We are witnessing one of the greatest instances of mass insanity in history. If we assume a certain number of wealthy people and racists voted for Trump out of perceived self-interest, knowing full well that Trump is a pathological liar, that leaves roughly 30-40% of the American electorate whom we can consider to be literally delusional, wacko, bonkers, nut cases.
Failure to convict Trump in the Senate and/or try him in a court of law would be a disaster, confirmation that our system of government, our Constitution and our way of life are a total failure. National suicide.
So if our legitimately elected Senators choose to acquit the former president, we will dissent. We will protest. We will perhaps say the conviction was stolen. What we will not do is storm the Capitol armed with weapons. What we will not do is call for physical harm to our legitimately elected Senators. What we will not do is attempt to destroy our democracy.
We will apply Stacey Abrams grassroots efforts and VOTE THEM OUT. This is how our democratic republic works. Starting now we resist R's efforts at voter suppression and gerrymandering. MI will now have a citizen commission redrawing district lines instead of the legislature. We worked hard starting in 2016 to get a bill passed in2018 to do this. Join a local Demoratic Club, work to find candidates to sponser at the local level, tell others in a respectful manner why you vote Democratic. It takes the village to govern itself. Become involved.
Sally, thank you for bringing Stacey Abrams into the conversation. She is my leadership role model, and I look to working with and for Fair Fight, Indivisible, Vote Forward, and Vote Save America on the 2022 midterm elections. Voting issues are my chosen activist focus, because I believe every issue I care about comes down to policy and who is elected to represent me from the local to the national level. ❤️🤍💙
Thank you. I would like to see Stacy Abrams take FairFight national, to get every state to pass a "tri-partisan" Redistricting Commission like Michigan's. Let's continue our donations to this truly democratic cause!
Gerrymandering is major a threat but it takes time. Many Repug-controlled state legislatures are trying to enact more oppressive voter-suppression measures right now. But as the estimable Ms Abrams showed in GA (twice), Dems can win a "Fair Fight" by expanding registration and turnout. (She actually did it a third time in 2018, but Brian Kemp dropped 300,000+ voters off the rolls. If they had voted her margin of victory would have been substantial.)
Better than nothing but I still strongly believe that trump should be held accountable in some way for his incitement (and other wrongs) or this will be perpetuated.
Btw, Stuart, I live in VT which votes mostly Democrat despite being very rural with lots of struggling farmers. We do have white supremacy groups, 200 of whom inculding a state trooper took buses to the Capitol. I know, "'tis a puzzlement..."
Hi Sally, I too live in VT. I was so concerned about our republican Governor Scott replacing Sen Leahy with a republican if he became too ill to serve. Looks like he is back in the saddle. Wishing him, and all of us, good health while we tackle...EVERYTHING before us.
Gov. Scott has said he'd replace Leahy and Sanders with Dems if they were incapacitated, but an election would have to happen within 6 months, not the end of the term of office.
Glad to hear about Leahy, Penelope. I remember many moons ago seeing a newly elected Leahy at subcommittee hearings. So funny, he's among the very few I do remember from those days!
There's something about the abundance of old Volvo' and Saab's on the roads. I always love coming to Vermont. I often used to "drop down" to Burlington; buying textiles, towels and sheets at the factory outlets.
I truly hope all the lawsuits being discussed for the past couple of years come to fruition. Bleed him dry of money, opportunities, a voice. Sure I would love to see him be convicted so that he can never hold office again and so that he is not privy to a pension, SS protection, or a travel allowance. But that's not going to happen. My prediction is that the moment the senate votes not to convict he will announce his presidential run for 2024 and we'll all be thrown back into his sh*t show again.
I would give you a "like" but I do not want that last sentence to be manifested ever! Shooosh! Visualize him in a small room surrounded by four walls like any other criminal most deserving.
And if we begin burning effigies in this country, it should represent all seditionists that who are Nazis, KKK, alt right (Reich), white supremacists, and looney tune Q'ers. Include, of course, the current trumplicans who signed on to overthrowing our fair election, use slave-era gerrymandering and are suppressing votes. In essence, anti-democracy pinheads with guns and bombs.
Gerrymandering: I read a letter to Judge Santelle by Samuel Isscharoff a few days ago (Racial Gerrymandering in a Complex World: A Reply to Judge
Sentelle, Catholic University Law Review, 1996) that the racial argument against gerrymandering... "From Nazi Germany to South African apartheid-and, by implication to the Jim Crow South as well-the defining feature of these odious forms of oppression always has been: a nasty, brutish power grab." I agree with his ideas that redistricting is racist, oppressive and with computers is odious. Tuskegee, Alabama has one district that has 32 sides!!!
Issacharoff states that white supremacists' officials goals in gerrymandering are twofold:
1. "Cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).
Isn't it time for a cool change for our citizens of color? Have they and our indigenous people paid a very high price? Is it not their turn for us to right the wrongs of our colonial ancestors? Do they not deserve for all of us to stand up and fight for them to be equal? To have equal opportunities in voting, jobs, and feeling safe driving or walking down the street in our country and not profiled and bullied by police and peers?
Let's end our 200+ year old American Apartheids. We can be much better than our colonial history. (And that history must be taught to our people, in honesty).
I think in case of acquittal I may begin to look elsewhere in the world for a better example of democracy, one where voting is a birthright and not subject to gerrymandering or any other sort of party-specific shenanigans, where every vote carries equal weight regardless of geographical provenance, where mere acreage and cows cannot vote, only people, where 200-year-old racist institutions no longer condition our politics, where basic facts and statistics prevail over lies, half-truths and scary, crazy conspiracy theories and where all necessary public services - including internet platforms - are subject to regulation consistent with the constitution and laws of said democracy.
Perhaps we need to look to all of the social democracies, such as Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, etc. There are so many! Wonderful examples of the melding of democracy with regulated capitalism.
I agree. Democratic socialism works and brings greater social fairness - and happiness if certain indexes are accurate - than our current crony capitalism.
I think we need to stay away from the ‘socialism’ until we have defined it in American terminology. I like “democratic capitalism” and then explain the difference between democracy and crony capitalism (crony capitalism). What do you think of that?
74 million voters and 88 million Twitter followers are all drinking the Kool-Aid. And then there’s Fox News, and Newsmax, and OAN and the millions upon millions of people who watch that swill. If you order the right-wing news cable package of channels, they might as well label it the Kool-Aid Package.
Look to who funds all of those propaganda machines. We need to corral around the head of the snakes (all the oligarchs --Mercers, Kochs, Murdoch, etc.) and squeeze them. They will only understand mass revolution against them--stop the flow of money to them, reveal what they do everyday and their crazy conspiracies and propaganda.
We, as a world need to figure out how to handle the propaganda of the internet. I have no idea, but maybe we need a second internet that is for REALITY and TRUTH and let this old one die out. (Spoken from total ignorance, but all options during a potential brainstorm should be entertained!).
You are dead on target. That's where the Good Guys have finally turned to common sense. Nowadays organizations with integrity are playing by the Republican playbook and attacking the Republicans where it really hurts, their funding. If I didn't have my father, I would not understand this side of Republicans. I am far too principled. I have walked away from very large amounts of money several times, because it was the best choice. My father values money above nearly all else, family being the only obvious exception. He would never say these words, but a person's net worth and their assets is his #1 standard. The people he admires the most are the (mostly men) who are wealthy in the material sense.
The only thing I have seen get under McConnell's skin is the label "Moscow Mitch." He must be ashamed of taking money from Russia. He also doesn't want that news to become public knowledge, obviously, it wouldn't sit well with the older Republican generation of voters who see Russia as the enemy dating back to the Cold War.
As for the "propaganda of the internet," I could not agree more that there is a serious problem. Even the employees in the big companies like FB and Tw have been pressuring their own management because of the serious social damage of their business policy. The Twitter owner guy was whining about cutting off Tя☭mp, what an idiot. Does this dork have the slightest clue how Putin's propaganda machine is affecting the U.S. democracy by using commercials to encourage voters to drink Kool-Aid?
Not sure it's the "greatest" (i.e. worst) incident of mass insanity, but it ranks in that class. I suspect the Rwandan genocide of 1994 was worse, for instance. But it certainly takes the cake in the United States.
Please forgive my hyperbole. Perhaps I should have said that recent events are the most extreme example in US history of nearly half of the electorate supporting and voting for (twice!) a presidential candidate who is petty, unhinged, evil, uninformed, self-centered, unpatriotic and stupid, though his feral instincts and ability to sniff out the weak points in others are well developed.
I am not a psychologist, so I should perhaps not attribute insanity to people I don't know personally, but selfish, thoughtless, irresponsible, racist and demagogic are attributes I think I know when I encounter them.
And yes, the Rwandan genocide was far worse than 4 years of Trump, but it could have been prevented - or at least limited - by certain former colonial and other western powers who failed to intervene. I am not sure that the USA is necessarily immune from similar genocidal tendencies, though I am quite sure no one will intervene to save us if we decide to go down that road.
A great deal of Trump's support was also certain people's innate, egocentric approach to politics and the society in which they "exist". There are three rules that dominate their conscious...
"I'm all right, Jack" is the first rule, "devil take the hindmost" the second and
"i don't want to pay for it" is the third
Lots of "good samartans" passing on the other side of the road!
Psychosis? Insanity? I'm not qualified to offer those judgments. But may I suggest what we witnessing is at its base, a crisis of spirit. In Buddhist thought, there are three 'poisons' which give rise to all suffering. Roughly translated from the Sanskrit: Greed, hate, and delusion. We see them in full bloom now coming from people without a spiritual anchor, conscious connection to the cosmos nor reverence for their fellow humans. Hopi legend has it that we are on the cusp of the coming of the 'Fifth World'. Hang on it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Absolutely! We are certainly heading for that open door now and before we restore ourselves individually and collectively to some important level of harmony...a lot of things are going to change.
Thank you D and J, it is indeed frightening. The "perceived self-interest" segment likely is larger still. It's less likely that so many people are clinically insane. We all are prone to dismissing aberration as insanity, but Trumpsky's bitter-enders, especially the insurrectionists, are capable of distinguishing between right and wrong. No one gets off the hook due to mental incompetence.
The Rwanda genocide is not well understood in America. Cast as a mass hysteria or hallucination, in fact there was much central planning and direction, not mere spontaneous mayhem, though some did occur. The genocidaires manipulated longstanding (but not primordial) ethnic tensions in time of war, but Hutus didn't murder Tutsis simply "because they've always hated and killed each other." German and Belgian colonial policies helped set the stage for tragedy, so its history is long but not immemorial, and can be understood in rational terms.
It is meaningful that Holocaust museums, including in Paris, Warsaw, and Los Angeles, have exhibits and events to raise awareness about the Rwanda Genocide.
We clearly cannot learn enough about how to prevent such atrocities.
When talking of Rwanda and the genocide you can't leave Burundi out of the equation or for that matter the eastern regions of the Congo. The relationship between the Tutsi and Hutu tribe in all three areas has been one of rivalry and domination ...and even slavery...for centuries; it is far from the first time they have massacred each other. However what is particularly offensive and indeed sickening, over and above the horror of the killings, this time is that all those who could have stopped the affaire...the French Military presence and powers in the area amongst others... did nothing to prevent or stop it while it was apparently clear that it was coming.
The pullout of French forces from southern Rwanda as genocide commenced was especially outrageous, though it's been defended as fulfilling bilateral treaty obligations. A few years after Rwanda's 1994 genocide, Pres Clinton apologized, describing his policy as a failed attempt at intervention. No. It was a successful attempt at noninternvention. Rwandans didn't have valuable resources, simply didn't matter enough to US decisionmakers. A Frontline documentary (from the late 1990s?) has Clinton's speech and much else, including the inimitable Will Lyman.
I am not informed about the circumstances of these genocides, but I will say this: the more time passes since Clinton was president, the more I mistrust him and the more naïve I think we were in selecting him. With the passage of time, he looks more and more like a sicko and a self-serving opportunist. Someday after he’s gone the definitive full story of William Jefferson Clinton will come out, like the fact that he f***ked everything that moved, including likely a small army of underage girls in Epstein’s universe. Has anyone else seen that photograph of Bill Clinton wearing a blue women’s dress, a large framed item that was in Epstein’s New York residence? Sometimes when I see something of this nature, it looks fun and playful. But when Bill does it, for some reason I see depths of depravity that shock me. And I’m not easily shocked that way, certainly not by cross dressing. Something is way off.
It's a toss-up between the King of Belgium, the President of France and the Kaiser Wilhelm....but Rwanda and Burundi i think have 2 of the very few boundaries in Africa that actually respect ancient kingdom divisions. The role of "kings" is still very important in Africa especially with societal and property issues. I came across this a great deal in West Africa.
I started looking at population statistics for Germany in the 30s. Then I remembered that Germany controlled a healthy portion of Europe. Now there is an example of mass insanity out of control, starting to take over a whole continent.
David Herrick makes excellent points but you seem more sharply aware than most people of the painful reality that collective psychosis is a far greater problem than the madness of individuals; the exception being when a deluded deluder casts his net over an entire population beset by deep underlying mind poisons of fear, hatred and resentment and gives voice to their diseased silence.
Nietzsche understood this reality: “Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”
"... How much do we really know about the vaults and caverns which lie somewhere under the structure of a great nation—about these psychic catacombs in which all our concealed desires, our fearful dreams and evil spirits, our vices and our forgotten and unexpiated sins, have been buried for generations? In healthy times, these emerge as the spectres in our dreams. ... But suppose, now, that all of these things generally kept buried in our subconscious were to push their way to the surface, as in the blood-cleansing function of a boil? Suppose that this underworld now and again liberated by Satan bursts forth, and the evil spirits escape the Pandora's box?"
I can see that, Roland, that's why I sent it to you.
People would do well to read books like Reck-Malleczewen's diary of the Hitler years. But there's a problem: even hatred for great evil taints our minds. But we're not saints, we're not the kind of pure-hearted warriors who fight without hatred, to do what must be done. And there's the rub: hatred's a tenacious weed, it harms many a harvest. It will infect the unborn.
It's one thing to feel fear, to rage, another to become enslaved by anger and hatred, fear our taskmaster. Then we're drifting towards the paranoid Niagara that swept away so many on January 6th.
There's a dose of paranoia in almost all of us, we're forever blaming others for everything we don't like, forever looking outside of ourselves, finding fault with someone else. A great dodge, a great compensation, finding fault, judging others as a means of expressing our own meanness while avoiding personal responsibility.
Hence the injunction:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
Beautifully stated. As in physical discrimination — so in religious discrimination. The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” can be found in every great religious expression. If there is any proof of a “soul” to be had — those universal statements of a higher good should be that proof. In our collective hearts, we can recognize right from wrong.
"National suicide," "delusional." Yes, this is it and well said. Unfortunately. Republicans' continued support of former president Trump mirrors their support during his tenure, all for one reason: So they can get re-elected, damn the truth. Any argument against term limits is now mute. If politicians are so willing to crawl up the ars* of Trump for self-preservation, men and women of conscience don't stand a chance.
Call your Republican legislators and tell them they WON'T get reelected if they support Trump, that the party is splitting and you and your fellow Republicans (not a Republican? You can be one for 10 minutes) are going with the party's traditional Lincoln values.
Reading this this morning reminds me of what I went to sleep watching from the US Capitol. The respect being shown to Office Brian Sicknick is what's right about America. The fact that this is happening shows how we need to repair so much in America. And having President Biden and the First Lady show up, and show up quietly, shows we have competent, caring and decent leadership back in the White House. January 6 is a date that we must remember as a day that terror struck this country -- and it was instigated by the then-still-President of the United States. Let us learn. Let us place a higher value on facts and truth. Let no government employee like Ms. Conway ever try to say there was something truthful in alternative facts. Brian Sicknick died for his country. A country the President takes the oath of office to protect.
Good morning Sharon...Like you, I want to remember January 6 as a day when we saw the threat of domestic terrorism become real ending in murder and deaths. It's a day in which we saw the then-President of the United States equate patriots with being people who were White Supremacists and those wearing t-shirts embracing the awfulness of Nazi Germany. And i hope Donald Trump is convicted in his Senate Impeachment Trial and that he is indicted for his criminality that he has displayed throughout his adult life. I truly don't think there is an individual who i have hated in my lifetime as much as him, yet, I also think we need to be careful about the suggestion above as we need all of us to stand above his actions and point to a better way. Let the Majorie Greens, the Tommy Tubervilles and the Matt Gaetzs be the awful ones and we will remain the ones who our next generations can be proud of.
What we need is for the Senators to hold trump responsible and vote their conscience not their political future. I hope all their constituents are calling them.
The Capitol Hill switchboard allows you to connect to anyone, not just your legislators. Wait for option 3 to get a live operator and just say their name and state. These days, it will be a chance to leave a message. Mitch’s mailbox is always full.
As children we would build a cloth and straw figure of Guido each Nov 5 and burn him on the big local, communal bonfire celebrating with fireworks. mr Faukes after all was part of a Catholic plot to blow up the Protestant Houses of Parliament during a "sitting".Guess what who's effigy will go on the burning inferno on Jan 6th celebrations? How are the kids going to copy the orange " foxtail"?
I think burning him in effigy is more likely to turn him into even more of a counter-culture hero. I'd rather he just goes down in history as a complete failure, financial, political, and psychological.
Maybe for a little while, but I think in time he'll be seen as a bad joke. A dangerously bad joke. I really like the idea of burning him in effigy. I'll mark my calendar.
Kellyanne Conway ought to be remembered as the leader of the United States' Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, just as Joseph Goebbels is remembered for being the Nazi head of the German ministry in 1932. She worked hard to rock the American public off the foundation of objective facts and truth and she should be accorded much credit for the success of the Regime in promoting self-serving lies.
Always pretty obvious whenever Trump opened his mouth, as to whether he was using his own words (minimalist and repetitive vocabulary), or those of his speech “manipulators” (grandiose and for him almost unpronounceable).
The Terror struck me way back on Nov. 3, 2016. King of Q was so obviously a baby Hitler in speeches and rallies and propaganda. But Jan. 6, 2021 was the full Krystallnacht of the republican seditionist coup on our country. I do not see it tamed unless we convict ALL those seditionists to show others there are consequences to commit felonies and attempted murders against our government and our elected officials. This behavior MUST end. They only understand strongarms. We need to show force via legal means, harsh and loud.
Here I am naive again, should seditionists lose their country after trying to overthrow it? Let them be immigrant refugees, scale walls somewhere looking for political asylum from the USA. See which countries will take them. That ex-military and law enforcement people participated in this coup is so appalling and says something about teaching people how to strategize and kill. How do we de-program our warriors when they return to us? And what the hell is wrong with SOME of our police? White supremacists are attracted to positions of power via their fears. And we are witnessing them being trigger-happy terrorists versus Officers of the Peace? Our challenges are many, thank goodness there are more of us than them. But we have so much work to do....
Definitely. We all remember where we were when we heard, how we reacted, how our teachers, classmates, and families reacted. I am ashamed to admit that in my tiny, developing 3rd grade mind, I thought it was a good thing that my parents would be happy about and I actually cheered! Then we were called in from recess and my Catholic classmates (who outnumbered the rest of us) and my teacher were all crying. We listened to a tearful announcement over the intercom by our principal and were sent home early. When I got home, my anti-Catholic, anti-Democrat, anti-Kennedy parents were also crying. That was a real wake-up moment for me - that my parents' vociferous disagreement with the religious and political views of our President did not include a wish for him to die. The honestly deeply-felt anguish they expressed as we later watched the funeral procession with brave young John-John holding his mother's hand moved me and confused me at the same time. However, by the time Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated so soon after that dark November, I had learned that religion and politics were not worth killing for. My parents and I disagreed over so many aspects of religion and politics, but I never doubted their essential decentness toward their compatriots.
1. If Donald Trump had not assembled a mob on January sixth, worked them into a frenzy with lies about a stolen election snd sent them to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal”, Officer Brian D. Sicknick would still be alive. He was only 42 years old. It makes me heartsick. Donald Trump has Officer Sicknick’s blood on his hands.
2. Donald Trump was still President when the House of Representatives impeached him. Mitch McConnell refused to call the Senate back into session and have the trial in the Senate until after the Biden inauguration. Then he voted to investigate whether it was constitutional to impeach a past president.
Rest in Peace Officer Bryan Sicknick. Pray for Justice.
I always return to "Vengence is mine. Sayeth the Lord" Everyone will eventually be judged for their lives, fairly by one who sees the heart. It may not happen in their lifetime but eternity is a long long time. I do the best I can here on earth to see justice done but I rest in the knowledge that they will be judged eventually.
I was particularly interested this morning to see the NYT's detailed vote map showing with "horrifying" clarity, with my apologies for the generalization, of the Urban-Rural divide. Does living in the country drive people crazy so they buy Trump's lies and accept the strict and varying limits he would impose on freedom? Is city living so "bad" that they have no choice but to vote for the party that will "save" them? Is it a question of population density? Is it a question of availability of public services? Is it about the number of ancestors you can trace since the first "got of the boat".....and in what condition you were placed on that boat? Is it strictly about money....the very rich and the very poor "whites" in the rural areas and everyone else of all colours and means in the subdivision/tenement/condiminium?
The cities are growing and the country population is declining. Is it enough to say, time will solve the problem? Do we want an empty countryside? Do we want people to have the power or for wealth to decide? Hell No! Time to get to the root of the problem and not just to assuage the symptomes of what is driving us apart and to stop Trump or his ilk happening again.
Trump speaks for let’s call it 40% of the country. He is not the problem. The 40% of the US is the problem. He is the mouthpiece that speaks for them, he is their elected leader.
It was here on HCR that I really began to get a handle on this issue. Old social order versus new social order. Red vs. Blue (GOP vs. people who vote Dem). Whites first, males first, straights first adherents and believers, and anarchist-types, the people like Waco and Ruby Ridge and Malheur NWR. BTW “malheur” is French for “illness,” as in “malaise.”
There is a very strong libertarian and anarchist ethic in the US, particularly in the West. Think TV westerns and all that. In the southeast, it’s the history of slavery. You would think that eventually people would grow out of the belief of whites first and blacks second, but confederate flags and monuments on the license plates and state flags and at NASCAR (until 2020 and George Floyd) indicate otherwise. Don’t let the overt changes fool you: just because the symbols now banned at NASCAR are being removed from some or all of those listed items, that doesn’t mean the consciousness is changing for that 40% of the population. .
I’m still at work with an iPhone. Let’s get you a better response when I get home. I’m just warming up.
My father is one. I have been speaking to him for 20 straight years. Almost all the truck drivers I work with fall in that group. Let’s face it, most of them are dummies in someway shape or form. A lot of them are white men who have inferiority complex is, maybe because of their lot in life, self-esteem issues, they’re not blessed with the type of gifts that you and I have become accustomed to. Gifts of access to privileges. Being educated, being articulate, and being part of the world community is a very very different Weltanschauung than struggling to gain money, privilege, resources, and status and standing. When you’re at the bottom of the heap, your male privilege and your white privilege might be the only thing you have, and you might be hanging onto it with everything you’ve got. Having somebody try to rip that away from you might be like losing two of your only advantages left in the world. You and I, Stuart, we have gifts. We have blessings. We have smarts. Be grateful. Be grateful that we don’t have to clutch on to social privileges that are going the way of the Dodo bird, becoming extinct.
You’d have to be a genius to figure it out from NYT. Just drop yourself anywhere in America and start talking to white men with blue-collar jobs, or do a little bit of hunting, it won’t take much, in any snooty country club or retirement home. Republicans galore. Welcome to America, the divided country.
Yes Susan, there's an entire large conversation here today about City/Rural. And someone else posted exactly as you did, about Republicans in blue cities. My response was (something like), "That would be my dad. We live in a blue county in California. He is member of a country club and now lives in a snooty Republican retirement home."
I work in a law office and in a building that is 95% accountants, architects and attorneys in a downtown capital city and most everyone is a die hard Republican. Not a Drumpf fan but always vote red. After Biden won they stopped paying attention to the news. No one on my floor watched the inauguration, no one watched the riots, no one watches the impeachment news, no one knows who Eugene Goodman is, no one knows who MTG is or what she has been putting out in the world. There is a real head in the sand issue going on with choosing your own news and it does not just come from rural areas, or the uneducated or the poor or the "forgotten". It's really wild. When I tried to pull a couple co-workers over to my computer screen when I was watching the insurrection on 1/6 AS IT HAPPENED they both walked away and one said "everyone is crazy" and the other said"I'm with him, they are crazy on both sides". I can't stop shaking my head.
Wow. Thank you Kimberley for sharing this perspective.
I had the odd thought, "Hmm, this must be how the rumor started that Antifa is responsible for Jan. 6. The people in denial of the truth, like these people in Kimberley's world, would just rather believe what they believe, that Trump supporters are innocent of any culpability."
The people you are describing are like my dad. Clueless. Seeing only what they want to see, not what's really there. These are the same people sending money to Tя☭mp which he then uses to feather his own nest.
We have super powers they don’t have. Even my dad. My dad is a millionaire. He got very lucky. But he grew up barely educated in Germany, at the bottom of his class in a farming community outside Munich. He emigrated to America, learned English in the US Army, and managed to succeed financially, and to have a family that’s doing well as well, even though he isn’t all that sharp. He is a diehard Republican, one of the ones with money. And he still believes completely in the old social order trust me. Like I said, self-esteem issues, inferiority complex. In his case, growing up in that era of Germany of course had an influence as well, very strong and lasting influence. I don’t think the social programming is quite as severe in America but it’s definitely there, take a look at the impact MeToo and George Floyd is having. Btw I’m rooting for BLM to get the Peace prize.
We're not responsible for our parents, just fortunate to have them and love them if we can somtimes despite themselves! Mine was dead to me as of the age of 7. He died unlamented by anyone in 2012.
Similar father and brothers story. Deep insecurities. Disappointments. Fears. And all Republicans who voted for Trump. Rooting for BLM to receive Nobel Peace Prize, too. ❤️🤍💙
Oh, wow, father *and* brothers. Fortunately my sisters are both non-Republicans. I don't know what I would do. I would barely speak with them. This year I realized how grateful I am that this Tя☭mp moment-in-history didn't estrange me from my sisters.
Sadly, the case for them may be bolstered by yet another outrageous police murder which could occur any time. It is inevitable, and if next summer has any resemblance to 2020, the Committee won't need archived video to recall why Black Lives Matter.
Just the other day in a neighboring city, police handcuffed and pepper sprayed a 9 year old girl. She was in an extremely agitated state but even young nurses in psychiatric EDs are trained to take a person down safely without harming them.
Awesome! So many deserving, so few Peace Prizes to go around. Navalny belongs in the Kremlin. He deserves that Peace Prize now, and later when he gets there, he deserves it again.
Let's not forget the Native Americans in this. Their genocide involved North, East, South and West of America and their continued treatment as subserviant, inconvenient groups with only secondary rights too......secondary to the rights of the moneymen that is!
Trust me, I do not forget. I also do not forget Chinese and other Asians. In California particularly a sordid history of lynchings and cold-blooded murders of all of the above.
Yes. When they finished building the railways they had the nerve to want to join the goldrush! Heaven forbid...had to put a stop to such outrageous behaviour!
The Gold Rush came first, creating the need for railways and other necessary infrastructure. Most of the first Chinese immigrants came seeking success on what they called "Gold Mountain." When it didn't (literally) pan out, often due to exclusion and intimidation, they shifted into other sectors of the economy, including railway construction, domestic labor ( i.e. laundry), and the service sector (restaurants and retail).
I'm afraid i sinned against the historical timeline on purpose as it made for a funnier reponse and underlined a very basic attitude towards the Chinese community...denying their right to independant existence.
Racism didn't stop them. There is still a town named Chinese Camp. In my gold rush town, lineages of Chinese people with ancestry that goes back to the Gold Rush, how else would a Chinese-American find this rural town? The freeway built through this town in the 1960s with Eisenhower Interstate Highway funds was routed right through the Chinese section of town. Imagine that. Dodger Stadium wiped out Chavez Ravine neighborhood, my wife and her sister grew up in L.A. and they have never forgotten. Latin neighborhood eliminated, everyone displaced. Notice they didn't build Dodger Stadium in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air or even Brentwood or Anaheim.
I recommend "Wind River" from 2017, starring Jeremy Renner. It's a feature film but has great depth and insight on the ongoing ordeal of Native American women. Not for the faint of heart.
I saw it when it as soon as it came out. Horrific but not new to me. It was equally revealing for the despair and drugs of her 2 brothers and the dignity of the father sitting in the garden. There have been many similar real-life tragedies...for one concerning inner British Columbia with girls leaving the reserve to go to Vancouver and never to be seen again.
Roland: 20+ yrs ago, Idaho. My good friend Fr. Bill Wassmuth (RiP) headed up an inter-faith, anti- hate, anti-white supremacist movement. A late night phone call from a friend got him out of bed and into his living room, saving him from the bomb that seconds later blew up his bedroom ! You are right. Long histories.
It is often hard not to take on the characteristics of our parents and the environment we grew up in. I became a democrat because my parents, grandparents ... were democrats. Some people walk away from their upbringing, but I feel that most do not. We may see their leanings as terrible and uneducated but they do not. They have a hard time understanding why they should change when they are "right."
Trump was much more than a symptom. He was recruited by nefarious forces domestic and abroad, unleashed his exploitative talents in a new playground of power, and from the start of his campaign, exponentially and terrorizingly exacerbated the problem of the great American experiment in democracy.
A good one....I was being far too serious there and it got in the way of a well merited laugh. I was thinking of the start to end point of the rook's move not the intermediary moves....oblique too! I hope we are not heading for a simple "castling" in the next few weeks§
My chess fanatic husband applauds you! Yes, the rook is actually a very powerful piece. BTW, I hope you have watched "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix! It is fabulous.
Donald John Tя☭mp. imagine a small swastika in place of "n" in "John." The origin of John is likely Johann and likely from his grand[parents, both ancestors born in Kallstadt, Germany, what was then Bavaria, the place Hitler came to power after WWI when the German democracy was fresh and new.
I think the cause can 100% be traced to the fact that rural media bandwidths are cheap and easy for right wing propaganda groups to buy up, to the savvy way those media groups have targeted and exploited the natural cultural differences and pride in a certain rural identity, and the cynical way those groups have taken advantage of the end of the Fairness Doctrine to increasingly entrench the rural narrative in pride and anger and disinformation. We have a real mess to clean up.
Great question, and for years I felt that there's been a missed opportunity here. It's not just the bandwidth that's the issue, though. NPR broadcasts to a pretty comprehensive area, but it's seen by a lot of folks as elitist. Even more than investing in bandwidth, you have to invest in the kind of programming that caters to and celebrates certain cultural differences. Finding talent who can do that from a liberal perspective without pandering sounds to me like a daunting task and a real investment.
Leftish media exists in this liberal comfort zone where we all know how to talk to each other about our favorite novels and arthouse movies and the latest pan-Asian recipe we tried. The leftish media CEOs and CFOs looked at dollar signs and found it obvious that catering to urban and suburban folks pays the biggest dividends. Bandwidth costs money. Programming costs more.
Right wing activists, on the other hand, played a long game: a game where you invest in influence, not in advertising dividends, and you take your time and hone your message and you engage folks in a conversation until you know what works. They have decades of practice at this.
I live in a rural area in a Bible belt state. Beautiful and yet exhausting. I work in the city. The difference between rural and city mentality is striking. IMO, it seems like the lack of cross pollination of experiencing different people and cultures makes a huge impact. Rural people have a very limited range and scope - work, church, family, grocery store, and Wal-Mart/Target. There is a limited - if any - appreciation of the arts. I'm not trying to stereotype or be elitist but to show the limited range of experiences. Anyone or thing outside of this circle is viewed with suspicion. Anyone or thing that is viewed as a threat to this circle brings them together. The lack of life experiences, problem-solving that comes from those experiences, and desire to consider another viewpoint is a toxic combination. Anyone that is viewed as a 'savior' to save them from the threat creates a blind following. Hence, the extreme version we saw on 1/6..
This is not to say that this does not exist in cities. It most definitely does. But the limited experiences in a rural area create a larger population that is susceptible to this mentality.
I have lived in large cities (Austin, Houston, Memphis), medium sized cities (Oxford, New Braunfels, Fayetteville, Shreveport) and small towns (Hosston, Lockhart) and rural areas (Canyon Lake.) In all of these, I found clusters of people who fit your description above: individuals who chose to cling together because of their limited life experiences and their "sameness." Those of us who traveled, read, had interest in the world and its varied peoples were not welcome in those clusters. We were always the "outsiders" and perceived as being weird or different. So, we too would create our own "clusters" of like minded people. It was not so much that we considered ourselves "elite," but that we wanted to associate with people with whom we could talk, enjoy entertainment (as in the arts) and share stories and experiences. Most of those folks remain in my world even to this day, from Hawaii, to DC, to UK, to Spain and even Dubais. I am not an anthropologist, but among those of us here, perhaps there are some who understand this apparent tendency of people to seek out and stay with others with whom they share values and interests. In the small town in which I now live, diversity exists but the only shared experience that appears to cross cultural divides is politics. Just my two cents!
Great comment. My younger sister is a year younger than me. Same small rural town, same friends, same employment circles, same everything her entire life. She has a memory about everyone’s lives and happenings like a steel trap. And even with this limited life experience and view she is one of the happiest and kindest persons I know. She has a robust social life. Completely unaware of almost everything that I fret over re the world and life in the US. We have nothing in common but recipes and wine.
I left that small town at 17 and never to return. Im 56 now. I have college degrees, have traveled the world for 20 years, very full and intense professional life, news junkie and love my politics and causes. Have met and maintained relationships with really neat people all over the world. Yet more and more all I see around me are people like my sister. I feel alone and unable to relate outside of interest blogging.
Many days I’d give anything to be just like her. To swap my life for hers. Sometimes ignorance is bliss and the more you know the more difficult life is.
Connecting with compatible people is even harder during the pandemic. I suggest joining mailing lists for seminar series, book, worship or support groups, and thematic discussions. Libraries offer many and can direct us to more. As Poirot would say, "stimulate the little grey cells."
Your sister is not ignorant. Her life is not easier, better or more/less satisfying than yours. She is choosing to focus her energies on the people, things and places she can affect. Her soul purpose is different than yours. Do what nourishes you as she does what nourishes her.
Tricia, You named the reason for your discontent, feeling 'alone', and TPJ made some thoughtful suggestions. I do not know why your are lonely, but I will add a few ideas to TPJ's. Sometimes it is a bit depressing to transition from a very active life to one more quiet and, perhaps, to missing the 'old self.' . It could be enjoyable to fish around for companionship with people in your age group go in the opposite direction towards younger folks. Life will be easier when the pandemic releases it hold. Classes on subjects you would like to pursue, book clubs on line and group tours are options. Another possibly is talking with a counselor or social worker. Personal conversations with a knowledgeable professional may provide you with more insight; Zoom can make such conversations possible at this difficult time. This socio-political forum is also a good place to exercise you political spirit. Onward!
Thanks, Fern. I appreciate the time you took to list out things that may be of help. I'm a mental health therapist and suggest much of the same for my clients.
I guess the point I was trying to make, yet obviously wasn't too clear about, is that I find myself seeing more and more people like I described in my sister and less and less like myself. In the workplace, in society. It can feel lonely at times to feel different than the majority, but also I wanted to convey the thought that progressive experiences and thinking can take some people into territory that can be psychologically and emotionally draining. I've seen this with many of my clients and know how it feels myself. The last 3 sentences of my comment above was the true meaning behind my post. And the fact that oftentimes we view people who are so unlike ourselves as something wrong or pathological or that don't mirror what our nations stands for. Some are, of course, but some just want to live, and seem to enjoy, a more simple existence.
It is a benefit to me for us to have this exchange. About three months ago I realized how politically far apart a friend and I are. I don't know if the Trump years brought that to fore or if our differences grew with our different interpretations of who did what. Our differences were bred in the bone. I became involved in social issues at a young age, and he grew up in a narrow minded, right-wing family. He is a very good person and quite attentive to his family, friends and clients. My accommodation is to focus on his humane instincts and to handle differences bit by bit, not in big chunks. I have also missed lively and challenging discussions with other progressives. Two like-minded good friends live far away, but we email, text and have long telephone conversations every week or two. While I sometimes feel as you do, I am content with my political philosophy. Reading and participation also keep the feeling of isolation at bay. This is a frightening time for the country. That is all the more reason to seek out the people we can talk with.
I agree that there can be a contentment and simplicity to routine and the sameness of your family, friends, social life, neighborhood, job...while it may lack variety and "excitement" I am envious of some who can relax into their life and just be.
Exactly our thought and our hesitancy in settling permanently in Provence. In the village cafés you tend to find much of the clan and the "foreigners" (those not born in the village) tend to form more discrete, "invitation only" groups out of sight of the crowds.
Completely agree. The rural folks - Ole Yankees - I encountered in my youth were cynical, stubborn, backward viewing, and proudly faithful to the old ways/beliefs of their ancestors. They world only hard enough to get by. Their view of the world is binary: us and them; have's and have not's. This is their way. It is interesting that 45 is their demigod because he could not care less about them. They are pawns in his shell game of power grabbing. Nothing more. He doesn't love them even in the slightest.
I once worked with a young woman who had not traveled outside her home state of New Hampshire. She was quiet, hard working, fiercely loyal and honest. In New England it's actually challenging not to set foot into another state since they are all so small. Going on a "mountain" hike, at the peak you can usuals see at least 3 states in a 360° view.
They are stuck in the last century so it's not surprising they are rebelling against time and the 21st century.
Kim, who put that chip on your shoulder about New Englanders? You've just stereotyped an entire population of people - that's part of what has gotten us into this mess in the first place - based how knowing how many people for how long??? I was born in Maine and have lived in NH almost my entire 59 years. Heather is from Maine and it's astonishing to me that you would insult and lump together "Ole Yankees" in this way on the author's page. Your comment that we only work hard enough to get by would be laughable if it weren't so completely opposite the truth. Clearly you never spent time on a lobster boat or a dairy farm or a construction site or with a tradesperson or a public health nurse, just for starters. Why are you saying we're stuck in the last century? Vermont gave us Bernie, NH (which by the way went for Biden and Hilary in 2016) gave us Dean Kamen, inventor of, among other things, the autosyringe and insulin pump, Massachusetts gave us the ACA; must I go on? You knew one person who had never traveled outside the state of NH and you make a huge leap about all of us? So what she never left? The elitist attitude about travel in this thread is very revealing.
But my main concern about your post is that it bears a striking resemblence to things I've read about "them" and the "other" in posts from Trumpeters.
Thank you Ben. I spent my youth in New England (ME/NH/MA/CT/NY) and left in my early twenties. Had exposure to lots of different people of all stripes and backgrounds. Which was my point in the thread. Traveling broadens scope and temperance. So does reading, education, volunteering, being a parent and grandparent. My work of the past 30 years has been in the construction industry and there are lots of red maga hats to be seen. My political hat is blue.
It would be interesting to compare the propensity to travel of the 2 populations. On the one hand, Travel broadens the mind and leads to understanding and acceptance of the new or the different. On the other, absence might lead to seeing the new or different as a threat damaging the certainties of close physical and clan ties which ensure their "safety" .
Here in Provence, the "ordinary" people often move about more than in Paris as they have to find opportunity and services where the can; the city dweller gets lazy as the are always a little "spoon fed" . They fly off all over the place too as do some Parisiens but probably from Barcelona rather than Paris; it's closer and cheaper all round.
This is an interesting discussion but I believe one element that has been left out is financial ability to travel. Yes, I agree that in more insular, small communities people tend to feel more comfortable with people like themselves but is that a symptom of a closed mind or a symptom of inability to access other points of view because travel and attending cultural events is out of reach for them due to location and also financial status.
I believe that leaving out the financial factor is somewhat elitist. It is also true that travel in different places teaches one to be less ethnocentric. I was fortunate enough to live in Argentina as an ex pat for about a year. When exposed to other cultures you learn that our way of life is not necessarily the "right" way of life. Other cultures our not quaint or frightening. They are just different. I think my experience made me much more open to differing life styles. I think the fact that I lived with different people and became truly bilingual made me the person I am today.
It is also true that while living there, although I did have many friends of different cultures, I did spend a great deal of time with my American friends.
So agree with your comment and regarding other cultures. I lived in Buenos Aires for 2 years and the Saudi Arabia for 8 years. All those years I traveled a lot. Living, traveling and working in different cultures taught me so much about humanity, politics, and just life overall. I didn't spend a great deal of time with my American colleagues while abroad. I found them less interesting.
Very true. However the "democratization" of international travel through radical reduction of air fares had gone a long way to removing the financial barriers. However, I don't think that this will survive the Covid disaster. Prior to the outbreak, hotel accomadation was already turning much more towards meeting the needs of the 1% through signifcant "quality" and price rises and despite initial encouragement AirBnB etc followed suite and maintained it's relative positioning...nolonger really accesible to the "ordinary" folk!
I travel to VA each year and have turned away from flying. Amtrak is similar cost, more comfy, more scenic, better amenities, and the full door-to-door trip is barely longer. Forget lines -- just show up and it's all aboard!!
Arriving at Union Station -- as in those who vanquished the Confederacy -- is always an added thrill. See you on the train ... or not, we'll never know!
From what I've seen, rural people rarely go away for vacations. If they do, it is a place that is very similar to their safe circle and relatively close to home. The notion of exploring another part of the world or country doesn't cross their mind. The cross culture in a city tends to expand your world vision and the desire/knowledge to make that trip happen. I live with someone (not my wisest life choice) that is the epitome of this rural mindset and it would absolutely never cross his mind to go to another country nor does he have the desire. Whereas, my overseas trips have broadened my life and viewpoints. I want to travel and explore more when safe!
I think it is not helpful to create a black and white dichotomy between rural and urban people. I live in both places and it is not true that rural people do not travel and are not curious. We need to look to the way policies of both parties have disenfranchised large swaths of our population, who are angry and who do not believe that mainstream politics has any interest in making their lives better. If we fail to consider the reality of this, we will see more extremism and not just from rural areas.
When there was a military draft, conscription often took isolated people to new places and experiences. A cousin who is a red-state rancher served a couple of years in Germany, but otherwise has rarely left his state; now he rarely leaves the ranch. It's just one example, but it illustrates how sojourning, forced or not, can broaden horizons. Also consider the many servicemen who found spouses in Vietnam, Philippines, Japan, etc.
The demise of the conscription army in France and its civilizing influence on street gang members has had a disasterous effect on agressive incivility on the steets for the whole population.
France was the biggest tourist destination in the world, but the French are the people in Europe who travel the least outside their own national boundaries.
If you look at cities like New York, i'm not sure that residents of Harlem or the Bronx have the same propensity for international travel as Manhattan...or of nearby nice, wealthy NJ or Pa leafy townships for that matter. A mixed bag of course and as always when you take averages in statistics you lose a little of the truth.
Way back in the last millennium I spent a semester in Rodez, and still feel great affection for France. It's perhaps the most geographically and climatically diverse European nation, offering a range of experiences within one country. The same is even more true here. Americans can travel extensively, see a variety of places (but not people) without ever crossing international borders. "Travel broadens the mind," but not all travel has that effect.
I think being well read and having access to museums of all sorts is more important than travel. Even in many rural areas, it's just a day trip into a decent city to spend hours at a museum, very do-able. Only Europeans or extremely weathly Americans can take the length vacations needed to spend enough time in new places to even get a sense of how life there is different. A week in a new city doesn't do it. It requires being able to sink in and live among the locals for some time and Americans don't get that sort of time off. And most travel is not sustainable, Flying particularly is incredibly detrimental to the environment.
Marx & Engels referred to "the idiocy of rural life." It doesn't mean that rural dwellers are more stupid, but it tends to confirm the lack of diverse culture described here. The gap was greater in the 19C.
Pause for one moment and consider this: cities are not self sustaining. Cities depend upon the exploitation of rural places foreign and domestic. American Imperalism has come to the homeland. Urban centers depend upon their privlage to sustain their way of life. Only rural people who work in blue collar jobs like farming, ranching, manufacturing and mining feel the oppression of capital supporting urban life.
It's all very well talking about "localizing" food supply chains but the rural and urban workers are totally essential to each other to maintain harmony and "comfortable" life on earth
Capitalism to date, is ONLY about making humans comfortable and entertained at the expense of the planet. Adam Smith wrote during a time of "natural law". Capitalism boasts about an economic system based upon self-interest. No wonder the people who commit to it are distroying the planet. Supply and demand is not a natural law like gravity. It is a human invention, as is money.
Interesting conversation. I’d say the greater divide is between rich and poor. Hunger Games without the annual, deadly war games. Wealthy people whether urban or rural rely on service workers to enjoy the benefits of their wealth. Without the entire support system and infrastructure provided by workers who build, farm, manufacture, clean, repair and provide care, money would be meaningless. The eternal challenge for the powerful minority is how to divide, control and suppress the essential majority. They have become very good at keeping us under control. This is not a US problem. It’s a human problem. The clock is ticking.
The red-blue division is there precisely to disguise the division between the very very rich and everyone else. We have seen over the last fifty years that the more inequality increases, the more the radical right creates "culture war" light shows to deflect attention, anger, away from the real sources of inequality.
Exploitation is a capitalist problem the same way racism is a white problem. The whole earth suffers under capitalim the same way people of color suffer under racism.
Yes but the rural areas need the city just as much. Who else will buy what they grow? Who will pay for the state colleges in the less populated rural areas? Who will pay for the infrastructure-- road maintenance, internet, power, waste treatment, water treatment hospitals?
The same argument was used by the British Empire to brag about the blessings "bestowed" upon India.
Note, I am not against "modern" farming, but against policies that reward the use of farmland to supply cheap High Frutose Corn Syrup. I am not against education, but the policy of using up all the sand from around the world to make buildings for Americans in the U.S. I am not against roads, but the policy of building roads out of asphalt, built by rivers that prevent animals from drinking the water without learning to dodge cars and polluting the water from run off.
The best book to look at about re-imagining a sustainable and nuturing society is The Empathetic Civilization by Jeremy Rufkin.
I have Donut Economics on my "to read" shelf. I have listened to all her interviews and TED talk. Have not read it yet.
There are too many distopia stories about the future. It is refreshing to me to imagine a better world. In order to create it, we must first imagine it. Regardless of the frailty of the author, I recommend the Harry Potter series of books and science fiction novels such as Ecotopia and The 5th Sacred Thing by Star Hawk.
My wife is a huge fan of The 5th Sacred Thing, it had a deep impact on her, still to this day. I am currently reading this Starhawk book to her now. We are reviewing it.
Your "better world" is the book I am working on. I'm creating the story universe for it. Today was a big day, I just came up with the name for my sci-fi book.
Sorry, no. Nobody from any city is buying the produce from the rural farms around me. We're buying it from them! And I get my very own tax, cable/internet, utility bills every month just like you. Got a private well and septic system too. Don't have my own hospital yet but the one where I work is supported by the surrounding rural towns and small city where it's situated.
I have nothing against cities at all, and this may not be true everywhere, but it is also not an absolute that rural areas need cities.
On the other hand, rural communities are not self-sustaining, either. They are all roped into the "Get big, or get out" world of corporate farming, based -- not on strong sons and fertile daughters -- but on John Deere and the commodities markets. Diesel dries up and the tractor dies. A bumper crop can be a scourge, since it drives prices down.
As an adult, I've always lived an urban life, but have felt no less oppressed by the capitalist economy. Perhaps more so, as the cost of living in even the smaller urban areas of my state have been rising steadily next to stagnant wages since I first entered the workforce in the early 1970's. A capitalist economy is fairly equal in its oppression of both the rural and urban working classes; nevertheless, there is often a red-blue divide between us.
It is a distraction to compare oppression. For example, the people of London were also oppressed during the British Empire, not the same way as the people of India, but Charles Dickens describes in what way. Yes, class is key to supporting Colonialism by an Empire, but what class is the rest of life on earth?
" Only rural people ... feel the oppression of capital supporting urban life."
I respectfully dissent from this view. There's plenty of oppression to be felt in cities, and suburbs to a lesser extent. Perhaps the problem is most glaring in one-industry towns, often the only developed areas in a broad hinterland. A single corporate decision can wipe out the local economy in one stroke.
There are other types of oppression than economic. For example, even though Patty Duke was rich and famous, she lived in a time before people understood bi-polar disorder.
It will be interesting to see how the the Pandemic changes the red-blue maps of the future. So many college-educated people, who tend to vote blue and now work from home, are leaving the cities for less densely populated areas.
Same here in France. Executives leaving Paris as they can telework. The lower levels of the business hierarchy aren't so lucky. The question now will be the next start-ups...where will they install themselves?
Here in USA, Zillow trends show movement to Austin, Cincinnati etc. from San Francisco-where I used to live for a short time. In my local Hudson Valley, home sales prompt bidding wars with 100% cash sales of NYC dwellers moving out of the city. It’s starting to become a movement! ❤️🤍💙
And San Francisco and NYC priced themselves out of the market for "ordinary" people...even for erstwhile computer "geeks" and "nerds" . In our Provençal village, Parisians are coming in having sold out in Paris. They can pay cash both for the old stone "Mas" and for the inevitable renovation...thus doubling the cost..and still have enough left over for the new Porsche or Mercedes! When locals earning minimum wage want to buy and start a family they are in trouble.
I'm a little further north, and just today, read a note in my local newsletter - people gushing about a $1,200 a-night hotel located about a mile from our house. I haven't been home since the pandemic began. I expect to find the community much changed by the influx of people from the City, flush with cash, who bought everything in sight. They will go back, eventually, leaving a mess in their wake.
I'm not sure that big cities will serve the purpose in the future with technology changing the structure f our economic lives; smaller centres will take over to my mind.
Even as the "rural" population declines, the electoral system won't necessarily change the outcome of elections. Support the National Popular Vote bill: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
Very interesting. Thank you for the link. The current 2 party system is exacerbating the "divide" as it is clear neither all small town/rural populations not denser big city populations have the same views and interests. In the circumstances where the latter comes to dominate totally the former, it would be logical for wide differences of opinion to emerge that will break up the current blocks. A monopoly of power by one party does not constitute democracy and can not be perpetuated.
I understand a very high percentage of Trump's voters are from densely blue urban areas. They show up blue because they are greatly outnumbered. Is this true? Are they the wealthier blue collar and racist bunch as much as the rural or?
I haven't looked at how they built the map but i should imagine that the grade of red and blue depends on the degree of dominance. It's a winner takes all system and rich and poor democrats live in red areas too.
One thing to consider about “the country is this. No high tech infrastructure, no jobs, starved education creates a recipe for serfdom. Always has; always will.
As around me in the village. The peasants can't just dispose of their land as they might wish and all salaried jobs are regardless paid at min wage. Free labour or wage slavery...the Southern or Confederate conception of this is never far beneath the surface. We are still far from the Lincoln view.
"The cities are growing and the country population is declining."
You have hit upon the root of the problem , Stuart. Under the electoral college system and the 2 Senators per state, this will exacerbate the inequity....despite the population shift, the rural states' influence will only increase.
I wonder if e.g. Wyoming ultimately will have 1 Rep and 2 Senators who represent only their own three votes. Or worse, if one person holds two offices, just two votes!
Yes....and what is the number? 40% of the population will represent 70% of the Senators and electoral college? Prepare for more Republican minority Presidents!!
Today AOC's regular message detailed her experiences on Jan 6 in the Capitol siege, which actually lasted several hours. She and my Rep Ayanna Pressley came within moments of serious harm, but they boosted each other's confidence and made it through. Who knows the effects of the day's trauma on so many Congress and staff people? Not to mention CP officers who did their duty, including Brian Sicknick, who gave his Last Full Measure of Devotion. The more details that emerge concerning the insurrection, the more urgent the need to vigorously prosecute all responsible parties to the full extent of the law, from the former president on down.
The harrowing documentary "Downfall" (below) should be seen by all who care about America. Perhaps as outsiders, the Australians saw clearly how best to present one of the most terrifying events in our history, one for which justice is essential. Warning: though it's not graphic, the shooting of the female insurrectionist is clearly shown. Someone really dies in this film.
Last week my husband and I watched what we thought would be an escape movie (2 1/2hours) from 2004 about the last days and hours in the bunker as Berlin was falling to the Russians. The English title is also “Downfall” and stars the excellent Bruno Ganz as Hitler. But the interesting thing is the film is bracketed by cuts of 2002 interview with the woman who was hired as a 22 year old as Hitler’s secretary during those last weeks. She spoke of trying to forgive herself for not understanding what she was a part of. The film is harrowing in exploring those last minute choices to go down with the cause or escape. And it was decidedly not an escape from the present day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall_(2004_film)
Prosecution for everyone speaking at the pre-Trump Riot rally, including Trump (picture a swastika in place of the “u”), and his spawn Eric Hitler, and Rudy Himmler. And of course the Congress members.
I've been at BU since 1983. Our community is SO proud of both our wonderful former students now in Congress. BU has the best representation of any university!
Oberlin was the abolitionist college par excellence. Visit Boston sometime and we can go on a tour of the Black Heritage Trail, modified for world history courses.
I visited Boston in 2002 and did a short city tour....I wish I had known about the Black Heritage Trail. There is so much history in Boston...incredible city.
I copied that Australian Broadcasting Corp. video from yesterday’s Heather comments. When I get home in the morning I’m checking it out. Thanks for posting it again. 👍
Hello Marcy. Having trouble finding the following post of yours:
"Roland, does your father live in Germany? I think you said once you were first gen American ...?"
No, my father lives in the same town as me in northern California. After my dad retired, my parents moved here for their retirement. Yes, I am first gen American.
The coverage of Novalny's court appearance and sentence to 2.5 more years in a Russian prison after recovering from the attempt on his life drives my thinking that such authoritarian power as Putin's in Trump's tool box shows the necessity of conviction and bar from ever holding office not only in the Senate but in SDNY and other courts for crimes yet to be exposed. Trump must be stopped totally.
Right on target Eleanor. In this community and in the main stream news media, journalists and regular people tend to look at Trump in isolationist fashion just from the American perspective. Americans are way behind, they haven’t realized yet that this guy is a puppet of Putin. He does Putin‘s bidding, more consistently than anything else except lining his own pockets, feathering his nest. Greg Olear and others have also detailed his mob history, which also gets near-zero coverage in the news. This guy is dirty every which way, most people just don’t realize it. Thanks for bringing this perspective into the discussion. There is absolutely no question in my mind they should’ve locked him up and thrown away the key a couple decades ago. And still he is free.
Recently I said it will take a presidential library just to have a repository big enough to contain all the information about all his criminal activity and corruption. Tя☭mp is the most corrupt US politician of any kind that we’ve probably had in 100 years in this country, easily the most corrupt US president in history, mobbed up, and a puppet and pawn and likely employee of Vladimir Putin, who is the world’s most fabulously wealthy and powerful criminal at this moment in history. Tя☭mp is a Hitler imitator when it comes to propaganda and inciting people, if possible I would now put a swastika in his name to replace the hammer and sickle. Reminder: there are also *multiple dozen* sex crime lawsuits against him right now, I would bold-face “multiple dozen” if I could.
I have trouble imagining anyone dirtier.
Do we need to insure he is locked up? Do we need to insure he doesn’t return to public office? Was suspension of his propaganda platforms warranted?
Thank you for this reminder, Eleanor. I'm not going to repeat the whole of the largely unread comment I made some six hours ago about the spiritual excrement still smeared not only on the walls and floors of the Capitol but in the Senate chamber, in the House. How Senators and Representatives must still share the same space with criminals. But Roland has spoken for me in his response to your message. And here, I shall repeat the last paragraph of my earlier comment:
If you want to see where these conspirators would lead America, look at Russia today, slowly imploding under the colossal weight of contradictions that crush every manifestation of life. The survival of a gangster oligarchy depends on the death of its host country.
"I'm not going to repeat the whole of the largely unread comment I made some six hours ago about the spiritual excrement still smeared not only on the walls and floors of the Capitol but in the Senate chamber, in the House. How Senators and Representatives must still share the same space with criminals."
I suspect people in this community are still becoming familiar with you, Peter. In a month, you will be flooded with "likes" because your contribution is excellent. Right now they're probably reading you and digesting, getting to know you.
Thanks, Roland, that's a kind thought, but experience tells me that my thinking is sometimes half-baked and often not easy to digest. I hope people here will put me in my place when necessary. I've just responded at considerable length to a message from Christy, and I hope that's of some use, rather than adding to the confusion of the times.
I ask, once again, what happens if the Senate fails to even rule that Trump shouldn't be eligible to run for office again, one of their two choices upon conviction? HCR has expressed some optimism that eventually we'll do the right thing. Personally, I think that assumes facts not in evidence.
Somewhere along the line we've lost the desire or courage to hold public officials to account for transgressions, large and small. Despite publicly recorded video, audio, documentary, and/or photographic evidence, time after time we've seen politicians (and others) deny their intent, involvement, or responsibility for what they've done. When such an event comes to light we usually get the crisis PR chestnut of "I'm sorry if I've offended / hurt / insulted / pick your verb anyone. I've learned from my mistake and will endeavour to do better in the future."
We now have 90% of GOP Senators saying they won't convict Trump on his second Impeachment charge. No surprise here, because to try and convict Trump would lay bare their own culpability not disavowing Trump's objections to the election's results, let alone their previous support and enablement of the former president's antidemocratic efforts.
They've called the Impeachment politically motivated or divisive or in conflict with president Biden's calls for unity. They day that, because Trump's out of office, it would be unconstitutional. This allows them to have a trial but still be seen as not turning on Trump, which is now feared more than the "wrath of God" even for so many "Christians." Also, his hastily cobbled defense team said that even if impeachment was to be Constitutional, Trump was only exercising his First Amendment rights to free speech, and that his words of January 6 didn't incite a crowd to crash the Capitol Building in order to stop Congress's counting of the certified election results. They've conveniently failed to account for the body of tweets and comments prior to and after the November 3rd election that set the stage and tone to actively interfere with the 1/6/21 Congressional activities.
And yet - many have improbably objected to an election in which Trump was defeated but they themselves may have won. They go on the Sunday morning circuit and refuse to acknowledge there legality of Biden's victory. They're beginning to say that they disagreed with Trump the whole time, or that's what's past is past and shouldn't be revisited. And after these nearly impossible logical contortions much of the public refuses to call them out.
We continue to elect and reelect representatives who may have low approval ratings at home, who have actively supported policies that are, at best, cruel and prejudiced, and Stu worst, are immoral, unethical, and possibly illegal. We continue to elect representatives who have no compunctions about b fudging the facts, if not outrightly lying to those who voted them into office. We commuting to elect representatives whose primary objective is to perpetuate their job and allow their party to retain power instead of fighting for their constituents regardless of how many tweets are slung at then. To borrow a phrase, "this is not who we are" Rather, it say "this is not who we should be." Our loyalty shouldn't lie with politicians, but with our neighbors and communities. We heard before that most soldiers will say they're not motivated by the political argument for why they're at war, but to support and protect their teammates. Should our elected officials fail to pursue and establish accountability, they will have set the stage for any and all future erosion of our system of government.
Biden wasn't my choice but he was my only choice. I'm glad he's there and, at first glance, trying to unwind some of the worst of Trump's decisions, but I have to question whether I feel that way only because Trump was so objectively awful, or because Biden knows how to better work three levers of collaboration. He has a lot on his plate - the coronavirus, av economy decimated by said virus, repairing alliances, and restoring domestic and international conference in America's principles and capabilities. But we have this crisis of accountability as well. I know Biden's loathe to interfere with the workings of Congress or the Justice Department, prefering to operate within the guidelines of Article 1. The Republicans will, without irony,?try to frame him and the Democrats as the source of our troubles instead of assuming any responsibility themselves or even attempting to redeem themselves by collaborating in good faith for the greater good, not their own interests. We can't allow three GOP to lay this all at Biden's feet. If we, the citizens of the USA, aren't willing to demand better, it's hardly fair to lay that failure off on Biden.
Prior to the rioti said to my wife that I thought Pence and other Republicans must be exhausted by Trump and would welcome a return to somewhat less chaos. So far, 2021 has proven me wrong. Under the circumstances it's hard to believe that our form of government stands any chance of lasting through another assault by someone much smarter and knowledgeable than Donald Trump.
It's instructive to read the full impeachment brief (https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_final.pdf). They respond to each and every objection about trying Trump, i.e., is it constitutional (yes) and was he "just" exercising "free speech" (no). They don't just quote the Constitution; they also describe in-depth the mind of the Founders when they wrote the impeachment clause through what they wrote in the Federalist Papers, the historical precedents, and what we inherited from English common law. They thoroughly debunk anything and everything Trump's lawyers have come up with.
This is a superb suggestion. It asks us to look at (if not read thoroughly) the primary source: The Article of Impeachment. Reading the Article, I feel like I am reading history as it is made. It is beautifully crafted. It encourages us to "look to the helpers."
We continue to elect these representatives as a result of the extreme Gerrymandering that creates a situation where there is never any viable opposition, and no need to maintain a more centrist approach.
Ally, you're right, but that doesn't explain why their constituents find their behavior to be up to snuff, at least for me. Cruz and Hawley may have been distasteful for lots of reasons but they weren't quite so polarizing or extreme until recently (well, Cruz may have been). The MTGs and Madison Cawthorn have absolutely no agenda other than rabble-rousing. They're unfit for office for numerous reasons. I'm thinking some sort of sanity check needs to be imposed on candidates, at least for Federal office.
Maybe it's time to ignore the labels people attach to Democrats and just get on with it. Who cares if the Republicans think our motives are "political"?
Stuart, I'll be happy to start. I've been thinking on this for some time. You could start with a basic civics test. I suspect more than a few current Congresspeople wouldn't pass it.
Add in a few simply questions about geography, history and how the world functioned and you would most certainly lose many of them, possibly most The repost would be that you are "elitist" and not democratic! You have to laugh as such stupidity hurts too much.
Stuart, since some of these folks shop for districts or states to represent, the geography questions should be a land mine. All about an address or a coffee shop or something specific enough that a long term resident would know. Maybe something about the natural resources of their state, local foods, etc. All of this would be fun, but I'm quite serious about suitability b screenings. Psychological tests were pretty common at one point. Certainly today, employers will rustle through a prospective employee's social media, credit history, etc. You can't waive them as conditions of employment. Is it really so much to ask that a Congressperson meet at least the same screening requirements as a junior sales person or admin staffer? It doesn't seem as if the FBI or whomever does the background checks has done that great a job at identifying character concerns or conflicts of interest.
I am hoping (actually praying) that the House Managers have actual video footage of some of the seditionists in Congress letting people inside of the Capitol before the insurrection happened. I want to see them all squirm and sweat.
Call them as witnesses, let them lie, then show them the footage. That would be priceless. Especially if there happened to be a member of the "jury" involved.
I am really hoping for some bombshell evidence being presented, not that what we have all already witnessed with our own eyes and ears shouldn’t be more than enough evidence.
Good morning all! Morning, HCR! NPR's Morning Edition has some very good stories this morning about the impeachment trial coming up and does a good job of explaining how the procedure can be viewed--the "indictment" occurred in the House and the trial is in the Senate. If one takes that analogy further, nothing prevents the trial from happening even if the person indicted is no longer in the position he held at the time of indictment. That is, indeed, how trials work. The problem is that convincing 17 Gormless Obfuscating Puffball senators to stop lying and cheating, and to actually serve as legislators and representatives of their constituents, is probably an impossible task. The "defense" that Cheeto's new team of "lawyers" (I use that term advisedly) has proposed is no defense at all. To claim that his "free speech" should not be blamed for what happened is ludicrous, especially in the face of evidence that some of his own staff apparently coordinated with the coup plotters and insurrectionists. In addition their claims of unconstitutionality have been debunked by a large majority of constitutionalists. But the GOP has decided to hitch their wagon to the totalitarian train and they won't budge because NONE of them have (1) courage; (2) a moral or ethical code; (3) honor; (4) a soul. They ditched those way back in the 1960s when they decided that promoting racism and misogyny was a good way to get elected.
Given the likelihood that Cheeto will not be convicted by a 2/3 majority in the Senate--although a simple majority will vote to convict him, I imagine--the only alternative is the one that I suspect might actually work: bury him in lawsuits, bury his followers in lawsuits, bury the pols who support him in lawsuits, and hit them all in their financial underbellies. This is the USA: ethics whisper, money screams. It is not the satisfying solution but, like Dominion's lawsuits, it is more likely to conclude in an appropriate way.
But may I also add some stuff about how heartening the last two weeks have been? In a real way, Biden and Harris have done some extraordinary things in being clear, in not leading with their egos, and in being interested in making sure that people hear about what they are doing s that the lead doesn't get buried. And for the very first time, an openly gay person has been confirmed by the Senate (despite the a-hole homophobes Cruz and Co) for a Cabinet position. This made my day yesterday. And what I want is more news like that and a big wet blanket over the Cheeto and his minions.
In terms of reality v what we'd all like to see happen, I think you're closer to the consequences that are most likely. Trump will not be convicted in the senate, but will face legal troubles over the next several years. Rudy and others will also. When association with Trump becomes costly, sycophants will jump ship. Meanwhile, Biden & Co will go about the business of the nation, following the science, passing helpful legislation, reversing damaging policy via executive order...these actions will speak to many. We will not win over the 40% - they are lost. We must concentrate on the remaining electorate.
I don't think I've ever done this before with an HCR post: I copied your email and put the copy in my "Politics" file.
As per Joe and Kamala, we haven't seen many people here expressing gratitude for their actions. Most of the posts naturally begin with Heather's News-Of-The-Day and take off from there. Maybe we should encourage her to appreciate the under-the-radar news of Cabinet appointments and all the excellent policy actions, the Executive Orders and such.
It is SUCH A RELIEF having people with integrity in the White House, isn't it? Very grateful here.
I got news yesterday that I found really interesting: Clinton nominated--and after a very contentious process, got approved--an under-secretary for HUD, Roberta Achtenberg, who was an out lesbian woman. So Pete is the second--first to run a cabinet office--but I am going to honor Ms Achtenberg, who in 1993 must have had a really rough time (and of course being a woman also had the double whammy of homophobia and sexism to deal with). Found this link this morning: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930516&slug=1701473
"But the GOP has decided to hitch their wagon to the totalitarian train and they won't budge because NONE of them have (1) courage; (2) a moral or ethical code; (3) honor; (4) a soul. They ditched those way back in the 1960s when they decided that promoting racism and misogyny was a good way to get elected."
🤣 Aw shucks Roland. I'm just a professional wordsmith and I love what I do. Also have a temper and an overflowing emotional life a lot of the time--that Greek thing.....
1. If Donald Trump had not assembled a mob on January sixth, worked them into a frenzy with lies about a stolen election snd sent them to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal”, Officer Brian D. Sicknick would still be alive. He was only 42 years old. It makes me heartsick. Donald Trump has Officer Sicknick’s blood on his hands.
2. Donald Trump was still President when the House of Representatives impeached him. Mitch McConnell refused to call the Senate back into session and have the trial in the Senate until after the Biden inauguration. Then he voted to investigate whether it was constitutional to impeach a past president.
Rest in Peace Officer Bryan Sicknick. Pray for Justice.
The news is saying he won't be convicted. This is heartbreaking. Letting him go is a clear and present danger to all, including and especially, those in the building with gun toting members.
Please remember, they are talking about the senate, not any of the real court cases!
Nobody expected him to be convicted by the Senate. And if big business Republicans pull themselves together and convict him, I’m not sure I’m happy about that. I’d actually rather see Trump supporters control the party long enough to damage the business Republicans severely.
After that, I want to see MTG’s looney claims and Trump’s real court hearings — when he can’t control the narrative with presidential power or even Twitter rants — erode all that remains of the party’s credibility.
Does he have to appear at his second impeachment trial? Johnson and Clinton did not attend theirs, but they were still sitting presidents. Yet another way that Trumpsky has forced us into uncharted territory.
Really nice argument, S. Mikelle, I love your thinking. And that profile photo! Wow it’s gorgeous. Looks like a rose in the foreground with Kauai in the back. Frameable. Up there with Tricia’s profile photo.
All this Kumbaya talk about being nice to The Enemy, when The Enemy takes talk of civility as a sign of weakness, demonstrates that there is in fact a war on, declared by the other side. Like it or not, they have to be dealt with. To quote a famous movie, they "... need termination - with extreme prejudice."
We need to call BS on the Repugs calls for "unity" and "Bi-partisanship". Enough already. Where is the unity when Lindsay Graham still blocks a hearing for AG nominee, Merick Garland because the Republicans haven't allowed the Democrats to take over as committee chairs? Yes, apparently they reached some sort of "agreement" today but for God's sake, this is February 3rd already. How in the hell did they retain so much power???
To stir the pot .... isn’t the language of these last two posts ( though I agree with the sentiment and arguments of the authors) reminiscent of language used by trump supporters and anti Hillary nut cases? Are we also guilty of inflaming our followers? We would say that our position is valid because trump is an ego maniacal crook. We have truth on our side. But trump supporters are not all ignorant but believe that he genuinely represents the direction our country needs to go in. The defense of first amendment rights in this country, like it or not, allows for much ugly, racist hate speech. Where do we draw the line?
Yes, of course LMC you are absolutely correct. I hesitated posting, but then I just started thinking Tom Clancy novels. Clear and Present Danger. More to your point, I would never use language like this just any old place. I’ve become kind of comfortable and relaxed here. This isn’t exactly a community with members who might act on words that could be taken literally. No way in hell would I be this casual with words in a place that I didn’t feel it was safe to do it. Thank you for your post, you were just echoing my thoughts. I don’t see you stirring the pot. We’re all adults here, that’s what made the decision to post easy for me, even upon consideration.
Right! Context matters. Some people can say "We need to stand for our values and fight!" and that means legal, peaceful means. Other people say "We need to stand for our values and fight!" and they mean to raise their weapons and do violence in order to triumph over their enemies.
The emotions allowed by toxic masculinity are: Fear, anger, victoriousness, and a self-satisfied smugness.
LMC, so true. I remember Hillary calling people who vote for Trump are deplorables. I remember some Democratic candidates, ore maybe it was a CNN commentator, saying when they go low, we go lower.
Where do we draw the line on hate speech? When it's used to incite people to violence. On both sides of the aisle when applicable and on the streets when warranted.
I get quite literally sick to my stomach at the thought that the Senate won’t convict the then president; my anxiety ratchets up to 11.
As to the assertion that that the election got stolen by votes that were cast “illegally” under voting laws passed by states but not by state legislatures, I call bulls**t. The voters who took advantage of being able to vote by mail were registered voters who had every right to vote, and to vote safely during a pandemic. The defense lawyers would have everyone believe that the state legislatures would not have approved any changes to mail voting system in their state, but they don’t know that, and certainly can’t prove it.
Also, the argument that a president can’t be convicted in the Senate after he has left office is beyond the scope of the impeachment indictment, and should not be allowed to be argued there. It seems like that is an issue to be argued before the Supreme Court only after the Senate trial concludes.
IMO, the future of our nation’s democracy depends on the Senate convicting t****, and the republican party getting out from under his influence.
We watched the heart-breaking Capitol ceremony in silence. Also in tears. Grief about Officer Sicknick. A life so full of promise reduced to a small, wooden box. Grief for his family. Grief for our country.
The United States of America has at least temporarily lost its place on the moral high ground from which to credibly pontificate about democracy. Take, for example, Russia's prosecution of Alexei Navalny. His crime was breaking parole by going to Germany so he wouldn't die from the poison the Russian government sanctioned/administered. Difficult for the U.S. to play its traditional moral compass card when our democracy had an epic fail, culminating on January 06.
The trail of literal and virtual damage and destruction via Donald J Trump is so far incalculable. But it's a thing.
Penelope Simpson Adams: Please note that I said in my comment that we have "at least temporarily lost (our) place on the moral high ground."
One way or another, roughly 40% of "us" have slithered down from the moral high ground, trying to drag the rest of us along with them. The public actions of that rogue minority have called into question the infallibility of the United States and the strength of our democracy. Were we ever infallible? No. The self-proclaimed "Greatest Nation on Earth" has some fault lines and precedent for almost coming apart altogether (1861-1865, for example).
The message circling the globe is that the U.S.A. is not immune to violent sedition launched by deplorables. Further, that some of the deplorables have infiltrated our government. And perhaps worst of all, that "we" elected a verifiably dangerous, corrupt, amoral, narcissistic blowhard to be POTUS. The stench of trump et al will be with us for an indeterminate amount of time.
I've been asking myself every day what I'm going to do during the next two to four years (assuming we survive COVID-19). What can I do to help our country move from the inaccurate "We're better than this," since this is who we are, collectively, in this moment? Still trying to figure that out.
May our national mantra become some variation of, "We learn slowly, but we learn damn well!"
I would feel better if we state the 30% of America has lost its place on the moral high ground. There are so many good people, and I think most of the world knows that and supports us during this dark time.
Our democracy has been poisoned by Putin and his continuous 24 hour propaganda troll machine, and the presidential puppet he owns. Our moral compass is still our Constitution, if our senators have the conscience to protect it.
It’s all over... Axios may have taped. Insanity beyond doubt. Russia, Russia, Putin flushed, follow the money, money down the drain, easy come, easy go, the Queens Flash is busted by a white Swan, the Eisenhower Nixon Rockefeller Ford GOP is vanishing, destroyed by The Big Lie...
Excellent Sandy, I was going to post this. If you like this article, there’s a series of I think 6 by Jonathan Swan. They are absolutely riveting articles about the end of the Trump administration.
also on Axios, Swan did a series and Sandy’s link takes you to the latest in Swan’s series of pieces. Each piece is about the same length as the Axios article you just read. The other pieces are just as riveting.
I’m just going to write a little bit to bring us back to the central issues. The appearance of Urban vs Rural, the perpetuation of the Big Lie, and why and how did we get here and why are we trapped here. To me these are the actual issues and while I understand the need to express our emotional outrage staying in it isn’t going to resolve the underlying causes and issues. (this is sounding too righteous)
Solutions are only made to look complicated because people in power don’t want change. Real solutions are actually simple.
Urban vs. Rural, I have lived rural or semi rural my whole life. I don’t like cities can’t understand why people would want to live so crammed together. I do understand that I’m not the only person voting democrat in a rural area but I have felt each time like my vote doesn’t count. That is because of our winner take all voting system. This simply isn’t working for our country any longer. So we don’t have to deconstruct gerrymandering, we don’t have to rebuild the Electoral College we just have to tabulate one citizen one vote majority rule.
Why is that hard to do? It is a simple straightforward law change that could be written in a single sentence. Why is that not happening? The answer is also not complicated IMO. The answer is -> super wealth.
The Big Lie, and by this I’m not just referring to the current example of it though of course I do agree this is the most glaring example. However, we have been lied to for a long time. HCR wrote about this recently. The economy, that is the general over all economy, does better when an active government manages it than it does when pure capitalism is given a free hand. We have 40 years of modern experience to document this since Regan but it has been written about since capitalism was invented. The solution is not complicated it is regulation and taxes . It is not socialism. It is not unpatriotic. It is simply the way capitalism works best for the general population.
And Why don’t we have this? The answer is -> super wealth. IM not so HO.
Unfortunately super wealth doesn’t come with enlightenment. Rather it comes from a place of self-centered psychology that never quite gets beyond fear. Super wealth is created when regular wealth isn’t enough. This is young soul territory, the period where self-preservation, self-identity, self-focus are perfected and manifested but wholeness, oneness, community, greater good, the elevation of service as the highest goal, aren’t really in the picture yet. Perhaps there is a grander purpose for the phenomenon of super wealth in the world just now but I’m not seeing it.
Hi Patrick, thanks for this excellent post. The community ended up having a very lengthy discussion of rural/urban under another post. Bring it up again some day, bright and early, and I will jump right in, I was engaged on other thread discussions today.
"free market" capitalism is a euphemism for "giving greedy corporate parasites license to indulge their bloated lifestyles and pad their nests at the expense of the real workers, the deserving people."
"Super wealth is created when regular wealth isn’t enough. This is young soul territory, the period where self-preservation, self-identity, self-focus are perfected and manifested but wholeness, oneness, community, greater good, the elevation of service as the highest goal, aren’t really in the picture yet. Perhaps there is a grander purpose for the phenomenon of super wealth in the world just now but I’m not seeing it."
You are hitting on an outstanding conversation topic. Actually I don't think there is any grand purpose for super wealth. You said it perfectly, it's "young soul territory." The large majority of super wealthy people are not fulfilling a greater purpose, they are self-serving narcissists feeding ego and addictions. Major exceptions exist, of course, Queen Elizabeth, the wife of Ray Kroc the founder of Macdonald's, I would probably include the Gates family. Do most royals contribute and give back to the level of their wealth? No. Do most billionaires contribute beautifully back to the human condition? No. In fact, the Mercers and Murdochs and Adelsons and Kochs of the world make things even worse.
That money should go to funding education, health care, housing. It's wasted on those people. No, I do not see a greater purpose to be gained by having super wealthy people.
After the Nazis fell in WWII, the world asked how Germans could have been so gullible to follow such an evil dictator who would lead them to the slaughter. We must ask ourselves the same question. How, in the face of overwhelming facts, could a chunk of the American electorate swallow such glaring lies about the election, Antifa, Qanon and partisan bullies? We must dig deep for reasons, but I'm afraid we're not going to like what we find.
Let's begin with the American Revolution. In the late 1700's colonists were becoming increasingly literate and newspapers (newsletters, really) such as the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advisor influenced and fueled passions to fight against oppressive English monarchy. One could argue that without these primitive means of communication with rural communities our fight for independence at least would have been delayed. These newspapers voiced a call to arms.
Flash forward 250 years. Communication with the masses by is as easy as a click of a button. The difference, of course, is that there are so many points of view it can be problematic to rouse and sway insurrection. So discourse shifted to what Professor Heather Cox Richardson (Letters From An American--the best political commentary in the country) so eloquently points out: The Big Lie. Right wingers jumped on the collective bandwagon with enthusiasm to be able to play war. But this doesn't explain why they took the bait. The explanation is darker and delves into the underbelly of the American psyche.
All humans wish to belong and seek others with whom they have the most in common. Those who protest in the name of freedom and equality grow their ranks together. But now, as a direct result of the Internet Age. people can band together and feel validated even is their base argument is a Big Lie. The differentiation between truth and lies no longer matters. What matters to the participants is they feel life now has meaning, that they belong to something greater than themselves, that their lives now have worth, widely accepted facts notwithstanding.
The result of this new paradigm is that morality has been subjugated by collective human action. "We'll follow our leader to the edge of the cliff and gladly jump!" It's identical to the mass hypnosis of Nazi Germany, but this time we can tweet about it, thus somehow further validating our existence. But to what end? Anarchy? It is said that a sucker is born every minute. Our fear should be that have already begun to mobilize, again.
Fine for lemings.... but they finish very badly.....in the sea at the bottom of the cliffs. They do however solve their overpopulation problem rather radically!
We are witnessing one of the greatest instances of mass insanity in history. If we assume a certain number of wealthy people and racists voted for Trump out of perceived self-interest, knowing full well that Trump is a pathological liar, that leaves roughly 30-40% of the American electorate whom we can consider to be literally delusional, wacko, bonkers, nut cases.
Failure to convict Trump in the Senate and/or try him in a court of law would be a disaster, confirmation that our system of government, our Constitution and our way of life are a total failure. National suicide.
This is it, folks.
So if our legitimately elected Senators choose to acquit the former president, we will dissent. We will protest. We will perhaps say the conviction was stolen. What we will not do is storm the Capitol armed with weapons. What we will not do is call for physical harm to our legitimately elected Senators. What we will not do is attempt to destroy our democracy.
We will apply Stacey Abrams grassroots efforts and VOTE THEM OUT. This is how our democratic republic works. Starting now we resist R's efforts at voter suppression and gerrymandering. MI will now have a citizen commission redrawing district lines instead of the legislature. We worked hard starting in 2016 to get a bill passed in2018 to do this. Join a local Demoratic Club, work to find candidates to sponser at the local level, tell others in a respectful manner why you vote Democratic. It takes the village to govern itself. Become involved.
Sally, thank you for bringing Stacey Abrams into the conversation. She is my leadership role model, and I look to working with and for Fair Fight, Indivisible, Vote Forward, and Vote Save America on the 2022 midterm elections. Voting issues are my chosen activist focus, because I believe every issue I care about comes down to policy and who is elected to represent me from the local to the national level. ❤️🤍💙
Excellent choice, DB.
Thank you. I would like to see Stacy Abrams take FairFight national, to get every state to pass a "tri-partisan" Redistricting Commission like Michigan's. Let's continue our donations to this truly democratic cause!
"I propose to move immediately upon your works!"
--Ulysses Grant at Fort Donelson, 1862
Exactly! Elections have consequences. Democrats must win and win and win.
Gerrymandering is major a threat but it takes time. Many Repug-controlled state legislatures are trying to enact more oppressive voter-suppression measures right now. But as the estimable Ms Abrams showed in GA (twice), Dems can win a "Fair Fight" by expanding registration and turnout. (She actually did it a third time in 2018, but Brian Kemp dropped 300,000+ voters off the rolls. If they had voted her margin of victory would have been substantial.)
GOP is quadrupling down on gerrymandering and we are late to the starting line. It definitely starts at the local level.
THIS. ONLY THIS.
What we will do is sue the pants off of him in civil and ordinary courts.
Better than nothing but I still strongly believe that trump should be held accountable in some way for his incitement (and other wrongs) or this will be perpetuated.
Btw, Stuart, I live in VT which votes mostly Democrat despite being very rural with lots of struggling farmers. We do have white supremacy groups, 200 of whom inculding a state trooper took buses to the Capitol. I know, "'tis a puzzlement..."
Hi Sally, I too live in VT. I was so concerned about our republican Governor Scott replacing Sen Leahy with a republican if he became too ill to serve. Looks like he is back in the saddle. Wishing him, and all of us, good health while we tackle...EVERYTHING before us.
Gov. Scott has said he'd replace Leahy and Sanders with Dems if they were incapacitated, but an election would have to happen within 6 months, not the end of the term of office.
Glad to hear about Leahy, Penelope. I remember many moons ago seeing a newly elected Leahy at subcommittee hearings. So funny, he's among the very few I do remember from those days!
Patrick Leahy is a bulwark of the republic. To his health!
There's something about the abundance of old Volvo' and Saab's on the roads. I always love coming to Vermont. I often used to "drop down" to Burlington; buying textiles, towels and sheets at the factory outlets.
And I miss going across the border, still closed due to Covid, to Quebec and love Montreal...
I truly hope all the lawsuits being discussed for the past couple of years come to fruition. Bleed him dry of money, opportunities, a voice. Sure I would love to see him be convicted so that he can never hold office again and so that he is not privy to a pension, SS protection, or a travel allowance. But that's not going to happen. My prediction is that the moment the senate votes not to convict he will announce his presidential run for 2024 and we'll all be thrown back into his sh*t show again.
I would give you a "like" but I do not want that last sentence to be manifested ever! Shooosh! Visualize him in a small room surrounded by four walls like any other criminal most deserving.
And if we begin burning effigies in this country, it should represent all seditionists that who are Nazis, KKK, alt right (Reich), white supremacists, and looney tune Q'ers. Include, of course, the current trumplicans who signed on to overthrowing our fair election, use slave-era gerrymandering and are suppressing votes. In essence, anti-democracy pinheads with guns and bombs.
Gerrymandering: I read a letter to Judge Santelle by Samuel Isscharoff a few days ago (Racial Gerrymandering in a Complex World: A Reply to Judge
Sentelle, Catholic University Law Review, 1996) that the racial argument against gerrymandering... "From Nazi Germany to South African apartheid-and, by implication to the Jim Crow South as well-the defining feature of these odious forms of oppression always has been: a nasty, brutish power grab." I agree with his ideas that redistricting is racist, oppressive and with computers is odious. Tuskegee, Alabama has one district that has 32 sides!!!
Issacharoff states that white supremacists' officials goals in gerrymandering are twofold:
1. "Cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).
Isn't it time for a cool change for our citizens of color? Have they and our indigenous people paid a very high price? Is it not their turn for us to right the wrongs of our colonial ancestors? Do they not deserve for all of us to stand up and fight for them to be equal? To have equal opportunities in voting, jobs, and feeling safe driving or walking down the street in our country and not profiled and bullied by police and peers?
Let's end our 200+ year old American Apartheids. We can be much better than our colonial history. (And that history must be taught to our people, in honesty).
Well said, Lyell, but....
I think in case of acquittal I may begin to look elsewhere in the world for a better example of democracy, one where voting is a birthright and not subject to gerrymandering or any other sort of party-specific shenanigans, where every vote carries equal weight regardless of geographical provenance, where mere acreage and cows cannot vote, only people, where 200-year-old racist institutions no longer condition our politics, where basic facts and statistics prevail over lies, half-truths and scary, crazy conspiracy theories and where all necessary public services - including internet platforms - are subject to regulation consistent with the constitution and laws of said democracy.
Acquittal or no, our work is cut out for us.
A beautiful dream, but I'm with you!
Perhaps we need to look to all of the social democracies, such as Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, etc. There are so many! Wonderful examples of the melding of democracy with regulated capitalism.
I agree. Democratic socialism works and brings greater social fairness - and happiness if certain indexes are accurate - than our current crony capitalism.
I think we need to stay away from the ‘socialism’ until we have defined it in American terminology. I like “democratic capitalism” and then explain the difference between democracy and crony capitalism (crony capitalism). What do you think of that?
A rose by any other name.... I get it and find the substitution politically acceptable :-)
Democratic Capitalism!!
Might be difficult to find. Some comprise would be essential. Nowhere's perfect like that.
You already live there. What you outline above is the means to achieve it.
Agree, David. All these things must be changed...but for me by rule of law, not by force.
74 million voters and 88 million Twitter followers are all drinking the Kool-Aid. And then there’s Fox News, and Newsmax, and OAN and the millions upon millions of people who watch that swill. If you order the right-wing news cable package of channels, they might as well label it the Kool-Aid Package.
Look to who funds all of those propaganda machines. We need to corral around the head of the snakes (all the oligarchs --Mercers, Kochs, Murdoch, etc.) and squeeze them. They will only understand mass revolution against them--stop the flow of money to them, reveal what they do everyday and their crazy conspiracies and propaganda.
We, as a world need to figure out how to handle the propaganda of the internet. I have no idea, but maybe we need a second internet that is for REALITY and TRUTH and let this old one die out. (Spoken from total ignorance, but all options during a potential brainstorm should be entertained!).
Hit 'em in the bank account, it's the only place they feel anything.
You are dead on target. That's where the Good Guys have finally turned to common sense. Nowadays organizations with integrity are playing by the Republican playbook and attacking the Republicans where it really hurts, their funding. If I didn't have my father, I would not understand this side of Republicans. I am far too principled. I have walked away from very large amounts of money several times, because it was the best choice. My father values money above nearly all else, family being the only obvious exception. He would never say these words, but a person's net worth and their assets is his #1 standard. The people he admires the most are the (mostly men) who are wealthy in the material sense.
The only thing I have seen get under McConnell's skin is the label "Moscow Mitch." He must be ashamed of taking money from Russia. He also doesn't want that news to become public knowledge, obviously, it wouldn't sit well with the older Republican generation of voters who see Russia as the enemy dating back to the Cold War.
As for the "propaganda of the internet," I could not agree more that there is a serious problem. Even the employees in the big companies like FB and Tw have been pressuring their own management because of the serious social damage of their business policy. The Twitter owner guy was whining about cutting off Tя☭mp, what an idiot. Does this dork have the slightest clue how Putin's propaganda machine is affecting the U.S. democracy by using commercials to encourage voters to drink Kool-Aid?
I am trying to wrap my head around moscow mitch feeling...particularly shame!
Not sure it's the "greatest" (i.e. worst) incident of mass insanity, but it ranks in that class. I suspect the Rwandan genocide of 1994 was worse, for instance. But it certainly takes the cake in the United States.
Picking nits, of course.
Yes! What you said.
Please forgive my hyperbole. Perhaps I should have said that recent events are the most extreme example in US history of nearly half of the electorate supporting and voting for (twice!) a presidential candidate who is petty, unhinged, evil, uninformed, self-centered, unpatriotic and stupid, though his feral instincts and ability to sniff out the weak points in others are well developed.
I am not a psychologist, so I should perhaps not attribute insanity to people I don't know personally, but selfish, thoughtless, irresponsible, racist and demagogic are attributes I think I know when I encounter them.
And yes, the Rwandan genocide was far worse than 4 years of Trump, but it could have been prevented - or at least limited - by certain former colonial and other western powers who failed to intervene. I am not sure that the USA is necessarily immune from similar genocidal tendencies, though I am quite sure no one will intervene to save us if we decide to go down that road.
Happy reading!
A great deal of Trump's support was also certain people's innate, egocentric approach to politics and the society in which they "exist". There are three rules that dominate their conscious...
"I'm all right, Jack" is the first rule, "devil take the hindmost" the second and
"i don't want to pay for it" is the third
Lots of "good samartans" passing on the other side of the road!
Psychosis? Insanity? I'm not qualified to offer those judgments. But may I suggest what we witnessing is at its base, a crisis of spirit. In Buddhist thought, there are three 'poisons' which give rise to all suffering. Roughly translated from the Sanskrit: Greed, hate, and delusion. We see them in full bloom now coming from people without a spiritual anchor, conscious connection to the cosmos nor reverence for their fellow humans. Hopi legend has it that we are on the cusp of the coming of the 'Fifth World'. Hang on it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Absolutely! We are certainly heading for that open door now and before we restore ourselves individually and collectively to some important level of harmony...a lot of things are going to change.
In Joseph Campbell's "The Hero's Journey" we haven't yet reached the dark night of the soul. We, first, need to recognize we are on a journey.
Thank you D and J, it is indeed frightening. The "perceived self-interest" segment likely is larger still. It's less likely that so many people are clinically insane. We all are prone to dismissing aberration as insanity, but Trumpsky's bitter-enders, especially the insurrectionists, are capable of distinguishing between right and wrong. No one gets off the hook due to mental incompetence.
The Rwanda genocide is not well understood in America. Cast as a mass hysteria or hallucination, in fact there was much central planning and direction, not mere spontaneous mayhem, though some did occur. The genocidaires manipulated longstanding (but not primordial) ethnic tensions in time of war, but Hutus didn't murder Tutsis simply "because they've always hated and killed each other." German and Belgian colonial policies helped set the stage for tragedy, so its history is long but not immemorial, and can be understood in rational terms.
A Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story
T Longman, Christianity & Genocide in Rwanda
C Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression
G Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis
It is meaningful that Holocaust museums, including in Paris, Warsaw, and Los Angeles, have exhibits and events to raise awareness about the Rwanda Genocide.
We clearly cannot learn enough about how to prevent such atrocities.
When talking of Rwanda and the genocide you can't leave Burundi out of the equation or for that matter the eastern regions of the Congo. The relationship between the Tutsi and Hutu tribe in all three areas has been one of rivalry and domination ...and even slavery...for centuries; it is far from the first time they have massacred each other. However what is particularly offensive and indeed sickening, over and above the horror of the killings, this time is that all those who could have stopped the affaire...the French Military presence and powers in the area amongst others... did nothing to prevent or stop it while it was apparently clear that it was coming.
The pullout of French forces from southern Rwanda as genocide commenced was especially outrageous, though it's been defended as fulfilling bilateral treaty obligations. A few years after Rwanda's 1994 genocide, Pres Clinton apologized, describing his policy as a failed attempt at intervention. No. It was a successful attempt at noninternvention. Rwandans didn't have valuable resources, simply didn't matter enough to US decisionmakers. A Frontline documentary (from the late 1990s?) has Clinton's speech and much else, including the inimitable Will Lyman.
I am not informed about the circumstances of these genocides, but I will say this: the more time passes since Clinton was president, the more I mistrust him and the more naïve I think we were in selecting him. With the passage of time, he looks more and more like a sicko and a self-serving opportunist. Someday after he’s gone the definitive full story of William Jefferson Clinton will come out, like the fact that he f***ked everything that moved, including likely a small army of underage girls in Epstein’s universe. Has anyone else seen that photograph of Bill Clinton wearing a blue women’s dress, a large framed item that was in Epstein’s New York residence? Sometimes when I see something of this nature, it looks fun and playful. But when Bill does it, for some reason I see depths of depravity that shock me. And I’m not easily shocked that way, certainly not by cross dressing. Something is way off.
Yes.
And who was it that said what the boundaries between places like Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo would be?
It's a toss-up between the King of Belgium, the President of France and the Kaiser Wilhelm....but Rwanda and Burundi i think have 2 of the very few boundaries in Africa that actually respect ancient kingdom divisions. The role of "kings" is still very important in Africa especially with societal and property issues. I came across this a great deal in West Africa.
I started looking at population statistics for Germany in the 30s. Then I remembered that Germany controlled a healthy portion of Europe. Now there is an example of mass insanity out of control, starting to take over a whole continent.
David Herrick makes excellent points but you seem more sharply aware than most people of the painful reality that collective psychosis is a far greater problem than the madness of individuals; the exception being when a deluded deluder casts his net over an entire population beset by deep underlying mind poisons of fear, hatred and resentment and gives voice to their diseased silence.
Nietzsche understood this reality: “Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”
"... How much do we really know about the vaults and caverns which lie somewhere under the structure of a great nation—about these psychic catacombs in which all our concealed desires, our fearful dreams and evil spirits, our vices and our forgotten and unexpiated sins, have been buried for generations? In healthy times, these emerge as the spectres in our dreams. ... But suppose, now, that all of these things generally kept buried in our subconscious were to push their way to the surface, as in the blood-cleansing function of a boil? Suppose that this underworld now and again liberated by Satan bursts forth, and the evil spirits escape the Pandora's box?"
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
In August 1936, from Diary of a Man in Despair
This quote is right up my alley, Peter. *reflecting . . . “
I can see that, Roland, that's why I sent it to you.
People would do well to read books like Reck-Malleczewen's diary of the Hitler years. But there's a problem: even hatred for great evil taints our minds. But we're not saints, we're not the kind of pure-hearted warriors who fight without hatred, to do what must be done. And there's the rub: hatred's a tenacious weed, it harms many a harvest. It will infect the unborn.
It's one thing to feel fear, to rage, another to become enslaved by anger and hatred, fear our taskmaster. Then we're drifting towards the paranoid Niagara that swept away so many on January 6th.
There's a dose of paranoia in almost all of us, we're forever blaming others for everything we don't like, forever looking outside of ourselves, finding fault with someone else. A great dodge, a great compensation, finding fault, judging others as a means of expressing our own meanness while avoiding personal responsibility.
Hence the injunction:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
Beautifully stated. As in physical discrimination — so in religious discrimination. The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” can be found in every great religious expression. If there is any proof of a “soul” to be had — those universal statements of a higher good should be that proof. In our collective hearts, we can recognize right from wrong.
IMHO one of the best tools the human mind has available to it for building resilence against evil is the practicing of gratitude. I’m not able to watch scary movies, but I once sat thru “Fallen” (with Denzel Washington) and the metaphor for the contagion of evil just about did me in. https://gratefulness.org/grateful-day/?fbclid=IwAR1ZTVBlylm3VeTgwG2K4-Sd_Eu39ElbdmZrh-DNNvfvt3dSFiHDeMEiE2s
Love your posts, Peter. Thank you.
"National suicide," "delusional." Yes, this is it and well said. Unfortunately. Republicans' continued support of former president Trump mirrors their support during his tenure, all for one reason: So they can get re-elected, damn the truth. Any argument against term limits is now mute. If politicians are so willing to crawl up the ars* of Trump for self-preservation, men and women of conscience don't stand a chance.
Call your Republican legislators and tell them they WON'T get reelected if they support Trump, that the party is splitting and you and your fellow Republicans (not a Republican? You can be one for 10 minutes) are going with the party's traditional Lincoln values.
"(not a Republican? You can be one for 10 minutes)" LOL!
Lethal toxin. Apply the antidote immediately afterward.
"(not a Republican? You can be one for 10 minutes)"
Lethal toxin. Apply the antidote immediately afterward.
Nice!
“This is it, folks.“
Maybe that’s why substack is burying us in multiple copies.
Yes, I've deleted HCR 3 or 4 times already, but I kept one...
Reading this this morning reminds me of what I went to sleep watching from the US Capitol. The respect being shown to Office Brian Sicknick is what's right about America. The fact that this is happening shows how we need to repair so much in America. And having President Biden and the First Lady show up, and show up quietly, shows we have competent, caring and decent leadership back in the White House. January 6 is a date that we must remember as a day that terror struck this country -- and it was instigated by the then-still-President of the United States. Let us learn. Let us place a higher value on facts and truth. Let no government employee like Ms. Conway ever try to say there was something truthful in alternative facts. Brian Sicknick died for his country. A country the President takes the oath of office to protect.
I hope I live to see the day we observe January 6th by burning the former president in effigy, as the British do on Guy Fawkes Day.
Good morning Sharon...Like you, I want to remember January 6 as a day when we saw the threat of domestic terrorism become real ending in murder and deaths. It's a day in which we saw the then-President of the United States equate patriots with being people who were White Supremacists and those wearing t-shirts embracing the awfulness of Nazi Germany. And i hope Donald Trump is convicted in his Senate Impeachment Trial and that he is indicted for his criminality that he has displayed throughout his adult life. I truly don't think there is an individual who i have hated in my lifetime as much as him, yet, I also think we need to be careful about the suggestion above as we need all of us to stand above his actions and point to a better way. Let the Majorie Greens, the Tommy Tubervilles and the Matt Gaetzs be the awful ones and we will remain the ones who our next generations can be proud of.
What we need is for the Senators to hold trump responsible and vote their conscience not their political future. I hope all their constituents are calling them.
I want them to vote the truth. They have no moral compass and no conscience.
A few might, but conscience fails in the face of losing power and privilege for many of them.
The Capitol Hill switchboard allows you to connect to anyone, not just your legislators. Wait for option 3 to get a live operator and just say their name and state. These days, it will be a chance to leave a message. Mitch’s mailbox is always full.
202-224-3121
Thanks G. NB, when people call or write the WH or Congress, they count each contact as representing 100 others (est.).
Flood Mitch with postcards.
As children we would build a cloth and straw figure of Guido each Nov 5 and burn him on the big local, communal bonfire celebrating with fireworks. mr Faukes after all was part of a Catholic plot to blow up the Protestant Houses of Parliament during a "sitting".Guess what who's effigy will go on the burning inferno on Jan 6th celebrations? How are the kids going to copy the orange " foxtail"?
They can use a leftover rotten pumpkin from Halloween.
I think burning him in effigy is more likely to turn him into even more of a counter-culture hero. I'd rather he just goes down in history as a complete failure, financial, political, and psychological.
Hopefully we'll see many monuments to Trumpsky. Tearing them down will be exhilarating!
Maybe for a little while, but I think in time he'll be seen as a bad joke. A dangerously bad joke. I really like the idea of burning him in effigy. I'll mark my calendar.
I’d really rather he is made to live out the rest of his life in a deep, dark, damp dungeon filled with other rats
Kellyanne Conway ought to be remembered as the leader of the United States' Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, just as Joseph Goebbels is remembered for being the Nazi head of the German ministry in 1932. She worked hard to rock the American public off the foundation of objective facts and truth and she should be accorded much credit for the success of the Regime in promoting self-serving lies.
And I think Steven Miller put the words in Trump’s mouth.
Always pretty obvious whenever Trump opened his mouth, as to whether he was using his own words (minimalist and repetitive vocabulary), or those of his speech “manipulators” (grandiose and for him almost unpronounceable).
He's the real Joseph Goebbels; Conway, despite her "alternative facts' statement, was just a cheerleader.
The Terror struck me way back on Nov. 3, 2016. King of Q was so obviously a baby Hitler in speeches and rallies and propaganda. But Jan. 6, 2021 was the full Krystallnacht of the republican seditionist coup on our country. I do not see it tamed unless we convict ALL those seditionists to show others there are consequences to commit felonies and attempted murders against our government and our elected officials. This behavior MUST end. They only understand strongarms. We need to show force via legal means, harsh and loud.
Here I am naive again, should seditionists lose their country after trying to overthrow it? Let them be immigrant refugees, scale walls somewhere looking for political asylum from the USA. See which countries will take them. That ex-military and law enforcement people participated in this coup is so appalling and says something about teaching people how to strategize and kill. How do we de-program our warriors when they return to us? And what the hell is wrong with SOME of our police? White supremacists are attracted to positions of power via their fears. And we are witnessing them being trigger-happy terrorists versus Officers of the Peace? Our challenges are many, thank goodness there are more of us than them. But we have so much work to do....
"Banishment from the country is decidedly unconstitutional, at least for U.S. citizens."
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/01/banishment-as-punishment-is-it-constitutional-for-states-to-exile-criminals.html
We may need to enact new laws, or revise old ones.
Mention July 4, December 7, September 11 or January 6 and Americans will know the meaning, until forever runs out.
My (boomer) generation would include November 22. Alas, increasing numbers of people don't recognize it as JFK's assassination. Alas!
Definitely. We all remember where we were when we heard, how we reacted, how our teachers, classmates, and families reacted. I am ashamed to admit that in my tiny, developing 3rd grade mind, I thought it was a good thing that my parents would be happy about and I actually cheered! Then we were called in from recess and my Catholic classmates (who outnumbered the rest of us) and my teacher were all crying. We listened to a tearful announcement over the intercom by our principal and were sent home early. When I got home, my anti-Catholic, anti-Democrat, anti-Kennedy parents were also crying. That was a real wake-up moment for me - that my parents' vociferous disagreement with the religious and political views of our President did not include a wish for him to die. The honestly deeply-felt anguish they expressed as we later watched the funeral procession with brave young John-John holding his mother's hand moved me and confused me at the same time. However, by the time Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated so soon after that dark November, I had learned that religion and politics were not worth killing for. My parents and I disagreed over so many aspects of religion and politics, but I never doubted their essential decentness toward their compatriots.
1. If Donald Trump had not assembled a mob on January sixth, worked them into a frenzy with lies about a stolen election snd sent them to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal”, Officer Brian D. Sicknick would still be alive. He was only 42 years old. It makes me heartsick. Donald Trump has Officer Sicknick’s blood on his hands.
2. Donald Trump was still President when the House of Representatives impeached him. Mitch McConnell refused to call the Senate back into session and have the trial in the Senate until after the Biden inauguration. Then he voted to investigate whether it was constitutional to impeach a past president.
Rest in Peace Officer Bryan Sicknick. Pray for Justice.
I always return to "Vengence is mine. Sayeth the Lord" Everyone will eventually be judged for their lives, fairly by one who sees the heart. It may not happen in their lifetime but eternity is a long long time. I do the best I can here on earth to see justice done but I rest in the knowledge that they will be judged eventually.
Great reminder, Sally Hart. I will hold fast to the Lord's words...and yours as well.
Loose the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
-- Julia Ward Howe
So heartsick. Why can tRump not be tried for murder.
Is it possible that the Capitol police will charge him?
Wow.
Thanks, Candace!
I was particularly interested this morning to see the NYT's detailed vote map showing with "horrifying" clarity, with my apologies for the generalization, of the Urban-Rural divide. Does living in the country drive people crazy so they buy Trump's lies and accept the strict and varying limits he would impose on freedom? Is city living so "bad" that they have no choice but to vote for the party that will "save" them? Is it a question of population density? Is it a question of availability of public services? Is it about the number of ancestors you can trace since the first "got of the boat".....and in what condition you were placed on that boat? Is it strictly about money....the very rich and the very poor "whites" in the rural areas and everyone else of all colours and means in the subdivision/tenement/condiminium?
The cities are growing and the country population is declining. Is it enough to say, time will solve the problem? Do we want an empty countryside? Do we want people to have the power or for wealth to decide? Hell No! Time to get to the root of the problem and not just to assuage the symptomes of what is driving us apart and to stop Trump or his ilk happening again.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html
Getting Trump definitively out of the way is extremely important, but he is a symptome and not the cause of the problem.
Trump speaks for let’s call it 40% of the country. He is not the problem. The 40% of the US is the problem. He is the mouthpiece that speaks for them, he is their elected leader.
It was here on HCR that I really began to get a handle on this issue. Old social order versus new social order. Red vs. Blue (GOP vs. people who vote Dem). Whites first, males first, straights first adherents and believers, and anarchist-types, the people like Waco and Ruby Ridge and Malheur NWR. BTW “malheur” is French for “illness,” as in “malaise.”
There is a very strong libertarian and anarchist ethic in the US, particularly in the West. Think TV westerns and all that. In the southeast, it’s the history of slavery. You would think that eventually people would grow out of the belief of whites first and blacks second, but confederate flags and monuments on the license plates and state flags and at NASCAR (until 2020 and George Floyd) indicate otherwise. Don’t let the overt changes fool you: just because the symbols now banned at NASCAR are being removed from some or all of those listed items, that doesn’t mean the consciousness is changing for that 40% of the population. .
I’m still at work with an iPhone. Let’s get you a better response when I get home. I’m just warming up.
My father is one. I have been speaking to him for 20 straight years. Almost all the truck drivers I work with fall in that group. Let’s face it, most of them are dummies in someway shape or form. A lot of them are white men who have inferiority complex is, maybe because of their lot in life, self-esteem issues, they’re not blessed with the type of gifts that you and I have become accustomed to. Gifts of access to privileges. Being educated, being articulate, and being part of the world community is a very very different Weltanschauung than struggling to gain money, privilege, resources, and status and standing. When you’re at the bottom of the heap, your male privilege and your white privilege might be the only thing you have, and you might be hanging onto it with everything you’ve got. Having somebody try to rip that away from you might be like losing two of your only advantages left in the world. You and I, Stuart, we have gifts. We have blessings. We have smarts. Be grateful. Be grateful that we don’t have to clutch on to social privileges that are going the way of the Dodo bird, becoming extinct.
You’d have to be a genius to figure it out from NYT. Just drop yourself anywhere in America and start talking to white men with blue-collar jobs, or do a little bit of hunting, it won’t take much, in any snooty country club or retirement home. Republicans galore. Welcome to America, the divided country.
I found out many of the people I worked with were Trump voters, true believers. It really shook my faith in the hearts of others.
I have friends who are white collar, educated(?) trumpets...and in cities. It's not just rural...IMHO.
Yes Susan, there's an entire large conversation here today about City/Rural. And someone else posted exactly as you did, about Republicans in blue cities. My response was (something like), "That would be my dad. We live in a blue county in California. He is member of a country club and now lives in a snooty Republican retirement home."
I mean "blue districts" not "blue cities."
I work in a law office and in a building that is 95% accountants, architects and attorneys in a downtown capital city and most everyone is a die hard Republican. Not a Drumpf fan but always vote red. After Biden won they stopped paying attention to the news. No one on my floor watched the inauguration, no one watched the riots, no one watches the impeachment news, no one knows who Eugene Goodman is, no one knows who MTG is or what she has been putting out in the world. There is a real head in the sand issue going on with choosing your own news and it does not just come from rural areas, or the uneducated or the poor or the "forgotten". It's really wild. When I tried to pull a couple co-workers over to my computer screen when I was watching the insurrection on 1/6 AS IT HAPPENED they both walked away and one said "everyone is crazy" and the other said"I'm with him, they are crazy on both sides". I can't stop shaking my head.
Wow. Thank you Kimberley for sharing this perspective.
I had the odd thought, "Hmm, this must be how the rumor started that Antifa is responsible for Jan. 6. The people in denial of the truth, like these people in Kimberley's world, would just rather believe what they believe, that Trump supporters are innocent of any culpability."
The people you are describing are like my dad. Clueless. Seeing only what they want to see, not what's really there. These are the same people sending money to Tя☭mp which he then uses to feather his own nest.
Yes, and if I try to throw a few facts in there about the election, the riots, the impeachment I start to sound like the conspiracy theorist. LOL
Grateful every day, buddy! You betcha!
We have super powers they don’t have. Even my dad. My dad is a millionaire. He got very lucky. But he grew up barely educated in Germany, at the bottom of his class in a farming community outside Munich. He emigrated to America, learned English in the US Army, and managed to succeed financially, and to have a family that’s doing well as well, even though he isn’t all that sharp. He is a diehard Republican, one of the ones with money. And he still believes completely in the old social order trust me. Like I said, self-esteem issues, inferiority complex. In his case, growing up in that era of Germany of course had an influence as well, very strong and lasting influence. I don’t think the social programming is quite as severe in America but it’s definitely there, take a look at the impact MeToo and George Floyd is having. Btw I’m rooting for BLM to get the Peace prize.
We're not responsible for our parents, just fortunate to have them and love them if we can somtimes despite themselves! Mine was dead to me as of the age of 7. He died unlamented by anyone in 2012.
Did your father have any family in Philadelphia PA? My last name was Attewell for 25 years. It is a very unusual name in the US
Similar father and brothers story. Deep insecurities. Disappointments. Fears. And all Republicans who voted for Trump. Rooting for BLM to receive Nobel Peace Prize, too. ❤️🤍💙
The Black Lives Matter movement is so much larger than the original BLM organization. Which has been nominated for the Nobel Prize?
Oh, wow, father *and* brothers. Fortunately my sisters are both non-Republicans. I don't know what I would do. I would barely speak with them. This year I realized how grateful I am that this Tя☭mp moment-in-history didn't estrange me from my sisters.
BLM Yes!!!
Sadly, the case for them may be bolstered by yet another outrageous police murder which could occur any time. It is inevitable, and if next summer has any resemblance to 2020, the Committee won't need archived video to recall why Black Lives Matter.
Just the other day in a neighboring city, police handcuffed and pepper sprayed a 9 year old girl. She was in an extremely agitated state but even young nurses in psychiatric EDs are trained to take a person down safely without harming them.
Me too! BLM!
I just read that Walesa nominated Navalny for the peace prize.
Awesome! So many deserving, so few Peace Prizes to go around. Navalny belongs in the Kremlin. He deserves that Peace Prize now, and later when he gets there, he deserves it again.
😁🙏🙏
So true
Let's not forget the Native Americans in this. Their genocide involved North, East, South and West of America and their continued treatment as subserviant, inconvenient groups with only secondary rights too......secondary to the rights of the moneymen that is!
Trust me, I do not forget. I also do not forget Chinese and other Asians. In California particularly a sordid history of lynchings and cold-blooded murders of all of the above.
Yes. When they finished building the railways they had the nerve to want to join the goldrush! Heaven forbid...had to put a stop to such outrageous behaviour!
The Gold Rush came first, creating the need for railways and other necessary infrastructure. Most of the first Chinese immigrants came seeking success on what they called "Gold Mountain." When it didn't (literally) pan out, often due to exclusion and intimidation, they shifted into other sectors of the economy, including railway construction, domestic labor ( i.e. laundry), and the service sector (restaurants and retail).
Y Chen, Chop Suey USA
A Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy
P Siu, The Chinese Laundryman
R Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore
I'm afraid i sinned against the historical timeline on purpose as it made for a funnier reponse and underlined a very basic attitude towards the Chinese community...denying their right to independant existence.
Racism didn't stop them. There is still a town named Chinese Camp. In my gold rush town, lineages of Chinese people with ancestry that goes back to the Gold Rush, how else would a Chinese-American find this rural town? The freeway built through this town in the 1960s with Eisenhower Interstate Highway funds was routed right through the Chinese section of town. Imagine that. Dodger Stadium wiped out Chavez Ravine neighborhood, my wife and her sister grew up in L.A. and they have never forgotten. Latin neighborhood eliminated, everyone displaced. Notice they didn't build Dodger Stadium in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air or even Brentwood or Anaheim.
Particularly the continuing genocide of indigenous women in this country and in Canada.
I recommend "Wind River" from 2017, starring Jeremy Renner. It's a feature film but has great depth and insight on the ongoing ordeal of Native American women. Not for the faint of heart.
I saw it when it as soon as it came out. Horrific but not new to me. It was equally revealing for the despair and drugs of her 2 brothers and the dignity of the father sitting in the garden. There have been many similar real-life tragedies...for one concerning inner British Columbia with girls leaving the reserve to go to Vancouver and never to be seen again.
Roland: 20+ yrs ago, Idaho. My good friend Fr. Bill Wassmuth (RiP) headed up an inter-faith, anti- hate, anti-white supremacist movement. A late night phone call from a friend got him out of bed and into his living room, saving him from the bomb that seconds later blew up his bedroom ! You are right. Long histories.
Fellow Idahoan Wassmuth Center volunteer. Even here we hold the line.
Thank you, Laurie.
Wow. That's horrible.
It is often hard not to take on the characteristics of our parents and the environment we grew up in. I became a democrat because my parents, grandparents ... were democrats. Some people walk away from their upbringing, but I feel that most do not. We may see their leanings as terrible and uneducated but they do not. They have a hard time understanding why they should change when they are "right."
Trump was much more than a symptom. He was recruited by nefarious forces domestic and abroad, unleashed his exploitative talents in a new playground of power, and from the start of his campaign, exponentially and terrorizingly exacerbated the problem of the great American experiment in democracy.
A pawn in the game, not the king or Queen!
Maybe a rook.
Perhaps! Rendering possible his often "oblique" moves.
The rook, or castle, moves only on 90 degree lines. I picked it for the pun on 'rooking', or conning, someone. It's the bishop that moves on an angle.
A good one....I was being far too serious there and it got in the way of a well merited laugh. I was thinking of the start to end point of the rook's move not the intermediary moves....oblique too! I hope we are not heading for a simple "castling" in the next few weeks§
My chess fanatic husband applauds you! Yes, the rook is actually a very powerful piece. BTW, I hope you have watched "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix! It is fabulous.
Puppet. Putin's Puppet. Putin's Pawn. Russia invaded us from within.
Russia is still invading us from within. They have funded numerous Republican members of Congress. https://americanindependent.com/republicans-congress-celebrated-fourth-of-july-russia/
Why do folks believe The Big Lie but scoff at The Big Truth?
Grrrrrrrrrrr
Donald John Tя☭mp. imagine a small swastika in place of "n" in "John." The origin of John is likely Johann and likely from his grand[parents, both ancestors born in Kallstadt, Germany, what was then Bavaria, the place Hitler came to power after WWI when the German democracy was fresh and new.
I think the cause can 100% be traced to the fact that rural media bandwidths are cheap and easy for right wing propaganda groups to buy up, to the savvy way those media groups have targeted and exploited the natural cultural differences and pride in a certain rural identity, and the cynical way those groups have taken advantage of the end of the Fairness Doctrine to increasingly entrench the rural narrative in pride and anger and disinformation. We have a real mess to clean up.
So . . . why aren't liberal or progressive groups buying up some of those rural media bandwidths?
Great question, and for years I felt that there's been a missed opportunity here. It's not just the bandwidth that's the issue, though. NPR broadcasts to a pretty comprehensive area, but it's seen by a lot of folks as elitist. Even more than investing in bandwidth, you have to invest in the kind of programming that caters to and celebrates certain cultural differences. Finding talent who can do that from a liberal perspective without pandering sounds to me like a daunting task and a real investment.
Leftish media exists in this liberal comfort zone where we all know how to talk to each other about our favorite novels and arthouse movies and the latest pan-Asian recipe we tried. The leftish media CEOs and CFOs looked at dollar signs and found it obvious that catering to urban and suburban folks pays the biggest dividends. Bandwidth costs money. Programming costs more.
Right wing activists, on the other hand, played a long game: a game where you invest in influence, not in advertising dividends, and you take your time and hone your message and you engage folks in a conversation until you know what works. They have decades of practice at this.
Why not have an obligation of local ownership as a condition of keeping the licence?
That used to be the case, but it was lost in the Great Deregulation a couple of decades ago.
I live in a rural area in a Bible belt state. Beautiful and yet exhausting. I work in the city. The difference between rural and city mentality is striking. IMO, it seems like the lack of cross pollination of experiencing different people and cultures makes a huge impact. Rural people have a very limited range and scope - work, church, family, grocery store, and Wal-Mart/Target. There is a limited - if any - appreciation of the arts. I'm not trying to stereotype or be elitist but to show the limited range of experiences. Anyone or thing outside of this circle is viewed with suspicion. Anyone or thing that is viewed as a threat to this circle brings them together. The lack of life experiences, problem-solving that comes from those experiences, and desire to consider another viewpoint is a toxic combination. Anyone that is viewed as a 'savior' to save them from the threat creates a blind following. Hence, the extreme version we saw on 1/6..
This is not to say that this does not exist in cities. It most definitely does. But the limited experiences in a rural area create a larger population that is susceptible to this mentality.
I have lived in large cities (Austin, Houston, Memphis), medium sized cities (Oxford, New Braunfels, Fayetteville, Shreveport) and small towns (Hosston, Lockhart) and rural areas (Canyon Lake.) In all of these, I found clusters of people who fit your description above: individuals who chose to cling together because of their limited life experiences and their "sameness." Those of us who traveled, read, had interest in the world and its varied peoples were not welcome in those clusters. We were always the "outsiders" and perceived as being weird or different. So, we too would create our own "clusters" of like minded people. It was not so much that we considered ourselves "elite," but that we wanted to associate with people with whom we could talk, enjoy entertainment (as in the arts) and share stories and experiences. Most of those folks remain in my world even to this day, from Hawaii, to DC, to UK, to Spain and even Dubais. I am not an anthropologist, but among those of us here, perhaps there are some who understand this apparent tendency of people to seek out and stay with others with whom they share values and interests. In the small town in which I now live, diversity exists but the only shared experience that appears to cross cultural divides is politics. Just my two cents!
Great comment. My younger sister is a year younger than me. Same small rural town, same friends, same employment circles, same everything her entire life. She has a memory about everyone’s lives and happenings like a steel trap. And even with this limited life experience and view she is one of the happiest and kindest persons I know. She has a robust social life. Completely unaware of almost everything that I fret over re the world and life in the US. We have nothing in common but recipes and wine.
I left that small town at 17 and never to return. Im 56 now. I have college degrees, have traveled the world for 20 years, very full and intense professional life, news junkie and love my politics and causes. Have met and maintained relationships with really neat people all over the world. Yet more and more all I see around me are people like my sister. I feel alone and unable to relate outside of interest blogging.
Many days I’d give anything to be just like her. To swap my life for hers. Sometimes ignorance is bliss and the more you know the more difficult life is.
Connecting with compatible people is even harder during the pandemic. I suggest joining mailing lists for seminar series, book, worship or support groups, and thematic discussions. Libraries offer many and can direct us to more. As Poirot would say, "stimulate the little grey cells."
Thank you. See my comment to Fern below.
Your sister is not ignorant. Her life is not easier, better or more/less satisfying than yours. She is choosing to focus her energies on the people, things and places she can affect. Her soul purpose is different than yours. Do what nourishes you as she does what nourishes her.
But once you've "eaten of the fruit" there is no putting it back on the tree. Dealing with all that is why we are here.
I so completely understand Tricia. Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you, Linda. That means a lot to me.
Tricia, You named the reason for your discontent, feeling 'alone', and TPJ made some thoughtful suggestions. I do not know why your are lonely, but I will add a few ideas to TPJ's. Sometimes it is a bit depressing to transition from a very active life to one more quiet and, perhaps, to missing the 'old self.' . It could be enjoyable to fish around for companionship with people in your age group go in the opposite direction towards younger folks. Life will be easier when the pandemic releases it hold. Classes on subjects you would like to pursue, book clubs on line and group tours are options. Another possibly is talking with a counselor or social worker. Personal conversations with a knowledgeable professional may provide you with more insight; Zoom can make such conversations possible at this difficult time. This socio-political forum is also a good place to exercise you political spirit. Onward!
Thanks, Fern. I appreciate the time you took to list out things that may be of help. I'm a mental health therapist and suggest much of the same for my clients.
I guess the point I was trying to make, yet obviously wasn't too clear about, is that I find myself seeing more and more people like I described in my sister and less and less like myself. In the workplace, in society. It can feel lonely at times to feel different than the majority, but also I wanted to convey the thought that progressive experiences and thinking can take some people into territory that can be psychologically and emotionally draining. I've seen this with many of my clients and know how it feels myself. The last 3 sentences of my comment above was the true meaning behind my post. And the fact that oftentimes we view people who are so unlike ourselves as something wrong or pathological or that don't mirror what our nations stands for. Some are, of course, but some just want to live, and seem to enjoy, a more simple existence.
It is a benefit to me for us to have this exchange. About three months ago I realized how politically far apart a friend and I are. I don't know if the Trump years brought that to fore or if our differences grew with our different interpretations of who did what. Our differences were bred in the bone. I became involved in social issues at a young age, and he grew up in a narrow minded, right-wing family. He is a very good person and quite attentive to his family, friends and clients. My accommodation is to focus on his humane instincts and to handle differences bit by bit, not in big chunks. I have also missed lively and challenging discussions with other progressives. Two like-minded good friends live far away, but we email, text and have long telephone conversations every week or two. While I sometimes feel as you do, I am content with my political philosophy. Reading and participation also keep the feeling of isolation at bay. This is a frightening time for the country. That is all the more reason to seek out the people we can talk with.
I agree that there can be a contentment and simplicity to routine and the sameness of your family, friends, social life, neighborhood, job...while it may lack variety and "excitement" I am envious of some who can relax into their life and just be.
You may not be a professional anthropologist, but this is a worthwhile mini-ethnography. Write on!
Exactly our thought and our hesitancy in settling permanently in Provence. In the village cafés you tend to find much of the clan and the "foreigners" (those not born in the village) tend to form more discrete, "invitation only" groups out of sight of the crowds.
Completely agree. The rural folks - Ole Yankees - I encountered in my youth were cynical, stubborn, backward viewing, and proudly faithful to the old ways/beliefs of their ancestors. They world only hard enough to get by. Their view of the world is binary: us and them; have's and have not's. This is their way. It is interesting that 45 is their demigod because he could not care less about them. They are pawns in his shell game of power grabbing. Nothing more. He doesn't love them even in the slightest.
I once worked with a young woman who had not traveled outside her home state of New Hampshire. She was quiet, hard working, fiercely loyal and honest. In New England it's actually challenging not to set foot into another state since they are all so small. Going on a "mountain" hike, at the peak you can usuals see at least 3 states in a 360° view.
They are stuck in the last century so it's not surprising they are rebelling against time and the 21st century.
Kim, who put that chip on your shoulder about New Englanders? You've just stereotyped an entire population of people - that's part of what has gotten us into this mess in the first place - based how knowing how many people for how long??? I was born in Maine and have lived in NH almost my entire 59 years. Heather is from Maine and it's astonishing to me that you would insult and lump together "Ole Yankees" in this way on the author's page. Your comment that we only work hard enough to get by would be laughable if it weren't so completely opposite the truth. Clearly you never spent time on a lobster boat or a dairy farm or a construction site or with a tradesperson or a public health nurse, just for starters. Why are you saying we're stuck in the last century? Vermont gave us Bernie, NH (which by the way went for Biden and Hilary in 2016) gave us Dean Kamen, inventor of, among other things, the autosyringe and insulin pump, Massachusetts gave us the ACA; must I go on? You knew one person who had never traveled outside the state of NH and you make a huge leap about all of us? So what she never left? The elitist attitude about travel in this thread is very revealing.
But my main concern about your post is that it bears a striking resemblence to things I've read about "them" and the "other" in posts from Trumpeters.
Thank you Ben. I spent my youth in New England (ME/NH/MA/CT/NY) and left in my early twenties. Had exposure to lots of different people of all stripes and backgrounds. Which was my point in the thread. Traveling broadens scope and temperance. So does reading, education, volunteering, being a parent and grandparent. My work of the past 30 years has been in the construction industry and there are lots of red maga hats to be seen. My political hat is blue.
It would be interesting to compare the propensity to travel of the 2 populations. On the one hand, Travel broadens the mind and leads to understanding and acceptance of the new or the different. On the other, absence might lead to seeing the new or different as a threat damaging the certainties of close physical and clan ties which ensure their "safety" .
Here in Provence, the "ordinary" people often move about more than in Paris as they have to find opportunity and services where the can; the city dweller gets lazy as the are always a little "spoon fed" . They fly off all over the place too as do some Parisiens but probably from Barcelona rather than Paris; it's closer and cheaper all round.
This is an interesting discussion but I believe one element that has been left out is financial ability to travel. Yes, I agree that in more insular, small communities people tend to feel more comfortable with people like themselves but is that a symptom of a closed mind or a symptom of inability to access other points of view because travel and attending cultural events is out of reach for them due to location and also financial status.
I believe that leaving out the financial factor is somewhat elitist. It is also true that travel in different places teaches one to be less ethnocentric. I was fortunate enough to live in Argentina as an ex pat for about a year. When exposed to other cultures you learn that our way of life is not necessarily the "right" way of life. Other cultures our not quaint or frightening. They are just different. I think my experience made me much more open to differing life styles. I think the fact that I lived with different people and became truly bilingual made me the person I am today.
It is also true that while living there, although I did have many friends of different cultures, I did spend a great deal of time with my American friends.
So agree with your comment and regarding other cultures. I lived in Buenos Aires for 2 years and the Saudi Arabia for 8 years. All those years I traveled a lot. Living, traveling and working in different cultures taught me so much about humanity, politics, and just life overall. I didn't spend a great deal of time with my American colleagues while abroad. I found them less interesting.
Very true. However the "democratization" of international travel through radical reduction of air fares had gone a long way to removing the financial barriers. However, I don't think that this will survive the Covid disaster. Prior to the outbreak, hotel accomadation was already turning much more towards meeting the needs of the 1% through signifcant "quality" and price rises and despite initial encouragement AirBnB etc followed suite and maintained it's relative positioning...nolonger really accesible to the "ordinary" folk!
But air travel is ruinous to the environment.
I travel to VA each year and have turned away from flying. Amtrak is similar cost, more comfy, more scenic, better amenities, and the full door-to-door trip is barely longer. Forget lines -- just show up and it's all aboard!!
Arriving at Union Station -- as in those who vanquished the Confederacy -- is always an added thrill. See you on the train ... or not, we'll never know!
From what I've seen, rural people rarely go away for vacations. If they do, it is a place that is very similar to their safe circle and relatively close to home. The notion of exploring another part of the world or country doesn't cross their mind. The cross culture in a city tends to expand your world vision and the desire/knowledge to make that trip happen. I live with someone (not my wisest life choice) that is the epitome of this rural mindset and it would absolutely never cross his mind to go to another country nor does he have the desire. Whereas, my overseas trips have broadened my life and viewpoints. I want to travel and explore more when safe!
I think it is not helpful to create a black and white dichotomy between rural and urban people. I live in both places and it is not true that rural people do not travel and are not curious. We need to look to the way policies of both parties have disenfranchised large swaths of our population, who are angry and who do not believe that mainstream politics has any interest in making their lives better. If we fail to consider the reality of this, we will see more extremism and not just from rural areas.
When there was a military draft, conscription often took isolated people to new places and experiences. A cousin who is a red-state rancher served a couple of years in Germany, but otherwise has rarely left his state; now he rarely leaves the ranch. It's just one example, but it illustrates how sojourning, forced or not, can broaden horizons. Also consider the many servicemen who found spouses in Vietnam, Philippines, Japan, etc.
The demise of the conscription army in France and its civilizing influence on street gang members has had a disasterous effect on agressive incivility on the steets for the whole population.
France was the biggest tourist destination in the world, but the French are the people in Europe who travel the least outside their own national boundaries.
If you look at cities like New York, i'm not sure that residents of Harlem or the Bronx have the same propensity for international travel as Manhattan...or of nearby nice, wealthy NJ or Pa leafy townships for that matter. A mixed bag of course and as always when you take averages in statistics you lose a little of the truth.
Way back in the last millennium I spent a semester in Rodez, and still feel great affection for France. It's perhaps the most geographically and climatically diverse European nation, offering a range of experiences within one country. The same is even more true here. Americans can travel extensively, see a variety of places (but not people) without ever crossing international borders. "Travel broadens the mind," but not all travel has that effect.
Very valid points!
I think being well read and having access to museums of all sorts is more important than travel. Even in many rural areas, it's just a day trip into a decent city to spend hours at a museum, very do-able. Only Europeans or extremely weathly Americans can take the length vacations needed to spend enough time in new places to even get a sense of how life there is different. A week in a new city doesn't do it. It requires being able to sink in and live among the locals for some time and Americans don't get that sort of time off. And most travel is not sustainable, Flying particularly is incredibly detrimental to the environment.
Marx & Engels referred to "the idiocy of rural life." It doesn't mean that rural dwellers are more stupid, but it tends to confirm the lack of diverse culture described here. The gap was greater in the 19C.
Life viewed from the library of the reading room of the British Museum where the former was doing his thinking and writing!
I was born in a rural Southern town. You are exactly right.
Pause for one moment and consider this: cities are not self sustaining. Cities depend upon the exploitation of rural places foreign and domestic. American Imperalism has come to the homeland. Urban centers depend upon their privlage to sustain their way of life. Only rural people who work in blue collar jobs like farming, ranching, manufacturing and mining feel the oppression of capital supporting urban life.
It's all very well talking about "localizing" food supply chains but the rural and urban workers are totally essential to each other to maintain harmony and "comfortable" life on earth
The question is "Comfort for whom?" I am surprised you enclude the word "comfort" for "life on earth" not merely Human life.
I was merely looking for a way to include our economic system and level. Harmony was for the human side of things.
Capitalism to date, is ONLY about making humans comfortable and entertained at the expense of the planet. Adam Smith wrote during a time of "natural law". Capitalism boasts about an economic system based upon self-interest. No wonder the people who commit to it are distroying the planet. Supply and demand is not a natural law like gravity. It is a human invention, as is money.
Hopefully there's time enough to convince most people that saving the earth is the ultimate self-interest. But time is a-wasting.
Capitalism depends on the "free market", a myth that doesn't work, has never worked and cannot work.
Some significantly and increasingly more comfortable than others.
Interesting conversation. I’d say the greater divide is between rich and poor. Hunger Games without the annual, deadly war games. Wealthy people whether urban or rural rely on service workers to enjoy the benefits of their wealth. Without the entire support system and infrastructure provided by workers who build, farm, manufacture, clean, repair and provide care, money would be meaningless. The eternal challenge for the powerful minority is how to divide, control and suppress the essential majority. They have become very good at keeping us under control. This is not a US problem. It’s a human problem. The clock is ticking.
The red-blue division is there precisely to disguise the division between the very very rich and everyone else. We have seen over the last fifty years that the more inequality increases, the more the radical right creates "culture war" light shows to deflect attention, anger, away from the real sources of inequality.
Wow, Joan, I never thought of the red-blue division before in the way you describe it here, but makes perfect sense. Thanks.
Agreed, redirecting our anger away from the real problem keeps us fighting one another instead of dealing with the real problem.
Oh!
Exploitation is a capitalist problem the same way racism is a white problem. The whole earth suffers under capitalim the same way people of color suffer under racism.
100%
Yes but the rural areas need the city just as much. Who else will buy what they grow? Who will pay for the state colleges in the less populated rural areas? Who will pay for the infrastructure-- road maintenance, internet, power, waste treatment, water treatment hospitals?
The same argument was used by the British Empire to brag about the blessings "bestowed" upon India.
Note, I am not against "modern" farming, but against policies that reward the use of farmland to supply cheap High Frutose Corn Syrup. I am not against education, but the policy of using up all the sand from around the world to make buildings for Americans in the U.S. I am not against roads, but the policy of building roads out of asphalt, built by rivers that prevent animals from drinking the water without learning to dodge cars and polluting the water from run off.
The best book to look at about re-imagining a sustainable and nuturing society is The Empathetic Civilization by Jeremy Rufkin.
I've requested that Rifkin book from my public library. What do you think of Kate Raworth's ideas called Doughnut Economics?
I have Donut Economics on my "to read" shelf. I have listened to all her interviews and TED talk. Have not read it yet.
There are too many distopia stories about the future. It is refreshing to me to imagine a better world. In order to create it, we must first imagine it. Regardless of the frailty of the author, I recommend the Harry Potter series of books and science fiction novels such as Ecotopia and The 5th Sacred Thing by Star Hawk.
Here's a short account of applying that doughnut model to a real city: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/amsterdam-doughnut-model-mend-post-coronavirus-economy
It's a long, long time since I read Star Hawk's book. I will put it on my list to revisit.
My wife is a huge fan of The 5th Sacred Thing, it had a deep impact on her, still to this day. I am currently reading this Starhawk book to her now. We are reviewing it.
Your "better world" is the book I am working on. I'm creating the story universe for it. Today was a big day, I just came up with the name for my sci-fi book.
Sorry, no. Nobody from any city is buying the produce from the rural farms around me. We're buying it from them! And I get my very own tax, cable/internet, utility bills every month just like you. Got a private well and septic system too. Don't have my own hospital yet but the one where I work is supported by the surrounding rural towns and small city where it's situated.
I have nothing against cities at all, and this may not be true everywhere, but it is also not an absolute that rural areas need cities.
On the other hand, rural communities are not self-sustaining, either. They are all roped into the "Get big, or get out" world of corporate farming, based -- not on strong sons and fertile daughters -- but on John Deere and the commodities markets. Diesel dries up and the tractor dies. A bumper crop can be a scourge, since it drives prices down.
“...the oppression of capital supporting urban life.”? Are you objecting to a capitalist economy as an oppressor of rural people?
As an adult, I've always lived an urban life, but have felt no less oppressed by the capitalist economy. Perhaps more so, as the cost of living in even the smaller urban areas of my state have been rising steadily next to stagnant wages since I first entered the workforce in the early 1970's. A capitalist economy is fairly equal in its oppression of both the rural and urban working classes; nevertheless, there is often a red-blue divide between us.
It is a distraction to compare oppression. For example, the people of London were also oppressed during the British Empire, not the same way as the people of India, but Charles Dickens describes in what way. Yes, class is key to supporting Colonialism by an Empire, but what class is the rest of life on earth?
" Only rural people ... feel the oppression of capital supporting urban life."
I respectfully dissent from this view. There's plenty of oppression to be felt in cities, and suburbs to a lesser extent. Perhaps the problem is most glaring in one-industry towns, often the only developed areas in a broad hinterland. A single corporate decision can wipe out the local economy in one stroke.
There are other types of oppression than economic. For example, even though Patty Duke was rich and famous, she lived in a time before people understood bi-polar disorder.
Thanks JJ; I'll take a look.
I love your thinking Judith. Sustainability awareness. You have it in spades. Mother Earth consciousness.
It will be interesting to see how the the Pandemic changes the red-blue maps of the future. So many college-educated people, who tend to vote blue and now work from home, are leaving the cities for less densely populated areas.
Same here in France. Executives leaving Paris as they can telework. The lower levels of the business hierarchy aren't so lucky. The question now will be the next start-ups...where will they install themselves?
Here in USA, Zillow trends show movement to Austin, Cincinnati etc. from San Francisco-where I used to live for a short time. In my local Hudson Valley, home sales prompt bidding wars with 100% cash sales of NYC dwellers moving out of the city. It’s starting to become a movement! ❤️🤍💙
And San Francisco and NYC priced themselves out of the market for "ordinary" people...even for erstwhile computer "geeks" and "nerds" . In our Provençal village, Parisians are coming in having sold out in Paris. They can pay cash both for the old stone "Mas" and for the inevitable renovation...thus doubling the cost..and still have enough left over for the new Porsche or Mercedes! When locals earning minimum wage want to buy and start a family they are in trouble.
That's it.
I'm a little further north, and just today, read a note in my local newsletter - people gushing about a $1,200 a-night hotel located about a mile from our house. I haven't been home since the pandemic began. I expect to find the community much changed by the influx of people from the City, flush with cash, who bought everything in sight. They will go back, eventually, leaving a mess in their wake.
I'm not sure that big cities will serve the purpose in the future with technology changing the structure f our economic lives; smaller centres will take over to my mind.
Same here in Northern Michigan. 110% cash sales.
Even as the "rural" population declines, the electoral system won't necessarily change the outcome of elections. Support the National Popular Vote bill: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
Stuart - If you haven’t seen it, Will Wilkinson of The Niskanen Center has a great article and podcast that speaks to the question you’re raising https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-density-divide-urbanization-polarization-and-populist-backlash/
Very interesting. Thank you for the link. The current 2 party system is exacerbating the "divide" as it is clear neither all small town/rural populations not denser big city populations have the same views and interests. In the circumstances where the latter comes to dominate totally the former, it would be logical for wide differences of opinion to emerge that will break up the current blocks. A monopoly of power by one party does not constitute democracy and can not be perpetuated.
I understand a very high percentage of Trump's voters are from densely blue urban areas. They show up blue because they are greatly outnumbered. Is this true? Are they the wealthier blue collar and racist bunch as much as the rural or?
I haven't looked at how they built the map but i should imagine that the grade of red and blue depends on the degree of dominance. It's a winner takes all system and rich and poor democrats live in red areas too.
Thank you
One thing to consider about “the country is this. No high tech infrastructure, no jobs, starved education creates a recipe for serfdom. Always has; always will.
As around me in the village. The peasants can't just dispose of their land as they might wish and all salaried jobs are regardless paid at min wage. Free labour or wage slavery...the Southern or Confederate conception of this is never far beneath the surface. We are still far from the Lincoln view.
"The cities are growing and the country population is declining."
You have hit upon the root of the problem , Stuart. Under the electoral college system and the 2 Senators per state, this will exacerbate the inequity....despite the population shift, the rural states' influence will only increase.
I wonder if e.g. Wyoming ultimately will have 1 Rep and 2 Senators who represent only their own three votes. Or worse, if one person holds two offices, just two votes!
If nothing changes in the electoral. System. The increase would be relative only in terms of "representation per head" .
Yes....and what is the number? 40% of the population will represent 70% of the Senators and electoral college? Prepare for more Republican minority Presidents!!
If only it were that simple! In NH, we consistently send Dems to DC and Republicans to the statehouse. Go figure.
My condolences! Something rotten in the state of Denmark methinks!
Today AOC's regular message detailed her experiences on Jan 6 in the Capitol siege, which actually lasted several hours. She and my Rep Ayanna Pressley came within moments of serious harm, but they boosted each other's confidence and made it through. Who knows the effects of the day's trauma on so many Congress and staff people? Not to mention CP officers who did their duty, including Brian Sicknick, who gave his Last Full Measure of Devotion. The more details that emerge concerning the insurrection, the more urgent the need to vigorously prosecute all responsible parties to the full extent of the law, from the former president on down.
The harrowing documentary "Downfall" (below) should be seen by all who care about America. Perhaps as outsiders, the Australians saw clearly how best to present one of the most terrifying events in our history, one for which justice is essential. Warning: though it's not graphic, the shooting of the female insurrectionist is clearly shown. Someone really dies in this film.
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2103H001S00
Last week my husband and I watched what we thought would be an escape movie (2 1/2hours) from 2004 about the last days and hours in the bunker as Berlin was falling to the Russians. The English title is also “Downfall” and stars the excellent Bruno Ganz as Hitler. But the interesting thing is the film is bracketed by cuts of 2002 interview with the woman who was hired as a 22 year old as Hitler’s secretary during those last weeks. She spoke of trying to forgive herself for not understanding what she was a part of. The film is harrowing in exploring those last minute choices to go down with the cause or escape. And it was decidedly not an escape from the present day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall_(2004_film)
I love Ayanna Presley. She had a very close call.
Prosecution for everyone speaking at the pre-Trump Riot rally, including Trump (picture a swastika in place of the “u”), and his spawn Eric Hitler, and Rudy Himmler. And of course the Congress members.
Women for America First
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-capitol-siege-campaigns-elections-d14c78d53b3a212658223252fec87e99
I've been at BU since 1983. Our community is SO proud of both our wonderful former students now in Congress. BU has the best representation of any university!
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/04/aoc-pressley-sotu-110734
You must be very proud and you SHOULD be very proud 🏆🥰🏆🏆
I moved to Boston right out of college in 1980. Stayed until ‘88. Followed my ex back home, she want to BU. Her parents met at Oberlin.
Boston is a special place. I always keep one eye out for what’s going on over there.
Oberlin was the abolitionist college par excellence. Visit Boston sometime and we can go on a tour of the Black Heritage Trail, modified for world history courses.
I visited Boston in 2002 and did a short city tour....I wish I had known about the Black Heritage Trail. There is so much history in Boston...incredible city.
Excellent piece, TPJ.
Thanks, L; you do pretty well yourself. Quality over quantity.
thank you, important to watch!!!
I copied that Australian Broadcasting Corp. video from yesterday’s Heather comments. When I get home in the morning I’m checking it out. Thanks for posting it again. 👍
I’m having trouble with Mick Mulvaney’s words condemning trump when he helped make the man. I suppose his regret may be genuine.
I agree that Mulvaney's words come too late, but he is certainly emphatic about his feelings for tRump since 1/6.
Painted himself as a saint, mentioned Catholic Church? Genuinely doesn't want to go down in history as the rat he is.
After Jan 6 is very late to the party. Where was Mulvaney for the last four years???
Sorry, my laptop computer is hiccuping.
Hello Marcy. Having trouble finding the following post of yours:
"Roland, does your father live in Germany? I think you said once you were first gen American ...?"
No, my father lives in the same town as me in northern California. After my dad retired, my parents moved here for their retirement. Yes, I am first gen American.
Sorry, my laptop computer has the hiccups.
As the doctor says, "my fee is thanks enough."
The coverage of Novalny's court appearance and sentence to 2.5 more years in a Russian prison after recovering from the attempt on his life drives my thinking that such authoritarian power as Putin's in Trump's tool box shows the necessity of conviction and bar from ever holding office not only in the Senate but in SDNY and other courts for crimes yet to be exposed. Trump must be stopped totally.
Right on target Eleanor. In this community and in the main stream news media, journalists and regular people tend to look at Trump in isolationist fashion just from the American perspective. Americans are way behind, they haven’t realized yet that this guy is a puppet of Putin. He does Putin‘s bidding, more consistently than anything else except lining his own pockets, feathering his nest. Greg Olear and others have also detailed his mob history, which also gets near-zero coverage in the news. This guy is dirty every which way, most people just don’t realize it. Thanks for bringing this perspective into the discussion. There is absolutely no question in my mind they should’ve locked him up and thrown away the key a couple decades ago. And still he is free.
Recently I said it will take a presidential library just to have a repository big enough to contain all the information about all his criminal activity and corruption. Tя☭mp is the most corrupt US politician of any kind that we’ve probably had in 100 years in this country, easily the most corrupt US president in history, mobbed up, and a puppet and pawn and likely employee of Vladimir Putin, who is the world’s most fabulously wealthy and powerful criminal at this moment in history. Tя☭mp is a Hitler imitator when it comes to propaganda and inciting people, if possible I would now put a swastika in his name to replace the hammer and sickle. Reminder: there are also *multiple dozen* sex crime lawsuits against him right now, I would bold-face “multiple dozen” if I could.
I have trouble imagining anyone dirtier.
Do we need to insure he is locked up? Do we need to insure he doesn’t return to public office? Was suspension of his propaganda platforms warranted?
YES. ABSOLUTELY. UNEQUIVOCALLY.
Two presidential libraries. One for his crimes and corruption, the other for his honest ... oh, never mind!
Lol
Thank you for adding your on-target understanding, Roland.
Eternal vigilance and focused action needed
Thank you for this reminder, Eleanor. I'm not going to repeat the whole of the largely unread comment I made some six hours ago about the spiritual excrement still smeared not only on the walls and floors of the Capitol but in the Senate chamber, in the House. How Senators and Representatives must still share the same space with criminals. But Roland has spoken for me in his response to your message. And here, I shall repeat the last paragraph of my earlier comment:
If you want to see where these conspirators would lead America, look at Russia today, slowly imploding under the colossal weight of contradictions that crush every manifestation of life. The survival of a gangster oligarchy depends on the death of its host country.
"I'm not going to repeat the whole of the largely unread comment I made some six hours ago about the spiritual excrement still smeared not only on the walls and floors of the Capitol but in the Senate chamber, in the House. How Senators and Representatives must still share the same space with criminals."
I suspect people in this community are still becoming familiar with you, Peter. In a month, you will be flooded with "likes" because your contribution is excellent. Right now they're probably reading you and digesting, getting to know you.
Thanks, Roland, that's a kind thought, but experience tells me that my thinking is sometimes half-baked and often not easy to digest. I hope people here will put me in my place when necessary. I've just responded at considerable length to a message from Christy, and I hope that's of some use, rather than adding to the confusion of the times.
Wow.
Aleksei Navalny
I ask, once again, what happens if the Senate fails to even rule that Trump shouldn't be eligible to run for office again, one of their two choices upon conviction? HCR has expressed some optimism that eventually we'll do the right thing. Personally, I think that assumes facts not in evidence.
Somewhere along the line we've lost the desire or courage to hold public officials to account for transgressions, large and small. Despite publicly recorded video, audio, documentary, and/or photographic evidence, time after time we've seen politicians (and others) deny their intent, involvement, or responsibility for what they've done. When such an event comes to light we usually get the crisis PR chestnut of "I'm sorry if I've offended / hurt / insulted / pick your verb anyone. I've learned from my mistake and will endeavour to do better in the future."
We now have 90% of GOP Senators saying they won't convict Trump on his second Impeachment charge. No surprise here, because to try and convict Trump would lay bare their own culpability not disavowing Trump's objections to the election's results, let alone their previous support and enablement of the former president's antidemocratic efforts.
They've called the Impeachment politically motivated or divisive or in conflict with president Biden's calls for unity. They day that, because Trump's out of office, it would be unconstitutional. This allows them to have a trial but still be seen as not turning on Trump, which is now feared more than the "wrath of God" even for so many "Christians." Also, his hastily cobbled defense team said that even if impeachment was to be Constitutional, Trump was only exercising his First Amendment rights to free speech, and that his words of January 6 didn't incite a crowd to crash the Capitol Building in order to stop Congress's counting of the certified election results. They've conveniently failed to account for the body of tweets and comments prior to and after the November 3rd election that set the stage and tone to actively interfere with the 1/6/21 Congressional activities.
And yet - many have improbably objected to an election in which Trump was defeated but they themselves may have won. They go on the Sunday morning circuit and refuse to acknowledge there legality of Biden's victory. They're beginning to say that they disagreed with Trump the whole time, or that's what's past is past and shouldn't be revisited. And after these nearly impossible logical contortions much of the public refuses to call them out.
We continue to elect and reelect representatives who may have low approval ratings at home, who have actively supported policies that are, at best, cruel and prejudiced, and Stu worst, are immoral, unethical, and possibly illegal. We continue to elect representatives who have no compunctions about b fudging the facts, if not outrightly lying to those who voted them into office. We commuting to elect representatives whose primary objective is to perpetuate their job and allow their party to retain power instead of fighting for their constituents regardless of how many tweets are slung at then. To borrow a phrase, "this is not who we are" Rather, it say "this is not who we should be." Our loyalty shouldn't lie with politicians, but with our neighbors and communities. We heard before that most soldiers will say they're not motivated by the political argument for why they're at war, but to support and protect their teammates. Should our elected officials fail to pursue and establish accountability, they will have set the stage for any and all future erosion of our system of government.
Biden wasn't my choice but he was my only choice. I'm glad he's there and, at first glance, trying to unwind some of the worst of Trump's decisions, but I have to question whether I feel that way only because Trump was so objectively awful, or because Biden knows how to better work three levers of collaboration. He has a lot on his plate - the coronavirus, av economy decimated by said virus, repairing alliances, and restoring domestic and international conference in America's principles and capabilities. But we have this crisis of accountability as well. I know Biden's loathe to interfere with the workings of Congress or the Justice Department, prefering to operate within the guidelines of Article 1. The Republicans will, without irony,?try to frame him and the Democrats as the source of our troubles instead of assuming any responsibility themselves or even attempting to redeem themselves by collaborating in good faith for the greater good, not their own interests. We can't allow three GOP to lay this all at Biden's feet. If we, the citizens of the USA, aren't willing to demand better, it's hardly fair to lay that failure off on Biden.
Prior to the rioti said to my wife that I thought Pence and other Republicans must be exhausted by Trump and would welcome a return to somewhat less chaos. So far, 2021 has proven me wrong. Under the circumstances it's hard to believe that our form of government stands any chance of lasting through another assault by someone much smarter and knowledgeable than Donald Trump.
It's instructive to read the full impeachment brief (https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_final.pdf). They respond to each and every objection about trying Trump, i.e., is it constitutional (yes) and was he "just" exercising "free speech" (no). They don't just quote the Constitution; they also describe in-depth the mind of the Founders when they wrote the impeachment clause through what they wrote in the Federalist Papers, the historical precedents, and what we inherited from English common law. They thoroughly debunk anything and everything Trump's lawyers have come up with.
This is a superb suggestion. It asks us to look at (if not read thoroughly) the primary source: The Article of Impeachment. Reading the Article, I feel like I am reading history as it is made. It is beautifully crafted. It encourages us to "look to the helpers."
My heart thrills with hope.
Excellent! May I copy and post your comments with link?
You may.
Thank you
We continue to elect these representatives as a result of the extreme Gerrymandering that creates a situation where there is never any viable opposition, and no need to maintain a more centrist approach.
Ally, you're right, but that doesn't explain why their constituents find their behavior to be up to snuff, at least for me. Cruz and Hawley may have been distasteful for lots of reasons but they weren't quite so polarizing or extreme until recently (well, Cruz may have been). The MTGs and Madison Cawthorn have absolutely no agenda other than rabble-rousing. They're unfit for office for numerous reasons. I'm thinking some sort of sanity check needs to be imposed on candidates, at least for Federal office.
Yes but who is going to write the criteria for this and who will apply it.....and not be called "political".
Maybe it's time to ignore the labels people attach to Democrats and just get on with it. Who cares if the Republicans think our motives are "political"?
Stuart, I'll be happy to start. I've been thinking on this for some time. You could start with a basic civics test. I suspect more than a few current Congresspeople wouldn't pass it.
Add in a few simply questions about geography, history and how the world functioned and you would most certainly lose many of them, possibly most The repost would be that you are "elitist" and not democratic! You have to laugh as such stupidity hurts too much.
Trumpsky still can't admit that Frederick Douglass is deceased.
Ask this: Who's buried in Grant's tomb?
It's not a trick question, it's a trick answer.
Stuart, since some of these folks shop for districts or states to represent, the geography questions should be a land mine. All about an address or a coffee shop or something specific enough that a long term resident would know. Maybe something about the natural resources of their state, local foods, etc. All of this would be fun, but I'm quite serious about suitability b screenings. Psychological tests were pretty common at one point. Certainly today, employers will rustle through a prospective employee's social media, credit history, etc. You can't waive them as conditions of employment. Is it really so much to ask that a Congressperson meet at least the same screening requirements as a junior sales person or admin staffer? It doesn't seem as if the FBI or whomever does the background checks has done that great a job at identifying character concerns or conflicts of interest.
Oh, phooey, the whack-job Kool-Aid Queen now has an acronym, MTG. *sour-face emoji here*
Work to get a tri-partisan Redistricting Commission in every state.like Michigan's.
I am hoping (actually praying) that the House Managers have actual video footage of some of the seditionists in Congress letting people inside of the Capitol before the insurrection happened. I want to see them all squirm and sweat.
Call them as witnesses, let them lie, then show them the footage. That would be priceless. Especially if there happened to be a member of the "jury" involved.
I am really hoping for some bombshell evidence being presented, not that what we have all already witnessed with our own eyes and ears shouldn’t be more than enough evidence.
Good morning all! Morning, HCR! NPR's Morning Edition has some very good stories this morning about the impeachment trial coming up and does a good job of explaining how the procedure can be viewed--the "indictment" occurred in the House and the trial is in the Senate. If one takes that analogy further, nothing prevents the trial from happening even if the person indicted is no longer in the position he held at the time of indictment. That is, indeed, how trials work. The problem is that convincing 17 Gormless Obfuscating Puffball senators to stop lying and cheating, and to actually serve as legislators and representatives of their constituents, is probably an impossible task. The "defense" that Cheeto's new team of "lawyers" (I use that term advisedly) has proposed is no defense at all. To claim that his "free speech" should not be blamed for what happened is ludicrous, especially in the face of evidence that some of his own staff apparently coordinated with the coup plotters and insurrectionists. In addition their claims of unconstitutionality have been debunked by a large majority of constitutionalists. But the GOP has decided to hitch their wagon to the totalitarian train and they won't budge because NONE of them have (1) courage; (2) a moral or ethical code; (3) honor; (4) a soul. They ditched those way back in the 1960s when they decided that promoting racism and misogyny was a good way to get elected.
Given the likelihood that Cheeto will not be convicted by a 2/3 majority in the Senate--although a simple majority will vote to convict him, I imagine--the only alternative is the one that I suspect might actually work: bury him in lawsuits, bury his followers in lawsuits, bury the pols who support him in lawsuits, and hit them all in their financial underbellies. This is the USA: ethics whisper, money screams. It is not the satisfying solution but, like Dominion's lawsuits, it is more likely to conclude in an appropriate way.
But may I also add some stuff about how heartening the last two weeks have been? In a real way, Biden and Harris have done some extraordinary things in being clear, in not leading with their egos, and in being interested in making sure that people hear about what they are doing s that the lead doesn't get buried. And for the very first time, an openly gay person has been confirmed by the Senate (despite the a-hole homophobes Cruz and Co) for a Cabinet position. This made my day yesterday. And what I want is more news like that and a big wet blanket over the Cheeto and his minions.
Beautiful 🙏
In terms of reality v what we'd all like to see happen, I think you're closer to the consequences that are most likely. Trump will not be convicted in the senate, but will face legal troubles over the next several years. Rudy and others will also. When association with Trump becomes costly, sycophants will jump ship. Meanwhile, Biden & Co will go about the business of the nation, following the science, passing helpful legislation, reversing damaging policy via executive order...these actions will speak to many. We will not win over the 40% - they are lost. We must concentrate on the remaining electorate.
I don't think I've ever done this before with an HCR post: I copied your email and put the copy in my "Politics" file.
As per Joe and Kamala, we haven't seen many people here expressing gratitude for their actions. Most of the posts naturally begin with Heather's News-Of-The-Day and take off from there. Maybe we should encourage her to appreciate the under-the-radar news of Cabinet appointments and all the excellent policy actions, the Executive Orders and such.
It is SUCH A RELIEF having people with integrity in the White House, isn't it? Very grateful here.
I got news yesterday that I found really interesting: Clinton nominated--and after a very contentious process, got approved--an under-secretary for HUD, Roberta Achtenberg, who was an out lesbian woman. So Pete is the second--first to run a cabinet office--but I am going to honor Ms Achtenberg, who in 1993 must have had a really rough time (and of course being a woman also had the double whammy of homophobia and sexism to deal with). Found this link this morning: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930516&slug=1701473
"But the GOP has decided to hitch their wagon to the totalitarian train and they won't budge because NONE of them have (1) courage; (2) a moral or ethical code; (3) honor; (4) a soul. They ditched those way back in the 1960s when they decided that promoting racism and misogyny was a good way to get elected."
I LOVE YOU!!!
"This is the USA: ethics whisper, money screams."
". . . hit them all in their financial underbellies."
Linda Mitchell with the Greek surname I would love to see
YOU ARE MY NEW HERO!
🤣 Aw shucks Roland. I'm just a professional wordsmith and I love what I do. Also have a temper and an overflowing emotional life a lot of the time--that Greek thing.....
You love what you do, and *I* love what you do.
1. If Donald Trump had not assembled a mob on January sixth, worked them into a frenzy with lies about a stolen election snd sent them to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal”, Officer Brian D. Sicknick would still be alive. He was only 42 years old. It makes me heartsick. Donald Trump has Officer Sicknick’s blood on his hands.
2. Donald Trump was still President when the House of Representatives impeached him. Mitch McConnell refused to call the Senate back into session and have the trial in the Senate until after the Biden inauguration. Then he voted to investigate whether it was constitutional to impeach a past president.
Rest in Peace Officer Bryan Sicknick. Pray for Justice.
The news is saying he won't be convicted. This is heartbreaking. Letting him go is a clear and present danger to all, including and especially, those in the building with gun toting members.
Please remember, they are talking about the senate, not any of the real court cases!
Nobody expected him to be convicted by the Senate. And if big business Republicans pull themselves together and convict him, I’m not sure I’m happy about that. I’d actually rather see Trump supporters control the party long enough to damage the business Republicans severely.
After that, I want to see MTG’s looney claims and Trump’s real court hearings — when he can’t control the narrative with presidential power or even Twitter rants — erode all that remains of the party’s credibility.
Does he have to appear at his second impeachment trial? Johnson and Clinton did not attend theirs, but they were still sitting presidents. Yet another way that Trumpsky has forced us into uncharted territory.
No
They can try to subpoena him.......
Yes, he could be subpoenaed, but he'd fight it in court.
BTW, it's hard to spell subpoenaed properly.
Yes but even he can manage NO!
Are you certain??
PS, the perspective from your Provencal perch is much appreciated. I spent a semester in Rodez many moons ago and deplore reflexive French-bashing.
Really nice argument, S. Mikelle, I love your thinking. And that profile photo! Wow it’s gorgeous. Looks like a rose in the foreground with Kauai in the back. Frameable. Up there with Tricia’s profile photo.
All this Kumbaya talk about being nice to The Enemy, when The Enemy takes talk of civility as a sign of weakness, demonstrates that there is in fact a war on, declared by the other side. Like it or not, they have to be dealt with. To quote a famous movie, they "... need termination - with extreme prejudice."
We need to call BS on the Repugs calls for "unity" and "Bi-partisanship". Enough already. Where is the unity when Lindsay Graham still blocks a hearing for AG nominee, Merick Garland because the Republicans haven't allowed the Democrats to take over as committee chairs? Yes, apparently they reached some sort of "agreement" today but for God's sake, this is February 3rd already. How in the hell did they retain so much power???
Of course it's BS. They (the Repugs, thank you Annette, thank you Rob Boyte) come up with any old garbage whenever it suits them. When your primary objective is making money, and staying in power because it earns you money, you're a windsock. You say whatever seems most expedient to say. As Linda Mitchell said today, and I quote, "the GOP has decided to hitch their wagon to the totalitarian train and they won't budge because NONE of them have (1) courage; (2) a moral or ethical code; (3) honor; (4) a soul. They ditched those way back in the 1960s when they decided that promoting racism and misogyny was a good way to get elected." © Linda Mitchell
Completely totally absolutely AGREE. Chuck and Kamala: PLEASE. Resolve to expose and punish Trump at every opportunity. ❤️🤍💙
Clear and present danger. Terminate with extreme prejudice. This guy is going doowwwwnnnn . . . . . . . .
No p!ss!ng on his grave til we're done dancing on it.
To stir the pot .... isn’t the language of these last two posts ( though I agree with the sentiment and arguments of the authors) reminiscent of language used by trump supporters and anti Hillary nut cases? Are we also guilty of inflaming our followers? We would say that our position is valid because trump is an ego maniacal crook. We have truth on our side. But trump supporters are not all ignorant but believe that he genuinely represents the direction our country needs to go in. The defense of first amendment rights in this country, like it or not, allows for much ugly, racist hate speech. Where do we draw the line?
Yes, of course LMC you are absolutely correct. I hesitated posting, but then I just started thinking Tom Clancy novels. Clear and Present Danger. More to your point, I would never use language like this just any old place. I’ve become kind of comfortable and relaxed here. This isn’t exactly a community with members who might act on words that could be taken literally. No way in hell would I be this casual with words in a place that I didn’t feel it was safe to do it. Thank you for your post, you were just echoing my thoughts. I don’t see you stirring the pot. We’re all adults here, that’s what made the decision to post easy for me, even upon consideration.
Right! Context matters. Some people can say "We need to stand for our values and fight!" and that means legal, peaceful means. Other people say "We need to stand for our values and fight!" and they mean to raise their weapons and do violence in order to triumph over their enemies.
The emotions allowed by toxic masculinity are: Fear, anger, victoriousness, and a self-satisfied smugness.
Love Tom Clancy 😎
LMC, so true. I remember Hillary calling people who vote for Trump are deplorables. I remember some Democratic candidates, ore maybe it was a CNN commentator, saying when they go low, we go lower.
Where do we draw the line on hate speech? When it's used to incite people to violence. On both sides of the aisle when applicable and on the streets when warranted.
“We have truth on our side.” I don’t use rationalizations like this to guide my behavior. It’s my trust in this group that allowed me to be casual.
Out of curiosity, which truth is that?
Well, if they convict, then they know they'll be next. After all, the committed crimes along with him.
I get quite literally sick to my stomach at the thought that the Senate won’t convict the then president; my anxiety ratchets up to 11.
As to the assertion that that the election got stolen by votes that were cast “illegally” under voting laws passed by states but not by state legislatures, I call bulls**t. The voters who took advantage of being able to vote by mail were registered voters who had every right to vote, and to vote safely during a pandemic. The defense lawyers would have everyone believe that the state legislatures would not have approved any changes to mail voting system in their state, but they don’t know that, and certainly can’t prove it.
Also, the argument that a president can’t be convicted in the Senate after he has left office is beyond the scope of the impeachment indictment, and should not be allowed to be argued there. It seems like that is an issue to be argued before the Supreme Court only after the Senate trial concludes.
IMO, the future of our nation’s democracy depends on the Senate convicting t****, and the republican party getting out from under his influence.
We watched the heart-breaking Capitol ceremony in silence. Also in tears. Grief about Officer Sicknick. A life so full of promise reduced to a small, wooden box. Grief for his family. Grief for our country.
The United States of America has at least temporarily lost its place on the moral high ground from which to credibly pontificate about democracy. Take, for example, Russia's prosecution of Alexei Navalny. His crime was breaking parole by going to Germany so he wouldn't die from the poison the Russian government sanctioned/administered. Difficult for the U.S. to play its traditional moral compass card when our democracy had an epic fail, culminating on January 06.
The trail of literal and virtual damage and destruction via Donald J Trump is so far incalculable. But it's a thing.
Penelope Simpson Adams: Please note that I said in my comment that we have "at least temporarily lost (our) place on the moral high ground."
One way or another, roughly 40% of "us" have slithered down from the moral high ground, trying to drag the rest of us along with them. The public actions of that rogue minority have called into question the infallibility of the United States and the strength of our democracy. Were we ever infallible? No. The self-proclaimed "Greatest Nation on Earth" has some fault lines and precedent for almost coming apart altogether (1861-1865, for example).
The message circling the globe is that the U.S.A. is not immune to violent sedition launched by deplorables. Further, that some of the deplorables have infiltrated our government. And perhaps worst of all, that "we" elected a verifiably dangerous, corrupt, amoral, narcissistic blowhard to be POTUS. The stench of trump et al will be with us for an indeterminate amount of time.
I've been asking myself every day what I'm going to do during the next two to four years (assuming we survive COVID-19). What can I do to help our country move from the inaccurate "We're better than this," since this is who we are, collectively, in this moment? Still trying to figure that out.
May our national mantra become some variation of, "We learn slowly, but we learn damn well!"
I would feel better if we state the 30% of America has lost its place on the moral high ground. There are so many good people, and I think most of the world knows that and supports us during this dark time.
Yes. Illegitimi non carborundum!
We are not all alike.
Yes. We will not let the bastards (and bitches) get us down.
The Better Angels Of Our Nature still hover over America. We must not allow them to be banished.
Our democracy has been poisoned by Putin and his continuous 24 hour propaganda troll machine, and the presidential puppet he owns. Our moral compass is still our Constitution, if our senators have the conscience to protect it.
I propose that there are four points to our moral compass: DOI, Constitution, the Reconstruction Amendments, Dr King's famous speech.
Alternate choices welcome.
It’s all over... Axios may have taped. Insanity beyond doubt. Russia, Russia, Putin flushed, follow the money, money down the drain, easy come, easy go, the Queens Flash is busted by a white Swan, the Eisenhower Nixon Rockefeller Ford GOP is vanishing, destroyed by The Big Lie...
https://www.axios.com/trump-oval-office-meeting-sidney-powell-a8e1e466-2e42-42d0-9cf1-26eb267f8723.html?utm_campaign=organic&utm_medium=socialshare&utm_source=email
One participant later recalled: "When Rudy's the voice of reason, you know the meeting's not going well." Oh, Lordie. Thanks, Sandy.
"I'm melting -- melting! All my beautiful wickedness!!"
This is the kind of meeting that happens when an absolutely incompetent, self-serving idiot is president.
An idiot owned by Putin
Once Putin's useful idiot, Trumpsky is again just a simple idiot.
Holy cow. What a gallery of rogues and fools.
Excellent Sandy, I was going to post this. If you like this article, there’s a series of I think 6 by Jonathan Swan. They are absolutely riveting articles about the end of the Trump administration.
also on Axios, Swan did a series and Sandy’s link takes you to the latest in Swan’s series of pieces. Each piece is about the same length as the Axios article you just read. The other pieces are just as riveting.
I’m just going to write a little bit to bring us back to the central issues. The appearance of Urban vs Rural, the perpetuation of the Big Lie, and why and how did we get here and why are we trapped here. To me these are the actual issues and while I understand the need to express our emotional outrage staying in it isn’t going to resolve the underlying causes and issues. (this is sounding too righteous)
Solutions are only made to look complicated because people in power don’t want change. Real solutions are actually simple.
Urban vs. Rural, I have lived rural or semi rural my whole life. I don’t like cities can’t understand why people would want to live so crammed together. I do understand that I’m not the only person voting democrat in a rural area but I have felt each time like my vote doesn’t count. That is because of our winner take all voting system. This simply isn’t working for our country any longer. So we don’t have to deconstruct gerrymandering, we don’t have to rebuild the Electoral College we just have to tabulate one citizen one vote majority rule.
Why is that hard to do? It is a simple straightforward law change that could be written in a single sentence. Why is that not happening? The answer is also not complicated IMO. The answer is -> super wealth.
The Big Lie, and by this I’m not just referring to the current example of it though of course I do agree this is the most glaring example. However, we have been lied to for a long time. HCR wrote about this recently. The economy, that is the general over all economy, does better when an active government manages it than it does when pure capitalism is given a free hand. We have 40 years of modern experience to document this since Regan but it has been written about since capitalism was invented. The solution is not complicated it is regulation and taxes . It is not socialism. It is not unpatriotic. It is simply the way capitalism works best for the general population.
And Why don’t we have this? The answer is -> super wealth. IM not so HO.
Unfortunately super wealth doesn’t come with enlightenment. Rather it comes from a place of self-centered psychology that never quite gets beyond fear. Super wealth is created when regular wealth isn’t enough. This is young soul territory, the period where self-preservation, self-identity, self-focus are perfected and manifested but wholeness, oneness, community, greater good, the elevation of service as the highest goal, aren’t really in the picture yet. Perhaps there is a grander purpose for the phenomenon of super wealth in the world just now but I’m not seeing it.
Thanks, Patrick. That was well said and I agree!
Hi Patrick, thanks for this excellent post. The community ended up having a very lengthy discussion of rural/urban under another post. Bring it up again some day, bright and early, and I will jump right in, I was engaged on other thread discussions today.
"free market" capitalism is a euphemism for "giving greedy corporate parasites license to indulge their bloated lifestyles and pad their nests at the expense of the real workers, the deserving people."
"Super wealth is created when regular wealth isn’t enough. This is young soul territory, the period where self-preservation, self-identity, self-focus are perfected and manifested but wholeness, oneness, community, greater good, the elevation of service as the highest goal, aren’t really in the picture yet. Perhaps there is a grander purpose for the phenomenon of super wealth in the world just now but I’m not seeing it."
You are hitting on an outstanding conversation topic. Actually I don't think there is any grand purpose for super wealth. You said it perfectly, it's "young soul territory." The large majority of super wealthy people are not fulfilling a greater purpose, they are self-serving narcissists feeding ego and addictions. Major exceptions exist, of course, Queen Elizabeth, the wife of Ray Kroc the founder of Macdonald's, I would probably include the Gates family. Do most royals contribute and give back to the level of their wealth? No. Do most billionaires contribute beautifully back to the human condition? No. In fact, the Mercers and Murdochs and Adelsons and Kochs of the world make things even worse.
That money should go to funding education, health care, housing. It's wasted on those people. No, I do not see a greater purpose to be gained by having super wealthy people.
After the Nazis fell in WWII, the world asked how Germans could have been so gullible to follow such an evil dictator who would lead them to the slaughter. We must ask ourselves the same question. How, in the face of overwhelming facts, could a chunk of the American electorate swallow such glaring lies about the election, Antifa, Qanon and partisan bullies? We must dig deep for reasons, but I'm afraid we're not going to like what we find.
Let's begin with the American Revolution. In the late 1700's colonists were becoming increasingly literate and newspapers (newsletters, really) such as the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advisor influenced and fueled passions to fight against oppressive English monarchy. One could argue that without these primitive means of communication with rural communities our fight for independence at least would have been delayed. These newspapers voiced a call to arms.
Flash forward 250 years. Communication with the masses by is as easy as a click of a button. The difference, of course, is that there are so many points of view it can be problematic to rouse and sway insurrection. So discourse shifted to what Professor Heather Cox Richardson (Letters From An American--the best political commentary in the country) so eloquently points out: The Big Lie. Right wingers jumped on the collective bandwagon with enthusiasm to be able to play war. But this doesn't explain why they took the bait. The explanation is darker and delves into the underbelly of the American psyche.
All humans wish to belong and seek others with whom they have the most in common. Those who protest in the name of freedom and equality grow their ranks together. But now, as a direct result of the Internet Age. people can band together and feel validated even is their base argument is a Big Lie. The differentiation between truth and lies no longer matters. What matters to the participants is they feel life now has meaning, that they belong to something greater than themselves, that their lives now have worth, widely accepted facts notwithstanding.
The result of this new paradigm is that morality has been subjugated by collective human action. "We'll follow our leader to the edge of the cliff and gladly jump!" It's identical to the mass hypnosis of Nazi Germany, but this time we can tweet about it, thus somehow further validating our existence. But to what end? Anarchy? It is said that a sucker is born every minute. Our fear should be that have already begun to mobilize, again.
Fine for lemings.... but they finish very badly.....in the sea at the bottom of the cliffs. They do however solve their overpopulation problem rather radically!
Lemmings set an awful example for humans, yet some take inspiration from them.
Exactly. Power is the mob. Feared by our founders. Not a word about party.
To truth. To the individual. To tolerance.
Thank you, Randy Watson. Thank you.
Mass hypnosis. Nice. I’ve been using words like brainwashing, cult leadership, Kool-Aid, delusion.