Trump Fatigue

Fewer people are reading my blog these days.  And I am signing fewer online petitions, and sending more political appeals to trash without opening them.  After all, how many $3 donations can one person make?

We have been overwhelmed since the day Donald Trump paid people to watch him ride down an escalator and begin to spew his bigotry and ignorance with an aim to becoming president.  We laughed at his ignorance, but we were also appalled, and like a car crash, the media couldn't stop filming and we couldn't take our eyes off him.

I can't watch him speak anymore.  I now assume it is totally unnecessary and a waste of whatever hours I have left of my life.  I safely assume that there will be far too much coverage of what he says, hours and hours of rerunning the same quotes and then analyzing those bon mots -- whose thoughts David Brooks has notably said amount to "six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar."  It is beyond disturbing that overnight we went from a president of strong values and intelligence as well as a great orator to a president with no moral compass, who is unable to face the nation without a teleprompter, whose words can be so obviously categorized as being ghost written or spewing from his own small and petty mind.  A president who chooses to communicate with the world through the safety of 140 characters.  A president who for-gods-sake "tweets."

His stupid phrases echo throughout our lives.  He faces world leaders who are intelligent and thoughtful with the same inane compliments, and shouts the same lame and angry promises -- and threats -- at his rallies.  A president who lives for his rallies, because his staunch supporters haven't noticed that it is not Mexico that will pay for his wall, but they themselves.

I was happy to hear that he is using the funds from his 2020 campaign to pay for his lawyers, lawyers who appear to be as stupid as he is, or maybe are just taking his money while not putting a lot of energy into a losing battle.  On the other hand, we seem to have tired of getting angry at the theft of America by the Trump family business; for the moment we are shocked that his cabinet members are following his lead by literally and figuratively flying first class on America's dime.  Eventually there will be a new horror uncovered and the excesses will continue.  Meanwhile, the ironically named "Department of Justice" and the excitable Attorney General Jefferson Sessions goes about the business of dismantling our individual rights.  Too many distractions, 24/7.

And then there is Congress.  We are tired of having to yell at republicans for their slimy attempts to placate their wealthy donors with bills that will take away the safety nets of most Americans.  They keep saying that their truly ugly bills to repeal Obamacare are really a need to fill campaign promises; what has become clear is that those promises were to their wealthy donors who are threatening to throw them out of office if they don't repeal.  Which explains why town halls and ground level approval ratings have been ignored.

And I am exhausted whenever I hear a Democrat or someone in the media refer to the latest planned heist as "tax reform."  There is nothing reformative about tearing down our social institutions in order to add more billions to the billionaire class.  Maybe we need to put David Brooks on the job to find a more fitting phrase, one that would alert Americans to what is really behind the tax cut plan that has Mick Mulvaney and Paul Ryan salivating.

I worry that we are so tired of fighting this unfair fight that we have turned back to the day-to-day things that really matter:  our families and our homes.  We made time to march, and to call out legislators at town halls, but we have jobs to go to.  And this is what Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham count on.  This is why they continue to try to pass the noxious bill that would destroy health care for millions.  Donald Trump is not a brilliant thinker, but he has wealth and a lifetime of being a successful con artist.  He knows that government can be manipulated, and he has a cabinet that has spent their careers doing it with great success.

Will we be able to bring forth the energy and outrage we had in January to fill our statehouses and Congress with people who represent us and not the wealthy and powerful?  Will we be able to spread the word to those who barely have time to care for their children and get to work on time?  Will we get out to vote and be able to convince those even more exhausted than we are to do the same?

I call it PTTD:  Post Traumatic Trump Disorder.  The trauma was the election, but the effects are the aftershocks that never stop.  Trump fatigue, Trump anxiety.  We feel discouraged; we don't believe we can win against the tsunami of hate and corruption.

But we have won an amazing number of victories.  We have won local elections across the country in once red districts.  We have stopped, and stopped again, the repeal of Obamacare.  We have turned the tide on the repeal of DACA and the Muslim ban.  We have, by our numbers of peaceful counter-protesters, halted the march of the white supremacists.

