking voters if they are better off now than four years ago, but given his record he may not like the answer.

During his tenure Trump proposed buying Greenland, mismanaged the Covid crisis which he called kung flu though there was nothing funny about the death of a million Americans, a market selloff, and the tripling of the unemployment rate. He refused to heed the advice of medical experts, falsely claimed a malaria drug would cure the disease, and proposed penalizing news outlets if they had the audacity to report that he was misleading the public and endangering their health.

He has encouraged his MAGA party followers to ignore enemies foreign and domestic, has sided with extremists and insurrectionists at Charlottesville and at the U.S. Capitol when he encouraged them to help steal an election he had lost. He has also notoriously praised and pandered to malign tyrants whose unfettered power he clearly envies including Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, and Victor Orban.

He has also appointed judges of dubious probity and qualifications to the Supreme Court and lesser venues including Florida’s Cannon who panders to Trump and whose rulings have  repeatedly been rejected by appellate courts.

Trump also exploited his presidency to profit from public service including his latest ludicrous grifts, promoting the sale of gaudy Trump sneakers he would never wear and peddling a Trump Bible for $60 each that he would never read. This is fairly rich from a man who is not known to have ever attended services and when asked to name his favorite Bible verse or book was clueless. 

Of course, Trump’s feigning of faith is in keeping with his long history of peddling any lie that helps him make a buck, mislead his customers, or persuade followers to cast a vote in his favor. Despite his alleged wealth he is relying on suckers to send him campaign contributions which he uses to pay the many lawyers trying to keep him out of prison. 

But his magnum opus is having sold the big lie that he won the 2020 election which he falsely claims was stolen by Biden. Two-thirds of Republicans have fallen for this nonsense and can probably be counted on to vote for Trump again. Why not? He has already persuaded them his conviction of sexual assault and defamation against E. Jean Carroll, his payment of hush money to a porn star, and the other crimes for which he is being prosecuted are just disinformation spread by his enemies. Apparently P.T.Barnum was right. There’s a sucker born every minute.

Stuff

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American author, philosopher, and transcendentalist, coined a famous phrase in one of his poems — “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” His implied preference, like his neighbor Thoreau, was for an austere natural simplicity rather than for rampant materialism.

Still, we are all creatures of our own personal abode. There is no place like home in part because it contains and is given character by our stuff. These may include heirlooms we have inherited, familiar furniture that we find comfortable, landscapes that harbor years-worth of memories.

After a recent trip to faraway places, coming home was comforting in part because it was familiar, especially the stuff it contained. An upstairs room is a library, its walls covered with shelves that contain books organized by subject matter, genre, and author. There’s great comfort to be had from immediate access to fiction, poetry, history, fine arts, biographies accumulated over the years.

There’s also comfort to be had from a few odd artifacts or objets d’art. A farmer my mother knew when I was a child would occasionally plow up some surprising oddities in his fields and pass them on to the curious kid she’d told him would find such finds intriguing. And I did. Enough so that all these decades later I still have the molar of a mastodon that he gave me. A few other fossils are on display. He also sent me many Indian arrowheads in a cigar box that wound up in the garage and were stolen, presumably by some other neighborhood kids. A lesson to keep your stuff in a safe place.

Other stuff that warm’s the heart and gives home more character than it might otherwise possess hangs on the walls. Some are old fashioned sepia photos of ancestors long gone but not forgotten. There are also photos of the part of the world where I grew up. One of a steel mill and others of the river where we played that ran through our home town. 

A fondness for Japanese Ukiyo-e prints has resulted in several walls adorned with them which depict men crossing a bridge in the rain, fishermen throwing nets in the water with Mt. Fuji in the background, sailing ships, wading birds and the like. 

The walls also have reminders acquired in other far away places. Tara in Ireland, a painting of a mediterranean island complete with volcano, another of a Chinese tea plantation and its workers, a church in the English village of Rumsey where ancestors several centuries ago may have been married. There’s also a little collection of illustrations from stories found in children’s books by L. Frank Baum, Poe, Washington Irving et al. There’s also a painting of a yard sale by a woman I used to work with. 

None of these pictures are especially valuable, but together they are an organic part of our lives. They give character, nostalgia, and beauty to the place where we spend our days. It is stuff that might mean next to nothing to anyone else, but it captures moments from our past and help to keep the memories fresh. The value of such stuff should not be underestimated. 

Shameless

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Politics at its worst can be a ruthless, cutthroat, and corrupting competition. This isn’t news. A long line of wits and cynics were perfectly aware of it. Ambrose Bierce called politics “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.” H.L. Mencken said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the public alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Machiavelli said “politics have no relation to morals.” And Cal Thomas said “one of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician’s objective. Election and power are.”

The Republican Party is now controlled by Donald Trump who behaves as a dictatorial ruler and has made a habit or treating the truth with contempt. Over four years as president, the tally of his lies reached a total of 30,573. He has now put his unqualified relatives and cronies in charge of the RNC (Republican National Committee) and demonstrated a shameless willingness to use his position to do anything necessary to gain and maintain power, up to and including the undermining of democratic government itself. 

Trump raises money, ostensibly for the purpose of campaigning for office, but the money often ends up in his pockets or is used to defray the cost of fines for his criminal acts levied by various courts. His agenda is self-serving and in many cases threatens the well-being of the public he allegedly seeks to serve.  

Often his proposed plans reflect his contempt for governmental rules, orderly processes, and democracy itself. He is envious of autocrats like Putin who can do as they please, are not constrained by law and order, and are contemptuous of democracy. He opposes the protective alliance of NATO and has encourage Putin to feel free to attack its members. 

He also proposes the elimination of the safety net of social security and medicare that Americans his age rely on. He hopes to see to it that the government provides less for those in need and to slash taxes and provide other perks for the monied elite. And he has also made it clear that he has no compunction about stealing an election or rigging votes if it would benefit him.

Our democracy’s history, at its best, has been an attempt to create a safe haven for its citizens, to enable economic success for the majority, and to provide what’s needed for a peaceful and orderly life. Trump prefers disorder and chaos, a government that does less, neglects those in need, and further enriches the donor class. 

As long ago as ancient Greece, Plato warned of the danger of entrusting the state to such a creature when he said: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” 

An even more dire warning of the dangers of political fecklessness was expressed by Dante who said: “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” This sentiment probably inspired another famous quote worth remembering. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 

Hence, vote as if your life depends on it.