The Explanation Is Simple

Traditionally and historically, an American president's Cabinet was a group of advisors to the president. No one has experience in every facet of governance, and everyone at times needs advice from someone with specific knowledge -- or simply a different perspective. That was the role of the Cabinet. Until 2017.

Now once again, half the public, many elected officials, a number of past and present ranking military officers, and reporters from all over the country and the world gasp at each new appointment made by the president-elect. Why? He is also a former president, so you have seen this act play out before. What don't you understand?

A man who does not want advice and does not see that he needs any is not looking for advisors. This man, as we have seen before, wants flunkies. Toadies. Yes-men and -women. Anyone not ready to nod like a bobblehead wouldn't last a week in his Cabinet, and anyone seriously qualified is, ipso facto, disqualified from the get-go.

Really, what else did you expect?

He Took a Stand

Moment of decision

October 18 was the birthday of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Born in 1859, Bergson presented his French doctoral thesis (two were required then, one in French, a second in either Latin or Greek) on “The Immediate Givens of Consciousness,” in English usually titled “Time and Free Will, to the examining faculty in 1889. The question he addressed was that of determination vs. free will: When we come to a fork in life’s road, are we free to choose which path to follow, or has our path forward been predetermined before we reach what looks like a point of decision? Bergson’s answer was that a "path" ahead in time does not exist. The fork does not exist. The future does not exist. We only create our path and our direction forward by going forward. Moreover, although we are definitely creatures of habit and perform countless habitual actions every day without thinking about them at all, we always have a measure of possible freedom, and when we act out of that freedom it is the expression of our whole life up to that moment.

 

Bergson died on January 3, 1941, of bronchitis. But it is what he did before he died that matters, not the manner of his death. Refusing the occupying Nazis’ offer of exemption from their race laws against Jews (inspired by American race laws against Blacks), just as he had already refused “honors” they wanted to bestow on him, Bergson stood in line to be given the yellow star indicating his heritage. He didn’t have to do it. He could have let himself be bought off. But he took a stand. 

 

What good does it do for one person to make a stand? Wasn’t his a futile gesture? His wearing of the yellow star did not save anyone from the gas chambers, and he himself did not even live to see Paris liberated.

 

I say, he died a free man, a man of integrity – perhaps with a broken heart, but not with a broken spirit. 

What kind of future do you hope to create? What legacy do you want to leave behind? 

 

I Am Not a Billionaire

Not in the 1%. I work for a living.

I am not a billionaire but a member of a group called “the working elderly.” I have run my own business for 31 years to make a living. It is not a hobby.

 

If I were a billionaire -- and cared for nothing but my investment portfolio -- the big tax cuts I would get under another Trump presidency would probably offset the inflationary increase in the cost of living brought about by his plan for across-the-board tariffs, mass deportations, and curbs on the Federal Reserve. Even conservative economists predict that American households can expect their living expenses to increase by $2,000 to $3,000 a year if Trump is elected again and puts his ill-conceived policies in place. 

 

Can you afford a $3,000 increase in your living expenses? Yes, of course, if you are a billionaire.

If You Must Tell Lies –

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The other day I went down a rabbit hole, as people say these days, chasing the ninth commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” That’s the wording I remember from Sunday school days, the explanation we were given simply that lying was wrong. 

 

Newer translations online give the Biblical text as “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” and while some internet sites read the commandment as forbidding any false statement, others, even religious ones, claim that the commandment is not about lying in general but only requires that we refrain from giving false testimony about another. I’ll leave it to you to go down your own rabbit hole(s), if you find the prospect inviting.

 

For the moment, however, for the sake of discussion, let us accept the narrower interpretation. I have personal misgivings about allowing even “harmless” falsehoods, as in ordinary situations, dishonesty does nothing good for relationships, but for now, let that go and agree – for the sake of argument or discussion -- that I can lie about my age with impunity, and you can lie about your natural hair color, but we are all forbidden by the commandment to speak falsehoods against our neighbors. 

