2020: An Unexpected Prison

You have to admit that you didn't think things would roll out this way.

I didn't think that I would need to take a detour and live out part of the rest of my days as a near hermit: selecting all of my existence to be nearby; staying away from nearly everyone; engaging no one in casual conversation waiting in line, at a stoplight, buying bread; making sure never to linger anywhere for very long.

I never imagined not going to movie houses, bookstores, libraries, art museums, theaters, the things that make urban living an enjoyable, interesting thing, the reason I wanted to settle in one. Most of the time, I might have been just as likely to function in little Princeton, Wisconsin, where I once had a place, population a thousand and something, where nothing ever happens and no one ever makes loud noises. It does have a nice flea market on spring and summer Saturdays, but that would be a major superspreader event. I'd have to stay away from that. Too.

Instead, I must look over my shoulder endlessly in Milwaukee, lest someone unsuspectingly tries to end my life by giving me an infinitesimally small virus that's apparently thousands of times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence (hat tip to Fareed Zakaria in his book Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World). That can make me horribly sick. That, combined with my triple by-pass two and a half years ago which narrowed the freeway to my heart, can kill me.

And there is no interest to be accrued for being a good and observant practitioner of social distancing, hand cleaning (whether with soap or alcohol-based goop), and mask wearing. Each day starts from zero. Each day could be the start of a rapid, painful, lonely, panic-filled demise. I have forgotten my mask in a store exactly once and felt really stupid. A very nice gal at the counter gave me a one-time usage mask. I got away with it, which is to say: No sickness.

Nobody who is healthy can stop living. Everyone must get food and for people like me, their prescriptions. That the supply chains haven't run dry yet is a major accomplishment, or perhaps a stroke of good luck largely ignored by the pundits. Nearly everything I need is a block away, a nice addition to the convenience I sought when I originally got the apartment. I had no idea it would be so vital.

Some nine months we've had to put up with this. But for a great deal of it, we've had to run in place while an incompetent, uncaring federal administration used obfuscation and grandstanding instead of doing the hard work of figuring out what to do and assuming a leadership role. It is a major reason, perhaps the major reason, it isn't being allowed to continue.

Journalism has helped reduce the paranoia, but the science remains: This can kill you. And is killing hundreds of thousands of us, even those who are observing protocols. There is a randomness to this that is maddening, that you have to blot out of your mind lest you stay in bed all day.

The virus has spread. It is worse than ever before. Nine months later, it's as if we've done next to nothing at all. Testing is nearly futile because of the slowness of the report following up. We now have a couple of vaccines, a remarkable development in the history of science, but their distribution is one-tenth of what's been predicted. The president has yelled at everybody he accuses of being against him, but never once at someone who's supposed to get this vaccine passed out to us. But since he's gotten sick himself, it really doesn't matter, since it's always been solely about him.

And there are those, still, who refuse to pay attention, those who think it's just God evening things out, it's just bad luck that nobody can do much about. I know there are stupid people out there, and I never had to believe I needed to have anything to do with them. But I know they've been around me, though nearly everyone in my local area now wears masks. I have to do more than shrug my shoulders in the presence of stupid people now: I have to protect myself from them.

We know nothing for sure: Who's supposed to get the vaccine in what order, when to expect it, where to go to get it. No one has said anything. No one has said who's going to say so.

And coming up on 350,000 killed. The numbers increase. The dead pile up. Hospitals in some parts of the country are simply overrun. Terrible triage is near.

I don't know if I'm merely lucky or I really have succeeded in raising the odds of my survival. But I do know two things: Until I get a vaccine, I'm in a survival mode; and the uncertainty of it all is beginning to wear on me. Even the vaccine has its own uncertainty; nobody knows how well it will work and for how long. It's like the commercial that suggests: A chance to live longer.

Because every day, I'm forced to endure the monotony of my existence. I get up at the same time, do about the same things. I know there is only so much I can possibly do without exposing myself to major risk. My world has shrunk. It is tolerable, but it is something of a prison. Nobody guarantees my safety.

Now there is a mutated form of the virus in at least Colorado and California. It is supposed to spread faster than the original one. Scientists don't think the vaccine will fail with it, but nobody knows right now. It's enough just to get the vaccine out there. More than ever, it seems to be a race against time.

Granted, we rid ourselves of the menace in the White House. Another four years of him are unimaginable. The battle we had to fight, though, was an enormous disappointment.

This is not how I envisioned spending most of 2020. I thought I'd be traveling for a project I began two years ago, which was bearing interesting fruit. Until things return to something close to normal, it won't do me much good to continue it. 

The places I plan on visiting will have to engage in decent commerce and casual exchange of information and access, or else it will distort my findings. To get the kind of information I seek, I have to visit, among other places, bars and mom-and-pop restaurants, the kinds of places that are now dangerous if they are open at all.

I am sixty-nine years old. I won't live forever. Time is now being stolen. The kind of patience that Buddhists observe is easy when you're forty. But the clock stops for no one.

In the totality of human existence, this will be reflected upon by historians and scientists and journalists forever, I suppose. But I don't have forever. I don't have all that long. I need to be freed from prison.

2021 promises that, but nobody can foresee when, partly because we remain under the cloud cover of incompetence for another twenty days. It is a torturous slowing of time. We are in the same kinds of cages that those poor people on the border are in, with something promised but indefinitely on hold. Justice delayed is justice denied, but this time cannot be returned. It is gone. The year is lost.

But I still live. A year from now, I want to write about the good things that happened, the interesting places I went, the friends and family I mingled with. I want to be hopeful instead of wary. I want to trust people again.

That will have to be its own journey. Being vaccinated is one thing: Restoring my faith in humankind is quite another, having seen plenty of reason to doubt it, having seen previously unfathomable meanness and stupidity. That will go more slowly. Nobody can vaccinate me against cynicism. That will have to be a self-cure.

But I don't want to leave without thanking those of you who have taken the time to read what I've written here. You are valued more than you know. And I plan to be here, every couple of days or so, to ring in 2022 as well. After all, we made it this far.

Happy New Year, everybody. May you gain new energy and hope. May it still be possible.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. One day closer to a vaccine. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

A Promised Land: Measured, Profound, Moving, Instructive

I tend to think in cycles. When one thing happens in one way, the other way is not far off. Things tend to balance out.

Why have we just had such an awful president, unwilling to read or listen, reacting in petty, superficial ways, uneducated and uncaring? Unable to consider anything other than his own thinking? Because just before him, we had one of the most literate, if not the most literate, presidents ever, one who thought deeply about nearly everything and cared that deeply, too.

Just pick up Barack Obama's first part of his presidential autobiography, A Promised Land, and read any stretch of ten pages. That's all you'll have to do. It's quite measured, in a way, but so is he. It's quite profound, too, as he has always been. It left me with an even deeper remorse for what we lost, the vacuum of deep thought, the self-control, the empathy.

It is a primer in economics. It has to be, from the person who managed to get out in front of the Great Recession of 2008-14 (I'm approximating here), and who helped save Greece from imploding and going completely bankrupt (and why that was vital). He tries hard to explain the damage of subprime mortgages on interest rates and the sapping of people's savings to render them nearly helpless against their ravages. He makes it clear that we just can't have that kind of fat-catting any longer.

It is a primer in foreign affairs. It is a sifting of what's vital in that realm with what isn't. The right-wing echo chamber nearly lost its mind when he deigned to bow in the presence of a powerless Japanese emperor Akihito, but gave him no credit (which he does here, in great and gleeful detail) when he crashed a clandestine meeting of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) leaders at the otherwise doomed and largely moribund Copenhagen climate summit in 2010 in gangsta style, getting them to make a more inclusive joint statement of needed improvements in the reduction of fossil fuels. Yes, literally crashed it: The idea of the meeting, in an obscure upstairs room, was that it would exclude the United States in lieu of making any new movements to improve the minimum of what they were doing on climate issues, rendering it out of touch, in a kind of ambush. Instead, Obama ambushed them: His intercedence showed what real American power looks like, selective and meaningful, not pushing small countries' leaders aside for an egotistical photo-op.

And the Middle East? Well, he devotes a significant amount of the book to it. Why anyone would want to take on that part of the world is beyond me. And it gives me chills to think that Jarod Kushner, green behind the gills and no doubt deeply invested economically, was given that much authority to conduct talks and make deals.

It is a primer in management. He learned that while he hired a goodly representation of women to vital positions in his administration, the same old guardrails of mansplaining and dominance were beginning to emerge. So he had the ladies in for dinner, had a good listen, and spread the word. Yet, he also gently admonished them: Don't take it from them. If you get cut off, demand to finish statements. Say (like Kamala Harris did with Mike Pence later on), I'm talking here.

It is a primer in conduct. Notice there were almost no scandals in his administration, or at least nothing approximating the absolute plethora of them in the latest one (save Stanley McChrystal and later David Petraeus, both in the military realm where discipline is supposed to be paramount). He does make it a point to say that there was zero tolerance for them. Some Cabinet positions got more attention than others, yes, but that was inevitable: State, Defense, Legal, National Security. He had to let some of it go, barring a genuine crisis, from his direction: There was only so much time to devote to Agriculture, Labor and Education, only so many hours in the day. Besides, the President's Daily Briefing, the summary that 45 refuses to examine, didn't follow the crop yields or test scores. But at least he read it.

It is a primer in handling disasters. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is the "spot" of Macbeth that would not so easily wash out. But while it happened on his watch, the real problem was multi-faceted and filled with land mines that, if discussed openly, would reveal increasing barrels of helplessness rather than appropriate but futile analysis, something that would deepen the political damage. The real core issues were: Reliance on big business to handle its own problems; the dependance of this society on fossil fuels; and a previous scandal that his administration wasn't responsible for. They were obscured behind an explosion that left everyone scratching their heads while by far the worst environmental disaster in our history unfolded before our very eyes, day by day, hour by hour, as thousands of gallons of raw oil flowed unabated into the Gulf of Mexico.

Consider this: The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, an unsung hero if there ever was one, took personal command of the solution and pulled it off, though it took weeks. 45's Secretary of Energy was Rick Perry.

The biggest concern among Obama's personal staff was not that the burdens of the office were taking the inevitable toll, it's that it didn't seem to. No-Drama Obama was as immersed as anyone who has ever held the office, but he seemed to be dealing with things with his normal modicum of emotionality, while others were tearing their hair out and barking at each other. Nobody could know it at the time, but it was exactly what the country needed as the edges were moving toward the center: Someone who could stay serene regardless, who represented whatever of a center remained. When Obama's temper got short and he chewed some people out, more often than not, at least within these pages, he blames himself. Imagine that.

It's not as if he ignored the common people, either. He got hundreds of letters per day, and commanded aides to daily get him the ten best ones they found among them. Reading them was often the last thing he did before turning in, and he did answer many. Some of them are in another book called To Obama. They are humorous, sad, and profoundly moving; he mentions them more than once. But at least he had a barometer about what was going on in the enormous country he governed.

All while this is happening, he must deal with a wife who's trying to both guard their two young daughters from too much scrutiny (at which, if you recall, they do succeed without pulling them out of town) and bring him back home whenever he can to sustain a challenging marriage (for more on that, and there's plenty more, try Michelle Obama's book Becoming). The book is loaded with delightful anecdotes that demonstrate that Michelle, Malia and Sasha are the ballast that he needs to provide enough perspective to prevent him from ever taking it all too seriously, if that's at all possible. His presence in the above Copenhagen climate summit, for instance, a meeting he was loath to attend, is blended with the cute story of a backdrop of saving the dwindling habitat of tigers, so he could report to Malia that he was, indeed, doing something about it.

The biggest hurdle he had to vault to get to the White House at all was intrafamilial, convincing Michelle that it was worth it--and that took some serious explaining, partly because his rise to the top was so meteoric, so fast as to spin heads, and she was already tired of keeping the homefires burning at night while he was out saving the world. She's college-graduated and a well-established professional herself. They got to know each other because she was his mentor; he always had plenty of information, but she carried the urn of wisdom. Talk about role-conflicted!

The Obamas also took a page from Kennedy and made the White House a cornucopia of culture, inviting writers, artists, and musicians from all walks. They celebrated hip-hop and Yo-Yo Ma, invited Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney. 

Snotty, you say? Elitist? Those people rushed to the White House to demonstrate their skills. Asked to give performances, they couldn't get there fast enough. In doing so, they celebrated America's accomplishments in a decidedly apolitical way, unlike Ted Nugent and Kanye West, who were used by 45 no less than he used other living props in an endless striving of legitimization.

If this sounds a little damn near too perfect, just the kind of guy you want to be your president, it should. It wasn't long ago that we had exactly that guy in the White House, where he was endlessly attacked on vaguely racial grounds. They nit-picked at him because there was really nothing so terrible about him that could be that deeply attacked. So, as they continue to do right up to today, they either make stuff up or do their darnedest to try to convince a half-attentive public that the world will fall apart unless they take it over again.

No matter what happens now, 45 can't outdo Obama. He's taken his four years to try to destroy everything Obama stood for. He's certainly disrupted a great deal of it, but Obamacare survived every court challenge 45 commandeered. 45 trashed much of the international goodwill that Obama created and sustained; that may take longer to replenish, if it can be at all. He has shown what quite the opposite of Obama can be--amoral, crude, unfinished, insulting, gluttony. While Obama had little governmental experience but learned and grew from it, 45 had none whatsoever when he entered the gauntlet and learned nothing. Whoever he hires to ghostwrite his story will have a confusing array of non-facts to choose from. I don't envy him/her when he/she sits down and tries to figure out just what to say.

But that will be for that person to do. For now, what we have in front of us is a marvelous re-telling of a time of great challenge, met by someone whose skills at first had to overcome his lack of experience. When they caught up with each other, they produced this volume of history. It is written with impeccable literary style. It is a great reminder of a time; you find yourself going, "Ohhhhhh, yeah...."

You ask yourself, "Is it possible that this brilliant author was president, too? Were we really that lucky? Did we really deserve all that?" Kind of like asking yourself if, in counterpoise, we deserved what we've gotten in the last four years, too. But things tend to balance out.

Please understand: I did not support all Obama's policies, especially in the area of education, where I made something of a fleeting contribution at the national level, through my union, during much of the decade before he took over. He tried to be too much a a centrist, and set the nation on a course it has still to reckon completely with, mis-analyzing what the problem really was. I wonder if he wishes he had that one back. Yet, what has taken place in that realm the last four years, true to form, has been a reflection on the secretary's boss: incompetent, jealous of someone else's success, strangely angry, an absolute disaster.

It has occurred to me, too, that if the natural processes play out, this will be the first president I will not outlive. That has a strangely calming effect: that whenever my demise takes place, what I am leaving behind will be this hybrid of a man who represents the best of what America can yet become--half-white, half-not; urbane; cultured; thoughtful; caring; sighing in acceptance but always striving to be better. Ex-presidents have had differentiating effects in their later years, some great, some minimal. This one's contribution, through this book, cannot be otherwise than lasting. It's not cheap, but well worth your while.

And to think there's another one coming: this one ends in 2011, with bin Laden's death. He has a second term to go. I can barely wait.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. One day closer to a vaccine. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Silent Night in German: Cute, But Manipulative, Much Like Today

It was the early '60s, probably the high-water mark for Catholic education in America.

The baby boomers were being educated now, having been born at some point during the past fifteen years or so. Traditional values were the rage, with parents having survived a horrible economic depression and a worldwide war that demanded complete support but had the advantage of not touching much of their homeland: We had it both ways.

We won the war because we were better people, we were told, or at least that thinking was never discouraged (and kept us from delving into the imperial motivations of our own). Exceptionalism was on the march. God had blessed us, which is thinking that dated back at least a hundred years before that (in the form called Manifest Destiny), so victory in humankind's worst war just built on that pedestal.

But in 1957 there came Sputnik, which scared the bejabbers out of everyone and created a new commitment to national education. It wasn't as if the Russians were smarter than we were; they simply decided to devote themselves to more concentrated research. As a totalitarian society, that's a little easier to do. 

Americans bring a load to a task but get there when they get there, when they think it's a big deal. It was Albert Einstein's warning, after all, that alerted FDR to the possibility of a German atomic bomb and sparked the Manhattan Project. Without it, the Germans might have been first to that horrible goal and the history of Western civilization might have taken an even worse turn.

But it looked like the Russians were smarter, so schooling became a priority. That was no different in Grafton, Wisconsin, in which a brand-spanking new Catholic grade school had opened (in 1957, wouldn't you know it) and the eight classrooms which would ostensibly hold eight different grades weren't adequate for the surging clientele, what with very un-Catholic contraception still a few years away, papal encyclical or not. Big families were the rage, and quite encouraged.

So some of us, in grades 4 and 5, were shoved back into the old school, rather dilapidated but useable, for at least a few years while St. Joseph's Parish absorbed this enormous influx of kids. Compared to the nice, neat, modern school next door, it was a hand-me-down. The steps leading up to the classrooms groaned and sagged even when grade schoolers used them. The heating registers worked but sometimes dinged loudly and didn't mind interrupting religion class when they did so. The bells still worked, though.

Even back then, there weren't enough nuns to go around, so some lay teachers were hired. Every teacher had at least forty souls to instruct and save from the vestiges of sin and Lutherans. Obviously, unionization of teachers never reached them (and in the private sector, never would) so class sizes were non-negotiable. But they hardly needed it, since a little hardship in devotion to a cause greater than oneself was a very recent memory and scarcely worth a reminder since it had been so successful.

One of these lay teachers taught fifth grade for a while at St. Joseph's in Grafton. He had served in the Navy (or Marines), and had enough ego that he demanded that the students address him as "sir," instead of merely his name, and stand whenever he entered the room, as if a commanding officer had suddenly appeared. Looking back, it was only in the kind of atmosphere in which a wartime mentality could be considered at all reachable that he was allowed to get away with that. Instead it was considered quirky. At least I don't remember anyone making a big deal about it. It was a staple of Catholic guilt that he could make you feel bad for not doing it.

The discipline served as a cover, for he almost never came to school on time. His attendance record would have made me, as a future teacher, lock the door behind me and make him wait outside until attendance was taken (which I did to chronic offenders, who oddly seemed to respond well because someone was paying some attention to them). I honestly don't remember him ever being there on time, though I'm sure there was a day or two. It was surprising when he did.

At St. Joe's, we were to begin at 8. My fifth grade teacher was always at least five or ten minutes late, and sometimes up to half an hour or 40 minutes. His excuse was that his wife worked as a stewardess, they didn't have a second car (interesting with two jobs, but women didn't drive as much), and he had to drop her off at the airport before coming to work in Grafton, quite a drive in those days. This was before the Interstate system decided to build an extension north of Milwaukee, so the main artery to Grafton was U.S. Highway 141 (now known as Port Washington Road), which ran (at most) three lanes north and south and was increasingly treacherous at certain times of the day (which my family knew very well because we'd make a comparable drive on weekends to my Polish grandparents, who also lived on Milwaukee's South Side. In the winter especially, it could be an adventure).

So it was understandable, to a point, for him to say that he was caught up in traffic. But it was also true that the vast majority of the school's business took place next door in the new school, and the principal, a nun otherwise respected to an iconic degree and the 8th grade teacher herself, was too busy to check on him very often; out of sight, out of mind. He came late so often because he knew he could get away with it. As demanding as he was of his students' discipline, he was pretty sneaky himself.

Amazingly, we kids never (at least I don't remember it), ever got rowdy or decided to hang out on the steps or play hooky, taking chances that they could beat him back to the room. Instead, we quietly sat and did some of our homework or read. This was probably because, though he was consistently late, you could never tell how late he would be. But he'd come strolling in and we'd have to "hit the deck," as he called it, coming to our feet when he entered. It was also because somehow, he had us worried that we would be the main culprits if we were caught being tardy or AWOL, which I'm sure is how he would put it, addicted as he had made us to his quasi-military farce.

I wonder if anyone's parents ever complained. I wonder if they ever knew. I'm sure my parents did. The number of instructional minutes wasted through that year must have easily gone into four figures. If we'd have decided, as kids, to test his limits by disappearing (or invoking the now unofficial but widely followed ten-minute limit on sticking around, and then dispersing for the day--what a headache that would have been), I think action would have been swift and guilt-producing, regardless of the actual irresponsibility that had sparked it. I do remember that he was good and knew his stuff, so that must have carried him further than it otherwise might have.

Or not. Suddenly, as we neared Christmas, we were being made to memorize the song Silent Night. No one knew exactly why we were being made to do that. We were to sing it together while waiting in the lunch line one noontime hour near the holiday. Thing is, we were to do it in German.

Nobody told us why we had to do that, either. I'm guessing that, with his job already in jeopardy, the teacher had to convince the principal that we were, or that he was in fact making us, capable of many remarkable things in his purview, and that he was the master at making us do it. With the culture of Grafton thoroughly German--the Bund, a pro-Nazi group, had held a summer camp for youth briefly just twenty years before--it would hit the right notes, literally, with the general population and maybe even be the talk of the town.

So even though we lost minutes of instruction almost every day, we were to pull off to the side and learn one verse of one Christmas carol in German, thus losing even more instruction in arithmetic, religion, and reading. We practiced, of course, for days; he had a German name and perhaps knew the language well.

I have nothing against learning new languages; in fact, we've done not nearly enough of it. Enhancing the curriculum can be a great boost. And what the hell's wrong with a Christmas carol in a Catholic school? But a one-time deal like this is cheesy. It built on nothing and there was no follow-up. When I taught, I engaged students in some activities that were complimentary to the curriculum, but there were follow-ups and various roles involved. This wasn't that.

As I recall, we pulled it off. We had that thing down cold: Stille nacht, hielige nacht. Alles schlaft, einsome vacht. Think that doesn't stick with you? I didn't have to look that up. It probably helped, too, that St. Joe's choir also sang it in German at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

It must have saved his job, at least for the moment. It made quite the impact, the kind that made you believe he'd be there forever, a reliable cornerstone. But it was a gimmick, a one-time diversion of attention that was never repeated. It had all the appurtenances of cuteness, but in retrospect, it feels like we had been used, maybe in effect if not in intent. He did not stay. By the time we graduated from eighth grade and dispersed to various high schools, he was long gone.

We could have been forgiven: We were fifth graders. Might we have been adults, we might have looked back and asked ourselves: Really? We bought into that? And nobody twitched a muscle?

I wonder whether some of the otherwise faithful to 45 might ask themselves that very thing later on. Or will they blindly continue in indoctrination after he leaves: Make America Great Again. Lock Her (Him, Them) Up. Fake News.

Think that doesn't stick with you? But nobody, so far, has seemed to do anything but buy into that. Nobody's twitching a muscle.

Perhaps time will introduce perspective, as it has mine (though 60 years downwind). Perhaps a considerable number of minions will conclude that they've been hoodwinked and, in point of fact, robbed of some of their money by grifters out for only themselves. Eventually, they might figure out that they were diverted from their attention to the undermining that had really gone on. Perhaps they will double down. More journalism will certainly ensue. More people will talk.

45 can't save his job (maybe it should be called his awarded hobby; he sure never worked at it), though he keeps trying at ridiculous levels. Too many who are interested in the continuation of the republic have interceded, building a firewall for now. But he will be remembered for stretching democracy nearly out of whack. He wants to return. He will work daily in attempts to do just that, and will get stooges to help him. We're not finished with him, arrest and trial for some of his grifting notwithstanding.

Where he takes his nonsense after January 20 will make for temporary interest. Meanwhile, Joe Biden will need our help in building back a governmental infrastructure that 45 has tried (and is still trying) to deconstruct.

Only one thing to do with bad memories: Build new and better ones. Merry Christmas.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. One day closer to a vaccine. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

The Point Is: I Wanted to Find It

I don't stargaze a lot. I probably should.

Being a writer, I should probably look up at the heavens and conclude that whatever I'm saying and whatever I'm saying it about really aren't that big a deal when you get right down to it. We are, after all, such a small speck of the universe that, all told, we really aren't much to discuss, all eight billion of us.

But then, of course, that begs a question: Why are we here, here on a planet that, compared with the sun that warms us from ninety-three million miles away, is comparable to a dot on an i with a basketball? And are we the only ones?

Carl Sagan, in his classic work Cosmos, did a mathematical estimation of the odds that we were alone. He came up empty. There have to be other beings out there, he wrote. Some of them have to be smarter than us.

Just look at the present situation. End of discussion. Don't get me started.

There is an incredible amount of activity going on in just our galaxy, which is one of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. And a galaxy has hundreds of thousands of stars. It blows the mind, which is probably why not too many people devote their lives to watching all that, or as much as they can with the obviously inadequate tools we now have.

Hey, I got enough with my own problems. What the hell do I want to take all that on for?

Well, I don't, actually. But one can look at the heavens the way others do and did, with a sense of wonder and proportionality. You can look for signs, like others did.

So that's why yesterday I thought I could see the proximation, relatively speaking, of the planets of Jupiter and Saturn, which will come closest today, apparently, just after sundown. Very likely, though, the sky will be cloudy, as it usually is in December in Wisconsin, obscuring it.

I thought there would be clear sky yesterday. I went southwest of Milwaukee to a Park-and-Ride, hoping the sky would reveal it, not closest but close enough. It didn't. I turned around and headed home.

What good did I do myself? I went on a galactic wild goose chase. I kind of knew it before I left. But I had to go. I'm 

Something inside of me told me to. Something inside of me seeks comfort, reassurance, and wonder. Jupiter and Saturn come relatively close every twenty years, and as close as this every eighty. This is my last shot.

The last time they came this close, apparently, was in 1226. That's a long time ago. Or, not, if you consider the age of the universe, some 13 billion years, apparently. That's just a pinprick, an eye blink. Eight hundred years.

Think of what's happened in eight hundred years. The end of the Dark Ages. The Renaissance. The entirety of Western civilization. The exploration that brought Europeans to the Americas. The horrors of slavery that provided the economic sustenance, and other genocides. Wars upon wars and their horrible destruction. Plagues every so often and their devastation, the middle of one we're presently in (which ho-hums it, of course, but there is nothing new under this sun, either). Inventions. Revolutions of some type or another. The growth of population probably eight times what it was. The last sixty years, more people have been born than lived and died before it.

All on this little orb of a planet. No, it isn't big, not big at all. But it's hosted an incredible amount of humanity. We know of a part of it, but not nearly the stories of every one of us. The amount of recording and writing about the human race is a shaving of the experience of each one of us.

I have no idea why, and neither do you. But it all happened and is happening. It makes sense to pull off the road, literally, and watch something larger than us, that functions in spite of us, that has little if anything to do with us.

So I did. Or, I tried. The point is that I wanted to find it. I wanted to reassociate myself, at the end of the worst year that I've existed for more than one reason, knowing that something is going to happen that's completely out of my control or our control, that nobody can help, but that re-establishes the fact of things. One of which is, I'm not really very important amidst all this.

Which, instead of being intimidating and crushing, spurs me on to the future, as little as there now is of it in a normal lifespan. I don't have that much time left; without medical advancement, in fact, it would now be gone. It's time to go do what I want without listening to people saying or implying that I'm crazy. 

Of course I'm crazy. Crazy that I haven't done more to this point.

I won't leave heirs behind; too late for that. But I can leave behind memories. It's what's left.

So if it's not going to matter all that much, I might as well do it. Maybe I won't amaze anyone anymore. Maybe I'll just amaze myself. Might as well. I will go away soon enough, and so will this planet.

That isn't as a ridiculous a notion as could have been wondered a generation ago. The planet is under more stress than ever before. It will carve out a new reality soon enough. 

I will keep recycling plastic and paper and buy an electric car if or when they become cheap enough. The rest has to be left up to collective wisdom, which, see above, has been a bit wanting nowadays.

The year has been horrible. But what makes humankind maddeningly frustrating and disappointing is and has been balanced by what makes it amazing: Vaccines are coming, for now. Democracy has been saved, for now. There are some people, some leaders actually, who do care about the lot of us.

It's incredible that so many people fail to see the greater good. Whether or not it will prevail is still an open question. But many also do see it. We still have a chance if we remember how much we matter to the rest of the world we inhabit and act that way. We've tried four years of the opposite. Didn't work very well.

Maybe that's why I went looking to the heavens: To wish upon a star. Others have done so. Songs have been written about it.

As we turn the page, our challenges remain great and in some sense now greater; messes need to be cleaned up. But now we know what can happen with the wrong people in charge. Maybe they ironically did us a favor. Maybe that's all we can give them credit for. Maybe that will be enough.

Maybe we can wish that, too, upon a star.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

The Breakup of the Two-Party System? A Bad Thing, or Good?

People are having a tough time with the Republicans nowadays. And with good reason.

Over 70 million of them voted for 45. 45, with all his corruption. 45, with all his incompetence. 45, with all his insults. 45, with all his dysfunction.

Tough to believe that that many people wanted four more years of that. But they didn't have much choice.

That's because we only have two real choices: Republican and Democrat. Regardless of the candidates and what they really represent, the choice is usually the lesser of two evils. It isn't a positive one. That's why our presidential races, for one, usually have such poor participation.

But the Electoral College has something to do with that, too. It's winner-take-all for the electoral votes in a particular state, which discourages third parties from getting involved. If they happen to make a good showing in one state, they usually don't nationwide. It's token. So why start something you can't finish?

Direct popular vote, though, would give multiple parties a chance. They could perform poorly in some states but spectacularly well in others. They wouldn't have to be burdened with one of the usual labels and all the baggage that goes along with them. They could be what they are--a far more distinctive choice. They might lose one campaign, but the numbers might inspire them to hang in there and get more involved four years later. The more parties, the more choices. The more choices, maybe the more participation.

Could that promote radicalism? Perhaps. It could feed into people's needs for a stronger identity, too.

Steve Schmidt understands that. A founding member of the Lincoln Project, ostensibly moderate Republicans who see the existential threat of 45, he's crossed over to the Democrats with at least what he says is a single issue: The maintenance of democracy, which he believes continues to be under duress. He won't be a liberal standout, but he will be an articulate advocate for decency amongst us. He will be trying to pull progressives back to the middle, where the country can better operate.

The result might just be the kind of coalition government, at least in Congress, that Britain and other European countries practice. Laws have to be passed, so even without actual majorities, parties would have to combine to get a budget, provide for the national defense, and approve of presidential appointments. There would be more negotiating between the executive and legislative branches. People would actually have to talk to each other.

Bernie Sanders gave up much of his significance to the Democratic left wing by telling people to support Joe Biden. That was after he had finished second in quite a few primaries, giving up only after it was clear that he had no path to the nomination. His complaints about the nominating process, voiced with bitterness in 2016 after he lost the race to Hillary Clinton, were largely muted. Protest votes for him never greatly materialized.

But that was because Democrats, and a few Republicans who kept their heads on straight, were faced with an existential threat (which is being realized at this very moment). Something of a coalition has been formed, but will it last? What will the people who created, and supported, the Lincoln Project do now?

Standing alone, by themselves, won't do. That's a path to oblivion. They might not want to join the Democrats, either. So will they test the waters and run candidates for Congress and/or state legislatures in 2022? Will they run to remind Republicans that there used to be a far more rational, if conservative (actually conservative) party that respected the due process of law and respected the guardrails of decent behavior? Will that be the new primary threat to Republicans, not those even farther to the right than they currently are?

Why would they want to do that? Because, for instance, two members of QAnon are now members of Congress because the Republicans couldn't bring anybody else forward. These people believe, among other crazy things, that Democrats are at the base of an underground movement to kidnap little kids and drink their blood. What kind of nonsense is that? And what's it doing in the houses of Congress?

Will these awful ideas find fresh ground to grow? Or will they get buried amidst legitimate Congressional business and fade away? Recent developments would not suggest the latter. There's the stonewalling behind impeachment charges, for instance. That set a irrational tone.

Wisconsin's own kook, Senator Ron Johnson, this week held futile, pointless hearings about (wouldn't you know it) election fraud, as if it still happened and as if there were still something anyone could do about it if there was. He's done nothing but make noise, but the noise has been recorded, as it must be, and can be used by more kooks.

Is it time to break up the two-party system in favor of kind of a hybrid? We will see. There is a restlessness now, beyond the exhaustion of 45's endless tirades and crushing of logic and decency. We have to either get back to normal or create a new one. Returning to the former feels inadequate.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask, while the vaccine arrives. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

I Want to Hear Them. Really. Tell Me Why My Vote Should Have Been Thrown Out.

It isn't that I'm surprised that 45's people still wanted to throw out the votes of just Milwaukee and Dane Counties, comprising over 200,000 of them, including my own, during the past presidential election. Note that no other election was questioned, in no other county: Not Lincoln, not LaCrosse, not Brown, not Ashland, none of them. Just those two.

No, by this time, I'm not surprised that they'll try anything like that. To 45, trying to go to court to get something reversed is par for his course (he cheats at golf, too). To him, it's all the same. Denying the effects of democracy doesn't matter to him because it's all about him and nothing else. The effects of whatever he does on anybody or anything else don't matter to him because he's supposed to be more important than anything or anyone else.

The fact that that attitude was clear and obvious and probably lent itself to his defeat in the first place won't occur to him ever, at all. But that's neither here nor there. He lost. The counting in the states he wanted recounts reproved that fact. The numbers don't lie. They really don't.

No, I'm not surprised. But I do want to know why three of Wisconsin's seven Supreme Court justices agreed. I want to read whatever they have to say that would justify, in their minds, the cancelling of my vote.

All I wanted to do was vote. And I did so, in Milwaukee, by mail. Somehow, this unusual method of voting, though verified legally, caused them to reverse its meaning. It caused them to think that I cheated somehow.

Now, how the hell could I have done that? How could I have participated in a fraud? The choices were printed on the ballot, including where the place of my selection could be made. It's just like any other ballot I've ever filled out. It's just that I didn't do it in a place normally reserved for voting.

Did somebody misprint something? Didn't look like it to me. All the names seemed to be spelled right.

Were the names mismatched with the political parties they represented? Nope. Not a one.

I didn't even send my votes through the mail. 45 made his idle threats, so I didn't take any chances. 

I got in my car, Covid be damned, and dropped it off in a box specifically designed for that purpose outside of a public library on Milwaukee's south side. I wanted to make sure that as few middle people handled my vote as possible. It was picked up that day.

And now three people wanted to throw it out? Screw them. No, wait: SCREW THEM. All this made me go to extraordinary lengths just to perform the ultimate act of citizenship, and three clowns on the state Supreme Court say it shouldn't count??

Prove it. Prove I'm not worthy. Prove I cheated. Prove someone cheated for me. Like so many millions of fools, you have made up stuff in your own head. They, not me, can't be trusted to think clearly in an unusual situation--the very thing appeals demand you to do. They, not me, can't be trusted to separate yourself from the petty politics of the matter.

Whenever I gave a history test or assignments, there was always the possiblility that kids would cheat. I tried my best to eliminate that, but wasn't always successful. I discovered the more blatant attempts, and threw out the grades, reducing them to zeros. But should I have done that to the entire group? Of course not. 

If someone cheated about voting, it couldn't have been widespread. If caught, their votes shouldn't be counted and they should be prosecuted according to the law. But eliminate the whole bunch? You've got to be kidding.

Somebody should buy Brian Hagedorn a beer. He's a conservative on the state Supreme Court, and he voted with the three moderates to deliver my vote and those of 200,000 others to their rightful place. He's a true conservative, rather than those who claim to be so, when in fact their relationship to the laws they're supposed to maintain is remote, at best, and subject to manipulation based on a large group temper tantrum.

Instead, as opposed to the three whose heads are spinning out of control, he decided to support the laws that are already on the books in Wisconsin. He decided to support the votes that everyone in those two counties cast, after they, as in other states, were recounted in those exact counties. 

The other three have abused their power, plain and simple. They are as shameless as the president they not-so-subtlely wished to catapult to victory. They voted, too, to interrupt the governor's executive orders to manage the pandemic. We have seen the results.

Drunk with power, having eliminated the governor's Covid executive orders, designed to save lives, they nearly reversed the votes of an entire state. But before the election, another of their ilk was still on the court, ready to turn back logic and science. And so they did. And so Wisconsin became one of the worst states for the virus to be absorbed.

Wisconsin is in the grip of irrationality, Republican style, but those on the other side of it have probably surmised it by now. The legislature is no different. It hasn't met since April. Its leaders must have figured that it has nothing to do, though four thousand of its residents have died due to Covid and thousands more are out of work because of it.

Gerrymandering won't do this state's mentality any good, either. We're stuck for now. But those in the realm of rationality can't walk away, weary though they may be. Stricken with quasi-religious righteousness, these forces do not relent. 

We have to keep speaking out against those who twist or deny reality. Vaccines will help us return to a semblance of normal, a little at a time. But the illness of reality denial lives on. No vaccine can change that. That will take an even longer battle.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Defund the Police? Uh, No. Let's End the Racism. And Take Away the Street Guns.

Probably the worst development of this past political campaign was the phrase, Defund the Police. It was pinned to Democrats and might yet lose them control of the Senate. It certainly lost them an increase in the House, which they now keep but in a very small majority.

The derivation of the phrase came with the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day weekend. The Black Lives Matter movement picked up the cry and it was front-page news for a while.

An understandable exaggeration of the problem, and the Republicans wisely repeated the mantra. It added to their strategy of trying to scare the hell out of enough people to get them to return 45 to office. His transgressions were too much, even for some dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, but people clearly did plenty of ticket-splitting.

Defunding the police would be a terrible mistake. The country sits on a razor's edge at the moment, with far too many people buying into the illogical, ridiculous myth of a fraudulent election. As January 20 nears, some have taken to carrying weapons outside the residences of ballot counters, as if to intimidate them to change their minds about numbers that have somehow been tabulated arbitrarily. (They haven't.)

Beyond that, gun laws have been loosened in far too many states, allowing far too many people to strut around in holsters. They wait, I suppose, for the opportunity to take the law into their own hands, or to fulfill some pledge they've made to themselves to defend the public interest against a wild-eyed person carrying an automatic weapon lurking right around the corner, not considering that that person could be themselves.

I don't know about you, but I need protection against these self-appointed deputy sheriffs. I need a police presence more than ever. Defunding the police works in the opposite direction. If anything, the police now have weapons that the military no longer use but are plenty powerful. Ever see them arrive in full force? Pretty tough to outgun them now. In a way, that's good. In another, that's sad and dangerous.

There are two things we need: First, an end to the racism that some police clearly demonstrate, either willingly or not. Yes, white people get arrested, too, and some have died in captivity. That's tragic, too. But the percentages still say that if you're black and you get stopped, you'd better be on incredibly good behavior, or someone in a uniform is more likely to jump to conclusions much faster than they would if you were white. That needs to stop.

If you disagree, let me ask this simple question: If George Floyd were white, would he have been treated the way he was? Would he have died right there on the street, with a knee on his neck, for the non-violent charge of trying to pass off a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill?

If the police claim innocence, let's see the numbers. If their unions provide protection, let's take the idea of  qualified immunity and re-examine it. Yes, the police need some room to treat resisting arrestees with enough force to subdue them. The phrase sounds reasonable, but has it been expanded too far? Have the police taken reckless advantage? Are there too few restrictions? How could George Floyd's arresting officer believe that he needed to put a knee on the neck of a prisoner who was already handcuffed? How could he assume that blank check?

The second thing we need is that which obviates the previously discussed overweaponized police: To get weapons off the streets. When guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns. That's exactly right. That's just the way I want it.

With the proliferation of cell phones, common citizens can become informational officers. They can call 9-1-1 and report people with weapons immediately. The police will be there in four minutes, maybe less. They can take the guns away. They can issue vouchers that will pay for the guns, or set a court date for the perpetrators to sue to get their guns back. Refusal results in, hopefully, no more than arrest. Either way, there will be confiscation.

There will be NO licenses for concealed or any other kind of carry. Target practice or hunting, for which there will still be licenses issued, are other matters. Again, there is no need to openly carry any weapon outside of those activities. The only people who should be with a weapon in public are police officers or security personnel, PERIOD.

If someone is afraid for their family or property, they can have as many weapons as they want ON their property. Defense of property, loved ones, and self on one's home turf has never been challenged, and it never will be. That's what the Constitution has always meant, and that's what it always will mean. Your home is your castle. Nobody should mess with that. That's originalism.

Will it stop the crazies who want to shoot up restaurants, workplaces, movie theaters, churches, and schools? Not altogether. But it will reinstate an atmosphere in which the thought of bringing a weapon into such establishments becomes more unthinkable than it is today. And again, such perpetrators had better hide that weaponry until the last second, because all it will take is one phone call to take it out of their hands.

Will it stop armed robbery? No, not that, either. If that should happen, the perpetrators already have their weapons brandished. They already have the drop on you and they're not going to confront you in a spot where someone else could come along. Reaching for a weapon would be a really bad idea, perhaps a fatal one. But everyone who's thinking already knows that.

Part of the reason the police are so heavily armed today is that they now have to assume that people are more heavily armed themselves--especially with automatic weapons and even open carry. All this is ramping up, going in a direction no one prefers.

There will be a showdown soon, I fear. It will be based on race or politics. It matters not. But then the police will have to either make a choice about who to disarm first or try to disarm everyone. They will probably succeed, but at a terrible price.

But the Supreme Court said we have gun rights, you might say. Yup, it did. It was wrong to extend them that far. It didn't take into consideration what's really happening out there. It's getting out of control. It needs to be revisited, re-examined, and reversed. Get the guns off the streets.

If not, we will have open warfare on the streets and/or police openly patrolling with weaponry that is truly scary; machine guns and grenade launchers. The tear-gassing that welcomed protesters last spring might easily be more generally utilized, with "unrest" more broadly defined. We might feel safe, but it will be a relative brand of safety that is contingent upon attitudes that nobody can hold back and, once unleashed, cannot be reversed. It will inch along until we have a genuine police state on our hands.

Lobbying for universal background checks is a nice idea, but I think it's too late for that as a primary solution. The absorption of weapons in our society has ascended beyond mere record-keeping. No: Get the guns off the streets today. 

Everyone with a weapon will complain, until they realize that nobody has an advantage anymore. Yes, that involves the interference of government at a level we haven't realized. And yes, it is necessary.

It will make the libertarians crazy. But libertarians have been allowed to dominate social thinking lately, and we have seen the results. They used to be at the fringes of our society. They need to be catapulted back there.

They will complain that big government is holding them hostage. No, gun toters are. They hold us hostage in a newly created world in which normal people would rather not bother to arm themselves and are supposed to come and go without having to worry about who's going to open fire. Just ask the Secretary of State of Michigan, for instance, and vote counters in Phoenix.

The pandemic is putting this mostly on hold, election paranoia notwithstanding, with far fewer people on the streets. It's probably the one good thing about it. But vaccines will become common fairly soon, and we will return to life as we've once lived it. There will be more guns around us, not fewer.

Put the guns back into people's homes. Defend yourselves there. You have that right. Leave the rest of us to exist without fear of being gunned down. And keep the police funded.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Advent, While We Wait To Be Rescued

I don't write with connection to religion often. It feels hokey more often than not. There are always too many efforts to twist the meaning of old works into new forms that require too big of a send-up.

But this is Advent in the Christian church, and we do anticipate something this year that isn't hokey and not a send-up: Rescue from a pandemic. That is enough of an anticipatory set to make note of.

Word has gone out: The pharmaceuticals have found vaccines. Instead of working together, though--imagine that--they are racing to be first so that people take only their brand. Selfishness would triumph over the common good, but too much is expected and required too soon. The vaccine manufacturers will collide despite themselves.

If you think that competition is superior in these circumstances, make a sideways adjustment into journalism. You know, the fake news. We perpetually run the risk of absorbing new information too quickly in the name of some media source getting it first. Rumors are "confirmed" before being confirmed. They sometimes cause paranoia and avoidance, sometimes excessive reliance. But it's not always the media's fault.

The next time--and there will be a next time; people who are not gathering will again someday soon, and there very recently was one at Mayfair Mall in Milwaukee, probably the number one place in that city for Christmas shopping--there's some kind of shooting not far from you and the shooter hasn't yet been caught, see if you don't react with some trepidation. The police (a.k.a. government authorities) try very, very hard to put a lid on excess information until they have what they think is a sufficiently thorough story to release to the press. In the meantime, everyone trying to file a report is just supposed to stand there and wait, I guess--for days.

But that never happens. Bits of news emerge, if only because reporters will not, in all likelihood, just stand there. They'll talk to bystanders, they'll try to get pieces of information from the periphery of the investigation. These are interesting stories. They may be merely odd. They may, or may not, be germane to the situation.

Now come back to the vaccine distribution. There will be quirks associated with it. Some of them may discourage people to wander out of doors--like "information" about a shooter. Some of them may discourage vaccination, when that's the last thing we should be doing.

When the vaccine arrives, a serious and sincere effort to get everyone to get the damn shots should get underway. There should be public service announcements. They should sound patriotically cooperative. They should remind people that if they care about their loved ones, they owe it to themselves to overcome whatever hesitations they should have, get the damn shots, and encourage them to do the same.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that for vaccines to become effective, even at 90 percent or so, 75 percent of the entire American population will have to have the shots. That's a heavy lift. Salvation will not be sudden. It will be like a fog lifting.

Joe Biden has pledged to require the wearing of masks where he can, in federal buildings and on airplanes. That will help set a tone. But he will have to pound away at the idea that masking is still the number one thing people can do to arrest and slowly bring down the disease. A one-time speech won't do it. He has pledged to get 100 million shots out there in his first 100 days. Good luck with that.

The C.D.C. should also repeat its disavowal of hydroxochloroquine, or injection of bleach, or anything else our stupid, grandstanding, outgoing president has said might work against the virus, because people who are addicted to him are addicted to his misinformation. It should wipe away any pretense that that had anything to do with curing this pestilence. It should begin doing so the morning of January 21, the day after we are finally finished with having to listen to his nonsense. His repudiation should continue.

Meanwhile, we wait. We wait for the truth to, finally, emerge. We wait for science to get back into control. We wait for rescue. It is the season, like Advent. Religion will not save us; only science can do that. But it's also true that faith in science is also faith in what the universe has placed on earth; in fact, how the earth and each of us actually exist. What has been there to destroy us is also there to save us if we want it.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Impeach Barrett? Oh, Stop. Let's Get Real.

I saw it on my AOL site, and blanched.

"Impeach Amy Coney Barrett!" The headline cried.

Okay. For what?

The Constitution says that Supreme Court judges can serve "during good behavior." Violation of that, whatever that would mean functionally, would justify impeachment and removal.

There have been federal judges impeached and removed, but for pretty dicey stuff that constitutes corruption, to be sure. But what has Amy Barrett done to this point to deserve it?

The question merits asking: Whose idea is this?

I clicked on the headline and found something called the "Democratic Strategy Institute" there. It says that it "provide(s) its services free of charge to the Democratic community."

Such as what, organizing an impeachment of a Supreme Court justice who just got there and ruled on, to the best of my knowledge, just one case?

The DSI's webpage features the logos of the AFL-CIO; the Daily Kos; the Democratic Party; and a pro-immigrant group called "United We Dream."

Really? The AFL-CIO stands behind impeaching Amy Barrett at this point? And the entire Democratic Party, too? I have a notion to pull out.

Look--you can say what you want about the Supreme Court at this time, and you don't have to like the people that 45 has appointed to it. But as cantankerous as it all has been, it's been constitutional right down the line. Elections do have consequences. So does timing.

As difficult as it's all been, and as long in coming as it took, the American people finally had their voice about the current administration (if that's what you want to call it) on Nov. 3. But outside of obnoxious executive orders, it can't take back what it's done, especially the more than 200 federal judges it's appointed. All of them, every single one, gets to serve for life.

That includes Amy Coney Barrett, who is probably due to weigh in on Roe v. Wade before too terribly long, and is likely to oppose it. Whether that means to throw it out or toss abortion to the states is beyond anyone's guess. But the betting's pretty good that that's what's going to happen.

In anticipation of that, maybe, the DSI wants to suddenly get rid of her, give that position back to Joe Biden, who would appoint someone friendlier to reproductive rights. But it can't, and it knows it can't. It's a phony way of raising money, every bit as phony as 45 getting more than $200 million (and counting) for financing his election objections, all of which have gone and will go exactly nowhere.

I don't mind if another group of liberals wants to organize and raise money to support causes; there are plenty already and another one or two wouldn't hurt. But let's get real here. Her behavior looks to be as clean as a countertop after bleaching, and no one ruling's going to get her a reasonable challenge to her membership in the nation's highest court, anyhow.

The same thing was done by conservative crazies after Brown V. Board in 1954; "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards decorated the South. It sparked no serious movement, because nothing could be done. Rulings you don't like don't qualify anybody for being kicked off the Supreme Court.

And remember that Earl Warren was the Republican governor of California before he was nominated by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican (though Eisenhower reportedly called that the worst decision of his presidency). And the lead opinion of Roe V. Wade was written by Harry Blackmun, who was nominated by Richard Nixon, also a Republican.

So Supreme Court members can change their minds--not often, but they can. I wouldn't count on that happening in the case of Amy Barrett, at least not right away. But justices grow in different ways, especially with that lifetime term in their back pockets. Nowhere else in our system but the federal courts can anyone relax once they're appointed.

If the Democratic Strategic Institute wants to truly make a difference, it could do one of three things, and quickly:

• It could find a way to help the Democratic U.S. Senate candidates win in Georgia; or
• Find a way to accurately determine who's getting stricken with the coronavirus most often so we can start tracing it accurately; or even
• Do some serious linguistics research and get us out of the hole dug for us by Black Lives Matter who, though they meant well, put us behind the eight-ball by suggesting that we "defund the police," which probably got five or ten candidates for Congress beaten, and three or four Senate candidates to boot. (How about, "Stop Police Racism"? Because that's really what we all want.)

If they managed to do that, lots of people would remember them and give them lots more money. If they crabbed about Amy Barrett some more, lots of people will vote with their feet and go elsewhere.

When conservatives complain about liberals being out of touch with reality, this is what they mean. Liberals look as bad as conservatives do when they do things like this, and they waste their energy.

I'm no expert on any of this, so I don't know how serious the Democratic Party takes the Democratic Strategic Institute. But it should take another look. We have enough challenges with or without victory in Georgia in another month. And the Republican nonsense machine will continue.

If you want to be taken seriously, then change what you can when you can. When you can't, lick your wounds and move on. There are plenty of other unresolved issues out there.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

The Moment Can't Be Unseen: He's All Alone Now.

I don't know if it exists anymore, but Cedarburg High School's Social Studies Department used to teach a course in basic law called The Law and You. The purpose was to introduce the kids to legal processes and thinking.

Part of the course was to introduce them to the jury system and what that meant. We showed them a film called 12 Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb, and including some actors who would make their marks later, such as Jack Warden, Jack Klugman and Martin Balsam. I wrote an introduction to the film, highlighting each of the 12 men on the jury (something which, I'm guessing, would never be allowed now; there would be several women on it for sure, but this was from the 1950s, when that kind of awareness didn't yet emerge: no blacks, either, hard to imagine in a large urban area). 

Each had his prejudices and their sensitivities. The film was adapted from an award-winning Broadway play, in which the facts, the stubborn facts, eventually entered the minds of each of the jurors, and equipped with that, a near-unanimous verdict against a young man was slowly brought into question, and then reversed.

The trial takes place in the summer, as a front moves through the city. The jury room is hot and uncomfortable. The ceiling fan doesn't seem to work. Tempers flare. Personalities reveal characters that aren't necessarily the greatest, but jury selection doesn't allow for this. It isn't supposed to.

The most dramatic moment came at the end, when the angriest man (Cobb) had to admit, finally, that he was wrong and had to agree that the boy was not guilty. In the film, the foreman of the jury (Balsam) is not the real leader. The real leader of the jury (Fonda), after ten others come to their a-ha moments, turns to what has become the sole holdout and says calmly, "You're all alone."

Now the lone wolf, he rants and raves one more time--he has done so the entire movie, insulting those who have changed their minds as weak (the favorite insult of 45); "What's the matter with you?" he shouts more than once--revealing not only his prejudice against "kids these days," but the pain of realizing that he has estranged himself from his own son. He breaks down and then mutters "not guilty."

Inside the White House, we may have reached that moment. Attorney General William Barr, as much of a sycophant than this president could ever have, inventor of a theory of government that goes as far to protect a rogue than could ever be concocted, has just told the Associated Press that he didn't see any election fraud that could possibly turn the results around and allow 45 to win another term as president.

If he has concluded that, the lights are now going out. I'm guessing that a new group of Republican politicians, and some at the periphery, will now come out and say what they've been thinking for at least three weeks: that this game is over and we should get on with transferring the government to Joe Biden and his associates.

This moment can't be unseen. Just about everyone has turned on 45 now. He's already complained that the Department of Justice has been noticeably absent from any of this bogus inquiry; that's for obvious reasons. Not long ago, Barr did say that he would be using his resources to determine if anything corrupt had been going on, probably as much to mollify 45 as anything. He's reached the obvious conclusion, the one the rest of us have known for weeks: No.

For all we know, he's asking to be fired. We'll see. But someone has to tell him, as in the movie, what the jury leader needed to tell the sole holdout of the new verdict: You're all alone.

Most likely, too, it will preclude any validity to a Supreme Court review (though he could still try). With the chief law enforcement officer of the country concluding that all of the state elections are valid, and each of the secretaries of state and governors of the states he asked to have recounts signing off on them, I highly doubt that the Supreme Court would agree to listen to the case. It takes four justices for certiorari, or review, and I just don't see that happening now. If approached, the Court could simply refuse to consider without comment. I hope it would do just that.

From angry, as the movie began, it's getting very sad. So it has become sad now, that 45 may be the only one who doesn't get it. But then, he hasn't gotten it from the start--that with accurate information easily available, he could have made better decisions, however objectionable; with a basic caring about common people, not mere rhetoric, he could have taken decisive steps far sooner to deal with the pandemic and won over those who wanted to still vote for him, but couldn't; with some thought to common humanity, he could have cared far more for those seeking asylum at the border while tightening restrictions.

But he didn't. He thought that he was the center of the universe, and with all that power and no experience and no perspective, that may have occurred to him at the start. But sooner or later, it usually occurs to anyone with more power than they're used to that they'd better watch what they're doing, that the appearances of power are often far more effective than their blatant use. He ignored that, and the power he believed he had absolutely slowly seeped away.

Now he's faced with losing it altogether, like every president who has gone before him, and one of his most trusted people is about to tell him that that can't be reversed. Maybe he'll absorb it today, this afternoon, and come out tweeting a firestorm tomorrow. That will be even more pathetic, but not beyond him.

There are, reportedly, a few members of Congress determined to question the official tabulation of Electoral College votes when the matter comes before it soon. But that is very likely to be token, a final sop thrown to constituents, no more than an annoyance.

Whatever 45 does now to dissemble government and sabotage the incoming administration can and probably will be reversed by Joe Biden, if Congress hasn't already passed it. He will watch it being undone. That's what happens when you seek to destroy; someone comes along and rebuilds it, if it's not meant to happen and if consensus follows and allows.

80 million people say that that is exactly the case. William Barr is losing something too; he thought that this was his chance to remove all corruption from the country and set it on its far more appropriate path, with a tighter grasp of morality applied, while the president could do pretty much what he wanted, and he to personally protect him from legal consequences (a dichotomy I'd like to hear him explain someday). He's being robbed of another four years of trying. 

But he has also watched the reins being passed to a different political party, too, and the republic has survived. He would do well to tell that to 45, a paranoid, narcissistic fool who clings to his position with no class or style, as the clock ticks to its conclusion. After all, he's all alone.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

On the Other Hand, History Leads Us to Andrew Jackson

History matters in more than one way. It allows us to see what's possible, and that's not always a relief.

Let's take the Election of 1824, for instance. The present election, which we are still in thanks to an unaccepting presidential loser, has nearly duplicated it. The Electoral College will meet in 14 days, and 45 has still not challenged the whole electoral vote, which he is likely to do at the Supreme Court level. Nothing he's done has gained the least bit of legal traction so far, largely because states have fixed their vote counting processes so as to avoid the kinds of attacks 45 is leveling, only because he lost. 

It has nothing to do with the legitimacy or integrity of the balloting, which in fact is only being solidified by the pointless challenges. Name the state: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona. He's gotten nowhere.

But in 1824, at the end of a time called the Era of Good Feelings, in which there was only one organized national political party, the Democratic-Republicans (later known as Democrats), who were divided regionally, things were a different in a way. In a way, they weren't. There were cries of corruption, and on the surface, they appeared to be valid, if only because the winner of the presidential election either really was corrupt and practiced it in the open--not unlike the president we've had these four years--or because he didn't think politics mattered and decided to govern on stubborn principle (more likely), which was a naive and what turned out to be a ridiculous notion, or at least a bad choice.

Andrew Jackson,  southern Democrat and native of Tennessee, capitalizing on a recent national expansion of states into the West and South and the lack of property qualifications for voting, won the popular vote in a four-way race that also featured Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, an aristocrat from Kentucky and a Whig, a party developing during that time (and lasting until eclipsed by the Republicans in the 1850s). John Quincy Adams, son of the revolutionary lawyer and second president, a northern Democratic-Republican (but who would have been a Federalist if that party had survived), finished second in the popular vote.

Nobody won a majority of the electoral vote. So, as the Constitution dictates, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Clay, who liked neither Jackson nor Adams, favored the latter, if only because Jackson, a crude, disheveled man who made his reputation as a brawler and frontier soldier and hero of the victory over the British in New Orleans (which wouldn't have had to be fought with modern communications, since the peace treaty of the War of 1812 had been signed 15 days earlier in Ghent, Belgium), did not appear to have anything like the political savvy and experience to handle the job of the presidency (Does this sound familiar?). Adams, at least, had aristocratic bearing and inheritance going for him.

Clay had finished a distant third and was clearly not going to win the House vote. But as Speaker, he did have influence over a few House members, and leveraged that to throw his support to Adams. After 36 ballots and a hopeless outlook, the deadlock was broken and Adams was elected president.

Jackson's followers were bitter. They resented the prestige that Clay and Adams had already established and the privilege they exuded. It was the condescending, aristocratic tone that angered them, much like 45's followers resent the condescension of the liberal "elites." They would carry that resentment for another four years, when Jackson ran again.

To fuel their fire, Adams also nominated Clay to be Secretary of State. There, of course, was a clear case of, dare we call it, quid pro quo: What looked to be an obvious tradeoff, what Jacksonians called a "corrupt bargain." Was it made in a backroom deal while all those ballots were being counted in seemingly endless deadlock? There was nothing in writing. Who knew?

Adams and Clay said no, but as in American tradition, the story that emerged had as much to do with repetition than accuracy. The finger-pointing got legs and kept it, since Jackson had plenty of supporters in that day's media, which did not respect objective journalism. Armed with that anger, Jackson cruised to victory in the election of 1828.

45's claims of a "stolen election" is one that will no doubt be sustained for a while despite the clear and open counting of the ballots (in Georgia, remember, three times). And even if Fox News has begrudgingly agreed that all this is for naught, 45 is encouraging followers to tune into fledgling networks such as One America News and Newsmax, neither of which has accepted the results. Because of the First Amendment, neither of them can be sued successfully, since they're commenting upon a presidential election which, due to its ultimate political status, is freer from libel than anything else we know of. They can broadcast as many lies, dead-ends and innuendoes as they want, and do it as often as they want.

Jackson clearly kept his following and expanded it, using the "corrupt bargain" as justification. 45's claims of corruption may stick just as well. Even though he lost the popular vote by six million, he came plenty close enough. Will 74 million people stay with him, even though his claims are based on lies and conjured accusations?

Well, they obviously stayed with him while he did other highly unethical and illegal acts (for a nice summary, check the New York Times Magazine on November 22); while he divided the country and fanned the same kind of class resentment; while he insisted upon saying things that, in the name of stopping "political correctness," were nothing more and nothing less than favorable exaggerations and lies, more than 22,000 of them; while he encouraged extremism in Charlottesville and crushed the humanity of those seeking asylum here. None of that seemed to matter. 

45's voice, regardless of the utter lack of integrity attached to it, seems to be all that needs to be present. Far too many accept it as truth, or close enough to truth for them. And it certainly won't stop 45 from making up conspiracies, which he could do daily. 

In The People's Almanac, David Wallechinsky called Andrew Jackson (paraphrasing here) the most unstable person to ever become president. He may have been eclipsed.

Remember, too, that many of 45's toadies survived the election, especially in the Senate, where they have a far greater peacock status: Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio. Remember, too, that if Republicans survive the election runoffs in Georgia, Biden's Cabinet positions must be run past them. They will create "corruption" where it does not exist, and accuse the Democrats of having done the same thing, through empty accusations, during the impeachment trials last year.

It means that not only are we not done with 45 and his nastiness, we are in the middle of an era in which it will be omnipresent, despite Joe Biden's attempts to balance and ameliorate it. It will not die easy, if it dies at all.

45 will need a volume-laden perch from which to continue to wield influence. If he gains it, Republicans might still look over their shoulders to see what he's saying. That is intimidation on a grand scale, and it might leave him even more influential than he was as president, unaffected by House Democrats standing in his legislative way. Remember: He can be elected president one more time. There are rumors that he will not only not attend the inauguration, but hold a rally during it.

There is nothing, too, that prevents him from calling not only members of Congress, but foreign leaders ahead of whatever Biden tries to do. He could get their phone numbers; all he has to do is ask someone to provide them before he leaves the White House. It's up to them to pick up the phone and talk to him with any meaning. What's to stop him from keeping a running relationship with Putin? Kim Jong Il? A third rail isn't that difficult if you believe the public's still behind you.

Andrew Jackson was president for two terms, and left the country in financial ruin. The economic effects of the pandemic will spill over to Biden, who 45 will blame for it, the same way he took credit for the recovery from the recession that challenged Obama. He may try to create a shadow government with access to officeholders, planting seeds of disruption and doubt in their heads. Biden might have to take decisive action to avoid the interruptions of a damaging pest.

On the other hand, 45's fundamentally lazy anyhow, and that might take too much work. He won't strain himself. He'll act on whims, as he always does, living in a world he has created for himself and finding support there. Unlike Jackson, though, he won't disappear. 

If past presidents can get six figures to speak, he won't hesitate, especially since he can still say whatever he wants. And he has, by one report, raised $170 million since the election, without speaking anywhere. But he apparently owes $421 million, so he has some work to do.

This assumes that his legal problems can be handled without jail terms. He has lawyers to fight, and yes, the rich have that advantage. The stable of attorneys he got to contest the election results slowly disintegrated, but criminal charges in New York are quite another thing. His speaking fees can pay for them (He can also sell some of his property, with his status as a former president jacking up the price.), and he can certainly keep raising money from jail, with a claim of "political prisoner" added to his other lies.

Would criminal conduct be an issue during another campaign? Don't be so sure. Eugene Debs, famed labor leader and avowed socialist, ran for president from jail in 1920. He was put there for violating unjust World War I sedition laws. He got more than 900,000 votes, or more than 3 percent.

History is a double-edged sword. Our electoral system and federal bureaucracy have held, for now, thwarting a historic effort to undo them. But our tomorrows are fraught with uncertainty. People still do the same things for the same reasons. Meanwhile, we await the results from Georgia.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark