"C'mon Now"--a Southern Code Phrase That Means More Than You'd Think

I heard Elijah Cummings' closing speech yesterday in the car. I couldn't help but pick out a phrase I'd heard during my sojourns in the South. To wit:

C'mon now. It can be said quickly and slowly, almost not pronoucing the 'm', sometimes with a head cocked toward the recipient and a knowing glance. It's a kind of coded demand to face facts and stop avoiding the issue.

I heard it more than once as Cummings excoriated, then tried to inspire, his fellow House members, both on the Oversight Committee and not, to extend themselves to get beyond the morass in which we've found ourselves. Cummings is from Maryland, a mid-South state with decidedly liberal tendencies (but split like many states into urban progressives and rural conservatives). He has been a staple in Congress for some time now. He is not young; I winced as I watched him walk to his seat as Chairperson before Michael Cohen told the country, among other things, that 45, his former boss and someone with whom he had been in many confidential conversations for ten years as his personal attorney, was a "racist, a con man, and a cheat."

Cohen and Cummings then had to endure the snipings of House Republican Oversight Committee members who insisted that first, they simply wouldn't participate in any actual investigatory inquiries, so as not to contribute to what may be the president's actual demise. During their questioning, which could have been done by one of them instead of all since they exhibited the same attitudes and lanes of operation, they kept emphasizing that:

• Cohen was convicted of lying to the same Congress (which he was); 
• That he might be seeking a book contract when his term in prison is finished (which he admitted); and that
• The whole thing was a colossal waste of time (which it certainly was for them, since they had no interest in performing their duties under the Constitution, which was to discover whether any wrongdoing has been taking place). 

Whatever that had to do with the price of tea in Sri Lanka, which is the kind of distraction they would have begged for and enjoyed.

The game should have been anticipated. We should have anticipated that the very smarmy Mark Meadows would have lowered himself and someone else to introduce to the committee a black appointee from the Department of Housing and Human Services (the Secretary of which is black, so why did he bother?) to demonstrate that, you bunch of sillies, the president can't possibly be a racist.

Never mind what Cohen testified about 45 saying that countries with black leaders were "shithole" countries; that that statement was made, he said pointedly, when Barack Obama was President; and that black people wouldn't be voting for him because "they're too stupid." No, no: Let's bring in Exhibit 2, okay (Exhibit 1 being the "Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire" poster hanging behind the committee)? Here. She's black. She works in a Cabinet department. See?

Yes, we see. And Rashida Tlaib called him out, unfortunately without bringing Cohen's quotes about 45 back into the discussion, such as: Oh, this is sufficient proof of his racial magnanimity? No tokenism here whatsoever, huh? How, then, can you possibly reconcile what he's said about black people? Or is it true that she won't be voting for him in 2020 because she's "too stupid"? Let's sit her down for a minute and ask her, okay?

A perfect place for some Democrat to have said to Meadows, a North Carolinian: C'mon now. Because, in one sense of the Southern phrase, it means: You know the truth like the rest of us do.

All this with a black man as Chairperson of the committee.

He brought it at the end of the day with an impassioned, impromptu speech, both jeremiad and balm. "I mean, c'mon now. Our president has told 8,718 false or misleading statements. Sounds like you [Cohen] got caught up in it."

C'mon now, the man said. This is ridiculous. It means that, too.

He went on. "C'mon, now. We have got to get back to normal." C'mon now: You know what I mean.

It will not be easy, this return to normal, and what constitutes normal won't be exactly what it was on November 7, 2016. But we've let something slip away from us, and it's up to more of us than we thought to retrieve enough of it to reclaim our place in the world and in the advance of history, of which we have taken great responsibility over the past century and a half.

Rep. Cummings wants to believe, too, what he also kept on saying: We're better than this. We really are. To which I would respond: I thought we were, too. Now we will see. There must be a reckoning. It must involve, in a sense, all of us.

C'mon now. Let's get at this.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

The New Draft Notice: Feminism Confronted with Another Kind of Me-Too

I wonder if Meg Ryan understood what she was doing.

She starred in a film called "Courage Under Fire," (1996) about a woman army commanding officer in Desert Storm, who must stand in the way of the enemy while the rest of her squad, all men of course, flee to safety. She is killed while they escape, under suspiciously unclear circumstances. After an investigation led by an officer played by Denzel Washington, she is given a posthumous Medal of Honor.

Implicitly, it proved a point: Can women fight battles on the ground? Can they command men under fire? If so, they're just as liable--and just as ready, too--to die for their country.

Not a new concept for that gender. Soviet women fought in World War II. Israel has had women fighting for its entire existence, and there we go back to 1947, if not before. And one of the best Vietnamese military leaders in 16th Century wars against China was female, not to mention those who fought successfully against the Americans.

Then there's Joan of Arc, about 800 years ago.

Acknowledging this, officially and proscribing it into our jurisprudence, was a district court judge in Texas, just the other day. He said that women, while volunteers, have more than proven their military capabilities to be equivalent to that of men in this country.

But he also said: They can be made to sign up for the draft when they gain legal age. Too.

"While historical restrictions on women in the military may have justified past discrimination," Judge Gray Miller wrote in Houston in response to a lawsuit brought by the National Coalition of Men, which claimed that male-only drafts were in violation of the 14th Amendment's 'equal protection' clause, "Men and women are now similarly situated for purposes of a draft, or registration for a draft. If there ever was a time to discuss 'the place of women in the Armed Services,' that time has passed."

So someday, our present 17-year-old girls, and those younger, will be getting the same letter from the draft board that boys always get just before they turn 18. It's up to the president and the Congress, but now they're empowered to do so.

Feminism loses its luster here, with this confrontation, as well as American exceptionalism. It's been kind of smirky for women to prove their fighting selves when they feel like signing up for it: kind of ha-ha, we showed you guys, the rarity of it being roughly equivalent to firefighting and police work (where women have also lost their lives, but also as volunteers), for whatever small percentage wished to assume those risks. But the demand that all of them put it on the line will change the way we look at military and foreign policy issues forever.

It's like saying: Take us seriously, damn it. And now Judge Miller has said: We do. But, as Spiderman has always claimed, "With great power comes great responsibility."

War now means that the entire flower of American youth may be at risk. Guys got killed, generally speaking, in our wars until now, and the women stayed home, generally speaking, tended the home fires, even got into the factories to help make war munitions, and waited for their guys to come home, if they could, to start or continue families--to send more males off to war, etc.

Since we have gone to an all-volunteer military in the wake of the draft protests during the Vietnam War, we have not had to conduct another draft, largely because the casualties stemming from our subsequent foreign excursions have been low enough to absorb volunteer replacements. We tend to forget that, when the draft ended, Congress did not abolish it. It held in abeyance the ability to re-open the draft, should that awful possibility become necessary. All 18-year-old men since then have received draft registration notices.

We have floated amidst that wonderland since. We have achieved a comfort zone of disbelief: How could we have another war so big that we would lose so many of our military people that we would need to call up thousands of girls who have barely become women, train them brutally for the ultimate challenge, and send them off to fight, kill and perhaps die?

They are trained that way now. They are doing fine. But they're the ones who wanted to do that.

Wouldn't that make us hesitate before getting involved, even more than we hesitated (and we sure did) before diving into both world wars? Would we be inclined to fight, then, only to defend our own soil, instead of dreaming up excuses to stop international movements 10,000 miles away? Would the neo-liberals, all too eager to push democracy and our markets (Don't forget our markets) into places that aren't used to them, be so willing to commit our women to those efforts? Aren't they exactly the chauvinists who would pause at such a development?

Would that be considered a liberal position? Or a conservative one? Or, since it would involve the very fabric of our nation, wouldn't it matter? Isn't this another kind of Me-Too, flipped on its other side?

Wonder Woman would be proud. If she existed. But this is no longer a comic book story. This is reality served on a hot plate.

I wonder, too, if Meg Ryan is thinking about her role in this: How many girls she inspired to sign up for the military. We'll never know, of course, and the film is a generation old now. But it had to do so; her character displayed incredible but believable courage, and other women have displayed the same. Some are Army Rangers and Marines now, some serve on our aircraft carriers and missile cruisers (I have met some of them), some fly jets (I know of someone; I had her in class) and those folks are very tough indeed, people you and I can be proud of.

But they wanted to qualify for those positions. They didn't have to. They are proving, though, that if called upon, women can step up and deliver the ultimate effort and pay the ultimate price; that in the end, it's our country, together, men and women, as it has been in Israel, in the Soviet Union, in France, in Vietnam.

And they'll go where their commander-in-chief directs them. Just think: the one we now have will automatically have a much, much larger fighting force available if something should happen and Congress allows him.

Or if someone makes something happen. Depending, of course, on how one looks at it. Not that anyone would invent an excuse or anything--like, maybe, a national emergency.

Judge Miller's ruling is declaratory, which means it doesn't have to be acted upon immediately. So we'll wait, most likely, until a larger war is imminent, until there will be general panic about women ages 18 to 35 (the peak of child-bearing, except some of the military women serving right now are mothers, so there's that) suddenly being drafted. It might never happen, of course. But it might.

Let's see who steps up and appeals this federal court decision. If anyone.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Reparations: Great on Paper, Great in Politics, A Trap in Reality--Think Colin Kaepernick and 45

As of this writing, four Democratic candidates--Elizabeth Warren, Kamela Harris Julian Castro and Marianne Williamson--have said that they favor reparations for black Americans descended from slaves. There's a now-moribund legislative connection: for about 30 years now, there has been a proposed bill by the late John Conyers (D-MI) that asks for Congress to conduct a study of the issue.