We are allowed our exhaustion.  We need our time with our families and we need our time to laugh as well as to cry.  We need to keep talking to each other.

We can't make all the phone calls or fight all the battles, but when we feel that spark of outrage we can use it to fight, and we can support those who are fighting other battles.  If we do this, we can reach inside and find the energy to drain the swamp -- no, the sewer -- that Donald Trump has brought to our government.  More important, we can clean out the Congress that since the election of Barack Obama has eroded the integrity of the legislature and the trust of the American people.  It took a dirty Congress to create the atmosphere that spewed forth a Donald Trump, but we the people can clean it out.  We have done it before.

Yes, our country has survived ugly times before.  We will do it again.  I believe that Trump fatigue is a treatable disease.

George W. Bush didn't last forever.  Even Hitler didn't last forever.  And our democracy is strong, with millions fighting all in our own way.  When we come back from this, we will come back stronger still. 

Success: Democrats' Best-Kept Secret

Once, not too long ago, CNN and MSNBC carried news about Russia, all day every day.  Then hurricane season hit, and now we have Russia and Harvey, Russia and Irma, Russia and Maria.  And every now and then we hear about confederate general wannabe Jefferson Sessions and the human rights he is working to rid us of, and the republican Congress' umpteenth bill proposing to take health care away from Americans, and Kim Jong Un's latest missile test with subsequent threats and insults by our bully-in-chief.

Discouraging as that may be, there has been good news.  It may be the best kept secret in America but for Donald Trump's taxes, but there have been special elections across the country, and it looks like our protests and demonstrations are paying off.  If only someone would tell the Democratic Party.

Back in the spring, we actually had a special election that made national news.  In a solidly republican district in Georgia, apparently where IQ's are higher than most, Hillary had lost to Trump by only one percent.  Encouraged by that fact, a young man named Jon Ossoff garnered so much excitement that people who had once been afraid to put out lawn signs for Democrats were now campaigning door-to-door.  When republicans got wind of this excitement -- and while they suck at governing, republicans are really, really good at sniffing out the political winds -- they went all in against Ossoff.  Oppo research went into high gear, ads that were so nasty Mitch McConnell could only look on in envy.  Trump did a robocall telling republican voters to protect their right to not have Democrats be part of the electoral process in Georgia's 6th.

And despite Karen Handel's relative unpopularity, she won.  But despite all the dirty attacks against Ossoff in a staunchly republican district, he only lost by four percent.

And even more significant, in a race in South Carolina that went pretty much under the radar, Archie Parnell lost to his republican opponent by just about the same margin.  Here!  In South Carolina!  With little acknowledgement or help from the national party.

Well, if the situation had been reversed and these were republican losses in Democratic districts, the republican party would be celebrating a huge win.  We would have heard for days, maybe weeks, about what an upset had just occurred.  But what happened?  Democrats wondered if Ossoff was too young.  They worried that they hadn't done enough in SC's 5th.  In a masterly irony-free comment, the ever invisible state hero, Jim Clyburn, said,

"I don’t think we had the campaign that was designed to win," said Clyburn. "If we had gotten the resources, I think we would have won."

Ya think?

A week or so ago, I got an email from Ryan Grim who writes at The Intercept.  It had some amazing news...

A Democrat stunned in a special election in Oklahoma last night. In November, Trump won this state legislative district by 11 points, and Jacob Rosecrants, the Democratic candidate, lost his election by 20 points. Last night, Rosecrants -- the very same guy -- ran again in the special, and upset his opponnent by 20. I'll do the math for you: that's a 40-point swing.

It's the third special election Democrats have flipped in Oklahoma (!) since November -- and in a fourth, in May, they lost a race by two points in a district that Trump had carried by 50. (That’s not a typo; it was a 48-point swing.)

And in New Hampshire, in a 29-point swing, Democrats flipped another district. (There are like five gazillion members of the New Hampshire legislature, so I wasn’t paying close attention to that one.)

In the race I was watching closest, in Mississippi, there were reports of people -- many students -- showing up to the polls and being told they were no longer registered. The Democrat, Kathryn Rehner, finished second, but forced a runoff election in October. If you know anybody who lives in Hattiesburg, Miss., forward them this email and tell them to get in touch with me if they were turned away at the polls. (And tell them to sign up while they're at it.)

El-Yateem, the democratic socialist running for city council in New York, lost by 7 points.

Apparently, the Democratic Party has decided to keep the good news under their hats.  Now, some of you who do more serious news watching than I do may have heard of these victories somewhere, but please keep in mind that most voters just don't go beyond the headlines.  And these victories were not headlines.

Be aware that these are state and local elections, not national.  What is important about this is what we have been learning since November:  that we need to fight on the state and local level; that when we change the fight on the local level, it moves up to the national level.  Keep in mind that the abhorrent attack on redistricting could only have happened in states where republicans controlled the drawing of the maps.  And 2020 will be the election that determines who will draw the next census districts.

If the Democratic Party celebrated the narrow losses in once-republican districts as well as all those local victories, eventually the voters who don't have time to read the fine print will start to recognize that something important is going on, and the republican party is on the wrong side of it.

And believe me, it will convey to national elections, which is something republicans have known all along, or at least since the Kochs, Art Pope and ALEC recognized it and started throwing their money at local elections.

Our SC state party has begun to send out informative emails about upcoming candidates as well as those who are already in the Statehouse fighting for us.  If you aren't on their email list, go to their website and sign up.  I've been very excited to see them move away from their "Give $3" fund-raising emails to actually informing us about issues and individuals.

On the other hand, the national party continues to hide out, which I suppose is preferable to all that public hand-wringing.  My philosophy has become throw all my support and enthusiasm behind all those great candidates, and don't expect much from the party.  They may figure it out someday, but the excitement comes before the money.

There are a couple of national campaigns I've recently heard about.

In Texas, besides having a really great name, Beto O'Rourke has decided to take on the evil Ted Cruz.  A friend alerted me to him via a link describing what is becoming a famous road trip.  O'Rourke took a congressional seat away from a long-time republican incumbent, and looks like he could actually do it again against Cruz.  He has a strong personality and a strong progressive message.  What he doesn't have is Ted Cruz' wealthy donors.

Two things about that.  Social media has been proving to be more powerful than big bucks.  And Jon Ossoff proved that when the message is right, we will find the money.

And maybe it is better these days to not be controlled by a twitchy party.  I read an article a few weeks ago talking about all the great people who are stepping up to run for office in 2018.  The article talked about how they made the pilgrimage to the national party office to ask for support, which the party made clear was contingent upon their fund-raising ability.

Pardon my French, but fuck that.

While they obsess about why Democratic voters have stopped responding to the deluge of fund-raising emails, they seem to have no clue as to why Democratic voters have stopped going out to vote.  So, candidates first.  First, last and in the middle. Candidates with a message that puts the 99 percent ahead of the one percent should not have to make raising funds for the big dogs part of all the hard work they are having to do to be heard.

Candidates need to be fearless.  They need to know that the closer they come to being heard, the dirtier their opponents will stoop.  They need to incorporate that into their campaign, as in, "The reason my opponent's party is attacking me is because he knows I can win.  They know I am going to fight for you, and that you know I am going to fight for you.  Their special interests have lots more money than me, and they will do anything to keep us from talking about the issues.  I am not going to let that happen."

And our candidates need to resist the party message of cautiousness.  That is how republicans divide us.  They have used abortion and gay rights to throw shade on the real issues of individual rights and income disparity.  In January, Indivisible led the way to a movement in which our unity gave us power.  We have let that unity work for us in our fight for health care and against the Muslim ban, for transgender and reproductive rights, for DACA and voting rights and environmental rights.  We can get the candidates who reflect that unity elected.  We just have to show up and be heard.

We can help by letting everyone via email, on Facebook, Twitter and all those other social media outlets that I haven't yet gotten to, know right now about those great people who are considering running.  We need to show up at their debates and rallies, and we need to get them in the news on local TV and the newspaper.