 

The next obvious question becomes, Who is to count as my neighbor? Only someone who lives in my immediate neighborhood? Someone I know? Someone I like?

 

The Jewish people are told in Leviticus to remember always that they were once slaves in Egypt and should therefore treat “the stranger among you” as one born in their land, a neighbor, while anyone who claims to be Christian and a follower of Jesus should recall the parable of the Good Samaritan and its message that even our enemies are our neighbors and should be loved as we love ourselves. 

 

Telling harmful lies about another person is slander, defamation of character, and constitutes grounds for lawsuit, whether the words are spoken on the witness stand or in the street. (On the witness stand, it is also perjury.) And when such lies – about entire groups of people -- are spoken publicly and widely disseminated, putting the slandered at risk for their very lives, how can a candidate for any public office, how can any public person whatsoever, claim justification for such lies because, for instance, lies about Haitian immigrants in this country legally “brought attention to the legitimate issue of illegal migration”? No!  

 

No! The Republican candidate for vice president claims to be a Catholic and has borne false witness against his neighbors. He also possesses a degree in law and is guilty of slander. This is not a matter of taking something out of context, as the context is public and broad, and his attempted justification has been publicly given. Going to confession does not undo the harm he has caused. He is unfit for any public office at any level. 

 

Moral of my story: If you must lie, lie about your age, your weight, your hair color – in short, lie about yourself, not someone else, and keep your lies trivial, please, IF YOU MUST LIE AT ALL. -- But really, is it necessary? Is it good for you? Do your words and actions align with what you claim are your beliefs? At issue is what is called character.

Who are these so-called “socialists,” anyway?

🍎🍗🥦🍞🌽

 

Or call them “Communists,” as Republican candidates often do. This year’s Republican candidate for the office of President of the United States is fond of throwing around the lie that his opponent is a “Communist,” a lie born early in the last century and has been dragged out over and over again by politicians who seek to win by inducing fear. 

 

There are also idealogues who want either no government at all or government only for military purposes. To them, anything more is socialism. 

 

But enough with the generalizations. Let’s get down to something specific and look at it more closely.

 

Food stamps. No actual “stamps” are involved (there were stamps from 1939 to 1943), but that name for the benefit persists, so I’ll use it. I was curious about the people Reagan years ago called “welfare mothers” and who they are today, so I looked into it. Data found by the Pew Research Center (full article here for you) is eye-opening. Take a look. 

 

The majority of recipients of SNAP benefits are overwhelmingly white (62.7%) and were born in the United States (a whopping 87.8%). There are almost as many two-parent families receiving benefits (43.9%) as single-parent families with only a mother in the household (45.5%). As for the age of primary recipients, 44.5% of recipients fall into the 25 – 64-year-old age range. (Pew gives 25-44 and 45-64 separately. I have collapsed them.) The full history of the government program can be found here. Today over 12% of the American population receives this benefit. 

 

There is no way to determine the political affiliations of recipients, but I vividly recall one of my students years ago at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, a self-proclaimed libertarian, who “did not believe” in government programs but acknowledged that her family relied on them. I did not then and do not now understand that. To me, what you do shows what you believe. If you believe in voting, for example, you vote. If you don’t vote, you don’t believe in it.

 

An important and often overlooked feature of food assistance in the United States is that it was inaugurated not only to alleviate hunger but also, essentially and perhaps primarily, to help farmers and business owners. Read about that here. The largest-ever expansion of government food assistance programs took place under a Republican administration for the benefit of American business. Communists? I don't think so.

 

Don’t fall for fake stories. And please don’t fall for name-calling and old, tired lies.

 

What Unites Us Is What Divides Us

We don’t agree on what the biggest problems are, we don’t agree on the causes of our problems, and we don’t agree on how to work toward solutions on even those issues we all agree are problems. So what on earth can possibly unite us? 