That's it. A study. No money, outside of what's already been legislated, should be spent.

It got nowhere. It hasn't yet made it to the floor. Buried in committee means buried. It means someone inside that committee must dig it back up.

Nobody has. Why? Way too hot a topic. Let Ta-Nehisi Coates call it, though he supports the idea of it and has written extensively on it, to describe the objections. In his best-selling book We Were Eight Years in Power, actually a collection of essays, he says "the popular mocking of reparations" calls the idea "a hare-brained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists."

Thinking about it, though, does not reduce its legitimacy. Coates calls it

....the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering
alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his
life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckon
us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is--
the work of fallible humans.
Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already
divided. The wealth gap [to which he alludes as being the major
measurement of the collective and individual damage] merely
puts a number on something we feel but cannot pay--that 
American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribu-
tion. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with
old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche
and the banishment of white guilt.
What I'm talking about is more than a recompense for past in-
justices--more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluct-
ant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that 
would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the
end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the 
facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yel-
ling "patriotism" while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations
would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a
reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with
the facts of our history.

But would that payoff--because that's what it would be--result in spiritual renewal? Does the settlement of past grievances create the reform necessary to prevent their repetition? Do the parties think differently of each other after the settlement?

To answer those questions, let me ask this one: When a worker utilizes a grievance to challenge her employer, does the winning of that grievance mean that the employer acknowledges her civil and human rights--thus rendering her equal--or is the employer forced to observe her rights under the contract?

Are the two the same? No, they aren't. You win the grievance, but I don't have to like you or be with you or invite you to sit with me at dinner. I can still separate myself and enjoy the separation. My spirit isn't renewed: In fact, it might double-down against you.

Colin Kaepernick settled out of court with the NFL, which, it was learned, blackballed him from employment because of his visual protest during pre-game national anthems--a protest vilified and intentionally mis-characterized in very effective fashion (one must admit, though it doesn't say much good about us) by 45. The NFL threw, probably, millions of dollars at him. But he can't discuss it anymore.

They restored his damages, but they also bought his silence. They shut him up. Nobody has to hire him, either, though he probably still has the skills necessary (he took a team to the Super Bowl) to help at least a few of the league's 32 teams, perhaps as a backup quarterback--or, in fact, something else, since quarterbacks are good athletes and some have been converted into other positions.

Would you, as an NFL owner, bring him back at age 31, past his prime? Would you demand that he not kneel during the national anthem? Would you intentionally bring a controversial person back into the locker room, knowing that the support for him isn't universal?

Nope. He caught us, you'd say, and he's rich. Enough now. We're done talking about it. After all, he took the money. Let's move on. When's the draft?

Let me pose another question: How many articles have been written about Colin Kaepernick since the deal has been struck? Journalists can certainly discuss it endlessly: They've been held to no gag rule. But I haven't seen a single one. What are the chances that this will be revitalized in the near future? What do you think? Uh-uh. We've all moved on.

So: Would reparations based on damages caused by slavery cause a larger discussion? Or would the payoff end the discussion? I think the latter. We paid you. Now go away.

We'd agree to the reparations money, fine. But no one would not have to agree to accept blacks in any other way than under the Constitution, as far as it can be enforced in their favor--which has never been, and never will be, the same in every corner of the land.

What else would go away? Let's see: How about Black Lives Matter? Yeah, they do, some would say. We just settled on how much.

How about affirmative action? Uh-uh. All done. We paid you. We've made up for it because you wanted us to. All part of the damages. And, oh, yeah--we're sorry. Feel better?

Can such things be utilized as bargaining chips? Yes, if they're that important.

Who would do that? Who else? 45. He could call a meeting of significant black leaders: NAACP, National Urban League, Congressional Black Caucus, etc.--tweeting his fingers off with anticipation: Free at last! Free at last!

He could put it on the table like this: You want those Confederate flags and monuments to go away? Okay, fine. We'll put each of them that's left into museums, and prohibit their public displays forever. That might violate the displayers' freedom of speech and property rights, though. To avoid losing in court, we'll make you lose some of your speech freedoms thusly:

• Affirmative action is denied, forever. No university or employer needs to allow for differences in race or skin color or gender or gender identity or sexual orientation when hiring or accepting anybody. 
• Accordingly, anyone spotted with a Black Lives Matter t-shirt or banner or other public display will, like the Confederate flag owners, be made subject to arrest and escalating fines.
• Your official position, when we take it to Congress, is 100% support, thus putting Nancy Pelosi on the hot seat far more than any national emergency would.

Okay, it's a trade-off. Life is full of trade-offs. Sign here.

Deal? Or a trap?

Would he do that? Of course he would. He would spin and tweet it as putting him in the position of the Great Healer of America. And refusing him, of course, would allow him to insult, belittle and mock those with whom the bargaining began, while proving to his base that, in fact, he really is interested in racial justice for everyone. He would have every right to say: Well, I tried. Guess it isn't that important to them after all.

He could frame the whole matter as transactional and prove once again that everything in life can be bargained away. Everyone has their price, it just has to be found.

Consider, too, that slavery itself was nothing more than a transaction, made with the chiefs of the African tribes from which the people were kidnapped and subjected to life-long, forced servitude. Would the offer to replace that transaction with another one make it an effective payback? Or would it, once again, reduce the importance of the individuals directly or indirectly affected by the atrocities/

Absurd? No more so than the thought of reparations in the first place. And absurdity is the watchword of this monster. Remember: He does anything he wants and says anything he wants to get his way. Anything.

He could get the jump on all the Democratic candidates before they began a debate on the issue. He would steal one of their biggest moral positions right out from under them.

And he can't lose. Remember who we did not mention, too: The children of immigrants sent back across the border, thousands of whom are somewhere we can't see right now. We've been assured that they're okay. Count on this: They aren't. They're without their parents. Start there.

To separate those two issues is to give 45 exactly what he wants: opportunities to divide the opposition. The Democratic presidential candidates should think twice about this, because in terms of meeting the needs of the various groups that normally vote with them, they become inclined to jump on bandwagons to be sure to avoid finger-pointing.

Add this all up. Would we emerge as a cleansed, far more united nation? It doesn't look like it. Are monuments being torn down? Yes, here and there. Are school names being changed from those of Confederate leaders? Yes, here and there.

Would a reparations settlement cause more conversation on race and our mottled history, with which Coates wishes us to reconcile? Sure, for a few weeks, here and there. But then, like the Kaepernick deal, once settled, it would dissipate, become reduced, and lose its meaning and status amidst all other public affairs issues.

Down a hole it would go, emerging, like Punxsutawney Phil, once a year during Black History Month (notice it's the same month). That, like the above deal, sells everybody short.

We need to do this the hard way. When the country achieves its inevitable demographic destiny--when it becomes less than half-white, despite desperate efforts to hold that back--we will have the reckoning we need. In the meantime: to minorities, a recommendation: Cut no deals. Don't lose the power you've already gained.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Matt Kuchar and Trickle-Down Economics

Matt Kuchar can't be blamed. Well, not really.

And he was big enough to apologize and try to make it right. Good for him.

But his initial comments about giving his rent-a-caddy just $5,000 of the $1,296,000 he claimed by winning a pro tournament earlier this year were the ones that caught right in my craw:

• We had an agreement: Uh-huh. Now you can run and hide with $1,291,000. Never mind that the agreement, made with a handshake, was made with your perfect knowledge that it was entirely possible for you to scoot home after stiffing this caddy way, way below what the PGA tournament players usually pay out--10% being the norm.
• Tipped him another two grand to make it five: See above.
• This is a non-story: We know you would think that. We know you would think that it's time to move on.
• Didn't lose any sleep over it: Did the caddy? Have you made any comments about him yet? Or is this all about you?

Kuchar comes off as a good-guy, hail-fellow-well-met type. He has immense talent and has finished in the top ten in several major tournaments. This was not his first victory, either; he has won multiple times. He also makes TV ads for golf shoe manufacturers, as if he needs that extra cash.

Because he has won 46 million dollars on tour. 46 million. Yes, he worked very hard for that money, and continues to do so. I've played the game competitively, and it's amazing how much work it takes to get good enough to be competitive.

But it doesn't remove him from having to be compassionate, fair, and aware.

When he came very close to winning the British Open tournament two years ago, his family (wife and two children) surprised him by flying to Scotland to see him. That couldn't have been cheap. He couldn't have spent his last earned dollars on that trip.

He's a good interview, friendly and engaging. He's what the PGA Tour prefers, as close to an All-American guy as you'll get, squeaky clean and smiling more often than not--which is fairly rare in a sport in which tension must be dealt with deeply, and mistakes can never be made up.

But he's pure American in another sense. There he stands, tall and white. There's his temporary caddy, short and Hispanic. Kuchar said it himself; making 500 bucks would have been a good week for him.

Would he have said that if a white guy would have caddied for him? Would he have given him just five grand for a $1.3 million windfall?

You don't have to be racially condescending on purpose. You can be completely thoughtless, too. You can just forget all about everyone else and make everything a business proposition. You can say that you ignored the other person's race in an attempt to make everything equal, everything the same.

But you can't. Because it isn't. Why doesn't America look good lately? Or, to be more direct: Why have so many of us recently learned how bad we look to the rest of the world?

You can say to yourself that you'll never see this guy again, and giving him something is better than nothing. After all, he's part-time help. Part-time help, regardless of the tasks involved, don't deserve what full-time people get.

Especially if they're from, you know, there. He should be lucky to have gotten what he got paid. Right? 

Here we sit with a made-up crisis on that international border, where those people are getting barrier after barrier thrown up against them in their desire to become citizens of this country--just like us. So how does this look, since the tournament was played in Mexico? In the holy, completely false world of the so-called 'free market', wouldn't a 'free market' allow--actually, demand--that the caddy have a chance to cross the international border and work in America??

Ohhhhh, noooooo. Can't have that. Real Americans need big-time caddy jobs. So we need to wall all that off. Literally. Right?

Here we sit with Fight-For-Fifteen demonstrating for $15 per hour while 45 jams up federal employees with his temper tantrum-laden government shutdown. What's the deal? They should be happy they have a job, right? $15 an hour will make the business owners less rich, won't it? That will raise prices, won't it? So opposing it will be a brave stand against government interference, even socialism, and will be doing the laborers a favor because they can take the pittance they're making and pay less for fewer things. Right?

It's difficult to consider such folks fairly if you're a multi-millionaire, earning your money at a sport in which you earn, or don't earn, every single dime. It's you against the field. It takes a hardness of spirit, a grinder's mentality, to stay competitive. It takes hundreds of hours of work, month after month, to keep one's skills fresh. You don't belong to a team, unless you count your caddy. 

But it isn't a team, as such, outside of being referred to in a very token way. A pro golfer can (and they have) fire a caddy in the middle of a round and pick another one out of a crowd. They can, and have, kept caddies for years, then dropped them with a thud like the heavy bags they carry. It isn't easy to be a caddy, but neither does it take tremendous individual skills. Anybody can carry a heavy bag, hand a person a club, rake sand traps, hold the pin, and shut up while your guy's swinging. It's a bonus if golfers rely on caddies for any advice, and the golfers have the last word. Let's call it for what it is: paid servitude.

Though they need them to get through their rounds--and couldn't possibly play as well without them--pro golfers look down their noses at caddies automatically. They're just employees with no contract, no health insurance, no pension. The condescension is palpable. It's easy to add the subtleties of race to that and ignore what should be obvious: That while paying that Mexican caddy five thousand would be an incredible payday for him, a regular American caddy would get a hundred grand, no sweat.

So Kuchar split the issue and paid him $50,000, along with an apology and an admission that he didn't do any of that well. Good, but had he not been ratted out by a fellow pro, would any of this have happened?

If some public workers' unions have next to no collective bargaining rights, as is true in Wisconsin, will the news of dropping wages and watering down pensions get anywhere near the front pages? Talk about stiffing the help....

Is the proposal of taxing people making millions of dollars per year 70% of their earnings all that outrageous?

Is the fact that people are paying far more in federal taxes this year, after being told the convenient lie that they'll benefit from putting the nation into a two trillion dollar debt to reduce corporate taxes and make fat cats even more corpulent with their corporatism, the least bit surprising?

It's where the rich are in America: Taking money endlessly, spouting the holiness of the 'free market' that they control, right down to the last dime they can pinch, and then whining about having to give that last dime away to maintain that very society in which they thrive, or to give somebody else a break. Strange how most of the rest of us don't respect that, because we have just seen--again--the true definition of 'trickle down' economics, where the very rich allow their money only to trickle, only to the degree to which they don't get caught at being outright miserly--which they prefer.

Because they don't respect us. Like the person who said he would make America great again but is dragging it down to ruin, there are those who have money and those who don't, and those who don't, well--you lost. Loser.

To which I respond: Try a mirror. And the minute caddies organize into unions, I'll be back with a ringing endorsement.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

The Realization That Will Change Us: McConnell's Obsessions

Moments of a-ha show up indiscriminately by their very nature. We drift along inside a comfortable box of reality when Wham! something rips open the lid and new, disturbing and life-changing information comes roaring in.

We are at that moment politically. There is a new reality about. Actually, it has been practiced by many already, but many also have managed to deny it. No more.

To wit: The point of politics is to win, plain and simple. It is no longer to regain something of a balance of power and decision-making ability, concluding after the effort that, oh well, it's always been that way and the battle rages on.

No. One party has figured out that power is there to be taken for as long as possible and necessary, the latter of which is forever. Forever, as in religious righteousness. Forever, as in the end of evil. Forever.

Its embodiment is not 45. Its embodiment is Mitch McConnell. Let us count the ways during this decade:

• When, as Minority Leader, he instructed his fellow Senators that they were to oppose every single proposal by then-president Barack Obama, regardless of what it was;
• When, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, as Majority Leader he stonewalled any attempt to hold hearings to confirm the appointment of Merrick Garland, Obama's choice to succeed Scalia, while Obama's second term took place;
• His support for a cruel and damaging government shutdown; and
• This moment, when he has signaled that he would support 45's ridiculous national emergency declaration to construct a ridiculous, unnecessary and ineffective wall to keep out those illegally wishing to enter through our southern border.

Disingenuously, which is his wont, McConnell can drag out the phrase "checks and balances," leaning on that old bromide to invoke the spirit of the Constitution so that one group of people don't get out of hand and claim too much power. But, as 45 often tries to do, he is the one who wishes to do exactly that.