I would like to end by talking about the other potential candidate, one who has me pretty excited.

Annabelle Robertson is an employment discrimination attorney.  She is also founder of Indivisible South Carolina.  Today she is contemplating a 2018 run against US House Representative Joe Wilson.  You may recall that he made it to national fame by yelling "You lie!" during Barack Obama's speech to Congress in 2009.  What was less well-known is that it was Wilson who was lying, and that he later apologized to Obama for his crude outburst.  He may have been wrong, and he may have apologized, but he has done lots of fund-raising on that undignified act.  Not only did those two words reflect a new low in respect for the office of the president, but once again made South Carolina a laughingstock on the national stage.

Robertson represents everything the Democratic Party should stand for, as reflected in Indivisible.  And the icing on the cake is that she is a really smart woman.  So we need to a) encourage her to run, b) support her any and every way we can, c) get the word out.

The naysayers may be out there, but you know what I say to them.

Religion and Me

Apparently, I’ve recently offended a friend by making a smartass crack about the hypocrisy of the Christians running the government.  I admit, I should have put quotation marks around “Christian,” but assumed the irony was obvious.  Of course, I wasn’t referring to all those good, moral Christians out there.  But in fact, I do have an anti-religion bias, and sometimes it gets away from me.  Maybe it is because I get tired of the self-importance, the way my own atheism is considered to be an anomaly, and the belief that if you don't believe in God you have no moral compass.  Maybe the NRA's success at jamming Jesus into the 2nd Amendment has put me over the edge.  Or the fabrication that goes into taking holy books as fact instead of historical documents, while rejecting the parts they disagree with -- and then breaking into factions to argue about which interpretation is true.

I don’t know much about my father’s history; he didn’t share much and he wasn’t easy to talk to.  But I do know that in Italy, as he was being held as a prisoner of war, a Catholic priest came to his cell to try to convince him that he should fight for Mussolini.  For him, so the story goes, that was the end of his belief in religion, if not in God.  At my First Communion or maybe my Confirmation, he was taking a home movie as the monsignor of the church came down the stairs at the procession at the end.  He held out the ring and advanced toward my father, at which time the movie goes haywire as he turns around and tears out of there.

As a child, I tended to be an overachiever.  Not very popular, I went from wanting to be a nun, to wanting to be a saint.  And then, around age 16, when I fell in love with Paul McCartney and said a failed prayer to God that Paul would find me and fall in love with me, I lost my belief, completely.  And that, folks, is something I have never, ever shared.  Not quite the dramatic come-to-atheism moment as my father, but there it is.

Catholicism for me was having to go to church every Sunday.  But somewhere in my life, probably in elementary school, I was taught the Golden Rule, which seems to me today something we could all get back to.  Back in the 50’s in Rhode Island, as far as morality was concerned, they didn’t talk about “Christianity,” but of the “Judeo-Christian ethic.”  This despite the fact that there weren’t too many Jews in my neighborhood.  We only knew who they were because they were absent on the Jewish holidays.  But the message was that both those religions conveyed the ethical rules by which we should all live.  Still, it seemed to me to be the Golden Rule in a different wrapping paper.

I have toyed with belief in God a few times since then, but I keep coming back to how silly all the religions are.  The rules beyond the Golden one are silly; the ideas about afterlife are silly.  And yet, if that is what it takes to help a person deal with mortality, I respect that.  I am proud of the fact that, as a psychologist many years ago, I had a number of clients that were Jehovah's Witness, referred by one another.  They never preached their religion to me, and I in turn respected it as an integral part of their lives.

A few years ago, my daughter told me with some trepidation that when she married she had promised to raise their children in her husband's Catholic faith.  I was surprised that she thought that I would object.  Likewise, my son's agnosticism has been a thorn in the side of his girlfriend's mom.  Unnecessary man-made miseries.  Everyone trying to define -- for everyone else -- what life is all about.

My own belief is that mortality is what this is all about:  what motivates us, what forges our perceptions and our emotions.  What makes us make rules about how we live.

Up until my husband died just three years ago, I tortured myself over the thought of my mortality.  I couldn’t imagine being here and then just not.  I am an older parent, and when my kids were born and through their young lives I did the math thing:  when they are this age, I will be that age.  It drove me crazy.

When Stephan died, I did some soul-searching, some reading and some therapy.  I ended up finding peace in the greater picture of the universe, the one in which we humans are not the center.  I began to feel some of the excitement that Neil deGrasse Tyson conveys.  Look at the sky and the stars, we are minute immeasurable particles of the universe, those particles are here today and somewhere else entirely tomorrow.  Our minds haven’t come anywhere near the ability to understand the complexities of time and the vastness of space.  But, man, isn’t it great that we have the consciousness and the intellect to try?!  And aren't each of those discoveries miraculous?

It is a shame that religion constrains the potential we have to be excited by our existence, to make the most of our time here.  It is really shameful that in this country that they keep telling me is great, our leaders and too many of our fellow citizens have rejected science that was accepted when I was a teenager in the last century.  Politicians have warped religious belief to twist it into a fight to make women less free, to defend their racist ideologies, to lead us to war, to frighten people into accepting jealous and fearful rules that hurt us.  They make rules that in the end hurt those who accept them as well as those who are attacked by them.

Personally, I find talk of religion, at best, boring.  I have no need to understand different theologies; to my mind, they are rationalizations of a pretense that some people are more important than others, that some have the right rules and the rest do not.  That some will reap reward and some won’t.  When I am with people who begin to talk about religion, I space out.  And let me be clear about this:  I am not an intellectual, I don’t like ideas that go off into the stratosphere.  Philosophy too often seems to be an auto-erotic exercise.  I am just as bored hearing justifications for atheism.  I would much rather talk about science than atheology.  Science is fun.  Science is us.

The recent eclipse brought to light the idiotic hypocrisy of the people currently running our country, and those who support them.  There you had the idiot-in-chief and the idiot-general along with all those other anti-science freaks donning their special glasses at the exact time that scientists predicted that the moon would block the sun.

Granted, the idiot-in-chief had to be persuaded to wear the glasses,

but still.  No one at the White House was saying that they wouldn’t go blind because God wouldn’t let them.

The same is true for medicine.  Those jackasses that bring the bottom fraction of a percent of physicians to testify against abortion would never go to the bottom of the barrel for cancer treatment.  They want the best physicians, and they want the best treatment by consensus.  And damn, they may pray for that tumor to go away, but they do it while they are getting surgery and chemo.  I guarantee, when they choose their doc, they aren't as concerned with religious belief as with medical expertise.

This week we are watching the double whammy of Harvey followed by Irma.  We are trying to determine the best course of action by following the reports of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),  an organization for which the current administration will be cutting funding.  Sadly, there are those in the path of Irma who are saying God will take care of them, using God to rationalize the fact that they don’t want to leave their homes, and possibly putting rescuers at risk.  At least come out from behind God and take the responsibility for your own stupid choices.  Even the God-fearing Florida Governor Rick Scott  isn’t telling you to listen to God to decide whether to evacuate.

I don’t do the math thing where I wonder where I will be in so many years anymore.  My mother died at 63, and for years I thought I would not outlive her, and now I am 66.  I am healthy today, and instead of being afraid of dying, I try to look at today, to appreciate my good friends, and I try to contribute through my writing to make days and lives a little better for someone, somewhere.  I don’t take offense as often as I once did; I don’t carry the anger with me that my father carried all his life and that he passed on to his three daughters.  There just isn’t time, and in the end it is just going to drain the pleasure that could be here each day.

It saddens me to see how difficult we all make our lives.  How we choose our leaders for stupid or selfish reasons.  How we categorize and judge each other.  Sure, I do it.  I’m human.  But in the back of my mind is the awareness that I am a gazillion particles that come and go in the universe, and maybe beyond the universe.  That we all wrestle with our mortality, and that in the end, one day our consciousness leaves us and we die.  And that is fine.

My sarcasm and flippancy helps me cope with my anger and frustration at those who use religion to manipulate people, to block progress, to rein in our potential rather than celebrate it.  So, to those who are offended by my flippant attitude toward religion, I hope that at some point you will be able to understand that when we are all said and done, my attitude doesn’t matter at all who you have chosen to be.

  

The Ironic Cherry Reads about Steve Bannon...

...so you don't have to

The Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon,

Donald Trump, and the Storming

of the Presidency

by Joshua Green

Reading Devil's Bargain was a dirty job.  In light of what has happened, how our worst fears have come true, the details of the meeting of these two evil minds -- one stupidly evil and the other brilliantly so -- was like reading about Hitler and World War II if it had had a different ending.  So many people hurt, with more devastation to come.

But it is also important information.  We need to understand just who these people are and how this fouling of American democracy was allowed to happen in order to fight it.  Because 2018 is here.

Steve Bannon may look like something the cat dragged in, but this is part of his look, a cultivated don't-give-a-damn appearance.  He reminds me of a mirror-image Antonin Scalia, in that both came from immigrant backgrounds and were raised in strict Catholic families, with strong education in classics and history.  Where Scalia's father was a professor in romance languages and made education a priority, Bannon grew up in a blue collar family and neighborhood; he was scrappy and a fighter, taking on the rich prep school kids.  Scalia clung to law-and-order by virtue of a right-wing philosophy and the pursuit of law.  Bannon went right-wing into the Virginia Military Institute, followed by of all things a degree at Harvard Business School and a career at Goldman Sachs, followed by of all things Hollywood and the movie industry, using his Goldman Sach education to invest and take over failing businesses.  Through all their pursuits, both worked their asses off, determined never to quit, to work their way to the top.

Scalia's path took him towards the most extreme radical Catholic beliefs, Bannon's education nurtured his political paranoia, hardening nationalist philosophies that he had held since his youth.  Business speculation and internet coincided when Bannon's interests discovered the gaming universe -- and the realization that more than money, there were networks of gamers and message-board inhabitants looking for a challenge... and a way to blow up the status quo.

There is a huge web of denizens of the "alt-right," those who have been motivated by their paranoia to network, some with great success.  Breitbart would naturally lead to Bannon, which would inevitably lead to Trump.

At this point, we all know way too much about Donald Trump.  A man of privilege, who like Bannon, set his sights high.  He  is not intelligent, but his insecurity has given him a fine-honed instinct for who has power that he can use, and who can be bullied and manipulated.  Trump always seeking to be the news, Bannon knowing how to get that done.  Both enjoying the heady feeling of controlling the message, and both seeking yet greater power.

The similarities aren't as interesting as the differences.  Bannon fought his way up, had to prove himself at every turn.  Trump was handed his fortune and his career.  Bannon had to be smart to make it where Trump only had to be a con artist.  To be a con artist Trump had to be front and center; Bannon grew his power in the shadows.  A perfect fit.

If anyone believes that letting Bannon go was Trump's idea, and that Bannon and Trump are no longer a thing, they have truly underestimated Bannon's power over Trump.  The White House may have a lot of ears, but there are still lots of terrifying lines of communication open to a president who doesn't give a shit about the national security he bleated about on the campaign trail.  We know Trump can't keep his tiny fingers off Twitter, neither can he stay off the phone.  He needs constant reassurance, and that is what has made him vulnerable.  But Bannon is the real go-to guy when Trump needs that reassurance, and Bannon isn't going to let those calls leak.

And Bannon's goal continues to be to blow up civilization, to bring about chaos while claiming anarchy is libertarianism.  With Trump as his mouthpiece, no doubt he has spent hours gleefully rubbing his hands together, as the rest of the country runs headfirst into each other trying to make sense out of what could be impending apocalypse.  Steve Bannon is not going to allow Trump to stray too far from his influence, and Donald Trump needs Bannon's conviction to continue to batter the nation in order to remain king.

The grown-ups in the room may continue to work to contain Trump's madness and narcissism, but Steve Bannon is the one the angry toddler goes to for fun and games when the grown-ups aren't around.