In the Aftermath--Georgia on Everyone's Mind

 It is doubtful that any election has ever been quite so scrutinized as 2020’s general. We all knew that if the results weren’t favorable to the incumbent president, he would claim a rigged election; he told us that straight out. So officials were watching. And while there were efforts at suppression and even some for repression (one could note these efforts came from the GOP, but no need to digress); nevertheless, no credible evidence of significant and intentional vote manipulation has been shown. 

Moreover, as many have pointed out, if some cabal were managing to coordinate fraud across various states to defeat Qanon’s savior-in-chief, why did it not add more seats in the House of Representatives and grab control of the Senate? Why are state legislative bodies not overwhelmingly blue? 

Politico  reported on 4 November  that “Republicans were already set to have total control over the crafting of more than twice as many congressional seats as Democrats. And after a weak showing on Tuesday, Democrats did nothing to reverse that disadvantage, giving Republicans a chance to draw favorable maps that will help them elect their preferred state and federal representatives for the next five election cycles.” [Ally Mutnick and Sabrina Rodriguez, “‘A Decade of Power’: Statehouse wins position GOP to dominate redistricting”] Given the long-term importance of these races, you’d think any fraud effort would make sure that the GOP didn’t retain quite so much power, right?

But let’s leave all that to one side for a moment. Let’s just acknowledge that United States’ voters are divided, that within many states, there’s a seesaw effect among political subdivisions, but that the institution of elections has held. Officials did their jobs with integrity, and absent any evidence to the contrary, it was a free and fair election, despite the pandemic.

In 2020, you might be able to quibble about a few thousand votes here or there—which recounts will settle—but it’s hard to dispute that BOTH the popular and the electoral votes went in Joe Biden’s column in a significant number. The president knows it, which is why he’s sulking in the white house, purging any appointee he thinks might not fully support him, and filing frivolous lawsuits everywhere. The Rudy Giuliani press conference at Four Seasons Landscaping is an apt metaphor for the entire debacle. 

Campaign yard signs, Maine 2020

Which begs the question: why are GOP leaders not acknowledging Biden’s win and rejecting the president’s drama? To agree there was fraud calls into question the very real GOP gains in this election, gains that, as Politico points out, offer a decade of power in the redrawing of congressional district lines. It calls into question close races for the Senate and the GOP’s control of that body. That’s the political (and somewhat cynical) question.

More importantly, the GOP has always held itself up as the real defender of constitutional principles and national security. What the president is doing undermines both. “Law and order” is not the same thing as “Rule of Law,” as every lawyer should know—and there are many lawyers in the Congress. In fact, law and order that isn’t subject to the rule of law—tiresome principles like due process and freedom of speech and assembly—partakes little of law and turns order into authoritarianism.

If you’ve not drunk the Kool-Aid, you’re aware that the incumbent president doesn’t give a damn about the nation and its citizens outside the role he’s  gotten to play as president. His current conduct makes that patently clear if it wasn't already. There’s a reason he loves rallies: standing at that podium before cheering crowds equates with how he sees the part he’s playing in a script he imagines. So if you’re a powerful Senate leader like Mitch McConnell, assuming you subscribe to the basic principles of the GOP, why do you not take the president on?

Some pundits say that Republicans are afraid of the backlash of their constituents, their “base” which is also the president’s base. They also want to keep the base mobilized for the Georgia run-offs, is the assertion.

May I respectfully point out that the nation is in peril, and one of the jobs of an elected official is to show leadership when leadership is required? Moreover, if the president could manipulate the so-called base into such fervor for him, seems like a savvy politician could find a way to distract and redirect that energy. True, it might be—it probably is, really—risky. But isn’t that what the oath of office requires? For the good of the country?

If they aren’t willing to do that, I find myself asking: why are they in Washington? Whose interests to they seek to serve?

And as to Georgia: while I get that there are times a divided government is a good thing, that there are times when you want that check on power, this is not that time. I BEG Georgians to send two Democrats to the Senate. One of them will have to be reelected in 2022, so there’s a built-in safeguard if Georgia’s worried about some sort of rampant Blue power grab. But a huge amount of damage has been done, damage we won’t fully comprehend until President-elect Biden is inaugurated—just as President Obama couldn’t realize the depth of the financial crisis of 2007 until he got the complete information upon stepping into the Oval Office. 

Socially distanced voters complete their ballots for scanning
and counting in Maine

The slim Democratic majority that electing Jon Ossof and Rafael Warnock would give the Senate isn’t enough to allow some sort of radical frenzy; but it might temper debates and allow President Biden to put things back on the track of progress, might restore order and orderliness. And it might begin the revitalization of Rule of Law, through thoughtful rather than knee-jerk obstructionist, confirmation votes on appointees selected for their qualifications and character. 

I sure hope Georgia will give this gift to the country: two years! And if you don’t like the country’s direction when it’s had a chance to actually move forward, well then, have at it and we can go back to chaos.

                            

So Smart = So Loyal?

January 23, 2016. Donald Trump, the candidate, boasted, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? It's, like, incredible.”  

        The audience at his rally in Sioux Center, Iowa laughed, perhaps enthralled by what he had said right before that: “My people are so smart!” And, he went on, “so loyal!” 

Donald Trump descends Trump Tower on an escalator to announce his candidacy for US president on 16 June 2015. Photograph: Christopher Gregory/Getty Images

It was that loyalty he was praising when he talked about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, loyalty that in his mind showed that "his people" were "so smart." 

        And that Iowa crowd laughed. Oh, Donald, they thought, Such a master of hyperbole!

        Except he meant it.

So far as we know, he hasn’t shot anyone yet, but he has contributed to the deaths of over 195,000. And his “so smart” people apparently remain loyal.

It’s been a conundrum to me. I can almost reach an understanding of his attraction: he’s entertaining, in a rather nasty kind of way--his "jokes" tend to be at the expense of others, but he also voices the fears and frustrations many of our compatriots feel: after years of hearing how Washington doesn’t understand or care about them from cynical political operatives and their clients, this guy rides down an escalator and says he’s going to fix everything. If you bought into his characterization of how bad everything was, his presentation was superficially very appealing. 

        Among other things, he talked about the country’s need for a cheerleader, “somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again,” he said. [Emphasis added.] 

So here’s my question for his supporters, now, after his almost 4 years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, now that we’ve heard from his own mouth how he knew covid-19 was “deadly stuff” but didn't bother to devise a national plan to address it, or to even pull up the plan previously sketched out and modeled that his administration had consigned to mothballs: are you okay with this guy dissing you to a degree that endangers the lives of everyone you care about?

        Hear me out. A leader leads. That requires informing followers when there's a problem, telling them what the problem is, and what the plan is for dealing with the problem. A leader knows that to address a crisis effectively, it's necessary to get folks on board to solve it. That means trusting the citizenry to rise to the occasion, in short, recognizing that the people are smart enough to respond appropriately to the information they’re given .

Listening to the Woodward tapes, what I hear is that the president who didn’t “want to create a panic” feared doing so because, when National Security Advisor O’Brien told him the gravity of the situation, he himself panicked. He found himself in the place where he claimed that policeman in Kenosha was when he emptied 7 bullets into Jacob Blake: the president choked. 

Or worse: he thought his job was to be a cheerleader and keep everyone chipper while they were dying because, well, what can you do about a pandemic, really, until “like a miracle” it goes away?

Maybe he feared that if he galvanized the public to confront the pandemic, it  might interfere with his own interests: cause a negative stock market reaction, or demand leadership action that couldn't be easily rolled into a sound bite and tied up with a bow by Election Day. 

        To put it bluntly, it looks to me like the president  thinks the American people are too stupid to handle a serious national emergency. And since staying in office is the only value he cares about, he can just ignore the daily death toll and spreading cases and talk about other things, or blame it all on whoever comes to mind: China, Democratic mayors, Democratic governors, medical personnel who don't like him...

           In short, he keeps relying on our stupidity to let him run roughshod over our very lives. He’s been doing this now for almost 4 years, with increasingly destructive results. 

        

Election polls, Harpswell (ME) Community School
during covid-19 pandemic July 2020

        There's an election coming that allows us to prove him wrong. Aren't you tired of his manipulations, of his shape-shifting truth to benefit himself, regardless of its impact on the national interest? 

        Let's quote him one final time, yes? Let's tell him: "You're fired!"

Whose Vision?

I was sent an ad for the president’s reelection via social media by a relative recently, not, I was told, as a political statement, but just because it was a beautiful American message. You can judge for yourself: it can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRlCRalEJxY ; it’s called “The Best is Yet to Come.” It hasn’t turned up on my TV set, yet, although it looks like it was released on the internet earlier this year.

My relation was enthusiastic about the positive vision the ad offers of our country, she told me. But as I watched it, I found myself wondering how I’d feel if I were anything other than a white American…

I can believe that this is how the president envisions America. It’s very much a TV vision from the era of his youth (also the era of my youth, so I know whereof I speak). Lots of bits from TV shows and movies are edited into this [times are approximate], like Davy Crockett, complete with coonskin hat, riding into Washington, D.C. [0.42]. The president’s voice lists heroes (predominantly white males, with some odd exceptions: Annie Oakley appears in old film shooting a repeating rifle at a target) and tells of their carving “a nation out of the vast frontier” [0:56]. These heroes “tamed the wilderness” [1:10]  and “settled the wild west,”[1:13] they “braved the unknown.”[1:09].

A Native American might quibble with the characterization of wilderness taming. They might point out that the “unknown” could have been known if the newcomers had adopted a different approach to  the folks who already lived in the lands they'd stumbled on.  Native Americans could also debate the nation carving, given that those who lived in the unknown lands actually managed it with a light but effective touch, and in much of what’s now the United States, had a fairly long history of organized governance, even confederation among peoples.

African Americans might also find this telling less than relevant. The president’s American Story doesn’t have slavery (though it does have Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman as its token black heroes, for unspecified reasons—no MLK or Rosa Parks, mind you!).

Mexican Americans might wonder at the account of the 1836 “last stand” at the Alamo, by “Texas patriots”[0:51]—particularly given that those “patriots” were immigrants to the Mexican territory of Tejas.  Many were slave holders, and it’s not so coincidental that Texas rebelled not long after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. Texas became the independent Republic of Texas in April 1836. Not a part of the U.S., and at the time, not interested in being a part of the U.S. Though the United States did not directly participate in the insurgency, the Texian forces, as they were then called, included numerous U.S. soldiers who returned to their U.S. military units back home in the United States after the rebellion without consequences for being AWOL.

The tacit U.S. support for the rebellion, and the later annexation by the U.S. of Texas in 1846 led to the Mexican American War, a war ignored by the ad, as well as largely ignored in mainstream U.S. history. (Lincoln made a forceful speech opposing this war  while he was in Congress—not a part of Lincoln’s legacy that the current president chooses to mention). The origins of the war are murky, as is often the case, but U.S. President Polk definitely saw it as an opportunity to fulfill the so-called “manifest destiny.” When it was over, Mexico lost most of what is now California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, the western half of New Mexico, the western quarter of Colorado, and the southwest corner of Wyoming, along with bits of Kansas and Oklahoma.

Parenthetically, Korean Americans and Vietnamese Americans might wonder about what happened to the Korean and Vietnamese Wars--as might the veterans of those wars. There's also no mention of Jewish Americans or Arab Americans; the far east and the middle east might not exist at all....

Irish Americans might find a timeline showing 1848 - 1849, where the president’s voice says we were lifting “millions from poverty, disease, and hunger”[1:15] mildly puzzling.  The smaller print that goes by quite quickly references Irish immigrants coming to the United States, who arrived (in the thousands, not the millions) to escape the potato famine.  No mention of the discrimination Irish immigrants faced on arrival in the accolade to lifting millions out of the muck.

Into the 1850s, now, Civil War on the horizon. Except according to the president’s vision, there apparently wasn’t one—a sort of lip service is perhaps given in an image that zips quickly by of a black soldier in what may be a Union uniform holding a flag [1:00]. Nope, there was nation-building in the infrastructure sense: we “laid down the railroads” [1:25]—again, from an indigenous peoples’ perspective, this might recall land grabs, or buffalo slaughter, or relentless relocations and suppressions—and a Chinese American might wonder why their contribution to the transcontinental railroad is ignored but for a single lone frame showing the back of a worker’s head, topped by a conical hat and displaying a single long braid [1:29]. Nor is there mention of the legally imposed discrimination, once the railroad was complete, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States and placed restrictions on those already here. Indeed, until 1943, federal law prohibited Chinese residents from becoming American citizens.

Native Americans, in fact, might find a a strange image juxtaposition ominous: Mt. Rushmore appears [1:36] as the president is talking about “our ancestors” building “the most exceptional republic ever to exist in all of human history”; the Statue of Liberty flows by with Manhattan in the background, immediately followed at 1:40 by an image that looks like a horseman from one of the Plains tribes consumed in a dust storm as the president’s face then appears [1:43] saying “and we are making it greater than ever before.”


A bit later, a painting flashes on the screen [2:10]. I recognized it as “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe), or rather, a piece of that painting. Bad enough that in the complete painting, shown here, the Wampanoag who enabled the Pilgrims to survive were portrayed as a few attendees, mostly in the background. But in the campaign video, they’re cropped out entirely. Just the left side is shown (pilgrims only). The painting is apparently meant simply to illustrate “the hand of Almighty God” by which we are, says the president, all made equal. There’s a certain irony, there…

Since they opted to use this painting, it’s worth taking a look at what it doesn’t depict. According to Grace Donnelly in a 2017 Fortune article cited by Charles M. Blow (NYT, Opinion: “The Horrible History of Thanksgiving,” 27 November 2019).

"The celebration in 1621 did not mark a friendly turning point and did not become an annual event. Relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated, leading to the Pequot War. In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man the settlers believed the Wampanoags killed, they burned a nearby village, killing as many as 500 men, women, and children. Following the massacre, William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for 'the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.'”

In short, as Blow points out succinctly, “Just 16 years after the Wampanoag shared that meal, they were massacred.” Another way of looking at it might be that one European life is worth around 500 indigenous lives. Begging the question, in today’s terms, which lives matter?

Those are just some of the president’s historical interpretations that frankly, we should all take issue with.

My point here isn’t to denigrate my flawed, beloved country.  But in order for us to continue the great American experiment of forging “a more perfect union” that began in Philadelphia in 1776, we can’t pretend that we haven’t tripped, stumbled, and even fallen along the way. We can’t dismiss the voices and perspectives of huge portions of our united peoples.

What makes us great is that when we trip, we search until we find our footing; though we may stumble, we catch ourselves and keep going; when we fall, we get ourselves up again.

What keeps us great is our diversity, our ability to learn and progress, our fundamental goodness when opportunity arises, like the outpouring of help in times of flood or sacrifice in a pandemic. When we draw on it, our diversity allows renewal through the myriad voices that join the national conversation, offering different viewpoints and creative visions. It is, as former President Barak Obama says, “messy.” But it is far more beautiful, offers far more freedom, than the lovely, distorted myth of America  envisioned by the president.