 

Emotions. We all love our country. We want to be proud of our country. We are, all of us, at times angry and frustrated, deeply saddened and impatient (with one another), wanting to be hopeful and feeling surges of hope, only to have it dashed once again. We Americans are all human beings with the same human emotions.

 

What unites us, though – the confusing stew of emotions – is also what divides us, because our emotions, too often, have different (you should excuse the term) triggers. It's enough to make a stone weep.

Stop Falling for the Either/Or Crap!

...Or so some people would have you believe....

It doesn’t make good sense to trust every aspect of life to government – any kind of government. Communism only turns into another kind of oligarchy, with party leaders on top taking the place of landed gentry and everyone else relegated to a peasant/worker class with few important rights. --But neither does it make good sense to trust every aspect of life to unregulated market forces. There are essentials in life, both biological and social, much too important to be left to unrestrained market forces. The only kind of economic “system” that makes sense is a mixed economy, with roles both for entrepreneurial markets, regulated where necessary, and government-run public institutions.

 

Note that I do not use the term “free market” for the ubiquitous either/or false dilemma so often posed. Why? Because what is meant by “free” when applied to market forces just is lack of regulation. We are asked to allow business to be as free as the wind, and if it whirls itself into a tornado or whips up a tsunami and destroys human lives in its path, well, we are told, that’s the price of “freedom.” No. I say no. That is the price of self-deception on the part of Americans who have bought into a dangerous theoretical fiction unleashed on the world by Milton Friedmann and confusing and destroying communities for decades.

 

Economists are theoreticians. I find it bitterly ironic that so many people who consider themselves “conservative” will reject evolution because it is a “only a theory” and then turn around and embrace an economic theory which has far less evidence for itself. And yet the untrammeled theoretical “free market” has become an article of faith for American conservatives, a plank almost religious (to judge by the fervor with which it is held), and certainly a litmus test for politicians, so that if a candidate voices the slightest support for any kind of regulation, that candidate is branded “socialist” or even “communist,” and conservatives run in fear, believing their “freedom” is in danger.

 

Bullshit! If all aspects of health, education, and banking were to be treated exclusively as unregulated businesses, with clinics, hospitals, schools, and investment groups run solely for profit and without any boundaries on their greed, the rights of American citizens to speak and organize and vote would count for very little. You don’t trust “government,” but you trust “corporations”? Really? With your life?

 

Would you do away with public libraries, public schools, public boards of health, and replace all of them with for-profit businesses, available only to paid subscribers, like cable TV? Would you close the government mint and throw American citizens on the stormy, uncertain seas of myriad “crypto-currencies” (digital “currencies” 100% dependent on huge, monster computers, with their huge, monster fans running 24/7 somewhere off in the countryside), an untested monetary abstraction that few even pretend to understand? 

 

A simpler example: A certain faction of our country seeks to “privatize” (i.e., sell to profit-seekers) the United States Postal Service, replacing it with anyone in the market who wanted to start up a company but would have no mandate to serve the entire country. Profitable areas could be cherry-picked, the rest underserved or not served at all. 

And note carefully here that “privatization” means more than letting business instead of government run something: it means selling off carefully constructed public goods that have been built and maintained for years with money from public taxes – not to those who paid the taxes for years (often generations) but to a private, profit-seeking organization or organizations. [Note: The United States Postal Service was government-funded until 1970. Since then, like county conservation district offices, it has had to pay its own way in the country, competing against private companies who do not have to serve every community.] Historic public good sold at fire sale prices? How can that be for the benefit of the public? How does that increase the “freedom” of citizens?

 

Those who would blind you with the false dilemma “socialism vs. freedom” rely on your not seeing that unrestricted “freedom” for corporate “persons” means seriously diminished real freedom for real persons, i.e., human beings. No one can own the air, and it cannot be restricted to a bounded place, so why should a corporation be allowed to poison it in order to make profits, and how does sacrificing environmental and human health to market forces increase our freedom? It does not. That is only one example.

I don't even want to say there are many shades of grey between black and white, and the idea of heads or tails on a coin is plain silly. It makes more sense and is truer to life to think of alternatives to either/or as a rainbow of possibilities.

The "road" of the future does not exist until we build it -- and in my imagination it is not one big superhighway but an interconnected network. Again, possibilities....

 

False dilemmas - Homework: Think about it. 

When does something count as a “BIG LIE”?

A timely title, no?

The other day I bought a Wall Street Journal for the first time in months, curious to see what it would have to say about President Biden stepping down from the 2024 campaign and endorsing Kamala Harris. In an extraordinary opinion piece, headlined (and I realize that writers do not provide headlines themselves) “Democrats Will Pay for the Biden Big Lie,” Matthew Hennessey wrote that Biden’s announcement 

...brings to an end the big lie Democrats have been telling about the president for at least a year and maybe longer — that he is in full control of his mental faculties…. 

 

What can I say about such a leap of logic? But wait. Let’s go back to Hennessey’s first paragraph: 

 

President Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos earlier this month that only “the Lord Almighty” could get him to abandon his failing bid for re-election. Well, someone call the Vatican: I’d like to report the second coming.

 

My first question: Do Christians say the Lord must appear again on earth for Him to speak to his believers? I never heard that.

 

Leave religion aside, though, and let's address politics: No one is ever in a race for office until that person officially declares. It’s all denial, denial, denial until the announcement. Similarly, no one is ever dropping out until that person announces his or her campaign is over. That’s the way the game is played. Grow up, Matthew. You didn't know that?

 

As for “lying” on the part of Democrats, how does MH conclude, from Biden’s dropping out of the race, either (1) that the president's mental faculties are failing or (2) that other Democrats believed that to be the case and have been lying about it? As I say, quite a leap. Reaching such a conclusion would require at least one additional premise, but, if MH does have another, he has hidden it well.

 

If you want to judge President Biden’s mental strength, you have only to watch and listen to his interview with Lester Holt. In that exchange, it’s obvious that Joe’s mind is still sharp as a tack. His voice is weak, and he is showing the fragility of age, but his thinking is clear — unlike that of the Republican candidate. 

 

As for “big lies,” who is the champion? Who kept claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Who is still claiming, in the face of a mountain of disconfirming evidence, that the 2020 was “rigged,” “stolen,” etc., etc.? 

 

Has the Republican nominee, I wonder, made any true public statements? Let’s have one quoted, please. Just one substantive true statement. I’m waiting....

 

Did you ever in your life think it would get this bad – in your lifetime?

He whose name I shall not mention, the one who refuses to say he would accept the election results unless they met his fairness standards (translation: unless he were to win), he who is the tool of the Heritage Foundation and the one they depend upon to enact their Project 2025, he who blasphemously advertises himself as the next Jesus Christ (and is somehow accepted as such by people who were once people of true faith), promises to bring about a “Second American Revolution.” Irony hardly seems appropriate in this nightmare scenario, wherein the tool assures his followers that he will be a “dictator for a day” -- was there ever such a thing? -- to help them “take back our country.”  Those he wants to “take it back” from are legion: -- well, there! I saw a video in the morning and thought it would be easy to find again. It was not, and I wasted a lot of time looking through online crap. I do remember mention of "Communists" and "vermin." Naturally, undocumented workers would be rounded up, along with "criminals." (He forgets that he is a member of that category).

 

What the Heritage Foundation and presumably the Republican candidate (oh, how a once respectable party has fallen!) want to establish, however, is nothing like the U.S.A. but a government more repressive than any the United States has ever known. In this “brave new world” they would put in place, the teaching of history would be banished. (Teachers and librarians are already under siege in many places.) Many government agencies would be abolished and the ones allowed to continue purged of "disloyal" experts, to be replaced by loyalists, whether expert or not. Undocumented aliens would be swept up in the largest-ever dragnet for mass deportation. Not only abortion but also contraception would be outlawed. 

The devil in the details goes on and on, but the keystone is that the president, under Samuel Alito’s “unitary executive” theory -- only last week given a massive accelerative boost by the Supreme Court -- would have almost unlimited powers if and only if what the president did were approved by the Republican-stacked Court, so a president elected on the Democratic ticket obviously could not, literally, get away with murder, as could a Republican. 

 

Make no mistake: Call it what you will, this plan is not conservatism, which is why I call the Court “Republican-stacked” rather than “majority-conservative.” Privileging one political party over another is not conservative. Purging government agencies of the those denoted as “disloyal” is not conservative. Turning the president into a king, above the rule of law, is absolutely not conservative. 

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….”

 

Confession: I post on Facebook. On July 4, I posted a link to Heather Cox Richardson’s July 2 podcast on three recent Supreme Court decisions, the so-called “debate” between the two presidential candidates, and the obvious truth: No one is coming to save us. As HCR notes, we certainly can’t depend on the so-called “liberal press”!

I was disappointed (though not, I admit, surprised) at how few Fb friends bothered to follow the link to the podcast. It wasn’t, after all, a cute puppy picture or a pretty garden photo they could simply “like”  before moving on, so they simply scrolled by. I tagged a couple of friends and edited my introduction to say that the link might take them to the most important words they would hear that day, but -- deaf ears, for the most part. Not that people don’t care. Some are so firmly convinced that the game is lost, so demoralized, that rousing them from their lethargic stupor seems all but impossible. 

 

This morning I was thinking about personality traits and what I would say if someone asked me to name my worst. Of course, I don’t know what others would say about me (and maybe don’t want to know), but I do know myself to be very stubborn. On the other hand (and this fits right in with my philosophy of life, i.e., that everything is a double-edged sword), if I weren't stubborn, my bookstore would not have survived for 31 years, because I would have quit when the going got tough, rather than taking on one part-time job after another to hang on by my fingernails. And in this case, which involves nothing less than the future of our country, I don’t see giving up as an option.

 

So if you have lost all hope, please ask yourself what you have to gain by infecting others with your defeatist attitude. You need to vent? Vent in the shower! When you speak your presumptive defeat publicly or smear it all over social media, you only give aid and support and endless amusement to the opposition. 

 

Fear is something to overcome. Defeatism is not a game plan. Another name for stubbornness is perseverance or persistence. If you can’t summon up any positivity or determination, then, if you got no sisu at all, put a sock in it. Or – 

When you just can't keep it zipped!

Random Thoughts: Buying or Judging?

Photo by Harris & Ewing, "between 1905 and 1935." http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hec.16410

A thought that came to me recently concerns the phrase “marketplace of ideas," not only as it occurs in everyday speech but specifically as I read it in a positive and pithy little book by Dan Rather & Elliot Kirschner entitled What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism. 

In the chapter on dissent (which also, coincidentally, mentions Eugene V. Debs as “the famous socialist labor leader” who ran for the presidency from prison, where he was incarcerated on a federal charge of sedition), the authors cite the case of Abrams v. the United States (1919), in which two justices dissented from the majority on a question of free speech. The Court had twice previously been unanimous in supporting limits to free speech during World War I, but Justice Holmes was convinced by friends that the court had gone too far in suppressing speech, so in Abrams he dissented from the majority, Justice Brandeis concurring in the dissent. 

Holmes wrote in his dissent, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market….” Hmmm....

We are so accustomed to hearing and reading and using the phrase that I wonder how many of us ever think much about it. A marketplace, whether physical or virtual, is a scene for buying and selling, and while we commonly say “I don’t buy that” to indicate disagreement or at least lack of interest, do we want to think of our own dearly held beliefs and firmly held convictions as something to “sell” other people? Are ideas and beliefs and convictions and principles nothing more than virtual products to be advertised and promoted for--personal gain? to "win"?

But how else, you may ask, should we speak about ideas competing for our allegiance? I like “court of public opinion” a little better, because it implies judgment. While in a market I may make an impulse purchase and have little to regret (if the price is low enough), serving on a jury I would be asked to deliberate more carefully, weighing all the evidence presented and not voting solely on the basis of which attorney was the better salesperson.

What do you think of when you hear "marketplace of ideas"? 

Resilience

Beautiful Great Lakes water
 

‘Resilience’ is a word we have heard perhaps much too often since the year 2020, and its omnipresence may have begun four years earlier. Who knows? As a widow, I have had personal encounters with the word and the idea, as well as meeting with it in casual news and important news stories day after day, and sometimes I get tired of the word. But then I think, what other word could possibly take its place? 

 

The movie “Bad River” that premiered in various U.S. cities on March 15 (mostly cities much larger than Traverse City, so we were particularly fortunate to have it there) is set in a small place beset with large issues that are pertinent to everyone on earth. The federally recognized Ojibwe tribe at Bad River, Wisconsin, numbered 6,945 members in 2010. In 2020, 1,545 members lived on the 193.11 square mile reservation, most of it managed as “undeveloped” forest and wetland. In this tribe’s culture, wild rice is as elemental as land and water, but all are threatened by a Canadian-owned oil pipeline over 70 years old and in imminent danger of failure at key points, as the film makes clear. 

 

Challenge and threat are nothing new to the people of Bad River. Removal of their children to boarding schools (where their language was prohibited, physical and mental abuse rampant, and where many children died), removal and relocation of whole families to cities far from their homes, broken treaties, pressures from the dominant culture that shrunk the tribe’s lands time after time, an allotment plan that divided the land (all the better for lumber companies to buy their land and gain control), along with all the ills that follow poverty and disculturation. 

 

“Bad River” the film is a story about much more than the dangers of an oil pipeline that could spill into Lake Superior and from there contaminate the Great Lakes, because the Bad River people have been fighting to maintain their land and way of life and identity for much longer than the pipeline has been in place, but in a 1980s court case the judge ruled in favor of the tribe, saying that the Treaty of 1854 does indeed guarantee their rights to hunt and fish and gather food. Sport fishermen were incensed, but the fact is that the tribe manages its own fisheries, more than replacing the fish they take each year. See details of that history here. 

 

Now the tribe comprising roughly 7,000 Native Americans has been defending, at their own expense, not only their own lands and waters and resources, but the entire Great Lakes system, freshwater on which the entire world depends. The Canadian corporation, Enbridge, has been ruled a trespasser on tribal land since the tribe chose not to renew the corporation’s lease, which expired in 2013 – and yet a judge ruled that the trespass could continue until 2026 -- and the corporation has no intention of shutting down the pipeline and removing it then. 

 

Line 5 originates in Canada, passes through Wisconsin, Michigan, tribal lands, and the Great Lakes, only to end back in Canada. Apparently it was easier and cheaper for the foreign company to build the line below their national border. What would the energy cost be without Line 5? The company’s own experts estimate that gas prices might increase by half a cent per gallon. 

 

As is much too often the case with cost/benefit analyses, profits do not go to populations bearing the risks. Almost always, the few and the poorer bear the risks in order that the already wealthy can become wealthier. In this particular case, however, the risks are born by all Americans and Canadians within the Great Lakes system, now and into the future. “We’re not there yet,” said someone in the trial that found the corporation guilty of trespass. I.e., we have not yet had a disastrous break in the line. That, of course, is just the point: to prevent a disaster that could not possibly be contained.

 

The Bad River people have had to be resilient for generations in order to survive. Nature, we often note, is also resilient. The span of time needed for nature’s resilience, however, is not always limited to the span of a human life. What do we want to bequeath to our children and grandchildren, let alone to the seventh generation in the future?

 

SHUT DOWN LINE 5 NOW!