Because this is excessive, and he knows it. This constitutes winning at all costs, without a thought as to the future of our political culture. By previously setting the stage for such thinking, McConnell has made it easy for 45 to take, and try to get away with, such extreme stances. He represents the desperation of the reactionary forces:

• That a woman's right to choose might continue partly unabated (certainly not completely);
• That a majority of the population of this country might eventually become non-white (it will anyhow);
• That a permanent upper class would somehow lose its ability to steer the economy where it wishes (something it has never lost) and
• That the military's grip on our economy and culture will somehow disappear (since World War II and the expansion of our empire, small chance of that).

To do that, reactionaries (not conservatives; in our badly tilted political spectrum, they are small in number now) see that this may become their last stand, to pull the nation back from a fate they cannot fathom. In the same way they hated Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton, succeeding only at the end and only because they were aided by the blockage of voting rights and Russian intervention the depths of which we will soon learn, they will surge to seize power and preserve it in absolute terms.

Where will we see it next? In the Supreme Court, which will either support 45's national emergency that isn't, or where the next appointment (barring impeachment and removal of 45, necessary but not on the front burner as of yet) will be even more radical than that of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, the true colors of whom we have yet to know.

All this is why Yours Truly kept telling people, back in 2016, that it was the U.S. Senate, not necessarily the presidency (though it certainly would have been nice), that was the key to holding the keys of power for the following four years. Without it, we've had to go through two awful years before the House of Representatives finally reflected what the country's feeling about this awful series of power grabs. Without it, Mitch McConnell will continue to pursue his obsessions and twist his own reality to deny the rest of ours.

But he can do that. That's the moment of a-ha. The next major political writing should follow how we got here. Meanwhile, the next efforts should be to take McConnell's power away so he can't renew it. It's one of the major goals we must achieve to get us out of the morass we're in.

In the aftermath of such abuse and usurpation, can we be sure to return to a more measured, considerate political climate, having seen the alternative and the willingness of one side to incorporate it? What do you think?

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Why I Can't Run for Office, Either

It didn't seem like that big of a deal. We all knew it would be embarrassing, at least for that moment. But later?

Turn back the clock to January, 1970. There I was in a small liberal arts college in Appleton, Wisconsin, having just joined a fraternity. No biggie: Thousands did that every year.

But thousands didn't submit themselves to a "slave" auction. My frat joined with a sorority to have their new pledges auctioned off to the highest bidder. Ostensibly, it was for a charity. So we shrugged and went through with it.

I must say that to have been put on display like that didn't feel especially good. It brought some humiliation with it, though in a temporary, flippant way. But I felt it. I do remember that.

Right after it had ended--at least, the white kids' part of it, for no fraternity nor a sorority member, to my recollection, was black--black students held a mockery of it on the same stage. I recall that a number of us were taken back by the display, as if we were somehow being insulted.

Well, yes. There was an insult being delivered--to them. It gradually dawned on me--admittedly, not immediately, largely due to the simple fact that I had not grown up with black kids in my schools--that what we were doing was to bring back one of the ugliest reminders of perhaps the worst part of our national history. And, after all, in public, just the way slaves were actually auctioned off in the past (granted, we weren't checked for our functional body parts as in those days).

I do not recall if it was done in subsequent years, but I don't think it continued past my senior year there. Gratefully, someone with more awareness drew a line and said no.

And so: Because I willingly, though not terribly sensitively, went through with such mockery, would that eliminate my political chances of being nominated for or elected to public office? Would I be branded a racist? Would there be no possible way I could redeem myself?

More to the point: Is 49 years not enough time to put between the event and the present day? If not, what would? Would I have to wait another year for the golden anniversary and free myself from adverse branding?

I'm not asking for a friend. I'm asking for those who have had things revealed about their past. Like, maybe, the governor of Virginia, who confessed to having worn blackface 35 years ago. Like, maybe, the attorney general of the same state, who apparently did the same thing at about the same time.

They're already in significant public office. Should they now resign because they got caught a little more than a year after their elections? The behavior wasn't criminal, as opposed to the lieutenant governor, now accused of two sexual assaults. But it was mean-spirited, if not simply dumb.

Yet, has nothing they have done in the name of racial equality or equity in the 35 years since able to make up for those awful decisions? Wouldn't they, instead, have the possibility of assuring the black communities of Virginia that they would get more attention than they've been used to getting--which, in the final analysis, can't be a bad thing since the governor's position has been limited to a single, four-year term?

All things considered, then, do they deserve a break? Or are they endlessly compromised unless they quit and try again, more appropriately branded as recovering racists?

Thinking back, there wasn't a mean-spirited bone in my body about the "slave" auction in which I participated. So it could reasonably be called mindless, if not dumb (not pointing fingers, either, at the organizers of the event). Had I had more awareness, I suppose I could have taken a stand and refused to get involved. But that would have exposed myself to ridicule, at least from my fraternity brothers. That would have been a tough choice for a very recent pledge.

I was just 18. I wasn't much younger than Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford at a party at Georgetown University. I was of today's legal age (though not at that moment, for legality at 18 was a year away by constitutional amendment). I was supposed to be able to make adult-level decisions, though.

I'm not running for anything, nor do I have plans to do so. This recollection had nothing to do with that decision, either. I don't view myself as a recovering racist, though. Considering what I learned in college, how I taught my social studies courses with emphasis on the civil rights movement and became inspired by that to move up to the national leadership of the National Education Association, interacting with people of color en route, that label would be inaccurate.

I wouldn't even believe I had anything to defend, either. Not because of something that happened, that I did not start but did not stop to consider its impact, 49 years ago, wet behind the ears though I was. Maturity is never a straight line for anyone.

My racial awareness can be traced to a moment even before that, too--by my dad, as well as the civil rights movement, of which anyone growing up in the '50s and '60s had to be aware. But that's for another time. Meanwhile, if this sad situation in Virginia has caused more people than just Yours Truly to recall moments when they could have done a bit better, so much the better going forward--as long as we do utilize it to go forward.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

From a Spaniard, in Turkey, to An American: The Basic Question

The Situation: Ankara, Turkey, December 2004
The moment keeps arriving in my mind like it was yesterday, because it said so much in so few words.

There we were in Ankara, Turkey, in December 2004. Just about a month had gone by since the re-election, so to speak--if you want to call his original election legitimate, which many, including this observer, certainly do not--of George W. Bush as the 43rd president. Much had happened in his first term that would propel my nation on a disastrous course, the whirlwind of which we presently reap.

Nine-eleven, first of all, the horrible day and its ill-directed aftermath: The victory of the conservative mind-meld and media machines in somehow obscuring the ultimate blame on the ultimate breach of airport security and internal intelligence that would allow a full 19 saboteurs the opportunity to hijack four major-sized airliners and fly them to their deaths and the deaths of several hundred others--thereby slaughtering nearly three thousand people in a matter of a few hours. No one has ever, fully taken Dubya to task for this heretofore unthinkably ridiculous betrayal of national trust. Had Al Gore been actually elected in 2000, the way he should have been had all the votes been counted, would the Republicans allowed him to slide by amidst a sudden but cat-quickly temporary descent into hand-holding, we're-all-in-this-together national unity, numbed as we were by the shock of the tragedy? Or, having very recently conjured a reason to legally unleash their hate upon the previous, Democrat president, just re-started their impeachment engine and picked up where they left off with charges of incompetence and even (and you can bet the ultra-conservative wags would have touted this accusation) treason?

No matter: Not only was our attention diverted successfully (sound familiar?), but 43 then embarked on an incredible, even deeper diversion of attention--to implicitly blame Saddam Hussein for the attack, when there was never any solid or even pursuable evidence of it, by the utilization of that ace of smearing and vague but portentious negativity, his veep, Dick Cheney (whose blame has also never been completely established, either, in the national consciousness, though the recent film, Veep, gets as close as anything that's been attempted). The national announcement of the initial attack upon Hussein's Iraq is notable not for what was said by 43, but what was left out: any reference to the weapons of mass destruction that were misleadingly touted, especially by Cheney, to stir up so much public sentiment that major media perusal and potential objection was muted and diminished.

That was in March, 2003. We have already observed the 15th anniversary of our ill-fated, ill-advised, ill-managed and unsolicited invasion of Iraq. We still have military people there, and every so often, a few are killed in explosions and ambushes. Still.

But 21 months later, several of us were sitting in a hotel meeting room in Ankara, chatting amongst ourselves in a getting-to-know-you way. Yours Truly, as a member of the national Executive Committee of the National Education Association, representing more than three million members, had been named to join them in a conference connected to the meeting of the Turkish National Teachers' Union, Egitim Sen. We were mostly from Western Europe and, of course, the U.S., ostensibly to support Egitim Sen's efforts to resist the nation's Supreme Court, in a matter very much connected to the very invasion my country had initiated. Like it or not, I was thrust into an international quagmire that had bubbled to the surface, and what I said might either be touted or utilized into an international cause celebre' by opponents near and far.

Wars may be fought within national boundaries, but their effects are never self-contained. So, too, it was with Iraq, from which hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled from their normal enclaves in northwestern Iraq. The closest border to those enclaves was that with Turkey, so the refugees streamed into it, trying to find another peaceful place.

Well and good, but Turkey was now stuck with dealing with them. The Turks have a history dotted with their own set of tragedies, not the least of which was the century-old international accusation which, in a 45-ish sense of non-reality, they endlessly deny: The annihilation of about a million Armenians during World War I, as part of the Ottoman Empire. Not even the U.S. government can make public statements recognizing that genocide, lest it lose the support of not only a traditional ally against Russia (which, since then, has now frayed), but at that particular moment, a potential addition to the European Union.

Though the Ottoman Empire fought on the losing side of The Great War, the Versailles Treaty saved the Turks' general territory and culture, and the people, who began a new democracy, continued a fierce nationalistic streak amidst a combination of mostly Islamic religious observance (prayers were sung from loudspeakers at the appointed times throughout Ankara) and secular government. Such a balance is endlessly delicate, and depends upon stability in other aspects of national culture.

The Kurds threatened to dislodge that balance by their simple existence as a refugee surge. Those families, too, have kids, and those parents, too, want them to enroll in the schools. But, as American teachers have had to ask again and again: What do you do with thousands of kids who don't know the language?

In the United States, that's something of a philosophical issue, the results of which have been legislated in the many ways in which state governments deal with public education. But the consensus is that some time must be allowed for the kids to understand some of the language--the natural process of cultural assimilation combining with teachers' skills to create new citizens out of wandering urchins.

Not in Turkey, though. Adherence to the national language is embedded in the Turkish constitution. Article 42, in fact, states specifically that children taught in Turkish schools learn their lessons in Turkish. Period.

The National Teachers' Union objected. The kids would be sitting in classes operated in a completely different language, as different to them as, perhaps, Japanese would be to American children (and vice versa, as I learned myself upon the inclusion of a very nice, sweet Japanese girl in my U.S. History class. She would write essays by starting out in American English, but her mind couldn't keep up and would fall back on her comfort zone and shift into Japanese--which, of course, I knew nothing about.). With typical compassion, they demonstrated and made collective statements of resistance. Who the heck was the government to deny reality and demand teaching that kids couldn't possibly understand, with no time allotment to learn the new language through actual teaching or osmosis or exposure to classmates who, in fact, might actually teach them better than anyone else could?

They appealed to the national Supreme Court, which, like ours, has a veneer of balanced and deeply considered jurisprudence, but is also greatly politicized. At that particular moment, Egitim Sen's appeal was pending, but it called upon other national teachers' unions for their support--which we quickly rushed to provide.

So there we were, huddled in that hotel meeting room. Being the dumb American and knowing just my own language fluently--everyone else knew at least two and some three or four--I quickly connected with a Spaniard, Jose', who had been an AFS student in Iowa during the '70s. His American English was outstanding, and his diction went as fast as any American I had ever known. Not only did he know the language, but having been there a year, he knew America and Americans better than the others in the room.

So the Question Was (and still is):
The Europeans had reeled upon 43's re-election (as the NEA had; we had worked like mad for John Kerry, and our sense of disappointment was palpable and nearly desperate). His reputation for being less than an intellectual certainly did not help, and though Britain had quickly come to America's support in Iraq, there were significant pockets of resistance to the wars throughout the continent.

This was visited upon me by a glance at Turkish newspapers. I hadn't the foggiest notion of how to translate, but the banner headlines veritably shouted at readers that 43 had, once again, ruined their lives with an unnecessary war next-door. The photographs were insulting. My Turkish welcomers did so with something of a smile that was at once a semi-sneer.

Teachers tend to give each other the benefit of the doubt, but not this time. Jose' turned to me and, in a voice that could be heard by the rest, asked regarding what appeared to be the '04 election's improbability, "Mark, how could you [Americans] have been so stupid?"

He said it drawn out, as in stu-u-u-u-upid, with a hand clawed upwards to try to capture the depth of his utter disgust. I was caught unawares, but I shouldn't have been; back home, we were trying to figure out the same thing.

I offered that Americans like the image of the cowboys for their independence and saying little but doing a lot. That seemed to be the image that Dubya managed to portray, if for no other reason than that saying very much normally got him ridiculed at best. But in a circumstance in which 9-11 still hung over us like a dark cloud, the Republicans did a great job in capitalizing on that sentiment.

That's about all I could offer on short notice. As I wasn't challenged about that the rest of my 5-day stay in Ankara, it had to do enough good for me to skate by.

But that question lingers, because we have to ask it again: Why were so many people stupid enough to vote for this abomination of a president? Having elected someone with very average intelligence who managed to mess up not one but two wars, at least he watched one of them so that he bailed out our efforts to avoid catastrophe. This guy, 45, learns nothing and cares to learn nothing. He has infuriated our NATO allies and ended treaties with Iran and Russia, both of which now have opportunities to expand their arsenals to unprecedented levels.

He put it all on display during his campaign, too. People thought it was all just for show. Thing is, they were right: It was, but they thought he actually knew what he was doing. He didn't. He doesn't. He won't. And the vagaries of the Electoral College remain such that there's a chance we may have this disaster in the making for another four years.

How could we have been so stupid? Why are we so stupid now? Why, no matter what he does and does it so poorly, does his approval rating fail to fall below 35 percent? What are these people looking at?

That deserves some examination. It'll happen here.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark